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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 10 (Listen & Download)

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There are two kinds of nonattachment:the ordinary and the sublime. That attitude of nonattachment to the objects of desire in which the seeker knows that he is neither the doer nor the enjoyer, neither the restrained nor the restrainer, is called ordinary nonattachment. He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life. Whether in pleasure or in pain, he can do nothing. Indulgence is but a disease and affluence of all kinds a storehouse of adversity. Every union leads inevitably to separation. The ignorant suffer the maladies of mental anxiety. All material things are perishable, because time is constantly devouring them. Through the understanding of scriptural precepts, one’s faith in material things is uprooted and one’s mind freed of them. This is called ordinary nonattachment.When thoughts like: “I am not the doer, my past deeds are the doers, or God himself is the doer,” cease to worry the seeker, a state of silence, equilibrium and peace is attained. This is called sublime nonattachment.On the path, in the search, every step has two sides: the beginning of the step, and the conclusion. The beginning will always be with conscious effort, it is bound to be so. A struggle will be there, constant need to be alert will be there. Sometimes you will fall, sometimes you will fall asleep, sometimes you will forget, sometimes you will go astray. Again and again you will have to remember, come back to the path. Again and again you will have to make more intense effort to be conscious.So the beginning of every step will be struggle. There will be ups and there will be downs. Sometimes you will feel very miserable, frustrated; whenever the contact with the method is lost, whenever you have gone astray, frustration will happen, you will feel depressed, sad, lost. There will be moments of intense happiness also. Whenever you regain the control again, whenever even for moments you become the master, whenever even for small glimpses you become capable, you will feel intense joy spreading all over your being.Peaks and valleys will be there. They will disappear only when the conscious effort has disappeared, when the method is no more a method, when the method has become your very consciousness, when you need not remember it, when you can completely forget it and it still grows, continuous, flows, when you need not maintain it, when you need not even think of it – and then it becomes spontaneous, sahaj. This is the end aspect of every step. Remember this: through constant practice a moment comes when you can drop the practice completely, and unless you can drop the practice you have not attained.Taoist masters have used many dimensions: poetry, painting, and many other crafts have been used as training grounds. Painting has been used for centuries in China and Japan. Taoist painting has a principle, and that principle is that first one should become proficient in painting, in the technique of painting – it takes many years – and then for a few years one has to drop painting completely. One has to forget that one is a painter; throw the brushes, colors, inks, and just drop from the mind that one has learned something. For a few years one has to be completely away from painting. When the thought has dropped, then again the master says, “Now you start.” Now this man is not a technician. He knows the technique but he is not a technician, because there is no need to be aware of the technique. Now he can paint like a small child. The effort has ceased, to paint has become effortless. Only then master-teachers are born.I remember one story I would like to tell you. It happened once in Burma that a great temple was to be built, and the main door had to be something unique on the earth. So many painters, Zen masters, Taoist masters, were asked, and the one who was the greatest was invited to design the door. That great master had a habit that whenever he would paint something, design something, his chief disciple would sit by his side, and whenever he would complete the design he would ask the chief disciple whether it was okay. If the disciple said no he would throw the design and he would again work on it. Unless the disciple said, “Right, this is the thing,” he would go on.Designing this main gate of the temple became a problem, because the chief disciple continued to say no. The master painted at least one hundred designs. Many months passed. He would work for weeks, and when the design was complete he would look at the disciple who was sitting beside him. The disciple would shake his head and he would say, “No,” and the master would put aside the design and start again. He was also worried, “What is going to happen? When will this design be complete?” – and he had been doing hard work such as he had never done in his life.Then one day it happened. The ink with which he was painting was almost finished, so he told the disciple to go out of the house and prepare more ink. The disciple went out to prepare the ink, and when he came back he started dancing in ecstasy and he said, “Now this is the thing! But why couldn’t you paint it before?”The master said, “Now I know. I was also worried, what was happening? Now I know, your presence was the disturbance. In your presence I remained the technician. I was aware that I was doing something, effort was there; I was conscious of the effort, and I was thinking, expecting, that this time you would say yes. That was the disturbance. I could not be spontaneous. When you went out I could forget you, and when I could forget you I could forget myself also.”…Because the self is the reaction to the other. If the other is in your consciousness you will remain the ego. They both drop simultaneously; when the other has disappeared, the ego has disappeared.“And when I was not,” the master said, “the painting flowed by itself. This design I have not done. All those hundred designs you rejected were my doings. This design is through Tao, through nature; it has dropped from the cosmos itself. I was just a vehicle. I could forget and become a vehicle.”When you can forget the method, the effort, the self, the other, when everything has been dropped and you have become simply a flow of energy, spontaneous, then really something is attained – not before. And look at the difference in the Eastern and Western attitudes about painting, and about everything else also. In the West you have to make conscious effort and bring the effort to a peak. You become a technician and the other part is missing. In the East you have to become a technician, and then drop that whole technicality and become again innocent, simple, as if you were never trained.Once somebody asked Winston Churchill, one of the greatest orators the West has produced, “Don’t you get afraid of the audience? Thousands of people staring at you – don’t you get afraid, scared? Don’t you get a little fear inside?”Churchill said, “This has been my constant practice: that whenever I stand to speak I look at the audience and I think, ‘So many fools!’ The moment this thought comes to my mind I am okay, then I don’t worry.”Somebody asked the same question of a Zen master, Rinzai: “You speak to thousands, don’t you ever get worried about it? Don’t you ever get scared? Don’t you ever get an inner trembling? – because so many persons are present, judging, observing, looking at you.”Rinzai said, “Whenever I look at people I say, ‘I am sitting there also. Only I am in this hall.’ Then there is no problem. I am alone, these people are also me.”This is the Eastern and Western difference. Churchill represents the West: if others are fools then you are okay, then the ego is strengthened. You don’t worry about them, because who are they? – nobodies. And Rinzai says: The other is not. They are just me, my forms. I am alone. I am the speaker and I am also the audience. Then what is the fear?”In your bathroom when you are alone you can be a good singer – everybody is, almost everybody. And bring the same man out of the bathroom, let him stand here, and the moment he sees you he is no more capable of singing – even humming becomes impossible. The fear grips the throat; he is not alone, the others are there, they will judge. The moment the other is there fear has entered. But the same man was humming beautifully, singing beautifully in the bathroom – nobody was there.The same happens when you can see in the other your own self. Then the whole earth is your bathroom; you can sing, you can dance. The other is no more there, there is nobody to judge. Through these eyes you are looking, and through others’ eyes also you are looking. Then it becomes a cosmic play of one energy in many forms. But the ultimate of any method is to become methodless, the ultimate of every technique is to become nontechnical, innocent. All effort is only to attain an effortless spontaneity.There are two kinds of nonattachment: the ordinary and the sublime.The ordinary is the first aspect of vairagya, nonattachment. The sublime is the spontaneous, the end; the other aspect of the same when things have be-come spontaneous.That attitude of nonattachment to the objects of desire in which the seeker knows that he is neither the doer nor the enjoyer, neither the restrained nor the restrainer, is called ordinary nonattachment.The emphasis is on the word knows. He has to maintain that, he has to remember it: “I am not the doer. I am just a witness. Whatsoever happens I am not involved. I am an outsider, just a spectator.” But this has to be remembered, this has to be maintained. This point must not be lost. And it is very difficult to remember it constantly. To remember even for a few minutes is difficult, be-cause for many many lives you have been the doer, constantly you have been the enjoyer.When you are eating you are the eater, when you are walking you are the walker, when you are listening you are the listener. You have never made any effort to remember that while doing anything you are not the doer but the witness. While eating, try it. The food is going into the body, not into you. It cannot go into you, there is no way, because you are the consciousness and the food cannot enter consciousness. It will go into the body, it will become the blood and the bone, whatsoever the body needs, but you remain a witness.So while sitting at your table eating your food, don’t be the eater. You have never been the eater; this is just an old habit, an old conditioning. Look at the eater, the body, and the eaten, the food, and you be the third. You just witness, you just hover above, you just look from a distance. Stand aloof and see your body eating, the food being eaten, and don’t get involved in it. But you can maintain it only for a few seconds – again you will become the eater. It has been such a long, long conditioning; it will take time to break it.You are walking on the street. Don’t be the walker, just watch the body walking. For a few seconds you may remember; again you will forget and you will enter in the body and become the walker. But even if for a few seconds you can maintain it, you can remember that you are not the walker, then those few seconds will become satori-like, those few seconds will be weightless, those few seconds will be of a joy such as you have never known. And if this can happen for a few seconds, why not for ever?Somebody is insulting you – it will be more difficult than with walking or eating to remember that you are the witness. One Indian mystic, Ram Teerth, went to America in the beginning of this century. He never used the word ‘I’, he would always use the name Ram. If he was hungry he would say, “Ram is hungry.” It looked unfamiliar and strange. If there was a headache he would say, “Ram has a headache.”One day it happened that a few people insulted him. He came back laughing and his disciples asked, “Why are you laughing?”So he said, “Ram was insulted very much, and I enjoyed. I was standing out of Ram and looking. Ram was in much difficulty; much inconvenience, discomfort, was there in Ram.”You become an object of your own consciousness. This is coming out of the body, out of the ego, out of the mind. This is difficult not because it is unnatural, this is difficult only because of a long conditioning. You may have observed that small babies in the beginning never say ‘I’; they say, “Baby is hungry.” They seem to be witnessing the phenomenon. But we train them to use the ‘I’ because it’s not good to say, “Baby is hungry,” or “Baby wants to play.” We train them to use the ‘I’.‘I’ is not existential, ‘I’ is a social entity; it has to be created. It is just like language: it is needed because if people go on speaking like babies or like Ram Teerth, if like Ram Teerth people go on saying their names, it will be very difficult to say whether they are talking about themselves or about somebody else. It will create confusion. If you say, “I am hungry,” immediately it is meant that you are hungry. If you say, “Ram is hungry,” if people know that you are Ram then it’s okay; otherwise they will think somebody else is hungry, not you. And if everybody uses it, it will create confusion.It is a social convenience to use the ‘I’; but this social convenience becomes truth, it becomes the center of your being, a false thing. The ‘I’ never existed, can never exist. But just because of social utility the child is trained, the consciousness becomes fixed around a center which is just utilitarian, not existential – and then you live in an illusion. And the whole life of a person who has not come to know that there is no ego will be false, because it is based on a false foundation.To be a witness means to drop the ‘I’. The moment you can drop the ‘I’, immediately you become the witness. Then there is nothing else to do, you can only be the witness. This ‘I’ creates the problem. Hence the emphasis of all religions to become egoless, to be egoless, to be humble, not to be proud, not to be conceited about it. Even if you have to use it, use it as a symbol. You have to use it, but use it knowingly – knowing that this is just a social convenience.That attitude of nonattachment to the objects of desire in which the seeker knows that he is neither the doer nor the enjoyer, neither the restrained nor the restrainer, is called ordinary nonattachment.When you become capable of remembering that you are the witness, this is the first stage of nonattachment.He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life.Try to see that whatsoever action is there, it is not arising out of you but rather arising out of the chain of actions you have done in the past. Try to understand this distinction clearly. Whenever you do something – if somebody insults you, you think that the reaction is arising from you. That is wrong. It is arising not from you but from the chain of your mind which has come from the past. You have been trained in the past that this is an insulting word.I will tell you one anecdote. Kahlil Gibran writes somewhere that one man came to Lebanon. He was not a Lebanese, he didn’t know the language of the country; he was totally a stranger. The moment he entered Lebanon he saw a very big palatial building, many people coming in and out, so he also entered to see what was going on there. It was a big hotel, but he thought, “It seems the king has given a party – so many distinguished guests coming out, going in, and everybody is being served.” And, as the human mind works, he thought, “It may be that because I have come to Lebanon, just for my reception, in my honor, the king is doing something.”The moment he entered he was received by the manager, he was placed at a table and food was served. He enjoyed it and he was very happy, he had never been so happy in his life. And then when he had finished his food, drink, and everything, he started thanking them. But they could not understand his language and he could not understand their language. They were placing a bill before him – it was a hotel – but he couldn’t understand. He thought, “They are giving in writing, ‘It was so good of you to accept the invitation. You have honored us.’” So he took the bill, put it in his pocket, and thanked them again.Then the manager became disturbed: either he was insane, because he was talking in such strange sounds they couldn’t understand, or he was a rascal just trying to deceive. So he was brought to the owner of the hotel. The man thought, “Now they are bringing me to the chief minister or the prime minister of the country.” He again started thanking them. It was no use, so he was brought to the court.When he entered the palatial building of the court, bigger than the hotel, he thought, “Now this is the palace of the king, and he himself is going to receive me in person.” Again he started bowing down and thanking, and the magistrate thought, “This man is either mad or a perfect rascal,” so he punished him. And it was the punishment of that country in such cases that the man should be forced to sit on a donkey backwards, and a plaque should be hung around his neck on which it was written: “This man has committed the crime of deception, and everybody should be aware.”He was painted black, and he enjoyed it very much because he thought, “A strange country, with strange manners, but they are paying every attention to me.” Naked he was placed on a donkey, a plaque was hung around his neck. He enjoyed it. Then the donkey started moving all over town just to make the whole town aware that this man was a criminal. And a crowd, children and many cripples followed, and he enjoyed. He thought, “These people are just following in my honor.” The children were enjoying it and he was also very happy and joyful, but only one sadness was in his heart: “Nobody knows what is happening to me in my country. I wish they could become aware of how I have been received. And they will not believe me when I go back, they will say that I am just inventing stories.”Then suddenly he saw a man in the crowd who belonged to his country. He was very happy and he said, “Look how beautifully they have received me! This is not only in my honor, but my country is honored.” But the other man who knew the language of this country, Lebanon, simply disappeared in the crowd, hiding his face, because he knew what was happening. This was not an honor. And the man on the donkey thought, “Jealousy, nothing else. This man is jealous. They have honored me and they have not honored him.”You have a mind trained through many lives. Things come out of that, not out of you. You have a long chain of actions; whenever a new act is born in you it comes out of that chain. It is a new link in that chain; it is born out of that chain, not out of you. When somebody insults you, you get angry. That anger comes from your past angers, not from you.This difference has to be noted, because it will help you to become a witness. And that is what is meant by living moment-to-moment – that is the moment. Don’t allow the chain of the past to react. Put aside the chain and let your consciousness function directly. Don’t be influenced by the past, respond here and now, directly. The whole life will be different if you can act out of the present moment. But all your actions are almost always out of the past, never out of the present. And action that is born out of the present is nonbinding, an action that is born out of the past chain is a new link in your bondage. But first one has to become aware.When you get angry just look: from where is that anger coming? from you or just from your past memories? You have been insulted before, you have been angry before – that memory is there waiting, that memory works like a wound. Again something happens and that memory starts functioning, that memory creates the same reaction again. If you watch and observe for twenty-four hours you will see that you are just a mechanical robot, you are functioning out of memories, out of the past. The past is dead, and the dead is so weighty on you that your life is crushed under it. Look at the chain. This sutra says:He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life.Not only that his reactions come from his past memories, but others’ actions in connection with him are also part of his past actions.It happened, Buddha became enlightened and one of his cousins, Devadatta, tried to poison him, tried to kill him, in many ways tried to murder him. He was always a failure, fortunately. Somebody asked Buddha, “Why don’t you do something about it? This man is constantly trying in many ways to kill you.”Once he brought a mad elephant and left the elephant near Buddha. The elephant was mad, in a rage. The elephant came running, but suddenly just near Buddha it stopped, bowed down and closed its eyes as if it was meditating. So somebody asked, “Why don’t you do something about this man? And why is he doing such things?”Buddha said, “Because of my past actions. I must have hurt him in the past. He is simply reacting out of that chain. It is not his doing, I must have done some wrong to him in the past. And I must have done something good to this elephant in the past, otherwise there was no possibility…. And I should remain now a witness. If I do something again in connection with Devadatta, then again a chain will be created. So let him be finished with my past deeds – but I am not going to create a new karma for the future.”When someone insults you, the attitude of a witness, of a person who is practicing nonattachment, is this: “I must have insulted him before in some past life somewhere, because nothing is born without a cause. The cause must be there, this is only the effect. So I must wait and take it, accept it as part of my destiny and be finished with it, because if I do something again a new future is created and the chain continues.”Someone insults you. If you answer in any way then the account is not closed, it remains open. If you don’t respond then the account is closed. And this is the difference between the Eastern attitude and Christianity. Even very beautiful things sometimes can be basically wrong. Jesus says, “If someone hits you on one cheek, give him the other.” This is a beautiful saying, and one of the most beautiful sayings ever uttered in the world. But ask an Eastern buddha. He will say, “Don’t do even that. When someone hits you, remain as you were before he hit you. Don’t change, don’t do anything, because even giving him the other cheek is a response – a good response, a beautiful response, but a response – and you are creating karma again.”Nietzsche somewhere criticizes Jesus for this. He says, “If I hit Jesus on one cheek and he gives me the other, I will hit even harder on the other, because this man is insulting me, he is treating me like an insect. He is not giving me the same status as him.” Nietzsche says, “It would be better if Jesus hits me back, because then he is behaving with me on equal terms. If he gives me the other cheek he is trying to play the god and he is insulting me.”That’s possible. You can insult a person just by becoming superior – not that Jesus means it, but you can do it. And just trying to become superior will be more insulting, and the other person will feel more hurt than if you had given him a good slap. The Eastern attitude is to not do anything in any way, to remain as if nothing has happened. Somebody hits you, you remain as if nothing has happened. And this hit has come not from this person but from your past deed. So accept it – it is your own doing, he has not done anything – and remain as if nothing has happened. Don’t hit him back and don’t give him the other cheek, because both will create a new chain. Be finished with it, so the account is closed with this man at least. And this way you close the accounts with all.When all the accounts are closed you need not be reborn. This is the philosophy of going beyond life and death. Then you need not be reborn again; you simply disappear from this phenomenal world, from this bodily, physical world. Then you exist as cosmos, not as individuals. Jesus’ saying is beautiful, very moral. But Buddha’s attitude is spiritual, not only moral: not to do anything, because whatsoever you do creates future, and one has to stop creating future.He knows that whatever faces him in this life is the result of the deeds of his past life. Whether in pleasure or in pain, he can do nothing.If you think you can do something you can never become a witness; if you think you can do something you will remain a doer. This has to be very deeply realized – that nothing can be done. Only then can the witness arise.Life has to be observed, and if you observe life you will come to feel that nothing can be done. Everything is happening. You are born – what have you done about it? It has not been any choice, you have not chosen to be born. You are black or white – you have not chosen to be black or white, it has happened. You are man or woman, intelligent or stupid – it has happened, you have not done anything about it. You will die, you will disappear from this body, you will be born in another. Look at all this as a happening, not as a doing on your part. If you feel that you are doing something you can never become a witness.The modern mind finds it very difficult to become a witness, because the modern mind thinks he can do something, the modern mind thinks he has willpower, the modern mind thinks that it is in its hands to change things and destiny. The modern mind goes on insisting to children, “You are the master of your destiny.” This is foolish. You cannot do anything, and whenever you feel that you are doing something you are under a wrong impression.It happened once, under a tree many stones were piled. A building was soon going to be constructed and those stones were piled there for that building, to fill in the foundations. One small boy was passing, and as small boys do, he took a stone and threw it in the sky. The stone was rising upwards…. It is very difficult for stones even to imagine that they can go upwards, they always go downwards. Just because of gravitation stones always go downwards, they cannot go up-wards. But every stone must be dreaming somehow or other to go upwards. In their dreams stones must be flying, because dreams are fulfillments of those things which we cannot do. They are substitutes.So all those stones must have dreamed somewhere, sometime, about flying. And this stone must have dreamed that some day he would fly, he would be-come a bird – and suddenly it happened. He was thrown, but he thought, “I am rising.” He looked downwards. Other stones, his brothers and sisters, were lying down, so he said, “Look! What are you doing there? Can’t you fly? I have done a miracle! I am flying, and I am going to the sky to see moons and stars!”The other stones felt very jealous, but they couldn’t do anything so they thought, “This stone must be unique, an avatar, a reincarnated superior being. We cannot fly. This stone must be a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ. He has miraculous power; he is flying” – and this is the greatest miracle for a stone.They felt jealous, they wept over their destiny, they were sad, but they couldn’t do anything. Then they started feeling – because this is how mind goes on consoling – “Okay, you are one of us. You belong to us, to this pile, to this nation, to this race. We are happy that one of our brothers is flying.”But then the moment came when the momentum of that small boy’s throw was lost, the energy finished and the stone started falling back. For a moment he felt dizzy, for a moment he felt, “What is happening?” and he couldn’t control it. But suddenly, as everybody rationalizes, he rationalized, “It is enough for the first day. I have gone too far, and I must go back now to my home.” Then he thought, “I am feeling homesick. It is better now to go back, to rest a little. I am tired. I must go back to my brothers and sisters, to my community, and tell them what beautiful phenomena I have seen – the sky, infinite sky, and such vast space, stars, moons – so near. This has been a cosmic event, an historical event; it should be written for the generations to come, for them to remember that one of us had flown once into the sky, had become just like a bird. The dreams are fulfilled.”He started falling back. When he came just near the pile he said, “I am coming back. Don’t look so sad. I will not leave you, I will never leave you. The world is beautiful, but nothing is like home.” And he fell down.And this is the story of your whole life. You are thrown, existence throws you. Then for certain moments you enjoy – life, flying, beauty, love, youth – but this is happening. It is happening just like breath coming in and going out. You are not doing anything, everything is a happening. Once you understand this ego disappears, because ego exists only with the idea that you can do. To realize that nothing can be done is the highest point for the spiritual seeker to begin with, the climax of understanding. After that is transformation.And if you cannot do anything, then when someone insults you, you can remain a witness – because what can be done? You can look at what is happening, you can be detached. A pain comes, a suffering happens – what can you do? You can be a witness. Pleasure comes, you are happy – what can you do? It has happened. It is happening just like night and day, morning and evening.Watch your mind. There are moments of sadness, and immediately after them moments of pleasure, then again moments of sadness. When you are sad you are just on the brink of being happy, when you are happy you are just on the brink of being sad. This goes on revolving. And you have not done anything really, you are just like that stone. He takes a happening for a doing – that is fallacious. When you fall in love what have you done? Can you do anything to fall in love? Can you fall in love consciously? Try it and then you will see the impossibility; you cannot do anything. And if you have fallen in love, you cannot stop that falling.There are foolishnesses which belong to youth and there are foolishnesses which belong to old age. This is the foolishness of the youth: he thinks, “I am doing something when I am in love.” So he thinks, “This is something of my doing.” It is a happening. And this is the foolishness of old age: old people go on saying, “Don’t fall in love. Stop yourself, control yourself” – as if love can be controlled. But the whole society exists around the ego – control, doing, not happening. If you can look at life as a happening, witnessing comes easily.Whether in pleasure or in pain, he can do nothing. Indulgence is but a disease and affluence of all kinds a storehouse of adversity.This is not condemnation, this is just giving you a hint that the opposite is hidden. When you are in pleasure, pain is there hidden, will come soon.Indulgence is but a disease and affluence of all kinds a storehouse of adversity.It is not a condemnation, this is simply the fact. But you go on forgetting. When you are happy you forget that you were ever sad before, you forget that sadness will follow again. When you are sad you forget that you were ever happy before, and you forget that happiness will follow again. You are in a moving circle, in a moving wheel. That’s why in the East life is called a wheel, just a wheel – moving. Every spoke will come up and every spoke will go down and will again come up. You may not be able to connect – that’s your misery. If you can connect you can see.Go into loneliness for at least twenty-one days and then watch. There is nobody who can make you happy or unhappy, there is nobody who can make you angry, pleased, or anything. You are alone there. Have a diary and watch and note down every mood that comes to you. Then for the first time you will be-come aware that there is no need for anybody to make you angry – you become angry by yourself. There is no need for anybody to make you sad – there are moments when you suddenly feel sad. And there is no need for anybody to make you happy – there are sudden glimpses when you are happy.And if you can watch for twenty-one days and go on noting down, you will see a wheel emerging. And this wheel is so subtle, that’s why you are not aware and you never connect it. If you watch deeply you can even say that one mood is passing and you can say what will follow, which spoke is going to come. If you have observed basically, deeply, you can predict your moods. Then you can say, “On Monday morning I will be angry.”Much research is going on in Soviet Russia about moods, and they say a calendar can be made for every person. On Mondays he will be angry; on Saturdays, in the morning, he will be happy; on Tuesdays, in the evening, he will feel sexual. If you observe yourself you can also approximately fix a routine, a wheel of your life. And then many things become possible. Russian psychologists have suggested that if this can be done – and this can be done – then family life will become more easy, because you can look at your wife’s calendar and your wife can look at your calendar. Then there is no need to get angry about anything, this is how things are going to happen.You know that on Tuesdays the wife is going to be terrible, so you accept it. You know from the very beginning that it is going to be on that day, so from the morning you can remain a witness, you need not get involved in it; it is your wife’s inner work. Two beings moving side by side need not get concerned with the other’s spokes. And when she is unhappy, sad, it is just foolish to get angry about it, because you create more sadness through it. The day when your wife is unhappy it is better to help her in every way, because she is ill. It is just like menses, a periodical thing.Now in Czechoslovakia one research has proved that not only women have their menses, periods, but men also; every twenty-eight days they become depressed for three, four days. And it should be so, because man cannot be anything else than a wheel; if woman is a wheel man must be a wheel. And there are some secretions in the blood in man also: every twenty-eight days, after four weeks, they pass through a menstrual period, for four or five days they are sad.With every menses every woman becomes depressed, violent, angry, and her intelligence goes low. It is now a proven fact that girls in menses should not go to sit for examinations because they unnecessarily lose much. Their IQ is low when they are in menses, and unnecessarily they lose much. They should not be forced to go to the examination when they are having a period, they cannot compete rightly. They are angry, disturbed, the whole system is a chaos inside. But there is no rule yet.In the East it has been one of the traditions that whenever a woman is in her period she should not make any contact with anybody. She should move into a lonely room and remain closed and meditating for four days, because if she is out mixing with people she will create unnecessary bad karmas and they will create chains. She should not touch food, because she is in such a chaos that the food becomes poisonous.Now scientifically also it is proved that when a woman is in menses, if she takes a flower in her hand the flower immediately becomes sad. Subtle vibrations, chaotic vibrations, affect it. A woman in menses should not be in contact with people, it is better if she simply meditates and rests. Such periods are with men also, but they are more subtle. The body secretes some hormones in the bloodstream.This calendar can be maintained. You can observe your life for two or three months impartially, and then you can know that you are moving in a wheel and others are only excuses; you impose upon them. You get sad when you are alone also, but if you are with someone you think the other is making you sad. And man and woman are not different, cannot be. They are not two different species, they are one species, and everything has a positive-negative relationship.Man ejaculates in intercourse; women don’t ejaculate, but a subtle ejaculation happens in the bloodstream, subtle hormones are released in the bloodstream, because women are passive. But as far as childbirth is concerned they are positive and man is passive. That’s why menses with woman is positive – ejaculation happens, blood comes out of the body. In man ejaculation happens but it moves into the bloodstream, hormones are released. Man is born out of man and woman, woman is born out of man and woman – in every individual both are there.I remember, once Mulla Nasruddin’s wife said to him, “Nasruddin, I wonder…sometimes I get very puzzled. Sometimes you look so manly, so powerful and strong, and sometimes so effeminate, so feminine. What is the matter?”So Nasruddin brooded, contemplated, and then he said, “It must be hereditary, because half of my parents were men and half were women.”But everyone is bisexual; no one belongs to one sex, and cannot belong to one sex. Half of you is man and half of you is woman. So the difference is only of which part is visible. You may be man only because the male part is visible on the surface and the female part is hidden behind; you are a woman if the female part is visible on the surface and the male part is hidden behind.That’s why if a woman gets ferocious she will be more ferocious than a man, because then she simply comes out of her surface, and what is hidden is the man. Ordinarily when a woman is angry she is not so angry as a man, not so aggressive as man, but if she is really angry then a man is nothing compared to her. A man can be more loving than a woman. He is not ordinarily so, but if he is then no woman can be compared with him, because then the hidden part comes out. And man has not used the hidden part; it is fresh, alive – more alive than woman. So if a man is really in love he is more loving than any woman, because then his hidden woman which is fresh, unused, comes out. And when a woman is angry, filled with hatred, no man can be compared, because the hidden, fresh aggression comes out.And this happens in life: as people grow old, men become more effeminate and women become more manly. That’s why old women are very dangerous; the stories about mother-in-laws are not just inventions. They are dangerous, be-cause now the female part has been used so much that it has dissipated and the male part has come in. Sometimes women may grow mustaches when they are old. Their voice will become manly, it will not be so feminine, fine; it will become coarse, because one part has been used. And by the time menopause happens, when the menses have stopped, the female part is dropping, the surface is dropping and the inner part is working more and more. Old men become effeminate, their coarseness is lost.So this is a rare phenomenon: if they have really lived silently, beautifully, then old men become more beautiful than old women. When young a woman is just wonderful, very beautiful; everything, every curve of her being is beautiful. Old women become coarse, the beauty is lost. Old men become more beautiful than they were when they were young. Look at Mahatma Gandhi’s pictures: when he was young he was ugly, the older he grew the more beautiful. Only when he was in the last stage of his life was he beautiful. This happens because man becomes more effeminate, more curves come into his being and corners become soft. This is not to condemn.Every union leads inevitably to separation.Every union leads to separation, every marriage is a preparation for divorce.The ignorant suffer the maladies of mental anxiety.The ignorant suffer because of ignorance – because they cannot see this polarity. If they can see that every union is going to become a separation they will neither be happy about the union nor unhappy about the separation. And if you are not happy about the marriage and not happy about the divorce you have transcended both. Then a relationship grows which cannot be called marriage and cannot be called divorce. That relationship can be eternal.But marriage implies divorce, union implies separation, birth implies death. So be aware of the opposite, that will help you to become a witness. It will lessen your happiness, it will lessen your misery also. And a moment will come when happiness and misery will become the same. When they become the same you have transcended.And this is the way they can become the same: when happiness comes, search for the hidden unhappiness somewhere in it. You will find it. When unhappiness comes, search for the happiness hiding somewhere – you will find it. And then you know that happiness and unhappiness are not two things but two aspects of the same coin. And don’t believe too much in the aspect that is visible, because the invisible will become visible, it is only a question of time.All material things are perishable, because time is constantly devouring them. Through the understanding of scriptural precepts, one’s faith in material things is uprooted and one’s mind freed of them. This is called ordinary nonattachment.This is through effort, understanding. With mind you can achieve this ordinary nonattachment. But this is not the goal, this is just the beginning.When thoughts like: “I am not the doer, my past deeds are the doers, or God himself is the doer…”Even such thoughts drop. These were the base of the first, these thoughts were the base of the ordinary nonattachment. When even they:…cease to worry the seeker, a stage of silence, equilibrium and peace is attained. This is called sublime nonattachment.…Because to constantly think, “I am not the doer,” shows that you believe you are the doer; otherwise why go on constantly saying “I am not the doer”?Once it happened, one Hindu sannyasin, a traditional monk, stayed with me for a few days. Every day in the morning, in the brahmamuhurt, just before the sunrise, he would sit and repeat constantly, “I am not the body, I am the soul supreme. I am not the body….”So I heard him doing it, saying that for many days, and then I said, “If you really know that you are not the body, why repeat it? If you really know you are the supreme self, then who are you convincing every morning? That shows you don’t know. You are just trying to convince yourself that you are not the body, but you know you are the body; that’s why the need to convince.”Remember this: the mind works in this way. Whenever you try to convince yourself of something the contrary is the case. If a person tries too much to say, “I love you,” know well that something is wrong. If a person tries to say too much about anything, that shows that the contrary exists within; he is trying to convince himself, not you. Whenever a husband feels guilty that he has looked at another woman, or has been friendly, or was attracted, then he comes home and that day he will be more loving to the wife. He will bring ice cream or something. So whenever the husband brings ice cream beware – because now he is not trying to convince you, he is trying to convince himself that he loves his wife more than anybody else.Whenever mind becomes aware that something has gone wrong, that wrong has to be put right. The first effort for nonattachment is such effort. You go on insisting to yourself, “I am not the body, I am not the doer,” but you know well that you are the doer, you are the body. But this will help. One day you will become aware of both these polarities: that you are insisting that you are not, and still you believe that you are the body. Then both drop, you simply remain silent, you don’t say anything. Neither do you say, “I am the doer,” nor do you say, “I am the witness.” You simply drop this whole nonsense. You allow things as they are. You don’t say anything, you don’t make any statement. Then silence, equilibrium, and peace are attained – when you don’t make any statement.Somebody asked Buddha, “Are you the body or are you the soul?” Buddha remained silent. The man insisted, and Buddha said, “Don’t force me, because whatsoever statement I make will be wrong. If I say I am the body, it is wrong, because I am not. If I say I am not the body, that too shows that somehow I am attached to the body, otherwise why this denial? Why this botheration to say that I am not the body? So I will not make any statement. If you can understand, look at me, at what I am.”When you simply are – without any statement, without any idea, without any theory, without any concept…when you simply are, when you have become a tree, a rock, you exist, that’s all. And you allow existence to flow from you, within you. You don’t create any resistance, you don’t say, “I am this,” because every statement will be a definition, and every statement will make you finite.But this will not happen immediately and directly, remember. You cannot drop unless you have made the first effort. So first try, “I am the witness.” And bring it to such intensity that in that intensity you become aware that even this is futile. Then drop it and be yourself.It happened once, Mulla Nasruddin went to England. His English was not very good, just like me – that is not much. He had a very beautiful dog, but very ferocious. So he put a plaque on the door, and instead of writing “Beware of the dog,” he wrote “Be aware of the dog.” That is wrong English – but wrongly he did a right thing, because the whole emphasis is changed. When you say “Beware of the dog,” emphasis is on the dog. When you say “Be aware of the dog,” the emphasis is on you. And this English word beware is beautiful. Make it two, be plus aware.Be plus aware is the first step. In the second step, awareness also has disappeared. Simply be. Don’t be even aware, because that will create an effort. Simply be. When you are in that state of being – not doing anything, not even witnessing, because that too is a subtle doing….A state of silence, equilibrium, and peace is attained. This is called sublime nonattachment.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 11 (Listen & Download)

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Osho,If everything is simply happening, then can there be any ultimate purpose to it all, or is life just an accident? Can it be said that life is evolving towards some ultimate goal?It is very difficult, particularly for the Western mind, to understand that life is purposeless. And it is beautiful that it is purposeless. If it is purposeful then the whole thing becomes absurd – then who will decide the purpose? Then some God has to be conceived who decides the purpose, and then human beings become just puppets; then no freedom is possible. And if there is some purpose then life becomes businesslike, it cannot be ecstatic.The West has been thinking in terms of purpose, but the East has been thinking in terms of purposelessness. The East says life is not a business, it is a play. And a play has no purpose really, it is nonpurposeful. Or you can say play is its own purpose, to play is enough. Life is not reaching towards some goal, life itself is the goal. It is not evolving towards some ultimate; this very moment, here and now, life is ultimate.Life as it is, is accepted in the East. It is not moving towards some end, be-cause if there is some end who will decide the end and why? If God decides it, then you can ask the same question about God: “What is the purpose of creating a world with purpose?” or, “Why should he create a purposive world?” or even more deeply, “What is the purpose of God’s existence?”Maybe life has a purpose and God decides the purpose, but then God’s existence has to be questioned – why he exists – and that way the question is simply pushed one step ahead. Then God becomes purposeless, or you have to create another God to decide the purpose of this God. Then you will be in a regress ad infinitum, then there is no end to it. Somewhere deep down you will have to come to the conclusion that this phenomenon is purposeless; otherwise there is no end.So why go from the world to the God? Why not say that life itself is purposeless? The whole game of logicians, theologians, is stupid in a way. They say, “God created the world, because how could the world come into existence if there was no one who created it?” But the question can be asked, “Who created the God?” – and then they fall on their own. They say, “God is uncreated.” If God can exist without being created, why can’t this life itself exist without being created? If you accept that something is possible without being created, then what is the trouble? Then why think about a God who created the world?The East says God is not the creator, God is the creation. Nobody has created it, it is there. It has been so always, it will be so always – sometimes manifest, sometimes unmanifest; sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. It goes on moving in a periodical rhythm, in a circle. But existence itself is uncreated and it has no goal.Then think about it in other ways also. Firstly, if there is a goal why hasn’t it been achieved yet? The existence has been existing timelessly, millions and millions of light-years it has existed, and the goal has not been reached yet. When will it be reached? If so many millions and millions of light-years have passed and the goal is nowhere to be seen, when will it be reached? Secondly, if some day the goal is reached, what will happen to existence? Will it disappear? When the purpose is fulfilled, then what? Conceive of a moment somewhere in the future when the purpose is fulfilled: for what will existence exist then? Then it will be purposeless for it to exist.The reality is this: that it is already always purposeless. There is no goal towards which the existence is moving. It is moving, but not towards any goal. It has a value, but the value is not in the end, the value is intrinsic.You love someone. Have you asked the question, “For what purpose does love exist?” The mind, a calculating mind, is bound to ask, “Why love? What is the purpose?” If you can answer then one thing is certain – that you are not in love. If you can show the purpose then love is not there, it is a business, it is a bargain. But lovers will always say there is no purpose to it. To be in love is the goal. The goal is not somewhere else; it is intrinsic, it is in the very phenomenon of love. The goal is already achieved. When you are happy have you asked, “What is the purpose of being happy?” Can there be any purpose to being happy? When you are happy you never ask because the question is absurd. Happiness is itself the goal, there is no purpose to it.Life is like love, life is like happiness. Life is existence – no goal. And once you can understand this your ways of living will change totally, because if there is no purpose in life itself there is no need to create a purpose for your individual life also – no need. Because of individual purposes you become tense, something has to be achieved. Then an achieving mind is created which is always trying to achieve something or other. And whenever something is achieved again the mind asks, “Now what? What is to be achieved now?” It cannot remain with itself, it has to go on achieving.This achieving mind will never be blissful, it will always be tense. And whenever something is achieved the achieving mind will feel frustrated, because now new goals have to be invented. This is happening in America. Many of the goals of the past century have been achieved, so America is in a deep frustration. All the goals of the founding fathers who created America and the American constitution are almost achieved. In America the society has become affluent for the first time in the whole history of mankind. Almost everybody is rich. The poor man in America is a rich man here in India.The goals have almost been achieved – now what to do? Society has become affluent: food is there, shelter is there, everybody has got a car, radio, refrigerator, TV – now what to do? A deep frustration is felt, some other goals are needed. And there seem to be no goals. Instead of one car you can have two cars – a two-car garage has become the goal – or you can have two houses, but that will be achieved within ten years. Whatsoever the goal it can be achieved. Then the achieving mind feels frustrated. What to do now? It again needs a goal, and you have to invent a goal.So the whole of American business now depends on inventing goals. Give people goals – that’s what advertisements and the whole business of advertising is doing. Create goals, seduce people: “Now this is the goal! You must have this, otherwise life is purposeless!” They start running, because they have an achieving mind. But where does it lead? It leads into more and more neurosis.Only a nonachieving mind can be at peace. But a nonachieving mind is possible only with the background of a cosmic purposelessness. If the whole existence is purposeless then there is no need for you to be purposeful. Then you can play, you can sing and dance, you can enjoy, you can love and live, and there is no need to create any goal. Here and now, this very moment, the ultimate is present. If you are available the ultimate can enter you. But you are not available here; your mind is somewhere in the future, in some goal.Life has got no purpose and this is the beauty of it. If there was some purpose life would have been mean – just futile. It is not a business, it is a play. In India we have been calling it leela. Leela means a cosmic play…as if God is playing. Energy overflowing, not for some purpose, just enjoying itself; just a small child playing – for what purpose? Running after butterflies, collecting colored stones on the beach, dancing under the sun, running under the trees, collecting flowers – for what purpose? Ask a child. He will look at you as if you are a fool. There is no need for purpose.Your mind has been corrupted. Universities, colleges, education, society, have corrupted you. They have made it a conditioning deep down within you that unless something has a purpose it is useless – so everything must have a purpose. A child playing has no purpose. At the most, if the child could explain he would say, “Because I feel good. Running, I feel more alive. Collecting flowers, I enjoy, it is ecstatic.” But there is no purpose. The very act in itself is beautiful, ecstatic. To be alive is enough, there is no need for any purpose.Why ask for anything else? Can’t you be satisfied just by being alive? It is such a phenomenon. Just think of yourself being a stone. You could have been, because many are still stones. You must have been somewhere in the past, sometime, a stone. Think of yourself being a tree. You must have been somewhere a tree, a bird, an animal, an insect. And then think of yourself being a man – conscious, alert, the peak, the climax of all possibilities. And you are not content with it. You need a purpose, otherwise life is useless.Your mind has been corrupted by economists, mathematicians, theologians. They have corrupted your mind, because they all talk about purpose. They say, “Do something if something is achieved through it. Don’t do anything which leads nowhere.” But I tell you that the more you can enjoy things which are useless, the happier you will be. The more you can enjoy things which are purposeless, the more innocent and blissful you will be.When you don’t need any purpose you simply celebrate your being. You feel gratitude just that you are, just that you breathe. It is such a blessing that you can breathe, that you are alert, conscious, alive, aflame. Is it not enough? Do you need something to achieve so that you can feel good, so that you can feel valued, so that you can feel life is justified? What more can you achieve than what you are? What more can be added to your life? What more can you add to it? Nothing can be added, and the effort will destroy you – the effort to add something.But for many centuries all over the world they have been teaching every child to be purposive. “Don’t waste your time! Don’t waste your life!” And what do they mean? They mean, “Transform your life into a bank balance. When you die you must die rich. That is the purpose.”Here in the East – particularly the mystics we are talking about, the Upanishads – they say, “Live richly.” In the West they say, “Die a rich man.” And these are totally different things. If you want to live richly you have to live here and now, not a single moment is to be lost. If you want to achieve something, you will die a rich man – but you will live a poor man, your life will be poor.Look at rich people: their life is absolutely poor, because they are wasting it transforming it into bank balances, changing their life into money, into big houses, big cars. Their whole effort is that life has to be changed for some things. When they die you can count their things.Buddha became a beggar. He was born a king, he became a beggar. Why? Just to live richly…because he came to understand that there are two ways to live: one is to die richly, the other is to live richly. And any man who has any understanding will choose to live richly, because dying a rich man doesn’t mean anything; you simply wasted yourself for nothing. But this is possible only if you can conceive that the whole existence is purposeless; it is a cosmic play, a continuous beautiful game, a beautiful hide-and-seek – not leading anywhere. Nowhere is the goal.If this is the background, then you need not be worried about individual purposes, evolution, progress. This word progress is the basic disease of the modern age. What is the need? All that can be enjoyed is available, all that you need to be happy is here and now. But you create conditions and you say that unless these conditions are fulfilled you cannot be happy. You say, “These conditions must be fulfilled first: this type of house, this type of clothes, this type of car, this type of wife, this type of husband. All these conditions have to be fulfilled first, then I can be happy.” As if by being happy you are going to oblige the whole universe.And who is going to fulfill your conditions? Who is worried? But you will try for those conditions, and the effort is going to be so long that they can never be fulfilled really, because whenever something is fulfilled, by the time it is fulfilled the goal has shifted.One of my friends was contesting an election, a political election, so he came to me for blessing. I said, “I will not give the blessing because I am not your enemy, I am a friend. I can only bless that you may not get elected, because that will be the first step towards madness.” But he wouldn’t listen to me. He was elected, he became a member. Next year he came again for my blessing and he said, “Now I am trying to be a deputy minister.”I asked him, “You were saying that if you could become a member of parliament you would be very happy, but I don’t see that you are happy. You are more depressed and more sad than you ever were before.”He said, “Now this is the only problem: I am worried. There is much competition. Only if I can become a deputy minister will everything be okay.”He became a deputy minister. When I was passing through the capital he came to see me again and he said, “I think you were right, because now the problem is how to become the minister. And I think this is the goal. I am not going to change it. Once I become the minister it is finished.”He has become the minister now, and he came to me a few days ago and he said, “Just one blessing more. I must become chief minister.” And he is getting more and more worried, more and more puzzled, because more problems have to be faced, more competition, more ugly politics. And he is a good man, not a bad man.I told him, “Unless you become the suprememost God you are not going to be satisfied.” But he cannot look back and cannot understand the logic of the mind, the logic of the achieving mind. It can never be satisfied, the way it behaves creates more and more discontent. The more you have the more discontent you will feel, because more arenas become open for you in which to compete, to achieve. A poor man is more satisfied because he cannot think that he can achieve much. Once he starts achieving something he thinks more is possible. The more you achieve the more becomes possible, and it goes on and on forever.A meditator needs a nonachieving mind, but a nonachieving mind is possible only if you can be content with purposelessness. Just try to understand the whole cosmic play and be a part in it. Don’t be serious, because a play can never be serious. And even if the play needs you to be serious, be playfully serious, don’t be really serious. Then this very moment becomes rich. Then this very moment you can move into the ultimate.The ultimate is not in the future, it is the present, hidden here and now. So don’t ask about purpose – there is none, and I say it is beautiful that there is none. If there was purpose then your God would be just a managing director or a big business man, an industrialist, or something like that.Jesus says…. Somebody asked him, “Who will be able to enter into the kingdom of your God?”Jesus said, “Those who are like small children.” This is the secret. What is the meaning of being a small child? The meaning is that the child is never businesslike, he is always playful.If you can become playful you have become a child again, and only children can enter into the kingdom of God, nobody else, because children can play without asking where it is leading. They can make houses of sand without asking whether they are going to be permanent. Can somebody live in them? Will they be able to resist the wind that is blowing? They know that within minutes they will disappear. But they are very serious when they are playing. They can even fight for their sandhouses or houses of cards. They are very serious when they are creating. They are enjoying. And they are not fools, they know that these houses are just cardhouses and everything is make-believe.Why waste time in thinking in terms of business? Why not live more and more playfully, nonseriously, ecstatically? Ecstasy is not something which you can achieve by some efforts, ecstasy is a way of living. Moment to moment you have to be ecstatic, simple things have to be enjoyed. And life gives millions of opportunities to enjoy. You will miss them if you are purposive.If you are not purposive, every moment you will have so many opportunities to be ecstatic. A flower, a lonely flower in the garden…you can dance if you are nonpurposive. The first star in the evening…you can sing if you are nonpurposive. A beautiful face…you can see the divine in it if you are nonpurposive. All around the divine is happening, the ultimate is showering. But you will be able to see it only if you are nonpurposive and playful.The second question:Osho,It is felt by many in the West and elsewhere that the peak of love is reached only between an ‘I' and a ‘thou'. If I and thou are both dropped, can love still exist? Can love exist without relationship?Love, life, light – these three l’s are the most mysterious. And the mystery is this – that you cannot understand them logically. If you are illogical you can penetrate them; if you are simply logical you cannot understand, because the whole phenomenon depends on a paradox. Try to understand.When you love someone, two are needed: I and thou. Without two how can love be possible? If you are alone how can you relate, how can you love? If you are alone there can be no love. Love is possible only when there are two, this is the base. But if they remain two love is again impossible. If they continue to be two then again love is impossible. Two are needed for love to exist, and then there is a second need – that the two must merge and become one. This is the paradox.‘I’ and ‘thou’ is a basic requirement for love to exist but this is only the base. The temple can come only when these two merge into one. And the mystery is that somehow you remain two and somehow you become one. This is illogical. Two lovers are two and still one. They have found a bridge somewhere where I disappears, thou disappears; where a unity is formed, a harmony comes into being. Two are needed to create that harmony, but two are needed to dissolve into it.It is just like this: a river flows, two banks are needed. A river cannot flow with only one bank, it is impossible; the river cannot exist. Two banks are needed for the river to flow. But if you look a little deeper those two banks are joined together just below the river. If they are not joined then also the river cannot exist, it will simply drop into the abyss. Two banks, apparently two on the surface, are one deep down.Love exists like a river between two persons who on the surface remain two, but deep down have become one. That’s why I say it is paradoxical. Two are needed just to be dissolved into one. So love is a deep alchemy and very delicate. If you really become one, love will disappear, the river cannot flow. If you really remain two, love will disappear, because there can be no river in an abyss if the two banks are really separate. So lovers create a game in which on the surface they remain two and deep down they become one.Sometimes they fight also, sometimes they are angry also, sometimes in every way they separate – but this is only on the surface. Their separation is just to get married again, their fight is just to create love again. They go a little away from each other just to come and meet again, and the meeting after the separation is beautiful. They fight to love again. They are intimate enemies. Their enmity is a play, they enjoy it.If there is really love you can enjoy the fight. If there is no love, only then the fight becomes a problem; otherwise you can enjoy, it is a game. It creates hunger. If you have ever loved, then you know that love always reaches peaks after you have been fighting. Fight – you create the separation, and with separation the hunger arises, you feel starved; the other is needed more. You fall in love again, then there is a more intense meeting. To create that intensity the two should remain two, and at the same time, simultaneously, they should become one.In India we have pictured Shiva as Ardhanarishwar – half-man, half-woman. That is the only symbol of its type all over the world. Shiva – half is man, half is woman; half Shiva and half Parvati, his consort. Half the body is of man and half of woman: Ardhanarishwar, half-man, half-woman. That is the symbol. Lovers join together but on the surface they remain two. Shiva is one, the body is two – half comes from Parvati, half he contributes. The body is two, on the surface the banks are two; in the depth the souls have mingled and become one.Or look at it in this way: the room is dark, you bring two lamps into it, two candles into it. Those two candles remain two, but their light has mingled and become one. You cannot separate the light; you cannot say, “This light belongs to this candle and that light belongs to that candle.” Light has mingled and become one. The spirit is like light, the body is the candle.Two lovers are only two bodies, but not two souls. This is very difficult to achieve. That’s why love is one of the most difficult things to achieve, and if even for moments you can achieve it is worth it. If even only for moments in your whole life, if even for moments you can achieve this oneness with someone, this oneness will become the door for the divine. Love achieved becomes the door for the divine, because then you can feel how this universe exists in the many and remains one.But this can come only through experience – if you love a person and you feel that you are two and still one. And this should not be just a thought but an experience. You can think, but thinking is of no use. This must be an experience: how the bodies have remained two and the inner beings have merged, melted into each other – the light has become one.Once experienced, then the whole philosophy of the Upanishads becomes exactly clear, absolutely clear. The many are just the surface; behind each individual is hidden the nonindividual, behind each part is hidden the whole. And if two can exist as two on the surface, why not many? If two can remain two and still one, why can’t many remain many and still one? One in the many is the message of the Upanishads. And this will remain only theoretical if you have never been in love.But people go on confusing love with sex. Sex may be part of love, but sex is not love. Sex is just a physical, biological attraction, and in sex you remain two. In sex you are not concerned with the other, you are concerned with yourself. You are simply exploiting the other, you are simply using the other for some biological satisfaction of your own, and the other is using you. That’s why sexual partners never feel any deep intimacy. They are using the other. The other is not a person, the other is not a thou; the other is just an it, a thing you can use, and the other is using you. Deep down it is mutual masturbation and nothing else. The other is used as a device. It is not love, because you don’t care for the other.Love is totally different. It is not using the other, it is caring for the other, it is just being happy in the other. It is not your happiness that you derive from the other; if the other is happy you are happy, and the other’s happiness becomes your happiness. If the other is healthy you feel healthy. If the other is dancing you feel a dance inside. If the other is smiling the smile penetrates you and becomes your smile.Love is the happiness of the other; sex is happiness of your own, the other has to be used. In love the other’s happiness has become even more significant than your own. Lovers are each other’s servants, sex partners are each other’s exploiters.Sex can exist in the milieu of love, but then it has a different quality; it is not sexual at all. Then it is one of the many ways of merging into each other. One of the many – not the only, not the sole, not the supreme. Many are the ways to merge into each other. Two lovers can sit silently with each other and the silence can become the merger. Really only lovers can sit silently.Wives and husbands cannot sit silently, because silence becomes boredom. So they go on talking about something or other. They go on talking even nonsense, rubbish, rot, just to avoid the other. Their talk is to avoid the other, because if there is no talk the other’s presence will be felt, and the other’s presence is boredom. They are bored with each other so they go on talking. They go on giving each other news of the neighborhood, what was in the newspaper, what was on the radio, what was on the TV, what was in the film. They go on talking and chattering just to create a screen, a smokescreen, so the other is not felt. Lovers never like to chatter. Whenever lovers are together they will remain silent, because in silence merging is possible.Lovers can merge in many ways. Both can enjoy a certain thing, and that enjoyment becomes a merger. Two lovers can meditate on a flower and enjoy the flower – then the flower becomes the merger. Both enjoying the same thing, both feeling ecstatic about the same thing, they merge. Sex is only one of the ways. Two lovers can enjoy poetry, a haiku, two lovers can enjoy painting, two lovers can just go for a walk and enjoy the walk together. The only thing necessary is togetherness. Whatsoever the act, if they can be together they can merge.Sex is one of the ways of being together, bodily together. And I say not the supreme, because it depends…. If you are a very gross person, then sex seems to be the supreme. If you are a refined person, if you have a high intelligence, then you can merge in anything. If you know higher realms of happiness, simply listening to music you can move into a deeper ecstasy than sex. Or simply sitting near a waterfall and the sound of the waterfall, and in that sound you both can merge. You are no more there; only the water falling and the sound, and that can become a higher peak of orgasm than can ever be attained through sex. Sex is for the gross. That is only one of the many ways in which lovers can merge and forget their I and thou and become one.And unless you transcend sex and find out other ways, sooner or later you will be fed up with your lover, because sex will become repetitive, it will become mechanical. And then you will start looking for another partner, because the new attracts. Unless your partner remains constantly new you will get fed up. And it is very difficult; if you have only one way of enjoying each other’s togetherness, it is bound to become a routine. If you have so many ways to be together, only then can your togetherness remain fresh, alive, young, and always new.Lovers are never old. Husbands and wives are always old; they may be married only for one day but they are old – one day old. The mystery has gone, the newness disappeared. Lovers are always young. They may have been together for seventy years but they are still young, the freshness is there. And this is possible only if sex is one of the ways of being together, not the only way. Then you can find millions of ways of being together, and you enjoy that togetherness. That togetherness is felt as oneness.If two can exist as one, then many can exist as one. Love becomes the door for meditation, prayer. That is the meaning when Jesus goes on insisting that love is God – because love becomes the door, the opening towards the divine.So to conclude, love is a relationship and yet not a relationship. Love exists between two, that’s why you can call it a relationship. And still, if love exists at all it is not a relationship, because the two must disappear and become one. Hence I call it one of the basic paradoxes, one of the basic mysteries which logic cannot reveal.If you ask logic and mathematics, they will say that if there are two they will remain two, they cannot become one. If they become one, then they cannot remain two. This is simple Aristotelian logic: one is one, two are two, and if you say that two have become one, then they cannot remain two. And this is the problem – that love is both two and one simultaneously. If you are too much logic-obsessed, love is not for you. But even an Aristotle falls in love, because logic is one thing, but nobody is ready to lose love for logic. Even an Aristotle falls in love, and even an Aristotle knows that there are points where mathematics is transcended – two become one and yet remain two.This has been one of the problems for theologians all over the world, and they have discussed it for many centuries. No conclusion has been reached, because no conclusion can be reached through logic. Not only with lovers – the same is the problem with God. Whether the devotee becomes one or remains separate – the same problem. A bhakta, a devotee – whether he remains ultimately separate from his god or becomes one, the same problem.Mohammedans insist that he remains separate, because if he becomes one then love cannot exist. When you have become one, who is going to love and whom? So Mohammedans pray, “Let me be separate so that I can love you. Let there be a gap so that devotees can be in prayer and love.” Hindus have said that the devotee becomes one with the divine, but then it’s a problem: if the devotee becomes one with the divine, then where is the devotion? where can the devotion exist? And if the devotee becomes the divine he becomes equal, so God is not higher than the devotee.My attitude is this: just as it happens in love, it happens with the divine. You remain separate and yet you become one. You remain separate on the surface, in the depths you have become one. The devotee becomes the god and still re-mains the devotee. But then it is illogical. You can refute me very easily, you can argue against it very easily, but if you have loved you will understand.And if you have not loved yet then don’t waste a single moment – be in love immediately, because life cannot give you a higher peak than love. And if you cannot achieve a natural peak that life offers to you, you cannot be capable, worthy, of achieving any other peaks which are not ordinarily available. Meditation is a higher peak than love. If you cannot love, are incapable of love, meditation is not for you.It happened once, a man came to Ramanuja. Ramanuja was a mystic, a devotee mystic, a very unique person – a philosopher and yet a lover, a devotee. It rarely happens – a very acute mind, a very penetrating mind, but with a very overflowing heart. A man came and asked Ramanuja, “Show me the way to-wards the divine. How can I attain the God?”So Ramanuja asked, “First let me ask a question. Have you ever loved anybody?”The devotee must have been a really religious person. He said, “What are you talking about? Love? I am a celibate. I avoid women just as one should avoid diseases. I don’t look at them, I close my eyes.”Ramanuja said, “Still, think a little. Move into the past, find out. Somewhere in your heart, has there ever been any flickering – even a small one – of love?”The man said, “But I have come here to learn prayer, not to learn love. Teach me how to pray. You are talking about worldly things and I have heard that you are a great mystic saint. I have come here just to be led into the divine, not to talk about worldly things!”Ramanuja is reported to have said…he even became very sad, and said to the man, “Then I cannot help you. If you have no experience of love then there is no possibility for any experience of prayer. So first go into the world and love, and when you have loved and you are enriched through it, then come to me – because only a lover can understand what prayer is. If you don’t know anything illogical through experience, you cannot understand. And love is prayer given by nature easily – you cannot attain even that. Prayer is love not given so easily, it is achieved only when you reach higher peaks of totality. Much effort is needed to achieve it. For love no effort is needed; it is available, it is flowing. You are resisting it.”The same is the problem, and the problem arises because of our logical minds. Aristotle says, “a is a, b is b, and a cannot be b.” This is a simple logical process. If you ask the mystics, they say, “a is a, b is b but a also can be b, and b also can be a.” Life is not divided into solid blocks. Life is a flow, it transcends blocks. It moves from one pole to the other. Love is a relationship and yet not a relationship.The third question:Osho,Can one be absorbed in doing something – for instance, these dynamic meditation techniques – with absolute total intensity, and at the same time remain a witness who is separate, apart?The same is the problem in many forms. You think that a witness is something apart, separate. It is not. Your intensity, your wholeness, is your witness. So when you are witnessing and doing something you are not two – the doer is the witness.For example, you are dancing here in kirtan. You are dancing: the dancer and the witness are not two, there is no separation. The separation is only in language. The dancer is the witness. And if the dancer is not the witness then you cannot be total in the dance, because the witness will need some energy and you will have to divide yourself. A part will remain a witness and the remaining will move in the dance. It cannot be total, it will be divided. And this is not what is meant, because really this is the state of a schizophrenic patient – divided, split. It is pathological. If you become two you are ill. You must remain one. You must move totally into the dance, and your totality will become the witness. It is not going to be something set apart, your wholeness is aware. This happens.So don’t try to divide yourself. While dancing become the dance. Just remain alert; don’t fall asleep, don’t be unconscious. You are not under a drug, you are alert, fully alert. But this alertness is not a part standing aloof; it is your totality, it is your whole being.But this is again the same thing as whether two lovers are two or one. Only on the surface are they two, deep inside they are one. Only in language will you appear two, the dancer and the witness, but deep down you are the one. The whole dancer is alert. Then only peace, equilibrium, silence, will happen to you. If you are divided there will be tension, and that tension will not allow you to be totally here and now, to merge into existence.So remember that, don’t try to divide. Become the dancer and still be aware. This happens. This I am saying through my experience. This I am saying through many others’ experience who have been working with me. This will happen to you also. This may have happened to many already. But remember this: don’t get split. Remain one and yet aware.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 12 (Listen & Download)

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The first stage, to which contentment and bliss impart sweetness, springs from the innermost recesses of the seeker’s heart, as if nectar has issued forth from the heart of the earth. At the inception of this stage the innermost recess becomes a field for the coming of the other stages. Afterwards the seeker attains the second and third stages. Of the three, the third is the highest, because on its attainment all the modifications of will come to an end.One who practices the three stages finds his ignorance dead, and on entering the fourth stage he sees everything, everywhere, equally. At that moment he is so strongly embedded in the experience ofnonduality – advaita – that the experience itself disappears. Thus, on attaining the fourth stage the seeker finds the world as illusory as a dream. So while the first three stages are called waking ones, the fourth is dreaming.The fourth stage. The first is that of the oceanic feeling that Brahman exists everywhere – oneness. The one alone exists, the many are just its forms. They are not really divided, they only appear divided; deep down they are one.The second stage is that of vichar – thought, contemplation and meditation – where mind has to be disciplined to become one-pointed, because it can disappear only when it has become one-pointed, when the flux has stopped; that is, when you can remain with one thought as long as you wish. You have become the master then, and unless you are the master of the mind, the mind cannot disappear, it cannot cease to be; you cannot order it out of existence.If you cannot order thoughts to stop, how can you order the whole mind to go out of existence? So in the second stage one has to drop thoughts by and by, and retain only one thought. When you have become capable of dropping thoughts, one day you can drop the mind itself, the whole thought process. When the thought process is dropped you cannot exist as an ego. You exist as consciousness but not as mind; you are there but not as an I. We say “I am.” When mind drops, the I drops; you remain a pure amness. Existence is there, rather, more abundant, more rich, more beautiful, but without the ego. There is no one who can say I, only amness exists.In the third stage, vairagya, nonattachment, you have to become alert – first of the objects of desire, the body, the world – and continuously practice and discipline yourself to become a witness. You are not the doer. Your karmas may be the doers, God may be the doer, fate, or anything, but you are not the doer. You have to remain a witness, just a seer, an onlooker. And then this has also to be dropped. The idea that “I am the witness” is also a sort of doing. Then non-attachment becomes complete, perfect. The third stage, this Upanishad says, is the highest of the three. Now we will discuss the fourth.The fourth is the state of advaita, nonduality. This word advaita has to be understood before we enter the sutra. This word is very meaningful. Advaita means literally nonduality, not two. They could have said one, but the Upanishads never use the word one; they say nonduality, not two. And this is very significant, because if you say one the two is implied, it becomes a positive statement. If you say there is only one you are asserting something positive.How can the one exist without the other? One cannot exist without the other. You cannot conceive of the figure one without other figures – two, three, four, five. Many mathematicians have worked it out, particularly Leibniz in the West. He has tried to drop the nine digits, figures. Instead of nine he uses only two: one and two. In his calculations, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine are dropped, because he said it is just superstition to continue using ten figures. Why continue using ten figures?You may not have observed: ten figures exist in mathematics not by any planning, but just because we have ten fingers. The primitives used to count on the fingers, so ten became the basic figure and it has been taken all over the world. These ten figures, this basis of all arithmetic, was produced in India. That’s why even today in all languages the words that denote these ten figures are basically Sanskrit: two is dwi, three is tri, four is chaturth, five is panch, six is shashta, seven is sapta, eight is ashta, nine is nava. These are basic roots.These ten counting figures, these ten digits, Leibniz says are useless. And science must try to work with the minimum, so he tried to minimize the digits. But he could not minimize more than two, he had to stop at two. So in Leibniz’s system there is one, two, and then comes ten; three means ten, four means eleven, and so on, so forth. But he had to at least concede two, because just one cannot be conceived. You cannot use only one digit, at least two are needed – the minimum requirement. The moment you say one the two is implied, be-cause one can exist only by the side of two. So the Upanishads never say that the Brahman is one, the truth is one; rather they use a negative term, they say he is not two. So one is implied but not directly asserted.Secondly, about the total we cannot assert anything positive, we cannot say what it is. At the most we can say what it is not, we can negate. We cannot say directly, because once we say anything directly it becomes defining, it becomes a limitation. If you say one, then you have limited; then a boundary has been drawn, then it cannot be infinite. When you simply say it is not two there is no boundary – the implication is infinite.The Upanishads say that the divine can be defined only by negatives, so they go on negating. They say, “This is not Brahman, that is not Brahman.” And they never say directly, they never assert directly. You cannot point to the Brahman with a finger because your finger will become a limitation. Then Brahman will be where your finger is pointing and nowhere else. You can point to the Brahman only with a closed fist so you are not pointing anywhere – or, everywhere.This negativity created many confusions, particularly in the West, because when for the first time the West came upon the Upanishads in the last century and they were translated – first in German, then in English, and then French and other languages – it was a very baffling thought, because The Bible defines God positively. Jews, Christians, Mohammedans define God very positively, they say what he is. Hinduism defines God totally negatively, they say what he is not.In the West this looked not very religious, because you cannot worship a negativity. You can worship only something positive, you can love only something positive, you can devote yourself only to something positive. How can you devote yourself to something which is simply a denial, a negativity, a neti neti, neither this nor that? You cannot make an idol of a negative Brahman. How can you make an idol of a negative Brahman?That’s why Hindus conceived their highest conception of Brahman as shivalinga. And people go on thinking that shivalinga is just a phallic symbol. It is not just a phallic symbol, that is just one of its implications. Shivalinga is a symbol of zero, shunya, the negative. Shivalinga doesn’t define any image. There is no image on it – no face, no eyes, nothing; just a zero, not even one. And the zero can be infinite. Zero has no boundaries; it begins nowhere, it ends nowhere.How can you worship a zero? How can you pray to a zero? But Hindus have totally a different conception. They say prayer is not really an address to God, because you cannot address anything to him. Where will you address him? – he is nowhere or everywhere. So prayer is not really some address; rather, on the contrary, prayer is your inner mutation. Hindus say you cannot pray, but you can be in a prayerful mood. So prayer is not something you can do, prayer is something you can only be.And prayer is not for God, prayer is for you. You pray and through prayer you change. Nobody is listening to your prayer and nobody is going to help you, nobody is going to follow your prayer but just by praying your heart changes. Through prayer, if authentic, you become different – your assertion changes you.In the south there is one old temple. If you go in the temple there is no deity; the place for the deity is vacant, empty. If you ask the priest, “Where is the deity? Whom to worship? And this is a temple – to whom does this temple belong? Who is the deity of this temple?” the priest will tell you, “This is the tradition of this temple – that we don’t have any deity. The whole temple is the deity. You cannot look for the deity in a particular direction. He is everywhere – that’s why the place is vacant.”The whole universe is Brahman. And this is such a vast phenomenon that positive terms will only make it finite; hence negativity – it is one of the highest conceptions possible. And this negativity reached its most logical extreme in Buddha. He would not even negate. He said, “Even if you negate, indirectly you assert, and every assertion is blasphemy.”Jews could have understood this. They have no name for God. Yahweh is not a name, it is just a symbol; or it means “the nameless.” And in the old Jewish world before Jesus, the name was not to be asserted by everybody. Only the chief priest in the temple of Solomon was allowed once a year to assert the name. So once a year all the Jews would gather together at the great temple of Solomon, and the highest priest would assert the name, Yahweh. And it is not a name, the very word means the nameless.Nobody was allowed to assert the name, because how can the finite assert the infinite? And whatsoever you say will be wrong because you are wrong. Whatsoever you say belongs to you, it comes through you, you are present in it. So unless you had become so empty that you were no more you were not allowed to assert the name. The highest priest was the man who had become just an emptiness, and to assert the name, for the whole year he would remain silent. He would prepare, he would become totally empty, no thought was allowed in the mind. For one year he would wait, prepare, become empty, become a nonentity, a nobody. When the right moment came he would stand just like an emptiness. The man was not there, there was nobody. The mind was not there. And then he would assert, Yahweh.This tradition stopped because it became more and more difficult to find persons who could become nonentities, who could become nothingness, who could become anatta, nonbeing – who could destroy themselves so completely that God could assert through them, who could become just like a passage, just like a flute, empty, so that God could sing through it.Buddha went to the very extreme. If you asked him about God he would remain totally silent. Once it happened: Ananda, his chief disciple, was sitting with Buddha, and a man came, a very cultured, refined philosopher, a great brahmin, and he asked, “Bhante, tell me something about the ultimate.”Buddha looked at him, remained silent, then closed his eyes. Ananda became disturbed, because this man was very useful. This brahmin had a great following, thousands followed him; if he was converted then thousands would become Buddhists. And Buddha remained silent, he didn’t answer him. The man, the brahmin, bowed down, thanked Buddha and went away.The moment he left Ananda asked, “What are you doing? You have missed a great opportunity. This man is no ordinary man. Thousands follow him, he is a great scholar. Thousands worship him, his word is significant. If he becomes a Buddhist, if he follows you, many will follow automatically – and you didn’t answer him!”Buddha said, “For a good horse even the shadow of a whip is enough. The shadow of the whip is enough, you need not beat him. He is converted.”Ananda was not convinced, but next day he saw the man coming with all his followers, his disciples; thousands followed, great scholars. He had a big ashram and they were all coming. Ananda couldn’t believe his eyes. What was happening? – and Buddha had not answered the man. So again in the night he asked, “What has happened? You have done a miracle. I was there. You remained completely silent; not only silent, you closed your eyes. I thought this was insulting. The man had come with so much inquiry and you were rejecting him.”Buddha said, “This is the subtlest answer. He knows that nothing can be said about the ultimate. Had I said anything the man would have gone, because the very saying would have shown that my ultimate is not ultimate – it could be defined, something could be said about it. Nothing can be said. And that’s why I even closed my eyes – because, who knows, he may have thought that I was saying something through my eyes. So I became completely silent, closed my eyes – this was my answer. And for a good horse even the shadow of the whip is enough. You need not beat him.”The Upanishads are negative about the Brahman. That’s why they say “the nondual,” that which is not two. Now we will enter the sutra:The first stage, to which contentment and bliss impart sweetness, springs from the innermost recesses of the seeker’s heart.As I said to you, the first is the feeling, the first is the heart. The first stage be-longs to the heart and only the heart can know contentment and bliss. If you are in contact with your heart you will know contentment and bliss, just like sweet springs flowing towards you, filling you, overflooding you. But we don’t have the contact with the heart. The heart is beating, but we don’t have the contact.You will have to understand it, because just by having a heart, don’t go on thinking that you are in contact with it. You are not in contact with many things in your body, you are just carrying your body. Contact means a deep sensitivity. You may not even feel your body. It happens that only when you are ill do you feel your body. There is a headache, then you feel the head; without the head-ache there is no contact with the head. There is pain in the leg, you become aware of the leg. You become aware only when something goes wrong.If everything is okay you remain completely unaware, and really, that is the moment when contact can be made – when everything is okay – because when something goes wrong then that contact is made with illness, with something that has gone wrong and the well-being is no more there. You have the head right now, then the headache comes and you make the contact. The contact is made not with the head but with the headache. With the head contact is possible only when there is no headache and the head is filled with a well-being. But we have almost lost the capacity. We don’t have any contact when we are okay. So our contact is just an emergency measure. There is a headache: some repair is needed, some medicine is needed, something has to be done, so you make the contact and do something.Try to make contact with your body when everything is good. Just lie down on the grass, close the eyes, and feel the sensation that is going on within, the well-being that is bubbling. Lie down in a river. The water is touching the body and every cell is being cooled. Feel inside how that coolness enters cell by cell, goes deep into the body. The body is a great phenomenon, one of the miracles of nature.Sit in the sun. Let the sunrays penetrate the body. Feel the warmth as it moves within, as it goes deeper, as it touches your blood cells and reaches to the very bones. And sun is life, the very source. So with closed eyes just feel what is happening. Remain alert, watch and enjoy. By and by you will become aware of a very subtle harmony, a very beautiful music continuously going on inside. Then you have the contact with the body; otherwise you carry a dead body.It is just like this: a person who loves his car has a different type of contact and relationship with the car than a person who doesn’t. A person who doesn’t love his car goes on driving it and he treats it as a mechanism, but a person who loves his car will become aware of even the smallest change in the mood of the car, the finest change of sound. Something is changing in the car and suddenly he will become aware of it. No one else has heard it; the passengers are sitting there, they have not heard it. But a slight change in the sound of the engine, any clicking, any change, and the person who loves his car will become aware of it. He has a deep contact. He is not only driving, the car is not just a mechanism; rather he has spread himself into the car and he has allowed the car to enter him.Your body can be used as a mechanism, then you need not be very sensitive about it. And the body goes on saying many things you never hear because you don’t have any contact….In Russia a new research has been going on for thirty years. Now they have concluded many things. One result which is very revealing is this: that when-ever a disease happens, for six months continuously before it happens the body goes on giving signals to you. Six months is such a long time! A disease is going to happen in 1975; in the middle of 1974 the body will start giving you signals – but you don’t hear, you don’t understand, you don’t know. When the disease has happened already, only then will you become aware. Or even then you may not be aware – your doctor first becomes aware that you have some deep trouble inside.The person who has been doing this research for thirty years has now made films and cameras which can detect a disease before it actually happens. He says that the disease can be treated, and the patient will never become aware of whether it existed or not. If a cancer is going to happen next year it can be treated right now. There are no physical indications, but just in the body electricity things are changing – not in the body, in the body electricity, in the bioenergy, things are changing. First they will change in the bioenergy and then they will descend to the physical.If they can be treated in the bioenergy layer then they will never come to the physical body. Because of this research it will become possible in the coming century that no one need be ill, there will be no more need to go to the hospital. Before the disease actually comes to the body it can be treated, but it has to be detected by a mechanical device. You cannot detect it, and you are there living in the body. There is no contact.You may have heard many stories that Hindu sannyasins, rishis, Zen monks, Buddhist bhikkus, declare their death before it happens. And you may be surprised to know that that declaration is always made six months before it happens – never more, always six months before. Many saints have declared that they are going to die, but just six months before. It is not accidental, those six months are meaningful. Before the physical body dies the bioenergy starts dying, and a person who is in deep contact with his bioenergy knows that now the energy has started shrinking. Life means spreading, death means shrinking. He feels that the life energy is shrinking; he declares that he will be dead within six months. Zen monks are known to have even chosen how to die – because they know.It happened once: one Zen monk was to die, so he asked his disciples, “Suggest to me how to die, in what posture.” That man was a little eccentric, a little crazy, a mad old man but very beautiful.His disciples started laughing; they thought that he may have been joking because he was always joking. So somebody suggested, “How about dying standing in the corner of the temple?”The man said, “But I have heard a story that in the past one monk has died standing, so that won’t be good. Suggest something unique.”So somebody said, “Die while just walking in the garden.”He said, “I have heard that somebody in China once died walking.”Then someone suggested a really unique idea: “Stand in shirshasana, headstand, and die.” Nobody has ever died standing on his head, it is very difficult to die standing on the head. Even to sleep standing on the head is impossible, death is too difficult. Even to sleep is impossible and death is a great sleep. It is impossible – even ordinary sleep is impossible.The man accepted the idea. He enjoyed it. He said, “This is good.”They thought that he was just joking, but he stood in shirshasana. They became afraid: What is he doing? And what to do now? And they thought he was almost dead. It was weird – a dead person standing in shirshasana. They became scared, so somebody suggested, “He has a sister in the nearby monastery who is a great nun. Go and fetch her. She is the elder sister of this man and may do something with him. She knows him well.”The sister came. It is said that she came and said, “Ikkyu” – Ikkyu was the name of the monk – “don’t be foolish! This is no way to die.”Ikkyu laughed, jumped from his shirshasana, and said, “Okay, so what is the right way?”She said, “Sit in padmasana, Buddha posture, and die. This is no way to die. You have always been a foolish man – everybody will laugh.”So it is said he sat in padmasana and died, and the sister left. A beautiful man. But how could he decide that he was going to die? And even to choose the posture! The bioenergy started shrinking, he could feel it – but this feeling comes only when you have a deep contact not only with the surface of the body but with the roots.So first try to be more and more sensitive about your body. Listen to it; it goes on saying many things, and you are so head-oriented you never listen to it. Whenever there is a conflict between your mind and body, your body is almost always going to be right more than your mind, because the body is natural, your mind is societal; the body belongs to this vast nature, and your mind belongs to your society, your particular society, age, time. Body has deep roots in existence, mind is just wavering on the surface. But you always listen to the mind, you never listen to the body. Because of this long habit contact is lost.You have the heart, and heart is the root, but you don’t have any contact. First start having contact with the body. Soon you will become aware that the whole body vibrates around the center of the heart just as the whole solar system moves around the sun. Hindus have called the heart the sun of the body. The whole body is a solar system and moves around the heart. You became alive when the heart started beating, you will die when the heart stops beating. The heart remains the solar center of your body. Become alert to it. But you can be-come alert, by and by, only if you become alert to the whole body.While hungry, why not meditate a little? – there is no hurry. While hungry just close your eyes and meditate on the hunger, on how the body is feeling. You may have lost contact, because our hunger is less bodily, more mental. You eat every day at one o’clock. You look at the watch; it is one – so then you feel hunger. And the clock may not be right. If somebody says, “That clock has stopped at midnight. It is not functioning. It is only eleven o’clock,” the hunger disappears. This hunger is false, this hunger is just habitual, because the mind creates it, not the body. Mind says, “One o’clock – you are hungry.” You have to be hungry. You have always been hungry at one o’clock, so you are hungry.Our hunger is almost ninety-nine percent habitual. Go on a fast for a few days to feel real hunger, and you will be surprised. For the first three or four days you will feel very hungry. On the fourth or fifth day you will not feel so hungry. This is illogical, because as the fast grows you should feel more and more hungry. But after the third day you will feel less hungry, and after the seventh day you may completely forget hunger. After the eleventh day almost everybody forgets hunger completely and the body feels absolutely okay. Why? And if you continue the fast…. Those who have done much work on fasting say that only after the twenty-first day will real hunger happen again.So it means that for three days your mind was insisting that you were hungry because you had not taken food, but it was not hunger. Within three days the mind gets fed up with telling you; you are not listening, you are so indifferent. On the fourth day the mind doesn’t say anything, the body doesn’t feel hunger. For three weeks you will not feel hunger, because you have accumulated so much fat – that fat will do. You will feel hunger only after the third week. And this is for normal bodies. If you have too much fat accumulated you may not feel hungry even after the third week. And there is a possibility to accumulate enough fat to live on for three months, ninety days. When the body is finished with the accumulated fat, then for the first time real hunger will be felt. But it will be difficult. You can try with thirst, that will be easy. For one day don’t take water, and wait. Don’t drink out of habit, just wait and see what thirst means, what thirst would mean if you were in a desert.Lawrence of Arabia has written in his memoirs: “For the first time in my life, when I was once lost in the desert, I became aware of what thirst is – because before that there was no need. Whenever my mind said, ‘Now you are thirsty,’ I took water. In the desert, lost, no water with me and no way to find an oasis, for the first time I became thirsty. And that thirst was something wonderful – the whole of the body, every cell, asking for water. It became a phenomenon.” If you take water in that type of thirst, it will give you a contentment that you cannot know just by drinking through habit.So I say to you that Mahavira, and people like Mahavira, have known the real taste of food. You cannot know it…because for three months Mahavira would fast, then he would go begging. And he would go begging only when the body would say so, not the mind. When the body would say, “Now I am exhausted completely,” and the hunger gripped the whole body and every cell of it asked, then he would go begging. He would not listen to the mind. He must have tasted food as no one has ever tasted on this earth. But Jainas think completely differently; they think that he was taste-less, they think that he had no taste. My feeling is, only he knew what taste is, and he knew it with his whole body, his whole being.You know only by your tongue, and that tongue is very deceptive. That tongue has been serving the mind so long it is no more serving the body. The tongue can deceive you, it has become a slave of the mind. It can go on saying, “Go on eating. It is very beautiful.” It is not serving the body any more, otherwise the tongue would say, “Stop!” The tongue would say, “Whatsoever you are eating is useless. Don’t eat!” Even the tongues of cows and buffaloes are more body-rooted than your tongue. You cannot force a buffalo to eat any type of grass – she chooses. You cannot force your dog to eat when he is ill – he will immediately go out, eat some grass and vomit. He is more in contact with his body.First one has to become deeply aware of this phenomenon of the body. A revival of the body, a resurrection, is needed – you are carrying a dead body. Then only will you feel, by and by, that the whole body with all its desires, thirsts and hungers, is revolving around the heart. Then the beating heart is not only a mechanism, it is the beating life, it is the very pulsation of life. That pulsation gives contentment and bliss.Contentment and bliss impart sweetness.Your whole being becomes sweet, a sweetness surrounds you, it becomes your aura. Whenever a person is in contact with his heart you will immediately fall in love with him. Immediately, the moment you see him, you will fall in love with him. You don’t know why. He has a sweetness around him. That sweetness your mind may not be able to detect, but your heart detects it immediately. He has an aura. The moment you come into his aura you are intoxicated. You feel a longing for him, you feel an attraction, a magnetic force working. You may not be consciously aware of what is happening; you may simply say, “I don’t know why I am attracted,” but this is the reason. A person who lives in his heart has a milieu around him of sweetness – sweetness flows around him. You are flooded with it whenever you are in contact with that person.Buddha, Jesus, attracted millions of people, and the reason is that they lived in the heart; otherwise it was impossible. What Buddha demanded was impossible. Thousands of people left their homes, became beggars with him, moved with him in all types of sufferings, austerities, and enjoyed it. This is a miracle. And those who left their homes were rich, affluent people, because India knew the golden age in the time of Buddha. It was at its highest peak of richness. Just as America is today, India was at that moment. At that moment the West was just wild; no civilization existed really. The West was totally uncivilized at the time of Buddha, and India was at its golden peak.Buddha attracted millions of people who were rich, living in comfort, and they moved and became beggars. What filled them, what attracted them, what was the cause? Even they couldn’t explain what the cause was. This is the cause: whenever a person of heart is there, a person who lives in his heart, he imparts around him vibrations of sweetness. Just being in his presence, being near him, you feel a sudden joy for no visible cause. He is not giving you anything, he is not giving you any physical comfort. On the contrary, he may lead you into physical uncomfort; through him you may have to pass through many sufferings – but you will enjoy those sufferings.Buddha was dying, and Ananda, his disciple, was weeping. So Buddha said, “Why are you weeping?”Ananda said, “With you I can move on this earth, millions of times I can be reborn and it will not be a suffering. I can suffer everything. Just if you are there, then this sansar, which you call dukkha, suffering, is no more suffering – but without you even nirvana will not be blissful.”Such a sweetness surrounded Buddha, such a sweetness surrounded Jesus, such a sweetness surrounded Saint Francis, such a sweetness surrounds all those who have lived through the heart. Their charisma is that they live in their heart.Jesus was not a very learned man, he was just a villager; he remained a carpenter’s son. He was talking in people’s ways, ordinary parables. If someone gives you Jesus’ parables, his statements, without saying that these belong to Jesus, you will throw the book, you will never read it again. But he influenced people, impressed so much, that Christianity became the greatest religion of the world. Half the earth belongs now to Christianity, to a carpenter’s son who was not educated, not cultured. What is this mystery? How did it happen? He was not a man of knowledge, he was not like Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell could have easily defeated him in any argument. It is not difficult to conceive of that. Jesus could be defeated easily.It happened in India in just the last century. Ramakrishna, Vivekananda’s master, was here. He was a man of heart, completely uneducated, not in any way proficient in the scriptures. He had no logic, no arguing force, could not convince anybody. It happened that one of the greatest scholars ever born in India, Keshavchandra Sen, went to see Ramakrishna. He was a great scholar, very logical, rational, argumentative, so many people followed just to see what would happen, because everybody knew – it was decided – that Ramakrishna would be defeated immediately. Nobody could argue with Keshavchandra.Ramakrishna’s disciples were very scared. They also knew that this Keshavchandra was going to be difficult, and once Keshavchandra defeated Ramakrishna – and he could defeat him on any point, there was no question about it – then that defeat would spread all over the country. So what to do? How to protect Ramakrishna? They started thinking. They were so worried they couldn’t sleep for days. Whenever they said anything to Ramakrishna he laughed and he said, “Let him come. I am waiting.”Then that day came. The whole ashram was sad. Keshavchandra came, very proud, very egoistic. And he had reason to be proud and egoistic; he was one of the finest intellects, a genius. And many of his followers came; professors of the universities, pundits, scholars, men who knew the Vedas – there was a big, big crowd of many renowned persons. Keshavchandra started the argument. “Does God exist?”So Ramakrishna said, “You say whatsoever you want to say.”Keshavchandra started criticizing, saying that there is no God, but by and by he became very uncomfortable, because whenever he would give an argument against God, Ramakrishna would laugh and enjoy so much that there was no argument. And he would say, “Right! Absolutely right!” He was not refuting, he was not going against, so the whole thing became nonsense because you can defeat a person only when he argues. The very effort to win was futile because there was no one to defeat. Then by and by he became sad, and the whole thing looked useless. Then he asked Ramakrishna, “Why do you go on saying ‘Yes’? I am saying God is no more!” Keshavchandra thought, “He is so foolish, he cannot understand what I am saying.”Ramakrishna said only one thing: “I was never so convinced that God is before I saw you, but the moment I saw you I was absolutely convinced that God is.”Keshavchandra asked, “Why?”Ramakrishna said, “How could such a beautiful mind exist without God? Such a refined intellect. You convince me that God is! I am a poor man, uneducated; such a mind like me can exist even without God, but such a mind like you? – impossible!”Keshavchandra had to touch his feet and say, “You have defeated me!” He became a lifelong devotee of Ramakrishna.What was the miracle? What was the charisma? A person living in the heart. Keshavchandra is reported to have said to his followers, “This man is dangerous, don’t go near him. He has converted me, not saying anything, just being present there, laughing, enjoying. And he filled me with such sweetness as I have never known. Just in his presence I have felt the first ecstasy of my life, the peak experience. The unknown has touched me.”The first stage, to which contentment and bliss impart sweetness, springs from the innermost recesses of the seeker’s heart, as if nectar has issued forth from the heart of the earth. At the inception of this stage the innermost recess becomes a field for the coming of the other stages. Afterwards the seeker attains the second and third stages. Of the three, the third is the highest, because on its attainment all the modifications of will come to an end.All the modifications of will come to an end. The third is the highest. And the reason? Let it penetrate deep in your heart. The third is the highest. Why? – because all the modifications of will come to an end. Your will is the cause of your ego. You think you can do something, you think you will do something, you think you have got willpower, you think that there is a possibility for you to struggle with existence and win. Will means the attitude to fight, the attitude to conquer, the attitude to struggle. Will is the force of violence in you.Bertrand Russell has written about “the conquest of nature.” This is impossible to conceive in the East. Lao Tzu cannot use these words, conquest of nature, because who will conquer nature? You are nature. Who will conquer nature? You are not separate from it. But the West has lived for these twenty centuries with this wrong concept – the conquest of nature. We have to defeat nature, to destroy it, to cripple it, to force it to follow us. You cannot win, this whole struggle is nonsense, because you are nature. There is no division. The East says, “Follow nature, become nature. Leave the will. The will is the cause of misery. The will is the door to hell.”The third is thought to be highest, because when you leave all desires there is no need for the will – because will is needed to fulfill desires. You have desires, you need will. There are many books in the West, and particularly in America, which go on teaching willpower. And they are sold in millions, they are best-sellers, because everybody thinks that he has to conquer and create willpower. People even come to me, to such a person who is absolutely against will, and they say, “Help us. How can we have more willpower?”Will is your impotence. Because of will you are defeated, because you are doing something absolutely absurd, something which cannot happen. When you leave will, only then will you be powerful. When there is no will you have become potent. Omnipotent also you can become when there is no will, because then you are one with the universe, then the whole universe is your power.With the will you are a fragment fighting with the whole existence, with such a small quantity of energy. And that energy is also given by the universe. The universe is so playful that it even allows you to fight with it, it gives you the energy. The universe gives you the breath, the universe gives you the life, and enjoys your fighting. It is just as a father enjoys fighting with a child and challenges the child to fight. The child starts fighting and the father falls down and helps the child to win. This is a game for the father. The child may be serious, may get mad; he will think, “I have conquered.”In the West this childishness has become the source of many miseries: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the two world wars, were because of this will. Science should not be any more the conquest of nature. Science must now become the way towards nature – surrender to nature, not conquest of nature. And unless science becomes Taoist – surrender to nature – science is going to eliminate the whole of humanity from this earth. This planet will be destroyed by science. And science can destroy only because science has become associated with this absurd notion of conquest.Man has willpower. Every will is against nature, your will is against nature. When you can say totally, “Not mine, but your will should be done” – “your” means the divine, the totality, the wholeness – for the first time you become powerful. But this power doesn’t belong to you, you are just a passage. This power belongs to the cosmos.The third is the highest, because all the modifications of will come to an end. Not only the will but the modifications – because will can get modified. We saw that the Upanishad divides desirelessness, nonattachment, in two parts. First, when you make effort to be nonattached – that too is a modification of the will. You struggle, you control, you detach yourself, you make all the efforts to remain a witness. Those efforts to remain a witness belong to your will, so really that is not real nonattachment, just a rehearsal; not real, just a training ground.Nonattachment will become real only in the second stage, when even this struggle to be a witness has dropped; when even the idea that “I am a witness” has dropped, when there is no more conflict between you and existence. No more any conflict, you simply flow with it.Lao Tzu is reported to have said, “I struggled hard but I was defeated again and again, fortunately.” He says, “Fortunately I was defeated again and again. No effort succeeded, and then I realized – against whom am I fighting? Against myself I am fighting, against the greater part of my own being I am fighting. It is as if my hand is fighting against my body, and the hand belongs to the body. It can fight, but the hand has the energy through the body.” Lao Tzu says, “When I realized that I am part of this cosmos, that I am not separate – the cosmos breathes in me, lives in me, and I am fighting it – then the fight dropped. Then I became like a dead leaf.”Why like a dead leaf? – because the dead leaf has no will of her own. The wind comes, takes the dead leaf; the dead leaf goes with the wind. The wind is going north, the dead leaf doesn’t say, “I want to go to the south.” The dead leaf goes to the north. Then the wind changes its course, starts flowing towards the south. The dead leaf doesn’t say, “You are contradictory. First you were going to the north, now you are going to the south. Now I want to go to the north.” No, that leaf doesn’t say anything. She moves to south, she moves to north, and if the wind stops she falls down on the ground and rests. She doesn’t say, “This was not the right time for me to rest.” When the wind raises her into the sky the dead leaf doesn’t say, “I am the peak of existence.” When she falls to the ground she is not frustrated. A dead leaf simply has no will of her own. “Thy will be done.” She moves with the wind, wheresoever it leads. She has got no goal, she has no purpose of her own.Lao Tzu says, “When I became like a dead leaf, then everything was achieved. Then there was nothing to be achieved any more. Then all bliss became mine.”All the modifications of will come to an end. One who practices the three stages finds his ignorance dead, and on entering the fourth stage he sees everything, everywhere, equally.Two things: One who practices these three stages finds his ignorance dead. Your ignorance cannot become dead by accumulating knowledge. You can accumulate all the knowledge available in the world, you can become an Encyclopaedia Britannica, but that won’t help. You can become a walking encyclopedia, but your ignorance will not be dead through that. Rather, on the contrary, your ignorance will become hidden, secret; it will move to the deep recesses of the heart. So on the surface you will be knowledgeable and deep down you will remain ignorant. This is what has happened, and all the universities go on helping this.Your ignorance is never dead; it is alive, working. And just on the surface you are decorated, you are a painted being. Your knowledge is painted just on the surface and deep down you remain ignorant. The knowledge, real knowledge, can happen only when the ignorance is dead. Before that, knowledge will remain information – borrowed, not yours, not authentic – it has not happened to you. It is not a lived experience, but only words, verbal, scriptural.And ignorance can become dead only when you practice these first three stages, because ignorance is a mode of life, not a question of information. It is a way of life, a wrong way of life, that creates ignorance. It is not just a question of memory, of how much you know, or how much you don’t know – that is not the point. That’s why Ramakrishna can become wise and Keshavchandra remains ignorant. Jesus became enlightened and Pontius Pilate remained ignorant. He was more cultured than Jesus, more educated; he had all the education that was possible. He was the governor-general, the viceroy, he knew whatsoever could be known through books. And in the last moment before Jesus was sent to the cross he asked him a very philosophical question.Nietzsche wrote about Pontius Pilate, because Nietzsche was always against Jesus. When he became mad in the end – and he was bound to become mad because his whole way of life, the whole style was madness – he started signing his signature as “Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche.” He would never sign his signature without writing before it “Anti-Christ.” He was absolutely against Jesus. He says that only Pontius Pilate was the man who knew, and Jesus was simply an ignorant carpenter’s son. And the reason that he proposes is that in the last moment before Jesus went to the cross, Pontius Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” This is one of the most significant philosophical questions which has always been asked, and philosophers enjoy answering it – but nobody has answered yet. To Nietzsche Jesus looks foolish. He writes that when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” he was asking precisely the peak question, the sole question, the ultimate question, the base of all philosophy, the base of all inquiry – and Jesus remained silent.Nietzsche says that was because in the first place Jesus would not have understood what Pontius Pilate meant, and secondly, he could not answer because he didn’t know what truth is. He was ignorant, that’s why he remained silent. And I say to you, he remained silent because he knew, and he knew well that this question can never be answered verbally.Pontius Pilate was foolish – educated, well-educated, but foolish – because this question cannot be asked in such a way, and it cannot be answered when a person is going to be hanged. For the answer to this question Pontius Pilate would have had to live with Jesus for years, because the whole life has to be transformed, only then can the answer be given. Or the transformed life itself becomes the answer, there is no need to give it.Jesus remained silent, that shows he was a wise man. Had he given any answer, to me he would have proved that he was ignorant. Even Jesus’ followers became a little uncomfortable, because they thought that had he answered Pontius Pilate, and had Pilate been convinced that his answer was true there would have been no crucifixion. But crucifixion is better than answering a foolish question with a foolish answer. Crucifixion is always better than that. And Jesus chose crucifixion rather than answering this foolish question…because such questions need a mutation in life; you have to work upon yourself.Truth is not something which can be handed over to you. You will have to raise your consciousness, you will have to come to the climax of your being. Only from there the glimpse becomes possible. And when you die completely to your ego truth is revealed, never before. It is not a philosophical inquiry, it is a religious transformation.One who practices the three stages finds his ignorance dead, and on entering the fourth stage he sees everything, everywhere, equally. At that moment he is so strongly embedded in the experience of nonduality – advaita – that the experience itself disappears.This is a very subtle and delicate point. Let it go deep in your heart. He is so embedded in the fourth stage…. After the three stages the fourth follows automatically. The three have to be practiced, the three have to be deeply rooted in your being through your effort – the fourth happens. Suddenly you become aware that there is nonduality, only one exists – one being, one existence.He is so strongly embedded in the experience of advaita – nonduality – that the experience itself disappears.…Because for experience to exist, duality is needed. So the Upanishads say you cannot experience God. If you experience God, then the God remains separate and you remain separate, because only the other can be experienced. Experience divides. This is the deepest message of all the Upanishads: “experience divides,” because whenever you say experience it means there are three things: the experiencer, the experienced, and the relationship between the two, the experience.The Upanishads say that God cannot be known, because knowledge divides the knower, the known and the knowledge. If really you have become one, how can you experience? So even the experience disappears. The Upanishads say a person who claims he has experienced the divine is false, his claim proves that he is false. A knower cannot claim, one who has really experienced the divine cannot claim, because the very experience disappears. Buddha says again and again, “Don’t ask me what I have experienced. If I say anything then I am not true. Rather come near me, and you also go through the experience.”One man came, Maulangputta, and he asked Buddha serious questions. Buddha said, “You wait for one year and then I will give you the answers. And for one year you have to follow me, whatsoever I say, with no argument, no discussion. Put your reason aside. For one year be with me and experience, and after one year has elapsed you can ask all your questions, bring all your reason back, and then I will answer you.”While Buddha was saying this and Maulangputta was being convinced, one sannyasin, one bhikku of Buddha, Sariputta, who was sitting under a tree, started laughing. Maulangputta became uncomfortable. He asked Sariputta, “Why are you laughing? What is wrong?”Sariputta said, “Don’t be deceived. This man is a deceiver – he deceived me the same way. Now I cannot ask, so he need not answer. If you want to ask at all, ask now. After one year it will be too late!”Then one year passed, and Maulangputta waited, meditated, became more and more silent, and started realizing why Sariputta was laughing – because the questions were disappearing. One year passed and then he started hiding, because if he met Buddha he would say, “Now where are the questions?”But Buddha remembered. Exactly on the day when he had come one year be-fore, exactly on that day as he was hiding behind ten thousand monks, Buddha said, “Where is Maulangputta? He must come now, the time has come. Bring your reason and bring all your questions. I am prepared to answer.”Maulangputta stood, and said, “You are really a deceiver. That Sariputta was right – because now I have no questions!”Buddha says, “Experience – and you cannot even claim that you have experienced.”…Because who will experience? There is no other. Who will experience whom? Even the experience itself disappears. There is nothing like God-experience; it is only in the minds of the ignorant. The knowers know that God disappears and the I disappears, the duality disappears. Knowing is there, but the knower is not and the known is not.Because of this Mahavira has used a beautiful word. He calls it kaivalya gyan; he calls it, “Only knowing remains” – only knowing, neither the known nor the knower. You disappear, the God you were seeking disappears, because really the God you were seeking was created by you. It was your ignorance that was seeking. Your God was part of your ignorance. It is bound to be. How can you seek the real God? You don’t know it.You project your God through your ignorance, you seek it. All your heavens are part of your ignorance. All your truths are part of your ignorance. You seek them and then your ignorance disappears. When your ignorance disappears where will those gods remain who were created by your ignorance? They will also disappear.It happened: when Rinzai became enlightened he asked for a cup of tea. His disciples said, “This seems to be profane.”And he said, “The whole thing was foolishness: the seeking, the seeker, the sought. The whole thing was foolishness. You just give me a cup of tea! None existed. The seeker was false, the sought was false, so of course the seeking was false. It was a cosmic joke.”That’s why I say there is no purpose – God is joking with you. The moment you can understand the joke you are enlightened. Then the whole thing be-comes a play, even the experience disappears.Thus, on attaining the fourth stage the seeker finds the world as illusory as a dream. So while the first three stages are called waking ones, the fourth is dreaming.When the fourth stage is attained, when even God disappears, when the God-seeker, the worshipper disappears, this whole world becomes like a dream. Not that it is not there – it is there, but like a dream; it has no substantiality in it. It is a mental phenomenon, it is a thought process. You enjoy it, you live in it, but you know that this is all a dream.This is the Hindu concept of the world, they say it is a dream in the mind of God. It is just as when you dream in the night; when you dream you can create a reality in the dream, and you never suspect that this is a dream and you are the creator. The beauty is this – that you are the creator, you are the projector, and you cannot suspect that it is just a dream. Hindus say that as there are private dreams, individual dreams, this is the collective dream – God dreaming the world. You are a dream object in the God’s dream. We take dreams to be real, and Hindus say the reality is a dream.I will tell you one anecdote.Once it happened, Mulla Nasruddin was fast asleep with his wife in bed. The wife started dreaming; she had a very beautiful dream. One charming young man was making love to her, and she was enjoying it very much. She was old, ugly, and he was a very charming young prince and she was enjoying it.Suddenly in the dream, when she was enjoying the lovemaking, Mulla Nasruddin entered from the roof – in the dream. She became afraid. She became so afraid and disturbed that she said loudly, “My God, my husband!” She said it so loudly that Mulla heard it and jumped out of the window. He thought he was sleeping with some other woman.Our dreams are realities for us.For the Upanishads, our reality is just a dream.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 13 (Listen & Download)

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Osho,Some mystics have been very introverted and silent. In your own case, you appear to be moving both introvertedly and extrovertedly without any difficulty. Please explain how this is possible.The mind goes on dividing on every level of being. Wherever the mind looks immediately it divides; division, to divide, is the nature of the mind. So we say above and below, we say up and down, we say this world and the other world, we say life and death, we say in and out, extroversion and introversion – but all these divisions are of the mind. The below is part of the above, the beginning of the above; up is nothing but the extension of down. Life and death are not two, but the same energy arising is life, the same energy dissolving is death. Out and in are not two, the division is only mental.But we exist extrovertedly, we exist outside. The ordinary man exists outside, he never goes in. He moves further and further out, because desires can be fulfilled only in the outside; some object is needed to fulfill them. The object can be found in the outside, there is no object within – there is only subjectivity, there is only you. You need something to fulfill desires, so you move in the world. The out is created because desires are moving outwardly.Then a moment comes in everyone’s life when you get frustrated with this whole business – desires, the search for them, the objects – and you come to realize that the whole thing is futile. Then the other extreme arises in the mind: “Don’t go out, go in!” Then you simply reverse the whole process. Before you were going out, now you start going in; before you were for the out, now you have become against it.This type of mind which has become against the world, the out, is just the same man, the same mind, standing on its head. You are standing on your feet, he is standing on his head, but he is the same man, there is no difference. The difference comes into being only when you are not moving at all, neither out nor in, when the division between out and in has dropped.And this can drop only when you are not. If you are, then you are bound to divide the within and the without. When the ego disappears, which is within? Where is within then? It was around your ego. If ego has disappeared, then where is within and where is without? They were in relation to your ego. When the ego has disappeared, out and in disappear – then there is no introversion and no extroversion. Man exists as extrovert or introvert, but when you transcend the ego you have transcended the man. Then you simply exist – the within and without have become one, the boundaries have disappeared.Just as we are sitting inside this room…if these walls disappear, then what will be the inside and what will be the outside? Then the inside will become the outside and the outside will become the inside. In actuality, even now this very moment, is the space outside and the space within really divided? Can you divide it? You can create walls but you cannot divide it, you cannot cut space. And you can use the inside only because of the doors; otherwise you cannot use the inside. And from the door it continues to be the same, from the door the inside and the outside are one.Lao Tzu uses this symbol very much. He goes on saying that the room is valuable not because of the walls but because of the doors. The room has value not because of the walls but because of the doors – and doors mean no division between outside and inside. Doors are the link, you can come in and you can go out. But if you destroy the walls then the division disappears, when the ego drops the division disappears.So Jung’s psychology will be meaningless when the ego has disappeared. Jung divides mind into two, the extrovert mind and the introvert mind – but this is a division of the mind, not of consciousness. Consciousness is just like space, mind is just the walls. But you can use mind only because mind has a few doors, and through those doors the within moves into the without and the without goes on moving into the within.A mystic is a person whose mind has disappeared, he has attained to no-mind. So if a mystic insists that “I am against the world,” he is not a mystic really; he still belongs to the world, because he still carries the same division.I will tell you an anecdote.It happened once two Zen monks were returning to their monastery. The evening was near, the sun was just going to set, and they came upon a small stream. When they were just going to cross the stream they saw a very beautiful young girl there. One monk who was old, traditional, orthodox, immediately closed his eyes because it is not good to see a woman – desire may arise, lust may come in, passion may happen. Just to avoid he closed his eyes and moved into the stream.The other monk who was a young man, newly ordained, not well trained in the orthodoxy of the sect, asked the girl, “Why are you standing here? The sun is going to set, soon it will be night, and this place is lonely.”The girl said, “I am afraid to go into the stream. Can’t you help me a little? Can’t you give me your hand?”The monk said, “The stream is deep. It will be better if you come and sit on my shoulders and I will carry you.”The other monk, the old monk, reached the other shore and then he looked back: what was happening? And when he saw that the girl was sitting on the monk’s shoulders he became very disturbed. His mind was revolving fast: “This is sin!” He himself also felt guilty, because he was older, senior; he should have told the other young monk to avoid the situation. This is sin and he would have to report it to the abbot.The young monk crossed the stream, left the girl there, and started going towards the monastery. The monastery must have been one or two miles away. They walked. The old monk was so angry that he couldn’t speak. They walked in silence. Then they reached the door of the monastery, and when they were crossing the door the old monk stopped and said, “You have done wrong! It is prohibited! You should not have done this!”The young monk was surprised. He said, “What? What are you saying? What have I done? I have remained completely silent. I have not even said a single word.”The old monk said, “I am not talking about these two miles you have walked with me, I am talking about that beautiful young girl you were carrying in the stream.”The young man said, “But I dropped the girl there and it seems you are still carrying her.”If a mystic is really a mystic he cannot carry any division. He cannot say, “That is outside and this is inside,” because only ego can divide; ego is the boundary. Only mind can divide, no-mind cannot divide. Nothing is outside and nothing is in – the whole existence is advaita, one, nondual. Divisibility is not possible – it is oneness, it is a harmony, no boundaries exist. But if somebody goes on condemning….There are monks, millions of monks all over the world in Hindu monasteries, in Christian monasteries, in Buddhist monasteries, who are afraid of the outside and who go on condemning it. That shows they are really interested, still interested in the outside; otherwise, why condemn? They have a deep unconscious lust for it, otherwise why condemn? Their condemnation shows they have some deep greed for it. When the greed really disappears how can there be condemnation? How can you hate the world? The hate is possible if love is somewhere hidden behind. Love and hate are not two things, love-hate is the phenomenon; they are two aspects of the same coin. You can change the aspects, from love you can come to hate. When you were in love with the world hate was hidden be-hind; now you hate the world, love is hidden behind – the other aspect remains.A real mystic is one for whom the coin has disappeared; there is no hate, no love – no hate-love relationship. He simply exists without dividing. And there is no difficulty in it. If you try to make a harmony between the two then there will be difficulty, if you try somehow to synthesize then there will be difficulty. You cannot synthesize. This has been tried.Reading the Upanishad you may come to realize, intellectually of course, that the out and the in are one, within and without are the same. If you realize intellectually then you will start trying to make a synthesis of the division. In the first place division is wrong; in the second place, to try to synthesize is doubly wrong, because synthesis means that you still think they are divided and somehow they have to be joined. Then it is very difficult and your synthesis will remain superficial, deep down the division will exist. You can only whitewash it, that’s all – you cannot do much.But it is very simple if you disappear. Then there is no need to synthesize. When you disappear they are simply one – there is no need to synthesize, there is no need to join them together. They were never apart. They have always been joined, they have always been one. It was you, because of you the division existed.Many people try many types of synthesis. In India this last century, many people have tried to synthesize all religions, the divisions of religions. Gandhi made much effort to synthesize Christianity, Hinduism, and Mohammedanism, but the whole effort was a failure. It was bound to be a failure, because in the first place he believed in the division – that they are separate – and then he tried a synthesis. The foundation was that they are separate and they have to be joined together, so at the most he could create a hodgepodge thing – not very meaningful, not alive. The real synthesis happens only when you can see there are no divisions. Not that you synthesize – simply you see there are no divisions. There is no need to join them together, they have never been apart.A mystic is one who has disappeared. Through his disappearance all divisions simply disappear. And I say all divisions, absolutely all divisions. He cannot divide between the good and the bad, he cannot divide between God and the Devil, he cannot divide between hell and heaven – simply he cannot divide. It is not only a question of in and out, because that’s very simple. We can think, “Okay, maybe in and out are the same” – but heaven and hell? Devil and God?You may not be aware that the English word devil comes from the same root as the word divine. Both come from the Sanskrit root; the Sanskrit root is dev. Dev means god, divine, devata. From dev comes the English word divine, and from dev comes the English word devil. Both are divine. Both are one. Good and bad…. Very difficult to conceive, because the mind persists. How can one think that the bad is also good and the good is also bad?Look. For a moment try to look into the nondivided reality of things. Can you think of any man who is good if there exists no man who is bad? Can you think of Buddha, Krishna, Christ, without there existing a Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Napoleon, Alexander? You cannot conceive of it. A Buddha cannot exist without there being someone who is a Genghis Khan, a Tamerlane. Tamerlane is also impossible, cannot exist, if there exists no Buddha. Just look in your society: the sinner cannot exist without the saint and the saint cannot exist without the sinner – they are joined together.Many people come from the West and ask me, “In India there have been so many saints, but the whole society seems to be of sinners. Why this paradox?” This is not a paradox, this is a simple, obvious fact; this must be so because saints can exist only amidst sinners. They are not two – the more saints, the more sinners. If you want sinners to disappear you will have to destroy saints first; when saints disappear sinners disappear.Lao Tzu says in Tao Te Ching that when the world was really religious there were no saints. When there were saints immediately sinners appeared. So the saint cannot exist without the sinner. That means they are joined together somehow, they are part of one reality. Make one disappear and the other will disappear automatically.It is just like hot and cold; make hot disappear completely and cold will disappear, because cold is nothing but a degree of hot. Make cold disappear completely and hot will disappear, because the difference is only of degrees, the quality is the same. And saints and sinners are just like hot and cold, they are degrees on the same thermometer. Destroy one, the other is destroyed immediately – they exist as polarities. People go on asking, “If God is good then why is there evil in this world?” God cannot exist without the evil, the evil is because God is. The light cannot exist without darkness, neither can the darkness exist without light.For Christianity this has been such a big problem that for twenty centuries Christian theologians have been continuously working on this one problem: why does evil exist if God is good? They have not solved it, and they will never be able to solve it because they cannot see the simple reality that good and bad are two degrees of the same phenomenon. So they have to divide. They say, “All good belongs to God, and all bad belongs to the Devil.”And from where does this Devil come? If the Devil comes from God himself then why so much fuss about it? He belongs to God. If the Devil is a separate source from God then two Gods exist in this world, and then there is no necessity that the good God will win. The whole situation seems to be otherwise. If the Devil is also a separate source there is every possibility that he will win – because he is winning ninety-nine percent of the time every day! If they are separate sources then it is better to worship the Devil, because you are on the losing side if you go on worshipping God.So Christian theologians cannot say that the Devil is a separate source; they say that the Devil was also an angel of God, but then he disobeyed. They go on shifting the problem. Then from where does this disobedience come? If it comes from the Devil himself then he becomes a separate source. Or if God himself suggests it to him then it becomes a play, a game.When I was saying last night that life is a game, a play, and God is playing this whole cosmic joke, one friend immediately wrote a letter saying that it cannot be conceived that Jesus being crucified is just God’s play. The crucifixion of Jesus cannot be conceived of as just God’s play, it must have some purpose.The question is not whether any particular thing has some purpose or not, the question is whether the whole has a purpose or not. You are here. You had a purpose in coming here, that I know; without purpose you would not be here. Jesus may have had a purpose, or you may think that he had a purpose. Christians may think that he had a purpose – salvation was the purpose, to liberate humanity from the sin that Adam committed was the purpose. But this is your thinking. If Jesus is enlightened he cannot have any purpose, because purpose belongs to ignorance. He can only be in a play. And if he also thinks that whatsoever he is doing is very serious, purposive, then he belongs to the same business mind as you.And the whole, the cosmos, cannot have any purpose, because purpose means something outside. There is nothing outside the whole. And whenever we think that God must have some purpose we are talking in deep absurdities, because if God has any purpose, he is omnipotent so he can do it immediately. Why waste so much time? If he has only this purpose – that man should reach heaven – he can simply order, “Go to heaven!”…because when he can say, “Let there be light,” and there is light; when he can say, “Let there be the world,” and the world is there, then why can’t he say, “Let there be only heaven,” so that everybody is in heaven? Then why this whole nonsense of Adam committing sin, then Jesus helping people? Why this nonsense?Purpose is absurd in terms of the total. Purpose may exist for individual egos because egos cannot exist without purpose, but for the cosmic there is no ego. It cannot be anything else than a cosmic play. Even Jesus’ crucifixion is a play. That’s why Jesus can go to the crucifixion so easily, not disturbed, as if it is just a drama, as if he is just acting a role. The man of knowledge is just an actor enacting a role. What is going to be the result is not his concern. Whatsoever the result, everything is good. There is neither good nor bad, there is neither in nor out, there is neither beginning nor end – but this happens only when you have disappeared.You can misunderstand me. I am not saying to go and do evil because there is no difference. I am not saying to go and kill somebody because it is just a drama. And if you are really thinking of killing someone, then when you are sent to jail or killed, murdered by the court, then you will have to enjoy it – it is a game. If you are ready to accept the whole, then you can go and kill. But then don’t complain – because in a game, in a play, complaining is useless.To understand this intellect alone will not be of much help. It can only prepare the ground. Unless your being is transformed you cannot see this unity, you cannot see this vast unity of polar opposites. They exist together, they disappear together. Gurdjieff used to say an apparently very absurd thing, but deep down a reality. He used to say that everything remains in the same quantity always, the proportion remains the same. The same proportion always remains between saints and sinners. That cannot be disturbed, otherwise the world will lose balance. The same proportion exists between ignorant people and people who are wise – that cannot be disturbed.Now modern psychology also has discovered a few facts which are relevant. One of them is this: five percent of people, only five percent, are intelligent, talented, genius, and five percent of people are idiotic, stupid – exactly the same proportion. On one polarity five percent with intelligence, on another polarity five percent with complete absence of intelligence. And then there are other grades, and every grade has a proportionate grade on the other side. You can divide the whole world. It is like two polarities balancing each other; whenever something grows more, immediately the balance has to be regained.It is just like a walker, a tightrope walker. The tightrope walker has a trick, a balancing trick. Whenever he feels that he is losing balance and is leaning towards the left and will fall down, immediately he moves to the right. When he feels that he has moved too much to the right and will fall down, he again moves to the left. Walking on the rope, continuously he goes on moving from left to right, from right to left, regaining balance by the opposite.The same happens in existence, the proportion remains almost the same. Whenever there is born a very saintly person, immediately a sinner is born somewhere. Whenever a wise man is born, immediately one idiot has to balance him, otherwise the world would disappear immediately. Whenever you do a good act, know well that somewhere someone will have to do a bad act to balance you. So don’t get too proud that you have done some good acts, because by doing them you have created the other also. Someone has to balance you because you unbalanced the world. Whenever you do a bad act someone is bound to become a saint because of you.I am not saying to do this or that. The Upanishads are not concerned with your doing, they are concerned with your understanding – that you understand well that the world exists in duality, and if you go on dividing you will remain a part of ignorance. Don’t divide; transcend division and look at the world as one vast expanse. Once you know that the two are not two, the opposites are not opposites, you cannot be tense, because tension is possible only when you choose. When you say, “This must be and that must not be,” when you say, “This is good and that is bad,” you are creating anguish for yourself. You will create tension, you will create a conflict within the mind; expectations, hopes, frustrations – all will follow. Once you can understand that no choice is needed because everything is the same, suddenly all anguish disappears. And then you have a tranquility, a peace, a bliss, that can exist only when divisions have disappeared.The second question:Osho,If one experiences or understands inwardly the deep feeling of becoming as a dry leaf to be moved only by the existence itself, then how can one push oneself to breathe or jump or do anything at all but lie flat on the earth and dissolve?First, to experience and to understand are two different things. If you experience this there is no need to ask the question – just lie down flat on the ground and dissolve. Why ask the question? This is an act, you are doing something. No dry leaf has ever asked. But the very question shows that intellectually you understand, but you have not experienced any such thing – and intellectual understanding is not understanding at all. Intellectual understanding is just appearance of understanding, it is not understanding.Why do I say this? I will read the sentence, you will feel why. “If one experiences or understands….” You cannot use the “or” because they are not the same thing – either you experience or you don’t experience. First thing, intellectual understanding is not equal to experience. “…Or understands inwardly the deep feeling of becoming as a dry leaf to be moved only by the existence itself, then how can one push oneself to breathe or jump or do anything at all but lie flat on the earth and dissolve?”You will have to do that also – to lie flat. You will have to do that also – to lie flat on the earth. And if you can do that, why can’t you push, jump and breathe?I will tell you one anecdote.It happened, one Zen monk, Dogen, used to tell his disciples, “Unless you die, you will not be reborn.”So one stupid disciple – and there are always many – thought, “If this is the key, then I must try it.” So one day he came and did just as you have said. He must have lain with closed eyes, flat out in front of the door of the master, just in the morning when the master was expected to come out for the morning prayer. The master opened the door and found that his disciple was lying there not breathing, as if dead. The master Dogen said, “Okay, doing well.”So the disciple opened one eye just to see the expression on the master’s face, and Dogen said, “Stupid! Dead men don’t open their eyes!”You will have to do that also – to lie flat on the ground – but that will be your doing. And these breathing exercises are to help you so that it can happen and is not your doing. All these techniques of meditation are to help you to come to this realization when suddenly you feel that it is happening – you have fallen on the ground, dissolving. But that should not be something done on your part, you cannot do it. If it is a doing the whole point is lost. It must be a spontaneous happening.And right now whatsoever you do will not be spontaneous, whatsoever you are doing you have to make effort. And I know that you have to make effort for breathing, for catharsis, for the mantra Hoo – and you have to bring all effort possible. These efforts are not going to become your enlightenment, because enlightenment is never achieved through effort, but these efforts will help you; they will bring you to a point where you can become effortless. And when you become effortless, enlightenment is always there. You can stop them, but just by stopping them nothing will happen. Continue them, and do them as totally as possible because then you will come to realize sooner that nothing can be achieved through effort.Nothing can be achieved through effort – you have to realize this. I can say this, but this will not be of much help. I know well that just by breathing fast you are not going to enter into nirvana. I know it well. And just by crying and dancing no one has ever entered there. Even if their door is open they will close it, if they see that you are coming doing Dynamic Meditation they will close the door. This I know well.I have heard, one Christian missionary was giving a sermon to some middle-school students, small boys and girls. After the sermon he asked, “Those who want to go to heaven should raise their hands.”So all the boys except one raised their hands. Only one boy, someone called Johnny, remained silent.The missionary asked, “Don’t you want to go to heaven?”Johnny said, “Not with this bunch!”So if you go doing Dynamic Meditation even I cannot enter with you, it is impossible. But I know that Dynamic Meditation is not the end, it is just to prepare you so that you can drop automatically. It is to exhaust you and your ego; it is to exhaust your mind, your body; it is to exhaust your individuality. And when your individuality is exhausted completely you will drop on the ground like a dry leaf. But not like Dogen’s disciple – if he could have done Dynamic Meditation the whole story would have been different. Then there would have been no need to lie down on the ground, he would have fallen on the ground.And if you have to lie down, that shows only that you are withholding yourself, you are not really exhausted. If you simply move totally in whatsoever I am saying to do you will get exhausted. You have a certain amount of energy, a limited amount of energy – that energy can be exhausted. Once exhausted you will become a dry leaf, a dead leaf.When you cannot do anything only then can nondoing happen. While you can do something, nondoing is not possible.The third question:Osho,Does returning to the heart center mean becoming more passionate? Is the heart also the source of passion? Can a man who is authentically centered at the heart be called passionate?Heart is not the center of passion; rather, heart is the center of compassion. And the man who lives in the heart cannot be called passionate, but can be called compassionate. Passion comes from the sex center, all passion comes from the sex center. You can join the sex center and the heart, but from the heart only love flows, not passion.Love is a very silent flow, nonaggressive, almost passive; it is a very silent breeze. Sex is passion, violence, aggression, with force, with strong energy – it attacks. The heart and the sex center can join together, then love becomes passionate. If heart is not joined with the sex center then love becomes compassionate. Then love is there in its total purity and only then, when there is no passion in it, is love pure. It is silent, passive, nonaggressive. You can invite it but it will not knock at your door. It will not even ask to be invited. You can persuade it to come, it can become your guest, but it will not come uninvited.Love cannot rape, and sex always rapes in many ways. Even when legally it is not a rape, sex is rape. You may persuade the other person legally, in the way the society allows, but in the mind rape remains the center. You are just thinking to rape the other person, you are aggressive, and all that you do before it is just a foreplay, just to achieve the end. That’s why, when two persons get married, foreplay disappears.When you meet a girl or a boy for the first time, there is much foreplay! Before you enter into a sex relationship you have to go on playing, so that the sex doesn’t look like a rape, but that is on the mind, that is in the mind. In your mind you are constantly thinking of the end, and everything is just persuasion, seduction, just to make the whole thing appear loving. But the more you become intimate with the girl or the boy, the less foreplay is there; if you get married, no foreplay. Then sex becomes just direct, something to be done and finished with.Look at this. If two persons are really in love, then not only foreplay but afterplay also will be there. If two persons are not in love then sex will happen and they will go to sleep, there will be no afterplay. Foreplay will not even be there, and afterplay is impossible, because what is the use? The thing has happened, the end has been achieved. Rape is in the mind.The sex center knows only rape, it is the center of aggression. That’s why the military doesn’t allow sex for soldiers, because if they have sex relationships they cannot be good fighters. The aggression moves through the sex center. If sex is allowed and a soldier is living with his wife or with his beloved, he will not feel like fighting on the battleground.This is one of the reasons why American soldiers are defeated everywhere: their girls follow them. They cannot be aggressive because the center of aggression is sex. If sex is allowed, aggression flows out of you and then you don’t feel like fighting. So the soldiers have to be prohibited from sex, they must suppress their sex; then the whole sex becomes aggression. Then rather than entering a woman’s body they can enter anybody’s body with a bullet. But it is the same thing – the entry. Your bullets, your knives, your guns, are just phallic symbols – to enter the other’s body, to destroy.The coaches of athletes who go to the Olympics tell them, “Don’t have sex at least for two weeks before,” because if you have sex you will not be a good runner. From where will you get the aggression to fight and run and compete? All religions all over the world – almost all, I will say, because only one wonderful sect, Tantra, is an exception – all religions all over the world have told their monks to be celibate, because they think that religion is also a sort of struggle. You have to fight with yourself, so retain the aggressive energy and fight with yourself.Sex can easily become violence because it is passion, it is rape. Love, the heart center or the love center, is totally different. It is nonviolent, it is passive, not even active. It can come to you like a very silent perfume, and that too when you invite. That’s why persons like Buddha or Jesus, they have much love, but we cannot feel their love, because we can feel love only when it is too violent. We have become addicted to violence. And Buddha’s love is so silent. It showers on us but we cannot feel it, we have become so insensitive. Only when someone attacks do we start feeling.The heart center is not the center of passion, but is the center of compassion. And compassion is absolutely different from passion, just the opposite. It is non-aggressive energy, moving without any noise, but you have to become very sensitive to feel it. So only very sensitive persons can become attracted to Buddha, because only very sensitive persons can feel that some love is flowing from him. If you are asking for strong doses of passion, then Buddha will just look dead; nothing is coming out of him.Remember this: passion has to be transformed into compassion, only then will you move from the sex center to the heart center. Now even your heart has to follow your sex center, which is the higher following the lower. Then your sex center will follow the love center, the heart center – the lower following the higher. And this should be the order of your being – always the lower following the higher. Then the lower becomes totally different, the quality changes.When sex follows love, sex becomes beautiful, a grace, a blessing. When love follows sex, love becomes ugly, a destructive force; you destroy each other through your love. All the courts of the world are filled with persons who have been in love and now are destructive to each other. Fifty percent of marriages break down completely, and the other fifty percent are continued somehow, not for love, but for other reasons – for children, for society, for family, for prestige, for money, for other reasons, but not for love. Fifty percent break down completely.Love has become so destructive because it is following a lower center. Re-member, this should be the law within you: always remember that the lower should follow the higher, then everything is beautiful and a blessing. Nothing is to be denied, there is no need to deny anything; only let the higher lead, because following the higher the lower changes its quality. And if the higher has to follow the lower everything becomes ugly.The fourth question:Osho,Did Mulla Nasruddin become enlightened?He must have – because if he is not enlightened then nobody can be.Mulla Nasruddin is a Sufi figure, one of the oldest figures of Sufi anecdotes, and he shows whatsoever I have been saying here: that the world is a cosmic joke – he represents that. He is a very serious joker, and if you can penetrate him and understand him, then many mysteries will be revealed to you.Mulla Nasruddin illustrates that the world is not a tragedy but a comedy. And the world is a place where if you can learn how to laugh you have learned everything. If your prayer cannot become a deep laughter which comes from all over your being, if your prayer is sad and if you cannot joke with your god, then you are not really religious.Christians, Jews and Mohammedans are very serious about their god; Hindus are not, they have joked a lot. And that shows how much they believe – because when you cannot joke with your god you don’t believe in him. You feel that through your humor, your joke, he will be insulted. Your belief is shallow, it is not deep enough. Hindus say that the trust is so much that they can laugh; the trust is so much that just by laughing it cannot be broken.One Buddhist, Bodhidharma, one of the greatest followers of Buddha, used to say to his disciples, “Whenever you take the name of Buddha immediately rinse out your mouth, because this name is dangerous and it makes the mouth impure.” Another Buddhist monk, Bokuju, used to tell his disciples, “While meditating, if this fellow Gautam Buddha comes in kill him immediately, because once you allow him then he will cling to you and it will be difficult to be alone.”And they were great followers, they loved Buddha – but they could laugh. Why? The love was so intimate, so close, that there was no danger that something might be taken wrongly. But Christians have always been afraid, so immediately anything becomes blasphemy – anything. They cannot take anything humorously, and if you cannot take anything humorously, if you cannot laugh at yourself, at your god, then you are ill, you are not at home, and your god is something to be feared.In English we have a word, God-fearing, for religious people. A God-fearing person can never be religious, because if you fear God you cannot love him. Love and fear cannot exist together. With fear, hate can exist, love cannot; with fear, anger can exist, love cannot; with fear you can bow down but you cannot surrender; with fear there can be a relationship between a slave and a master but there cannot be a love relationship. Hindus, Buddhists have a totally different attitude, and that attitude is different because they think the whole existence is a cosmic play, you can be playful.Sufis are very playful; they created Mulla Nasruddin. And Mulla Nasruddin is an alive figure, you can go on adding to him – I go on adding. If some day he meets me there is bound to be difficulty, because I go on creating around him. To me he is a constantly alive figure, in many ways symbolic – symbolic of human stupidity. But he knows it and he laughs at it, and whenever he behaves like a stupid man he is just joking at you, at human beings at large.And he is subtle enough. He will not hit you directly, he hits himself; but if you can penetrate him then you can look at the reality. And sometimes even great scriptures cannot go as deep as a joke can go, because the joke directly touches the heart. A scripture goes into the head, into the intellect; a joke directly touches the heart. Immediately something explodes within you and be-comes your smile and your laughter.Nasruddin must have attained enlightenment, or he is already an enlightened figure, there is no need to attain. I go on using him just to give you a feeling that to me religion is not serious. So I go on mixing Mulla Nasruddin with Mahavira – which is impossible, poles apart. I go on mixing Mulla Nasruddin with the Upanishads, because he gives a sweetness to the whole serious thing. And nothing is serious, nothing should be serious.To me, to laugh wholeheartedly is the greatest celebration that can happen to a man – to laugh wholeheartedly, to become the laughter. Then no meditation is needed, it is enough.I will take one or two anecdotes from Nasruddin.Once it happened that Nasruddin and his friend Sheikh Abdullah lost their way in a forest. They tried and tried to find their way but then evening came, the night was descending, so they had to wait for the whole night under a tree. It was dangerous ground, there were many wild animals, and they had to keep awake because any moment they could be killed.They tried every way to keep awake, but Mulla was tired, yawning, feeling sleepy, so he said to Sheikh Abdullah, “Invent something, because I am feeling sleepy and it seems impossible now to stay awake. The whole day we were traveling, and I am tired.”Sheikh Abdullah asked, “What should I do?”Nasruddin said, “We should play a game, a game of guessing. You describe a film actress – just become the film actress and describe – and I will guess who this film actress is. Then I will do the same and you guess.”Even Abdullah became interested, it seemed to be a good game. So Abdullah said, “Okay.” He contemplated and then he said, “My eyes are like Noor Jahan, my nose is like Cleopatra, my lips like Marilyn Monroe,” and so on and so forth.Mulla Nasruddin became very excited, his blood pressure rose high. Even in the dark you could have seen his eyes, they became so fiery. And then when Sheikh Abdullah said, “Now the measurements of my body – thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six.” Nasruddin jumped over to Sheikh Abdullah. Sheikh Abdullah said, “Wait, guess!”Nasruddin said, “Who is bothered about guessing? I don’t care who you are. Quick! Kiss me!”The human mind is such – imagination, desire, passion, projection. You project, you imagine, and then you become the victim. And this is not a joke, this is reality – and this is about you.Enough for today.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 14 (Listen & Download)

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On the attainment of the fifth state, the mind of the seeker ceases, like clouds in an autumn sky, and only truth remains. In this state, worldly desires do not arise at all. During this state all thoughts of division in the seeker are stilled and he remains rooted in nonduality.On the disappearance of the feeling of division, the fifth stage, known as the sushuptapad – sleeping – draws the enlightened seeker into its nature. He is perpetually introverted and looks tired and sleepy, even though externally he continues his everyday activities.On the accomplishment of this stage, the desire-free seeker enters the sixth one. Both truth and untruth, both egoism and egolessness and all sorts of mentation cease to exist in this state, and rooted in pure nonduality, the seeker is free from fear.As the entanglements of his heart dissolve, so all his doubts drop. This is the moment when he is completely emptied of all thought. Without attaining nirvana, he is in a nirvana-like state and becomes free while yet dwelling in the body. This state is like that of the motionless flame of a lamp. And then comes the seventh stage.The first three stages belong to the part of your mind which is called will. The first three belong to the realm of effort. You have to do them, they will not happen on their own; and unless you have done them the other states will not follow.After the third stage everything becomes spontaneous. There is a sequence: one after another things will happen, but you will not be doing them. The only thing to remember for the other stages after the third is to allow them to happen. The first three you have to force to happen, they will not happen by themselves. After the third you have to allow them to happen, if you don’t allow they will not happen.So the first three belong to the positive effort and the remaining belong to the negative effort. Let it be understood well what I mean by positive effort and negative effort. By positive effort is meant: you have to do something, only then will something happen. By negative effort is meant: you are only to allow, you have to remain passive, not doing anything, open, receptive, that’s all, and things will happen. For example, the sun is rising outside. You can close your doors. If the doors are closed you can leave them closed. The sun will be outside, the sunrays will be outside, but you will remain in darkness. Negative effort means let your doors be open, that’s all. But you have to open the doors, that is positive effort in the beginning. Open the doors, then you have not to do anything else. The sun will rise, the light will enter. And as the sun rises more and more, more and more light will come to your room. The darkness will disappear.You cannot bring the sunrays inside, you cannot put them in a bucket and bring them inside. You cannot force the sunrays to come in. No positive effort is needed, only to open the doors you have to be positive, that’s all. Then the sun by itself will fill the room. If you are open, passive, receptive like a womb, nothing can then prevent the light from entering. Or in other words, the first three steps are male, and the remaining steps are female. In the first three steps you have to be aggressive, masculine; in the remaining steps you have to be female, feminine, passive, receptive. That’s why I say that in the negative steps you have to be just a womb to receive.Have you observed it? No woman can rape a man, so all over the world, in no law book is there any law against it. No woman can rape a man because her whole sexuality is receptive, she cannot be aggressive. But a man can rape a woman, even if she is not willing she can be raped. If a man is not willing he cannot be raped, you cannot do anything, rape is impossible, because male energy moves outward, female energy simply waits inward – just waits.That’s why no woman worth the name will be aggressive in love. She will not initiate any love affair. She will not say, “I love you.” She will just wait for you to say that you love her. And if a woman says in the beginning that she loves you and you have not initiated it, escape from her; that woman is dangerous, you will suffer for it. That woman is not really feminine; she is aggressive, unwomanly. She will wait. She will seduce you, but her ways of seduction will be passive, indirect. She will not hit you directly on the head, she will not say anything. So in the end no man can say, “You persuaded me into this love affair.” No man can say that. The woman will always say, “You dragged me into this affair, you initiated me, so you are responsible,” because she can wait, she can be patient, she can be only receptive. And that is natural.The first steps are male, the last steps are female. Then there are a few things implied. The first three steps will be difficult for women, they will have to make more effort for them. The first three steps will be easy for men. The last steps will be easy for women and they will be difficult for men. This will be the difference in sadhana. The first three steps will come easily to a man. There is no problem because they suit his nature, he can be aggressive easily. The first three steps will be difficult for a woman; she will have to exert force, she will get tired easily. But if she can wait for the fourth then the whole wheel turns. The last steps will be very easy for a woman – she can wait, she can be receptive. Negative effort just suits her nature.Nobody is at any advantage and nobody is at any disadvantage. The whole – half is male, half is female. So remember this: if you are a woman the first three steps are going to be a little difficult. Knowing it well, make all efforts. If you are a man then remember that after the third difficulty will arise for you, because it is difficult for a man to be in a let-go. He can do something, that’s easy. But to not do anything, to just remain waiting, is difficult. But if the first three steps have been done well that difficulty will not be so difficult, it will dissolve by and by.Now the sutra. Before we enter it one thing more: that after the third the fourth will follow, you are not to drag it. After the fourth the fifth will follow, after the fifth the sixth will follow, after the sixth the seventh will follow. They will come automatically. Once your life energy starts moving things will happen automatically.That’s why it is said that samadhi, the last, the seventh step, happens by the grace of God. That’s true in a way, because you will not be making any effort for it. Suddenly one day you will feel yourself filled with grace – suddenly, not knowing any visible cause. So sometimes samadhi has happened in such moments that one was not even aware, one could not even imagine that samadhi would happen in such a state.One Zen nun, an old woman, was coming one night from the well carrying two pails of water on her shoulder on a bamboo pole. The full moon was in the sky. As she was walking towards her hut, towards the monastery, suddenly the bamboo broke. The two earthen pots fell down on the ground, were broken, shattered to pieces, the water flowed out – and the woman became enlightened. She started to sing and dance.In the morning the people of the monastery found her still dancing, singing. She was transformed, metamorphosed – a completely different being. They asked, “What happened?”She said, “When those two pots fell down, shattered, the water flowed out – the moon in the water disappeared. The moon was in the sky, it was reflecting in the water of the pots. The pots fell down, water spread, the moon in the water disappeared – and then I looked at the real moon and I was enlightened.”What is she saying? Just when those two earthen pots fell down on the ground…she must have been waiting for long, all effort had been done. She must have been growing by and by, spontaneously. And when growth comes spontaneously you cannot be very much aware of it, it goes on and on. It is just as when a child becomes a young man, he never knows when he became a young man. A young man becomes old, he cannot draw the line when he be-came old. It is happening so spontaneously moment to moment, it is happening always all the time, there is no demarcation. So after the third things will flow. Your master may become aware, you will not be aware. You will become aware only when the seventh has happened.The pots fell down on the ground, shattered, water spread out, and the moon disappeared. The falling of those pots triggered it, the sound, the shattering of earthen pots. Suddenly…as if the body disappeared, because the body is earth-en. The water flowed out because there was now nothing to hold it together. The soul is the water. The body broken, the water spread out, became one with the cosmos. There was nothing to hold it in. And then the ego disappeared – which is a reflection of the real moon, of the real God. Only God can say ‘I’. We go on saying ‘I’ – that is just a reflection.Water in the earthen pot reflects the moon.Consciousness in an earthen body reflects the divine, becomes ‘I’.But such an ordinary situation – the shattering of two earthen pots – became the cause of enlightenment. But it is not a cause, because you can break as many pots as you like and it will not happen, so it is not a cause. A cause means something which can produce the effect, so it is not a cause, it has not caused it – it was already happening. It was as if the woman was asleep and suddenly the sound of the breaking of the pots awoke her, she became aware. What has happened? Then she must have looked at the pots and at herself. Suddenly there was no body, no pots, no ego; everything had disappeared. Then the energy was dancing, not that woman; that was the metamorphosis, that was the transformation.In the morning when the monastery found her she was no more the same. So they asked her, “Where has the old woman gone?” It has become one of the oldest Zen sayings to ask a person who has been transformed, “Where has the old woman gone?” or, “Where has the old man disappeared to?”…Because now there is only energy with no will of its own, dancing. The dance is not willed, it is spontaneous.In many situations enlightenment has happened, sometimes very ordinary situations. It is told of Nanak that he was serving in an ordinary store, just selling things to people, the whole day weighing, measuring things and selling them to people. One day – he must have been growing inwardly, he was not aware of it – he was weighing something and giving it to a man. He counted: one, two, three, four, five…and then he came to thirteen. Thirteen in Hindi is tera. Tera means thou, thine. The word for thirteen in Hindi is tera. Tera has two meanings: one – thirteen; another – thine.Suddenly when he said “Tera,” he forgot the shop, he forgot the weighing, he forgot the counting, he forgot that tera means thirteen; suddenly he became aware that tera means thine. Then he went on weighing, but never the fourteen came again. He would weigh something that he was selling and would say, “Tera, tera, tera.”Evening came. The owner of the shop was informed that Nanak had gone mad; he was not proceeding further, he had become obsessed with tera. The owner came and he looked. He must have been a man who knew scriptures, who knew something about mysticism. He bowed down to Nanak, because his whole face was transformed, he was no more the same man. And after that moment everything became God’s; Nanak was not now his own, he was God’s. The whole existence was God’s.He left the shop, became a monk, a wandering monk with a follower, Mardana, who would play on an instrument and Nanak would sing the glory of the lord. And then Nanak moved all over the country and even outside the country. He went even to Mecca, everywhere – but the song remained the same: “Thine, tera – everything is yours, nothing is mine.”It happened just in an ordinary shop. It can happen anywhere, no bodhi tree is needed. It was accidental that Buddha was sitting under the tree and Nanak was sitting in that shop, it was accidental. It can happen anywhere because every spot on the earth is his, and every spot on the earth is sacred. Wherever you are, if you have done the right effort then things will grow, and one day – the happening. And that happening is going to be grace, because you cannot say, “I have done it.” You were not doing anything at all. That’s why so much insistence that the ultimate happens through grace, it is a gift of God. It is nothing which you have produced.But remember, you have still been doing something which is negative: you were not creating hindrances. If you create hindrances even God’s grace cannot be available to you. There is a reason for it. As I told you, love cannot be aggressive, and grace is the suprememost love – the love that existence has for you. It cannot be aggressive, it cannot even knock at your door. If the doors remain closed the grace will simply wait there for millions of your lives. If the doors remain closed the grace will not knock, because knocking is aggression. Unless you open the doors on your own the grace will not enter. It is not aggressive, it has no sex center in it. It can wait infinitely.One thing you have to do: don’t create hindrances after the third. And once the fourth has happened these stages will follow. They follow just as a river flows to the sea. Once it has started, once it has crossed mountains – because in the mountains there will be a little struggle, effort, resistance; the rocks, the valleys, the mountains…. Once the river has followed the mountains, has crossed them and has come to the flat land, then there is no problem, things flow easily. It will reach one day to the ocean.The three stages for your river are as if in the mountains, then from the fourth you are on plain ground, you can flow. Sooner or later the ocean will be there and you will fall down into it. And the whole course is now going to be spontaneous, you have just to flow and not do anything. And for flowing one need not do anything, flowing is not something to do.You enter a river: if you want to swim, then you will have to do something. But if you just want to flow with the river you need not do anything, you have simply to allow the river to take you – no resistance. That’s why a miracle happens. A live man may be drowned, but no river can drown a dead man, no river is so powerful it can drown a dead man. And any man who is live, alive, can be drowned by a small river also. The dead man must know some secret which alive men don’t know.The alive man fights with the river. The river is not drowning him; through his own fight he gets exhausted, he becomes tired, dissipates energy, becomes impotent – through his own fight, unnecessary fight. The river is not fighting him, he is fighting the river and wants to swim upstream. Every one of you wants to swim upstream, because only when you fight with the river and swim upstream is ego created. Then you feel you are winning, you are becoming victorious. The swimming upstream creates the ego.One day you are bound to get tired of it, and then the river will drown you because then you will have no energy left. But a dead man knows a secret. He cannot fight, he is dead; he cannot flow upstream. He simply allows the river to take him anywhere it wants. Not he, but the river now wills. No river can drown him. He can move, he can become the flow.After the third stage you have to become like a dead man, that is the negative effort. That’s what is meant by old Indian scriptures when they say that the guru, the master, is like death, he will kill you. Only when you are dead will the grace become possible to you. So all the efforts you are making here are just to become available to me so I can kill you. I have to be a murderer, because unless you are dead grace will not be possible for you, you cannot receive it.Dead men flow. They are spontaneous because they have no will of their own. After the third stage you should be like dead men. Then these stages follow:On the attainment of the fifth stage –the fourth is advaita, the feeling of nonduality –the mind of the seeker ceases, like clouds in an autumn sky, and only truth remains.The fourth is advaita, nonduality, when you can see that only oneness exists, clouds start disappearing, only the sky remains. Clouds are there because you divide, because duality is there. Your mind is clouded, many clouds float there, because you cannot see the one sky hidden behind the clouds. You are too obsessed with the clouds, with the contents.One psychologist was conducting an experiment. He came into his class, fifty students were present there. On the big blackboard in the classroom he pasted a white paper of just the same size as the blackboard. On that white paper there was a simple small black dot, the only thing; otherwise the whole paper was white, clean, clear. There was just a small dot, difficult even to see.And then he asked the students, “What do you see here?” So they stared, and everybody had to write what he was seeing. And the fifty students, with not even one exception, all wrote that they saw a small black dot. Nobody saw that big white sheet, just a small dot. Nobody saw, nobody wrote that they saw a big white sheet. Everybody saw the small black dot.We see the clouds, not the sky. The background is always missed, and that background is the real, the big, the wide and the vital and the vast. Whenever you look in the sky you see a small cloud floating there, you never see the sky! The emphasis has to change, the focus has to change – from the black dot to the white sheet, from the cloud to the sky. When you look inside the mind you always see small thoughts. They are nothing compared to your consciousness; your consciousness is vast, but you always see small dots floating there.When nonduality comes to you dots will disappear and the background will become clear. And once you can see the white sheet, once your mind is focused on the white sheet, that small dot will disappear, because if you are focused on the small black dot you cannot see the white sheet so big. Focusing on the black dot the big white sheet disappears. So why shouldn’t it be otherwise? – when you focus on the white sheet the black dot disappears. When you can see the sky clouds disappear. When you can see the consciousness thoughts disappear.On the attainment of the fifth stage the mind of the seeker ceases, like clouds in an autumn sky, and only truth remains.The sky is the truth, the vagabond clouds are not true. They are not eternal, they are momentary phenomena, they come and go. Remember, this is the definition of the Upanishads, the definition of truth: that which remains always. The real is not true if the real moves and changes. Upanishads have a particular definition of truth: truth is that which always remains, and untruth is that which comes and goes.The untruth can exist, but it is momentary, it is dreamlike. Why do you call dreams untrue? They exist, they have their existence, their reality; in the dream you believe in them, but in the morning when you have awakened you say they were dreams, untrue, unreal. Why? They were there, so why do you call them unreal? You must be following unknowingly the definition of the Upanishads – because they are no more. They were, but are no more. There was a moment when they were not, then there was a moment when they were, now there is again a moment when they are not, and between two nonexistences how is existence possible? That existence which exists between two nonexistences must be unreal, dreamlike.One day you were not here on this earth, in this body. If your name is Ram, then Ram didn’t exist before your birth. Then, after your death, Ram will not exist again. So two nonexistences on two poles, and between is your existence, the Ram. It is dreamlike. If there is something which existed before your birth and will exist after your death, the Upanishads call that the truth.They say, “Find the eternal, the nonchanging. Unless you come to that which has always been, will always be, consider all else dreaming.” They say, “Clouds are dreams. Not that they are unreal – they are real, they are there, you can see them, but they are dreams, because they were not and they will not be again. And when they were not the sky was, when they are the sky is, when they will not be again the sky will be. So the sky remains, the space remains, and everything appears in it and disappears.This world of appearance and disappearance is called maya – the illusion, the dream. The background which remains always constant, continuous, eternally there, which never changes – which cannot change – that is the truth.Your life is also divided by the Upanishads into two parts: one that changes and one that remains permanent, eternal – eternally permanent. That which changes is your body, that which changes is your mind, and that which never changes is your soul. Your body and mind are like clouds, your soul is like the sky. At the attainment of the fifth stage clouds disappear; your body, your mind, clouds in the sky…and all that is impermanent disappears, and the permanent is revealed…and only truth remains.In this state, worldly desires do not arise at all.…Because worldly desires can arise only for the clouds, for the objects, for the impermanent; you cannot desire that which is always. There is no need to desire it, it is always there. You can desire only that which will not be there. The more impermanent the more you are attracted towards it. The sooner it flies into nonexistence the more your obsession with it.All beauty appeals, because it is the most impermanent thing in existence. A flower has an appeal, not the rock just lying down there beside the flower. You will never see the rock, you will see the flower, because the flower is impermanent. In the morning it is there, by the afternoon it will be no more – or at the most by the evening it will disperse, fall down, dissolve. The flower attracts you, not the rock.You may have heard about Zen gardens, which are called rock gardens. They don’t make flower gardens in Zen monasteries, they make rock gardens. They say, “Flowers disappear, they are not true; rocks remain.” That is just symbolic. So Zen gardens are really unique in the world; nowhere else do such gardens exist. In their gardens only sand and rock is allowed, no flowers. Vast grounds with sand and rocks, and a Zen disciple has to sit there just to meditate on rocks, not on flowers. It is just symbolic.You never see the rocks, you always see the flower, because your mind is concerned with the impermanent. And you become more concerned because it is going to dissolve soon; before it dissolves, possess it. Possession arises in the mind. Beauty disperses, is impermanent; possess it before it disperses. That’s why there is so much possessiveness in human relationship and so much misery in it – because you are aware that this is something which is not going to last forever. It is moving: the young woman is becoming old, the young man is becoming old; every moment death is coming in and you are afraid, the fear is there. You want to possess and indulge more and more so that you have tasted it before death appears.At the fifth stage only truth remains. Worldly desires do not arise at all – because they arise only for the impermanent. The world means the impermanent: power, prestige, beauty, wealth, fame – all are impermanent. You may be a president today and next day a beggar on the street and no one looking at you. Have you observed? – this is happening every moment.Where is Doctor Radhakrishnan now, do you know? He was the president. Then his photograph was in every newspaper. Now he lives in Madras. Nobody knows about him, nobody reports what he says. He must be wiser than when he was a president, he has lived more; whatsoever he says is now more significant – but nobody reports it. The newspapers will report only when he dies, and that too in a corner and that too only because he is an ex-president, not because he is Radhakrishnan. Fame is flowerlike; power, prestige, flowerlike.I was reading Voltaire’s life. He was so famous, so loved by people, by the masses, that it was impossible for him to go to Paris, because whenever he would go such a great crowd would gather to receive him that he was almost crushed many times by the crowd. A big police force had to be maintained whenever he came. And there was a superstition in those days in France that if you could get a piece of the clothing of a famous man like Voltaire, it was worth preserving, it helped you. So whenever he would go to Paris he would reach his home almost naked because people would snatch his clothes. His body would be scratched.Then suddenly the fame disappeared, people forgot him completely; he would go to the station and there would be no one even to receive him. And when he died only four persons followed him to the cemetery – three men and one dog. But these things attract the mind, and the more impermanent the more the attraction – because if you are not in a hurry you may lose.At the fifth stage worldly desires do not arise at all – because now your focus has changed, your emphasis changed. Your gestalt has moved from the foreground to the background, your gestalt has changed from the content to the container. Now you don’t look at the clouds, you look at the sky. And the sky is so vast, so infinite, that your clouds don’t mean anything now. Whether they are there or not, they are not – they have no significance.During this state all thoughts of division in the seeker are stilled, and he remains rooted in nonduality. On the disappearance of the feeling of division, the fifth stage, known as the sushuptapad – sleeping – draws the enlightened seeker into its nature. He is perpetually introverted and looks tired and sleepy, even though externally he continues his everyday activities.The Upanishads say there are four stages or four steps of human consciousness. First, the waking state of consciousness. Just now you are in the waking state of consciousness. The second, the dreaming state of consciousness, when you dream in the night. The third, the sleeping state of consciousness, when you don’t dream, simply sleep, deep sleep. These three are known to you. Then the fourth, when all these three have disappeared and you have transcended them. This fourth is simply called turiya; turiya means the fourth.The first three, which need your will and effort, belong to the waking consciousness. The fourth and fifth belong to your sleeping consciousness, to your dreaming consciousness. The sixth belongs to your sleeping consciousness. And the seventh will belong to the turiya, the transcendental state of consciousness.On the disappearance of the feeling of division, the fifth stage, known as the sushuptapad, draws the enlightened seeker into its nature.In deep sleep mind disappears, because there is not even dreaming, no content. In deep sleep you have fallen back again into your nature. That’s why deep sleep refreshes you. In the morning you feel alive again, rejuvenated, young, vital, because in deep sleep you had fallen again to your original nature. You were no more an ego, you were no more a mind – you were just part of nature. While you are deep asleep you are just like a tree or a rock, you are no more an individual. You have become part of the ocean, of course unknowingly, unconsciously.If this can happen knowingly, consciously, sushupti, deep sleep, becomes samadhi, becomes ecstasy. In sushupti, deep sleep, you touch the same point which Buddha touches, which Ramakrishna, Ramana, Eckhart or Jesus touch. But they go to that point conscious, you go to that point unconscious. You move into your nature but you are not aware of what is happening. They also move to the same nature, but they are aware. That is the only difference between sleep and samadhi; otherwise they are the same.Alert, conscious, aware, you move into yourself, you are enlightened. Unconscious you move every night, but that doesn’t make you enlightened. You give yourself to nature. Tired of your ego, tired of your day-to-day activities, the routine, tired of your personality, you fall into a sleep. Nature reabsorbs you, recreates you, gives you back your vitality in the morning.So if a person is ill, very ill, the physicians will try first to give him deep sleep, because nothing will help, no medicine can help if you are not falling back to your nature. If an ill person can go into deep sleep, even without medicine he will become healthy. So the first effort of the physician is to help you to fall into deep sleep, because nature spontaneously rejuvenates.On the disappearance of the feeling of division, the fifth stage, known as the sushuptapad – sleeping – draws the enlightened seeker into its nature. He is perpetually introverted – in this stage, the seeker will remain perpetually introverted – and looks tired and sleepy, even though externally he continues his everyday activities.If you go to Sufi monasteries you will see there many persons very sleepy, as if someone has hypnotized them. They will look like zombies – as if they are walking in sleep, working in sleep, following orders in sleep. And monasteries were created because of such things.A person who is in the fifth stage will have many difficulties in the world because he will move sleepily. He is constantly deep in his nature, as if fast asleep. He will have to make effort to be awake. He will be introverted, he will not be interested in the outside world. He would like more and more time to move inwards. You will be able to see from his eyes also; they will be droopy, tired. He doesn’t want to look out, he wants to look in. His face will show the same state as that of a hypnotized medium. The face will be relaxed, as if he can fall any moment into sleep. He will become just like a child again.The child in the mother’s womb sleeps twenty-four hours a day for nine months; never awakens, just sleeps, goes on sleeping for nine months. Those nine months are needed, because if a child awakens then the growth will be hindered. In those nine months of deep sleep his whole body is created. Nature is working. The waking consciousness will create disturbance in nature, so the child sleeps completely.Then the child is born and after his birth he sleeps less and less. Twenty-four hours he was sleeping in the womb; out of the womb he will sleep twenty-three hours, then twenty-two hours, then twenty hours, then eighteen hours. His sleep will come to eight hours only when he has become sexually mature – that is at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, somewhere around there. Then his sleep will remain fixed because now the body has grown up completely, biologically. He can reproduce, he can now himself give birth to a child, he is sexually mature. Now there is no work left to do in the body; the body has stopped working, no new creation is going on. Eight hours sleep will do.Then as he becomes old, after fifty, there is less and less sleep. Old men cannot sleep; four hours, three hours, then two hours, then even one hour will be too much, they will not be able to sleep. If you can understand this then when you get old you will not be worried. There is no need now for more sleep. And if you can understand this then you will not force small children to be awake when they feel sleepy.Every family tortures children, because you want them to behave like you. If you get up early in the morning, at five, you would like your children also to get up in brahmamuhurt. You are foolish. That is destructive to children, they need more sleep. You can drag them and they cannot do anything because they are helpless. Sleepy they will get up. You can force them to sit and read. Sleepy they will somehow do it. You force small children, and then when you become old and when they become old, they will think that if they cannot sleep for eight hours then something is wrong. Nothing is wrong. An old man doesn’t need…there is no new work in the body. Sleep will be less and less.When this fifth stage happens the seeker will become again like a small child. He will feel sleepy, he will need more sleep, he will be more introverted. His eyes will like to be closed more than open, because he is not interested in looking outside, and a new work has started in his being again. Now he is again a child. Something new, phenomenal, is happening now; alchemically a new being is created again. He himself has become the womb now. He will feel more sleepy.Monasteries were needed for such people, because in the world people will not tolerate you in this stage. They will say, “You have become lazy! Go to the doctor, take some activizers. This is not good.” You will look dead and dull, your shining face will become dull. People will think you are ill or that somebody has hypnotized you. You will look like a zombie. Monasteries were needed for the fifth stage, really. The first three can be done in the world, but after the fourth you will need…. And in the fifth you will certainly need a monastery where people understand you.Meher Baba used to sleep for forty-eight hours, sixty hours when he was in the fifth stage. Ramakrishna would fall asleep for weeks and he had to be taken care of, he had to be fed milk while he was asleep. The body was to be taken care of. Very loving friends, disciples who would care, were needed to help him. For two weeks he would remain as if in a coma. He became so introverted that it was impossible to open the eyes. The whole energy was moving inwards. If he had been left alone he would have died.Monasteries will be needed for such people, masters will be needed for such people, because they have again become children. Somebody has to mother them. The monastery becomes your mother, and there people know what is happening, where you are and what you need. In this stage only milk can be fed; nothing else will be good for the body, because the man has again become a child. Anything solid will disturb him, just milk will be enough.He has to be taken care of just like a child. He will be asleep and you need not disturb him, because the more he remains in this state the sooner the sixth will follow. If you disturb him then he will remain in the fifth, and he will feel just as you feel if something awakens you in the morning suddenly – an alarm clock, or something else – the whole day you feel depressed. If the sleep is disturbed, ordinary sleep, the whole day you will feel disturbed, frustrated, angry, irritated – anything will create the irritation – and you don’t know what has happened. It is because you were taken forcibly from your nature; when you were deep in it, suddenly you were called. An alarm is dangerous, because you have to come suddenly to the surface.People who understand will not disturb anybody’s sleep, one must come out of it gradually. But this is for ordinary sleep. When the person is in the fifth state then it is a very deep sleep – you don’t know about it. It is falling to the original nature so deeply that it is very difficult to be pulled out. Nobody should disturb. That’s why monasteries were made deep in the hills, forests, where nobody would come. Nobody would disturb anybody unnecessarily, and only a few people would be there who knew.Sometimes a seeker will remain for months at a time in sleep, and then very loving care is needed, no disturbance. He is being created again. And this can happen continuously even for nine months, just as it happens in the womb. And when the seeker comes out of it he will be totally new. A new child is born, the old man is no more. He will be completely, totally fresh. You look into his eyes and they will have a depth, an abysslike depth. You cannot find the bottom. You can go in and in and in and there is no end to it.This is what Jesus says: “Unless you become like children again, you will not enter into the kingdom of my God.” The fifth stage will make you again a child.He is perpetually introverted and looks tired and sleepy, even though externally he continues his everyday activities.He can continue but he will look like a robot. He will go to the bath, take his bath; he will go to the kitchen, eat his food. He will do, but you can see that he is doing as if walking in sleep, somnambulistic.On the accomplishment of this stage, the desire-free seeker enters the sixth one.All desires disappear in the fifth. He becomes totally introverted: no extroversion, no outgoing energy. Desire-free, then the seeker enters the sixth one.Both truth and untruth, both egoism and egolessness, and all sorts of mentations cease to exist in this state, and rooted in pure nonduality, the seeker is free from fear.Remember, in the fifth untruth disappears, truth remains. In the sixth even truth disappears. In the fifth clouds disappear, the sky remains. In the sixth the sky also disappears – because you cannot continue to remember the sky without the clouds. And when there is no untruth how can you remember the truth? The duality is needed. When there is no black how can you remember the white?Think, if the whole earth was populated by white men and there were no colored people, nobody would have been called white. Because of black people, colored people, a few people are white. Or think, if the whole earth was populated by Negroes, Negroid people, black, nobody would have been black. The contrast is needed. Only in contrast can the thing continue to be remembered. When untruth has disappeared how can you carry truth any more? How can you remember that it is truth? It has to be dropped, it will drop automatically. But first untruth drops, then truth is forgotten, it ceases. And when truth also drops you have reached something, not before it.The sixth is the door, the real door, to the infinity. The sixth is the door, the real door, to the ultimate. Lao Tzu says – and whatsoever he says belongs to the sixth and seventh – he says, “If you are good you are still bad. If you feel that you are a saint you are still a sinner. If you look in the mirror and feel you are beautiful you have ugliness in you”…because when a person is really beautiful he cannot remember that he is beautiful, only ugliness can remember. When a person is really good he cannot feel he is good, because first the bad disappears, then the good also. No divisions.In the sixth…truth and untruth, both egoism and egolessness, and all sorts of mentations cease.Ego disappears in the fifth, because ego is a cloud, it is part of the world of the clouds. It is just like a rainbow in the clouds – false, dreamlike. When you be-come aware of the soul you are not an egoist; you become egoless, you become humble. But Lao Tzu says that if you are still humble the ego exists somewhere; otherwise, how can you feel that you are a humble person?Go to somebody who is humble, watch him, and you will feel that his ego is very subtle, that’s all. He goes on saying, “I am a humble person.” He insists that he is humble. His humbleness has now become his ego and pride, and if you say, “No, you are not,” he will be angry. If you say, “I have seen a more humble person in your town,” he will say, “This is impossible. I am the most humble, the humblest.” But “I am” remains. Now the ‘I’ claims humbleness, before it was claiming something else.I have heard: Once it happened that a great king went to a mosque to pray. It was a religious day for the Mohammedans so he was praying. It was dark, just in the morning when there was no one there, and he was saying to God, “Allah, O my God, I am nobody, just dust on your feet.”When he was saying this, suddenly he became alert that somebody else was also in the dark mosque, in another corner, and was saying the same thing: “Allah, my God, I am nobody, just dust on your feet.”The king was irritated. He said, “Who is saying in front of me that he is no-body? When I am saying I am nobody, who else is claiming here that he is nobody?” Even nobodiness….And then the morning dawned and the king looked; the man who was claiming was a beggar. So the king said, “Remember, when a king is saying that he is nobody, nobody else can claim that – and you being just a beggar!” So even nobodiness can become part of the ego.In the sixth stage ego disappears, egolessness also. Then there will be problems. If egolessness disappears then you will have difficulty in interpreting. A real sage is without the ego and without humility. If humility is there the sage is not real, not yet real. He has not reached the sixth stage, he has not reached the door.But then you will be in a difficulty, because you always think that humility is the quality. If you go to a buddha you will not see any humility in him. You will not see any ego either, but you will not see any humility also. And this disappearance of humility may make it seem to you that he is not humble. Buddha says, “The Vedas are of no use, scriptures are to be thrown.” If you go to him it will look as if he is not humble. He is saying that scriptures are of no use, the Vedas are to be thrown – he looks very egoistic. He is not, but he is not humble either. So whatsoever he is saying is neither related to ego nor related to egolessness. That will be the problem.Look at Jesus, he was not a humble person at all. He was not an egoist, but not humble either. That created the problem, that led him to the cross. He was not humble at all. And now many psychologists say that he was neurotic, and they have a point. Many psychologists say that he was an egomaniac; they have a point. If psychologists study Buddha and Mahavira they will conclude the same things – but they have not studied them. They should have been studied very minutely.So they say he was an egomaniac. Why? You can find reasons – because he was not humble. He used to say, “I am God,” or “I am the son of God. I and my father in heaven are one.” To the egoist mind this will appear like ego. And no-body can say that this man is humble who claims that he and God are one, or who claims that he is the son of God. It looks like a claim to us; to Jesus this was a simple fact.And he was not claiming that you are not the son of God: claiming that he is the son of God, he claimed for you all. It is Christianity which claimed the wrong thing; Christianity started to claim that he is the only son of God. That is absurd, that is egomania. But Jesus was saying a simple fact: if the whole creation is out of God, the whole creation is the son, God is the father. He was saying a simple fact with no ego in it, but this disturbed people. They thought a sage must be humble. He used to say, “I am the king of the Jews.” This has been said many times, but to people who were more wise than Jews. Jews were offended that this man who was just a beggar on the street, no more – just a vagabond, just an old hippie – that this man claimed, “I am the king of the Jews.” But he was not claiming anything, he was in a state of mind where there is no ego. Kingship comes into being, but that is not ego. And that kingship doesn’t belong to any worldly affairs, it is not a claim to rule anybody. That kingship is just felt as an inner nature.Ram Teerth, an Indian mystic of this century, used to call himself Emperor Ram. He was a beggar, but nobody took offense in India because we have known so many beggars saying that, and we know that that happens: a moment comes when a person becomes an emperor without any kingdom. Really, a person be-comes an emperor only when there is no kingdom.He went to America, and the American president invited him to visit. The American president felt uncomfortable because Ram Teerth always used to say “Emperor Ram.” Even while talking he would say, “Emperor Ram says this.” So the president humbly asked, “I cannot understand this. You don’t seem to have any kingdom, why do you claim that you are an emperor?”Ram Teerth said, “That’s why I claim – because I have nothing to lose, no-body can defeat me. My kingdom is of the eternal, you cannot take it from me. Your kingdom can be taken, your presidency can be destroyed. Nobody can destroy me, I have nothing to lose. I am an emperor because I have no desires.”If you have desires you are a beggar. So there are two types of beggars, poor beggars and rich beggars. When Jesus said, “I am the king of the Jews,” he was saying this. But people got offended. They said, “This is too much. This man cannot be tolerated – he must be crucified, he must be killed.” But Jesus was a humble man, humble in this sense, that even humbleness was not there – egoless, egolessness was not there – truly humble. But then one starts saying facts. And you live in a world of ego, you interpret because of your egos. So people thought, “This man is claiming something – that he is the son of God, he is the king of the Jews – and he is nothing, just a beggar, a vagabond!”In India nobody would have taken any offense. India has seen so many Jesuses, nobody would have taken offense. In India every sannyasin is called swami; swami means the master, the king. We call a man swami; swami means the lord. When he leaves everything, when he doesn’t claim anything, when he has nothing, then he becomes swami, then he becomes the lord. Jesus was claiming something Indian in a country which was not India; that became the problem.…And all sorts of mentations cease in this state, and rooted in pure non-duality, the seeker is free from fear.Fear can exist only if the other is there. If you are alone, there can be no fear – the other creates the fear. You are sitting in a room alone, then somebody looks in through the window. Fear has come in. If you know the person well then less fear; if the person is absolutely a stranger then more fear, because then he is more other. If the person speaks your language then less fear, because he is somehow related. But if the person doesn’t speak your language then more fear. If the person is a Christian and you are also a Christian then less fear. But if the person is a pagan then more fear.If the person is totally other – doesn’t belong to your country, doesn’t belong to your language group, doesn’t belong to your religion, doesn’t belong to your race – more fear is created. The more the other is other, the more you become afraid. But whatsoever the other may be, howsoever near, the fear continues. The husband is afraid of the wife, the wife is afraid of the husband. They are close but the fear remains. Sartre says that the other is hell….Sartre has a very beautiful story to tell. Somewhere in one of his dramas called “No Exit” a person suddenly awakens and finds himself in hell. So he looks around for the usual, traditional concept of hell – fire burning, oil boiling, sinners being thrown in it – but there is nothing. It is one air-conditioned room, but without any exit, you cannot go out. And he is not alone, there are three other people also.They live in the room. Every desire is fulfilled immediately. That too is contrary, against the traditional concept of hell – that you will have your desires fulfilled. You will be thirsty, water will be flowing, but you will not be allowed to drink – that is the traditional concept. Desire will be there, the possibility to fulfill it will be there just in front of you, and you will not be allowed. But every desire is fulfilled immediately. Somebody comes in – from where nobody knows because there is no door – and brings food, drink, everything. And these four persons, one old lady, one young girl, another young man, and this person who has awakened, live together.For one or two days they gossip – from where they have come, inquiries, introductions – but then they have finished. And there are no more newspapers, nothing, so they cannot continue. They have even repeated many times the same things. Then they get fed up – and nobody can go out. You cannot put the light off, there is no switch. So they sit, they eat, they sleep. Even while sleeping they know that three persons are there, they are not alone. So all become torturers – all the other three for each one. For each one the three are always present.Then suddenly it is revealed to the man that this is hell. It becomes so impossible to live there, just the presence of the other three becomes so heavy that they want to commit suicide, but there is no way. They ask the person who brings the food. The person says, “In hell you cannot commit suicide. That much freedom is not allowed here – you can only live.”So they ask, “How many years do we have to live?”And the man says, “Hell is eternal. You will have to live here forever and forever and forever.”Just think! Sartre says the other is hell – and this is a more dangerous hell than all the theologians combined have invented ever, because you can tolerate other things. If you are burned or thrown into boiling water or oil, or you cannot drink, you can tolerate it because still something is going on. And you are not alone, many are being thrown in the same suffering. You can even enjoy it, by and by you can get accustomed to it. But just living in a closed room with no exit, with a few people forever and forever, will be hell.Your life is a suffering because the other is everywhere. You cannot destroy the other. You try to do it – the husband tries to destroy the wife so that the wife becomes a thing and the other is not felt. You may not have observed – you do it. Your servant enters the room, you don’t take any notice. If you are reading the newspaper you go on reading as if no one has entered. You have forced the man, the servant, to be a thing, just a utility. You don’t take any notice. It will be difficult to take notice because the other will bubble up.Servants are forgotten as if they are not, and they are taught to behave in such a way as if they are not: to not make any noise, to not bump here and there, to just move silently, absently. A good servant is one who is not a person but a thing, a mechanism. We try this. We try with children: they should not create a noise, they should not jump, they should not play, they must behave, they must be obedient. All these teachings are just to force them not to be persons but things.The husband tries the same with the wife, the wife tries the same with the husband, and we create hell for each other. The other cannot be destroyed; he remains a person, howsoever forced. Just look in the eyes of your servant and he remains a person. The “thing-ness” is just a surface, just a device to avoid you, just a device not to disturb you because he has to serve you, that’s all. He cannot exist without it so he has compromised – but he remains a person.That’s why masters will not talk to servants, will not laugh with them, will not make any personal relationship, because once you laugh with a servant he is no more a thing. The person has come out. Then he will start behaving like a friend. You have to be strict. But when you are strict with a servant not only is he reduced to a thing, you are also reduced to a thing, because you cannot be open, you cannot be free. Not only is he confined, you are also confined. Whenever you create a prison for somebody else it is also a prison for yourself. Whenever you possess something you are also possessed – and then you suffer.So what to do? How to kill the other? It is impossible. And you cannot exist without the other. If you can kill…. That’s what a Hitler tries to do – kill. But even then the others are there. Hitler wouldn’t allow any woman to sleep in his room in the night. Even his mistresses were not allowed to sleep in his room, he would remain alone. He was afraid of the other. He didn’t get married his whole life. He got married only on the day when it was absolutely certain that Germany was defeated and everything was destroyed and he had to commit suicide. The same day he married and committed suicide – both within three hours.First he got married, then he committed suicide with his mistress who had become his wife. The mistress had been continuously saying, “Marry me,” but he would not marry because once you marry a person they come close and the other remains always there. He got married only when it was certain that within hours he would be committing suicide – then there was no fear of the other. But even if you are alone in the room like a Hitler, all around the room there are persons who are guarding. They are there, even in your sleep you know they are there.The world remains around you, because you cannot exist alone. So what is the way to get out of this hell that the other creates? The Upanishads say, “You disappear!” When you are no more, the other is no more. You create the other by being yourself. The more the ego, the more the other will be there. The other is a creation, a by-product of the ego. And then, when you are no more and the whole has become one, the other and ‘I’ are not divided, there is no fear. The seeker is free from fear. And you cannot be free from fear in any other way.Many people come to me to ask how to get rid of fear. You cannot. They say, “Would it be helpful if we pray to God?” No, it will not be helpful because of the other; the God will be the other now and you will be afraid of him. You will be constantly in fear whether you have been praying rightly or wrongly, whether God is happy with you or not. You will be in fear again.If the other is there fear will remain. And the other can disappear only when you are not.As the entanglements of his heart dissolve, so all his doubts drop.Remember this. One man came to me just a few days ago. He had a long list of doubts, he had noted them down, and he told me, “Unless all these, my doubts, are dissolved, unless you answer all these I cannot meditate, I cannot become a sannyasin, I cannot surrender – so first these doubts. What do you think, can they be answered?”I said to him, “I will not look at your list. You just close it and go. If I answer one doubt, I will say something and your doubting mind will create more doubts about what I have said.” Doubts cannot be answered, they can only be dropped, because doubts are not significant, the doubting mind is significant. And you can focus the doubting mind on anything, you can go on…. Doubts arise in your mind just as leaves arise in a tree: the old fall, the new take their place. And you can go on cutting leaves but the tree will think you are pruning, so you cut one and four leaves will come out.This Upanishad says that only at the stage – this stage, the sixth – when all the entanglements of the heart, all the confusions of the mind, the mentation itself drops, then all doubts drop, never before. Only at the sixth stage a man be-comes doubtless, never before. You can trust before it, but you have to trust with doubts; the doubts remain by the side. They will always remain unless you reach the sixth. All that you can do is push them aside, don’t pay much attention to them. Nothing can be done. They cannot be answered, you cannot be satisfied. And you cannot drop them before the sixth.Then what should be done? You can just put them aside in the corner. Let them be there but don’t pay much attention to them, be indifferent to them. Buddha has said, “Be indifferent to your doubts and wait, and go on doing whatsoever is possible.” A state of mind comes when doubts disappear, when suddenly at the sixth stage you look – the doubts are not there in your consciousness, they have gone. They go with the change of your consciousness, not with answers.This is the moment when he is completely emptied of all thought. Without attaining nirvana, he is in a nirvana-like state, and becomes free while yet dwelling in the body. This state is like that of the motionless flame of a lamp. And then comes the seventh stage.Without attaining nirvana, he is in a nirvana-like state.The sixth state is not nirvana. He is still in the body, the mind has disappeared but the body is there. He has still to live, he has still to fulfill his karmas, he has to pay his debts, he has to finish all the accounts, close all the accounts that he has opened in many lives – but his mind has gone. The body will go when the time is ripe, when all the accounts are closed – then he will reach nirvana. But he is in a nirvana-like state, it is just close to nirvana.You are not exactly in the garden but just sitting by the side of it. You can feel the coolness, the cool air comes to you. You can smell the scent coming from the flowers. You can feel, it is showering on you, but you are standing outside. Soon you will enter. You are just at the gate but still not in it. That’s why the sixth state is called nirvana-like, but not nirvana.This state is like that of the motionless flame of a lamp.No movement, no wavering, all mentation has ceased, all thoughts stopped. You are unwavering, the consciousness is nishkam, without any wavering, like a flame with no wind. In a closed room where no breeze is coming, the flame of a lamp or a candle will become static, there will be no movement. Your consciousness in the sixth becomes a motionless flame.And then comes the seventh stage….

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 15 (Listen & Download)

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Osho,I feel lost in you without reason or direction. Questions and desires fall in confusion before you. Overpowered by senseless faith and love, listlessly I wait, feeling like a fool. Are there differences between blind faith, love and surrender?There is a state when you certainly feel like a fool, but this is the beginning of wisdom. Only fools think they are wise, and those who are wise become wise when they start thinking that they are fools. The moment you can feel that you are a fool wisdom has dawned upon you. Now you will change, now there will be transformation, now the possibilities open infinitely…because this is part of the foolish mind – not to realize the foolishness. And this is the beginning of a wise mind – to realize one’s ignorance, foolishness.So this is good news that you realize that you are a fool, this is something worth attaining. The ego cannot exist now. The ego always exists with knowledgeability, one goes on feeling one knows without knowing.It is reported that the oracle of Delphi declared Socrates the wisest man on the earth. So a few people, disciples of Socrates, came to him and said, “Socrates, be happy. The oracle has declared that you are the wisest man on the earth.”Socrates laughed and said, “Go back. There must have been some mistake. How can I be the wisest man? – because I know only one thing, that I don’t know anything, I am ignorant. So there has been some mistake. You go back and tell the oracle.”They went back to the oracle and said, “Socrates himself has denied it, so there must be something erroneous. He says he is not wise, he says he realizes only one thing – that he is absolutely ignorant, he knows nothing. He claims only this much knowledge, that he knows nothing.”The oracle said, “That’s why I have declared that he is the wisest man, that is the reason – because only the wisest can say that he does not know anything.”Fools always claim knowledge. Only then, only there through their claim, can they hide their stupidity. So be happy if you feel that you are a fool and you can see your foolishness. The one who can see his foolishness has become separate from it; now foolishness exists apart. It is there but you are separate; you can witness it, you are not identified with it now. Consciously alert, everybody will see that he is a fool.Secondly, there is no difference between blind faith, love and surrender – be-cause all differences belong to the intellect, all distinctions belong to the intellect. The heart knows no distinctions. Whether you call it blind faith or you call it surrender or you call it love depends on your intellect. The heart doesn’t know any distinction, the heart knows only the feelings – the feeling is the same.When do you call a faith blind? When? When the intellect says that this faith is wrong then the intellect calls it blind. When the intellect feels that some faith is justified by reason, then the intellect says that this faith is right. But does faith need any justification from reason? Is reason in any way the authority to know what is right and what is wrong in the world of feeling?Always rationalists have said that the believers are blind – always. But have you known any believer who was not blind? People who were following Jesus were blind – everybody condemned them. Those who were following Buddha were blind, rationalists condemned them. Rationalists have always been saying that faith is blind. This is just a trick of logic to say that that faith is right which is not blind – but there is no such faith.The very word faith means that where there are no grounds to believe, you believe. If there are grounds then there is no need for faith. For example, you don’t believe that the earth exists. Is it not a fact? There is no need for faith. The earth exists: this is a fact, justified, rational; faith is not needed. Faith comes only when the reason cannot justify but the heart feels it. And reason is not the totality, reason is not the total life and existence. There are things which go beyond reason, which reason cannot comprehend but which the heart feels.There are only two ways: either you deny the heart or you deny reason. When reason and heart are in conflict, these are the two alternatives: either you follow reason and say to the heart that it is blind, and unless something is justified, proved, you are not going to believe…. But do you know, whenever something is rationalized, proved, there is no need to believe.Marx, the founder of communism, used to say, “I will not believe in God unless God is proved in a scientific laboratory.” But he knew it well, so he added, “Don’t try to prove God in a scientific way, because once you prove God in a scientific way, in a scientific laboratory, there will be no need to believe.” Do you believe in chemistry or physics? There is no need. Only the unproved needs faith; the heart feels that it is there but reason cannot prove it.I have loved very few sentences in my life – very few, rare, they can be counted on one’s fingers. One of these few sentences is one from Tertullian, one Christian mystic. He said, “I believe in God because God is absurd, because God cannot be believed, is impossible to prove. That’s why I believe.”…Because if it is possible to prove there is no need to believe, then there are facts. The heart can feel and lead you. The reason will say heart is blind because reason thinks that only he has eyes, but the heart has its own eyes. When you love a person, love is always blind. Have you seen any love with eyes? A person who goes on following reason will never be in love.It happened to Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest German thinkers. He was a complete rationalist. One woman loved Immanuel Kant and proposed marriage to him. He said, “Wait, because first I will have to think pro and con – whether marriage can lead to happiness or not. And unless I decide rationally I cannot take any step.”So he thought and thought and brooded and contemplated, and he wrote at least one thousand pages for and against. And then he concluded that both the sides seemed to be almost equal, and a decision was difficult. So he went to find the woman to tell her that a decision was difficult and she would have to wait a little longer, but when he went there he found that she was already married and the mother of three children. Immanuel Kant remained unmarried; such a man cannot be in love. And this is the rationalist mind, one of the keenest minds – logical, logical to the very extreme – but if you start deciding with the mind, love cannot happen.To reason, love is blind and for the heart, reason is foolish. For the heart reason is foolish, stupid; it may be useful as far as the market is concerned, but is not useful as far as life is concerned. So those who live in reason live in the market and all that transcends the market, is greater than the market, is beyond them. They never realize it, they never have a glimpse; that rainbow never arises in their lives, it goes beyond. They live in the mundane, the trivial. No poetry ever happens to them, no singing ever descends in their hearts, no dance is possible for them – ecstasy is not for them.So it doesn’t matter what you call it – blind faith, love or surrender – call it whatsoever you like. Remember only one thing: it should arise from your feeling, and it cannot arise from your mind. And don’t force your mind to be the leader, don’t force reason to be the leader, because through mind you may be-come more powerful but you will be less happy. Through mind you may attain much wealth but you will remain poor within. Through mind you may rule thousands of people but you will not be a master like Buddha or Jesus – inside you will remain a slave.This has to be chosen: if you want more power, more money, more prestige, follow reason; if you want more happiness, more bliss, more silence, more peace, more God, more ecstasy, then don’t listen to reason, follow the heart. They are two different dimensions and don’t try to confuse them. Decide well, and then follow one path. Can you be satisfied just by reason? Can only logic make you happy? Logic is simply dead, dry; one cannot live by logic alone. As Jesus says one cannot live by bread alone, I say one cannot live by logic alone. But you can try, and in that effort you will lose all that is life, all that is of worth, and all that can be felt as a blessing and beatitude.“Overpowered by senseless faith and love, listlessly I wait.” Nothing else can be done but there is no need to wait listlessly – you can wait ecstatically. This listlessness will come because reason goes on interfering. Reason goes on saying, “What foolishness are you doing? What are you doing here? Why are you waiting and wasting time?” That reason creates the listlessness, otherwise waiting can become a joy. The most joyous thing possible is waiting – hope throbbing, heart beating for the unknown, and you wait in silence with infinite patience.If you can wait with joy there will not be much need to wait for long, if you cannot wait with joy you may have to wait for many lives – because the divine can happen to you only when your waiting is ecstatic, filled with joy. Just look at a woman waiting for her lover: she has faith, she has ecstasy – the eyes and the infinite patience and the happiness. Wait like a lover, only then is your waiting meaningful. Don’t wait listlessly, because if you are so listless your lover may come but will not find you worthy to be with. Only your joy can become the invitation. Wait blissfully, ecstatically, and then I say to you that you will not need more waiting. There will be no need, it can happen this very moment.If your joy is total this very moment there is no need to wait. The divine will descend in you – you have fulfilled the condition. And this I call the condition: waiting with infinite patience, but ecstatically. This is the condition. Fulfill this and a single moment will not be lost.It is said in old Egyptian books that whenever the disciple is ready the master appears. Whenever, wherever the disciple is ready the master appears. There is no need for the disciple to seek the master, it is always the master who seeks the disciple. Even if you go to the master, it is always the master who seeks you, who finds you.The same is true for the divine happening: whenever you are ready it happens – God seeks you. He has always been seeking you. He has been following you, he has been waiting for you. Whenever you are ready the seed will sprout, the bud will become the flower. But getting ready means waiting – waiting is the only prayer you can do. But if you don’t believe you cannot wait. Only faith can wait. Reason always insists on things happening immediately. Heart can wait, there is no urgency for the heart.Try to understand this: time exists only for reason. For the heart there is no time, heart exists in timelessness. Only for reason is there time. So mind goes on insisting on haste, hurry, urgency, and mind is always tense. Time is going, flowing, life is becoming less and less every moment. Things should happen instantly – that is the insistence of reason. But the heart knows no time, there are no clocks for the heart. Heart exists timelessly, that’s why the heart can wait – the heart can wait infinitely.If you love, if you have faith, if you trust, then there is no hurry, and then there is no need to wait listlessly. Why not dance while waiting? Why waste this time in listlessness? Why not dance? It will be better when your lover comes if your lover finds you dancing. It will be a good meeting, it will be the right moment.The second question:Osho,If even fifty percent of all persons should become enlightened, does it mean that fifty percent will have to immediately become idiots? The polar opposite theory doesn't seem to give much hope to more than five percent.You misunderstood – but that is always more possible than to understand. Your mind moves immediately to the wrong conclusion, and you cannot help it, that’s how you have trained your mind. In all these talks I have been telling you that enlightenment means going beyond the polar opposites. So there is no state against enlightenment, it means transcending the division. We have been saying again and again that mind is enlightened only when it transcends division.If fifty percent of persons are intelligent, then fifty percent will be foolish; if five percent are geniuses, then five percent will be idiots. But a genius is not enlightened – he is as unenlightened as the idiot, there is no difference. He may be an Einstein, he may have won Nobel prizes, but that doesn’t make any difference. Just by winning a Nobel prize you don’t become enlightened. A genius is as far away from enlightenment as an idiot. An idiot can also jump into enlightenment just as a genius can jump into it.Intelligence and stupidity are polar opposites. To enlightenment there is no polar opposite – it is transcendence of both. So there exists no state which is against enlightenment. Have you ever heard of anyone who is just the polar opposite to Buddha or Jesus? There is no one. The whole Vedanta, the whole of Upanishads’ teaching, the very doctrine is this: that when you transcend duality you attain a totally new dimension, nothing exists against it.In Sanskrit we have three terms: dukkha which means pain, suffering, misery; sukkha which means happiness, pleasure, joy; and ananda which can be translated as bliss. Happiness is against misery, they are polar opposites. Bliss is not against anything, there is no state which is against bliss. If you are happy you will become miserable, if you are miserable you will become happy. You can move, this duality is there. But if you are blissful you cannot move anywhere – duality has disappeared. Against ananda, against bliss, there exists no state.Enlightenment is not against ignorance, it is against ignorance and knowledge both. It is beyond, not against. So a person who knows more is not enlightened, and a person who knows less is not unenlightened because he knows less. Wherever you are you can take the jump into enlightenment. So sometimes very uneducated people have also jumped, not very intelligent people have also jumped. The jump is needed.And sometimes it happens that a person who is not educated much is more courageous and can take the jump more easily than a person who knows too much. Just because he knows too much he becomes too afraid of taking risks, because he is so clever he becomes cunning also – cleverness creates cunningness. He becomes calculative, and on the path of the divine you cannot calculate. Only gamblers, only those who can jump without calculating, only those who can take risks, only they can enter.So this question is just through your misunderstanding. In the world balance exists, but when you transcend the world you also transcend this polar balance. You go beyond the two, you become one.The third question:Osho,Does laughter belong to every stage?This is worth considering, significant. The first thing to understand is that, except man, no animal is capable of laughter. Laughter shows a very high peak. If you go out on a street and you see a buffalo laughing you will be scared to death, and if you report it nobody is going to believe that it happened. It is impossible.Why can’t animals laugh? Why can’t trees laugh? There is a very deep causality to the laughter; only that animal can laugh which can get bored. Animals and trees are not bored. Boredom and laughter – this is the polar duality, these are the polar opposites. Man is the only animal who is bored; boredom is the symbol of humanity. Look at dogs and cats – they are never bored. Man seems to be deep in boredom. Why are they not bored? Why does only man suffer boredom? And the higher your intelligence the more you will be bored, a lower intelligence is not bored so much. That’s why primitives are more happy.You will find more happy people in a primitive society than in a civilized society; even a Bertrand Russell becomes jealous. When Bertrand Russell for the first time came in contact with some primitive tribes he started feeling jealous because they were so happy – not bored at all. Life was a blessing. They were poor, starved, almost naked; in every way they had nothing, but they were not bored with life. In Bombay, in New York, in London, everybody is bored – more intelligent, more civilized, more boredom.So the secret can be understood: the more you can think, the more you will be bored, because through thinking you can compare – past, future, present. Through thinking you can hope, through thinking you can ask, “What is the meaning of it?” And the moment a person asks, “What is the meaning of it?” boredom will enter, because really there is no meaning in anything. If you ask the question, “What is the meaning of it?” you will feel meaninglessness. And when meaninglessness is felt you will be bored. Animals are not bored, trees are not bored, rocks are not bored. They never ask, “What is the meaning of life, what is the purpose of life?” They never ask so they never feel it is meaningless. As they are they accept it, as life is it is accepted. There is no boredom.Man feels bored, laughter is the antidote. You cannot live without laughter, because you can kill your boredom only through laughter. You cannot find a single joke in primitive societies, they don’t have any jokes. Jews have the largest number of jokes, they are the most highly bored people on the earth. But they must be so, because they win more Nobel prizes than any other community. The whole last century almost all the great names are Jews: Freud, Einstein, Marx – Jews. And look at the list of Nobel prizewinners – almost half the Nobel prizes go to the Jews. They have the largest number of jokes.And this may be the reason why all over the world Jews are hated – because everybody feels jealous of them. Wherever they are they will always win any type of competition, so everybody feels jealous of them, the whole world is united against them, feels hate for them. When you cannot compete with someone hate is the result. And they have the most beautiful jokes on the earth. Why? They must be feeling very bored; they have to create jokes – a joke is the antidote to feeling bored. Laughter is needed to exist, otherwise you will commit suicide.Now try to understand the mechanism of laughter, how it happens. If I tell a joke, why do you laugh? What happens? What is the inner mechanism? If I tell a joke, expectation is created, you start expecting. Your mind starts searching for what the end is going to be, and you cannot conceive the end. A joke moves in two dimensions: first it moves in a logical dimension, you can conceive it. If the joke goes on being logical to the very end there will be no laughter. Suddenly the joke takes a turn and becomes illogical, something which you could not conceive. And when the joke takes a turn and the result becomes illogical, the expectation, the tension that was created in you, suddenly explodes. You relax, laughter comes out of you.Laughter is a relaxation, but a tension is needed. A story creates expectation, tension. You start feeling that now the crescendo, now the crescendo will come, something is going to happen. Your backbone is straight like a yogi, you have no more thoughts in the mind; the whole being is just waiting, all the energy moving towards the conclusion. And all that you could conceive is not going to happen.Suddenly something happens which the mind could not conceive; something absurd happens, something illogical, irrational. The end is such a turn that it was impossible for logic to think about it. You explode. The whole energy that has become a pillar inside suddenly relaxes. Laughter comes out of you through this relaxation. Man is bored, hence he needs laughter. The more bored he is, the more and more laughter he will need, otherwise he cannot exist.Thirdly, it has also to be understood about laughter that it is of three types. One, when you laugh at someone. This is the meanest, the lowliest, very ordinary and vulgar – when you laugh at somebody else’s cost. This is violent, aggressive, insulting. Deep down there is a revenge.Secondly, when you laugh at yourself. This is worth achieving, this is cultured, and the man who can laugh at himself is valuable. He has risen above vulgarity, he has risen above low instincts – hatred, aggression, violence.And thirdly, the highest laughter, which is not about anybody – neither the other nor oneself. The third is just cosmic, you laugh at the whole situation as it is. The whole situation as it is, is absurd – no purpose in the future, no beginning in the beginning. The whole situation of existence is such that if you can see the whole – such a great vastness, an infinite vastness, moving to no fixed purpose, moving to no goal; so much going on without leading anywhere; nobody in the past to create it, nobody in the end to finish it; a whole cosmos, and moving so beautifully, so systematically, so rationally – if you can see this whole cosmos, then a laughter arises.I have heard about three monks. No name is mentioned, because they never told their names to anybody, they never answered anything. So in China they are only known simply as “the three laughing monks.”They did only one thing: they would enter a village, stand in the marketplace, and start laughing. Suddenly people would become aware and they would laugh with their whole being. Then others would also get the infection, and then a crowd would gather, and just looking at them the whole crowd would start laughing. What is happening? Then the whole town would get involved, and they would move to another town. They were loved very much. That was their only sermon, the only message – that laugh. And they would not teach, they would simply create the situation.Then it happened they became famous all over the country – the three laughing monks. The whole of China loved them, respected them. Nobody had preached that way – that life must be just a laughter and nothing else. And they were not laughing at anybody in particular, but simply laughing as if they had understood the cosmic joke. They spread so much joy all over China without using a single word. People would ask their names but they would simply laugh, so that became their name, the three laughing monks.Then they became old, and in one village one of the three monks died. The whole village was very expectant, filled with expectations, because now at least when one of them had died they must weep. This would be something worth seeing, because no one could even conceive of these people weeping.The whole village gathered. The two monks were standing by the side of the corpse of the third and laughing such a belly laugh. So the villagers asked, “At least explain this!”So for the first time they spoke, and they said, “We are laughing because this man has won. We were always wondering who would die first, and this man has defeated us. We are laughing at our defeat, at his victory. He lived with us for many years, and we laughed together and we enjoyed each other’s togetherness, presence. There can be no other way of giving him the last send-off, we can only laugh.”The whole village was sad, but when the dead monk’s body was put on the funeral pyre, then the village realized that not only were these two joking – the third who was dead was also laughing…because the third man who was dead had told his companions, “Don’t change my dress!” It was conventional that when a man died they changed the dress and gave a bath to the body, so he had said, “Don’t give me a bath because I have never been unclean. So much laughter has been in my life that no impurity can accumulate near me, can even come to me. I have not gathered any dust, laughter is always young and fresh. So don’t give me a bath and don’t change my clothes.”So just to pay him respect they had not changed his clothes. And when the body was put on the fire, suddenly they became aware that he had hidden many things under his clothes and those things started…Chinese fireworks! So the whole village laughed, and those two said, “You rascal! You have died, but again you have defeated us. Your laughter is the last.”There is a cosmic laughter when the whole joke of this cosmos is understood. That is the highest, only a buddha can laugh like that. These three monks must have been three buddhas. But if you can laugh the second, that too is worth trying. Avoid the first – don’t laugh at anyone’s cost, that is ugly and violent. If you want to laugh, laugh at yourself.That’s why Mulla Nasruddin in every one of his jokes and stories always proves himself the stupid man in it, never anybody else. He always laughs at himself and allows you to laugh at him. He never puts anybody else in the situation of being foolish. Sufis say that Mulla Nasruddin is the wise fool. Learn at least that much – the second laughter.If you can learn the second, the third will not be far ahead, soon you will reach the third. Leave the first laughter, that is degrading. But almost ninety-nine percent of the time you laugh the first one. Much courage is needed to laugh at oneself, much confidence is needed to laugh at oneself. For the spiritual seeker, even laughter should become a part of sadhana. Remember not to laugh the first laughter, remember to laugh the second – and remember to reach the third.The fourth question:Osho,Can there be moments of effortlessness while a seeker is engaged in the first three stages? Is effort completely lacking in the second four stages? Does there come a point at which both effort and effortlessness must cease?First, there can be moments of effortlessness even while making effort. If you are total in your effort there will be glimpses of effortlessness. Suddenly effort will have disappeared for a moment, there will be a gap. If you are aware and look deep in the gap you will see. Just doing meditation here, I feel many of you achieve for a single moment effortlessness. You may not be aware, but try to be aware. While doing, a moment comes when you feel you are not doing it – as if it is happening.You may have started it as a doing. When you start taking deep, fast chaotic breaths, of course, it is a fact that you start it. But have you observed that sometimes the breathing takes you, the mastery has changed? Now the breathing is going by itself, it has taken over. When you start the second stage, in the beginning there is effort to allow madness; even sometimes to imitate, to force, to do something because everybody else is doing. But you can watch: a moment comes to many, to at least ninety percent of people here, when the madness has taken over. You are not doing it, rather it is doing you. You are not the doer, it is moving by itself – then it is effortless. And when it is moving by itself it is beautiful, only then is the catharsis happening. When you are doing it is not catharsis, you are only starting it. When the madness has taken over and is on its own and the movement is going automatically, then it is catharsis – now the repressed energies are working. You may have started laughter in catharsis. Then a point comes when you feel that laughter is going by itself. You can watch it, it will continue. No need to do it, it is happening.Sometimes fear grips at that moment, because then you feel you have gone insane. Up to that moment you are making effort, you are the master and you are not afraid. You know that you can stop it, you know that it is within your control, you are doing it. Fear enters whenever you feel that it has become automatic. You get scared, because now you see it may not stop, it may continue. Then what are you going to do? And if you become afraid you again start doing. And that’s why you cannot watch effortless moments.There is one day left (of the meditation camp); watch and don’t get afraid, because that is the right moment – when the catharsis is starting to happen, when you become scared. When things are coming out, immediately you close yourself and make all efforts again to do something. With the doing the mind is at ease; with the happening the mind is afraid, and effortlessness will mean happening. But don’t be afraid, because any happening can be stopped – if you have started it, it can be stopped. So don’t get afraid.That’s why my insistence that when I say “Stop!” stop completely – because if you cannot stop when I say stop it can be dangerous. I don’t want you to be-come mad, rather I want you to become saner through throwing madness out. You must remain in control. But don’t try, there is no need. If you have started it, this is the law: if you have started, you are deep inside in control. Don’t get scared, allow it to happen. Any moment it can be stopped.That’s why after the third stage I always insist that when I say stop, when you hear the word stop, you stop, because that will make you the master and you will remain the master. Even while catharsis is happening you know that at any time you can push the button off. Once you become aware that the button can be put on and off you will never be afraid.Madness is there within everyone and the more you hide it the more you are vulnerable, the more you can go mad any moment. And if you go mad then you will not be the master. If you never started it then you cannot stop it. You can only stop that which you have started. If you have not started it you cannot stop it.So don’t go on suppressing, because a quantity can be tolerated but there comes a moment when the quantity reaches the climax, the evaporating point –one hundred degrees. Then you start boiling and evaporating. Many persons who were just like you a day before are in madhouses now. You can be there any day. If you don’t allow catharsis you are all prone to go mad, because civilization is such, the situation is such, that everybody accumulates madness. You have to throw it every day to remain clean and pure, to retain the clarity of mind and vision.But if you know the law that if you start a thing you can stop it, then you can start anything and you can stop. Be the master in the starting, you will be the master in the end also. But if a thing starts by itself then you cannot stop it, then you don’t know where the button is to turn on and off.And secondly, “Is effort completely lacking in the second four stages?”Yes. In the first three effort is there, in the last four there is no effort. And if you make effort you will not grow in them. As without effort you will not grow in the first three, with effort you will not grow in the last four. Effort is helpful in the first three, effort is a hindrance in the last four. So one has to learn effort and then one has to learn to drop effort, because there are things for which effort cannot be made.For example, you sow some seeds, some flower seeds; effort is needed because the seeds are to be sown. You choose the soil, you give water, sunrays, fertilizers; you arrange everything, you do everything. Effort is needed. But then the seeds sprout, you need not pull them to make them grow faster. You need not pull them, if you pull them they will die. Effort is not needed.And when buds come to your plant, don’t try to open them and make them flower. You will kill the whole thing. And if you open unripe buds those flowers will be ugly, there will be no fragrance and they will look artificial. You can do everything to help the plant but you need not make any positive effort to open the flowers. They will open by themselves. And when they open by themselves they will be ripe, they will be ready to express themselves. Their fragrance, their beauty, their ecstasy will come out.The same is the case in spiritual discipline. The first three stages are just to make the ground ready – seeds sown, every condition prepared – and the four end ones are just the flowering stages, they come by themselves. Don’t interfere with them by your effort, and don’t do anything positively. You simply wait and you will see that your inner consciousness is growing every moment.And thirdly, “Does there come a point at which both effort and effortlessness must cease?”Yes. Effort is positive, effortlessness is negative. The first three stages are effort, the second three stages are effortless, and the seventh, the last, is neither. It is neither effort nor effortless, it is neither positive nor negative – it is the transcendence. The seventh is the transcendence. We will try to understand that tomorrow morning. The seventh is the transcendence. Nothing is needed – neither effort nor awareness not to make effort. Both have to be dropped.The last question:Osho,What is moment-to-moment understanding in relationship?A difficult question – because unless you learn to live moment to moment you cannot understand it. As we live, we live out of the past. If someone insults you, you immediately react. That reaction comes from your past experiences. It is not from you, it is from the chain of your experiences.If someone is loving towards you, you become loving – that loving may be from the past experiences. So living moment to moment and understanding moment to moment in relationship comes only if you become aware of the past chain and don’t allow it to function. And always respond in the present, not through the past.For example, someone insults you. Many people have insulted you in the past; there has come a wound in your heart, through all the insults a wound is created. This insult will also hit the wound, and then you will react. That reaction will not be justified because this man is not creating the wound. And if the wound is touched, the pain is not created by his insult really. It has been created by many insults and the reaction is accumulated; it is not justified.That’s why it happens that if you react the other always feels, “Why are you reacting so much? I have not said anything.” You also know it: you are not aware that you have said something to someone which has become a hurt in him and he reacts. And you say, “You have misunderstood me, because I have not said anything to insult you. Why are you reacting? Are you mad?” But you don’t know. He has a wound, and when you hit the wound the whole pain comes towards you. The wound may have been created by many people – unknown, known, not remembered – but the whole wound is poured on this person. This is not justified.So what will it be to respond immediately? It will be first to put aside the past. Look at this man with alertness so that the past doesn’t cloud you. Look at whatsoever he has said, dissect it, analyze it, in the light of the present. And it will be better if you can wait a little and meditate on it.It happened once, one woman wrote a letter to an American author, Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie had delivered a lecture on the radio on Abraham Lincoln, and he had mentioned many wrong dates in it. The woman was a lover of Abraham Lincoln, so she wrote a very angry letter saying, “If you don’t know the ABC of Abraham Lincoln’s life you should not go on the radio. And this is insulting. If you are not well informed, then first get informed and then start lecturing.”Dale Carnegie was a man of fame, had written many bestsellers; he got offended, he was very angry. So he wrote a letter immediately in the same tone, the same anger, the same irritation. But it was late and the servant had gone, so he left the letter on the table. In the morning he would post it.In the morning, when he was putting it in the envelope, he just looked once more at it. He felt, “This is too much. The woman has not written like this, she doesn’t deserve so much anger from me.” And in a way he felt she was right also. So he tore up the letter and wrote another which was totally different. There was no anger, no irritation in it, rather the attitude of thanking her for making him aware of some mistakes and he felt obliged. But then he thought, “If in twelve hours so much can change, there is no hurry. I can wait for a few more days.”So he tried one experiment. He left the letter again on the table. By the evening he again read it and he wanted to change a few words again. For seven days he continued, and on the seventh day it became a love letter. And Dale Carnegie relates that that woman proved one of the best friends that he had ever had in his life. What would have happened if the servant had not gone and the letter had been posted? He would have created an enemy.When Gurdjieff’s father was dying he told Gurdjieff, “Only one message I give to you – and remember it!” Gurdjieff was very small, just nine years of age, and the father said, “I am not rich so I have nothing to give to you, only one advice which my father gave to me when he was dying. And this is the message: that if you get angry, don’t answer immediately, wait twenty-four hours. Then do whatsoever you like. Even if you want to kill the man, go and kill – but after twenty-four hours.”And Gurdjieff says, “In my whole life anger has not created any problem for me, because I have to wait twenty-four hours and then the whole thing seems foolish. And sometimes even the person who created anger seems to be right, so I go and thank him. Through anger I have not created a single enemy, and through anger there has been no complexity in my life.”So alertness is needed in moment-to-moment relationship. Alertness is needed. Be alert! Don’t allow your past to come in between you and the person to whom you are relating. It will take time to become aware because the past is so swift, it enters so immediately, there is no time gap. Somebody says something and the past has entered, you have interpreted through the past. So move a little slowly. Look at the person, wait, absorb whatsoever has happened to you, meditate, and then respond in the present. Once you become efficient, once you know this key, you have one of the keys which can allow you to enter into the mystery, into the mysteries of other persons.Every person is carrying such a mysterious being but the being is closed to you. Every person can become the door for the divine, any ordinary person is extraordinary. Just behind the surface the mysterious is hidden, but you need a key to open it. And that key is moment-to-moment alert response. Not reaction – response. Reaction is always dead; you do something because he has done something. Response is totally different.I will tell you one anecdote.Buddha was passing through a village. The people of that village were against him, against his philosophy, so they gathered around him to insult him. They used ugly words, vulgar words. Buddha listened. Ananda, Buddha’s disciple who was with him, got very angry, but he couldn’t say anything because Buddha was listening so silently, so patiently, rather as if he was enjoying the whole thing. Then even the crowd became a little frustrated because he was not getting irritated and it seemed he was enjoying.Buddha said, “Now, if you are finished, I should move – because I have to reach the other village soon. They must be waiting just as you were waiting for me. If you have not told me all the things that you thought to tell me, I will be coming back within a few days, then you can finish it.”Somebody from the crowd said, “But we have been insulting you, we have insulted you. Won’t you react? Won’t you say something?”Buddha said, “That is difficult. If you want reaction from me, then you are too late. You should have come at least ten years ago, because then I used to react. But I am now no longer so foolish. I see that you are angry, that’s why you are insulting me. I see your anger, the fire burning in your mind. I feel compassion for you. This is my response – I feel compassion for you. Unnecessarily you are troubled.“Even if I am wrong, why should you get so irritated? That is not your business. If I am wrong I am going to hell, you will not go with me. If I am wrong I will suffer for it, you will not suffer for it. But it seems you love me so much and you think about me and consider me so much that you are so angry, irritated. You have left your work in the fields and you have come just to say a few things to me. I am thankful.”Just when he was leaving he said, “One thing more I would like to say to you. In the other village I left behind, a great crowd just like you had come there and they had brought many sweets just as a present for me, a gift from the village. But I told them that I don’t take sweets. They took the sweets back. I ask you, what will they do with those sweets?”So somebody from the crowd said, “What will they do? It is easy, there is no need to answer. They will distribute them in the village and they will enjoy.”So Buddha said, “Now what will you do? You have brought only insults and I say I don’t take them. What will you do? I feel so sorry for you. You can insult me, that is up to you. But I don’t take it, that is up to me – whether I take it or not.” Buddha said, “I don’t take unnecessary things, useless things. I don’t get unnecessarily burdened. I feel compassion for you.”This is response. If a person is angry and you are present there, not with your past, you will feel always compassion. Reaction becomes anger, response always is compassion. You will see through the person. It will become transparent that he is angry, he is suffering, he is in misery, he is ill.When someone is in fever you don’t start beating him and asking, “Why are you having a fever? Why is your body hot? Why have you got a temperature?” You serve the man, you help him to come out of it. And when somebody is angry he also is having a temperature, he is in a fever, he is feverish. Why get so angry about it? He is in a mental disease which is more dangerous than any bodily disease, more fatal. So if the wife is angry the husband will feel compassion, he will try in every way to help her to be out of it. This is just mad – that she is angry and you also get angry. This is just mad, insane. You will look at the person, you will feel the misery she is in or he is in, and you will help.But if the past comes in then everything goes wrong. And it can happen only if you go deep in meditation, otherwise it cannot happen. Just intellectual understanding won’t help. If you go deep in meditation your wounds will be thrown, a catharsis will happen. You become more and more clear inside, clarity is attained, you become like a mirror. You don’t have any wounds really, so no one can hit them. Then you can look at the person, then you can respond.Response is always good, reaction is always bad. Response is always beautiful, reaction is always ugly. Avoid reactions and allow responses. Reaction is from the past, response is here and now.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 16 (Listen & Download)

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In this seventh stage, the state of videhamukti,liberation while living in the body is achieved. This stage is totally silentand cannot be communicated in words.It is the end of all stages, where all the processes of yoga come to theirconclusion. In this stage, all activities – worldly, bodily and scriptural – cease. The whole universe in the form of the world – viswa, intelligence – prajna, and radiance – tejas, is just aum. There is no division here between speech and the speaker.If however any such division remains, the state has not been attained. The first sound ‘a’ of aum, stands for the world, the second ‘u’ for radiance and the third ‘m’ for intelligence.Before entering samadhi, the seeker should contemplate on aum most strenuously, and subsequently he should surrender everything, from gross to subtle to the conscious self. Taking the conscious self as his own self, he should consolidate this feeling: I am eternal, pure, enlightened, free, existential, incomparable, the most blissful Vasudeva and Pranava himself.Since the whole visible world comprising a beginning, a middle and an end, is sorrow-stricken, he must renounce everything and merge into the supreme. He should feel that he is blissful, taintless, without ignorance, without appearance, inexpressible in words, and that he is Brahman, the essence of knowledge.This is the Upanishadic mystery.Thus ends the Akshi Upanishad.The first three stages are just like the waking state of the mind, the surface of your personality – just a fragment, the part where waves exist. The fourth and the fifth stages are deeper than the surface. They are like the dream state of the mind, where for the first time you are no longer in contact with the outer world. The outer world has ceased to be, you live only in your dreams. You enter subjectivity. The objects have disappeared, only the subject has remained.The sixth stage is still deeper, just like the dreamless sleep – the third state of mind – where even dreams cease to be. Objects have disappeared, now subjects also disappear. The world is no more, even the reflections of the world in the mind are no more. You are fast asleep with no disturbance, not a single ripple. These are the three stages of the mind, and parallel stages to these the seeker has to pass through on the spiritual path also.The seventh is like the fourth. The Upanishads have not given it any name, because no name can be given to it. The first is waking, the second dreaming, the third sleep – but the fourth has been left simply as the fourth, without giving it any name. It is symbolic. The Upanishads call it turiya. The word turiya means simply the fourth, it doesn’t say anything more. It is nameless because it cannot be defined. Words cannot express it, it can only be indicated. Even that indication has to be negative. It can be experienced but not formulated in concepts, hence it is called the fourth. The seventh stage of the seeker’s consciousness is like the fourth stage of the mind.Before we enter into the seventh stage and try to penetrate its mysteries, a few things will help to create the base for the understanding of something which is the most difficult to understand. First, the six are stages, but the seventh is really not a stage. It is called a stage because there is no other way to call it, but the seventh is not a stage. The six are stages, the seventh you are. The seventh is not a stage, it is your very nature; it is you, your being.For example, you were a child once; childhood was a stage. You were not childhood, you passed through childhood. It was a station, a stage, a phase, but you were not identified with it. If you were the childhood itself then there would have been no possibility of becoming a youth. Who would have become a youth? The child could not have become a youth, the child would have remained the child. But you were not the child. You passed through childhood, you became a youth. Then youth is again a stage, you are not one with it. If you are one with it you could not have been a child and you cannot grow old. You will pass through it also, it is a phase.So this is the definition of a stage: you come into it, you pass through it, you go beyond it – but you are not it. Then you will become old, that too is a stage. You will pass into death. Birth is a stage, death is a stage. One who passes through all these stages…. The being, the life force, the energy that you are, the consciousness that you are – that one is not a stage because you can never pass through it, you can never go beyond it. That is not a stage, that is your very nature; that you are. So the seventh is not a stage. It is called a stage because there is no other way of talking about it. Six are stages, the seventh is the one who passes through these stages. The seventh is your very nature. This is the first thing.The second thing, all the six can be described, they have a defined nature. You enter into them, they have a beginning; you pass through them, they have a middle; you finish with them, they have an end – they can be defined. Anything which has a beginning, a middle and an end can be defined, but you – you are indefinable. You don’t have any beginning, you don’t have any middle, you don’t have any end. You never begin, you will never end. You are the eternal. The life energy that exists in you has always been in existence, will always be so. There was never a time when you were not, and there will never be a time when you will not be. You will always be, you are nontemporal.The temporal can be defined through time. The nontemporal cannot be defined, it is timeless. Just as you are nontemporal you are nonspatial also. You exist in this space you call your body, but you have existed in many spaces. Buddha says he remembers his past lives. He says, “Sometime in my past lives I was an elephant.” So then he existed in the space called elephant. He relates a beautiful story about the elephant and how the elephant could become a buddha.Once it happened that this elephant who was Buddha in a past life was living in a forest and the forest caught fire, the forest was on fire. It was a very terrible fire. The whole forest was burning and all the animals and birds were escaping from the forest. This elephant was also running. The forest was very big, and from running and the heat all around and the fire he got tired. Just then he saw a tree which was not yet on fire. There was shade there, so he rested just for a single minute under the shade of the tree.After he had rested, the moment came when he wanted to move. He raised one leg. When he raised his leg a small hare, a white hare, who was also tired from running, came under his foot just to rest there. So this elephant thought, “If I put my foot on the earth this hare will be killed.” So he waited. He thought, “When this hare leaves, when he has rested, then I will move.”But the hare would not move. The hare thought, “It is beautiful to be under the shade of the elephant, and there is no danger when the elephant is there, and the surrounding trees have not yet caught fire.” So he waited.The hare did not move and, tired from standing on three legs, many times the elephant thought, “Crush this hare and move.” But then an idea came to his mind: “As I love my life this hare also loves his life. If I am escaping for my life and I am afraid of death this hare is also afraid of death.”So he waited and died waiting there, because the fire came nearer and nearer and the tree caught fire. He waited for the hare and the hare would not move, so the elephant died standing on three legs. Buddha said, “Because of that awareness I was born as a man. The elephant changed into another being – man.” And he goes on relating many stories about his past.You have also been in many spaces, many types of bodies – sometimes a tree, sometimes a bird, sometimes an animal. Hindus say that there are eight hundred and forty million types of existence, lives, and a man is born only when he has passed through eight hundred and forty million spaces. In the beginning Westerners used to laugh about this – such a great number! There seemed no possibility that eight hundred and forty million life forms exist. But now biologists say that this is almost the exact number, almost exactly this many species exist. And this is a miracle! How could Hindus fall upon this number?…because they had no biological research, they had known no Darwin, no Huxley. They must have come to this number through some other way. They say that they have come to this number through those who have remembered their past lives – Buddhas, Mahaviras, who could remember all the past lives.Eight hundred and forty million is a very big number. And that’s why Hindus say that once you are born a man, don’t waste this life, because it is so precious, you have struggled for it for so long, for millions of lives you have waited for it. And for what are you wasting it – food, drink, sex? Eight hundred and forty million lives spent waiting for this life, and then wasting this life in futile things!You were in many spaces, so you are not confined to space. If you can be an elephant, then a tiger, then a bird flying in the sky, then a small ant, and then you can be a man, that means that no space contains you. You can pass through many types of bodies, but you are bodiless. If you are bodiless, if consciousness is a bodiless phenomenon, then you are nonspatial. And these two things, time and space, are very very insignificant.Physicists say that existence consists of two elements: time and space. And Einstein turned even these two into one. He said that these are not two. So he used to call it spatiotime – one word, not two. He used to say that there is not space and time, there is only spacetime, and space is nothing but the fourth dimension of time. Hindus say that you are neither in space nor in time; you pass through them but you are not them, you may be in them but you are not them. You pass through them, you go beyond; you enter, you come out. Space and time is your temporal abode, it is not you – hence transcendence is possible, you can go beyond both.Somebody asked Jesus, “Tell us something about your kingdom of God, something special which will be there, some main characteristic.”Jesus answered in a very strange way, he said a very strange thing. He said, “There shall be time no longer.” Hindus have always been saying that – but not only about time. They say there will be time no longer, there will be space no longer, because time and space are really not two things, they are one.And this you can feel even in deep meditation. The deeper you move the less time will be. You are not aware of how much time has passed – as if time is just on the surface. The more inwards you move, the further and further away time goes. Then a moment comes when there is no time. And the same happens to space: the more inward you move the more you go on forgetting where you are. When you move more inward then you forget whether you are confined in a body or not. When you reach to the innermost center there is no time and no space, you simply exist without any boundary of time or space. Because you are not confined in any way you cannot be defined. Things which are limited and confined can be defined. So the seventh stage, or the seventh no-stage, is indefinable.The third thing. About the six there is not much mystery, reason can understand them; they are rational in a way, you can argue about them. The seventh is total mystery, absolute mystery. We must understand what mystery is, because this Upanishad ends on the word mystery. What is a mystery? The mystery is that phenomenon which exists but has no cause to exist, the mystery is a phenomenon which is there but is paradoxical, contradictory, the mystery is that phenomenon which is not only unknown but unknowable.Remember three words: the known, the unknown and the unknowable. The known is that which human mind has come to know – science is the known. The second phenomenon is that of the unknown. The unknown is that which will be known sooner or later, it cannot remain unknown forever. The unknown is the phenomenon philosophy is concerned with – it goes on thinking about the unknown and how to make it known.The known is science, it has already been known. So science is really the past, the accumulated knowledge, the condensed knowledge, the essential knowledge that human mind has come to know. That’s why science is so certain and there is no poetry in science. Science is simply history, the past, the whole past. You may not have observed the fact that science is a dead thing, just the past accumulated. You destroy the past and science will disappear. If there are no more libraries, if suddenly all the libraries are destroyed, science will disappear. It is accumulated past, it is history, the known, but it is dead.The second phenomenon is the unknown, which will be known sooner or later. Philosophy is concerned with the unknown, with how to make it known. So philosophy is nothing but a vanguard to science, just the pilot car moving ahead. That’s why philosophy goes on being reduced to less and less every day – because more and more unknown becomes known, it becomes part of science, and philosophy becomes less and less. In the days of Aristotle philosophy was a vast phenomenon, now it is not so vast. Every day philosophy is becoming less and less because more and more philosophy is becoming science.And then there is the third phenomenon, the unknowable. Religion is concerned with that. Unknowable means that which cannot be known whatsoever you do; it can never become science, it can never be reduced to history. That is the meaning of mystery, that which cannot be reduced to history, that which cannot become known, it always remains unknowable. It is not unknown, be-cause the moment you say it is unknown it can be known some day – more refined instruments, more technological devices and it will be known. It is not unknown, it is unknowable.Science says there is nothing like the unknowable, that’s why science denies religion. Science says there are only two things, the known and the unknown. And the unknown is that which is possible to know again some day – maybe somewhere in the future – but potentially it can be known. So science believes there is no real mystery, only known facts and unknown facts, and a day will come when science has known everything. This is the presumption of the scientific approach, that somewhere in the future – it may take time, but conceivably, somewhere, a day will come when everything is known and there is no mystery. That is the basic point, the basic conflict between religion and science.And philosophy also believes that there is no mystery, so philosophy is just a servant, a maidservant to science. That’s why philosophers have become secondary to scientists in this century; they are not very important, their departments in the universities are no longer important. Science has taken the place of importance and they have retreated – they exist just in the back rooms of science. They also say there is nothing unknowable. It is unknown, but we will do something – logic, analysis, speculation, experiments – and it will be known.Religion says that the substratum of existence is unknowable. Whatsoever you do is irrelevant; it will remain unknowable, it cannot be reduced to history. Why? Religion has a point, and that point is: How can a part know the whole? Man is just a part, how can the part know the whole? Man is just a by-product of this existence, just a throbbing of this existence. How can this throbbing know the whole? Your heart throbs, beats; how can the beats of the heart know you, the whole?The part cannot know the whole, and the whole is vast, really infinite. You cannot conceive of any end to the universe, there can be no boundary to it – or can there be? Can you conceive of any boundary to existence? How will you conceive the boundary? – because a boundary needs two. Your house has a boundary because of your neighbor, the earth has a boundary because of space. The other is needed for the boundary. If there is only one it cannot be bounded, because who will bound it?The existence is one; then it cannot be bounded, there can be no boundary. If you stand on the boundary what will you see? If you can see anything beyond, this is not the boundary. Even if you can see emptiness ahead then that emptiness is there. Can you conceive of a point in existence where a scientist can stand and there is nothing? But Hindus say that even nothing is something. If you can say that there is nothing then space exists, you will have to move ahead. There cannot come a point where you can say, “Existence ends here!” It cannot end, it cannot have any boundary. The whole is infinite. And you can know something which is finite, you cannot know the infinite. The mystery will remain.Secondly, man is part, he is not apart from existence. You cannot kiss your own lips – or can you? You will need somebody else’s lips to kiss, you cannot kiss your own. Man is part of this whole. To know this whole you will need to be apart, you will have to be separate; the knower must be separate from the known, only then knowledge is possible. The knower is not separate. The existence flows in you, you are just a wave. The existence trees in the trees, it waves in the waves, it mans in you. As it trees the earth, so it mans the earth. ‘Manning’, if I can coin a new word, manning is just like waving; it is a process. You are not apart from it, not separate.You cannot kiss your own lips, religion says, hence the mystery. And the more science progresses the more religion is proved right. A few days before Einstein died he asserted, “When I started my journey on the scientific path I was certain that the universe can be known, but now I am not so certain. On the contrary, my uncertainty has been growing every day, and I feel that it is impossible to know the existence in its totality. It is a mystery.”Edison, another top scientist, a great name, said in his last letters to his friends, “I thought in the beginning that the world consists of matter, there is no mind. But the more I penetrate into the secrets the more I feel that the universe is more like thought than like thing. It is more like the mind, less like matter. It is more mysterious.”And that has been the feeling of all individual scientists – not of science, but individual scientists. Science as a body remains adamant, goes on saying that there can be no mystery, and if there is it is only a question of time and we will dissolve it. So the effort of science is to demystify the universe. That may be one of the reasons why people are so unhappy today. That may be one of the basic reasons why people are so bored, that may be one of the basic reasons why people are feeling so meaningless – because without mystery there can be no meaning in life.If everything is explained then everything is explained away, if everything is known then there is nothing worthwhile, if everything becomes just factual you are finished with it. Just go to a biologist and ask him what love is, or go to a chemist and ask him what love is. He will explain to you the whole mystery, he will talk of hormones, secretions of certain chemicals in the body, and he will say, “You are just a fool! Love is nothing. It is just a question of certain chemicals flowing in the bloodstream.”He can explain everything about love, and when he explains everything about love then all your Kalidases and Shakespeares and Byrons will look stupid – because he can explain. But this same man who is explaining will fall in love. He will sit with a woman under the sky and then start talking poetry. This is the mystery. Life remains alive for mystery. And it is a good sign that even a scientist can fall in love, and a few great scientists sometimes even write poetry. This is a good sign. Man can still survive – there is a possibility, we can hope; otherwise, everything explained, poetry dies.This age is very nonpoetic. Even poets write things which are facts, not mysteries; they talk about mundane things in their poetry. The poetry that has been created in this age is not very poetic, it is more prose than poetry. There is no music in it, because music can come only through mystery. Something unknowable throbs around you; you become part of that unknown mystery, you dissolve into it, become a drop in the ocean.That’s why children are so happy, old men so unhappy. The reason is that the old man knows more – he has explained many things, more facts are known to him – and children are ignorant, more mystery is around them. That’s why even in old age you go on thinking that childhood was the golden period, the real paradise.Why is childhood so paradise-like? – because the child exists in mystery. Everything is mysterious – even the shade of a tree moving with the sun is so mysterious, so poetic. An ordinary flower, maybe a grass flower, is so mysterious because the whole life is expressed through it. A breeze blowing in the tree and creating rhythmic sounds, echoes in the valley, reflections in the water…. Everything is mysterious for a child, nothing is known. He is happy. Remember this, your happiness will be in the same proportion as your mystery – less mystery, less happiness; more mystery, more happiness.This Upanishad ends with the word mystery. Make that word mystery a secret in your heart, and try to live in such a way that nothing is reduced to facts and even facts become just doors for more mysteries. And unless you can turn facts into mysteries you will not become religious. So I can conclude, a scientist goes on reducing mystery to facts, and a religious man goes on changing facts into mysteries.The world was happier when it was religious. It was less affluent, it was poorer, food was scarce, wealth was not there; everything was just poor, poverty existed – but people were happier…because you cannot live by bread alone. They lived through mystery. Everything they saw they treated as poetry of life. All these Upanishads are written in poetry. If life can appear to you not like prose but like poetry, a song, a bird in flight always towards the unknown…only then will religious consciousness dawn upon you.Now we will enter the sutra.In the seventh stage, the state of videhamukti, liberation while living in the body is achieved.The Upanishads divide liberation in two. One, liberation while you are in the body. That is called videhamukti, liberation while in the body. And then the ultimate liberation when this body dissolves and you no longer enter into another body, you remain bodiless. So liberation with the body and bodiless liberation. Buddhists have used two words: nirvana, and mahanirvana. Nirvana means liberation in the body, and mahanirvana means liberation from the body also – freed from all embodiments, bodiless consciousness. Then you have become cosmos.The seventh stage is of videhamukti. You are living in the body, but living in the body you are no longer the body; the body has become just an abode, a house or your clothes. You are no longer attached to it in any way. You use it, you live in it, you take care of it, but you are no longer concerned, no longer afraid that if the body dies you will die. Now you know you are deathless; only the body can die, never you. You are not identified with the body, that is the liberation – videhamukti.This stage is totally silent and cannot be communicated in words.A person who exists in this stage remains inwardly totally silent. There is no inner talk, he never talks with himself. Really, to talk with oneself is a sort of in-sanity. If you see a man sitting outside alone talking you will think he is mad. But you are also doing the same, only less loudly. He is a little more daring, that’s all. You also go on talking within; continuously the inner talk is there, not for a single moment do you stop. Your mind is a marketplace – so many voices, crowded – and it goes on and on and on. And look, observe what goes on there: just futile things, absurd, senseless, with no rhyme or reason. You are just flooded.In the seventh stage the inner world becomes totally liberated from inner talk, everything is silent within. You can talk, but only with someone else, not with yourself. In that stage Buddha speaks, but he never speaks with himself. Buddha speaks to others, but that speech is qualitatively different from yours. Look! Whenever you are talking with others, then too the other is just an excuse – you continue your inner talk. Observe people talking. When you are talking with someone else you are not really talking with someone else, you go on talking within. You just catch some words from the other, and then you hang your inner talk on those words and continue.One psychologist was watching two madmen from a window, and he was surprised at their behavior. Those two madmen were both professors – professors are always prone to go mad because they are experts at talking. But he was surprised not because they were talking, he was surprised for some other reason. Both were mad, but whenever one was talking the other would remain silent as if he was listening. When the first one would stop the other would start, and the first one would remain silent as if listening. And the second mystery was this, their talk was not connected at all. The first was talking about one thing and the other was talking about something else which was totally irrelevant, which had no connection at all. They were moving parallel, not meeting anywhere.So the psychologist went and said to them, “I have observed many madmen, and I have seen that when they talk they don’t talk with the other, they simply talk with themselves. That is okay. But I have never seen them remaining silent while the other is talking. So why do you remain silent while the other is talking?”The professors said, “Just old habit. Just old habit, just to be gentlemanly. When he is talking it is unmannerly to start talking, so we have to force ourselves. When he stops then I can talk and then he has to keep silence. And this is a mutual understanding.”But this is all that is happening amongst you. This is just from mutual understanding and old habit that you keep silent when the other is talking. But you are not silent, you are just waiting for the opportunity, and when he stops you start. Only one thing you will do which those madmen were not doing because they were more frank, and that is that you will catch some word from the other’s talk and through that word you will hang your inner talk and you will proceed.Look at two persons discussing anything, they are never talking about the same thing. Ninety-nine percent of debates and discussions are just mad; people are not talking about the same thing, they are not using the words in the same way, they are not communicating at all. Just look at a wife and husband talking, they are not communicating at all. The husband is saying something and he goes on saying, “You are not understanding me.” And the wife goes on saying something else, and she also says, “You are not understanding me, you don’t understand what I am saying.”Nobody understands anybody. You cannot understand, because understanding can flower only in inner silence, it cannot flower while you are talking in words. So you are not listening to the other at all. The mind cannot do two things simultaneously – you can listen to yourself or the other. Communication has become such a great problem, everybody feels that one cannot relate. What is the problem? Why can’t you relate with the other? – because you are relating with yourself.A man who has attained the seventh stage is silent inwardly. He can listen, he can communicate, he can relate, he can answer. In India this was taken as a basic condition: one should not start preaching unless one has attained the inner silence…because if somebody starts teaching, advising, and his inner talk has not stopped, he is going to create more mischief in the world than there already is. He will be destructive. He cannot help anybody, he is not interested really in helping anybody. He is not interested in giving advice, he is interested only in bringing his inner talk out in the name of giving advice. He is throwing his rubbish on others, he is using you, your mind. He is too burdened, he shares only his burden with you. He may feel a little relief, but for his relief he has created much mischief all around.Political leaders, social reformers, so-called revolutionaries, they all belong to this category. They go on throwing rubbish on more and more people. And if you go on insisting and telling people something, it is possible they may start believing, because belief is created by constant repetition.Adolf Hitler writes in his autobiography Mein Kampf that there is no difference between the truth and a lie; the difference is only of repetition. Repeat a lie constantly and it becomes a truth. And this is a proven thing, he himself proved it through his life. He constantly repeated certain things and they became true – and to a country which is one of the most intelligent in the world, Germany. Hitler befooled the Germans. Then remember it, Hitler-type people can befool any country; if Hitler can befool the Germans, then no country is safe.Germany was the country of the professors, scholars, great scholars, great professors, logicians, philosophers – Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Marx, Feuerbach – the country of the best minds, but a Hitler, just a madman, could befool them. Madmen can befool you very easily, because they are obsessed with their ideas, they go on repeating. They won’t listen to you, they are fanatic; they are not worried about what you will think, they will go on repeating, and through repetition it becomes a suggestion, a hypnosis. If somebody goes on repeating you are bound to believe it. Psychologists say that if you go on repeating others will believe, and by repeating constantly in the end you will also believe that it is true.I have heard one anecdote.Mulla Nasruddin died and immediately he proceeded towards heaven. He knocked on the door and the man on the gate said to him, “Who are you, and what has been your business there in the world? – because we have a quota, just like the Rotary Club.”Nasruddin said, “I was a journalist. You will have to allow me, otherwise I am going to report it and that will create bad news.”And journalists have become a power, so the man, the watchman, said, “Wait, let me inquire.” Then he said, “It is difficult because we have a quota – only twelve journalists can be allowed in heaven and they are already there. And even they are useless because newsprint paper is not available. Moreover, nobody is interested in gossiping in heaven; even if you print a newspaper nobody purchases it. Nobody reads them, so even those who are here are unemployed. It is better,” he suggested, “you go to hell. Journalism flourishes there like anything, everybody reads newspapers. Many newspapers are published with great circulation, and there are gossips and stories and news – real news happens there.”You must have heard Bernard Shaw’s definition of news. He says, “When a dog bites a man it is not news, but when a man bites a dog it is news.”“So real news happens in hell. You go there, Nasruddin!”But Nasruddin insisted. He said, “No! I want to be here. You will have to find some way.”So the man suggested, “I will allow you in for twenty-four hours. Go in and spread the news in heaven that a big new newspaper is going to be published soon in hell and editors are needed. You may be able to persuade some other journalists to go. They are unemployed and bored, so if they go, if even one man goes, I will allow you.”Nasruddin said, “Okay!”For twenty-four hours he was creating the rumor. To whomsoever he met he said, “If you don’t feel good here, go. Many posts are vacant, a great newspaper is going to be started soon. Readers are waiting for it, the whole of hell is expectant about it. Editors are needed, sub-editors are needed, news reporters are needed!”He told the story in such an honest, sincere way that by the evening when he came to the door to ask the watchman if anybody had gone to hell, the watchman immediately closed the door and said, “Don’t move out! All twelve have left!”Nasruddin said, “Open the door. If all twelve have left then there is something in the rumor. I can’t wait here, I want to go to hell!”The watchman said, “What are you saying? You created it!”Nasruddin said, “It doesn’t matter. If twelve persons are convinced it means there must be truth in it, and I don’t want to be here!”If you go on repeating a lie you will end up believing it. Constant repetition becomes hypnotic. In India it has been one of the basic laws that one should not start teaching people unless one becomes inwardly totally silent. When dreams have stopped, only then should one start advising anybody. If you still have dreams don’t advise anybody, because you are still in a state of dreaming. Your advice is of no use, you will create more mischief and misery for others. If somebody follows your advice he will be in danger.Fortunately nobody follows anybody’s advice. They say that advice is the thing which everybody gives wholeheartedly, without any cause, but which no-body takes. It is good, fortunate, that nobody takes anybody’s advice, otherwise the world would be in more misery, because the advisor – not the advice, but the advisor – is significant.This stage is totally silent.And because it is totally silent it cannot be communicated in words. It can be indicated; that is all that can be done, and that is what this sutra is going to do.It is the end of all stages, where all the processes of yoga have come to their conclusion. In this stage all activities – worldly, bodily, scriptural – cease.In this stage there is no activity – activity as action, by effort. The person who has achieved the seventh stage leaves all activities. That doesn’t mean that he will not do anything, but now he will be spontaneous. He will not be active, he will be spontaneous. He will move like a wind. Whatsoever happens will happen; whatsoever doesn’t happen, he will not think about it happening. He will become a flow. Now he will not force anything. That’s the meaning that he will not be active.Buddha was active. After he attained enlightenment, for forty years he was active, but that activity was not activity, he was spontaneous. He moved, but with no conscious effort on his part, as if the existence was moving him, he had become just a passage, a passive vehicle. If life wanted to move through him it would move, if it didn’t want it was okay. He had no mind to do anything. Many things would happen, and really only in such a state do many things happen that are wonderful, that are mysterious.When you are not the doer, then you become capable of receiving existence. This is what is meant by Jesus’ saying, “Not I, but he, lives in me. My father lives in me.” Jesus is a vehicle, Mahavira is a vehicle, Krishna is a vehicle – just passages. The total can move through them, they don’t create any hindrance, they don’t change in any way. They have no will of their own, no mind of their own.The whole universe in the form of the world – viswa, intelligence – prajna, and radiance – tejas, is just aum.In this seventh stage of consciousness the person has really dissolved and become the whole universe, he has become Aum. This word aum is very symbolic. First, this word aum consists of three sounds: a, u, m. These three sounds are the basic sounds, all the sounds are created out of them. All the languages, all the words, are created out of these three sounds: a, u, m. And this is not a myth, now phonetics agrees that these are the basic root sounds. And the word aum is meaningless, it is simply a combination of all the three basic sounds.Hindus say that aum is the sound of existence, and then it divides in three: a, u, m, and then the three become many. From one, three; from three, many and millions. Now even science agrees that there is only one energy in existence; that one energy is divided in three. You may call it electron, proton and neutron; you may call it a, u, m; you may call it the Christian trinity: God, the Son, the Holy Ghost; you may call it the Hindu trimurti: Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu – whatsoever the name, the name is irrelevant, but one thing is certain: one becomes three, and then three becomes many. And if you want to move backwards to the one, move from the many to three and then let the three combine – it will become one. Aum is a way, it is a mantra, a path, to combine all the sounds in three, to first reduce all the sounds to three – and then aum becomes the door for the one.And this has been the experience of all the mystics all over the world, not only Hindus. They all have the same experience. They may have interpreted it differently. Mohammedans, Christians, and Jews end their prayers with amen. Hindu mystics say it is the same, aum. They interpreted differently, because the sound can be interpreted in many ways. You are traveling in a train and you can interpret the sound of the train in many ways; you can even feel that there is a song going on, because the interpretation is yours – sound is not creating the interpretation, the mind is creating the interpretation. Hindus say it is like aum; Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans have felt it as aumen, or amen.English has three or four words which are mysterious for linguists. They are omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and such words. They cannot reduce them to any logical order. What does omnipotent mean? And from where does omni come? It comes from the Hindu word aum. What does omniscient mean? From where does the word omni come? Linguists have no way to explain it, these words have remained unexplained in English. But if you can understand aum then those words become clear, because aum is the symbol of the universe for Hindus. So omnipotent means one who knows all, one who is all-powerful; omnipresent means one who is everywhere present – present in the aum, seeing the aum, powerful like the aum.If you enter deeper meditation soon you will realize that a sound is continuously happening there. It is the sound of existence itself, the humming sound of existence itself. And if you listen without interpreting it, if you don’t force any interpretation on it, if you simply listen and watch and observe, sooner or later you will realize it is aum vibrating inside.In this stage all activities…cease. The whole universe in the form of the world – viswa, intelligence – prajna, and radiance – tejas, is just aum.In this stage only aum exists – the sound, the ultimate sound. Or you can call it the soundless sound, the uncreated sound.There is no division here between speech and the speaker.This has to be understood. You speak but there is always you, the speaker, and that which you speak. You walk, there is always the division: the walker, you, and the walk, the activity. You eat, there is always the division: the eater, you, and the activity. You can fast but the division will remain: you, the faster, and the activity, fasting. The activity and the active agent remain two, a division exists.At this stage, the seventh, this division also disappears. The walker is the walk, the observer is the observed, the speaker is the speech – life becomes a process undivided. If you ask a question of the person who is in the seventh stage he never thinks about it, because there is no thinker. You ask the question, he responds. That response is not a thinking one, the response is just like a valley responding, a valley echoing. You sing a song in the valley and the whole valley echoes it. The valley doesn’t think that this sound is beautiful and should be echoed in such and such a way.A buddha is a valley. You throw a question, the valley echoes. There is no-body who can think, there is nobody who can plan, there is nobody who can choose – really there is nobody now. It is emptiness, shunyata, it is a void. There is a valley; the valley responds. The speaker and the speech are one, the mover and the movement are one. This inner division falls immediately.This exists because of the ego. Who thinks when somebody asks a question? Who thinks inside you? The ego. You have to give the right answer, or an answer which will be appreciated. But why are you worried about it? If you are the right person the right answer will flower through you. You are worried because you are not the right person. You have to force an answer, you have to create it, manufacture it somehow through the memory. You have to choose, combine, look at the person, at what type of person he is, and then it is a whole process of planning, choosing and thinking, but you are not spontaneous.If you are a valley, if you have reached the seventh stage and the ego has disappeared, who will choose? The answer will flow. It will flow from the total person, not from the ego. Because of your ego you cannot be spontaneous – because you are always afraid you may not look good, you may not be appreciated. Your ego is exhibitionist. The speech and the speaker become one because there is no exhibitionist ego. Buddha responds with his totality; whatsoever the response, he is not concerned really.If however, any such division remains, the state has not been attained.So this is the criterion: if you feel any division inside, then know well this state has not been attained.The first sound ‘a’ of aum, stands for the world – the universe; the second ‘u’ for radiance – life, élan vital; and the third ‘m’ for intelligence – consciousness, awareness. Before entering samadhi – that is, ultimate ecstasy, the final ecstasy…. This path has to be remembered well, it will be very helpful. This is the last advice of this Upanishad, the final. And only Hindus and Tibetans have used this advice for millions of years. This is their last secret.Before entering samadhi – that is, death with consciousness…. Samadhi means death with consciousness, dying fully alert. You have died many times but it was not samadhi, it was simple death, because whenever you died you were unconscious. Before death happens you are unconscious, it is just a surgical procedure. Because death will be so painful for you, you cannot be allowed to be conscious – just as a surgeon gives you anesthetic, chloroform, before he operates on you, and then his operation is just nothing.Death’s operation is so big because the whole being has to be taken out of your body with which it has become so attached, identified. It is not simply removing a bone, it is removing the whole body from you. So nature has a process: before you die you fall unconscious, fast asleep, you are no longer in your senses, and then your being can be removed. This is not samadhi.And remember, if a person dies in unconsciousness he is born in unconsciousness, because the birth, the coming birth, will be the same, the same quality. If in this life you die unconsciously, in the next life you will be born unconscious in a womb. If you can die consciously then you can be born consciously. And if you can die with total awareness, the whole being alert, not a single part unconscious, then you will not be born at all. Then there is no need, then you can simply discard this body and become bodiless.Before entering samadhi – that is, conscious, alert, aware of death…. And only the person who has attained the seventh stage can enter it. He will be born no more, he will be out of the wheel of existence.…The seeker should contemplate on aum most strenuously, and subsequently he should surrender everything, from gross to subtle to the conscious self. Taking the conscious self as his own self, he should consolidate this feeling: I am eternal, pure, enlightened, free, existential, incomparable, the most blissful Vasudeva and Pranava himself – I am the Brahman.Before entering death the seeker should try this.Many things. First, before you enter death ordinarily you cling to the body, you don’t want to give it up. That is the ordinary reaction of the mind, to cling. Death is snatching everything and you cling, you start a fight with death. In this fight you will be defeated. This sutra says: Give up consciously. From the gross to the subtle to the self, give up everything. Just say to death, “Take it. This is not me. Take this body, take this mind, take this self, this ego. I am not this.”Don’t cling, let your life be a gift to death. Don’t create any fight and resistance. If you create fight you will become unconscious and you will miss an opportunity again. Give up. Give death whatsoever you have – from the gross to the subtle to the very self, go on giving. Don’t create any resistance. This is the foundational thing. Don’t create resistance, don’t fight with death. What will happen? If you can give up knowingly, consciously, blissfully, you will not fall unconscious, there is no need. Your clinging creates the problem.It happened just at the beginning of this century, the king of Benares was to undergo an appendix operation. He was a very religious man, a very saintly man, and he said, “I have never taken anything to make me unconscious and I would not like to do that. So please, if you can operate, then operate on me when I am fully conscious. I will not take any anesthetic, chloroform, or any type of thing which can make me unconscious.”The doctors were worried, and the case was serious. The appendix had to be removed soon, otherwise the man would die. And he was adamant. He said, “I can die, that is not much of a problem – but I don’t want to be unconscious.” He must have been thinking of this sutra, he must have known about this secret, that one should never die unconsciously. Death is not the problem, unconsciousness is the problem.So he said, “It is okay. If you cannot operate then let me be as I am. I will die but I will die consciously. You give me chloroform, and if I die in the operation then who will be responsible? Can you take the responsibility? Can you give me a guarantee that I will not die through this operation?”Nobody could give such a guarantee. The case was serious and there was a possibility that he might die in the operation. So the doctors agreed, because there was no other alternative. They said, “Let us try, there is no risk. The man is going to die within hours, so take the risk. Let us try, let him remain conscious.”So no anesthetic was given. That was the first operation of this type in the whole history. And it was miraculous, because the king remained conscious. It was a long operation, almost two hours, and the whole stomach was opened and the appendix removed. The surgeons could not believe that the man was conscious, that he remained conscious. They asked him later on how it happened.He said, “There is no secret about it. I was not resisting. I said, ‘Okay death, take everything – this appendix, this body, this whatsoever I have been calling me – take everything. I am ready. There is no resistance.’”If there is no resistance there is no problem. Resistance creates conflict, conflict creates problem. So at the moment of death the seeker should contemplate on aum. He should feel himself as the aum, the universe, the very life, the very existence, the very awareness. And subsequently he should surrender everything – from gross to subtle. And this is not only for the seeker, even an enlightened person who has achieved the seventh has to surrender.It is reported of Buddha that he told his disciples one day just in the morning, “This evening I am going to surrender my body back to nature, so if you have to ask anything you can ask. This is the last day.”They were very worried, depressed, sad; they started weeping and crying. And Buddha said, “Don’t waste time. If you have to ask anything this is the last day. In the evening when the sun is setting I will surrender my body. I have used so many bodies and I have never thanked nature before. This is the last, now I will never move in a body again. This is the last house I have been living in, this is my last residence, so I have to thank nature and give the body back. It served many purposes, it led me really to this enlightenment. It was a means, and was a good means. It helped me in every way. So I have to thank nature and surrender the whole abode back, because it is a gift from nature and I must surrender it consciously. So there is no time….”But nobody asked any question, they were not in the mood to ask. They were sad and they said, “You have said everything and we have not followed, so just give us your blessing that we may follow whatsoever you have said.”Then by the evening Buddha retired. He went behind a tree to surrender. And it is said that a man named Subhadra who lived in a nearby town came running – there are many Subhadras always. He came running in the evening when Buddha had retired and he said, “I have some questions to ask.”Buddha’s disciples said, “It is too late now, we cannot disturb him now. This is not good. You could have come before. Buddha passed through your village many times, at least ten times in his life, and we have never seen you come to him.”The man said, “Every time Buddha was passing through my village there was something or other which prevented me. Sometimes my wife was ill, sometimes there was too much of a crowd in my shop, too many customers; sometimes I was ill, sometimes there was some other urgent thing to be done, sometimes there was some marriage going on – so I went on postponing. But now I have heard that he is going to die. There is no time to postpone now, and I must ask him. So allow me.”They prevented him. They said, “It is impossible.”Buddha came back from his retirement and he said, “Let it not be written in history that while I was still alive somebody came and knocked at my door and went away empty-handed. Let him ask.”Then he again retired. First he surrendered his body. It is reported that when he surrendered his body there was a radiance around the body as if the body had become energy and was moving into the cosmos – a conscious surrender. Then he surrendered his mind. It is said a fragrance spread, went on spreading. A buddha’s mind is a fragrance, the condensed fragrance of such a great and pure and innocent life, it was felt. Then he surrendered his self. These three things surrendered, he died. This was mahaparinirvana, mahasamadhi. But it was a conscious surrender, death was given back everything that nature had given. This man will never be back again. Only such a conscious surrender can become samadhi, the ultimate samadhi.Even if you have not attained the seventh stage, wherever you are, at any stage, when death approaches you try to be conscious, surrendering. Don’t fight with death. If you fight with death, death will conquer. If you don’t fight with death there is no possibility of conquering.This is the way with death, to be in a let-go. And this has been done even by buddhas who have attained the seventh stage. So try it. For you it will be an effort, but worth doing. Even if you fail it is good to do, because doing it many times you will succeed. And once you succeed with death fear disappears, surrender becomes easy.This is the difficulty with surrender. Many people come to me – one girl was here just the other day and she said, “I feel very sad because everybody else seems to be surrendered to you, trusting, in deep faith. I cannot surrender. Meditation is good, I feel good, but I cannot surrender.”What is the problem in surrendering? Surrender is a death, you are afraid of dying. Whenever you think of surrender you feel, “Then I am no more, then I dissolve,” and you want to persist.If you can surrender in death you can surrender in love, you can surrender in trust, you can surrender in faith. And the reverse is also true, vice-versa is also true; if you can surrender in love, surrender in faith, you will be able to surrender in death. Surrender is the same, the same phenomenon – and surrender is the key.Learn to surrender in death, and if you cannot surrender in death you cannot surrender in life also. Those who are afraid of death are always afraid of life. They miss everything.And subsequently he should surrender everything, from gross to subtle to the conscious self. Taking the conscious self as his own self, he should consolidate this feeling: I am eternal….While dying, or while in deep meditation, which is a sort of death, or while making love, which is a sort of death – wherever you feel a surrender, think:I am the eternal, the pure, enlightened, free, existential, incomparable, the most blissful Vasudeva and Pranava himself – God himself.It will be a thought for you, because you have not attained the seventh stage. But if you attain the seventh these will be spontaneous feelings, not thoughts. Then you will not do them, they will happen to you. This is the difference: for a seeker who is yet below the fourth stage, this will be an effort; for a seeker who has gone beyond the third, this will be a spontaneous feeling. He will feel this way – that he is God, he is Brahma himself, Vasudeva.Since the whole visible world, comprising a beginning, a middle, and an end, is sorrow-stricken, he must renounce everything and merge into the supreme. He should feel that he is blissful, taintless, without ignorance, without appearance, inexpressible in words, and that he is Brahman, the essence of knowledge.This is the Upanishadic mystery.Thus ends the Akshi Upanishad.What is the Upanishadic mystery? The art of dying is the Upanishadic mystery. And one who knows how to die knows how to live. One who knows how to surrender conquers the whole.

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

Vedanta Seven Steps to Samadhi 17 (Listen & Download)

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Osho,Many times I feel so merged in you that it is as if I have died and only you are. But this feeling doesn't remain constant, and always the ego returns. This happens whenever I have to again communicate with others or return to activity. Why doesn't the ego remain dead?If you make it a goal – egolessness – then you will always remain with the ego. Don’t make it a goal, because all goals belong to the ego. If you think that you should remain egoless, who is this “you” who should remain egoless? This is the ego. So the first thing, don’t make it a goal. Any goal will feed the ego – even the goal of egolessness.When you are egoless enjoy it; when you feel the ego again, be alert – but don’t expect the contrary. If you start expecting you will be more entangled with the same thing. Whenever egolessness is there enjoy it, feel grateful, thank God, and when the ego comes again, be alert. Soon more and more egolessness will happen to you, less and less ego will return. And the moment will come when ego will disappear, but don’t make it a goal. All goals belong to the ego.Secondly, don’t expect anything, because when you start expecting you have moved from the here and now into the future. When you start expecting something you have started to bring your memory, your past, into the present. This very moment you feel egoless – it is okay. Then it goes, the ego comes. You want to repeat the past again – you must be egoless. You project the past in the future and you miss the present.And remember, egolessness is possible only if you are here and now. If you move into the past, if you move into the future, the ego will persist. So don’t ask for any constancy because constancy means you want to continue the past into the future. Remain with the moment and don’t expect anything. The ego will drop by itself, no other effort is needed. If the ego has moved it means you are not in the present. So don’t fight with the ego, simply move into the present and ego will drop. And this is what is happening.You say: “Many times I feel so merged in you that it is as if I have died and only you are.”I am here and I am now. I have no past and no future. If you really relate with me you relate with my nowness and hereness, because there is no other thing with which to relate. If you feel a love, a trust, flowing towards me, that love and trust can flow only in the present. That’s why you feel you have died. It is not because of me that your ego is dying, it is because you have moved with me in the present. Then your past is forgotten, your future is no more. You are here, totally here.So don’t think that it is something that I am doing to you, it is something that you are doing to yourself – I am just the excuse. Try to understand this because otherwise it will become a clinging. The same can happen anywhere. Remember the secret. If you love me, if you listen to me deeply, if you are here present with me, receptive, open, you are in the present. That’s why for a few seconds the ego will disappear. Then you are not. If you can be in the present anywhere, you will not be.You can be only either in the past or in the future – you cannot be in the present. Just think about it, how can you be in the present? There is no need. The past accumulates, becomes crystallized, and you feel ‘I’. Then the past projects in the future and says, “This should be, this should not be. I desire this, I don’t desire that.” This is your past desiring – all the bad experiences you don’t want to repeat and all the good trips you want to repeat in the future. This is past asking for something in the future – and you are missing the present, which is the only existence.Past is no more, it is already dead; future is not yet, it is yet unborn. Both are not. And ego can exist only in nonexistence, it is the most false thing possible. The present moment is, it is the only is-ness; nothing else exists. If you relate with the present you cannot exist as an ego, because the present is the real and the real never creates anything false. Out of the real nothing false is created; only out of the false, false comes.So it can happen…it may be happening to you that for a few moments you disappear. While listening to me, while just sitting with me, you disappear. But I am not doing anything to you. If you think I am doing something then you will cling to me, you will become attached to me; a new attachment will be formed. And then through that attachment you will ask again and again for the same.Just try to understand the basic law. Then move into the forest, sit under a tree, and be in the here-and-now. Then be with your friends, remain silent, and remain in the here-and-now. Listen to music, forget the past, forget the future, and be here and now. And if you can be in the present anywhere, suddenly the ego will not be found. And if you ask that this should happen again, ego has come again, because now you are asking for the future, planning for the future. This is the mechanism.“But this feeling does not remain constant, and always the ego returns.” It will remain constant only when you don’t ask that it should remain constant. It will happen again and again every moment, it will be continued, but don’t ask for its constancy. Rather, enjoy it moment to moment and don’t project it. It will arise again and again every moment, but remember, it is never the old, it is always the new arising, every moment being born again and again. It is not the past continuing, it is the new being born every moment.“This happens whenever I again have to communicate with others or return to activity.” Why does it happen when you communicate with others? Really you don’t communicate, that’s why. If you communicate it will not happen. While you are here with me, this is a communication. You relate with me, you become silent, you drop your past. You listen so attentively that thinking stops. This is communication.When you communicate with somebody else you are not communicating, you are just throwing out your inner talk. You are thinking of many things. You may be saying something and thinking something else, meaning something else, doing something else. You are many while you communicate with others – then the ego enters.In activity also the ego can enter because you become the doer. While I am speaking you are not doing anything at all, you are simply here listening. Listening is not a doing, listening is passive, it is a non-act. You need not do anything; you simply be there and it will happen. If you do something you won’t be able to listen, if you go on doing something you will only appear to be listening but you won’t be listening. When you don’t do anything, listening happens. It is a passive thing. You need not do anything to create this capacity, it is always there.But when you return to activity the ego can return, because again the doer has come. So what is to be done? When you return to activity remain the witness and don’t become the doer. Go on doing things but remain the witness. Or if it is difficult then just leave everything to the divine and say that the divine is doing everything, you are just a vehicle, a passage, an agent. That’s what Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita: “You leave everything to me, surrender everything to me. You become just a medium and let things happen. Don’t you be the doer, God is the doer.”Or if you cannot think of any God then there is another technique, and that is destiny or fate, that everything that is happening is destined. You are not doing it, it was bound to be so, it was going to happen, it was predestined. These are simple things, but you feel these simple things are difficult because they have become difficult in this age.In the past these simple techniques helped millions to attain silence, peace, egolessness, because they could trust. Fate, or what Sufis call kismet, helped millions…because then simply you say, “I am not the doer. The whole existence has predetermined everything in me and I am just following.” This is the whole secret of astrology. Astrology is not a science but a technique of religion. If a person can believe that things are settled already and one cannot change anything, then the doer cannot arise. But simple faith is needed for that.If you feel this is difficult – and this is difficult for the modern mind – then only one thing remains, and that is, be alert and move again and again to the present. No faith, no God is needed. But then the path is very arduous because every moment you will have to pull yourself back to the present. It is such an old habit to move ahead, it has become such a fixation that you will have to constantly struggle.Remember not to move in the past and not to move in the future. Then every moment egolessness will arise, it will become a continuous flow. And the more egoless you are the more moments of egolessness, the more glimpses in the divine. The more you are the less the divine is for you, the less you are the more the divine.The second question:Osho,A number of times I have felt in the past that I had reached a state of effortlessness. It lasted for some time, for days or even weeks, but then I fell back from it. Why does this falling back happen? Can anything be done to prevent it?Whenever it happens again don’t get miserable about it – let it happen and accept it. This is difficult. Whenever happiness happens you accept it, whenever you feel blissful you never ask any questions about it. You never ask, “Why has it happened?” You accept it. But whenever misery comes, whenever unhappiness comes, whenever you are in pain and anguish, immediately you ask, “Why has it happened?” Behave equally to both, have the same attitude to both.There are two possibilities: one, do the same with unhappiness as you have done with your happiness, or do the same with your happiness as you are doing with your unhappiness. Either accept both or reject both, and then you will have a transformation. If you can accept both, when misery comes accept it as part of life, suddenly the nature of the misery is transformed. Through acceptance the quality has changed – because nobody can accept misery. If you accept it you have changed it, it is no more misery – because we can accept only happiness. Or if you can understand the deeper meaning of it, this is the meaning: whatsoever you accept becomes happiness, and whatsoever you reject becomes pain, misery, unhappiness.Nothing is happiness, nothing is unhappiness, outside you – it is your rejection and acceptance. Try it. And you know, many times this has happened to you unknowingly. You love a person, you are happy. You accept the person, there is happiness. And then a moment comes when you reject the same person. The person is the same; you don’t love him, you don’t accept him. The person is creating unhappiness now, and the same person was creating happiness before. The same object can give you happiness and unhappiness. So the object seems to be irrelevant. It depends on you, on whether you accept or reject.A person who can accept both misery and happiness equally will transcend, or a person who can reject both will transcend. And these are the two ways, the most fundamental ways of transformation. One is to accept everything – this is the positive path Hindus have been following. The Upanishads belong to this path, accept everything. Then there is the negative path, reject everything. Buddhists, Jainas have been following that, that is the negative path.But both do the same thing. If you reject happiness you can never be unhappy, if you accept unhappiness you can never be unhappy. How can you make a man unhappy if he accepts it? How can you make a man unhappy if he rejects happiness? You cannot make him unhappy. The problem arises because you divide. You say this is happiness and that is unhappiness. And division is in your mind – reality is not divided. In reality unhappiness becomes happiness, happiness becomes unhappiness. They are flowing.It is just like peaks and valleys: if a peak is there a valley is bound to be there. And the valley and peak are not against each other, they are part of one phenomenon. If you reject the valley and you accept the peak you will be miserable, because wherever a peak is the valley will be. And the higher the peak the deeper will be the valley. So if you love Everest then you will have to love deep valleys also. Happiness is like a peak and unhappiness is like a valley.Go to the sea and meditate on the waves. The wave rises high, but just be-hind it there is a gap, a valley. Each wave is followed by a valley. The higher the wave the deeper will be the valley just following it. This is what happiness and unhappiness are – waves. Whenever you reach a high peak of happiness, immediately unhappiness will follow. You have to accept that this is how life is. If you say, “I will accept only peaks and not valleys,” you are just behaving stupidly. Then you are going to be miserable.It has been happening in every camp. People do so much towards meditation, acceptance, happiness, and they achieve small, high peaks. Then they go back, and then suddenly the valley comes in. They feel very miserable after the camp.Somebody has asked a question:Osho,Why don't you carry on Your camps at least for three months, or six months?Because of this…because if I keep a camp continuing for three months you will reach Everest and then back home you will simply go mad with misery. And you will have to go back – and if it is difficult after nine days it will be impossible after three months. This is good, and part of the training, that you accept both the peak and the valley. Go home and accept the valley also.The real thing is to learn acceptance. And if you accept the valley then the valley is also very mysterious and beautiful. It has its own splendor. Even anguish has its own beauty if you accept it, even sadness has its own depth. Not only laughter is beautiful; sadness has its own beauty, a depth which no laughter can carry. Sadness has its own poetry, its own rhythm. If you allow me the expression, sadness has its own ecstasy. But one has to accept, only then one will be able to know.The light is good, but darkness has its own mystery. You may be afraid but that is because of you, not because of darkness. Darkness has its own silence, its own silky expanse, its own infinity. This choice is yours – that you go on saying that light is good. And every book, the Koran and the Gita and The Bible, goes on making parallels between God and light. They go on saying, “God is light.”This is because man is afraid of darkness. Otherwise darkness is more godly than any light because light is always limited, darkness is always unlimited. Light has to be produced, darkness is there eternally, there is no need to produce it. You can bring light in, you cannot bring darkness in. Simply put off the light and you find that the darkness was already there, there is no need to bring it. It is always there, the eternal and always infinite.Light has a tension with it, that’s why you cannot sleep in light. It is difficult to sleep because a tension continues on the mind. Darkness has a relaxation. Darkness absorbs you, it takes you in its womb and relaxes you. Darkness is like death. But we are afraid of death so we are afraid of darkness. No one says that God is darkness. This is because of our mind. But I tell you, God is both. And unless God becomes both to you, you will never enter him.Don’t choose. Accept without any choice. Be choiceless and accepting. Whatsoever falls upon you, accept it and feel grateful for it. Try this – you have tried everything else. When misery comes to you thank God, feel happy that misery has befallen you and now you can experience it. Don’t be scared. Try to experience what misery is and you will start enjoying it. You will start feeling new dimensions in it, new depths of which you were never aware.This is why comedies in literature are never as deep as tragedies. And a person who has not known misery remains always shallow – always shallow. He may be laughing, smiling, but his laugh and smile are always shallow, just on the surface. He has no depth. A person who has passed through miseries, many miseries, gains depth. He knows both the heaven and the hell. And a person who knows both really becomes integrated.Nietzsche has written many beautiful things, fragments of course. One of the most beautiful things he has ever asserted is that if you want to reach heaven, if you want to touch heaven, your roots must go to hell. It is just as if a big tree arises on the earth: the higher it reaches into the sky, the lower it has to penetrate in the earth. The highest tree must have the deepest roots. And it is proportionate, always the same: if the tree is twenty feet high the roots reach twenty feet down, if the tree is one hundred feet high the roots reach one hundred feet down. A man who really wants to reach a peak of bliss must send his roots deep into sadness, anguish, misery, and the proportion will always be the same.If you accept both you transcend. Then neither misery can make you miserable nor happiness can make you happy – you remain the same. Misery comes and goes, happiness comes and goes, you remain untouched. Just like day comes and night comes, and they go on moving in a circle and you remain untouched, life comes and death comes and you remain untouched. Until this is achieved your bliss is just a deception. The bliss that exists against misery is no bliss. Only that bliss is called bliss, ananda, which doesn’t exist against misery, which transcends happiness, unhappiness, both.So when the peak has gone and the valley has come, accept it. It will be difficult, but try. Accept it, feel it, be sensitive to it. Allow it to happen and you are changing its quality, and you are changing yourself also through it. And don’t divide, don’t say happiness, unhappiness; these are two aspects of the same coin. Accept both or reject both; only then tranquility, calmness, peace, become possible.The fourth question:Osho,Do you feel that the hippie way of life – a life of nonachieving, all play and no work, living for the moment, wandering about instead of remaining in one place – is better for a spiritual seeker than the usual life of marriage, family and career?The first thing: the hippie is not the alternative, he is a by-product. He has always existed in different forms. But remember, he depends on the established society. He is not an alternative, he’s just a shadow, a by-product of the society. He can go on moving, wandering, because many are established. If everybody is wandering nobody can be a hippie. A wandering monk, a wandering hippie, needs a society which is established, otherwise where is he going to wander? And he can afford play because others are working.This is new in the West, because the West has become for the first time affluent. It is one of the ancient traditions in India. Right now five million sannyasins exist in India, wandering. They have been always there. They don’t stay in one place, they don’t work – they simply exist. They beg, the society supports them. But they can exist only because a society exists, and the better the society is established the better they can exist. That is why only in America is the hippie way of life possible. Because American society is now well established, rich, it can afford a few young men wandering here and there, playing with life. It can afford it. In a poor society hippies cannot exist, a poor society cannot afford them.So the hippie way of life is not an alternative, it is a by-product. And it happens only when a society has reached a particular point of establishment, richness. Then it can allow a few young men to wander here and there and experiment. This hippie way of life cannot become universal and I never suggest that which cannot become universal because it is useless. And if you have to depend on the society you condemn, then the whole thing seems to be bogus.I don’t say no work and play, I say make your work your play. That is totally different, that can exist universally. Then you are not exploiting; otherwise hippies are exploiting. They may be exploiting their parents, their families, but they are exploiting. Their father and their mother and their brothers are working hard and they are enjoying a hippie way of life. This is sheer exploitation. Somebody has to work, and if somebody has to work it is better you work yourself. But change the work into play. If the work itself becomes the play then the whole world can go hippie, then there is no problem. And unless the whole world goes hippie it cannot become a way of life.Hippies have always existed and then they have disappeared. Many times they come into existence and then they disappear. Sometimes they were called Bohemians, sometimes other names, but they could not create a permanent way, they couldn’t make it universal. It is impossible to make it universal, somebody has to work somewhere. So I don’t say only work, I don’t say only play – I say make your work your play.Secondly, wandering, a life of a wanderer, is good for a few, it is not good for all. And that too is good only for a particular period of life, not for the whole life. My feeling is that every young man and woman should be allowed to wander for a few years, wander carelessly, just experimenting with everything that is possible, good and bad both; moving with many types of people, different societies, countries. Before one gets established one should have wandered the whole earth.This will give a richer family life. Then you are more experienced, more sensitive, multidimensional. And when you have wandered and then you settle your settlement has some meaning. You have known the opposite, and it is always good to know the opposite. It is said that whenever a person comes back to his own home country after wandering long, for the first time he comes to know it. It is true, because unless you have knocked at other doors you cannot recognize your own. So this must be a sort of university, this wandering.Every young man and woman should be allowed to move for a few years carelessly, without any responsibility, because soon responsibilities will happen, will come. They will have to settle and they will have to carry many burdens. Before this happens they must be allowed a floating life, just to know whatsoever exists on earth – the bad and the good, the establishment and the anti-establishment – they must know everything.The more you have moved around the richer becomes your consciousness. But this cannot be the whole pattern of life, this can be just a training, because wandering gives many things and then settling in a family life also gives many things that no wanderer can know. Both have their own richnesses.You may love many women. That has its own significance, because you come to know many types of personalities, and the more you know the richer you are. But then to love one woman has a different significance, because loving many women may be a vast, rich experience, but it is never deep, it is always superficial. Depth needs time, depth needs a deep long contact. So when you love one woman and you have settled, all the wandering of the mind has ceased and now your desire never craves for anyone else, you can move deeply with one person. Now you can relate, now love can flower.While making friendships and love with many women and men, you may come to know many techniques, many experiences of sex, but you will not be able to know love, what love is, because love needs seasoning. Just a hit-and-run experience cannot be of much depth – it cannot be. When you live with a person, and not only outward but inward wandering also has ceased, and nobody can create the craving in you, now this person is the sole and whole, then a depth starts happening. Then you start mingling, merging into each other, and higher peaks of love will be available to you. And a moment comes when two persons become one.Both have to be known. So I am neither for this nor against that. I am always for a richer life – the richer the better. But it is better if the first wandering part is done when you are not responsible. It must precede, and the latter part should succeed. And you will have your experience with many persons, many places, which will help you to settle somewhere, to choose the right person.The first love can almost never be the right love. It is bound to be childish, it is a baby love. You don’t know anything about love. When you have loved many persons you know what love is. You know the misery and the bliss both, the expectations and frustrations both, and then you can choose.I am in favor of many trial love affairs, and then also in favor of a fixed, permanent marriage. But marriage must happen after you have wandered here and there and knocked at many doors, tasted at many wells. Only then allow marriage to happen. Then there will be no divorce; otherwise divorce is bound to be there. The first love is dangerous, one should never marry in the first love. Wait, because you don’t know your mind, how it will change. It will change, it may be just a mood. Experiments are good.But there have been only two types of people. One type says, “Marry. You should remain true forever to the first person you fall in love with.” This is nonsense. Then there is the other party, the other extreme, who says, “There is no need for marriage, go on experimenting. Even when you are on your deathbed, go on experimenting.” That too is foolish. They are both foolish.My attitude is absolutely the third. There is a time to experiment; when you are young, experiment. Know many persons, allow many happenings, don’t be shy, don’t feel guilty, let life flow so you can become acquainted with it. And when you feel that now you are acquainted, you have known, you have a certain experience to settle with, then settle, and then settle forever. Both these things will give you the highest peaks possible.And this is my attitude in every dimension of life: allow both the opposites to happen. Don’t choose between the opposites, allow both the opposites to happen. Then you have depth, then you have height, and you will have a growth which cannot happen to persons who get married and have not known many persons, which cannot happen to persons who go on changing. Both miss.But these are the two parties: one is known as the orthodox, the other is known as the hippie – and both are wrong. A deep synthesis is needed. There are moments you should be a hippie and there are moments you must be a conformist. And if you can allow both, if you can enjoy both, you will be richer for that.The fifth question:Osho,How is one to overcome boredom? How can one rediscover mystery in things that have become boring, repetitive, demystified?The first thing to remember is that it is not that things are repetitive – it is your mind, not the things. The sun rises every day, you can say that it is repetitive. It is not, because the sun rises every day in a different way. The colors are different, the mood is different, the sky is different. The sun never repeats, it is always new. It is your mind which says, “This is repetitive, so what is the beauty there?”Looking at the sun rising every day will create boredom, but the boredom is coming because you are not sensitive enough to see the newness. Everything is new every moment. It looks old because you carry the past in your mind and you look through the past.You may have lived with a person for thirty years – your wife, your husband, your friend – and you may have noticed that for years you have not seen the face of the person, for years. You may be living with the person but you have not seen those eyes, the face. You think there is no need, you know the person well. The face is changing every day, the eyes are changing every day, the mind is changing every day. Life is a flux. Nothing is old, nothing can be old here. Never is a thing repeated, it is nonrepetitive. And if you think that things are old it is only because you are not sensitive enough to see the newness.Just try to see a person; observe for twenty-four hours, and see how many persons exist in that one person. And this is not only so with a person, even a rock has its moods. Sit by the side of a rock and feel the mood. Sometimes the rock is happy and then the rock will receive you, will welcome you. And you can feel, you can touch and feel a warmth, a receptive welcome. Sometimes the rock is sad. You touch it and it will be cold. She will not be receiving you, it is as if she is saying, “Go away.” In the morning look at the rock, in the evening look at the rock. When the stars have appeared in the night then look at the rock. It is not the same rock because the whole milieu is changing, it is part of a great milieu. When the whole milieu is changing how can this rock remain the same? It goes on changing but you don’t have eyes to see.Your eyes are old, this is the first thing to remember. Nothing is old in the world, everything is new – only your eyes get old. You become fixed, you start seeing patterns. Now scientists say that ninety-eight percent of the information that goes on coming from the outside world is not taken in by your senses, only two percent is taken. And that two percent of information that is taken in by your senses, you have a fixed pattern of taking, you choose it. That’s why the thing becomes old.You come to the house, you look at your wife in a particular pattern that has become fixed. You may not observe – you are not observing many things. The wife may be happy but you have become fixed with an idea: “My wife and happy? – it is impossible!” She may be happy but you cannot see. You have a pattern, you see only that which you believe.And if the wife sees that you are seeing only unhappiness when she is happy suddenly she will become unhappy, because happiness cannot exist unsupported. She may have been smiling and waiting for you. Then she looks at your face and reads your face and sees that you are seeing that she is unhappy. Suddenly the smile disappears and your pattern is proved right. And the wife is doing the same with the husband….Everybody has a fixed pattern, that’s why things become old, look repetitive. Drop this pattern. Boredom comes because of you, the world is not creating boredom. It is one of the most wonderful worlds possible. Everything is new and everything is changing, nothing fixed, no pattern is followed. It is an alive movement. But you have a dead mind, so you see only those things which you have fixed. Drop this mind and start looking afresh.What to do? Meditate. Whenever you see a thing which you feel is old, meditate. Look deeper, look again, think twice, feel, touch, be sensitive. Try to discover something new in it and you will always be enriched, you will always find something new there. Sometimes sit with your wife or with your child, with your friend, and look in the eyes, touch the face as if you are meeting for the first time. Close your eyes, put the light off, touch the face of your wife or your husband and feel the lines, the curves, as if for the first time. And suddenly the boredom will disappear, the person will become new. The person has always been becoming new only you never touched, your touch was dead. You never felt, your feeling was dead.“How is one to overcome boredom?” The first thing to remember, drop your pattern; your mind creates the boredom. And then you will feel mystery all around you. Every day you go to the table, you take your food – it has become a routine. Tomorrow, or this very night when you are eating, close your eyes. First feel the bread with your hands, smell it – you have never smelled it. Touch it on your cheek – you have never touched it. And be slow, so you can feel and you can absorb. And then eat it, then taste it. Chew it as much as possible.It should be the rule that while drinking water, eat it, and while eating food, drink it. Chew it so much that it becomes just like water and you can drink it. And when you drink water, don’t drink it abruptly, don’t just throw it down. Taste it. When you are thirsty just feel the water on your tongue, in your throat going down, the thirst disappearing – the feel of it. And even ordinary food can become wonderful. An ordinary woman can give you all the mysteries that any Cleopatra can give. An ordinary man is all – because ordinariness is just in your mind; otherwise everybody is extraordinary, everybody is unique. But you have to discover it.Life is not given readymade, it has to be discovered. You get bored because you think life is readymade, somebody is going to give it to you. Nobody is there to give it to you. You have to discover it moment to moment, every day. The discovery must continue to the very end. If you stop discovery you will be bored.You have stopped discovery, long ago you stopped discovery completely. Start again. Start feeling things, persons, try to find out something new always. Wherever you look – in the sky, at the trees, at the market, at the shop – wherever you look just be in a search to see something new. And there is enough, you will never feel a failure. Always the new will bubble up, the life will again become a mystery.And when life becomes a mystery you become religious. A demystified life cannot lead you towards the divine. The divine means the deepest mystery that is hidden in this life.The last question:Osho,Does a buddha ever get bored?That’s impossible, for many reasons. One, a buddha means one who has dropped his past, so he can never feel that anything is old, he can never feel that anything is repetitive. He is new. His mind is fresh and new every moment, he goes on dropping the past, the whole life is a new discovery.Once it happened, a man came who was very angry with Buddha because Buddha asserted something which was against his creed. The man was very angry, he started abusing Buddha. But that was not enough, so he spat on Buddha’s face.Buddha asked the man, “Okay, have you anything more to say?” He wiped his face and asked the man, “Have you anything more to say?”The man could not believe his ears, because he expected some reaction – irritation, anger, hatred. Buddha’s disciples were very angry. When the man had left they said, “This is too much! And we could not do anything because of you. We could have put this man right in his place.”Buddha is reported to have said, “I was feeling sorry for that man and now I am feeling sorry for you. And that man can be forgiven; you cannot be forgiven so easily. You have been with me for so many years. You have not learned a simple lesson.” Buddha said, “I enjoyed that man’s anger. It was so authentic, it was so real; it was not bogus. He was a very authentic man. This is how he felt so he expressed it. He was no hypocrite. You are hypocrites. If you were feeling angry, why didn’t you express it? You have been suppressing. That man was more innocent than you.” Buddha said, “I enjoyed that man’s authenticity. It was his childishness of course – but real.”Next day the man came again. The whole night he must have thought about it and he said, “Sorry.” He felt that he had done something wrong, he felt guilty. Next morning he came, fell down at Buddha’s feet and started crying. Tears were flowing down from his eyes onto Buddha’s feet.Buddha again asked that man, “Have you anything more to say? You are a man of body language; when you were angry you spat – it is a body language. Now you feel sorry, you are crying and weeping and your tears are falling on my feet. But you are authentic and I love your authenticity.”The man said, “I have come just to ask your forgiveness for the wrong act that I did yesterday.”Buddha said, “Forget it. Yesterday is no more. And I am not the same person you spat upon, so how can I forgive you? But I can assure you, the man who was there yesterday was not angry. You were already forgiven at that very moment because I don’t carry anything, I close my accounts every moment. And now this is not the same man, because the consciousness is just riverlike.”Buddha is reported to have said, “As the Ganges is flowing…and if you go to the bank today you will not find the same water that you found yesterday. The water has gone. Consciousness is like a river. So,” Buddha said, “you have come to the same bank again, but the river is not the same. So who will forgive you? But it is good that you ask, the very asking is enough. I am happy – you are authentic, honest.”You cannot make such a man bored. Everywhere he will find something he can enjoy, even your anger he can enjoy. You cannot make this man bored be-cause out of his riverlike consciousness he creates newness everywhere. He never exists with the past.Secondly, only the ego can get bored. If you are not, who is going to get bored? For many years I have been living in one room, so many of my friends come and they say, “Don’t you get bored just in one room?” Ordinarily I never go out – twenty-four hours in one room, almost only sitting in one chair. Their question is relevant. They ask me, “Don’t you get bored? The same room, the same chair – and an empty room, there is nothing in it, nothing even to see – don’t you get bored?”Their question is relevant – but you can get bored only if you are there. So I sometimes tell them, “The room may be getting bored with me – the same person. I am not bored. There is no one who can get bored.” And life is so rich, even in an empty room. And every moment the room is changing, it is not the same. Nothing can be the same – even the emptiness goes on changing, it has its own moods.A buddha has no ego, you cannot bore him. He exists like an emptiness, as if he is not. If you penetrate him you will not find anyone there. The house is vacant, no one lives there really. You can move in a buddha but you will never meet him.One Zen monk, Bokuju, used to say about Gautam Buddha, his own master, “The whole story of Buddha is false. He was never born, he never died, he never walked on this earth, he never preached a single word.” And every day he would go into the temple and bow down before a Buddha statue.So his disciples said, “Are you mad? You go on saying this man is just a myth – he was never born, never died, never walked on the earth, never asserted a single word – so to whom do you go every day? Before whom do you bow down? And we have heard you even praying there; you do prayers, and we have heard that you say ‘Namo Buddhaya’ – so whom do you address?”Bokuju started laughing and he said, “Nobody. This statue is not of anybody. This statue is just of a nobody, of nothingness. And I say he was never born because he was not an ego, he never walked on this earth because who will walk? He never asserted a single word because who will assert?”He’s not saying that really Buddha was not born, he is simply denying any entity there. You cannot say, “An emptiness is born, an emptiness is walking, an emptiness is speaking, an emptiness is dying.” We can say this, this can be said, but there is no substance in it, no ego.Try – if you cannot do anything else, then only do this: commit suicide as far as your ego is concerned. You will never get bored. You will be like an empty mirror. Whatsoever is reflected is always new because the mirror is empty, it cannot compare. It cannot say, “I have seen this face before.”Become the empty mirror, become egoless. And then there is no boredom – all life is a beatitude, a blessing, a deep ecstasy.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 01 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What exactly, in simple words, are you trying to teach? What is your exact message to humanity at large? – Again in simple language that I can understand.Walk without feet,fly without wings andthink without mind.That’s my teaching. It cannot be made more exact than that. Life is so mysterious that you cannot reduce it to exact formulas. That is not possible. That will be unjust and unfair to life. A mystery has to remain a mystery.If you reduce the mystery to a formula, you are being violent to reality. No explanation can explain away life. No fact can contain its truth.You ask me, “What exactly, in simple words, are you trying to teach?” Only some negative things can be said: that I am trying to destroy the mind; that I have come to destroy, not to fulfill – because unless the old mind is utterly destroyed, the new will not be born. It is out of destruction that creativity arises. It is out of death that life blooms.My whole work here consists in destroying the mind and its hold upon you; in destroying the roots of the mind so that you can be free in each moment of your life, so that you can be without a past. To be with a past is to be in a prison. The bigger the past, the more you are burdened with it. The more you are burdened with the past, the more you become incapable of living in the present. Then the present is only a word – you don’t experience it. And truth is always in the present. The past is only memory, and the future, imagination. One is no longer; one has yet to be. Between the two is this small precious moment.And you can be in contact with this precious moment only if there is no mind. The mind means past and future. Either the mind thinks of that which has gone, or of that which is to come; either of yesterdays or of tomorrows.Jesus says to his disciples, “Look at the lilies in the field – how beautiful they are! Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these. And they spin not, they weave not, they work not. They don’t think of the morrow.” What is the beauty of the lilies in the field? They live in the present.Except for man, existence knows no past, no future. Except for man, there is no misery. Except for man, there is no hell. By destroying your mind and your past, I am bringing you back home so Adam can again enter the Garden of Eden.But don’t ask me to be exact – that I cannot do. I cannot do it because I respect life so much. And I cannot be untrue to life. How can I be exact about a roseflower? And how can I be exact about the innocent eyes of a child? And how can I be exact about the beautiful form of a woman? How can I be exact about the clouds in the sky, and the rivers and the mountains and the stars? Life is so elusive, so mysterious, and life is such a flux – everything continuously changing.If you become too exact, you start losing contact with life. You have to be as inexact as life is. You have to be as volatile as life is. You have to be continuously on the move. Life is not a noun – it is a verb. You have to be as much of a verb as life is; it is a process.About dead things you can be exact because they are no longer growing. All their potential is exhausted; there is no more to them. A definition is possible. You can be exact about a corpse, but you cannot be exact about a child. He may be here this moment and the next moment he may be outside in the courtyard. You cannot be exact! But if a corpse is lying there in the room, you can be exact that it will be lying there in the morning too.Life is dynamic. Life is a dynamism. And I teach life itself, so I cannot be exact.That’s where I differ – I differ from theologians, theoreticians, philosophers. They are exact. Their very exactness destroys their beauty and their truth. If they are so exact, they can only be wrong, they cannot be true. How can you define something which is growing? Here you define – and the thing has moved beyond your definition. While you are defining, the thing has been moving beyond your definition. How can you demark something which is expanding? There is no way.And if you demark, then you will start looking at your demarcation and you will start forgetting life – because life will be very disturbing to you. That’s why philosophers don’t look at life; they are never existential. Even the philosophers who call themselves existentialists, even they are not existential. They are speculative. They weave theories in their minds. And they force life to conform to their theories. Life becomes crippled and paralyzed.That’s what Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians have done to truth – they have all paralyzed it. And they feel very sorry: “Why has truth died in the world?” They are the murderers! Who has killed God? Not the atheists, certainly. How can they kill God? They don’t even believe. How can they kill God? They cannot find him. To kill God, you will need to find him first. Who has killed God? – these theoreticians, these people who are very exact, these clever and cunning and calculating people, these mathematicians, these systematizers. Their theory is more valuable than life itself. They become obsessed with theory.I have no theories. I am like a mirror. If it is morning, I say it is morning. If it is no longer morning, I don’t say it is morning – then it is no longer morning! Each moment, I reflect whatever the case is. I live in suchness.And you ask me, “What exactly, in simple words, are you trying to teach?” Why do you ask this question? You would like to cling to some theory. You cannot get hold of me – that is your trouble. You want to catch hold of me.One day, a professor came to see me and he said, “Why don’t you write a small book in which all that you want to say is contained, like the Christian catechism?” That is ugly. To me, that is ridiculous. He wants me to say how many gods there are – one, two, or three? And when did God create the world – four thousand years before Jesus? On what day, in how many days did he create the world? Did he rest on Sunday or not? How many souls there are in the world? Is there rebirth or not? What are the virtues and what are the sins? He wants me to be very definite and clear.It is not possible – because something that is a virtue in the morning may become a sin in the evening. And something that was a sin in the morning may become a virtue in the afternoon – one never knows. Something is true in one context and becomes untrue in another context. Something is beautiful one moment, and the next moment it turns ugly, sour, bitter.Life is not a thing! Things can be defined, matter can be defined. That’s why science is exact and religion can never be exact. The day religion is exact, it is dead. Don’t ask me to be exact. How can one be exact? You can be exact about water, that it evaporates at a hundred degrees temperature, you cannot be exact about man.Man is unpredictable. The higher you go, the more unpredictable you become. A buddha is absolutely unpredictable. You cannot catch hold of him; you cannot have him in your fist. He is like the vast sky. And there are so many nuances and so many colors and so many songs. And there is such variety! How can one be exact? And there is so much contradiction and there is so much paradox – how can one be exact?No, I cannot be disrespectful to life just to provide you with an exact answer. So that you can cling to it, so that you can become knowledgeable? So that you can go back home and say to your people that this is the teaching, this I have learned?The question is asked by Dr. B. P. Arya, from Nairobi. He must be in a hurry to catch hold of what my teaching is and go to Nairobi and tell people, “This is his teaching!” No, I will not allow you that knowledgeability. I destroy knowledge! I don’t help you to become knowledgeable – I help you to become more ignorant, more innocent, because life happens when you are innocent. When you don’t know, you are available: when you know, you are closed.So this is my teaching:Walk without feet,fly without wings andthink without mind.The mind means knowledgeability. Who is asking this question about exact teaching? – the mind. The mind cannot tackle the elusive, the mysterious. The mind can only tackle the arithmetic, the logical. The mind is incapable of understanding a song. The mind can only understand a syllogism. It is the mind that is asking, and I am the enemy of the mind.And you ask, “…in simple words…” No word can contain it. There exists no word that can contain life. There exists no word that can contain love. There exists no word that can contain God.Sufis have ninety-nine names for God. One wonders, why not a hundred? Ninety-nine? They could have created one more. But there is a great message in it. They say, “The real name is left blank, the hundredth, because God cannot be contained in any word.” Ninety-nine are just toys to play with – because you ask, because you cannot be at ease with a nameless God, because you feel uncomfortable. You want some name for God so that you can address him. If God is nameless, you feel impotent – what to do then? How to address…? Where to look for…? What name to repeat?So ninety-nine names are given, but even those ninety-nine names do not indicate anything. They indicate the hundredth, and the hundredth is just no word, emptiness. These ninety-nine names are nothing but ninety-nine names of nothingness, and the hundredth is nothingness itself. Those are toys for children to play with. But they are dangerous toys because the children have forgotten the hundredth completely and they have become engrossed in the ninety-nine.Once a Sufi was staying with me and he used to repeat God’s names, chanting morning, evening, night. And I would ask him again and again “When will you remember God?” And he was a little worried why I asked – he was remembering continuously, morning, evening, night. Two, three days, and I was asking again and again, “When will you remember God?”He said, “What do you mean? I go on remembering him. Can’t you see my lips continuously moving? Can’t you see my rosary? I am moving the beads!”I said, “These are ninety-nine names, but when will you remember God? When will you throw away these beads? When will you stop moving the lips? When will you stop your inner chattering, inner talk, this constant repetition of those ninety-nine names? They have to go – only then does silence descend. Silence is mysterious. And silence cannot be contained in any sound. Truth cannot be forced into a word; the word is so small.”And you ask me, “…in simple words…” Simple or difficult, it makes no difference. All words are equally inadequate. There are not a few words which are less inadequate and a few which are more adequate – all are absolutely inadequate. If you want to know what truth is, you will have to listen to my silence, you will have to listen to my being.And you ask, “What exactly, in simple words, are you trying to teach?” I am not trying – I am simply teaching! Why should I try? But I know from where the question comes: you are always trying. People are trying to love, trying to pray, trying to meditate, and because they are trying, they never love. How can you love when you are trying to love? If you are trying to pray, you cannot pray, because your energy will be moving in your trying. When you are trying to meditate, who will meditate? You are involved in the trying.A Zen master dropped his handkerchief on the floor. A disciple was there and the master said, “Try to pick it up and give it back to me. Try!”And the disciple immediately took the handkerchief from the ground and gave it to the master, but the master dropped it again and he said, “I am saying, try to get it!”Six times the master goes on dropping, and the disciple is puzzled as to what he means. Then suddenly the idea struck him: “The master is saying try to get it.” He asked, “But how can I try? Either I pick it up or I don’t. How can I try?”And the master said, “That’s what you have been doing for three years – trying to meditate. Either you meditate or you don’t! How can you try?”Trying is a device. Trying is a trick. When you don’t want to do a thing, you try. When you want to do a thing, you simply do it!Your house is on fire – do you try to get out? You simply get out! You don’t try – you don’t consult maps, you don’t look into the scriptures. You don’t think, “From where and how should I get out? Whom to ask? Where to find a master who knows how to get out?” You don’t think whether it is right to jump from the window, whether the book of etiquette allows it or not. Should one go from the front door or from the back door? You may even escape from the toilet! It doesn’t matter – when the house is on fire, these things are immaterial, irrelevant. And you don’t try, you simply get out. In fact, you don’t even think; you will think when you are out. Then you will stand under a tree and you will take a good breath and you will say, “Thank God that I managed to get out!” But in fact you were not even thinking when you were getting out of the house. It was so immediate.When you come across a snake on the path, what do you do? Do you try to think how to jump, from where, how to escape? You simply jump! That action is total and that action is not of the mind.That’s what I mean:Think without mind,walk without feet,fly without wings.Move into the immediacy of life.I am not trying to teach: I am my teaching. The way I am, the way I look at you, the way I talk to you, the way I say something or I don’t say something – all that is part. It is not that I am separate from my teaching and trying to teach you. I am my teaching. And if you want to learn, you will have to be in tune with me.Don’t ask such foolish questions.And you ask, “What is your exact message to humanity at large?” Where is humanity? Have you ever come across humanity? You always come across human beings, never across humanity. Humanity is an abstraction, just an empty word. The concrete and the real is the human being, not humanity. Don’t be fooled by such great words.People are befooled. I know a man…He was a colleague: while I was teaching in a university he was also a professor there. He is incapable of love, but he loves humanity. He is incapable of love, but he cannot accept that incapacity. It hurts. He cannot love any human being because his expectations are too great. He asks perfection. Now, you cannot find a perfect human being. This is a trick to protect yourself from love. This is a way to avoid: ask the impossible – it will never be fulfilled and you will never come to know your impotence.He cannot love a woman, he cannot love a man – he cannot love. He is simply cold. And naturally so: he is a professor of logic – very cold. His heart has stopped beating; only his head is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. He is becoming top-heavy. Any day he will topple.He would always say that he loved humanity. I asked him, “How do you manage to love humanity? Just give me a few instances. I would like you to be loving humanity. I would like you to be in love with humanity, but where do you find humanity? I would like to see you holding hands with humanity, embracing humanity, kissing humanity – I would like to see it.”He said, “What are you talking about? Humanity is not a person.”Then what is humanity? Has anybody ever seen humanity? “Humanity at large” means nothing; it is just an abstraction. It is Plato’s idea. It is like you have seen one horse, another horse, another horse, and then you start thinking of the idea of “horseness.” Have you ever come across a person who loves horseness? That will look foolish. Either you love horses or you don’t – but horseness? What is that?And so it is with humanity. You come across this woman, this man, this saint, this sinner, but you never come across humanity. Humanity is just an idea created by the philosophers. But you can become obsessed with the idea and it can function like a protection. It protects that man from falling in love with an ordinary human being. And still he can go on thinking that he is a great lover – he loves humanity at large.I am not concerned with humanity at all. I am not concerned with abstractions. I love human beings. And I have no expectations from them. I simply love them as they are. I don’t ask for perfection. I don’t ask that they should fulfill any conditions. As they are, they are beautiful.The moment you ask anybody to fulfill a condition, you are destroying, you are violent. You are not respecting the person. You are degrading him, you are insulting, humiliating him. If you say, “Be such and then I will love you,” then you don’t know what love is. Love is unconditional.My love is for human beings and my message too is for human beings. I have nothing to do with abstractions like humanity. I deal with the concrete, with the real.You ask, “What is your exact message to humanity at large?” No message for humanity, but for human beings:Walk without feet,fly without wings andthink without mind.For human beings, for you, for him, for her – but not for humanity. Not for Hinduism, not for Mohammedanism, not for Christianity, but for concrete human beings.My message is: Drop the mind and you will become available to existence. Become innocent and you will be bridged with existence. Drop this ego, drop this idea that you are somebody special, and suddenly you will become somebody special. Be ordinary and you will become extraordinary. Be true to your inner being and all religions are fulfilled.And when you don’t have a mind, then you have a heart. When you don’t have a mind, only then does your heart start pulsating, then you have love. No mind means love. Love is my message.The second question:Osho,You have said all enlightened ones, all religions, agree on one thing only. Their disagreements are many, but there is one agreement among all, and that is that man is closed to reality because of his ego – the ego is the only barrier.Why is it that all enlightened ones agree on only one thing when they can experience reality as it is? Would not they agree on many things since they don't have the clouds or barriers of the ego present to color their perceptions?When there are no longer any clouds, when your perception is clear, you see the sky – but the sky is indefinable, indescribable, avachya, unspeakable. Nothing can be said about it, and whatever you do say will be wrong. But the enlightened ones have to say something about it because you go on asking and you are not capable of listening to silence – so they have to say something!Buddha says one thing, Christ says another thing; they are invented things. They cannot agree about those things. That is Buddha’s choice: when he faces you he has to say something to you, to convey something to you, knowing perfectly well that whatever he is saying is going to be misunderstood. But there is no other way to have a communication with you. Even if he wants you to come closer to him, to understand his silence, even if he wants to share his joy with you, he will have to use words to call you closer and closer.Now, it is his choice to use certain words. Christ chooses different words; that is his choice. Patanjali chooses still others, Lao Tzu still others. They don’t agree about those words, they can’t agree. There is no need – they are all arbitrary. They agree about only one thing: drop the ego, drop the mind. About that they all agree.Then what happens? – they have different stories to tell. Those stories are all invented stories; they have nothing to do with reality. They are just compromises with you, just to hold your hand a little longer so you can become infected with the buddha. Just to hold your hand a little longer, a buddha has to talk to you.If he is allowed his own way, he will never talk. Exactly that happened: when Buddha became enlightened, for seven days he remained silent. There was no point in talking. That which had exploded in his being was so vast that there was no way to relate it to others. There was not a single word to indicate toward it. His silence was absolute. The story is beautiful…The gods in heaven became very disturbed, because it rarely happens that a man becomes a buddha, and if Buddha kept quiet then the message would be lost. And there were a few beings who could be helped by him. The gods came to Buddha and prayed to him: “Speak, sir!”Buddha said, “But what is the point? First, whatever I say will not be true.”The gods said, “We know it will not be true, but it will attract a few people and then slowly, slowly you can lead them toward truth. Let them come. If you don’t speak, nobody will ever come – then how will you lead them to silence? Let words be just traps, just traps, to catch hold of people. Let words be just seduction, because people only understand words. Once they are caught in the net of words, then you can take them anywhere you want – but first let them be caught!”Buddha again said, “But they will not understand – they will misunderstand. They have always done that – misunderstanding – they will do that again. What is the point?”The gods said, “But there are a few people, very few, certainly, who can be counted on the fingers – they will understand.”Buddha insisted again. He said, “Those few who will be able to understand me will be able to reach on their own. I don’t think that they really need me. Maybe on their own they will take a little longer, but those who can understand me are aware enough – they will reach the truth on their own. I need not bother about them. And those who will not understand me, why should I bother about them?”The gods were in much difficulty as to how to convince Buddha. They conferred amongst themselves: “What to do? This man seems to be stubborn!” They discussed, argued among themselves, and they brought a legal point. They said to Buddha, “You are right: there are many who will not understand you, who will certainly misunderstand you; for them, your speaking is not needed. And there are a few who will understand you, but they are very few, and you are right: they will reach the truth even without you. But between these two, do you think there is nobody? Between these two there are a few who will not go to truth if they don’t get caught by you. And they will not misunderstand you. They may not be able to understand you immediately, but they will not misunderstand you. There is a category between these two categories: think of those people.”And Buddha could not find anything against it. It looked so logical – and Buddha was a man of logic. He spoke for those few. But whatever he says, there are two things in it: one, the negative part of it. The negative part is: drop the ego, drop the concept of self. About that all enlightened people are in agreement. Once the ego is dropped, then what happens? Then they are not in agreement – not that truth is separate, but truth is vast.Just think: three blind men are told by a physician, “This medicine will help you, it will cure your eyes. One thing is certain,” says the physician, “your eyes have to be cured, your blindness has to be dropped.”Now, the three blind men are cured and they are standing there in the garden, and then they go home and they each relate what they have seen – do you think they will agree about it? They will say the same things? About one thing they will agree, that their blindness has disappeared. But what happened after the blindness disappeared will be totally different. Somebody may have seen the colors of the trees, the rainbow, the sun. Somebody else may not have been interested in the trees and the rainbow and the sun, may have looked at people, the faces, eyes, children laughing, jumping; and somebody else may have seen something else.Those three blind people will agree on one thing, that blindness has to be dropped. But what happens after blindness is dropped will be different – although the world they open their eyes on is the same; but it is a vast world, multidimensional. They will choose according to themselves. And their choice will depend on their likings, dislikings, aptitudes, types.For example, Buddha says, “When the ego is dropped there is no misery.” Just look at his words: no misery. He never uses the word bliss; whenever he says it, he says “no misery.” Now this seems to be a little roundabout. Why should he say “no misery”?Mahavira says “bliss.” “When the ego is dropped, you are utterly blissful.” And Buddha says, “Misery disappears; you are in a state of no misery.” There is a great difference, their choice is different, their framework is different. Mahavira always likes positive words. Buddha always likes negative words.Buddha says that with positive words there is a difficulty, and the difficulty is that they create greed – so he will never use them. For example, if you talk about blissfulness then people become greedy, desire arises. Everybody starts thinking, “I should become blissful! I should have this bliss this Buddha is talking about – I must have it.” And the problem is, if you become desirous of bliss, you will not have bliss. The very desire will be the obstruction.So Buddha says that by talking positively you have destroyed the possibility. The man has become greedier. First he was greedy about the house and the money and the power and the prestige, now he is greedy about God and bliss and sat-chit-anand and truth – but he is still greedy. Now his desire is even bigger. He is more entangled in desire. You have not helped him – you have even harmed him. So Buddha says, “I am not going to use any positive words. All positive words create desire in people’s minds. I will say only that there is no misery.”It has some point, some valuable point in it. You don’t become greedy about no misery. Just think of the words “no misery” – “there will be no misery.” You don’t feel any greed, you don’t feel very enthusiastic about that state of no misery. It does not create desire. And Buddha says that only without desire can that state be attained.But Mahavira also has a point. He says that if you talk about no-misery, no-self, people will not feel enthusiasm. Now, what Buddha thinks is desire… Mahavira thinks that people will not feel enthusiasm: Who feels enthusiasm for no-misery? Why should one meditate for years and years just to attain a state of no-misery? That does not look very appealing. Why should one go into sadhana – into work upon oneself – just to attain a state of no-selfhood? You will not be there. Just to attain no-selfhood, who will bother? People will become unenthusiastic; they will lose nerve, they will not be attracted toward religion. So Mahavira says that he has to use positive words – bliss, freedom, absolute selfhood.Both are right and both are wrong. With words, that is the problem. No word is absolutely right and no word is absolutely wrong – it depends on how you look at those words.That’s why they don’t agree in anything else. Just about one thing they agree: that the ego has to be dropped.The third question:Osho,One day, as you talked about the new commune, I felt as though someone was hitting me again and again in my stomach until I thought I would vomit. Was that you? If it was, what are you up to?Have you ever heard that St. John of the Cross used to vomit during his ecstasies? Vomit can be of infinite significance. It can be a kind of unburdening. It can be not only indicative that the body wants to unburden – it can be indicative of the deeper psyche too because the body and the soul are not separate, they are one.Whatever happens in the body happens in the soul too; whatever happens in the soul happens in the body too – they vibrate together.It happens many times that when your inner being wants to release some garbage, your body will also release some garbage. And when your body releases some garbage, you will feel as if your mind has also become clean. Have you not felt that kind of cleanliness after a good vomit? Have you not felt a quality of calmness after a good vomit? It not only relieves your stomach, it not only relieves your physical system of some poison – corresponding to it, something in your psyche is also released.You say, “…as you talked about the new commune…” The day I was talking about the new commune, many of you felt many things. When I was talking about the new commune, it is natural that you started thinking about yourself – whether you will be acceptable in the new commune, whether you are worthy enough for the new commune. That is natural; for that idea to arise is natural – because the new commune will be the birth of a new man.We will be creating an alternative world, a small alternative world. We will be moving in different dimensions than the people outside. We will be dropping all taboos, inhibitions, repressions. We will be vomiting all that the society has forced on you, that the society has stuffed you with. That’s why the hammering was felt in the stomach.All the languages of the world have such expressions: when you cannot accept something you say, “I cannot stomach it.” When you have to accept something against yourself, you say, “I had to swallow it somehow.” The stomach is not just physical – it is as much psychological as it is physical; it is psychosomatic. That’s why whenever your emotions are disturbed, your stomach is immediately disturbed.A man who is constantly angry cannot have a good stomach. A man who is aggressive cannot have a good stomach. A man who is worried will have ulcers, cannot have a good stomach. The stomach is the place where you are joined together: the soma and the psyche are joined there in the stomach, in the navel. The navel is the meeting point of matter and soul.That’s why in Japan, to commit suicide, people hit just under the navel. The navel is called the hara – that’s why in Japanese, suicide is called hara-kiri.Have you not watched it, observed it, that fear is felt just exactly two inches below the navel? If you are driving and suddenly you see an accident is going to happen and it is beyond your control, where are you hit? Where do you feel hit? – deep in the stomach below the navel.Listening to me on that day, you must have felt this hammering in the stomach because to become real sannyasins you will have to vomit much. You will have to vomit all your education and all your religion and all your culture and all your civilization. To become a real sannyasin you will have to become primally innocent – you will have to become children again.And that is going to be the work in the new commune: to efface all that the society has burdened you with, to make you a clean slate; to make you again wild, to make you again as innocent as children are, as innocent as animals; to make you again as innocent as the trees and the rocks. Certainly, much will have to be vomited: your stomach will have to be cleaned physically and spiritually.Yes, it was I who was hitting – excuse me!The fourth question:Osho,How can I see you, how can I recognize you?An ancient saying:When the sun rises,we know thisnot by staring at it,but because we can see everything else clearly.How do you recognize the sun? You don’t stare at the sun – you look at the trees, you look at the people… You look all around: everything is so clear. Because everything is so clear, you know the sun has risen.The only way to see me is if I can help you to see clearly around yourself. That’s what I am doing here: making things clear, giving you clarity, sorting things out, putting things in their right places, giving you vision and insight.The day you can see things clearly – your desires, your greed, your anger, your rage, your violence, your misery – the day you can see that it is you who are creating all this hell, the day you can see that you have never been out of paradise, that you were just under a nightmare… The deeper you recognize it, the deeper you see it, the deeper your clarity, the more you will see me, the more you will recognize me. There is no other way.I cannot give you any proof. What proof can the sun give to you: “I have come”? Should it bring certificates from a court? Should it quote the scriptures: “Look! In every scripture it is written that I will be coming”? No, that is not the point.That’s what people were asking Jesus. “How should we recognize you? How can we believe that you are the Messiah? Prove it!” And the Christians have been doing that for two thousand years, trying to prove from the Old Testament and other scriptures that “Yes, the old prophets declared this, and this is the man they declared would be coming.”This is foolish. This is absurd. Jesus cannot be proved by any declaration by anybody else. Who are these prophets to declare? And who are these old scriptures? And why should they control? Jesus stands in his own right – and those who want to see him should see him by the clarity that he brings. There is no other way.If I bring some clarity to you, then you have seen me and you have recognized me. Don’t look for any other proof. There is none, and I am not interested in that at all.But it seems easier to have a proof: so that you need not think, so that you need not bother, so that you can accept something because of the old, ancient authorities. No, I stand here on my own feet. I am not standing on anybody’s shoulders. I will not take the help of Buddha. Buddha has declared, “I will be coming after twenty-five centuries,” and the time has come. People write letters to me: “Are you Buddha?” No. I stand on my own feet. I would not like to burden Buddha and stand on his shoulders – that will be so unmannerly. I can stand on my own feet.When the sun rises,we know thisnot by staring at it,but because we can see everything else clearly.Another ancient saying says:There are none so blindas those who do not wish to see.Remember it: if you don’t wish to see, then there is no way. If you wish to see, then you cannot avoid me. Just search for the wish, just search in your inner desire. If you have a passion to see me, then nothing can hinder you – you will be able to see me.But if you don’t want to see me, if you have some investment in not seeing me, not recognizing me, then there is a problem.Somebody has written, “I am a Christian and I cannot believe that you are the Messiah.” Now this is an investment. That’s what the investment was with the Jews: they could not recognize Jesus because they were Jews. Now, you are a Christian and you cannot recognize me. Hindus could not recognize Buddha because he had gone out of the tradition. Buddhists cannot recognize Kabir because he is not a Buddhist.Just a few days ago, a man came to me from far away. And he said, “I have come to you to become a sannyasin because I am a follower of Kabir and you have spoken such beautiful words about Kabir – that’s why I have come.”He was not interested in me at all. I could see that he was not seeing me at all. Just to be respectful to him, I gave him sannyas. And I asked him, “Will you be staying here?” He said, “No, there is no need.” “Would you like to do some meditations?” He said, “I am doing – I am following Kabir.”Now, this man, even though he thinks he has taken sannyas from me, has not even come to me. He is befooling himself. He has only come to me because I have spoken so beautifully on Kabir.There are many who have come to me because I have spoken so beautifully on Christ, or so beautifully on Gurdjieff, or so beautifully on somebody else – but they have not come to me. They are not my people. Even if they are here they will not be able to see me – they have their investments.The last question:Osho,You wonderful, beautiful, marvelous trickster! Here we are – Bodhi, Vidya, and Arup – walking home in the middle of the night, in drunken stupor of punch, beer, French wine, and champagne, after two years of total abstention, just repeating in true Buddhist fashion “Stumbling, stumbling, drunk, drunk” ready to tumble into bed and alcoholic oblivion – and there is the note that suddenly tomorrow is question-and-answer day!And two hours of typing, cutting, and being aware are ahead. And, lo and behold! Where is the drunkenness? Gurdjieff is nothing compared to this. Roars of laughter and clarity in the head. Spelling mistake, spelling mistake.Thank you for the device.This is from Arup.Arup, if you had invited me too, then I would not have troubled you at all. I had to change suddenly. I was going to start a series of talks on Shankaracharya’s atma-bodha – self-knowledge. Looking into the sutras, it looked like an anticlimax to Buddha. The heights that we were flying with Buddha, and then the very ordinary and traditional sayings of Shankaracharya – I felt it would not be good. It would be like falling from the peaks into the valleys. It would be like one had suddenly cut your wings.Buddha was talking of no-self; and Shankaracharya will talk of the self. Buddha was talking of no-knowledge and Shankaracharya will talk of self-knowledge. Shankaracharya’s statements are very, very traditional Hindu.I could have managed, but it would have been too much effort. Hence, I thought it was better to say good-bye to Shankaracharya – and I have said good-bye to him forever!Enough for today.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 02 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Do you believe in you?Do you believe in God?Who is God?No, I don’t believe in me. I cannot, because I am not. There is nobody to be believed in, and nobody to believe in it either.If you believe in yourself, you believe in an illusion. The very belief will prevent you from knowing reality. Once you start believing in an illusion, you start losing contact with the real. To know the real, all illusions have to be dropped – and the greatest illusion of all is the ego, the “I.”You ask me, “Do you believe in you?” No, not at all. That’s why I am able to know.You ask, “Do you believe in God?” No again – because to believe in God is not to know him. Belief is always out of ignorance. Those who don’t know, they believe. If you know, what is the point of believing? When you know, you know!You don’t believe in the morning sun. You don’t believe in the trees and in the mountains. You need not! You know the sun is there. You know the people are there, you know the trees are there. There is no question of belief. Why do you believe in God? – because you don’t know.You substitute belief for knowledge. And you hide your ignorance behind the belief. The belief gives you a pretension of knowing. All beliefs are pretensions; all beliefs are deceptions. Whom are you deceiving? You yourself are deceived.When a man says, “I believe in God,” he is saying he has not been able to know God – that’s all he is saying. He is not strong enough to say it that way. He is not strong enough to see his own ignorance and accept it. Hence, he says, “I believe in God.” What is the need of believing in God if you know?Knowledge never becomes belief; knowledge remains knowledge. Ignorance tries to become belief. Remember always: whenever you believe, it is just to hide your ignorance. It is a cheap knowledge that belief gives.I don’t believe in God – because any relationship of belief is a wrong relationship. I know God, but to know God the only requirement is that I should not be. The moment you disappear, God appears. Only when you are spacious enough to contain him, when you are no longer there occupying the inner space – in fact, an absence of yourself is the presence of God.Remember: you will never meet God. You cannot because the meeting will mean you are real and God is also real – then there will be two realities, not one. And reality is one. If you are, God cannot be. If God is, you cannot be.And the third thing you ask: “Who is God?” God is not a “Who?” He is not a person. God is the totality, the sum total of the whole existence. God is not somebody: God is “allness.”I am God, you are God – everybody is God, all is God. In fact, to use the word God is not right. There is godliness and no God at all. To be really true to reality, godliness is the right word to use, not God. The moment you say “God,” many things arise out of that word.First: God becomes a person – and God is not a person. God is impersonal existence; God is impersonal “beingness.” Once you say “God,” God becomes a “he” – that is male chauvinistic, that is ugly. God is neither a “he” nor a “she.” And if you decide to use “he” or “she,” then “she” is far better – because “she” includes “he,” but the “he” does not include “she.” “She” is far bigger – naturally so. Man is born out of the woman. The woman can contain the man, the man cannot contain the woman. The man has no womb to contain anything.But both are wrong. God is neither man nor woman because he is not a person at all.Then what is God? Don’t ask, “Who is God?” Ask “What is God?” Life is God. Love is God. Light is God. It is an existential experience. You never come across God like an object. You come across godliness – like an inner upsurge. Something blooms in you, and you cannot even find the flower, just a fragrance. God is not a flower but a fragrance.I cannot indicate where God is, who God is. I can simply relate my experience of the fragrance to you.Existence is full of godliness. Everything is divine – the flowers, the birds, the rocks, the rivers. It is not that you have to create a temple for God and a church for God – that is stupid because God is everywhere! For whom are you creating the temple and the church and the mosque? If you want to pray, you can pray anywhere. Wherever you bow down, you bow down to God because none else exists.You will have to understand my language. Belief is a dirty word here. And by belief you are prevented from knowing; you are not helped. It is because of belief that man is divided. It has not helped man’s spiritual growth; it has been one of the greatest barriers. It is belief that divides you as a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. It is belief that divides the earth. It is belief that creates wars.The moment you believe, you are no longer one with humanity: you are a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. You have become ugly, you are poisoned. And now you will be continuously fighting for your belief. All these people fighting for their beliefs are blind people fighting for their belief in light – and nobody knows what light is.I have heard…A policeman was walking his beat when he saw two men fighting and a little boy standing alongside them crying, “Daddy, Daddy!”The officer pulled the two men apart and, turning to the boy, asked, “Which one is your father, lad?”“I don’t know,” the boy said, rubbing the tears from his eyes, “That’s what they’re fighting about.”Do you really know who God is? You don’t know even who you are – how can you know who God is? You have not even become acquainted with the closest reality that is beating in your heart, that is breathing in you, that is alive in you – and you are thinking to become acquainted with the totality of existence? The infinite, the vast, the eternal? And you have not even been able to have a taste of your own being. You have not even tasted a single drop of the sea, and you want to taste the whole sea?And you never go to the sea! You go to the scriptures. You never go to the sea – you go to the priests. And then you create belief, and the belief comes out of your fear, not out of your love, not out of your knowing, not out of your experience – it simply comes out of your fear. You believe because alone you feel afraid; because you are childish, you want somebody to hang on to, to cling to. You need a father figure, so that you can always look up to him, so that you can always throw the responsibility, so that you can always cry and weep and remain helpless.It is out of your fear that you have created God. And a God created out of fear is ill, it is pathological. It will not bring you well-being: it will make you more and more pathological.The so-called religious man is almost pathological; he is neurotic. Go to the monasteries, look around with open eyes, and you will be simply surprised that in the name of religion a thousand and one kinds of pathologies are practiced. People don’t become healthy and whole – they become more and more helpless, more and more frightened, more and more eccentric. Of course, their neurosis is such that it is respected.Freud is right when he says that religion is a collective neurosis. I agree with him. The so-called religions are neurotic. If a single person behaves in that way, you will think he is mad; but if a big crowd behaves in that same way, you think it is religious.Just the other night I was talking about a follower of Mahatma Gandhi; his name was Professor Bhansali. He took a vow of silence. Now, the real silence never arises out of vows. The very phenomenon of the vow indicates that the silence is imposed, false, pseudo, violent; otherwise, there is no need to take a vow. If you have understood the beauty of silence, you will simply be silent. Why take a vow? Why decide for tomorrow? Why say that “From now onward I will remain silent and I will not speak a single word”? Against whom are you taking the vow?If you have known the beauty of silence, if you have experienced the joy of it, if you have melted in it, if you have flown in it, what is the point? You never take a vow that “I will love my whole life – I take the vow.” You don’t take a vow that “I will eat my whole life.” You don’t take a vow that “I will go on breathing till I die.” This will look foolish. You enjoy love – there is no need to take a vow. People take vows for celibacy, not for love. Why? – because celibacy is unnatural, imposed. When celibacy is also natural, spontaneous, no vow is taken.Now this man, Professor Bhansali – I knew the man – took a vow of silence, went to the Himalayas. For two years, three years, he remained in silence. It was a hard struggle; it was a continuous fight with himself – it was repression, great repression. He must have become split: the one who is trying to impose the vow and the one, the natural one, who wants to have a little chit-chat with people, or to talk, or to relate, communicate.One night he was sleeping and somebody in the darkness walked over him. He was fast asleep. In sleep you cannot remember your vow. He shouted, “Who are you? Are you blind or something? Can’t you see I am sleeping here?” Then he remembered that he had broken his vow. Naturally, he felt very guilty; great guilt arose in him. He had taken a vow and he had broken it! And he was really a masochist – otherwise, why should one take the vow of being silent?Talking, communicating to people is such a joy. Why should one become enclosed in one’s being? This is morbid. But now he was guilty – to punish himself he started eating cow dung. But that was not enough. To punish himself, he sewed up his lips with copper wire. Even that was not enough – insanity knows no limits. He jumped into a cactus bush and rolled naked, thousands of thorns in his body, and he would not allow the thorns to be removed by anybody. There were wounds and wounds all over the body.But he became very famous – he became a mahatma. People started coming toward him, worshipping him. Now, what will you call this man? Will you call him a mahatma? If you have any senses left in you, you will call him pathological. He needs psychiatric treatment, maybe electric shocks; he needs psychoanalysis. But he was a famous disciple of Mahatma Gandhi – just next to Mahatma Gandhi.This has been happening down through the ages. There have been Christian saints who have been beating themselves every morning, wounding their bodies; and people would come to worship them and to see who was wounding himself more. And the person who was wounding himself more than others, of course, was a greater saint.Now, these people who were wounding themselves, killing themselves slowly, they were pathological; and the people who used to come to see them, they were also pathological. The saints were masochists and the onlookers and the worshippers were sadists – they were both in a subtle ill state of affairs.There have been saints who cut off their genital organs. There have been women saints who cut off their breasts. What will you call these people? But they live according to the belief – they are believers.Man has to get rid of all this type of stupid religiousness. Man has to get rid of all this nonsense that has persisted down the ages. It is because of this nonsense that religion has not become part of everybody’s life.No, religion need not be based on belief. Religion has to be based on experience – not on fear but on love; not on negation of life but on affirmation of life. Religion has not to be a belief – it has to be a knowing, an experiencing. That’s why I say belief is a dirty word here. Knowing, loving, being – these are real words.And, belief hinders them: you cannot know if you believe, you cannot love if you believe, you cannot see if you believe. And remember: I am not saying that you have to disbelieve, because disbelief is again belief. The atheist and the theist are not different – they are in the same boat, they are fellow travelers. The theist believes God is, the atheist believes God is not – but both believe. Their beliefs are antagonistic, but as far as belief is concerned both are believers. There is not much difference.What I am saying is that neither belief nor disbelief is needed – because you don’t know, so how can you believe? And you don’t know, so how can you disbelieve? When belief and disbelief are both dropped, there is silence. When belief and disbelief have both disappeared, you are open to truth; then you don’t have any prejudice, then your mind is no longer projecting. Then you become receptive.Neither believe nor disbelieve. Just be watchful, receptive, open – and you will know.And what you call that knowing does not matter – whether you call it God, or you call it enlightenment, or you call it nirvana, does not matter. These words are just words. Any word will do: xyz will do. But first you have to get rid of belief and disbelief.Getting rid of belief and disbelief, you get rid of the mind. And only a state of no-mind comes to know. The state of no-mind is blissful.The second question:Osho,Isn't Shankaracharya enlightened? Then why did you drop the proposed series of talks on him?He is enlightened, perfectly enlightened. My dropping of the proposed series of talks does not mean that I am saying he is not enlightened. But his expression is run of the mill, very ordinary, mundane, traditional, conventional. His expression of his experience is ordinary.Buddha’s expression is extraordinary. Buddha’s expression is special. That does not mean that their experiences are lower or higher – no. Enlightenment is enlightenment – there is no higher, no lower. What Buddha knows, Shankaracharya knows.It is like this: you go to the Himalayas; you see the beauty of the Himalayas and the virgin silence, and those peaks covered for millions of years by pure snow – you feel it in every pore of your being; your every fiber vibrates with that benediction that the Himalayas is. You come back and somebody asks, “Would you please paint a little picture so I can see something of your experience? I have not been fortunate enough to go to the Himalayas, but can’t you paint a little picture?” Now there will be differences.If a van Gogh had gone to the Himalayas, he would have painted a totally different kind of picture; if you paint, it will not be a van Gogh – you don’t know how to paint. Still you have been to the Himalayas as much as van Gogh has.Or somebody says to you, “Can’t you sing a song about your experience?” Now, songs will be different…they are bound to be different. A poet will be able to sing beautifully, will be able to compose poetry. Your poem will not be much of a poem; at the most a limerick – it cannot be great art. It will depend on your skill.Buddha is a van Gogh of that world, so is Tilopa, so is Saraha, so is Hakuin. These are aristocrats of that world. Shankara is ordinary. Even when I chose him, I had chosen very reluctantly. I was thinking to drop many sutras. There are a few diamonds, but ninety-nine percent is rubbish. If you search deep enough you will find a few diamonds, but ninety-nine percent is valueless.Buddha’s sayings are all diamonds – you will not find any rubbish at all. In Shankara you may be able to miss the diamonds, but in Buddha it is impossible to miss, it is almost impossible to miss. You can miss one, you can miss two, you can miss three – how can you miss so many diamonds? A row of diamonds?Shankara is as enlightened as Buddha is, but his expression is mediocre. That’s why he has impressed the Indians very much! Buddha has not impressed them; Buddha remained so high that he passed over their heads. Shankara has impressed them very much. Shankara is one of the most important names in Hinduism. Buddha has no place. What happened?The mediocre mind found Shankara very appealing, close; there was some affinity between Shankara and the mediocre mind. And the crowd is mediocre. To understand Buddha you will have to become an individual; to understand Shankara will be difficult if you are an individual – you will have to be of the crowd.Shankara’s statement is for the crowd. He went deep into the Indian mind; he impressed the Indian mind very much.Buddha disappeared. The Indian mind lost track of Buddha; there was a great distance. But if you want to go to the Himalayas, why not go to Everest?That’s why I dropped that series.The third question:Osho,Why are parents so cruel to their children? Is there any sense in making them responsible? And how can one avoid making the same mistake?Parents are cruel to their children because the parents have some investment in them. The parents have some ambitions they would like to fulfill through their children – that’s why they are cruel. They want to use the children. The moment you want to use somebody, you are bound to be cruel. In the very idea of using somebody as a means, cruelty has entered, violence has come in.Never treat another person as a means because each person is an end unto himself.Parents are cruel because they have ideas: they want their children to be this and that. They would like their children to be rich, famous, respected; they would like their children to fulfill their unfulfilled egos. Their children are going to be their journeys.The father wanted to be rich but could not succeed, and now death is approaching; sooner or later he will be cut off from life. He feels frustrated: he has not yet arrived. He was still searching and seeking, and now comes death – this looks so unjust. He would like his son to carry on the work because his son represents him. He is his blood, he is his projection, his part – he is his immortality. Who knows about the soul? Nobody is definite about it. People believe, but belief is out of fear, and deep down the doubt remains.Each belief carries the doubt in itself. Without the doubt there cannot be any belief. To repress the doubt, we create the belief – but the doubt remains gnawing in the heart like a worm in an apple; it goes on eating inside you, it rots you from the inside. Who knows about God and who knows about the soul? They may not be.The only immortality known to man is through children – that is actual. The father knows: “I will be living in my son. I will be dead, soon I will be under the earth, but my son will be here. And my desires have remained unfulfilled.” He imposes those desires, implants those desires, in the consciousness of his son: “You have to fulfill them. If you fulfill them, I will be happy. If you fulfill them, you have paid your debts to your father. If you don’t fulfill them, you have betrayed me.”This is from where cruelty comes in. Now the father starts molding the child according to his desire. He forgets that the child has his own soul, that the child has his own individuality, that the child has his own inner growth to unfold. The father imposes his ideas. He starts destroying the child.And he thinks he loves: he loves only his ambition. He loves the son also because he is going to become instrumental; he will be a means. This is what cruelty is.You ask me, “Why are parents so cruel to their children?” They cannot help it because they have ideas, ambitions, desires – unfulfilled. They want to fulfill them, they want to go on living through their children. Naturally, they prune, they cut, they mold, they give a pattern to the children. And the children are destroyed.That destruction is bound to happen – unless a new human being arises on the earth, who loves for love’s sake; unless a new parenthood is conceived: you love the child just for the sheer joy of it, you love the child as a gift from God. You love the child because God has been so…such a blessing to you. You love the child because the child is life, a guest from the unknown who has nestled into your house, into your being, who has chosen you as the nest. You are grateful and you love the child.If you really love the child, you will not give your ideas to the child. Love never gives any ideas, never any ideology. Love gives freedom. You will not mold. If your child wants to become a musician, you will not try to distract him. And you know perfectly well that being a musician is not the right kind of job to be in, that he will be poor, that he will never become very rich, that he will never become a Henry Ford. Or the child wants to be a poet and you know he will remain a beggar. You know it, but you accept it because you respect the child.Love is always respectful. Love is reverence. You respect because if this is the desire of existence to be fulfilled through the child, then let it be so. You don’t interfere, you don’t come in the way. You don’t say, “This is not right. I know life more, I have lived life – you are just ignorant of life and its experiences. I know what money means. Poetry is not going to give you money. Become a politician, rather! Or at least become an engineer or a doctor.” And the child wants to become a woodcutter, or the child wants to become a cobbler, or the child simply wants to become a vagabond and he wants to enjoy life, rest under trees and on the sea beaches, and roam around the world.You don’t interfere if you love. You say, “Okay, go with my blessings. Seek and search your truth. Be whatever you want to be. I will not stand in your way. And I will not disturb you by my experiences – because my experiences are my experiences. You are not me. You may have come through me, but you are not me – you are not a copy of me. You are not to be a copy of me. You are not to imitate me. I have lived my life – you live your life. I will not burden you with my unlived experiences. I will not burden you with my unfulfilled desires; I will keep you light. And I will help you – whatever you want to be, be with all my blessings and with all my help.”Children come through you, but they belong to existence, they belong to the totality. Don’t possess them. Don’t start thinking as if they belong to you. How can they belong to you? Once this vision arises in you, then – then there will be no cruelty.You ask, “Why are parents so cruel to their children? Is there any sense in making them responsible?” No, I am not saying there is any sense in making parents responsible – because they have suffered because of their parents, and so on and so forth. Understanding is needed. Finding scapegoats is of no help. You cannot simply say, “I am destroyed because my parents have destroyed me – what can I do?” I know parents are destructive, but if you become alert and aware you can get out of that pattern that they have created and woven around you.You always remain capable of getting out of any trap that has been put around you. Your freedom may have been encaged, but the freedom is such, is so intrinsic, that it cannot be utterly destroyed. It always remains and you can find it again. Maybe it is difficult, arduous, hard, an uphill task, but it is not impossible.There is no point in just throwing off the responsibility because that makes you irresponsible. That’s what Freudian psychoanalysis has been doing to people – that is its harm. You go to the psychoanalyst and he makes you feel perfectly good, and he says, “What can you do? Your parents were such – your mother was such, your father was such, your upbringing was wrong. That’s why you are suffering from all these problems.” You feel good – now you are no longer responsible.Christianity has made you feel responsible for two thousand years, has made you feel guilty, feel that you are the sinner. Now psychoanalysis goes to the other extreme: it simply says you are not the sinner, you are not to feel guilty – you are perfectly okay. Forget about all guilt and forget all about sin. Others are responsible!Christianity has done much harm by creating the idea of guilt – now psychoanalysis is doing harm from the other extreme, by creating the idea of irresponsibility.You have to remember: the parents were doing something because they were taught to do those things – their parents had been teaching them. They were brought up by parents also; they had not come from heaven directly. So what is the point of throwing the responsibility backward? It doesn’t help; it will not help to solve any problem. It will help only to unburden you from guilt. That is good, the good part; the beneficial part of psychoanalysis is that it unburdens you from guilt. And the harmful part is that it leaves you there; it does not make you feel responsible.To feel guilty is one thing: to feel responsible is another thing. I teach you responsibility. What do I mean by responsibility? You are not responsible to your parents, and you are not responsible to any God, and you are not responsible to any priest – you are responsible to your inner being. Responsibility is freedom! Responsibility is the idea: “I have to take the reins of my life in my own hands. Enough is enough! My parents have been doing harm – whatever they could do they have done: good and bad, they have done both. Now I have become a mature person. I should take everything in my own hands and start living the way it arises in me. I should devote all my energies to my life now.” And immediately you will feel a great strength coming to you.Guilt makes you feel weak: responsibility makes you feel strong. Responsibility gives you heart again, confidence, trust.That is the meaning of sannyas. Sannyas wants you to be free from Christianity, Hinduism, Jainaism, Mohammedanism, and sannyas wants you to be free from Freudian psychoanalysis and things like that too. Sannyas wants you to live your life authentically, according to your innermost voice, not according to any other voice from anywhere. Not according to the Bible or according to the Koran. If God has spoken in a certain way in the Koran, it was specifically meant for Mohammed, not for you. It was God’s dialogue with Mohammed, not with you. You will have to find your own dialogue with God. You will have to find your own Koran.If Jesus has spoken those beautiful words, they are out of the dialogue that happened between him and the totality. Now don’t go on repeating them. They are meaningless for you. They are not born in you, they are not part of you. They are like a plastic flower: you can bring a plastic rose and hang it on a rosebush, saying, “Yes, they are like that” – it is not the same as when a roseflower comes out of the rosebush itself.You can deceive people. Those who don’t know may be deceived. They may see so many beautiful flowers blooming on the rosebush, and they are all plastic. But you cannot deceive the rosebush – you cannot deceive yourself. You can go on repeating Jesus, but those words have not been uttered in your ears by God; they are not addressed to you. You are reading a letter addressed to somebody else. It is illegal: you should not open that envelope. You should search and find your own relationship with the totality.That relationship I call responsibility. Response means the spontaneous capacity to relate. Response means the capacity to respond to life situations according to your heart, not according to anybody else. When you start feeling that, you become an individual. Then you stand on your own feet.And remember, if you stand on your own feet, only then will you be able to one day walk without feet and fly without wings. Otherwise not.And you ask, “And how can one avoid making the same mistakes?” Just try to understand those mistakes. If you see the point, why they are committed, you will not commit them. Seeing a truth is transforming. Truth liberates. Just see the point, see why your parents have destroyed you. Their wishes were good, but their awareness was not good; they were not aware people. They wanted you to be happy, certainly, they wished you all happiness. That’s why they wanted you to become a rich man, a respected man; that’s why they curbed your desires, cut your desires, molded you, patterned you, structured you, gave you a character, repressed many things, enforced many things. They did whatever they could. Their wish was right: they wanted you to be happy, although they were not aware of what they were doing, although they themselves had never known what happiness is. They were unhappy people – and unaware.Their wish was good – don’t feel angry about them. They did whatever they could. Feel sorry for them, but never angry at them. Don’t feel any rage. They were helpless; they were caught in a certain trap. They had not known what happiness is, but they had some ideas that a happy person is one who has much money. They worked for it their whole lives; they wasted their whole lives in earning money, but they remained with that stupid idea that money brings happiness. And they tried to poison your being too. They were not thinking to poison you – they were thinking they were pouring elixir in you. Their dreams were good, their wishes were good, but they were unhappy people and unaware people – that’s why they have done harm to you.Now be aware. Search for happiness. Find out how to be happy. Meditate, pray, love. Live passionately and intensely. If you have known happiness, you will not be cruel to anybody – you cannot be. If you have tasted anything of life, you will never be destructive to anybody. How can you be destructive to your own children? You cannot be destructive to anybody at all.If you have known awareness, then that’s enough. You need not ask, “And how can one avoid making the same mistakes?” If you are not happy and aware, you cannot avoid making the same mistakes – you will make the same mistakes! You are bound to, you are doomed to make the same mistakes.So I cannot give you a clue as to how to avoid – I can only give you an insight. The insight is: your parents were unhappy – please, be happy. Your parents were unaware – be aware. And those two things – awareness and happiness – are not really two things but two aspects of the same coin.Start by being aware and you will be happy! And a happy person is a nonviolent person.And always remember: children are not adults; you should not expect adult things from children. They are children! They have a totally different vision, a different perspective. You should not start forcing your adult attitudes upon them. Allow them to remain children because the childhood will never be again; and once lost, everybody feels nostalgia for their childhood, everybody feels those days were days of paradise. Don’t disturb them.Sometimes it is difficult for you to accept the children’s vision – because you have lost it yourself. A child is trying to climb a tree; what will you do? You immediately become afraid – he may fall, he may break his leg, or something may go wrong. And out of your fear you rush and you stop the child. If you had known what joy it is to climb a tree, you would have helped so that the child could learn how to climb trees. You would have taken him to a school where it is taught how to climb trees. You would not have stopped him. Your fear is good – it shows love, that the child may fall, but to stop the child from climbing the tree is to stop the child from growing.There is something essential about climbing trees. If a child has never been doing it, he will remain poor, he will miss some richness for his whole life. You have deprived him of something beautiful, and there is no other way to know about it. Later on it will become more difficult for him to climb a tree, it will look stupid or foolish or ridiculous.Let him climb the tree. And if you are afraid, help him, go and teach him. You also climb with him! Help him learn so he doesn’t fall. And once in a while, falling from a tree is not so bad either. Rather than being deprived forever…The child wants to go out in the rain and wants to run around the streets in the rain, and you are afraid he may catch a cold or get pneumonia or something – and your fear is right! So do something so that he is more resistant to colds. Take him to the doctor; ask the doctor what vitamins should be given to him so that he can run in the rain and enjoy and dance, and there is no fear that he will catch cold or will get pneumonia. But don’t stop him. To dance in the streets when it is raining is such a joy. To miss it is to miss something very valuable.If you know happiness and if you are aware, you will be able to feel for the child, how he feels.A child is jumping and dancing and shouting and shrieking, and you are reading your newspaper, your stupid newspaper. And you know what is there – it is always the same. But you feel disturbed. There is nothing in your newspaper, but you feel disturbed. You stop the child: “Don’t shout! Don’t disturb me! Daddy is doing something great – reading the newspaper.” And you stop that running energy, that flow – you stop that glow, you stop life. You are being violent.And I am not saying that the child has always to be allowed to disturb you. But out of a hundred times, ninety times you are unnecessarily disturbed. And if you don’t disturb him those ninety times, the child will understand. When you understand the child, the child understands you – children are very, very responsive. When the child sees that he is never prevented, then when once you say, “I am doing something, please…” the child will know that it is not from a parent who is constantly looking to shout at him. It is from a parent who allows everything.Children have a different vision.“Now, I want it quiet” said the teacher, “so quiet you can hear a pin drop.”A deep silence descended on the classroom. After about two minutes an anguished voice from the back shouted, “For Pete’s sake, let it drop!”It was the little boy’s first day at school, and as soon as his mother had left him, he burst into tears. Despite all the efforts on the part of his teacher and the headmistress, he went on crying and crying until finally, just before lunch, the teacher said in exasperation, “For heaven’s sake, shut up child! It’s lunchtime now, and then in a couple more hours you’ll be going home and you’ll see your mummy again.”At once the little boy stopped crying, “Will I?” he said. “I thought I had to stay here until I was sixteen!”They have their vision, their understanding, their ways. Try to understand them. An understanding mind will always find a deep harmony arising between him and the child. It is the stupid, the unconscious, the non-understanding people, who go on remaining closed in their ideas and never look at the other’s vision. Children bring freshness into the world. Children are new editions of consciousness. Children are fresh entries of divinity into life. Be respectful, be understanding.And if you are happy and alert, there is no need to be worried how to avoid, how not to commit the same mistakes – you will not commit. But then you have to be totally different from your parents. Consciousness will bring that difference.The fourth question:Osho,I came to Pune because you are a master and I have been seeking for one for a long time. How can I find out whether you are my master? Will I only have to believe what you say about that or will I be able to recognize you? Somehow I am waiting for something to happen which will make my inner voice say “Yes” and surrender. My relationship with you just seems to be in my head, but I don't feel that I can do anything to change it. Can you?First, you say, “I came to Pune because you are a master…” Don’t believe rumors. And you say, “…I have been seeking for one for a long time.” Why are you so against a master? Why are you seeking for so long a time? Why should you be so interested in a master? For what? You should seek yourself.If you seek yourself, you will find the master. The ancient saying is: When the disciple is ready, the master appears. How can you seek a master? You will not even be able to recognize one. You may come across…you may not be able to see.Seek your own being. Go deeper into your own being; go deeper into your own silence. And then suddenly, when you need a master, he will appear – he always appears.Now, you are on a wrong track. And if you are looking too much for a master, you will go on missing. At least while you are here for a few days, drop that search. Just be here and you may find. Meditate, dance, sing, and be here. Forget that search. Don’t go on looking from the corner of your eye for the master. Your very look, your very effort, your seeking, will prevent you. The very desire comes in between.The relationship with a master is possible only when there is no desire. In a non-desiring mind it happens.And you ask, “Will I only have to believe…?” No not at all. I am the last person to tell you to believe in me. Just be here with me, that’s enough. If you are here with me, I am going to happen to you. It is a promise – but don’t seek and search.Enough for today.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 03 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is herenow? Does thought form part of it?If so, then all-time and all-things are now. Or, is herenow only in no-mind?Thought is the capacity of not being here – so thought cannot exist in the herenow, it cannot be part of it. That is impossible. Thought can only be either of the past, or of the future. Thought can never be of the present; that is implied in the very process of thinking – it is intrinsic to it.The moment you think, either you think of the past, or you think of the future. It may be the immediate past, but it is still the past – it is never the present, it cannot be the present.Thought needs space. And the present moment has no space in it. Thought creates the past and the future to live in. The bigger the past, the more easily thought can move; the bigger the future, again, the more easily thought can move. The present is not capable of giving that space for thought to move.The present moment is a moment of no-mind. Whenever you are in the present, you don’t function as a mind. Your body is in the present, but your mind is never. Your body is always in the present – that’s why the body is so beautiful and the mind is so ugly.And, down the ages, you have been taught to be with the mind and against the body. That has been the greatest calamity humanity has suffered up to now. If a new humanity is to be, we will have to put things right – you have to be with the body and not with the mind.Use the mind, but never get identified with it. The mind is a good slave, but a very bad master. The body is wiser.When you are hungry, you are hungry herenow; you cannot be hungry in the future and you cannot be hungry in the past. When you are feeling thirsty, your throat is feeling it right now – it is immediate, it has a presence. But your mind is running in all directions, so your body and mind never meet. That’s how you have become split, that’s how schizophrenia has entered the very being of man.Get out of the mind and get into the body. The more you are in your body, the more natural you will be. The more you are in the body, the closer to God you will be.The mind is just a device. Good, helpful, can be used in a thousand and one ways. But it is from there that the problem arises – because it can be used in so many ways, you start becoming dependent on it and by and by you lose consciousness of the present and you become focused with the mind. Then your life will be dry, a wasteland.And suddenly questions will arise: “What is the meaning of life?” – because the mind cannot supply any meaning. The mind cannot give you any end. The mind cannot help you to live. It cannot give you life. It can give you technology, it can give you bigger machines, it can give you more affluence – but it cannot give you more life, more being.So riches go on growing, technology goes on becoming more and more sophisticated, and man becomes poorer and poorer. This is strange, that outside riches go on accumulating and inside man becomes a beggar. Never before in the history of man was there such inner emptiness, such inner meaninglessness, such inner poverty.The reason is: significance comes from the body – the body is the body of God. The mind is man-created: the body is still in God, it still exists in God, it still breathes God.You ask, “What is herenow?” Now, if any mind answer is given to you, that won’t be the right answer – because anything that the mind can say as a definition of herenow will be wrong; anything whatever, it will be wrong. The mind knows nothing of herenow. How can it define it? Just be silent; for a moment, just be – and it is there.This is herenow! I will not give you a definition because definitions come from the mind, and definitions will be taken by the mind, and herenow is an existential experience: these trees, this bird calling, and the traffic noise, and the train, and the sun and the trees, and you and me, and this silence, this presence.When not even a single thought is stirring in you, when the screen is utterly empty, not even a single picture moves… This is – and this cannot be defined. You can experience it; it is available. It is everybody’s right to experience it, but how to define it? If you try to define it you will have to bring in past and future. Go to the dictionaries, go to the Encyclopedia Britannica – what will they say? They will say the present is a moment between the past and the future – that’s the only way to define it. Now, can there be a more wrong way to define the present? If you have to bring in past and future into the definition, if you cannot define the present without bringing past and future into it, how are you going to define it?The present is neither past nor future – and it is not between the two! It cannot be between the two because the past is no more and the future is not yet. How can the present be between two nonexistentials? The present is existential; how can existence be defined by something which is not? That is utter absurdity! But that’s where logic moves. Logic appears very logical, but remains rooted in absurdity.The present is not between the past and the future: the present is beyond past and future. The present is eternity. The present is not even part of time. And it is not that time passes: we pass, time remains; we come and go, time remains. It is not that the moment that was here just a moment before has become past, no. It is a single moment, utterly one. It is eternity. It is not passing, it is not going anywhere.Have you not observed some time, sitting in a train, waiting on a station, and your train starts moving and you feel the other train has started moving which is just on the other track? Or, the other train starts moving and you feel your train has started moving, and then you look closely and you find that, no, your train is not moving, the other train is moving.Time remains there – we go on moving, we change. The ocean of time is there – the fish goes on moving. The movement is in our minds. The mind is movement. Truth is unmoving; it is always the same.Just see: when you were born… Have you changed since then? Yes, on one level you have changed, certainly – your body has grown, you are young or old, and you have lived through so many things, and experiences, and frustrations, and excitements, and ecstasies, and all that life gives. But go deep down: have you really changed on that plane? At the very core of your being, are you not the same? There, nothing has changed. It is where you were, and it is where you will ever be – it is always the same there, it is one climate.On the surface things go on changing. The wheel of the cart goes on moving, but it moves on something which remains unmoving: the axle. You are both the circumference and the axle, the center. Even the cyclone is not there at the center – there is silence. Nothing ever moves there.That is your being. What name you give to it matters not. That center of the cyclone… That center of the cyclone is herenow; it is not part of time. It is eternity.You ask me, “What is herenow?” Feel it. Experience it. That’s what we are doing here. What is meditation? – getting into herenow. What is love? – getting into herenow. What is celebration? – getting into herenow. But no definition is possible.Getting-into is possible, because in fact you have never got out of it. It is there. You can again turn and face it.While making love to a woman or to a man, have you not felt the herenow? If you have not felt it then you have not loved. Making love to a woman, have you not forgotten the past? Has not the past utterly disappeared in that moment? In that moment do you have a past, a history, an autobiography? If you have, then you don’t know how to love. Then you have been just playing the game of love not knowing exactly what it is – you have not loved.While making love, your autobiography simply disappears. There is no longer any past – as if you had never existed. You are not old – in that moment you are virgin newness; in that moment you are born for the first time; in that moment there is rebirth. Love is resurrection. And there is no future. Is there tomorrow? While making love to your woman, are you thinking of tomorrow? Of what you are going to do tomorrow? Then you are not with the woman and you are not in love either. All thinking stops – that’s the joy of love.That’s why I say that sex and samadhi are joined together. Sex is the lowest rung, samadhi is the highest rung, of the same ladder. They belong to the same ladder – sex is the lowest rung, samadhi the highest rung. But the ladder is the same. There is an affinity.Man got the idea of samadhi from two things: sex and sleep. Deep sleep is also on the same ladder. Man became alert to the phenomenon of samadhi, became excited, intrigued, by the phenomena of love and sleep – because in both these moments, time disappears, time stops, the mind stops, thinking no longer functions – and because thinking no longer functions and time stops, there is such ecstasy and such joy. Then man became intrigued: Is it possible to attain this joy without falling into sleep? Because it happens in sleep, but you are not aware of it; it is very unconscious. Only in the morning do you hear the distant sound of it, or the later effects. If you slept deeply in the night, in the morning you feel renewed, rejuvenated – but you had not exactly been there while it was happening. What was it?In sex, you are more aware, but then the sex moment is so small that rather than satisfying you it leaves you very frustrated. The greater the experience of love, the greater will be the frustration that comes in its wake. Remember: only great lovers are frustrated with love; ordinary lovers are not frustrated with love – because the higher the peak, the greater will be the fall. And the peak exists only for a single moment. It comes and it is gone; it is like lightning.And when the peak is gone, you have known the taste of it and now nothing will taste better and everything will look ordinary compared to it, and everything will look mundane. You have experienced something of the sacred. You have experienced something of godliness – God flashed like lightning, but you could not catch hold of his face, you could not figure it out, how he looks, and he was gone. It was so fast and so sudden.Man became interested: Is it possible to prolong that experience? Is it possible to remain in that experience a little longer? Is it possible to go into it a little deeper? Is it possible to have that experience without moving into sex? Because sex by its very nature depends on the other. It is a kind of dependence, and all kinds of dependence destroy your freedom. That’s the eternal fight between the lovers.They are giving something to each other which is immensely valuable, but mixed with poison. They cannot live separately and they cannot live together. If they are separate they start missing the joy that was happening through the other; if they are together, the poison is too much – and one starts thinking: Is the joy worth it? Because you have to depend on the other. When you depend on the other, your freedom is destroyed, your freedom becomes defined, confined, limited. You cannot open yourself as you would like to open. You have always to look to the other and the other’s feelings. You feel prevented, hindered. And the other starts possessing you, the other starts becoming powerful over you – because the other knows that it is through him or her that you feel joy.Man started looking for the same experience without becoming dependent on the other. If it depends only on sexual experience, it cannot last forever. You can have sex once in a while – and what about the other times? All other times you will remain dull and dead. Is it possible to have that joy continuously, as a continuum, like a river always flowing?These were the speculations of man, but they came from sleep and love. In love sometimes it happens, and that is the moment which is called orgasm. If time stops, if thinking stops, and you are utterly herenow, it is orgasmic.This orgasmic experience will give you the taste. I cannot define it, but I can indicate ways to feel it.If you have some aesthetic sense, then some aesthetic experience will give you the taste. Seeing a sunset, if you have the heart of a painter, the heart stops; you start missing beats. The sun is setting, just falling and falling and falling, and a moment more and it will be gone. And all that color in the clouds, all that sublime beauty! And the birds returning back to their homes, and the silence settling on the earth, and the trees getting ready to go to bed, and the whole of nature saying good-bye to the sun… If you have an aesthetic heart, if you are a poet or a painter or a musician, if you know what beauty is, if you are affected by beauty, not so-so but tremendously, if beauty awes you – then you will know what herenow is.Or it happens sometimes listening to music. There is nothing more meditational than music. Or if you can play some instrument yourself, then it is far better – because listening you remain on the periphery, playing you are at the center. If playing some instrument – playing a flute or sitar or guitar – and you are lost into it, absolutely lost into it, time stops, mind is no longer there, a buddha moment arrives, and you know what herenow is.Or if you can dance – which seems to me the most profound experience – if you can dance and dance so deeply that the dancer disappears, only the dance remains, then again you will be herenow.I cannot define it, but I can indicate a few things. You will have to experience it. It is a taste. If you ask me how sugar tastes, how can I define it? I can say it is sweet, but that will not make much sense – it will be a tautology. You were asking what sweet is; I have simply substituted another word for it. If I say to be herenow means to be in the present, I am not saying anything – I am simply substituting another word for it. That’s what the dictionaries go on doing.All dictionaries live on tautologies. And if you look in the dictionary you will be surprised: ask the philosopher or the philologist “What is mind?” and he says “Not matter”; and then ask him “What is matter?” and he says “Not mind.” What is the point of it? You don’t know either. When it comes to defining matter, you use “the mind” as if you know the mind, and you say “Not the mind”; and when it comes to defining the mind you start using “matter” as if you know matter, and you say “Not matter” – but you don’t know either. Now, how can two things themselves undefined, define each other? It is not possible.Ask the philologist who knows words and languages – what does he go on saying? You ask one word, he substitutes another word for it, but the real problem remains.A Zen master was dying and the disciples had gathered. And his whole life he had been talking about herenow – that’s what masters have been doing down through the ages. The disciples asked again, “Master, you are leaving us and we will be left in darkness. Is there any last message so that we can cherish it and remember it forever? We will keep it as a sacred memory in our hearts.”The master opened his eyes. At that moment on the roof of his hut, a squirrel ran making noise – tit tit, teevee, tit tit – and the master raised his hand and said, “This is it!” and died.What is he saying, “This is it”? He is simply indicating. He is simply saying there is nothing to say – there is much to see, but there is nothing to say.You ask, “Does thought form my part of it?” No, thought cannot form part of it. It is asking, “Does darkness form part of light?” Just like that. Darkness cannot form part of light. When light is present, darkness is absent; when light is absent, darkness is present – they never meet. So is the state of mind and herenow – they never meet.Herenow means no-mind. No-mind means no thought. And you know it! Many times it happens to you: there are moments, small, but they are there, when you suddenly see no thought stirring in you, no ripple arising – those are buddha moments. You just have to get more in tune with them, you just have to get deeper into them, you just have to change your emphasis.For example, you read a book. Naturally, you read the words printed on the paper; you don’t see the paper. The paper remains in the background. The words written with the black ink, they are the figure, and the white paper is the background. You may not even see the white paper while you are reading – although it is there. Without it, those words cannot exist; they exist because of it, against it, in contrast to it.It happened…A psychologist did a small experiment. He fixed a big piece of white paper over the whole blackboard, and the students watched. Then he brought his pen and on that big sheet of white paper he made just a small dot, a black dot – just a small one, barely visible. The students had to look very, very closely, only then could they see it. And then he asked, “What do you see?”They all said, “A small dot.”And nobody had seen the white paper – nobody, not a single student out of the fifty, said, “We see a big white sheet of paper over the whole blackboard.” Not a single student said that!They all said, “A black dot.”And he had simply asked, “What do you see?”What happened? Emphasis. Continuously reading, you emphasize the dots, the black marks on the paper; you don’t see the white paper. Just change the emphasis. Start looking at the white paper rather than at the black dot – and that brings great revolution.When two thoughts are moving in you, between the two thoughts there is a gap, an interval, a pause. When two words move in you, between these two words there is a gap again. Just look more into the gaps; become negligent of the words – look at the gaps.Just standing on the road, try an experiment: you are standing on the road and cars are passing; maybe it is an international car rally and cars are passing. One car has gone, another car has gone, another car, but between two cars there are gaps – the road remains empty. Just change the emphasis. Just change the gestalt, as the Germans would like to say – change the gestalt, change the pattern.Start looking at one gap and then another gap. Rather than thinking one car has passed, another car has passed, another car has passed, start looking at the one gap that has passed, another gap, another gap – forget about the cars, start counting the gaps, how many gaps are passing. And you will be surprised – so many gaps are passing and you had never seen them before.Just a change of emphasis: move from the figure to the background. Thoughts are figures, consciousness is the background. The mind consists of figures and no-mind is the background. Just start looking into the gaps. Fall in love with the intervals. Go deeper into them, search more into them – they have real secrets in them. The mystery is hidden there. It is not in the words that pass in your mind; those words are trivia, impressions from the outside. But see on what they pass, those ripples; look into that consciousness. And it is infinite. It is your being. That consciousness is called no-mind.That is the meaning of the English expression “reading between the lines.” Read between the lines and you will become a wise man. Read the lines and you will become an ugly scholar, a pundit, a parrot, a computer, a memory – a mind. Read between the lines and you will become a no-mind.And no-mind is herenow.The second question:Osho,You often say sannyas is to live in the utmost insecurity, but my experience has been different. I have felt more secure in my heart only since taking sannyas. What should I listen to? I am confused.Both things are true – life is very paradoxical. I say to you that sannyas is to live in utmost insecurity, but the moment you start living in utmost insecurity, all insecurity disappears. Then you are secure for the first time.Why does it happen? The moment you accept insecurity, you stop asking for security. The moment you understand that insecurity is the nature of life, the moment you see that asking for security is asking for death… A secure person is a dead person. If you are alive you will have to live in insecurity.Life is insecure, rooted in insecurity. One day you will have to die – how can you be secure? And you love a woman, and the woman is still alive, she can fall in love with somebody else. Nobody knows the ways of life – they are mysterious. And she is still alive; she is not dead. You can trust only a dead woman or a dead man.That’s why the moment people fall in love they start killing each other – to create security. If you have killed the woman she becomes a wife; if you have killed the man he becomes a husband. Now you can be secure. There is security with a husband, but no life; and there is security with a wife, but no life. You have killed her so much that she cannot fall in love again. But remember: she cannot fall in love with anybody else – she cannot fall in love with you either. You have destroyed love.You catch hold of a bird, and you had loved seeing it flying in the sky, it was so beautiful – it was freedom on wings. Now you are afraid: the bird may fly again. So you cut the wings and put it in a beautiful cage. Do you think it is the same bird that you had seen in the sky on the wing, whispering with the clouds? Do you think it is the same bird? It is a corpse, although it breathes. And it will never give you that joy.That joy was not only because of the bird – many, many things were involved in it: the open sky, the clouds, the sun, the wind. The freedom was implied there. Now you have destroyed the freedom, you have taken the sky away; you have taken the bird out of the whole context. Now it no longer has any meaning.You see a beautiful flower on the rosebush, and you cut it and you bring it home, and you put it in a pot on your table – but it is no longer the same flower. You have killed it. It is dying. And you will never see that beauty – because the juice was flowing, the flower was rooted in the earth. The earth was nourishing it and the sun was nourishing it and the wind was playing with it, and the fragrance was there – and all! You have taken it out of context. Now, in your plastic pot you have encaged this beautiful flower, but it is dead.That’s what we go on doing. You love a woman and she was so alive – that’s why! She was pure life. She was joy, she was dance, a song, and you had fallen in love with all those things together. Then you make a prisoner of her. You go to court, you put legal conditions on her – you reduce her from a woman to a wife. This is an ugly phenomenon: to reduce any woman to a wife, to reduce any man to a husband. You have taken away all that was beautiful and glorious, all that was divine.And now you are stuck with the woman and you wonder what has happened. Now you don’t feel so much joy in her being. Now being with her is tedium, boredom. Have you not seen husbands and wives sitting together, how bored they look – utterly bored? If a friend comes or a neighbor, they start becoming a little alive; otherwise, they are utterly bored, looking into each other and finding nothing. They have both killed each other. And, naturally, they are angry too, because how can you forgive your murderer? You cannot.The idea of security brings death in life. Afraid you may catch cold, you don’t go in the rain. Afraid you may harm your body, you don’t go to the playground. Afraid that you may fall from a tree, you don’t climb. Afraid that death may happen, you don’t go to the mountains. Afraid, afraid, afraid – you go on withdrawing yourself from life.A moment comes when you are there, but all life has disappeared. Then you are secure, but at what cost? And the more you make yourself secure, the more fear arises.Have you not seen it? Poor people are less afraid than rich people – naturally, because the rich have much to lose, so much more fear of insecurity. A rich man feels more insecure because communism can come. What does a beggar bother about communism? He says, “Okay, let communism be! It doesn’t matter.” The rich man is always afraid the bank may fail, the business may fail. This may happen, that may happen. He is continuously worried.It is not accidental that the rich man cannot sleep; the rich man suffers from insomnia. It is very rare to find a beggar suffering from insomnia: I have not found any. I have been searching for a beggar who suffers from insomnia – I have not found. That is the rich man’s disease. The beggar has nothing to worry about! He has nothing to lose. The rich man has a thousand and one things to worry about. He goes to bed, but the mind goes on spinning, weaving; it goes on working – a thousand and one things have to be settled, arranged, planned. Something may go wrong – how can he sleep? How can he afford sleep? A rich man is so poor, he cannot afford sleep; only a poor man is so rich that he can afford sleep.Just watch how life functions: the more secure you become, the more afraid, frightened. And when you are more afraid, you want more security. When you have more security, you become more afraid – it is a vicious circle.That’s why I say sannyas is to live in utmost insecurity. What do I mean by saying it? I mean that insecurity is life. There is no life without insecurity. That is the beauty of life, that all can be lost. Hence, the joy of the game. If it is certain that you will win, what joy will be in it? If winning is certain, absolutely certain, there cannot be any joy in it. The more uncertain the victory is, the more joy, the more search for it.Life is insecure. This, when understood deeply, brings a kind of security – then you are no longer afraid. Life is insecure. You know perfectly well you have fallen in love with this woman and this woman can still fall in love because she will still breathe, she will still be alive. Who knows about tomorrow? You are not the only man in the world. What foolishness to think that this woman cannot fall in love with anybody else! She can fall. And because she can fall, love her intensely – because who knows about tomorrow? Tomorrow she may go and may not turn again and may not see you again. This may be your last time – make as much of it as you can.This is the understanding of sannyas, that tomorrow is not certain, only this moment is my moment – I have to live it in totality.And I am not saying that she will leave you, or she has to leave you. In fact, if you love her totally in this moment, how can she leave you? If you have loved her so much, how can she leave you? Out of today will come tomorrow. Out of this moment will follow the next. If this moment has been of such ecstasy, how can she leave you? Out of insecurity, security is born – she cannot leave you. It is impossible to leave you – not because of the law and the court and the marriage and the society, but just because you loved her so much.You have given her the first insight into no-time, no-mind. You have been a door to the divine – how can she leave you? She has already become part of you; you have become part of her. But this is happening on its own: it is unmanaged. Out of insecurity you loved her totally, and out of total love, life becomes secure.So, you are right – what I say is true, what you feel is true too. Sannyas is uttermost insecurity, and once you are a sannyasin you start having a new vision of life. And that new vision knows nothing of insecurity.Because it is such a paradox, the problem arises: “What should I listen to? I am confused.” You need not be confused. Always remember: anything, to be true, has to be paradoxical. Truth is paradoxical. Only lies are not paradoxical. Whenever you see that something is not paradoxical, beware! – there must be some lie.Truth is paradox. That is an absolute quality of truth.The third question:Osho,What is desirelessness? Is it to be totally without desire or to be totally free to have or not have desire?To be totally free of desire will make you dead – you will not be alive any more. That’s what has been taught: “Be desireless!” But what can you do? You can go on cutting desires; the more desires are cut, the poorer your life becomes. If all desires are destroyed, then you have committed suicide, spiritual suicide.No, desire is the energy of life, desire is life. Then what do I mean when I say to be free of desire?The second is my meaning: to be free, totally free, to have or not have desire. Desire should not be an obsession – that is the meaning. You should be capable… For example, you see somebody’s beautiful house, newly built, and a desire arises in you to have such a house. Now, are you free to have this desire or not? If you are free, I will say you are desireless. If you say, “I am not free. This desire persists. Even if I want to drop it, I cannot drop it – it haunts me. I see dreams of that house, I think about it. I am afraid to go on that road because that house creates jealousy in me, that house creates disturbance in me.” If you say, “I am not capable of either having or not having the desire,” then you are not in a healthy shape – then desires are your masters, you are a victim. And you will suffer much because there are millions of things going around, and if so many desires take possession of you, you will be torn apart.That’s how it is happening: somebody has become the prime minister, now you want to become the prime minister; somebody has become very rich, now you want to become very rich; somebody has become a famous writer, now you want to become a famous writer. And somebody is something else, and somebody is something else… And all around there are millions of people doing millions of things. And from every nook and corner a desire arises and jumps on you and takes possession of you, and if you are not capable of saying yes or no you will go mad.That’s how the whole of humanity is mad. All those desires are pulling you in so many directions. You have become fragmentary because many desires have possessed parts of your being and those desires are contradictory too. Then it is not only that you are fragmentary: you become a contradiction. One part of you wants to become very rich, another part of you wants to become a poet – now, this is difficult. It is very difficult to become rich and remain a poet. A poet cannot be that cruel; it will be very difficult for him to become rich.Money is not poetry: money is blood, money is exploitation. A poet worth the name cannot exploit. And a poet worth the name will have some vision of beauty. He cannot be so ugly himself as to deprive so many people just for his desire to hoard money.Now, you want to become a politician, and you also want to meditate; you want to become a meditator too. This is not possible. Politicians cannot be religious. They can pretend to be religious, but they cannot be religious. How can a politician be religious? Because religion means non-ambitiousness and politics is nothing but pure ambition.Religiousness means: I am happy as I am. Politics means: I will be happy only when I am at the top – I am not happy as I am. I have to run and rush, and I will destroy if it is needed. If by right means, okay; if not, then by wrong means – but I have to be at the top, I have to prove myself.A politician naturally suffers from an inferiority complex. A religious man has no complex – inferiority or superiority.Politicians pretend to be religious because that pays in politics. Morarji Desai pretends to be religious – that pays in politics. Now, look at the disgusting thing Jimmy Carter has done: he came to India and the first thing in India, he asked for three hours for prayer. He knows India is a religious country – three hours for prayer? Prayer is nothing to be bragged about. You can do it in your bedroom – three minutes are enough, three seconds are enough, just a single moment is enough, because prayer has nothing to do with time: it needs intensity. Now, a three-hour prayer! Think of God also a little bit: listening to Jimmy Carter for three hours…poor old man! Nobody thinks of God. And what will you say for three hours? You will bore him to death! But knowing that India is a religious country, people will be impressed by the idea.And what can Jimmy Carter do for three hours, what will he pray for three hours? A politician cannot pray even for three minutes; he will be thinking all the time about politics.To be religious means to be non-ambitious, to have no ambitions of being somewhere else, somebody else – to be herenow!Now, if you have these two ideas together, that you want to be a politician and you also want to be a meditator, you will be in difficulty – you will drive yourself crazy. If you are honest, you will go mad; if you are dishonest, then you will not go mad, you will become a hypocrite. That’s what your politicians are.And I am not saying that all those who are in religion are not politicians: out of a hundred there are also ninety-nine who are politicians. They are in a different kind of politics: religious politics. They have their hierarchy; the priest wants to become the pope – again it is politics. Or, the sinner wants to become the saint – again it is politics, again it is an inferiority complex; again, once you have started doing something holy, religious, saintly, you will carry around yourself that ego of “holier than thou.” Then you will have a condemnation of others in your eyes; then everybody is doomed and only you are going to be saved. Then you can look at others with pity: “These people are going to hell.” This is again politics.A religious man knows no ego. He is not even humble – remember, he is so egoless he is not even humble. Humbleness is also a pretension of the ego; the humble person is also trying to be humble and trying to prove that “I am humble”; or even may have ideas deep inside his heart that “I am the most humble man in the world.” Again it is the ego!Many desires will take possession of you and many will be contradictory and you will be pulled apart and you will start falling into pieces, you will lose integrity, you will no longer be an individual.You ask, “What is desirelessness?” Now, these are the two things: you know desirelessness, then you have to cut off your life completely, then everything has to be cut. Then you become a Jaina monk – just an empty shell utterly discontented with everything, with yourself; uncreative, no celebration, no flowers ever bloom. Or you know desirefulness: then you become torn apart. Both are ugly states.The right thing to do is to be so totally free from desire that you can choose, that you are always able to choose: to have or not to have. Then you are really free. And then you will have both the creativity, the celebration, the joy of desires, and the silence and the peace and the calmness of desirelessness.The fourth question:Osho,I know we are not the body – or the “cloud” as you called it. But when I open my eyes I can't help noticing that your toes are turning blue from the cold! Why won't you wear a wrap or a shawl, or why won't you let us put a quilt or something over your legs?This question is from Divya – but there are four other similar questions, all from women sannyasins. Thank you, but you don’t know anything about my toes: they enjoy cold like anything. I understand your sympathy, but from my very childhood I have enjoyed the cold like anything. Just as you enjoy ice-cream, my toes enjoy cold. Don’t feel sorry for them – they are very happy.The fifth question:Osho,You always speak so beautifully of creativity and aesthetics. Will there be work for poets, painters, sculptors, designers, musicians, craftsmen, etcetera at the new commune?Yes, art is going to be the religion of the new commune.And the sixth question:Osho,I do not trust your words. At first I could grab onto a phrase or a theme and hug it to my bosom, paste it on my wall, repeat it as a mantra – “Aha! Now I have a key.” But the next day or the next week you say the opposite.Now I am afraid to listen to you.That is the whole purpose of listening to me: so that you don’t become a hoarder, so that no thought becomes so important to you that it takes possession of you.I would like you to become a no-mind. And those phrases, however beautiful they are, if you hug them to the bosom and paste them on the wall and repeat them as a mantra, they will create the mind.That’s why I have to go on destroying myself. I say one thing, and before you can hoard it, I destroy it. I will do it so continuously, so consistently, that sooner or later you will not hug any phrase to your heart, and you will not paste any phrase on your wall, and you will not take anything as a mantra.That day will be a great day of liberation for you. Then you will simply listen as you listen to music. Why can’t you listen to me as you listen to music? Why listen to me with a business mind, with some purpose in it? Why jump upon things and start collecting them? Why not listen simply, innocently, without catching hold of anything? Listen just as you listen to music, and that will be far more enriching. Then the mind will not be nourished.And my work here is to destroy your mind, so that your no-mind becomes available to you.The seventh question:Osho,What is a question? And is there an answer to every question? And why do you answer our questions?A question is a misunderstanding. You have misunderstood life as a problem – hence questions arise. Life is not a problem: life is a mystery.But the misunderstanding is possible because a mystery looks like a problem, a mystery looks like a riddle – and the ego starts trying to solve it. Hence the question. But a mystery means a mystery – it is a riddle which cannot be solved. A mystery is by its very definition insoluble. So all questions are irrelevant.And when questions are irrelevant, naturally answers are also irrelevant. A question is a misunderstanding about life: you think it can be solved – this is the misunderstanding. Nobody has ever solved anything. Great philosophies have been evolved, but not a single question has ever been answered.One can believe that one has got the answer, but that is just a belief. Look a little bit more and you will find that your answer was just make-believe. There are no answers. And all questions are meaningless. But then the question arises: “And is there an answer to every question?”There is not a single question which can be answered. Small questions – “What is yellow?” – cannot be answered. All your science and all your philosophy and all your religions cannot answer a simple, silly question: “What is yellow?” How can you answer it?A great philosopher, G. E. Moore, has written a book, Principia Ethica. In two hundred pages he goes on asking one question only: What is good? And he was one of the most important philosophers of this century and one of the most logical minds. You cannot improve upon Moore. He asks a simple question: “What is good?” And he asks in a thousand ways, and answers and answers and answers… And finally, in the end, he says: “Good is indefinable.”It is like yellow: What is yellow? All the philosophies have failed.So it is not that there are questions that can be answered and there are a few questions that cannot be answered – not a single question can be answered. Questioning is a wrong approach toward reality. You question: you go wrong.Then, naturally, you ask, “And why do you answer our questions?” If no question can be answered, then why do I go on answering you? Just to help you know that no questions can be answered. Just to destroy your questions – not to answer but to destroy.Watch my answers. They are not really answers to your questions – they are just like hammers. I try to destroy your questions, sometimes politely and sometimes not so politely. But the whole effort is to destroy the question.Naturally, I destroy one, you produce another – then I have to destroy that. This is the fight between a master and a disciple. It goes on and on. But the disciple has always been defeated.How long can you go on asking? Many of you have stopped asking, but new people go on coming so the story continues. One day, all of you will have stopped – stopping, not out of defeat, not out of desperation, but out of understanding. Seeing the point, that life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved – that is metanoia. You are converted. You have moved from the mind to no-mind.And the last question:Osho,This crazy, sweet, totally demanding and physically exhausting, delightful marathon called motherhood… Since this fireball came to us – almost two years now – not one uninterrupted night's sleep, not one day of rest. Feeling nothing as important as simply being present for him – and so very often inadequate and tense and tired in that.Where is laughter in this? Help! Help! Yuck, yuck, yuck!Yet another “Jewish mother.”Just to give birth to a child is one thing – to be a mother is totally different. Any woman can give birth to a child; that’s a very simple phenomenon. But to be a mother needs great art, needs great understanding.You are creating a human being – that is the greatest creation. A painter paints a picture; we call it great art. Picasso – we call him a great artist. But what about the mother who created Picasso? A poet writes beautiful poems, but what about the mother who created Shakespeare? We don’t think about mothers as the most creative people on the earth.That is one of the reasons why women are not great painters and great poets – they need not be: they can be great mothers. Why does man try to become a great scientist, poet, painter, this and that? – he is jealous of women: he cannot create children. He feels impotent.Sigmund Freud has talked much about phallic jealousy – that women suffer from jealousy because they don’t have penises. Now this is utterly meaningless, absurd. It is as if a female Sigmund Freud is born and starts talking about men suffering from breast jealousy because they don’t have breasts.But one thing is certain: deep down, man always feels jealous that he cannot mother, that he cannot carry an alive life in him, that he cannot reproduce life. To substitute it he paints, he sculpts, he writes poetry, he composes music; he goes to the moon, he goes to Everest. He wants to prove at least to his woman that “I can also do something,” otherwise he feels impotent. Compared to woman’s capacity, he looks like a child, looks almost accidental. His work is not much – giving birth to a child, he simply triggers the process. A small injection can do that; that is not much of a work.The woman passes through those nine months of agony and ecstasy. And then the work is not finished. In fact, then the work, the real work, starts – when the child is born. And the child brings again a fresh quality to life. Every child is primitive, a barbarian; now the mother has to civilize. Every child is a barbarian, remember. He is animal, wild. And the mother has to give him culture, has to teach him the ways of life, the ways of man. It is a great work.You have to remember that your work has not finished, it has started. Take it joyously! You are creating something immensely valuable – you are guarding a life, you are protecting a life. The work is such that no sacrifice is great enough for it – any sacrifice can and should be made. One thing.Second thing: don’t take it too seriously, otherwise you will destroy the child. Your seriousness will become destructive. Take it playfully. The responsibility is there, but it has to be taken very playfully. Play upon the child as one plays upon a musical instrument – and she knows how to play on musical instruments. Let the child be your instrument now. Play carefully but play playfully. If you become serious, then the child will start feeling your seriousness and the child will be crushed and crippled. Don’t burden the child; don’t start feeling that you are doing something great to the child. When I say you are doing something great, you are doing something great to yourself. By helping this child to grow into a beautiful human being, into a buddha, you will be becoming the mother of a buddha. You will not be obliging the child; you will be simply enjoying your own life. Your own life will become a fragrance through the child.This is an opportunity, an opportunity given by existence.And these are the two pitfalls: either you neglect the child, you are tired of it, or you become too serious about the child and you start burdening him, obliging him. Both are wrong. Help the child – but for the sheer joy of it. And never feel that he owes you any debt. On the contrary, feel thankful that he has chosen you to be his mother. Let your motherhood bloom through him. If you can bloom into your motherhood, you will feel thankful to the child forever.And, naturally, there will be sacrifices, but they have to be made joyously. Only then is it a sacrifice. If you do it without joy it is not a sacrifice. Sacrifice comes from the word sacred. When you do it joyfully, it is sacred. When you don’t do it joyfully, then you are just fulfilling a duty – and all duties are ugly, they are not sacred.This is a great opportunity. Meditate over it, go deeply into it. You will never find such a deep involvement. In fact, there is none as deep as it is between a child and the mother. Not even between the husband and the wife, the lover and the beloved – the involvement is not as deep as it is between the mother and the child. It cannot be so deep with anybody ever – because the child has lived in you for nine months as you; nobody else can live in you for nine months as you.And the child will become a separate individual sooner or later, but somewhere deep down in the unconscious the mother and the child remain linked.If your child can become a buddha, you will be benefited by it. If your child grows and becomes a beautiful human being, you will be benefited by it – because the child will always remain connected with you. Only the physical connection has been disconnected; the spiritual connection is never disconnected.Thank existence: motherhood is a blessing.Enough for today.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 04 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Listening to you in the discourse, it is the pauses, the gaps, between two sentences, two words, that roll in my ears like thunder, tearing me open and tearing me apart.I am being taken to a space beyond tears or laughter by your silence. What is happening to me?I am happening to you. Allow it. Sometimes it will be frightening, scary, because you will be going into spaces you are not acquainted with.You will be moving beyond yourself. You will be entering the unknown. And the unknown is always frightening. The new always creates great fear. With the old, one feels perfectly comfortable. The old always feels cozy, snug. With the new, you have to learn again. With the new you have to become a child again. The new happens only to those who are ready to become children again and again and again – because the old knowledge, the old experience, the old life, will have no meaning in the new. It will be irrelevant. You will suddenly feel ignorant facing the unknown; hence the fear, hence the clinging to the past.Remember: the journey to truth is a journey from the old to the new, from the known to the unknown, from the closed to the open. And I can happen to you only in the pauses.Words are used to create the pauses – not vice versa. I am saying things and talking to you just to give you an experience of silence. Those pauses are the most significant thing that is being delivered to you, being transferred to you. Be available in those pauses.They will tear you apart. They will destroy you. That’s why I say I have come to destroy, not to fulfill. But remember: the only way to fulfillment is through destruction. If you are destroyed utterly, only then will you be utterly new. Through crucifixion is resurrection.Let me first become your crucifixion. Let me first become your cross. And then the second thing follows naturally: nothing has to be done about it. To die is to be reborn.Die in those pauses, in those silences, in those gaps. In those gaps, my meditativeness is flowing toward you – receive it. Receive it with great joy. Receive it as you would receive a guest, a cherished guest. Open the doors of your heart.And, yes, there will be great chaos with it – I will bring chaos in you – but that is the only way stars are born: out of chaos. I will bring great upheavals in your being, I will uproot you from where you are because that is the only way to transform, to transplant you onto higher plenitudes. And there are higher and higher plenitudes, there is no end to it. This is an eternal pilgrimage.I know fear is natural, but don’t get caught by it. Leave it aside. Move in spite of it.Always remember: the difference between a courageous man and a coward is not that the courageous man has no fear and the coward has fear. No, that is not the difference. Both have fear – in the same proportion. Then where is the difference? The difference is that the courageous man goes in spite of the fear, and the coward stops because of the fear. Both have fear.If you can find a courageous man who has no fear, then how will you call him courageous? He will be a machine, not a man. Only machines don’t have fear. But you don’t call machines courageous. How can you call a machine courageous? Courage simply means that something is happening in spite of the fear. The fear is there, the trembling is there, but it is not stopping you, you are not being blocked by it. You use it as a stepping-stone. Shaking, trembling, still you go into the unknown.To be a sannyasin is to choose courage. Both possibilities exist in every human being: fear and courage. All will depend on which you choose between the two. Never choose fear. It cripples. It paralyzes. It destroys you without giving you a chance of resurrection. Courage will also destroy you, but that destruction is very creative – it will give you rebirth.Fear and courage both destroy – but fear simply destroys. The seed simply rots. When you sow the seed of courage in the soil, then too it dies – but it doesn’t rot. It dies – it dies into a new phenomenon. A sprout comes up.Courage will kill you as much as fear, but fear will simply kill you without giving you a new life. Courage will give you a new life. Choose courage – always choose courage.It is arduous, but it is adventurous too. It is difficult, it is uncomfortable, inconvenient, but it brings great ecstasies too. One has to pay the price for those ecstasies.The second question:Osho,If my mind still controls and blocks my feelings, how do I discover what is the next appropriate step for me to take?Listen to this question again, very carefully: “If…” It is not a true question; it starts with “If.” It is as if you are asking a hypothetical thing. You are supposing a question.Never ask such questions. At least be honest about your questions. If they are there, then ask. And I know the question is there, but you don’t even want to take the responsibility for it. The question is valid – but you start with “If”? Can’t you say “This is my problem”? You want it to appear theoretical? You want it to appear impersonal? Then you will miss the answer – because I don’t give answers to theoretical questions.This is not a philosophy class – I am not teaching you philosophy – I am teaching you life; not a philosophy of life, but life itself.Remember: when you ask a question, let it be true. Don’t camouflage it, don’t cover it. Don’t try to be clever with me, otherwise you will be at a loss.It may have happened unconsciously; I am not saying that you have put that “If” consciously. You are not that conscious, I know. It must have happened mechanically. You may have learned the trick of how to ask questions and remain aloof, and detached, and out of them.This is not the way to write or ask a question with me at least. You have to be in your question. I am going to be in my answer, and if you are not in your question, where and how shall we meet? If I am in my answer, I am absolutely there.You have to be in your question – only then is the meeting possible. And the meeting is the solution – not the answer, not the question: the meeting. The point where my consciousness touches your consciousness. But if you are not in your question and I answer it, how am I going to touch your consciousness? You will be absent. I will be knocking on a door where you are not.Don’t be so afraid of the answer. Be authentic. Be existential. Let the question have the flavor of your being. Let the question have life – it should have a heart which beats, it should breathe. Only then is there a possibility…You kill the question from the very beginning: “If?” “If my mind still controls…” as if it is not controlling and you are asking for others’ sake.“If my mind still controls…” and just watch how many times in such a small sentence “I,” “my,” “mine,” have come. “If my mind still controls and blocks my feelings, how do I discover what is the next appropriate step for me to take?”With so much “I,” whatever step you take will be wrong. With so much “I,” a right step cannot be taken at all. The “I” is the poison. It will destroy whatever you do.With so much “I,” if you love, your love will turn into hatred. With so much “I,” if you meditate, your meditation will be nothing but madness inside. With so much “I,” if you look at the flowers, you will not see the beauty. The “I” is ugly, and it creates ugliness all around it.In fact, the very question: “…what is the next appropriate step?” is because of the “I.” The “I” wants to control not only this step but the next too. It has been controlling all your past steps, it is controlling your present step, it wants to control the next step too. What do you mean by “appropriate”? That which fits with your ideas of right, true; that which fits with your idea of religion, spirituality. And what do you know of religion and spirituality? What do you know of truth? How can your next step be adequate, appropriate?Any step that is in accordance with the truth, any step that has the quality of suchness in it, is appropriate. But what do you know about suchness? You have lived in the mind – with the “I,” “me,” “mine.” All that you know is just rubbish. And out of that rubbish, you want to take an appropriate step? Remember: out of the mind there is no appropriate step; out of the mind all steps are inappropriate. Why? What do I mean when I say that? Let us move slowly into this phenomenon.Life brings a situation. Those situations are always new. Life is immensely creative; it never repeats. Even if you feel it is a repetition, it is not. There are vital differences, subtle differences…may not be available to you on the surface, but have you seen two mornings exactly the same? Have you ever come across two roseflowers exactly the same? Have you come across two human beings exactly the same? What to say about human beings? You cannot find two pebbles exactly the same. You can search the whole earth…Life is always fresh. That is the meaning of being alive – life is always moving into new spaces. And your mind is always old; it knows nothing of the new. It knows only of the past. It knows only that which has happened. It accumulates experiences. Experience means it has happened. And remember: life is never going to repeat the same situation in which that experience happened. And you act out of the mind, hence there is always a gap between you and life – and nothing is appropriate. How can it be appropriate?You act out of past experiences and life is always creating new spaces. You never meet with life, you never merge with life. You are always inappropriate. Your answers don’t fit the questions that life raises. Your responses are not responses but reactions.To be appropriate means to me to be spontaneous. Not to act out of the mind is to be appropriate: to act in this moment, to act utterly in this moment, to see the situation and to act, respond to the situation.Don’t search in your memory for what is appropriate, because the memory will supply you with answers which are not appropriate and cannot be appropriate. The memory is always irrelevant. You have to put the memory aside. You have to be in a kind of absolute exposure to the reality, to the situation that is.And let your total being respond. Don’t decide about it. Don’t rehearse it. Don’t prepare for it. Let it respond! And then it will be appropriate.When you are not, it will be appropriate. When the mind is not brought in, it will be appropriate. When it is spontaneous, it will be appropriate. Bring a little preparation in it, just a little bit, and you have poisoned it, then it is never appropriate.Life is not a school examination where you go prepared. That’s why schools are so ugly – they don’t prepare you for life, they destroy all possibilities of life. Schools have to disappear from the world, and the colleges and the universities. They are antilife. They believe in rehearsals. They believe in giving you fixed answers – as if there are fixed challenges! – the basic fallacy.And a third of life is wasted in the university. By the time you are ready with a PhD, one third of life has gone down the drain. And what are you ready for? You have simply bookish answers crammed into your head; you have become a computer. And now, with all that knowledge, whatever you do will be inappropriate!A knowledgeable man has never been known to be appropriate – never. He always goes on missing the train; he is always late. He is never to the point – he cannot be. His arrows never reach the target – they cannot, because the target is moving and his ideas of it are fixed.Education no longer prepares you for life: it prepares you for death. Your universities are cemeteries where the past lives; it goes on killing the present – and the future too. Education, as it is in the world now, is very reactionary. A totally different kind of education is needed – not that which simply goes on helping you to cram answers, but that which helps you to be open, which helps you to function from a state of not knowing.That’s what meditation is all about: a state of not knowing. Then whatever you do is going to be appropriate because then you are no longer the doer – then existence is the doer. Then life itself is responding.Just try to observe a few moments when you are spontaneous – they will give you such joy.For example: somebody is drowning in the river and you stand there and you think about it: “What should I do? What is appropriate?” If you are a Christian missionary, you will think this is a great opportunity to help and serve humanity – this is a way to reach heaven and be special there. And you repeat in your head all the quotes from the Bible, what Jesus has said – that service is the way to God… And then you jump! You are not concerned with this poor human being who is drowning: you are concerned with your ego trip you call spirituality. You want to be virtuous.This is so ugly. This spirituality, this religiousness, this service, is so ugly. It is not a spontaneous act; it is not out of your heart, it is out of your head.And if your head has been prepared in a different way, for example, if you had been born into another religion… There exists a religion in India, a sect of Jainas – Terapanth: if you had been born into that sect, then these ideas wouldn’t come to you. A follower of Terapanth will stand there on the bank, he will also think just like you are thinking, but he will think… His scriptures say: “Everybody suffers according to his karmas. Now, this man is drowning, he must have done some bad karmas in the past.” And his scriptures say: “Don’t come in the way of anybody’s karmas.” Now, he is being punished by his own karmas – you need not jump and save him. That will not be a help; you will be hindering, you will be delaying! If you get him out of the river and you save him, one day he will again have to fall into the river and drown. The mathematics of karma: he has to. Maybe he killed his wife in a past life by drowning her in water – now he has to suffer.Now think. From these two different minds: the Christian thinks this is an opportunity to go to God, and the Jaina thinks this is an opportunity not to get emotional – it is foolish to jump; it is emotional, sentimental. He has to control himself not to jump and not to save this human being because he is suffering his karmas – let him suffer so that he can be finished with it. Next life he will be born in a better life, in a better way.Now both these people are acting out of their memories. Can’t you see a third possibility: just acting out of the spontaneity of the moment, on the spur of the moment – neither a Hindu, nor a Christian, nor a Mohammedan, nor a Jaina, nor a Buddhist…nobody? Just acting out of the situation itself? Then it is appropriate.That is my definition of appropriate. Act out of the mind and it is inappropriate; it is not true to the situation. Act without mind and it is appropriate.Now I will read the question again: “If my mind still controls and blocks my feelings, how do I discover what is the next appropriate step for me to take?” Don’t think of the morrow. Just be in this moment, spontaneous, and out of the spontaneity of this moment the spontaneity of the next will follow of its own accord. You are not to plan for it.But we have become great planners. You come from the office and you start planning on the way what your wife will ask and how you will answer, and you prepare everything. You go to the office from the house and you know what your boss is going to say and what you are going to answer. You go on preparing. You don’t trust life.To trust life is to be appropriate. What do I mean by trusting life? I mean let the moment come, let it happen; be there present, be available. And then whatever happens through you is good, is virtue.Virtue is not a decision on your part. Sin is a decision on your part. Whatever you decide becomes a sin. The word decision is beautiful. It is made of two words: de, cision – it means “cut off.” Every decision cuts you off from life. When you act out of decisions, you act against life. When you allow life to take possession of you, everything is appropriate.The third question:Osho,I am gathering courage to ask this question. No buddha ever hung his picture round the neck of his disciples – yet you are doing it.Is there any purpose behind it?Every buddha has his own eccentricities and craziness – this is mine. And I am not supposed to repeat anybody else’s eccentricities: I can have my own.And remember: there is no purpose behind it. There is no purpose behind any of my activities here. It is just to make you a fool, that’s all – so that when you go into the world, you look ridiculous!The fourth question:Osho,You have said not to condition children with our ideas. What about sannyasin children? Why not let them choose consciously whether and when to take sannyas? For example, for children living in the West – outside of the ashram, anyway – can't the fact of their being sannyasins condition them in their relationship to other children or to their environment?Can I ask you a question? Have you taken sannyas consciously? Who has taken sannyas consciously? If you are conscious, then what is the need, in fact, of taking sannyas? In that way, everybody is the same as children; grown-up makes no difference.Children are truer. It often happens: a sannyasin mother or father brings a child to take sannyas and he falls asleep – and that is the true picture of a sannyasin! But he is authentic and you keep your eyes open, that’s the only difference. You are fast asleep with open eyes and the child is true: he is asleep so he has closed his eyes – that’s all. Why keep your eyes open when you are asleep? What is the point of it?The only difference I see between you and the children is that you are asleep with open eyes, unnecessarily straining your eyes, and the child is perfectly at ease.Sometimes it happens: I give sannyas to children when they are snoring but that is my experience with you too. So I don’t see the point, why they should be prevented. If they are to be prevented from sannyas, then everybody has to be prevented. And if you are not prevented, then why be hard on children?Sannyas is just an initiation toward consciousness. It can’t be expected from you that you should be conscious when you take sannyas.Sannyas is medicinal. When you are ill, medicine is needed. If a doctor makes it a condition: “Come only when you are healthy – I am not going to pour my medicine into such an ill body. First get healthy and then come,” then what is the point? Sannyas is medicinal – because you are unconscious, it is needed. I cannot expect you to take sannyas consciously; that is impossible. If you can take sannyas consciously, then you can do anything consciously. Then what is the problem? If you can take sannyas consciously, why can’t you eat consciously? Why can’t you walk consciously? Why can’t you love consciously? Where is the problem then? Then you will be conscious. You will be a buddha and sannyas will not be needed.You cannot be conscious, that’s why sannyas is needed. Sannyas is a beginning, not an end – first thing.Second thing: the question is – “You have said not to condition children…” Sannyas is a process of unconditioning, remember it. It is not a process of conditioning: it is a process of unconditioning.What am I doing here? I am not giving you knowledge – I am taking your knowledge away. It is a kind of mind-wash. I am simply cleaning your mind, effacing things, taking your ideas, helping you to drop those stupid fixations. I am not giving you anything as a substitute for them. You would like that very much.People come to me and say, “But give us some philosophy to live for!” Life is enough. What do you need a philosophy to live for? Life in itself is more than enough. They say, “That’s right – but something to live for, something to hope for, something for inspiration” – something so that they can plan, so that they can destroy the future, so that they can stop being spontaneous.People say, “Some discipline is needed.” Particularly religious people, when they come to me, are very shocked that I don’t give any particular discipline to sannyasins. Do you think wearing orange is a discipline? Or having the mala around your neck is a discipline? Or the change of your name is a discipline? Do you think these are disciplines? These are games. These are not disciplines.Discipline is when you move into a Christian monastery. Discipline is when you become a Jaina monk – then what to eat, what not to eat, how much to eat, when to go to sleep, how much to sleep, then a twenty-four-hour program is given to you. Sooner or later you become a robot, you become just a machine, a perfect machine; efficient, but a machine. You are no longer human beings.I am not giving you any discipline. I give you only awareness – because to me awareness is the fundamental thing. If you are aware, you will find your discipline yourself. Who am I to give it to you?And any fixed discipline will create problems – it will be inappropriate. How can you decide for tomorrow? And when you have a character, you have decided for tomorrow – that is the meaning of character. That’s why in society, people who have character are respected: because they are predictable people, you can rely upon them. You know that this man never speaks a lie; he can be used in business – you can rely upon him, he will never speak a lie. He has character. This man will not steal; he has character – you can rely on him, otherwise he will take your money. This man will not start an affair with your wife; he has character – you can rely on him, he can be allowed to remain in your house and work. This man will not suddenly jump upon you and kill you; you can rely on him, he has character. He has never done anything like that. He has certificates.A man of character simply means one whose past is so fixed that you can rely on it that he will not be able to change it in the future either.I don’t give you any discipline, any character. My basic approach is that one has to be utterly characterless. To be characterless means to be without the past. I am not saying that you have to commit murder and you have to start stealing and robbing people – I am not saying that. But I am saying this: that you should not be predictable like a man of character.Yes, you will not commit murder – not because it is your character but because of your awareness you cannot do such an ugly thing. Not because it is against the Ten Commandments and Moses and Manu and Mahavira, no – but because your inner voice is against it. You will not rob anybody, not because it is written in the scriptures that you will suffer in hell, but because the very idea does not arise in a conscious mind.A conscious mind has a fluid discipline about it – but fluid, it changes according to circumstances.A man of character is like one who goes out to the market and it starts raining but he will not open his umbrella because he has never opened it before – he is a man of character. But my sannyasin will open the umbrella! And when it stops raining will close the umbrella. The umbrella is to be used; it is not a fixation. When it is too hot, you move inside the house, you search for coolness. When it is too cool and getting cold in the house, you start moving outside to search for the sun’s warmth.Life should be fluid, natural. That’s what sannyas is: it is an unconditioning. It takes your character, your knowledge, your past – you – away from you. It makes you fluid. It helps you to melt. It is unconditioning.You ask, “You have said not to condition children…” Yes, don’t condition them – and sannyas is a way to protect them from conditioning.“You have said not to condition children with our ideas.” Sannyas is not an idea. It is a device. It is a method, not an idea. Just by becoming a sannyasin, you stop being a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist. Just by becoming a sannyasin, you stop being an American, an Indian, a Japanese, a German – these are ugly boundaries. They are no more valuable than what dogs do – they urinate and make a boundary, and that becomes their territory. These national boundaries are nothing but dog boundaries made by urinating. They are ugly.By becoming a sannyasin you become a citizen of the earth – you are no longer an Indian, no longer a Tibetan, no longer a Chinese. You claim the whole earth, and that is the beginning of claiming the whole universe. Passports are ugly, visas are ugly. They simply show that the world is not yet free. They simply show that there is no freedom of movement in this world, that you cannot enter a country freely, that there are a thousand and one obstructions, that you cannot choose your country freely, that this whole earth is not available to you, that these nations are nothing but big prisons. You are allowed to move inside, but you are not allowed to move outside. This is ugly.A sannyasin is a world citizen. Sannyas is the beginning of a new concept of consciousness, that we are all one. This may be the only place on the earth where nobody bothers who is a Jaina, who is a Hindu, who is a Mohammedan.I was worried about my old parents when they came and stayed here – I was worried that it would be too much for them. But I was very happy when they went to take their meals with Krishna Mohammed and Radha – I was so happy! That was a great step. Otherwise, they are orthodox Jainas.In my childhood I had a Mohammedan friend. It was very difficult for me to invite him sometimes for tea or for food, very difficult. And even if I would insist, my family would allow, but then we would have to sit outside the house to eat because the Mohammedan cannot sit inside. And when I insisted again and again, then they had to prepare separate pots and things for my friend. They were kept only for him; nobody would touch them.The world has lived like that, with a thousand and one divisions – of religion, of sect, of politics. To be a sannyasin means you are dropping all divisions. You are declaring humanity is one, and this whole planet belongs to us. This is our home.And when we have a really great number of sannyasins roaming around the world, then many things can become possible. It depends. If we have enough sannyasins around the world, it can usher a new era. Passports should be dropped someday, visas should be dropped someday. We should declare that we are free to move. Nobody can prevent us! We are free to live wherever we want. And the freedom of movement is one of the basic freedoms.Why are nations so afraid? Why so many visas and passports and boundaries and borders? There are very, very deep reasons you may not be aware of. In fact, the traveler is a dangerous phenomenon for closed societies. Why? Because the traveler brings new concepts of life; his existence is disruptive to the orthodox, to the conventional.For example, my sannyasins moving in India are a problem. What is the problem? They don’t do any harm to anybody.Just the other day, a couple was just holding hands outside the ashram. Not doing anything – just sitting silently holding hands, and a man jumped upon them and started shouting and abusing, “You are destroying our Hindu culture! I don’t allow my children to come in Koregaon Park because if they see you people, they will be destroyed.”I would like my sannyasins to roam around the earth as much as possible, to destroy children, to destroy these chauvinists – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan – it doesn’t matter who they are. Roam around the earth, be mobile, and with you the fragrance will spread.That’s why Russia does not allow people to enter – there is great fear. Communist countries are very much afraid. If hippies start moving in Russia, Communism will be gone – because then the Russian youth will see what is happening in other parts of the world: “People have become so free, and we are prisoners!” They are not to be allowed to see that.That’s why people in Pune are against my sannyasins. What is the fear? If you are right and your religion is right and your morality is right, then why be afraid? The fear is that your morality is not right – it is repressive, it is forced, it is violent. And if your children see my free people, of course they would also like to be free. That is the fear. They would also like to hold a woman’s hand – it is natural, graceful, lovely, divine. But the Hindus are very repressed – even to hold the hand of your own wife is a great revolution; even to talk to your own wife, one feels guilty. Now, these ugly hangovers of the past can be protected only if new fresh winds are not allowed to blow.Sannyas is the beginning of a world citizenship. It is the beginning of a world which will be religious but without religions. Sannyas is not an idea, it is a device, it is a method – a method to uncondition you. And it is very good that children should be sannyasins from the very beginning – so nobody can condition them. Once they have tasted freedom…Neerja was telling me that little Siddhartha falls in love with little girls – little Siddhartha! – and not only that: sometimes he tries to make love to them. Now this is great! Now he has no inhibitions, no taboos. He will grow up into a beautiful human being.To be a sannyasin means you will be allowing freedom to the children, you will not impose anything on them, you will not impose your ideas; you will not like them to become imitators. Sannyas is just symbolic of a great freedom.“Why not let them choose consciously whether and when to take sannyas?” In fact, many of them choose as consciously as you choose – many of them. When their parents become sannyasins, they are thrilled with the idea. Sometimes it happens just otherwise.Geet Govind is here from Esalen: his daughter took sannyas first – just a small girl. She has turned Esalen on – a small girl, five or six years old. She became interested first in Dynamic meditation and now it is difficult to prevent her – she goes on doing it, morning, evening; whenever she has time she does Dynamic. Geet Govind was asking me how to stop her. And she enjoys it and she is going crazy in it. She became the catalytic agent – then the father, then the mother, then other people.Life is so mysterious. One never knows from where the thing will start. And it is not the first case: many times it has happened that children have taken sannyas first because they are of course more courageous. They don’t care about others’ opinions. They are not calculative. They are not worried about their jobs – they have none. They are not worried about their wives or husbands – they have none. They are not worried about their children – they have none. They have no investment yet in life. They are free.It happens many times: children take sannyas first, then the mother starts feeling, then the father starts feeling; then they also gather courage. So, often the children take sannyas on their own. Sometimes the parents take first, then the children. The children are interested; they also want to be orange people: “What is it?” They want to be insiders. They don’t want to be left outside.And sometimes, only sometimes, very small children have been initiated – because their parents would like to protect them, to protect them from Christianity, to protect them from Mohammedanism, to protect them from Hinduism. I cannot say no because I know sannyas will be protective.Sannyas gives no ideology, but it protects you from other ideologies. Otherwise you cannot avoid it – your children will be conditioned. The church is after them, the politician is after them. You have to create some protection for your children, so that the priest and the politician don’t come in. Otherwise, they will grab hold of them – in the name of religious education, in the name of Sunday school, Bible class, this and that, they will catch hold of the child.And once the child is conditioned, it becomes an unnecessary waste of life and time and energy to uncondition him. It is better to leave him wild, leave him open.And with sannyas, there is one thing: if your child wants to leave sannyas when he is grown up, there is nobody to prevent him. I am not preventing anybody from leaving. The moment you want to leave, you can leave without any guilt. That is for you! If the child later on feels that he does not want to be a sannyasin, then who is after him? He can leave it.Sannyas is given easily and sannyas can be dropped as easily. There is no commitment as such. If there is any commitment, that is of your consciousness, that is your inner feeling – but nobody is after you, nobody will condemn you: “You have become a sinner and now you are bound for hell!”The fifth question:Osho,Today you told us to become responsible for our own lives and be responsive to our own inner being, and thus to take the reins back into our own hands from the hands of others. How does this fit in with surrendering the reins to you? I listen to my inner voice and sometimes it revolts against what you want me to do. Am I only hearing my ego? Are there any limits to surrendering to a master?The question is from Swami Prem Pramod.First thing, Pramod, do you think you have surrendered to me? Ever, for a single moment? My observation is that you have never surrendered. What do you want to take back? You have never surrendered! You have never surrendered those reins – they are in your hands.You were just befooling yourself that you had surrendered. What happens actually is: you ask me if you can do something with a decision already in the mind. If I say something that goes with your decision, you feel surrendered. You say, “Perfectly good. How deeply I am surrendered to Osho!” If it does not go with your idea and your decision, then your inner voice says, “This is not right.”Surrender comes only when things go against your decision – not when they go with your decision. Then what is the point of surrender? And I have been watching Pramod: if things go his way, then he is absolutely surrendered. If even a slight thing goes against his idea, then the revolt.Nobody is telling you to be in such a trouble. You can drop sannyas! Why create anguish unnecessarily for yourself? And I am interested now in helping many people to drop sannyas. Before the new commune, I want to sort out my people. Either you are with me or you are not with me – both are good. Don’t feel guilty. If you cannot surrender anything, at least you can surrender your sannyas to me – and that will be a great favor.You have some idea that you are obliging me by surrendering – what are you surrendering to me? I am not obliged to you. I am not gaining anything from your surrender, remember this perfectly well. What do you have to surrender to me? Your diseases, your madnesses, your ego, your mind, your past. I don’t gain anything out of your egos or out of your illnesses and anxieties. So don’t think that I am obliged to you, that you have done something great, a great favor to me by surrendering. Don’t be stupid!And when you surrender to me, do you think anything reaches me? I am just an excuse. If you can surrender without any excuse, perfectly good. I am just a peg – you can hang your things on me, so that you are unburdened. That’s the point. And once you have known the freedom of unburdening, once you have known the freedom that non-ego brings, then you will see the point, see what surrender is. Then you will see that nothing was to be surrendered. You had nothing to surrender – just the idea of “I,” a very illusory idea, has been destroyed by surrender.Surrender is like a thorn: you have a thorn in your foot… You have been walking in the garden and you have got a thorn in your foot and I supply you with another thorn. This thorn can help the other thorn – you can take the other thorn out with it. When it is taken out, you have to throw away both because both are thorns.Ego is a thorn, surrender is a thorn – surrender is just to take the ego out of you. It is a device. Once the ego is gone, surrender is gone too! When the illness is gone, the medicine has no more relevance; you don’t carry the bottle and the prescription. It is finished. But you will always be grateful because without the other thorn, you would have suffered from the first.Surrender is a device to bring you out of your ego. If you don’t want to come out of your ego, I am not much interested in bringing you out of your ego; it is none of my business. If you are interested, I am available. If you are not interested, perfectly good. The door is open.And what inner voice can you have? The inner voice comes only when the ego has gone; otherwise, the ego goes on pretending to be your inner voice. The ego is a great pretender – beware of it.And the last question:Osho,Is the quality and expression of one's enlightenment richer, deeper, and more creative if one allows oneself to complete one's worldly trips, rather than dropping them in the name of spirituality?Certainly. How can you drop if you have not lived your life totally? If you have not known sex, how can you drop it? It will linger, it will surround you in subtle ways; it will become an undercurrent in your unconscious. How can you drop anger if you have not lived it?Nothing can be dropped without experiencing it in totality. Only total experience helps you to go beyond.The spirituality that comes without experiencing life is impotent. That is the difference that I want to bring to your consciousness. That kind of spirituality has existed on the earth down the ages, and that’s why man is so ugly. It is because of that kind of spirituality. It has made you repressed; it has not transformed you. It was against this, against that – against everything. It was against life, it was antilife. It has not allowed you to live your life joyously – to see, to feel, to experience, and to go beyond through experiencing.Knowledge liberates – not the knowledge that you gather from scriptures, but the knowledge that comes through experience. You become angry again and again and again, and you start feeling the foolishness of it, the utter ridiculousness of it, the poisonousness of it, the destructiveness of it. One day the fruit is ripe; not that you decide “I will never be angry,” but just the fruit is ripe and it falls of its own accord. And anger disappears as if it had never existed in you. It simply evaporates.Live your life. Live a life of variety, a multidimensional life, and you will be richer. And, naturally, when a man has lived in all the dimensions of his life and comes to enlightenment, his experience is going to be richer. At least his expression is going to be richer.And finally: you can only come to enlightenment when you have lived truly. Those who think that they have come to enlightenment without living life are only deceiving themselves and nobody else. They are carrying the whole world in them – unlived, it remains there. They are carrying seeds.Patanjali divides samadhi, enlightenment, into two types: samadhi with seed and samadhi without seed. What he calls sabeej samadhi – samadhi with seed – is when you have not lived and subtle desires are still hankering to be fulfilled. You have repressed the seed but it is there, and it will assert itself when the right season arrives. When the spring comes, it may start sprouting again. You can repress your sex for your whole life, but even at the moment of death it may assert itself.Repression is not revolution. Revolution is through experience. Maturity is through experience. Enlightenment is ultimate maturity, beyond which there is none else. How can you find a shortcut to it? There is none. You have to go through the whole of life, tasting its sweetness and its bitterness, feeling its agonies and its ecstasies, watching its ups and downs, the sunlit peaks and the dark nights in the valley, the sadness and the joy of it. All has to be lived.You have to be a sinner and a saint. One who is only a saint is a poor saint, and one who is only a sinner is a poor sinner – you have to be a saintsinner or a sinnersaint. You have to live all that existence makes available to you. You have to live it unconditionally. And then one day: the quantum leap, enlightenment.A beautiful story for you to meditate…Pope Paul XV lay in the Vatican close to death. Scores of doctors were consulted, but none could come up with an answer. A pall of anxiousness hung in the air. All the possibilities were canceled out. Finally, one doctor came and said that the pope’s state was due to his life-long celibacy and the only thing to do was for him to make love. Once would be enough.A very embarrassed bishop came to break the awful news. “Your-a Holiness-a,” he began, “You hafta maka da love to a woman-a to save-a your life-a. Terrible-a news-a I have-a to geeve-a you.”The pope looked up slowly. “Dees is a sad-a, sad-a day-a for da Catholic-a church-a; there’s-a no-a other-a way-a?”The bishop shook his head. “No-a, Your-a Holiness-a, I’m afraid-a not-a!”“Well-a,” said the pope. “Eef I-a must-a, den I-a must-a do-a dees-a terrible-a thing-a. But I do eet on-a four-a condeetions-a only-a.”“Yes, yes-a, anything-a,” said the bishop, some-what relieved. “And what-a are your-a four condee-tions-a?”The pope drew a long breath.“First-a, she must-a be a Catholic-a.”“Of course-a, Your Holiness-a.”“Second-a, she-a must-a be a virgin-a.”“Yes, Your Holiness-a.”“Third-a, she must-a wear-a a blind-a fold-a so-a she-a does-a not see-a who ees-a doing dees thing-a to her-a.”“Yes-a, Your Holiness-a, and-a da fourth-a?”“Fourth-a, fourth-a, she gotta have da beeg-a tits-a and da nice-a bum-bum!”Enough for today.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/walk-without-feet-05/

The first question:Osho,I live in the land of seriousness, imprisoned in its borders. Can you draw me a road map to your land of leela? Have I a defective gene? I cannot find my laughter or lightheartedness. I see it around me, but do not feel it in me.There cannot be any map to the land of playfulness. All maps lead to seriousness. Playfulness is when all maps have been burned down. There is no way to playfulness because playfulness is not a goal and cannot be a goal. When you forget about goals, when you are not going anywhere, when the very idea of going is dropped, then herenow playfulness starts growing in you, happening in you.Playfulness is not then and there: it is herenow. So how can there be a road map? You are not to go: you are just to be.Seriousness is goal-oriented. And even when a serious person starts playing, he transforms the quality of the play – it becomes a game; it is no longer play. That is the difference between a game and a play. When a play becomes serious, it becomes a game.People go to see wrestling, people go to see bullfights, or American football – ugly, violent, inhuman. The people who are going to see these things are immature, a little perverted too. The spectators are as ungrown as the gladiators. And both are in some way catharting; in the name of the game they are throwing out their rubbish, they are simply vomiting their violence.This is a very violent, violent world. That’s why love cannot exist here. When human beings will really be human beings, things like bullfights and wrestling will be unheard of, they will become part of history. Just to imagine that thousands of people have gone to see a bullfight looks so ugly, disgusting.But people are serious. They change play also into seriousness. Play is something in which a goal is not at all concerned. The very being together is beautiful, for the sheer joy of it. In a better world, with more understanding, games will disappear – there will only be playing. There will be nobody as a winner, nobody as the defeated – because the very idea of defeating and winning is inhuman. There is no need for it. Why can’t we enjoy the sheer togetherness? There should be no counting, no marking. There should not be any result out of it.If you are in love with playing football, play football! Just play it. Don’t look for the result. If the result comes in, you become serious, the play is destroyed; it has become almost businesslike. Enjoy the sheer outpouring of energy. Enjoy the moment – don’t sacrifice it for anything else.That’s what leela is, playfulness is. But you are in love and it becomes serious, and you start thinking of marriage and you start thinking of having children and you start thinking of having a family – and the whole thing has become ugly. If these things happen, let them happen as by-products, not as results. Yes, if you love a woman, you would like to be with her – this is marriage. There should be no other marriage. There should not even be the idea, because the very idea makes things down-to-earth: the poetry is destroyed. It becomes mundane and the romance is destroyed.But the moment you are in love, immediately your mind starts weaving and spinning about family, how to have a family of one’s own. Why should you need “a family of one’s own”? People possess things and people possess people too. If you possess things, it can be forgiven, but how can it be forgiven when you start possessing people? You say “my wife,” “my husband,” “my child” – what have you done to call this child yours? Who are you? How do you come in? Can you create a child? Can you create a child according to your own desire?A child comes from the unknown, is a gift. You are not the creator, how can you be the possessor? It is not according to you that the child takes shape and form and being. You were longing for a beautiful child and you are hit with a lulu and still you call it “my child.” You have been just a passage in the great play of existence.Just as there are liberation movements, the women’s lib movement, so a new movement should be mounted: the children’s liberation movement. Nobody should be allowed to possess children. Possessiveness should not be allowed: nobody should say “my child.” All children are of the divine. You can only be a caretaker, not more than that. And you should be grateful that you have been chosen to be a caretaker of a new life evolving. That is more than enough. Enjoy the game of it, of being a caretaker of an evolving life, but don’t start possessing.But our minds are possessive. The possessiveness has gone to the very roots, and that has been the greatest hindrance in human growth.When love is possessive it becomes exclusive. Then “This woman is mine, and exclusively mine!” Then she cannot laugh with anybody else, then she cannot hold hands with anybody else, then she cannot look into the eyes of somebody else. What nonsense! Why? Who am I to possess? And how can love be possessive?Love is always inclusive; it can never be exclusive. If I love a woman, I would love to see her happy in a thousand and one ways, with a thousand and one people. I would like her to be happy. That will be my joy. If she is happy dancing with somebody, I should not feel jealous – I love her. How can I feel jealous? I should be thrilled that she is happy. But when you claim that she is your wife, then you cannot allow this. You start crippling her. She starts paralyzing you in revenge. You both become destructive to each other.Love is the greatest creative energy, but up to now it has been a misfortune, the greatest misfortune. People have not been killed because of hatred: people have been killed because of love. Life has become so bitter, not because of anger: it has become so bitter because of love.You fight for the love of a woman or a man; you fight for the love of your family or clan. You fight for the love of your ideology or religion; you fight for the love of your mother country or father country, fatherland, motherland. You go on fighting for your love. All murders, all killings, all kinds of sufferings exist because of your so-called love.Something is basically wrong with your love – your love is a fixated love; it is not a flowing play. It is serious, it is exclusive, it is possessive. It is full of stupidity.One should be able to see all this – and just seeing it, you start relaxing. You see the point of it and you start relaxing, and a new awareness arises in you.I am surprised when I come across a man whose wife has died – and he is still crying and in anguish: his beloved has died. Why be so monopolistic? There are so many beautiful women still alive. This makes no sense. Your husband has died and for your whole life you will remain in a nightmare – because you cannot love anybody else? Your love is so tiny, so fixated? It was a kind of obsession? It was neurotic, it was not healthy. Otherwise, when the husband is dead, yes, there will be sadness, but you will say good-bye and you will move. You will not sacrifice your life – because sacrificing your life is dangerous. If you sacrifice your life and you become a martyr, you will take revenge on life; you will create guilt in your children, you will create guilt all around. And you will suffer. And when a person suffers, he creates vibes of suffering all around.No, this makes no sense. The world is full of so many people, why should you be so fixated? But the fixation comes from the very beginning: the moment a child says “my mother,” and the mother feels very happy, the fixation has started. Now the child will remain obsessed his whole life.When the child is small, he is naturally dependent on the mother – and mothers and fathers have exploited that dependence immensely. He is helpless, he cannot survive on his or her own; he has to look up to the mother and the father. His helplessness is exploited. He knows if the mother is gone, he will be dead. If the mother is no longer available, he will be dead, he will not be able to survive. This idea goes on and on getting deeper and deeper. And the mother helps it because she enjoys the ego trip: “You cannot survive without me.” She threatens many times, “Listen to me, otherwise I will leave and go forever, or I will die – and then you will know!” And the child is shaken to the very roots – he cannot survive without the mother.This becomes, by and by, a conditioning. Later on it will be reflected in all his relationships. He will think the same about his wife: if the wife is no more, he will not be able to survive. This will become unconscious. He will think the same again and again about everything: “If this job is gone, then I am finished. If this house is no longer with me, then where will I be? If this bank balance is no longer with me, then where will I be?” His whole life he will think in terms of fixation, and his whole life will be a long, long, unnecessary suffering. He is no longer a child, but he remains childish because of the conditioning.Love, and immediately you turn it into bitterness because you become serious about it. You start thinking of the future. Think of the future – marriage, children, security – and you have destroyed the play and it has become a game, and a very dangerous game. And you will be a loser – nobody is ever a winner. With play, everybody is a winner. With seriousness, nobody is ever a winner – all are losers.You come to meditate here and you become serious about it. And I go on insisting: don’t become serious. Meditation can happen only in playfulness, in utter playfulness, when you are not searching and seeking for anything, when you are simply dancing or singing or chanting; when you are not asking, when the activity is all and all in itself, no future is provoked, no future is involved in it – then it happens. Meditation is a happening. You cannot snatch it from God’s hands. You cannot desire it and you cannot have it. You can only do one thing: you can become an empty receiving end – and that’s what happens when you are playful.Meditation is fun. Even the word fun looks absurd with meditation – meditation and fun? Down the ages, you have been taught that this is the most serious thing: go to the church and become serious – even if you don’t have one, create a long face, then you will look as if you are in church. Don’t laugh, don’t dance, don’t be playful! It is a serious affair. You are facing God.This God seems to be somehow very strange. He cannot allow laughter, he cannot allow dance, he cannot allow love, he cannot allow joy. The gods of the past were very revengeful, jealous gods, violent gods; ready to crush you and destroy you, ready to throw you into hellfire. Even the idea of God was ugly.Here with me, you will have to learn a new language: meditation is fun, prayer is love and laughter; and the temple, the church, the mosque, is the place to enjoy, the place to be drunk with life; the place to dance and hold hands, the place to share what existence has given to you, the place to be absorbed utterly in the moment. That is the meaning of fun, that is the meaning of laughter, that is the meaning of joy: to be utterly absorbed in the moment as if no other moment exists. So how can you ask for a result? A result needs another moment in the future.Become like small children – dancing, singing, shouting – and God will come to you unawares. Suddenly one moment, you will find he is surrounding you; suddenly you will find you are not holding the hands of a woman – God is holding your hands; you are not holding the hands of a man – it is God. Looking into the eyes of the other, playfully, joyously, suddenly you will fall into a depth unknown to you, unknown to your mind. You will start disappearing into a deep abyss.That’s what God is. God is not in the scriptures – it is in the eyes of people, and in the flowers and in the rivers and in the moons. God is written all over the place. Don’t go to the scriptures. And if you cannot find God in alive trees, green and red and gold, if you cannot find God there, you will not find him in the Bible, the Koran, and the Vedas. How can you find him there if you cannot find him here? Once you have found it here, you will find it anywhere; then he is everywhere.Once found, God is everywhere – but you will have to find him in life, in playfulness.Playfulness makes you alive to the maximum. Seriousness cripples you. You become shrunken, frozen. You become closed, you become isolated. You become egoistic. That’s why seriousness has been so cherished by people because seriousness gives you the ego, and playfulness takes the ego away.You ask me, “I live in the land of seriousness, imprisoned in its borders.” You can exist only in the land of seriousness – you as an “I,” and you can exist only imprisoned in the borders of seriousness – as an “I.” If you want to be playful, you will have to drop the idea of “I.” The “I” cannot be playful; it resists play because play is death to it. The “I” is always serious.Have you not watched it? When you laugh, just have a look inside: the “I” disappears. That’s why egoistic people cannot laugh – impossible! When you are dancing, a moment comes when the “I” disappears. But egoistic people cannot dance; they cannot allow the “I” to disappear ever. Naturally, they will remain imprisoned, they will be prisoners. But this is your choice.If you want the ego, you will have to accept the prison, you will have to accept the boundaries. If you want a bigger and still bigger ego, the prison will become smaller and smaller, and the walls of the prison will come closer and closer. If you want to become the greatest ego in the world, you will be nothing but a prison, you will be surrounded by China Walls from everywhere. You will live in a straitjacket, behind walls of iron.But if you want to be alive, then the ego has to be dropped. The ego is a distraction from life.“I live,” you say, “in the land of seriousness, imprisoned in its borders. Can you draw me a road map to your land of leela?” And you are again asking about a road map – that is a serious thing. I have none. If you want road maps you will have to go to the churches and to the priests – they have. Actually! In Indian temples there are maps of heaven, hell, and how to reach there, and what you will find…the whole geography! Who is who, and where God lives, and where the great saints live – you will find everything.They have charted all the maps – all imaginary because God cannot be caught in any map. And heaven is not a map, neither is hell; they are not geographical at all – they are psychological states. When you are serious, you are in hell; seriousness is hell, playfulness is heaven.You ask me, “Can you draw me a road map to your land of leela? Have I a defective gene?” No – nobody has a defective gene. And a defective gene does not create the problem: the problem comes from the ego. And the ego has nothing to do with the body; the ego is a mind attitude.You have a mind and that is your defect. I will not say that you have a defective mind – the mind is the defect. You will have to drop the mind. And dropping it, suddenly you will find you have always been in the land of leela; not for a single moment had you left it – nobody can leave it. We can just forget about it. We can become serious and we can forget about it.You are still children playing on the sea beach. You are still children searching for seashells on the beach. You are still children collecting wild flowers. You are still children trying to catch hold of a butterfly. That purity of childhood is still there; it has not been taken away from you – it has only been superimposed by seriousness, the ego, the mind. That purity is there. The rock is blocking the fountain, but the fountain has not disappeared. Remove the rock and the fountain flows again in all its splendor.You say, “I cannot find my laughter or lightheartedness.” Seeking, you will never find it. The effort to find it is a serious thing. It is here! You need not find it; start enjoying it. Start being cheerful this very moment. Don’t try to find it because if you try to find it you will remain serious. How can a seeker be nonserious?You are searching for happiness and laughter and joy – you have to be serious, otherwise how will you search? Meanwhile you will remain serious, and the seriousness is getting stronger every moment. Tomorrow again you will search, but a day has passed – twenty-four hours’ more conditioning of seriousness is on you. You will find less laughter tomorrow; the day after tomorrow it will become even more difficult, and so on and so forth. And you will always be searching and seeking and trying to find.Just be cheerful this moment! Just see the point of it. Don’t postpone it – these are tricks of postponing. You don’t want to be happy; you still want to remain unhappy. You still want some new excuse to be unhappy. Now this is the excuse: “I am searching for happiness, I am searching for joy. Right now I am unhappy. I will be happy when I have found – but how can I be happy right now? I will have to find, and the journey is long and the path is arduous, an uphill task.” So you can be happy with your unhappiness right now, and tomorrow we will see – and tomorrow never comes.Don’t try to postpone – these are tricks the mind goes on playing upon you. Be happy! Have a good laugh. Have a good dance. In the beginning it may look a little awkward, because you have not laughed for so long. The lips may have lost their elasticity. But it will come. Just give a little opportunity for the lips to learn it again. They cannot lose it. It may be forgotten – it will be revived again.One can never forget how to laugh. It is like swimming: you cannot forget it. Once you have known it, you cannot forget. You may not go to the river for fifty years; after fifty years, suddenly, you can swim. You will not even need to remember it.And you have been laughing when you were a child. Every child is born laughing, and there are very, very few fortunate people who die laughing. One who can die laughing has arrived. But if you want to die laughing, you will have to live laughing.Once an old Parsi came to see me and he said, “Do you know? We have a beautiful story about Zarathustra – that he was born laughing.” I said, “That is nothing special – every child is born laughing.”Zarathustra is simply a symbol. Every child is born alive, full of joy, great energy, great love for life, great curiosity, infinite wonder, awe for small things. Every child is born an adventurer, an explorer. And every child is born with great courage to go into the unknown. We cripple him. We stop him. We prevent him. We start cultivating – and whatever we call cultivation is nothing but destroying all the possibilities, allowing only small holes for him to live in, taking his whole sky away and giving him a very small corner in the world.He was born as all men, all women, all animals, all trees, all rivers, all mountains are. And what do we do with the child? We take all that he has brought away from him; we make him a doctor, an engineer, a businessman, a soldier, a politician – we confine him. He was born as all, as infinity; all the alternatives were open. We close all the alternatives and leave only one alternative open. We have killed him! We allow only a minute part of him to live.Just think of a businessman: he simply lives as a businessman. Morning, afternoon, evening, night, he lives as a businessman. He dreams of business, he talks of business, he reads of business – his whole life has become business. What have you done to this man? What misfortune has happened to this man? He cannot be anything else. He does not know how to relax. He does not know how to slip out of this small hole in which he has started living – he calls it businessman, doctor, engineer, professor.A man should be liquid; he should be able to be all. You should not live only as you – you should live as all humanity, past, future, present. You should live as a totality: you should live multidimensional, not one-dimensional, not linear. To live like a line is to live a very poor life.There is no need! But we have all become focused in small corners, tethered in small corners we call our minds, egos, this and that. And we are so obsessed with those small places, caves – dirty and dark, dismal and sad. But we have become accustomed to those places and we are afraid of the open air and we are afraid of the open sky and the sun and the sand, and we never go out of those small spaces. Hence, laughter has disappeared.Life has disappeared. How can laughter live without life? Your spirit is dead. And it is a miracle that your so-called spiritual people are the most spiritless people – and you call them spiritual. My definition of the word spiritual is: one who is spirited, one who lives a passionate life, with intensity; who lives at the maximum, not at the minimum; who does not live a lukewarm life.Be courageous and laughter will follow. Be courageous and live intensely and you will not need to ask how to be playful. Out of the maximum, playfulness happens of its own accord – because when you live at the maximum you start overflowing. That overflowing of energies is what playfulness is – there is no map to it, there is no technique to it. Just understanding.The second question:Osho,The human civilization is collapsing all around the world. What do you have to say about it?Rejoice in its collapse!The third question:Osho,Why is it that “going with the flow” makes me feel guilty? Please talk about guilt.It is the guilt factor that makes floating so unattractive.Guilt is one of the greatest problems everybody has to encounter. The whole past of humanity has been guilt-ridden. And each generation goes on giving its diseases to the new generation; the diseases become more and more. Naturally – they accumulate with each generation. And each new generation is more burdened than the previous one.But guilt has been one of the basic strategies of the priests to exploit people. The priest cannot exist without guilt. When you feel guilty, remember, the priest is around you. When you feel guilty, remember, the priest’s hands are around your neck – he is killing you. Guilt is a strategy to exploit people, to turn people into slaves.Try to understand the mechanism of it. Only that understanding will help you to get out of it. What exactly is guilt?First: it is a condemnation of life; it is a life-negative attitude. You have been told that something is basically wrong with life; you have been told that you are born a sinner. You have been told that nothing good can come out of life or out of you or out of anybody else. Nothing good is possible on this earth! Good is with God. And you have to find a savior – a Christ, a Krishna; you have to find a savior who can save you from yourselves, who can take you to God.Life is not worth living – avoid living! If you live, you will get deeper and deeper into sin – life is sin. Avoid life. Withdraw yourself from life. And whenever you feel you are attracted toward life, guilt arises. You start feeling you are going to do something wrong.And life is immensely beautiful. It has great attraction, gravitation to it. It is natural to be attracted by life. It is natural to be in love. It is natural to enjoy, it is natural to laugh, it is natural to dance. But all that is natural has been condemned. You have to go against nature – that has been the teaching down the ages.The puritans have poisoned your natural sources of life; they have made you against yourself. They have created a split in you. They could not corrupt the body, but they have corrupted the mind. So the mind exists according to the priests, and the body exists according to nature – and there is no meeting.The body desires the joys of life – all joys. The body is life-affirmative and the mind is life-negative. The mind represents the priests – Christian, Hindu, Jaina. The mind goes on talking in the language of the priests; it goes on saying “This is wrong!” If you are eating and you enjoy the taste, Mahatma Gandhi speaks from your mind: “This is wrong – don’t enjoy the taste. To enjoy taste is sin.”In Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram one of the basic disciplines was aswad – no taste. You have to eat just to fulfill bodily needs, but you should not take in any taste, you should not enjoy the flavor of the food, the smell of the food. You should destroy the food so it doesn’t taste, and you should destroy your tongue too so it loses sensitivity to taste. When you lose all taste, you have become a mahatma.The same has been true about other things: if you fall in love with a woman, you are falling into sin, something wrong is happening. If you see the beautiful face of a woman or a man, and you are thrilled, fascinated, great guilt arises: What are you doing? This is irreligious!And if you are a married man, then more so. You have a wife, you have committed yourself to her. Now, even to appreciate the beauty of another woman is impossible. You will go home feeling guilty. You have not done anything! You had just seen a beautiful woman pass by. Now, this is an ugly state of affairs. You will feel guilty; you will feel defensive. When you go back home, you will try to hide yourself. You will not allow your wife to know that on the road you have seen a beautiful woman and it was a great joy to see her – because if you say that, there will be trouble. And why create trouble? You will lie. And when you lie you will feel guilty again because you are lying, and one should not lie to one’s own wife. Now, so on and so forth: one guilt creates another, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam. It goes on and on. There is no end to it. Then you become guilt-ridden; you carry a Himalaya of guilt on your heart.And everything has been condemned. You will not get rid of the guilt unless you understand the whole mechanism of it – how it is through guilt that the priest has dominated humanity, how the priest has created a slavery, and a subtle slavery. You don’t have chains on your hands, you don’t have chains on your feet, but you have chains deep inside your soul.To be free of guilt is to be free of all the priesthood. To be free of guilt is to be free of all the past. And to be free of guilt is to become one, because then the split disappears. To be free of guilt is to drop schizophrenia. And then there is great joy because you are no longer fighting with yourself. You start living.How can you live if you are continuously fighting? You cannot live if you go on fighting with yourself. You can live only when the fight has been dropped. Then life has its own rhythm, its own melody. And life is such a blessing. Only in that harmony, when you are one, with no guilt, with no repression, with no taboos, with no inhibitions, with no priest interfering in your life – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian – when you are on your own, uninterfered with, your own master, only then can you contact God.The priest has made it impossible. If you cannot contact life, how can you contact life abundant? If you cannot contact flowers, how can you contact the one who has created them? If you cannot contact beauty, joy, love, how can you contact the one from where all beauty, love, and joy comes, flows? Impossible. The priest has made it impossible.The priest is the reason why the earth has become irreligious. Without destroying the priesthoods and the old churches and old religions, the world will remain irreligious.I teach you a new religion. Not Christianity, not Hinduism, not Jainism, not Buddhism. I teach you a new kind of religiousness – guilt-free, tabooless, non-repressive. I teach you a religion of joy, acceptance, naturalness, spontaneity.You ask, “Why is it that ‘going with the flow’ makes me feel guilty?” Because going with the flow makes you feel happy – that’s why. And you cannot allow happiness. Happiness has become associated with guilt. Go back to your childhood – you will find the causes there. Just remember, go backward; try to find out when it happened.A small child knows nothing of guilt; he is wild and primitive. That’s why to see a small child is such a joy. He is as yet uncrippled, he is as yet uncivilized. He has not been introduced to the disease called civilization – that’s why he has so much energy, so much flow. The child is streaming, vibrating; he is a great dynamo; he is all dance. He cannot contain himself – he has so much that he is overflowing. You cannot make a child sit silently. Why? – because the energy is so much, uncontainable.The child wants to enjoy everything, and the parents are guilt-ridden. The child wants to shout and he enjoys shouting; that is his expression, that is his creativity. That shout, if helped and not destroyed, will become his song – that is the beginning of the song. But we stop him. We say, “Don’t shout! This is ugly, this is bad, this is unmannerly. This is not done in society. You belong to a famous family, you belong to a great, respectable family – you should not do this. This is okay for urchins, but not for you. You represent us: look how serious we are. We never shout – and you are shouting?”And the child was enjoying the shouting so much. In fact, when you stop him shouting you have condemned his joy – that’s what he will understand deep down, existentially. What will happen to him? He cannot understand why shouting is wrong; he has as yet no mind to understand that kind of rubbish. He was enjoying – that he understands: that shouting brings such joy, such flow. He feels so high, he feels so turned on. Just by shouting, his energy starts moving, he becomes a riverlike flow, he becomes a roaring phenomenon, a tidal wave.Now you say, “Don’t shout – this is bad.” What are you actually saying? How will the child translate it? The child will think, “My joy is not accepted.”The child does not want to go to sleep; he is feeling so alive and you force him and you drag him to bed. He is trying to get away from you and he is saying, “I don’t feel like sleep. I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to play a little more!” But you don’t listen. You say, “It is time, you have to go to sleep.”Now what are you doing to the child? You are rejecting – you are rejecting his instinctive understandings. He does not feel like going to sleep right now – how can he be made to sleep? There is no way. You can force him; he will lie there underneath the blanket and will weep and cry and will feel rejected, will feel unaccepted by the family, will feel guilty about why he cannot go to sleep when the mother wants him to. Now, what can he do? Sleep is not coming. And in the morning when he is feeling sleepy, you drag him out and you say, “Come out! It is time to get up.” And he wants to sleep a little more.Now, you interfere – wherever he feels joy, you interfere. Naturally you make him feel again and again that his joy is wrong.It gets deep into your bloodstream. That’s what has happened to you. So whenever you are going with the flow it means something is wrong. You are feeling happy? You immediately hear your mother’s voice: “What are you doing? Feeling happy? Betraying me? Betraying your dad, betraying your family? Look how serious we are – and is it good to betray your mother? Look at what long faces we have. What are you doing? Flowing with the flow? Going with the flow? Never has it happened in our family! And it should not happen.”You start feeling guilty. Just watch when you start feeling guilty, listen silently. You will find your parental voices, your mother, your father, your teacher, saying, “This is not right.”While you are making love to a man, you will feel guilty because your mother has told you that it is wrong, it is the greatest sin. When you start making love to a man, something in you feels it is not right – the mother is standing there, the father is standing there, and it looks so embarrassing with the parents standing…and you are making love to a man: “What are you doing? Stop it!” You may not stop, but you will not go totally into it – which is far worse than stopping. It is better to stop. You cannot stop either, because then your whole nature feels discontented. And you cannot go totally into it because your mind says it is wrong. So you go half-heartedly, halfway, and you exist in a limbo. You never go to the totality of it – so you never feel satisfied. Out of it you only gather more frustration; you again find you have failed once more, that’s all. Again it has not happened this time.And you start wondering whether this orgasm is just an invention, whether some masochistic people have invented it, or some sadistic people have invented it, just to make people feel tortured – because it is not happening to me!You will be surprised: this is the first century after at least five thousand years that a few women are feeling orgasm. For five thousand years, women have not felt orgasm. That too is happening only in the Western hemisphere. I have not come across a single Indian woman who feels orgasm – she has not even heard about the word. In Indian languages we don’t have any word for orgasm – because the thing has not existed, so the word was never needed. Even in the West, only ten, twelve percent of women are feeling orgasm. This is ugly!And what to say about men? Do you think men feel orgasm? Ejaculation is not orgasm. Orgasm is a very, very different phenomenon. So, man can deceive himself easily because he can feel ejaculation, so he thinks he has orgasm – that is not so. Ejaculation is a very local phenomenon, just the triggering of a physical mechanism – a release, a relief, nothing more.Orgasm is ecstasy. Orgasm is getting lost in timelessness; orgasm is when your whole body vibrates with some unknown energy that you have never come across before. Orgasm is when you are very close to godliness.The word orgasm comes from orgia – it was a religious ceremony, a pagan ceremony, when people became ecstatic, so ecstatic, that their whole body was full of divine energy. They were bursting with energy and they were lost in that energy – that was called orgia. It was a religious pagan ceremony; it was something like Tantra. It was Dionysian. The word orgasm comes from that ceremony.Men also rarely feel it. When your whole body throbs, not only your sexual organ but your whole body throbs, from toe to head you become a sexual orgasm, you become a sexual organ. That is the symbol of Shiva; you must have seen the shivalinga in India. You may sometimes be wondering, “Where are the eyes and where is the nose and where is the mouth and where are the legs? What kind of image is this?”This is the symbol of orgasm: when the whole body turns into a sexual organ. From the eyes, mouth, body, mind – all disappear into sexuality, into sensuality, into a kind of immense sensitivity. That is the meaning of shivalinga.Orgasm has become impossible because you cannot go totally with the flow. And with orgasm becoming impossible, a thousand and one diseases have become prevalent in man. Wilhelm Reich is right that if we can bring orgasm back to humanity, almost ninety percent of mental diseases will immediately disappear – like dewdrops in the morning when the sun comes.Ninety percent of mental diseases exist because man has forgotten how to be rejuvenated with the divine, how to fall into divine energy, and come back again resurrected. Those blocked energies are creating problems. But now… First the priest created the guilt, and now the psychoanalyst is against Wilhelm Reich – because where will the psychoanalyst go if ninety percent of mental diseases disappear? If Reich is right, then what about the Freudians and the Adlerians and the Jungians and others? What will happen to them? Reich was condemned as mad, was forced into imprisonment – and he was one of the greatest geniuses of this age, who had a real insight. But this is what we always do: we crucify. He died condemned as a madman in a prison.Man has not changed much. Two thousand years have passed, but we go on doing the same as we did with Jesus. Now, this man was releasing a very, very significant truth – that man’s mental illnesses will continue and will go on becoming bigger and bigger, and soon it will be impossible to treat him. Out of four persons, three are already abnormal, and the fourth is just on the way, any moment… This is not a good situation.Reich is right that something has to be done. First the priest was involved, now the modern priest is the psychoanalyst. First the priest had an investment in making people feel guilty; he created guilt. Because of guilt, he stopped people being orgasmic. And now the psychoanalyst is enjoying – his profession is flourishing like anything. His is the most needed profession and the most respected.Physicians are no longer needed as much as the psychoanalysts are needed, because the body is getting better and better every day and the mind is getting worse and worse every day. Guilt has created human pathology.In the future, the priest will not be needed, neither will the psychoanalyst be needed. Both those professions are antihuman; they should go. But they can go only if man is freed of guilt, otherwise they cannot go.So even if you feel guilty, go with the flow. Ignore the guilt. Let the guilt be there; in spite of it, go with the flow. The more you go with the flow, the more you will become able to catch yourself, not getting caught in the trap of guilt. You will be able to catch yourself in time. You will be able to slip out of that guilt prison.One has to get out of it; otherwise life will be a long, sad, meaningless anguish.The fourth question:Osho,If one were to make only one New Year's resolution, what would you suggest?This and only this can be the New Year’s resolution: I resolve never to make any resolutions because all resolutions are restrictions for the future. All resolutions are imprisonments. You decide today for tomorrow? You have destroyed tomorrow.Allow tomorrow to have its own being. Let it come in its own way. Let it bring its own gifts.A resolution means you will allow only this and you will not allow that. A resolution means you would like the sun to rise in the west and not in the east. If it rises in the east, you will not open your windows; you will keep your windows open to the west.What is a resolution? A resolution is struggle. A resolution is the ego. A resolution is saying, “I cannot live spontaneously.” And if you cannot live spontaneously, you don’t live at all – you only pretend.So let only one resolution be there: I will never make any resolutions. Drop all resolutions! Let life be a natural spontaneity. The only golden rule is that there are no golden rules.Enough for today.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 06 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You say we cannot take full responsibility for ourselves until we are awakened. The Western growth movement says we cannot be awakened until we take full responsibility for ourselves. Is there a conflict?Please comment.There is no conflict at all – it is just seeing the same phenomenon from two different angles. They are two aspects of the same event; they are together, they are simultaneous. There is no contrariness in them: they are complementary.When I say you can take full responsibility for yourselves only when you are awakened, I mean that you don’t even know who you are – how can you take responsibility for something you are not even aware of? You are acquainted only with the tip of the iceberg – how can you take responsibility for the unconscious, which is nine times more than the conscious? The conscious, at the most, can take responsibility for the conscious. Even that is difficult because it is constantly influenced by the unconscious. You are pulled, dragged into things by the unconscious – you don’t know why.You fall in love with a man or a woman – how can you take responsibility for it? Falling in love is not a conscious decision on your part. It is an unconscious phenomenon. It simply overwhelms you; suddenly one day, you find that you are in love. You have not done anything for it, you have not prepared for it, you were not planning for it. It comes out of nowhere, out of the blue, and you are possessed by it, you are madly possessed by it. How can you take responsibility for your love? Love comes from roots about which you are not aware.That’s why I say unless you are awakened you will not be able to take total responsibility. Your responsibility will be fragmentary, superficial, shallow.And the growth-movement people are also true: they say we cannot be awakened until we take full responsibility for ourselves. Yes, how will you be awakened? You have to start taking responsibility. It cannot be total right now – let it be partial. It cannot be absolute right now – let it not be absolute. It can only be fragmentary; it cannot be total. No need to worry. Even a fragmentary responsibility is far better than irresponsibility. Even to be aware about a small part of your being is far better than not to be aware.The choice is not between total awareness and partial awareness: the choice before you is between partial awareness and no awareness. Choose partial awareness; that’s what the growth people say – they are true. And when you choose to be responsible for a few things, you will become a little more alert. When you become a little more alert, you will be able to become a little more responsible, and so on and so forth.The more responsible you become, the more alert; the more alert you become, the more responsible. They will go hand in hand.The growth movement is a gradual process of enlightenment. What I am saying is not a process but a metanoia, a metamorphosis, a transformation, a sudden transformation. If you understand me, in a single moment, like lightning, you can become enlightened. But if you don’t understand me, then you will have to crawl slowly through group methods, meditations, prayers, Yoga, Tantra, Tao. You will have to move slowly, slowly. Either you become enlightened instantly, this moment, or you have to grow into it slowly, slowly. The growth movement is a movement for growth; growth can only be gradual.What I am teaching you is sudden enlightenment. It needs no time: not even a single moment is needed. Listen to me, and in this very moment…because what I am saying or what I am trying to say is that you are already enlightened. You need not be enlightened. You have simply forgotten; it is a kind of forgetfulness. Not that you have to become – you are that. Just a recognition, just a turning in, just a deep look inside yourself, and you will start laughing. You have always been there; you had never left in the first place. Enlightenment is your nature.But there are two types of people and you cannot do anything about your type. Either like a Hui Neng, listening to the four lines of the Diamond Sutra, you become enlightened… Now, you cannot ask how to become a Hui Neng; that is not possible. Either you are or you are not; there is no more to it.Hearing about Hui Neng, down the centuries, many people have been cramming the Diamond Sutra, particularly those four lines. Day in, day out, people have been repeating them. “If Hui Neng can become enlightened just by listening to four lines of the Diamond Sutra, then why can’t I?” But you go on repeating – the more you repeat, the more unenlightened you will be. It can’t happen that way. You are not a Hui Neng; things are finished there.That is the problem with sudden enlightenment: either it happens or it doesn’t happen. You cannot do anything about it. It is beyond you. The bhaktas have called it the grace of God – as if it comes from him, it is a gift; you need not be worthy of it. Only one person in thousands, or even in millions, is capable of that. All the remaining ones have to move slowly, have to move gradually.That’s why here I go on talking about instant enlightenment, and I go on sending you into groups, meditations, processes. Sometimes people come to me and ask, “If enlightenment is possible right now then why do you send us into groups? Why do you make us suffer in Primal, in Encounter, in Gestalt? Why do you send us to these Rolfers who are very skillful torturers?” What can I do? If you cannot listen to me, you will have to go to the Rolfers. You either become awakened right now – it is your choice – or go on… Then I will send you to the groups. They will torture you, goad you, provoke you, pull you this way and that. They will create such misery for you that you will decide finally that it is better to become enlightened rather than suffer so much.And unless you say to me “Now I am enlightened,” I will go on sending you. They help.You have to follow the long, the hard way. If you cannot understand the shortcut, if you cannot take the jump, then you will have to get down by the ladder, rung by rung. Finally you reach the same place. One who has jumped into the valley and one who has been coming down by a ladder finally reach the same point.And remember: even descending by a ladder, when you come to the last rung, you jump! What will you do when you have come to the last rung? Your jump will be small, the other person’s jump has been big – he jumped from the top of the hill, you jump only from the last rung. But the last moment is always of jump. It cannot be otherwise.Whether you follow the gradual path or the sudden – the sudden is, of course, a pathless path, a gateless gate – whatever you follow, finally, at the last moment, the quantum leap has to happen. It depends how much courage you have. If you have real courage to risk all, to stake all, to surrender all, it will happen this moment. If you are miserly, businesslike, clever, cunning, conditional, then it will happen slowly.For the majority, growth groups are of immense importance. They prepare you, they help you to come to the point from where, even if you are not very courageous, you can take the jump. But the jump has to happen because you have to become discontinuous with yourself.Don’t see any conflict between these two. It has always been thought that there is a conflict between the sudden and the gradual. This may be the first place in the world where the sudden and the gradual are meeting. Otherwise, those who have been teaching sudden enlightenment – Hui Neng… Of course, Hui Neng became suddenly enlightened – how can he teach you gradual enlightenment? And his followers, although they are not enlightened, they go on talking about sudden enlightenment and they are against the gradual, antagonistic to the idea of gradual growth.And people like, for example, Patanjali, who have grown from a seed to a big tree, not like a jump, who have grown like a small child growing toward youth, step-by-step – he charts the whole map: from the body to the mind, from the mind to the soul, from the soul to the infinite. He charts the whole process; he is gradual. Now, he will be against Hui Neng because when Patanjali talks about the eight limbs of Yoga, Hui Neng talks only about the eighth – samadhi. The seven are dropped, the seven are not included at all. For Hui Neng, those seven are a kind of postponement: Why waste time with yoga asanas – yoga postures – what are you doing? Enlightenment has nothing to do with the body. Enlightenment has nothing to do with in what posture you are. You can be standing on your head, you can be sitting buddhalike, you can be lying down – it can happen! It can happen in any posture because it is not a physical phenomenon at all.No yoga posture has any relevance. Certainly not for Hui Neng: he was passing through the market, somebody was reading the Diamond Sutra, and he simply heard it – hearing it, it happened. There is no question of any yoga posture. There is no question of a certain diet. There is no question of any practice of breathing. All the seven limbs are dropped; only the eighth – samadhi, ecstasy… He immediately became ecstatic. It happened to him, so he is right; he says, “It has happened to me, it can happen to you, it can happen to everybody. Why waste your time practicing unnecessary things? All else is arbitrary. The essential is samadhi.”Now, Patanjali knows differently. Samadhi has not happened immediately to him; he has been growing toward it, slowly, slowly. It has been a growth – not only of one life, but many lives. It has been gradual, it has been slow; it has been like a seed becoming a tree. And he will say, “Don’t listen to such people – these people are mad. Things don’t happen like that! No seed has ever been known to suddenly become a great cedar of Lebanon. No seed has ever been known to. This Hui Neng has gone mad!”Or, Patanjali will find some way to explain it. He will say, “Hui Neng must have been doing all the other things in his past lives; he was ready – he had fulfilled the seven limbs in his past lives. That’s why suddenly the eighth has happened, but the eighth cannot happen unless those seven have been fulfilled. Hui Neng looks sudden, but is not.”And ask Hui Neng, “What about Patanjali?” and he will say, “He is befooling himself. The thing could have happened directly – he was unnecessarily going round and round. He could have jumped.” And the difference: Hui Neng will say, “Man is not a seed – man is already a cedar of Lebanon. Just forgotten! If man is a seed, then time is a must to become a tree” – but Hui Neng’s whole point is: “Man is already the tree, just fallen asleep. Asleep, dreaming ‘I am a seed.’ He has to be simply shocked and awakened. Just the dream has to be broken. Once the tree opens its eyes, it will know that there is no need for any growth.”For Patanjali, becoming is the most valuable word; for Hui Neng, being is the most valuable word. To me, both are true. I am a bridge between Patanjali and Hui Neng. And I understand: Hui Neng is ultimately true, but “ultimately” true; and very rarely will you be able to find a person who becomes enlightened by hearing four lines. It is not easy to find such a person. But it is possible; I don’t say it is impossible.For the ninety-nine percent? Patanjali will be the way. So I don’t discard Patanjali – I don’t discard anything. Everything is accepted and used. Use all the methods skillfully and you will be benefited by all. And don’t become obsessed with a method. Don’t say, “I believe in gradual growth.” If you say, “I believe in gradual growth,” then you are preventing the possibility of sudden enlightenment. Maybe you are the person – who knows? – you are Hui Neng! Even Hui Neng was not aware until he became enlightened. Who knows? – somebody may be here who is a Hui Neng, a potential Hui Neng, and if he starts thinking that “No, it is not possible. I don’t believe in sudden enlightenment,” that very idea will prevent him. Then he will listen to the four lines of the Diamond Sutra and will not become enlightened because of his idea.I would like you to remain open. But I am not saying that everybody is going to become enlightened just by listening to those four lines of the Diamond Sutra, because then there is again a danger: listening to those four lines, you may start believing you have become enlightened. That will be a pretension, that will be delirium, that will be madness. Both dangers are there.I make you aware of all the dangers, all the possibilities, and I make all the paths available to you. Don’t believe in any path. Don’t discard any path offhand, a priori, no. Stay open, and use whatever feels right in this moment. And everything will help and everything will support and everything will strengthen, and everything will open you up. Everything can be used; you can be benefited by all the paths.The second question:Osho,I am frustrated – you say, “Be herenow, drop the mind, be spontaneous.” To me this would be an enlightened state. I don't experience being enlightened, so what does this asshole do in the meantime?Meantime, enjoy being unenlightened – because, who knows, tomorrow you may become enlightened.I make you beware: enjoy being unenlightened meanwhile – because once enlightened, you are enlightened forever. Watch out! Then don’t come to me and say, “Now I have become enlightened and I want to enjoy things which only can be enjoyed in a state of unenlightenment.” Then I will not be of much help.I can help you from unenlightenment toward enlightenment; I cannot help you from enlightenment toward unenlightenment. That is not possible. That has never happened. That is not possible – once you know, you know. Then a thousand and one things will immediately become impossible. So don’t waste time – enjoy!You ask me, “I am frustrated…” Because you are carrying the idea of becoming enlightened – and you are unenlightened! And the idea of becoming enlightened is continuously hammering, and you continuously know you are unenlightened, so frustration…You misunderstand me. You continuously misunderstand me. I am not giving you a goal, enlightenment is not a goal. Naturally, you will ask, “Then how does it come?” If you can start enjoying your unenlightened state, it will come on its own – enjoyment bridges the two. That’s why my emphasis is on joy, celebration, happiness – because happiness bridges both.The unenlightened person can also be happy, and the enlightened person is necessarily happy. That is the only quality that they share; that is the only quality that overlaps. I have not come across any other quality that overlaps. Hence, I say: the quality that overlaps can be used as a bridge.The unenlightened person can be joyous only momentarily – obviously, because his mind is wavering. He is continuously dragged to the past, to the future, here and there, and he cannot remain here. But for moments he can…just coming from the past and going to the future, he can for a moment be in the present. Coming from the future, going to the past, he can have a halt, just a little holiday in the present. He passes many times in the day, again and again; he shuttles back and forth. Shuttling back and forth he crosses the present many times. In those fragmentary spaces he can be happy. His happiness cannot be eternal, but happiness is happiness, eternal or momentary.When you are dancing and celebrating, your dance and celebration has the same quality as when Kabir is dancing or Meera is dancing: the same quality. The difference is of quantity, not of quality. It is only momentary; it comes and it goes. It does not stay; it is like a flash. By the time you become aware of it, it is gone. But it is the same thing.It becomes a sun to a Kabir, to a Meera; it becomes a constant source of light. But lightning in the clouds has the same quality – it is not different. It is the same light, although you cannot read a book and you cannot write a letter. By the time you take the pen in your hand, the lightning is gone and it is deep darkness. But still, remember, the quality of fire, the quality of electricity is the same – whether it is a constant source like the sun or a very momentary flash of lightning, the difference is only of time.Happiness overlaps. When Buddha is, he is happy, he is simply happy; it remains. It is like breathing; it is a climate around him – it never leaves him. To you it comes like a fragrance: for a moment your nostrils are full of it and the next moment it is gone and you are full of the stink of the world – but it is the same fragrance. In Buddha’s life the flower has bloomed, in your life the flower has not bloomed – it comes and goes.You are feeling frustrated because this idea of enlightenment is becoming a heavy phenomenon for you. You are making a goal out of it, and you will create misery. And a miserable person can never become enlightened.Drop misery! And you will ask, “How to drop misery?” Drop goals. Goals create misery. When you are hankering for something and you cannot get it, you become miserable. When you don’t hanker for anything, but start moving in a new dimension, you start enjoying whatever you have. You may be sitting in the small garden of your cottage and thinking of the great palace – how to get it? In that very idea of the great palace which you can see far away in the sunlight, the marble palace, you are becoming miserable. The more you become focused on that palace, the more you forget the beauties of this small cottage – the flowers are there, the lawn is green, the trees are happy, the wind is blowing, the sun is showering, the birds are singing. For the birds there’s not much difference between a palace and a hut. And the flowers bloom the same, and the sun showers the same – on the just, on the unjust, on the poor, on the rich, on the beautiful, on the ugly, on the successful, on the failures.You are missing. Forget the palace! In forgetting the palace, you will not be miserable. Start moving with this bird that is blessing you, sitting on your small tree singing a song. Listen to it. And these rays of the sun that are falling on you, rejoice! Sing a song. Dance with the trees. Lie down on the grass; feel the wetness of it and the aliveness of it.That’s what I mean: meanwhile enjoy your unenlightenment. And if you can enjoy your unenlightenment, you will be surprised that the hut has become a palace. You will be surprised by the transformation that happens around you – because it has happened inside you. When you change, the whole world changes.If you can enjoy your unenlightened state, enlightenment is going to happen to you. It cannot happen by desiring – it happens only by rejoicing. Jesus says again and again, “Rejoice! Rejoice!” Why? There is a key, a golden key: if you can rejoice, you will become capable of more rejoicing. If you can rejoice, your heart will dance, throb, will be able to open more. And more will be coming.You always get that for which you are ready. More you cannot get.You say, “I am frustrated. You say be herenow, drop the mind, be spontaneous…” You go on misunderstanding me. When I say to you, “Be spontaneous,” you make a goal out of it – and that’s what I am saying not to do, please. Be spontaneous means don’t have any goals. You make a goal out of being spontaneous. You start trying: How to be spontaneous? The moment you bring in “How,” you can never be spontaneous because there is no how to it. “How” always leads into the future. “How” always prepares, plans. How can you plan to be spontaneous? Spontaneity is an understanding that “I have not to run after desires.” Seeing the futility of desires, one no longer runs after them and there is spontaneity.When I say drop the mind, you start trying to drop the mind. Who is trying? The mind starts trying to drop the mind itself. Now, this is impossible: the mind cannot drop the mind. You have to understand these things.What I am teaching you here is not something that has to be done: it is something that has to be understood. And you are too interested in doing. You are in such a hurry to do something that you don’t listen to what I am saying, you don’t get the point, and immediately you start planning how to drop the mind. Now, who is this planning? Who is this thinking how to drop the mind? It is the mind itself. Now a new desire has arisen in you of dropping the mind – now a new marble palace, now a new goal.Mind is desire. Mind is goal-orientation. To drop the mind means, see the point: mind leads you astray; it never allows you to be herenow. Seeing that, be finished with goals. Seeing that, don’t create new goals of dropping the mind and being spontaneous and being herenow. Seeing the point, have a good laugh, relax, rejoice. And you are herenow, and in the herenow there is no mind. And when there is no mind, there is spontaneity. Meanwhile, enjoy!“I don’t experience being enlightened.” You will never experience being enlightened. How can you experience being enlightened? You are the barrier. And enlightenment is not an experience – because there is no experiencer in it. Enlightenment is experiencing, not experience. In experience there is division – the experiencer, the experienced. Between the two exists experience. When the experiencer and the experienced are no longer separate, they have melted into each other – when the observer has become the observed, when the knower and the known are no longer separate – then there is a totally new phenomenon for which I would like to use the word experiencing. I would like to use a verb: experiencing.Experience is a noun, closed, finished. Experiencing is ongoing, it is riverlike. Those two, the duality of the knower and the known, have dissolved into the river. There is nobody who knows enlightenment, and there is not anything like enlightenment which can be known as an object.Forget about these complex things. Simply start enjoying. That simple thing can be done easily – you can dance, you can sing, you can love, you can eat, you can go for a walk, you can have a good sleep. All these activities are beautiful if you can be totally in them, dissolved.The mind will go on trying its ways on you, its tricks on you. And you will be led astray by the mind many times. Whenever you remember, again have a good laugh, rejoice. Don’t start fighting with the mind. Neglect. Ignore. This is just an old habit. Watch. Don’t pay much attention.By not giving attention, slowly, slowly you will starve the mind. It will start shrinking. One day, it will not be there. When the mind is gone, you are gone. When you are gone, there is enlightenment.You say, “I don’t experience being enlightened, so what does this asshole do in the meantime?” You are enlightenment; you have simply forgotten it. Remembrance will come to you – not by your effort, but by being in tune with existence.An old boxer phoned his manager. “Harry,” he said, “you gotta ged me anudder fight, I wanna fight Slasher Delaney.”“No, boy,” replied Harry. “You’re over the hill, no more fights. How many times do I hafta tell ya?”“But please Harry; just this one, I know I can beat ‘im. Please Harry, one more fight!”“No! You’re past it. Quit while you’re still on yer feet. You can’t fight again.”“But Harry,” pleaded the old fighter, “why can’t I fight Slasher Delaney?”“Why can’t you fight Slasher Delaney?” yelled the manager, “because, you stupid shit, you are Slasher Delaney!”Third question:Osho,Although I have been standing on my head for lifetimes, I cannot walk without feet.Why?You can go on standing on your head for many more lifetimes; that has nothing to do with it. To walk without feet you need not stand on your head. That has no relevance. It has no relationship.To walk without feet and to fly without wings, you need not do any unnecessary things like standing on your head. Standing on your head you will not even be able to walk with your feet – what to say about walking without feet? Standing on your head you will not be able to walk at all. Standing on your head you will be dead, you will not be alive.When I say walk without feet, what am I saying? I am saying, first: learn how to walk with feet, and then be very, very watchful inside, be alert. Create a luminous consciousness. See who is walking when you are walking. Are you really walking? You have come from England to India, or from Japan to India – has anything really moved inside you? You have not walked. The body has been carried from Japan to India, but your consciousness is the same.You were a child; now you are a young man or an old man, you have walked a long way – but have you really changed? Deep at the very core of your being you have not walked at all; there has been no journey. You are exactly the same at the very core of your being.Walking – if you watch, you will know there is no walking. Talking – if you watch, you will see there is no talking. Thinking – if you watch, you will see there is no thinking. The deepest core of your being remains untouched, untouchable. It is a lotus in the water: it remains in the water but untouched.Knowing that witness is what I mean:Think without mind,fly without wings,walk without feet.I am not teaching you some circus tricks here – that you can fly, so stand on your head.A circus manager was interviewing people for jobs in his circus. By the end of the day he had hired very few and turned down many, while getting very bored with all their tricks. As he was ready to leave his office, a man walked in and said, “I would like to get a job in your circus.”Without giving him a glance, the manager asked, “And what can you do?”“I can fly like a bird,” said the man.“Sorry, we have no need for that, and all the jobs are taken,” said the manager.“Oh well,” said the man, disappointed – and flew out of the window.But I am not teaching those tricks here. You have to drop all tricks – these are all tricks! People become very interested because the ego feels very fulfilled if you can do something which nobody else can do: if you can walk without feet, if you can fly without wings, you will feel greatly happy – although you have not achieved anything! Stupid birds are flying, so what have you achieved? There is no achievement in it.It happened…A man went to Ramakrishna; he was very haughty and very arrogant, and he said, “Do you know? – I can walk on the river.” They were sitting on the bank of the Ganges in Dakshineshwar.Ramakrishna laughed. He was a very, very innocent man. He said, “You can walk on the river?”And the man said, “Yes.”And Ramakrishna said, “How many years did it take you to learn the trick?”He said, “Eighteen years.”Ramakrishna laughed and said, “You fool – eighteen years?! When I want to go to the other side, just two paise… Something worth two paise, and eighteen years? I have never come across such a fool,” he said. “You have wasted your life. I just go by the ferry. There is no need…”But these things attract; the mind becomes very interested if something miraculous can happen to you. And miracles are happening continuously, but you don’t see them: you are breathing; you are alive; you are loving; you are seeing the sun rays, the sky. The world is such a benediction – miracles are happening every moment. But you would like to fly like a stupid bird, and then you will feel very good that you have become a great yogi or something.Remember: be ordinary. Don’t try to be special in any way, otherwise you will be moving in a wrong direction. To be special means to be egoistic and the ego is the only problem. There is no other problem. Forget about being special. Just be ordinary. And there is great joy in being ordinary. Just be human.And by being ordinary you will come to know – you will know the art of walking without feet and flying without wings. That art simply means, “I am not the doer. I have relaxed. Now existence walks in me, existence talks in me, existence loves through me, but I am a hollow bamboo. I have no special goal in life – the goal of existence is my goal. And if it has no goals, I am perfectly happy with no goal. I am flowing with the river. Wherever it leads, that is my home – if it leads anywhere. If it doesn’t lead anywhere, then that is my home.”This is relaxation. And to relax into reality is to attain, is to be enlightened. Enlightenment is an utter let-go.The fourth question:Osho,If people have been as destroyed by guilt as you say they have been, then how do they manage to live at all?I also wonder! It is a great mystery, a riddle, how they manage to live at all. Their sources of life are poisoned. In fact, they are not living – they are only managing to live. Managing to live is not living. Managing to live is just somehow dragging, pretending; it is pseudo, phony.All your life sources have been poisoned. And unless you get rid of the priest and the politician, you will never be able to really live. At the most you can manage. But by managing you can only postpone death, you cannot really live. You can go on postponing death one more day, one more day – but this is not life.Life needs passion. Life needs intensity. Life needs fire – because only when there is fire and there is a flame do you bloom; otherwise, you are just lukewarm, so-so.What is your love? How can you love? For five thousand years love has been condemned, so much so that even if you think that you are no longer part of any church, that you don’t go to the priest, it doesn’t matter much. The poisoning has gone so deep in the blood, in the bones, and the marrow, that even if you don’t go to the church, the church continues in you; deep down it goes on pulling you, controlling you.Still you manage. Still one has to love and one has to live, so one lives and one loves, but love creates only agony, not ecstasy. And each agony proves that the priest is right. And the priest is the cause of the agony! That is the beauty of the whole thing. But each time you feel the agony of it, you are reminded again that the priest was right, that love is misery.Love is not misery. Love is sheer joy. But it has been contaminated, polluted, so many things have been forced into it, that it is no longer love, it is something else. Each time you feel frustration, the priest stands proved: “He was right, I was wrong; I should have listened. I should have been wiser.” Each love relationship proves the priest was right because no love relationship is a love relationship at all. It is possessiveness, it is jealousy, it is domination, it is anger, it is violence, it is hatred.The very idea that you possess a person is the ugliest that you can invent. Psychological monopoly destroys all love and when love is destroyed, naturally you feel in agony because the ecstasy is missing and you invested so much for ecstasy. Ecstasy is not there and you are left crushed, in a collapse. Deep down, the priest speaks: “Listen, I have been telling you – had I not told you before that love is illusory? That love is misery? That love brings anguish? Be alert in future. Escape!”The priest has made you so against life. He could not destroy life completely, that is true. He cannot; it is like a tree. But you have poisoned the roots. He could not destroy life; life is irrepressible, life is divine, life is God. The priest was impotent to kill it completely, but at least he succeeded in poisoning it.I have heard…At a mountain resort, a man who was on vacation without his wife and a woman who was on vacation without her husband, met. After a few days of pleasant conversation, they grew fond of each other and eventually found themselves in bed together. But they felt very guilty and conscience-stricken.“My wife,” said the errant husband, “works and slaves to make a nice home for my children.” And he burst into tears.“My husband is so good to me,” said the cheating wife. “He is working his fingers to the bone to send me on vacation, and I wind up in bed with a lover.” And then she burst into tears too.This kept on for five days. So what happened? They spent the whole week long making love and crying, and crying and making love.This is what is happening all over the world. You cannot go totally into anything. You cannot escape totally either. You are hanging in the middle; you don’t belong to this side and you don’t belong to that side. You cannot escape from love because when you escape from love, you feel utterly lonely and there is misery. That misery is brought by nature because nature intends you to relate; nature intends you to fall in tune with the total, and to fall in tune with the total you have to start with individuals.Individuals are the doors for the total. So if you escape to the Himalayan caves or to a Catholic monastery, nature will take revenge, nature will never forgive you. You will be lonely, sad; your life will be a kind of vegetation. You will vegetate. Your prayers will also be dull because without a loving heart, how can prayers be alive? Your reading of the Bible or the Diamond Sutra will not have any flame because when love dies, all flame dies. You will be just dragging, dull, dead. You will somehow live, waiting for death. Death will be your delivery. Life will be a constant burden.Nature will take revenge and it will tell you, “Go back to life. Relate with people. Life is in relationships, and joy is in relationships. Go and love! Prayer arises out of love. Merged in love, one comes to experience meditation for the first time. Go into life!” Life will go on goading you. Life cannot leave you so easily. It never leaves. It has never left anybody.So you will be miserable. Your only joy will be one: that you are going to paradise and heaven, and there you will enjoy everything. And all these worldly people, they are going to hell and will be burned. Your only joy will be the fantasy that everybody who is enjoying in the world is going to hell. You can have a vicarious enjoyment. It is a kind of sadism. You want the whole world to go to hell. Just because you are suffering, you would like everybody else to suffer. You are angry; deep down you are envious and jealous. You cannot forgive these people who are dancing in the streets, who are making love, who are living, who are singing songs. Those songs go on floating in the monastery. You have to take revenge.Hell is created by the monks just as a kind of revenge. Hell exists not. It is a pure invention of those who have left life and cannot enjoy their seclusion. And for themselves they have created heaven. In heaven they will enjoy all the things that they have left here – everything.In the Mohammedan paradise, wine flows in rivers. Here they have left wine; in the paradise they will be rewarded a thousandfold, a millionfold. In heaven there are beautiful women who never go beyond eighteen. They are stuck there; their growth stops. Eighteen is the only age. And their beauty is not the ordinary beauty of this world, not muddy: they don’t smell of sweat, they are fragrant. They have bodies of gold.These are fantasies. These people have missed women here; now they are fantasizing. They are somehow consoling themselves: “Just wait a little more. Death will come and you will be delivered. God is going to repay you infinitely.” They have done a great job because they have left life. And life is persistent inside them – that life is creating fantasies.When you fast, your hunger creates fantasies of eating. When you become a celibate, a forced celibate, your hunger for the warmth of a woman or a man’s body creates fantasies. If you escape, life will not forgive you, nature will not forgive you, existence will not forgive you. You have gone against existence because this life is existence: if you go against life, you go against its creator.If you don’t escape and you don’t listen to the priest, and you go against the priest, the priest will never forgive you. So whenever you are with a woman, the priest is there inside, destroying the joy of it. He is creating your so-called conscience, morality, puritanism; he is condemning you there. And you start self condemning. And because you can’t go deep into love, because this priest is pulling you back, love becomes agony. Rather than becoming an ecstasy it turns into an agony – then the priest is proved right. And you start thinking about how to go into a monastery, how to leave all this love.The priest cannot forgive you if you are alive. And if you become dead in a monastery, life cannot forgive you. You are in this dilemma.Listen to life and not to the priest. The priest has been in the service of the Devil; he is Satan’s disciple. Listen to life. Go deep into life. If love brings misery, then find out – it cannot be love. Something else is pretending to be love, something else is masquerading as love. Analyze it, and drop all that is not love from love. And, slowly, slowly you will start moving toward prayer and meditation.The last question:Osho,Why am I so fascinated by pornography?Must be your religious upbringing – Sunday school; otherwise, there is no need to be interested in pornography. When you are against the real, you start imagining.The day religious upbringing disappears from the earth, pornography will die. It cannot die before it. This looks very paradoxical. Magazines like Playboy exist only with the support of the Vatican. Without the pope there will be no Playboy magazine; it cannot exist. It will have no reason to exist. The priest is behind it.Why should you be interested in pornography when alive people are here? And it is so beautiful to look at alive people. You don’t become interested in the picture of a naked tree, do you? Because all trees are naked! Just do one thing: cover all the trees. Sooner or later you will find magazines circulating underground of naked trees! And people will be reading them, putting them inside their Bibles and looking at them and enjoying. Try it and you will see.Pornography can disappear only when people accept their nudity naturally. You don’t want to see cats and dogs and lions and tigers naked in pictures – they are naked. In fact, when a dog passes you, you don’t even recognize the fact; you don’t take note of it that he is naked. There are a few ladies in England, I have heard, who cover their dogs with clothes. They are afraid – the nudity of the dog may disturb some religious, spiritual soul.I have heard, Bertrand Russell has written in his autobiography that in his childhood days – those were the days, Victorian days – that even the legs of the chairs were covered, because they are called legs.Let man be natural and pornography disappears. Let people be nude – not that they have to sit nude in their offices; there is no need to go that far. But on the beaches, on the rivers, or when they are at ease, relaxing in their homes, resting under the sun in their gardens, they should be nude. Let children play around nude, around a nude mother and father. Pornography will disappear. Who will look at a Playboy magazine? For what? Something is being deprived, some natural curiosity is being deprived, hence pornography.You ask, “Why am I so fascinated by pornography?” You will be surprised to know that the word fascinated comes from the word phallus. Man has been pathologically fascinated by the phallus – for no reason. The only reason is that people have been hiding it. Even if you go to a nude primitive community, the whole body is nude, but they will hide the sexual organ – so at least that much pornography will continue.Why this fear? How did it come? It must have a deep root cause somewhere in the past, maybe lost to human consciousness, but it is there.The word phallus in its turn comes from a Sanskrit root phala. Phala means the fruit. Reaching to the roots of this word fascination is very paying: first it comes from phallus, and phallus comes from phala; phala means fruit, bearing fruit. Man became aware that the sexual organ is the most important organ because it gives birth to life. He became aware that somehow life must be residing in it. It is precious – hide it. It is a treasure. Don’t let anybody see it. Somebody may take your treasure, somebody may steal it, somebody may harm it.This idea went deep into the unconsciousness of man. There is no reality behind it; there is no reason. Pornography is a by-product. And the priest became aware of one thing – it was obvious – that when people fall in love, they forget the whole thing, the whole world. Falling in love, or making love, they simply disappear from this world, they move into another dimension. And that dimension is the priest’s dimension – he wants monopoly over it. He does not want any other way for you to approach God. He wants you to come through the right way that he provides: the prayers, the meditation, this and that. And he became aware that people have a natural key with them, a natural door opens into the divine – that has to be stopped. Otherwise who will be interested in their prayers and in their meditations? Who will be interested in churches and temples? First people’s natural capacity to enter God has to be stopped and destroyed, then the profession can flourish. That’s how it has happened.Get rid of the priest within you, say good-bye. And then suddenly you will see that pornography has disappeared. Kill the priest in your unconscious and you will see a great change happening in your being. You will be more together.A small beautiful story for you to meditate…Three priests went to Grand Central Station to get a train to Buffalo. The older two appointed the youngest one to go to the counter to buy three tickets. Behind the wicket stood a gorgeously buxom young lady wearing a dress of outrageous décolleté. The young priest was visibly flustered.Finally, he blurted out, “Please let me have three pickets for Titsburgh.” When he realized what he had said, he was mortified, and ran back to the other two priests.The second took the money and approached the window. There, he too encountered the same upset, but managed to say, “Can I have three tickets for Pittsburgh?” And then, laying down a $50 bill, he continued, “And I would like my change in nipples and dimes.”Realizing what he had said, he was so abashed he left the tickets on the counter and ran back to the other two priests.The third, the eldest, then strode up to the counter to ask for the tickets and the change. Regarding at length the female clerk dressed in such a revealing fashion, he considered it his duty to admonish her.“Young lady,” he said, “you know if you go around dressed in such a provocative manner, you will most certainly obtain your just desserts in the life to come. It is my bounden duty to tell you that when you pass to the Great Beyond, St. Finger will certainly be there pointing his Peter at you.”Enough for today.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 08 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,If truth cannot be expressed in words, why have all the buddhas used words?A parable…The great mystic, Rabiya of Basra, was immensely beautiful – and a beauty not of this world. Once, a rich young man from Iran comes to Basra. He asks people, “Is there anything that is something special here?”“Yes,” they all tell him. “We have the most beautiful woman in the world!”The young man naturally becomes interested and he asks, “Where can I find her?”And they all laugh and say, “Well, where else? – in a brothel!”That repulses the rich young man, but finally he decides to go. And when he gets there, the matron asks for an exorbitant fee. He pays the fee and is ushered in. There, in a silent and simple room, a figure is praying. What beauty she has. He has never seen such beauty and grace, not even in his dreams. Just to be there is a benediction, and the prayerful atmosphere starts affecting him. He forgets about his passion. He is entering another kind of space. He is drugged. He is turned on to God.An hour passes and he feels intensely that he is in a temple. Oh, such joy and such purity! He goes on feasting on her beauty. But it is no longer the beauty of a human being – it is God’s beauty. It no longer has anything to do with the body – it is utterly otherworldly.And then Rabiya opens her eyes, those lotus eyes, and he looks into them, and there is no woman in front of him: he is facing God. And this way the whole night passes, as if it were only a moment.The sun is rising and its rays are coming through the windows, and he feels it is time to go. He says to Rabiya, “I am your slave. Tell me anything, anything in the world that I can do for you.”She says, “I have only one little request.”He asks, “What is it?”Rabiya says, “Never tell anybody what you have seen and experienced here. Allow the people to come to me – this beauty is nothing but a trap set for them. I use it as a door for them to enter God. Please, promise me that you will never tell others what you have experienced here tonight. Let them come to a whore and a brothel, because otherwise they will never come to me.”“Oh!” he says, “So this is the secret of this city. The whole city clamors after your beauty, yet nobody tells me about his experience.”Rabiya laughs and says, “Yes, I extract the promise, this promise, from all of them.”Rabiya used her beauty as a trap. Buddha used his words as a trap. Krishna used his flute as a trap. Meera used her dance as a trap.You have to be trapped. And you can only be trapped in ways that you can understand. You have to be taken from the known into the unknown, but the beginning has to be in the known.You understand passion. The young man was not in search of God, but he became interested in a beautiful body, in a beautiful woman – and was trapped. He had gone there because of his passion. Once he was there in the presence of Rabiya, the passion started changing – it became prayer.You can understand words, that’s why all the buddhas have used words, knowing perfectly well – saying again and again – that the truth cannot be expressed in words. But you understand words and the truth cannot be expressed in words. Then how to communicate? The journey has to start from where you are. The buddhas have to speak in words. The words will bring you closer to the buddhas; the words will not give you truth, but they will bring you closer to the buddhas. Once you are close to them, you will start forgetting the words; you will start falling into silence.The words cannot express truth, but they can bring you close to a buddha. And that is more than you can expect of poor words! That’s why buddhas go on saying on the one hand words are meaningless, on the other hand they go on using words.They are meaningful for you – you don’t know the language of silence, you don’t know the language of being. You know only your mind; you have forgotten all else. If I am to bring you out of your mind, I will have to start from the mind. I will have to take your mind in confidence – only then the pilgrimage toward no-mind.The second question:Osho,You have spoken about art. You have said that most of it is ill, that Picasso's paintings are only mad and a therapy for him. I agree with you – but I also know that I love the aesthetics of decadence. I know too that it is my mirror of my illness – but I also believe that there exists a little more as well.This little difference is important. In the little difference, life is hidden. I loved you speaking about aesthetics. Don't you think there is a beauty in the leaves of autumn? Don't you think there can also be an acceptance of madness? A surrender and knowing that all is good? The setting sun – what colors! Don't you think there exists a glimpse of the unknown in the paintings of Picasso? Don't you think there exists a madness without consciousness and a madness with consciousness?In real beauty I find always life and death. For me this problem is not abstract – I live it. I love a dying violet.It is significant to go into the aesthetics of life.First thing: while listening to me, remember you are not to agree with me or to disagree with me. If you agree or disagree, you miss the point. Agreement, disagreement, is of the mind. When you say you agree with me, what are you saying? You are really saying that I agree with you. You are saying, “Whatever you are saying is in tune with my own thinking.” But if this is agreement, then I will not be able to transform you.If you disagree with me, that is also the same: something is going against your prejudice, your idea, then you disagree. When something goes with your idea, you agree; when something goes against your idea, you disagree – but you remain there, agreeing, disagreeing. And in both ways, you will not be able to understand what I am making available to you.Please forget about agreeing, disagreeing – this is not a philosophical discourse. I am not teaching you philosophy or aesthetics. I am simply opening my heart to you. Just listen. Don’t be in a hurry to agree or disagree. Don’t go on agreeing, disagreeing while I am speaking to you; otherwise, your agreements, disagreements will become a barrier.First listen. First get in tune with me. First fall in harmony with me. Let there arise an accord. Accord does not mean agreement. Accord simply means you are in love with me – not with what I say. You are simply in love with my being. My saying this or that is irrelevant.First fall in accord with me and from there, insights will start exploding in you. They will be transforming.You say, “You have spoken about art. You have said that most of it is ill, that Picasso’s paintings are only mad and a therapy for him. I agree with you…” You miss the point. It was not a statement to be agreed with or disagreed with. I was opening a door. I was not saying anything about Picasso, I was just illustrating a point. I was just giving you an example so that things could become more concrete. I was not condemning Picasso.You say you agree with me? That means these were your ideas before you heard me, and you jumped upon them. You said, “Right! Osho, you are right because you agree with me. You must be right.”If you feel that way, you have protected yourself. You will remain the same; in fact, you have become stronger, you have strengthened yourself. Can’t you avoid agreement, disagreement? It is difficult because the mind is so accustomed to immediately agreeing, disagreeing.The moment you hear something, either you say yes or you say no. Can’t you avoid saying yes and no? Can’t you simply listen? There is no hurry to say yes or no. Let the thing soak into your being. Drink it. Let it move into your bloodstream. Let it go into your very marrow. From there, something will arise, sprout – and that will be new.And for that new I am working here. Whatever I say is only a device. It has nothing absolute about it; it is arbitrary. And that’s why with the agreement there is disagreement too.You say, “I agree with you – but I also know that I love the aesthetics of decadence.” The mind is very clever and diplomatic. It says, “On one point I agree with you; on another point I don’t.” But you remain the same. You have not changed a little bit. You have not even taken a single step toward me.“I know too that it is my mirror of my illness but…” And remember, those “buts” are very, very significant: those “buts” are your diplomatic strategies. You are only half-heartedly saying it: “I know that it is my mirror of my illness but I also believe that there exists a little more as well.” No, there exists nothing more.“This little difference is important,” you say. “In the little difference life is hidden. I loved you speaking about aesthetics. Don’t you think there is a beauty in the leaves of autumn?” Yes, there is beauty in the leaves of autumn – but those leaves don’t know that they are dying. Those leaves don’t know that they are decadent. Those leaves are still living. They have no fear of death. Those leaves are living their autumn! They have lived their spring, now they are living their autumn. Those leaves have lived their life, now they are living their death. And there is a great difference.When you see autumn leaves, the idea of death arises in you, not in the leaves. The leaves are uncorrupted by any idea. They are in total suchness. Spring was good, so is autumn. And life was beautiful – those green days and the winds and the clouds, they were beautiful and so are these days. The leaves are drying and becoming pale and falling to the ground – and they are enjoying because they are going back to the source. It is from where they had come in the first place. They were born out of the earth, they played in the winds, they rose high in the sky, they had their day – now they are tired, now they want to be rejuvenated, they want to fall back into the womb. They are perfectly happy. There is no hitch, no complaint, no grudge; there is no fear, no apprehension.Autumn leaves are not decadent. Nature knows no decadence. Nature is always alive, even in death. Nature knows no death. Death is a human invention. And why does man have to invent death? – because man has invented the ego. Death is a by-product of the ego. The moment you say “I am,” death has entered. The leaves have never said that they are – death cannot enter.If you don’t say “I am,” how can you die? To die, first you have to be. Just meditate over it. Don’t agree and disagree with me. Just meditate over it. If you don’t say “I,” then where is the problem? You are not there. There is eternal silence, absolute emptiness – what Buddha calls shunyata. Now, who is there to die? From where is decadence possible now?That’s why I repeat again: nature knows no death – because in death also there is life. Death is a phase of life; death is an inactive phase of life, a silent phase of life. Death is life relaxing. Death is life gone to sleep, to rest. Death is a pause – to rejuvenate oneself. Death is a cleansing. Death is a process of destroying the unnecessary and the unessential that gathers around oneself in the process of life. Death is an unburdening.But if you don’t burden yourself, there is no death. If you unburden yourself, then there is no death. If you don’t have the idea “I am separate from existence,” how can you think “I will die”? In the separation, behind the separation, comes the shadow of death.Those leaves have never thought they are separate, so don’t impose your ideas upon the autumn leaves. That is not fair.You say, “Don’t you think there is a beauty in the leaves of autumn?” There is beauty. Because there is no decadence. There is beauty because there is no death. There is beauty because there is eternity.“Don’t you think there can also be an acceptance of madness?” I know there can be an acceptance of madness – but the moment you accept madness, you are no longer mad. Madness exists only in its rejection. Have you ever found any madman who agrees that he is mad? Go to a madhouse and ask all the mad people who are there – nobody will accept that he is mad. And if somebody accepts that he is mad, that means he is no longer mad. How can madness accept? Only wisdom can accept.In accepting madness, the quality, the very quality of madness is transformed. You have brought a light and the darkness disappears.Remember: madness exists only in rejection, and the more you reject, the madder you will be. The foolish man goes on rejecting his foolishness and becomes more of a fool. The ugly man goes on rejecting his ugliness and becomes uglier. And the madman goes on rejecting his madness and becomes more and more mad.Accept – and ugliness disappears, grace arises. Accept – and sin is transformed into saintliness. Accept – and madness is no longer madness.Acceptance is the alchemical process of transforming everything. Whatever is, accept it. From where does the rejection come? The rejection comes because of some idea in you of how things should be. You cannot accept your foolishness because you have this idea that you should be wise. You cannot accept your madness because you have this idea that you should be sane. You cannot accept anything because you have the opposite idea.In acceptance, all ideals have to be dropped. When you are not searching for wisdom, only then can you accept your foolishness. But in accepting foolishness, one becomes wise.This is the secret. In accepting your ugliness, beauty arises. That’s why you don’t see an ugly tree, and you don’t see an ugly animal, and you don’t see an ugly bird. Why? – because there is no rejection. There is great acceptance. They live in suchness – tathata. Whoever they are and whatever they are, they don’t hanker for something else, they don’t hanker to be otherwise. They are in tune with themselves. In that very harmoniousness is grace. Grace is a quality that comes when you accept life as it is – and grace is beauty.I know madness can be accepted, but mad people don’t accept it. If they accept, they will become enlightened.Have you accepted things that you find in yourself? Or do you go on rejecting them? Do you go on hiding them? Do you go on covering them? Do you pretend to be somebody that you are not? Have you accepted yourself as you are? Are you ready to expose yourself as you are? In your utter nudity? If you are not ready then you are also mad. Sooner or later you will accumulate so much rejection and so much madness that you will not be able to control it.Civilization drives people mad because civilization forces ideals on people’s minds. Man is the only animal on earth who goes mad, because only man has perfectionist ideas. A dog is simply a dog, and perfectly happy with being a dog. And no dog is trying to become a super-dog. But man, every man, is trying to become a superman hence the madness.And you say, “…a surrender and knowing that all is good?” When you say “…all is good,” all is not good, something is wrong. This is again covering. When you say “…all is good,” it is a consolation. If all is good, there is no need to say anything about it. If all is good, all is good – saying it betrays you. You only say all is good when you know that all is not good.Whom are you trying to befool? You are trying to befool yourself. You are trying to create a kind of autohypnosis by saying all is good. You are following Emile Coué. You know you are ill, but you go on saying, “I am not ill. Who says I am ill? I am perfectly happy and perfectly okay.” And you know all the time. In fact, because you know you are ill, that’s why you are repeating this.Coué was teaching – he had a great following once – to go on repeating, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. I am healthy, I am wise, I am beautiful.” But when you say “I am wise,” what exactly are you saying? If you are wise, then what is the point? Deep down you know you are not. Because you know you are not, you are trying to become wise by saying it, by imposing it.When somebody says, “All is good,” look into his eyes and you will find something is gnawing his heart, something is disturbing him. He does not want to get disturbed; he wants to pretend all is good. These pretensions won’t help.All is certainly good, but there is no need to say it.Lao Tzu has said, “There was a time when people were religious, but then there was no religion. Then came religion, and people became irreligious.” A strange statement, but of great significance and of great profundity, and great truth is contained in it. When people are moral, they are oblivious of the fact. When people are really healthy, they are not aware of it. Have you not seen healthy people? Healthy people are not aware of it. Healthy people don’t read literature on naturopathy. Healthy people are simply oblivious of the body.In the ancient Indian scriptures, health is defined as “bodilessness.” I have never come across a better definition. One should be unaware of the body, then one is healthy. But you go on thinking about your illnesses, and you go on reading about health, nature foods, naturopathy – and there are a thousand and one fads around the world. And the more you read these things, the more ill you will be, and the more unnatural you will be, because the more conscious of the body you will become.I have seen people who are in search of health – they are continuously conscious of it. Just a little movement of the wind in their stomachs and they are there. Just a little heaviness in the head and they are there. Just a little pain somewhere and they are there. Now, the body is a complex and big mechanism; a thousand and one things are going on. If you are continuously looking inside you will go mad.Just try it for twenty-four hours, just go on looking inside at what is happening there – blood is circulating or not? The intestine is working or not? The stomach is digesting or not? Just look inside your body, and within twenty-four hours you will be as ill as one can be. Twenty-four hours’ work and you will be on the bed.The body, when healthy, remains in darkness. There is no need even to think about it. Healthy roots remain underneath the earth in darkness. All that is healthy remains unaware.In Sanskrit, we have a word vedana. It has two meanings, very strange meanings: one meaning is knowledge, the other meaning is suffering. Knowledge is suffering. One word has two meanings: knowledge and suffering. You know only when you suffer. You know about your head only when there is a headache. When the headache is gone, the head too is gone.Now you say, “Don’t you think there can also be an acceptance of madness? A surrender and knowing that all is good?” Yes, there is, but it is not a consolation. It is not even a statement. One lives in it. It is an existential experience.But I would like you to remember that Picasso had not accepted his madness. If he had accepted it, his paintings would have changed. If he had accepted it, he would have become a buddha. Nietzsche did not accept his madness. If he had accepted, there would have been a great change, mutation; he would not have died mad.Van Gogh did not accept his madness; if he had accepted he would not have committed suicide. Now, van Gogh committing suicide at the age of thirty-three, so young… Life was still ahead. And van Gogh committing suicide simply shows what kind of paintings he was doing – they are suicidal. Before he committed suicide he went mad; for one year he was continuously mad. In fact, his best paintings are those that he painted in his madness. They are bizarre, they are overflowing neurosis; they depict, they mirror a madman’s mind. He painted even the day he committed suicide; even in that painting there is the shadow of suicide. He must have been brooding, he must have been thinking – he was continuously thinking about suicide. He had not even accepted life – how could he accept death? But he was a genius; about that there is no doubt.Picasso is a genius. But to be a genius is not necessarily to be a wise man. A genius can be mad. A genius can be a wise man. Buddha is also a genius, but one who has awakened to his innermost core. Van Gogh is also a genius, but lives in absolute mechanicalness. Even without being sane he has painted so beautifully – had he been sane, you can imagine what his creation would have been. That would have been a great gift to the world. The world has missed something beautiful.You say, “The setting sun – what colors!” But do you know that the sun never sets? It is only setting for you. It is rising somewhere else. The sun knows no setting. It is always rising, it is continuously rising – each moment is a new birth. For you, it looks like the sun is setting; but for the sun, it is always rising and rising and rising. It is eternal rising.And so is the vision of an enlightened man. Life knows no death. Life has never known death. The sun never sets. Even if this sun dies, it will be born somewhere else again. Every star melts as surely as every snowflake, only to be born in another time, another place. Nothing ever dies. Death is improbable, impossible. Death exists not.It is in your mind. It is in your mind: the sunset is beautiful because it is another rise, it is another kind of morning. Have you not seen old trees, how beautiful they are? They don’t know of age. In their ancientness, they have such beauty. It rarely happens with man that an old man is beautiful, but whenever it happens you can be certain that man has lived his life to the full.A Rabindranath becomes more and more beautiful as he become old, as his hair starts turning gray and white, as his body starts turning older and older. He attains a new quality of beauty – which no young man can have. Youth has its own beauty, but it is shallow; it can’t have depth. It is more of the physical and less of the spiritual. It is more of the body; it can’t have much profundity.Youth has not lived yet to be so profound. An old man, a Rabindranath, who has lived life – its joys, its sadnesses, its blessings, its curses, its days, its dark nights – who has seen life in its variety and richness, who has suffered and who has been blessed, naturally becomes profound, naturally gains depth. In his old age, you can see a kind of luminosity, something like a flame inside, very deep, filtering through; the rays come outside too. With his white hair and old age, he looks like Everest – that white hair has become like ancient virgin snow on the Himalayan peak. If a man lives his life totally, is not afraid to live, he will become more and more beautiful every day.The child has a kind of beauty, youth has another kind of beauty, old age has another kind of beauty – and death is also beautiful. But only if you have lived, otherwise death is very ugly – because life has been ugly, how can death be beautiful? Death is simply the last statement, the testament: your whole life is condensed in that last statement.A man who has not lived rightly, or who has lived half-heartedly, will not be able to relax in death – he will cling to life. He will shout deep in his heart, “Give me a little more time! Don’t take me away – I have not lived yet. I am not yet ripe! I have missed opportunities. I need a little more opportunity.” There will be great longing and there will be great sadness. The man is not ripe. He will hold on to the shore: he will try hard to be here. He will cling, and that clinging will create his ugliness.When a man has lived, loved, meditated, danced, prayed, and has done all kinds of things, whatever – has moved in all kinds of desires, has not left anything unexperienced; has lived in sin and sainthood, has gone to the deepest darkness and has arisen to the highest sunlit peak, has moved freely and wildly; a man whose whole commitment was with life and there was no other commitment; a man who has not sacrificed his life for some stupid idea: God, heaven, the motherland, religion, politics, communism, socialism; a man who has not sacrificed his life for anything…because life is so valuable that it cannot be sacrificed for anything else. Everything else can be sacrificed to life – life to none. Life is God. A man who has lived life with reverence, with totality, will be able to relax. When death comes he will simply relax, as the child relaxes in his mother’s lap. He will close his eyes, he will say good-bye – his statement will be that of fulfillment, gratitude. There will be a prayer on his lips: “I am thankful. All that happened was incredible. I was not worthy of it, but you made me worthy. I had not earned it, but you went on pouring your grace. I cannot pay it back.” He will die in deep gratitude, and there will be grace and there will be joy. And there will be that luminosity which always comes with fulfillment. He is dying a ripe man, mature, wise. Life has made him wise.But this is not the setting of a sun. He is simply going into rest, will rise again. Every star melts as surely as every snowflake, only to be born in another time, another place.You say, “The setting sun – what colors! Don’t you think there exists a glimpse of the unknown in the paintings of Picasso?” Yes, it is there, but it is a very perverted glimpse. It is there, distorted – because Picasso’s mirror is distorted. It is like a mirror broken in a thousand pieces and you have somehow put it together, and it reflects – that reflection is a distorted reflection.Buddha is one piece. He also reflects the same reality, but because he is one piece, he is no longer in fragments. He is integrated, he has become a silent pool of energy, a reservoir with no ripples, with no thoughts, with no madness…because the mind is madness. And Buddha exists without the mind – there is no possibility of any madness. Only the mind can go mad.It is the same reality that is reflected in a madman and in a wise man, but the difference is in the mirrors, not in the reality. When I see the trees and you see the trees, the trees are the same – but there is a great difference. If your mirror is broken, if your mirror is covered with dust, layers of dust, of ancient dust of many, many lives, your reflection cannot be true to reality, it cannot be of suchness.Yes, there is a glimpse, even in Picasso, but that glimpse could have been far truer to reality. If Picasso had known something of meditation, if he had known how to drop his continuous thought process, how to drop his mind – the West has forgotten how.And you say, “Don’t you think there exists a madness without consciousness and a madness with consciousness?” I have never heard of madness with consciousness. All madness is without consciousness. To be conscious and mad is impossible. It is as impossible as it is to have light in the room and darkness too. When the room is lighted, you cannot bring darkness in the room. When you bring light in, darkness is no more.So is consciousness – consciousness is light, it is a flame, it is a fire. Madness is like darkness. It exists only in an unconscious being.That’s why I say if Picasso had known something of meditation, he would have benefited immensely and the world would have benefited immensely too. His creation would have been a great blessing. Right now, as it is, it is simply a statement of madness and nothing else.And, finally, you say, “In real beauty I find always life and death.” In real beauty there is neither life nor death – there is eternity. Life and death are our ideas. We go on imposing… If man disappears from the earth, life and death will both disappear. Trees will live and die, but there will be no life and no death. Birds will sing and one day fall and disappear – there will be life and death, but no idea of life and death. Ideas are all man-made.And beauty is only when you have pushed aside all man-made ideas. Beauty is eternal – it is beyond life and death. Truth is eternal – it is beyond life and death. Beauty is truth: truth is beauty.“In real beauty I find always life and death.” And what do you mean by “real beauty”? Have you ever seen unreal beauty? Beauty is reality. There is no unreal beauty. But we go on making distinctions because the mind cannot allow you to see the distinctionless. Everywhere it will make distinctions – real and unreal, good and bad, moral and immoral, holy and unholy, material and spiritual. The mind goes on making distinctions because the mind cannot see the distinctionless – and that which is, is distinctionless.“For me this problem is not abstract – I live it.” Nobody can live a problem! And if you live a problem, you will be mad. You can live a mystery, not a problem. A problem necessarily goads you for its solution. What is a problem? A problem is something that you cannot leave as it is; it has to be solved. You cannot live a problem. And the problem will not allow you to live at all, unless you solve it. And you have so many problems, and they all clamor for their solution, and they all destroy your life.Mysteries can be lived. What is the difference between a mystery and a problem? A problem can be solved, a mystery cannot be solved, a mystery is insoluble. A mystery is not a question and there is no answer for it. You have simply to live it. You have to trust it.The mind creates problems out of a mystery because the mind cannot trust. The mind is doubt. It goes on putting “Why?” It goes on creating the question mark everywhere.Why is the rose beautiful? Now it has become a problem; it has to be solved – Why? An answer has to be found. The beauty of the rose is a mystery – there is no answer. It is simply there. There is no why to it. So is love. So are people. So is music. So is silence. So are the stars and the seas and the mountains. So is this whole.If you make problems out of it, you will create philosophy. If you don’t make any problem out of existence, religion is born in you. Religion knows no problems and no answers. Religion lives life like a child – in absolute awe, wonder, in reverence. In fact, to ask a question is to be irreverent. The question is the beginning of the murder of the mystery. The question is the beginning of demystification.That’s what science has been continuously doing – demystifying. It cannot succeed. It has failed utterly, but it goes on trying. The more it fails, the more madly it tries. The whole effort behind science is how to demystify existence; how to know every answer for every question – how to make man knowledgeable. If science succeeds, then there will come a day when all questions have been answered. Just think of it. Beyond that will be sheer boredom.Just think of it. A day when all questions have been solved, mysteries dissolved, you know every answer. You can go and consult a computer or an encyclopedia, or you can ask an expert, but all questions are solved. There are no more questions left. That will be the day of utter doom. There will be sheer boredom beyond that. Then there cannot be any joy.Knowledge kills joy – knowledge is a killjoy. Religion does not trust in knowledge. Religion trusts in ignorance because ignorance is innocent.You say, “For me this problem is not abstract…” Problems as such are always abstract. You cannot live a problem: you can live only a mystery. But for that you will have to drop all problems.“I love a dying violet.” But why? Why can’t you love just a violet? Why does it need to die? Why can’t you just love a violet? Why “dying”? Somehow you must be suicidal. Somehow you are death-oriented. Somehow you are destructive. Somehow you enjoy only sadness.And again, let me repeat: the violet is not dying; the violet is only reborn. It is only in your mind that the violet is dying. But you enjoy death. There is something obsessive in you. It may be just because you are incapable of enjoying life – you have created a substitute: you enjoy death.I am not against enjoying death, but I would like to say to you: if you cannot enjoy life, you cannot enjoy death – because death is the culmination, death is the crescendo. Death is the finishing touch, the finish. Death is not against life: it is life’s greatest peak.The third question:Osho,How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship?How can one go deep with a person when he is afraid?Relationship and love are totally different things. Love is never a relationship, and relationship is never love. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. Relationship is a dead thing, a closed thing. Love is a flowing.Mantra, you ask me, “How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship?” So the first thing to be reminded of is that love is never a relationship. Then something else is masquerading as love. Maybe you are searching for a husband or a wife – you are searching for some security, you are searching for some structure. A structured life is a murdered life.There is a fixation in the human mind for structures because in a structured life one feels secure, one knows where one is, one knows where one stands in relationship to the other. It seems that because man is born in the womb of the mother and for nine months remains in a structure, that continues deep down in the psyche – and man is always trying to find a structure somewhere.If he loves, he wants to make a relationship out of it immediately. He wants to get married. He wants to create a certain conditioning. He wants to make it a contract. Or he enters a church, or he enters a political party, or he enters any club and he wants to be structured, he wants to know where he stands in the hierarchy, in what relationship. He wants to have an identity: “I am this.” He does not want to remain uncertain.And life is uncertain. Only death is certain. Remember: in your whole life, once you have taken birth, only death is certain and everything else is uncertain. Uncertainty is the very core of life. Insecurity is its very spirit. But we are always hankering for a structure.A relationship is a structure, and love is unstructured. So love relates, certainly, but never becomes a relationship. Love is a moment-to-moment process. Remember it. Love is a state of your being, not a relationship. There are loving people and there are unloving people. Unloving people pretend to be loving through the relationship. Loving people need not have any relationship – love is enough.Be a loving person rather than in a love relationship – because relationships happen one day and disappear another day. They are flowers; in the morning they bloom, by the evening they are gone. Be a loving person, Mantra.But people find it very difficult to be a loving person, so they create a relationship – and befool that way: “Now I am a loving person because I am in a relationship.” And the relationship may be just one of monopoly, possessiveness, exclusiveness.A relationship may be just out of fear, may not have anything to do with love. Relationship may be just a kind of security – financial or something else. The relationship is needed only because love is not there. A relationship is a substitute.Become alert. A relationship destroys love, destroys the very possibility of its birth. One thing.Second thing. You say, “How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship?” As far as I know, Mantra is still alone. As far as I know, it will be very difficult for her to move in love – that’s what my feeling is about her. Whenever I have looked into her eyes, I have found a very stony heart. In fact, the relationship has not even started and she is asking how to end it. Clever mind. Wants to have everything clear. Even before it has started, you want to be certain how to end it.The fear of going into love is such that one wants to be perfectly alert and capable so that if things are too much and one needs to get out, one knows when and how to know when it is time to get out. And Mantra has not yet entered love and she is asking how to end it! She wants to know every possibility beforehand. She wants to go into it prepared – and nobody can go prepared into a love relationship.Nobody can go prepared. When you are too prepared, that very preparedness prevents. Love has to happen. When it happens, it is almost from the unknown. It comes, surrounds you, drives you crazy – into unknown directions, into unknown dimensions. It takes you away. It is always a surprise. You cannot plan for it. The more you plan for it, the less is the possibility of its happening.And that’s what Mantra is doing – planning, thinking about it, brooding, preparing. And now this is the last thing that one can ask: “How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship?” It has not even started! The marriage has not happened and you have gone to the lawyer to ask about divorce.And third thing: love happens on its own and ends on its own. You need not be worried about it. You cannot make it happen and you cannot end it. It is beyond you. It is far bigger than you. Your ego is not capable of controlling it. And this is why Mantra is not moving into love energy, and is completely unaware of what it is. She keeps herself in control. She is a disciplined lady. If she had been around in the old days she would have been appreciated very much – she is a lady. Now she has fallen into wrong company here. This place is not for ladies and gentlemen. For ladies and gentlemen there are other places – cemeteries. This place is for people who are alive – for men, for women, certainly, but not for ladies and gentlemen.A lady is such a diluted woman – it is worthless. A gentleman is no longer a man at all – that’s why he is called “gentleman.” He has lost all energy; he is lukewarm, he has no fire any more, no passion. His fire has gone out. He is mannerly, he knows all about etiquette, but he is dead.One cannot start love. It is not like a switch that you put on and off. You can only make yourself available: when it happens, it happens. It always comes from the blue – and it comes like a jolt. And it shakes you and uproots you – it is an earthquake. The ground beneath your feet disappears. Suddenly you are falling into a bottomless abyss.That’s why love has been called “falling in love.” You lose balance. You are no longer yourself. You are drunk. You walk like a drunkard. The control, the discipline, can’t exist with love. You cannot begin it – how can you end it?Sometimes it happens: love has ended and you can go on living with the man or the woman, but love has ended. Sometimes the opposite also happens: the woman has died, but love continues; the man has died, but love continues. The ways of love are very mysterious.You can go on living with the woman and the man, and you can go on reproducing children, and love is not there. Or, the woman has left you, has gone with somebody else; for her, love has taken a different route – but you go on crying for her, you go on feeling for her; your heart still spins and weaves for her. Your heart still sings and dances for her. Or the woman is dead and there is no possibility of meeting her again, but still it continues.Love’s ways are beyond you. It is not possible for you to know when it is appropriate. Love is such a dangerous thing – you cannot know the appropriate time to begin it, and you cannot find the appropriate time to stop it. It happens in inappropriate times – when you were not even waiting, not thinking, and even when you feel embarrassed. But the god of love takes possession of you.If you want to start it and end it according to you, then it will not be love. It will be something plastic, synthetic.“How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship? How can one go deep with a person when he is afraid?” That’s his problem that he is afraid. You need not be worried about it. Never ask about problems which are not yours.Now, if you choose a person who is afraid, that simply means you have some problem deep down, that’s why you choose a person who is afraid. Maybe you are afraid and you don’t want to go with a courageous person, because then he will take you into unknown territories. So you manage a relationship.Remember: only relationships can be managed. You manage a relationship with a coward. You know that he will not go very far; you know that “He is more of a coward than me.” You know that he will become a hen-pecked husband, that “He will follow me like a shadow.” Now this is a problem, a dilemma.Nobody, not even the wife, loves the hen-pecked husband, cannot – because love always longs for something great. Love always longs for the divine. Now the hen-pecked husband looks so ugly, so unloving, unworthy of love. Even the wife cannot love him.A woman who is just a slave to you, how can you love her? Love happens among friends, not between masters and slaves. You cannot love a woman who is a slave. You can order her, but you cannot love her; you can use her but you cannot love her. It will be a kind of prostitution, it cannot be love. One loves only equals.So, Mantra, I don’t know about whom you are asking, but that is his problem. He should come to me; he can inquire. But one thing is certain about you: if you fall with a man who is afraid of going into depth, then really you are afraid of going into depth – that’s why you have chosen the man.We always choose the person according to our innermost characteristics. We always fall in love with a person because our mind only allows that.I have heard about a man who divorced eight times, and again and again was surprised that he always found the same type of woman. And eight times he tried – he tried hard! What more can you do? After each one or two years, he divorced the woman, started looking, and was very alert that he should never fall in the same trap, but again, after six months, eight months, he would find a woman. For a few days things would go okay – and then the same rut, and he would see that he had again found the same type of woman.After eight marriages he became aware of the fact that “The real problem is with my type. Only these women appeal to me, and unless I change my type, just changing the woman is not going to help.”You have a certain type of mind; for that mind a certain type of man or woman looks appealing. And you will find him or her again and again – unless you change.You ask, “How can one go deep with a person when he is afraid?” Why did you choose this man? You can choose the dangerous kind – if you want to go really deep.And everybody is afraid of going deep. In depth is death, because every depth relaxes you so much that it looks like death. Every depth takes you out of the ego. That’s why people are afraid of love. They hanker for relationship, but they are afraid of love.And a love which is open-ended creates more fear – because one never knows where it is going to land you. To remain open-ended, to remain in love without creating a relationship, is real courage. And if you have that courage, love will come in a thousand and one ways, will sing a thousand and one songs in your heart, will dance in a thousand and one ways in your being.The last question:Osho,Why can't I follow someone who knows? What is the need to search for truth myself?How are you going to know that the other knows? It will be just a belief. How are you going to know that the other has known the truth? You don’t have any experience. The other may be deceiving – or may himself be deceived. The other may be mad or may be cunning. How are you going to decide that the other has really known? There is no way.Out of fear you can follow the other, but you will be following blindly. And who knows, the one you are following may be blind himself; he may be following somebody else. That’s how things are. That’s how priests go on following each other. Nobody knows when the man with eyes was there.For example, Jesus was the man with eyes, but then the Christian priests for these two thousand years have been following each other; a long line of blind people. The blind leading the blind.You ask, “Why can’t I follow someone who knows?” And even if someone knows – for argument’s sake, let us accept that someone knows – even then he cannot transfer his truth to you. He can only indicate the way; you will have to go on the way. He can only give you a prescription; you will have to follow the prescription, you will have to do things.Truth cannot be transferred – you will have to arrive at it on your own.“What is the need to search for truth myself?” Because without truth life is meaningless. Because truth is always individual; it is not a collective phenomenon. Truth does not belong to the crowd. Each one has to come to it on his own.Remember, borrowed knowledge is not going to help. It may even be that the man you borrowed your knowledge from was a real knower, but the moment the knowledge comes to you it is borrowed – and borrowed knowledge is always false. The source may have been true but the moment it comes into you, you are untrue, it becomes untrue.For the truth to exist in you, you will have to become true yourself. One has to go into one’s own being to find the truth.And without truth there is no joy. And without truth there is no significance. And without truth you live in vain.Two tramps were talking. One, who was skinny and starved, said, “Hey, how come you always look so well-fed and never seem to go hungry?”The second said, “I’ve got me this system. I get some horse manure off the road, go up to one of the great big fine houses, knock on the door, and ask for a bit of salt and pepper to put on it. Of course, the people always say, ‘You can’t eat that! Come on inside for a decent meal.’ Or they give me a few rupees and I go eat at a cafe.”So the skinny tramp thought he’d give it a try. He found some really, really old manure, knocked on the door of the biggest house on the street, and said, “Excuse me, lady, could you spare me a pinch of salt and pepper for my bit of food here?”“You can’t eat that, you poor man!” said the woman.“It’s working,” thought the tramp, pleased with himself.“No, you can’t eat that,” repeated the woman, “you’ll be ill! Go round to the stables and get yourself a fresh bit!”Enough for today.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 09 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why can't I know God?For you are it! Knowledge is not possible; knowledge presupposes division, split. The knower has to be separate from the known. That’s why God cannot be known. You can be God – you are – but you cannot know him. The very effort to know him is based on separation. Knowledge separates, divides; it never bridges you. That’s why I insist again and again: be innocent, not knowledgeable – then you will be in harmony with existence. Then you will be existence. Be ignorant. Blessed are the ignorant.Why? – because when there is no knowledge, no effort to know, divisions disappear. You merge, you meet, you become one.You cannot know God because God is hiding in you. God cannot be reduced to an object. God cannot become the known. God is the knower; God is your subjectivity. It is not the goal, it is the seeker. It is not at the end of the journey, it is in the beginning – in the very beginning. It is the beginning of the journey. It is the pilgrimage. Don’t try to know God, otherwise you will fail, and there will be great frustration.Become God. Be God. And when I say become God, I am using language which is not adequate. You are God! Recognize it – that’s all that I mean by becoming it. Look within yourself. Don’t seek God – find him. Without seeking he has to be found. All search leads astray, because the search starts from the very false idea that he is separate, that he is far away, that he is somebody else.He is in the seeker – he is the search.The second question:Osho,Please explain “right-mindfulness.” If not a goal or something to practice, what is it?Right-mindfulness is a strange word. First: there is no mind in it – hence it is called “right-mindfulness.” Secondly, there is nothing right and wrong in it – hence it is called right-mindfulness. This is a Buddhist way of saying things.It can’t be a goal, because when there is a goal you are always in the wrong. Why are you in the wrong when there is a goal? – because when there is a goal there is desire, when there is desire you are unhappy, discontented. When there is desire, there is anxiety: “Will I be able to make it or not? Will it be possible or not?”When there is desire there is future. And with the future, anxiety enters your being. With the desire, you have lost contact with the present.Right-mindfulness is not a goal, cannot be a goal – because when all desires disappear and all goals disappear and you are herenow, that is the moment of right-mindfulness.Why is it called “right”? It is called right because it knows no division between right and wrong. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right. All judgments have disappeared. One is utterly innocent.When you see a roseflower, does the idea arise in you: “It is right, it is wrong”? When you see the morning star disappearing, does the idea arise in you: “Is it right or is it wrong?” When you start looking at life with no judgment, with no prejudice, then you are in the state of right-mindfulness.Jesus has said, “Judge ye not.” Jesus has also said, “Resist not evil” – not even evil has to be resisted, then arises right-mindfulness. When you are neither moral nor immoral, when you are amoral like the trees and animals and birds and beasts, when you are like a small innocent child who has just opened his eyes, with no ideas… Then, in that silence, in that purity, it is right-mindfulness.Why is it called right? It is called right because now it knows nothing as right and wrong – it knows no division, it is indivisible. The acceptance is total, that’s why it is called right. You have fallen into the suchness of existence. You are no longer standing there like a judge.Judging is wrong. To be in a state of nonjudgment is right. Right, not against wrong; right because all wrong and right have disappeared. You have no opinion. You don’t carry a philosophy in the mind. You are simply a mirror.When you come before a mirror, the mirror does not say, “You are beautiful,” “You are ugly” It simply reflects. It reflects without condemnation, without appreciation – it reflects choicelessly. It just reflects.When your consciousness has become a mirror and simply reflects whatever is the case, it is right-mindfulness. That mirrorlike quality…And it is not a goal because every goal will bring dust on the mirror. Every goal will stir desires, and desires surround your mirror like mist – then the reflection is not true, then suchness is not reflected. When you have some idea, you cannot be true to reality. You distort reality according to your idea. You try to mold reality according to your idea: you try to modify reality. You go on looking for your idea. You are searching for support; you would like reality to support your idea, you would like reality to agree with you – and then you distort. Then you start seeing things which are not there, and you stop seeing things which are there. Then you start living in a mind-world.To live in the mind is wrong. To live without mind is right because without mind, the consciousness exists in its purity, mirrorlike – it simply reflects. It says nothing. It has no interpretation. It interprets not.And why is it called mindfulness? This is the translation of a Buddhist term, sammasati. Samma means right – the translation is not very correct, cannot be. Samma is a very strange word, very significant, has many meanings. “Right” is only one of its meanings. Samma is the root from where samadhi arises; the word samadhi comes from samma.Samma means many things. Tranquility, silence, equanimity, balance, undisturbedness, undistractedness, centeredness, groundedness – they are all aspects of samma. Right is a very poor translation of samma.And sati – sammasati. Sati can mean mindfulness, can mean remembrance, can mean reflection, can mean recollectedness, can mean presence. All those meanings are involved in it. Mindfulness is only one of the meanings. It is a very potential and pregnant word – sammasati.It is the seventh step in Buddha’s eight steps – you are very close to reality. The eighth is samadhi. The seventh is sammasati. You have come very, very close; you are just on the threshold of reality – it has to be very, very significant. When you are utterly present in the presence, when you don’t have any past and don’t have any future; when this cuckoo calling, this train passing, this dog barking, is all; when this is all and there is no that, when the word here is your whole reality and there is no there, when now contains all time and there is no then – then you are in the state of sammasati.That’s what I go on calling “herenow” – that is sammasati. Then you are utterly present, absolutely present. When something is going on in your mind about the past, you are not here; a part of you is traveling toward the past, and a part of you is traveling toward the future – only a small fragment is here.When all the parts of your being are here, when you are totally at home, nothing is missing, when you are integratedly here, then it is right-mindfulness. In that moment you will reflect reality – as it is, without any distraction, without any distortion. Because you don’t have any thoughts in the mind, how can you distort it? Thought distorts, thinking is destructive. It goes on imposing – it does not allow you to see that which is.Right-mindfulness is a state of no-mind, no-thought. And remember: it is also a state of no-feeling – otherwise, you may think it is a state of feeling. No, it is not – because feeling again creates ripples and the surface of the lake is disturbed, and again the moon is not reflected as it is. Neither thought disturbs you, nor feeling.These are the three states: one is thinking – the most disturbed state; second is feeling – less disturbed than thinking, but still disturbed; third is being – no disturbance at all. One is in the head, second is in the heart, third is in your guts. Right-mindfulness is a gut-state: no head, no heart. You are simply there undefined, undefinable.You ask me, “Please explain what ‘right-mindfulness’ is. If not a goal or something to practice, what is it?” And, yes, it is not a practice. You cannot practice it because practice brings a goal. Practice is desire, practice is the mind. And remember: whenever you practice something, you are imposing something against yourself, otherwise why practice it? Against whom are you practicing? When you practice truth, what will you do? You will repress the untruth – but the untruth will remain there, deep inside you, ready to explode any moment. It will go on accumulating.When you practice love, what will you do? You will repress hatred. When you practice compassion, what will you do? You will repress anger. And all that is repressed will remain in you; all that is practiced will remain on the surface, and all that is rejected will go deep into your being. The rejected will become part of your being and the practiced will remain just a coating, a painting on the surface.And remember: whenever you practice anything, you are angry at it. Naturally so – because all practicing divides you, makes you schizophrenic.One part of you is trying to manipulate the other part. One part of you is trying to enforce some ideas on the other part. And the part that is trying to enforce is a very impotent part, but articulate – your head. It has no power, but it is very articulate, very clever, very cunning, very argumentative. And the head goes on imposing on your body, on your heart, which are far more potential, far more powerful; they have energy sources, but they are not articulate, they are not argumentative – they are silent. The head goes on pretending that it has practiced…and then a situation arises and all practice is thrown away – because the head has no energy.You think for years that you will never be angry, then one day somebody insults you and in a single moment you have forgotten all that practice. And you are angry! By the time you come to know that you are angry, the anger has already happened. You are burning, you are fire. From where does this fire come? And years of practice! That practice was just on the surface. The mind was pretending. Because there was no situation provoking you, the mind was able to pretend. Now the situation has arisen and the mind is not able to pretend. The reality asserts itself.That’s why down the ages, through the ages, the so-called religious people have been escaping from society, from life. Why? – they are escaping from situations where their practice can be proved wrong. They are doing nothing else. Going to the Himalayas, they are simply escaping from the world – because the world brings situations. And their so-called practice and their religion and their discipline is broken again and again. Somebody insults, or a beautiful woman passes by, and all their celibacy and all their brahmacharya and all their ideas are gone. A single beautiful woman is enough to destroy all their years of celibacy.They escape from women, they escape from the world, they escape from money and the market – they know that they can be moral and religious and saintly only when there is no situation which provokes their reality. Then the mind can go on playing the game in a monastery. When there is no challenge, the mind seems to be the master. When there is challenge, the mind is no longer a master.Whatever you practice remains false. Never out of practice has anything real happened. Beware of this. The real happens only through understanding, not through practice. And what is the difference?Understanding will say, “Remain where situations arise, remain where challenges surround you. Be where provocations and temptations exist. Test yourself. Go into situations!” Understanding will say, “If anger comes, then go into anger and see what it is. See yourself – don’t trust anybody else’s judgment about it. Go into it. Be burned by it. Let it leave scars on your being – because one learns only through the hard way.” Only your experience will tell you again and again and again that anger is stupid – not that it is a sin, it is simply stupid. And as the understanding grows deeper, anger will be coming less and less. One day…the understanding has touched your very core of being, the light has penetrated you. You have seen through and through that anger is futile: in that very moment, anger has disappeared and there has not been any repression.Remember this: repression is the pitfall for all those people who want to transform their lives – they have to avoid repression. Indulgence is not so bad because indulgence can one day bring understanding, but repression can never bring understanding. How can you understand something which you go on repressing and you don’t look into? You go on covering it, go on throwing it in the basement of your being.And remember: the more you practice, the more you pretend, the more you are angry at your own practice. Your real parts, your guts are angry.The intellectual young man was telling off his girlfriend. “Jane,” he remonstrated, “I don’t think you are the girl for me. My interests are in art, literature, and in music. You are only concerned with sports, with gambling and with common activities that are altogether alien to me. In fact, to be blunt about it – you are downright uncouth!”“Uncouth!” she exploded. “Me? What are you talking about? Uncouth? Didn’t I go along with you to them operas, them concerts, them lectures, and all that sort of shit?”That’s what will happen. You can go on practicing, but deep down you know that you are repressing, that you are rejecting, that you are denying some essential parts of your being.Right-mindfulness is the flavor of understanding, not the outcome of practice. Right-mindfulness is the fragrance – the fragrance of seeing into things deeply, the fragrance of insight.The third question:Osho,Is there any pain worse than this? You have touched my secret: all my sources are poisoned and yet I manage to go on living and it is not possible – that is what I want to hide from everyone. You put the finger on my deepest wounds, and make me scream out in pain and then you lead me to the only life-giving source – acceptance.No words any more. Only tears.Ecstasy is only out of agony – and the deeper the agony, the deeper the ecstasy will be; total the agony, total will be the ecstasy. Everything has to be paid for. For ecstasy, we have to pay in agony. One has to go through deep pain to get rid of pain. Pain is cleansing. Pain is a fire; it burns the rubbish in you, it destroys the unessential. Just as we purify gold through fire, consciousness is purified through pain. Pain has something to deliver to you.Don’t avoid pain. If you avoid pain, you are avoiding pleasure. Don’t avoid the world. If you avoid the world, you have avoided godliness. Don’t avoid darkness. If you avoid darkness, the dawn will never come. It is out of the dark night that the morning is born. And when the night is darkest, the sunrise is closest. Remember this fundamental law of life, this paradox.If I have to cleanse you, purify you, I have to become a fire to you. Jesus has said, “I am fire and I have come to burn you.” Every master is a fire. If you come across a master who is not a fire, but just a kind of ointment, escape from there. He will give you consolations, but he will not be able to transmute your life-energies. He may be able to make you comfortable in life, but he will not be able to help you to transcend life.The real master is always a fire. A real master is always there to destroy.Yes, I will touch your wounds again and again. You are hiding them. You are hiding them, that’s why they are not healing. They have to be brought to sunlight, to fresh air. They have to be exposed. Only in that exposure will they start healing. And, yes, when I touch your wound it hurts. The more you want to be healed, the more it will hurt, because much pus is there. You have been hiding the wounds for so long – much pus has gathered. The pus has to be thrown out of your system, the poison has to be thrown out of your system.This agony is not a curse, it is a blessing – because out of this agony, slowly, slowly you will arise in a totally different dimension. Acceptance is the bridge. Accept the pain, accept the wounds, accept yourself as you are. Don’t try to pretend to be somebody else, don’t try to show that you are not this. Don’t be egoistic, and don’t go on pre-tending and laughing while your heart is crying. Don’t smile if your eyes are full of tears. Don’t be inauthentic, because by being inauthentic you are simply protecting your wounds from being healed. Your whole being will become rotten.That’s how people are. Pus and pus and pus. And they are somehow managing so that nobody should know how much it stinks inside them. They don’t go inside themselves because it stinks too much, it is horrible. And they don’t allow anybody to enter their being – that’s why they don’t love because love will need exposure. They don’t make contact because if you contact somebody he may smell things that you are hiding. You know. You keep aloof, you go only so far.You don’t go inside yourself, you don’t allow anybody else to go inside you. But when you have come to me you have to allow me to come inside you. That’s what sannyas is all about. A declaration that for me your doors are open. By becoming a sannyasin, you have handed the key to me. Now pain is going to be there because sannyas is a surgery. Many rotten parts have to be cut and much poison has to be taken out of your system – it is going to be painful. But be courageous. Go through it and great will be your joy.The fourth question:Osho,Why should one search for God?Isn't life enough?Life is God. God is life. those two words are synonymous, synonyms. Forget about God! Search for life – it is the same search.Using the word God does not change anything. But I know why the question has arisen. The question has arisen because the priests have been telling you that life and God are not only separate but opposite. They have been telling you that if you want to search and seek God, you will have to renounce life – hence the question. They have been telling you that God is very angry at you because you are living, God is very angry at you because you are loving, God is very angry at you that you are happy here on this earth. Be sad! Be miserable and pray and ask for the other world. Feel yourself a stranger here; feel as if you have been thrown into a prison. This life is a kind of punishment.That’s what your priests have been telling you down the ages. They have created the idea, a very false idea and a very irreligious idea, that God and life are not only separate but antagonistic. If you search for life, you will be against God. If you want to search for God, you have to be against life. Now, this is utter stupidity! God is life, God is the very center of life. Life is the circumference of God’s center. Life is the cyclone and God is the center of the cyclone.Searching for God, you will come to know the deepest meaning of life. Searching for life you will start falling into God unawares. If you go deep into life, you will find God. If you go deep into God, you will find life abundant.But the religious people have destroyed a beautiful word – God is a beautiful word, but it has been used by wrong people. It has become associated with wrong meanings. When I use the word God, I mean the innermost core of life – not that you have to renounce life, but that you have to love life, that you have to dive deep into life.Why do I use the word God? Why can’t I drop it and simply use life? The problem is that with life you have the idea that life finishes in the mundane – the market, money, power, prestige, politics, the family, and the rut and the routine. You think this is life. This is just the very periphery of life. You are standing in the porch and you think this is the palace. It is part of the palace, but it is just the entrance. There are great treasures in the palace.That’s why I don’t use just the word life, because that will give you again a wrong notion. So I have to go on using both words: life and God – and go on insisting that they are synonyms.Search for the center of life and you will be searching for God.Jesus has said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, then all else shall be added unto you.” Life comes on its own – all else shall be added unto you. If you seek the center, then the periphery follows, the circumference follows. When you are standing at the center, the whole of life is available to you. But it is not so if you are standing on the circumference. You may not be even aware of the center.From the center, the circumference remains available; but from the circumference you may not even become alert, you may not be even conscious that there is a center also.I have heard a beautiful story…Once, Harun al-Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad, was celebrating a royal occasion. He ordered a grand display of all manner of jewelry and artwork for the occasion, and invited not only courtiers and nobles but many commoners also.At the height of the celebrations, the sultan developed a magnanimous mood and all of a sudden he ordered every person present to touch any article they liked, and that article, no matter how precious, would belong to that person. No sooner was the royal command given than a rush was made to possess the costliest thing within reach.A beautiful slave girl, remaining composed and serene by the side of the throne asked the sultan to reaffirm his command. On receiving affirmation, the slave girl immediately touched the Caliph himself on the arm saying, “Why should I run after those things when the master of them all is here?”The sultan, in admiration of the insight shown by the girl, complimented her and said, “Now that you possess me, the whole of my kingdom is yours.”Life is the circumference: God is the center. If you touch God, all is yours. If you have arrived at the center, then the whole belongs to you.You ask, “Why should one search for God? Is not life enough?” You will know life only when you have touched God. By being divine, life will be revealed to you in all its dimensions. It has multi facets to it, it is multidimensional. Just eating, drinking, and merrying is not all. And I am not against that, remember. That is perfectly good as it is. That is beautiful as it is, but it is not all.I am a spiritual hedonist. I am a synthesis of Buddha and Epicurus. Nobody has tried that yet. There have been people who are absolutely concerned with eating, drinking, and merrying, and they don’t bother a bit about God and all that nonsense. There are people who are absolutely concerned with God and don’t bother about eating, drinking, and merrying and all that nonsense. I love both. I am totally in love with both. And I don’t see any contradiction between the two.Eating, drinking, merrying, is the circumference. It is good! God is there too, but very dilute. When you start moving toward the center, God becomes more concentrated. When you drink, you attain a forgetfulness which is momentary. When you drink of God, you attain a forgetfulness which is eternal. When you fall in love with somebody’s body, it is going to be a very temporary affair. When you fall in love with somebody’s spirit, it is going to be an eternal phenomenon. Loving the body is good, but nothing compared with the love of the soul. Loving the visible is good, but don’t get caught there – there is more to it. Hiding behind it is the invisible.Eating is joyful, but when you start eating consciousness – that is what meditation is. When you start nourishing consciousness, then you know what real eating is. That’s what Jesus said to his disciples when he was departing: “Eat me, drink me – let me be your food.” Each disciple has to become a cannibal because he has to eat of the master. And each master is already a skilled cannibal – he goes on eating his disciples.There are things on the periphery and there are things at the center. The circumference cannot exist without the center and the center cannot exist without the circumference. That’s why I say they are both together, they are part of each other.Epicurus lives on the circumference. Buddha lives at the center. I live together in both the spaces. And that is my message to you: Be available to the circumference as much as to the center, and go on moving in and out. Fall in love and meditate. Be in the body and be the soul. Be the visible and be the invisible. And you will be the richest sannyasins that have ever existed on this earth.Epicurus’ followers were rich – they knew how to eat and drink and be merry; but they were a little poor in the sense that they didn’t know how to meditate. They knew how to love, how to relate, but they were not aware at all that there exists something like meditation. And they were beautiful people. Their dance was something of the eternal, but they were not aware of the eternal. Their joy was a reflection of something very deep, but they were not aware of the depth. They lived on the waves – although the waves were living on the ocean, in the ocean, but they lived on the waves. They sailed in small boats, and they were happy with the sun and the sea, and their joy was great, and I am all for it – but there are deeper treasures also. There are pearls which can only be found by diving. Buddha’s followers dived deep into the sea and forgot all about the sun and the waves and the joy and surfing – they forgot all about that. They were rich; they attained the center – but they were poor also.My own approach is that there is no need to choose – be choicelessly available to all. Sometimes it is good to be on the waves, in the sun, and sometimes it is good to go to the depth, to the pacific depth of life, to those dark silences where the sun has never penetrated. To be available to both the world and God, life and God, is freedom. To me, the Epicureans are not free because they cannot go into the depth; and Buddhists are also not free because they cannot go back to the surface. Their freedom has limitations.I give you absolute freedom without any limitations; I make available to you all that existence has made available to you. You are the most courageous experiment on the earth hitherto. It needs guts to be available to these two places together – it needs guts to be in love and still be in meditation, to meditate and yet to love. It is very easy, comfortable, to be in love and forget about meditation; it is simple, it has no complexity in it – because when you love, you forget yourself, you remember the other, you become other-oriented. It is a simple process to forget yourself and to become other-oriented. To love and to meditate is difficult, complex, because to meditate means to forget the other and become self-oriented. Now you will be moving between polarities – you will have to become a swinger. But out of complexity is richness.The fifth question:Osho,Whenever I am with somebody funny, I become funny. With somebody sad, I feel sad; somebody ecstatic, I feel blissful; and with a real schmuck, I become a schmuck too.And sitting with you in lecture, enlightenment.What is happening? And where is me?Chaitanya Hari, I must make you aware that you are very close to enlightenment. If you want to escape, escape now otherwise it will be too late!It is beautiful – the ego is disappearing. That’s how it should be. You are melting; you are no longer an iceberg. You are becoming a mirror – so somebody is sad, you reflect sadness; and somebody is ecstatic and you express ecstasy. And somebody is dancing and a dance arises in you. And somebody sings a song and you echo it. You are becoming a mirror.Don’t be afraid, don’t be worried, don’t create a problem out of it. Relax into it. This is how it should be.Forget about yourself. Don’t ask, “And where is me?” “Me” is a false entity, it is a shadow, it is illusion. It is disappearing. You are becoming a hollow bamboo. It will be frightening, because to you it will look as if you are dying. In fact, it is true that you are dying – the ego is dying. It is true that you will not be able to feel your personality. How can you feel your personality? When somebody laughs, there is laughter in you, and somebody cries and tears come to you. How can you feel your personality?A personality means resistance: somebody is crying and you are still happy – that is personality. Somebody is laughing and you are still crying – that is personality. You are separate, that is personality: you resist. You demark yourself. You say, “I am this, and I will remain this. You can go on laughing – I don’t care. I am sad and I won’t allow you to disturb my sadness. I will persist. This is me!”The ego is like ice, frozen. It is a resistance, a continuous resistance.Now that is dissolving – you are blessed, Chaitanya Hari. Help it to go. Soon greater things will happen. Looking at a tree you will become a tree; you will forget to go back to your room and Krishna will have to come and find you.It happened to Socrates: one night he went outside and he started looking at the stars and he became a star. He was looking at a star and it was fascinating. It was so beautiful that he could not look away from it. He became one with it.And the snow started falling and he was frozen – he was almost dead by the morning when he was found. His disciples searched for him the whole night; only in the morning was he found, covered with snow, but still his eyes were looking at the sky. He was not there.They had to shake him and shock him and warm him and massage him to come back. Slowly, slowly he came back and they asked, “What has happened?”And he laughed. He said, “This is strange! I became the star.”That used to happen to Ramakrishna almost every day. Anywhere, any excuse, and he would fall into samadhi. For hours. Walking on the road, his disciples were always in trouble. Even somebody passing by, and in India just anybody can say, “Hare krishna, hare rama,” just any word that reminds him of God. People ordinarily salute in India, “Jai ramji – hail God!” To anybody. And Ramakrishna coming – anybody would say it. Just hearing the word Ram and he is gone. Standing on the road, in the middle of the traffic… And the crowd gathers, and the policeman comes and tells the disciples, “Take your master away from here.”And they have to carry his body and he is just gone. It was enough!Once it happened that for six days continuously he remained like a corpse. His disciples had to feed him, to wash him, and cry and pray to God, “Send our master back!”Yes, it is possible. Standing by the side of a pine tree, you can become a pine. Touching a rock, you can become a rock – because really there are no divisions. We are part of one reality. We are not apart; we are one with the whole.When somebody is crying, you are crying. And when somebody is dancing, you are dancing. We are joined together. We are interlinked. We are not independent, we are not dependent either – we are interdependent. One consciousness, one life, surrounds you, within and without. It is oneness.Something beautiful is very close by – if you can allow it, you will be gone and God will be there. But it almost always happens that in such moments one becomes very frightened. One starts asking, “And where is ‘me’?” When resistance starts disappearing and the personality starts disappearing, naturally one becomes frightened: “What is happening to me? Am I going mad? Why should I cry if somebody else is crying?” – because you have been taught that you are separate. But that teaching is simply false; it is a make-believe.And there will be fear for one more reason: now there are so many people – somebody is crying and somebody is laughing, now what will you do? You will have to cry and laugh together. And then people will certainly think you have gone mad. It is okay that somebody is crying and you feel empathy and you cry, and somebody is laughing, naturally laughter is infectious and you start laughing. But what will you do when one person is crying and another person is laughing? And if you do both together you are very contradictory – but that’s what is possible. That is divine madness; that is the greatest experience that is possible to man. Allow that too.That is my purpose here. Why am I creating this commune? Just to create a certain milieu where everything is allowed, nobody interferes. If you are crying and laughing together, nobody comes and condemns you; people respect you, they have reverence for you. They know that something is happening to you; they will not interpret and they will not condemn – not even in their eyes will there be any indication that this is not good.It is a spiritual community where all is allowed, unconditionally; where everybody is helped into whatever space he is moving; where all kinds of spaces are respected; where nobody enforces any particular pattern and particular character. And all kinds of things are going to happen in my commune, because I am making available to you all the paths that have happened in the past, and things which are going to happen in the future too.So, many things are going to happen. Somebody may become a Socrates and somebody may become a Ramakrishna and somebody may become a Mahavira and somebody may become a Buddha and somebody a Meera and somebody a Jesus – all that is possible. You are all carrying seeds for that. Just the right soil is needed and you will start sprouting. You need support.So, support! If something is happening to somebody, even if your old mind brings interpretations, drop that mind; be respectful to the person and the space that he is moving into.Now, if you find Chaitanya Hari somewhere crying and laughing together, help him, tickle him, make him cry, so that he can go as deep as possible. All kinds of experiences have to be gone through, only then one day does one transcend experiences. Then a day arrives when you have passed through experiencing.Then somebody cries and nothing happens to you, and somebody laughs and nothing happens to you. Then simply nothing happens to you because you have become a nothing. But before that, this is going to happen, that you will be affected, that you will become very vulnerable, that you will start soaking in everything that is around you, that you will start becoming all kinds of things. That you will be very confused; that there will be chaos in you – but remember, only out of chaos stars are born. And one has to be ready to go into chaos.When you come back, all will be gone. Then nothingness pervades. Buddha has called that nothingness nirvana. Then nothing affects, because there is nobody to be affected and there is nobody to affect. Then all is a dream and you are just a witness to it.The sixth question:Osho,As more people come and take sannyas and more days pass, it seems that many of us grow together – stronger and stronger without even meeting much.It seemed to me when you spoke of the “new community” that somehow it is an old community of friends, reuniting again through your love and grace.Thank you, Osho.Yes, that’s how it is. Many of you have been with me in the past. Many of you have been together with each other in the past. It is a meeting of old friends. You have forgotten – I have not forgotten. And sooner or later you will also start remembering.This new commune is going to be one of the oldest things on the earth, the ancientmost. And travelers from different paths have come – travelers from different directions and dimensions. Jews are here and Mohammedans are here and Hindus and Jainas and Buddhists and Christians and Taoists – all kinds of people are here. All cultures are meeting here; all religions pouring into each other. And a natural synthesis will arise. We are not creating any synthesis, but it is happening on its own.The universal man can be born only out of such a commune – the man who will not be a Christian and will not be a Jew and will not be a Hindu and will not be Indian and will not be Chinese and will not be German. All boundaries are being lost here.And you are certainly not new. You have been here long enough, you have lived long enough. You have been passing through many, many lives. And you have brought many riches; you have brought great heritages with you. And once all those heritages are poured into one pool, it will be one of the richest phenomena that has ever happened or can ever happen.The seventh question:Osho,Sometimes I feel so jealous of all those people who live close to you – the ones in Lao Tzu house and those who see you every night in darshan. I tell myself that Lao Tzu house is in my own heart, but this is just knowledge. Just going through the gates of your house is like falling into another world – I can feel it. And to live there with you must be like a miracle. Meanwhile, I eat my heart out.You are fortunate that you are not in the Lao Tzu house – for many reasons. One is: those who are in Lao Tzu house, I torture them very much – you don’t know about it outside. They are continuously crucified. Sooner or later, I am going to make my whole campus Lao Tzu house so everybody will be inside – and then you will know. Meanwhile, enjoy as much as you can.And secondly, what almost always happens is: when you are too close to me you start forgetting about me. That too is a misfortune. When you are for twenty-four hours in the same place where I am, naturally you start taking my presence for granted. You become oblivious. That’s how the human mind functions.The gardener who lives the whole day in the garden has stopped seeing the trees long ago. The man who lives in the Himalayas knows nothing of the beauty of the Himalayas. When you go to the Himalayas, you know the beauty of it. But if you start living there, how long will you be able to know the beauty of it? After a few days the honeymoon is over and then those Himalayan peaks are taken for granted. Not that they have become less beautiful – they are exactly the same – but you have become insensitive.The obvious is almost always forgotten. That’s how we have forgotten God: because we live in his house, and he is always around – and we have forgotten about him.Go and ask the fish in the ocean; the fish has forgotten about the ocean. The fish only knows when it is thrown out of the ocean, when it is on the sands, in the sun – then it knows what the ocean was, what the ocean is. Now it is thirsty for the ocean. Now there is great longing for the ocean. But it has lived in the ocean for years and it has not even thought for a single moment, it has not even thanked God for the whole ocean that was given to her.That’s how it happens. It is very natural to our minds because our minds are not very sensitive, they are very dull.You love a woman – there is great joy; you feel so happy. And then the woman starts living with you and after a few days you have forgotten about her. You don’t even look at her. Still you touch her hand, but nothing flows. She has forgotten you, you have forgotten her. Familiarity makes people very unfamiliar. And the obvious becomes nonexistential.I have heard…In an anthropological institute in Vienna, there used to be great interest in the various love postures of the races. Two professors, one a Frenchman and the other a German, devoted most of their waking hours to the matter, consulting such ancient texts as The Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden. When they finally conferred to compare notes, they disagreed on only one point: the German said there were 138 postures; the Frenchman claimed there were 139. A hot argument ensued. It was decided to enumerate the positions.“Well,” the Frenchman began, “first, of course, there is the good old way.”“Ach!” exclaimed the German professor disgustedly. “You win – I forgot about that one.”And the last question:Osho,You are here – then why do I still go on doubting?This anecdote…Sinclair had been married for ten years and had lived all of them in agony. He was unbelievably jealous of his coquettish wife; for years he had suspected she was having an affair with his business partner. Finally, he could stand the tension no longer and hired a detective to trail her.A few days later, the detective reported to Sinclair.“Well, did you follow them?”“Oh, yes,” said the detective. “I have the report here. Last night she left your home about eight thirty, and then she met a man on the corner of Reid Street and Montgomery Place. They strolled around for about fifteen minutes, then they got into a car and went down to Patmore Lane. There they parked for a half hour and he made advances to her to which she ungrudgingly responded. Then they drove to the Franconia Hotel; I checked at the desk and found out that they were occupying room 301. Fortunately, room 301 faced the street, so I climbed a tree opposite their window, peered in and saw them both standing there completely nude, fondling each other.”“And then?” cried Mr. Sinclair. “What happened then?”“Oh, well, then they pulled down the shade.”“Oh,” moaned Sinclair, “what a tragedy! Always to doubt, never to know…!”I am here, but that will not make much difference – you have learned the habit of doubt. It has become ingrained, it has become unconscious. It is not that you doubt – it is that you have become doubt. So even if I am here confronting you, you go on missing me. The doubt goes on arising. If one doubt disappears, you produce another. If that disappears, you produce another. Doubts come to you just like leaves come to a tree.You will have to see the point. You will have to see me, putting aside your doubting mind. What are you expecting? Your expectation is that by and by I will argue against all your doubts, I will prove things so that your doubts are dissolved – then you will be able to see me. That is not going to happen. I can go on and on talking to you, I can go on and on showering myself on you, but that will not help much – the doubting mind will go on creating new doubts, fresh doubts.If you are waiting for that moment when all doubts are gone and then you will look at me, that moment will never come – I will be gone. That moment will never come. If you want that moment, then you have to put your doubts aside.Just once, look at me without any doubt, and that will suffice. And that will trigger a process of trust in you. Only through trust is the meeting with me possible. And only through trust is transformation.Enough for today.

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Walk Without Feet 01-10Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Walk Without Feet 10 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I'm not skilled in any art. Poetry sometimes happens. Dance happens through me. I feel now there is such a thing as the art of living, of life. Have you a comment?That is the right way. Poetry cannot be done, it can only be allowed. Poetry is not a technique, you cannot learn it. It is a happening – so is all art. Skill is not the central core of any art. Skill is of course needed, but that is secondary. And if the essential is there, one learns the skill easily, it comes. If the essential is not there, then you can become very skillful, you can know the whole technique of it, and still you will never become an artist, you will remain a technician.And there is no need to become a technician. Poetry should not be there as a performance – it should be a sheer joy, a celebration of life. You need not bother whether somebody comes to know about your poetry or not.The wild flower – nobody may come to know about it, still it blooms. Be a wild flower. And don’t think of exhibitions; dance as the dance comes to you. There is no need to be skillful about it. If the skill starts coming to you slowly, slowly without any effort on your part, that’s good; but there is no need to go in search of it.You say, “I am not skilled in any art.” Then art is possible. The skilled person is a closed person. Have you ever heard of anybody becoming a poet by learning the art of poetry? In fact, the universities and the colleges put people off poetry. The more they teach, the more impossible it becomes for anybody to become a poet. They destroy something rather than create something.The moment you start thinking about poetry as a craft, as a skill, as a technique, you have missed the point.Poetry is like love: you need not learn it. It is love of life. When you are happy, it flows. When you are overflowing, it flows in many ways. Sometimes in color – painting is poetry in color. Sometimes in dance – dance is poetry in movement. Sometimes in song…and then by and by it starts transforming your whole life. Then your whole life becomes poetry. Buddha is poetry lived, so is Jesus.You say, “Poetry sometimes happens.” Don’t hanker and don’t desire that it should happen at other times too. If you try for other times too, you will destroy the spontaneity of it. One has to wait. One has to be patient. One has to remain open, just like you wait for a guest: your doors open, you stand on the threshold and you go on looking down the road. Your heart is throbbing. But what else can you do? When the guest comes, the guest comes.Poetry is a guest – become a host! But don’t try to pull, don’t try to manipulate – poetry cannot be manufactured. It is not man-made, it is God-made. All poetry has the signature of God; if it is true poetry then it is always God-made.Yes, you can compose, you can manage to create an appearance of poetry, but it will be false, it will not have life in it, it will not have spirit in it. It will be dead, it will be soul-less.Wait for those moments. They will be rare, come once in a while. But it is good! Poetry is a rare phenomenon; it is not the ordinary rut. The dance will be rare, once in a while, but it has to be so. Allow it. When it comes, go totally into it. When it is not coming, don’t try to manage it. If you try to manage, you will start creating false things, pseudo things. And not only that: if you manage it, those real moments of happening will stop. You will become closed to them. All desiring is destructive.And you say, “Dance happens through me.” Right, you are on exactly the right track. When dance happens through you, it is divine dance. When you dance, it is very ordinary, mundane. It has not the touch of the unknown in it; it has no inspiration. It is just gymnastics, a body exercise: you have learned a few steps and movements and you are twisting your body. You are not possessed by God.When a dance comes to you, you are possessed, you are no longer yourself. God has penetrated you. Then there is a totally different quality to it. Then you are not the dancer: you are being danced. And the difference is immense. There is no effort on your part. You are simply taken over. You don’t know what is happening. You are neither the doer nor the knower, and then something great happens – something which is not of this earth. Those are the religious moments.A dancer can know God more easily than a thinker. And a painter can know God more easily than a businessman. And a poet is certainly closer to God than any politician. These are the people of God. The artist comes closest.In a better world, with better understanding, the poet should be the only priest. Only he can be the priest – not the theologian, nor the trained priest, but a wild poet. That used to be so in primitive societies. It is still so in primitive societies. The madman is the priest, the poet is the priest – the inspired one is the priest. He does not preach on his own; he simply lets himself go into the unknown. He becomes possessed. He dances a wild dance, he sings a wild song – for hours – he goes on dancing and dancing. And then there comes a moment when the man disappears and existence takes possession. Then his eyes change – they roll upward. Then his body has a totally different energy. It is felt by the people who are present there – the presence is felt, the transformation is felt. The man is metamorphosed, the man is drunk with the divine. Then he speaks – sometimes in a language that cannot be understood, sometimes in words which are not together, with no grammar, with no rules, he utters. But those few words that he utters can become the keys to the unknown, to existence.That’s how the Vedas were uttered. That’s how the Upanishads were uttered. That’s how Jesus is so beautiful! I have never come across a greater poet than Jesus, although nobody thinks about him as a poet – but he is one of the greatest poets that has ever walked on the earth. Just see the poetry of his sayings – the Sermon on the Mount. Each single word is so full of poetry. He must have been possessed in that moment when he delivered that sermon; God must have spoken through him. He must have been one with God in those moments. It is not Jesus who is speaking; he is just a vehicle, a passage, a medium, a messenger.And that is the meaning of the words christ, messiah – he brings the message. He allows the message to come to you; he becomes a bridge.So when the poetry comes, let it come. Be thankful. When the dance comes, let it come. Be grateful. But never try to bring it. And I know – the human mind is greedy; it continuously wants more and more. Once something has happened, you want it to be repeated again and again. You will destroy it – don’t be greedy!With greed, God disappears. God is possible only with a non-greedy mind. Hope and wait and pray, but don’t be greedy.And you ask, “I feel now there is such a thing as the art of living, of life too.” There is no separate art of life. If you know how to allow poetry, if you know how to allow dance, if you know how to allow love – if you know how to allow, then you know the art of life. In the allowing, in the let-go, in the surrender, is the art of life. How not to be and to let existence be – that is the only art of life.And one has to learn through many, many ways. Poetry is one way, song is another, dance still another. Learn allowing. Learn receptivity. Learn becoming a womb. Learn to be feminine. Don’t be masculine. Don’t be aggressive. Don’t try to conquer God, life, love, truth! Don’t go like a soldier: go like a beloved, a woman.Science is masculine, religion is feminine. That’s why science has destroyed the whole earth – the technology of it has been destructive. The ecology has been disrupted so badly that there seems to be no possibility of putting it right again. The circuit is broken everywhere. And the reason is that science became too much and lost track of the feminine qualities in human consciousness. Man became unbalanced, lopsided.Religion has to be brought back. And by religion I mean the feminine; by religion I mean receptivity – not going to conquer, but waiting for the guest to come; not doing, but happening.The second question:Osho,Today after lecture, as I was kneeling before your platform, sexual fantasies concerning you filled my head. On the one hand, my body was filled with energy and it felt good; on the other hand I began to feel guilty, that it was wrong to have such thoughts about you and I shouldn't allow them to continue.Then my stomach began cramping and I had to run to the bathroom with diarrhea.What is happening? And is it okay to have such fantasies?Sex is as sacred as samadhi. The lowest and the highest are part of one continuum. The lowest rung is as much part of the ladder as the highest rung; they are nowhere divided. And if you deny the lower, you will never be able to reach the higher.Sex is nothing to feel guilty about. It is your life. It is where you are – how can you avoid it? If you avoid it, you will be pseudo, inauthentic, untrue. If you avoid it, if you repress it, you will not be able to move upward because the energy will be repressed through that.Right now, you are at the stage of sexuality. When you listen to me, when you start feeling me, naturally your energy is stirred. And it can only be stirred where it is. Listening to me, feeling me, being in love with me, your samadhi cannot bloom right now. But if your sexuality starts moving, that’s a good sign. That shows you have been contacted, that something has stirred in you, that something has become a movement in you, that you are no longer a stagnant pool, that you have started flowing toward the ocean.Certainly, the ocean is far away. It will come in the very end. But if you stop this small muddy pool from flowing, you will never reach the ocean. I know the mud of it, but it has to be accepted. You have to start flowing. Don’t be worried about sexual fantasies; they are just natural.The serpent and the savior are not two – they are one. In fact, there is an ancient tradition says that when God created Adam and Eve and told them that they should not go to the Tree of Knowledge, and they should not eat the fruit of it, he then became the serpent. Coiled around the tree, he seduced Eve to eat the fruit of the tree. God himself became the serpent.I love this story. Christians will be very shocked. But only God can do such a thing – nobody else. From where can the serpent come? And without God’s help, how can the serpent convince Eve? In fact, the whole thing was decided beforehand: God wanted man to go astray, because only by going astray does one become mature. God wanted man to commit sin, because only through sin does one arrive at sainthood one day. There is no other way.That’s why God said, “Don’t eat the fruit of this tree!” This is simple psychology. What Christians say, if they are true, means that God is not even as much a psychologist as Freud is. It is simple psychology that if you prevent somebody from doing something, that something becomes more attractive, more magnetic.If you say, “Don’t do this!” you can be sure it will be done. Every parent knows this, and God is the ultimate parent. Will he not know it?There is a story…Freud had gone into a garden with his wife and child, and they walked around and it was a beautiful spring evening. They forgot about the child, and then it was time for the closing; the bell was ringing and everybody was to leave. The wife was very disturbed and she said, “But where is he? He has disappeared!” And it was a big park.Freud said, “Tell me only one thing: did you prevent him from going somewhere?”And she said, “Yes, I told him not to go to the fountain.”Then he said, “Let us go. If my insight is right, he will be at the fountain.”And he was found at the fountain.The wife was very puzzled. She said, “How could you know?”Freud said, “This is simple psychology. Every parent should know.”No, I cannot trust the Christian interpretation because that makes God look very foolish: “I would like him to do what I am saying!” He must have planned it, knowing perfectly well that if Adam is prevented from eating, is told, commanded, ordered, if an absolute order is given, “Never touch the fruit of that tree!” then it is absolutely certain that he will eat it.But maybe… Adam was the first man and was not aware of the ways of man yet. He was the first child and may have been an obedient child. There are obedient people also. God must have waited for a few days and Adam had not gone to the tree; he must have become the serpent. Now he must have tried through the woman, because when you cannot do anything to the man, the right way is through the woman. He must have tried through the woman. He must have talked to Eve. He succeeded. That’s why I say the serpent and the savior are one.And in the East, the serpent has never been in the service of the Devil; it has always been in the service of God. In the East, this is our symbology: that the serpent is inside you, coiled at your sex center; it is called the kundalini – the coiled serpent. It is there, asleep, at the lowest rung. The tree of life is your spine – that holds your life, it is your trunk. It nourishes you, your shape runs through it, and the serpent is lying there.When anything stirs you, it will stir the serpent too – because that is your energy. That is where your energy is. So don’t be worried, don’t feel guilty. That’s my essential message to you: never feel guilty for anything! All that happens is good. Bad does not happen and cannot happen, because the world is so full of God, how can bad happen? Bad must be our interpretation.So let me say to you: sex and samadhi are the same energy. The serpent and the savior are not two. There is a link between the lowest and the highest. There is a sequence that leads from one to the other, a way of life, a way of love, natural and inevitable as the way of a growing tree.Have you watched a tree growing, how it grows, how it goes on groping and growing? What method does it follow? From the seed, the sprout, and then slowly, slowly it starts rising upward. It comes from deep down in the earth, and then it starts rising into the sky. From root to trunk and branch and leaf and flower and fruit. This is my message for your tree of life too.There is no distinction between the sacred and the profane, no separation between God who is love and the human-animal four-lettered love. It is one continuity. Your love and God’s love are two ends of the same phenomenon, of the same energy.Your love is too muddy, true; too full of many other things – hatred, anger, jealousy, possessiveness, true. But still it is gold – mixed with mud, but still it is gold. You have to pass through fire, and all that is not gold will be gone and only gold will remain.And I am the fire. The master is the fire. Pass through me – unafraid, unashamed. Pass through me fearlessly. I accept you as you are: you also accept yourself, because only through acceptance is the transformation possible, otherwise not. If you start feeling guilty, you will become repressive.Have you gone to Khajuraho or Konarak? There you will see what I am saying to you. They are Tantra temples, the most sacred temples that still exist on the earth; all other temples are ordinary, bourgeois. Only Khajuraho and Konarak, only these two temples, have a different message which is not ordinary, which is extraordinary. Extraordinary because it is true.What is their message? If you have been to these temples, you will be surprised that on the outer sunlit walls there are all kinds of sexual postures – men and women making love in so many postures, conceivable and inconceivable, possible and impossible. All the walls are full of sex. One is shocked. One starts feeling: “What obscenity!” One wants to condemn, one wants to lower one’s eyes. One wants to escape. But that is not because of the temple but because of the priest and his poison inside you.Go inside the temple: as you start moving inside, there are fewer and fewer figures, and love starts changing. On the outer walls it is pure sexuality; as you start going inside, you will find the sex is disappearing. Couples are still there, in deep love, looking into each other’s eyes, holding hands, embracing each other, but sexuality is no longer there. Go still deeper and the figures are even less sexual. Couples are still there, but not even holding hands, not even touching. Go still deeper – and the couples have disappeared. Go still deeper…At the innermost core of the temple – what in the East we call the garbha, the womb – there is not a single figure. The crowd is gone, the many is gone. There is not even a window for the outside. No light comes from the outside; it is utter darkness, silence, calm and quiet. And there is not even a figure of a god – it is emptiness, it is nothingness.The innermost core is nothingness and the outermost core is a carnival. The innermost core is meditation, samadhi, and the outermost core is sexuality. This is the whole life of man depicted.But remember: if you destroy the outer walls, you will destroy the inner shrine too – because the innermost silence and darkness cannot exist without the outer walls. The center of the cyclone cannot exist without the cyclone. The center cannot exist without the circumference. They are together.Your outermost life is full of sexuality – perfectly good and perfectly beautiful. Khajuraho simply depicts you. It is the human story in stone; it is the human dance in stone – from the lowest to the highest rung, from the many to one, from love to meditation, from the other to one’s own emptiness and aloneness.Courageous were the people who created these temples. And they had a vision that is my approach too. Tantra is my approach. The still point is shown together with the turning world.The way of Tantra is not one of blind sensuality – and not only of spirituality either. It is of both–and. Tantra does not believe in the philosophy of either–or: it believes in the philosophy of both–and. It does not reject anything – it transforms everything. Only cowards reject. And if you reject something you will be that much poorer – because something has been left untransformed. A part of you will remain ungrown; a part of you will remain childish. Your maturity will never be total. It will be as if one leg remains on the first rung and your hand has reached the last rung: you will be stretched along this polarity and you will be in anguish, in agony; your life will not be of ecstasy.That’s why I say I preach Epicurus and Buddha together to you. Epicurus remains with the outer wall of the Khajuraho temple; he is right as far as he goes, but he does not go far enough. He simply takes a walk around the temple and goes home; he is not aware that he has missed the very point of the temple. Those outer walls are only outer walls; they exist for the inner shrine.Buddha goes into the inner shrine, sits there. In that silence he remains, but he forgets about the outer wall. And without the outer wall there is no inner shrine.To me, both are lopsided, half-half. Something has been rejected and something has been chosen – they have not been choiceless. I say to you: accept all – the outer and the inner, the without and the within – and you will be the richest sannyasins upon the earth. Drop guilt.Tantra is the whole way – neither obsession with the world, nor withdrawal from it. It is being in the world lightly, with a little smile. It is playfulness. It doesn’t take things seriously. It is light of heart, it laughs. It is unashamedly earthly and infinitely other-earthly. The earth and the sky meet in Tantra; it is the meeting of polar opposites.So you need not be worried about a sudden stirring of your sexual energy. It is how it should be. You say, “Today after lecture, as I was kneeling before your platform, sexual fantasies concerning you filled my head. On the one hand, my body was filled with energy and it felt good…”Listen to the body. The body is wiser than your so-called mind. The body knows much more, and the body is ninety-nine percent of your energy; the mind is a small fragment – making too much fuss.“…on the other hand, I began to feel guilty…” The priest came in; the Christian started speaking, the church. You have to be aware. You are not to allow the church to go on victimizing you forever. You have to drop the church, not your sexuality, because the sexuality will become the outer wall of your temple, and the church will never allow you growth.And “…on the other hand I began to feel guilty, that it was wrong to have such thoughts about you and I shouldn’t allow them to continue. Then my stomach began cramping and I had to run to the bathroom with diarrhea. What is happening? And is it okay to have such fantasies?”The diarrhea came because you crushed your rising energy, you repressed. The priest poisoned your stomach. Now, if you go to the priest he will say it is because of your sexuality that you got disturbed. He will use it again to give you new guilt. He will say, “Look: it is your sexuality that has disturbed you.” It is not your sexuality that has disturbed you: it is your idea of guilt that has disturbed you. The sexuality was innocent and pure. The idea of guilt is impure, calculating, cunning.Drop such ideas. Listen to the body and go with the body. And soon you will see that sexuality is changing into spirituality.I have heard…The sculptor, Bernini, made the moment of orgasm his model for St. Teresa’s experience of union with God.He searched for a model. He wanted to make a statue of St. Teresa in the state of samadhi. He searched for the model and he could not find…except a woman in orgasm.I love the story. Yes, that is true – I agree with Bernini absolutely. You cannot find anything else which can depict ecstasy, which can symbolize ecstasy. For the moment, a woman in orgasm is in samadhi – although for the moment only. Soon the moment will be gone and she will plunge into deep darkness.And the woman’s orgasm is deeper than the man’s because the man’s orgasm has become very local. It is confined to his genitalia; his whole body remains unaffected. But if a woman goes into orgasm, if she goes, then her whole body goes into it. She is more total, more rounded, more of a whole. And when her whole body is throbbing with joy, is moving in a timeless moment, is no longer part of a thinking process, all thoughts have disappeared, and there is great silence – yes, only that can depict…And that has been the insight of all the saints who have attained. Whenever they have talked about God and the experience of God’s meeting, they have always brought the metaphor from sex. It has to be orgasm – it is the ultimate orgasm, it is the total orgasm, it is the eternal orgasm. But where can you find the right expression for it? You can find it only in the moment, the momentary orgasm, that sex makes it possible for humanity to attain.If you go to Khajuraho, you will see that: on every lover’s face that is sculpted on the outer walls, great ecstasy. So many people go to Khajuraho and Konarka, but they only look at the lower half of these figures; they become concentrated on the genitalia. Very few people have been able to see the whole figures. And, certainly, rarely has somebody been able to see the faces of the figures – because you are so much obsessed with sexuality, for or against, that you remain confined to the lower.If you go and see Khajuraho, don’t miss the faces of the lovers – they have the real message. Those faces are so blissful, so calm, so meditative, that you will not find such faces sculpted anywhere else. Such great ecstasy! Even the stone has bloomed in those faces; those faces have transformed the stone into roseflowers, into lotuses. Seeing those faces you will be able to see that those lovers are no longer part of time and space; they have gone beyond.The figures are sexually active, but they are not obsessed with sex – neither for nor against. Both are obsessions – for and against simply means things are no longer natural. When things are natural, you are neither for nor against.Are you for sleep or against sleep? If you are for, you have become unnatural; if you are against, you have become unnatural. One is not for or against sleep. It is just a natural thing, so is sex. And when sex is accepted naturally, it starts growing higher. Then one day, the bud spontaneously becomes a flower. Not that you have to do something – just let the energy move. Let the sap flow and the bud will become the flower.Those faces are utterly at ease, in a state of let-go. They are in the world, but not of it. And they are not doing anything; they are just like small children playing on the sea beach. They are playful. But sexually-obsessed people have been very much against Khajuraho. Mahatma Gandhi wanted it to be covered with mud so that only once in a while, when some special guest came from the West or from the East it could be uncovered for him. It should be closed for ordinary people.Mahatma Gandhi represents the mediocre mind – he is the mahatma of the mediocres. He represents sexual obsession. His whole life he was obsessed against sex. Now, if Mahatma Gandhi goes to see Khajuraho, I don’t think he will be able to see the faces of the figures; I don’t think he will be able to go inside the temple – the outer will be enough to prevent him. And I don’t think he will be able to look at even the outer; he will be so angry, he will feel so guilty, he will feel so ashamed! If you talk to the so-called educated Indians about Khajuraho, you will see they feel ashamed. They will say to you, “We are sorry, but these temples don’t represent our mainstream. They are not representative of our culture. They are against our culture. They are freak events in our culture – they don’t represent us. We are very sorry that they exist.”But they represent one of the most holistic attitudes toward life – all is accepted because all is divine.So allow your sexual energies to move. Go with them. Don’t fight with them; they are your energies. Float with them and they will take you to the ocean. They inevitably take you. You just have to be capable of letting go.To me, the final stage of a human being is not the sage, not the Buddha, but Shiva Nataraj – Shiva the Dancer. Buddha has gone very deep, but the outer wall is missing, the outer wall is denied. Shiva contains all, contains all contradictions – contains the whole of God choicelessly. He lives in the innermost core of the shrine and dances on the outer walls too. Unless the sage can dance, something is missing.Life is a dance. You have to participate in it. And the more silent you become, the deeper your participation. Never withdraw from life. Never renounce life, because in renouncing life you will be renouncing existence itself. Be true to life, be committed to life. Be utterly for life.It happens when you have reached the innermost core of the temple – there is no reason for you to dance; you can remain silent. Just as Buddha says, “When you have attained enlightenment, then there are two paths open for you – either you can become an arhat, you can go to the other shore, or you can become a bodhisattva, you can remain on this shore.” In fact, there is no reason to be on this shore when you have become enlightened. But Buddha says for the sake of others, for compassion’s sake, create great compassion in yourself so that you can linger a little longer and help people.In the same way I would like to say to you: when you become enlightened, two possibilities open. Either you can remain inside the temple, in the womb of the temple: dark, windowless, not going out at all, not even light penetrates; no sound from the outside, nothing of the marketplace. You sit there silently, in absolute silence, in timeless silence. There is no reason why you should come out and have a dance, but still I would like you to come back, although there is no reason. You can stop there; your journey is complete – but something is still missing. You have learned how to be silent, now you have to show whether you can be silent in sound. You have learned how to be alone, now you have to show whether you can be alone and love too. You have to come back to the marketplace from the mountains. The ultimate test is there.There is no reason for this – that I would like to repeat: there is no reason for this world, but there is a rhyme and a rhythm. No reason, but a rhyme and a rhythm. When you have become silent, create sound – and your silence will go deeper because of the contrasting sound. When you have known what aloneness is, be together with people – and the people and their presence will help you to know your aloneness far more deeply. When you have known how to remain still, dance – and the dance will give you the background in which the stillness will come very loud and very clear.There is no reason for it, but there is a rhyme and a rhythm in it. Go to the opposite. And that is the meaning of Shiva Nataraj – Shiva the dancer of dancers. In his heart he is a buddha, but in his outer activities he is a worldly man.This is the ultimate for Tantra, and this is the ultimate for me too. I would like you to become gods and yet part of this world. No withdrawal is needed. But if you have a guilt feeling somewhere, the moment you become silent you will not be able to come back to the world of sound and noise. Drop all guilt feelings. That will help you to grow to the ultimate, and that will help you to come back to the world too.When you can come back to the marketplace with a wine bottle in your hand, the ultimate is achieved.The third question:Osho,What is philosophy?A small anecdote…A sporting gentleman at a bar insisted that, blindfolded, he could taste any liquor and identify it, and tell the name of the company that produced it.The bartender accepted the challenge. After the gentleman was blindfolded, the barflies gathered round to witness the first test. The expert took a sip and immediately declared: “Four Roses, put out by Frankfort Distillers.”“Right,” replied the bartender. They would try again. On his next turn, the expert again took only the one sip and announced, “Canadian Club, put out by Hiram Walker.”“Right again,” said the bartender. “Let’s try just once more.”This time the gang thought they’d play a trick on him. Instead of whiskey, the bartender filled the bottle with urine.When the expert tasted this, he remarked excitedly, “Why, this is piss!”“Right you are!” acknowledged the bartender. “But whose?”Philosophy is unnecessary curiosity. Pointless curiosity. And you can go on and on, ad nauseam. Avoid! Philosophy has trapped many people and destroyed their lives.Philosophy is mind gymnastics, hair-splitting. One can become very deeply involved in it. It is very, very engrossing because one question leads to ten new questions and so on and so forth. But you are in a mind trip; it leads you away and away from life and life’s real problems. It leads you away from existence. You become obsessed with speculation and you forget living.That’s why I say art is far better, because it is far more earthly. Philosophy is abstract. Avoid abstractions because through abstraction you will never come to reality. And we have to come to reality – because you can eat only real bread, not a philosophic concept of bread. You can love only a real woman, not a philosophic abstraction of womanhood. When you want to drink water and you are thirsty, you would not like any philosophy about water; you would like real water – however muddy and dirty, but real water. Even Pune water will do! But you would not like philosophy about water.Philosophy is always about and about; it goes round and round in circles – it never arrives anywhere.The fourth question:Osho,Your words about priests ring so true to me and are body blows to my ego. Yet my mind goes on asking, “Was the celibate monk, Francis of Assisi, not enlightened?”Francis of Assisi was enlightened – not because he was a monk, but in spite of it. It is like a man taking part in a race carrying two rocks in his two hands and he arrives first – not because of those two rocks that he has been carrying in his hands, but in spite of them. It is a miracle that St. Francis ever became enlightened.You need not carry those rocks.He must have been a rare man – even remaining a Christian he became enlightened.The fifth question:Osho,I want to become a sannyasin, but I am very serious about it. And I have been thinking and thinking, but no conclusion seems to be in sight.To take sannyas seriously is to miss the whole point of it. Sannyas is laughter, playfulness, fun. Laughter is at the very heart of it. You can only take it playfully, not seriously.If you decide out of long, long thinking about it, your decision will be wrong. If you come to a conclusion, I will not suggest to you that you take sannyas. You have started from a wrong beginning. The whole point of sannyas is to take life nonseriously, playfully, lightly. And if you can take life lightly, you will be able to walk without feet, fly without wings, think without mind.I have heard that angels in heaven can fly, not because they have wings, but because they take themselves very lightly.Bonhoeffer, a Christian mystic who was murdered by Adolf Hitler, wrote his last letter to his friends from prison. In that letter I have come across a great message. He says, “Make the most of the beautiful country you are in. Spread hilaritas around you – and mind you keep it yourself too!”Hilaritas – hilarity – this country is beautiful! This moment, this space is beautiful, where you find yourself. Nothing is missing except your laughter. If you can laugh, you will fall in tune with the cosmic energy. I teach you laughter. I am against all seriousness.Either take sannyas or don’t take it – but don’t think about it, because that is a sure way to miss it. You can take it after thinking but you will miss it all the same.Sannyas is a state of living unison, of being who we are and where, with widest eyes. Paradise is regained in the recognition that it was never lost. We waken from the long dream of having left it, and find ourselves at home all the while.You have not gone anywhere, you have not left home. You have not fallen. You are already in the Garden of Eden, just fallen asleep. Sannyas is an awakening. And if you can laugh, you will awaken and you will awaken others too.I teach you a life of joy, celebration, delight. I don’t teach you long faces. The days of the sad saint are no more. The future belongs to the laughing saints.And the last question:Osho,There is no doubt that for ninety-nine percent of the lectures I am very busy thinking. But strange are the weird trips I get into! Now for the last ten days, I am most of the time involved in these ballerina fantasies – seeing myself in this beautiful tutu, whirling in front of you in a great symphony!The dream of a poor little elephant?That is great! Forget all about the lectures. You are having such a beautiful experience – even I felt jealous.And the really, really last one:Osho,I have known many, many successes and only a few failures in my life, but still those few failures are heavy on me, they hurt. Why?Be a little playful, man. If you go on succeeding in everything, then everybody else will go on failing. A few chances to others too – be a little fair.A story for you to meditate…Joe the gambler walked into a saloon and said to the bartender, “Bet you a dollar I can bite my right eye.”The bartender said, “Okay. It’s a bet.”So Joe took out his glass eye and bit it. The bartender paid up, and then challenged, “Bet you a dollar you can’t bite your left eye.”Joe accepted the challenge. A crowd gathered. He then removed his dental plates from his mouth and bit his left eye. The bartender smiled and paid up.Then Joe said, “I’ll bet you a dollar I can piss on you without getting you wet.”This offer was promptly accepted and Joe proceeded to do his thing. The bartender jumped back, drenched, and exclaimed, “What? What the hell are you doing?”“Well,” answered Joe ruefully, as he slapped a buck on the bar, “You can’t win ‘em all!”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 01 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Do you have a message for sannyasins and friends gathering at the Cafe Royal, London, for the “March Event?”Anand Poonam, sannyas is a rebellion against both the past and the future. Man has either lived in the past or in the future, but never in the present, and the present is the only reality there is, nothing else exists. Existence knows only one time, that is now; and one space, that is here. But mind either lives in the past, which is no more, or in the future, which is not yet. Mind exists in the nonexistential, hence mind never comes across the reality; it cannot come across the reality by its very functioning.Sannyas is a rebellion against the mind itself. It is a way of life in which the mind is not the master, no-mind is the master, and the mind functions only as a servant. The mind actually is a mechanism. It is good as a beautiful device of nature, but the moment the servant becomes the master there is danger, great danger, then your life is bound to be a mess, a chaos. The servant is blind, unintelligent, unaware. To live according to the mind is not to live at all, it is sheer stupidity. The mind is never original, never intelligent; it is always repetitive, it is always borrowed, it is always mechanical – hence stupid, hence unintelligent. Sannyas is a tremendous jump into reality, an escape to reality from the unreal.There have been societies whose golden age was in the past. For example Indian society: it believes that the future is going to be darker and darker every day, that there is no hope. Hence Indian society lives in a state of depression, hopelessness, with no possibility of any change for the better. It lives in misery, poverty, sickness. And because of the idea that the golden age has already passed long ago, thousands of years ago – and we are falling, by and by, every day – it does not believe in evolution. It believes in involution, it believes in regression. It is a regressive philosophy, not a progressive one.The West lives in the future, its golden age is yet to come: the classless society, the crescendo of communism, the world of equality and freedom, the stateless state. Those golden days are far ahead. In a way, they are both the same. If one has to choose between the two of them, then I would suggest choose a progressive stupidity rather than a regressive one – if that is the only choice! At least with the progressive stupidity you have some hope, you have some thrill, you have some excitement; you are working for a better future. It is never going to come, but at least you are occupied with beautiful dreams. It has never been there before, it is not going to be there ever in the future. It is now. It is already the case.Adam and Eve have never been expelled from the Garden of Eden! That is my declaration, my message. That whole story is invented by the priests. Adam and Eve are still living in the Garden of Eden – they have just eaten the fruit of knowledge. And who has given them the fruit of knowledge? It is not the serpent – it is the priest, it is the theologian, it is the philosopher. The fruit of knowledge does not grow on trees! It grows in churches, in temples, in the universities. It carries degrees – PhD’s, DLitt’s, DD’s – and it comes in all shapes and all sizes.There is the Hindu world of knowledge, the Mohammedan world of knowledge, the Christian world of knowledge. You can choose your own fruit, you can shop for it. It is available for everybody’s requirement, according to everybody’s needs. The misery that has happened to man is not because he has lost the original paradise. He is still there, but he has fallen asleep, and in his dreams he has become a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian, a Jew, and whatnot: a theist, an atheist, a communist, a socialist, a fascist. Only in his dreams has he lost track of paradise and to dream simply means to live either in the memories – that is the past; or to live in fantasies – that is the future.Anand Poonam, this is my message for the March Event in London, where thousands of sannyasins are gathering together for the first time to celebrate a new opening – the British buddhafield. Tell them, “Get rid of the past and the future, and live herenow! It is suicidal to live anywhere else than herenow because each moment that is passing is precious, so precious that you cannot get it back. Don’t waste it!”But all the religions have been suicidal. Of course, they don’t call it suicide, they give it beautiful names: asceticism, tapascharya; but basically it is nothing but masochism, self-torture. They call it renunciation, but it is nothing but destroying yourself gradually, slowly. All the religions of the world up to now have lived with a philosophy of life denial.My fundamental approach is that of life acceptance, total life affirmation. There is no God other than life. The very idea of God other than life is dangerous because if God is other than life, then naturally you will start choosing God against life. You will be pro-God and anti-life because life is momentary and God gives you the greed of being eternal, forever.I say to you, there is no other God than life. Hence the question of choice does not arise at all. Live! Live totally, live passionately, live intelligently, live lovingly. Become a flame, so intense, so total, that each moment starts having the flavor of eternity.Remember, eternity is not horizontal. It is not like a line going from A to B, from B to C, from C to D – it is not horizontal. Eternity is intensity, it is vertical. It is diving from A to a deeper A, not going to B: from A to A1, from A1 to A2, from A2 to A3. In fact as far as intensity is concerned, A is the only alphabet. In fact, the word alphabet comes from A; it comes from Arabic, alif. A is enough! And when you can get A, why bother about B?A man with a parrot on his shoulder comes to a stop at the border crossing.“You have to pay duty on the parrot, sir,” says the customs official.“How much?” asks the man.“Let’s see,” says the official, paging through his book. “Parrots: live, fifty pounds; stuffed, ten pounds.”“Bill, don’t get any crazy ideas!” screams the parrot.Even parrots are far more intelligent than your priests. But man has lived under the dark shadow of a suicidal approach: “Renounce life! Escape from life to the monasteries, to the deserts, to the mountain caves. Go as far away from life as possible!” Because it has been taught, and taught for so long, the mind has become conditioned to the idea that the farther you are from life, the closer you will be to God. This is just bullshit! The closer you are to life, the closer you are to existence. Existence is the very core of life.Two castaways from a sunken ship landed on a desert island. They survived there for a few days without food or water. There was no chance of escape as the sea was full of sharks.Finally, one of the men fell on his knees, raised his hands to the sky and implored, “God, save us! If you do, I promise that I will always go to church and sing your praises, I will never drink again, never play cards or smoke, never make love to women and never read any novels or see any movies!”The second castaway looked at him and croaked, “Then why do you want to survive?”The so-called religious people have lived, but one wonders for what? If going away from life is the only way to reach godliness, then why commit a gradual suicide? Why not do it quickly and be finished with it?In fact, there are aboriginal tribes still alive in the world where nobody has ever committed suicide, the very idea does not exist. It must be because of these foolish religions that the idea has entered man’s mind. No animal in its wild state ever commits suicide, but some animals commit suicide when they are forced to live in a zoo, when they lose their freedom, when they are cramped, crowded. They need a certain space around themselves. When their territorial imperative is destroyed, when they are being disciplined by human beings according to their ideas, they start losing interest in life.There have been cases where zoo animals have committed suicide, or gone mad, or have become sexually perverted – but it never happens in the wild. No sexual perversion, no homosexuality exists in the wild, but in zoos it exists. It is very indicative. It shows that if you put people in an unnatural environment they start losing their instinctive intelligence, they start losing their natural understanding, they start becoming crazy. Either they go mad, or they become perverted, or they commit suicide.Humanity has been doing all these things. It has to be recognized, it is time to recognize that the religions have turned the earth into a zoo. It is these so-called saints and mahatmas who have made human beings perverted. And the most surprising thing is that they are the people who condemn all perversions – and they are the original creators of perversions! Homosexuality is a religious phenomenon. All sexual perversions started in monasteries.Monasteries are zoos where people are forced to live according to certain ideas determined by others maybe thousands of years ago. Those clothes were not tailored for them – now they are being tailored for the clothes; they are being cut according to the clothes. The clothes may have been made by Moses or Mohammed or Jesus or Buddha and they may have perfectly fitted the people they were prepared for, but now, after three thousand years, two thousand years, or even five thousand years…The Hindu code was written five thousand years ago – Manu wrote it – it is still being followed. In five thousand years everything has changed. If Manu came to earth, I don’t think he would be able to recognize anything; he would not be able to recognize anything at all, everything has changed. But Hindus are trying to live according to Manu – this creates perversion.The clothes are made by ancient people according to their ideas, according to their understandings, according to their needs, according to their situations. And they are being forced upon people who have a totally different world to live in. Now, the only way is either you cut the clothes or you cut the individuals, and religions have decided to cut the individuals.If the clothes are bigger than you, you have to be massaged and stretched and Rolfed, tortured in every possible way. Or if the clothes are shorter than you, you have to be cut, some plastic surgery has to be done on you. Your head has to be chopped off or your legs have to be chopped off. Man has to live for certain ideas – as if ideas are more important than man, as if man is made to live for ideas. I am against all this nonsense. My sannyasins have to live as individuals. I am not giving you any discipline because every discipline creates perversion, every discipline only fits the person who evolves it. Just look at all the disciplines that have been propounded down the ages.Buddha loved to eat once a day; now that is being followed by every Buddhist. That is not right, that is dangerous. It creates guilt because if you feel hungry twice a day then you feel guilty. And if you are an American you will feel hungry five times a day! Then, how much guilt?And, in fact, it is very strange that Buddha should have loved to eat only once a day. There is only one reason – he was born into a meat-eating family, he was born into the warrior race, the son of a king. Now, meat-eating animals eat only once a day; the lion eats only once in twenty-four hours because meat once a day is enough. It has no roughage in it. If you eat vegetables once a day you will starve because ninety percent is roughage. The meat can be absorbed totally, it is already digested by another animal. It is digested food, it is pure food. But when you are eating vegetables you have to eat many times more. Watch – monkeys are vegetarians, they eat the whole day; lions eat only once a day.Buddha was born into a meat-eating family, purely nonvegetarian, this became his habit. Of course, when he became enlightened he dropped eating meat, but the old habit of thirty years continued. Habits don’t change so easily. But now fools are following him and they are eating once a day, and they are nonvegetarians or vegetarians – it makes no difference. If they are vegetarians they should not do it, it is dangerous to their health, it is dangerous to their energy. The same is true of every discipline – the Ten Commandments, or other religious principles.Just the other day, a sannyasin wrote to me that he cannot go to sleep early at night, he can only fall asleep at three o’clock in the morning. Of course he feels very guilty. A religious person should go early to bed and should get up in brahmamuhurt – before the sun rises. He is feeling very guilty. Now there is no need to feel any guilt. This is perfectly okay, he is sleeping perfectly well. He sleeps for seven hours, from three in the morning to ten; he is getting enough sleep. This is his body clock, not somebody else’s principle about it; it is his body chemistry that has to be considered.All the religious scriptures were written by old people, and old people find it difficult to sleep in the morning. A child in the mother’s womb sleeps for twenty-four hours; then out of the womb, slowly, slowly the sleep is reduced – twenty-two hours, twenty hours, eighteen hours, sixteen hours. By the time he is a young person, it is fixed somewhere between eight and six hours. As one becomes older, sleep becomes less. When one is seventy, eighty, then two or three hours sleep is enough.And the scriptures were written by old people because of the idea that the older you are, the wiser you are. No young man has written any religious scripture; nobody would have taken note of a young man writing a religious scripture. You have to be very ancient and old, and then you can write a scripture. Age was of tremendous importance in the past. Of course these people have written that three hours’ sleep is enough; more than that is lethargy, tamas – it is not good, it is evil. This idea is good for old people.Now this young sannyasin is unnecessarily worried. He has tried everything, his whole life he has been struggling. It is useless – the whole struggle is useless. In fact, it is now a well-known scientific fact that everybody has his own body clock and everybody has to follow his own body’s needs.In a better society, which is more scientific, more rational, more intelligent, we would have totally different kinds of working hours. This is ugly – everybody has to go to work at eleven o’clock, everybody has to go to school at the same time, to university at the same time. This is not right. This is inhuman. Universities, offices, factories, should be open round the clock, and whenever people feel good they should work, and when they feel good they should sleep. This should be their birthright.And, in fact, it will help immensely because every college building will function as three colleges, every office building can be used as three buildings. You will not have this traffic jam on the roads because it will all be distributed over twenty-four hours. And everybody will have a little more freedom to live according to his innermost like–dislike, his instinctiveness. My approach is of freedom. My sannyasins should live a life-affirmative philosophy, accepting, respecting whatsoever one is, not creating “shoulds” and “should-nots.” They are ugly, they are monstrous.The Mother Superior called all the nuns of the convent together. “While walking round the convent this morning, I saw a man’s footprints outside the main gate,” she announced.Ninety-nine nuns shrieked in terror, “Ah God!”One nun secretly giggled, “Hee-hee!”“I followed the footprints. They led directly into our dormitory.”Ninety-nine nuns screamed in horror, “Ah God!”One nun secretly giggled, “Hee-hee!”“The footprints led to one bed, and under the bed I found a condom!”Ninety-nine nuns gasped in fright, “Ah God!”One nun secretly giggled. “Hee-hee!”“The condom was used!” continued the Mother Superior.Ninety-nine nuns squealed in disgust, “Ah God!”One nun secretly giggled, “Hee-hee!”“But it had a hole in it!”Ninety-nine nuns secretly giggled, “Hee-hee!”One nun screamed in shock, “Ah God!”These stupid people have been dominating humanity. Beware of them!A student social worker was doing research on the use of contraceptives and visited several women. He asked the first, “What kind of contraceptives do you use?”She answered, “Rubbers.”The second question was, “How do you like them?”“Well, sometimes they slip off, but in general we manage.”After he noted this data, he asked the neighbor of the woman the same question. She used the pill and since her lover helped her to remember to take it, they preferred this method.When the third woman, the wife of a Christian theologian, was asked what kind of contraceptive they used, she said, “We always use a bucket, a plastic bucket. Previously we used a zinc one, but that made too much noise for the neighbors; since we use the plastic one it is okay.”The investigator noted this data and said good-bye to the lady. However, he became very puzzled. “A plastic bucket! My professor will not believe this. I will have to go back and ask the woman how it works.” So he rang and asked the woman how it was possible with a bucket.“Well,” said the lady, “I will explain. I am rather tall and my husband is very small and we do it standing up. My husband stands on the bucket and by the time he starts rolling his eyes, I kick the bucket away!”Anand Poonam, tell my British buddhafield sannyasins there is no need to use buckets – zinc or plastic, it doesn’t matter. Be natural, be simple, be ordinary. There is a danger because once you become a sannyasin you can start having an old, holier-than-thou outlook. My sannyasins are not to be holier-than-thou. Remember, I don’t make any distinction between the sacred and the profane. To me the ordinary life is the only life. Yes, there is a way to live it – with beauty or ugliness, with insight or blindness, with awareness or unawareness. One can live this same ordinary life in such an exquisite, extraordinary way that it becomes sacred, but there is no other life than this. You have to learn the art of transforming this very ordinary life into something beautiful.So don’t become theologians, don’t become missionaries. I hate missionaries! My sannyasins are not to be missionaries. Be contagious, but not missionaries. Infect people, but don’t be missionaries.A Christian theologian was driving along a deserted road one night when his car broke down. He started looking for a place to spend the night. Finding a small cottage, he knocked on the door. It was opened by a lovely young woman. The man explained his problem. The young woman was reluctant, but the man reassured her, “Don’t be worried, madam, you can trust me. I am a Christian theologian.”So she agreed. They shared a delicious dinner and had a pleasant evening. Before saying goodnight, the young woman put on a transparent nightdress and said to the visitor, “You can sleep here in the living room, but if you need something, just call. I will leave the door of my room open.”She went to bed and spent an anxious night listening to the man snoring. Next morning, exhausted, she went out to feed her chickens.The man came out, looking refreshed, and remarked, “You have a lot of beautiful chickens.”“Yes, but only fifteen.”“Only fifteen?” said the man. “Then why do you have two cocks for such a small number?”“That’s not a problem,” replied the young woman. “One of the cocks is a Christian theologian!”Be simple, be natural, be spontaneous. I teach ecstasy – and ecstasy in the ordinary life. Life has not to be in any way renounced, but transformed. Renunciation is escapism, it is cowardliness, and you have worshipped cowards as saints up to now. You have worshipped people who were not courageous enough to accept all the challenges of life – and there are millions of challenges, every moment there is a challenge. The coward escapes. The coward has to be condemned, not respected.My sannyasins have to live in the world, totally in the world, responding to every challenge because the more you respond to the challenges of life, the more intelligent you become. Intelligence is like a sword: the more you use it, the more it remains sharp. If you don’t use it, it starts getting rusty, it loses its sharpness – it becomes absolutely useless.Hence your saints look dull, dead. But we have been conditioned to respect these dead corpses. We have been told for thousands of years that these are the real people. They are not real at all. They are very plastic, very phony. A coward can never be a real person. Reality needs all the challenges of life, all the dangers of life, all the insecurities of life. Only then integrity arises, authenticity arises, responsibility arises.Be in the world, but don’t be of it. Live in the world, but don’t allow the world to live in you. That is my message.There is a Zen saying:The wild geese do not intendto cast their reflections.The water has no mindto receive their image.The wild geese have no desire to cast their reflections on the water, and the water has no desire and no mind to receive their image – although it happens. When the wild geese fly, the water reflects them. The reflection is there, the image is there, but the water has no mind to reflect and the wild geese do not hanker to be reflected either.This should be the way of my sannyasins. Be in the world, live in the world, live totally, without ambitions, without desires because all desires distract you from living, all ambitions sacrifice your present. Don’t be greedy because greed takes you into the future; don’t be possessive because possessiveness keeps you clinging to the past. A man who wants to live in the present has to be free of greed, of possessiveness, of ambitions, of desires.That’s what I call the whole art of meditation. Be aware, be alert, so all these thieves have no possibility to enter and contaminate you. Be meditative, but be in the world. And it is my experience that the world helps immensely – it helps immensely to make you meditative. It gives you all the opportunities to be distracted, but if you don’t get distracted then each success becomes a tremendous joy. You remain centered, you become the center of the cyclone; the cyclone goes on roaring around you, but your center remains unaffected.Be a lotus flower. In the East, the lotus flower symbolizes the essence of sannyas. The lotus flower grows in the mud, dirty mud. It does not escape, it remains there. It floats in the lake in water, but there is a beauty, a tremendous phenomenon: it is in the water, but the water never touches it. It is so velvety that in the morning, if you go and see, you will find dewdrops gathered on the petals of the lotus, on the leaves of the lotus; and they shine like pearls in the early morning sun. But they are not touching it. The lotus leaf or the lotus petal remains dry, it does not become wet. The dewdrops rest there, but they remain separate.That’s the way of a true sannyasin – being in the world, but remaining untouched, unaffected by it. When meditation happens, and this is what I call meditation – being in the world and remaining untouched – love comes as a by-product.These are the pillars of my sannyasins: first, life-affirmation, unconditional life-affirmation. These are the four pillars of my temple: second, meditation; third, love; and the fourth cannot be expressed in words. It can only be called the fourth, turiya. If you live life totally, meditatively, lovingly, you come to experience something which is inexpressible. Lao Tzu calls it Tao, Buddha calls it dhamma, and Jesus calls it Logos – different names indicating toward the nameless experience. If you prefer, you can call it God. My own liking is to call it godliness, not God because God gives you the idea of a person, and godliness simply gives you the idea of a presence.These are the four pillars of my temple, and each sannyasin has to grow these four pillars because each sannyasin has to become a temple of godliness.The second question:Osho,The Free University of Amsterdam in Holland is a university with a distinctive character, which lies in its choice of a religious position. This is formulated in the constitution and the purpose of the university.All members of the university community are expected to act as much as they can in the spirit of this purpose, in obedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the daily practice, however, it seems to be very difficult for most members of the university community to communicate with love and to enjoy their work. It seems easier just to function in a deadly serious way and to keep each other at a distance.Do you have a message for the members of the community of this free university, who try to work in the spirit of Jesus Christ?The first thing to be remembered is that you can function in the spirit of Jesus Christ only if you are a Jesus Christ, otherwise not. And remember also that existence never repeats itself. Two thousand years have passed, there has not been another Jesus Christ and there is not going to be any other in the future either. It is so clear. Twenty-five centuries have passed since Gautam the Buddha, and no other Buddha has happened; five thousand years have passed since Krishna, and no other Krishna has happened either. Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, Moses, all the awakened ones have remained unrepeated.What to say about the awakened ones? Even the unawakened ones are unique! There is not anybody like you anywhere in the world – there has never been before and there will never be again. You are the only one. But religions have not accepted this simple fact. Existence is not repetitive, and it is good that it is not repetitive. Just think of a world where millions of Gautam Buddhas were sitting under bodhi trees – it would be so boring! Or millions of Jesus Christs were carrying their crosses and roaming all around the world. They would not even be able to find somebody to crucify them because others would also be carrying crosses. Who would have time to crucify anybody? It would be ugly, it would be boring. One Jesus has a beauty, many Jesuses would look as if they have been produced in a factory on an assembly line, like Ford motorcars. Every minute a car coming out, every minute a Jesus coming out – well-equipped with the cross, etcetera, with those twelve apostles following him. And they would go on coming out of the factory, round the clock. What would you do with so many Jesus Christs? What would you do with so many Mahaviras, so many Buddhas? No, it is not needed.Each individual is unique – uniqueness is a gift from existence. But why have these religions been teaching, “Live in the spirit of Jesus Christ,” or “in the spirit of Gautam Buddha” – why? Don’t you have your own spirit? Then drink alcohol, get some spirit! Make some spirit of your own! Why Jesus Christ? What wrong has this poor fellow done to you? Can’t you stop crucifying him? Will you never be able to forgive him?The whole idea is of imitation – “Imitate!” You have no right to be yourself, you have to imitate. You can be accepted only if you are somebody else: Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, Mahavira, Jesus, Kabir, Nanak, but not yourself. And can’t you see a simple fact? – Jesus was not Moses. He should have repeated, then he would have saved his life. He would not have been crucified by the Jews if he had lived the spirit of Moses. But he tried to create his own spirit, he tried to be an individual, and that was his crime. If he had simply repeated, he would have been respected, glorified as a great rabbi. But he became a rebel.Everybody has to become a rebel, not an imitator. That’s why you see people living there are deadly serious, they don’t love their work, they don’t enjoy their work. How can they enjoy it? They are not doing their work. You can never enjoy somebody else’s life, howsoever beautiful it is – it is not your life. You can only enjoy being yourself. A roseflower can be blissful only as a rose. If you force a roseflower to become a marigold it will be deadly serious; it will lose all joy, all fragrance.That’s what is happening. It is not only happening there in the so-called Free University of Amsterdam, it is happening everywhere. Hindus are trying to be like Krishnas, or Ramas; Jainas are trying to be like Mahaviras; Mohammedans are trying to be like Mohammeds; Christians are trying to be like Christ – everybody is imitative. The whole world has become full of imitation, and the whole world is looking sad. It is inevitable, this sadness. And it is not only sadness. Hidden behind this sadness is a state of schizophrenia because basically nobody can be anybody else than himself. So deep down he is himself but on top of it he is pretending to be somebody else, hence everybody is a hypocrite.All the religions have done this to humanity: they have created a hypocrite world, a schizophrenic humanity, a split personality. This is their gift. It is a curse, but this is what they call a gift to humanity. Everybody is living a split life, a double life – from the front door, one life; from the back door, totally another. And of course, between the two he is caught in a tension, in anxiety; he cannot be totally either this or that. He is torn apart. Hence the misery in people’s eyes, the sadness, the deadness.Nobody needs to be anybody else. Just be yourself. Show some respect to your life. Respect yourself. Love yourself because unless you respect yourself you will not respect anybody else in the world. If you cannot even respect your life, how can you respect anybody else? You can pretend, but pretension is not truth, and it is not liberating. Truth liberates. Pretension creates a bondage around you. It becomes an imprisonment, and one hates imprisonment.It is not accidental that Friedrich Nietzsche had to declare – I say, had to declare – that God is dead and man is now free. It was not only his individual opinion, it is really the voice of the millions who have no courage to speak. If God is destroying your freedom then it is better to kill God and save freedom, rather than killing freedom and saving God.Why should one be like Jesus Christ? Why should one live in the spirit of Jesus Christ? There is no need. He never imitated anybody. If you really understand Jesus, you should not repeat him. Buddha never repeated anybody. He could have easily become a Krishna, he had as much intelligence; he could have pretended to be a Krishna, but he never did anything like that. Hindus have not been able to forgive him because he was not following the trodden path, he was not following the crowd, he was not part of the mob psychology. He went on his own; he created his own small footpath toward truth.Everybody has to create his own footpath. There are no superhighways toward truth, only footpaths, and they too are not ready-made, available; you have to walk and create them. You have to search for truth, and in your very search you create the path. The path is not already there so that you can simply go to the truth. The search for truth is an immense adventure; each moment one is in for a great surprise. So the whole idea is wrong, and that idea is creating the trouble. And still these people call it “The Free University”! And what kind of free university is this, which has a religious position, which has a constitution and the purpose to propagate Christianity?“All members of the university community are expected to act as much as they can in the spirit of this purpose, in obedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Then what kind of free university is this? There is only one free university in the world and it is herenow. There has never been a free university before and there is none anywhere else yet – except this one.A free university simply means that there is no expectation from you. You are helped to be free, you are nourished to be free, you are supported to be free. You are given individuality. If there are expectations, freedom is destroyed. Expectations are a subtle way, a cunning way, to dominate. If the expectation is to live in obedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ then the whole thing is just a façade, in the name of freedom they are propagating an old slavery. Jesus is a free man, but Christians are not free.Friedrich Nietzsche is again right when he says that the first and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years ago – the first and the last. In fact, there cannot be anybody else who is a Christ. These are rare flowers.You are also a rare flower. Maybe you have not blossomed yet, hence you are unaware of your rareness. And you will not blossom if you go on fulfilling these expectations. Don’t fulfill any expectations of anybody. You have only one responsibility and that is toward your own being. If you try to fulfill others’ expectations you will be in trouble because they will impose, they will dominate, they will cripple and paralyze you. They are your enemies. Anybody who expects anything from you is your enemy – beware! A real friend simply gives you freedom. Love gives freedom: there is no expectation, there is no desire to manipulate you, not even indirectly. Freedom is the highest value in life – and if freedom were there, you would have seen a totally different phenomenon.You can see it here. People are working here – in fact I don’t think people are working anywhere else so hard, so totally, so devotedly – but there is great joy. They are rejoicing in it! People who come from the outside cannot understand it; and because they cannot understand it, they go on spreading rumors.Just now, hundreds of newspaper clippings are coming from Germany – so many rumors, so many false statements about Vimalkirti’s death. Nobody seems to try to understand. They are all saying that he was forced, regimented, almost as if he was in the army – he was forced to do the lowest menial jobs. That is their idea, that any job is low, but they go on imposing their categories.Yes, Vimalkirti was doing all kinds of jobs. He was cleaning the toilets, and to them this is inconceivable. The great-grandson of the last German emperor, nephew of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip of England, connected with almost all the royal families of Europe. One of his aunts died just two days ago, Queen Frederica, she was the Queen of Greece. Another aunt is the Queen of Spain, Princess Sophia. His own mother has three titles: Princess of Greece because she was born into the Greek royal family; Princess of Denmark because she was married to the Danish king; and then the Danish king died and she got married to the Prince of Hanover. Prince Charles is his cousin, and this Vimalkirti, Prince Welf of Hanover was cleaning toilets – naturally he must have been forced, violently forced, to do such a thing!And they are all saying that slowly, slowly, after four years, he got promoted, he had come to a certain position – he became a guard. This is sheer stupidity, inability to understand anything. Nobody had told him to clean the toilets – he had chosen to. He was tired of being a prince, was fed up with being a prince, and wanted to know life from all dimensions. So he was a cleaner, he was a gardener, he was a group leader, he was a guard. He was doing all kinds of things and he loved all his jobs. He was immensely happy – but they would not see his happiness.They think that there is some hierarchy here in the ashram, that cleaners are the lowest. The fact is that they are at the top. They are not only cleaners, they are the cleanest people too. When I choose my mediums most of them come from the cleaners because they are really clean!Now Vinod Khanna is here, he is a famous Indian actor. He has lived luxuriously, and he is immensely happy to get a small room. It must be all of the same size as him, six by four! But he is immensely happy. It is the same room where Vimalkirti lived. And one should be aware – Francis House has had two enlightened persons – watch out for Vinod! And from today he is going to start work in Lao Tzu garden – a man who has been earning lakhs of rupees per month, living the most luxurious life possible in India. Now he will be under Mukta’s charge, and Mukta is a hard master! Vimalkirti was also under her charge once.You say that people there are not working with love and are not enjoying their work. How can they? They are trying to fulfill certain expectations, they are trying to live up to certain standards. That creates seriousness; that creates sadness.If everybody is allowed to be just as he is, accepted, respected, loved unconditionally, then whatsoever he wants to do… And all kinds of work is needed: the gardeners are needed, the cleaners are needed, the managers are needed, the trustees are needed, the guards are needed, all kinds of people are needed.In a commune there is no hierarchy. Everybody is fulfilling his work with joy; it is because of joy that he has chosen to be in that particular work. Nobody is forcing, nobody is expecting. If he does not feel good he can change his work, there is no problem with it, he will not be condemned for it. But this is possible only when individuality is given the highest value. In this so-called Free University of Amsterdam in Holland it is not possible, the very foundation is wrong – a religious position. In fact, to start with any position is going to be wrong.Here, we are not starting with any position; there is no religious position here. It is just a caravan of drunkards, gamblers, far closer to a pub than to a temple! Just when I was answering Poonam’s question, I remembered, “This is not right what I am saying, ‘Four pillars of my temple?’ This is not right. Four pillars of my pub!” But that would have been too much for the buddhafield in Britain, so I thought, “Let it be four pillars of the temple” because British buddhas are going to be British buddhas! I don’t have any expectations of them – they are going to be British buddhas. It is going to be a totally different kind of buddhahood.We have only one British buddha here – Proper Sagar. The day he becomes enlightened, the whole of Britain will be enlightened! But he is coming closer, he is rising higher and higher. Now he is working in the same position as Vimalkirti – he is my guard. His duty is to open the door of my Rolls Royce. Now he is constantly thinking of only one thing, but has not been able to decide whether it is proper or not – that’s why he is called Proper Sagar – there are many Sagars here, but he is the only Proper Sagar. I gave him a hat, long ago, a beautiful hat. You could have seen it on the head of the Emperor Haile Selassie – a Haile Selassie hat. So now he is wondering and inquiring, can he wear it while he opens the door of my car? I have told Vivek, “Keep the camera ready. Whenever he wears that hat, a photograph has to be taken because sooner or later he will become enlightened – then we will need these photographs!”When you go to the Free University of Amsterdam, first tell them: it is not a free university. It cannot be free if it goes on insisting, expecting, that people should live in the spirit of Christ.Is it so easy to live in the spirit of Christ? Christ is not the name of a person; it is the name of the ultimate state of consciousness. It is exactly what we call in the East, buddhahood, awakenedness. Jesus is one thing; christ consciousness is a totally different phenomenon. It happened to Jesus. You can never be a Jesus, but you can be a christ. But if you are a Christian, then it is impossible to be a christ. To Christians it is impossible because once you accept that you are a Christian, you start living with the idea that you cannot be Christ – he is the only begotten son of God.Only begotten son of God. What happened to God after that? – sterilization? And what was he doing before that? – just sitting and sitting and thinking whether to produce a child or not, for infinity? Mighty slow thinker! Then finally he gave birth to this Jesus Christ, and the name of the woman is not known because the Christian trinity has no woman in it. Perhaps the Holy Ghost functions both ways – maybe the Holy Ghost is bisexual. Ghosts are known to do strange things. Otherwise, “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” and where is the mother? The whole story seems to be very concocted. The trinity has no woman, and then Jesus is born to a woman, and the woman has no man to father the child. Strange type of game!Once you accept yourself as a Christian you have debarred yourself from being a christ. You have become a follower, and the follower is only an imitator. He is bound to remain plastic. Yes, you can be a christ, but for that the first thing to drop is being a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan. You have to be a seeker of truth, and you cannot seek truth if you have already got certain prejudices. If you have already accumulated beliefs, you cannot seek and search truth.Truth is available only to the agnostic, one who says, “I don’t know anything, but I am ready to know. I am ready to go through all the processes of knowing, but I will not believe unless I see.” Seeing should be the only cause of believing; no other way should belief enter in you. Then you can be a christ, but then you are also a buddha, and you are also a lao tzu, and you are also a jaina – because these are different names, different languages, indicating toward the same ultimate consciousness.Tell those people that it is not a free university. You have to get rid of Christianity if you want it to be really free, you have to drop all positions. A true seeker cannot start from any position; he has to start from scratch, not with a position. He has to start utterly empty, just like a zero, a tabula rasa.And that’s what I call meditation. Meditation makes you utterly empty of all thoughts, prejudices, concepts, beliefs, and then there is a possibility to know the truth. Knowing the truth makes you a christ, a buddha; and then naturally whatsoever you do will be done in that spirit, never before it.Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 02 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I have heard that the German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, declared on television that sannyasins were very dangerous people for the state and society, and should not be engaged for public service or by respectable companies any more. Lots of Germans are television-watchers and behave according to what the politicians say.In fact, I don't want to have anything to do with society. But by being regarded as an enemy of society I don't enjoy the idea of not getting a job because of my orange clothes, or being molested by people on the street, as they very often become aggressive toward outsiders.You said that sannyasins are meant to be a provocation for the world, but do you want us to fight or to go underground? And do you think it is cowardly that I am considering staying in India not only to be close to you but also to avoid these troubles?It is good news! The politicians become afraid only when something really significant is happening – and they are becoming afraid all around the world. It is a good sign. It is immensely beautiful that my sannyasins are not being ignored. That’s the ugliest thing that can happen to anybody.What the German Chancellor has said is right: sannyasins are very dangerous people. Religion is always dangerous; the moment it is not dangerous it is no longer religion at all. Jesus is dangerous, Christianity is not dangerous; hence Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus. Buddha is dangerous, Buddhists are not dangerous. They have turned against their master; they have compromised with the society, with all that is rotten, dead, traditional.It is bound to be so if you are trying to live life authentically, lovingly. Then the politicians are bound to be against. They have created a society which is based on hatred, violence, division, distrust, cunningness, hypocrisy. To be religious simply means to be against all these things.To be religious means to live a life full of love, joy, innocence, freedom, individuality, to the extent that even if life has to be sacrificed for the higher values of freedom, love, truth, then one sacrifices it joyously. It is worth it. Freedom cannot be sacrificed, bliss cannot be sacrificed, love cannot be sacrificed; and life is significant only if these things are flowering, blossoming. The moment these things are sacrificed there is no point in living. Then living is simply vegetating.Socrates was given the option that if he stopped talking to people about his philosophy of truth, then he could be released from the court and he could save his life. He laughed and simply rejected the very idea. What he said is something worth remembering. He said, “To say the truth, to live the truth, is my life. If I cannot say the truth, if I cannot live the truth, then what I am supposed to live for?”A life is life only when there is something higher in it – higher than life itself. Remember, only that which is higher than life brings significance to life, brings meaning to life. If life has nothing higher than itself then it is empty, utterly futile; then it is absurd. I am giving you something to live and something to die for – and the greatest joy in life is to have something to die for. Only when you have something to die for do you have something to live for.This kind of threat is going to happen all over the world; it should be accepted – not only accepted, welcomed. It is good news. It is immensely satisfying that my sannyasins are making themselves felt.It is true that I would like the society that has existed up to now to disappear. It is a very primitive society. It is almost animal, it is not yet human. Humanity has to happen, it has not happened yet, it is something still in the future. It is only a potential, it has not become an actuality; what more joy can there be than making this potential actual? What more adventure can you hope for in life? What can be more ecstatic than making a tremendous effort to introduce humanity on this condemned earth?Unless societies disappear – German, Italian, Indian, Japanese – there cannot be a humanity. Unless these small divisions, which are absolutely pointless, are totally destroyed, totally erased, the one civilization, the one culture, the one religiousness cannot be born. I am against societies, against nations, against states because they have done enough harm to us. Look at the whole of history. It is monstrous, murderous, it is full of blood. In three thousand years’ history there have been five thousand wars. What kind of civilization, what kind of culture has there been? – as if we are here only to kill each other.But the politician thrives on these divisions. The moment a global civilization comes into existence, these politicians are bound to disappear. How can there be a German Chancellor then, or an American President, or an Iranian Prime Minister?The politicians and the priests have been in a very subtle conspiracy against humanity. They know one thing for certain: that they can exist only in a divided world. The religions – I mean the organized religions, the dogmatic religions, the creeds, the cults, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Mohammedanism – they keep humanity divided. That’s how the pope, the ayatollah, the shankaracharya, the imam, and all these hocus-pocus people can exist. If humanity is one, then these people will disappear. They will become things of the past, of an ugly past, of a nightmarish past.In the same way, if nations are no longer there – and nations are only on maps, the earth is not divided but the maps have become so important, more than the earth itself, more than humanity itself. In the so-called religions, the scriptures, the words have become so important that man can easily be killed for words. For the Bible, for the Koran, for the Gita, man can be killed and destroyed, as if man exists only for the Bible and the Koran and the Gita.The truth is just the opposite: all these scriptures exist for man; man does not exist for any scripture. And the same is true on the outside, in the world of politics. The inner being of man is dominated by the priest and the outer side is dominated by the politician, and they are in a conspiracy, an ancient conspiracy. They both have understood the fact very clearly: keep man divided – in states, in churches, in nations, in religions – and then you will remain in power.These power-hungry people, these egoists, are bound to be afraid of my sannyasins because this is something absolutely new that has never existed before. Jesus was followed only by a few Jews; Buddha was followed only by a few Hindus. My sannyasins belong to all kinds, all religions, all nations. The whole world has gathered together. It is the meeting of the East and the West.My sannyasins are proving with absolute certainty that what Rudyard Kipling has said was wrong. He said, “West is West and East is East, and never the twain shall meet.” They are meeting! They have met! They have met in the being of my sannyasins.Here no divisions exist – and we are not making any effort to destroy those divisions because I am never for fighting with darkness, I am always for kindling the light. The moment the light is there, darkness disappears. That’s where I differ from many nice people who have tried to create a certain synthesis.Mahatma Gandhi was one. He was trying in India to create a synthesis between Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism. But to try to make an effort for a synthesis presupposes that you have accepted the division already. I don’t accept the division at all; hence there is no effort to make any synthesis.And Gandhi failed immensely. He could not convince anybody – he could not even convince himself. His whole life he was singing a devotional song that he and his followers had made according to his philosophy: “Ishwar Allah Tere Naam – Ishwar, Allah, God, are all thy names.” But when he was killed and shot he forgot all other names, he simply remembered one name: “Hey, Ram!” He didn’t then say, “Hey, Allah!” At that moment he remembered only Rama, the Hindu god, the Hindu name for God. Suddenly from his deepest unconscious it must have arisen. He had remained a Hindu his whole life. Yes, he was trying to create a synthesis; he was finding in the Koran and the Bible the same message as is in the Gita, but the effort was basically cunning and political.The Gita was right – that was indubitable for him; there was no question about it. The Koran could also be right if it coincided, corresponded, supported the ideology of the Gita. So he would choose only those pieces from the Koran and the Bible and the Dhammapada which were in support of Krishna’s message in the Gita, and he could not talk about other passages which were absolutely against the Gita. And he was thinking that he was creating a synthesis. He was simply reading the Gita in other scriptures, but the Gita remained the criterion.With my people, the only criterion is your own experience, your own meditativeness – neither the Gita, nor the Koran, nor the Bible. I am not teaching you any scripture; I am trying to help you to read the scripture of your own heart. And the moment you know your own heart, the moment you become attuned with your own being, you will know that the whole humanity is one. Languages differ, but there are not many religions – there cannot be.If there is only one science about the objective reality, how can there be many religions about the inner reality, the subjective reality? If the objective truth is one – there is nothing like Hindu physics or Christian chemistry or Buddhist biology or Mohammedan mathematics. If the objective reality is one, whether you are experimenting in India or in Russia or in America, it makes no difference, you will come to the same conclusion. Then how can it be that the subjective reality is divided into three hundred religions?There are three hundred religions in the world and there must be three thousand sects of these three hundred religions and thirty thousand sub-sects, and so on and so forth. It is just ridiculous! Religiousness is one, love is one, truth is one, the taste of freedom is one. I am not trying to create a synthesis. I am simply creating a situation in which you can experience your own interiority. And the moment you have experienced it, you have experienced the very interiority of existence itself. Then there are no nations, no churches, no states.The German Chancellor is right. I am against the state and society because the state and society have been destructive. They are cancerous growths in the very heart of humanity. They have to be destroyed mercilessly. Man has to become free from politics and religious politics – both are politics. Man has to transcend all divisions. Naturally the people who are nourished by divisions, who exploit the divisions, will be against me and my sannyasins.But this is a beautiful challenge – you have to face it. And if it brings suffering, enjoy that suffering too because to suffer for anything beautiful is a benediction. One can live a very comfortable life, convenient, if one compromises with all kinds of lies, but then your life will be flat; it will not have any ecstatic peaks.We have to fight. Of course our fight is going to be totally different. We are not going to kill people, but we are going to give a tough fight to their minds. We are not actually to behead them, but metaphorically, of course, we have to behead them! Only then will they become aware of their hearts – when they lose their heads.You will have to suffer many things, you will lose your respectability. But do you think Jesus was respectable? The Polack Pope is respectable. See the strange ways of the world, the Polack Pope is respectable and Jesus was not respectable; Jesus was condemned like a criminal.Al-Hillaj Mansoor was not respectable. He was murdered, butchered, and in a very cruel way. Jesus’ crucifixion is far more human because al-Hillaj Mansoor was cut up piece by piece. First his legs were cut off, then his hands were cut off, then his tongue was cut out, and then his eyes were taken out. It is the cruelest kind of murder that has ever happened. Still, he was laughing to the very end. Even the murderers became a little puzzled, “Is he mad or something?”One of the murderers asked him, “Why are you laughing?”He said, “I am laughing because you can kill my body, but you cannot kill me. And I am also laughing at God. You will not understand that,” he said, “because you cannot see God, but I am laughing at God too. I am telling him, ‘You can do whatsoever you want to do with me, you can come like murderers as you have come today, but I will still recognize you. I can see you in these people who are murdering me. You cannot deceive me any more. I will recognize you in any disguise you come. I have recognized you even in these murderers.’”My sannyasins will have to suffer, but suffering in itself is not bad, suffering in itself is not misery. If you are suffering because you cannot compromise, if you are suffering because you want to live your truth, it is a joy, it is bliss. You have to become the very salt of the earth.And I know people believe the politicians. They will create all kinds of troubles for you, but I know that only through those troubles you will grow. So whenever I hear that people are going to create trouble for you, secretly I giggle. I say, “Hee-hee!”You have also asked, “And do you think it is cowardly that I am considering staying in India not only to be close to you but also to avoid these troubles?” It depends. It is up to you to be clear. If you want to be here just to be close to me, there is no question of cowardliness because here also you will have to face troubles – in fact many more because the main troublemaker is here! I have always enjoyed mischief and I still enjoy it – I don’t want to hide it from you. From my very childhood I have enjoyed all kinds of mischief, and my enlightenment has not made any difference. At the most it has made my mischiefs a little bit enlightened, that’s all, but the basic foundation remains the same. Of course, now I make mischief on vaster, greater planes; my canvas is bigger, but I enjoy it!So if you want to be here just to be close to me it is beautiful, but you will not be avoiding any trouble. In Germany you will be far better off because I have not heard yet that any sannyasin has been molested in Germany, raped in Germany, murdered in Germany, but in India all these things have happened. And many cases have happened because India is far more uncultured, far more uncivilized, far more irreligious than anywhere else in the world – for the simple reason that Indians believe that they are religious. Their belief of being religious hides their irreligiousness. They are the greatest hypocrites in the whole world.If you just want to avoid trouble, don’t be here. Germany is far better. Secondly, if you are here only to avoid troubles there, you will not be close to me; it will be a negative kind of closeness, and unless it is positive it is meaningless. If you are here to be with me, then it is perfectly beautiful. Otherwise, go to Germany and earn a positive relationship – accept the challenges there.I am not for going underground – there is no need. Only in China and Russia have I allowed my sannyasins to remain underground. Now, two of my sannyasins from Russia are here. They have been underground there; somehow they have escaped. Only in China and Russia can it be understood that it will be impossible to declare openly, but a few Russian sannyasins are still doing it openly; they have found a beautiful way. If you are really ready then you can always find a way.They are moving in red clothes and they say, “This is the color of Communism!” They are moving with a picture of mine in their malas and they say, “This is nobody but Karl Marx!” If one wants to find a way, one can find a way. And they are enjoying, and I love the idea – nothing is wrong in it because nobody knows about me, so they think, “Maybe this is Karl Marx.” Red is certainly a Communist color so there is no problem about it, and you can always read my books hiding them inside Das Kapital, the Communist manifesto.But except for China and Russia I will not allow underground work anywhere else. Remain above ground and give a good fight! And I am giving you so many weapons to fight with. In fact, the people you have to fight with are already dead. Just a little push and they will fall flat on the ground. Much wrestling is not needed at all. They have been long dead, they are just standing there because nobody pushes them!The second question:Osho,More and more people are putting their faith in all sorts of saints, swamis and god-men. What do you think of this phenomenon? What is your opinion on saints like Mahesh Yogi, Mother Teresa, Prabhupada, Muktananda, Satya Sai Baba, J. Krishnamurti, Anand Mai, etcetera, etcetera?What criteria should a person use to judge the worth of a god-man and to ensure he is not taken for a ride?The first thing to be remembered is that it is not something new that is happening today. You say to me, “More and more people are putting their faith in all sorts of saints…”They have always done that – this is not new. In fact, less and less people are doing it now, not more and more. Otherwise, how you can explain millions of Hindus, millions of Buddhists, millions of Christians, millions of Mohammedans? In fact, everybody on the earth belongs to some kind of religion. How can you explain this?Even Communism is a godless religion; it is a church. It has its own Bible – Das Kapital. It has its own unholy trinity: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V. I. Lenin. It has its own conflicting sects, so many Communist Parties in the world: the Chinese camp, the Russian camp, just like Catholics, Protestants; Shias, Sunnis; different interpretations of their scriptures, believing in different interpreters. Somebody believes in Fidel Castro, somebody believes in Mao Zedong, and somebody believes in Tito, and somebody believes in Joseph Stalin, and somebody believes in Leon Trotsky. Communism is also the same kind of phenomenon.A few people go to the Kaaba, a few people go to the Kremlin. It is the same phenomenon, the same pilgrimage. You are doomed if at least once in your life you don’t go to the Kaaba if you are a Mohammedan, and if you don’t go to the Kremlin at least once in your life if you are a Communist. Karl Marx’s books are worshipped, are thought to be infallible, in the same way as other religions have done with books.So if you look, then you will not be able to say, “More and more people are putting their faith in all sorts of saints, swamis and god-men. What do you think of this phenomenon?” This has always been so.Yes, one thing new is happening and that is: many more people are changing from one religion to another, are going astray from their forefathers. That is something new, and that is something good, that is something beautiful. It was for centuries an accepted fact that religion has something to do with your birth. It has nothing to do with your birth.Just the other day I came across a statement of Mother Teresa. Somebody had asked her about me, and what I had said about her, and she said, “Osho has no reason to interfere with my work. He should not interfere.” Why should I not interfere? I have every reason. If a crime is happening, I have to interfere, I have to say that it is criminal.She says she is fighting abortion by adoption – but who is responsible for abortion? – Mother Teresa, the Polack Pope, and the whole company. They are responsible for abortion because they are against contraceptives, they are against birth control. And if you are against contraceptives, against birth control, then abortion is bound to happen. First they manage that abortion should continue and then they fight abortion by adoption!The questioner said to Mother Teresa that I had been criticizing her because she refused a Protestant child to be adopted by a Protestant family; she wanted a Catholic family to adopt the child. Responding to this, Mother Teresa said that each child has a birthright to choose his religion. But who is she to choose? The child has the birthright – that I can understand, and I accept it. And if that is true, no child should be baptized until the child is grown up and decides on his own, without any manipulation, conditioning, teaching. He should be left alone to inquire, and when he decides to become a Christian or a Buddhist or a Mohammedan, of course he has the right. But a small child, how do you decide what religion he wants to choose?Mother Teresa was asked this, so she said, “First we decide according to what religion he has been born into.” Now, religion has nothing to do with birth. You may be born into a Hindu family; that does not mean that you have become a Hindu. You may be born into a Communist family; that does not mean that you have to become a Communist. You may be born into a family where the father is a doctor and the mother is a doctor, that does not mean that you have to become a doctor. Should it be that when two doctors give birth to a child he should immediately be given a certificate that he is an MD? This is nonsense. Religion has to be chosen.The questioner also asked, “If you don’t know the family of the child – because many of the children you bring into your orphanage are thrown-away children, you don’t know their family, you don’t know their background – then how do you decide?” Then she said, “Because I am a Catholic and I have been bringing them up, then they should go into Catholicism, they are Catholics. I decide!”Where is the birthright of the child then? Somebody else decides!This old stupidity is disappearing a little bit. People have started inquiring on their own. Now the people who surround me – today there are five thousand sannyasins here; all over the earth there are now more than two hundred thousand sannyasins – these are the people who have decided on their own. This is their decision, and when religion is your own decision then it becomes a commitment, then it is involvement. Then you are fulfilling your own heart’s desire. Then there is joy and then there is love. Then it is a love affair.In the past, people were born into a certain family and that was their religion. Today, only one new thing is happening, and that is more and more people are becoming mature, more and more people are understanding their birthright, are understanding that they have to choose their own religion. Only then can they put their heart into it; only then can they be ready, if the need arises, to sacrifice their life.The people who chose Jesus were Jews. According to Mother Teresa they were doing something wrong. Jesus himself was a Jew, he was not a Christian – that much is absolutely certain. He had not even heard the word Christian. He lived as a Jew and he died as a Jew. And the people who had gathered around him – a small group – they were all Jews. According to Mother Teresa they must have remained Jews. Then there would have been no Mother Teresa and no Christianity! But they had chosen a path of their own; they had decided to go beyond the mob psychology. They had chosen to go against the crowd.A religious person is always a rebel. Religion is rebellion; that’s its basic flavor, its fragrance. And now more and more people are becoming capable of doing it. This is a good sign; this shows that humanity is coming of age.You ask me, “More and more people are putting their faith in all sorts of saints, swamis and god-men. What do you think of this phenomenon? What is your opinion on saints like Mahesh Yogi, Mother Teresa, Prabhupada, Muktananda, Satya Sai Baba, J. Krishnamurti, Anand Mai, etcetera?”One gets the master one deserves – and that’s natural, inevitable. So I divide these saints into three categories. First, the idiots – there are millions of idiots in the world; they need their own saints, and they have every right. And what else can they do? They are idiots – whatsoever they do will be idiotic. And whenever there is demand, there is supply. So Prabhupada, Muktananda, Satya Sai Baba fulfill their needs. They are absolutely needed, otherwise the needs of the idiots will be neglected. Who will take care of them? They have every right to have their own saints, swamis and god-men.The second category belongs to the average IQ’s. Anand Mai, Mother Teresa, Mahesh Yogi, these belong to the average – neither idiots nor intellectuals, just middlers; the followers of the golden mean. Cautiously they move, calculatingly they move. These are the people who will follow Anand Mai, Mother Teresa, Mahesh Yogi.And the third category is of the intellectuals; they will follow people like J. Krishnamurti. His whole approach is purely intellectual.I don’t belong to any of these categories. I belong to a fourth category: the crazies, the mad. They are the most beautiful people on the earth – they are the real people. In fact, these mad people were around Jesus, around Socrates, around Buddha, around Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu. These are the people who have created the greatest flowers of mysticism because mysticism is a kind of madness, a madness with a method. It is going beyond mind.When somebody goes out of his mind you call him mad. Going beyond mind is also going out of mind. The madman falls below the mind and the mystic falls above the mind, but both go outside the mind, that much is similar. Hence every mystic has some similarity with the madman, and every madman also has some similarity with the mystic. You will find some place where they overlap. But this fourth category is the real category.For the first category…There was once a man who traveled to a far distant land to seek enlightenment. Finally he arrived at the dwelling of a sage who was reputed to be a master of masters. At the precise moment that he was ushered into the presence of the “Great One,” a strange agitation seized him and he fell to the ground, feeling that the very earth might open up and swallow him.“At last… At last!” he stammered, “You have stirred my innermost being, oh master!”“Not at all – that was an earthquake,” replied the master calmly.Now, this man reached the wrong master. He needed a Muktananda, a Prabhupada, who would have nodded, and he would have said, “Yes, this is the arousal of kundalini! Your kundalini has arisen. It happens when somebody comes to me – my kundalini triggers his kundalini.”Now, the master must have been a man like me. He simply said the truth, “Don’t be a fool! It is just an earthquake – nothing has happened.”An Irishman was in an airplane watching a movie. When he realized he had already seen it, he got up and walked out the door of the plane. After a long time floating in the ocean he landed on a small island.Many years later a beautiful woman in a wet suit came out of the sea and approached the Irishman. She unzipped one of the top pockets of the suit and said, “I bet you have not had a smoke for a long time,” and she handed him a cigarette.Next she unzipped her other top pocket and said, “I bet you have not had a drink for a long time,” and she produced a flask of whiskey from the pocket.Slowly unzipping the front of her wet suit she said, “I will bet there is something else you have not done for a long time!”The Irishman exclaimed, “My God! Have you got golf clubs in there too?”Now, these people also need masters, saints, swamis, god-men, and their need is authentic, very authentic, and they are in the majority. These are the people who live in Californialand!A politician in California was addressing a group of concerned citizens on the problem of overpopulation. “Do you realize,” he said, “that while we sit here, every minute a woman is giving birth to a child? What are we going to do about this?”From the back of the room a voice piped up, “Well, the first thing we had better do is find that woman!”A Polack arrived in the big city for the first time. He stood gaping at a fifty-story building which housed the country’s biggest newspaper press. He asked a passerby, “What is this huge building for?”Seeing how naive the Polack was, the passerby said, “Why, that is where Brutus the Giant lives!”The Polack hung around in front of the building all day, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the giant.At ten o’clock in the evening, the same passerby saw the Polack still standing there and took pity on him.“Look, there is not any giant in there, I was just joking.”“Joking, my foot!” replied the Polack. “Five minutes ago a truck arrived loaded with huge rolls of toilet paper for him!”A Polack found a twenty-dollar bill. He thought for a few minutes about how to spend it. Finally he flipped a coin. “Heads, I will eat it away; tails, I will drink it.”The coin spun in the air, fell on his lap, and disappeared between the buttons of his fly. “Aha!” grinned the Polack. “That’s another possibility!”For these people, Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna Movement, is almost like a magnet; he attracts the uttermost idiots in the world. That much credit must be given to him. Muktananda – he is not as great as Prabhupada but comes very close. Now he is sitting on Miami Beach – that is the right place, that’s where these people are needed.And for the second category, the average, intelligent person: Mother Teresa, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Anand Mai, these people will do.The police station received a call: “Philip’s residence!” a hoarse voice shrieked. “Get over here quick! There is a cat in the house!”“A cat? And you called us up for that? To whom am I talking anyway?”“Philip’s parrot!”Average intelligence!Murphy, the father of ten children, asked the pharmacist for a packet of contraceptives. He returned six weeks later to complain, “They did not do any good at all. My wife is pregnant again. I think they were too big, even though I cut off a droopy bit at the end!”And for the third category, the people who are attracted to Krishnamurti…A fat Jewish lady walked slowly home to her apartment after shopping. She had a tremendous problem: for the last block she had badly needed to fart. But she managed to hold onto it until she got into the elevator. Then, to her great relief, she let it go.Worried, however, that the ripe smell would disturb anyone who entered the elevator before she got to her twenty-fifth-story apartment, she took out from her bag an aerosol can of pine-spray and sprayed the elevator.At the fifth floor two professors got on. They immediately clapped their hands over their noses. After the fat Jewish lady got off at the twenty-fifth floor, one professor said to the other, “Christ, what a smell! What do you reckon it is?”The other replied, “Smells to me as if someone has just shit behind a pine tree!”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 03 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Would you please say something on the following words of the poet, Kahlil Gibran: “When love beckons to you, follow him. Love possesses not, nor would it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love. Love has no desire but to fulfill itself.”Kahlil Gibran is a poet, but not a mystic. A poet is a dreamer, a mystic is a visionary; and the difference is vast. The difference is not only of quantity but of quality. The poet looks not at the moon but at a reflection of the moon in the troubled waters of the lake. He gets a few glimpses here and there, but they are only glimpses, and very vague. His perception is not clear – cannot be because he has not passed through the alchemical process of meditation.The mind is there between him and reality. And the mind always interprets, it is a constant commentator. It never allows the reality to reach you as it is; it distorts it, it polishes it, it changes it. It makes it according to its own gestalt, its own pattern. It gives it the shape of its own ideas, it colors it. Of course, something of the reality still lingers on, but it is only something fragmentary as if the poet has seen a beautiful dream.But the mystic knows it directly, immediately; there is no interpretation. Existence and the mystic are in deep communion. The poet is only once in a while in a sort of communication, but never of communion. In communication you remain separate, bridged for the moment, but still separate. In communion you are no more, not only bridged for the moment, you are simply not there. It is not a question of creating a bridge, you are immersed, you are attuned. You are in a state of at-one-ment with reality.Remember this before we start meditating on these beautiful words of Kahlil Gibran. And they are beautiful. He is one of the most perceptive poets of this age – but he is a poet, not a mystic. He is not a buddha, not a christ. He has not seen reality, he has dreamed about it. His dreams are beautiful, psychedelic, but dreams are dreams. Even if sometimes they reflect the reality, they only reflect it. They are faraway echoes, or maybe echoes of the echoes of the echoes.Kahlil Gibran says, “When love beckons to you, follow him.” It is implied in the statement that love is something outside you and you have to follow it. In fact, when love is there, you are not there; there is nobody to follow it. Love is overwhelming. Love is a dissolution of the ego. Who is there to follow? Who is there not to follow? If there is still somebody to follow or not to follow, then it is not love; then it must be something else – maybe biology, chemistry, psychology – but not love. It must be instinctive. It must be lust parading as love, camouflaged as love. It must be something animal.When love is there, the lover is not; they can’t exist together. That is impossible, that is not in the nature of things – they cannot coexist. If the lover is there, love is not; if love is there, you will not find the lover anywhere. Then who is to follow? Who is to hear the call of love, and who has to go with love? If somebody is there to follow love, then something is missing – something very basic and fundamental is missing. The statement is beautiful, but it has not come out of meditativeness. It is a faraway echo; he has dreamt about it.If you ask Buddha, he will say, “When love is there, you are not.” There is no way not to follow it, there is no way to go against it. You are it! But then you have to understand the multidimensionality of the phenomenon of love. The lowest dimension is animal; ninety-nine percent of people never go beyond it. So when they hear words like this, “When love beckons to you, follow him,” they interpret it according to themselves.In all the languages of the world we have the expression “falling in love.” It is significant. Why falling in love? – because for ninety-nine percent of people it is really a fall. They are going downward to the world of instincts, biology, physiology. They are being dominated by hormones, by glands, by their body chemistry. It is happening in animals, it is happening in trees; it is nothing special, it is nothing human.I will not say, “When your biology beckons to you, follow it.” I will say, “Watch, be aware, be alert.” Because if you are not aware you are bound to be taken over, dominated by the lowest element in you, by the most peripheral in you. You will be dominated and guided by unconscious, natural forces. That’s what is happening in the name of love, people are simply behaving like animals. It is a fall. But there are higher dimensions of love too.The first kind of love appears as if it is coming from the outside. It really does come from the outside because it comes from the circumference and the circumference is outermost in you – it is outside you. At the deepest shrine of your being you are far away from the circumference, and the center has to follow the circumference. When love calls you forth that means it is coming from the periphery, somewhere outside.A man falls in love with a woman, or a woman falls in love with a man, but it is nothing special to man, it is not part of the dignity of man. It is a fall and it will bring misery to you. And remember, it will be possessive. Also, if you watch carefully, you will see it will not only be possessive – deep down there will be a desire to be possessed too. You are already possessed by nature, now it will have other implications. The man will be possessed by the woman, the woman will be possessed by the man – and the whole conflict of the so-called “love.”Whenever you are possessed by somebody there is a dichotomy in you: you want to be possessed and yet you want to be free. There is a conflict within you. You want to be possessed because that makes you feel valuable, possessable; somebody is paying respect to you, somebody is thinking of you as a treasure, so you feel good that you are possessed. But on the other hand, simultaneously, you feel that you are being reduced to a commodity. You may be a treasure, but a treasure has no consciousness. You are becoming a thing, you are being reduced to the world of objects, you are becoming an object of possession. You are losing your subjectivity and the freedom of your subjectivity – hence the conflict.And you will be in misery because whatsoever you do will only fulfill half the desire and the other half will remain frustrated. If you allow yourself to be possessed, your desire to be free remains unfulfilled, it fights. If you don’t allow yourself to be possessed you are free, but something in you goes on insisting that nobody possesses you. Does that mean nobody values you? Does that mean nobody is bothered about you, nobody is taking any note of you, that you are worthless?At this level of love, misery is a natural consequence. Watch it because through watchfulness you can rise above it. You can start rising in love, rather than falling in love. Watchfulness becomes like a ladder from the lowest to the highest.The second dimension is closer to what Kahlil Gibran says in his second statement, “Love possesses not, nor would it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.” But again he gives the wrong reasoning why love is not going to possess and is not going to be possessed. He says, because love is sufficient unto itself – that’s not so. Love is not sufficient unto itself, love needs to be shared. There is an immense, overflowing energy which needs to be shared. The flower is not sufficient unto itself: it needs the winds and the sun so that it can release its hidden splendor, its fragrance, its perfume. If it is not allowed to release its perfume, it will be in deep suffering.Love suffers most when there is nobody to share it. The greatest suffering comes when you have love to give and there is nobody to receive it. “Love possesses not,” that is true, “nor would it be possessed” – that is also true. But the reason Kahlil Gibran gives for it is not right. It is poetic, but it has no insight into the reality of love.Love is non-possessive because love’s very essence is freedom. If you love a person, you would like that person to be absolutely free. And, you can love somebody only if you have loved yourself first. That is a precondition. You cannot love others if you are not in deep love with yourself first. The foremost love is love for oneself. When this flame starts burning in you – love for oneself…For centuries you have been taught just the opposite, “Don’t love yourself, it is selfish,” they say. “Love others!” Even Christians who think they are following Christ have misinterpreted his tremendously significant statement, “Love your enemies as yourself.” They have taken only half of the statement, “Love your enemies,” but they have forgotten the basic condition. Jesus says, “Love your enemies as yourself,” but if you don’t love yourself, how are you going to love your enemies? What will be the criterion? First you have to love yourself, then you can even love your enemies. What to say about friends? What to say about lovers?The first love has to happen within yourself, it is something inner. It happens only when you become silent, aware, meditative; when you get out of the mind. The mind is possessive, the mind is dictatorial, the mind is a despot. It wants to dominate because the center of the mind is the ego and the ego can ride on anything – any horse will do. Money will do, power will do, knowledge will do, asceticism will do, virtue will do, love will do – even love! Even love will be converted into a horse, and the ego can ride on it.Love is non-possessive only when it is not of the mind. But Kahlil Gibran knows nothing of the no-mind. Meditation means the state of no-mind. Love should arise in a state of no-mind. You have to prepare the state of no-mind for love to happen, it does not come from the outside, it does not come from somewhere else. When you are silent it springs within you, it blooms within yourself.Meditation functions like spring, the flowers that have been waiting for spring suddenly open up. Your inner being becomes so full of perfume, it is so fragrant; you are so overflowing with fragrance that you have to share it. There is so much that you cannot be miserly with it.There is an ancient Tibetan story…A master denied his whole life to accept any disciple. The more he denied, the more famous he became. More and more people came asking to be initiated, but he refused. His conditions to be initiated were such that nobody was able to fulfill them.He had only one young man to look after him, who was also not a disciple because he had never initiated anybody. The master was getting old so he had allowed this young man… And the young man wanted to serve the master. He said, “If you are not going to initiate me, okay, don’t initiate me, but let me be here to serve you, to look after your physical needs, as you are getting old.” And he allowed the young man.The day he was dying he called the young man and said to him, “Run to the village and tell people, ‘Whosoever wants to be initiated can come immediately.’”The young man could not believe it. “But what about your conditions?” he said. “Your conditions are so impossible that nobody up to now has been able to fulfill them.”The master laughed and said, “Now I can tell you the truth, the truth is that all those conditions were just a strategy not to tell people that I had not yet reached. I didn’t have it, so how could I give it to them? I never wanted to say that I had not yet become the awakened one, the blessed one. So I found this strategy: ‘You are not yet worthy to be initiated.’ But now I have attained – this morning it happened – and I am so burdened that I want to be relieved.“So there is no condition at all. Simply go, and whosoever wants to be initiated, gather them and tell them that this is my last day. As the sun sets I will also disappear from this world, only a few hours are left. So gather as many people as you can.”The young man could not believe it, but the master was saying it, so he rushed away. The villagers could not believe it; they thought it must be some kind of joke. The man had been so stubborn with his conditions, and the conditions were so impossible – only Superman could fulfill his conditions!Those poor villagers said, “But we are not worthy.”The young man said, “Now he is not asking for any readiness on your part. Anybody who wants to be initiated, who wants to share the truth, he is ready to give.”A few people were curious, “What’s going on?” So, knowing that old man perfectly well for many years, but without believing, they followed, just out of curiosity. Somebody’s wife had died and he was feeling a little miserable, so he said, “Okay, it will be good just to go to the old man for some consolation, and if he wants to give some advice or some wisdom, why not take it?” A young man was unemployed, he had been thrown out of his job, and he was just sitting idle, so he said, “Okay, I am also coming.” Even a small child, seeing a crowd going toward the hermitage, followed. He had not been to school that day and it was a good excuse that he had gone to the saint, so he also went.The young man looked at the crowd. He could not believe his eyes because he had seen very wise people coming, the purest, the most innocent, the virtuous, the puritans, the ascetics, and they had all been refused. And this motley crowd! He laughed to himself, “What is going to happen? The whole thing seems to be simply crazy. And what is this small child going to get? And the reasons they are coming are absurd: somebody’s wife has died; somebody is unemployed; somebody’s day off; the child has not gone to school.”He went with this crowd. The master did not even ask, “Why do you want to be initiated?” He simply started calling single individuals, initiating them. The young man said, “I cannot believe my eyes. I never imagined that this would ever happen.”The master said, “It is very simple. Now I have it and I have to give it; then I didn’t – there was nothing to give. And what was the point of showing one’s emptiness to people? So I pretended, ‘I have it, but you are not ready.’ Now – whether you are ready or not, who cares! – I am unburdening myself.”That has always been the way of the masters. When the rain cloud is full of rainwater it does not bother whether it is showering on the rocks or on good soil, whether the soil is fertile or not, it simply showers. It showers without any conditions.So is the truth of love. When you love yourself, when your love has exploded, when it has become a reality within you – you share it. It is not sufficient unto itself, it needs sharing. Even truth needs sharing, buddhahood needs sharing, christ consciousness needs sharing. It is irresistible, it has to be shared – there is no way to avoid it.Otherwise why, in his old age, when Buddha was eighty-two, was he still traveling and talking to people? He was ill, he was old, he was getting weaker every day, but he was still traveling. His disciples were saying, “Now, please stop!”And he would say, “I cannot, I have to give. To the last of my breath I have to give.” And actually that’s what happened. When the last day came and he was dying, he declared that now he was going to leave his body. He asked, “Has anybody something to ask?”Ten thousand sannyasins, his disciples, had gathered. They were crying. They said, “You have answered everything. You have been answering for forty-two years continuously, morning, afternoon, evening. You have said everything that we would have ever thought, or asked, or inquired – in fact you have said a thousand times more. There is nothing to ask.”It was Buddha’s way to ask everything thrice. He again asked, “Have you got any questions?” They refused. He again asked, “Maybe somebody has a question and is not asking so as not to bother me in this last moment of my life. Don’t be worried, ask it! Till my last breath I want to share, I have to share.”But they refused. They said, “We don’t have any questions.”Then he said, “Good-bye. I can close my eyes, I can start disappearing.” He said, “First I will disappear from the body, then from the mind, then from the heart, then from my soul. As when a candle is extinguished, the flame disappears, you cannot find it anywhere because now it is everywhere.”Just when he had closed his eyes and was disappearing from the body, and the mind, and was reaching the third stage, a man came running. For thirty years he had been waiting to ask something, but something or other always came up and he could not ask. In fact, he had not seen Buddha for thirty years. He had always wanted to visit him, but sometimes customers were there, sometimes guests arrived, sometimes the wife was ill, sometimes some other problem, and he had always postponed. The ordinary way of humanity: postponement, tomorrow. “Next time when Buddha comes by I will ask.”Suddenly he heard the rumor in the village, “This is the last day, Buddha will not be there tomorrow.” So he closed his shop. The customers were still there and they said, “What are you doing?”He said, “Enough is enough. Now I cannot wait.”The wife said, “I am feeling very ill” – they are always feeling ill – “I have a headache!” And when you are going to a buddha, the wife will always have a headache! “Where are you going?”He said, “You get lost! I don’t even have time to answer.”He rushed. The wife followed, the customers followed, “What is the matter? He has suddenly gone mad. Such a calculating man, a businessman!”He reached there and he said to the disciples, “I want to ask a question.”They said, “It is too late. He has asked thrice, we have refused. And where have you been? For thirty years he has been passing through your village, almost every year he has passed through. Where have you been?”He said, “I am sorry, but I always postponed, believing that there would be a tomorrow. Now I cannot postpone. And I don’t know whether in my future life I will ever come across a man like Gautam Buddha. Who knows? I cannot miss this opportunity.”A quarrel started. He was saying, “I will ask him!” And they were saying, “Now it is not possible!”And Buddha opened his eyes. He said, “This is not right. I am still alive – let him ask. To the last of my breath, if I am alive I would not like it to be said about me that ‘Buddha was alive and a man came to inquire, and he was refused.’ Let him ask.” And he was ready to answer. He answered.Love, truth, bliss – there is an intrinsic core in them; they need to be shared, they are not sufficient unto themselves. Sharing is part of it. They are also not possessive; the reason is totally different. The reason is that love basically gives freedom: it gives freedom to oneself, it gives freedom to others. A love that becomes a bondage is not love – it is lust, it is animal, it is not human. Love gives freedom, then it becomes human, but it is still a kind of relatedness.There is one more dimension to love. In the first dimension love is a biological need; in the second it is a psychological sharing; in the third, you are love. In the first it is a relationship, a possessiveness; in the second it is a relatedness, a friendship, a friendliness; in the third you are love itself: your very being is love, you radiate love. Only then love has come to its crescendo; it has achieved the ultimate, the last – you can call it godliness.Jesus rightly says, “God is love.” I would like to change the statement just a little bit – the same words but a different arrangement. I would like to say, “Love is God” – because when you say, “God is love” it simply means love is one of the attributes of God, there may be many others. I say to you, “Love is God.” God itself is nothing but an attribute of love; it is godliness.And the third statement of Kahlil Gibran is, “Love has no desire but to fulfill itself” – a beautiful statement, but only apparently. Deep down something is missing, it is bound to be missing. It is not the fault of Kahlil Gibran, he is only a poet, he can be forgiven. He says, “Love has no desire but to fulfill itself.” No, even that desire is not there because love itself is a fulfillment. There is no question of any future fulfillment; there is no future in love. Love knows only one time and that is this moment, now. Love is the means and the end. It is fulfillment, it is contentment, and out of this fulfillment is the fragrance.So to a certain extent he is right when he says, “Love has no desire,” but in the second part of the statement, “…but to fulfill itself,” he commits a mistake. That too is a desire, “…to fulfill itself.” Even that desire is not there. Love has no desire; in fact love happens only when you have reached the point of desirelessness. That’s what I call going beyond the mind. Mind has desires; when you slip out of the mind you are a no-mind. There are no desires, no memories, no imagination, no fantasies, no future, no past. You exist now and here.This very body the buddha. This very space the lotus paradise.The second question:Osho,Since you call yourself Bhagwan, are you really God?My God! Are you a German or something? Can’t you understand a simple joke? God does not exist at all, so how can I really be a god? Don’t take me seriously – I am not a serious person at all – this is just a joke! But you must be a German, and perhaps also a Jew…A German has no humor: he only laughs when told to.A German never thinks: that’s what his boss does for him.A German loves variety: provided it never changes.A German never makes a mistake: if he does, he does it correctly.A German loves foreign customs: as long as they are German.A German is orderly: even chaos is strictly organized.I have nothing to do with God. I don’t take the responsibility of making this world, and doing this whole job in six days! It was absolutely destined to be a mess. And the man who has never done anything like it before did it in six days; and since then he has disappeared, nothing has been heard about him. He must have freaked out, seeing what he has done.But you are very concerned about my really being a god. A Jewish concern! If I am really a god, then Joseph will think of becoming a sannyasin, but first he has to check, double-check: “Is this man really a god?”A young man went to the legal firm of Goldberg and Weinstein. “Can I see Mr. Goldberg?” he asked the secretary.“I am sorry, Mr. Goldberg is out of town.”“Then can I see Mr. Weinstein?”“I am sorry,” she answered, “Mr. Weinstein is tied up.”A week later he returned. “Can I see Mr. Goldberg?” he asked the secretary again.“I am sorry,” she replied, “Mr. Goldberg is out of town.”“Then how about Mr. Weinstein?”“I am sorry, Mr. Weinstein is tied up.”In another week he returned. “Can I see Mr. Goldberg?” he asked.“I am sorry, Mr. Goldberg is out of town.”“Well then, let me see Mr. Weinstein.”“I am sorry, Mr. Weinstein is tied up.”“Look,” he said to the secretary, indignantly, “I have been here three times, and each time you tell me that Mr. Goldberg is out of town, and Mr. Weinstein is tied up. What is going on here?”“Isn’t it awful?” she replied. “Each time Mr. Goldberg goes out of town he ties up Mr. Weinstein!”Jews have their own ways of thinking, everything has to be done in a business way.I am neither a real god nor an unreal god. And why are you worried about me? – you should think about yourself.This word bhagwan has been of immense use to me. I saw many god-men in India: Satya Sai Baba, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Muktananda, and many etceteranandas. I tried to fight them from the outside, but it was difficult. Then I thought it is better to be an insider, and then fight. So I declared myself a bhagwan, I became an insider – and now I am giving them a hard time! It is as simple as that.But you must have come with your prejudices, ideas about God. And you must be a seriously religious person, hence the question. Here, you have to put aside all your prejudices, that’s why I am so outrageous. This is part of my work.A successful lawyer was married to a woman who nagged him incessantly. She nagged him about his appearance, about how much he drank, about how little he loved her, about the state of the garden, and so on. The lawyer started staying late at his office to avoid her.One day, after weeks defending a certain William Wright, who was accused of murder, he came home very depressed. He had lost the case and Wright was to be executed that night unless the State Governor granted a stay of execution.As he entered the house, his wife began, “Where have you been? It is after ten o’clock!”“Ah, nag, nag, nag!” he said in disgust, and went to pour himself a drink.“The minute you come home you start to drink, not even a hello for me!”“Ah, nag, nag, nag!” he sighed. Then he went upstairs to take a bath, saying to his wife that he was expecting a call from the Governor.While he was in the tub the call came – Wright was reprieved. The lawyer’s wife decided to give him the good news herself. As she entered the bathroom he was standing naked, bending over the tub to wipe it clean. “They are not hanging Wright tonight,” she said.“Ah, nag, nag, nag!” the lawyer snarled.When you have preconceptions you are bound to be in difficulty. You will misunderstand everything.Here, everything is a joke, nothing is serious. Neither my being Bhagwan is serious, nor your being sannyasins is serious. We are just playing a game. I have decided to be the master, and you have decided to be the disciples. Sometimes we can even change roles – you can be the master and I can be the disciple. You will just have to dig a hole so I can sit there and you all sit on the platform, that’s all. And we can have a good laugh. One thing you have to remember – I will still be talking and you will still be listening.A bishop visiting an insane asylum was told by his guide that one of the inmates insisted he was God. The bishop expressed interest in meeting the man, who proved to be a venerable and dignified figure with a flowing white beard.“I understand that you are God,” said the bishop.“That’s correct,” replied the old man with a gentle bow.“Well, there is one thing I would like very much to know. When you speak in the Bible of creating the world in six days, do you mean this literally or metaphorically? Do you mean six days of twenty-four hours each, or do you mean eons or ages?”“I am sorry,” replied the old fellow, “but I make it a practice never to talk shop.”The third question:Osho,What is the meaning of Gurdjieff saying, “Practice love to animals first because they are more sensitive?”Don’t take it literally because I know my people are dangerous people! He is talking metaphorically. But George Gurdjieff’s statement is not complete. It has to be made complete, so you don’t misunderstand it.Start loving yourself. That has to be the beginning, and that is also going to be the end. Then the circle is complete. You begin by loving yourself because you are the closest to yourself. Of course, when you begin to love yourself your love is from the circumference toward the center because you exist on the circumference. You turn in, you stand at the door which connects your inside and the outside. You look inward – you are still standing on the circumference – and you fall in love with your center. This is the beginning, and the end will be when you have reached the center and you stand at the center and look at your circumference. That will be the completion of the journey.But between these two, the beginning and the end, there are seven steps. Gurdjieff’s statement belongs only to one step, and it is absolutely right. Animals are far more sensitive because they are not logical, not rational. But to begin with animals is not good; you have to go a little further back.The first step has to be stars, sun, and moon. The farther they are, the better because if you can love the farthest, it will be easier to love those who are closer to you. Stars also have a tremendous sensitivity; they are far more primitive than the animals.Prem Volodya, the Russian sannyasin, has sent me a beautiful joke…Brezhnev gets up in the morning and goes out onto his balcony to stretch his body. The sun is rising. “Good morning, red sun!” he exclaims.“Long live Leonid Illich Brezhnev!” the sun answers back.Very happy with this, Brezhnev goes about his business. After a busy morning he goes out onto his balcony again and sees the sun at its height.“Good afternoon, sun!” he shouts out.“Long live Comrade Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!” comes the reply.Very pleased, Brezhnev returns to his work. Once more in the evening, after a hard day, he comes out onto his favorite place. He sees the sun setting and with a knowing smile cries out, “Good evening, my little red sun!”“Fuck you!” comes the answer. “I am in the West now!”Stars, sun, moon – start with them, and they will answer you, remember. And be ready because they are not very gentlemanly either. They will tell you the exact truth, whatsoever it is.Then move to rocks, mountains. Feel the rocks, their texture, love them. Then move to rivers, wind, rain; they are more alive, livelier than anything. Dance in the rain, in the wind. Swim in the river, let go. Flow with it, don’t fight against the river. Don’t push the river, don’t go upstream. Go with the river, totally one with it.This is how you will be able to learn many ways of love, many qualities of love. Then trees, bushes, flowers, fruits – move very slowly toward life. Now, trees are more alive, flowers are closer, far closer than the stars and the rocks and the rivers. Then move to birds – and only then is Gurdjieff’s statement correct – to the animals.And when you have been able to love all these different expressions of existence, you will be able to love man and woman because man and woman are the highest expression. They imply the stars, the mountains, the rivers, the winds, the rain, the trees, the birds, the animals; they imply all these. We are made of all these. Something of us belongs to the stars; something of us belongs to the rivers, mountains; something of us belongs to the trees, flowers; something of us belongs to the birds.It is not accidental that you dream of flying, it is not accidental that man invented airplanes, it is not accidental that man has been immensely attracted toward the stars for thousands of years. It may have been astrology, then astronomy, and now the immense attraction to reach the moon, Mars, and then the stars. There is something magnetic that is pulling us.It is not accidental that when you go to the sea something in you feels in tune with the sea because eighty percent of your body is made of seawater. Man was born as a fish in the beginning; from a fish he has grown toward man. In fact, each child in the mother’s womb is first a fish for a few days. In nine months he has to pass through all the stages that the whole of humanity has passed through in millions of years. Something in you always remains fishy!It is not very strange that when you love a woman you start calling her cat, pussy; there is something in it. Every woman has a cat inside her being, every man has a dog. Hence you can see husbands and wives always in a cat-and-dog fight!If you want to love man and woman you will have to love many more things. Just jumping into love with a woman you will be in trouble because you will not know many of her dimensions. You will not know the dimensions of the man you are in love with. Something in him is rock. Unless you know the texture of rock and you can love rock, you will not be able to love a Peter. A Peter means a rock.You have to experience love in all possible ways, only then… Man and woman are the culmination of many things; much has passed. Man and woman have a tremendous past, this is implied in their being; it is there and very alive. If you cannot love trees, if you cannot love the wind, if you have no joy in having a dance when it is raining, you will not be able to love a woman or a man. Something in your love will be missing. It will not have the perfection; it will not have that exquisite grace that it can have, that it should have.Gurdjieff is right, but you have to move slowly. Begin with yourself and then move to the farthest stars, and then from those stars start moving again toward yourself. Those stars make your circumference, and only then can you come to a point, again can you rediscover your center. That is the moment a person becomes enlightened, a buddha, a christ. That is the moment when he has come home, he has done the whole pilgrimage. It is a love pilgrimage.A young couple met on vacation, fell in love, and decided to get married. The only minister in the area was a resident of the local nudist colony.They inquired and found that the minister and the members of the colony would perform the marriage ceremony if the two would disrobe and join their group. They were happy to do this, and the minister performed the ceremony outside under the trees. The nudists lined up with the men on one side and the women on the other.When the minister said to the lady, “Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” she looked first at the groom and then down the line of handsome, naked men and said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I believe I would rather have that guy at the end of the line!”You have to know love in all its expressions. Don’t get hooked too soon. Move freely with the whole of existence. Love many men, love many women. Then only, slowly, slowly can you discover the person with whom your heart feels a synchronicity. It is not an easy job. No astrologer can do it for you, no father, no mother can do it for you. There is no other way to do it; the only way is by trial and error.Don’t be repressive of anything inside you, be expressive. All the old religions up to now have been repressive; they have made the whole humanity sad.Krishna Prem has asked me:Osho,I look around and I don't see any ecstatic men, including me, but I see ecstatic women. Why is it so difficult for men to let themselves go?It is simple. All religions have been created by men. There is not a single religion which has been created by women. Why did men create all these religions? All these religions have been repressive – particularly repressive of sex.A few things have to be understood. Man is afraid deep down of sex because as far as sex is concerned, he is far weaker than the woman. The woman is capable of having multiple orgasms, man is not capable of that. He is immensely afraid of the woman. Hence all human societies, particularly the so-called civilized societies, have destroyed the very possibility of women knowing – even knowing – that they are orgasmic. It is only just within these twenty, thirty years that it has been discovered that the woman not only has an orgasmic capacity, she has the capacity of multiple orgasms. But man must have known from the very beginning that no single man can satisfy a woman if she has a multiple-orgasmic capacity. Man can have only one orgasm; with one orgasm he is finished – and the woman is still on the way, may not even have started!The second trouble is – she is slow, and she is slow for a basic reason. Her sexuality is not local, her sexuality is total. Her whole body has a sexual quality. Man’s sexuality is local, it is genital. Woman’s sexuality is not local, it is not focused, it is diffused – it is all over her body. So unless she can go into a sexual dance while making love she will not be able to have orgasm.But if she goes into a sexual dance while making love – shrieks, screams, sings, shouts, says “Alleluia!” – the man will become so afraid because whatsoever she says will be gibberish, it will not make any sense. It will be sensuous but not sensible. She will be speaking a divine language, it will be just coming. Even she will be surprised what is coming up. What is she saying and why, for what? It is nothing to do with expressing any particular thing; she is just so excited, ecstatic. Her whole being is in a dance; she is in a temporary state of madness, and this can freak out the man. The poor fellow may even forget about his one orgasm! He may become concerned about the neighbors and the police and the fire brigade and whatnot!So from the very beginning, man has been repressive – repress the woman, make her feel guilty. Nice ladies don’t even move. They have to lie down almost dead, cold, unmoving, only then are they ladies. What a strange definition of ladies – the true definition should be “a good lay”! But what kind of good lay is this lady? She is just dead!A man was caught making love to a dead woman on the sea beach. The magistrate asked, “Are you mad or something? What were you doing? You were making love to a dead woman?”The man said, “I thought she was English!”Krishna Prem, in my community, in my commune, it is going to be difficult for men. The women will be ecstatic because for the first time they have a chance to be as orgasmic as possible, and men are going to be constantly afraid. And you can see them, always walking, tail between their legs, afraid, watching here and there. Any women can jump and catch hold of them: “Where are you going, Krishna Prem? When love beckons, follow it!” But how long can you follow?A yogi’s lament – it is not the lament of any of my sannyasins, it cannot be. It is an old yogi’s lament:Sitting silently, doing nothing,A woman comes, and it springs up by itself!It is perfectly okay with an old yogi, repressive, but with my sannyasins it does not spring up at all. A woman comes by and the sannyasin escapes – “I have other things to do!”Krishna Prem, you can be ecstatic only if you forget all about sex. I am the only ecstatic man around here. If you remain sexual you cannot be ecstatic; you will be continuously drained out, walking dead, dull. You can be ecstatic only if you go beyond sex. The old way was to repress the woman; that is ugly. Why repress the woman? That is not right, that is not human. Let the woman be expressive, but if you feel that sex is a drain on you, a drag on you – and one soon feels this – then go beyond it. But don’t be repressive, just transcend. Transcendence comes by itself – slowly, slowly. It takes a little time to understand, to see the point.Women also will get tired, but they will take a little longer. They are slow; they are not so efficient, so quick. First men will transcend, and the women will go on helping men to transcend because new men will be coming and they have to help. When they have helped many, they will start thinking, “How long I am going to help others? It is time I should be enlightened myself!”In my commune this is going to be the way. Men can be ecstatic only when they have transcended sex; women will have a far better time. They will be ecstatic while they are in sex, and they will be ecstatic when they have transcended sex. My commune is going to be matriarchal. You can see it – the whole show is run by women. I trust women more because they are going to be ecstatic all the way. Man will be ecstatic only at the very end of the journey, he can be trusted only after that. Women can be trusted. I trust ecstasy. I trust blissfulness.Why did man start this repressive business? Firstly, to save his ego; secondly, to keep control and possession of the woman, to reduce the woman into property. And then he has great intellectuality – women are emotional, they are heart people – men are head people, they are intellectual, so they rationalized their repressiveness. They made much fuss about repression. They started making so much noise that they even made women feel guilty – that something was wrong if they were happy in their sexual life. In fact, happiness itself became a sin. To remain sad and serious became a necessary condition to be respectable, to be known as a saint or a sage.A man whose pet parrot had died wanted to replace it and went to the pet shop to buy a new one. The pet-shop owner showed him his selection of parrots.“I want one that can talk,” said the man. “You see, I like to chat with my bird.”“Ah,” said the pet-shop owner, “I have just the bird for you. It can speak five languages too. Here it is. I must mention one thing though, sir. I’m afraid he lost both his legs in a fight with a cat.”“Impossible!” said the man. “If he has got no legs, how come he is standing on his perch?”“He is not standing, sir,” said the owner. “He is holding on with his prick. Luckily he has got quite a long one – and what is more, he is a great ascetic, almost a saint, and his control over himself is immense, almost absolute.”“Unbelievable!” muttered the man, and he looked down under the perch, and sure enough the bird had his cock wrapped around the perch.“I will take it,” he said.The next day he went to work, and when he returned in the evening the parrot called him over. “Hi! I have been waiting to talk to you,” the parrot said. “After you went to work this morning, a young man came in and sat on the sofa with your wife.”“No?” said the man.“Yes!” said the bird. “Then he opened your wife’s blouse and put his hand inside.”“What? The bastard! What next?”“Well, he put his other hand up your wife’s skirt.”“The fucker! What then?”“Well, I don’t know,” said the bird. “I lost my self-control and fell off my perch!”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 04 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why is hugging such an incredibly effective therapeutic tool?PS I used to think that clarity, wit, and analysis were the way, but they are all garbage alongside hugging.Man needs to be needed. It is one of the most fundamental needs of human beings. Unless one is cared for, one starts dying. Unless one feels that he is significant to somebody, at least to somebody, his whole life becomes insignificant.Hence love is the greatest therapy there is. The world needs therapy because the world is missing love. In a really loving world no therapy will be needed at all – love will be enough, more than enough. Hugging is only a gesture of love, of warmth, of caring. The very feel of the warmth flowing from the other person melts many illnesses in you, melts the ice-like, cold ego. It makes you a child again.The psychologists are now well aware of the fact that unless a child is hugged, kissed, he misses some nourishment. Just as the body needs food, the soul needs love. You can give to a child all the physical needs, all the physical comforts, but if hugging is missing, the child will not grow into a wholesome being. He will remain sad somewhere deep down, uncared for, neglected, ignored. He was nursed, but he was not mothered.It has been observed that if a child is not hugged he starts shrinking – he can even die – even though everything else has been provided for. As far as the body is concerned, every care has been taken, but no love surrounds the child. He becomes isolated, he becomes disconnected to existence.Love is our connection, love is our very root. Just as you breathe: for the body it is absolutely essential – stop breathing and you are no more. In the same way, love is the inner breath. The soul lives by loving.Analysis won’t do it. Wit and clarity, knowledge and scholarship won’t do it. You can know all there is to know about therapy, you can become an expert, but if you don’t know the art of love you remain only on the surface of the miracle of therapy.The moment you start feeling for the patient, for the one who is suffering – out of a hundred cases, ninety people are suffering basically because they have not been loved. If you start feeling the patient’s need for love, and if you can fulfill the need, there will be almost a magical change in the condition of the patient.Love is certainly the most therapeutic phenomenon. Sigmund Freud was very afraid of it, so much so that hugging was out of the question. He was not even ready to face the patient because by listening to his misery, listening to his inner nightmares, he might start feeling sympathetic. His eyes may become wet, tears may start flowing, or maybe in an unguarded moment he may take hold of the hand of the patient.He was so afraid of any loving relationship between the therapist and the patient that he created a certain device. The patient had to lie down on a couch and the psychoanalyst had to sit behind the couch so they were not facing each other.Remember one thing: it is by facing each other that love grows. Animals cannot grow love because they make love to each other without facing each other, so there is no friendship, no relatedness. Once they are finished with lovemaking they go their separate ways – not even saying a thank you, or good-bye, or see you soon! Animals have not been able to create friendship, family, society; for the simple reason that when they are making love they are not looking into each other’s eyes. They are not looking into each other’s face; as if their lovemaking is almost mechanical, there is no human element in it.Man created the whole dimension of all kinds of relationships for the simple reason that he is the only animal that makes love facing the other. Then eyes start communicating, then facial expressions become a subtle language. Then the changes of mood and emotions – the joy, the ecstasy, the orgasmic glow, and intimacy grow. Intimacy needs it; it is a basic requirement.Hence it is good to make love in light, not in darkness – at least a dim light, candlelight. Making love in darkness is just something animal in us, avoiding facing each other – a strategy to avoid.Sigmund Freud was very afraid of love, he was afraid of his own repressed love. He was afraid that he might get into some entanglement, involvement. He wanted to be just outside, not to be involved with the person, not to become part of his interiority, not to enter deep waters, but just to remain a scientific observer – aloof, detached, cool, far away. He wanted to create psychoanalysis as if it were a science. It is not a science, and it is never going to be a science. It is an art, and it is far closer to love than to logic.The real psychoanalyst will not avoid getting deeply into the interiority of the patient – he will take the risk. It is risky, it is going into troubled waters. You may be drowned yourself – after all, you are also human. You may get into some trouble, complexity; you may create some problems for yourself, but that risk has to be taken.That’s why I love Wilhelm Reich very much. He is the man who transformed the whole face of psychoanalysis – by getting involved with the patient. He discarded the couch, he discarded this detached aloofness. He is a far greater revolutionary than Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud remained traditional, he was really afraid of his own repressions.If you are not afraid of your own repressions, you can help tremendously. If you are not afraid of your own unconscious – if you have solved your problems a little bit – you can help greatly by getting involved in the world of the patient, by becoming a participant rather than remaining just an observer.In fact, because psychoanalysts have their own problems, sometimes even more than the patient himself, one can understand Sigmund Freud’s fear. As far as I am concerned, I would like to make a categorical statement about it: unless a person is really awakened, enlightened, he cannot be a real, authentic therapist. Only a buddha can be a real therapist because he has no problems left. He can merge and melt into the patient. In fact, for him the patient is not the patient at all. That’s the difference between the relationship that exists between a patient and his therapist, and the relationship that exists between a disciple and a master. The disciple is not a patient; the disciple is a beloved, a loved one. The master is not just an observer, he has become a participant. They have lost their separate entities, they have become one, and that oneness helps.Hugging is only a gesture of oneness – even the gesture helps. You are right. You ask, “Why is hugging such an incredibly effective therapeutic tool?” It is, and it is only a gesture. If it is true – not only a gesture but your heart is also in it – it can be a magical tool, it can be a miracle. It can transform the whole situation instantly.A few things have to be understood about it. The idea that the child dies and then he becomes an adolescent; then the adolescent dies and he becomes a young man; then the young man dies and he becomes a middle-aged man; and so on and so forth – is wrong. The child never dies – nothing ever dies. The child is there, is always there, wrapped in other experiences – wrapped in adolescence, then by youth, then by middle age, then by old age – but the child is always there.You are just like an onion, layers upon layers, but if you peel the onion, soon you will find fresher layers inside. Go on deeper and you will find fresher and fresher layers. The same is true about man. If you go deep into him you will always find the innocent child – and to contact that innocent child is therapeutic.Hugging gives you an immediate contact with the child. If you hug somebody with warmth, love – if it is not just an impotent gesture, if it is meaningful, significant, true, if your heart is flowing through it – immediately you come into contact with the child, with the innocent child. And the innocent child, surfacing even for a single moment, makes a tremendous difference because the innocence of the child is always healthy and whole; it is uncorrupted. You have reached the innermost core of the person where no corruption has ever entered; you have reached the virgin core. Just making the virgin core throb again with life is enough – you have started, triggered, a process of healing.Hence all the religions have used this phenomenon in different ways. Whenever Jesus prays to God he always calls him Abba, Christians have translated it as “God the Father.” That translation is not right, it is very inaccurate – in a way literally true, but the metaphor has changed. Abba can only be translated as daddy not as father. Father seems cold. Just repeat the word father and it seems so distant. “God the Father” looks like an institution! The father is really an institution, it is not a natural phenomenon. The mother is natural, the father is only the creation of a certain society. There have been societies where the father never existed.The word uncle is far older than the word father. In a matriarchal society, people knew about the mother, but because marriage had not yet come into existence, no child knew about the father. So all the people who had been the lovers of the mother – one of them must have been the father but that was not known – so all the people who could have been the lovers were known as uncles.In the Talmud, the Jewish God says, “Remember, I am not nice, I am not your uncle!” The uncle is always nice, the father almost never. It is very difficult to be friendly with the father; it is very easy to be friendly with the uncle. I would rather say it is better to call him “God the Uncle” than to call him “God the Father.” It is closer, nicer, more friendly. But to call him Abba is the best. Jesus is giving him a name which creates intimacy.When you call God, Abba – Daddy – you are saying, “I am just a child. Take care of me, don’t ignore me. I cannot live without you – you are my life. Your love is my very nourishment.”All the religions have used the idea that unless a man becomes a child again he cannot be truly religious. To be a child means to be innocent, means to be full of wonder, means to be full of awe. For the child everything is a mystery – everything. He has no answers, he has only questions. He is immensely interested in knowing, he is open. The moment you have an answer you become closed, to that extent. If you have all the answers for all the questions then you are absolutely closed, then you are not open. Your inquiry is finished, and with the inquiry finished you are dead.A real being is always inquiring, he is always on a pilgrimage. He remains always an agnostic. All children are agnostics, neither theists nor atheists, nor Hindus nor Mohammedans, nor Catholics nor Protestants. They are simply innocent. They don’t believe in anything but they are ready to inquire, to investigate – and the inquiring heart is a healthy heart. When you are loaded with beliefs you are ill.The Christian is ill, the Hindu is ill, the Jaina is ill – ill because they are prejudiced, ill because without seeing, they have believed, ill because they are behaving stupidly. How can you believe in something that you have not known? When you know something, there is no need to believe at all, so belief in any case is ridiculous. Either you know or you don’t know. If you know, there is no need to believe; if you don’t know, how can you believe? So belief is only for the mediocre, the stupid, the idiots. And no child is an idiot. Every child is so fresh, so alive, so full of zest that his very aliveness makes him healthy.If you can touch the child in the patient in any way – and hugging is simply one of the most important ways.Because I have allowed my sannyasins to hug and kiss, I am condemned all over the country for telling my people to be indulgent. If this is indulgence, then let it be indulgence! This is not indulgence at all; there is something more in it. I am telling you to be loving, and just sitting with somebody and telling him again and again, “I love you,” is not enough. At least hold the hand! Make it a reality – hug the person.A very shy Englishman – and he must be very shy, otherwise just to be an Englishman is enough; there is no need to use the adjective shy – they are all shy! They are the most perfect gentlemen in the world. And, of course, in the same proportion they are dead too. Who has ever heard of a gentleman who is alive? If you are alive you are a man – why gentle? For what? Corpses are always gentle: they cannot do any harm, and they look so polite, so humble.This shy gentleman was seeing a young woman for months. One full-moon night they were sitting together on the porch, looking into the garden, and beyond the garden the moon was rising. And the shy Englishman gathered courage; it must have been a real, great mighty effort. My own feeling is it must have been because of the moon; the moon drives people crazy, hence the word lunatic. Lunatic means “struck by the moon.” Lunatic comes from lunar, the moon. Moonstruck. He must have gone lunatic.He asked the lady, “Can I… Can I kiss you?”And the lady was really getting tired, so she said, “What do you think? I’m waiting here for a bus?”When you love a person just verbal expressions are not enough, words are not enough, something more substantial is needed, words are only abstract. You have to do something. Hold the hand, hug the person, kiss the person, embrace the person. It is going to help you both – if you can melt in the hug you will both become younger again, fresher, livelier. And that’s the whole process of healing.Analysis is the way of the mind, hugging is the way of the heart. The mind is the cause of all diseases, and the heart is the source of all healing.The second question:Osho,I have a lot of fantasies, especially sexual ones. Even though I see how they are taking me away from life here and now, I let myself be dominated by them. According to astrology, a Scorpio has especially strong sexual desires. I am a Scorpio.Have my fantasies anything to do with that? I would like to drop them because they make it difficult for me to relax and I think they are a large part of my prison. Could you please indicate a way?Jane Muller, it simply shows you are a really religious person. Such great problems arise only for religious people. These are good signs. Having sexual fantasies is an indication that you are reaching toward a higher plane of spirituality. It happens only on higher planes of spirituality. Ordinary mortals don’t have such things. They may have sex, but they don’t have sexual fantasies. Sex in the genitals is perfectly good – but in the head, everything becomes topsy-turvy.Religious people have been doing that for centuries. It is a kind of shirshasan – headstand. They stand on their heads so the sexual energy starts going to their heads, just because of gravitation. Either physically they do the headstand, or psychologically. But remember, everything belonging to its own center is healthy; whenever it starts entering another center, the territory of another center, you go insane.The so-called religious people went insane. They created a whole insane humanity – and once you are trapped in any insanity you will start finding many things. Because of your prejudices you will not be able to see the real cause. Your prejudices will show you some cause which is not the real one and you will start fighting with that cause. The real cause remains somewhere else.You say, “…and I think they are a large part of my prison.” They have nothing to do with your prison. Your condemnation of sex creates the prison. It is your condemnation, not your sexual energies.You say, “Even though I see how they are taking me away from life here and now…” They are not taking you away from life. In fact, your so-called spirituality – heaven, there, far away above the clouds; and God the Father sitting on a golden throne, always looking at you like a Peeping Tom… Wherever you go, even in your bathroom, he never leaves you alone, he is always looking through the keyhole. What are you doing, what is Jane Muller doing? And not only in your bathroom, he has a hole in your head too, a small window, and he goes on looking in your head: what you are thinking, what you are doing. He is constantly after you.This idea of God, this idea of a heaven somewhere else, this idea of attaining immortality by overpowering, controlling your sexuality, is what is taking you away from life here and now. It is not sexuality. In fact, if a fantasy is moving in your head, that is your here and now – enjoy it! But you push it aside, you say, “No, I want to go to heaven. I want to be respected as a saint.” You are pushing away your herenow.Your fantasy is your reality. That’s what you are, that’s where you are at. Enjoy it. What is wrong with it? Just a private TV! What is wrong with it? Make it a little more colorful, make it a little more juicy. Paint it, be a little more artistic about it, be creative. It is not your problem. Your problem is some phony kind of spirituality that is dominating you – and then one has to find these stupid rationalizations.You say, “According to astrology, a Scorpio has especially strong sexual desires. I am a Scorpio.” Now, don’t blame poor Scorpio. Stars have nothing to do with you – they have their own problems. They are having fantasies of female stars! I know one thing for certain: no star is so stupid to say, “Jane Muller is the cause of my trouble.” This is just a rationalization – avoid such rationalizations.A parrot kept raiding the henhouse to mount the hens. The result was chickens with crooked beaks. To put a stop to this, the farmer electrified the middle rung of the roost ladder.The next morning the parrot came again, climbed on the ladder and boasted, “Tra-la-la, tra-la-lo, get ready girls, here we go!”When he got to the middle rung the shock almost knocked him over, causing him to cry, “Wowww! I am really in top shape today!”Don’t be a parrot! If you are having sexual fantasies it simply shows you are a human being – not a Scorpio!Some fool has calculated – must be a fool otherwise who is bothered about such nonsense? – that every man has a sexual fantasy arising in his head every three seconds, and a woman every six seconds. Women are far more spiritual, doubly spiritual!Maybe that is one of the problems between men and women. Women all know that these men are sinners, continuously thinking of women. And all women have that attitude of holier-than-thou, particularly wives; they don’t show any interest. They also have sexual fantasies, but the gap is there. So whenever the husband says, “What about it today?” immediately the wife says, “Enough is enough! Today it is impossible. The servant has not turned up, the electricity has gone, my daughter is not back yet, it is too late in the night, and moreover I am having a great headache.” This is spirituality. Deep down she knows that this is a way of getting the upper hand, and he will come crawling with his tail between his legs – he will come crawling. And why miss an opportunity if you can pretend to be spiritual?You are just a human being.Two Martians arrive by night on earth. They land their flying saucer in a petrol station. Very cautiously they slither out of their spaceship and look at the row of petrol pumps.“Well,” whispers one, “look at the pricks of these earthmen – they are much bigger than ours!”“That’s true,” replied the second, “but I wonder why they stick them in their ears when they go to sleep!”Are you having these kind of fantasies? Then you may be a Scorpio! Otherwise why not just be a human being? Why bring poor astrology in? Nothing is wrong in having sexual fantasies – perfectly good, poetic. If you fight, they will come more; if you push them away, they will rebound. If you accept them, if you just watch them, they will start evaporating.Yes, one can transcend sex, but not by fighting. Fighting only makes the problem more complicated. It is only by witnessing that transcendence happens, and it is better to start witnessing right now.Jane Muller, I don’t know how old you are, but the older you get, the more and more fantasies will be coming; and the older you get, less and less is the possibility of becoming a witness. The younger you are the better because the fantasies are also great – worth witnessing! When you become older they become dirty, not worth witnessing at all. They also become old, mind you. They are just like skeletons. When you are younger your fantasies are younger, and you also have enough energy to be a witness. When you are older your energy also starts getting low – and witnessing needs energy.If you understand the whole process of witnessing, it is simple. The first requirement is not to have this antagonistic, religious idea; otherwise you can never be a witness. You are already fighting, how can you witness? Witnessing needs a non-judgmental awareness – nothing is good, nothing is bad – whatsoever is, is, and you have to see it. It is moving on the screen of the mind and you are just viewing it. When you become older you may fall asleep while you are viewing it, you may not have enough energy to witness. You will not have enough energy even to put your prejudices aside. You may not have enough energy to cleanse yourself of all kinds of nonsense that others have loaded you with.Religious people, in their dying moment – the last moment – are full of sexual fantasies and nothing else. That’s what they have been repressing their whole life. When they were alive they could repress it, they were sitting on top of it; but when they are dying, their energy evaporates, and the repressed snake uncoils.A famous Soviet academic, Petya, is dying, and his friend and colleague, Vasya, comes to his bedside to pay his last respects to this great old man. He finds Petya lying there with closed eyes and a sad look on his face.Slowly he opens his eyes, looks at his friend, and then says, “Vasya, look at all those books on that wall over there – just look at them.”“Yes, Petya,” replies his friend. “Those are your most famous works. Everyone knows what an important and…”“Yes, yes, yes!” interrupts Petya. “But look over there at that wall – you see all those books?”“Yes, my dear friend. Those are the translations of your works into all the languages of the…”“Yes, but that is not the point. Look over there – do you see those books?”“But of course. Those are the works of your students and followers. We all admire…”“No, but you don’t understand, Vasya!” exclaims Petya. “Look, do you remember when we were students, and we were sent off to work on the collective farm?”“Of course I remember, my friend. How could I forget?”“And do you remember, Vasya, walking down that country road one hot summer’s day?”“Yes, Petya, yes I do.”“And do you remember, we passed that cornfield, and there, sitting on the top of one of the haystacks, was that pretty young Masha?”“Yes, yes, Petya, I do! You liked her, I remember!”“Yes,” says Petya, sinking back onto his pillow with a blissful smile on his face. “You know what I did, Vasya? I climbed up on top of the haystack and we were really starting to have a bloody good time. But you know, my friend, those bloody haystacks – just when you are really getting somewhere, whoosh! – they give way under you. I did everything I could, but every time that bloody haystack… So you see, I have just been thinking, Vasya” – Petya looked round the room – “how it would have been if we had had all these books, these bloody books, underneath us!”An old, dying academic – at the last moment, what is he thinking about?Jane Muller, there is still time. Don’t fight with your sexual fantasies; stop fighting. Don’t call them your prison – they are not.You say, “Have my fantasies anything to do with that? I would like to drop them…” That’s why you are creating them; the very idea of dropping them is the cause. Drop this idea. If you want to drop anything, drop this idea. “…because they make it difficult for me to relax…” You are talking simple nonsense. Who has ever heard that sexual fantasies prevent people from relaxing? In fact, that is the only way people do relax. That’s a way of relaxing. Actual sex is also a way of natural relief.Have you ever heard of any man or woman dying from heart failure while making love? It has not happened yet. There is not a single exception in the whole of medical history. People have died in all kinds of conditions – jogging they have died, sitting doing nothing, meditating, they have died. Doing yoga postures, standing on their head they have died, praying they have died, but never making love.It is great exercise – it is almost like jogging. Your heart beats faster, your breathing goes berserk, you are perspiring, your blood circulates faster, your whole body is throbbing, tingling. You are in a state of madness. It is a temporary madness, but immensely relaxing. You come to a peak of madness that you call orgasm, you come to a moment of great, tense climax – and the relaxation.Now all the heart specialists in the world are advising their patients to make love if they want to survive. For the heart it is good, it relaxes. And sexual fantasies are also not in any way anti-relaxation.What is making you tense, Jane Muller, is your antagonism. You are in a double bind. The sexual fantasies are there and they will remain there because you want to drop them – and you don’t know how to go beyond them, you simply want to drop them. You cannot drop them that simply; you have to learn the whole art of witnessing. You can go beyond, but you cannot drop them. Of course, when you have gone beyond they are dropped, but you never actually dropped them; you simply transcended, you surpassed.Without knowing the art of surpassing you are trying to drop them – that, and the very effort of dropping them, is making you tense. And still they are there; the more you try to drop them, the more they are there. Naturally you feel frustrated, you feel a failure, you feel guilty, and that guilt creates tension. It has nothing to do with your sexual fantasies. Relaxation and sexual fantasies are not related at all; and if they are related, sexual fantasies help people to relax.But if you are religious then the problem arises. It is your religiousness that is creating the whole trouble for you. Drop this religiousness. Learn the art of witnessing; that is the science of transcendence. Once you have transcended you will know that those sexual energies are not thrown away, but they are transformed. The same energies have become your ecstasies. The same energies are now giving a perfume. Before they were stinking, now they are creating a perfume, a fragrance.You ask me, “Could you please indicate a way?” If you want to drop them, I cannot indicate a way, but if you want to transcend them I can certainly indicate a way. Learn to watch – and watch blissfully. Watch joyously. Nothing is wrong in them, nothing at all. It is natural. It is your biology, it is your chemistry, it is your physiology, it is your psychology. But by watching you go beyond your physiology, beyond your biology, beyond your chemistry, beyond your psychology. You simply become a watcher, a witness. That witnessing makes you centered in your spirituality and that is the transcendence.The last question:Osho,I have heard you say that parrots are better than pundits. I have also heard you praise the ignorant children more than the great knowledgeable people. I cannot understand this at all. Are you not exaggerating?Pundit Lajjashankar Jha, do you see? You cannot understand even such a simple thing. Everybody understands it here except Pundit Lajjashankar Jha! I am not exaggerating. Truth cannot be exaggerated, it is impossible. Even if you want to, you cannot do it. Only lies can be exaggerated – they have to be exaggerated. Truth is so vast, there is no way to exaggerate it, but I can illustrate it.The great scholarly doctor who had published many research papers – must have been something like my physician, Devaraj – had just finished his first delivery.“Not bad,” said the old nurse who was helping him. “But it is the baby you should smack on the bottom, not the mother.”Pundit Lajjashankar Jha, did you hear about the German professor of philosophy who had used up all of his sick days? He called in to say he was dead.At an auction sale a brahmin pundit was trying to buy a parrot. Every time he bid, someone bid higher. Finally the auctioneer declared the bird his, but for a very high sum.“Can he talk?” he asked the auctioneer.“And how!” screamed the parrot. “Who do you think pushed the price up so high?”“Are these the only two parrots you have for sale?” asked the rabbi, who used to speak only in the holy language, Hebrew, and had to keep an interpreter always with him.“At the moment, sir, yes,” said the shopkeeper.“Then I will take the one on the right,” said the rabbi.“Unfortunately, sir, it is not that easy. You will have to take them both.”“Why is that?” asked the rabbi.“Because that one only speaks Greek, the other is his translator.”Pundit Lajjashankar Jha, knowledgeability is not against ignorance, it is in fact a cover-up for ignorance. Knowledgeability is not wisdom. Knowledgeability is like a blind man knowing all about light, but still he remains blind. Even if you know everything about light and you don’t have a light in the room, your room remains dark.Wisdom is like light. Whether you know anything about light or not does not matter, what matters is light.That’s why I praise children more. At least they are simply ignorant; their ignorance has a certain innocence in it. The knowledgeable person is ignorant and cunning. He is ignorant, but hiding it – he is a hypocrite. He is cheating others and maybe cheating himself too. The child is ignorant because he is innocent, and from ignorance there is a way toward wisdom. But there is no way from knowledge. The knowledgeable person will first have to become ignorant, only then can he move toward wisdom.Ignorance is like a crossroad – you can go in the direction of knowledge, but it never leads toward wisdom. From knowledgeability there is no way to wisdom. You will have to come back to the crossroad from where another direction opens, another dimension, that of wisdom.Hence Jesus says, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter my kingdom of God.” And Socrates said in his ripe old age, “I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” The Upanishads say, “The person who says ‘I know,’ knows nothing, and the person who says ‘I don’t know,’ knows it.”I certainly praise the children because I would like you to have again the same kind of innocence that children have. I would like you to be born again, to be twice born – to have a second childhood is the beginning of wisdom.Just watch the small children – their perceptiveness, their clarity, their sensitiveness, their awareness, their intelligence – and then you will not call them just “ignorant.” Their ignorance is pregnant with wisdom, and the knowledgeable person is very dry, dead; he is not pregnant. Knowledge is sterile.The schoolteacher was angry with little Johnny. “Your essay about ‘My Dog’ is exactly the same as your brother’s!” she shouted.“Please, Miss, it is the same dog. What can I do?”A young female biology teacher, wearing a rose in the plunging neckline of her dress, asks her class, “How are roses nourished?”Little Max calls out, “With milk, Miss.”The teacher cuffs his head and says, “Don’t be fresh! Roses are nourished with water.”In tears, Max sobs, “I am sorry, Miss. I did not know their stems were so long!”The teacher of a class of ten-year-olds is too shy to conduct the sex-education class and so she asks her class to make this a homework project.Little Eddy asks his father, who mumbles something about a stork. His grandmother says he came from a cabbage patch. His great-grandmother blushes and whispers that children come from the great ocean of existence.The next day Eddy gets called first to report on his project. He says, “I am afraid there is something wrong in my family. Apparently, nobody has had a good fuck for three generations!”Enough for today.

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

The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 05 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Please talk about the Antichrist and tell us what it could be. I have always heard it being commented upon with great fear and with no explanation. People don't know what it is and yet they fear it.The priest has lived as a parasite; he has been sucking people’s blood – and his whole trade secret is creating fear. All the religions have been fear-oriented. When I say, all the religions, I don’t include Gautam the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Zarathustra, Mahavira, or Lao Tzu. These individuals don’t belong to any religion at all. Religions are a collective phenomenon, and the moment a collectivity, a crowd, gathers around a dogma, immediately exploitation starts.The buddhas, the awakened ones, have not created any religions. It is an absolutely wrong notion, prevalent all over the world, that Gautam Buddha founded Buddhism, or Jesus Christ founded Christianity. It is absolutely wrong; nothing can be more wrong than that. Christianity is created by people of a totally different caliber – the unawakened ones, but cunning, clever – the priests.Priests are the most cunning people in the world; even politicians are not as cunning. The priests even exploit the politicians. The priest is the real Antichrist, anti-Buddha, anti-Mahavira – anti-truth in a sense. The priest lives on lies, he fabricates lies. He is clever enough to exploit human misery, human fear, human greed, human possessiveness, human weakness as such.For example, every man is born with fear; it is natural. In the mother’s womb the child is absolutely fearless; there is nothing to be afraid of. He is absolutely taken care of by existence itself; there is no worry, no anxiety, no fear. But the moment he comes out of the womb, even passing through the passage from the womb into the world, fear starts arising; he feels suffocated. The canal that he has to pass through is narrow. He feels cramped, he feels as if he is being murdered, killed.To the child itself, birth is just like death – or even worse because when you die you simply die; there is nothing much to it; you stop breathing. But when a child is born he starts breathing, he becomes alive, and he finds himself in a very strange situation – upside-down, coming out head first. And he is losing his beautiful home. The womb has been so warm, so comfortable, that psychologists say that man searches again and again for the same comfort, the same luxury, the same warmth.We have created houses, palaces, just because of the memory of the womb. We make them as cozy as possible, we make them as comfortable as possible, and yet there is nothing like the womb. Whatsoever you do, you will have to worry about a thousand and one things; you will have to take care of yourself. Even the greatest emperor is not as fearless as the smallest child in his mother’s womb, the poorest child.Fear is part of the very birth process, and the first thing that a child is going to do is scream, cry. He has been uprooted from such a warm, loving, cozy atmosphere, and has been thrown into a world so cold, so alien – fear has entered.With fear enters greed; greed is the other side of the same coin. Greed means accumulating everything that will help you to remain fearless. If money can help, then accumulate money; if power can help, then be powerful – or whatsoever it is. To protect yourself against fear, greed starts growing, and religions have exploited both instincts. Fear has become hell; greed has become heaven – these are projections.Every child is very weak, delicate, vulnerable. He can be crushed just like a roseflower; he can be killed very easily. He depends on his parents, on his family, on the society; he is not independent.His dependence has been exploited by the priests – hence the idea of God the protector, the almighty. If you worship him, if you pray to him, if you buttress him, if you praise him, he will protect you. If you don’t praise him, beware, you are in danger. You will be left behind all alone; God will not be with you.People praying in churches, in temples, in mosques, are not religious people. A religious person has nothing to do with prayer; or if he has something to do with prayer, his prayer has a totally different meaning. His prayer is never out of greed, out of fear, that much is absolutely certain. His prayer is nothing but pure gratitude, no desire in it. He is not asking for something, he is not asking for more – he is not asking at all.He is simply thanking because whatsoever has been given to him is more than he deserves. His heart is full of gratitude, tremendous gratefulness. In fact, no word is needed to express it; his very heartbeat expresses his gratitude. He is in prayer twenty-four hours a day – walking, sitting, sleeping, the prayer continues like an undercurrent. He need not go to a temple to pray, only irreligious people go.But the larger part of humanity is full of fear, full of greed, full of anguish – the anguish that death is standing there. Any moment it can jump upon you, and you need a protector, an almighty protector.Just see the word almighty, ponder over it. Man feels absolutely powerless; hence an almighty God is needed. Man feels ignorant; hence an omniscient God is needed. Man feels weak; hence an omnipotent God is needed. Man feels limited; hence an omnipresent God is needed. These are projections, and the priests have been using them in all possible ways, in all possible combinations.There is an ancient story…A disciple of the Devil came running, and said to the Devil, “What are you doing here? Our whole business is at risk – just now a man has found truth on earth. We should go and do something. If he spreads the message we will lose all our clients, all our customers!”The Devil laughed and said, “You are new! You don’t know that there is no need to worry at all. I know one man has found the truth, but I need not go there. My agents are already there.”The disciple said, “But I have not seen any of your agents there, I have not seen any of my colleagues there.”The Devil said, “My agents are in disguise. The priests that are chanting mantras around the man, they are my agents! They have reached him. Now they will stand between him and the people. They will become the interpreters, they will distort the truth; they will create a thousand and one mythologies around it, they will create many fictions.”Your so-called religions are nothing but religious fictions. Just as there are science fictions there are religious fictions. Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism are all creations of the priests – the agents of the Devil.Mahavira is not the founder of Jainism. In fact, the story is that Mahavira himself never spoke, he remained silent. But there were people who used to speak, and they would say that they were in an inner communion with Mahavira: Mahavira was speaking to them in a subtle language which could not be heard by anybody else except them and they were making it available to the people. These people were called ganadharas, apostles of Mahavira. They created the whole structure of Jainism; Mahavira had nothing to do with it.I used to know such a man. In this very city, just a few years ago, lived one of the most glorious men who has ever walked on the earth; his name was Meher Baba. For thirty-three years he remained silent; he lived in silence for thirty-three years and died in silence.But one man, Adi K. Irani, used to tell people what Baba was saying to him, what he was communicating to him in some invisible way. Irani has written all the books which you come across in the name of Meher Baba. Now, this is the priest – and the priests are very crafty.You are asking me, “Please talk about the Antichrist.” The priest is the Antichrist, the pope is the Antichrist, these thousands of Catholic and Protestant missionaries, these are the Antichrists. The Antichrist has already happened. The first Antichrist was Peter, who founded the church. In fact, far more harm has been done by Peter, the first pope, than by Judas. Judas helped Christ’s work immensely. If Judas had not sold Jesus Christ to his enemies you may not have ever heard his name. It is because of the crucifixion that Jesus became part of human consciousness. Judas was not really his enemy.In fact, George Gurdjieff used to tell a very beautiful story – of course, his own invention. But people like George Gurdjieff, even if they invent stories, their stories have immense significance. He used to say that Judas did sell Jesus for thirty pieces of silver – only for thirty pieces of silver – to the enemies, on the behest of Jesus Christ himself. It was his order; he told Judas. And of course, being a devoted disciple he could not say no. With tears in his eyes and with a crying heart, he followed the commandment. And it seems a little bit relevant too because when Jesus was crucified all the disciples escaped, they all ran away. Nobody suffered as much as Judas. Judas committed suicide the next day – within twenty-four hours. He could not live without Jesus Christ.It is a story, but one thing has to be meditated upon – that Judas has not harmed the cause of Jesus, he is not the Antichrist; but the so-called followers, the people who established Christianity, they are the Antichrist.Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the greatest novelists ever to have existed in the world, in his beautiful book, Brothers Karamazov, wrote a parable which has multidimensional meaning…After eighteen hundred years, one day – a Sunday of course – Jesus thought, “It is now time for me to go back and to see how my people are doing on earth. Eighteen hundred years ago when I was there I was alone, I had to start from scratch. And, of course, the Jews were against me because I was saying things which went against their tradition, their orthodoxy. It was natural that they felt offended and they killed me. Now almost half the earth is Christian – this is the time for me to go. Now they will receive me, welcome me, they will open their hearts to me. Now the right moment has come.”He chose one Sunday morning, descended into the marketplace in the small town of Bethlehem. People gathered around, villagers started laughing, giggling. They said, “This man looks just like Jesus Christ!”Jesus said to them, “What are you saying? I don’t look like Jesus Christ, I am Jesus Christ!”They all laughed and they said, “It would be better if you escaped from here because soon the church service will be over, and once the bishop comes out… If he finds you pretending to be Jesus you will be in trouble, that much we can say.”Jesus said, “But he is my bishop, he’s doing my work. If you cannot recognize me, at least he will recognize me!” And he waited.People laughed and joked. They were thinking, “He is a good actor, and doing perfectly well – looks exactly like Jesus.”Jesus tried to convince them, but they were not ready to listen. Then he waited. The bishop was bound to recognize him. And he was the archbishop. He came out of the church, a crowd of the so-called Christians following him. The moment he saw this young man looking exactly like Jesus, he shouted, “Get down!” – he was standing on a podium under a tree – “Get down immediately!” And he told his people, “Arrest this fellow! This is sacrilegious – somebody pretending to be Jesus – he cannot be forgiven!”Jesus said, “Don’t you recognize me?”And the bishop was very angry, and said, “Yes, I recognize you.”He was chained, imprisoned, taken to the church and thrown into a dark cell. He could not believe what was happening, “My own people…”In the middle of the night the archbishop came with a candle in his hands, fell down on the earth at the feet of Jesus and said, “I did recognize you, but I could not recognize you in a public place. You would destroy our whole business. Forgive me, and listen to my advice. You are no longer needed – we are doing perfectly well – and if you don’t take my advice, we will have to crucify you again.”Jesus could not believe his eyes, his ears, what he was seeing, what he was hearing. He said, “You belong to me, you serve me, you pray to me. I have seen you kneeling down before my statue. And now I am here alive in front of you, and you say you have recognized me – and still you don’t want me to appear before the people?”The archbishop said, “No. I cannot allow you to appear before the people because you are a dangerous fellow. You will again disturb the whole establishment. In eighteen hundred years, with great effort, somehow we have been able to manage. I say to you that even the rabbis of old, when you came the first time, must have recognized you – they were learned people. They must have recognized that you are the only begotten son of God, but they had to crucify you just to save their own skin, otherwise you would have destroyed everything.“Right now I can see why they had to crucify you. If you don’t listen to my advice, tomorrow morning we will have to crucify you. We cannot allow you to interfere any more. Whatsoever you want to do you can do through us. We are the mediators, people have to reach you through us. You have to reach the people through us. You cannot avoid it, you cannot bypass us.”This too is a parable. I don’t think Jesus would ever dare to come back again; it is not possible. Once is enough.You say, “Please talk about the Antichrist, and tell us what it could be.” The priest – and nobody else. There is no Devil other than the priest, and the priest exists in all shapes, all sizes, all forms, all colors – whatsoever you need. Each according to his need, each according to his capacity – and the priest is available to fulfill everybody’s need. The pope, the ayatollah, the shankaracharya – these are different forms of the same phenomenon.The people who have experienced truth are christs, and the people who are exploiting in the name of their truth are the Antichrists. To me, Christ is not a person. Jesus is a person. Christ only symbolizes the ultimate flowering of one’s consciousness.In fact, the word christ comes from the Sanskrit word krishna. Krishna has traveled into different countries, and by and by, the moment it reached Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, it became christ. Even in one Indian language, Bengali, Krishna is called Christo. And from christo to christ, the word did not have to travel too far.Christ simply means krishna. Christ simply means the ultimate flowering of consciousness, the one-thousand-petaled lotus opening. Jesus is only one of the christs; there have been many before him. Abraham was one, Moses was one, Lao Tzu was one, Chuang Tzu was one, Zarathustra was one, Krishna was one, Buddha was one. And after Christ there have been many christs – Nanak, Kabir, Al-Hillaj Mansoor, Saint Francis, Eckhart, Ramakrishna, Raman – there is a long line of enlightened people. You can call all of them christs.In the East we call that state buddhahood, in the West it is called christ consciousness. Christ consciousness means a fully awakened state. Then who is the Antichrist? – the person who is absolutely unconscious. And I have not come across people who are more unconscious than the priests and more dangerous than the priests.The priest is the ugliest phenomenon on the earth because he exploits your very opportunity to be religious. He gives you a pseudo kind of religion. He is a cheat, he is a hypocrite; he has done every kind of wrong to humanity. Of course he knows the art of doing it, the knack of doing it. He camouflages his acts with beautiful words. He spins and weaves beautiful theories, theologies, but if you go deep inside you will find nothing there – no truth at all, no silence, no love, no godliness.All religions have been fighting each other tooth and nail, murdering each other, destroying each other – Christians destroying Mohammedans, Mohammedans destroying Hindus, Hindus destroying Buddhists – the whole earth is full of blood in the name of religion. Everybody’s hands are absolutely bloody in the name of beautiful words. The priest talks about love and creates hatred; talks about forgiveness and enrages people, creates anger and violence; talks about godliness, but whatsoever he does serves only the purposes of the Devil. His words are full of light, but his acts are full of darkness. And it needs no argumentation – the whole history is full of it.Who crucified Jesus Christ? – the Jewish priests, the rabbis. Who crucified al-Hillaj Mansoor? – the Mohammedan imams, the Mohammedan priests. Who made many efforts to kill Gautam the Buddha? – the Hindu brahmins. Many efforts were made to kill him; they could not succeed but that is another matter. Efforts were made to kill Mahavira too – this has been always so. Still today the story is the same; nothing has changed. The priest goes on doing the same stupid act. And people are so conditioned they can’t even see what is being done to them.You say, “I have always heard it being commented upon with great fear, and yet with no explanation. People don’t know what it is and yet they fear it.” In fact, if you want people to fear something, you have not to give any explanation. Because once something is explained, fear disappears. The moment you know something, fear disappears. Fear exists only with ignorance. Knowing functions like light and dispels darkness. Hence science has helped immensely to destroy fear.You can see it – look into the Vedas and your so-called great seers, rishis – and remember, I am only calling them so-called because more than that they are not. They are praying to some unknown god, Indra, the god of clouds, lightning and thunder. Whenever there is thunder and lightning, they fall on their knees and start praying to the god Indra because they think that Indra is angry, that’s why there’s lightning, “He wants to destroy us.” The thunder is a threat.Now nobody is bothered by Indra – nobody is afraid of lightning. Now we know the secret of electricity. Now it is Indra who is sitting inside this fan. And he is doing a thousand and one things: cooking your food, turning your fan – all kinds of things. Who is going to worship Indra sitting inside a fan? Now nobody takes any note of Indra. Indra is as dead as one can be dead.The seers of the Vedas were very frightened. Ignorance is fear. Hence, no explanation has to be given. Even if some explanation is found, it has to be kept secret. That’s why all religions have tried to ensure that the language of those religions should not be understood by the people, by the ordinary people. The Hindu brahmin has insisted that Sanskrit is the only divine language – devavani – it is the language of the gods. It should not be polluted by ordinary people; only the scholars, the pundits, the knowledgeable people, the priests, should know about it. And of course when they start chanting in Sanskrit, you feel mystified because you don’t understand what they are saying. They may be saying sheer stupid things, just nonsense – abracadabra – but because you can’t understand you feel mystified.They were very angry with Buddha and Mahavira because they were the two people, in India in particular, who started a totally new tradition, a new beginning because they started talking in the language of the people. The Brahmins could not forgive them; they destroyed their whole mystery. They were creating much noise with their Sanskrit chanting. If you translate it, it’s absolutely meaningless; there is not much in it. Ninety-nine percent of their Sanskrit mantras are just ordinary; it is very rare to find a real diamond.Buddha spoke the language of the people, he discarded Sanskrit and chose Pali, which was the language of the people. Mahavira chose Prakrit, the language of the people. The same was done by Jesus Christ, and the rabbis were not happy. Hebrew is the divine language and Jesus started speaking in the language of the people, Aramaic. That means you are demystifying. And if people start understanding each and every thing, how will you create fear in them? They have to be kept afraid.You say, “I have always heard it being commented upon with great fear, and yet with no explanation.” There is no contradiction in it. An explanation cannot be given; any explanation will be dangerous – the fear will be gone.Science demystifies; hence science makes men stronger.You say, “People don’t know what it is and yet they fear it.” That’s why they fear it – because they don’t understand what it is. The unknown always makes one afraid.Secrets have to be kept secret from people if you want to exploit them. Then you have to create much mumbo jumbo, much smoke, so nobody can see what is actually happening. You have to keep people blind, then you can do everything – and they have done everything.In India, prostitution has existed in the temples in the name of God. And when prostitution exists in the name of God it is not prostitution at all – it is something sacred. You just have to give it a beautiful name. The prostitutes of the temples were called devadasis – servants of God. In fact, they were serving only the priests; they were sexually exploited by the priests and the rich customers who could pay. But this smoke was created that they were serving God, and then prostitution continued in India in the name of religion.In fact, in many parts of this country it was a tradition, a convention which had to be followed, and people followed it religiously that when one got married, his wife first had to sleep with the god in the temple. The first night, the real honeymoon, had to be with the god. Of course, it was a religious thing! God should initiate the woman into the secrets of love. And the god was nothing but a stone statue – behind the statue was hidden the priest…Pouring out his troubles to his great and good friend over a couple of triple martinis, Brad had to confess that things were not going too well at home.“My wife and I just don’t hit it off at night,” he was saying to Bart. “I hate to admit it, but I am afraid I just don’t know how to make her happy.”“Hell boy,” said Bart, “there is really nothing to it. Let me give you some advice. At bedtime, switch on a new Sinatra recording, turn all the lights low and spray some perfume around the room. Next, tell your wife to get into her sheerest nightie; then make sure you raise the bottom window.”“Then what do I do?” asked Brad.“Just whistle.”“Whistle?”“That’s right. I will be waiting outside the window. When I hear you whistle, I will come right up and finish the job.”That’s what the priest was doing hidden behind the god. For thousands of years this continued; in a few places it still continues.Now, if you give explanations, then everything will be destroyed. Explanations are not to be given; things have to be kept hidden. Things have to be kept in such a way that nobody even suspects what is going on. In the name of religion all kinds of exploitation, oppression, slavery, has happened.The Antichrist is nothing but your unconscious state. Become conscious and you become christs. Remember, I don’t want any Christians in the world, I don’t want any Hindus in the world. Enough is enough! We are tired of all these people. They have done too much harm, they have wounded humanity immensely. They have made the whole humanity sick. What they have done is nauseating.They have driven humanity into a state of schizophrenia because they have created guilt. That is their only contribution to the world – guilt. They have created more and more guilt in people because whenever you create guilt, you become powerful. The guilty person starts feeling afraid – fear of punishment – in this life, in the other life, or in the beyond. Then he has to take the help of the priest who knows the secrets: how to bribe God; how to help you pass through; how to help you avoid hell and hellfire; how to arrange for you a beautiful place in paradise so you can enjoy their streams of wine and beautiful young women, apsaras.The priest does not want you to become conscious. He is against consciousness because consciousness will make you a christ, a buddha, not a Christian, not a Buddhist.That’s my whole purpose here – my sannyasins are not to be followers, imitators, but independent, conscious human beings. You are not to imitate me, you are not to repeat me, you are not to collect more and more information from me. You have to learn only one thing: how to be more conscious, how to be more an individual, independent, absolutely independent. Freedom is the only taste of real religion. Wherever slavery exists in the name of religion, the Antichrist is at work – and wherever freedom exists, a christ is at work.You can be a christ, you have the potential, all the potential. Every man is born to be a buddha; if he misses the point it is his own unintelligence. And the most unintelligent thing a person can do is to be conditioned by others. Remain unconditioned. Yes, it is difficult because the child is so helpless he has to follow the parents. But you are not a child forever; a day comes when you become independent. The moment you are independent from your parents, drop all the conditioning that your parents have given to you.Jesus says one thing which will look very strange to you – and particularly from the mouth of Jesus who says, on the one hand, “Love your enemy just like yourself.” Not only that, he even says, “Love your neighbor just like yourself” – which is even far more difficult. In fact, enemies and neighbors are not different people, they are the same people. It is easier to love your enemy; it is far more difficult to love your neighbor. But Jesus says even that: “Love your neighbor.” This is on the one hand. And the same man says, “Unless you hate your parents, you cannot follow me.” Very strange.Buddha goes even a step further. He says, “Unless you kill your parents, you cannot follow me.” Now, Buddha is one of the most nonviolent persons in the whole history of humanity, who will not even kill an ant, not even a cockroach, not even a mosquito. And he says, “Unless you kill your parents, you cannot follow me.”What he means is not to be taken literally. He is saying that unless you drop all the conditionings that your parents have put inside you, unless the mother and the father disappear from your inner world totally, you will not be able to grow, to become mature, you will not be really alive.Be free from all conditionings and you are capable of being a buddha or a christ.The second question:Osho,Christ and five million Christians carrying their crosses! Buddha and ten million Buddhists carrying their lotus flowers.One wonders, can we escape the risks of imitation in this amazing game you have created?Anand Dharmesh, It is impossible to imitate me. I am taking every care that if you try to imitate me you will fall like Humpty Dumpty – and then nobody can put you together, not even me.It is impossible to imitate me for the simple reason that I am so inconsistent, so self-contradictory, that it is impossible to follow me. In the morning I will say, “Go north!” In the afternoon I will say, “Go south!” By the evening I have changed the whole idea – “Go to the west!” How can you follow me?Christ can be followed because his message is small and very consistent. Buddha can be followed; he is a very logical thinker. I am absolutely illogical. It is for a certain purpose: it is one of my devices, so that you cannot imitate. You cannot even write a treatise on me; you cannot make any sense of all that I have been saying to you. It is pure nonsense – or, if you allow me to coin a new word, it is pure non-zense!You have to be on your own, I cannot supply you any philosophy. I have none. Many times people have approached me, that it would be good if I could write a small book just like a Christian catechism, just the essential core of my philosophy. But I said, “I don’t have any philosophy, and there is no essential core to it. You can rely on me only for one thing, that I am not going to give you any philosophy.” It gives me absolute freedom, I don’t have to remember what I said yesterday. I can live in the moment, for the moment. I can say whatsoever comes with no preparation, with no idea. Even I am surprised sometimes. Sometimes I say inside myself, “Man, what are you saying?” I cannot even imitate myself, how can you imitate? It is impossible.Wayne Edward Innis has asked:Osho,You call homosexuality a perversion. That keeps me awake at night and makes me feel like a sick, twisted sinner.Now, Innis, don’t get unnecessarily disturbed. Homosexuality is not a perversion. It is really a very progressive step. It simply shows the inventiveness of human beings. It shows their multidimensionality. Poor animals are always heterosexual, they don’t know that something else can be done. It shows man’s freedom, he can choose even his sexuality: to be heterosexual or to be homosexual, or to be bisexual, or to be celibate, to go beyond sexuality – all possibilities. You need not be worried.How are you going to imitate me? One day, certainly, I said that homosexuality is a perversion. Today I change my idea. And it is my own idea, I am absolutely free to change it. I am not responsible to anybody, I am not answerable to anybody. It is just my idea. That moment it was so, this moment it is not so. And I cannot guarantee for tomorrow.You cannot imitate me, that’s impossible, Anand Dharmesh. Try, and you will find it impossible. I am so illogical. A certain logic is needed to create a following; you have to convince people intellectually that this is the best thing to do. I never convince anybody, I never try to convince you intellectually. Contagious certainly I am, but not convincing.I am crazy, and only a few crazy people feel attuned with me. What can I do about it? Crazy people are never followers; crazy people are always independent people. In fact, that’s why they are thought to be crazy, eccentric – they are so centered in themselves. Others think they are eccentric because they are not following the mob psychology, the crowd – they always go astray. That’s what the crowd thinks – they are going astray. They are simply going their own way; they are trying to find a new path.And it is always good to find your own path. Even if you go wrong it is good to follow a new path rather than to be right but on a trodden path. To be on the trodden path, just like on a superhighway, is ugly – it is inhuman, it is destructive of individuality, it destroys your very soul. It is better to go astray. It is better to go into the jungle and get lost, than to follow somebody who pretends to be knowledgeable because one learns by mistakes, one learns by errors. All that I can suggest to you is: never commit the same mistake twice. Find new mistakes, invent new mistakes, and you will be growing, and you will be flowering.Truth is found only by those who are ready to risk because the only way to truth is via trial and error – there is no other way. There are no superhighways.But Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists, Christians, they all believe there are superhighways – not only that there are superhighways, they say, “Ours is the only authentic superhighway – a German autobahn. Others are just muddy tracks.”You cannot follow me because I am not serious. To create a following you need to be very serious, and I cannot afford that. I could have created a great following, it is so simple – so many gullible fools are available in the whole world, millions of fools are available. You can gather a following very easily. You just have to do a few things: you have to be very serious. That I cannot do; I cannot lose my laughter…Pope John Paul dies, and he stands in front of heaven’s gate calling Saint Peter, the doorman of paradise.“Who is there?” asks Saint Peter.“John Paul.”“Which John Paul?”“Why, the pope! Open at once!”“What do you mean – the pope?”“Well, your successor – the head of Christianity, you know? Rome – Vaticano?”Saint Peter starts roaring with laughter. He yells to Christ, “Hey Jesus! Do you remember that silly joke we played on the planet earth people two thousand years ago? Well, they are still into it!”You cannot follow me. I am saying it is all a joke right now, not after two thousand years; that will be too late!God was in the habit of receiving each person coming to heaven personally at the gate; but when Osho died and went to heaven, God changed his habit and sent Saint Peter to the gate to receive him.Saint Peter was puzzled, “Why this sudden change?”God was very afraid and said, “If I leave my chair free, this guy will run in, sit there, and I shall never get it back again!”The last question:Osho,I am going to Italy tomorrow.Can you tell me a few jokes so that I can carry them with me to Italy?I am always ready to tell jokes.All the girls of the whorehouse went off for the day leaving Gina to watch the business. When they returned in the evening, they asked her how it had been.“Woww! First-a there came-a the Catholic-a Men’s Choir, then a hockey team-a, then twenty-a lumberjacks. After that-a, it gotta really busy. But-a I ran-a from room-a to room-a and served them all-a!”“Jesus! You must be really wiped out,” said the others.“Eh,” said Gina, “my feet-a are really killing me-a from all-a that-a running about!”Gina Lottabazooma, the shapely Italian screen siren, was put under contract by a Hollywood studio and brought to the U.S. to make an epic Western.“I absolutely refuse to play this scene,” she exclaimed.“But, Gina,” explained the director, “all you have to do is point out the direction the outlaws took when the sheriff and his posse ride up to you.”“I know,” said the star, “but have you read the screen action in the script?”“What do you mean?”“Look, how I am supposed to point,” snapped the star. “It says here that I am to place both hands behind my back, take a deep breath, turn north and say, ‘They went thataway’!”Think over it later on. When you are back in Italy, then think over it. Maybe it takes a little time for you to laugh.Italians make good jokes for others; they themselves never get the point. It needs a little brain to get a joke. And I have looked in many Italian brains and I find only spaghetti!Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 06 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Every time I'm away from my family I feel such a deep and beautiful love for my wife and my children. But when I am with them, lots of conflicts arise and I feel like running away from family, job, tradition, etcetera. But when I'm away I feel that's not it – that's not the answer.What is going on? Can you tell me what to do?It is not a question of doing. Whatsoever you do will be wrong because you are not in the right space. You are not right, so how can you do anything right? That is impossible.It is a question of being, not of doing. Hence, you can move from one prison to another but you cannot be free. You can escape from the world but you will still be miserable – for new reasons of course. You can change your wife, you can change your job, you can change your house, you can change your religion, your church – still you will be the same. All these changes are superficial. They are just like painting your face black, white, red, but deep down nothing is changed, you remain the same.You have to become more aware. And awareness is not a question of doing: it is a question of being. It is something about your essential core; nothing about your circumference. That’s why this is happening to you – not only to you, it is happening to everybody.I have known people who have renounced life, renounced the wife, the children, the marketplace, have moved to the Himalayas, to the caves. Sitting in their caves they are still miserable – the same misery. There are no longer the same old causes. But those causes were just excuses, they were not real causes.The real cause is always within you, and how can you escape from it? Wherever you go, you will be yourself.Sitting in the Himalayan caves, they are still themselves, utterly miserable. And now they are thinking, “What are we doing here?” Now they have forgotten all the misery of the world, now they remember with nostalgia all the joys of the world. They may not have experienced those joys; they may be just imagining, fantasizing.Miserable people have the habit – it is inevitable, otherwise it will become impossible to live – to fantasize beautiful things either about the past or about the future. The present is always miserable wherever you are, misery surrounds you. To escape from that misery, at least to forget all about it, the best opium is to think with nostalgia about the past – the wife that you have left behind, the children, the beautiful home, the coziness, the security, the safety. All those sweet things which may not have happened at all; you may have just created them, invented them. Or, if you don’t have much past and you cannot paint anything on the past, then the future is there – a vast canvas. You can always think of a beautiful tomorrow. If yesterday is not worth painting, then you can always paint tomorrow. It is always there.And this is the way man has been avoiding the present. But to avoid the present is to avoid the real cause of it all.The new inmate at the mental hospital announced in a loud voice that he was the famous British naval hero, Lord Nelson. This was particularly interesting because the institution already had a Lord Nelson.The head psychiatrist, after due consideration, decided to put the two men in the same room, feeling that the similarity of their delusions might prompt an adjustment in each that would help in curing them. It was a calculated risk, of course, for the men might react violently to one another; but they were introduced and then left alone, and no disturbance was heard from the room that night.The next morning the doctor had a talk with his new patient, and was more than pleasantly surprised when he was told, “Doctor, I have been suffering from delusion. I know now that I am not Lord Nelson.”“That’s wonderful,” said the doctor.“Yes,” said the patient smiling demurely, “I am Lady Hamilton.”One can change from being Lord Nelson – one can become Lady Hamilton – but there is no change at all. That’s what people are doing all over the world. They change their religion, they change their wives, their husbands; they change their jobs, they change their outer situations. And again and again they are surprised – nothing changes. The misery persists, it remains the same. In fact, the more they change the outer circumstances, the more they become aware of one thing – the misery is not going to leave, it is going to stay there. Their frustration becomes more settled; their failure becomes their very lifestyle.You ask me, “Osho, can you tell me what to do?” You have done enough. Now be done with it all; no more doing! Move from doing to being. Become a little more aware. Wherever you are – in the family, with the family, or somewhere else… Wherever you are, become more aware. Try to be now and here. This moment, this silence.Don’t move from thisness. It will be difficult in the beginning; every small distraction will take you away. A bird starts calling and you get distracted, you cannot just accept it. Immediately you find an excuse – you start thinking what bird it is, and then the whole chain – the sound of the railway train, the traffic noise, anything is enough to take you away from the now. And that is the root cause of misery: to be there and then. The only source of bliss, the only source I say, is to be now and here.Once you have learned to be present to the present, there is no problem at all. Then your response is total, then your response is from your very innermost core, very fulfilling. Then even living in the family situation with all the conflicts of it, you will remain untouched.The conflicts will be everywhere. If you go to a monastery, there will be conflicts there – the same struggle, the same competition, the hierarchy – somebody trying to boss; somebody trying to put you the way he wants to put you together. Everywhere you will find manipulation, domination, nagging. Everywhere you will find exploitation of your fear, of your greed. Hence, changing situations is not going to help, it has never helped anybody – but it has been one of the ways of wasting one’s life.For centuries people created monasteries, people created such monasteries that once you entered the monastery you could not leave. It was for your whole life. People became so afraid of each other – of the wife, of the husband – that there were Catholic monasteries where no woman entered for a thousand years. What fear! The founders of those monasteries must have been really terribly tortured by their wives. Now even an innocent woman who is not your wife is not allowed to enter the monastery. Not only a woman but even a small girl, a six-month-old girl, is not allowed in.What kind of fear? Are these monks afraid of a six-month-old girl? Are they afraid of the girl or are they afraid of themselves? Are they going to rape the small child, or what? Are they monks or monsters? But fear has dominated them. And there are nuns and their nunneries where no man is allowed to enter. But these people are living in misery.Here are many ex-monks, ex-nuns, Christian, Hindu, Jaina. They have suffered very much; they had to escape from those prisons. But people coming here also expect some kind of monastery.Just the other day I was reading an article against me in an Australian magazine. The woman who had come to cover the ashram and its activities was very shocked. She seems to be a very traditional, orthodox woman, interested in Yoga and Hindu spirituality, etcetera. She says, “This is a strange kind of ashram. Nobody has ever heard of anything like this.”She is offended most by one thing: that people are laughing, dancing, singing – in short, that people are alive. She is very offended that there is a certain “climate of a holiday resort.” She must have looked for a prison, not a holiday resort. What is wrong with the “climate of a holiday resort”? That should be the climate of the whole earth! That should be the very climate of life itself. Life should be a holiday. Only a holiday is a holy day.And people are working here, people are continuously working – it is not that they are just lazing around. But the climate is certainly one of joy, of laughter. That offends.The whole article is obsessed with the idea that an ashram has to be ascetic, people have to be there doing yoga postures, standing on their heads, doing all kinds of gymnastics, chanting mantras, doing religious rituals, and being very serious – as if they are just walking corpses. Then she would have been immensely pleased. “This is a religious place,” she would have said, “a spiritual place.”Reading her article I decided one thing: that the new commune will not be called an ashram – that word is certainly ugly. We will drop it. This is not an ashram. In a way, this is the only ashram because ashram literally means rest, restfulness. But it has become associated with wrong people. We will drop it.People come with all kinds of ideas. They are miserable in their ideas, but they are still looking for the same ideas. And if they don’t find them, they don’t feel good. They are miserable, and they want everybody else also to be miserable.One gentleman has just written to me, “Osho, your claim that Swami Vimalkirti attained buddhahood sounds phony.” As if this gentleman knows what buddhahood is!I was very pleased with his question. I thought, “My God, Gautam Buddha is here who knows what buddhahood is, and what buddhahood is not; who knows the distinction between the authentic buddhahood and the phony buddhahood.” Must be a man far superior to all the buddhas, only then can he judge.But he must have come with a certain idea. In fact, Hindus were offended by Gautam Buddha’s declaration that he had become enlightened because they had their own idea – just like this gentleman, they had their own idea. In fact, this gentleman will be surprised that Buddha’s five disciples immediately left him, thinking that he had either gone mad or was pretending to be enlightened. His five disciples, who had been worshipping him up to now while he was not a buddha – they were worshipping him as their master. And the moment he declared that he was a buddha – it must have sounded phony – they left him immediately. And what was their argument? Their argument was that he had fallen into the trap of the ego, he had fallen from his ascetic life.For six years Buddha tortured himself as much as any human being has ever been tortured, and found nothing by that torture. It was the sheer masochistic teachings of the ages that he had been following. But he was an intelligent man – he understood. One full-moon evening, as the moon was rising, he could see the whole stupidity of what he had been doing for six years. Just by torturing your body, how can you become enlightened? What relationship exists between torturing your body, destroying your body, and buddhahood?That evening he dropped torturing. He told his disciples that now he would live relaxedly, now he would not torture himself, now he would follow the middle path. Up to now he had been doing something extremist. First, he lived the life of a prince, indulged in all kinds of pleasures and luxuries – that was one extreme. Then he moved to another extreme, he renounced the world and all its comforts, luxuries, pleasures, and started torturing himself, started a suicidal course – that was another extreme. He said to his disciples, “Tonight I have come to a tremendous understanding, that truth is not to be found by extremes. I have renounced the world; today I renounce that renunciation too! Now I will be just ordinary, neither a king nor an ascetic.”The disciples immediately left him, and that very night he became enlightened. He searched for his disciples because he felt they had been with him for so long – for six years continuously – and that it was his duty that he should share his understanding, his bliss, his love, first with those five disciples. When he reached close to those five disciples, they were sitting under a tree, they looked at Buddha coming and they said, “Here comes that fallen man! We should not stand up to pay respect to him; we should not fold our hands in respect to him. We should keep our backs toward him. If he comes and sits, it’s okay; if he wants to say something, it’s okay, but we are not going to pay him any more respect or attention.”Even Gautam Buddha was not understood by his own disciples.This gentleman says my assertion that Vimalkirti has attained buddhahood sounds phony. Why? What is wrong with Vimalkirti attaining buddhahood? If I can attain it, why cannot Vimalkirti attain it? Why cannot you attain it?Buddhahood is not something like a goal far away; it is your very nature. In fact, you are all buddhas, although unaware of the fact. All that happens in attaining buddhahood is that one becomes aware of it. The treasure is there – it is always there, you cannot lose it even if you want to lose it. It is your very being, hence there is no way to drop it. Who will drop it? But you can forget about it. And buddhahood simply means a remembering, a recognition.Why does it sound phony? If you have some preconceived ideas, if you have some idea how a buddha should be, then certainly it will sound phony.Jainas in India have not yet accepted Buddha as enlightened. Twenty-five centuries have passed, and I don’t think they will ever accept him as a buddha for the simple reason that they have a certain attitude which is not fulfilled by him. They think that whenever a person becomes a buddha he goes naked, and Buddha never went naked. That’s enough to prove to them that he was not a buddha. When a person becomes a buddha he drops even a begging bowl, he possesses nothing. And Buddha possessed three pieces of clothing, one begging bowl, one walking staff – too many possessions. This won’t do. He’s still living in luxury. According to Jainas, it is still luxury.Mahavira lived naked, with no begging bowl, with nothing at all. He used to eat from his hands; he used to drink water from his hands. He would lie down on the earth to sleep, the earth underneath and the sky above. Hence he was called a digambara. The word digambara means one who is clothed only with the sky and nothing else. The sky itself is his clothing – nothing else between him and the sky. How can they accept that Buddha has become enlightened?Hindus cannot accept him. Christians cannot accept that he was a man of the same caliber as Christ because he never did any miracles. A christ is supposed to do miracles, to cure blind people, to make the ill healthy, to raise the dead back to life. How can they accept Buddha as a christ? He never raised any dead.In fact, a story is worth remembering…When Lazarus’ sisters asked Christ to come and raise Lazarus from death, he came running. He was far away; it took him four days to reach there. And after four days, he raised Lazarus from his grave. He called forth Lazarus, “Lazarus come out of your grave!” and Lazarus walked out.A similar story is told about Buddha, but with a totally different dimension to it. A woman’s only son died; her husband had already died. Her name was Kisa Gautami. She went almost mad: her husband was dead, she was living only for this child – and a beautiful child, suddenly died. She carried the body of the son to every physician, every doctor, to every saint, and they all said, “Nothing can be done.” Somebody suggested, “Buddha is in the town. Why don’t you go to him? He says he has become enlightened. If he is really enlightened, he can raise the dead. His touch will do a miracle.”Kisa Gautami was ecstatic, knowing that Buddha was there: “What was impossible to a buddha?”She went to Buddha with the dead body of the child. She put the child’s body at Buddha’s feet and said to him, “You can do anything – you are enlightened. Make my child live again. I cannot live without my child.”Buddha did not do what Christ had done; Buddha did something far more significant. But to understand its significance one needs great clarity.This gentleman, who says that my assertion that Vimalkirti has attained buddhahood… If he was there – and there is every possibility he must have been there if he is here – he must be an ancient traveler, shopping for spirituality. He must have gone to Buddha, he must have been there and he must have thought, “This man sounds phony.” What Buddha said sounds phony if you compare it with Jesus, and if you don’t have a deep understanding of life and its mysteries.Buddha said, “Okay, I will revive the child, but you have to fulfill one condition. Go to the town and bring a few mustard seeds from any family. The only condition is that I will only accept mustard seeds from a family in which nobody has ever died. Once you have brought those few mustard seeds, I will immediately bring your son back.”The woman could not see the point; she was in such a state, almost going mad. She rushed to the town, she knocked on every door. And people said, “We can give you as many mustard seeds as you want” – because in that town they used to grow mustard seeds, that was their main crop. So they said, “We can give you as many mustard seeds as you want, but the condition is unfulfillable. So many people have died in our family – somebody’s father has died, somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife, somebody’s husband, somebody’s grandfather, somebody’s great-grandfather – so many people have died.”In fact, in any family only a few people are alive, millions have died. If you take into account the whole of the family from Adam and Eve, then millions of your family have died. It is a miracle how so very few are still alive. You are sitting on a huge mountain of corpses: your fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, great-great-great-grandfathers. And underneath it all – poor Adam and Eve. And Friedrich Nietzsche says even God is dead. So underneath Adam and Eve, God the Father. That seems to be the foundation of this whole Everest of death. You are sitting on top of it and not aware at all that soon you will be really part of it. It is only a question of a few moments; any moment you will be part of it. And somebody else will be sitting on top of you – your son, your daughter, your son-in-law, somebody will be sitting on top of you.The woman, by and by, became aware that the condition was unfulfillable. By the evening she came – she came dancing, she came rejoicing. She fell at Buddha’s feet and she said, “You have done a great miracle! You have made me see something; you have helped me to remember that this life is death.”Buddha asked her, “Do you want me to revive your child?”The woman said. “No because he will have to die again. What is the point? Making him die again is ugly. Once is enough, twice will be too much. Rather, I have come for something else now. Help me to know that life which never ends. My son is gone, I will be gone. Before I am gone, I would like to taste something of the eternal.”Buddha initiated her into sannyas.Now these two stories, Lazarus’ and Kisa Gautami’s, are in a way parallel. Christ brings Lazarus to life; Buddha gives Kisa Gautami a new insight into life and death itself. To a Christian, Buddha looks phony. To a Buddhist, Jesus looks phony. What is he doing? This is sheer nonsense, because what happened to Lazarus afterward? One day he must have died because we don’t see him around anymore. If he was going to die what was the point of postponing it for a few days, or a few years? Why let him go through that suffering again? – the same wife, the same children, and the same job.I don’t think Lazarus will be able to forgive Jesus. He was resting in his grave, feeling, “Thank God, all that nightmare is finished. Now my wife cannot nag me anymore, I am out of their reach, I don’t have to go to the office again tomorrow morning.” But Jesus pulled him back. And the Christian fools think this is a miracle.If I had been in Lazarus’ place, I would have killed Jesus. “What are you doing? Don’t you have any respect for anybody? Dragging somebody back into the turmoil of life? Is it human?”This gentleman says that my claim is phony. He also says that my criticism of Mother Teresa seems to be the criticism of a very ordinary man. That is true. There I agree. I am certainly a very ordinary man, so ordinary that you cannot even call me phony because a phony person is not ordinary, he’s extraordinary. I am really ordinary. I have no claims. I don’t do any miracles. And, of course, he must have come with the idea that Mother Teresa is doing great work – she is extraordinary, I am ordinary, that’s perfectly true. And I am not in any way interested in becoming extraordinary. To me, any desire to be extraordinary is very ordinary. To be ordinary is the only way of being extraordinary because that is really extraordinary. Nobody wants to be ordinary.But this gentleman must be as unconscious as you are…Two buddies had been out drinking for hours when their money finally ran out.“I have an idea,” croaked Al. “Lesh go over to my housh and borrow shum money from my wife.”The two of them reeled into Al’s living room, snapped on the light, and lo and behold, there was Al’s wife making love on the sofa to another man. This state of affairs considerably unnerved Al’s friend, but did not seem to affect the husband.“Shay, dear, you have any money for your ever-lovin’ hushban’?” he asked.“Yes, yes,” she snapped. “Take my purse from the mantle, and for Pete’s sake turn off those lights!”Outside they examined the purse and Al proudly announced, “There’s enough here for a pint for you and a pint for me. Pretty good, eh, old buddy?”“But Al,” protested his friend, somewhat sobered by the spectacle he had just witnessed, “what about that fellow back there with your wife?”“The hell with him,” replied Al, “let him buy his own pint!”All that is needed is a little more consciousness. It is not a question of doing something; you need a new kind of being. Right now you are unconscious – you have to be conscious. You have to be more aware, watchful, witnessing.Witnessing is the key of my sannyas, the master key. I don’t give you any other discipline because giving you a discipline will not help; your unconsciousness will be there, and the discipline will only cover it. You can look like a saint but you will be as unconscious as before. Your saintliness will be as unconscious as your sinfulness was; there will be no qualitative difference in it.So I am not interested in making saints out of you. I am not interested in helping you to drop your sins either. What I am interested in is to make you aware. The moment you start becoming aware of your actions, your thoughts, your feelings – these are the three dimensions where awareness has to be applied. Walk, but know that you are walking, remain alert of each gesture. Eat, but eat with awareness, don’t just go on stuffing food inside. Think, but witness your thoughts, the process of thoughts, desires, dreams. Feel, but remain a little aware that these feelings, these moods, are not you.You are only pure awareness and nothing else. You are not the body, nor the mind, nor the heart. You are the fourth, and the fourth is the miracle. Once you have tasted the fourth, then wherever you are – even in hell – you will be in heaven.The second question:Osho,I am a member of a group in Holland called the “Open Lotus,” which is gathered around a medium who claims to transfer messages and energies from Master Morya. This has very much affected my heart and being.When I am in your audience I feel a kind of melting, but my heart does not as yet seem to be as deeply touched as it is with the medium. What is happening?Is the experience with the unseen Master Morya unreal and something of the mind? Can it be a hindrance to becoming one with you, Osho? Are you in support of groups like the Open Lotus? If so, do you have a message for them?Marinus, first, meditate over this story…Stan and his wife, Rita, were playing the tenth hole. He teed off and Rita hit hers into the woods.Stan had not hit his ball very far on the fairway, so he went into the woods to help her find it. Suddenly they came across a little fellow about four feet tall with a pointed hat and green suit.“Hey,” said Stan, “are you a leprechaun?”“Sure I am,” he replied.“Well, maybe you could grant my wish to be a scratch golfer.”“All right, but you have to give up something. If you let me have your wife in the woods for one hour, I will grant your wish.”“You’ve got it!” said the husband.The little guy took Rita into the woods and after an hour’s pleasure asked, “How old is your husband?”“Forty.”“And he still believes in leprechauns?”Marinus, how old are you? – and you still believe in Master Morya? You must be feeling great because if something happens according to your belief, it strengthens the ego, it nourishes the ego. Master Morya is not visible, only the medium is there. And the medium is more concerned in impressing you, so she will follow you. In fact, there is no Master Morya anywhere. This whole idea of Master Morya was created by the theosophists. It is an invention of Madame Blavatsky – Madame Blah-blah-blah. It is just fiction.Madame Blavatsky used to receive letters from Master Morya. In the roof there was a hole, and a servant used to hide on the roof, and all the Marinuses, the theosophists, would sit with closed eyes waiting for Master Morya’s message. And Madame Blah-blah-blah would sway, and she was a really fat lady and very ugly too. Ugly people become religious – what else can they do? I have seen many ugly people, but Madame Blah-blah-blah defeats them all. Only some fictitious entity like Master Morya could love her; no man – no man alive – would be able to gather so much courage.And she would sway, and she would speak gibberish – what Christians call glossolalia – she would make strange sounds. Much incense would be burned, and much smoke would be created so nobody could see what was happening. And their eyes were full of tears because of the smoke. And then a letter would drop, and all these fools – and they were not uneducated people, all retired magistrates, high court judges, government officials, professors, scholars – they would wait for the letter. Then the letter would be read by Madame Blah-blah-blah.And great messages were received, but they were all fulfilling their desires. Whatsoever they wanted was fulfilled. They were immensely happy.It was J. Krishnamurti who destroyed the whole game, who came out of this nonsense and declared, “This is all stupidity.” J. Krishnamurti did a great service to humanity by destroying the theosophical nonsense. But Holland used to be one of the great centers of the theosophical movement, and a few fools still go on living with the hangover.Certainly you will not feel the same here. In fact, you will feel just the opposite because I am continuously shattering your ego, I am hitting it hard. I am not here to nourish your ego, I am here to destroy it. You can be one with me only if you are totally egoless, otherwise there is no possibility.If you want to enjoy your ego and your dreams and your fantasies, then these mediums are good. But remember, you will remain childish, you will never grow. Yes, sometimes coincidentally something may appear to be true. If a medium says thousands of things, one thing may coincide with reality. And the fools and the gullible immediately jump upon that one thing, and they make much fuss about it. They think, “If one thing is right then others also must be right. Maybe we are not yet capable enough to understand, maybe we need more purity. We have to become as pure as the medium.”And what the medium says, you have to interpret, and you always interpret according to your mind. These masters don’t exist at all.“I have learned one thing about women,” said the experienced one to his drinking companions. “You just can’t trust a girl with brown eyes.”“It occurs to me,” said one of his inebriated friends, “that I have been married nearly three years and I don’t know what color eyes my wife has.”The second man finished his drink, climbed from his stool, and hurried home to investigate this disturbing possibility.His wife was in bed asleep. He crept up to her and carefully lifted an eyelid. “By God! Brown!” he exclaimed.“How the hell did you know I was here?” said Brown, crawling out from under the bed.Yes, once in a while some coincidence like that will happen. Beware! All these mediums and all these priests and all these theosophists, theologians are the most cunning people, and they have many brands all around the world. It is better to be with a gambler, with a drunkard; it is better to be with a so-called sinner than to be with these people. These people have been preventing human growth for thousands of years. They are the most criminal people in the world. Their crime is unpardonable.A genie jumped on his ball and said, “Would you like to be the world’s best golfer?”“I sure would,” said the man.“Would you give up your sex life for it?”“Of course,” said the man.The genie granted his wish, and in the next twelve months he won every tournament on the pro tour.After the year was up, the man was back on the eighteenth tee, and once again the genie appeared.“How did it feel to be the world’s best golfer?”“Great!” said the man.“Did you mind giving up your sex life?”“Not at all.”“How often did you have sex in former years?”“Four or five times a year,” replied the man.“That’s not very much!”“Well, it is not bad for a priest with a small parish.”These priests, these rabbis, these ayatollahs, these imams – beware of them. It is time that humanity should get rid of all this stupidity.Rabbi Goldstein was allowed to join a “restricted” country club. His first day he met Peckham, the president.“Welcome, Rabbi Goldstein. Would you like to play a round?”“Sure, we will play a friendly game of a hundred dollars a hole.”Rabbi Goldstein lost eighteen hundred dollars.“Look” said Peckham, “I will give you a chance to get even – three thousand, six hundred dollars or nothing.”Rabbi Goldstein agreed and lost again.Later in the locker room, Rabbi Goldstein said, “You like to wager. I will bet you one thousand dollars I can pee over your head from ten feet.”“All right,” said the club prezzy. “But nobody can pee that far.”Rabbi Goldstein proceeded to pee all over Peckham.“See,” he said, after changing his clothes. “I knew you could not do it. Come on, I will buy.”At the bar they met Lockwood, the local bank chairman. “This is Rabbi Goldstein,” said the club president. “He is one of our new members.”Peckham then told Lockwood about the money he had won, including how Rabbi Goldstein had peed all over him.“Oh no!” cried the banker, “That son-of-a-bitch bet me twenty thousand dollars he would piss all over the president on his first day at the club!”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 07 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You often advise us to follow two courses of action that seem to be incompatible with each other. First you tell us to be completely in the moment, without mind, to be our fear, our joy, or rage. Then you tell us to become detached from our egos, to watch what comes up within ourselves.How can we do both? Please explain.Logic is not necessarily existential, it is intellectual. But existence has no obligation. [Increasingly loud sounds of screeching cats.] You see? Existence goes on its own way. It is not concerned with your question; it is not concerned with my answer. It is absolutely illogical.Logic will see a contradiction. If logic was all, then certainly there would be difficulty. But logic is not all – it is just the way of the mind, of looking at things. The mind divides into polar opposites; the division is not there in existence itself. Existence is undivided. The day and the night are one, birth and death are one, the plus and the minus are one, the positive and the negative are one. But logically they are incompatibles. Existentially a totally different dimension opens up: they are not contradictory to each other but complementary.This word has to be pondered over, meditated upon. Life is complementariness. The opposite is not really the opposite – it helps, it supports its own so-called opposite. Without birth there is no possibility of death, and without death there can be no birth either. It is one phenomenon, two sides of the same coin.Yes, I say that first you should be in the moment, totally one with whatsoever is happening, utterly one – and then watch it. Certainly, if you only think about it, the problem will arise – how can one do both these incompatibles together? If you think then the problem is there, but if you do, the problem disappears. Rather than thinking, try – give it a try.How it happens is simple: if you are not identified totally with anything, you cannot be disidentified with it totally either. If you are only half-heartedly in it, you can only be half-heartedly out of it. You were never totally in it, how can you be totally out of it? You have to become utterly absorbed in it, and in that very moment you can slip out of it as totally as you had slipped in.It is as simple as coming into the house and going out of the house. If somebody was just thinking philosophically, then that too would seem incompatible. How to go into the house and come out of the house? These are incompatibles – and you are doing a thousand and one incompatibles every moment.It is the same breath that goes in and comes out, and you never for a single moment feel worried that something incompatible is happening. To be logical, either take a breath in and don’t allow it to go out – that would be logical – or if it is out, don’t allow it to come in.Logic is perfectly okay with dead things, with matter. That is the difference between the objective and the subjective world, with matter and with consciousness. Logic is absolutely adequate with the material phenomenon, but absolutely inadequate as far as consciousness is concerned.Consciousness is a synthesis of polar opposites. Consciousness is where thesis and antithesis meet, mingle, merge and become one. Consciousness is a state of orgasmic oneness where man and woman disappear and become one, where life and death are no longer separate, where they are in such deep accord that you cannot draw a line where life ends, where death begins.Rather than thinking about it, go into it. What I am saying is something existential, not intellectual. If you just listen to my words and follow them you will be in trouble.Heraclitus has a tremendously pregnant statement. He says life moves through one opposite to another. Through the opposite, through the tension of the opposite, everything lives and becomes deeper. This is the secret. This is the hidden harmony.Heraclitus is one of the greatest buddhas of the world. In Western philosophy his name is not part of the mainstream. The mainstream consists of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Moore. Heraclitus is something of an outsider for the simple reason that he is one of the greatest mystics. What Aristotle only thinks, Heraclitus knows. What Wittgenstein only thinks, Heraclitus experiences.What I am doing here is not helping you to become great philosophers. My whole approach is anti-philosophical, anti-logical. My approach is existential. You have to experience; except experience, there is no proof of what I am saying. Don’t listen to my words, listen to the intervals. Don’t be too obsessed with what I say, become more and more attuned with my silence. The moments when nothing is said are far more pregnant. My message is not in the words but beyond the words.But I can understand your difficulty. That is the difficulty of all logical people – and the whole world is trained for logic.Here we are doing just a totally different thing. We are trying to undo what the society, the college, the university has done to you. They have made you obsessed with language and logic. Language certainly divides things; that’s why truth cannot be said, it can only be showed. I am only indicating the way; I am not really leading you, I am just pointing the way.Henry Miller has written these beautiful lines:“The real leader has no need to lead – he is content to point the way. Unless we become our own leaders, content to be what we are in the process of becoming, we shall always be servitors and idolaters.”I am here just to point the way. Don’t start clinging to my fingers, look at the moon the fingers are pointing at. The fingers are irrelevant.In an attractive little town just near Los Angeles, a group of the local intellectuals formed a club to study hypnosis, mesmerism, and related sciences of the mind. The club took a definitive place in the social life of the little city and many of the most prominent citizens were invited to join. The studio where the club meetings were held was most attractively decorated and there was a beautiful, big crystal ball suspended from the ceiling in the very center of the room. The leader and teacher had a dynamic personality and he presided over the séances authoritatively and with great dignity.One recent evening a séance was held, and the members took their seats in the large circle that had been formed as part of the seating arrangement. The lights were dimmed, and the crystal ball automatically began to swing back and forth as the professor mounted his little platform.“Concentrate on what I am saying,” began the leader. “Do exactly as I tell you to do. Keep your eye on the ball. Think about what I am saying. Follow my instructions faithfully. Do exactly what I tell you to do.”And then, with a terrific crash, the cord broke and the crystal ball fell and was smashed to pieces.The leader shouted at the top of his voice, “Ah, shit!”They say that it took over two weeks to clean up the studio.Please remember, you are not to follow my words. You are to follow my silences – the pauses between the words, the gaps, the intervals. It is in those intervals that the communion happens, and then you will see the complementariness of the opposites. In those moments you will see there is no master, no disciple. Something totally different takes place – a meeting, a merger: not unity but oneness. And the oneness is not mechanical either; it is organic, it is alive, throbbing.In the East, we have called these moments satsang, communion. Communion is not communication. This is not a discourse, this is not even a talk – this is just a communion. Words are being used only to create silences, just as one uses a blackboard to write with white chalk on it. The blackboard is not the purpose: the purpose is the white writing. I am using words to create a blackboard so that I can write a few moments of silences on it; that is the purpose.If you become too much concerned with my words you will get into unnecessary trouble – and you are already in so much trouble. Get out of it.The second question:Osho,Why in the first place did religions develop the idea of celibacy if it is unnatural?There are many reasons behind it. The most fundamental reason is that man has always found himself the weaker sex compared to woman, as far as sexuality is concerned. His ego is hurt and the male ego is very aggressive. The feminine ego is totally different: it is non-aggressive, it is receptive. Everything in the feminine psychology is receptive and everything in the male psychology is aggressive.That’s why they complement each other; that’s why they fit with each other; that’s why they miss each other; that’s why they feel only half without the other. That’s why love is possible. Their chemistries, their physiologies, their psychologies, all are complementary – and of course, logically opposites, existentially complementary.Man is sexually weaker. Any woman can exhaust him very easily, and once a man is exhausted he will take at least twenty-four hours to be sexually potent again. That hurts. The woman is sexually potent twenty-four hours a day; man is potent only once in a while, and the remaining time impotent. For one moment he is potent, then for twenty-four hours impotent; then again for one moment he is potent. His impotence is far greater than his potency, than his power, than his sexuality. That created a deep urge in him to create a certain other kind of power.Celibacy was just the effort of the male chauvinist ego because through celibacy he thought he could become very powerful. It was through sex that he became impotent. Once his sexuality was released he was at a loss; then he had to wait for time to heal. He became like a wound – empty. And he could see that the woman was never empty, she was always capable. Always comparing with the woman, he discovered celibacy. It was a natural and logical conclusion that if sex makes you impotent then celibacy, obviously, would make you omnipotent. And this is not something primitive, even today the logic is the same.Even a man like Mahatma Gandhi was continuously concerned with how to become omnipotent through celibacy; he was trying in every way to become powerful through celibacy. He was thinking that if he was really celibate he could defeat the British Empire – through celibacy. If he was really celibate then nobody could kill him.In his ashram this was a usual phenomenon: somebody would do something wrong – nothing much, but his ideas were too puritanical. Even drinking tea was a sin. Now you can imagine – every man becomes a sinner. If even drinking tea is a sin, it is very difficult to find a saint. The whole ashram was continuously watching each other – who was committing sins. Somebody smoking, somebody drinking tea, somebody falling in love – all were great sins.And whenever somebody was caught, Mahatma Gandhi would think that it was because his celibacy was not yet perfect – that’s why someone could commit a sin in his ashram. That was his logic. He would not say anything to the person; he would go into self-torture. He would fast to purify himself. He must be impure, that’s why somebody could commit a sin, could drink tea, could smoke, could fall in love with a woman.When his own secretary fell in love with a woman – that was too much. His own secretary! That simply meant his celibacy, his purity, was not yet up to the point where just his presence would transform people.And he was continuously thinking in this way. This is really a very egoistic way of thinking – as if everybody has to be dominated by you. You see the inner desire to dominate others in the name of purity, morality, virtue. Now somebody falls in love, and Mahatma Gandhi thinks he is at fault. As if he is the center of the world. As if everything depends on him. As if the whole world has to be according to him. If something is not according to him, it simply proves that his power is not omnipotent yet.This is the way of a power seeker, although he pretended to be most humble. He tried hard to be simple but if you look deep down, in his simplicity, in his poverty, in his so-called humbleness, you will find nothing but pure ambition to dominate.When there was a danger that he may be killed by some Hindu fanatic, the government asked him if they could be allowed to protect him. Could some arrangement be made so that he would be continuously guarded and protected?He said, “No! Absolutely no! If my purity is enough, if my celibacy is true, then nobody can kill me.”You see the logic – everything depends on his purity. But a brahmin from Pune killed him – his purity was greater! His celibacy seems to be greater; he was far more potent! If Mahatma Gandhi’s logic was correct, then Nathuram Godse, the man who killed him, seems to be more virtuous. And in Pune there are people who worship Nathuram Godse as a mahatma. In fact, he has proved that he is a mahatma – otherwise the bullet would not have killed Mahatma Gandhi. The bullet was able to kill him; that simply proved that he was not yet a real sage.Now this whole logic is stupid, but it has been there for thousands of years. Man has always thought of becoming powerful through controlling sexual energy – the idea that sex takes your energy out, that it is a leakage; your energy leaks out and leaves you empty. Accumulate energy! This is sheer stupidity. It is absolutely unscientific. It is not that you can accumulate sexual energy – in fact, the more you accumulate it, the less you have it; the more you use it, the more you have it. So if a person goes on making love late in his life he may even be able to make love at the age ninety, ninety-five, a hundred.In fact, in Russia there are people whose age is about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty, a few people have even come close to a hundred and fifty. And they are all sexually potent, still sexually potent – because Russia is not a religious country. In a religious country like India even young men become impotent. Impotence is something religious; it is a by-product of your religiousness.I am all for transcendence of sex, but I am not for repressiveness. And I don’t say that by transcending sex you will become powerful, that you will be omnipotent, that everything will happen according to you, that you cannot be killed. This is all sheer bullshit. In fact, you will become more fragile, more flowerlike, more vulnerable. You will be just like a roseflower which can be easily crushed between two rocks – not that rocks are more powerful, but more gross. The roseflower is a higher expression; the higher expression is always fragile, delicate.You ask me, “Why in the first place did religions develop the idea of celibacy if it is unnatural?” Because it is unnatural: the ego always enjoys everything that is unnatural because the natural cannot fulfill your ego. Everybody is doing the natural; there is nothing exceptional in being natural – it is ordinary.That’s why I say I am a very ordinary person because I am just natural; I have no pretensions of being special. I am absolutely ordinary because to me that’s how everybody should be. To me that’s what buddhahood is: to be utterly ordinary with no pretensions of being special. To me that is the experience of godliness.It is not a question of becoming powerful, otherwise it is the same trip. Somebody is becoming powerful through money; somebody else is becoming powerful through politics; somebody else is becoming powerful through celibacy; somebody is becoming powerful through prayer, God-realization, arousal of the kundalini – but the basic desire, the ambition, is to be powerful.The truly religious person is just ordinary, natural. Celibacy became important because it is unnatural: everything unnatural became important. Fasting is unnatural, standing on your head is unnatural. Everything unnatural became significant because only very few stupid people can manage to do it. Any intelligent person will see the point, why bother standing on your head? If nature had wanted you to stand on your head, nature would have created you that way.Don’t try to improve upon existence; don’t try to be more intelligent than existence itself. That’s what people are trying to do. If nature wanted you to fast there would have been no need to create the stomach at all. If nature wanted you to be celibate, then you would not have been human beings but amoebas – because as far as I know, nobody is really celibate except amoebas. They are the real brahmacharis. They don’t have any sexual life at all, they reproduce nonsexually. They are great mahatmas!Maybe all the mahatmas are born as amoebas. Perhaps that’s why in India there are so many amoebas because the life of an amoeba is absolutely nonsexual. Its way of reproduction is really religious!One amoeba goes on becoming bigger and bigger and then splits into two. It goes on eating, then a point comes when the balloon bursts; then the amoeba becomes two amoebas and then they both start eating and growing. Then they become four, and this is their way of multiplication. That’s why within hours they can produce so many amoebas. They can defeat anybody! Their reproduction is just the limit, the very climax of reproduction. Nobody can surpass them.And the amoeba is also religious in another way: the amoeba is eternal because when there is no birth there is no death. That’s why it is so difficult to kill amoebas. Our doctors are trying hard, but it is very difficult, almost impossible to kill them, for the simple reason that death is possible only if there has been birth. But they have never been born. In the first place because they are not born you cannot kill them. At the most you can dope them, drug them. Sooner or later they wake up again. Just for a few days you don’t take the medicine and they are again awake. They become buddhas again and again and again! The amoeba has the longest life in the world; it is almost immortal.Nature has not made you amoebas. Nature has not made you to stand on your head. Nature has not intended you to be celibate. But that’s why the ego takes these forms – the ego enjoys doing something exceptional.A devout and devoted couple decided to give up sex during Lent. It was a very difficult sacrifice for them to make, but they were successful until Good Friday when they went to the supermarket together to do some household shopping.When the wife was leaning over a tray of apples, he got a good look at her chest and nearly went mad. A few minutes later he saw her thigh when her dress got entangled in another customer’s pushcart. In the confusion he lost all control of himself, forgetting his vow completely.A few days after Easter he went to confession and told his priest that he had broken his vow. The father confessor tried to console him by saying that he was sure that after all the days and nights of privation, God and the church would forgive him.“I am not worried about God and the church,” replied the troubled confessor, “but my wife and I both feel terrible because they won’t let us back in the supermarket!”That has been the ultimate result of all religious repressiveness: everybody has become utterly guilty in his own eyes. That has helped the priests immensely. If you can make somebody feel guilty he becomes submissive because he becomes afraid. If you can make somebody feel guilty, he is so afraid of punishment that he is bound to follow whatsoever the priest says. Any nonsense, any stupid ritual, and he will be ready to do it just to get rid of the fear.Religions have exploited fear. And the best way to make people afraid is to tell them to do something unnatural because you can be sure they will not be able to do it. If you tell them to do something natural, you cannot make them feel guilty.For example in my commune, nobody can feel guilty – it is impossible to feel guilty. I am not creating any guilt in you. My whole effort is to erase all guilt from you so that you can feel at ease with yourself – and the moment you are at ease with yourself, you are beyond the clutches of religious exploitation. Then no church, no temple, no priest, nobody, can exploit you, oppress you. But if you are afraid… And the best way to make you afraid is to tell you to be celibate, and you will not be able. The more you try, the more you will feel a failure, and the more you feel a failure the more guilt-ridden, condemned in your own eyes, you will become.If you want to create fear in people, tell them to fast, tell them to stop their breath, tell them to stand on their head. Sooner or later they will get tired, and when they stand on their legs they will feel guilty – they are doing something which should not be done.Flannery was not much of a churchgoer for he played with the same foursome every Sunday. Father Reardan, the parish priest, admonished him.“Father,” murmured Flannery, “I just want to know if there are any golf courses in heaven.”“I don’t know,” replied the priest. “I will check with the pope.”The next day Father Reardan reported to Flannery, “My son, I have got good news and bad news. Here is the good news: there are plenty of courses in heaven, beautiful fairways, greens smooth as silk, and it never gets dark so you can play twenty-four hours a day.”“That’s wonderful!” exclaimed Flannery. “And what’s the bad news?”“You’ve got a tee-off time tomorrow morning at nine-fifteen!”Fear has to be created. Hell creates the fear. Hell has been painted in as many ugly ways as possible just to make you tremble, just to make you ready to fall at the feet of the priest and to listen to whatsoever he is saying, and to believe because only the believers will be saved. Every religion tries to convince you. The Christians say only Christians will be saved and the Hindus say only Hindus will be saved. And those who will not be saved will fall into hell for eternity, into hellfire. And those who will be saved will enjoy all kinds of pleasure.A strange logic. Here, every pleasure is condemned, and there in heaven every pleasure will be supplied a thousandfold. Here, you have to renounce women and there you will get beautiful women who remain always young, who never become old, who don’t perspire. Here you are told to fast and there you will be supplied with delicious food. Everything that is condemned here will be made available there.This is an ancient strategy of religions, and sex has been used as the fundamental to exploit, to make human beings tremble, afraid, worried, anxious. This is a way to create anxiety and anguish. And when you are in anguish you have to go to the priest for help; without his help you cannot be saved.The third question:Osho,I always wanted you to give me a sannyas name containing two words – love and bliss – and that's what you really did. My name, Premananda, contains only those two words. You told me Prem means love, Ananda means bliss. How did you manage such miracles?Premananda, this is not a miracle. You must be something of an esoteric – that is a condemned word here. Get rid of your esoteric-ness. It is just a coincidence, nothing much in it…A man dropped into a corner bar and ordered a triple martini. “What a coincidence!” announced the bartender. “Just an hour or two ago I was saying that nobody ever orders a triple martini anymore.”As he was churning up the drink, a nice-looking young woman dashed up to the bar and asked for a triple martini. The bartender and the gentleman customer looked at each other in amazement. They could scarcely wait before beginning their explanation that these happenings really constituted a coincidence and that they had just that minute been discussing it.“Well,” said the young lady, “I am celebrating a very special event. My husband and I have been married for nine years and we have wanted children very badly. Just today I have learned that I am pregnant.”Then the man spoke up, explaining that he also was celebrating a very special event. “I have been breeding fancy chickens for years, trying to produce a blue-eyed hen, and just today I have learned that I have been successful.”“How do you account for your success?” asked the young lady.He replied most casually, “Just changed cocks.”“Well,” said the young woman, “that really makes it a coincidence!”The last question:Osho,An Indian author has written, “Osho need not be crucified nor glorified, only ignored.” She seems to have taken this hint from your repeated statements that your critics do the work of propagating your vision.Osho, what you speak is truth and nothing else but truth. Truth is glorified by those who are able to understand it, or crucified by fools, but can it ever be ignored?These are the three steps. The first step is to ignore the truth. If that does not succeed, the second step is to crucify it. If even that does not succeed, then the third step is to glorify it.Jesus was ignored first as just a crazy young man, but they could not ignore him for long because truth cannot be ignored.You are right – truth cannot be ignored. You can try, but you are bound to fail. Truth is very persistent; truth goes on shattering your lies. How can you ignore it? It goes on pulling the very earth from underneath your feet. How can you ignore it? It goes on sabotaging your very world: your society, your church, your state, all your consolations, securities, safeties – truth goes on cutting them. Truth is a sword and it cuts things mercilessly. You cannot ignore it for long. Yes, in the beginning you can try.When you can no longer ignore it, then comes the second step – crucify it. But the moment you crucify truth you have accepted defeat. You have accepted that “It cannot be ignored so we have to remove it, we have to destroy it, and we have to kill it.” But truth cannot be killed either; if you kill it, it resurrects.That’s the whole meaning in the story of Jesus’ resurrection: it is not historical, it is not saying anything about Jesus the person, it is simply talking about the truth that was contained in Jesus. Jesus is only a container, a vehicle. Jesus was crucified – and there is no resurrection of the body, the body dies. The body is part of matter, it cannot resurrect. But truth cannot be killed, truth is eternal. In fact, the day they crucified Jesus, they accepted their defeat.And whenever you crucify truth, later on you start feeling that you have done something wrong, something utterly wrong. You start feeling guilty – hence Christianity. Then glorification comes in, then you have to compensate. It is the law of simple compensation: you have crucified Jesus, now you feel guilty that you have done something utterly wrong. You have crucified an innocent man for no reason at all. His only crime was that he was telling the truth, his only crime was that he was trying to help you toward the truth – and it is not a crime.But people realize things only very slowly. They are lazy in recognizing, very lousy in seeing things. They are always late, they always miss the train. When the train has left the platform they come running, but then the platform is empty, the train has left. And they know they could have come a little earlier, they know that it is their responsibility, that they did not recognize – on the contrary, they destroyed. Now they feel guilty and out of guilt they glorify.You are absolutely right about one thing – truth cannot be ignored – but about its glorification you are not right.You say, “Truth is glorified by those who are able to understand it.” No. Truth is glorified by the same people who first ignore it, then crucify it, then glorify it. The Christians and the people who crucified Jesus are not different people, remember. They are the same people, exactly the same people – reincarnations of the same fools. First they crucified, now they are glorifying – they are compensating. Of course, the same people will compensate – why should anybody else compensate?I don’t glorify Jesus. I never ignored him in the first place; I never crucified him in the second place – why should I glorify him? I love him. Glorification is not love, it is compensation. It is just trying to cover up your guilt.The people who understand love, they don’t glorify. My sannyasins don’t glorify me, they love me. They love me totally, but there is no glorification. Love knows nothing of glorification; it is hate that glorifies. It is a little difficult to understand because ordinarily we think the people who are glorifying Mahavira are the lovers of Mahavira, and the people who are glorifying Buddha are the lovers of Buddha. That is not so. These are the same people who first tried to ignore, then tried to kill, and now they are glorifying.The people who understood, loved at the first sight. When you see the truth, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, if you have a heart to feel, you immediately fall in love. It is instant. There is no way of going back. And love is not a glorification. Love is a meeting, a merger, a melting. The disciple becomes one with the master, attuned, in a deep accord. His heart beats in the same rhythm, he breathes in the same rhythm. He forgets who is the master and who is the disciple. The oneness becomes so absolute, how can he glorify? There is no separation. For glorification you have to be separate.You say, “Truth is glorified by those who are able to understand it…” No. Those who are able to understand it simply love it. And you say, “It is crucified by fools…” That too is not true. It is crucified by learned people, not by fools. It is crucified by the rabbis, by the pundits, by the ayatollahs, by the imams, by the shankaracharyas; it is not crucified by the fools. In fact, the fool is simple, he cannot crucify. The fool is childlike, he is not so cunning – and the fool is not afraid of the truth – why should he crucify? It is the learned person whose learning is at stake, whose scholarship is at risk, whose priesthood is in danger.Truth is crucified by the knowledgeable, not by the fools. The fools know that they know not, so how they can say what is right and what is wrong? The fool has more potential to understand Jesus than the rabbi.In fact, you can see it: the twelve apostles of Jesus are all fools in a way – simple people, uneducated, fishermen, woodcutters, farmers, gardeners, simple people. Not a single rabbi. And the people who crucified are all rabbis; the people who crucified are the priests. The highest priest of the temple of the Jews was the cause of crucifixion. The Roman governor-general, Pontius Pilate, was a learned man, very scholarly, well educated. Pontius Pilate and the high priest of the great temple of Jerusalem, these two persons conspired to crucify Jesus. His followers were simple people, very simple people. You can call them fools, they were so innocent.Truth is loved by those who understand; truth is crucified by those whose vested interests are in difficulty. There are many people who are living on lies. They exploit, they thrive on comfortable lies; they manufacture more and more comfortable lies for people. They supply whatsoever people demand. They are the persons who crucify, and surprisingly, they are the same people – the same rabbis and the same governor-generals – who will finally become the people to worship, to glorify.It is a strange coincidence that Jesus was killed by a Roman governor, and finally Rome became his citadel, the Vatican became the capital of the Catholic Church. The Romans, the Italians, became the most deeply Catholic – and they were the cause: their forefathers had crucified. It is strange that Rome should become the citadel of Christianity.And Jews, who had conspired in the crucifixion, they turned into Christians – who else? In the beginning it was the Jews who turned into Christians, then the Romans, and then the disease started spreading; then it became contagious.Truth cannot be ignored, about that you are absolutely true. And this woman writer who says, “Osho need not be crucified nor glorified, only ignored,” is simply saying, “Start the process.” But it is a strange way of ignoring me – by writing an article. This is real ignorance, authentic ignorance – by writing an article. The article has not yet appeared; I have only seen the advertisement. The article is going to appear in March. These are words from the advertisement.And the advertisement also says that the article will be well illustrated with colored pictures. Great way of ignoring me! Go on ignoring me this way as much as you can – you are on the right track. Crucifixion will come later on, but first – illustration, colored pictures! I love the idea – a good beginning. And finally it will end, remember, in glorification, and I will not be responsible for it.If you understand me there is no need to glorify, but then you have to stop the process from the very beginning, you have to destroy the seed. Don’t ignore me, otherwise glorification is bound to happen. It is a logical consequence, it is inevitable.The woman comes here often. She not only comes, she brings many people – really ignoring me! She is a famous journalist, so she not only brings journalists, she brings very important people, visitors from all over the world. She lives in Mumbai and she is a well-known journalist, so she comes into contact with Western novelists, poets, musicians, other creative people, and she brings them here. This is good.And she writes also – she has written a few other articles. I say, “With my blessings go on, go on ignoring me!” Of course she must be thinking that she is doing a great job. People have their own understanding…An old farmer asked a lawyer to help him get a divorce.“Do you have grounds?” asked the lawyer.“Sure do, son. I got me five acres up in them hills.”“Does she beat you up?” asked the lawyer.“Sure does. She gets up at five and I get up at six.”The lawyer persisted, “Is she a nagger?”“Of course not, son. She is a little old white woman.”This is what goes on between Jesus Christ and the people who ignore him and crucify him and glorify him, and this is what is going on between me and the people who want to ignore me, and will crucify me, and will glorify me.A Chinese laundryman in Santa Barbara opened a savings account in one of the city’s leading banks and went faithfully every week to deposit his profits.After some months he had accumulated a very substantial amount so he decided to close the account. He arrived at the bank teller’s window and announced that he wanted to withdraw all his money.The young teller was taken by surprise so he asked him if something had gone wrong. The Chinaman explained very carefully that he was going to get married and go on his honeymoon.Then the teller said, “Just take what you need for your immediate requirements.”When the man insisted on closing the account, the teller summoned the manager who tried to influence the man into changing his mind. He explained to him two or three times that if he took out all his money he would lose the interest. But the laundryman was not to be talked out of his plan and he finally walked out of the bank with all he had on deposit.A few weeks later the bank manager chanced upon the laundryman in the street. After a most casual greeting the manager asked about the honeymoon and the married life.The fellow had only this to say: “No good. Honeymoon and married life just like banking: put in, take out, lose interest!”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 08 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What made a loving disciple like Peter, who started from innocence, turn into the cunning first pope and become the founder of Christianity?Is it possible to lose one's innocence once the love relationship with the master is established?There are many things to be understood. The first is, the love between the master and the disciple is not a relationship. In a relationship the two remain two; in a relationship the egos are not dissolved. A relationship is simply a relationship between two egos. The love between the master and the disciple is a non-relationship in that sense because there are no egos involved in it, there is nobody to relate.The master is already a zero, a nothingness, a tremendous emptiness, pure space. The disciple, slowly, slowly coming closer to this nothingness, starts disappearing, evaporating. A moment comes when these two spaces are not two anymore. They have lost their boundaries, just like a dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf into the lake. Will you call it a relationship between the dewdrop and the lake? It cannot be called a relationship because the dewdrop has become the lake; the lake has become the dewdrop.One of the great mystics, Kabir, says, “Herat herat hey sakhi, rahya kabir herai. I was searching and searching and searching, and a miracle happened: the searcher disappeared. And that was the moment when there was no seeker, no searcher – that it was found.”It is a far more profound and pregnant statement than Jesus’ statement, “Seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given unto you, knock and the doors shall be thrown open to you.” That is very primary.Kabir’s statement is, “I was seeking and seeking, but because I was there as a seeker I was not finding it. I was the problem – not that it was far away, not that it was arduous, it was just in front of me. It was all around, it was everywhere, there was no need to seek and search. My eyes were closed by my ego – the seeker itself was the hindrance – that’s why I was not finding it. But a moment came when the seeker evaporated and it was there, in all its beauty and benediction.”There is another beautiful story about a strange mystic woman, Rabiya al-Adabiya.Rabiya used to pass through the marketplace every day just to purchase some vegetables, some fruits for herself. Just in the middle of the marketplace was the mosque. She never went in, she never used to visit the mosque; she never participated in any kind of religious ritual. But she always saw a man, who later on became a great friend and disciple of Rabiya – his name was Hassan – praying in front of the mosque every day. A very heartfelt prayer, tears rolling down from his eyes, hands raised toward the sky – and he was calling, just like a lost small child for his mother. He was always saying only one thing, “Open thy doors! How long are you not going to take any note of me? I am crying, I am calling! I am dying without you. I cannot live without you. Open thy doors!” Perhaps he was following Jesus’ advice: “Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you.”Again and again Rabiya heard this man Hassan crying, weeping, shouting. One day, she came up behind him and hit him on the head. Perhaps Hassan thought that God had come, but what kind of coming? From behind and hitting him on the head? He looked, and this strange woman was there. And he knew about this strange woman – everybody was aware of her strange ways.She shouted at Hassan and said, “Stop all this nonsense! The doors are always open. But you are a fool. You don’t look at the open doors; you simply go on calling, ‘Open the doors!’ How can he open them when the doors are already open? Just look!”And it was a transformation. For a moment Hassan was shocked. Sometimes a shock can become an opening because when you are shocked your thinking stops. For a moment he forgot all about his prayer, all his searching. For a moment he was at a loss what to say.At that very moment Rabiya laughed and said, “Do you see? It is already open! There is no need to cry and call for God to open it. He has never closed it.”Since then Hassan was not seen at the mosque door. Since then he disappeared in the communion of Rabiya. Finally he became a great mystic, a realized soul, a buddha himself.Lao Tzu also says, “Seek and ye shall never find it; do not seek and right now you have found it.” Seeking implies the seeker, and the seeker is the ego, and the ego is the only barrier; the ego can never become the bridge.Hence I say to you, the love that exists between a master and a disciple is not a relationship, it is dissolution of all relationships. It is a totally different phenomenon. It is not part of the world of your so-called relationships: husband and wife, mother and child, brother and sister. You cannot reduce it to any definition, any defined relationship.It is a very diffused phenomenon: it is like two candles burning in a room, their light will become one. You will not be able to draw a line, you will not be able to separate the two lights, you will not be able to say which light belongs to which candle. And in the love of a master and the disciple there are not even two candles either – the light is there, each light penetrating the other. There are no candles either; it is simply an orgasmic merging of two lights.Hence, the first thing to be remembered – it is not a relationship, so how can it be established? That word established is ugly. Anything established becomes dead; anything established means now there is no opening, no growth possible; things have settled.With a true master, things are never settled. There is always a beautiful chaos. The moment the disciple wants to settle, the master immediately unsettles. The master is always on the move – the new commune! And remember, even in the new commune I will go on talking about another new commune – it is not going to stop. We are not going to stop anywhere. So don’t think for even a single moment that once the new commune is established you will be relieved, you will take a deep sigh of relief, “Finally it has happened!” No! With a real master anything final is not possible, nothing happens finally. It is always happening, it goes on happening. It is a constant process. It is not an event, it is a process; it is a movement, so nothing is ever established.The disciple would like it; hence the question. The desire of the disciple is to come to a settlement, to an established relationship, as soon as possible – but the master cannot allow it. The moment things are settled you are dead, and the communion that transpires between the master and the disciple is always a growth. But our minds work in a totally different way, and what transpires between the disciple and the master is not a mind phenomenon; it is a no-mind phenomenon. The mind always wants establishment.When Werner Erhard first started his EST, it was E.S.T. – Erhard Seminars Training – that was its name. Soon he found that est has a beautiful meaning; it is a root word, it means is, isness, existence. So he dropped E.S.T. and made it EST. Now I would suggest to him to drop that meaning also. Now it is simply the short form for establishment. It has nothing to do with existence but with establishment.He has been here. When he comes for the second round I am going to tell him, “Now make it clear that it is just a short form of establishment. Now it is no longer in any way rebellious – it is functioning in the service of the establishment.” Hence the way the EST training happens in California is totally different from the way it happens in Mumbai and Delhi. In Mumbai it happens according to Indian culture, Indian religion, Indian values. If it was to happen exactly like it happens in California, the Hindus would be outraged. This is a compromise.Any revolutionary cannot be prepared for any compromise whatsoever, whatsoever the consequences. Compromising with each society, with each pattern, simply means you are now more interested in business, less interested in revolution. That is the way of the mind: the mind always hankers for establishment.The mysterious experience that happens between the master and the disciple is never a mind phenomenon; hence there is no possibility of its ever becoming established. The master won’t allow it. If the master allows it, the master is not a master at all; he is only a teacher of a certain tradition – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish – but he is not a master.A master belongs to no tradition. A master is basically a rebel. A master is non-compromising. A master is ready to be crucified rather than to be crowned. He will not compromise on any grounds. The teacher simply functions as an agent of the past, and because he functions for the establishment you can have an established relationship with a teacher. With a rabbi, with a priest, with an imam you can have an established relationship, but never with a master.The master is always pushing you into the unknown; he never leaves you for a single moment to settle in the known. The known has to be constantly renounced for the unknown. And finally, when you have become courageous enough to move from the known to the unknown without the master’s push, on your own accord; then he pushes you from the unknown to the unknowable.These are the two steps of this eternal pilgrimage – from the known to the unknown, and from the unknown to the unknowable. The moment you take the plunge into the unknowable, you disappear. Then only godliness is. The master is no longer found, the disciple is no longer found, but godliness – just a fragrance, a fragrance which is of the beyond.You ask, “What made a loving disciple like Peter, who started from innocence, turn into the cunning first pope and become the founder of Christianity?” Now a second thing has to be understood. That is: ignorance and innocence look very similar. And something also overlaps between them, something of a common ground also. The ignorant one has a certain innocence; he is not as cunning as the knowledgeable.Knowledge is basically cunning. It is an effort to steal the secrets of existence, it is detective work. You are spying on existence; you are trying to find out how to control existence. Knowledge is power in that sense because it makes you capable of knowing certain secrets, and the moment you know the secret you become powerful. Knowledge is basically a power trip. Lord Bacon is right when he says, “Knowledge is power” – the very search is for power.Hence the ignorant is more innocent than the knowledgeable, but his innocence is going to be lost, it is bound to be lost. It is inevitable that it will be lost because it is unearned. The ignorant person and his innocence are not equivalent to the innocence of a buddha. Each child is born ignorant and innocent, but each child will have to become corrupted, and the greatest corruption happens through knowledge.Just the other day I was reading an article against me. The writer seems to be a historian and he says, “Osho’s knowledge of history is zero.” That’s absolutely true! Not only is my knowledge of history zero; as far as knowledge is concerned – it may be history, geography, chemistry, physics, and there are at least three hundred and fifty subjects – I am zero about all of them.Zero is my only possession, my only treasure because to me to be zero is of the uttermost innocence. But it has to be earned. Who cares about your history and all that rubbish? I don’t have any time for all that rubbish. I can make history, why should I know history? For what? I am making history. There are only two types of people: those who make history and those who read history.I am certainly absolutely ignorant about history. I am ignorant about all directions of knowledge, all dimensions of knowledge. I know only one thing: I am acquainted with my innermost core, but that is not knowledge; that is knowing, that is wisdom, that is buddhahood.Each child is born ignorant, and of course his ignorance has a certain quality of innocence, but that is natural. He will lose it. He will become interested in a thousand and one things – history and geography and chemistry and physics and mathematics and whatnot. He will become interested. His ignorance also has great curiosity; that curiosity will lead him toward knowledge. He would like to know.You can see. Each child asks thousands of questions, he goes on asking; you cannot stop his asking. He is very curious, he wants to know because somewhere deep down that longing to be powerful is hidden. He can see his father is powerful because he knows more; the teacher is powerful because he knows more – the people who know more are powerful; the priest is powerful because he knows more. If he wants to be powerful someday he has to accumulate knowledge.Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; and knowledge gives you great power. The more knowledgeable you become the more power you have. And the child is interested in becoming powerful. He will create power through knowledge, he will create his ego through power – these are natural phenomena – and he will lose his innocence which was part of his ignorance.There is a totally different kind of innocence which happens only to the awakened ones. Certainly their innocence also has something of ignorance in it. Dionysius calls it “luminous ignorance,” and he is right. You can see it: a knowledgeable person has no luminosity in him. He has gathered many facts, much information; he is well informed, but all that information gathers like dust on him, he is loaded with it. He is a donkey carrying scriptures, great scriptures – the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, the Gita, the Vedas – but a donkey is a donkey. He can carry beautiful scriptures, but deep down he remains the same.Knowledge never dispels ignorance, it only covers it up. It gives you a facade, it gives you a mask, it gives you pretensions – knowledgeable people are very pretentious – it makes you hypocrites. But if you dig deep there is ignorance, the same old ignorance, and that ignorance goes on goading you to accumulate more knowledge, more knowledge, more knowledge. There is no end to it – more – because deep down you know there is still ignorance; in fact, it is uncoverable. You can cover it from one side and the other side will remain uncovered, you cover it from that side and you will discover another territory which is still uncovered. Ignorance is as infinite as wisdom, and knowledge is finite. So the finite cannot cover the infinite, only the infinite can dispel the infinite.You can paint the outside. It will be just like a whitewashed grave – you can put roses on the grave, you can burn candles and incense on the grave, but that does not make the person alive. The dead person inside the grave is still dead. The whitewash on the grave does not help in any way. All knowledge is just a whitewash, ignorance remains intact.When somebody goes deep into meditation, when somebody moves deeper toward his innermost core, when somebody becomes absolutely silent and aware, then a light explodes inside. It is just like an atomic explosion – not destructive – great creativity is born out of it, great life. Abundant life is born out of it, and then your ignorance becomes luminous.And when ignorance is luminous, when darkness is luminous, darkness is not there at all. How can darkness be luminous? And when through meditation, awareness, witnessing one’s own being, a person comes to understand, to see, to have eyes, his ignorance is dissolved but his innocence is saved. This is earned innocence.You cannot lose the earned innocence, but you are bound to lose the unearned. It is part of life’s game that everything you have from nature will be lost and you will have to reclaim it. Only when you reclaim it will it be yours, and it will be yours forever.You ask me, “What made a loving disciple like Peter, who started from innocence…?” He started from ignorance, not from innocence. Of course, a part of ignorance is innocent, but it is unearned. Peter had not earned it; he was not enlightened, he was not awakened. It is so clear.Jesus is one of the most unfortunate masters in the whole history of humanity: he could not help any of his disciples to become enlightened. It was not his fault; he was just working in adverse conditions. The Judaic tradition has known prophets, it has never known buddhas, and a buddha and a prophet are basically different. The buddha is rebellious, the prophet is also rebellious, but the prophet’s rebellion is more political than religious, than spiritual. The buddha’s rebellion is spiritual; you cannot call Buddha a prophet.Judaic tradition, and the two offshoots of Judaic tradition, Christianity and Islam, all have prophets; hence politics remained part of religion. The church was powerful in both ways, spiritually and politically. The high priest of the Jews was powerful in both ways, politically and spiritually. Mohammed, the Mohammedan prophet, fought hundreds of wars his whole life – always with a sword in his hand. You cannot conceive Buddha having a sword in his hand and fighting wars. This is something special to the Judaic tradition: the prophet. Nothing like a prophet has happened in the East. The East has a totally different dimension.The buddha is only a simple, innocent, silent, peaceful, enlightened being. He shares his being and if people are ready to share, if people are ready to become attuned with his being, they will become enlightened.Jesus was working in a very adverse condition. He came to the East; he lived in Egypt, in India, in Tibet. For eighteen years he worked in the East, particularly in Buddhist monasteries. His whole message was a synthesis between the Buddhist message and the Judaic tradition, so he was a cross between the prophet and the buddha, and that created trouble.He spoke the language of the old prophets of the Old Testament; that language was political. For example, “the kingdom of God.” Buddha has never used such an expression, Mahavira has never used such an expression, Lao Tzu has never used such an expression. It was impossible. “The kingdom of God” – it stinks of politics! Jesus had to speak the language that the Jews could understand. He was born a Jew, he lived a Jew, he died a Jew. That was the only language the Jews would have understood – and that was the only language that they misunderstood too. If he had spoken just like a buddha, he would not have been crucified because the Jews would not have bothered much. But once he started talking about the kingdom of God, and “the day of judgment is very near, close at hand,” he created much political fever – unknowingly, or unintentionally.His message was purely that of Buddha, the message consisted of awareness. He shouted again and again, “Beware!” And remember, the word beware consists of two words: be aware. He said again and again, “Remain awake!” but he had to translate it into Jewish metaphors.The people who gathered around him had gathered around him thinking that he was a prophet – Peter and others. They had not come to him thinking of him as an enlightened person. There was not even a word for the enlightened person in Aramaic or Hebrew; there is no equivalent word for a buddha in the Judaic tradition. Hence the people came to him thinking of him as one of the prophets declared by the Old Testament who would come one day to deliver them. Now, this is absolutely anti-Buddha, this whole approach.Buddha says nobody can deliver you. You have created the mess; you have to sort it out. Nobody has created it, so nobody can deliver you either. Your bondage was created by you, so only you can come out of it. Hence his last statement on earth was: “Be a light unto yourself.” This is a totally different dimension: “Be a light unto yourself.” The buddhas only show the way but you have to work upon your being; you have to work hard to discover your innermost core.But the Jewish tradition was that a prophet comes and delivers you, and they were waiting – they are still waiting. Jesus tried just to become relevant in the Jewish context of “I am the person you have been waiting for.” This is only a device; this is a pure lie – of course pure because a man like Jesus never used anything impure! This is an unadulterated lie, but he had to do it. Otherwise, in the Jewish context there was no possibility of his ever being heard by anybody. He had to say that he belonged to the family of David, that he was the one prophesied by the Old Testament, that “You have been waiting for me.”This worked in two ways. A few ignorant people gathered around him thinking, “He is the prophet and he has come to deliver us.” Peter belonged to those ignorant few. All the apostles, except one – Judas – were ignorant, uneducated people. Only Judas was a little educated, a little sophisticated; hence he was never as surrendered as the others – obviously. He could find many things wrong in Jesus’ statements; he was knowledgeable. He was trying to improve upon Jesus, he was continuously advising him, “Do this, don’t do that. This is not right, this should not be done, this would be a wrong precedent.”A woman came – Mary Magdalene came – and poured very precious oil, perfume, on Jesus’ feet. Judas said to Jesus, “Stop this woman! This perfume is so costly that we could feed the whole village for three days. And people are poor – why waste such a precious thing? We could sell it and the poor could be fed.”Now this looks very relevant and logical, rational – socialist, communist, democratic: serve the poor. But Jesus said, “The poor will always be there, don’t be worried. You can serve them later on. Right now, while the bridegroom is with you, rejoice!”Judas was not convinced. All the other eleven apostles were convinced, except Judas. Reluctantly he kept silent, but deep down there was doubt. You have to forgive Judas – if you were in his place you would have also doubted. He was the only knowledgeable person; knowledge brings doubts. All the others were ignorant, they were simply faithful.But this faithfulness was not of luminous ignorance; it was not of enlightened innocence. It was just of those people who don’t know how to argue, how to doubt, who have never used their minds – farmers, fishermen, woodcutters, carpenters – very down-to-earth, but nothing to do with the head; heartful, but as unconscious as those who live in the head.That is the reason why Peter could turn into a cunning pope, the first pope. He was ignorant but he believed, and whenever an ignorant person becomes a believer he becomes a fanatic. He cannot doubt, he cannot allow anybody else to doubt. He knows only one way and that is belief. He has not experienced: he simply believes that what Jesus says is true, has to be true because it is said by Jesus – “Jesus is the prophet we have been waiting for. He has come to deliver humanity.”One thing is certain, that humanity is not yet delivered. Two thousand years have passed, the misery is the same, and in fact it has grown far deeper. Man is more miserable than ever, more in anxiety and anguish than ever, feeling more meaningless than ever, standing just on the verge of committing global suicide. Two thousand years have passed, and Jesus was saying, “The kingdom of God is just about to happen.” He was saying, “In our lives you will see the Judgment Day,” and it has not happened yet. Two thousand years have passed.Those ignorant people believed and the knowledgeable people doubted. Remember, this is how it works: the ignorant believe and the knowledgeable doubt. Doubt and belief are not very different.When you are innocent – innocent not just like a child but innocent like a sage, innocent through meditation, innocent through a rebirth, a resurrection; innocent because you have reached your center, you are grounded there – then you neither believe nor doubt. Doubt and belief are two sides of the same coin. Doubt comes from the head, belief comes from the heart, but they are two sides of the same coin. One is rational, another is emotional, but both are bondages.The enlightened person goes beyond both the head and the heart; he reaches his being. He lives from being – he lives from that awareness which is beyond the heart and the head – beyond reason, beyond emotion. His insight is clear, unclouded. He never believes, he never doubts; he simply knows, he understands.Peter could become the first pope, could become the founder of Christianity because his innocence was not an earned innocence.The parson of a little church in Mississippi stood before his congregation and asked the head usher to come forward. Holding his nose with displeasure, he gave some instructions, saying, “Please go through the church and see if some stray dog done stole in, stooled, and then stole out again.”The usher immediately began his inspection, and after some minutes came back to the pulpit and made his report. “No sir, Mr. Parson,” he said, “I don’t see where some stray dog done stole in, stooled, and stole out again. But I does see some very positive signs where some creeping cat crept in, crapped, and crept out again.”This type of ignorant people had gathered around Jesus – they created Christianity. It is the most ignorant religion on the earth, its whole tradition is ignorant.A truck driver was trying to change a tire along the side of a busy road. He hammered away with all his might, cursing with each unrewarding blow, until the village parson who was passing that way decided to go to his aid. He finally quieted the driver and proceeded to give him a little lecture about the necessity of offering a prayer instead of curses when confronted with trouble.Finally the truck driver said that he was willing to try anything just to get the tire off the wheel, so they both kneeled beside the truck and prayed. When the driver went back to work, resuming his hammering with great force, the tire almost leaped off the wheel to the roadside.The parson, in his amazement, just shouted, “Well, I’m a son of a bitch!”You can be something just on the surface, and deep down just the opposite of it.Peter is faithful but utterly ignorant; hence the Christianity that has come into being through Peter and his successors. And now it has reached rock bottom – now a Polack pope! It cannot go further down – there is no further down. Peter has ended up with a Polack pope!The whole succession of these popes is basically ignorant – not even a single pope has been an enlightened man. Of course they are chosen by votes: it is a political phenomenon. A certain college of bishops chooses the pope. No master has ever been chosen. Who can choose a master? A master has to declare himself; he has to declare himself as the sun declares itself in the morning. The Polack pope! In India we also have Polack popes.Mahatma Gandhi always had a statue with him on his table. He loved that statue – somebody had presented it to him. It was an ancient Chinese and Japanese symbol: three monkeys. One monkey tightly closing his eyes – the way he is holding his hands and covering his eyes shows very definitively that he wants to see. The very tightness, the forced effort to keep his eyes closed: he is afraid. Just a little opportunity and he will see. The old metaphor is: don’t see anything evil.But it is a beautiful statue. It is beautiful because it was carved by Taoists, by the followers of Lao Tzu, and they have made it very clear that if you repress something, the deep desire will be to do the opposite. So both are there – the monkey is repressing his desire to see, and yet you can see on his face a tremendous desire to look at what is happening. The other monkey is closing his ears forcibly, not to hear anything evil. The third monkey is forcing his hands upon his mouth not to say anything evil.When I went to see Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram and I saw this statue, the man who was showing me around, Mahatma Gandhi’s son, Ramdas… I told him – Mahatma Gandhi was dead by that time – I told his son, “One statue is missing. Originally the Taoist statues were four.”He said, “Nobody said that, nobody ever mentioned it.”I said “Either the fourth monkey has escaped – every possibility – or Gandhi must have cut off the fourth monkey: it would not suit the Indian context. The fourth monkey was very representative of the Indian mind: he was holding his genitals tightly – repressed – brahmacharya, celibacy.”After that, when I saw Morarji Desai, I immediately recognized – this is the fourth monkey! I told him, “You are the fourth!” He thought I was talking about the turiya, the fourth state of consciousness. He was very happy. The people who had gone with me to see him could not believe it because I was always joking about him and I was telling him, “You have reached the fourth. You are the fourth.”He came to see me off outside his bungalow – he was very happy, immensely happy. The moment he left me, the people who had come with me said, “You told him, ‘You are the fourth.’” I then told them the whole story: “This is the fourth monkey! Don’t misunderstand as turiya, the fourth state of consciousness. That has nothing to do with it – this man escaped!”The fourth monkey is really significant. But if you see the fourth monkey you will see a really religious person – tightly repressing himself in every possible way. Now these four monkeys are not really four: these are four faces of one monkey – one religious monkey. Of course you don’t have eight hands, so they had to make four statues. But a religious person has to do this miracle: he has to keep his eyes closed, ears closed, his mouth closed, his genitals closed – everything closed. He has to live a dead life. This is how the Christians have lived for two thousand years – a repressed life.In the West, what is happening now is just a movement of the pendulum to the other extreme – indulgence. It is a by-product of Christianity. The people who are responsible are from Peter to the Polack pope. These are the people who have created the whole indulgence of the West. The prostitutes, the Playboys, Hollywood; everything that is ugly in the West, the real founders of it are from Peter to the Polack pope. These are the criminals responsible. It is bound to happen. If you repress something, sooner or later some intelligent generation will revolt against it. And this is a far more intelligent age in that way; man has become more mature.One Saturday morning at Cape Kennedy, a young mechanic went to the headquarters of one of the scientists to repair a radio. While he was working he spotted a whiskey bottle on a shelf. As he was alone in the room he just reached up and took a big swig out of the bottle. When he had completed his repair job he took another big drink but before he replaced the bottle he decided to see what kind of whiskey he had been so generously snitching.He examined the bottle carefully and nearly collapsed when he read “Missile Fluid” on the inscribed label. Panic-stricken, he rushed home and called his family doctor on the phone, reporting that he had just drunk missile fluid by mistake.The doctor was very puzzled by the situation, and after assuring the mechanic that he had never heard of a similar case, advised the fellow to go right to bed and to remain there, but to phone him again promptly if there were any developments.About an hour later the doctor’s phone rang and the mechanic was on the line. The doctor asked if there had been any repercussions.“Yes,” said the mechanic, “I farted twice!”“Don’t bother me with such trivial matters,” cautioned the doctor.“But, doctor,” said the mechanic, “you don’t understand, I’m calling from Shanghai!”Fools can believe anything. Now he has drunk something that he thinks is going to create trouble – the missile fluid. Of course, then two farts are enough and you will reach Shanghai!The people who had gathered around Jesus were very ordinary fools. I am sorry to say that, but what can I do? When I see a fool I have to call him a fool. Jesus was between two kinds of people: on the one side were his followers who were just fools, and on the other side were the rabbis, the knowledgeable. He was crushed between these two.Jesus has been crucified twice: once by the knowledgeable, the rabbis – and that was of a short duration. And the other crucifixion has continued for two thousand years – now the Polack pope is doing it. It will go on and on. Jesus was misunderstood by the knowledgeable; he was misunderstood by the ignorant. Both can only misunderstand.Understanding is possible only through meditation, and nothing like meditation has existed in the Judaic tradition, at least not up to the time of Jesus. Only later on, when Hasidism came into existence, meditation started entering the Judaic tradition.In the time of Mohammed nothing like meditation existed in Mohammedanism, in the Arabic world. It was only later on when the Sufis developed mystery schools that meditation entered there.Meditation is the contribution of the East to the whole world. Wherever you will find it, it has reached there in some way or other, directly or indirectly, from the East. The West has only known prayer, not meditation at all, and prayer is not transformation. It is only meditation which is the alchemy of inner transformation, which changes your darkness into light, which changes your ignorance into innocence, which changes your whole vision.The last question:Osho,To be serious is not to be alive. There is much pain in me, and a deep laughter is so helpful.To be serious is not only not to be alive, it is worse than death. Have you ever seen a dead person serious? Impossible! Seriousness is worse than death. Laughter is life, is love, is light. Laughter in its purest form is a dance of all your energies.In a real deep laughter the mind disappears. It is not a part of mind, or of the heart. When a real laughter happens – a belly laughter, as it is called – then it comes from your very core. From your very center, ripples start spreading toward your circumference. Just as you throw a rock into a silent lake and ripples arise, and they start moving toward the source, in the same way real laughter arises from your center and moves toward your circumference. It is almost like an earthquake. Each single cell of your body, each fiber, dances in tune.Laughter has never been used as a meditation. I may be the first person who is using laughter as a meditation. Jokes have never been used as part of a spiritual transformation – I may be the first person – but they can be used, they are tremendously refreshing.You say, “There is much pain in me, and a deep laughter is so helpful.”Then I will tell you a few jokes!To celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, a couple decided to go back to the hotel in the Mediterranean area where they had spent their honeymoon. They got the same room that they had occupied, and tried in every way to relive their first great matrimonial experience.At breakfast the next morning the wife had this to say: “Fifty years ago, when we had finished the wonderful wedding dinner, we came up here to prepare for bed. Being bashful and sort of nervous, you went into the bathroom and undressed. I was terribly excited, and when you came out naked I exclaimed over and over again that you looked exactly like a Greek god. Well, I hate to tell you this, but last night when you came out of the bathroom naked you looked just like a goddamned Greek!”Morarji Desai dies and goes to hell. The Devil ushers him in, and Morarji is very surprised. Instead of the eternal fires he had always expected there is only a big pool full of shit.The Devil explains, “The more evil you were on earth, the more you are covered with shit here.”And, indeed, Morarji looks around and sees many former friends and colleagues. One scene catches his eye: in a far corner there is a short, black-haired man who has a tiny mustache and whose right arm is raised to the sky in salute, and the shit only comes up to his ankles.Morarji calls to the Devil and asks, “What about this man? He was very evil on earth. Why is he only covered in shit up to his ankles?”The Devil shouts, “Adolf, when will you learn to stand on your own feet instead of always standing on the pope’s head?”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 09 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,A few months ago in the West I read a book by Lama Trungpa, entitled Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, and I got the impression that everything that could be done wrong, I was doing. Then I tried to be more alert, but by avoiding one pitfall I was constantly stepping into another, and so on.Now my question is: Would you be so kind as to speak about this subject of avoiding spiritual materialism?I am not for avoiding anything in life – not even materialism. Life has to be transformed, not avoided. If you avoid life, you will remain immature. Life is a great blessing, an opportunity to grow, a challenge; a constant challenge that helps awareness, centering, grounding. Nothing has to be avoided. That is the most ancient stupidity – man has been living under its shadow for so long that it has become almost part of his blood, his bones, his very marrow.Materialism is perfectly good in its place. If there is matter, matter has to be absorbed in a total life view. It has not to be avoided. It has to be used as a stepping-stone toward spirituality. There is no contradiction between materialism and spiritualism, although it has been said again and again for thousands of years. You have been conditioned so much – the conditioning has gone so deep that nobody ever thinks about it. It is one of the greatest calamities that has happened to humanity.Matter is the outer side of spirit; spirit is the inner side of matter. They are not separate. The outside and the inside cannot be separate, they are inseparable, they are inevitably together. Hence, a right vision, a total vision of life will be a synthesis, a synchronicity between matter and consciousness.Materialism has its own beauty, its own significance, just as spiritualism has its own beauty. But don’t make “isms” out of them. Life is one – it is spiritual and material. In fact, to use the word and between spiritual and material is not right, but language comes from the past. It would be better to make one word out of the two: spirit-matter.They are existing together in perfect harmony. In you they are existing together – your body, your mind, your soul, they are all existing in deep at-one-ment, attunement. There is a subtle rhythm. They are all part of one dance. The body is not against the soul – it is the temple of the soul.But people like Lama Trungpa go on condemning materialism. And when they condemn, they create guilt in you; you start feeling that whatsoever you are doing is wrong. And the moment you feel that whatsoever you are doing is wrong, you are trapped, you are imprisoned in a dichotomy. If you follow the so-called gurus, lamas, etcetera, you will be constantly in trouble, in conflict because you will be avoiding something which is unavoidable.If you follow the body, you will feel guilty; if you don’t follow the body, you will feel unnatural. Something in you will remain missing if you don’t follow the body. If you don’t nourish the body, if you don’t respect the body, if you don’t love the body then something in you will remain like a wound, rejected, condemned. And it is part of you. You cannot throw it away, you cannot get rid of it; it is going to be there and it is going to be heavy on you because you have a deep condemnation for it.Sooner or later the body will take revenge, the matter will take revenge. You have created an enmity, a conflict, an unnecessary struggle within yourself; you have created a deep tension. Hence, the so-called religious people live in immense tension, in immense anxiety and anguish. What is their anguish? – the shoulds and the should-nots.But Lama Trungpa is not even living according to his own ideology. So you need not be worried. He is one of the people who can be called absolute hypocrites. He condemns materialism, and is a drunkard. Perhaps he thinks alcohol is spirit, is spiritualism. The more you take of it the better!These fools influence many people because there is a long tradition supporting them. Don’t be a hypocrite. Both are ugly – to feel guilty is bad, it is a state of sickness. But these are the only alternatives your religions leave for you: either feel guilty or be a hypocrite. The cunning ones among you will become hypocrites, and the simple, the innocent ones among you will become guilty. The hypocrites will dominate the simple-hearted; the hypocrites become the priests, the leaders of people. They say one thing and they do exactly the opposite. They have masks, they are hiding behind their masks – they have a double life.But they are cunning. They are simply befooling you, so there is no problem for them. Their only problem is that they should not be caught. If they are caught, then they are in difficulties. So it is only a question of how cunning they are – the more cunning they are, the safer.But many of them are bound to be caught, sooner or later. You can deceive a few people for a few days, but you cannot deceive all the people forever. How can you deceive? Somebody is bound to know. Somebody is bound to be aware of your dichotomy, aware of your double standards; that you use a different standard for other people, and a totally different standard for yourself.You have two doors to your being – the front door is just a facade to receive the innocent ones and to make them feel guilty. And you have a back door too, where you receive totally different people. But those people you receive from the back door are bound to be aware of your duality, of your deceptiveness, of your cunningness.So the only fear that the priests and the hypocrites and the mahatmas feel is that they may be caught. And they are caught. But the stupidity is such, the unconsciousness of humanity is such, that again and again they are caught, and again and again we go on listening to the same kind of stupidities.It is time enough that we should get rid of this whole division between matter and spirit. They are not divided anywhere. They are not divided in you – your body and your soul are functioning totally together in deep synchronicity. You can experience it: if your body is sick, your innermost core also becomes sad, and if your innermost core is joyous, your body also wants to dance.I am not for any escapist attitude; I am not for any split in you. I want you to be one, I want you to be integrated. I want you to be totally natural, accepting, affirming. I teach you a materialist-spiritualist approach to life. It has never been done before – that’s why I am so condemned. I accept it. I don’t feel any trouble with it because it is natural.There have been materialists in the past: Epicurus in Greece, Charvakas in the East – they believed in materialism. They said: “All spiritualism is hocus-pocus, it is an invention of the crafty priests. It is just to exploit people. And man is nothing but body, there is no soul. So there is no question of knowing thyself, you are just matter.”That’s what Karl Marx said again in the modern context: “Consciousness is only a by-product, an epiphenomenon – just some matter, some chemicals joined together, created. Once they are no longer together it disappears, it evaporates. Nothing remains after death; there was nothing before birth. Life consists only of birth and death, and in between; so don’t be bothered about the other world, and don’t be bothered about hell and heaven.”And Karl Marx said, “This is the opium of the people.” Priests have been dope dealers. Perhaps that’s why they are against all kinds of dope – they have their own specific dope to sell. They have to be against LSD, marijuana, hashish. They have to be against all other drugs because if people are taking opium, hashish, marijuana, LSD, who are going to be the Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans? It is a simple question of competition. They had to push their own drugs on the market.Epicurus, Charvakas, Karl Marx, have a certain truth in what they are saying, but it is a half-truth. The other half has been told by the so-called spiritualists. The other half is that matter is illusory, that it does not exist at all, it is maya; the real existence is of the soul – matter has to be avoided.What Lama Trungpa is saying is an ancient, very ancient and rotten ideology. He’s a Tibetan, and Tibet is the most primitive country in the world, the most rotten – even more rotten than India. If India is two thousand years rotten, Tibet is five thousand years rotten. It is stinking. He represents that stinking tradition.These so-called spiritualists have been saying the same thing as the materialists. The materialists say, “The soul does not exist, only matter exists.” The spiritualists say, “Matter does not exist, only the soul exists.” My own observation is that both are right in part, and both are wrong in part. And remember one very fundamental truth: half-truths are far more dangerous than lies because half-truths have a certain truthfulness about them that becomes deceptive, that keeps people deluded.A lie is a lie – sooner or later you will discover, but a half-truth is very dangerous. You may not go to such depths to discover that it is only half, that the other half is missing.The West has followed one half – the materialist approach to life. It has created great science and technology. Science and technology is enough proof that matter exists, that the shankaracharya is utterly wrong in saying that matter is illusory. The West has proved finally that matter is there, a reality, and that it has to be understood otherwise we cannot survive. But it is only half of the truth. Even Albert Einstein realized before dying that it is only half of the truth. He knew so much about the universe but he knew nothing about himself. The knower knows nothing about himself. This is a very sad state of affairs.The East has done the other half. They have proved, certainly they have proved, that the soul is a reality because thousands of mystics have lived in such profound silence, peace, bliss. Their blissfulness, their silence, their tranquility, their unaffectedness in different situations… In life, in death, in success, in failure, they remain absolutely still, unaffected. That shows definitively that there is a center inside you – your interiority – and if it is explored you can attain some transcendence, you can attain the beyond. You can remain calm and quiet in failure, even in death. It is enough proof that the soul exists, that it is not illusory, as the materialists say.But the other part is missing, and the East has remained poor, starving. Its outside is ugly. It has found some inner secrets, but its outside is sick, its outside is almost not worth living. It has committed suicide on the outside, just as the West has committed suicide on the inside.The West has enough technology, enough science, enough affluence, enough money, but something of the inner is missing. There is no peace, no silence, no joy, no bliss, no meditativeness, no experience of godliness. It is time we should see that up to now humanity has lived dividedly.A new human being is needed on the earth: a new human being who accepts both, who is scientific and mystic; who is all for matter and all for the spirit. Only then will we be able to create a humanity which is rich on both sides. If it is possible to be rich on both sides, why choose poverty in any way – the outer poverty or the inner poverty?I teach you richness: richness of the body, richness of the soul, richness of this world and that world. Both are possible, there is no problem at all. What I am saying I am living, and I don’t see there is any conflict. I can be as meditative in my Rolls Royce – in fact, more meditative – than in a bullock cart! I have been in a bullock cart, I have been on a camel. I have used all kinds of vehicles – and to be meditative on a camel is really difficult. Camels don’t like meditation at all, they are very non-meditative animals – and in a bullock cart on an Indian road…I don’t see any point in dividing the outer and the inner. I have been poor, I have lived in utter poverty, I have lived in richness. And believe me, richness is far better than poverty. I am a man of very simple interests – I am utterly satisfied with the best of anything, I don’t ask for more!Don’t be unnecessarily tortured by these people like Lama Trungpa.Abe cornered Rabbi Levin behind a bunker at the fourteenth green. “I caught you kissing my wife last night,” said Abe. “I know you are the playboy of the country club, and it is about time somebody taught you a lesson. That kiss will cost you ten dollars.”“Ah, all right,” said Rabbi Levin. “Here is a hundred.”“A hundred dollars?” exclaimed Abe.“Sure,” smiled Rabbi Levin. “The rest is for what you did not catch me doing!”“Come over for a couple of beers, Rabbi Levin?”“Cannot today. MacDowell is playing in the club tournament.”Next week: “Come over for a few beers, Rabbi?”“Can’t make it this week either. MacDowell won at the club and is playing in the All-Island.”The following week: “How about some beers today, Rabbi?”“No good. MacDowell has moved up to the State open.”“Hey Rabbi, your game used to be soccer. How come this sudden interest in golf, always watching MacDowell?”“I don’t watch MacDowell. Whenever he plays, I screw his wife!”Beware of all these lamas and rabbis and Ayatollah Khomeiniacs – beware! These are the people who have caused so much misery for humanity that it is incalculable. Either they have created cunningness or they have created guilt, and both are ill states. One should neither be cunning nor guilty. In fact, both are related to each other, they have a deep connection.The people who create guilt are bound to be cunning. They are cunning, that’s why they create guilt. Once they have created guilt in you, you can be exploited, you are vulnerable. It is to exploit you that they create guilt. We have to put a full stop to all this nonsense. Enough is enough.Be simple, be natural, be spontaneous. Follow your own light. Don’t be bothered by others – shoulds and should-nots. That’s the freedom a sannyasin has to live.My sannyasins have not to be cunning, and they have not to be guilty either. The moment you are free of guilt and cunningness, you have the door of the divine open for you. You are welcomed by existence itself. To me that is true religiousness.The second question:Osho,I wonder if I am falling asleep more and more?It is impossible here to fall asleep more and more. In fact, when you come here you are already as asleep as you can be – you come here snoring. You cannot fall asleep more than that; there is a limit to everything.Talbot was teeing off at the golf club. As he swung he did something funny with his left thumb, and the drive went slicing off into the trees and out onto a nearby freeway. The ball smashed through the windshield of a bus, blinding the driver. The bus struck a truck filled with chickens, causing both vehicles to tumble into a deep ditch.Talbot rushed to the scene and soon a state policeman arrived. “Hey,” he exclaimed. “Can you tell me what happened?”“Well,” replied the golfer, “I think I did something funny – like this – with my left thumb.”That, he thinks, is the cause of the whole thing that has happened: he did something funny with his left thumb. It is not the cause. It may have triggered a process in many sleepy people moving around. And why did he do that funny something with his left thumb? He himself could not explain it – he would shrug his shoulders, he would say, “I don’t know.”You are not aware at all of what you are doing. You are simply living some unconscious instincts…The big-mouthed frog went to a photographer to have his photo taken. The photographer put the frog on a stool and adjusted his camera. Then he discovered that the frog’s mouth was too wide for the camera frame. The photographer suggested that the frog should go home, purse his lips, and repeat the word pussy for several days in order to make his gaping mouth narrower.A week later the frog returned. The photographer adjusted his camera and then shouted, “Now say the word!”Losing all control, the frog cried, “Cat!”It is not very different with a man either…In a county courthouse in upper Vermont, a youth went on trial charged with raping the daughter of one of the local families. The victim, who was being questioned in the witness chair, was very shy, and the judge was trying very hard to be patient with her as he asked the necessary questions. Most of the time she just hung her head in embarrassment and refused to reply.At last, the judge, obviously losing patience with her, said, “You must tell the court exactly what happened. Did he insert his organ into you?”Finally she raised her head and rather timidly whispered, “Well, your honor, it looked more like a flute.”You are not falling more asleep. What is really happening is just the opposite: you are becoming aware of your sleepiness, you are becoming aware how deeply asleep you are. That is something of immense importance – becoming aware of one’s own sleepiness, of one’s own unconsciousness. This is the beginning of the day, the dawn; then the night is already over.The moment you start becoming aware how asleep you are, something new has happened, something in you has already become awakened. The one who is aware of sleepiness is not asleep. That part in you – of course it is yet a very small part, a very small fragment of you – but that’s enough. That will function like a catalytic agent; it will transform many more things in you. It will go on widening, it will go on becoming bigger and bigger.It is like a seed: it contains buddhahood in it.Of course, when you see a seed you cannot see the flowers which are hidden in it. But the seed contains the whole potential – the tree, the branches, the leaves, the foliage, the flowers, the fruits. A single seed can make the whole earth green. Or why say the whole earth? It can make the whole universe green because a single seed can create millions of seeds, and then each single seed can go on creating millions of seeds.The first seed has happened in you. Rejoice! You are not falling asleep; you are becoming aware of your sleepiness. You were not aware before – and of course, when one becomes aware, it hurts. When one becomes aware of how unconscious one is, one has always been, one feels very sad, one feels in great turmoil. One cannot believe, “This is the way I have existed up to now!” One feels absurd, ridiculous.But you are looking at the wrong side, at the negative side. You are simply looking at the sleepiness that has surrounded you up to now. You are not looking at the small candle of light that has started growing in you, which is becoming aware of the surrounding night, of the darkness all around. That small flame will function as a seed. Help it to grow. Become more aware of your sleepiness. That’s the only way to go beyond it. That is the only way to disperse it; that is the only way to transform it.The day is not far away, the night is over. The day has to come. And it is the moment of transmission, the moment of transformation. If you look back, it is all night – and of course, you can only look back because that is what your mind contains, your past memories. You cannot look ahead, you cannot understand what is going to happen the next moment, but I can see it. That’s the function of the master: to help the disciple to remain aware not only of the past, but of the future possibility.The disciple can only see the past; the master can also see the future. The disciple can see only one’s stupidity; the master can also see your buddhahood, your “awakenedness.” It is a moment of transformation, a transitory period, a bridge. Don’t look back. Forget the whole night, and the darkness, and the sleepiness. You are finished with it – finished in a way that the first ray of light has come in. It is because of that ray of light that you are becoming aware of your sleep, of your darkness. Now help – pour all your energy into that ray of light. Make it as powerful as possible. Concentratedly become one with it. Get rooted in it. Risk everything for its growth. And then the day is not far away – it is very close by, it is just round the corner.The third question:Osho,What is the difference between a sannyasin and a virgin?A sannyasin stays a sannyasin.The fourth question:Osho,What is the difference between pleasure and bliss?The difference is immense. It is not only of quantity and degree: it is a qualitative difference.Pleasure is dependent on something outside you. Because it is dependent on something or on somebody, it brings bondage. Bliss is your intrinsic nature, your flowering, your one-thousand-petaled lotus opening; it is your own fragrance. Because it is your own, it brings freedom.Pleasure always imprisons you, and bliss always liberates you.A young girl arrived home about four o’clock in the morning and awakened her mother to tell her this sad story:“I met a charming young fellow in a bar, and after a few rounds of drinks he took me to his apartment where we had some more drinks. Finally I passed out cold. Then while I was completely unconscious he raped me!”“What a pity,” murmured the mother in a most consoling tone. “You missed the best part!”As the family was gathering for the evening meal, the father, the head of the house, asked his eighteen-year-old son what kind of a day he had had.“Wonderful,” answered the youth. “I met a couple of very good-looking girls in the park, and made love to both of them, very satisfactorily.”Then the youth asked his father if he had had a good day.“My day was fine also,” came the reply. “I turned a couple of good deals in the stock market and I am very pleased with the results.”Then they both turned to grandpa and asked him how he had passed the day.Grandpa, beaming with delight, announced, “My day was absolutely tremendous – my bowels moved twice!”Pleasure – it depends… Bliss is independent.A child may have pleasure with toys, a young man may have different toys, an old man still different toys. But bliss is the same whether a child attains it, or a young man or an old man. It is our eternity. Pleasure is momentary, temporal: bliss is eternal, timeless. Bliss is part of our immortal being.I am not against pleasure. There is nothing wrong for a child to have pleasure with toys, and there is nothing wrong for an old man to have tremendous pleasure when his bowels move twice. Perfectly good! But if your life consists only of toys and bowel movements, then it is not much of a life. Something more is needed and that something more cannot be found on the outside. You have to dig within. That’s what meditation is all about.The fifth question:Osho,Can silence be heard and understood?Only silence can be heard and understood. Words can be heard, but only superficially – and can be understood, but only intellectually. Silence is heard existentially and is understood from your innermost being. It is a total understanding.I can see why you have asked the question because ordinarily we understand only words. We are prepared to understand only words, not silence. We are educated to understand language and all its complexities. Nobody helps us to go beyond language, to go beyond words, to reach the wordless space within us.The society is against it because if you can hear silence you will not be part of the crowd mind, of the collective mind – you will become an individual immediately. And an individual is a danger to the state, to the church, to the society. An individual is always dangerous because an individual is nothing but rebellion. His very presence is a risk for all the vested interests, for the establishment. The establishment wants you to be obedient: it wants you to understand orders. The establishment wants you to be slaves, servants – efficient, of course, but not too intelligent; just intellectual, not intelligent.Silence is the explosion of intelligence. Silence means: inside you, you are just spaciousness, uncluttered spaciousness. Silence means you have put aside the whole furniture of the mind – the thoughts, the desires, the memories, the fantasies, the dreams – you have pushed all aside. You are just looking into existence directly, immediately. You are in contact with existence without anything in between you and existence. That is silence.To be in tune with existence even for a single moment is enough to make you aware of many things. One is that you are deathless, and the person who is deathless cannot be forced to be a slave. He would rather like to die than to become a slave. He would rather like to risk everything than to risk his freedom because death means nothing to him.When Socrates was given the opportunity that he could choose either death or to remain alive but not to preach his message to the people… If he remained alive, he could remain alive only on one condition: that he would not talk about his truth. Socrates laughed and rejected the whole thing immediately. He said, “There is no need for me to be alive then. If I cannot say my truth, if I cannot live my truth, if I cannot convey my message, what is the need for me to live? Then I would rather choose death.”The magistrate was surprised, he could not believe… He said, “You need not answer right now. You can have time, you can think it over. Don’t be in such a hurry! Life is precious – how can you be so easily ready to die?”Socrates said, “There are only two possibilities. If I die, these are the two possibilities: either I die completely or only the body is left behind and something of my essential core still lives. Both are perfectly good. If I die completely, there is nobody left to be afraid, to suffer, to be miserable. So why should I be afraid if I die completely as the materialists say? Perhaps they are right. But then there is no fear because I will not be here, so who is there to be afraid?Or, the second alternative is as the spiritualists say: that I will not die – then why be worried about death? Only the nonessential will be gone, the essential will still be alive. It is worth risking the non-essential for the truth.”Socrates was a very rational being; hence he gave these two alternatives. He knew perfectly well that he would not die, but his expression was always rational. His expression was not mystic, his expression was philosophical. Of course the magistrate had to agree with him. These were the only two alternatives: either you die or you don’t die. In both ways Socrates was right.My own feeling is that Socrates knew perfectly well that he was not going to die. It is impossible that he should not have known – such a tremendous intelligence, such an individuality, such purity, such penetrating insight – it is not possible that he would not have known the non-temporal, the timeless.The moment you understand that you are eternal, all fear disappears. Society exists through exploiting your fear; hence it teaches you from the school to the university, it devotes almost one-third of your life in learning words, language, logic. It is not concerned at all that you should understand silence. That’s the function of a master: to undo all that society has done to you, to help you to go beyond words.You can experience it happening here – you can hear the silence – and when you hear it, there is immediate understanding. Understanding comes like a shadow following silence.To understand words and to hear words is very simple. Anybody can do it; just a little education about language is needed, nothing much. But a tremendous transformation is needed to hear silence and to understand silence. Silence is the basic requirement for understanding existence, the basic requirement to know truth.Father Ryan and Anderson, one of his parishioners, were playing a friendly round together. The priest had been having trouble all day. At the seventeenth hole, his ball fell into a deep sand trap. Several times he whacked away; sand flew, but each time the ball rolled back into the hazard.Still silent, but with his lips compressed and his eyes burning with frustration, Father Ryan stared at the ball for a long time.“Father,” said Anderson, “that’s the most profane silence I have ever heard.”Silence can be profane too. Silence can be sacred too. Silence has as many nuances, as many dimensions as your being has. It is multidimensional and it is tremendously pregnant.Being here with me, being a sannyasin, can be defined very simply as learning to be silent – sitting in silence with me. I am using so many words for the simple reason that words can give you gaps. I can simply sit here; one day I am going to do that. I will be just sitting with you.It is really a torture for me to talk. I would like as quickly as possible just to sit silently with you. But if you are not ready to understand it, you will fall asleep: you will start dreaming, you will start dozing away. You will not be able to understand it.My words keep you awake, and just between the words I give you gaps. Those are the real, essential things. Waiting for another word, you have to listen to silence. I tell you one joke, that wakes you up, then just searching for another joke… Not that I have to search for it – I know where it is. And it does not matter much, any joke will do – I can manage. But just searching for another joke, you are awaiting breathlessly, utterly silent. Even though sometimes Monkeyjibhai Desai comes with his colleagues on the roof and they start doing their thing. But you are not distracted; in fact, those monkeys help you to become more silent, more alert, so that you cannot miss any word that I am going to say to you.This situation is being used to hand over to you a few pieces of silence. It will look very strange to the newcomers that I am talking just to make you able to hear silence and to understand silence. But that has always been the way of the buddhas.The day you are ready… And slowly, slowly many people are getting ready. The day is not far away when I will have enough people ready – a certain quantity is needed. Just as at a certain temperature, a hundred degrees, water evaporates, there is a certain quantity which is needed for silence. And when so many people are here, then anybody who wants to fall asleep when I am sitting silently will not be able to fall asleep either. The silence all around will go on goading him to keep alert. The silence all around will not in any way allow him to fall asleep. Silence has its own tremendous force, its own power.I am waiting for the right quantity – and people are coming. The moment I see that my commune has enough silent people and I can sit silently – and the newcomers will be transformed by the silent people; just sitting among them will be enough for them to have a taste, they will be drowned in your silence – then there will be no need for me to talk at all.A few people have fallen asleep. For them…The sweet young thing was telling her mother about the great time she had at the mountain resort.“I met a man in the recreation hall and we played ping-pong all afternoon,” she said. “What fun, mother!”“Why, dear,” said the mother, “I never knew you enjoyed ping-pong.”“I do now,” the daughter said. “I would hit the ball the wrong way, and we would both go under the table after it. Then he would hit the ball the wrong way, and we would both go after it under the table. We played all afternoon. It was wonderful!”“But I don’t understand,” said the mother “where does the fun come in?”“Under the table, silly!”Finley was flipped over golf. It became his only topic of conversation. Mrs. Finley was slowly going bananas with the constant discussion of birdies, drivers and sand traps, of his golf clubs, his caddies and his scores.Finally, at dinner, she snapped, “I am tired of you talking about golf twenty-four hours a day! I don’t want to hear about it at this meal!”“But what about… What shall I talk about then?”“About anything,” said his wife. “Talk about sex for goodness’ sake!”“Okay,” said Finley, “I wonder who my caddie is screwing these days?”The two old maids lived their lonely lives together until, rather unexpectedly, a stranger arrived on the scene and whisked one of them away in matrimony.After the honeymoon, the new bride visited her unmarried friend and painted an ecstatic picture of married life.“Our honeymoon,” she said, “was like a cruise down the Mediterranean, a sail into a glorious sunset. It was wonderful!”The second old maid was very much impressed and determined to get a man for herself. She showed her bank book around town and eventually nailed a local gigolo. They were married at once and began their honeymoon.They climbed into their wedding bed, and in a short time the husband was flushed with excitement. The bride, however, was cool as a cucumber and decidedly unaffected by the proceedings.“I simply don’t understand it,” she said rather indignantly. “My friend told me that marriage was like a cruise down the Mediterranean, like a sail into glorious sunset.”“Oh, she did, eh?” said the guy, now trembling with uncontrollable excitement, “Well, bon voyage, baby – I’m sailing without you!”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 10 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,The latest from the pope: “Defending the human dignity of the poor and their hope for a human future is not a luxury for the church, nor is it a strategy of opportunism, nor a means of currying favor with the masses. It is her duty…”Anything to say about this most recent statement from the bejeweled and bedecked pontiff?All the religions have been saying “service to the poor” for centuries, yet poverty goes on increasing. Poverty has not disappeared, the so-called golden future has not arrived, and they have been talking about it for at least ten thousand years. There must be something fundamentally wrong – they don’t really want the poor to disappear from the earth.They talk about the dignity of the poor, but what dignity can there be in poverty? Poverty is the most humiliating experience in life. It is the root cause of all crimes. It reduces human beings to a state of animality, or even worse. It takes away their humanity and makes them commodities in the marketplace, purchasable, saleable. But beautiful words: “dignity of the poor.” Nobody is going to argue against them except a crazy man like me.We have heard enough of this nonsense. In the name of “the dignity of the poor,” poverty has to be saved; poverty has to be protected. Whenever you want to protect something ugly, you have to give it a beautiful name. And people live by words. People are so stupid that they become too concerned about words rather than the reality hidden behind them.There is a cow in the Himalayas, a wild cow, called “the blue cow.” In nineteen fifty-two, the number of blue cows became so high that they started destroying crops. It became a problem, and it had to be solved immediately. The Indian Parliament discussed the matter. They wanted to shoot the blue cows, to kill them because that was the only way. But to kill a cow in India would create bigger problems than it would solve. The cow is the holy mother to the Indians; you cannot kill a cow. So they did a small trick: they didn’t call it a “blue cow,” they called it a “blue horse”! They killed thousands of blue cows – but they were not killing cows, they were killing “blue horses.” Of course it was the blue cow which was killed, but on paper it was the “blue horse.” Nobody bothered about the blue cows at all. There was no protest from the Hindus, who are always ready, who are waiting for such opportunities.You cannot kill a monkey because monkeys represent Hanuman, the monkey god. You cannot kill an elephant because elephants represent another god, the god Ganesha. You cannot kill a cow – but blue horses? Who cares about blue horses! Nobody is concerned. The problem was solved just by changing the word. Such is the stupidity of humanity.The poor have to be saved, the misery has to be saved, the suffering has to be saved – for the simple reason that without the poor, the miserable, and the suffering humanity, there is no future for the church. Not only the Catholic Church – no future for any church, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist. They have all been living; they have all been in great demand, for the simple reason that people are suffering. And suffering humanity needs consolation, comforts. The present is so ugly that they need hopes for the future. The hopes of the future are nothing but opium for the people. I agree with Karl Marx, I cannot agree with the Polack pope.The future helps in a way to tolerate the present. It is almost intolerable, it is so inhuman that if hope for the future were taken away, there would be immediate revolution in the world, there would be rebellion everywhere. The establishment would be overthrown within days; the status quo would no longer be there.The politicians and the priests are in a subtle conspiracy. The politician would not exist if people were not in misery – when they are in misery, they need leaders. When somebody is blind, he needs to be led. When you have your own eyes, you don’t need leaders. When somebody is utterly blissful herenow, who cares about your silly paradise and heaven? Who bothers? This very moment is paradise enough – this very body the buddha, and this very space the lotus paradise. But if the present is ugly, if the present is like an open wound, full of pus… If the present hurts too much, then you need painkillers.The future is a painkiller: tomorrow everything is going to be okay. It is only a question of today. You have tolerated so much, just a little more, just a little more… And it is always today that comes, it is never tomorrow. Tomorrow always looms there near the horizon. The distance between you and tomorrow remains constantly the same, but it keeps you running, changing, chasing, dreaming, fantasizing about the future.What the pope says has to be very deeply pondered over. It is the essence of all religious exploitation up to now; this is the history of all that has happened in the name of religion. It has nothing to do with true religiousness. It is absolutely irreligious. It is a political game; hence meditate over each statement.First, he says, “Defending the human dignity of the poor…” How can you defend the dignity of the poor? There is no other way than by destroying poverty. There is no other way – categorically I say, there is no other way – than to destroy poverty itself. Only when people are not poor do they start feeling that they are worthy. They can have a life of pleasures, happiness, joy; they can rejoice in the beauty and the blessings of nature. But when their stomachs are empty, how can you defend their dignity?It is a well-known fact that mothers have sold their children for just a few rupees because they were hungry for so many days. Now, to think of a mother selling her child – maybe to a butcher – just for five rupees, just to feed herself for one day: what more indignity can there be? But you cannot blame the mother.Parents have been known to murder their children for the simple reason that they cannot feed them. It happens every day. Almost every day in India, in some corner or other, girls are sold for prostitution by their own parents – of course with great sadness, with tears in their eyes and in their hearts, crying and weeping. But what else to do? There seems to be no way out.Every day I read in the newspapers: families first throw their children into a well or into the ocean, then they jump themselves. They destroy the children first, then the mother, then the father himself. Or they take poison and go to sleep.How can you save the dignity of the poor? Why not destroy poverty?Nobody says, “Save the dignity of the rich!” That would bring the whole point to a focus that would bring you to a clear-cut perception. No pope, no shankaracharya, no ayatollah says, “We are trying to save the dignity of the rich.” Everybody would laugh. There is no need to save the dignity of the rich. Why is there a need to save the dignity of the poor?It is poverty that is making their life subhuman. Why not destroy poverty? Now we have the means and the methods to destroy the poverty. It is now within our hands, within our capacity. We can forgive the past and forget all about it because I can see it was impossible for Jesus to destroy poverty. It was impossible for Buddha to destroy poverty because there were no scientific methods available, no technology, no industry. They had to find some rationalization for the poor.Buddha found rationalization in past lives: you are poor because you have done wrong in past lives. That suits, it makes it reasonable. If you have done so many sins in the past, who is going to suffer? You sow the seeds then you have to reap the crop. Nobody else is going to suffer for you; nobody can suffer on your behalf.It looks logical. Buddha can be forgiven because there was no other way. The poverty was there, with no possibility to destroy it – at least some consolation, some comfort could be given. If it is from the past, you have a certain rationale for it. And you have the hope also, that if you don’t commit the same kind of things now, in future either you will be born rich, a prince, a princess; or if you are really virtuous you may not need to be born at all, you will live in paradise for eternity.But today, these popes cannot be forgiven at all because science has provided all the technology that can destroy the poverty as quickly as you can imagine. If it is not being destroyed, the reason is the vested interests of the past don’t want it to be destroyed. They live on it; they are parasites. They are exploiting people and their suffering, so they still go on repeating the same mantras, chanting the same mantras.Hindus go on saying, Buddhists and Jainas go on saying, “Poverty is because of your past bad karmas.” And Mohammedans, Christians and Jews go on thinking it is because Adam and Eve committed a crime – so you are suffering. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and because you are just part of the same continuum you have to suffer for it.Today this whole thing is just rubbish. Neither have your past lives anything to do with your poverty, nor has Adam and Eve’s disobedience anything to do with your poverty. Your poverty is there because of our own stupidity now; it has nothing to do with the past. That excuse is escapist, and if it has something to do with the past, then naturally you have to hope for the future. The present is the only reality. Between the past and the future you will be crushed and destroyed – and that has been the case up to now.These are the people who are trying to save the dignity of the poor, and at the same time they go on helping more and more people to be born on the earth. The pope, on the one hand, is against the use of contraceptives, against the very idea of abortion, against birth control methods. Now this is how poverty is created. Remember, rich people don’t produce many children. Have you ever pondered over the fact, why? Why rich countries are concerned that their population is decreasing? France is concerned because its population is decreasing; Sweden is concerned, too concerned, that its population is decreasing. A great fear that if rich countries go on decreasing in their population, and the poor countries go on increasing in population, sooner or later they will overrun the whole world. Just the sheer fact of their numbers will be enough to overpower, to possess all the rich countries.Now, it is a very strange world: the rich countries are concerned with how to increase their population, and the poor countries are worried how to decrease their population. Are we living at the same time, or in different worlds, in different centuries? We are not contemporaries; our problems are totally different.Why do poor people produce more children? The reason is very simple – and the simple and the obvious is always overlooked – the rich person has many other things for his entertainment, and the poor man has only sex; nothing else for his entertainment because everything else costs something. You go to a movie… The poor man earns so little that just going to a movie and all his earnings of the day will be gone. Then how is he going to manage himself and his family? He cannot drink alcohol, he cannot become a Rotarian, a Lion, he cannot afford all these new entertainments. He cannot even have a radio or a TV – he cannot sit before the idiot box, glued to the chair for six hours, otherwise who is going to earn the bread and butter?After the day’s work, tired, humiliated, tortured, he comes home. The only relaxation, the only entertainment that he knows of that is freely available to him, is sex. Hence poor people produce more children.Rich people have diversions; sometimes they become so interested in other things that sex becomes secondary. You can find rich people so interested in other things. Somebody may be interested in paintings, collecting paintings; or he may himself be a painter; or may be immensely interested in music; or may be a composer himself; or may be interested in dancing.There are possibilities – and he can always live his sexual life too, in a vicarious way. My own observation is that when you are seeing sex on the TV screen, you are living it in a vicarious way. You become identified with the man or the woman, whatsoever may be the case. When the man is making love to the woman, deep down in your fantasies you are making love to the woman. It is satisfying in a way. Your cerebral sex is satisfied. Remember, the sex center does not exist in your genitals; the sex center exists in your brain, it is cerebral.Now there are scientists like Delgado who say that we can put electrodes in the brain, and you can carry a small box, like a matchbox, inside your pocket, with a remote control – so even the wire will not be shown, there will be no wire. You can just put your hand in your pocket, push the button and you will have an orgasm. It will be non-genital. It will not have anything to do with your genitals, and it will be far more satisfying because you will not have to depend on the other person.And there are many problems when you have to depend on the other person. It is a rare coincidence that the man can satisfy the woman or the woman can satisfy the man. There are discrepancies. Nature is not such a perfect master as you think. The male genital organ is small compared to the female genital tunnel – one inch less. Just in a small city like Pune there is a difference of miles! That difference is unbridgeable.Their timing is different; the woman will take a longer time to come to an orgasmic peak. For centuries she has been pretending – just to buttress the ego of the male chauvinist pig because he enjoys tremendously that he has given a beautiful orgasm to the woman. So she has been pretending. That’s why it is more satisfying with a prostitute because she knows how to pretend, she is an expert in pretending. She will scream in joy, sing songs in joy, and you will think what a great man you are: look what you have done! She is all bliss – and she is only pretending; you have paid for it. And she will be pretending the same thing after you with somebody else. It is all pretension.But that’s actually the case with wives too. They have been pretending for centuries. To bring the woman to orgasm, a certain training is needed that is lacking; a certain discipline is needed on the part of the man.So when you depend on the other there are many problems. If your pleasure is dependent on the other, there is a bondage attached to it too, there is a certain imprisonment. And there is jealousy and there is suspicion, and all kinds of ugly things enter from the back door.Delgado’s device can be of tremendous help to make men and women free of each other. But I don’t think the Polack pope will agree with it because sex for pleasure is sin, and Delgado’s device will make it absolutely for pleasure.Sex is right only for a reproductive purpose – that is the religious idea: if you produce children then sex is right. If you are just having fun, you are committing a crime against God because sex is sacred, and fun is not sacred. Now, who has decided that fun is not sacred? I say to you: fun is more sacred than reproducing in an overcrowded world.But these popes and these priests are all for reproduction, and then they want to save the dignity of the poor. They create poverty!Mahatma Gandhi was doing the same in India. His whole life he thought he was raising the dignity of the poor, but he was simply changing the name. He was calling the poor, “the children of God.” By calling them “the children of God” nothing was changed – they remained the same poor people. Yes, their egos felt a little flattered. But that is not going to help at all; that is going to create more problems. They will be hungry, they will be ugly, and they will be egoists also. You have added a new dimension to their problems, which were already too complex.He was also against birth control, he was also against the pill, he was also against any contraceptives. Go on creating children! And moreover, he was against all science, all technology. You will be surprised to know that he was against the railway trains, he was against telephones, he was against all kinds of industries. He was even against things as innocent as the telegraph, the post office. He was against anything invented by man. Man has to go back to nature. Back to nature simply means that there will be even more poor people in the world than there are now because even the rich will become poor, even the middle-class people will fall back into poverty. It will be a huge ocean of poverty. Yes, in a way people will feel good – “We are all equal” – because poverty will be distributed equally. But that is not raising the dignity of the poor.The only way to raise the dignity of the poor is to destroy poverty. It can be done – now we have all the means and methods to do it. Even communism is not needed at all. In fact, communism has not been able to destroy poverty, in Russia or China or anywhere else. It has simply destroyed the rich people. In fact, the communism that exists in the world is not communism at all: it is only state capitalism. The ownership has changed. Now there is no longer private ownership; instead of private owners the state has become the only owner.Now this is even worse because when there is only one owner, when there is a monopoly of everything – it is a state monopoly – then there is no freedom possible. Not only is the dignity of the poor not saved or defended, even the dignity of human beings is lost. Dignity as such is lost.Now Soviet Russia and China are huge concentration camps and nothing else – no freedom of expression, no freedom of thought, no freedom at all. You have to function just like machines; you have to produce more and more for the state, for the great state. And there is a bureaucracy, the Communist bureaucracy, which has replaced the capitalists.There is no need for communism to destroy poverty; science can do it very easily because a single machine can do the work of thousands of people. But it is not being allowed because it goes against the vested interests, and those interests are pouring their money into the churches.Who has made the pope “…the bejeweled and bedecked pontiff?” Who has made the Vatican the richest religion in the world, the richest church in the world? From where has all that money come? It is bribery. It is the rich people who go on bribing the church, and the church goes on preaching things which look very religious but are basically political and economical, and are against all revolutions.The only revolution that can free humanity from poverty is a scientific revolution. In fact, if machines are introduced more and more… [At this moment the electricity fails, so does the sound system.] You see, the Holy Ghost seems to be angry! It must be the work of the Holy Ghost – his representative on the earth is being criticized.If machines can replace man more and more, within two decades, just within two decades, the whole of humanity can be freed from the indignity of a mechanical life. A laborer working in a factory has become almost a machine. He goes on doing the same thing day in, day out; year in, year out; for thirty years, forty years. Maybe it is just one small repetitious thing. That repetition for forty years necessarily destroys his intelligence. It becomes mechanical.If machines can do all this work – and they can do – then man is freed; then man can do all those things that he had always wanted to do, but there was no time and no opportunity. He can sing songs, he can dance, he can play, he can meditate, he can pray, he can rest, he can relax, he can be creative, he can paint, sculpt. He can do thousands of things which everybody deep down wants to do but cannot do because there is no opportunity.The genius of man is in a state of dormancy, stagnant. Because he cannot fulfill the needs of the body, the needs of his soul remain unfulfilled. There is a hierarchy of needs, remember. First you have to fulfill the bodily needs; that is the very foundation of your life. Then you have to fulfill your psychological needs. And only then, and remember, I repeat, only then can you fulfill your spiritual needs.The poor person struggles first with his basic needs. He cannot be interested in poetry, in music, in painting. How can he be really interested in meditation?People go on asking me again and again, almost every day there is a question: “Why are people from all over the world coming to you and yet Indians are ignoring you?” They are not ignoring me – their basic needs are not fulfilled; there is a gap between them and me. They are searching for bread and I am talking about meditation. I cannot give them bread, I cannot give them shelter, and if I suggest to them how they can get the shelter and the bread, their whole conditioning goes against it. They will not listen to me.If I suggest that birth control is needed, the pill is needed… Because to me, the pill is one of the greatest things that has happened after the bullock cart; it is one of the most revolutionary things. There have been only three revolutionary things in the history of man. First was fire, second was the bullock cart, and third is the pill. Their conditioning goes against it if I suggest to them, “Do this, and poverty can be destroyed.”They are not interested in meditation, they cannot be. Their basic needs are destroying them. They don’t have the opportunity, or the energy, or the time, or the intelligence, to be interested in meditation. First, the basic needs have to be fulfilled and then the psychological needs.This is my constant observation: if a person comes to me for the wrong reasons, he is bound to be angry at me because I will not be fulfilling his needs. I receive hundreds of letters from South Africa – all the letters are concerned… Somebody is suffering from a ghost, somebody has been put under a spell, somebody is afraid of a black magician – so they need me to protect them and send them a mantra which can save their life. Now, I cannot do all this nonsense.When Indians write to me, they always write about money. They want money – they want their sons to go to the colleges, to the universities. Somebody writes: Can you send my son to Oxford or to Cambridge? All their needs are basically physiological. They are not the people who can be interested in meditation. They cannot look at the stars – their eyes are focused on the earth, their necks are paralyzed; they have lost all the power to see that which is beautiful. Even if they look at the moon they will think of a chapati! It is natural because we project our own needs; everything becomes just a screen for our projection.When some visitors, Indians, come here, and after the lecture I go around Buddha Hall, I can see they are not looking at me; they are looking at the Rolls Royce. They are nudging each other, “Look!” They are not interested in me, their whole obsession is the Rolls Royce. That’s why I am keeping it – at least something for them to enjoy.I see even educated Indians… But even educated Indians are not basically fulfilled. Their sexual lives are starved, their nourishment is not enough. Their body is not as it should be; something is missing. When they come here and I enter Buddha Hall, and with folded hands I welcome you, only those few Indians don’t answer – as if their hands are paralyzed. They cannot even fold their hands just to welcome me – and I am welcoming them. It is not that they have to take the initiative, I am taking the initiative. But they cannot even do that. They look so ugly. They can see, all around, thousands of people, with love, with gratitude, folding their hands – and folding their hands in love and gratitude. And respect and surrender should be more natural to the Indians; it is their way of greeting. But they cannot even greet me, as if something prevents them; like a thick iron wall between them and me.What is the wall? The wall is that I don’t exist here to fulfill their needs. I am, in a way, irrelevant to their context. Somewhere, deep down, the distance is so great that even a greeting is impossible. They look embarrassed. They can see what they are doing, but they are somehow paralyzed, as if it is impossible for them to just welcome me. If they cannot even fold their hands, do you think they will be able to allow me into their innermost core? That’s impossible.The basic needs have to be fulfilled first. Science can do that. The psychological needs then have to be taken care of – art, aesthetics, can do that. Only then does religion enter. Religion is the greatest luxury in the world because it is the peak, the virgin peak of Everest, the snow which has not been trodden by anybody. To reach it you will have to move from the valleys where you are living. It is a long pilgrimage. Only when somebody reaches the peak of Everest, to the peak of consciousness, is there dignity. The poor cannot have any dignity. The poverty will prevent the dignity from happening.Hence, I say, the pope is absolutely wrong, saying, “Defending the human dignity of the poor and their hope for a human future…” Yes, he is trying to save their hope because if they can go on hoping, then the church can hope to exist. Their hope is basically the hope for the future popes. But I don’t think it is going to happen. In fact, there is an ancient prophecy of Nostradamus that the last pope will have his name starting with a W. And this Polack pope has his name starting with W. I think this is the end!I don’t believe in prophecies, but sometimes miracles happen. This is the first pope in the long succession of popes whose name begins with W. This may be the last, and rejoice if the prophecy is fulfilled!The only hope for the church – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Buddhist – is that humanity should remain poor; then they need opium. Otherwise, who wants opium? When do you want to drink alcohol? – when you are miserable, when you want to drown your misery in something, when you want to forget it all; when you want to have a little rest from your worries, anxieties, anguishes. That’s what religion has been doing in the past.Religion is nothing but a drug, a very subtle drug. But if people are really happy, rejoicing in life, living with intensity and passion, like flowers and birds, and rivers and mountains and stars, who will need these fools around? Who will go to the Vatican, or to the Kaaba, or to Kashi? Who will listen to all kinds of nonsense?There is no hope for religion as it has existed up to now. Yes, there will be a totally different kind of religiousness if man becomes happy. That’s what I am trying to make clear to you: what kind of religiousness is possible if humanity becomes happy. Then it will not be a religion of renouncing.Buddha says, “There are four truths: first, life is misery; second, there is a method to end the misery; third, you can do the method, you can go through the process, it is not impossible, it is possible for all human beings; and fourth, there is a state beyond misery.”Now, if there is no misery, Buddha’s first truth is canceled. And once you cancel the first truth, what is the need of the second? If there is no misery, what is the need of a method to end the misery? The whole house topples down. And it is not only Buddha’s house. He’s simply making it clear what others have said only in a very implied way. He is a very rational man, so he is saying it exactly, precisely, in a scientific way. But this is what all other religions have been doing.Their basic assumption is that life is misery. If this is the basic assumption, then renunciation is, of course, the method to get out of it – renounce life, escape to the monasteries, to the deserts, to the Himalayas. If life is misery, then escapism is religion. I am teaching you here that life is not misery. If I am true, then escapism loses all significance, all meaning, all relevance. Then there is no point in renouncing life. If life is bliss… And that’s what I say again and again – life is bliss, ultimate bliss, life is ecstasy. Rejoice! There is no question of renouncing it.This is going to be the future religiousness. And remember my distinction: I am not calling it the future religion, I am calling it the future religiousness – because religion will give you the idea that it will be Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan; a creed, a dogma. No! Religiousness: a diffused kind of fragrance surrounding the earth, with people rejoicing, dancing, singing; people rejoicing so much that a tremendous gratitude arises in their being, a gratitude for the unknown energy that has given them birth, for the unknown source from where they have come, and to where they have to return one day; for the unknown whole which has made all these benedictions possible. Only then does man have dignity. It is not a question of dignity for the poor or for the rich: human beings will have dignity.In fact, the so-called religions have made man feel very undignified. They have created guilt; they have condemned all that is natural in you, all that is spontaneous in you. They have praised the unnatural and condemned the natural. They have made everybody feel like they are crawling on the earth like an ugly worm – crawling on the earth in the mud. While my effort here is to remind you that you have wings, that you are a bird, that you can soar toward the stars, that the whole sky is yours, that even the sky is not the limit. Only then does man have dignity.It is not a question of poor or rich, black or white, man or woman. Man as such has dignity only when life has dignity, when life is joy, when life has the flavor of ecstasy, adventure, exploration.He says: “Defending the human dignity of the poor and their hope for a human future is not a luxury for the church…” That I know. It is not a luxury for the church: it is its very basic need. Without it, it cannot exist; without it, it will not have even a single moment to live. It is not a luxury, it is its very breath. With that I will agree with the Polack pope. I can rarely agree with him, but on a few points I can agree.He says, “…nor is it a strategy of opportunism, nor a means for currying favor with the masses. It is her duty.” Nobody had asked him… Why is he saying that this is not a strategy of opportunism? Somewhere in his unconscious he knows it is because he was sermonizing on his own. I have read the whole sermon that you have asked about. Just the other day I was reading the whole sermon. Nobody had asked him, nobody had raised the question. He was talking on his own, he was opening his own heart. Deep down he suspects that it is a strategy of opportunism.Sigmund Freud says even a slip of the tongue has some unconscious roots behind it. If suddenly somebody stands up and says, “I am not a thief! Who says I am a thief? I am not a thief!” Then what will it show? It will simply show, “Give him to the police! Why is he shouting that he is not a thief?” There must be something in him which has erupted in spite of himself. Why is he defending, saying that he and his church are not opportunistic? It is. It has always been.For example, the whole history of the church – and not only his church, of all churches – is ample proof that they have been opportunistic, always opportunistic. They fit in with the status quo – whosoever is in power, they serve the master. They are just like dogs: the moment they feel that the master has changed, they change their attitude also, they start wagging their tail before the new master.He says that it is not a strategy of opportunism. Then what is it? He made this statement in the Philippines, one of the poorest countries in the world. When he was in America he did not make such a statement. When he was traveling in the Western, rich, affluent societies, he was not making such statements. Now in Karachi, in the Philippines, in the East where poverty is everywhere, why is he making such a statement? It is opportunistic, it is meant for “…currying favor with the masses.”The masses are so stupid that they immediately fall in line with anybody who praises them. Those praises are just hot air, but the masses feel very good. Immediately the masses are with the person who praises them. This is an ancient trick of the politicians and the priests. They have changed thousands of times; for example: in Galileo’s time, the Catholic Church and the Catholic pope decided that Galileo should take back his statement that the earth goes around the sun because the Catholic Church had believed for hundreds of years that it is just vice versa – the sun goes around the earth.Religious people are very afraid that if even a single statement proves to be wrong in their scripture, then all other statements become suspicious. It is a natural conclusion. If Jesus can make a statement which is absolutely false, unscientific, then what is the guarantee that other statements are true? If he does not even know whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth, what he knows about God may not be true either; he may not know anything about paradise. If he does not know about this world, how can you believe that his statements about the other world are right?Hence, all the religions try to stick stubbornly to every statement. Howsoever ridiculous it appears, they have to stick to it. But you cannot stick to a lie for long, and in fact, I don’t see there is any point. The simple thing is that Jesus has no need to be a physicist or an astronomer or a chemist or a mathematician.For example, I am not a physicist, so if I say something wrong about physics, it’s perfectly okay. There is no need to stick to it. I am not infallible. If somebody points out to me that this statement is not right as far as physics is concerned, I am immediately ready to correct it because I’m not a physicist. If I had made the statement, I was not making it as a physicist. I may have been illustrating something, but an illustration is an illustration. It does not change my argument.Just the other day somebody wrote that my statement about Somnath is not historical: there were not twelve hundred priests there, but only five hundred. So how does that make any difference? My logic remains the same. But he thinks that he is proving me wrong. My argument was that those priests of the Somnath temple were saying, “There is no need to defend the temple; the Vedic mantras are enough, so there is no need for an army.” And when Mahmud Ghaznavi came, he himself was surprised that there was not anybody to defend it. Instead of five hundred, I had said twelve hundred priests were chanting mantras, doing Vedic rituals to prevent Mahmud Ghaznavi from conquering the richest temple of the country.Warriors from all over the country had offered their services, “We can come and fight Mahmud Ghaznavi.” But they were, in fact, humiliated and insulted by the priests. The chief priest told them, “Do you think you can defend God? This is God’s temple. God defends you, you cannot defend God, so don’t be foolish. And we know the ancient science of mantras which will create a subtle energy around the temple so nobody can enter.”But Mahmud Ghaznavi entered, and the god that defends everybody was destroyed in a single hit. He hammered the chief statue of the temple, and the statue fell into thousands of pieces. Inside the statue the priests had been hiding immense treasures, the most valuable diamonds. They were scattered all over. Mahmud Ghaznavi had never seen such diamonds. That statue was a kind of safe – there was a hole through which they were dropping those diamonds inside – and nobody could ever have suspected, no thief would ever have suspected that the statue was being used as a device to protect the treasures.Mahmud Ghaznavi was a Mohammedan; he destroyed the statue. He was not aware that there were treasures inside it – he was simply interested in destroying the most important temple of the country.I had said that there were twelve hundred priests, and now somebody has written that my knowledge of history is absolutely zero – there were only five hundred priests. Does it matter? My argument remains the same; twelve hundred, five hundred, five, one, any number will do. And I am not so foolish to count how many priests were there. One more or one less, it’s perfectly okay – I agree there were five hundred people. And somebody says there were not five hundred but only four hundred and ninety-nine. So okay, but my argument remains the same. The thing is my theme, not my illustration.But the Catholic Church could not accept Galileo’s idea. They forced old Galileo to take his statement back. Galileo took his statement back. He was a man of immense sense of humor. I love Galileo. Many have thought that he was a coward – he was not. Many have thought that he had not the courage to fight, but I don’t see… What is the need to fight with fools, when you can just get out with a sense of humor? Why fight? He simply said, “Perfectly right! I will make a statement in my book that whatsoever I have said is wrong – the earth does not go around the sun, and the Catholic Church is right, the sun goes around the earth. But one thing I have to tell you: even if I take my statement back, the earth will still go around the sun. My statement won’t make any difference!”Do you see the sense of humor of the man? His intelligence? And he made a statement in his book. In a footnote he wrote, “What I have said above is not right.” And in the end he says, “But what can I do? Still neither the sun nor the earth is bound to follow my ideas. They go on doing their thing. What Galileo says is irrelevant.”This Polack pope has opened the case again after three hundred years because now it is an established fact that the earth goes around the sun. Now to go on saying that the sun goes around the earth looks so foolish. He has reopened the case to correct the error.This has been going on for two thousand years; again and again they have been correcting. What does it show? It simply shows opportunism. At that moment the masses were with them, the masses were with the Bible. Now they know the masses are more aware of science, and if they have to choose between a scientific statement and a biblical statement they will choose the scientific statement. Now people are more educated. This is opportunism – reopening the case now and changing it.He says that it is not a strategy of opportunism. Then what is it? – it is sheer business to tell the poor people about their dignity. And whenever they talk to the poor people, they always quote Jesus as saying: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” They forget completely that the meaning of Jesus is totally different. The whole statement is: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” He does not mean that they should be starving, poor; he simply means that they should not be egoists. “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” The ego makes you feel higher and superior to others. When there is no ego, that is poverty of the spirit. It has nothing to do with the poverty that exists in India, in the Philippines, in Pakistan. This is not the poverty Jesus is talking about. But they use Jesus’ quotations, and they go on saying that this is not opportunism. Then what is it?And he says it is not “…a means of currying favor with the masses.” He must be consciously feeling guilty. It is so apparent that it is simply a way to have the support of the people. I know it perfectly well. I have done all kinds of things – I have been moving with the masses, and I know how masses become victims. It is so simple. I have talked to crowds of Hindus, I have talked to crowds of Mohammedans, Jainas, Sikhs, and I have really enjoyed all those things. I have giggled inside to myself, “What kind of fools the world is full of!”I have talked to Jainas on Mahavira, and they have come to me and they have said, “For the first time, listening to you, we have understood what greatness, what immense truth Mahavira has given to the world.” For twenty-five centuries they had not discovered that truth. In fact, it has nothing to do with Mahavira; I am simply putting my ideas through his mouth. But they were worshipping me.I have talked to Sikhs on Nanak, and they said, “Nobody has ever been able to open the mysteries of the statements of Nanak as you have done.” There are no mysteries, or anything; those mysteries are my inventions, but I had not told them this. I simply laughed inside to myself. You never found me laughing; I always laughed inside because laughing outside is dangerous.I have talked to Hindus about Krishna, and they were rejoicing. Fifty thousand to a hundred thousand people used to gather to listen to me on Krishna, and they were thrilled that their Krishna has such profundities, such great insights. In fact, if Krishna were there he would have been very puzzled.I have talked about many people. If they come to the ashram, they won’t be allowed inside, but when I have talked about them I have given my insight to their words.I receive many letters from the West, “Nobody has told us the truth about Jesus except you.” It has nothing to do with Jesus, it has nothing to do with Krishna, it has nothing to do with Mahavira or Buddha. I am simply talking about my truth.But then finally I said, “It is enough! It is absolutely absurd, meaningless because they cannot understand. Only their egos are feeling fulfilled, nourished. I am not helping them; on the contrary, their egos are becoming bigger.” Hence I dropped that whole thing completely. And the moment I stopped talking on Mahavira, Jainas disappeared. Only a few Jainas remained who had understood me – that it has nothing to do with Mahavira, it is my own understanding that I am giving to Mahavira. It is my light that I am focusing on Mahavira. Only those few Jainas who understood have remained with me.Only those Hindus who understood that it has nothing to do with Krishna and Gita have remained with me. It is my experience; I am simply using them as excuses. The same is true about others. But I could only do that when I decided that I do not have to go to the masses at all.Just the other day I was reading an article against me. Somebody has written, “Why don’t I go outside the ashram?” The reason he has given is that I have hypnotized the whole atmosphere, so whosoever enters here, the moment he enters the gate, becomes hypnotized. So I don’t go outside the ashram because there it will be very difficult to hypnotize people. I loved the idea – a great discovery!What the pope is doing is simply “…currying favor with the masses.” And he says it is the church’s duty. To whom? Duty to whom? He means duty to the poor. That’s wrong. It is duty to the vested interests; it is service to the establishment.So only on two points do I agree with him. One is: “Defending the human dignity of the poor and their hope for a human future is not a luxury for the church…” It is not a luxury, it is its very life, its basic need. And the second point: he says, “It is her duty…” That too is true. It is duty to the establishment, duty to all that is ugly, to all that is dead, to all that is past.The outraged husband, having caught his wife in another man’s arms, shouted, “Sir! This is my wife, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”The man replied, “If that is your wife, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”It was eleven-thirty, and Hunchback Harry wanted to be home in time for the midnight movie, so he took a shortcut through the graveyard. He was very nervous as he walked among the gravestones. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning, and a loud clap of thunder, and a voice boomed, “I am Lucifer! I am the Devil!”Terrified out of his wits, Hunchback Harry cowered behind a tombstone shivering. “Dost thou have a desire?” thundered Lucifer.“Y-y-yes,” mumbled Hunchback Harry. “I want to lose my hunchback.”“Right! It shall be done!” shouted Lucifer, and vanished. And thus Harry lost his hunchback.The next night in the pub the lads were amazed.“Hey, Harry,” said Charlie, “what happened to your hunchback?” So Harry told about how he had walked home through the graveyard and met Lucifer.“Mm, that’s interesting,” said Charlie, and he decided he was going to walk home through the graveyard that night.As he crept along there was a blinding flash and loud thunder. “I am Lucifer! I am the Devil!” Charlie dived in panic behind the nearest tombstone and shuddered with fear. “Dost thou have a hunchback?” roared Lucifer.“N-n-no,” stuttered Charlie.“Right! Take this one!”I agree with the Polack pope, but not according to him, not what he wants. I agree according to myself. That is the only way I can agree with him.A certain innocence is needed. But the priests are never innocent. They are so knowledgeable, they are lost in a jungle of words and concepts and beautiful theories. Somebody has to hit them hard and bring them back to earth. That’s what I’m trying to do. It hurts.I have received a news cutting from Kolkata. The reporter says that he went to Mother Teresa with a cutting from a newspaper about my statement that she is idiotic. She became so mad that she tore up the cutting and threw it away. She was so angry that she was not even willing to make any comment. But she has made a comment – tearing up the newspaper cutting!The reporter said, “I was puzzled. I said, ‘The cutting belonged to me. I had just come to show it to you and to hear your comment.’”And these people think they are religious people. In fact, by tearing up the cutting she simply proved what I have said was right: she is idiotic – this is idiotic. I receive so many “compliments” – in inverted commas – from all over the world that if I start tearing them up that would be enough exercise for me. And I hate exercise!These popes need a little more innocence. These Mother Teresas lead a life of such hypocrisy, such cunningness, such deceptiveness, that they need to become a little more human, a little more simple, a little more innocent. Only then will they see the truth. And it is time that the truth should be seen, otherwise there is no hope for humanity. It will go on and on in circles; in the same circles it has been going on for thousands of years.Jesus is right when he says, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter my kingdom of God.” And these popes and Teresas are not like small children. I would like my sannyasins to be like small children…The Jones family recently moved from their suburban home into a far-out nudist colony. One day the youngest son walked up to his father and asked. “Dad, how can I tell a rich man from a poor man in this place?”Of course, this is a great question for a child in a nudist colony. How can you tell who is rich, who is poor? Of course, when people are dressed you see immediately who is rich, who is poor. But in a nudist colony?His father was speechless for a second, but fathers can’t accept that they don’t know. Then laughingly he said, “I guess a rich man has a bigger cock than a poor man.”This answer seemed to satisfy his son’s curiosity and he left.A few days later while working in the garden he heard his son yelling, “Dad, quick! Come quick!”He jumped up and started running toward the house calling, “What is wrong, son? What is wrong?”The boy shouted back, “There is a poor man chasing mummy and getting richer by the moment!”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 11 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,“Holier-than-thou” seems to be my lifelong mantra. Growing up as a Catholic, I thanked God daily that I was a part of the one true religion. As a Catholic nun I knew I had “made it.” Now, as a sannyasin, I observe those same attitudes and judgments happening at every turn. I watch myself as I act superior around non-sannyasins and inferior around those who have been with you longer than I.I really exhaust myself in constructing intricate continua along which to place everyone in relation to myself. I simply can't shake hard enough to let it go.Please comment.Religion, as it has existed down the ages, is nothing but a subtle ego trip. Far more subtle, of course, than those trips which people are making for money, power, prestige, respectability, and all that. But the basic quality is the same.Man’s mind has been molded, distorted, poisoned, for only one thing, and that is the ego. Sacrifice everything for the ego! That is the single note of all our civilizations, cultures, societies, religions, educational systems. From the very beginning we implant seeds of ambition in the child’s mind. Then we devote twenty-five years in the schools, colleges, and universities to nursing, watering those seeds so that they can have roots, branches, flowers, fruits.Twenty-five years is a long time; it is one-third of your total life. And when you are conditioned for such a long time for ambitiousness, it certainly becomes very difficult to get rid of it. But ambition starts in such a way that you never become aware what poison it contains. The bottle of ambition contains pure poison, but the label is not that of poison: the label says it is pure nectar.We live through words, we are word-oriented. Our whole life is dominated by words. Beautiful words can hide ugly realities. In fact, ugly realities exist in the world only because we are camouflaging them behind beautiful facades of language, philosophy, theology, ideology. Just give it a beautiful word and you can cover up anything.The so-called religious people are the most egoistic because religion is one of the most beautiful words. It contains the whole spectrum of all that has been valued, appreciated, longed for: freedom, love, liberation, God, nirvana, moksha, immortality. What more can you ask? It contains the whole kingdom of God. The word is so beautiful that one has to be really intelligent to see what it is hiding behind it.Religion is nothing but a very unholy trip in the name of holiness. Hence, you will see in the faces of your saints, in their eyes, in their gestures, nothing but the pious ego. But you will have to watch because it comes from the back door. It is never there in its nudity; it is always hiding behind curtains. Don’t be deceived by the curtains – the curtains may be beautiful, made of beautiful material, but what is behind the curtain has to be looked into.Your saints have been doing hard work, their austerities are arduous. They are doing almost the impossible: celibacy, fighting with biology; fasting, fighting with their physiology; and doing everything that is unnatural for a single purpose – that whenever you do something unnatural you are respected. Naturally, you are thought to be a superior kind, a superman. You are no ordinary man. Ordinary men live ordinary lives – they love food, they enjoy food. The religious person is not allowed to enjoy food.Mahatma Gandhi used a very strange chutney in his ashram which had never been used before – chutney made out of neem leaves. Now, neem leaves are the most bitter leaves, and if you eat chutney made out of neem leaves it is going to destroy all your food, it is going to destroy all your joy. The very idea is enough to destroy it.When Louis Fischer, the American thinker-writer-philosopher, stayed with Gandhi to study his philosophy and life – he was proposing to write a book on Gandhi, so he wanted to be close to him to understand his ways of working, his ways of living, everything minutely – Gandhi invited him every day to come for food with him. On the first day he was very happy – Gandhi himself inviting him. But when he tasted the chutney, he could not believe… How was he going to manage? It made his whole tongue so bitter that to eat anything afterward would not change the taste.Being a logical man, and being a very polite, cultured man, he could not say no to Gandhi. He thought the best way was to swallow the whole of the chutney in one gulp and then enjoy the food, rather than destroying the food again and again. That chutney had to be tasted, and it was a rule in Gandhi’s ashram that you could not leave anything on the plate, everything had to be eaten. So he swallowed the chutney in one gulp and Gandhi immediately ordered more chutney for him. He said, “Look! A man of understanding can immediately see the medicinal qualities of neem leaves.” For seven days he had to suffer that hell.The whole idea behind the neem chutney was to destroy your delicate, fragile taste buds so that you only stuff yourself without tasting: aswad – tastelessness. That has been one of the very cherished goals of religious people. So if you are enjoying your food, you are ordinary. Ordinariness has to be condemned – only then can you become extraordinary. And then certainly, deep down, the feeling of holier-than-thou.It is present in all the religions around the world; it has nothing particularly to do with Catholicism. Try to see the mechanism: the unnatural seems to be respected because the man who is capable of doing it seems to have certain powers which the ordinary person has not got. So anything that seems ordinary and natural has to be condemned, and anything that seems to be unnatural has to be respected. Laughter is condemned because it is very ordinary.Christians say Jesus never laughed – I cannot agree with it. Only a man like Jesus has the capacity for real laughter. But Christians saying that Jesus never laughed are certainly making a point: they are saying that he is so sacred he cannot commit such a profane act as laughter.Jainas say that Mahavira never defecated or urinated. Such ordinary acts. That is one of the criteria, whether somebody is really enlightened or not – toilet is the criterion. You see the stupidity of it? They say Mahavira never perspired. That is possible only if he had no skin – if instead of his skin, he was living in a kind of plastic bag. Plastic does not perspire, but skin has to perspire. That is part of its aliveness. It is very fundamental, you can only live if your skin perspires. Certainly dead people don’t perspire, they cannot. Mahavira was either dead or plastic!A living person has to perspire, for the simple reason that every pore of your skin breathes. There are millions of small pores breathing into your body; you are not only breathing through your nose. If your nose was allowed to breathe and your whole body was covered with a thick paint so that all your skin’s pores were closed, you would die within three hours. If you were allowed to breathe through the nose, you would still die within three hours because your whole body needs to breathe; each cell of your body breathes.And when it is so hot… Mahavira lived in one of the hottest parts of this country, Bihar, and he lived naked and traveled on foot. He must have been perspiring more than anybody else. Perspiration has a natural function: when it is too hot your body perspires to keep your body temperature within a certain limit. You perspire, your body relieves some water from the skin’s pores, that water evaporates taking away your body heat. Hence, the body can maintain a constant temperature. If you don’t perspire, your body will become so hot that you will burst forth, or you will be burned from the inside.But all these stupid ideas are propounded for the simple reason to show that Mahavira is special, that Jesus is special. Something extraordinary has to be fabricated.You say, “‘Holier-than-thou’ seems to be my lifelong mantra.” It is in fact everybody’s lifelong mantra, in different ways. Somebody is trying to show his ego by his money; somebody by his knowledge; somebody by his political power; somebody by his austerities; somebody by his religiousness. But it is all the same – only the excuses differ, but the motive is the same…A bus loaded with tourists was making a rather prolonged drive along the seafront in Sicily, when it stopped for the passengers to have a brief rest and enjoy the scenery. At once, most of the men rushed up the embankment where they relieved themselves, despite the fact that the women remaining on the bus could see them.When the men reboarded the bus, one indignant wife was so furious that she told her husband and the others in a loud tone of voice exactly what she thought of the strange maneuver. “But, Jock,” she continued in a more conciliatory tone, “I was awfully proud when you took out ours!”The motive is the same. It may be profane, it may be sacred; it does not matter, it makes no difference at all. The motive is the same: somehow to prove, “I am greater than you, holier than you, wiser than you, more virtuous than you.”You say, “…I thanked God daily that I was part of the one true religion.” Every religion believes that. There are three hundred religions on the earth, and every religion believes in the same idiotic idea. There are hundreds of countries in the world, and every country believes in the same nonsense. There are many races, many colors, but everybody believes that there is something special about his country, his religion, his race, his color.If you observe these attitudes of others, you will be immediately aware what kind of idiocy prevails among human beings. But it will be difficult for you to see your own idiotic, irrational prejudices. First watch others, then it will become easier for you to see that the same is the case with you.I always loved a beautiful story about a professor of philosophy; he was the head of the philosophy department at the University of Paris. He was a very logical man, obviously. He was a great philosopher.One day he declared to his students, “I am the greatest man in the world.”The students were shocked. They had never thought that their philosopher, their professor, who was such a logical man, would ever say something so absurd.One of the students asked, “Sir, you have always been proving your statements rationally – can you prove this one too?”And the professor laughed and he said, “Yes. If I cannot prove it, then I would not have made it in the first place.”He spread on the board a world map. All the students watched him: “What he is doing?”Then he asked them, “Which country is the best country in the world, and the greatest country in the world?”Of course, they were all French so they said, “France.”So he said, “Now, I have only to prove that if I am the greatest man in France that will do. France is obviously the greatest country in the world and I am the greatest man in France, so the natural corollary will be: I am the greatest man in the world.”They had to agree. It was logical.Then he asked, “Forget the whole world, look at the map of France. Which is the most beautiful and the greatest city in France?”Now, the students started feeling a little worried that he was coming closer to the point. But they all lived in Paris, they all loved Paris, and they were all told from their very childhood that Paris was the greatest city in the world. And they said, “Of course, Paris.”And the professor said, “Then we can drop the whole of France, it is now only Paris in which, if it is proved that I am the greatest man, then, as a natural consequence, it will be proved that I am the greatest man in the world.”Then he asked, “Can you tell me which is the greatest place, the wisest, the most beautiful, the most sacred in Paris?”Naturally, the University of Paris, the seat of wisdom.And then he asked, “Now tell me, in the University of Paris which is the most significant, the most important department?”Now what can compete with philosophy? And they were all students of philosophy, so they had to agree that the philosophy department was, of course, the very center of the University of Paris; it is the very soul.And the professor laughed and then he said, “Now, do you see the point? And I am the head of the philosophy department.”Deep down everybody is trying to prove it. If you ask Indians, they think India is the only religious country in the world. Remember, the only. All others are worldly countries; India is a sacred land, the land of the rishis, of the Upanishads and the Vedas, the land of Mahavira, Krishna, Buddha, the land of Kabir, Dadu, Nanak, Meera, Chaitanya – the land of all the great mahatmas, sages and saints. In fact, Indians believe that even the gods in paradise desire to be born in India; they are jealous of Indians.No Indian would ever doubt it because it fulfills some inner need of his own. This is a vicarious way of saying, “I am the most religious person in the world – I belong to the most religious land, the sacred land.”Just the other day I was listening to a song, a beautiful song, which tells how a pilgrim had gone to visit the places where Mohammed lived, Mecca and Medina. The song says, “Your paradise is beautiful, God. But for the moment, at least, I am not interested in it at all. I am in the city where Mohammed lived and walked. Even the dust of this city is far more valuable than your paradise. And if I have the choice, then I will live in Mecca or Medina rather than going to paradise.”Mohammedans believe – it is part of the Mohammedan religion – that if you are really religious, at least once in your life you should go to the Kaaba; to visit the place where Mohammed began his sermons, where he composed his first part of the Koran. If you don’t go to hajj, on this sacred pilgrimage, you are not a complete Mohammedan – something remains incomplete in you.The same is the case with the Jews. They think Jerusalem is not part of this world: it is a sacred city. Hindus say, “Kashi does not belong to this earth, it belongs to the beyond.”These are all vicarious ways of fulfilling your ego. So remember, it has nothing to do with Catholicism as such; it is a very common disease for all religious people. They are utterly blind that they are projecting their ego in beautiful ways.You say, “…I was part of the one true religion.” Every religion thinks, “My religion is the true religion.” Ask the Jainas, they say, “All other religions are untrue, only Jainism is the true religion.” And once you accept the idea of any religion as the true religion, you become a fanatic, you become obsessed. Then every nonsense is possible through you.If you believe Mohammedanism is the only true religion, as Mohammedans believe, then it is your sacred duty to transform the whole world into a Mohammedan world. Even if people are to be forced violently to be Mohammedans, it is your sacred duty to do it because you are doing it for their own sake. Even if they have to be tortured and killed, it is worth it because if they die without becoming Mohammedans they are bound to go to hell. Save them from falling into hell!Christians have the same idea: Christ is the only begotten son of God, and those who are with Christ will be saved. On the last Judgment Day he will come and sort out, “Who are my people and who are not my people.” Those he will choose as his people will enter paradise with great celebration, songs, dances, music. And those who are rejected will start falling into hell – and the Christian hell is the worst because it lasts forever; it is eternal. It is a very strange idea.In one short life of seventy years… Christians believe in only one life, you are born only once. And this small life of seventy years will be decisive for your infinity, for eternity. This seems to be unfair and unjust, absolutely ridiculous. How can you commit so much sin in such a small life that your punishment will be for eternity? Even if you continuously commit sin – twenty-four hours a day, not even taking a tea break, for seventy years; not going to bed, not sleeping, just sinning and sinning and sinning – then still, eternal condemnation seems to be too much, unfair.Bertrand Russell is right when he says, “I have counted all the sins that I have committed. If I am punished for them, then the hardest, rocklike magistrate cannot throw me into jail for more than four years. If my thoughts about committing sins are also to be accounted for – which I have not committed, just thought…” Somebody’s beautiful wife passing by, and just a fantasy – if that has also to be counted as adultery… And the Polack pope will agree that it has to be counted. Not only somebody else’s wife; the Polack pope says, “If you look at your own wife with desire it is adultery.” Your own wife? If you look with desire, appreciation, if you say, “You look beautiful,” that’s enough: you have committed adultery.“Even if these thoughts have to be counted,” Russell says, “then at the most I can be put into prison for eight years. But for these sins, to throw me into hell for eternity is very unfair.” Then God is not as fair, compassionate, and kind as Christians, Mohammedans and others go on saying. Then God seems to be really an ugly despot, far uglier than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, far more cruel than Tamerlane, Nadir Shah and other murderers of history. But one can go on believing once you have accepted the idea, “This is the only true religion.”Just now, Jainas are celebrating one thousand years since the completion of the establishment of a beautiful statue of Bahubali, one of their great sages. It is one of the biggest statues in the world. Now, nearabout one million people are gathered in the province of Karnataka, in Gomteshwar, to celebrate this special occasion. One thousand years the statue has stood, in rain, in sun, in wind. It is so big and huge that it cannot be sheltered. It stands naked. It is part of a hill; the whole hill has been carved. But you will be surprised to know that Bahubali committed suicide.But Jainas cannot see it. It is impossible for them to see that a man who committed suicide cannot be enlightened. They call Bahubali “Bhagwan.” He cannot be “the blessed one” because the man who has attained the ultimate truth is neither interested in living a single moment more… If death comes, he welcomes it. If death does not come, he cannot desire for it. And committing suicide simply means desiring for death; at least one desire is still there.But in a way this is the logical conclusion of the whole Jaina philosophy. It is life-negative, it is against life, it is anti-life. This is the logical conclusion of it: renounce life, escape from life. Every so-called Jaina saint is committing a gradual suicide. And Jainism is the only religion in the world which allows suicide. Of course, they give it a beautiful name, they call it sallekhana. One is so fulfilled, they say; one is so blissful, they say, that one feels there is no need to live any more – so one commits suicide.But if one is so fulfilled that there is no need to live any more, is there any need to commit suicide? The fulfilled person accepts with joy whatsoever is happening. If life is happening, good; if death is happening, good. He lives in a dance, he dies in a dance. He cannot commit suicide.Suicide certainly shows that he is still incomplete. Something in him is still desiring, something in him still wants – what it wants is immaterial. But Jainism says if you sacrifice your life totally then the other world is yours; so at the ultimate moment it is better to commit suicide than to die naturally. Everything natural is wrong. Suicide has something religious in it: you commit it, you do it.The desire to live is a very natural desire. Everybody has it: animals have it, trees have it, birds have it. It is nothing special. But the desire to finish life, to put an end to it, and you earn great virtue. The motive is of earning, the motive is to get something out of it; you are sacrificing life as a means to attain something. It simply proves that the desire is there, the motive is there – but Jainas cannot see it.I will not call Bahubali a bhagwan – no, not at all. His suicide proves definitely that something was wrong in his being. The really enlightened person neither wants to live, nor wants to die. If life is there, he dances with life; if death is there, he dances with death. Each moment is accepted in its totality without any desire for things to be otherwise. But Jainas will not be able to see it.Now you can see it because you are no longer a Catholic nun. You are gaining a significant insight; you are coming out of that parrotlike knowledge, that repetitive knowledge that every religion conditions people for. In fact, parrots have been complaining to me, “Please don’t compare us with pundits!” I can see their point – parrots are not so stupid…A vicar buys the only parrot left in the pet shop.“I have to warn you, vicar,” says the shopkeeper, “that he swears terribly. But if you want him to stop, take him by the feet and swing him around in the air.”The vicar takes the bird with him on a plane trip, and soon the parrot begins to swear. Embarrassed, the vicar takes the bird out of the cage, and swings him round in the passageway of the plane.“Ahhh!” the parrot cries. “Just feel that fucking breeze!”Parrots are not so stupid, but pundits are far more so. You can forgive the parrots, they are only poor parrots, but you cannot forgive the pundits.You say, “As a catholic nun I knew I had ‘made it.’” That’s what they all go on hypnotizing you for. People are living like zombies in Catholic monasteries, nunneries; in Buddhist viharas. The Jaina monks and nuns are all living like zombies, conditioned, deeply conditioned, hypnotized by constant repetition that they have “made it.” And of course when it is constantly repeated to you, you start believing it. In fact, you want to believe it and when everybody says that you have done it, you jump upon the opportunity. You immediately accept it without any argument. But you are, in a way, fortunate that you were capable of “unmaking” it.You say, “Now, as a sannyasin, I observe those same attitudes and judgments happening at every turn.” They must have gone deep in you, they must have become part of your blood, your bones, your very marrow. It will take a little time before they leave your system totally. But if you remain aware they are bound to leave.Two psychiatrists were on the first green. The first one missed a two-footer and muttered, “Nuts!”“Please, Max,” said the partner, “let us not talk shop.”People become accustomed to words, ideas. Even if they change, the first change is only on the circumference, the center remains the same. You have changed your outer habits. The nuns’ clothes are called habits: you have changed from white habits to orange habits. But by changing the clothes nothing is changed; that is only a gesture. Much has to be changed now. And it is good that the question is arising in you, that you are becoming alert you are still carrying the same old judgmental attitudes.One morning before school, little Johnny was sitting at breakfast when his mother asked, “What would you like for breakfast, Johnny?”“I want some fucking cornflakes,” said Johnny.Whereupon the mother belted little Johnny on the ear and shouted, “Don’t ask for that again, do you hear?” Then she turned to Johnny’s little brother, Tommy, and asked, “What do you want for breakfast, Tommy?”Tommy sat nervously in his chair for a moment, then answered, “Ahem, I… I don’t know, Mom. But I sure don’t want any of those fucking cornflakes!”You have changed, but not much. The important thing is that you are becoming aware that those judgmental attitudes are still hanging around you.You say, “I watch myself as I act superior around nonsannyasins, and inferior around those who have been with you longer than I.” This is what has been told to everybody: that you have to put yourself higher and higher, that you have to climb the ladder, that you have to be ambitious, that you have to be the first.My whole effort here is to tell you that you have to be just yourself, neither first nor last. And you are so unique that nobody has been like you before, and nobody is going to be like you again. Hence, there is no question of comparison at all, you are so unique that you are incomparable. So drop this whole idea of comparison.It is comparison which creates trouble; then somebody is higher than you and somebody is lower than you. If you drop this comparative habit, then nobody is higher than you and nobody is lower than you. Then suddenly you recognize everybody’s uniqueness. The moment you can see everybody’s uniqueness, your life has a different flavor. It becomes non-ambitious, it becomes non-egoistic. Then you are not trying to imitate, then you are not trying to compete; then you are simply being yourself, relaxing with yourself. A great love for yourself arises. And not only for yourself, a great love for everyone else also because everyone is so unique. It is because of the uniqueness of individuals around the world that the world is so beautiful.You say, “I really exhaust myself in constructing intricate continua along which to place everyone in relation to myself.” You are doing an absolutely impossible thing. You are simply yourself; there is no need to put yourself into any hierarchy. In a hierarchy somebody will be higher than you, somebody will be lower than you. The lower will feed your ego and the higher will hurt your ego. Both are dangerous, and because the higher hurts you, you will hurt the lower, you will take revenge with the lower.There is a story…Once, Birbal, one of the very significant people around the great emperor Akbar, cracked a joke. Akbar was angry because the joke was on him. He was so angry that he slapped Birbal in front of many people. But Birbal did not miss the opportunity – he immediately slapped the person who was standing at his side, who was lower in rank.The person who was slapped by Birbal could not believe what was happening because he was not concerned with it at all. Birbal had cracked a joke and he had received the reward! Now, why should he be hit? He was nothing to do with it.And he asked, “What are you doing?”Birbal said, “Don’t waste time, hit another person lower than you. The world is round. Sooner or later the hit will reach Akbar.” And it is said it reached him in the night – the wife hit Akbar.The next day he said to Birbal, “You are right, the world is round. But you have always to hit the person who is lower than you; you have to be alert about that.”So everybody is hitting everybody else, hurting everybody else. That’s why we have created this insane world.Drop this whole attitude, this whole approach. With me, nobody has to play the game of holier-than-thou. To me there is no division between the profane and the sacred, between the holy and the unholy – it is all one.The second question:Osho,Are there any meaningless coincidences, or is everything a gigantic, precise mechanism?As far as ninety-nine point nine percent of people are concerned everything is meaningless, just coincidences and coincidences. Only for the very few rare people – the buddhas, the awakened ones, the krishnas, the christs, the zarathustras – only for those very few people who can be counted on fingers, the world is not coincidental.But unless you become awake it remains coincidental. You are in a deep sleep, groping in your somnambulism. How can there be any purpose, any significance? How can there be any sense of direction? You are just walking like a drunkard – not knowing where you are going, not knowing from where you are coming, not knowing exactly who you are.A German once sat in zazen,Asked “Who am I?” again and again.“If I don’t sort this out,I shall stomp, scream und shout!For I’m German, Heil Hitler! Amen!”A German sitting in zazen is bound to “stomp, scream und shout.” And what will he shout? “Heil Hitler!”There was an old fellow from LymeWho married three wives at one time.When asked, “Why the third?”He replied, “One is absurd,And bigamy, sir, is a crime!”Two wild elephants were grazing in the jungle, when suddenly Tarzan streaked in front of them in hot pursuit of Jane. One elephant turned to the other and asked, “How do you suppose he can breathe through that little trunk?”A drunk and his inebriated friend were sitting at a bar. “Do you know what the time is?” asked the drunk.“Sure,” said the friend.“Thanks,” said the drunk.Two small mice were crouched under a table in the chorus girls’ dressing room of a big Broadway show.“Wow!” exclaimed the first mouse. “Have you ever seen so many gorgeous legs in your life?”“Means nothing to me,” said the second. “I’m a titmouse.”Jacqueline’s one-time mother-in-law phoned her recently to ask about her health.“I’m in bed with arthritis,” moaned the young woman.“What ever happened to the other Greek?” asked the ex-mother-in-law.An Irish maid went to confession and told her parish priest that she had been having an affair with the butler who was married and already had two children.The priest admonished her, saying that she had sinned against the church.“Oh, no, father,” she explained. “It was against the china closet. And it would have done your heart good to have heard those dishes rattle!”As far as ninety-nine point nine percent of people are concerned, everything is accidental: their birth is accidental, their love is accidental, their death is accidental, and all that passes in between. Everything is accidental.That’s why when you fall in love… The phrase “falling in love” – it is not anything conscious in you. Suddenly you see a woman or a man and some instinctive force, some unconscious force possesses you. It is a fall, it is not conscious; you are unconscious. Hence, the people who are not in love will think you have gone crazy. All lovers are thought to be a little bit insane, but only by others. The same thing happens to others too, in their own time – then others think about them that they are a little crazy. Why does love look so crazy? – there is a point in it.It is accidental. If somebody asks you why you have fallen in love with a woman or a man, what are you going to say? Whatsoever you will say will look very silly. The color of the eyes, somebody will say – now, what nonsense is this? Or the length of the nose, or the shape of the eyes, or the way she walks, or the way he stands. What nonsense! What has it to do with love? You are just finding something so that you can pretend to be rational, conscious, in control.Just as people fall in love, they fall out; and when they fall out it is the same nose, the same color of the eyes, the same hairstyle, the same woman, the same man. What has happened now? Nothing has changed. You can fall in love today and you can fall out tomorrow. In fact, not to fall out tomorrow simply means you are not very intelligent because from now onward there is just repetition. Once you have learned the topography of the other, it is finished! Now the same curves and the same topography – how long are you going to touch the long nose? It will be the same nose every day.Whatever happens in ordinary life is all accidental. Your birth was accidental. Maybe your father was not thinking about you at all – in fact, he was not even thinking about your mother while he was making love to her, he was thinking of Sophia Loren. He was not concerned with the woman he was making love with, he was just doing it like an exercise, a gymnastics. He had to do it because he is the husband; he is supposed to do it. He is fulfilling a duty.And the woman was not at all thinking of your father either. She was thinking of Muhammad Ali, “The Greatest.” And your father is the farthest from Muhammad Ali, the greatest – there is nothing to compare. That’s why women always close their eyes when they make love – shy, knowing perfectly well that they are not interested in this man. They are thinking about somebody else, some superstar. It is better to think – when your eyes are closed you can fantasize in a better way.These people have given birth to you – Sophia Loren and Muhammad Ali were not making love. The people who were making love have given birth to you, and they were not thinking of each other – and not at all about you! How could they think about you? They had not even heard of you, they had not even seen a picture of you, no idea that an orange sannyasin was going to be born! Otherwise they would have stopped in the middle.It is all unconscious. How have you chosen your job? Just unconscious…When I entered university, somebody was filling in his form, the application form. I had no fountain pen, so I asked him if I could borrow his fountain pen, just for a minute, to fill in my form.He said, very happily, “Do, because I am hesitating about which subjects to choose. So while I am thinking about it, you can fill in your form.”So I filled in my form. He looked at my form and he said, “Philosophy? That sounds good, I will also put that.” And he joined the philosophy department. Now he is a professor of philosophy!Just a few days ago he came here – just a week ago – to visit, with his students. Now he is a doctor of philosophy – and it was just by coincidence. If I had been just one minute late, or if I had had a fountain pen with me, then nobody knows what would have happened to this man. One thing is certain, he would not have been a doctor of philosophy, a professor of philosophy. Now he has lived his whole life as a professor of philosophy, thinking that he has chosen it.When Sheela brought his name, “Dr. Patel has come and he says that he is an old colleague, an old friend of yours.” I tried to remember. In a way, certainly, I have been very fateful to him: I have determined the whole course of his life. Then I remembered that he had filled out his form just by looking at my form.Philosophy sounded good, and it certainly sounds good if you think of physiology, biology, zoology. Philosophy sounds good, something great, and he liked the word. And now his whole life he thought he had chosen it.Your job is not chosen by you. You are living the life of a somnambulist.A swank, Long Island country club staged a ladies’ tournament last summer. The day before the award of the trophy to the winner, Harris, the committee chairman discovered that no trophy had been bought. He hurried to Jenkins Jewelers and was told that he could not get the cup engraved in twenty-four hours. Jenkins suggested that the sample cup that he had on display be given to the winner with the explanation that one just like it, with a suitable inscription, would be delivered to her the following week.Next evening, the tournament winner marched proudly up to the platform to receive her trophy. Harris, under stress and with a few scotches under his belt, forgot to mention that the cup was a sample, and one with the correct inscription would be delivered later.She looked at what was inscribed on the cup and fainted dead away. Harris then picked up the trophy. It read, “Awarded to the Best Wire-Haired Bitch in Nassau County!”If you look around you will see it is all accidental. Your whole life is accidental. You try to make some sort of meaning out of it just to console yourself, but in fact there is no meaning in it. Only buddhas have meaning, nobody else has any meaning.Riedel came running into the clubhouse yelling for a doctor. An MD came over and was amazed to see the man had a putter rammed up his butt.“What happened?” asked the physician. “I was playing golf with my wife,” replied Riedel. It was the first time she had ever played. I got on the green in three, but her second shot landed an inch from the cup. I bent over to pick up her ball and I said, ‘It looks like your hole, honey,’ and that’s all I remember!”Two Scotsmen are on holiday in Rome, and the first night of their visit they decide to go out drinking. So, turning in to the first bar they find, they order two pints of beer.“I’m sorry,” says the barman, “but we don’t sell beer.”The Scotsmen are absolutely horrified and ask the barman, “What do you sell?”The barman starts going through a huge and confusing drinks list.“Look, Jimmy,” says one Scot, having a sudden brain wave, “what does the pope drink?”“Crème de menthe,” replies the barman.“Okay, give us two pints of that then,” says the Scot. And between the two of them they consume, during the evening, nearly thirty pints of crème de menthe.So the next morning they both regain consciousness lying in the gutter covered in green vomit.“Oh, God!” says one. “What happened last night?”“We were drinking that stuff the pope drinks,” groans the other.“Well,” replies the first, “if the pope drinks that stuff, no wonder they have to carry him about in a chair all day!”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 12 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Catholicism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, which are the most “religious” of religions, seem most concerned about purity, cleanliness and sexual abstinence. Yet, they preside over the most unhygienic, malnourished and miserable peoples of the earth. Is there a connection?Devaraj, there is certainly and absolutely a tremendous connection.Our life grows around the center of our vision, of our philosophy; we start looking at things according to a certain perspective. Once that perspective becomes a settled thing, our reality shrinks. Then the whole of reality is no longer available to us; only that part of reality remains available which fits with our prejudices, our ideologies, our philosophies, our religions.Almost everybody on the earth is living a partial life, nobody is living a whole life; hence the earth is not holy. The so-called religions, all of them, in different ways, have caused a certain blindness. People see only that which is allowed by their minds to reach their consciousness. It is one of the established scientific facts now that only two percent of reality reaches through our senses to our consciousness. That two percent reality, against ninety-eight percent, is nothing. And we think of that two percent as if it is the whole of life. Things go upside down – life becomes a chaos.Buddhism has chosen the color yellow for the bhikkus – for the Buddhist monks and nuns. And you will be surprised why they have chosen the color yellow. They have chosen the color yellow to represent death – yellow is the color of death. When a leaf dies, it becomes yellow; before falling to the ground, to its grave, it becomes yellow. When a person dies, he starts becoming yellow. As you become older you start losing your redness, your aliveness, you start becoming pale.Yellow is the color of death. Buddhism’s whole conclusion is that life is not worth living. The only purpose that life can be put to is: how to renounce it? How to get out of it? All the three religions born in India – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism – talk about the wheel of life and death. Existence is looked at as a wheel of life and death, and unless you drop out of this wheel you will go on moving in circles. All these three religions have made the goal of their search only one single thing – how not to be born again.Now, this life-negative approach is bound to affect you, it is bound to influence your very gestalt, your very style, your functioning. In the East, if you see poverty, malnourishment, starvation, sickness, the reason is clear: all the three religions which have dominated the East are against life. Why should one bother too much about the body? The body is the enemy – you don’t feed the enemy, you don’t nourish the enemy, you don’t take care of the enemy. It is better that the enemy dies. You would like to torture the enemy, not to make him healthy. And all these three religions of the East have been teaching methods, how to torture yourself. They call it tapascharya – austerity, but deep down it is nothing but slow suicide, it is a crime against life and existence.Then a vicious circle is created. You don’t take care of the body, you don’t take care of the environment of the body, you don’t give it right nourishment. You suffer, and that suffering proves that your religions are right, that life is suffering. Then you become even more and more disinterested with all that the body contains, life contains, implies. Naturally that creates more suffering, and your mahatmas are proved even more correct. This is a vicious circle, but the basic point is that from the very beginning you have accepted a belief, a prejudice, without ever inquiring.The religions all over the world prevent people from inquiry. Before a child can inquire we give him beliefs, we force beliefs on him. And once a person has beliefs, his inquiry can never be detached, his inquiry can never be pure. His inquiry is already contaminated – he has a priori conclusions.A very famous Hindu psychologist, Dr. Bannerji, once came to see me. He is the head of the department for Psychical Research at Rajasthan University. He had come to see me because he was working on a project; the project was whether there is only one life, or many lives.Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism – all the three religions born outside of India – believe in only one life. And the three religions born in India believe in thousands of lives, in fact, the actual number is eight hundred and forty million lives. The difference is immense – one life and eight hundred and forty million lives – is not a small difference!So he was working on the project: Who is right? He told me, “I am a man of science” – and he has many degrees; he has been educated in the West.I asked him a simple question, “This is beautiful work that you are doing, but before you ask me anything I would like to ask you one thing only. Then I am ready, you can ask anything you want. My question is: Do you believe that there are many lives or there is only one life?”He said, “Of course, I believe that there are many lives, man is born again and again.”I said to him, “Then the inquiry is pointless. If there is already a belief, if you are already prejudiced, then your inquiry is not scientific, you are not open. You will collect only that data which supports your prejudice. In the same way a Christian working on the same project, or a Mohammedan working on the same project, will find that there is only one life. And you will find that there are many, many millions of lives. It is not a question of inquiry at all. To inquire one needs an open mind.”But each child is burdened with beliefs. Parents are in such a hurry that before the child starts thinking on his own he has to be poisoned because who knows, he may not agree with his parents, with his tradition, if he starts thinking on his own. And I can see that their concern is relevant: if a person starts thinking on his own, all traditions will disappear from the world. Once you start inquiring on your own you will accept only that which you have experienced. You will not accept anything which has simply been given to you by others, handed over to you by generations for thousands of years.Everybody begins life on the wrong step; the very first step goes wrong. Once you accept something, then you have colored glasses on your eyes and everything looks the same color.These religions have certainly something to do with the “…unhygienic, malnourished and miserable peoples of the earth.” Their basic approach is anti-life. But to teach anybody an anti-life philosophy will not be right because even a child will start asking embarrassing questions. Why should one be anti-life? Life is so beautiful! All that is beautiful is beautiful because it is alive. And life is created by God – why should he create something which has to be discarded and renounced?Hence, these people don’t teach anti-life attitudes directly; they go indirectly, in roundabout ways: they teach you anti-sexual attitudes. That is an indirect way to put negativity in your mind and heart against all that exists. But it is a very cunning way because nobody can immediately see that life and sex are synonymous. Unless you are very intelligent, you will not see the point that all life exists through sex, comes through sex. You are born through sex, your parents were born through sex. The whole of life is sexual.The flowers that you think beautiful – and your poets go on praising – are sexual expressions of the trees, that is their sexuality. Those beautiful roses are not meant for your garlands; those beautiful roses have something to do with the sexuality of the rosebush. When the cuckoo starts calling from a distant, faraway place, it sounds so beautiful, but it is not calling you – neither your poets, nor your musicians. The cuckoo is not interested in your poetry, in your music, etcetera. That call of the cuckoo is sexual. And remember, the call is coming from the male cuckoo, not from the female. Females don’t call. It is the male cuckoo who is trying to allure the female, attract the female.Have you seen? A very rare phenomenon. Look around. You will always find the male more beautiful, more musical, more decorated than the female – except in man. The beautiful peacock with all its rainbow-colored feathers is the male; compared to it the female looks very ordinary. All the songs are sung by male birds, not by female birds. The reason is that the female is beautiful just by being female – that’s enough. The male has to show, to manifest, to decorate.In the ancient days this was the case with men too. You must have seen the statues of Krishna and the pictures of Krishna. You can see it. Krishna must be very ancient. His long hair, and he is using all kinds of ornaments; his beautiful silk dress; his posture, that of a dancer. He looks very feminine.Never think for a single moment that shaving your beard and your mustache is a new thing. Krishna must have been doing it five thousand years ago because he seems to have no mustache, no beard. He was decorated in every possible way, with the flute and the song.It was only later on, when marriage became an established thing, that the woman started decorating herself because the woman is one thing, and the wife is totally different. The woman is beautiful just by being a woman. The same woman, once she becomes your wife, loses all attraction. To hide that, she starts decorating herself – to keep herself attractive to the husband. This is part of the marriage system that has put things upside-down. Now the male is not interested in decorating himself. In fact, he is miserable because he got caught with a woman! He is afraid.That’s why all these religions have been created by men. The root cause of all these religions is basically the fear of the wife. How to renounce the wife? You have to create a great fog, a philosophical jargon around it; otherwise the wife is not going to leave you so easily. The people became very tortured by the wives – and the simple torture is that she loses attraction. Once she is your possession she loses attraction, and that is the greatest torture.And the moment she starts losing attraction she starts becoming suspicious of you, jealous of you. She starts spying on you: “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” She starts nagging you, she goes on finding some fault with you to dominate you. First she used to dominate without domination, her beauty was enough, her being a woman was enough. Now it is no longer enough, something else has to be added.How to escape from the woman? And you caught yourself in the mousetrap. It is always the mouse who goes into the trap; the trap never chases the mouse, remember. But once inside the trap the mouse becomes religious. He starts thinking, “Life is a bondage, a suffering, imprisonment. How to go beyond life?” Hence all religions are created by these suffering, henpecked husbands.Just the other day an old man asked a question, “Two of my sons have become your sannyasins…” He said that he is seventy years old and has not the courage now, or the energy, or guts enough to fight society. He wants to become a sannyasin, but he cannot. But Hindu scriptures say that if even one person in the family becomes a sannyasin, then seven generations will be delivered, will attain moksha. “So is it true about your sannyasins, too, or not?” the old man has asked.These religions have been teaching that if the husband leaves the wife, “Don’t be worried – you will attain to moksha, the wife will also attain moksha.” In fact, she should attain first because she is the basic cause of it. She started the whole thing in the first place, otherwise there would have been no God and no moksha. She should enter first, the husband should really follow.But they have been saying, “The husband has left you – don’t be worried. This life is short; it will be difficult and painful without the husband, but you will have tremendous rewards afterward. Not only you – seven generations will all become enlightened, without any effort on their part.”So the poor old fellow has asked, “Not only one, but two of my sons have become your disciples – so what about me, what about the seven generations?” As far as my sannyas is concerned, it is individual. It has nothing to do with your seven generations. Truth is always individual, but the people who were going against life had to create some consolations around themselves.And when it became a deep-rooted idea in the minds of people that life is ugly, sex is ugly, existence itself is a bondage – as if life is a punishment, not a reward, not an act of grace; as if you have been thrown into life for some crime that you must have committed somewhere in the past – then naturally these things are bound to happen. People will become malnourished: why go on taking care of the body? The body is the cause of your bondage. Why be hygienic? For what?In fact, the Indian ascetic is very unhygienic. The more unhygienic he is, the more he is respected. The highly respected ascetic is called paramahansa – the great swan. This is the highest category of saints in India. And the definition of a paramahansa is that he can eat from the same plate as a dog, or he can eat just sitting by somebody’s side who is defecating. He will remain unconcerned. He does not make any distinction between food and shit – it is all the same.That’s why I say Morarjibhai Desai is fifty percent a paramahansa because he makes no distinction between water and urine. In fact, urine is far better – he calls it the “water of life.” Fifty percent paramahansa – just fifty percent more is needed and he and his seven generations will be delivered.Why should one be hygienic? For what? And remember, when sex is repressed, many things are repressed automatically. Sex is such a significant phenomenon because it is the source of all life. It has to be so significant because if you repress it you will repress many other things. For example, the person who is sexually repressed will become uncreative because creativity itself is a kind of sexual activity.In my observation, if a person is totally creative, he will transcend sex without repressing it because his whole energy will become creative. He will not need to go into sex; not that he will prevent himself – the very need will disappear. He now has a far higher bliss happening to him. The lower is bound to disappear when you have the higher in your hands.Try to understand my arithmetic: never drop the lower, try to attain the higher. When the higher is there, the lower is bound to disappear on its own accord. And when the lower disappears into the higher, then life becomes more beautiful, more healthy, more whole.A real poet while producing, creating, composing, forgets all about sex. A real sculptor absorbed in his work forgets all about sex. Even if a naked woman passes by he will not look at her, his concentration is so total in his own creativity. A real dancer disappears in his dance; his ego, his sex, are dissolved in his dance.But if sex is repressed, then just the contrary will be the result: your creativity will be repressed, and creativity repressed means many things. Its implications are very great because it has multidimensionality to it. If your creativity is repressed, your science and the scientific endeavor will disappear.What happened to India? This is the most religious country in the world. The absolute proof of its being the most religious country is that this is the most unscientific country too. What happened to India’s intelligence? It is very strange to know that arithmetic was discovered in India. But Einstein was not born in India. Arithmetic reached its crescendo somewhere else, not in India. The first great astronomers were Indian, but Eddington, Einstein – the peaks – didn’t happen here. Something went wrong.India is the most ancient country in the world; all other countries are just small children compared to India’s life history. It has been there for at least ten thousand years; certainly it may have been longer. In ten thousand years, India has produced great talented people, great geniuses, but the idea of life-negation caught hold of all those geniuses. They all became uncreative, they all escaped from life; they moved to the mountains, to the caves. They did not become great scientists, poets, painters, dancers; all these things were left to the mediocre. Otherwise there was no reason why India should not have become the most affluent society in the world. It should have become the richest country, but for the simple reason that creativity disappears when you repress sex.If your sex life is flowing joyously, you have tremendous interest in everything you are doing; otherwise you become disinterested, everything seems to be meaningless. You go on doing things because they have to be done – just a drag, just a burden you go on carrying. It is a duty, it has to be fulfilled, but it is not joy.So nobody in India will seem joyous, will seem utterly interested in creativity. And creativity contains everything: science, art, music, poetry, literature – everything becomes repressed. And even if some rebels start doing something creative, then their creativity will show some obsession with sex because they are part of this society. Even if they are rebels rebelling against this society, their rebellion is also not pure; their rebellion is basically a reaction. So they created the statues and beautiful temples of Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri. But if you see those temples you can see immediately they have been made by very sexually perverted people.If you go to Khajuraho and see all kinds of sexual sculptures, you will be surprised – who were these people? What kind of mind did they have? Whatsoever they were fantasizing, they have put with great effort into stone; it must have been centuries of work. You will see all kinds of obsessive statues, almost having the quality of insanity in them. For example, one woman is doing shirshasan – headstand – and two people are making love to her. One woman is being made love to by many people; you will be surprised how many people can make love to one woman. All kinds of things are being done – all the openings of her body are being used.Now what kind of people made these statues? And it must have taken years of work. They must have been fantasizing these things. They were rebels, certainly, going against the puritan society. But their rebellion is not meditative. Their rebellion is just a reaction, and the reactionary always moves to the opposite extreme.Homosexuality is depicted, lesbianism is depicted. You cannot say anything which is not available in Khajuraho. All else that has been done by people like de Sade or Masoch, all are there, and much more – and in the name of religion because it is a temple. Even the rebellious people had to pretend that this is religion. In the name of Tantra, ninety-nine percent is nothing but sexual indulgence. But it has to be put behind a garb of religiousness, spirituality, great words: Shiva and Shakti, yin and yang.If you reduce it to its reality, it is nothing but man and woman. But when you call it yin and yang, it sounds great; Shiva and Shakti, and it sounds like something sacred. Of course, they were going through rituals which made it look sacred, but the ultimate result was nothing but just ordinary sexuality. But the introduction was long and religious; the preface was to function as a facade. Ninety-nine percent of Tantra is nothing but pure sexual indulgence behind beautiful names.On the one hand creativity was repressed, science disappeared, art disappeared. And even the art that remained is predominantly sexual.Kalidas, one of the greatest artists of India, who can only be compared with Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and people like these – if you look into his words you will be surprised. If he goes into the garden and sees apples, those apples are not apples but breasts. Now, this man must be perverted. What will you call a man who sees a woman with beautiful breasts and sees apples? – you will call him starved, hungry. The same is true of Kalidas, there is no difference in it. So many breasts are hanging in the tree… Stupid, ugly, perverted, insane, but this was thought to be literature. All religious scriptures are full of all the kinds of perversion that you can imagine, that you can fantasize.So, on the one hand everything great is repressed because people lose interest. If life is meaningless, then the only thing worth doing is how to get rid of it. Why waste your time in composing music? Why waste your time in writing poetry? Why waste your time in sculpture? Get rid of life, renounce life. The only thing worth doing is to torture yourself as much as you can because that is the only way to attain moksha.So the whole energy became self-torture – and when people start torturing themselves, they are nothing but masochists. They cannot be hygienic, they cannot be scientific, and they are bound to be miserable.Remember that sex is the lowest pleasure. According to me, sex – the pleasure – is the seed. If sex is allowed natural growth, respected, valued, then transformation happens, metamorphosis happens. Sex starts growing into a foliage of art, music, poetry, dance, and a thousand other creative dimensions. Sex is only a seed, or the roots, but if supported, nourished, watered, taken care of, then many branches grow, much foliage comes; many green leaves moving in all directions, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun. This is what the world of art is, the world of aesthetics. If you allow the world of aesthetics to reach its highest peak, then flowers come.Sex is pleasure, the lowest; art is happiness. Sex is animal; art is human. Sex is biological. The second step, higher than sex, is love. The man who has accepted sex respectfully, lovingly, will be able to transform it into love. And on the foliage, on the branches of love, the flowers of bliss happen. That is the highest stage; that is spirituality, true religion.But these so-called religions crippled humanity from the very base. They destroyed the very root.In Japan they have a certain art form. I will not call it an art form because it is murderous; it is called bonsai. In Japan, there are trees four hundred years old and six inches tall: trees which would have been one hundred, two hundred feet high in the sky, reaching toward the stars. Aspirations of the earth – which would have bloomed, which would have grown so vast that thousands of people could have taken shelter under their shade, hundreds of bullock carts would have rested underneath them, they are only six inches tall. And it is called an art form. It is not art, it is not form; it is deformation. It is ugly, it is murderous.It is like keeping a child just one foot tall, or six inches, just keeping him undernourished so he cannot grow. That has been done to humanity too. The whole trick is they plant the tree in a pot without any bottom, and they go on cutting the roots. When you go on cutting the roots the tree cannot grow. There is a certain proportion between the roots and the tree: the tree can only go so high if the roots go very deep. In fact, Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “If you want to reach heaven, you will have to reach hell as far as your roots are concerned.”I perfectly agree with the man. He is a little mad, but once in a while he has great insights. If you want to reach the stars, your roots will have to go to hell itself; only then will there be proportion. A big tree cannot remain standing with small roots – roots like seasonal flowers have. They go on cutting the roots; the tree cannot grow. It goes on becoming old, but it grows not. It grows old, but it does not grow up. And that’s what has happened to humanity in a subtle way. We have been cutting the root.Sex is the root. You cut the root, then man grows old – grows in age, but does not grow up. Psychologists in the First World War became aware of the fact that the average psychological age of human beings is not more than twelve years – a very sad fact. A person may be ninety years old or even more, but his psychological age is only twelve years. What has happened to his psychology? If his physiology is growing, why is his psychology not growing with it? Something must have been done to his psychological roots.Sex has been cut – that is the root. He has lost joy in life. He has become guilty; he has become burdened with the idea of sin. And the more a person becomes burdened with the idea of sin – and sex is the most sinful act – then his psychology starts shrinking.And why twelve years? There must be some reason. It is somewhere between about twelve and fourteen that your sex starts growing, you become sexually mature. So before that age of sexual maturity, fourteen, something must have been done to you so you never even reach sexual maturity, you remain immature. You can see this immaturity all over the world. You can see it in your films, what people are going to see there. If there is no murder, no rape, no sexuality, no obscene scenes, the picture flops – otherwise the house is full.Who are these people? What have they gone to see there? Something is missing in their life, and they want at least to see it projected onto the screen – some vicarious satisfaction. Who are the people who are reading Playboy and such magazines, which are sold by the millions? – religious people.Everybody is religious in the world. Somebody is Hindu, somebody is Mohammedan, somebody is Christian – whosoever is purchasing these Playboys belongs to some religion. Of course, he cannot read Playboy, cannot see the nude women, in front of others, so he hides it. That shows his religion: if he hides it in the Bible he is Christian; if he hides it in the Gita he is Hindu; if he hides it in the Old Testament he is a Jew. Just look where he is hiding it – that will show his religion.Why so many obscene magazines, obscene movies, blue movies? Why so much interest in murder, rape? You can read Indian newspapers every day and you can see; so many rapes are committed every day, and the country is so religious. It must be religious – those rapes prove it! It is a religious country. It is not a contradiction, mind you. Those rapes prove that it is a religious country, perhaps the most religious in the world. So many murders. Every kind of ugliness happens every day, and religious people are doing it.These are the same people who go to the temples, to the mosques, to the churches – the same people who are ordinarily very religious. In fact, to compensate for what they are doing, they become even more religious. They go on pilgrimage because the priests have created such cunning devices: they say to the Hindus, “If you go to the Ganges and take a dip in the Ganges, all your sins are washed away.”Now the Ganges is the dirtiest river in India, maybe the dirtiest in the whole world because it is the only river where dead bodies are thrown in. It is thought to be a great privilege if somebody’s body is thrown into the Ganges, if somebody dies in the Ganges. If he cannot die in the Ganges, then at least throw the body in – his benefit will be great. A dip in the Ganges and all the sins of your past are washed away. Just think how many people in millions of years must have taken a bath in the Ganges – it must be full of sins, over-full. Avoid it!I have never taken a dip in the Ganges. I have stayed on the bank of the Ganges many times. And when I was staying near the Ganges, in Prayag or in Varanasi or in Patna, the people I was staying with would say to me, “It would be good. Why don’t you come to take a dip in the Ganges?”I said, “No, that I cannot do. It is so full of so many people’s sins that I don’t think it will wash mine away. More is the possibility that I will gather others’ and come back. And, in fact, I don’t have any sins to wash away, so why should I bother? It is risky! It is better to have your own sins, why borrow them? Even if you have, it is perfectly good; they should at least be yours. I’m not interested in other people’s sins.”But the priests have always been very crafty and cunning. This is a simple device: you go to the Ganges, take a dip, and you are finished with all your sins. So you are again ready to commit all those sins with fervor, with gusto, and you know there is no problem – you can go any time again and take a dip in the Ganges. There is no problem in it.People go… The Mohammedans to Kaaba; they become hajji. Hajj means pilgrimage to Kaaba. Now even smugglers go to Kaaba and they become hajji. The greatest smuggler in India is Haji Mastan – you see how religious this country is? – even smugglers are religious. His name is Haji Mastan, one who has done the pilgrimage to Kaaba. Every Mohammedan should do at least one pilgrimage to Kaaba, and that finishes all his sins; then he becomes pure.And of course, when you are pure, what are you going to do? You will again start writing the same things that you were writing before. Now, again finding the slate clean, you can write in a better way because now you are more experienced.These so-called religions have something basically wrong with them. They have been a calamity to humanity. Certainly, they are the cause of people’s misery. First, they console people: “Your misery is determined by your past lives’ bad karmas, so don’t commit bad karmas any more, otherwise you will be punished again in your future life.”Now you cannot do anything about the past life, except suffer. At the most you can suffer as patiently as possible, and that patience is very much praised. Suffer patiently – it has to be suffered, so why make an unnecessary fuss about it? It is inevitable. You committed the crime in the past, now it is a by-product. Just as a shadow follows you, your karmas follow you. This is the approach of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism; these three religions have this explanation.And the other three religions – Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism – say it is because Adam and Eve committed a sin and you are suffering because of their sin. So unless you do something to undo that sin that your forefathers committed… What was their sin? – disobedience. So be obedient. Obedient to whom? They were disobedient to God. Now you are no longer in the Garden of Eden so you cannot meet God directly; you have to depend on the Polack pope – he is the mediator. You obey the Polack pope. If you obey him totally, then there is a possibility God may forgive you and you may be allowed back into the Garden of Eden.So the only thing left for you is to obey the church, the dogma, the religion into which you are born. Howsoever nonsensical it is, howsoever stupid, superstitious it is, you are not to ask any questions. You have simply to obey. And if your obedience is total you will be rewarded. Not now – after death.All these religions are clever in that way. Their rewards will always be after death. That’s a very simple device. Nobody comes back to say whether he has been rewarded or not. At least people like Jesus should come back and tell the truth – whether they have been allowed back into the Garden of Eden or not. But nobody comes; nobody can come, so it remains shrouded in mystery. And only the pope, the shankaracharya, the imam, the ayatollah, these people know the secret, nobody else. So you follow obediently whatsoever they say – then you will be allowed.The devices are different but the goal is the same. Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas, Buddhists, Jews – their devices are different, but if you look at the goal, the goal is the same. Follow the priest – and the priest is following the tradition. It means basically: follow the past, follow the dead past. And when you follow the dead past, how can you be happy? Life is now, and your mind is always hanging somewhere in the past. There cannot be any attunement between you and existence; there is always going to be a discord.Life creates new situations for you to respond to, and you go on repeating parrotlike answers that others have imposed upon you. They never fit, they cannot fit. Life is never repetitive, and your answers are always given by somebody in the past. Moses gave the answers for the Jews. Now what does Moses know about this moment? Three thousand years have passed. In fact, for forty years people had followed when he was alive, and he simply went on roaming in the desert, groping in the dark.And then too, he took a wrong turn – unforgivable! If he had taken a right turn, now the Jews would have owned all the oil of the world. Just a little angle. Forty years of wandering in the desert, and all the torture, and where did they reach? – Jerusalem! Teheran would have been far better; Baghdad would have been far better.The Jews cannot really forgive Moses. They should not – he is the cause of their whole misery. And he gave them the idea: “You are the chosen people of God.” For this idea they have suffered for three thousand years – for nothing else. It is not anything else that is wrong with them but this idea, this ego that Moses gave them, that they are the chosen people of God.Once you have such egoistic attitudes you are bound to be in trouble. Nobody wants you to be the chosen people of God because others are themselves the chosen people of God. Then there is going to be a clash.Adolf Hitler was the chosen person of God, Nordic Germans were the chosen people of God. Now, the clash. There can only be one people, the chosen people; God cannot make this mistake: he cannot choose two people. So the Jews have to be destroyed, annihilated from the earth. The Jews have suffered for this simple reason: this ego that Moses gave them.And what is his gift? – those Ten Commandments. Nobody follows them, but those Ten Commandments are still torturing people. In fact, he was not the chosen person of God.The story is…God was trying to find a customer. He asked the French, “Would you like to have a few commandments?”And the French said, “No. First show us a sample.”And he said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”They said, “Stop! If we don’t commit adultery, then what are we going to do? We don’t want such commandments.”He asked the Hindus and he asked others, but nobody was willing. And then he asked Moses, “Would you like to have a few commandments?”And Moses, being a perfect Jew, said, “How much does it cost?”And he said, “Free! It costs nothing.”Moses said, “Then I will have ten!”That’s how he got those Ten Commandments. And they are torturing the Jews for three thousand years.It is time to get rid of all that. It was his trip, why should you be on his trip? Do your thing! Why go on doing Moses’ thing, or Abraham’s thing, or Manu’s thing, or Mahavira’s thing? Can’t you be a little bit more intelligent to manage your own life? The very idea that your life has to be managed by somebody else creates stupidity. You are bound to become stupid; you have given the power to somebody else to dominate you.Now Hindus are still being dominated by Manu. Thousands of years have passed, and all that Manu has given is sheer ugliness. He has given the idea of the sudras, the untouchables – he is the cause of millions of people’s misery. He has given the idea that the woman is lower than the man. He has given the idea that the brahmins are the highest caste, and everybody has to listen to and obey the brahmins.Hindus have lived in slavery because of Manu; they have lived a very subhuman kind of life because of Manu. Who is this Manu? Why should one bother about him? It was his joy to write a certain scripture, but there is no binding on you to follow him. Why can’t you write your own scripture?That’s my message to each of my sannyasins. You are not to follow me. I am doing my thing, you have to do your thing. It is just a coincidence that by chance we have met. If we can enjoy each other, good; if we don’t enjoy each other, good-bye. More than that is dangerous!It is just a meeting of travelers on the same path. For a few miles we can be together as long as you enjoy me, I enjoy you. Otherwise a crossroad comes and we say good-bye, and we say to each other, “See you soon. If existence permits, if existence is willing, it may happen again – some other road in some other life, on some other planet we may meet. But this time it has been joyous to be together for so long.” And we are grateful. But there is no binding.My basic message is for the individual, and the freedom of the individual. These religions have created misery for the simple reason that they have taken away your intelligence. When you obey, your intelligence is destroyed. When you cannot say no, your yes is impotent; it means nothing, it is bogus. And all these religious people are living bogus, borrowed lives. People are malnourished, people are poor, living in unhygienic conditions, people are living in psychological slavery. Unless we destroy all these religions, there is no hope. Certainly we need a certain kind of religiousness in the world, but religions are not needed.Religiousness is a totally different phenomenon. Religiousness is like love. Love is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Mohammedan. Religiousness is also neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian. The moment love becomes Christian, beware, it is not love. The moment somebody says, “My friendship is Hindu,” beware. It is not friendship, it is just Hindu chauvinism trying to catch hold of your neck in the name of friendship. Beware of Christian love because this Christian love has killed thousands of people, burned people alive – it is Christian love. And they are burning for your own sake.Devaraj, you ask me, “Catholicism, Mohammedanism and Hinduism, which are the most ‘religious’ of religions, seem most concerned about purity, cleanliness and sexual abstinence.” They are really concerned about sexual abstinence. The concern for purity and cleanliness is secondary. In fact, it is part of their sexual abstinence.They call sex dirty. Because sex is dirty, then sexual abstinence is pure. They have nothing to do with purity, and there is nothing dirty in sex. What can be dirty in sex? But these people have created the idea that the sex center is exactly between the two dirty centers, so it must be dirty, doubly dirty.But it has nothing in it – no dirt. There is no question of the sex center being dirty at all. But these people have been calling the whole body dirty. And when they call the body dirty, they create a certain logic to show that they are true. The body consists of bones, of blood, of pus; the body is dirty. But one strange thing: all the scriptures of the world say that the woman’s body is dirty, as if man’s body is made of gold – instead of bones, diamonds and emeralds; instead of blood, perhaps nectar. Nobody condemns man’s body because the scriptures were written by men. And the man’s body is also part of the woman’s body because it has come from the woman’s womb. It is the same body. But the woman’s body is dirty.These male chauvinist pigs have been riding on humanity’s chest for so long, you have completely forgotten that you are being used as a donkey. And they have been there so long that you think they are part of you. They have to be thrown, completely thrown away.There is nothing dirty in blood, there is nothing dirty in bones, there is nothing dirty in the body. The body is one of the most beautiful phenomena of nature; one should be grateful to existence rather than calling it dirty. It is one of the most amazing miracles. For seventy to a hundred years it keeps alive, it keeps rejuvenating itself, it perpetuates itself. Its every mechanism is a miracle. People go to see the pyramids in Egypt, then the Taj Mahal in India. In fact, their body contains far greater miracles than those ugly pyramids.You cannot even conceive how your body is working. You are not aware of it – how it transforms your bread into blood. You have heard about alchemists, that they were trying to transform baser metals into gold; your body is doing far better. It is transforming all kinds of crap that you go on throwing inside you, into blood, into bone. Not only into blood and bone, it makes your brain out of that crap! Out of your ice cream, Coca-Cola, it goes on making your brain; a brain which can create a Rutherford, an Albert Einstein, a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. Just see the miracle.A brain, such a small thing, enclosed in a small skull – a single brain can contain all the libraries of the world. Its capacity is almost infinite. It is the greatest memory system. If you want to make a computer of the same capacity you will need miles of space to make that computer function. It is encaged in your small skull. And yet, although science has developed so far, they have not been able to transform ice cream into blood. They have been trying, but they cannot find the clue – what to do? How to transform ice cream into blood? It is a faraway thing to make anything like brain out of ice cream! Perhaps it may never happen. Or even if it happens, it will happen through the brain, it will again be a miracle of the brain.These people go on calling the body ugly, dirty. Their idea of purity has nothing to do with purity. You can look around the world. They have different ideas of purity. It depends on their religion, on their climate, and other things.The Indian cannot conceive of any Westerner as clean because he is always thinking of toilet paper. The moment he sees a Western person he becomes concerned; his dirtiness is so clear to him. And the Westerner cannot conceive the Indian as pure because he is always looking at his nails. And particularly Devaraj! He is always looking at nails. He is a doctor, and he is very concerned because just a little bit of shit in the nails and you are dirty. And you are eating from the same hands, and you are preparing food from the same hands.If you ask Devaraj he will say, “It is better to keep your dirt to yourself rather than to go on distributing it so generously. When you prepare food you are distributing it to the whole family; and if you are preparing food in a hotel, then you are distributing to thousands of people. That dirt in your nails carries amoebas, the greatest enemy of man – the amoeba.” Devaraj is an amoeba expert; he is known as the amoeba king. He is continuously researching, working; he is a great researcher. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Medicine in England. His whole concern is how to keep people clean.But cleanliness is a totally different idea to different people. To the Hindus it is one idea; to the Jainas it is a different idea. For example, the Jaina muni will eat refined butter only for some time – four hours, six hours – after that it is unclean. The Jainas will not drink in the night, will not eat in the night – it is unclean because a mosquito may fall in. Some insect may creep into the food and there will be violence, bloodshed. So they will eat only in the day. The people who eat in the night are all unclean, dirty people.And the same Jainas will defecate anywhere. The whole of India is being used as a toilet. That’s perfectly okay; there is no problem in it. They are simply making the soil richer, they are giving it manure.And about manure also, there are different ideas. One of my friends in a Zen monastery in Japan was very puzzled because he was staying with a professor there, and when he saw his garden he could not believe it. Fresh shit was being spread on the vegetables! Fresh! That was their idea of cleanliness – it had to be fresh! He could not believe what was happening. Then he escaped because he was eating those vegetables.Now Devaraj goes on looking into vegetables. All the Indian vegetables that you purchase from the market are bound to be unclean. Not fresh shit, but stale shit! He does not allow me – because he is my physician – he does not allow me to eat any vegetable from the market. My own sannyasins grow vegetables, and they have to pass the tests of Devaraj, only then…One day, a sannyasin made cheese for me. First it went to Devaraj and he said, “It is contaminated!” – exactly the word, contaminated. When I heard contaminated, I thought, is it poisoned? Or what is the matter? It was contaminated because her nails were a little long and there was a slight possibility of amoebas. And he worked hard and he found that the cheese was not right, it was impure – it was “contaminated.”Jaina munis – a few Jaina munis, a sect – use a small strip or piece of cloth on their noses. That is their idea of remaining pure, to have filtered air. Otherwise, who knows? In the air, every kind of thing goes on floating. So their noses are covered, their mouths are covered, so nothing unfiltered reaches. Moreover, there is one more idea in it: when you breathe out your breath is warm, and that warm breath can kill a few small, live cells floating in the air. Again bloodshed, violence – and you will suffer in hell.Now, if you watch people’s ideas about purity, cleanliness, you will go crazy. If you follow all their ideas, life will become impossible. Then the only clean thing will be suicide.But these ideas have been developed only as part of a program. The program is to make you sexually afraid. In Jaina scriptures, making love to a woman is violence. Why is it violence? – because when the genitals meet, there are many small, alive people inside the woman’s genitals, small cells of life. They will be killed. It is a massacre! And when the man, making love, comes to an orgasm; millions of live cells will be released. They will live only two hours; now, he is the cause of their death. Millions of live cells – each live cell would have become a man or a woman, given the right opportunity. Now it has been calculated that a man will make love to a woman in his forty years of love-making, at least four thousand times. Now, each time millions of cells will die – just calculate how many people you have killed! Is there any hope for you?This sexual abstinence creates all kinds of side effects. It is basically repressive: repressive of joy, repressive of intelligence, repressive of life and all that helps life to become a dance, a celebration.This earth will remain miserable unless we get rid of all life-negative attitudes, whosoever may be the cause of it. This very earth can become paradise, but people have to be taught life-affirmation. And that’s my whole work. I am teaching you a life-affirmative religiousness, a life of dance, joy, beauty, creativity, sensitivity, celebration.Unless this new religiousness takes possession of the whole intelligence of humanity, then we are coming very close to the boundary where we will have to commit a global suicide. If life is such a misery, then why go on living? What is the point of it all?The last question:Osho,Can you tell me a few Polack jokes?I am a Polack and leaving for the West tomorrow.The pope tried to cross the railway trackbefore a rushing train.They put the pieces in a sackbut couldn’t find the Polack’s brain.Why does it take seven Polacks to carry a coffin at a funeral?Six carry the coffin and one carries the radio.Poland has just bought five hundred million tons of sand from Saudi Arabia. The Polish government has decided to drill for its own oil.The tall Polack policeman took pity on the dwarf Polack standing next to him at the urinal of a public toilet. “Why do you keep twitching your eyes?” he asked. “Trouble with your nerves?”“No, you are splashing me!” said the dwarf.A Polack drunk staggers out of a bar. He sees a taxi parked just outside. Opening its door, he lurches in, loses his balance and hits his head against the door at the other side. The door flies open, and the Polack rolls out of the other side of the taxi.Getting to his feet he peers at the taxi driver and says, “Shay, man, you shure are fasht! How much do I owe you?”Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 13 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I am not a sannyasin, and I am visiting for a short period. I appreciate the work that is done here, but there is one question that I cannot avoid asking. The theory is nice, but from the dozens of sannyasins with whom I have spoken, nobody could say, “I have found the way, I am proceeding, and I am sure one day I will be able to stand on my own feet.”My feeling is that they develop a tremendous dependency on you and the ashram. As long as they are here they are fine, but when they leave they lose most of the benefits they gained, some of them even get worse because of the frustration. How do you face this reality? Do you prepare them for the day when this place won't exist anymore? Do you prepare them for the inevitable future? The future does exist. Most of them have thirty to forty years yet to live. Will they stay in Pune for the rest of their lives? I don't think so.I would appreciate your comments.Rami Gilboa, there are a few things which can only be understood by a sannyasin because a deep participation is needed to understand them. The outsider, at the most, can think about them. But thinking is not feeling; thinking is not experiencing. Thinking is a very poor substitute for knowing.The blind man can think about light, but he cannot know it; for knowing he will need eyes. The deaf man can think, philosophize about music, but he cannot experience it – and without experiencing it, whatsoever he says is bound to be wrong.Rami, you say, “I am not a sannyasin…” Then it will be very difficult for you to understand. I will do my best, but I don’t feel that it will be possible for you to get it.You say, “…I am visiting the ashram for a short period.” This is not a place where you can just come and go. This is a space to be shared, to be loved, to be lived. If you are just an onlooker, a visitor – and that too, in a hurry – you are bound to miss the whole point. And your question shows absolutely that you have missed it – although it will be very difficult for other outsiders and observers and the visitors to see where you have missed it.You say, “I appreciate the work that is done here…” It is not a question of appreciation at all. Either you participate, or you don’t participate. Appreciation always keeps things at a distance. It is not much different from criticizing; they both belong to the same spectrum. Criticism is negative, appreciation is positive, but the distance is the same. You have to participate in the mystery of it. You have to become part of it. Only – and I remind you and emphasize that the only way to understand is from being an insider.The lover knows love. Others can appreciate that it is beautiful, but their appreciation is superficial, inevitably superficial. If you really appreciate, then participate; then show it by your participation, then become a sannyasin. There is no other way to show appreciation. If you love somebody, you cannot just appreciate – you become committed, you become involved. Sannyas is a love affair; it is involvement, it is commitment. And then a totally new insight opens up.You say, “I appreciate the work that is done here…” No work is being done here. Work is the last thing that we do here. What we do is totally different from work. I am not so much against alcoholism, but I am very much against workaholism. Workaholics have been the most mischievous people in the world. Adolf Hitler is a workaholic, Joseph Stalin is a workaholic, Mao Zedong is a workaholic. Now, no alcoholic has ever done so much harm.Just think – if Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and people like that, if they all would have been alcoholics, the world would have been in a far better state. But unfortunately they were workaholics.Adolf Hitler was almost a mahatma. You can call him the Gandhi of the West; he is very similar to Mahatma Gandhi. He was a vegetarian – absolute vegetarian. He was against alcohol, against smoking, against taking anything like coffee or tea. These are the basic requirements for being a mahatma.He used to get up in brahmamuhurt, early morning, and he would take a cold bath. His whole life was disciplined; there was no indiscipline in his life. The only difference was – which is not much of a difference, a difference which does not make any difference at all – that he used to kill others, that he loved killing others. And Mahatma Gandhi loved killing himself. And if you ask me, I will say he is far better than Mahatma Gandhi because when you kill somebody else, at least the other person has the possibility to defend. When you kill yourself, there is nobody to defend. The murderer is far better than the person who commits suicide.But both are violent. And it is a strange coincidence that Adolf Hitler remained a murderer his whole life, and in the end committed suicide. Mahatma Gandhi tried to commit suicide his whole life, and was murdered in the end!We don’t do any work here. I am a lazy man, and hence a lazy man’s guide to enlightenment. We are playing, it is a game – absolutely nonserious. But if you are an outsider, you will not be able to understand it. From the outside everything is being done systematically, from the inside there is immense chaos!You say, “The theory is nice…” Rami, what theory are you talking about? From where did you get the idea that there is a theory here? I am a destroyer of all theories, and I don’t give you any substitute. I only decondition you, and I never recondition you. There is no doctrine, no dogma, no creed, no religion. My whole approach is that of being innocent, loving; dancing, singing, enjoying the small things of life because the small things, if enjoyed totally, become great things. The mundane, loved without any conditions, becomes the sacred.There is no theory as such in it, no philosophy at all. But listening to me, and that too only for a short period, you will get the idea that there is a theory. You have to be here for a longer period to know that there is no theory at all because then only will you be able to see my contradictions.A theoretician is very consistent, and you cannot find any man in the whole world who is more inconsistent than me, so I cannot be a theoretician. It is not logic that is happening here but a love-play.As far as I have known, existence is understood not by theories, ideologies, but by a wondering heart, by the capacity to feel awe – an innocent heart, not a very clever head – a childlike quality. It is a very delicate phenomenon, and it is very subjective and inner. You will never be able to see it in others unless you have found it first in yourself.Hence, I say, Rami, first become a sannyasin – and stay here a little longer to have a right perspective of what is happening. I can see from your question that you have not understood at all.You say, “The theory is nice, but from the dozens of sannyasins with whom I have spoken, nobody could say, ‘I have found the way…’” Nobody can say, not even I. There is no way, we are not going anywhere; we are just being here. The way exists in the mind, the mind always thinks in terms of means and ends, ways and goals. The mind is always arrowed toward some target. The mind is always sacrificing the present for the future. The goal is bound to be in the future, the goal cannot be in the present. In the present is the way. Today is the way, tomorrow is the goal. But I say, today, this very moment, is all. Call it the way, call it the goal, but it is all.And there is no need to divide existence into means and ends, ways and goals. That division is part of the duality of the mind – and that duality is the cause of all misery.Everybody is ambitious for a goal. The goal may be worldly, it may be otherworldly, but the goal is always there. And whenever there is a goal you are bound to remain tense because you have not yet achieved it. You are bound to remain in anguish, a deep trembling; whether you are going to make it or not, whether you will be able to live to achieve the goal, whether you will be strong enough to compete for it, to struggle for it. And meanwhile life goes on slipping out of your fingers like water.The goal always remains like the horizon: you can see it just there – maybe only a few miles away – and you can always hope that just a little more effort and you will reach. But nobody has ever reached the horizon because it exists not. It is an illusion, an appearance only; not a reality, an optical illusion. So when you move toward the horizon, the horizon goes on moving away from you. And the distance between you and the horizon always remains the same, exactly the same, absolutely the same. Wherever you are, the goal is always there somewhere ahead of you. It keeps you hoping, but it destroys your life.I am not teaching any goal – worldly, otherworldly, materialistic, spiritualistic. I am teaching you how to live this moment. Naturally, this moment is so small it cannot contain the goal and the way, it cannot contain the means and the ends. It is so small that you cannot divide it, it is indivisible. Naturally, none of my sannyasins can say, “I have found the way.”And then you will misunderstand. The misunderstanding comes from your own prejudice because you are thinking in terms of ways and goals, and my sannyasins are not thinking in terms of ways and goals. They are not thinking in terms of mind; they have dropped that jargon. They have moved into a totally different space, the space of the heart, where only this moment exists and nothing else.Jesus says to his disciples: “Look at the lilies in the field, how beautiful they are! Even Solomon was not so beautiful, attired in all his grandeur.” Solomon was the richest emperor in the Jewish history or mythology. Even Solomon was not so beautiful, attired in all his grandeur. These poor lily flowers are far more beautiful.Why? Jesus himself gives the reason. And only in such statements does he come very close to the ultimate truth. He says they are so beautiful because they think not of the morrow.But if you don’t think of the morrow, how can you think of the goal? The goal is out of necessity in the future, has to be in the future. The goal is a way of avoiding the present – its misery, its ugliness – it is turning your face from the present toward a faraway, distant goal. It helps, it consoles, it is a kind of drug. And if the goal is in the future, then of course the present is only a passage, a bridge, a way. I am not teaching any way.The Zen people are right. They say that the real path is a pathless path, the real gate is a gateless gate. The real effort is an effortless effort. Hence none of my sannyasins can say to you, Rami, “I have found the way.” In fact, the more he is drowned in the world of sannyas, he starts losing himself. There is nobody to find the way. There is no way to be found, and there is nobody to find it.And this is what is happening here. This is the miracle that is happening here. This is the miracle that has always happened whenever there was a man like Buddha, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Bodhidharma. Rami would have misunderstood Bodhidharma if she had had an encounter with that great master. Even the Emperor Wu of China could not understand him. These were exactly the questions that Rami has asked…The Emperor Wu had waited for Bodhidharma to come to China. He had heard beautiful stories about the man. It took years for Bodhidharma to fulfill the invitation of the emperor because he had to walk all the way from India to China. He had to cross the Himalayas. Even today it is difficult, and fourteen hundred years ago it was very difficult. But he managed; with a few disciples he reached China. It took years.Emperor Wu was immensely happy. He had come to welcome the guest at the border of his country. He had managed a great festival in his whole empire to celebrate the moment, the entry of Bodhidharma. But the entry never happened because when Bodhidharma came, Emperor Wu, after formal questions, asked some questions that he had waited and waited and always wanted to ask an enlightened person. Now the person was there, a person of the caliber of Buddha was there – and in some ways far more juicy than Gautam Buddha himself.He asked Bodhidharma, “What is the way to the ultimate truth?”And Bodhidharma said, “Way? Are you crazy or something? There is no way and there is no ultimate truth. The truth is immediate, not ultimate. And because it is immediate there is no way.”The Emperor Wu was shocked. For a moment there was silence, he could not figure out what he was saying – all the Buddhist masters who had come were talking about the way and the ultimate goal. And this man, in a single statement, demolished the whole thing: “There is no ultimate truth, the truth is immediate, hence there is no possibility of any way.”He was afraid now to ask anything more – this man seemed to be dangerous. But he gathered courage and he asked a few more questions.He said, “I have done many religious works. I have made many temples of Buddha, many ashrams for Buddhist bhikkus, sannyasins, monks. I have put thousands of scholars to translate all the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. What is my merit?”Bodhidharma looked at him – and he had really big eyes, and very ferocious – and he said, “Merit? You are waiting for merit and reward? You will fall in the seventh hell for doing all this!”Now it was too much. Everybody had said to Wu, “You will reach the seventh heaven.” And here comes this mad monk and he says, “You will fall in the seventh hell!”Bodhidharma said, “You have earned great demerit. You have committed great sin against religiousness.”Wu asked, “What do you mean? I have not done anything that is wrong.”Bodhidharma said, “You don’t understand me. The very idea of doing is wrong. ‘I have made the temples, I have made the ashrams, I have arranged for the translations of the Buddhist scriptures.’ This I, this doer, this is your demerit. This will take you to the seventh hell. It has become too loaded, too heavy. You cannot fly upward, you will fall downward. You are carrying too much weight.”Now, even Emperor Wu, a very cultured man… And China has known real culture because of Confucius – Confucius transformed China into a very cultured country. The whole religion of Confucius is nothing but mannerism, etiquette. And Emperor Wu was taught and brought up by Confucian masters. He was very polite, but he forgot all his politeness. He became angry and he said, “Sir, can I ask you one question more? Who are you?”Bodhidharma laughed and said, “I don’t know!”Now, Rami, listening to Bodhidharma saying, “I don’t know,” what would you have thought? You would have thought, “Poor fellow, he does not know himself. And that is the whole thing of all religious teaching: Know thyself. Socrates says, ‘Know thyself.’ The Upanishads say, ‘Know thyself.’ And this man says, ‘I don’t know.’ So he has not risen to the heights of a Socrates, or to the heights of the Upanishadic seers. He is ignorant.”You would have totally missed the point. The Upanishadic seers and Socrates and all others can be put on one side of a weighing machine and Bodhidharma on the other side, and he will be far weightier than all of them because when he says, “I don’t know,” he is making the most profound, the profoundest statement ever made. There is no I, so how can you know it? There is no knower, so how can you know? The more you go into inner silence, the I disappears like dewdrops in the early morning sun. It simply evaporates.And when you reach the very core of your existence there is no knower to be found. All is absolutely silent and still. Knowing is also a disturbance, a distraction, a division – a division between the object and the subject, the knower and the known. When you reach the profound silence of your innermost shrine, there is no object to be known, no subject to know – that’s what Bodhidharma is saying: “I do not know.”This state of luminous ignorance is the most significant ever achieved.But Rami, just as Wu misunderstood him, you would have misunderstood him. Wu turned away. He said, “Then there is no need for you to come to my kingdom. You have shattered all my hopes.”Bodhidharma also turned back toward the Himalayas. He remained outside Emperor Wu’s kingdom. Only when Emperor Wu was dying did he realize, “What Bodhidharma said, I misunderstood.” But it was too late.Rami, you say, “I have found the way.” No sannyasins could say it. How can my sannyasins say it? They have lost themselves. That’s what sannyas is all about: not finding the way, not finding the goal, not finding anything – but losing, disappearing, melting, merging into the whole.You say, “Nobody could say, ‘I am proceeding…’” Where? There is nowhere to proceed. One is always now and always here. But this whole idea of proceeding, of going – always on the go – is one of the most contagious, contemporary diseases. It originated in America. It is the American disease – always on the go, everybody is going somewhere; nobody exactly knows why, for what. People are even going to the moon! And what they will do on the moon? They will simply look silly there. Just think, Rami, of yourself standing on the moon, how silly you will look. What will you do there?But the American will not be at a loss. He will immediately start preparing to go to Mars, and from Mars to somewhere else. He is always on the go. He is never where he is; he is always somewhere else.You say, “Nobody could say, ‘…I am sure one day I will be able to stand on my own feet.’” These are all egoistic ways of thinking – “on my own feet,” do you think my sannyasins are standing on my feet? I have got two hundred thousand sannyasins – they will kill me if they are all standing on my feet.And you say they are not sure. Only ignorance, stupidity, is sure. Wisdom is never sure.Lao Tzu says, “The wise man walks as if passing through a very cold stream” – very cautious, hesitant, not sure. The stream is very cold, ice cold, unknown. Who knows – the next step and you will fall into a deep pool, or you may stumble into a rock. The wise man walks very cautiously, very alert.Lao Tzu also says, “Everybody is sure except me. Everybody seems to be very certain about everything, but I am very muddle-headed.” And these are the words of one of the most significant men who has ever walked on the earth.If I have to choose between Buddha, Zarathustra, Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, and Lao Tzu, that only one person can exist, then I will choose Lao Tzu because nobody has been so close in his expression of truth. How can you be sure of truth? Truth is so vast, truth is so infinite. To be sure will simply show you are stupid. You can be sure of small things, but you cannot be sure of vastness, infinity, eternity.And people are losing themselves – so there is no question of standing on their own feet. That does not mean that they are standing on somebody else’s feet. Of course they are standing on their own feet, but now they are no longer their own feet – they belong to existence. They themselves belong to existence. That’s why none of my sannyasins will say that.You say, Rami, “My feeling is that they develop a tremendous dependency on you and this place.” This is not your feeling, this is your logical guess – guesswork – and it looks very logical!If the Emperor Wu had concluded, “This man is not wise – this Bodhidharma seems to be utterly ignorant. He cannot even say with surety, ‘I know myself,’ then what else can he know?” If he turned away, he was very logical.So you are logical. But he misunderstood, and you are also misunderstanding. That’s why I invited you in the first place. Participate! Dive deep into this phenomenon, experience it from the inside, and then you will know – nobody is dependent on me. Nobody is dependent because nobody is there. How can one be dependent if one is not? I am not here, my sannyasins are not there, so who can be dependent on whom? I am dissolved into the existence and they are dissolving, disappearing.But for the outsider this will appear – and I can understand the outsider’s difficulty also because this will be the logical conclusion – that people are becoming dependent. In fact, to be independent is ugly, to be dependent is ugly – not to be is the only beautiful experience. A sannyasin is neither independent nor dependent. He simply is not, he is part of the organic unity of existence, of this orgasmic celebration of the whole.You say, “As long as they are here, they are fine, but when they leave they lose most of the benefits they gained…” How do you know it? Have you followed my sannyasins? But Rami is doing great intellectual work.Follow my sannyasins! Now one of my very intimate sannyasins, Teertha, is going to England. Follow him. Another of my intimate sannyasins, Ajit Saraswati, is going to Tel Aviv. Follow him. And see whether they lose anything or they gain. You will be surprised: they always gain. I send them myself purposely to gain something because when they are here, whatsoever is happening is so obvious, one tends to take it for granted, one tends to forget all about it.Now Teertha, back in London, mad London, will know the contrast. I was not very willing to send him because he has been here for many years, and his health is not good for all this traveling. But just to give him an experience, a contrast, to see what has happened to him… The best place will be London, where he used to live before, to see that he has become a totally different being. Meeting the same people, visiting the same places, he will be able to see the contrast. He will be able to see the difference that has happened to him. Here, it will not be possible. Slowly, slowly he has almost disappeared. There, suddenly, he will find that he is no longer. London is there, he is no longer.Rami, don’t just assume. Follow any of my sannyasins. But if you really want to follow, then ask me whom to follow because there are many people who become sannyasins accidentally – they had just come to visit somebody and got the idea, the whim. And it is easy to get the idea here to be a sannyasin without any real understanding, real involvement. And deep down they know that as soon as they leave this place they will drop sannyas. If you follow them, certainly you will see that sannyas is something which depends on Osho’s presence.Don’t follow the accidental ones. There are a few who become sannyasins just experimentally to see what it is all about, to have a little taste. But they don’t mean it and they can’t have the taste. Unless you mean it from your very heart…Thousands of my sannyasins are working around the earth, and everybody is growing. They cannot lose because it is not a question of gain, if you gain something you can lose. Here you lose! You lose everything. I don’t leave anything with you to lose anywhere else. I do my job totally. I finish you completely! So what is there to lose whether you are here or anywhere else?Yes, somewhere else, you will become more aware of what a tremendous transformation has happened to you. So once in a while I send my people. It is a good experience.And you say, “Do you prepare them for the inevitable future?” I have never come across the future. So why should I prepare them for something which I have never come across? And I know they are not going to come across it either.You say, “The future does exist.” You are simply talking nonsense. Only the present exists.You say, “Most of them have thirty to forty years yet to live.” If you can live now, totally, then the next moment will also be now, and next to that will also be now. It is always now, tomorrow never comes.And why thirty, forty years? My people are going to live for eternity. They have found eternity, but it is not the future, it is the present. So I prepare them only for the present, not for the future.But the only way to understand me is to become a sannyasin.The second question:Osho,I have no interest in anything. It all seems to be meaningless. Nothing excites, provokes or challenges me. There is no juice, no zest. I have felt like this all my life. Why should I do this or that when nothing fulfills me anyway? I am always trying to be joyful – pretending to feel, to be excited, interested and alive. I am always trying to be courageous, to jump over some of my fears. But for what? I am tired, I feel that “I am not” – and even that I don't really feel.Osho, where am I?Devagyan, are you a Jew or something? The question is very Jewish.You say: “I have no interest in anything.” What do you want? How much interest?Little Moishe asked his father, “Father, how do you say ‘one hundred percent profit’ in Yiddish?”“It is Yiddish, my boy,” the father replies.Hundred percent profit – it is Yiddish!Moishe fell overboard and was eaten by a shark. In an endeavor to beat the shark off while Moishe was rescued, the passengers had pelted it with oranges, boxes and anything they could lay hands on. The cook in the galley waited until the shark was near, and hurled a kitchen table at it. The shark was stunned and was eventually killed.When it was drawn aboard, there was an instant clamor for souvenirs, so the shark was cut open. Inside, Moishe was discovered – he had set up shop on the kitchen table and was selling oranges at cut prices!You say, Devagyan, “I have not got any interest in anything. It all seems to be meaningless.” Has it to be meaningful? Why you are expecting it to be meaningful? That very expectation is creating trouble. There is no meaning. In fact because there is no meaning, joy is possible. Because there is no meaning, playfulness is possible. Because there is no meaning, dance is possible.Listen to the birds – do you think there is any meaning? There is no meaning. But why should there be? See the trees too, the flowers, the stars – is there any meaning? But why should there be?Once Picasso was doing his painting. A friend came to see him. He watched for a while and then said, “But I don’t see any meaning in the painting.”Picasso took him into the garden, showed him a rosebush with beautiful flowers, and said, “Do you see any meaning in these roses? If the roses have no obligation to be meaningful, why should my paintings be meaningful? I am enjoying painting them. If somebody can enjoy seeing them, good; if nobody enjoys, that is their business. But I have enjoyed just doing my painting – splashing color – I have enjoyed!”A distant call of the cuckoo and do you see the beauty of it? But you never ask about the meaning, what she is saying. She’s not saying anything. It is just glossolalia, she’s just enjoying, an outburst of joy.Children running hither and thither, so excited, do you think there is any meaning? Do you think they have found a treasure? Do you think they have found diamonds? Nothing much, maybe just colored stones or a dead butterfly, or maybe they have collected a few old leaves, seashells on the sea beach – but they are so immensely blissful.Blissfulness need not be rooted in meaningfulness. In fact, the very idea of meaning destroys bliss. Once you start looking for meaning you become a calculator, you become a mind. You lose your being. Then you will be in tremendous trouble because everything will only make you ask again.For example, “Why did God create the world? What is the meaning?” Even if some fool can supply you the answer – and there have been very foolish theologians who have been supplying all kinds of answers because whenever there is a demand there is going to be supply. When fools ask, “foolosophers” answer.But any meaning that can be given: God created the world because of this… Hindus say he created the world because he was feeling lonely. Seems to be meaningful. You can understand it: when you are feeling lonely you start doing something – reading the same newspaper which you have read thrice before, or fixing the radio which is perfectly right. You have to do something, otherwise you start feeling meaningless.So, God was feeling meaningless, lonely; he started creating the world. But the question is: Why only at a certain moment did he start creating the world? What had he been doing before?Christians say he created the world exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ. Of course, it must have been a Monday when he started; the week starts on Monday! But the question is: four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ – that makes only six thousand years – and what had he been doing for the whole eternity? Just vegetating? And if he could manage for the whole eternity, he should have managed for six thousand years more because six thousand years are not much compared to eternity. Not even six moments.And if he had to create a world, he had to create this world? Maybe he was feeling lonely, but why have so many people to suffer for that? Let him feel lonely; he can commit suicide. But why should so many people suffer? And how is he feeling now? Very great? Since then he has not been seen at all. They say since he created woman, he escaped, he renounced the world. Must have become afraid. That was his last creation. First he created man, then he created woman, and since then nothing has been known about him. Maybe doing some austerities because he has committed such a sin!Subhuti has informed me that the Polack pope in the Philippines has met Cardinal Sin – that is the archpriest of the Philippines – Cardinal Sin. Such a great meeting!He must be doing penance, fasting, standing on his head, yoga postures, somehow to get rid of the karma that he has done, creating the world. But can’t he “uncreate” it? Can’t he say, “Lo and behold! This is the end!” Just as he said in the beginning, “Let there be light!” – and there was light. Can’t he say, “Let there be darkness!” – and there is darkness?Has he gone dumb? He must have been dumb from the very beginning, otherwise why should he create this world? Such misery, such suffering that everybody is trying to get rid of misery.Even Devagyan feels there is no juice, no zest. What kind of world has he created? – no juice, no zest. He should have learned something from Zorba the Greek – a little zest, a little juice. He should have learned a little laughter before he created the world. He created with such seriousness. That is the only thing wrong with God – he is too serious.You say, Devagyan: “I have not got any interest in anything.” Neither have I. But I don’t see that there is any problem; I am enjoying it. In fact, since I lost all interest in everything, I have been in immense joy. Now each moment is just a joke. Then the whole thing is so ridiculous, I can even joke about God without any fear because there is no problem.One thing is certain: if ever I meet God I am going to hit him hard on the head, “You son-of-a-bitch, why did you create the world? And particularly, why did you create Devagyan? No zest, no juice, nothing excites him.”Nothing excites me either. Nothing provokes him. Nothing provokes me either. Nothing challenges him. You are almost close to enlightenment, Devagyan. That’s how one becomes enlightened. When there is nothing to do, what else? Then one thinks, “Let me be enlightened now. No zest, no juice, no excitement, no provocation, no challenge. Why not be enlightened now?”That’s how it happened to me. One day, I saw that there was nothing else left, so I said, “It is good now. Everything is finished, all is done, so I can be enlightened, at ease.” And since then I have remained enlightened because nothing has happened to change my idea.Life is meaningless, but that’s why it can be enjoyed. If you start asking for meaning you are asking for trouble. Then kissing your woman, first you will brood, “What is the meaning of kissing?” There is no meaning.There are many aboriginal tribes who have never kissed – they rub their noses. It looks foolish to you – kissing looks foolish to them. And my feeling is they are more hygienic, rubbing noses is more hygienic. Kissing each other’s lips is really dangerous. And avoid French kisses absolutely! Exploring each other’s mouth through your tongue – absolutely meaningless. You won’t find anything, believe me! Unnecessary trouble. You may get a few diseases, it is simply an exchange of many germs, millions of germs. I think they say one million germs are exchanged in a single kiss.If people have lived for centuries without kissing, why can’t you? If there were any meaning they would have discovered it. If you have lived without rubbing noses – if there were any meaning, you would have discovered it. In fact, there is no meaning. Meaning is only a mind desire.What is the meaning of anything? If you start asking that, naturally you will lose all juice, all zest. When you wake up in the morning, ask the question, “Why should I get up? What is the meaning of it all? And I have been getting up every day for thirty, forty, sixty years – what is the point of it all?” Every day you get up and nothing happens – and again you have to go to bed. When you have to go to bed again, why not remain in it? You will lose all zest, all juice. Ask of everything that you do: Why should I do it? What is the meaning of it?For twenty-four hours, Devagyan, do this. And, naturally, the only thing that will be left for you to do will be to commit suicide. But remember, you have to ask the same question again: Why? Why should I commit suicide? What is the meaning of it? That will save you!If you ask stupid questions, you will destroy your own life. What I am trying to point out is that the whole question of meaning is stupid. Enjoy, love, sing, dance! There is no meaning, so why not enjoy? If there was meaning, that means there would have been some kind of mechanical life.Machines have meaning. The car has a meaning – it transports you from one place to another. The food has meaning, the house has meaning – it protects you from sun and rain – the clothes have meaning, but life has no meaning. That’s why life is freedom. Meaning will become a bondage, an imprisonment. Only machines have meaning; man cannot have meaning.But that freedom – once you drop that nonsensical idea of meaning, you will feel immense freedom. And in that freedom there will be juice and zest.You say, “I have felt like this all my life.” So enough! You have done enough, now try my way. You have tried your way, try my way. Forget all about meaning, start living meaninglessly. Do all kinds of meaningless things, and see what happens. You will immediately become alive, immensely alive, because life has no meaning. So the moment you drop meaning, mind disappears and life possesses you.You say, “Why should I do this or that when nothing fulfills me anyway?” It is not that nothing fulfills you: it is your why that creates trouble, that has created trouble for millions of people. In fact, all the so-called religions have been doing this stupidity that you are doing. They go on asking why.There is a beautiful story by Turgenev…In a village there was a poor man who was thought to be an idiot. The whole village laughed at him. Even if he said something very serious they laughed, they found something idiotic in it. It was a determined thing that that idiot could not say anything meaningful. The idiot was getting tired of it.A mystic was passing by. The idiot went to the mystic, fell at his feet and said, “Save me! The whole village thinks I am an idiot! How can I get rid of this idea that surrounds me? And everybody goes on and on hammering the same idea on me.”The mystic said, “It is very simple. Do one thing: for seven days don’t make any statement on your own, so nobody will say, ‘This is idiotic.’ Instead, start asking ‘Why?’ to others – whatsoever they say. Somebody says, ‘Look, the roseflower is so beautiful.’ Ask ‘Why? Prove it! How can you prove that this roseflower is beautiful? What grounds have you got?’ And that will make him feel foolish, because nobody can prove it. Somebody says, ‘Tonight is beautiful, the full moon…’ Immediately ask – don’t miss any opportunity – ‘Why? What grounds have you got?’ For seven days, don’t make any statement that anybody can ask you why. Simply wait for others to make a statement. And ask. Somebody says, ‘Shakespeare is a great poet.’ Ask ‘Why? What grounds have you got? It is all nonsense that he has written, all meaningless, gibberish. I don’t see any beauty, any poetry in it.’”For seven days the idiot did the same thing. The whole village was very puzzled. He made everybody feel idiotic. Naturally, they all started thinking he had become wise. After seven days he came to the mystic immensely happy. He said, “It was a great trick. I was not thinking that much is going to happen out of it, but now the whole village worships me.”The mystic said, “Continue. They will worship you because there are things – in fact, anything that is really significant is meaningless.”In dictionaries significance and meaning are synonymous, but in existence they are not synonymous, they are antonyms. Meaning is of the mind, and significance is a natural phenomenon. It cannot be proved; it can only be felt – it is a heart thing. When you feel that the rose is beautiful, it is not a head thing, so you cannot prove it. When you say, “This woman is beautiful,” you cannot prove it; “This man is beautiful,” you cannot prove it. Because you cannot prove it, it is not of the mind, it is a feeling – your heart starts throbbing faster.A very famous actress, Sarah Bernhardt, became old. She started living on a fourth floor. In those days there were no lifts, so people had to go to see her, meet her, through a long staircase – four floors they had to… By the time they reached her they were huffing and puffing.A friend came to see her and asked, “What is the point? Why do you live on the fourth floor? Can’t you live on the ground floor? So many people come to see you and this is unnecessary torture. And on the ground floor there is an apartment available – I can manage it for you immediately.”She said, “No, that I cannot do, for two reasons: one, on the fourth floor…” The fourth floor was the last – in those days the fourth floor used to be the highest. She said, “There are two reasons. One is: living on the fourth floor only God is above me, nobody above me. Secondly, now I am no longer young and I love people huffing and puffing. When I was young they used to huff and puff just seeing me; now these four staircases do the work. I don’t want to see anybody unaffected. When they come perspiring and their hearts beating faster, I still feel the old thrill.”When your heart feels thrilled, it is a totally different dimension; it is the dimension of significance.Devagyan, if you can drop your search for meaning, you will be immensely showered by a thousand and one significant experiences. But if you look for meaning, you will lose all significance and you will never find meaning.Mind is the most impotent thing in the world. It can make machines, it can create technology, it can do much scientific work, but it cannot create poetry, it cannot create love, it cannot give you significance. That is not the work of the mind. For that a totally different center exists in you – the heart, and the opening of the heart. When the heart lotus opens, the whole of life is significant, but I will not say it is meaningful. Remember the difference.I don’t teach you meaning, I teach you significance.And you say, “I am always trying to be joyful…” That is the best way to kill joy forever: trying to be joyful? You say, “I am pretending to feel.” These are the surest poisons to kill all feeling.You say: “I am trying to be excited, interested and alive.” In the very effort you have accepted that you are dead, that you are not interested, that you are not excited, that you are not feeling, that you are only pretending. Trying to be joyful simply means you know perfectly well that you are sad. Now, you may be able to deceive others – how can you deceive yourself? You are trying to be joyful. You know perfectly well that you are sad. And each time you try, you are emphasizing your sadness. Each time you try to feel, you are going farther away from feeling. Each time you try to be excited, it is bogus. And you are becoming hypnotized by your repetition of being interested and alive.This is a very suicidal course that you have chosen. If you are sad, be sad. Nothing is wrong in being sad. Be really sad, enjoy it! Sadness has its own beauty, sadness has its own silence, sadness has its own depth. And if you can be really sad, sooner or later you will have to come out of it. But that will not be a pretension; you will simply come out of it.In my childhood I used to love swimming, and my village river becomes very dangerous in the rainy season, it becomes flooded. It is a hilly river; so much water comes to it, it becomes almost oceanic. And it has a few dangerous spots where many people have died. Those few dangerous spots are whirlpools, and if you are caught in a whirlpool it sucks you. It goes on sucking you deeper and deeper. Of course, you try to get out of it, and the whirlpool is powerful. You fight, but your energy is not enough. And by fighting you become very much exhausted, and the whirlpool kills you.I found a small strategy, and that strategy was – everybody was surprised – that I would jump into the whirlpool and come out of it without any trouble. The strategy was not to fight with the whirlpool, to go with it. In fact, go faster than it sucks you so you are not tired, you are simply diving into it. And you are going so fast that there is no struggle between you and the whirlpool.And the whirlpool is bigger on the surface, then it becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. It is difficult to get out unless it is very small. At the very end, rock bottom, it is so small you are simply out of it. You need not try to get out of it, you are simply out of it. I learned my art of let-go through those whirlpools. I am indebted to my river.And then I tried that let-go in every situation of my life. If there was sadness I simply dived into it, and I was surprised to know that it works. If you dive deep into it, soon you are out of it and refreshed, not tired because you were not fighting with it because you were not pretending, so there was no question of fighting. You accepted it totally, full-heartedly. And when you totally accept something, in that very acceptance you have transformed its character.Nobody accepts sadness, hence sadness remains sadness. Accept it and see. In that very acceptance you have transformed its quality. You have brought a new element into it, that of acceptance, which is extraordinary. And in accepting it you start seeing its beauties. It has a few beautiful aspects. No laughter can have depth, as much depth as sadness. No joy can be so silent as sadness.So why not enjoy those aspects of sadness which sadness makes available to you, rather than fighting with it, rather than pretending the opposite? And remember one fundamental law: “Aes dhammo sanantano,” Buddha says. It is the law of life that nothing remains the same for long. Just enjoy while there is sadness, and nothing remains the same for long.Heraclitus says, “You cannot step in the same river twice, the river is so fast-moving.” Life is moving like a river. So why be worried? If sadness is there, enjoy it while it is there. And soon it will be gone. If you enjoy it to the very core, it will leave you refreshed, rejuvenated – and then there will be joy. And that joy will be natural and spontaneous.You say: “I am tired…” You are bound to be tired because you have been fighting. Relax, let go, and all tiredness will be gone.You are using the wrong language. You are fighting with existence rather than being part of it, rather than welcoming its gifts, whatsoever those gifts are. Sometimes it is sadness, sometimes it is joy, sometimes it is dark, sometimes it is light, sometimes it is winter and sometimes it is summer. Enjoy all the seasons. All those seasons are needed; the sun is needed, the rain is needed, the wind is needed, the darkness is needed, the light is needed. In fact, everything that exists has its place in life. Use it and you will not feel tired, you will feel over-full of energy. You will feel a dance of energy within you.But you will have to change your whole approach toward life. What I have spoken to you is exactly my definition of sannyas.Enough for today.

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The Wild Geese & Water 01-14Category: RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

The Wild Geese & Water 14 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,The Dutch television has asked me to participate in a program. One of the questions on which they want me to speak is as follows: what is lacking in the Christian churches that is attracting so many young people to the new religious movements?Deva Ojas, Christ is missing.The Christian churches are there but they are just containers without the content, utterly empty, a lamp whose light has gone out long before, a cage – perhaps a golden cage – but the bird has flown and it sings no longer.If Christ is missing, it is bound to attract new people into new adventures. It is always the young ones who find the real masters. The old ones settle with the establishment, such are their vested interests. And if once in a while an old person gets into an inquiry for the truth – even though it goes against his tradition, convention, belief – then that old man is old only physically; psychologically, spiritually he is young.Ojas, remind your people back in Holland: Who were the people who were attracted toward Jesus himself? Were they old? Were they young? And what was missing in the Jewish religion? Why were they attracted to Christ?They were all young people; Jesus himself was very young. He died when he was only thirty-three and the people who had come to him were almost of his age. What was the reason? Begin your answer from there, from why they left the Jewish church. It has a long tradition from Abraham, Moses, Ezekiel, so many prophets; a beautiful scripture, the Old Testament, a great system of theology and philosophy. Why did they leave all that behind and follow this uneducated carpenter’s son. What was the reason?The reason was that he had attained the ultimate in consciousness; he had become a christ. Remember, christ has nothing to do with Jesus as such. Jesus is the individual and the phenomenon of christ consciousness is universal. It has happened to many people before Jesus and to many people after Jesus; Jesus is only one of the christs.Buddha is a christ, Zarathustra is a christ, Lao Tzu is a christ and there have been many, many christs after Jesus. Bodhidharma, Lin Chi, Kabir, Nanak – the long, long river of christ consciousness continues. And the young, the fresh, will always be seeking the christ, the christ consciousness. So wherever the young people find the taste of living christ consciousness, they are bound to go there. They are going to risk everything.In the Christian churches everything is there, only the bridegroom is missing. All the guests are there, the celebration is perfectly ready to start but the bridegroom is missing. So, only the old who have become almost blind – blind because of their conditioning – will not be able to see that this whole thing is just false, pseudo. Now instead of Christ they will find the Polack pope, who is just making stupid gestures.Just the other day he landed in a small country which is forcibly occupied by the Americans. The American government had made every arrangement, security arrangement, for him. A car had been flown from America to take him from the airport to his residence – just six kilometers, and highly guarded security arrangements were made for him. He descended from the airplane, a special airplane that was only caring for him – a big jetliner carrying just one Polack!And he talked about the dignity of the poor. He descended from the airplane and kissed the earth – these are empty gestures – and he said, “I love your country so much that I kiss its very earth.” But he didn’t talk about freedom. He loves the country so much, then why didn’t he talk about the freedom of the people? Why didn’t he say something against the people who are ruling the country forcibly? Who are occupying it? Who have made it a military base?He didn’t talk about freedom. He talked about the beautiful country but he didn’t talk about the ugly imperialism. He was not received by any representative of the country – he was received by a special agent of the American president who had come just before him to receive him on behalf of Ronald Reagan.And he kissed the earth. That he goes on doing everywhere, kissing the earth – impotent gestures. Talking about the dignity of the poor, and living in richness. These hypocrites are the people who have to be avoided – and the young can see.I talk about the dignity of being rich. There is no dignity in being poor because if there is dignity in being poor, then there is dignity in being a slave too, then there is dignity in being sick too, then there is dignity in being starved too, undernourished too. These are all part of poverty.I talk about the dignity of the rich. One should be both rich on the outside and on the inside. There is no need to divide the outside and the inside – they are all one. And one should live as richly as possible. That shows intelligence. Why talk about the dignity of the poor? Why not destroy poverty? Why console poor people? Why tell them, “You are the children of God, the special children of God”? If the poor are the children of God, then who are the rich? – the children of the Devil? Then it is better to belong to the Devil than to God, then let him have his poor children and their dignity. But then the Pope will be a son of the Devil because he is one of the richest people in the world.Now, living in luxury and talking about the dignity of the poor is hypocrisy. Live the way you would like everybody to live. Live according to your own understanding, but don’t be pretenders. The young can see it, only the young can see it.You must have come across the beautiful parable, I love it…A very great king was visited by a cunning, clever priest. All priests are clever and cunning, otherwise they cannot be priests. Prostitutes may be innocent, but priests are never innocent. In fact, only innocent girls become prostitutes. Very cunning people become priests; it is the most cunning business.The priest came to the king and said, “You have conquered the whole world. Now only one thing is missing, and unless you have that you will remain discontented.”The king was surprised because actually that was the case: he was feeling discontented. Every successful man feels discontented. The failure can always hope, the successful cannot hope any more – he has succeeded. You have heard the proverb that nothing fails like failure. I say it is all wrong. I say to you: nothing fails like success. Once you have succeeded, you can see the futility of it. The riches are there, the power is there, but you are as empty as before. Or maybe now you feel your emptiness more, in contrast to the richness, to the power, to the success that you have achieved. Now it hurts even more. And there is no hope either – there is no tomorrow any more. You have achieved whatsoever is possible to achieve, so you cannot dream, you cannot fantasize.The king was feeling discontented because he had conquered the whole world. He was very surprised, and trusted this priest, that he had some miraculous powers: “He has read my mind. I have not told anybody that I am feeling discontented. How has he come to know?”He took him into his private chamber and said, “How did you manage to find it out? I never told anybody, not even my wife. I go on pretending that I am immensely contented and happy.”All successful people do that. What is the point of saying it to everybody? They will simply laugh, “You are a fool!” They will say, “We told you before but you never listened.” So it is better to keep quiet.“How did you manage to know?”The priest said, “I can read your thoughts, and I know what is missing. If you can get the special clothes of the angels, then you will be immensely happy.” A new desire, a new hope – tomorrow again became alive.The king said, “I am ready, but how to get clothes from heaven? What is the way?”The priest said, “I will do everything. I know the way, I know the whole map, but it will cost you much. It is not an easy thing. For the first time in the whole history of humanity you will be getting divine clothes; you may be the first and the last. And I will have to bribe the angels, persuade somebody to steal, and then I have to fly to heaven and come back. It is a long journey and dangerous too, but for you I am ready to do it.”The king said, “Don’t worry about the money. But remember one thing: don’t try to cheat me, otherwise death will be the only reward for you. So you can have a palace to yourself; do whatsoever you want to do, but you will be guarded, you cannot leave the palace. And whatsoever money you want, simply send a message and the money will be delivered to you.”And the priest started asking for millions of rupees every day. But the king had enough. Within three weeks the priest informed him, “The clothes have arrived. A great celebration should be arranged; people should be informed. The whole capital should be decorated with lights, fireworks, balloons, because something absolutely extraordinary is happening.”The king did as he was told, and the whole court was waiting in great silence. The man came with a beautiful box, a golden box. He opened the box, but before opening the box, he said to the court, “One thing I should remind you: I have been told by the angels that these clothes can only be seen by those who are born of their own fathers – no bastard can see these clothes. Remember that.”Then he opened the box – the box was empty. The king looked in, the viziers looked in, and everybody started praising the clothes. Who wants to be called a bastard? Everybody knew that the box was empty, but when others were praising the clothes, everybody thought within his own heart, “It is better to keep absolutely mum. It seems that I am not the son of my father. Only I am not the son of my father because everybody else can see the clothes.”And when the king saw that all the viziers and the courtiers and the queen, everybody could see the clothes, what was the point in saying, “I don’t see…”? He also started praising the clothes. There was great rejoicing, and the crafty priest told the king, “Now give your clothes one by one to me and I will give you the divine clothes.”His coat was taken, his shirt was taken, his turban was taken. And he was handed nothing, just nothing! Just the gesture, an empty gesture. A turban was placed on his head that didn’t exist at all. He was looking silly in his own eyes. The shirt disappeared, then he was afraid… Then the pants disappeared, then he was standing just with his underpants, afraid: “Now what is this man going to do?”And everybody was clapping and shouting with joy, “Our king has got divine clothes! How beautiful they look!”Then the crafty priest asked for the underpants. For a moment the king hesitated, but now it was too late. Now to say, “I don’t see,” will be very illogical. Up to now you were seeing – what happened? Suddenly you are not the son of your father? He had to give – reluctantly, but he had to give. He had given his underpants also, now he was standing absolutely naked, just like a Jaina monk. And everybody was clapping and shouting with joy, and people started dancing. Everybody was trying to defeat everybody else, so it was known to everybody that “I am the son of my own father, far more than you are.” It was a great competition!And then the crafty priest said, “Thousands of people are waiting outside the palace. The chariot is ready. Now, sir, come! A procession has to be taken. The whole capital is waiting. Many, many people have gathered from all over the place to see the divine clothes.”Again he felt very hesitant for a moment. “But if everybody can see the clothes, then there is no fear really. Only I cannot see, but that is not the point. I already know,” he thought, “that I am naked. I know my nakedness and everybody can see clothes so there is no fear.”He went into the chariot. Everybody, millions of people saw he was naked, but just before the chariot it was continuously announced that the clothes were divine and could be seen only by those who were born of their own fathers. So everybody was shouting, clapping, dancing – it was such a rejoicing.Just a small child sitting on his father’s shoulders told the father, “Daddy, the king seems to be naked.”The father said, “Shut up! When you grow up, then you will see. You are just a child, you don’t understand.”But again and again the child said, “But father, I can see everything – only the clothes I cannot see. I can see you, I can see the naked king, the chariot, the horses, millions of people. And just for the clothes I have first to become grown up?”And the father said, “Keep absolutely silent! You don’t understand. It takes time. One has to be adult, at least twenty-one years old – when you have the right to vote, that is the time when you start seeing the clothes. Wait!” And fearing that somebody may hear, he took the child away.That was the only person there in the crowd who could see that the king was naked. Everybody could see, but only a child can say it as it is.Jesus was recognized only by innocent people. The rabbis killed him. Now, the same rabbis have become popes, bishops, priests – the same rabbis. It is the same business. It was done in the name of Judaism, now it is done in the name of Christianity.Christ is missing, Deva Ojas, that is the first thing to be remembered.You ask me, “What is lacking in the Christian churches that is attracting so many young people to the new religious movements?” The second thing is that Christianity or Hinduism or Mohammedanism or Jainism or Buddhism are not your choice. You are born into a certain family which is accidental – then you are conditioned. It is a conditioning. The first disciples of Jesus were not born Christians, they chose it. And when one chooses out of one’s own intelligence and freedom, it is a totally different matter. When something is imposed upon you, it is nothing but an imprisonment.Now, churches are nothing but jails. And for that matter, not only Christian churches, all churches. Only when a living master is there and his presence triggers a process of enlightenment in you, triggers a process of transformation in you, and you choose because of that process, then you are really religious. Otherwise these are all pseudo people: Christians, Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs – all pseudo.The people who chose Nanak were a totally different people; they risked their lives. The people who went with Mohammed were real Muslims, they risked everything. Being with Mohammed was not an easy job, it was risking your life, your very head. To be a Mohammedan now is convenient, comfortable. To be a Hindu costs nothing.In fact, before you ever become conscious you are already conditioned, your unconscious is already stuffed with all kinds of superstitions.If the younger people are moving to new religious movements, the reason is because only the new is religious; the old is always a cult. Christianity is a cult. But it is a very strange thing: Christians call new religious movements cults, sects; just the opposite is the truth, they are religious. Anything which is very old is only a cult, a sect. When Jesus is alive there is religion. When Buddha is alive there is religion. When Buddha is gone there is only a cult left.A cult is the corpse of a religion. A cult is only the footprints of the buddhas on the sands of time. Buddhas disappear in the timelessness, and on the sands of time the footprints are worshipped, as if those footprints are buddhas.I say to you that religion exists only in the presence of a master. The moment the master leaves, the religion disappears. It is just like the fragrance of a roseflower. The moment the roseflower disappears, its petals start falling back to the soil; the fragrance also disappears. Religion is the fragrance of the person who has become awakened. It cannot be caught in churches. You cannot catch hold of a fragrance. Even if you keep the dead flower – as people love to keep in their Bibles, they keep roses between their Bible pages – by and by they become dry, they lose all fragrance. Those dry flowers, dead flowers, just give you a sense that once there was a flower.Young people are always searching for something alive; that’s what youth is all about. So whosoever is young, whether physically or spiritually, will always seek a christ – wherever he can find, in whatsoever form he can find, he will find a christ. Unless he finds a christ he will not feel contented. And no church can be a substitute for a christ.One has to choose the religion. These Christians, these Mohammedans, these Hindus, they have not chosen. It has been imposed on them. And remember, even if you choose hell on your own, then it is heaven, and if you are thrown into heaven forcibly, then it is hell. My definition of hell and heaven depends on freedom: if it is freedom, then it is heaven; if it is not freedom, then it is hell.The churches are against the individual, and the young people are always searching for individuality. It is one of the intrinsic parts of youth, youthfulness, to search for authentic individuality. The churches belong to the collective mob psychology and they have fallen down to the mob psychology. They fulfill the expectations of the marketplace. They fulfill the expectations of the sleepy people, somnambulists. They cannot help you to be awakened.Only a person who never fulfills your demands, who lives in his own light without caring about what the crowds say about him… Do you think Jesus in any way cared about what the crowds were saying about him? If he had cared, he would not have been crucified, he would have been given a Nobel Prize, he would have been a Nobel laureate like Mother Teresa of Kolkata.He is crucified, and this Mother Teresa becomes a Nobel laureate. There seems to be no connection between Mother Teresa and Jesus Christ. There is certainly a connection between Jesus Christ and al-Hillaj Mansoor. There is certainly a connection between Jesus Christ and me. I can be crucified any day. The crowd is against me – the crowd has always been against the buddhas, but Mother Teresa fulfills the expectations of the crowd. Only stupid people can fulfill your expectations.I have always been wondering because I have come across two persons, Morarji Desai and Mother Teresa. I had always been a little puzzled who is more stupid. They both seem to be greater than the other, bigger than the other. But then, finally, the Nobel Prize decided. Mother Teresa came first; Morarji Desai is second in the race. She fulfilled the mob psychology and its expectations more.Jesus is crucified, Socrates is murdered. Many attempts were made on Buddha’s life. Mahavira was tortured in every possible way.Young people are searching for freedom, for intelligence. Young people are searching for rebellion, for revolution, for a radical change. The church has been too heavy on their being, it is like a mountain-load. They want to throw it off, but they don’t know how to do it. Unless they come across a person who has done it, who has thrown away all the nonsense of the past – only he can help you to be unburdened.That’s why young people, Ojas, are searching for new religious movements.Remember, this television series in Holland is arranged by the Christians. They are becoming more and more afraid; they are becoming more and more worried. And why have they asked Ojas to come? They are going to pay him the fare and all the expenses from Pune to Amsterdam. Why? – because Ojas is an ex-priest. And they are becoming very worried. Even priests are becoming Osho sannyasins! It is too dangerous. They have to find out what the reasons are, so they can manage some way to prevent it. But you have to tell them the truth as it is, utterly naked. Hammer it on their heads!Their effort is to find out the reason so they can prevent others from escaping. You should make every effort so that even others can escape because there are many, many nuns; many, many monks; many priests, who want to escape from the slavery, but they don’t know how to do it.So use this opportunity. Don’t miss the opportunity. Don’t be polite – be true. Say the truth as it is. Say that the king is naked, say that Christ is no longer in the Christian churches, say, “We have found Christ somewhere else, that’s why we are going.” In fact, you are real Christians, they are bogus Christians.But priests are certainly very cunning people…At the airport a flustered young rabbi starting on his honeymoon absent-mindedly asked for one ticket to the Bahamas. But when his wife pointed out his error, he answered without a moment’s hesitation, “By thunder! You are right, dear. I had forgotten myself completely!”Priests are very clever and cunning. But don’t worry about them. When you are with a living master, whatsoever they do to prevent people will help us; whatsoever they do to prevent people is going to help people to come to us.At a dance party, a young lady had just been introduced to her partner. By way of making conversation she said, “Who is that terribly ugly man?”“Why, that is my brother!” he exclaimed.“Ah, you must excuse me,” said the lady in embarrassment, and added apologetically, “I really had not noticed the resemblance.”Don’t worry. Whatsoever they will try to do will make things worse for themselves.You go and enjoy the trip. Laugh loudly. I have been telling you so many jokes about the priests and the rabbis and the bishops and the popes. Find the juiciest ones because that is the best way to hit these people.The rabbi: “What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”The girl: “Nothing – I can’t talk and laugh at the same time.”Only stupid people are going to remain in the churches. Intelligent ones are bound to escape. Stupid people have their own ideas – those ideas are idiotic, but they try to fulfill them. And they have to be forgiven. If only stupid people are left in the churches, it is good. It is good for the world, too. They will remain engaged there in their prayers, they will remain engaged listening to all kinds of crap, and the world will be saved from them. Let them become nuns and priests and monks, and that will do immense good to humanity. Let them remain closed in their monasteries; that is a beautiful way to keep them off, away, far away, because they are contagious, they can infect others too. Stupidity is like cancer. Cancer maybe is curable, but stupidity seems to be incurable…One psychiatrist was very happily married to a surprisingly ugly woman. “I know she is terribly homely,” he explained to a friend, “and slightly cross-eyed and a bit dull. But boy, what exciting nightmares she has!”He is not interested in the woman; he is interested in her exciting nightmares. So let them, such kinds of people, if they want to remain Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans, let them. We don’t want that kind to come here and pollute the air.The father’s tone was severe as he said, “Young man, do you think you should be taking my daughter to nightclubs all the time?”“Certainly not,” the boy answered, then added hopefully, “let us try to reason with her.”You missed it!Once you are caught by a girl, it is no longer a question of your choice where you go. The boy is right; he says, “Let us try to reason with her.”The second question:Osho,I am not a dancer, but I love to dance. At times I would like to leap and twirl and stay in the air. But, Osho, I worry about enlightenment. Does an enlightened man dance?You must have come from a Christian family so you don’t have any idea that enlightened people have been of all kinds. It is a spectrum, the whole rainbow.There has been Krishna – the dancer, the flute-player, the singer. There has been Chaitanya – a mad dancer, he will dance and dance for hours, until he will fall in ecstasy; the joy will be so overflowing, uncontainable. There has been Jalaluddin Rumi who whirled – he became enlightened while whirling. He whirled for thirty-six hours continuously, non-stop; then he fell, exhausted by the ecstasy, and when he opened his eyes the old man was gone and the new had arrived. It is Jalaluddin Rumi who founded the whirling dervishes and their whole beautiful tradition. There has been Meera in India, who danced to abandon, who danced from one village to another village, covering almost the whole north of India.But the Christians have only one idea – that of Christ. And they say Christ did not laugh either, what to say about dance? But I don’t believe that that is true. I know him far better than the Polack pope. He was a man of immense joy. He loved to eat, to drink even; he’s the only enlightened one who was not against wine. In fact no enlightened person should be against wine because it is pure vegetarian.He loved to eat and stay up late in the night eating, talking, gossiping. Christians have the idea that he was only delivering gospels; they have dropped all the gossip. In fact, those gossips contained more truth than the gospels that they have chosen because in his gossips he was really more human. In gospels you become a little inhuman, you become dry. And he was a wet man, not a dry man at all. Can you think of a man who drinks wine and moves with gamblers and prostitutes not gossiping? Impossible!Narada was one of the great, enlightened persons in India who loved his veena, and played his veena continuously. Kabir loved to dance, sing; Dadu, Nanak were lovers of singing. Nanak always used to have a companion because any time he would start singing, and he needed somebody to play, so he had one continuous companion, his name was Mardana. He was always ready with his instrument to accompany Nanak. In all his travels he had only one companion, Mardana, because he was a master-player. At any moment Nanak would start singing, in the middle of the night, anywhere. Whenever the divine possessed him he would sing, and immediately Mardana would have to play.There have been people like Buddha who never danced, Lao Tzu, who never danced, Bodhidharma, who never danced. But that does not mean that they were against dancing. My own understanding is that they had found a subtler dance of their inner being; there was no need for a physical dance. They were great dancers in that sense – far greater than Krishna, Chaitanya, Meera, Nanak, Kabir, Dadu because the body was not moving, but their soul was dancing, their very being was in a dance.So you need not be afraid. You say, “I am not a dancer, but I love to dance. At times I would like to leap and twirl and stay in the air. But, Osho, I worry about enlightenment. Does an enlightened man dance?”You need not worry – just avoid J. Krishnamurti!One of my sannyasins, Yoga Suresh, has written:Osho,Recently J. Krishnamurti was talking in Mumbai, and I also attended with a lot of my sannyasin friends. On the very first day, after sitting on the stage, he took one glance at us and then said: “This is not a place of amusement, dance, music, and enjoyment. Therefore, if anybody has come here for joy or something else, he should leave the premises right now.”He has also mentioned very often in his talks: “All foreigners who come to India are trapped by the so-called Bhagwan, who gives them colored clothes to wear and a necklace of beads or a mala, and he teaches them, the ignorant Western people, to sing and dance to Hollywood music, et cetera, et cetera. And they call it meditation.”Osho, as you always praise him and his teachings in your lectures, why does he have a grudge against you? He does not even have the courage to say it directly to you by using your name as you use his name. Why is this so?So, if you are worried about enlightenment, about what will happen, this is the only place where you need not be worried. But you will have to avoid people like J. Krishnamurti. He is too serious, so deadly serious, as if he has the responsibility to transform the whole world. He is carrying the burden, and he is becoming more and more angry every day because nothing is happening. “People still go on dancing, people still go on enjoying music,” he said.Whenever my sannyasins go to listen to him… And I say, wherever he is, go! Just sit in the front row, and enjoy. Irritate him, annoy him, drive him crazy because I love that man. So I would like you also to love him.He is a good man, nice, getting a little senile. That’s okay; he is old, we can forgive him. Red clothes just trigger something in him – like a red flag triggers something in a bull. Although he’s an old bull, the moment you flag him with the red, he forgets his age; he becomes young again. And this is good, to bring new blood to the old man – he will live a little longer. Help him! In his past lives he must have been a Spanish bull.He said, “This is not a place of amusement.” And I say to you that this is a place of amusement, dance, music and enjoyment. To me, life is not seriousness, life is not sadness. He’s too deadly serious, he cannot laugh. Jesus must have laughed, but Krishnamurti? He cannot laugh.But that too is an aspect, so I don’t say that he is not enlightened, remember. I will never say anything against him because to me enlightenment is a multidimensional phenomenon. He can say things against me, that’s okay because his understanding of enlightenment is one-dimensional, linear. He thinks as if he is the criterion of enlightenment, that if somebody fits exactly with him, just like him, then he is enlightened. But that will simply mean that Jesus is not enlightened, that Buddha is not enlightened, that Krishna is not enlightened, that Zarathustra is not enlightened – because the first thing Zarathustra did as he moved out of the womb, he laughed. Now, that’s what my sannyasins should learn. Next time when you are around, coming out of the mother’s womb, have a good belly laugh. Let that become the sign that an Osho sannyasin is born again!Zarathustra cannot be enlightened according to Krishnamurti. Lao Tzu cannot be enlightened because he was a very nonserious man. He used to ride on a buffalo, and that too backward – just to make everybody laugh. Just his passing from a town and a crowd will gather and they will start laughing, “What is the matter?”Only one other master – the Sufi master Mulla Nasruddin – had done that, nobody else in the whole history of humanity. Iran has not been able to produce anybody better, higher, greater than Mulla Nasruddin.Nasruddin was going to visit a place and his disciples were following him. He was riding on his donkey, sitting backward. A crowd started gathering; the disciples started feeling a little embarrassed, obviously. Nasruddin was enjoying, but the disciples were feeling embarrassed, “What kind of a master have you got? He does not even know how to sit on a donkey! In the first place, he is sitting on a donkey; in the second place, the wrong way.”Finally one disciple gathered courage and asked, “Mulla, people are laughing and we are feeling embarrassed. What is the reason for your sitting backward on the donkey?”Mulla said, “A simple reason – the reason is not very complicated.” He said, “If I sit as people usually sit, then my back will be toward you. That will be disrespectful. I love you, I respect you; a real master always respects his disciples.”A disciple then suggested, “Then we can have some other arrangement: we can walk ahead of you.”He said, “That is not right because then your back will be toward me – that will be disrespectful toward the master. And if even the master is trying not to be disrespectful toward the disciples, how can the disciples be disrespectful to the master? So this is the only possible way: I am facing you, you are facing me, and the journey is continuing, the donkey is going. Let the fools laugh, but we have our own philosophy and we have to live according to our philosophy.”Lao Tzu never gave a reason – nobody knows why, but perhaps this was his reason too because his disciples Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, and others, were always following him, and he was making a laughing stock of everybody.Krishnamurti will not accept Lao Tzu as enlightened and certainly not Chuang Tzu, because Chuang Tzu will look very absurd to him. Chuang Tzu has written such absurd stories – that’s the only reason I love him. He is the most absurd master in the whole world – before me, not after me! I am far more absurd. Even if Chuang Tzu comes here, he will feel a little hesitant whether to enter the Gateless Gate or not.Krishnamurti never uses anybody’s name: Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, Christ, Zarathustra, Bodhidharma, Rinzai, Bokuju – he never uses anybody’s name for the simple reason that he is a very one-dimensional man. He thinks he is the only criterion of enlightenment. Hence, he has no grudge against me – just his vision is very limited. His vision is a tunnel vision – perfectly right; through his tunnel he has seen the light, but through a tunnel.My vision is immense: I can include him, he cannot include me. Hence he says, “Therefore, if anybody has come here for joy or something else, he should leave the premises right now.” Whatsoever he says, never leave those premises! Be the first to enter and be the last to leave. And when he is talking against me, clap, enjoy, laugh. There is no reason why you should not enjoy. Whenever an enlightened person is available, one should enjoy as much as one can, one should eat as much as one can.And, to me, there is no difficulty. Many times it has been said to me, “You never say anything against Krishnamurti, but he goes on saying things against you.” Of course, he never mentions my name, but indirectly he is saying things against me. He can say, still I don’t think that he has any grudge against me. His tunnel vision is the reason for it.But this is not only his situation – Mahavira had a tunnel vision, Mohammed had a tunnel vision. In fact, very few people have been able to have multidimensional vision, for the simple reason that when you achieve enlightenment you achieve through a certain path, a certain method, and you become obsessed with it. You think it is the only way. And you are right – it is a way, but not the only way.I had never had a master in all my past lives, but I had been with many enlightened people. That has made my vision rich. I can understand Jesus as easily as Krishna. I can penetrate the very heart of Mahavira as easily as Buddha because I have followed, accompanied many enlightened people down the ages. And I have never been a follower of anybody; otherwise I would have become obsessed, with a tunnel vision. I have seen Jalaluddin Rumi attaining enlightenment through dancing, and I have seen Gautam Buddha sitting and attaining enlightenment without dancing, and I have seen Krishna with sixteen thousand women – really enjoying Hollywood music!And it is strange that Krishnamurti should say anything against Hollywood music because he lives in the Hollywood area. In fact, I don’t know what Hollywood music is. He lives in Hollywood; maybe that’s why he has become anti-Hollywood music. It is very difficult to forgive your neighbors.He says: “All foreigners who come to India are trapped by the so-called Bhagwan.” That is true! You can try and trap them – they are perfectly available. In fact, I send them to Krishnamurti’s meetings. If he can manage to trap them, I make them available. It is he himself who says to them, “…leave the premises right now.” He cannot trap my people; nobody can trap my people because I am not trapping you. I am making you free from all traps.He says, “He gives them colored clothes…” What is wrong with colored clothes? Just the past life, that Spanish bull life, a hangover.“…and he gives them a necklace of beads or mala to wear.” What is wrong with it? It is just to irritate people like you, J. Krishnamurti, people who have a tunnel vision. So I put my people exactly at the other end of the tunnel, so whatsoever you can see are only orange people with a mala and my picture.The moment he sees my picture, he is no longer in his senses. That is the moment when he transcends his mind. That is an opportunity for him to go into meditation; otherwise he is a very rational man, very much tethered to the mind. Whatsoever he goes on saying is just mind stuff. He has transcended the mind, but the way he expresses, he only uses his mind.I am using many other devices too. I use the mind, I use words, I use silence, I use music – yes, I can even use Hollywood music and make you enlightened through it. That’s how the alchemist functions. This very life has to be used, and all that this life contains.I can send you to see a “blue movie” and tell you to be just a witness, don’t get identified, and it becomes a meditation. And the blue movie will be the right thing because again and again you will forget to be a witness. And again and again you will have to be a witness. It will be a constant struggle. Just looking at a wall, anybody can become a witness.Bodhidharma was looking at a wall for nine years. There is no wonder he became enlightened. What else can you do? He must have thought, “It is better now to become enlightened – at least to get rid of this wall.” It is better to project a blue movie on the wall and then be a witness. And I tell you, you will not take nine years, far quicker – you will be tired of all those naked women passing by.Everything can be used. That’s why I am against renunciation – everything in life can be used. Yes, even wine can be used. You can drink it, but in small quantities in the beginning, and remain alert – just a little quantity and then remain alert. Try to be alert when the wine starts functioning in you. If you can be alert with wine, then go on increasing the dose. One day you can drink the wine just like water and still you are alert. And if you can drink the whole bottle and remain alert, then nobody can make you unenlightened again. Impossible!This has been used; this is not a new method. This has been used for centuries in India, from the days of the Rig Veda; they called it somras, it is the same. Everything can be used. In fact, the more you have been taught to be against alcohol, against other drugs, the more you have become interested in them. And nobody teaches you how to use these drugs – alcohol, other intoxicants – to become alert, aware.In a better world, in a more scientific world, every commune should have a small place with experts to give you small doses of intoxicants and help you to remain alert. And if you can remain alert while every possibility is of losing alertness, then in ordinary life you will be alert without any difficulty.So, just avoid J. Krishnamurti, and that too only till you have become a sannyasin. You are not a sannyasin yet; once you are a sannyasin there is no need to avoid anybody. Go to Krishnamurti, go anywhere. Let them avoid you! This will be a great thing.He never comes to Pune; he used to come in the past. This is the time, now he should come – now the spring has come to Pune. He used to visit this town when it was dead. Now he should come and I will send five thousand sannyasins and you will see that even an enlightened person dances. Of course, it will not be a very beautiful dance, but he will jump and scream, and hit his head. It will be some sort of dance, a little weird, something like jogging, dynamic meditation. And when he is doing that, put a mala around his neck!The last question:Osho,Why are Indians so intolerant and so angry at you?It is very simple: they are very religious people, the only religious people in the world, very spiritual. This is a sign of their spirituality, their religiousness – the so-called religious always become fanatics. They talk about tolerance, but they are very intolerant. In fact, the very idea of becoming tolerant has the seed of intolerance in it.When somebody says, “Be tolerant,” that simply means there is intolerance. Why be tolerant? I am not tolerant hence I need not be intolerant either. Why should I be tolerant or intolerant? They are two sides of the same coin. But these so-called religious people, these phony spiritualists, are bound to be intolerant because they are repressing their anger, their rage. They are boiling within.Just the other day I was looking at the newspapers. One article suggests – a very religious person has written the article – that Osho should be given electroshocks. This is Indian culture, religiousness, nonviolence, celibacy, great heritage, the country of the great seers – asking the government to give me electroshocks.The second article I saw yesterday was that I should be deported immediately. The third article was that the Indian government should throw me into the Arabian Ocean – not even into the Indian Ocean because I may pollute the Indian Ocean. “Throw him in the Arabian Ocean, so if he pollutes, he pollutes the Arabs!”My suggestion is all these three things can be done together, there is no need to do them separately. First, give me electroshocks; then deport me, and don’t give me a passport, so of course I cannot go outside the country; and because you have deported me, then throw me into the Arabian Ocean. This will save your country, your religion, your culture, your great heritage! This will prove to the world that you are really the gurus of the world, that the whole world needs your advice and your wisdom.They are angry because I am not supporting their beliefs. They are against me because I am original, and they are always against anything that is original because the original means anti-traditional, anti-conventional. India has lived with borrowed knowledge for centuries…Chandulal: “Good evening, thought I would drop in and see you about the umbrella you borrowed from me last week.”Gaurilal: “I’m sorry, but I lent it to a friend of mine. Did you want it?”Chandulal: “Well, not for myself, but the fellow I borrowed it from says the owner wants it.”This is the way of the Indian mind – borrowing, borrowing. And the moment they see something new, they become afraid. It is their fear that becomes anger. Remember always, it is fear standing upside down that becomes anger – fear doing a headstand, shirshasan, becomes anger. Anger is just a security because deep down they are feeling afraid.There is not a single argument against me. Do you think these are arguments against me? Electroshocks, deportation, throwing me into the Arabian Sea. Are these arguments? There is not a single argument. They are feeling very impotent, and out of their impotency great rage is arising.And they go on, again and again, asking me for many things.Pandit Lajjashankar Jha has asked two things:Osho,Why are the Indians not allowed to participate in the therapy groups?Second:Are you brainwashing the innocent Westerners in the therapy groups?First he wants to know why Indians are not allowed in the therapy groups. Will they understand therapy? Will they understand bringing all their repressed sexuality out? Will they be able to realize and recognize their ugliness? Will they be able to see their original face in the mirror of therapy?I am perfectly ready to allow them. Pandit Lajjashankar Jha can be allowed, but will he be ready to put his scholarship aside – he is a pandit, a brahmin – will he be able to put his past aside and go into a therapy group? Will he be ready to be really spiritually naked, truthful, honest? A therapy group can function only if you are authentic, if you say only that which you feel. But something else will happen: he will not say what he feels; he will say what is expected of him to say.Just the other day a sannyasin informed me that an Indian had fallen at her feet and started massaging her feet and saying to her, “Mother, mother,” and then he started taking his hand upward. She stopped him but he would not listen, calling “Mother, Mother!” And he was trying to reach her thighs, and “Mother!” – this dual personality, saying “Mother” and trying to touch her naked body.Indians are not allowed for the simple reason that they cannot open themselves. They have become the most closed people in the world. If they cannot even understand what I am saying here, how can they go into a really deep therapeutic situation? It will be impossible for them.And the second question shows his fear already: “Are you brainwashing the Western people, the innocent people in therapy groups?” His fear is there, that if he allows himself and opens up he will be brainwashed. Don’t be afraid, Pundit Lajjashankar Jha because to be brainwashed one thing is absolutely needed – that is a brain! How can I brainwash you? First you will have to have a brain in there, then it can be washed. We will wash it clean, but first it has to be there.And he calls them, “innocent Western people.” If they are innocent then there is no need to wash them. In fact, you need washing, but you don’t have the brain. They have the brain, but they don’t need washing. You see my troubles?The Indians are angry with me because they hoped, expected, that I would give more nourishment to their ego; and rather than giving nourishment to their ego I started shattering it to pieces. That’s what is hurting them – I am not fulfilling their expectations.They will not say it clearly, but every day I see in newspapers. People write to me: “When you were giving discourses on Shrimad Bhagavadgita, it was so beautiful, we enjoyed it so much. When you were talking on Mahavira we loved it. But now, whatsoever you are doing, we hate it!”Why did they love it when I was talking on the Bhagavad Gita? Because they felt that I am bringing the message of Krishna up to date, I am making it contemporary.Don’t worry, once the commune is settled I will talk again on the Bhagavad Gita – and you will hate it because then I will tell you the real truth. The last time I was just talking about the circumference of the Bhagavad Gita; now I will expose its reality, its nakedness, and then you will hate me more.But you are asking about it…Durga has her first date and comes home at two o’clock at night.“Where have you been?” the worried mother wants to know.“Oh, I went to a party with Prem,” she answers.“And then where did you go?” she wants to know.“We went to his room,” she says.“And what did you do there?” worried mum wants to know.“We had a drink, sat on the bed and talked.”“Darling, what then?” mum says, jumping up and down.“Then he asked me to close my eyes, and he undressed me.”“Darling, and then?” mum is nearly fainting.“Then he gave me a leotard and a pair of roller skates – and mum, why are you laughing?”Try to get it! Let me repeat, “Then he gave me a leotard and a pair of roller skates – and mum, why are you laughing?”The mother is waiting, some hidden expectation that now this is going to happen, now that is going to happen, now this is the last moment and it is going to happen – and suddenly it does not happen.The Indians have been waiting for me, that I will go around the world spreading the Indian religion and the message of the Vedas. Why should I do all that nonsense? When I can give my own message, why should I give anybody else’s message? The seers of the Vedas were not concerned with me, why should I be concerned with them? They never gave my message, why should I give their message?But they have a very rotten language of understanding. They can understand only that which is written in their scriptures. They cannot understand anything else. Howsoever rotten it is – and much of it is bound to be rotten; the world has grown, man has come of age…A man went into a butcher’s shop and asked for half a pound of kidley.“I beg your pardon?” said the butcher.“I want half a pound of kidley.”“Say that again?”“Half a pound of kidley.”“Are you sure you don’t mean half a pound of kidney?”“That’s what I said, diddle I?”It is a question of language.Once, a sannyasin asked an Indian in a chai shop for information. He said, “Excuse me, where can I buy some shampoo?”The chai wallah asked, “You are from which country?”“Australia,” said the sannyasin.“America?” queried the Indian.“Not America – Australia!”“England? Germany? Oh, yes, Germany people very good. Are you married or single?”“Not married,” said the swami. “But where can I buy some shampoo?”“What you want?”“Shampoo!”“For what you want this?”“To wash my balls!” snapped the sannyasin. “What do you think?”“Oh, oh yes,” he said, “you are a tourist or you are coming for study?”“I want to buy some shampoo! Do you know where I can buy some?”“What? What you want?”“Shampoo!”“Oh yes, you can buy.”“But where can I buy it?”“In shop you can buy!”“Yes, but which shop?”“What you want?”“I want some fucking shampoo!”“No!” shouted the Indian, standing up, “No fucking here!”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why have you called this series of discourses: Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen?I am not to blame. The whole blame goes to this old guy Yoka. He is one of the rarest enlightened people; his sayings are tremendously beautiful. Very few sayings are available, but each saying is a diamond, unique in itself.Reading his sayings, I came across this statement:A man of Zen walks in Zen and sits in Zen. Whether he speaks or acts, whether he is silent or inactive, his body is always peaceful. He smiles, looking straight at the sword which takes his life. He keeps his balance even at the moment of death.I love the statement: “A man of Zen walks in Zen and sits in Zen.” I love it for the simple reason that meditation cannot be just a part of your life. You cannot make a fragment of your life meditative. It is not possible to be meditative for one hour and non-meditative for twenty-three hours. It is absolutely impossible. If you are doing that, that means your meditation is false.Meditation can either be a twenty-four-hour affair or it cannot be at all. It is like breathing: you cannot breathe for one hour and then put it aside for twenty-three hours, otherwise you will die. You have to go on breathing. Even while you are asleep you have to go on breathing. Even in a deep coma you have to go on breathing.Meditation is the breath of your soul.Just as breathing is the life of the body, meditation is the life of the soul. The people who are not aware of meditation are spiritually dead.George Gurdjieff used to say that very few people have souls – and he is right. One is not born with a soul, but only with a seed which can grow into a soul – which may not grow. It will depend on you. You will have to create the right soil, the right climate for it to grow, to bloom. You will have to provoke the spring to come to you so that your soul can flower; otherwise you are just a bodymind. The soul is only an empty word. Meditation makes it a reality. Meditation is the climate in which the soul happens.Zen is another name for meditation. The word zen comes from the Sanskrit root dhyana – it has traveled far. Dhyana means a state of absolute silence, of thoughtless silence, but full of awareness. Even the thought that “I am aware” is enough to distract you from your meditation. Even to know that “I am in meditation” is enough to destroy it.A state of meditation is an innocent, silent state. You are blissfully unaware of your awareness. You are, but you are utterly relaxed. You are not in a state of sleep; you are fully alert, more alert than ever. Rather, you are alertness.Dhyana is the greatest contribution of the East to the evolution of humanity.Buddha never used Sanskrit himself. He used a language that was used by the masses of those days; he used Pali. In Pali, dhyana becomes jhan. When Buddha’s message reached China, jhan became chan. When it traveled from China to Japan, it became zen. But it originates from dhyana. Dhyana means meditation, but the English word meditation does not have that flavor. It has a long association with contemplation. The English word meditation means meditating upon something; there is an object of meditation.In Zen there is no object at all, only pure subjectivity. You are aware, but not aware of something. There is nothing to be aware of; everything has disappeared. You are not even aware of nothingness because then nothingness becomes your object, nothingness becomes your thought. You are not aware of emptiness either. You are simply aware; there is no object to your awareness. The mirror is empty, reflecting nothing because there is nothing to reflect.You have to remember this, otherwise meditation can give you a wrong impression. Whenever the word meditation is used, immediately the question arises, “On what?” That question is irrelevant. If you are asking, “On what?” you are asking what to think about; to contemplate about; to concentrate on something – and that is not meditation.Concentration is not meditation. Concentration is an effort of the mind to focus itself. It has certain purposes of its own. It is a method in science – useful, but it is not meditation. Contemplation is a little vague, more abstract. In concentration, the object is more visible; in contemplation, the object is abstract. You concentrate on a flame of light; you contemplate on love. In Christianity, contemplation and meditation have become synonymous.The word meditation should be given a new meaning, a new fragrance – the fragrance of Zen. Concentration is of the mind. Meditation is not of the mind at all. Contemplation is just in between, in a limbo. It is something of the mind and something of the no-mind, a mixture: a state where mind and no-mind meet, the boundary.One has to reach the absolute state of awareness – that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you even have to sleep in it.One of Gautam Buddha’s chief disciples Ananda, asked Buddha: “One thing always puzzles me and I cannot contain my curiosity anymore, although my question is irrelevant. The question is that when you go to sleep you remain in the same posture the whole night. Wherever you put your hands, your feet and whatever side you lie down on, you remain exactly the same, like a statue. You don’t move, you don’t change your side, you don’t change your hands, your feet – nothing changes. You wake up in the morning in exactly the same posture as you had gone to sleep. One night, just out of curiosity, I watched you the whole night through – not a single movement. Are you controlling yourself even in your sleep?”Buddha said, “There is no question of control. I am awake, I am in meditation. I sleep in meditation. Just as I wake up early in the morning in meditation, every night I go to sleep in meditation. My day is my meditation, my night too. I remain absolutely calm and quiet because deep down I am perfectly aware. The flame of meditation goes on burning smokeless. That’s why there is no need to move.”Yoka says:A man of Zen walks in Zen and sits in Zen.This is of great significance for you all. Meditation has to become something so deep in you that wherever you go it remains, abides with you; whatever you do, it is always there. Only then can your life be transformed. And not only will you be meditative in your life, you will be meditative in your death too. You will die in deep meditation.That’s how Buddha died. That’s how all the buddhas have always died. Their death is something exquisitely beautiful. Their life is beautiful, their death too. There is no gap between their life and death. Their death is a crescendo of their life, the ultimate peak, the absolute expression.When Buddha died he was eighty-two years old. He asked his disciples to come together – just as he used to when he talked to them every morning. They all gathered together. Nobody was thinking at all about his death.Buddha said: “This is my last sermon to you. Whatever I had to say to you I have said. Forty-two years I have been telling you, saying to you – I have poured my whole heart out. If anyone has any question left he can ask now because this is the last day of my life. Today I leave for the other shore. My boat has arrived.”They were shocked! They had come just to listen to the daily discourse. They were not thinking that he was going to die – without making any fuss about death! It was just a simple phenomenon, a simple declaration: “My boat has come and I have to leave. If you have any question left you can ask me, because if you don’t ask me today, I will never again be available and the question will remain with you. So please, be kind and don’t be shy,” he told his disciples.They started crying. Buddha said, “Stop all this nonsense! This is no time to cry and weep, and waste time. Ask if you have something to ask, otherwise let me go. The time has come. I cannot linger any longer.”They said, “We have nothing to ask. You have given more than we would have ever asked. You have answered the questions that we have asked, that we could have asked. You have answered questions which will be fulfilling for all kinds of inquirers for centuries.”Buddha said, “So I can take leave of you. Goodbye.”And he closed his eyes, sat in a lotus posture and started moving toward the other shore.It is said that at the first step he left his body; the second step, he left his mind; the third step, he left his heart; the fourth step, he left his soul. He disappeared into the universal so peacefully, so silently, so joyously. The birds were chirping; it was early morning and the sun was still on the horizon. Ten thousand sannyasins were sitting and watching Buddha dying with such grace. They completely forgot that this was death. It was such an extraordinary experience. There was nothing of death as they had always conceived it would be.So much meditative energy was released that many became enlightened that very day, that very moment. Those who were just on the verge were pushed into the unknown. It is said that thousands became enlightened through Buddha’s beautiful death.We don’t call it death, we call it mahaparinirvana, dissolving into the absolute – just like an ice cube melting, dissolving into the ocean. He lived in meditation, he died in meditation.It is because of Yoka that I have chosen this title: Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen. In this simple phrase, the whole experience of all the awakened ones is condensed.Yoka also says:The fearless thought of Zen is like the powerful roaring of a lion, striking terror into the hearts of all other animals. Even the king of the elephants runs off forgetting his dignity. Disciples of good heart, they alone, like the old dragon, hear that roaring with calm delight.Yes, Zen is like the roar of a lion. All other religions speak in a way that does not hurt so much. They are compromising; they compromise with your sleep. Zen is noncompromising. It does not care about your sleep and your beautiful dreams. It shocks you, it shatters you. Its whole effort is to wake you, whatever the cost. Yes, it is like a lion’s roar.Only disciples of good heart, they alone, like the old dragon, hear that roaring with calm delight.It can be heard only with a deep love for truth. It can be heard only by those who are real inquirers, not just curious, not just spectators, not just philosophers, but those who are really ready to go through a radical transformation – who are ready to die and be reborn. It is only for those few people who have guts and courage because it is not like Christianity, a Sunday religion, that each Sunday you go to the church and your paradise is assured. It is not like Mohammedanism, that you pray five times and go on repeating the same words like a parrot. Words which are not your words, which are not spontaneous to you, which have been imposed on you by others – you may not even know their meaning.It is such a stupid world! Mohammedans pray in Arabic, which they don’t understand; Hindus pray in Sanskrit, which they don’t understand; Buddhists now pray in Pali, which they don’t understand. And all for the simple reason that priests have been insistent in keeping the dead language because if the prayers are translated into your language which you understand, you would realize that they are very poor. You would be at a loss – you would not be able to see what there is to pray about in them; they would lose all the mystery. The mystery is there because you don’t understand them. Hence Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit – dead languages which nobody understands anymore. Priests go on insisting that prayers should be in the dead languages.You are saying something which you don’t know the meaning of. What kind of prayer is this? To whom are you addressing it? You don’t know anything about God. And what you are saying is not arising out of your heart; you are just being a gramophone record – “His Master’s Voice.”Zen is not interested in such compromises. It wants you to really wake up. It is hard work, a thankless job. A Zen master has chosen something for which nobody is going to thank him. Everybody will feel sabotaged by him and everybody will feel hurt by him. Everybody will feel, “He is disturbing my sleep.” Only very few people, who are real inquirers, who are ready to risk all, will be able to understand. Because Zen says that your whole life has to be transformed, not just a part of your life.When you are in the temple, in the mosque, in the synagogue, you become religious. When you step outside again, you are irreligious, just the old self. Being in the temple is a pretension. It divides you, it creates a schizophrenic humanity, it creates people who have split minds. If you see them praying in the mosques, in the temples, you will say, “How beautiful they are!” And the same people in the marketplace become so ugly. The same people will kill each other with such cruelty, you could never have conceived of it. If you had seen them praying in the mosque, in the church, you would not have believed that they could butcher each other so cruelly, so mechanically.Christians have killed thousands of Mohammedans, Mohammedans have killed thousands of Christians. Hindus have killed Mohammedans, Mohammedans have killed Hindus; Hindus have killed Buddhists, and so on and so forth. All these religions have been enemies of each other. They talk of love, but that is only mere talk; the reality is totally different. Why is it so? – because their prayer is false.Zen wants you to be religious, not in a formal way, but to be really religious in your day-to-day life. Zen does not divide your life into the mundane and the sacred, it says that everything is sacred. So eating, be meditative; walking, be meditative. Whatever you are doing – taking a bath, be meditative. Wherever you are, you are in the temple. This whole existence is God’s temple. Behave as you would like to behave in a temple. God is present everywhere.Zen does not talk about God at all, but only of godliness – a certain quality, a fragrance which is everywhere. Only when you have the capacity to learn will you be able to see it. All that is needed on your part is the capacity to be silent, receptive, welcoming, open.The second question:Osho,It is claimed that we learn from chaos. How much more does man need to awaken?Chaos is not there outside – the outside is a cosmos, but inside there is a chaos. It is because of the chaos inside that people don’t look inward. They are afraid to look, very frightened of looking in. They keep themselves occupied in every possible way so that there is no time left, no space left to look in. They go on listening to the buddhas, who say, “Know thyself.” They understand perfectly well what is meant by “knowing thyself,” but they don’t make any effort to know themselves. They are afraid of the chaos.Inside there is chaos. Outside there is no chaos. The stars are moving in a rhythm, the whole existence is rhythmic; it is in absolute accord. Just man’s mind is in a chaos. And if you see any chaos outside, that is man-made, man-created.Man remains a chaos unless he becomes a no-mind. The mind is a chaos – the mind is bound to be a chaos – and you have become identified with it. What is the mind? – past plus future. The present is not part of the mind at all, the present belongs to existence. And the present is an absolute harmony. The past is no more and the future is not yet. Your mind consists of these three nonexistential things: memories and imaginations, memories and desires, memories and hopes. It is because of this that you are living in a mad state.Everybody is insane inside. We don’t call anybody insane unless he moves too much to the extreme, but the difference between insane people and the so-called sane is only of degrees – and anything can trigger it. You are just boiling somewhere near ninety-nine degrees and just one degree more – your business fails, you go bankrupt, your wife dies… That one degree is added to your ninety-nine degrees and you start evaporating; you are insane.The psychiatrists, the psychotherapists, all function only to keep you within limits. They keep you normally abnormal – that is their function. They are agents of the society, just as in the old days, priests were the agents of the society. Psychotherapists are the new priests – a new priesthood which functions to keep this society running; which keeps this society believing that everything is okay.Nothing is okay. Everybody is on the verge of a breakdown and anything, any accident, can push you into the world of the insane. You are getting ready, you are always getting ready. The more sensitive you are, the more alive you are; the more is the possibility that you may go insane.At the funeral of his wife, Perelli made a terrible scene. In fact, it was so terrible and heartrending, that friends had to forcibly restrain him from jumping into the grave and being buried with his beloved Maria. Still overcome with grief, he was taken home in the rented limousine and immediately went into complete seclusion.A week passed and nothing was heard of him. Finally, worried about the poor guy, his late wife’s brother went to the house. After ringing the doorbell for ten minutes – and still worried – the brother-in-law jimmied the front door, went upstairs and found his dead sister’s husband busily banging the maid. The bedroom was a mess – empty champagne bottles everywhere.“This is terrible, Perelli!” the brother-in-law declared in shocked tones. “Your dead wife, my sister, has been dead only a week and you’re doing this! You’re doing this!”So busy in the saddle was Perelli that he managed only to turn his head. “How do I know what I’m doing?” he said. “I got such grief! I got such grief!”People are in a mess. They are just keeping face somehow, managing a facade, pretending that everything is okay. But nothing is okay.You ask me: “It is claimed that we learn from chaos.” Yes, it is true. But we learn from chaos only if we go inward, if we enter the chaos consciously, deliberately, knowingly. If we encounter the chaos, of course, we learn – there is no other way of learning. It is really out of this chaos that stars are born. It is out of this chaos that buddhas are born – but you have to encounter it. We go on doing just the opposite; we go on hiding it, covering it. We don’t want to show it to anybody and we don’t want to see it ourselves. We are so frightened, we are so scared. We are afraid that we may not be able to manage. We are afraid that if we go in we may not be able to come back. So we cling to anything on the outside; any excuse is enough to cling. We go on clinging to something or other – we just go on avoiding ourselves.The person that you are avoiding the most in your life is you. Your whole life is managed in such a way that you never come across yourself. You have been trained, brought up, educated, cultured, civilized in such a way that you will never meet yourself. You will meet everybody except yourself. You will be introduced to everybody except yourself, for the simple reason that society does not know how to cope with the inner chaos.It is only in the presence of a master, in a buddhafield, that people gather courage to face themselves. In the beginning it is a breakdown. But if you are moving into it consciously, soon the breakdown becomes a breakthrough. To transform breakdowns into breakthroughs is the whole function of a master. The psychotherapist simply patches you up. He puts a few bandages on you, a little ointment here and a little ointment there. He helps you to stand on your own two feet again, back in the old way. He makes you your old self again. You start functioning, you start doing the old things that you have always been doing. That’s his function. He is not there to transform you. You need a metapsychology – the psychology of the buddhas.It is the greatest adventure in life to go through a breakdown consciously. It is the greatest risk because there is no guarantee that the breakdown will become a breakthrough. It does become – but these things cannot be guaranteed. Your chaos is very ancient – for many, many lives you have been in chaos. It is thick and dense. It is almost a universe in itself. So when you enter it with your small capacity, of course, there is danger. But without facing this danger, nobody has ever become integrated, nobody has ever become an individual, indivisible.The claim is absolutely right: we learn only from chaos. But we learn only if we go through the chaos. And we have to go through the chaos in a particular way, with a style, with a method. Just going into chaos without any method will be a breakdown – you will go mad.Zen, or meditation, is the method which will help you to go through the chaos, through the dark night of the soul, balanced, disciplined, alert. The dawn is not far away, but before you can reach the dawn, the dark night has to be passed through. As the dawn comes closer, the night will become darker.This is really the function of religious communes. Alone you may not be able to do it, but in a commune where many people are ahead of you, many people are behind you – and with a master who has attained to the dawn, who goes on calling you forth, who goes on saying to you, “Don’t be worried, the goal is not far away”… And there are people ahead of you who say, “Don’t be worried. We have passed through such a state and you will also pass through it. Just a little more perseverance, a little more awaiting, a little more patience!” And there is the master, like a shining star. He goes on helping you in every way, holding your hand in moments when you would like to run away, to escape and go back to your old world; to forget all about it because it is such a nightmare. Yes, one learns, but one learns the hard way; there is no shortcut.You say: “How much more does man need to awaken?” It is not a question of how much more, it is not a question of quantity; either you are asleep or you are awake. No one is more asleep than anybody else. The people who are asleep are asleep in the same way. It does not matter how deeply you are asleep – it is not a question of quantity. You are asleep, that is enough. The same is the case with awakening. If you are awake, you are simply awake. Nobody is more awake or less awake.For centuries theologians have been discussing… Theologians always discuss stupid things. In India they have been discussing for centuries: “Who is more awake, Mahavira or Buddha?” Jainas say that Mahavira is more awake, Buddha’s followers say that Buddha is more awake. The whole point is nonsensical, the whole argument is foolish. There is no question of more or less. If somebody is awake, he is awake. Buddha is awake, Mahavira is awake. The night is over; the chaos has been transformed into a cosmos.This is the miracle: when you are perfectly awake, your very chaos becomes a cosmos because it starts settling into an orchestra; the noise becomes music. Suddenly, all that was insanity, madness, is transformed into buddhahood, into enlightenment – the same energy! Chaos means energy – energy of which you are unconscious. If you become conscious, the very phenomenon of consciousness is a transforming phenomenon. You need not do anything else, just being conscious of it is enough. The spring has come. Suddenly, buds start opening, flowers bloom – thousands of flowers. The inner world becomes full of fragrance.Man is absolutely asleep.The drunk Mulla Nasruddin noticed a parrot perched on top of a farmhouse gable. Attracted by the bright plumage, he ran to fetch a ladder. He climbed onto the roof and was about to clap his cap over the bird when the parrot fixed him with a beady eye and asked, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”“Gosh, I didn’t mean nothing!” said the Mulla, “I thought you was a bird!”People are not in their senses. You think you are awake and that is one of the greatest mistakes – it keeps you unawake. The very idea that you are awake is a deception. If you think you are already awake, there is no need to do anything to be awakened.You have to realize that you are drunk, drunk with many things: with greed, with lust, with anger, with ambition, with ego. These are all drugs. It is a very strange world: ordinary drugs are prohibited, which are not so harmful. People are continuously talking against smoking, which is not very harmful. It is a kind of pranyam: breathing in, breathing out. Of course, a little foolish because you can breathe pure air and you are breathing dirty smoke and paying for it. But it is nothing much to be worried about. Or people are against alcohol. Once in a while a little bit of alcohol is not bad, it is fun. And it is purely vegetarian. You are not harming anybody. But so much antagonism against alcohol, smoking!The new drugs are far better than alcohol. For example, LSD is far better, less harmful than alcohol. Taken in right doses, with a right guide, in a right atmosphere, it can reveal many things to you. It can become a method of encountering yourself. It can give you new visions, new insights into your being and into existence itself. But people are against it, although they are not against greed; they are not against ego trips; they are not against ambition.Just a few months ago Morarji Desai was the Prime Minister of India. He is very opposed to alcohol, obsessed by it. He wanted absolute prohibition. But he is not aware that he is more alcoholic than anybody else. He is such an egoist – very rare to find – and so full of greed and ambition. He has been trying to be in some post or other his whole life. Now he is eighty-five, but still, a few days ago he said, “If people want me again, I will stand in the elections.” It is a well-known fact that he was even willing to become Chief Minister of Gujarat. After being the Prime Minister of India, he was ready to be just a chief minister of one of the smallest states. Such power-hungry people!But nobody thinks that ambition, greed, lust for power are intoxicants. They are keeping humanity in a chaos. These are the people – and they are not alone. We are all in the same boat. A few are madly after power, a few are not so madly after power, but everybody thinks in terms of power, money, prestige, respectability. These things go on keeping you drunk. And then a person can do anything.Morarji Desai wants to live as long as he can. Maybe deep down he thinks that he can become physically immortal by drinking his own urine! He is against alcohol, but not against drinking his own urine. Now, alcohol is pure fruit juice – far better than drinking your own urine. But he does not call it urine, he calls it “water of life.”Just the other day Indira moved into the Prime Minister’s house. For two, three months, she didn’t move there. Why? – for the simple reason that the whole house had to be cleaned because Morarji had lived there for two, three years. Every utensil had to be cleaned and changed. The bathroom tiles had to be removed and demolished. The whole house was stinking!I have heard that when he went to America he was very puzzled. Wherever he went – he was invited to many parties – the ladies would always gather in the opposite corner of the room. He inquired about it, but nobody would give him an answer. Politely, people tried to change the subject, but he insisted. Finally somebody said, “Sir, if you insist, we will have to tell you. The ladies are afraid that if you suddenly feel thirsty, then…? So they keep themselves aloof, a little far away.”These people have been dominating humanity – ambitious! Now he wants to live. For what? – just for power, to have more power; to have more power for longer.Man is not destroyed by these small things – marijuana, LSD, etcetera – he is destroyed by something far deeper. Ambition is the most poisonous thing. We are unconscious.Unless we become very aware of our inner poisons we will not be able to transform our being from darkness into light. We will remain dark holes – and we have the capacity to become eternal light.Three Irishmen, none too sober, were talking together at a bus terminal. They got so engrossed comparing their bowling scores that they didn’t notice the bus had pulled in. As the driver sang out, “All aboard,” they looked up, startled and dashed from the platform.Two of them managed to hop on the bus, but the third didn’t make it. As he stood sadly watching the bus depart in the distance, a stranger tried to cheer him up, saying, “You shouldn’t feel too bad. Two out of three made it and that’s a pretty good average.”The Irishman shook his head. “But they came to see me off.”It is not only so with the people who are drunk, it is not only so with the people who are politically drunk, it is so with your so-called religious people too. Those who think they are helping mankind – great missionaries, public servants – are the most mischievous people; for the simple reason that they themselves are in chaos and they are trying to help others. They double your chaos, they multiply your chaos. The world would be far happier and far saner if there were no missionaries, no public servants. If people are left to themselves they will come to their senses sooner. But there are public servants; they cannot leave you, they cannot leave you alone.A man was beating an old woman on the street. A crowd gathered. The man was very strong, tall, muscular. Finally somebody in the crowd gathered courage and asked, “What’s the matter? Why are you beating that poor old woman?”He said, “I want to help her to the other side of the road, but she insists on not going. I am here to help old people to cross the road. The traffic is dangerous.”That’s what is happening: missionaries, public servants, are bent upon helping you!Jake the barber, passing by a tenement house in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, saw a man leaning limply against the doorway.“What’s the matter?” he asked sympathetically. “Drunk?”“Yeah, I’m afraid sho.”“Do you live in this house?”“Yep.”“Want me to help you upstairs?”“Yeah, shank you.”“What floor do you live on?”“Shecon.”With much difficulty, Jake half dragged, half carried the wilting figure up the dark stairway to the second floor.“Is this your apartment?” he asked.“Yep,” affirmed the man, his eyes already closed in alcoholic slumber.Jake opened the unlocked door and shoved the drunk inside. He then groped his way back downstairs. But as he was going through the vestibule, he made out the dim outline of another man, apparently in worse condition than the first, staggering in front of the house, out of the night.“What’s the trouble, mister?” he asked. “Are you drunk, too?”“Yesh,” came the feeble reply.“Do you live in this house also?”“Yesh.”“Don’t tell me you live on the second floor, too?”“Yesh.”Again Jake half carried the stranger to the second floor. He pushed open the same door and shoved the man inside the darkened room.As Jake was emerging from the building he discerned yet a third man, evidently worse off than either of the other two. This poor fellow was disheveled and bleeding from cuts and bruises on his head and face. He was about to approach him and offer him assistance when the object of his solicitude darted into the street and threw himself into the arms of a policeman.Offisher,” he gasped, pointing a quivering finger at Jake, “perteck me from this man. All night long he’s done nothin’ but drag me upstairs an’ throw me down the elevator shaft!”It is not a question of how much more man needs to awaken; man simply needs to be awake. The only way to be awake is through meditation; there is no other way. Zen is the only way: Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen.The third question:Osho,After listening to you the other day and hearing you say that sex is stupid, we tried it right away. We don't understand! What do you find stupid?I have been talking to you of other things. Have you ever tried them right away? I am telling you about meditation every day and you go on postponing it. And sex you tried right away! You did me a great favor – you did not try it here! That shows its stupidity.Sex is not stupid, you are stupid. It is because of you that poor sex also becomes stupid. You will never know unless you rise a little higher. Unless you become a little more alert, you will not see the stupidity. You can’t see it remaining on the same level – nobody can see it.Go to the madhouse, ask any madman, “Are you mad?” He will be mad at you! No madman will accept that he is mad. He will say, “What are you talking about? The whole world is mad except me. I am perfectly sane.” No madman accepts he is mad. If a madman accepts he is mad, that is a sure sign that he is coming out of his madness, he is becoming sane.You will not be able to see the stupidity of it unless you learn a little more meditativeness, so that you can observe; so that you can remain detached; so that you can see from a vantage point; so that you can have a little perspective. Right now you don’t have any perspective; you are too close.Just stand very close to the mirror, with your nose touching it and you will not be able to see your own face. It is not the fault of the mirror. You have to give it a little space, then the mirror can reflect you. You are too close.Sex seems to be the greatest obsession. The priests have to be given all the credit for it. For centuries they have been condemning sex as sin and they have made it an obsession. I don’t call sex a sin, I simply call it stupid. I am not saying that you will suffer hell – how much more hell do you need to suffer? You are already suffering in it. And what does it go on giving you? It just keeps you engaged – engaged in the other so that you can avoid yourself. That is its basic stupidity: it keeps you ignorant because it keeps you ignoring yourself. The man is interested in the woman, the woman is interested in the man. Everybody is interested in the other. It seems as if the other has all that you need and the other is also thinking that you have all that he or she needs. Both are beggars – and believing that the other has the kingdom.Sooner or later you feel frustrated, but your frustration never teaches you anything. It is very difficult to learn anything. If one woman has failed you, you start looking toward other women. If one man has not been up to your standards – and no man can be, no woman can be, because that is not possible, that is not in the nature of things – then you start looking to other men. All kinds of perversions are there, but if you ask any perverted person, he will not say that he sees any stupidity in it.A Frenchman was making love to someone’s wife when the husband returned two days early from his business trip. Quick as a wink, the Frenchie scrambled out of the sack and took off like a big, big bird. However, the angry husband was just as fast on his feet and he grabbed a rifle and shot the Frenchman’s balls off. Not at all perturbed, the Frenchman stuck out his very long tongue and shouted, “Missed me!”Now if you ask this Frenchman, he will say that he is not doing anything stupid; he is doing the most fantastic thing in the world!Three woodcutters came down to the town after a long four-month work period, during which they had not seen or heard a thing except trees and their axes. Within hours they were totally drunk and decided to visit the local whorehouse.The madam of the institution found herself in a fix, as she could only offer two girls and didn’t want to lose her third customer. So she told one of the girls to put the inflatable tailor’s dummy into one bed. While two of the woodcutters were escorted to the beds with the real girls, the one who was the most drunk was put to bed with the dummy.When the three met the next morning, they exchanged the reports of their experiences. When the turn came for the one, who had been in bed with the air-filled rubber woman, to share his experience, he said, “First it was really nice, but she was too quiet. Then, when I bit her nipple, she gave one big fart and flew out the window.”You will not be able to see what you are doing. Be a little more meditative and don’t be in such a hurry: “You told us and right away…” It seems it was just an excuse. You believed that you were experimenting, you believed that you were doing something in order to know. People can believe all kinds of things – but you cannot deceive me! People can go on rationalizing. You think you did it because I said sex is stupid? You would have done it anyway. Even if I had said that sex is very intelligent, you would have done it. If I had not said anything about sex, you would have done it.Have a look at your mind. Try to understand how you go on rationalizing and deceiving yourself. You cannot understand what I am saying unless you rise a little higher from the state of consciousness where you are right now. If you want to see more you have to rise a little higher.It is as if you are standing on the road; I am sitting on the treetop. I say to you, “A bullock cart is coming down the road.” You say, “I don’t see any bullock cart. There is no bullock cart.” But I can see. My perspective is bigger because I am on a higher place. You will only see the bullock cart when it comes very close to you and after a few yards it will disappear again. And I will say to you, “It has not disappeared. It is still there on the road.” You will say, “It is no longer there, it is gone.”The higher you rise, the more you can see. When you reach the ultimate height, buddhahood, you can see everything. There is no past and no future; there is only present. In that clarity, sex is the most stupid thing because it keeps you in bondage the longest. I am not condemning it, I am simply stating a fact. It is your bondage. It keeps you unconscious and it does not allow you to see what you are doing. You are possessed by it.Back in the early 1960’s when France was fighting its last colonial war, a draft-dodger from Paris pretended to have poor eyesight during his physical at the army induction center.The army doctor didn’t buy that, so he sent for a gorgeous young nurse and told her to take off her clothes.“Describe what you see, young man,” the doctor asked.“All I see is a blur, doctor,” the slacker replied.The military MD said, “Your eyes may not be as good as they should be my lad, but your prick is pointing straight toward Algeria!”That’s why I call it stupid: it keeps you unconscious, it keeps you in a kind of possession. It is hormonal, it is chemical. It is not you; it is just your biology that goes on forcing you to do certain things. If you watch, you will be surprised: “What are you doing? And why are you doing it?” If you watch you will be surprised: “What are you gaining out of it? What have you gained up to now?” In your saner moments you know perfectly well what I am saying, you understand it. Those saner moments are very superficial – they come and go – and soon you are again back in the same trap.Go back again, do it right away, but be watchful, be meditative. I will be there, standing by your side. Let us see what happens. Either you will not be able to do it at all or you will find that it is a biological compulsion, it is an obsession; it is not you. Your consciousness will remain floating upward and deep down in the valley it will happen, but you will remain detached, unconcerned, cool. And that will give you the insight.Sex becomes a tantric experience when meditation is added.The fourth question:Osho,Why do wives always close their eyes during love-making?They can’t bear to see their husbands having a good time!And the last question:Osho,I am sure my husband is deceiving me. Last night he came home with lipstick on his shirt, but when I asked him about it, he said it was tomato juice. What should I do?Ask him, “Who is this tomato?”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 02 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is Zen?It is almost impossible to answer because Zen is not a philosophy, it is not a doctrine. It is an experience, an experience of your own interiority, of your own subjectivity – not an objective experience. If it were some object outside you, there would be a possibility of describing it, of analyzing it, of defining it. It is indefinable by its very nature; it is not within the grasp of intellect. It is an experience of dropping out of your mind: of disappearing from your mind into your being; of slipping out of the mind and entering into your being.The mind is a false entity; your being is your real face, your original face. The mind is created by the society, hence there are different kinds of minds – the Hindu mind, the Christian mind, the Jewish mind – but the being is one. It is neither Christian, Hindu nor Mohammedan. Being is not even individual, it is universal. It is like a dewdrop slipping into the ocean. As a dewdrop, it disappears. As a dewdrop, nothing remains. It dies. On the other hand, it is reborn: it becomes the ocean. But there is nobody to say what has happened and there is no way to say it; no words are adequate enough.I can tell you how it happens, but I cannot tell you what it is. I can indicate toward it – fingers pointing to the moon, but fingers are not the moon. There are millions of people who go on worshipping the fingers. The more attached you become to the fingers the less capable you will be of seeing the moon. The fingers have to be forgotten. Once you have understood the point, where to look – forget the fingers and look at the moon.Zen is one of the purest spiritual experiences, uncontaminated by any thought, any theology, any speculation. It is nonargumentative, it simply is.Listen to Yoka. Yoka says:Dear friend, do you know the true man of Zen?He has forgotten the intellectual understanding of what he has learned in order to reach profound understanding….He lives in equanimity, calm and content. He is free from all care, and he acts naturally and reasonably. He does not struggle to avoid illusion nor does he seek for satori.He knows that illusion is unfounded and that satori is none other than himself. He sees the real nature of not-knowing as the nature of the Buddha and he sees that the reality of his illusory body is equivalent tothe eternal body of the Buddha.When he fully realizes the body of the Buddha, the body of the universal law, he has nothing. He becomes nothing. He himself is the source of all things and his ordinary life is another name for the eternal Buddha….If you live in this understanding, you can change in a single moment. You can transform yourself absolutely, without wasting any time. Beautiful hints. First, you have to forget all that you have learned. All your learning is a barrier. Put it aside. Zen cannot be learned and cannot be taught. You can imbibe it, you can imbibe the spirit of it.Living with a master, you can drink – you can drink the invisible nectar, you can be full with it – but you will have to fulfill one condition: you have to put the mind aside.Gayan has written to me. She says that while listening to me she feels like dancing. That’s how the disciple is bound to feel; something inside you starts dancing, singing. Something inside you rejoices. Something inside you immediately falls in tune with the master; a deep synchronicity happens. It cannot be taught, it cannot be learned, but it can be transferred. That transfer is beyond words and beyond scriptures. It needs a totally new art: the art of surrender, the art of total let-go.The first condition: forget all that you have learned. The second condition: be calm, quiet, contented. Desire keeps you away from the present moment, far away. Zen is the taste of reality here and now. It is the feel of the here and now. Zen is not concerned with any God after death. Zen is concerned with the godliness that surrounds you right now.These sounds, these birds, these trees, these people, this silence – three thousand people disappearing into a silence, losing their identities, egos – and suddenly Zen is there! It becomes almost tangible. You can touch it, you can eat it, you can drink it. But there is no way to convey it through words. You have to be calm, quiet and contented so that you can be in the present. You have to be free of all care. Care simply means that you are not trusting existence; you are trying to be careful on your own. You are afraid. You are not yet aware that existence cares for you, that it mothers you, that it fathers you. Once you start feeling the mothering and the fathering that surrounds you, in the air, the sun, the moon, the stars, you drop caring for yourself. There is no need to be worried. You start flowing with existence. You drop pushing the river. And you are then able to understand what Zen is. You have to live naturally and reasonably.Remember, society has made you absolutely artificial. It has given you ideas, it has imposed certain moralities, characters upon you. It has destroyed your spontaneity. You have to regain it, you have to reclaim it. That is the most essential thing to be done.Once you have claimed your naturalness, Zen starts welling up within you. Zen is your nature, your very nature. When you are spontaneous and responsible, responding to reality moment to moment without any ready-made formulas and reflecting reality like a mirror – you are living the life of Zen. And that is the reasonable life – not rational, remember, but reasonable.A reasonable man is not rational. They are not equivalent, they are not synonymous. The rational man is never reasonable, the rational man tries to deny all that is irrational. Life consists of both the rational and the irrational. The reasonable man accepts both. He accepts the paradox of life. He accepts the rational, he accepts the irrational and he sees no inconsistency in them. Hence he remains undivided; nothing can divide him. No division exists in his being and he sees no division anywhere. Life and death are one to him; summer and winter are one to him; men and women are one to him. He knows that divisions are superficial; deep down everything is one. He knows the oneness of life, hence he is not disturbed by any contradictions.The man of Zen contains all contradictions. He is vast enough, he can contain contradictions. He enjoys paradoxes and does not make life a problem. He looks at life as a mystery. He is not interested in solving it, he is interested only in living it – living it to the uttermost. He knows that illusion is unfounded.Hence he is not worried like the Hindu monks, escaping from the world because the world is illusory. Do you see the stupidity of it? If the world is illusory, why are you escaping from it? For what? If it is not, if it is not really there, why are you escaping?If you see a man running and you ask him, “Where are you going?” and he says, “There is a rope which only appears to be a snake – it is not a snake – and I am running away from that appearance of a snake,” you will say, “You are stupid! If you know it is a rope, stop running. If you know it is not a rope, stop saying that it is illusory, that it is only an appearance.”But that’s what the Hindu monks have been doing for thousands of years: calling the world maya, illusory and yet renouncing it. Renounce your wife because she is illusory; renounce your children because they are illusory; renounce your day-to-day, ordinary life because it is illusory. Escape to the Himalayas – everything is illusory. But why are you escaping? From what?That is the beauty of Zen. Zen says:He knows that illusion is unfounded and that satori is none other than himself.He knows that all is illusory so there is no need to escape. It is unfounded, you need not be worried about it. It is a rope that appears to be a snake. So why escape? Why renounce? Let it appear to be a snake, let it be there as a rope. Whatsoever it is, the appearance is unfounded, hence there is no need to renounce.Zen does not teach renunciation. It teaches understanding, awareness, alertness, and the capacity to see things as they are. There is no need to escape from anywhere. Wherever you are, Zen helps you to relax.There is no need to search for God, to search for satori, samadhi, enlightenment. The very search is a barrier. We search for things only if they are not within our being. If they are within our being, there is no need to seek and search. Just relax! In that very relaxation you have found them. Satori is our nature. Samadhi is our nature. Godliness is our nature. Hence, the man of Zen goes nowhere; he simply rests in himself.He sees the real nature of not-knowing as the nature of the Buddha…To function from the state of not-knowing is to function in the present. If you function from the state of knowing you are functioning out of the past. All knowing is from the past. Knowledge means the past: your experiences, your memories. If you function through them you are not responding to reality. The only way to respond to reality is to be utterly innocent.When you function from the state of not-knowing, your response is total and always adequate. It always brings fulfillment, it is liberating. Hence Yoka says it is: …the nature of the Buddha. When you realize this totally, you are nothing. Not that you become an enlightened soul, no; you disappear. The ego is no longer found. There is nobody to become enlightened – that is enlightenment. According to Zen: “When there is nobody to be enlightened, enlightenment has happened.” When you are just a pure nothing, a silence so profound, so unfathomable that there is no way to measure it; so virgin, so pure, that nobody has ever walked into it –even you cannot enter into it. Only when you disappear, is it there.This nothingness is the ultimate truth. Buddha calls it shunya, the void. If you can live in this nothingness, your ordinary life is another name for the sacred life. That is one of the greatest messages of Zen. It does not destroy your ordinary life, it enriches it. All other religions have been destructive, they have been poisoners, they have been condemnors. They have been condemning your ordinary life and praising some ideal life which exists nowhere. They condemn that which is and they praise that which is not.Zen says: “This is all. There is no other life, there is no other existence. This ordinary existence is beautiful. There is no need for any other world; this world is more than enough.” Zen is the greatest alchemy. It transforms your ordinary, mundane life into a sacred, holy life.A Zen master, Rinzai, was asked, “What did you used to do before your enlightenment?”He said, “I used to do the same as I am doing now. I used to carry water from the well for my master and I used to chop wood for him and the commune. I continue to do the same: I carry water from the well and I chop wood for my disciples.”The man said, “But, what is the difference between an enlightened man and an unenlightened man?”Rinzai said, “The difference is the unenlightened man thinks that this is an ordinary life – chopping wood, carrying water from the well. And the enlightened man knows this is holy, sacred, divine.”The last thing to be remembered is that Zen does not believe in a gradual process. It says: “Because buddha is your nature, because enlightenment is your very nature, you can get it right now. There is no need to wait even for a single moment.” Zen believes in sudden enlightenment, hence Yoka says: “It can happen in a moment.”All other religions are postponements. Hindus say: “You will have to be born many, many times; only then can you become enlightened.” Why? – because first you have to undo all the bad karmas that you have done in your past lives. Now, you have lived for millions of lives. How long is it going to take to undo all those karmas? And while you are undoing those karmas you will be doing other karmas, so once again you will be accumulating bad karma. That means it is impossible to become enlightened or next to impossible.Zen says: “Whatever you have done has been done in a dream. Wake up and it is finished.” It is not that when you wake up you have to undo what you have done in your dream; just by waking up all dreams are finished. Knowing that they were dreams is to end them. You have lived your sleepy life for many lives and whatever you have done has been done in your sleep. It is nothing very important. It is of the same stuff as dreams are made of.Just wake up!The second question:Osho,Why do all the awakened ones say that man is asleep? I don't agree. I think I am fully awake. What do you say?It is impossible to understand what the awakened ones say unless you are also awakened. They speak your language – they have to speak your language out of sheer necessity because there is no other language – but their meaning is totally different.When the buddhas say that you are asleep, they don’t mean ordinary sleep. Of course, you are not ordinarily asleep, you are awake. You go to the marketplace, to the office and you do your things. Of course, in the night you sleep. But buddhas say that you are asleep twenty-four hours of the day. Certainly, they are not using the word sleep in the same sense that you are acquainted with it; they mean something else, something totally different. They are talking about a metaphysical sleep. They are talking about an inner state of unconsciousness.You walk, you talk, you do a thousand and one things, but like a zombie. You live mechanically. You don’t live in awareness. When you listen to the awakened ones, you are listening again through all the barriers that you have created in your sleep, through all the layers of your sleep. You go on misinterpreting them. Of course, you are right – you are awake. In that sense, all the buddhas are wrong. They know it too. But when they say that you are asleep they mean something more fundamental, not the ordinary sleep, not the ordinary awakening.When they say to you, “Wake up!” They mean, be totally conscious so that nothing unconscious and dark remains in your being; so that no nook or corner of your being remains dark and unconscious. Right now only a very small part – one-tenth – is conscious; very fragile. Nine-tenths of your being is unconscious. You are just like an iceberg: just a little fragment of it shows on the surface – one-tenth, exactly one-tenth – and nine-tenths is underneath the water.When you listen to the awakened ones, you will have to learn to understand their language, not according to you, but according to them.As the Prime Minister was waiting to board the special plane that was taking him to the capitals of Europe, the Home Secretary, who had come along to see him off, whispered, “What is your advice on the Homosexual Bill?”“Oh yes… Hmm,” said the Prime Minister. “Tell him we’ll pay him off when I get back!”You listen according to yourself. You don’t listen silently. You don’t listen, having put your mind aside.“Have you ever had an X-ray before this?” the doctor asked the sexy Italian girl.“No, doc,” she said, “but I have been ultra-violated a couple of times.”Your mind is constantly distorting and giving its own color to everything that it hears. Your mind is making you stupid, although you think your mind is making you intelligent.Listening to the buddhas needs a certain space, a different kind of space. You have to listen very silently, you have to listen without any thoughts. You have to listen without any prejudice, you have not to decide for or against. You are not to be in a hurry – whether they are right or wrong. Just listen without being for or against. Don’t be in a hurry, otherwise you will do something stupid.The Polish rapist is standing in the line-up of criminals at the police station. Bright lights blaze in his face and there are sleazy characters on either side of him.The police bring in the rape victim and he jumps forward and shouts, “That’s her!”Keep your stupid mind silent. Tell the mind, “Please be quiet.” It is okay in the ordinary world, but not with the buddhas, not with the awakened ones.Whenever new disciples came to Gautam the Buddha he would say to them, “Just sit silently by my side for two years, then something will be possible. I can then say something to you and you will be able to understand.”Once a great philosopher, Maulingaputta, came to see him. He had thousands of disciples of his own. He was a well-known philosopher, very respected, a great scholar. When Buddha said to him, “Be here and be silent for two years, then there will be a possibility of something transpiring between me and you,” of course he was offended.He said, “Do you think that I am an ignorant person who cannot understand you? You can say whatever you want to say right now. There is no need for me to wait for two years. I understand the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita – why not you?”Buddha said, “If you have understood the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita, why have you come here? For what reason? Your questions are answered. If you have understood the Upanishads, what is left? Don’t waste my time. You know already. So, get lost!”He must have felt very shocked. He had come with five hundred disciples; they were also shocked. But he must have been a man of great guts – he understood the point. He said, “That’s right. If I had understood – really understood – there would have been no need to come to you. I have come to you because my questions have not yet been answered. I know all the Vedas and the Upanishads, but they have not transformed my being.”Buddha replied, “Follow what I am saying. Ask no questions for two years. Unlearn everything. For two years keep quiet and be silent and sit here.”While this was happening, Sariputta, one of Buddha’s greatest disciples, who was sitting there, started laughing.Maulingaputta said, “Why is this man laughing? Is he crazy or something?”Buddha said, “Ask him.”Sariputta was asked and he said, “I am laughing because this man is really very cunning” – he was talking about Buddha – “I came here just like you and he told me to be quiet and silent for two years. During those two years all my questions disappeared. Now I have nothing to ask. And he goes on asking me, ‘Sariputta, why don’t you ask now?’ So my suggestion to you is that if you want to ask, ask now. If you don’t want to ask, then listen to him and be silent for two years.”This happened. After exactly after two years, Buddha asked Maulingaputta, “Where are your questions?”He laughed, bowed down, touched his feet, and said, “They have disappeared in silence. Just watching you, just seeing you, slowly, slowly my clarity became more and more transparent. The mind disappeared and I could see you with a no-mind. A totally different kind of relating has happened. Something has transpired. There are no questions, no answers either, but I am utterly contented. I have arrived home.”A man says to his friend, “When you get to New York, call up my college chum, Jimmy Sexover. He is now working at the XYZ Company.”When the out-of-towner reached New York he phoned the XYZ Company and asked the receptionist, “Have you a Sexover there?”“Sex hour? Hell!” she replied. “We don’t even have a coffee break!”You ask: “Why do all the awakened ones say that man is asleep?” Because man is asleep. It is a simple fact. Watch yourself and you will find the truth in it.You say: “I don’t agree.” You can’t agree. You will have to disappear for the agreement to happen. If you persist, agreement is not possible. Both things are not possible: you and the agreement. Either the agreement is possible, then you will not be there, or you are possible, then agreement will not be there.You also say: “I think I am fully awake.” If you are awake there is no need to think that you are awake. When you love a woman you don’t say, “I think I love you.” If you say that she will slap your face! If you love her, you love her. What is the point of saying, “I think”? When you are thirsty you don’t say, “I think I am thirsty.” If you are thirsty you are thirsty. You simply say, “I am thirsty.”You say: “I think I am fully awake.” You are fully asleep! Maybe you are dreaming in your sleep that you are awake, that is possible. That’s what thinking is all about: dreaming, dreaming with open eyes.Listen to the buddhas. Be more silent, quiet, calm. In your silence you will disappear, then the agreement, the harmony. It is not a question of agreeing philosophically. It is a question of being harmonious with the awakened one, falling in tune with his being. That’s what real agreement is.If you go on thinking like this you will miss me totally. Here, thinking is not required; non-thinking awareness is required. It is hard to put thinking aside because we are so accustomed to thinking, and we think it is very clever to think about everything. There are things you cannot think about; either you know or you don’t know. The things I am talking about belong to that category: either you know or you don’t.If you are fully awake, what are you doing here? Such a nice guy, what are you doing here? If you are fully awake, go and help other people to be fully awake. But you are not awake. I know you, I know your sleep – it is deep. You need a real hammering on your head. Unless your skull is broken you will not awaken, you will not be able to wake up.Ordinary alarms won’t do. I am creating extraordinary alarms here. So I go on sending you from one therapy group to another. That means being pulled and pushed, beaten, shaken and shocked. We don’t leave any opportunity for you to remain asleep. Only when a little bit of awakening happens to you, will you understand what is happening here; what is transpiring here between me and the mad people who have gathered here.The third question:Osho,Can affirmations be helpful for deconditioning the mind?Deconditioning is possible only through negations, never through affirmations. Affirmation is the way of conditioning the mind. You have to negate: neti-neti. The Upanishads say: “Neither this nor that.” You have to go on negating till nothing is left to negate. When there is absolute emptiness, and no content is left to be negated, that is the state of a deconditioned mind.A deconditioned mind is not a mind at all, it is a no-mind. How can you achieve a no-mind through affirmations? Affirmations mean that you are repeating something constantly, creating an atmosphere of autohypnosis. That’s how people have been doing it for thousands of years. Go on telling the child again and again and again, “God is. He created the world.” The whole of society goes on repeating it in the home, in the school, in the church – everywhere you go on repeating it – and the child becomes conditioned. He starts thinking he knows that God is. He is simply a gramophone record. It has become imprinted on his mind that God is. If he had been born in Soviet Russia the situation would have been just the opposite because there they go on repeating, “There is no God.”One of my friends visited Soviet Russia. He was a teacher and he was very interested in the Soviet system of education, so he visited schools, colleges, universities – many schools. He told me that even small children laugh at the idea of God.On his first visit he went to a small school and asked the younger children, “Do you believe in God?” They all laughed and said, “Do you?” He replied, “Yes, I believe in God.” And they said, “In the past, primitive people used to believe in God; ignorant people used to believe in God. Now nobody does.” These children are conditioned that there is no God.Just because of the word no, don’t think that it is a negation – it is an affirmation. Affirmation can be of belief, and can also be of disbelief. Real negation means helping people to get rid of all kinds of beliefs and disbeliefs; helping them to get rid of all the conditionings that society enforces upon them.Adolf Hitler writes in his autobiography: “There is only a very small difference between truth and untruth. Truth is untruth repeated many times, that’s all.”He is right in many ways. Repeat any untruth, just go on repeating it and sooner or later people will start believing it. People have believed in all kinds of things for the simple reason that the people who were in authority were believers, they believed in these things. If they believed in God, the masses believed in God. People look up to the authorities: the priests, politicians and the rich people; the scholars and the professors. If they are all believers, there must be a God. If they believe that there is no God, the masses start following them. The masses are simply imitators. The society – every society – creates a certain atmosphere of conditioning. There exists no society in the world yet which does not live through this process of conditioning.The whole process of conditioning is harmful, poisonous because it destroys the freedom of the individual. It destroys his capacity to inquire into truth; it destroys his adventure into life; it destroys his initiative to explore what is. Even before he asks a question, the answer is imprinted upon him. The people who go on doing this have vested interests. The priests would like you to believe in God. The communists would like you not to believe in God. There is nobody who is interested in you; they are all interested in their vested interests.So affirmations cannot be helpful. All affirmations are conditionings. You need total negativity. That’s what Zen is: it negates. It says that there is no God; it says there is no soul; it says there is no paradise; it says there is nothing. It leaves you nothing to believe in. Even if you start believing in nothing, the Zen master is going to hit you hard.It happened…A disciple of Bokuju would bring his new experiences again and again – that he had experienced energy rising in his spine… And he would be beaten. Bokuju said, “Get out of here! Don’t bring such nonsense to me! You are not it. You are the watcher who watched the energy rising. So don’t get identified with it, otherwise it is once again a new identification, a new ego: the birth of a new ego, a spiritual ego, which is far more dangerous than ordinary egos.”One day the disciple came and said, “You are right. Now I am seeing great light. I am full of light, all is light!”He was beaten again, and was told, “You are not light either, you are the watcher. Who is seeing the light? You are the seer.”It went on again and again in this way for years. After ten years he came to Bokuju really happy, fell at the feet of the master and said, “Now you will be happy with me – and no need to beat me. I have experienced nothingness!”This time the master was so angry! He physically threw him out of the window – of a two-story house. He fell on a rock and the master looked from the window and said, “How are you feeling now?”The hit was so hard that it really brought the disciple to his senses. He started laughing; lying down there on the rock he started laughing. The master also jumped from the window, embraced the disciple and said to him, “Now I am happy, really happy!”The other disciples asked, “What has transpired? It is so mysterious!”Bokuju said: “To say ‘I have experienced nothingness’ is wrong because you have made an object of nothingness. Nothingness has become your affirmation again – a thought, a content. You have to get rid of nothingness too! When he laughed, I could see nothingness in his laughter. There was nobody who was laughing, there was simply laughter – no claim, no claimer, just simple laughter, pure laughter. There was nobody who was laughing.”That very moment the master felt connected to the disciple for the first time. Otherwise, all those experiences were creating barriers. Affirmations can’t help. All affirmations are conditionings.“Cats, my dear,” said the spinster, “I hate the very sight of them. I had a sweet little canary and some cat got that. I had a perfect parrot and some cat got that. I had an adorable fiancée, and – oh, don’t mention cats to me!”This is how things become conditionings. Now the very word cat has become associated with many, many bad experiences. The word cat has nothing to do with those experiences.It is said of Napoleon that he was defeated because of cats. The enemy general brought seventy cats and placed them in front of the army because he had found out that the moment Napoleon saw cats he went crazy. He would lose all balance, he would lose all intelligence and become very nervous. That was true because apparently when Napoleon was only a six-month-old child, a wild cat had jumped on his chest. Since then, although he could fight with lions, don’t mention cats! That had become a very deep conditioned reflex.Behaviorists all over the world are trying to manipulate this process of conditioning to create a robot-like humanity. Skinner says, “We can change the whole of humanity within a few years.” There is no need for a Buddha, a Jesus or a Mohammed to change humanity – and they have not changed it. For centuries they have been teaching, and nothing has happened; humanity has remained the same. We can change humanity very easily. All that is needed are methods of conditioning people.If you want somebody not to steal again, there is no need to put him in prison for ten years. That is not going to help. In fact, that will condition him to be a bigger thief than he ever was before because he will be living with thieves. He will be living with greater experts than himself and all that he is going to learn is why he got caught in the first place. Next time he is not going to commit the same mistake.That’s why once a person goes to jail he becomes a regular. He returns again and again. The jail becomes his home – he becomes a jailbird. He goes outside only to practice his art and he comes back again to do the homework. He does the homework in jail.Skinner says that there is no need to waste time, just give him electric shocks and within two to three weeks he will be conditioned. He will never think of stealing. Even the idea of stealing will be enough, and he will start trembling and fall to his knees. Just the very idea will be enough to make him so nervous… He will remember all those electric shocks.He proposes that every vice can be dropped from humanity just by giving electric shocks or with methods like it. And all virtues can be established by giving rewards, by giving beautiful rewards. For example, they have found that in your head there are different centers for different experiences. There is a pleasure center. When you are making love, the pleasure that you derive from it has nothing to do with your genital organs, it happens in your head. The genital organs simply trigger a process. In fact, the pleasure happens in your head, in your brain.Now, Skinner says that there is no need to go into such a long process of courtship, talking nonsense to a woman or to a man. And then getting caught and married and having a thousand and one troubles. He says that simple things are possible. You just have to keep a small box in your pocket which will be connected to the pleasure center in your head – without any wires; it will be a wireless connection. So don’t be worried if people see wires coming out of your head and going into your pocket. Everybody will know what you are carrying in your pocket! Just a small box in your pocket and you can push the button. Suddenly you have a great orgasm and you are all smiles.Skinner says that if you reward people for their virtue, for their good deeds, by manipulating their pleasure center, they will keep doing those things. For example, if whenever you go into a church suddenly you have great orgasms, naturally you will go more often. In fact, you will not leave the church at all! You will have to be forced to go out and do something else.When Skinner was working on a rat, he connected the rat’s pleasure center with a small box and taught the rat to push the button. You will be surprised what the rat did. The rat pushed the button six thousand times. He went on pushing it right up until he fell down dead. He forgot everything else. He forgot all about food, he forgot to drink, he forgot everything else. He just went on and on pushing – six thousand times. The poor rat could not bear that much joy! Died, but died in ecstasy!This can be done to man. This is going to be done because the idea is simple, very simple; the process is simple. Governments are bound to use it because it is easy to condition people to do and not to do certain things. Everyone will then be a saint and nobody will be a sinner. But saints or sinners – they will all be robots. They will not have any choice of their own.Ultimately it could be that there is no need to have your own small boxes. In every country’s capital – in New Delhi, in Washington, in London – the prime minister or the president could hold the key. And every once in a while he could push the button and the whole country goes into an orgasmic joy. Then everybody will be obedient. Nobody will break any commandments, nobody will go against them. The whole country could be punished just by pushing a button because just as there is a pleasure center in the brain there is also a pain center. Just push the pain center and you could be in such agony, in such hell. But this is not going to bring freedom to humanity. This will be the destruction of all freedom and all possibility of freedom. It has to be stopped.Affirmations, whether repeated in the old, primitive way or done by a more scientific, technological methodology, are the same. Man needs to be totally free of all conditionings. And that is possible only through absolute negation, where only pure consciousness is left and everything else is negated. Just the watcher is left and nothing to watch; the seer is left and nothing to see; the experiencer is left and nothing to experience.That’s what we in the East have called “the witness.” That is transcendence – transcendence of all bondage; transcendence from the body, the mind and all the limitations that they impose upon you. Nirvana is possible, absolute freedom is possible, but only via the negativa.The fourth question:Osho,What is compassion?We know what passion is, hence it is not very difficult to understand what compassion may be. Passion means a state of biological fever – it is hot. You are almost possessed by biological, unconscious energies. You are no longer your own master, you are just a slave.Compassion means you have transcended biology, you have transcended physiology. You are no longer a slave, you have become a master. Now you function consciously. You are not driven, pulled and pushed by unconscious forces; you can decide what you want to do with your energies. You are totally free. The same energy that becomes passion is transformed into compassion.Passion is lust, compassion is love.Passion is desire, compassion is desirelessness. Passion is greed, compassion is sharing. Passion wants to use the other as a means; compassion respects the other as an end unto himself or herself. Passion keeps you tethered to the earth, to the mud, and you never become a lotus. Compassion makes you a lotus. You start rising above the muddy world of desires, greed, anger. Compassion is a transformation of your energies.Ordinarily you are scattered, fragmentary. Some energy is being absorbed by your anger; some energy is being absorbed by your greed; some energy is being absorbed by your lust, and so on and so forth. There are so many desires surrounding you that you are left without any energy. You are left hollow, empty.Remember what William Blake said. There is great insight in it. He said, “Energy is delight.” You don’t have any energy left; all your energy keeps on going down the drain. When all these energies are no longer being wasted, they start filling your inner lake, your inner being. You become full. A great delight arises in you. And when you start overflowing, you have become a buddha and you have come upon an inexhaustible source.Compassion is a key word, but you will understand it only if you go deep into meditation. Meditation is the key to transform passion into compassion. You will have to become more conscious. Right now you are unconscious – notwithstanding what you think, you are unconscious.A girl taking a job in an office is asked by her intended employer how much she hopes to earn.“Twenty dollars a week,” she answers.“Twenty dollars?” he says. “I’ll give you that with pleasure.”“With pleasure, that will be thirty dollars,” she replies.Watch what you do, what you say, what you think, and you will be surprised – without taking any alcoholic beverages, without taking any drugs, you are in a state, a mess.Mrs. O’Brien was berating her husband for his drunken behavior at the party the previous night.“For sure, you were making an ass of yourself,” she asserted, “cavorting around like that!”“I was not cavorting or nothing!” O’Brien defended himself. “I was walking as straight a line as any man there… Till all those people started stepping on my fingers!”Just look at what you have been doing to yourself, to your life. What have you made of yourself? What have you gained? What meaning have you attained? What significance have you experienced? People don’t ask such embarrassing questions because the questions make them feel very depressed. But these questions have to be asked. Unless you ask these questions you are not going to change.An Irish immigrant walked up to a vending machine, put in a coin and pressed the button labeled: “Coffee, double cream, sugar.” No cup appeared. Then two nozzles went into action, one sending forth coffee, the other, cream. After the proper amounts had gone down the drain where the cup should have been, the machine turned off.“Now, that’s real automation!” the Irishman exclaimed. “This thing even drinks it for you.”Man goes on living like a robot, functioning well, efficiently. In fact, the more like a robot you are, the better you function, the better society feels about you – because it is a society of robots. To be awakened, alert, conscious is dangerous. It is a society of blind people; to have eyes is to invite danger.But without creating consciousness you will never know the beauty, the blessing that existence has bestowed upon you. You will never know the great opportunity that has been given to you to grow, to become. You can be sunlit peaks and you are just dark holes!“Shit!” said Polaris. “I got a real jolt in court this morning. The judge fined me five hundred dollars for attempting to rape some broad I met on the subway. And then when he took a good look at her he fined me an extra ten dollars for being drunk!”If you become alert to at least one thing – that you are not alert – that’s a great beginning.A big Irishman said to a homely woman on the subway, “My God, you’re looking lovely tonight.”“Oh, thank you, sir.”“But don’t mind what I say, I’m drunk.”Even if you are aware of that much – that you are drunk – you are not absolutely drunk.Socrates says, “If you know that you don’t know, that is a great beginning. It is then possible for you to know.” To be aware that “I am ignorant” creates the possibility of seeking, searching in your own interiority for the truth – for your truth.Compassion is the ultimate transformation of passion. You are in passion, but you go on thinking that you are right as you are. You go on defending yourself. You go against anything that disturbs your comfortable, mechanical life.A visitor has written to me: “Your medicine seems to be too bitter. Osho, are you sure that you are a physician and not a horse doctor?” When I look at all the monkeys and the donkeys and the Yankees surrounding me, I wonder myself! I must be a horse doctor. The medicine is bitter and it is difficult to push it down your throat.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin went to the horse doctor and said “My horse has become so lazy that something has to be done. He does not run. Not to mention running – he does not even walk! So give me something really vital.”The doctor said, “We have the medicine, but it is very bitter and the horse may not take it, so you will have to use a certain device. Take this bamboo pipe, it is hollow inside. Fill it with the medicine – it is a powder.” He gave Mulla the powder. “Put one end of the pipe into the horse’s mouth and the other in your own mouth and blow so that it will go down the horse’s throat.”Everything went well up to the last moment – the horse blew first! Nasruddin, an eighty-year-old man, jumped the fence of his garden and ran so fast that no Olympic runner would have been able to compete with him.His wife rushed to the horse doctor. She said, “Give me a double dose immediately because I have to catch him. He has escaped!”Looking at you, I can only say that I must be a horse doctor. But I take every care so that you cannot blow before I blow!The first thing to be understood is that the medicine is bitter because you don’t know anything. It is bitter to accept. The second thing to be understood is that you are a machine. It is very bitter to accept. And the third thing to be understood is that you are just living in mud, crawling into dark holes, while you are meant to be flying into the sky toward the sun. It is hard to accept. You want lullabies, you want me to sing beautiful songs to you so that you can fall asleep, so that you can dream better dreams.When you come to me you don’t come to be awakened, you come to me so that you can dream beautiful, sweet dreams. That is your purpose for coming; that is not my purpose in being here. Once you are here, you are caught. Slowly, slowly I start taking your dreams away. Slowly, slowly I go on destroying your illusions. Once your illusions are dropped, your dreams shattered, a great awakening is waiting for you – a great awakening which makes you a buddha.When you are a buddha, only then will you experience what compassion is. It is cool love – not cold, mind you – cool love. It is a sharing of your joy with the whole of existence. You become a blessing to yourself and a blessing to the whole of existence. That’s compassion. Passion is ugly, compassion is beautiful. Passion is a curse, compassion is a blessing.The last question:Osho,I wrote twenty questions and tore them all up. I realized that all I wanted was to say, “Hello, Osho. I am still here.” And to hear you say my name in lecture.Hello, Deva Mohan. How do you do?Enough for today.

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

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 03 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,You say: “Go beyond the mind. Do not listen to its chatter. Discipline it and make it a servant. Do not be its slave.” But how to know when the mind is being disciplined and when it is being repressed? Also, when I took sannyas the other night you said not to get hooked on you. I have to tell you that you are closing the stable door after this particular horse has already bolted.Prem Lisa, the difference is so great that it is impossible to miss it. Repression happens through fighting with your mind. Discipline happens through being watchful, aware, alert. In discipline, there is no fight implied. In discipline, there is no condemnation, no evaluation. One simply looks at the mind silently, seeing the whole traffic, without saying what is right and what is wrong; what should be and what should not be. Just as standing by the side of the road, you watch people walking by – saints and sinners, beautiful people, ugly people, good people, bad people – but you are unconcerned. It has nothing to do with you; you are out of it.That’s exactly the meaning of the English word ecstasy. Ecstasy means to be out of the mind. You are just looking, as one looks at the clouds moving in the sky or at the river flowing by – cool, detached. You are neither trying to cling to something nor are you trying to push something away from you.This is pure awareness; you are only a mirror. And in just being a mirror, the miracle happens – the miracle of discipline. Slowly, slowly the traffic starts disappearing. Fewer and fewer thoughts are moving on the road; fewer and fewer pictures are appearing on the screen; fewer and fewer memories, fantasies. Gaps start appearing.A mother was saying to her child, “Be very careful when you go to school because the traffic is dangerous in the rush hour.”The child replied, “Don’t worry. I always wait at the side of the road. And when a gap comes, then I cross.”“When a gap comes…” As you are looking at your mind you will be surprised that gaps come, intervals come, when there is nothing to be seen. The observer remains alone and because it is alone, it is no longer an observer either. You can’t call it an observer because there is nothing to observe. The mirror is there, but it is not reflecting anything. There is no duality of the seen and the seer. In these intervals discipline arises.The word discipline is also beautiful. It is sometimes very significant to go to the roots of words. Discipline comes from a root which means learning. When you are looking at a gap, learning happens. Learning about what? Learning about yourself, because there is nothing else. You are full of awareness. You are just full of your own being, overflowing. This experience of just being yourself, overflowing, undistracted by anything, undisturbed by anything, is the greatest learning; the greatest possibility of knowing the truth. This is discipline.From the same root comes the word disciple. Disciple means one who is becoming capable of being utterly silent in the presence of the master. The disciple is one who allows the interval to happen when he is with the master. With the master you are bridged only through silence; when there is nothing in your mind you are bridged. Something then transpires between the master and the disciple. A flame jumps from the master into the heart of the disciple. The unlit candle of the disciple suddenly becomes lit. All is joy and light and love; a great dance arises.Lisa, discipline can never be misunderstood as repression. Repressions are totally different. In repression you have already decided what is wrong – a priori decisions. In fact, others have decided for you what is wrong and what is right. Now you are simply trying to impose the ideas and opinions of others upon yourself. You will have to repress your nature. You will have to force that which is wrong – or which you have been told is wrong – deep into the unconscious. There will be a fight, great turmoil. Instead of bringing silence to you, every method of repression brings more turmoil.That’s why the so-called religious people are more restless, more worried. You are worried only about this world, they are even worried about the other. You are worried only about this life, they are worried about many, many past lives and future lives. Your worries are nothing compared to the worries of the so-called religious people. They are sitting on a volcano because whatever is repressed is there and is not destroyed. Repression never destroys anything; you are simply sitting on top of it. The danger is that you cannot sit on top of it for twenty-four hours a day; you have limitations. You will get tired, you will need some rest. And whenever you are tired and need rest, repressions will start arising in you.Hence, even your greatest saints go on thinking, fantasizing, dreaming about all the things that they have repressed. Mahatma Gandhi has written in his autobiography: “I have been able to control my sexuality as far as my day is concerned, but in the night, in my dreams, it comes with a vengeance.” This, he was writing at the age of seventy… A whole life of repression!Yes, in the day you can somehow manage, but in the night, in your dreams, that which you have repressed in the day is bound to take revenge. It will come back, it will explode in you.Hence, down the ages your saints have been very afraid of sleep. They go on cutting it down – five, four, three, two hours. The less they sleep, more is the danger because all their repressions have to come in those two hours, and in a very condensed way. They are crowding in from everywhere. And people worship them! The less a saint sleeps, the more people worship him. They say, “Look how much he has sacrificed! What a great austerity he is doing – he is not even sleeping! Or he sleeps for only two hours or one hour.”The reality is that he is afraid of sleep. And where is the fear coming from? The fear is coming from the fact that when you are awake you can control, but when you are asleep, who is there to control? The controller is asleep, in a relaxed state. He cannot sit on top of all the repressions, and they will assert…So, Lisa, if you are fighting with anything, it is not discipline. I don’t teach how to fight. I teach awareness. It is useless to fight with darkness, utterly useless and stupid. Bring the light in. Why fight with darkness? How can you ever hope to win by fighting with darkness? Bring the light in and darkness is no longer found.You are surrounded by many darknesses: greed, anger, jealousy, lust, ambition, ego. They are layers of darkness. If you start fighting with all the layers of darkness, you are not going to win because there is no way to fight directly with darkness. Darkness does not exist in the first place; it is only the absence of light. So if you want to do something with darkness, don’t try to do it directly. Do something with light. If you want darkness, put the light out. If you don’t want darkness, put the light on. But do something with the light, forget about the darkness.If light is there, darkness is not there. If light is not there, you cannot avoid darkness. You can close your eyes, you can try to forget about it; you can become occupied somewhere else, you can take your mind far, far away from it, but it is there all the same. It will show in your acts, in your thoughts, in your behavior. It will come up again and again. You cannot hide it – it is impossible to hide it. The truth of your being, whatever it is, is bound to surface.Lisa, become aware. I am not saying what is wrong and what is right. I am simply saying, be aware. Or, awareness is right and unawareness is wrong. When you are aware, things start changing of their own accord and the mind functions as a servant. It is a machine, a beautiful machine. For thousands of years, it has been one of the most complex machines invented by nature. Man has not yet been able to create anything comparable to it. Even the best computer is not yet so capable as the mind.A single human mind can contain all the libraries of the world. It is almost infinite. Its capacity is great, its use is great, but it should be your servant, not your master. As a servant it is beautiful; as a master it is dangerous.Let consciousness be your master and the mind your servant. It happens through awareness. I am not telling you to control it because all control is repression. I am not telling you to fight because all fight is a sheer waste of energy. You are fighting with your own servant – you are wasting your energy. You need not fight with your servant, you have simply to say, “I am the master”; that’s all. You have simply to be the master, that’s all, and the servant bows down. The servant immediately understands that the master has come in. How does the master come in? The moment you become awake, the master comes in.You ask me, Lisa: “You say: go beyond the mind. Do not listen to its chatter. Discipline it and make it a servant. Do not be its slave. But how to know when the mind is being disciplined and when it is being repressed?”It is very simple. Nobody can ever misunderstand the difference between the two, nobody can ever confuse the two. They are so different – just like light and darkness; just like love and hate; just like flowers and thorns; just like poison and nectar. They are so totally different. But if you think about them you may get confused. In thinking you cannot make the distinction. Don’t think about them – experiment, experience and the distinction will be absolutely clear.You also say: “Osho… When I took sannyas the other night you said, ‘Not to get hooked on you.’ I have to tell you that you are closing the stable door after this particular horse has already bolted.”Lisa, I am not only a horse doctor but a horse lover too. When I see a good horse, I immediately fall in love. I believe in love at first sight; because it saves time. The moment I saw you, Lisa, the moment I saw tears of joy, love, trust and surrender in your eyes, I accepted you deep down as part of the orange Mafia!I say, “Don’t get hooked on me,” only when I know that you are absolutely hooked and there is no way to escape. I don’t say it to everybody. I say it only to those who are already in. They may not be aware of it and may become aware of it later on.I have seen it. You are hooked, you are stoned on me. Now there is no going back. Now this is going to be your whole world. I am your home. I say it only when I am absolutely certain, categorically certain, that there is no possibility of your going away; when I see that you are melting and merging. Only then do I say this, just to be generous: “Don’t get hooked on me.” I can afford to say it when I know that Lisa is finished!The second question:Osho,What is the essence of Buddha Dharma – the religion of the Buddha?Yoka says,If you reach the Zen of Buddha, at that very moment you accomplish everything. In your dream there are many pathways. But when you wake up, they are reduced to nothing. Neither error, nor happiness, nor loss, nor gain. Do not try to find anything in the essence of your being. It is a long time since you wiped the dust from your mirror. Now it is time for you to see its brilliancy perfectly.Who can not think, all is his…. If you practice charity in order to become Buddha. When will you succeed? Never – a thousand times never….Drink and eat according to your true nature. All things in the universe are impermanent and therefore all existence is void. That is the whole understanding of Buddha.This is the essence of Buddha Dharma, the religion of the Buddha. First: it is not a philosophy that you can understand intellectually. You have to become a buddha to know it. Hence, Yoka says:If you reach the Zen of Buddha – the state of the Buddha – at that very moment you accomplish everything.Nothing is missing when you reach the ultimate state of awakening; all is fulfilled, you are utterly contented. For the first time, life is known as a great significance, as a great dance, a celebration. Life is known for the first time as absolutely perfect. There is no complaint, no desire, no hankering for things to be other than they are. One is simply contented, totally contented. All desiring disappears.What is the state of buddha? What is this “Zen of Buddha” Yoka is talking about? – it is the state of no-mind. Hence, Yoka says:Who can not think, all is his…The greatest thing in life to experience, is a state of no-thought. The greatest art of life, is to be able to be without mind. Even if it happens for a single moment – just a glimpse – you have reached into the beyond and you have crossed the point of no return.Don’t go on thinking about what it is. By thinking you will go on missing it. Thinking is the sure way of missing the Buddha Dharma; non-thinking is the way to achieve it. It is your own nature.Buddha does not talk about great mysteries, hidden secrets, esoteric knowledge. He does not believe in mythology; he is not an occultist. He is a very simple man, very ordinary. He believes in ordinary existence. He says that your day-to-day life is all there is. If you can live it joyfully, silently, understandingly, watchfully, there is nothing else to be done. Your very ordinary life starts becoming extraordinary.Drink and eat, Yoka says, according to your true nature.Just remember not to distort your nature, remain true to your nature. Listen to your own nature and follow it. Don’t follow anybody else.Buddha says: “Even if you meet me on the way, kill me immediately.” He is saying: “Don’t follow me, just take the hints. Try to understand, imbibe the spirit. Feel my presence and go on your way. Live according to your own light, howsoever small it is, but if it is yours and you live according to it, it will go on growing.”Buddha says: “Be a light unto yourself.” That is his greatest message. Nobody else in the whole world, in the whole history of humanity, has been so respectful toward others as Gautam the Buddha. “Be a light unto yourself.”Buddhas only point the way – fingers pointing to the moon. You have to follow, and you have to follow according to your nature. You have to be silent, quiet, so you can listen to the still small voice within you, and then follow it. Wherever it leads it is good. Go in deep trust, following your own voice. Be spontaneous, natural, ordinary. This is the way of being extraordinary. Be ordinary but aware, and the ordinary becomes the sacred.All things in the universe are impermanent…So don’t be worried. All things are impermanent: pleasure and pain, friendship and enmity, poverty and richness, success and failure, birth and death. All is in a flux, all is impermanent, so why be worried? Everything goes on changing. Don’t cling – clinging brings misery, clinging shows your misunderstanding. The moment you cling to something you are living with the idea that it can be permanent. Nothing can be permanent and nothing can be done about it. It is just the nature of things to be impermanent.You are trying to catch hold of rainbows. They are beautiful, but you cannot catch hold of them. One moment they are there, another moment they are gone. So don’t cling to anything because everything is impermanent. And don’t desire anything because even if you get it, you will lose it. If you don’t get it, you will be frustrated. If you get it and lose it, you will be frustrated. Either way you will be in misery; you are inviting misery. So don’t desire anything and don’t cling to anything.Whatever comes, accept it. Buddha calls it tathata, suchness. Just accept it; live through it silently, without being disturbed by it. Misery comes, it will go. Happiness comes, it will go. Everything passes away, nothing abides, so there is nothing to worry about.Go on passing through all kinds of experiences and you will know that one can pass through the world uncontaminated, uncorrupted. One can live in the palaces without clinging, then one is a sannyasin. One can live in a hut and cling to it, then one is not a sannyasin.That’s why I don’t tell you to renounce the world, I simply say: “Be watchful.” That is the essence of Buddha’s message.People ask me, “But Buddha renounced the world. Why did he renounce it?” He renounced it when he was not a buddha. He renounced it when he was as ignorant as anybody else. He renounced it in ignorance.When he attained the truth, when he experienced the truth and came back home, his wife asked him only one question: “Just tell me one thing. Whatever you have attained… I can see you are a transformed being. You have become luminous, you are no longer the same person. The old is gone, you are reborn. It is so clear to me – even a blind person like me can see it. But just answer me one question. Whatever you have attained, was it not possible to attain it living here with me in this palace?”And the story is that Buddha remained silent, looking downward. She was right. He didn’t say anything.In the East, not saying anything is thought to be a sign of agreement. Mounam sammati lakshanam: to be silent means I agree with you. It says more than Buddha saying yes. His silence says more, it is more pregnant with meaning.He felt it immediately: “She is right.” Whatever he had attained could have been attained anywhere. There was no need to go into the jungle.There is no need for you to go anywhere. Wherever you are, you can assert your buddhahood, you can become awakened.The essence is to slip out of the mind, get out of the mind. The mind is the world. The mind is full of desires, full of clingings, attachments, longings. Get out of the mind! Create a little distance between you and the mind. Be a watcher, a watcher on the hills and you will be surprised. As you watch the mind, the distance becomes bigger and bigger. As you watch the mind, as you become more and more established in watching, the mind recedes farther and farther away. One day it happens and you cannot hear the chatter of the mind; it is no longer there. It is simply, absolutely silent. In that silence, truth descends in you. In that silence, you encounter yourself, you encounter your innermost core. And that is the innermost core of the whole existence. Your being is the being of all.We are separate as minds, as bodies, but not as consciousness. In consciousness we meet, we are one. That consciousness is godliness. That meeting, that oneness where all differences dissolve; where we are no longer separate ice cubes; where we have melted and disappeared into the universal, Buddha calls nirvana. The word is beautiful; it means cessation of the ego. When the ego ceases you are godliness, you are a buddha, you are a christ. It is the ego that is giving you a limitation. It is the ego that is making you live in a prison. Get out of the ego! Nobody is preventing you – it is your own clinging, it is your own attachment. You have become too attached to your chains, you have become too attached to your prison cell. You think it is your home, it is not. Come out of it. Wake up.To be awake is to be a buddha. Yoka is right. He says: If you reach the Zen of Buddha – the state of Buddha – at that very moment you accomplish everything.The third question:Osho,When you speak of religions, you usually mention Christians, Mohammedans and Hindus, but not Jews. Is there a reason for it?Veet Ateet, there is a reason: I am the only Jew in India!Once, I was taken for a ride in a Cadillac. The owner wanted to sell it and I was interested. I have used all kinds of cars except the Cadillac. It was a beautiful car, specially made. I loved it.He said to me, “What do you say? How did you feel in it?”I said, “I felt just like a Jew! I will not purchase this car – this will show my identity. I am already in more trouble than a man can manage. Now to declare myself a Jew will be inviting even more trouble. Jews are experts at inviting trouble!”An old Jew was praying to God for years and never asking for anything. God became fed up. If you ask for something, it can be done and he can get rid of you! But he was not asking for anything. He was just praying and praying and praying.So one day God said, “Listen! What do you want? Why don’t you say exactly what you want? I am ready to fulfill it.”The old Jew said, “Is it true that we are your chosen people?”God said, “Yes, that’s true.”The Jew said, “Now please choose somebody else. For three thousand years, just because of you, we have suffered so much. Enough is enough! Now choose somebody else!”Veet Ateet, you must be also a Jew, otherwise why this question? Jews are always thinking, in every possible way, about Jews.The Friends of the Elephant Society – a society created to help sick, old or homeless elephants – decided that although most people knew what an elephant was, there had never been any serious, definitive study conducted about the huge animal. They therefore decided to hold a competition with a prize of a thousand dollars to be given for the best book on the subject of the elephant.An Englishman entered his book entitled: The History and Statistics of the Elephant.A German entered a three-volume set entitled: The Anatomy and Physiology of the Elephant.A Frenchman entered a slim, hundred-page volume entitled: The Amorous Affairs of the Elephant.An Italian seriously considers the project for about five minutes, drops it and joins his friends for some spaghetti.And a Jew entered an epic effort entitled: The Elephant and the Jewish Problem.Now, Ateet, why does this question come to your mind? I don’t say much about Judaism because in India there are no Jews. There are Hindus, Christians, Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists; only the Jews are missing, so I don’t mention them much. Of course, Jews are not missing here. This must be the only place in the whole of India where you can find thousands of Jews – but they are no longer Jews.Ateet, this must be a hangover with you. Do you know what your name means? Veet Ateet means going beyond the past. You still seem to have a hangover of being Jewish. And having thousands of Jews here, it is better not to talk about them because they are very argumentative people.A Christian visiting the Holy Land struck up a conversation with an Israeli.“I am really surprised that you and the Arabs can’t get together peacefully.”“My dear man,” said the Israeli, “the Jews are a very argumentative people. The only thing you can get two Jews to agree upon is what a third Jew should give to charity.”That is true.Jimmy finally got Sadat and Begin together for a resumption of the Middle East peace talks.Afterward Sadat said, “I’m glad we buried the hatchet. In the future I wish you everything you wish me.”Begin answered, “See, you’re starting up again.”That’s why, Ateet, I don’t mention Jews very much. It is dangerous! Surrounded by thousands of Jews it is better not to mention Jews at all. And, moreover, Judaism is a dead religion, just as Hinduism is. In fact, there have been only two source religions in the world: Hinduism and Judaism. Both are dead. Jainism and Buddhism are offshoots of Hinduism, but because the root is dead the branches are dead too. Christianity and Islam are branches of Judaism and because the root is dead the branches are dead too. These are dead phenomena. I am not concerned much with the past.Yes, something beautiful has also happened in Judaism and that is Hasidism. I have talked about it a lot. Just as I love Zen people in the tradition of the Buddha, I love Hasids in the tradition of Moses and I love Sufis in the tradition of Mohammed. These three are still alive in some small way because these three have never become established religions. They have always been anti-establishment; they have always been alternatives to the established religion; they have always been rebellious.Hasidism is worth talking about, not Judaism – and I have talked about Hasidism. I have been approaching Hasidism with my own experience. I have been bringing Hasidism up to date, trying to make it part of the twentieth century. Hasidism is the essence of Judaism, the very fragrance of it.I have something of the Hasids in me, that’s why I sometimes call myself a Jew. The Hasids love life, they are life-affirmative. They don’t believe in renunciation, they believe in rejoicing. They believe in dancing, singing, celebrating – and that’s exactly my approach too.My religion is something of a meeting of Zen, Sufism and Hasidism – and something more thrown in.The fourth question:Osho,Actually, I love to philosophize. What to do with that ability in a place like this?Deva Anurati, philosophy is a sheer waste of your energy. The same energy can become your meditation, the same energy can become your awakening. Philosophy is like dreaming: you can dream beautiful dreams, but dreaming is dreaming. You can think of God, but to think of God is not to know God. To know about God is not to know God. The word about means around. You can go on around and around… You will be moving in a circle and you will never reach the target because the target is the center not the circumference.Philosophy is circumferential, peripheral. It can deceive. It has deceived millions of people because it talks about love, about God, it even talks about meditation. It philosophizes about everything.Philosophy means that your mind remains your master; it is mind that philosophizes. You have to go beyond mind, Anurati – and it is not going to happen through philosophy. It can happen only through meditation.Now, you must be philosophizing about meditation: what it is, how to define it. There are thousands of definitions and you can be lost in the jungle of definitions.I can understand your difficulty. You must be feeling a little out of place because here philosophy is debarred. I am creating a nonphilosophical atmosphere. The whole effort here is to help you go beyond the mind. I don’t want you to think about love, I want you to love. I don’t want you to think about existence, I want you to know existence, to be existence.What is the point of thinking about water when you are thirsty? Even if you discover by your thinking that water consists of H2O, that is not going to quench your thirst. And that’s what philosophy is: H2O. You are thirsty and philosophy says, “Don’t be thirsty. Water is simply H2O. Just write H2O on the paper and eat the paper!”Philosophers go on eating the paper. They eat great things: Upanishads, Vedas, Korans, Bibles. They have a great appetite for paper. That’s why there is such a shortage of paper in the world; there are so many paper-eaters. Crazy people!Yes, once in a while philosophy may be good, just for a change.Molly Landau was learning to drive a car. Regrettably, as it turned out, she thought she already knew how. So she dismissed her driving instructor and ventured forth upon the public highway, unaccompanied by either an experienced hand or a driver’s license.As she wobbled in an uncertain course along Southern Boulevard in the Bronx, a milkman driving a well-behaved horse turned a corner. Mrs. Landau tried simultaneously to do several things: apply the brakes, avoid a collision, turn out, turn in, veer left, veer right, speed up, slow down, and who knows what else.The “what else” was that she banged squarely into the side of the milk float, leaving it turned on its side in the middle of the street, with the horse and driver entangled in the wreckage.The lady, at the same time as losing her head, lost control of the car. She sped away, swerved out of sight and circled the block on squealing tires. A minute later she reappeared at the scene of the accident, still wrestling with the steering wheel. The dairyman, who had managed to extricate himself from the mess, was cutting his struggling horse loose from the twisted harness, when he heard the clatter and roar of an approaching, wide-open engine. He looked up to see the same car and the same woman again bearing down on him. He jumped aside, just in time to save himself.There was a second crash and once more the green motorist proceeded on her devastating way. But now the capsized wagon was a total loss. The milkman was a natural born philosopher. As he stood in the midst of the ruins, he shrugged his shoulders and remarked to the curious citizens who had gathered around, “About that lady’s driving, I can’t say she’s an expert. But you have to give her credit – she’s thorough!”Yes, in such situations, a little philosophy is good; it helps you to keep cool. But more than that it is of no use, Anurati. You will have to learn a new way of being. If you are here – and you are here – stop philosophizing. Start experiencing because it is only through experience that one comes to know the truth.Truth is not a conclusion arrived at by logical argumentation; truth is not arrived at through syllogism. Truth is an experience of a silent, still, consciousness. Learn to be more silent and still.This is the first question from Anurati that I am answering. She must have asked hundreds of questions – I go on throwing them away. The moment I see Anurati’s name, the question goes into the wastepaper basket for the simple reason that I don’t want to nourish her philosophical mind. If I start talking about her philosophical problems she will get more and more into them.She goes on asking me, “You answer everybody’s question. Why don’t you answer my question?” So today I decided that at least one question should be answered.Philosophy is a disease – and I know it firsthand. I have been a professor of philosophy – you can trust me! I have suffered from it and I know it is chronic. Once it enters your system it is very difficult to throw it out. I have every sympathy for Anurati, but if the right effort is made you can get rid of it; it is not incurable. And because it never gives you anything… It promises much, but it never supplies any goods.Just look back. What has it given you? It makes people great bullshitters, that’s all! They go on talking about great things they know nothing of. It may give you a very polished ego, but this is the problem that has to be solved, it is not the solution.Anurati, wake up from your philosophical dream! However sweet it is, it is a dream. It is so useless that you can always find an argument for anything. Philosophy is a prostitute; it can go with anybody.Meditate on Murphy’s maxim: To every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.You can argue for, you can argue against. Philosophy has no anchor. It is a game, like chess: it keeps you occupied and gives you a sense of doing something great. But remember, it is all dreaming.One night Zorba the Greek dreamed that he had to leave his island. So he went down to the port and stepped aboard a boat.The captain stopped him and said, “You’ll have to pay one hundred drachmas.”“That’s sheer robbery!” exclaimed Zorba. “I won’t give you more than fifty drachmas.”“One hundred or you will have to swim!”“Is that so?” Zorba said. “You better take me for fifty drachmas or I’ll wake up and you’ll lose everything!”Anurati, please wake up! But people are afraid to wake up. The fear is that they will lose everything because all that they have is nothing but dream stuff. Their philosophy is their dream; their religion is their dream; their knowledge is their dream; their ego is their dream. In their dream they have gathered many things, hence they are afraid to wake up because the moment they wake up all is lost.One night Mulla Nasruddin dreamed that a man wanted to give him some money. He was very generous, but Mulla was insistent, “Give me a hundred rupees.”And the man was saying, “Take ninety… Ninety-one… Ninety-two… Ninety-three.”But Mulla was insistent on a hundred rupees because he could see that the man was so generous. He looked so kind that he might agree on a hundred rupees, so why settle for less?The man said, “Listen. For the last time, take ninety-nine.Mulla said, “One hundred!” But he said it so loudly that he woke up. He opened his eyes – the man had disappeared and the money had disappeared.He immediately closed his eyes and said, “Okay, okay. Give me ninety-nine!” But now there was nobody there. He said, “Don’t be so angry. Ninety-eight… Ninety-seven…”But there was nobody there at all. It was all a dream. You are dreaming beautiful dreams. Philosophy is a very clever dream.Anurati, get out of it! This is not the place to philosophize; you can do that anywhere else. Such stupid things can be done anywhere. You need not come from America to India for such stupid things. Do something real, do something authentic. Do something that will transform your life, that will give you a new birth.Unless you are born again you cannot enter my kingdom of God.The fifth question:Osho,I have traveled all over India, but I have never heard an ill word spoken of this town, Pune.Perhaps it is because one should not speak ill of the dead!The sixth question:Osho,Why are you against the Greeks? Why do you call them the “Goddamned Greeks”?The Greeks are great people – I love them. I love Socrates, I love Pythagoras, I love Heraclitus – and of course, I love Mukta. But they are “goddamned.”A Russian can be cheated only by a gypsy, a gypsy by Jew, a Jew by a Greek, and a Greek only by the Devil.The seventh question:Osho,I am British. Anything I can do about it?This time it is too late. Next time be a little more careful in choosing your parents!The eighth question:Osho,Can children understand the truth?Children can understand the truth, but cannot understand that they understand it. They understand more clearly than you can understand because they are more clean, more innocent. They are so innocent that they cannot understand that they understand.Hence, you need another childhood, a second childhood. First you have to lose your first childhood. That is the whole meaning of the biblical story of Adam and Eve losing paradise; that is losing the first childhood. It is a tremendously significant story. It has so many meanings, it is such a multidimensional parable, that I don’t think there exists any other parable comparable to it.You can look at it from many aspects. It is losing the first childhood – that is inevitable. Adam and Eve are not committing a sin. In fact, the word sin comes from a root which means forgetting, and that is a beautiful meaning. They are simply forgetting something.Every child has to forget his innocence. Every child has to get lost in the world. Every child has to go astray, has to make many, many mistakes. He has to suffer. He has to pass through pain, pleasure, and all kinds of dualities, so that one day he can start feeling a great longing to return home. Lost in the deserts of the world, one day a longing arises to go back home.That longing is sannyas, that longing is religion. And one consciously comes back again to one’s childhood. This is the second childhood. Now one understands, and also understands that one understands. The first childhood is very innocent. It is bound to be lost because it is a natural gift, existence’s gift. The second childhood is never lost because it is your earning, you have become worthy of it. It is no longer a gift; you deserve it. It is growth, not a gift. It is your maturity.Adam and Eve lose their first childhood; it is in people like Buddha, Jesus Christ, Zarathustra, Moses that the second childhood happens. In Christ, Adam starts moving back toward paradise. If Adam is the going away from paradise, Jesus is the coming back home.If you watch children, you will see how clear they are about things – far clearer than you are. You are very confused; you have so many thoughts to confuse you. Children are not confused – they don’t have any thoughts to confuse them. Their flames are burning bright with no smoke. They are full of wonder and awe. The moment they see something they immediately understand, because there is no barrier.If we can help children to be meditative we can change the whole world – its energy, its consciousness. But we teach them something else, never meditation – geography, history and all kinds of nonsense which is absolutely useless. Now, what does it matter where Timbuktu is? I don’t know. I simply love the name Timbuktu – wherever it is! But children are being taught about stupid kings – Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah and Tamerlane. For what? Why are you filling their heads with rubbish?This is the moment to make them aware because they are naturally aware. If we help them to understand their awareness and their innocence, the first childhood can become a movement into the second childhood.A French farmer’s son missed a day in school and explained to the teacher that he was absent because of important family business.“I had to take the bull to the cows,” he explained.“But couldn’t your father do that better?” the teacher wanted to know.“I suppose my father is a pretty good lover,” the French lad said, “but in this case I think the bull does it better.”They are clearer about things, more so than your so-called knowledgeable people.California is full of crazies. Even the doctors are crazy. A troubled young lady went to consult an MD, complaining that she was having trouble with her menstrual cycle.“No problem, chick,” said the medico. “Why don’t you just trade it in for a Honda?”During a visit to the zoo a youngster asked his mother, “Mom, how do lions screw?”She replied, “I really don’t know, dear, most of your father’s friends are Rotarians.”“My new husband is a sex maniac,” complained the young lady to the judge. “Ever since our honeymoon he has been making nonstop love to me. I can’t get no rest day or night. I want a divorce.”“All right,” said the judge, “but first you’ll have to file your application.”“File my application!” exclaimed the lady indignantly. “Why, that poor thing is so sore, I can’t even bear to touch it!”A schoolteacher bent too low over her desk to mark a paper and little Johnny in the front seat said, “Teacher, I see something.”“That’s very rude, Johnny. Tomorrow don’t come to school,” the teacher admonished.A week later, the teacher bent down to pick up a piece of chalk. Johnny, still in a ringside seat, got up and started to walk to the door. “Where are you going?” asked the teacher sternly.“Teacher, my schooldays are over.”Children see very clearly; their eyes are transparent. But soon they have to lose their innocence. We force them to lose it. We fill their heads with such rubbish that their eyes stop seeing. Every parent is trying, every society is trying, every church is trying to fill the child’s mind with stupid things before he starts becoming aware on his own; otherwise he will be a rebel. So by the time you are three or four years old, things have already started being poured into you. You are sent to church, you are taught religion – as if religion can be taught.Religion cannot be taught, it can only be caught. You can catch it only when you are in the company of a man like Jesus or Buddha. When you are in the company of a man like Yoka, Rinzai, Bodhidharma, you can catch it; it is infectious. But it cannot be taught. A religion that is taught is rubbish. But, as soon as possible, we are very interested in making our children Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan.In a better world, in a more human world, at least up to the age of twenty-one, children should not be taught any Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, no. Up to the age of twenty-one – when they become capable of voting – they should be left to inquire on their own. And I assure you that Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, will all disappear from the world. Up to their twenty-first year, just leave children to themselves and then try to teach them Christianity! They will raise such questions that even you will start suspecting whether Christianity is of any worth. But you force poor children, three years of age… They cannot resist, they cannot protect… They depend on you for their survival, so you can do anything.This is the greatest crime that can be done to children. Throughout the whole past, parents have been criminals. The greatest crime is that you condition your children’s minds and you don’t allow them the freedom to seek, search and inquire for themselves. Of course, parents have not done it knowingly. Their parents had conditioned them and they were simply repeating a pattern. They were thinking that they were doing it for your own good. In fact, the greatest crimes have been committed for your own good. Whenever somebody says, “I am doing it for your own good,” beware, because nobody needs to do anything for your own good.Yes, parents need to feed you, to clothe you, to support you, to make you strong in body. They need to support you in your inquiry, in your questioning, and to give you every kind of support and protection so that you can freely inquire. The whole world will then be full of agnostics, inquirers, and that will be the beginning of a true religion on the earth. It has to happen from childhood because it is such a stupid waste of time to destroy their minds first. It then becomes very hard and very difficult to uncondition them. They start resisting because they start getting identified with their own minds.Every day I receive questions – rude questions, ugly questions – because whenever somebody feels hurt, immediately his conditioned mind reacts and he writes something in anger.I am trying to help you to be on your own, to be free; you get angry because you don’t want to be free. You have become accustomed to being slaves. But you don’t think it is slavery; you think it is knowledge. It is wisdom. You think you know the Bible, the Gita, the Koran. And when I go on destroying, negating, you become scared. If all your knowledge is taken away, what is left? You are very afraid of nothingness – and that is the true beginning; that is the beginning of a new birth.Everybody has to become again a nothing, again a child, again innocent; only then will you be able to understand truth.Children are capable of understanding it, but they are not capable of understanding that they understand it. For that you have to wait a little. But we can prepare the children. We can use their capacity to understand to make them more free, to make them more adventurous, to make them more courageous.If you really love your children, you will help them to go on an adventure so that they can find God by themselves. It is beautiful to find truth; it is ugly to carry somebody else’s truth on your shoulders. It is simply a dead weight. It cripples, kills; it poisons you.The last question:Osho,There's no question about it, Sarjano is my LSD: a Latin-seducing-Don Juan. The ashram seems to be the right environment and I know you are guiding me through the trip, but what's the right dose to take him in?Sarjano is a ladies’ man, so don’t waste your time in thinking about the right dose to take him in because tomorrow he may not be available. Eat him totally if you can! There is just one thing you have to be aware of: if you don’t like spaghetti, then eating him is going to be a torture – it will be all spaghetti!What did the cannibal say after he ate the Italian? – “The meat’s a little on the greasy side.”So eat him while he is available and don’t waste time in thinking about right proportions – how much to and how much not to. Sarjano is like the wind: he is here today, tomorrow somewhere else. And remember it perfectly well: eat him before he eats you because these Italians are really dangerous people!Just the other day there was a question: “What is more dangerous than an Italian?” – of course, two Italians!Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 04 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,The vision of “neither this nor that” feels so negative, so absolutely negative. How can I be accepting or even creative with this? I feel totally confused.Mind lives in the duality of the positive and the negative. It lives like a pendulum, moving from yes to no, from no to yes. It cannot live in the absolute yes, it cannot live in the absolute no. Absolute yes means now there is no possibility for the pendulum to move anywhere. Absolute no also means the same: no space for the mind to play games. Anything absolute is a death for the mind.There are two possibilities to kill the mind, to transcend the mind: either absolute yes or absolute no. The Upanishads have used the first possibility, absolute yes. Buddha has used the second possibility, absolute no. But look deeply and you will find they are not different, they are bridged by the same phenomenon – absoluteness. Anything absolute becomes the grave of the mind; it needs duality to exist.That’s why you are so afraid of the absolute negative because in the absolute you start disappearing. You are your mind. Of course, there is something more in you than your mind, but you are not aware of it. As you start disappearing, fear arises, confusion arises. One is scared, one wants to cling to whatever is available.It is because of this miracle of the absolute that God has been synonymous with the absolute. God means the absolute. Either say absolute yes and your mind disappears, or say absolute no and your mind disappears.Why has Buddha chosen to say absolute no, why not absolute yes? – for a certain reason: with the absolute yes there is one danger. The danger is that you may not understand the absoluteness of the yes; you may still go on thinking that it is your old positivity. With the absolute no that danger is not possible. With the absolute no, death seems so clear that you cannot miss it – hence the confusion.This confusion is good. Don’t try to escape from it, go deeper into it. Soon it will become a chaos – not just confusion, but chaos. When all that you have known about yourself is shattered; when all that you have believed in has evaporated; when all that you were identified with has slipped out of your hands – the very earth beneath you is no longer available, you are falling and falling into a bottomless abyss – that is chaos. Only out of chaos are stars born. Out of chaos is creativity.You ask: “How can I be accepting or even creative with this?” There is no question of accepting because every acceptance means that deep down there is rejection. Otherwise, why the question of acceptance? Why in the first place do you think of accepting? Somewhere, you must be rejecting.I don’t accept life because I don’t reject it in the first place. It is simply there, neither rejected nor accepted. It is so. Buddha calls it tathata, suchness.A man came to Buddha and asked, “What should we do with death? Should we accept it?”Buddha replied, “There is no question of accepting or rejecting. Death is! It is so. Such is the nature of things: they are born one day and one day they die.”Why do you think of rejecting or accepting? If you try to accept, that simply means a kind of repression. First you must have rejected. You must be still rejecting and are covering it up with acceptance. Deep down you are angry and on the surface you are smiling; you are all smiles. Deep down you are sad. On the surface you are laughing, trying to hide the fact not only from others but from yourself too.Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “I laugh because I am afraid that if I don’t laugh I will start crying and weeping. I go on laughing just to avoid the possibility of crying and weeping. I don’t want to cry and weep. I want to forget that there are tears in me.”But this is just a cover-up; this laughter is not true. This is not the laughter of the buddhas – it can’t be. It is a desperate effort of a split mind. This is schizophrenia: one part wants to cry, another part is trying to hide it. You are in a conflict. But we are brought up in conflict, we have learned how to live in conflict – this has become our very lifestyle. It is not a question of accepting.True acceptance is not an acceptance at all. You will be surprised by my statement: true acceptance is not an acceptance at all. True acceptance is absence of rejection and acceptance. One simply knows that this is how things are – the suchness of things, tathata. Hence, one of the beautiful names of Buddha: Tathagata. The Buddhist scriptures always use the word tathagata for Buddha: one who lives in suchness, neither rejecting nor accepting; simply seeing whatsoever is the case, only reflecting.You ask me: “How is creativity possible out of this absolute negativity?” You don’t know anything about creativity. Creativity comes only out of total negation, it comes out of absolute emptiness. The whole world has come out of nothingness and the whole world will one day move into nothingness.Now scientists have stumbled upon one of the most important discoveries ever: the discovery of the black hole. They say that there are a few spots in existence that can be called black holes; where if anything comes close it is sucked in by the black hole and disappears. It becomes nothing.But this is only half the story; the other half has still to be discovered. I can predict it will be discovered soon: the white hole. The other side of the black hole, from where things start coming out, out of nothingness. Existence goes into rest, nothingness prevails. When the rest is over, existence again becomes active, manifest; then creativity prevails. Creativity comes out of nothingness.The more you are a nobody, the more you know that there is no ego in you, the more creativity will flow through you. You will become a vehicle, you will become a passage. Songs will pour out of you – and music and love and joy. Whatever you touch will be transformed into gold; whatever you say will have something poetic in it. Whatever you do will have grace, will have something divine about it, something sacred and holy.Creativity is nothing that you have to do; you are the barrier. And it is because of you that creativity is being prevented. Make way. Don’t stand in between. Move yourself away and let your void, your inner void, face existence. The inner void will reflect existence and out of that reflection, creativity is born.But I am not talking about ordinary creativity, where you compose a poem or paint a small picture or where you sculpt. These things can be done without being creative. All that you need to know is the art, the technique of doing them. Out of one hundred so-called creators it is very rare to find even one or two who are real creators; ninety-nine percent are only composers, not creators. They know how to put words together. They are clever, they are cunning, they are crafty; what they are doing is not creativity. They are putting things together – maybe in new arrangements, but there is nothing original.The original always comes from an egoless state, it always comes when you are absent. When you are absent, consciousness is present, godliness is present. And then something miraculous starts happening, not by you, but through you. It gives you a great feeling of humbleness and gratitude.So don’t be worried about absolute negativity; that is one of the most beautiful spaces to be in. One can be in that space through absolute positivity also, but there is a danger in that your mind can play tricks with the absolute positive. But it cannot play tricks with the absolute negative. With the absolute positive, it can still hope to remain in some way or other; the positive seems to be sheltering, safe.Hence, except for Gautam the Buddha, every religion has used the positive. It is only Buddha who has used the negative. But you must know that more people have become enlightened through Gautam Buddha’s approach than through all the other approaches put together. For the simple reason that with the absolute negative there is no safety, no shelter at all for the mind, for the ego. It is total death.That’s why you are confused. I am happy that you are confused. I will be more happy if your confusion becomes a chaos. I will be still more happy if you disappear into a black hole because then the only thing possible is that you will come out of a white hole. You will be resurrected.Crucifixion is the way of resurrection. Death is the way of being reborn.The second question:Osho,What is satori and how to attain it?Satori is exactly your ordinary nature; it is not anything special. Hence, there is no question of attaining it – it is already the case. You are in it, you have just forgotten. You have become too occupied with the outside world. You have forgotten your own kingdom, you have forgotten your own treasure, you have forgotten yourself. You have become too concerned with others. You are in the world too much and you don’t give any time or any space for your inner nature to have a dialogue with you, to whisper a few things to you. You have become artificial.You have created a false ego because nobody can live without a center. You have forgotten your real center. Nobody can live without a center, so you have created a false center as a substitute. That’s the ego. Ego simply means living with a false center. Satori is dropping the false, entering into the real – just being yourself, your natural self, your ordinary self.The word ordinary has to be remembered because the mind is not interested in the ordinary at all. It wants to be extraordinary, it wants to be special. It is through being special that the ego survives. It is constantly striving to be more and more special. It wants to be richer, to be more powerful, more respectable; it is ambitious. Hence, the word ordinary has no appeal for the mind. And that is the beauty of the word ordinary – it has no appeal for the mind.Mind is an achiever and the ordinary need not be achieved; it is already the case. The extraordinary has to be achieved, the extraordinary becomes the goal. It is far away. You have to make all kinds of efforts; you have to struggle for it; you have to fight for it because there are so many competitors.To be ordinary… And there is no competition at all. You can just be ordinary, nobody has any objection. People will simply feel sorry for you that you have dropped out of the competitive race. One competitor less – they will feel good, but sorry for you. They will say, “Poor fellow! What happened to him? Why did he have to drop out?” The dropouts are not respectable people.Buddha is a dropout. All real masters are dropouts. To be a sannyasin means to be a dropout. To drop out of the rat race is to drop in because when you are in the race you cannot enter in. When you are no longer in the race, there is nowhere to go. You start moving inward because life is a flow and if there is no outer direction it takes the inner direction. If the goal is not far away in the future, you start moving into your nature in the present. That is satori.Satori is very ordinary. Satori means your nature. You have come with it; it is your original face – all other faces are masks.Yoka says:A disciple speaks in accordance with the ultimate, the absolute truth…Remember that one should cut the root and not the branches and the leaves.What is the root of your misery? The root is your ambition, desiring. One wants to be this and that; one wants to possess this and that; one wants to be somebody; one wants to be significant.Yoka says: …cut the root… Only then are you a disciple. And the moment you cut the root – not the branches, not the leaves – you attain the ultimate truth. The ultimate truth is not far away. It is the immediate truth, it is your truth, it is your very being.Most people do not recognize the perfect jewel, the jewel of supreme wisdom, satori. It is hidden in the secret place of tathagata, awaiting its discovery. It is to live in your suchness; it is hidden in your suchness. Whatever you are, live in it. Don’t create any conflict, don’t live through the ideal. Don’t be an idealist, just be natural.But everybody is being taught to be an idealist: “Become a Jesus, a Buddha or a Krishna.” Nobody tells you just to be yourself. Why should you be a Jesus? One Jesus is enough and one Jesus is beautiful – he enriches existence. Many Jesuses just carrying crosses and wherever you go you meet them… It won’t look beautiful, it won’t add to the beauty of existence; it will make the whole world ugly. Wherever you go, you meet a Mahavira standing naked…It is because of this that existence never creates the same person again. It never repeats; it is original. It always creates a new person. You have never been before and there is no one who is like you; there will never be anybody else like you again. In the whole of eternity, you alone are just like you. Look at the beauty of it and the glory of it; the respect that existence has shown to you. What more respectability do you need? See the uniqueness of yourself. There is no need to be unique. You are already unique, just as everybody else is unique. You are unique in your ordinariness, in your suchness.Satori is hidden, says Yoka, in the secret place of your suchness, awaiting its discovery….It has not to be created, it is already there; you just have to discover it. Go in and discover it! It is waiting and waiting. Centuries have passed and many, many lives have passed and you have become addicted to extroversion. You never move in.The first step toward satori is meditation. Satori is the ultimate experience of meditation, when meditation is fulfilled, when meditation has reached to its ultimate flowering.Yoka says:The world is complete illusion, yet nothing exists which might be called illusion.The world that you have created through your mind is illusory, but there is another world which is not your creation. When your mind disappears you discover that world: the world of suchness. That is a totally different experience. No words can describe it. Thousands of mystics have tried to describe it, but nobody has ever been able and nobody will ever be able to describe it. It is so mysterious, it is so beautiful that all words fall short. No poetry reaches to its level, no music even touches its feet.The perfect light of this wisdom enlightens one…The moment you have put your mind aside – mind means ambition, the ego trip of being this and that – the moment you have put the whole mind aside, a great light explodes in you and you are enlightened. This is satori. It does not come from the outside; you are not delivered by somebody else. You are delivered by your own being, by your own nature.That is possible only by practicing zazen beyond speculation.You can see clouds naturally in the mirror but to hold on tothe reflection is impossible.That is possible only by practicing zazen… Satori is possible only by practicing zazen. Zazen means:Just sitting, doing nothing,the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.You are simply relaxing into your own being, not doing anything at all. It is not a question of doing, it is simply a question of being. You go on relaxing into your being. A moment comes when you are in your utter purity, in your utter simplicity, in your utter innocence. That is satori.Zazen is a beautiful word. It simply means just sitting – not even doing meditation. In fact, you cannot do meditation. Meditation is just sitting silently; it is not a question of doing. If you are doing something, you are disturbing your meditation.Somebody is chanting a mantra; he is disturbing his meditation. Somebody is focusing on something; he is disturbing his meditation. Somebody is concentrating, somebody is praying, somebody is thinking of God; they are disturbing their meditation. All these are the doings of the mind and if the doing continues, the mind continues. Stop doing and where is the mind? When the doing disappears, the mind disappears. The disappearance of the mind is satori.Yoka says that it is beyond speculation. You cannot think about it, you can only experience it. It is the ultimate experience and the immediate experience, of truth, beauty, love, bliss, godliness, and of nirvana.The third question:Osho, I still don't believe that sex is stupid.It is not a question of your believing or not believing it; such is the case. What can I do? Sex is stupid. I feel sorry for you, but I have to tell the truth some day or other. Yes, I have been telling you, “From sex to super-consciousness,” and you have been very happy. But you only hear “from sex,” you don’t hear “to super-consciousness.”This is the case with those who are against me and with those who are in favor of me – the same. Man is almost the same; friends and enemies are not very different. I am being misunderstood by the opponents and that is understandable, but I am also being misunderstood by my followers; that is not understandable at all. The opponents can be forgiven, but my followers cannot be forgiven.Because I said, “Sex is stupid,” many angry questions have come to me. One of my sannyasins, Maya, has written to me: “You have some nerve to say that sex is stupid!” She must have felt hurt. I can understand it. When you are living in a certain way, you don’t want it to be described as stupid. Nobody wants to be called stupid. It is not about the question of sex that you are disturbed, it is your life. If it is stupid and you are living it, you are being stupid. That hurts. But I have to say it even if it hurts because that is the only way to make you aware that there is something more in life; something higher, something greater; something far more blissful, far more orgasmic.Sex is only a beginning, but not the end. Nothing is wrong if you take it as a beginning. If you start clinging to it, things start going wrong. If I say anything against homosexuality, immediately the homosexuals start writing to me. If I say anything against anything, there are people who will start writing. If it hurts your ego, you are immediately ready to defend – not only defend but to attack.Whatever you are doing is going to be stupid because unless something comes out of meditation it remains stupid. It is not only a question of sex. The way you eat is stupid, the things that you eat are stupid. And not for any other simple reason other than whatever you are doing is being done without any awareness. Stupidity is sleep. Stupidity is unintelligence.Just watch people – what they are doing, what kinds of things they are doing. Whatever they’re doing, they are doing it with the feeling that it is the right thing to do, that it is the most intelligent thing to do.Abby, a well-stacked coed, was undressing when her roommate, Jean, said, “Do you know there is an impression of a large M on your stomach?”“My fiancé is in town this weekend,” confided Abby, “and he likes to make love with his football-letter sweater on.”“Which school does he attend, Michigan or Minnesota?” questioned Jean.“Neither,” giggled Abby, “he goes to Wisconsin.”But tell her fiancé that this is stupid and he will hit you on your head!An ugly-looking little Italian guy always succeeded in picking up the best looking girls at his favorite bar every night. The other guys in the bar just couldn’t understand how such a creep could be so irresistible to women.One night they asked the bartender, “The guy’s scoring so much – what’s his secret?”“Well,” said the bartender, “I don’t know if the guy’s hung, but he’s the only guy who comes in here who can lick his eyebrows with his tongue.”But nobody can tell the guy, “You are stupid.”Whatever you are doing seems to be the most intelligent thing in the world. Whatever space you are in seems to be the right space. Everybody else may be wrong, but not you. You have to become aware of this phenomenon; this is one of the greatest illusions of humanity. You have to be watchful. You have to learn to see that, yes, there are many things that you are doing which are stupid. How can it be otherwise? You are not meditative.You are not a buddha, you are not awakened. How is it possible that you can do something which is not stupid? So whatever you are doing is bound to be stupid – it is out of unawareness. You go on doing things, not exactly knowing why. How did you learn them? From whom did you learn them? Why did you learn them? There are millions of stupid people just like you and you go on imitating them, you go on learning things from them.Sex is one of the greatest intoxicants. It is in your very biology. It releases a certain drug into your very bloodstream and you become possessed; you are no longer in your senses and you don’t know what you are doing. You are being forced to do it. Some unknown force – call it nature, biology, chemistry, hormones. Whatever you want to call it – some unknown force, XYZ, forces you to do something. In your saner moments you also know that this is stupid: “What was I doing and why? What have I gained out of it?” And you know those saner moments also.That’s why, after making love, many women will cry and weep, for the simple reason that the whole thing seems to be so meaningless. Why? – it may be a titillation for the moment, but the same titillation again and again… It is a repetition; you are not reaching anywhere. The man goes to sleep immediately after making love, simply to avoid the saner moment, so he need not think about it. And by the morning he will have forgotten all about it.After making love, at least for one hour sit in zazen and you will see what I am saying. You will understand what I mean when I say that sex is stupid. After making love, make it a point: sit in zazen for one hour, just watching what has happened. Were you the master of it or just a slave? If you were the master of it, it is not stupid. If you were a slave, it is stupid because by repeating it you are making your slavery stronger, you are feeding your slavery.It is only through meditation that you will understand what I have been telling you. It is not a question to be decided by argument. It can only be decided by your own meditation, your own understanding, your own awareness.The fourth question:Osho,I'm in Vipassana. Tell me a joke!I feel for you. Vipassana is really serious! Buddha invented it so that you can pass through hell on this earth and need not go to the real hell. It is a process of cleansing you of all your past karmas. Better finish it! It is a torture because you don’t know how to sit silently for so long. Your mind goes on thousands of trips. Sitting, sitting, sitting… You feel sleepy and that is not allowed. If you start dozing, a hit comes on your head. A really good hit to bring you back to your senses. You cannot escape either because I go on praising Vipassana so much – and without Vipassana there is no satori, no enlightenment.So you say, “Okay, somehow I will pass through it. It is only a question of a few days. And one thing is certain: many have survived, so there is no danger to life.” Yes, your knees hurt and your body aches; you feel very restless and you are not allowed to move. You have to sit just like a Buddha statue, doing a very stupid thing – watching your breath. Now what kind of a thing is this for an intelligent man to do? Thousands of doubts arise: “What are you doing? Such a nice guy, sitting and watching your breath?” You could have made love to your girlfriend, you could have done a thousand and one things. And delicious food appears… And it looks far better to sit in the Blue Diamond than to sit in zazen! “Why am I sitting here? What am I doing here?”The mind goes on questioning you and there really seems to be no escape because it is all voluntary; nobody has forced you. Not only that – you have to pay for it! Have you ever heard of anybody paying to suffer in hell? But when you have to pay for it, then one thinks it is worth suffering for.Mulla Nasruddin was saying that when he came to India for the first time, he was feeling very hungry. As he entered through the Himalayas he came across a man selling some strange fruit, very red, very beautiful. He asked the price. The man said, “Just two paise for the whole bucketful.” So he purchased the whole bucket and started eating it – and it was fire! Tears started rolling down his face.A man who was watching said, “What are you doing? This is not a fruit. You will kill yourself! This is a medicinal herb; it has to be taken only in very small amounts for particular diseases. What are you doing? You will go mad!”He said, “Whatever happens… But since I have paid two paise for it, I have to eat it!”He continued, “I went on crying and the tears went on flowing, but I finished it. I ate the whole bucketful of that nasty thing!”When you pay, you cannot escape. And we don’t leave any loopholes. We make every effort so that nobody can escape.A man was in jail for rape, murder, kidnapping and blackmail.The lawyer said, “I found a loophole in your case. According to Abramovitz v. Arcaro, January 6, 1911: Book III, Section II, page 6, paragraph 13, I think I’ve got the answer. Don’t worry, I’ll get you out. Just leave it to me. Now I’m leaving for Washington on Monday and I’ll be back Friday. Meanwhile – try to escape!”We don’t leave any loopholes in the first place. There is no possibility to escape either because whenever somebody escapes from Vipassana I send him back again. Vipassana has to be suffered for the simple reason that it makes you encounter yourself, it forces you to encounter yourself – your fidgetiness, your restlessness, your ugliness, your madness. It forces you to see all the rubbish that you are carrying within yourself. And that is one of the most essential steps to go beyond it. If you want to go beyond anything, first you have to encounter it. Without encountering it there is no transcendence. There is no shortcut, there is no way of bypassing it.It is not that Buddha is a sadist and trying to torture you. He is simply making you aware of what you are. You can never become aware if you remain occupied in your day-to-day business, in your day-to-day engagements. From morning till night you are so engaged that you don’t have any time or any space to look within, to feel yourself; to see who you are, where you are, what you are doing.Vipassana forces you – there is nowhere to go. You have to watch your breath, you have to look at your thoughts day in, day out.After the seventh day, something starts settling. If you persist, persevere and if you are patient enough, your body learns to settle. Your mind learns to settle, your breathing becomes calm and cool, almost invisible. You can feel that something has changed, the climate is different. You are not fidgety, you are not restless. Suddenly, as if the sun had risen, all that neurotic fight disappears. The hell is over. A great peace descends on you, the silence that comes after the storm. Everything seems to be clean, very clean, spotlessly pure, innocent, as if a layer of dust has disappeared from your consciousness. Your consciousness seems to be transparent. For the first time you can see the green, the red, the gold of the trees. For the first time you can hear the song of the birds – as if something which was in your ears blocking them and something which was in your eyes like a curtain, has disappeared. Suddenly you feel light, very light.It is said: “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” You suddenly feel that you are so light, so full of light and so light that you can fly, almost fly. Gravitation has disappeared. You have entered into a different world: the world of grace.You will then know a different quality of laughter arising in you. It will not be painted on the lips, it will be coming from your depth. You will be laughing for no reason at all; you will be laughter. That is Zen laughter – unmotivated, out of sheer joy, out of sheer delight, out of sheer insight into things.Yes, you need a beautiful joke!After a day of long discussions at the World Religions Conference in Geneva, Rabbi Zuckerman found himself seated at the same dinner table as Father O’Malley.The rabbi was partaking of koshered veal, while the priest was cutting into a thick slice of ham.“Would ya like to try some of this ham, Rabbi?” asked the priest. “It’s really good!”“Ach, no,” replied Rabbi Zuckerman, “it is against our religion.”“Ah, but it’s so delicious! Are ya sure ya wouldn’t like a taste?”“Thank you, no,” said the rabbi. “Since the time of Abraham, the flesh of the swine has been regarded as unclean by our people and pork in all its forms is forbidden to us.”“Ah! Ya don’t know what you’re missin’, Rabbi,” said the priest, shoving down another mouthful of ham.“Ach! But you have not tasted the gefilte fish that my wife makes, Father. How about your wife, Father? Is she a good cook?”“Ah…well, Rabbi, that I cannot say, for I am not married.”“Not married? So what do you do for a screw?”“For a…what?”“I mean – where do you get your sex?”“Sex?” said the priest. “Alas, Rabbi, in my religion it is forbidden unto us, the servants of Our Lord, to partake of the ways of the flesh.”“You mean – you’ve never had sex?” asked the Rabbi.“No, I have not!” replied the priest.“Oho! You ought to try it… It’s better than pork!”The fifth question:Osho,Do you really think that nothing beautiful has ever come out of Italy?I am not an expert on Italy. I have not even tasted spaghetti!My first Italian sannyasin, Veet Sandeh, once prepared spaghetti for me, but it smelled so awful – it smelled just like the Italians! – that I could not eat it. And Veet Sandeh was one of the most perfect Italians. I don’t think she has ever taken a bath in her whole life.So I don’t really know whether anything beautiful has ever come out of Italy or not, but I can tell you what the experts say. They say that two things have come out of Italy, two beautiful things, but both are possessed by Sophia Loren.The sixth question:Osho,I must be the most greedy person in the whole world. What should I do about it?Are you confessing or bragging? The world is very big and what do you know about the whole world? It is impossible to be first in anything. Not even in greed can you be the first, because people are moving in circles. Nobody is the first. Don’t become so concerned with your greed and don’t feel guilty either. Everybody is greedy.Unless you know that you are deathless you will remain greedy; greed comes because of death. You may never have thought about it, but greed exists because we are afraid of death. And because death is there we want to have as much of life as possible. We are greedy. We want to eat more; we want to have as many women or men as possible; we want to have as much money as possible, because death is there. “Soon everything will be finished, so before it happens have all that is possible, don’t miss a thing.” That’s how greed arises. Greed is nothing but fear of death. Greed is out of fear. It is the fearful person who becomes greedy.The really fearless person is not greedy at all; he shares. He is not possessive, he is very happy to give. He goes on giving whatever he has. He goes on giving for the sheer joy of giving.You will remain greedy unless you experience your eternity: that death is not going to make any dent in you; that death is not going to make any change in you; that death is only of the body, your consciousness continues. Your consciousness is the only eternal phenomenon. Everything else changes, but not your consciousness. But you don’t know anything about consciousness, hence the greed.All the religions of the world have been teaching: “Don’t be greedy,” but it hasn’t made any difference. It has made people greedy for the other world, that’s all. It has made people greedy for heaven and heavenly joys, that’s all. But it hasn’t changed their greed; it has even increased their greed. I don’t tell you not to be greedy. I say be conscious, be more conscious and you will be surprised. As your consciousness grows, greed starts disappearing. It starts falling like dead leaves; it leaves no trace behind.Skolnik, the Scarsdale skinflint, awoke one morning to find that during the night his wife had died. After one glance at the stark form lying there beside him, he leaped out of bed and ran into the hall.“Daisy,” he called down to the maid in the kitchen. “Come to the foot of the stairs, quick!”“Yes,” she cried. “What is it?”“Only one egg for breakfast this morning!”Can you beat that?When the Internal Revenue Service hauled him in and wanted to know why he claimed his mother as an exemption, in spite of the fact that she had been dead for five years, Bernstein said, “Oh, but Mom is still very much alive in my heart.”A Jewish couple went to a shopping center and left their child and carriage with the others in front of the place. After shopping, they started to head for home. A few blocks later, the wife turned to her husband, who was wheeling the carriage, and cried in panic, “That’s not our child!”“Shut your big mouth!” he replied. “This is a better carriage.”People are living in greed. It will be difficult to be the first! Even to be aware that you are greedy is a good sign. It is a beginning, a good beginning, if you become aware of it. And remember, don’t feel guilty about it because that is a way of losing your awareness again. Don’t start repenting of it because repenting means you are thinking about the past, which is no more. Don’t start trying to be non-greedy because whatever you do will be greed, even the effort to be non-greedy will only be rooted in greed. One can become so greedy about being non-greedy.I have seen people who have become so greedy about being non-greedy that they go on and on renouncing this and that. Their greed has taken a new turn: it is standing upside down, it is doing a sirshasana, a headstand. Now they are greedy about non-greed; non-greed has become their possession, their money, their power. Now they are respected for their non-greed. They were respected first for their money, now they are respected for renouncing the money. Now they go on renouncing as much as they can – to the fullest extreme. They can renounce clothes, they can stand naked. They can renounce everything, but deep down the greed is there, they are still greedy. It is simply greed and nothing else. Now they are hoping that they will be rewarded in paradise – a great reward is waiting for them.So don’t try to become non-greedy. A greedy person cannot do anything about greed. And that’s so about other things too. An angry person trying not to be angry is not going to change his being. A violent person trying to be nonviolent will still remain violent; his violence will now take subtle forms.The only thing that is possible is to be conscious of your greed. I am not saying that you will be rewarded in paradise, I am not saying anything about the future. I am simply saying that if you become aware of greed it disappears. And when it disappears, life is a bliss here and now – not in the future, not as a reward.Greed cripples you, anger cripples you, violence cripples you. When they all disappear… And they all disappear through one method. A single method is enough – meditation is enough. All the diseases disappear with a single medicine.The words medicine and meditation come from the same root. Meditation is the ultimate medicine; it cures you of all ills.Remember Yoka again. He says: “Don’t cut the branches, cut the root…”Unconsciousness is the root. Cut the root, be conscious and herenow you are a new person. Herenow, your life is transformed, you become luminous, you radiate bliss, you radiate benediction; you become paradise.Wherever a man of awareness moves there is paradise. You cannot send a man of bliss, of awareness, of meditation, of satori, to hell because if he reaches hell, it will be paradise for him. And you cannot send an unconscious man into paradise because wherever he is he will find his hell. If it is not there he will invent it – his unconsciousness will project his hell.Reduced to a simple principle, the whole philosophy of all the awakened ones is: “Unconsciousness is hell, consciousness is heaven.”The seventh question:Osho,I was born on February 29, hence my birthday comes only once in four years. Is there some significance in it?January or February or March, February 28 or 29 – these are all arbitrary. These are our imposed ideas. Existence knows nothing of February, March. Even if you were born on April 1 there is no significance in it! You will not be a bigger fool than you are, you will be the same. What significance can February 29 have? But people want some significance.I have heard about only one accident that has happened on February 29: that is the birth of Morarji Desai.Zoo keeper to the tourists: “In this cage we see the leopard. This animal has one black spot for every day of the year.”Old lady: “What about a leap year?”Zoo keeper, thinking fast: “Ah yes – behold, madam, I lift his tail thus – behold the 29 of February!”And the last question:Osho,How do you manage to deliver so many beautiful discourses?What discourses? You call this yakkety-yak discourse? Discourse is a serious phenomenon! Discourse is something religious, holy, sacred. It is delivered in churches, temples. This place is not a church. This place belongs to the drunkards – it is a pub! What discourse? I have never delivered any discourse. Yes, I gossip, that is true, but there is no gospel in it and there is no art, no secret in it. It is very simple – my method is very simple.A great emperor was passing through a village. He was one of the most famous warriors of those days and he was a lover of archery. He loved people who were perfect archers. Passing through the village he saw on many trees, lampposts and garden fences, arrows sticking exactly in the middle of circles – exactly in the middle, at the centers of the circles. So many arrows everywhere… He was surprised.He asked, “Who is this man? I have never seen such a perfect archer! His aim is perfect, he never misses, not even by a fragment of an inch. The arrow always goes exactly into the center. Each target proves it.” He stopped his chariot, called to the people of the village and asked, “Who is this man?”They laughed and said, “Don’t worry about him. He is a madman!”He said, “What do you mean by madman? He may be mad, but he is the greatest archer I have seen.”They replied, “It is nothing to do with archery. He knows nothing about archery.”The king said, “But then it is a puzzle. How does he manage it?”They replied, “It is simple. First he shoots the arrow at the tree and then he goes and makes a circle around it!”That’s exactly my method. It is simple. Hence, you can ask anything. Whatever I want to say, I say it. First I shoot the arrow and then I draw a circle around it – just as a finishing touch!A parish priest was having a few words with his bishop and in the course of conversation said, “It’s all right for you, my Lord. When you prepare a sermon you can deliver it to several churches in the diocese, but I have to give two new sermons every Sunday.”The bishop replied, “You should be able to give a sermon on almost any subject at a moment’s notice, as I can.”“I’ll take you up on that,” said the parson. “Come to my church next Sunday and I will put you to the test.”The bishop agreed and in due course went to the pulpit to find a card with the one word constipation written on it. Without hesitation he started, “And Moses took two tablets and went out onto the mountain side.”Enough for today.

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

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/walking-in-zen-sitting-in-zen-05/

The first question:Osho,It feels that to be a witness is also a kind of thought. So what is the difference between the witness and a thought of the witness?Witnessing is not a thought, but you can start thinking about witnessing, you can make it a thought. The moment you make it a thought, it is no longer witnessing. Either it is witnessing or it is a thought; it cannot be both together.When you are witnessing, you are not thinking that you are witnessing. If you are thinking that you are witnessing, this is not witnessing at all; it is another kind of thought. If the witnessing is simple, there is no thought of witnessing at all. If the thoughts are just passing in front of your vision and you are witnessing them, and no idea arises in you that “I am witnessing,” then it is pure witnessing. It is not a thought at all, it is a state of no-thought, no-mind. You are simply reflecting whatever is passing by.The moment you say, “Aha! This is witnessing. So I am witnessing. This is what meditation is; this is awareness,” you have missed the point. You have fallen back into the mud of the mind. You are no longer a witness. You have become identified. Witnessing cannot be reduced to a thought.But your problem is significant. It is encountered by almost every meditator. We have become so habituated to witnessing in a wrong way. We think that we witness. We judge, we evaluate and think that we are witnessing. We think that we witness; it is not witnessing. We are associated with a wrong kind of witnessing and that idea lingers for a long time. We have become so conditioned to immediately reducing every experience into a thought. We never allow any experience to remain just a pure experience, even for a few moments.You come across a beautiful roseflower in the garden. The moment you see it, almost instantly you say inside, “How beautiful!” You can’t let that beauty sink in. The thought of beauty becomes a barrier. The moment you say, “How beautiful!” you have already started comparing it with other roses that you have seen in the past. You have started comparing it with all that you have heard about roses. You are no longer seeing this rose. You are missing its suchness. You have gone into the past. You are searching in your memory to find how many roses you have seen before and to declare: “This is the best one.” But this rose is no longer there in your awareness. Your awareness has become very clouded. So much smoke has come from the past, so much dust has arisen that your mirror is no longer reflecting the beauty. You are not now-here.Allow the rose and its fragrance, its beauty, its dance in the wind and the sun, to penetrate you. Don’t bring your mind in. There is no need to say it is beautiful. If it is, there is no need to say it; if it is not, then it is false to say it. Either it is or it is not. Creating a thought about it in any way is creating ripples in your consciousness. It is like throwing a pebble into a silent lake. Just a moment ago it was reflecting the moon and the stars so beautifully, but your pebble has created ripples; the moon and the stars have all become distorted. That’s what happens whenever a thought arises in you: your consciousness is disturbed, it starts wavering. Waves start arising in you. Now you are not capable of reflecting that which is.You will have to learn this new art of seeing things without judging; of seeing things without verbalizing; of seeing things without evaluating. See the rose, the bird on the wing, the night full of stars; see the river passing by, see the traffic. Listen to the songs of the birds or a train passing by. Start learning a new art of just being reflective, not bringing any thought in, not saying anything at all.It will take a little time – old habits die hard – but one day it happens. If you persist, if you are patient enough and if you go on and on working at cleaning your inner world, one day it happens. The benediction of that day is immense. In fact, that day you are born anew. You start seeing the same world with new eyes because your eyes are so clear. Your mirror reflects so deeply, so totally, without distortion, that trees – the same trees that you have seen before thousands of times – are far greener than they have ever been. And their greenness is no ordinary greenness. It is luminous, it is radiating light.It is the same world, the same people. A Buddha, a Jesus, walks in the same world – the same trees, the same rocks, the same people, the same sky – but he lives in paradise and you live in hell. The difference is created by the mind.It will take a little while to drop this mind. It has dominated you for so long that in the beginning it is difficult to suddenly disassociate yourself from it. It clings. It can’t leave its power over you so easily. Hence, it goes on coming in from the back door.You are sitting silently and a beautiful stillness arises. The mind comes in from the back door and says, “Look, how beautiful this moment is!” And it has taken you away. It came so silently, without making any noise and you were caught by it in such a subtle way, that you could not have been aware of it. You rejoiced, you thanked the mind, but it has destroyed your stillness.When stillness is really true there is no mind to say anything about it. When witnessing is true you are simply a witness. You don’t think, “I am witnessing.” There is no “I,” there is no thinking; there is only the witness – because all thinking and the “I” have all become contents, objects of your witnessing. And witnessing itself cannot be its own object. No mirror can reflect itself. Your eyes cannot see themselves. Your witness cannot witness itself, that’s impossible.Your question is relevant. You will have to be very, very careful, watchful. It is a razor’s edge. One has to be very cautious because if you fall, you fall into a deep abyss. The ordinary people cannot fall; they have nowhere to fall to – they are already at the bottom. But as you start moving higher, the possibility of falling down grows every day. When you reach the Everest of your consciousness, just a little slip, just a little wrong step and you will go rolling down into a deep abyss.The greater the meditation, the more is the danger of losing it – naturally. Only a rich man can be robbed, not a poor man. That’s why a beggar can sleep under a tree in the afternoon with the noise of the traffic and the marketplace; nothing disturbs him. He can sleep anywhere, he can sleep deeply. He has nothing to lose – no fear.Once, at night, a king came across a very strange man, a very luminous man, standing alert underneath a tree. He was so silent, so quiet and so alert. The king was curious: “Why is he standing there?” From his appearance he looked like a monk, one who has renounced the world. The king was a very cultured man and he thought, “It is not right to disturb him.” But it happened every night.That was the routine of the king: to go around the capital at night in disguise to see how things were going; whether the guards were on duty or not; mixing and meeting with people; going into the hotels and the theaters to find out how things were going – whether things were all right or not.Every night he would come across this man. He saw this man so many times that it became impossible to resist the temptation. One day he approached him and asked, “Excuse me, sir, I should not interfere – you look so silent – but why do you go on standing there the whole night? What are you guarding? Is there any treasure underneath this tree?”The mystic laughed. He said, “Not underneath this tree, but within me there is a treasure and I am watching it. It is growing every day and is becoming bigger and bigger, hence I have to be more and more alert.”The mystic continued: “You can sleep, you have nothing to lose. I cannot, I have much to lose. If I can remain awake I have much to gain.”The king was very impressed. He asked the mystic to come to his palace – he invited him. The monk agreed. The king was a little puzzled: a monk agreeing so soon, without even refusing once, is not thought to be right. A monk should say: “No, I cannot come to the palace. I have renounced the world. It is all futile. It is all dream, illusion, maya. I cannot come back to the world. I am happy wherever I am.”But this monk didn’t say anything. He was a Zen master. The king started thinking in his mind, “Have I been deceived by this man? Was he simply standing there every night just to ensnare me?”But now it was too late; he had invited him.The mystic came to the palace and lived with the king. Of course, he lived more joyously than the king because he had no worries, no cares about the empire, no problems or anxieties. He enjoyed good food. The king had given him the best room in the palace – and he lived just like an emperor.Six months passed. Now the king was boiling within and had to ask him, “What kind of renunciation is this? You are enjoying everything – servants, good food, good clothes and a beautiful palace.”And one day, while they were walking in the garden, he said to the mystic, “Can I ask you a question? Forgive me if you feel offended. This is my question: What is the difference now, between me and you?”The mystic looked at the king and said, “Why did you wait for six months? You could have asked me this question on the very first night. The moment you invited me and I accepted your invitation, this question arose in your mind. Why did you wait for six months? You tortured yourself unnecessarily. I was waiting for it at any moment. There is no question of my feeling offended – it is a natural question.“There is a difference, but it is very subtle. If you really want to know the difference, come with me. I cannot tell you here. I will tell you in a certain space, at a certain place. Come along with me.”They both went outside the city. The king said, “Now can you tell me?”The mystic said, “Come along.”When they were crossing the boundary of his empire – it was evening – the king said, “What are you doing? Where are you taking me? Now this is the end of my empire. We are entering somebody else’s kingdom and I would like to be answered. What is your answer? I am feeling very tired.”The mystic replied, “My answer is that I am going. Are you coming with me or not? I am not going back.”The king said, “How can I come with you? I have my whole empire, my wife, my children. How can I come with you?”The mystic said, “That’s the difference. But I am going!”Again the king saw the light, the beauty of the man and fell at his feet. He said, “Come back! I am just stupid. These past six months, I have missed. I have been thinking things which are really ugly. Forgive me and come back.”The mystic said, “There is no problem for me. I can come back, but you will think the same again. It is better for me now to go ahead – that story is finished, that chapter is closed – so that you can remember the difference.”The witness lives in the world just like a mirror, reflecting everything. He may be in a hut, he may be in a palace; it makes no difference. What difference does it make to a mirror, whether the mirror is in a hut or in a palace? What difference does it make to the mirror whether the mirror is reflecting beautiful diamonds or just ordinary stones? It makes no difference to the mirror.Witnessing is the art of transcending the world.Witnessing is the very essence of Zen, of religion itself. But don’t make it a thought – it is not a thought at all. Thoughts have to be witnessed. Even if the thought of witnessing arises, witness that thought. Remember that it is not witnessing, it is only a thought – it has to be witnessed. It is there in front of you. You are not it.The witness is irreducible to any thought; it always goes on sliding back. You cannot catch hold of it through any thought. It can witness each and every thought, the thought of witnessing included; hence, it can never itself become a thought.Next time when you are meditating remember it. Don’t start enjoying the thought: “This is a beautiful moment. My mind is silent, my being is still. This is witnessing!” The moment you say it, you have lost it.The second question:Osho,Please say something more about the man of Zen.The man of Zen is very ordinary – extraordinarily ordinary. He is so ordinary that there is every possibility if you meet him, you will not be able to recognize him. He lives just like you, eats like you, sleeps like you. He is in every way just like you. As far as his outside is concerned, he is not different from you at all.The difference is certainly there, but that difference is inner. He has an insight, he has a clarity. He has eyes and you are blind. He is awake and you are asleep. You are drunk: drunk with greed, drunk with lust, drunk with anger, ambition, ego.The man of Zen is simply not drunk; he is in his senses. He walks consciously, he sits consciously: walking in Zen, sitting in Zen. He is not in any way special. He is not like other so-called saints. He will not lie down on a bed of thorns or on a bed of nails, he will not stand on his head. He is not stupid, he is not an exhibitionist. He will not walk naked in the streets. He is not mad, he is not neurotic. He lives in a very ordinary way, in a very normal way.That’s why it is the most difficult thing to recognize the man of Zen. You can recognize a saint who walks on water – naturally, it is so obvious that he is special. But a man of Zen does not walk on water. He does not perform any miracles. He does not play any kind of egoistic games. He is not an ego, he is not even a person. He is just a presence, a nonentity. He is absolute nothingness. Only when one is absolute nothingness, is one full of awareness. Whatever he does, he does with totality. Only a man who is not drunk can do things totally. Otherwise one remains partial. Only a part goes on doing something and at the same time, other parts may be going against it, being destructive. You may be creating something with one hand and destroying it with the other. A man who is drunk does not know where he is going. He thinks he is on the right path, but he is dreaming.Barry Higgins, a traveling salesman, was driving home to London one afternoon after a hard-drinking lunch with a prospective customer. Through the rearview mirror he spied the flashing blue light of a police car. A shiver went up his spine and he grasped the steering wheel tightly to steady his driving. The blue light approached, a siren wailed and a police car overtook him with a hand signaling him to pull in and stop.Barry was nervous as he saw the policeman get out of his car. His breath was heavy and his hands were moist on the steering wheel. He wondered what he was going to say.The policeman came up and bent to speak through the car window. “Ay, ay, now then, had a few, eh?”Barry could not stop himself and blurted, “Ohh…g…good onsternoon, afterble, I…I’m not as think as you drunk I am!”The man of Zen is absolutely conscious – no greed, no anger, no jealousy, no ambition. These are all intoxicants, these are all drugs; they go on keeping you sleepy. It is a miracle how you manage your life with so many poisons running in your bloodstream, in your very being. That is the only difference; otherwise, from the outside, you will not know.There are other so-called saints who make outside differences because there is no inner difference. They have to stand naked, they have to torture their bodies, they have to go on fasting. They have to distort their bodies, cripple their bodies. They have to do something that makes them more special than you, “holier than thou.”A Zen man is not “holier than thou.” He has no idea of being in any way higher than you. He is simply living his nature.Yoka says:The man of Zen goes alone…That is his first characteristic. He is not part of a mob psychology. He is not Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, nor is he Jewish. He is not Indian, Japanese, nor Chinese – he cannot be. He never belongs to any crowd. He is alone. He is a rebel. He lives according to his light. He does not follow, he does not imitate. He has reached the goal.What is the goal? – the goal is not somewhere outside you. It is not there, far away like a star. It is within you, it is your own interiority. He has entered his own interiority. And the man who has reached his goal……can play on the path of nirvana.His life becomes a play. He is playful, he is not serious. He cannot be serious; the whole of life is a divine play, leela. He is part of it. He is just playing a role. He acts the role as beautifully as he can, as perfectly as he can, but he knows that the whole world is a big stage, a great drama – but nothing more. So he is not serious about it.The man of Zen has natural manners and is harmonious.He does not pretend to be special, he has natural manners. He is very human, utterly human. His humanity is superb, intense, absolute. He does not claim any sacredness and because he does not claim it, he is sacred – he is harmonious. He is not divided within himself, he is not in a constant fight with himself, he is not in a constant civil war. He has a melody, a music. If you sit by his side you will be able to listen to the music.Just the other day, Navanit asked: “Osho, whenever I come close to you, I immediately smell a certain fragrance. What fragrance is it?” I don’t use any perfume – I cannot. Navanit is a doctor, he knows; hence the question has become more pertinent to him. He says that he always finds the same fragrance whenever he is close to me.That fragrance has nothing to do with any perfume. It is the fragrance of harmony, it is the music. It expresses itself in a multidimensional way. Sometimes you will hear it as a silent sound like a murmur: the wind passing through the pine trees, or the sound of running water. Sometimes you will hear it as music and sometimes you will feel it as a smell, a beautiful fragrance. Sometimes you will see it as an aura, a light, very mysterious.But the man of Zen simply lives in harmony and out of harmony all these things are manifested.His spirit is simple, clean, pure and sincere…. His Zen, which no one sees, is treasure beyond all value.You can see his body, you cannot see his Zen. You cannot see his inner meditativeness, you cannot see his awareness unless you become aware yourself. You can know only that much which you have experienced.Navanit, you are blessed that you are feeling a certain fragrance. That means you are reaching to a certain depth, a certain height in your being.His Zen, which no one sees, is treasure beyond all value. This jewel, rare and of incalculable value, never changes however one uses it. And others can freely benefit from it on all occasions.The man of Zen is always overflowing with joy. You can share it. He is a giver: he gives delight, he gives joy, he gives beauty, he gives truth. He radiates truth, he radiates godliness, but so silently, without any declaration. He goes on pouring his blessings into existence. He is a blessing to the world.The third question:Osho,I know my love stinks, so why do I cling to the smell?We live according to the past; our lives are rooted in the dead past, we are conditioned by the past. The past is very powerful, that’s why you go on living in a certain pattern. Even if it stinks, you will go on repeating it. You don’t know what else to do; you have become conditioned. It is a mechanical phenomenon. And this is not only so with you, it is so with almost every human being – unless he becomes a buddha.To become a buddha means to get rid of the past and to live in the present. The past is immense, very huge, enormous, of millions of lives. You have lived in a certain way. Now, being here, you may have become aware that your love stinks, but that awareness is also not very deep; it is very superficial. If it becomes really deep, if it penetrates to the very core of your being, you will immediately jump out of it.It is as if your house is on fire you will not ask anybody how to get out of it. You will not consult the Encyclopedia Britannica; you will not wait for some wise man to come and tell you; you will not consider whether it is appropriate to jump out of the window or not – you won’t bother about anything. Even if you are taking a bath you will jump naked out of the window; you won’t even bother about clothes. When the house is on fire and your life is at risk, now everything else is secondary.If your love stinks – this has become your experience – then you will just come out of it. You will not simply ask a question, you will jump out of it. But I think that it is just an intellectual idea because each time you are in love, some misery arises; each time there is some conflict, some struggle, some fight, some jealousy, some possessiveness. So you have started taking an intellectual standpoint: “My love stinks, so why do I cling to the smell?” – because it is not yet really an existential experience for you.And it is your own smell. One becomes accustomed to one’s own smell. That’s why when people are alone they don’t experience that smell, they experience it only when they are together with somebody.When you are in love, you start showing your real face. Love is a mirror. The other starts functioning as a mirror. Every relationship becomes a mirror. Alone, you don’t experience your own smell – you cannot; one becomes immune to it. You have lived with it so long, how can you smell it? It is only with the other that you start feeling that he stinks and he starts feeling that you stink. And the fight starts… That is the story of all the couples all over the world.“Where are you going with that goat, Juan?” asked the policeman.“I’m taking him home to keep as a pet!” replied Juan.“In the house?”“Sure thing.”“But what about the smell?”“So what? He ain’t gonna mind the smell!”Your own smell is not disturbing to you. In fact, if it suddenly disappears you will feel a little jolted; you will feel a little uprooted. You will not feel your natural self; you will feel something has gone wrong.If you love and there is no jealousy, you will start wondering whether you love or not. What kind of love is this? There seems to be no jealousy! You love a man and if he goes with another woman once in a while, you don’t make much fuss about it. You take it for granted – it is perfectly good for a change. And if your man is happy, why not let him be happy? You love him. If you really love him you will respect his happiness too. He is not going forever.In fact, if once in a while couples are allowed a little freedom, they will not separate; divorces will drop in the world. Divorce exists only because marriage is too tight. Let marriage be a little more relaxed and divorce will disappear. Divorce is only a by-product of marriage. The tighter the marriage system, the more divorce becomes an absolute need. If divorce is not allowed, then you have double lives: one to show to the society and one to live.It is because of marriage that prostitution exists in the world. The whole blame goes to the marriage system. If people are a little more loving and less jealous, if they understand nature, it is simple. You eat the same food every day; you get fed up with it and once in a while you would like to go to the hotel. The hotel food may be worse than what you get at home, but even that is good – at least that makes your home food look better. When you come back the next day you feel so relieved that you are back home and you are so happy to have the same food again!The more man’s mind is understood, the more and more marriage will have to be made a little relaxed. It is perfectly okay to give a few days off in marriage. The woman should be allowed to have her boyfriends and the man should be allowed to have his girlfriends – at least, just as you have Sunday religion, a Sunday marriage! You will be surprised that your own wife looks far better. Again a honeymoon starts – a mini honeymoon. You again start from ABC.And being with many women and with many men does not destroy marriage – no, not at all. It is a very nonsensical idea that has prevailed over humanity: that it is destructive to marriage and family. It is not so – it is very supportive. It will help the family to be more joyous, less quarrelsome. Otherwise, the woman is constantly spying on the husband and the husband is constantly spying on the woman. What love can exist between two persons who are constantly at each other’s throats?Yes, your love stinks, as everybody else’s love stinks, but you feel it only when you are in a relationship. You have not yet felt that it really has something to do with you. Deep down you still feel that there must be something wrong with the other. That’s how the mind functions; it throws the responsibility on the other. It accepts itself and it is always finding fault in others.Several people are sitting in the front row of a movie theater. The show has already begun when suddenly there is a terrible smell.One of the spectators turns to the man sitting beside him and asks, “Did you shit in your trousers?”The man beside him answers, “Yes, why?”People accept themselves totally! Whatever they are doing is right: “Why? What is wrong in it?” They are his own trousers, so who are you to interfere? And freedom is everybody’s birthright!If your love stinks, try to find out what exactly it is that stinks. It is not love, it is something else. Love itself has a fragrance; it can’t stink, it is a lotus flower. Something else must be in it – jealousy, possessiveness. But you have not mentioned jealousy and possessiveness. You are hiding them. Love never stinks, it cannot; that is not the nature of love. Please try to see exactly what it is that creates the trouble. I am not saying to repress it. All that is needed is a clarity about it – what it is.If it is jealousy, I would only suggest one thing: be more watchful of your jealousy. When it arises next time, rather than becoming mad, close your doors, sit silently, sit in meditation, watch your jealousy. See exactly what it is. It will surround you like smoke, dirty smoke. It will suffocate you. You would like to go out and do something. But don’t do anything. Just be in a state of non-doing because anything done in a moment of jealousy is going to be destructive. Just watch. I am not saying repress it because that is again doing something.People are either expressive or repressive and both ways are wrong. If you express, you become destructive to the other person. Whoever is your victim will suffer and is going to take revenge. He may not take revenge consciously, but unconsciously it is going to happen.Just a few months ago, Krishna Bharti fell in love with a woman. Nothing extraordinary about it, but Deeksha went mad. Deeksha could not accept the idea. For centuries we have been told that if a man loves you or a woman loves you and the man or the woman goes to somebody else, that is a rejection of you.That is utter nonsense. It is not rejection; in fact, it is just the opposite. If a man loves the woman and he enjoys the woman, he starts fantasizing how it will be with other women. It is really the joy that this woman has given him that triggers his fancy. It is not that he is rejecting this woman. It is really an indication that this woman has been such a nourishment that he would like to see and know how other women are. If a little rope is given he is not going to go very far, he will come back because with the other woman it may be novelty. It will be something new, but it can’t be that nourishing because there will not be any intimacy. It will have something empty about it. It will be sex without love.Love needs time to grow, it needs intimacy to grow. It needs a really long time. It is not a seasonal flower that blooms within three, four weeks, but then within three, four weeks it is gone. It is a long, long process of intimacy. Slowly, slowly two persons melt and merge into each other, then it becomes nourishing. The other woman or the other man cannot be nourishing. It may be just an adventure, a thrill. But suddenly the feeling will arise – it is bound to arise – that it is good fun, but it is not nourishing. And the person will be back.Krishna Bharti would have been back, but Deeksha went mad. She behaved just like any other woman. But I was waiting… Sooner or later she was going to take revenge. Now she is taking revenge. Krishna Bharti fell ill, he was in hospital and Deeksha had a little freedom. She fell in love with her own handyman! He really proved handy! Now K.B. is in hell.There is no need to be so worried about it. I have sent K.B. a message: “Wait, don’t be worried. Just let her take revenge. It is good that the unconscious burden is finished.”If we understand each other a little more, if we understand human nature a little more, there should be no jealousy. But it is a past heritage of centuries.So I cannot say that you can drop it right now. You will have to meditate over it. Whenever it possesses you, meditate over it. Slowly, slowly the meditation will create a distance between you and the jealousy. The more the distance, the less jealousy will arise. One day, when there is no jealousy, your love releases such a fragrance that no flower can compete with it. All flowers are poor compared to the flowering of love.But your love is crippled because of jealousy, possessiveness and anger. Remember: it is not love that stinks because I have seen people who think it is love that stinks so they close up, they become closed; they stop loving. That’s what has happened to millions of monks and nuns down the ages; they became closed to love, they dropped the whole idea of love. Rather than dropping jealousy, which would have been a revolution, rather than dropping possessiveness, which would have been something of immense value, they dropped love. That is easy, that is not much; anybody can do that. To be a monk or to be a nun is very easy, but to love and not to be jealous; to love and not to be possessive; to love and let the other have the whole freedom is really a great achievement. Only then will you feel love and its fragrance.The fourth question:Osho,What do you think? Is Jesus coming back to earth again as he had promised or not?Once a man becomes awakened he cannot come back. He promises out of his compassion, but it is not possible. It is not possible because it is against the law of life. Jesus has promised to come back; Buddha also has promised to come back; Krishna has also promised to come back. Nobody has come yet and nobody is going to come back. It is against the law of life.They promise because of their compassion, their love. They promise because they see your misery, they see your sad state of affairs, they see your tears. So they promise and their promise fulfills a certain purpose. Because of their promise you go on remembering them and that remembrance helps you. Because of their promise you go on connecting yourself to them, surrendering to them and that surrendering helps. But they cannot fulfill their promise.Once a man is awakened there is no possibility of his being born again. One can be born only if something in him has still remained unconscious. Life is an opportunity to become conscious. It is a school, a training school, where people become centered, rooted, integrated. Once they have become integrated, once they have attained self-realization, they cannot be allowed back into the school. They disappear into the universal. They become part of existence.So the first thing to be remembered: Jesus, Krishna or Buddha cannot come, but that does not mean that awakened people will not be there. There will be people like Jesus, Buddha, Krishna – of the same quality. Maybe their faces will not be the same and their bodies may not be the same…Who would like to have a body like Jesus? You don’t know about Jesus, that’s why. He was only four feet five inches and a hunchback! It is said in the old scriptures that he was the ugliest man who has ever walked on the earth. Who would like to have his body?But his disciples have said he was the most beautiful man. They saw his beauty; that is of the inner, hence there is no contradiction. The disciples saw the inner. They saw the real Jesus, the pillar of his consciousness. They saw his interiority. They communed with his being. And yes, there has never been such a beautiful man.But the others saw only his body. The others could not see his soul, the others could not see his Zen. Only his disciples could see his Zen, his meditativeness, his love. Only his disciples could feel who he was, his divineness. They could say, “He is the most beautiful man who has ever walked on the earth.”The descriptions are so contradictory that it has been a problem for the historians to decide what is right. Both are right; there is no need to decide. It is not a question of choosing this or that.In the second place, even if it were possible for him to come back, do you think he is mad? What did you do with him when he was here? Just remember it; you tortured him as you have never tortured anybody else before him.Socrates’ death was not a torture. He was given poison and within minutes he was dead. His death was a silent one.The way Jesus was crucified is one of the most violent ways. Sometimes it takes three days for the person to die. Just nailing a man on a cross cannot kill him immediately. Slowly, slowly blood starts oozing from his body. Life starts oozing out, but very slowly. Even the weakest man will take at least six to eighteen hours to die. If the man is healthy he can take even three days or more. This is real hell! This is real torture!He was dying on the cross and people were throwing stones and abuse at him. Soldiers were poking their spears into his body and blood was coming out. He was alive, he was thirsty and they would not give him water. He was crying for water. One hundred thousand people had gathered to see this torture.What did you do with Jesus when he was here? I think that was enough to keep him away from this earth forever!A new arrival knocked on heaven’s door. Jesus was on duty and he opened the door.“Who are you?” he asked.“Adolf Hitler,” came the reply.“Adolf Hitler! You cannot come here. You are a megalomaniac bent on world domination. Get away!”“But I want to mend my ways!”“No way! Get out!”“Ah, if you will let me in, I will give you something.”“Well,” said Jesus, weakening a little, “what is it?”Hitler, in dress uniform, pulled off his special Iron Cross and showed it to Jesus. “Well,” he asked, “can I come in?”“Just wait here. I’ll go and ask my dad.”Jesus found God in his study. “Dad, there’s a newcomer at the gate who wants to come in.”“Who is he?”“Adolf Hitler.”“Adolf Hitler! That megalomaniac bent on world domination? He can’t come in here!”“But he has something very special to give me.”“What is it?”“His Iron Cross.”God thumped his chair. “What do you need an iron cross for? Hell, you couldn’t even carry that wooden one!”You forced poor Jesus to carry his own cross. He was weak and he had not slept the whole night. The whole night he was tortured and questioned and investigated. And then he had to carry that big wooden cross. He fell thrice on the road under the burden of the cross. He was hurt and wounded, but the soldiers whipped him again and forced him to carry his cross.He was only thirty-three years old. He had not seen much of life yet; in fact, it was just the beginning. Had he lived as long as Buddha, the world would have been far more enriched. Buddha lived eighty-four years; Mahavira lived eighty years; Krishna almost the same age. They died at a ripe old age. They saw the whole of life with all its ups and downs, success and failure, misery and joy, ecstasy and agony. They became mature and ripe. They could give something immensely valuable to the world.Jesus was allowed only three years. He started his ministry when he was thirty years old and he was killed when he was thirty-three. Just three years! He could not do much. He could have done great work for humanity, but we killed him. And now we are waiting for his next coming.If he comes, you will do the same again because you are doing the same again to people of that quality, of that insight. You have always been behaving as inhumanely as possible with the buddhas.Jesus is a buddha. That is the exact meaning of the word christ. Christ and buddha are synonymous. Buddha means the awakened one, christ means the crowned one. It is awakening that becomes your crowning, that makes you an emperor, that takes all suffering away from you and gives you the kingdom of God.No, even if he could come he would decide not to. Man has not learned anything. After Jesus, you did the same with al-Hillaj Mansoor. The behavior toward al-Hillaj Mansoor was even more ugly. And the same is the attitude of the masses even today. Nothing has changed. Man seems to be stagnant, stubborn – just living an unconscious life and repeating it.But why should you be waiting? You can find the awakened ones any time; they are always available. Fortunately, there is always somebody who is a buddha. Those who are real seekers are bound to find him because he is also seeking and searching for the real seekers. It is not a one-way search.If you have come here in search of me, I am also searching in my own way for you. It is not one-way. If you are here, you are here only because I have invited you to be here. You are here only because I have called you forth to be here.Now don’t waste your time thinking about whether Jesus will come or not. What do you want with Jesus? I am ready to give you all that Jesus can give to you. Be receptive, be surrendered because he will ask for the same conditions to be fulfilled. He cannot just deliver you as you are. You will have to fulfill a few conditions. You will have to drop your ego; that is the basic requirement. Fulfill that.I am your Jesus. Of course, the body is different, the mind is different, but the consciousness is never different. Two awakened persons are exactly the same. They belong to the same dimension, the same fragrance, the same harmony; the same bliss, the same godliness.The fifth question:Osho,Is there a place for competitive sport in the new commune?In the new commune there will be a new organization called: “Athletics Anonymous.” When you get the urge to play golf, baseball, or anything else involving physical activity, someone will be sent over to drink with you until the urge passes.The sixth question:Osho,I am a Jew, Italian and a psychologist! Is there any hope for me?You are really fortunate! There is every hope for you; in fact, you cannot miss. Even if you want to miss you cannot because the Jew is going to kill the poor Italian; the psychologist is going to kill the poor Jew and when there is nothing left for the psychologist, they almost always tend to commit suicide!And the last question:Osho,Are you pushing my pleasure button? When I sit in lecture I am all smiles and it takes me hours to wipe it off my face.Parmita, you fool! Why do you try to wipe it off? I make so much effort to create it and you take hours to wipe it off. Never do it again – so that it becomes something permanent, essential, natural with you; something that surrounds you.But I know people are afraid of smiling because if you are caught red-handed by others smiling for no reason at all, they will think you are crazy. So people repress their smiles. That’s why Parmita must have been trying to wipe it off.But when I push the button, I really push the button and now I am going to push harder! You will not be able to wipe it off even if you make an effort for hours or for days. Enjoy it! And why does it matter if people think you are crazy? Why be worried about it? There is nothing wrong in being crazy. Here, at least, everything is crazy.Just the other day somebody asked, “Osho, there are so many clocks in the ashram. Why do they all show different times?” Just crazy – cuckoo clocks! If they all show the same time, what would be the need for so many clocks? One would be enough!Parmita, a joke for you:A young nurse’s first duty on her new job was to bathe the man in room 305. She performed her task and quickly returned to the nursing station.Her supervisor, an old, seasoned nurse asked, “How was he?”“He was doing fine,” she said, “but there was a very strange thing… He had the word little tattooed on his prick.”The older nurse was very curious and decided to check it out. She returned forty-five minutes later, hair messed up, clothes askew and said to the young nurse, “Honey, that tattoo does not say ‘little.’ It says, ‘Little Rock, Arkansas, Pride of the South’!”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 06 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why do I want to wake up when, as you say, “Awakening only happens when I am not?” This seems very paradoxical.The ego is not your real self; the ego is a false entity, arbitrary. It is the ego that is your sleep, that surrounds you like a darkness, like a cloud. Hidden behind this darkness is your real self, your real being; which wants to wake up; which wants to get out of all this smoke, out of all this darkness; which wants to get out of the prison of the ego.There is really no paradox, it only appears so. It appears paradoxical. Your question seems relevant… But you have two selves. One is the real: the one that you were born with; the one that was even before your birth; the one that will be there even when death has happened; the one that is running underneath like a hidden current. The other is created by you, by your family, by your church, by your society, by your state, by the crowd.This false one is a pretender; it pretends to be the real self. The real self wants to come out of this unreal one surrounding it. It is a constant suffering for the real self because the real is being suffocated by the unreal; the real feels imprisoned in a dark cell. The real self is vast and has become confined in a very small space. It is crippling and paralyzing.So when I say that awakening happens only when you are not, I mean when your false ego is no more. That is the only “I” you are aware of right now – that is the “I” you are identified with. Hence, I say that whatever you know of yourself will not be there when awakening happens. That does not mean you will not be there. You will be there, but that “you” will be so new, so utterly discontinuous with this “you” that you are living right now, that it is better not to mention it at all.Hence, Buddha is silent about it. Not only that, if you insist, he calls your real self anatta, a no-self. He calls it thus for the simple reason that to call it also a self may be confusing. The false is known as the self; if the real is also called a self, you may get confused. You are already very confused. Buddha calls it a no-self.But don’t lose heart. Don’t be worried and don’t be afraid that you will die completely. As you are, you will not be there, but you will be there as you should be. Your natural, spontaneous being will be there.Buddha is also right in calling it a no-self because when the real self is there you don’t have any idea of “I.” The “I” is also a thought. The real self has no idea of “I”; the real self is one with the universal self. It is not separate from existence, it is not an island. The unreal self is separate and creates separation, hence, the unreal self creates misery. To be separate from the whole is to be miserable. To be one with the whole is bliss. The paradox is only apparent; there is no paradox in reality.One Sunday morning at the parish of St. Mary’s, Little Wakefield, the signboard announcing the subject of the day’s sermon read: “And forgive us our trespasses.”A few yards away, stuck into the grass, was another sign which read: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”Just like that, there is no real contradiction, but it appears to be there. On the one hand, a sign says: “And forgive us our trespasses,” and on the other hand another sign says: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” But they are not concerned with the same object; their meaning is totally different.When I say that you will not be there, I am talking about the artificial self – the one which you are not, but which you have come to believe that you are. Your real self will be there – the one which you are but which you have forgotten completely.The second question:Osho,Please comment on these words of Yoka: By zazen we can obtain directly to the ultimate truth. The scholars like to teach others but have no deep convictions themselves. Once you have revealed your prejudices you can see your true self. How can you wander off into external struggles?Yoka’s words are always tremendously beautiful. He is one of the greatest Zen masters. There have been many Zen mystics, but there is a difference between a master and a mystic.A mystic is one who has known the truth, but is absolutely incapable of relating it to others. He has no means, he cannot devise methods, he has no skills. He cannot paint it, sing it, dance it, and he cannot say it. He is utterly dumb. The experience leaves him almost drunk – utterly drunk. You can see that something has happened, something of tremendous import. You can feel a certain vibe around him. You can try to understand what has happened. But from his side there is no effort to communicate, to commune. He is so dazed by what he has seen, he is in such an awe that he has forgotten language. He has entered into no-mind and he has forgotten the way to the old mind. First, he used to live in the mind, then he tried hard to find the way toward no-mind. Now he is in no-mind, but he has forgotten the way to the mind. He cannot use the mind – he has lost his mind. He is almost, to all practical purposes, mad – absolutely joyous, overflowing with bliss, beauty, grace; something worth seeing, something of the beyond, but of no practical use.The master is one who has reached the ultimate, but is capable of coming back down to the world where you are. The master is one who has reached the Everest of consciousness, but is able to come down back to the dark valley where millions of people are still living. To communicate to them something about the incommunicable, to make a few gestures toward the highest peak. Maybe one in a million will be able to look at the moon where his fingers are pointing, but even that is more than enough.The master is something, plus. The mystic knows, but cannot help you to know. The master knows and can help you to know.Yoka is a master, a master of great skill. Hence, his words have to be meditated upon – his each word is significant. He says:By zazen we can obtain directly to the ultimate truth.First: By zazen… Zazen means just sitting and doing nothing. That is the most unique phenomenon in Zen; nowhere else has it happened. No other religion has been able to create this device of just sitting. Every religion provides you with something to do: chant a mantra, say a prayer, repeat certain words from the holy scriptures or go through a ritual, but do something. Physical exercises, yoga, or some mental exercises: visualization, concentration, contemplation. But one thing is certain: all the religions have provided you with something to do.Zen says – and there is great insight in it – that if you go on doing something, the mind will go on living; you will never be able to transcend it. You may be able to control it, but control is not transcendence. You may be able to make it more virtuous, but to be virtuous is not to know the unknowable. To be virtuous is a choice and whenever you choose you are choosing bondage. All choices lead to bondage.Somebody becomes a sinner – he has chosen iron chains; somebody becomes a saint – he has chosen golden chains, beautiful chains, valuable chains. But chains are chains; whether they are made of gold or of iron makes no difference. In fact, golden chains are far more dangerous because with the iron chains sooner or later you will get fed up, you would like to get out of them – they are humiliating. With the golden chains you may feel that they are not chains at all, they are ornaments. You may start loving them, you may start clinging to them – they are so valuable! You will be happy that you have them. You will look on others who don’t have them as poor people, unfortunate people.Your saints look on sinners as unfortunate. They feel sorry for them because they think that the sinners are bound for hell and they are going to heaven. Both are in hell. Hell is divided in two parts – let me tell you the truth. In one part saints live, in the other part, sinners. Sinners live a little more of an uncomfortable life – a third-class prison you can call it. In India there used to be class divisions during the British Raj: third class for the criminals and first class for the political leaders – for Mahatma Gandhi and Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, etcetera. Just like that, in hell there are two divisions: one is for sinners, the other is for saints.Saints are provided with a little comfort. They have already suffered too much in being saintly, hence they have to be compensated. The sinners have enjoyed too much, hence a little suffering will bring balance, but there is not much difference. Whenever you choose you are in a bondage.Zen teaches choiceless awareness: neither this nor that, neti-neti. It teaches you absolute negation. That is the meaning of zazen: doing nothing, neither singing a song from a film nor saying a prayer; just sitting silently, doing nothing.The moment you do something, the mind becomes powerful because the mind is the doer. The moment you are a doer, the ego comes back. The ego is a doer. When you are in a state of non-doing, the mind has to cease, the ego has to disappear.Non-doing is the death of the mind and the ego; that is the meaning of zazen.Yoka says: By zazen we can obtain directly to the ultimate truth. There is no need to wait, there is no need to grow gradually. One can know the truth directly. Nothing else is needed; one can know the ultimate truth immediately. It is a quantum leap from the mind to the no-mind.Learn the art of just sitting silently, doing nothing. The spring comes and the grass grows by itself.Zen is a method of sudden enlightenment, not of gradual enlightenment. There is no question of gradual enlightenment, there is no question of degrees. Either you have it or you don’t have it. Zen says: “Take the jump, be courageous, and have it in its totality. It is possible right now. It is possible only now. Either now or never.”The scholars like to teach others but have no deep convictions themselves.Avoid the scholars – they don’t know themselves. They have learned from the scriptures; they have not experienced it directly, they have not seen it directly. They have not realized it. It is not their own experience. Avoid the scholars.Once you have revealed your prejudices you can see your true self.All that is needed is to drop your prejudices. Your mind consists of your prejudices: of being Indian, Japanese, Italian, German; of being Hindu, Jewish, Mohammedan.That’s why I go on hitting the Italians, the Germans, the British, and the Indians. Now I am getting so many requests from Spanish sannyasins who are writing letters: “Osho, why are you leaving us out?” And Australian sannyasins are writing: “Have you completely forgotten about Australia?” Wait! One by one, I am going to hit everybody! I am not going to leave anybody out.All your prejudices have to be destroyed, demolished. Only then will you be able to come to your reality.Yoka says:How can you wander off into external struggles?Once you have dropped all your prejudices – your mind – all your extroversion disappears, all your ambitions disappear. Then there is nothing to achieve. You have already found the treasure of treasures: the kingdom of God.The third question:Osho,Why can I take almost everything lightly except my husband, Pravasi? Why do I fight him so? Why do I always try to change him?It is one of the most ancient stories. It has nothing to do with you or Pravasi in particular. The institution of marriage is an ugly institution – the ugliest, in fact. All other ugly institutions are based on the institution of marriage.The day marriage disappears from the world, states will disappear, nations will disappear because they all need the family as a base. Churches will disappear, religions will disappear. The whole past is rooted in the family and the family is rooted in the invention of marriage.Marriage is ugly because it destroys the freedom of two persons. Freedom is the ultimate value for me. Anything that destroys freedom is against human nature. When your freedom is destroyed you are angry, you are in a rage. And on whom are you going to throw all your rage? The wife finds the husband, the husband finds the wife. They are close, available and bound together in such a way that escape is not easy. The society has made it in every way difficult or almost impossible.Marriage has an entrance, but no exit. Or, even if the exit has become possible in a few countries, it is not really respected. It is condemned, a subtle condemnation. Marriage is praised. The priests go on saying, “Marriages are made in heaven,” and “This is something sacred.” The whole establishment depends on the sacredness of marriage. But it is not sacred, it is really very ugly. It has destroyed the whole of humanity.And you cannot take revenge on the priest because he is not directly there; he functions in a very indirect way. You cannot take revenge on the politician; he is very diplomatic. All that you can find is the other person – the wife, the husband – tangibly, physically present, so your anger starts pouring out on the other.Husbands and wives are continuously quarreling, fighting, as if they were enemies. It is very rare to find a couple which is friendly. They show friendliness when they are with others; when guests come, immediately they start smiling. They wear masks before their children, they avoid clashes. They don’t fight on the streets, but they are fighting twenty-four hours a day. Their fight takes so many forms; it is multidimensional. It dissipates their energy. And they have to live together, so somehow they have to make it up.Sex just becomes a method for making things smooth, for making up. First fight, then, because you have to live with the other person, use sex to show love and tenderness – so that for the time being there is peace. But that peace does not last long; it is just a cold war, not peace. Again the war will erupt. In the morning, the same story will be repeated. And unless we become aware that something very stupid has been propounded in the name of marriage, this is going to continue.My sannyasins, at least, should become aware: your husband hasn’t done anything wrong to you; your wife hasn’t done anything wrong to you. If anything is wrong, it is the very bondage, the very feeling of bondage that is wrong. Drop that bondage. Give each other more freedom. Respect freedom more than anything else because freedom is the ultimate value – even higher than love. If your love brings freedom, it is good. If your love does not bring freedom, it is not good – it is not love either.Your love brings jealousy, possessiveness; it never brings freedom. It destroys all possibilities of freedom. And it started from the very beginning…Forget what your rabbi told you! What does he know about romance? Here’s the way it really happened:“Adam, baby,” said Eve as she presented him with a bouquet of forget-me-nots she had picked in the Garden of Eden, “do you absolutely and truly love me?”“Sure,” said Adam. “Who else?”Your story started then!I have heard that every day when Adam returned from his day’s adventures, in the night, Eve would count his ribs!It is a very ancient story. In the very beginning, something went wrong. You may know, you may not know that Eve was not the first woman. God first created Adam and Lilith. The first night, the honeymoon night – the first honeymoon – a quarrel started because there was only one bed. And in those days double beds were not available. This is the story of the beginning; there was just a single bed. So who should sleep on the bed and who should sleep on the floor?Of course, Adam was as much a male chauvinist pig as anybody! He was muscular, more powerful, so he possessed the bed. But Lilith was not willing to agree. She said, “We are equal, we are made equal.” She was the founder of the Lib Movement, the real founder!They fought so much. I don’t know whether clothes were thrown at each other or not, but if there were clothes, they must have been thrown. In the middle of the night they knocked on God’s door and Lilith said, “This cannot go on. Either I have to be accepted as an equal or I am finished with this man.” So the marriage was not consummated.And God, being himself a man, of course favored Adam. So he dissolved Lilith and by taking out a rib from Adam’s body, he created Eve. To make sure that Eve was always going to be secondary, he took just a part of Adam’s body, not more than that, so that she could not claim equality. She would have to sleep on the floor!Now what kind of foolishness is this? Just a double bed was needed! Our Asheesh could have done it – it was so simple. But God was very miserly.You are simply repeating an old story, an old pattern. Get out of this old pattern. Being a sannyasin, that should be the first thing.There is no need to take your husband Pravasi seriously. Why that poor man? What has he done to you? If you can take everything else lightly, why take your husband seriously? Seriousness is a disease. When you take somebody seriously, sooner or later you will take revenge because you cannot remain serious for long. One wants to be happy and take things in fun.But you alone are not at fault. Pravasi must also be making sure that he is being taken seriously. Every husband has been doing that for thousands of years: he should be taken seriously – he is no ordinary person, he is your husband!In India, husbands have taught the women: “Your husband is your god.” Husbands teaching the wives! And they have forced the poor women to accept them as their gods. But they take revenge – they are bound to take revenge. They cannot accept it. No being can accept such indignity.But the woman’s way is more subtle. The man’s way is gross; he imposes his superiority by beating his wife. The wife imposes her superiority by torturing him in very subtle ways – in such subtle ways that he cannot even defend himself.When somebody is fighting with you, attacking you in a gross way, there is a possibility of defending yourself. You can learn karate – Satchidananda can help you – you can give him a few good kicks. Every woman should learn karate because enough is enough. So when your husband tries: “Take me seriously,” you can give him some good karate kicks. You should learn karate shouts too, so that the whole neighborhood knows what is happening.Life has to be light. Neither the wife has to be taken seriously nor has the husband to be taken seriously. Seriousness is not a good thing. Between two persons, seriousness creates a wall; it destroys intimacy. But if you are bent upon dominating each other, naturally you have to be serious. You cannot dominate playfully. If you become playful and take things in fun, you cannot be dominant, you cannot have any ego trip. The ego functions only in the climate of seriousness.“Dear,” asked the husband, “what exactly is hypnotism?”“Hypnotism,” replied his wife, “is getting a man into your power and making him do whatever you want him to do.”Snorted the husband, “That’s not hypnotism – that’s marriage!Husbands are trying to force their wives to be just shadows to them. And the wives are trying to force the husbands to be just shadows to them. The whole idea is inhuman, irreligious, insane, neurotic.If you really want to celebrate life, don’t make such demands on life. Take things nonseriously. Remember, how long has it been since you laughed with your husband? How long has it been since you danced with your husband informally? Not in a formal setting, not at some marriage, or in some Rotarians’ meeting or Lions’ meeting and not in some formal setting, but just out of sheer joy. How long has it been since you sat silently together listening to music, not arguing, not talking, not nagging; not doing all that nonsense that goes on in the name of marriage?A wall is created between the wife and the husband. The society perpetuates the wall. And you are so stupid that you go on helping the society to destroy your relationships, to destroy the beauty of your relationships.Walking down M.G. Road, the middle-aged guy said to his wife, “Hey, did you see that pretty girl smiling at me?”“That’s nothing,” said the wife, “the first time I saw you I laughed out loud!”A Frenchman came home early one day and found his best friend in bed with his wife.Shaking his head in disbelief, he said, “You know I have to, Pierre – but you?”Mr. Schmendrick came home earlier than expected and found his wife in bed with a strange man.“What are you two doing?” he bellowed.“See what I mean?” said the wife to her lover. “A schnook!”The Bravermans married off their last daughter and decided to sell their house and move into a furnished apartment.Mr. Braverman showed his wife the apartment he had rented.“I don’t like it,” said Mrs. Braverman.“Why not?” asked Mr. Braverman.“There are no curtains in the bathroom. Every time I take a bath the neighbors will be able to see me in the nude!”“Don’t worry,” said her husband, “when the neighbors see you in the nude, they’ll buy the curtains!”“Ah, yes, my late wife was a most remarkable woman,” the mild old Englishman told one of his cronies on a park bench in London. “A very religious woman,” he continued. “Never missed a day in church and at home it was prayers and psalm-singing from morning to night.”“How did she come to die?” the friend inquired.“I strangled her.”You say: “Why do I always try to change him?” Stop! Otherwise, if he strangles you, it will be difficult to save you. Every wife goes on trying to change the husband; that is a subtle strategy to dominate. It is a condemnation: “You are wrong and you have to be put right.” And husbands can’t defend themselves because they do a few things which they themselves think are bad, so they can’t defend themselves.For example, they smoke and admit that it is wrong, so the wife goes on nagging them, “Stop smoking!” In fact, the more she nags, the more the husband has to smoke because he becomes more nervous. And when he is nervous, there is no other escape than smoking. If he does not smoke, he will strangle the wife! So he strangles a cigarette, or he starts chewing gum; otherwise he will chew on the wife! He has to do something just to keep himself engaged, so that this moment of anger passes by.The wife has a good point there; she is just doing it for your sake – for your health, for you to live a long life. And the husband wants to die as soon as possible. With this woman… To live a long life! He goes on smoking more in the hope that smoking really does kill!He drinks and you are against it – and he is against himself because the whole atmosphere is that he has been told it is wrong and he has accepted the idea. So he cannot say that he is right – he has no guts to say that he is right. He has to accept that the wife is right. And wives don’t smoke, they don’t drink, they don’t gamble, they don’t do anything wrong. They are so saintly! That is one good thing about being saintly – you can torture everybody! In fact, if you cannot torture everybody you will not be a saint at all – the whole joy is lost.Wives are very holy and very religious for the simple reason that they can torture their husbands, they can torture their children, they can torture everybody. They are so holy; in comparison to them, everybody is a sinner.The husband comes home shaking, trembling. He knows that he is doing wrong things. And there is nothing wrong in smoking. There is nothing wrong if you drink once in a while; it is absolutely human. Have you ever seen any animal smoking? That makes you distinct! Otherwise, what is distinctive about you? Have you seen any animal drinking, going to the pub, carrying bottles of beer? That makes you human; nothing wrong in it!Just the other day I received a letter. A woman from Vinoba Bhave’s ashram had come to see our ashram. She could not see anything else. She writes that she had no time to come and listen to the lecture, no time to participate in the meditations, but she had enough time to go to the Blue Diamond and to other hotels to see what sannyasins were eating. She writes: “I have found out that not all sannyasins are vegetarians and they drink. And, Osho, you should stop them from doing this because if they are religious, if they are meditators, how can they be nonvegetarians and how can they drink?”I don’t see that there is any problem. Jesus used to drink and he was religious – as religious as Buddha – in fact, a little more religious, because Buddha must have been a little afraid that if he drank, his religiousness might be lost. Jesus must have been absolutely certain about his religiousness; that a little drink here and there did not make much difference. And, as far as alcohol is concerned, it is absolutely vegetarian – nothing wrong in it.But the woman took note of these things. In the first place, a woman; in the second place, coming from a Gandhian ashram… So, doubly wrong! That was all that she could find.Mohammed was not a vegetarian, neither was Ramakrishna. I don’t think that Krishna was a vegetarian, nor Rama, nor the seers of the Upanishads, nor the rishis of the Vedas. They were not vegetarians. Still they attained to the ultimate. So just what you eat and what you drink can’t make much difference.I am not telling you to eat meat. I am simply telling you that if it is possible, it is cleaner not to eat meat. But it has nothing spiritual about it. It is aesthetic not to eat meat, it is poetic not to eat meat, but it has nothing religious about it. I am not telling you to become drunkards, but I cannot say that it is unspiritual; once in a while, getting a little ecstatic from a little drink is perfectly okay and human.My whole approach is human. I don’t want you to become sad and serious holy people. We are tired of all these saints!Please don’t try to change him. Love means acceptance, accepting the other as he is. These are the ways of hate. Trying to change someone is not love. And don’t be after him. He has not done anything wrong in getting married to you. Don’t make him suffer too much. He has not done anything wrong, so why punish him so much? Give him freedom. In giving freedom you will find your freedom too, because we can get freedom only if we give freedom.When two persons give freedom to each other, only then can love grow. In absolute freedom, absolute love grows. And when love and freedom are together, their beauty is immense.My sannyasins have to live freedom, love, meditation, bliss. Drop all these wrong patterns of creating misery for each other.The fourth question:Osho,Why are you so against knowledge?Knowledge is destructive of something immensely valuable in you; it destroys your wonder. It is through wonder that one becomes aware of godliness, not through knowledge. You need wondering eyes like small children. You need the capacity to feel awe before the sunrise, before the sky full of stars, before a roaring ocean. If you cannot feel awe you cannot feel godliness because godliness is a mystery. It is available only to those who are capable of feeling awe, who are capable of being mystified.Knowledge destroys wonder, destroys the capacity to feel awe. It makes you capable of explaining away everything. It takes away all poetry from life. It takes away all meaning from life. The knowledgeable person is never surprised by anything. He has explanations for everything – why should he be surprised? In fact, no explanation is true. Explanations don’t explain anything at all. The mystery remains. The mystery is infinite.But the knowledgeable person becomes so burdened by his knowledge that he loses the mirrorlike quality of reflecting the beauty, the benediction, the dance, the ecstasy of existence.Hence, I am against knowledge because I am in favor of knowing. Knowing is a totally different phenomenon. Knowing means innocence; knowledge means cleverness, knowledge is cunning. Knowing is simply a heart phenomenon, knowledge is a head thing. Knowledge means you have a lot of information, means you have gathered much information in your memory; your memory has become a bank. Your memory is nothing but a biocomputer. It does not make you wise – no, not at all; you can repeat only that which has been put into your memory in the first place. Memory can never give you any original experience, any original insight. It takes away many things and gives you nothing – except that you feel more egoistic because you think you know.Strolling through the card room of a business club, Stimson was surprised to see three men and an Airedale terrier playing poker. Pausing to watch, he commented on the extraordinary performance of the dog.“He’s not so smart,” said the Airedale’s owner. “Every time he gets a good hand he wags his tail!”Perkins dropped over to visit Nelson, a new neighbor. They were sitting in the den talking, when a dog came in and asked if anyone had seen the Sunday Times. He was handed the newspaper and left.“That’s remarkable,” exclaimed Perkins. “A dog that reads!”“Oh, don’t let him fool you,” said Nelson. “He just looks at the comics.”Dixon, seated in a movie theater, noticed that the man in front of him had his arm around the neck of a huge Afghan hound that occupied the seat next to him.The dog was watching the picture with obvious understanding for he snarled softly when the villain spoke and yelped joyously at the funny lines.Dixon leaned over and tapped the man in front of him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, but I can’t get over your dog’s behavior.”“Yeah, I’m surprised too,” said the man. “He hated the book.”The knowledgeable person becomes absolutely incapable of experiencing surprise, of experiencing the mysterious, the miraculous. Even if God stands in front of him he will say, “So what?” Nothing can surprise him, hence nothing delights him.Jesus says, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter into the kingdom of God.”Knowledge has to be put aside, so that you can reclaim again those beautiful moments of your childhood when you were running after butterflies, collecting seashells and colored stones on the seashore; thinking that you had found a treasure. Those colored stones were far more significant to you than Kohinoors. You have to regain that fairyland. You have to look again with those eyes at the world; it is full of godliness. The birds singing, a distant call of the cuckoo, the flowers… Everything is so wonderful that wherever you look, wherever you move, you would like to give thanks, you will feel grateful. You would like to kneel down on the earth and pray. You will not need to go to any church or to any temple; there is no need. The whole existence becomes the temple – it is the temple.I am against knowledge because knowledge hinders your wisdom. Unless you put knowledge aside, your nature cannot explode into intelligence. Put knowledge aside and you will be in for a great surprise – you start behaving in a different way, in a spontaneous way.Knowledge is ready-made; it keeps you tethered to the past. Hence, all your responses are out of date, never to the point; always falling short, and are never adequate, can never be adequate. Life goes on changing every moment, it is always new. And your response is not a response, it is a reaction; it comes from the past. You have a ready-made answer. You have not even looked at the situation and you have repeated the ready-made answer like a gramophone record.Hence you lag behind life. And if you lag behind life you can’t have blissfulness in your being. You will always feel that you are missing, you will always feel that something is missing. What is that something? You are not in step with life. You will always dream that you are rushing and running toward a station; by the time you reach it, the train is moving away from the platform. That dream is symbolic; it simply shows that you are never alive to the moment, you are always late. It is because of your past and because you think you already know the answers. Hence you never listen to the questions, you never listen to the situation that is confronting you.A Zen story…Two temples were traditionally antagonistic to each other. Both priests had a small boy to run errands and both priests told the boys, “Don’t talk to the boy from the other temple. We are enemies!” They were afraid that boys being, after all, boys they may start becoming friendly with other. If the priests had not said anything they may not have thought about it, but when they insisted that they should not talk to each other, of course, the temptation was too great.So one day, one boy asked the other boy when they met on the road, “Where are you going?”The other boy said, “Wherever the wind takes me.”Listening to philosophical discussions and discourses, he had also become philosophical.The other boy was almost dumb. He could not think of what to say now. And then he thought, “My master is right – these people are dangerous! I am asking a simple question, ‘Where are you going?’ and he is talking metaphysics!”He went back. He told the master, “I am sorry that I didn’t obey you, but this has happened.”The master said, “This is very bad – we have to defeat him! It has never been so. We have always been victorious in every argument with the other temple. So tomorrow you ask him again, ‘Where are you going?’ and when he says, ‘Wherever the wind takes me,’ ask him, ‘And if the wind is not blowing at all, then?’”The boy was very happy! He arrived a little earlier, stood there, waited and repeated many times what he was going to say in order to become perfectly clear about it.The other boy came and he asked, “Where are you going?”And the other boy said, “Wherever my feet take me.”Now the answer was irrelevant; whatever he had prepared was meaningless. He was again at a loss. He asked the master again.The master said, “Those people are cunning and crafty! Now, whenever he says, ‘Wherever my feet take me,’ you ask him, ‘If you were born paralyzed, then what?’”Again the boy came. He asked, “Where are you going?”The boy said, “I am going to fetch vegetables.”Life is like that. You come with a prepared question and it changes, it says, “I am going to fetch vegetables.” No prepared answer is going to help. Knowledge is not going to help as far as life is concerned. The knowledgeable person is almost a dead person; he lives in his grave.Come out of your graves. Live more spontaneously, more responsibly. Respond to the moment. Listen to the moment and act accordingly. Then your act will be total because it will arise out of the present; it will reflect the actual situation. It will be really meaningful, significant, satisfying, fulfilling. And you will find that you are no longer missing. You are in step with life, you are in harmony with life.Innocence is always in harmony with life. To be harmonious is to be enlightened. To be harmonious is the only way to know the ultimate truth.The fifth question:Osho,Why do the Jaina monks live naked?They suffer from clothestrophobia!The sixth question:Osho,Whenever I get off on the jokes you crack, underneath my laughter I get run over by a bulldozer and end up feeling like a mashed potato! How long can an over-and-over-mashed potato survive?Have you survived yet? Are you still there?The distraught woman went to hospital and said, “It is my husband – he was run over by a steam roller. Could you tell me which ward he’s in?”The nurse said, “Ah, he must be the one who is in wards four, five and six!”Here you see that all are mashed potatoes! It is very difficult to know who is who – just orange potatoes!Your question is coming a little too late. You are finished already. Now nothing can be done. You can’t put a mashed potato back together again. That is impossible!The last question:Osho,I work for the Osho Ashram, Pune, India. Please… Tell me a joke!Why a joke? I am not miserly! I will tell you three jokes!The first:The Italian bride and groom went into the honeymoon suite. The bride, eager to go but still a trifle bashful, insisted that they turn off the light and undress in the dark.She made it into bed in seconds and lay there sighing deeply. “Oh, my darling,” she said, “I just can’t believe I’m really married.”She heard a scuffling sound in the darkness and repeated, “Oh, my darling, I can’t believe that I’m really married!”From out of the darkness, the bridegroom’s voice said furiously, “If I ever manage to get this zipper unjammed you will!”The second:An old philosopher goes to see the doctor and says, “Doc, I’ve got a question you can probably help me with. When I was a young man in my twenties I used to get an erection once in a while and I’d grab it with both hands; I couldn’t bend it. Then later on in my forties I would get a hard-on and I’d grab it with both hands and I couldn’t bend it. Now, doc, I’m in my seventies and you know – the other day I was surprised! I got a hard-on and I grabbed it with both hands and I could bend it. Now, doc, does this mean I’m getting stronger?”And the third:An American tourist’s pretty wife said she didn’t feel well and went to consult a well-known French doctor. Worried, the American followed her to the doctor’s office to make sure everything was all right. To his anger and dismay, when he got there, he found her in bed with the doctor.“What in hell do you think you’re doing?” he raged.Said the foxy Frenchman, “Do not excite yourself, my friend. I am merely taking the lady’s temperature.”“Okay, doc,” said the burly American, doubling his big fists. “But that thing better have numbers on it when you take it out!”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 07 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the difference between longing for the divine and loving another?There is no difference at all – all desires are the same. You can desire money, you can desire meditation; you can long for power, you can long for godliness, but you remain the same. What you long for cannot change you. The object of longing has no effect on your inner being; it is the same game played again with new words, with new objects of desire.You long for a person, you desire a person. Why? – because you are feeling lonely. You don’t feel sufficient in yourself. There is a kind of emptiness in you which you would like to be filled by the presence of the other. You feel meaningless and you want the other to impart meaning to your life. It never happens; it is only a longing and a hope. It is never fulfilled – in the very nature of things, it cannot be fulfilled. It is impossible because the other is desiring you for the same reason: he is also feeling empty. Now two empty persons are hoping to be fulfilled through each other; two meaningless lives are hoping to become meaningful and significant, from each other.This is the utmost absurdity. Sooner or later one becomes aware of the phenomenon because again and again there is frustration; again and again there is failure; again and again the hope evaporates and you are left in a far deeper mess than you were ever in before. Again and again you are disillusioned.It is because of this that Jean-Paul Sartre used to say: “The other is hell.” He is unconsciously groping in the dark and has unknowingly stumbled upon a fact, although the way he expresses it is not exactly what it should be. The other is not hell, your desire for the other is hell – that’s what all the buddhas have said down the ages – not the other. When Sartre says, “The other is hell,” it seems as if the other is responsible for your misery, disappointment, disillusionment. The other is not responsible, it is your own expectation that has been shattered. The greater the expectation, the more will be the frustration.Hence, wherever arranged marriages have disappeared and love marriages have become prevalent, there is more frustration. In an arranged marriage your expectations are not very big. It is not a romantic affair at all; you are not hoping to reach to paradise through it. It is a mundane phenomenon, arranged by your parents, grandparents; arranged by the society, the family, the priest, the astrologer – arranged by others. Your dreams are not very involved in it. Hence, the arranged marriage moves on far smoother ground; it has no peaks, no ups and no downs. It is just like a plain superhighway – not even an Indian one, but a German superhighway. Nothing grows on it, it is dead; made of asphalt or tarmac or cement – utterly dead, but safe. It is not a hilly track. You are not moving in the unknown. You can have a map with milestones everywhere and pointers indicating where you are; where you are moving; how long the destination is; how far the destination is; how far you have moved from your place. Everything is clear – that’s how the arranged marriage functions.If the arranged marriage happens when you are just a small child, with no idea of love, sex, romance, then you start taking your wife or husband for granted; just as you take your brothers and sisters for granted. Nobody ever thinks of changing one’s mother. If the marriage happens when you are a child, a small child, then you never think of divorce. You grow together; the husband and the wife grow together just as brothers and sisters grow together. They have lived together so long – as long as they can remember.When my mother was married she was only seven years old. My father was not more than twelve years old. Now what dreams are possible? What can they hope for? In fact, they enjoyed the whole show of marriage, they were enchanted: the music, the bands and all kinds of fireworks. It was a really enjoyable experience – with no idea of what they were getting into. By the time they became aware, they were already rooted; they had become indispensable to each other.But in a love marriage, it is going to be difficult. In America, out of two marriages, one is going to be shattered. That is the proportion of divorce: one divorce out of two marriages. And remember, the one marriage that has not shattered is not moving in a joyous world; it is not moving. It is simply because of cowardice, security, safety that people go on clinging. As they become more courageous, the divorce rate is going to become higher and higher, it is going to become bigger and bigger.Why do love marriages fail? – for the simple reason that there is a deep expectation which cannot be fulfilled. Soon, you realize that you have been a fool. Soon, even before the honeymoon is over, the marriage is over. It may linger on… It depends how much courage you have. If you are a coward, it may linger on for the whole of your life. If you are courageous and can see the point, you may divorce immediately after your honeymoon is over because the marriage will also be over. You will have seen that all those illusions that you were carrying were just illusions. You were living in a world of rainbows, you were living in a world of poetry, not of reality.Sartre is not right when he says that the other is hell, but in an unconscious way he has come very close to the truth. The buddhas say: “Not the other, but the desire for the other is hell.” To make the other responsible is a very common characteristic of human beings. One of Murphy’s maxims says: “To err is human and to blame the other for it is even far more human.”That’s what Sartre has done: you have erred, now you are blaming the other. If you really see the point, then the desire is the cause; if you don’t see that, you will change the other. This other is causing you problems – change him or her. So after one divorce, another marriage and then another marriage and another marriage. It is the same illusion that you live again and again. People are so unintelligent, so unaware that they never see the point: that you can go on changing the whole world, you can change partner again and again… It will remain the same story because you are the same. Wherever you go you will remain the same; your heart is in the same state. There is confusion, there is no light inside you, there is total darkness.When one becomes so fed up with ordinary relationships with people, one starts imagining a relationship with God; that is the longing for the divine. Now God is a little better in the sense that firstly, you can never be disappointed because you will never meet him; secondly, for the simple reason that there is going to be no honeymoon, the honeymoon can never be over. And thirdly, for the simple reason that there is not going to be any living together with God, so you can go on hoping. Now you are alone; it is a monologue, it is not a dialogue.All human relationships fail because the other is there and you start clashing with each other; you start dominating each other; you start being jealous of each other; you start being possessive of each other. You are afraid that you may lose the other. One day, you see that there is nothing to lose – the other is as empty as you are. One dream is shattered, then dream another dream…That is the beauty of the religious dream: you can go on dreaming, it can’t be shattered. The relationship with God can never be on the rocks – it is impossible because you are simply alone. When you are praying, what are you doing? – talking to yourself! It is like whistling in the dark – there is nobody to listen.God is not a person with whom you can have any kind of relationship. God is not somebody in particular whom you can address, whom you can long for. But all your frustrations, all your relationships that have failed, have not made you alert enough yet – that it is better to drop the whole idea of desiring the other. Now you are trying to desire something which you are never going to get. One thing is good about it: you can go on hoping for lives. There is never going to be any end to it; the journey is unending. The other does not exist at all; now you are living in pure dreams. First, you were living in dreams but the other was there, so between the two realities the dreams were bound to be crushed – and they were crushed. But now there is nobody else, you are alone. You can make your god the way you want.In India, people worship God in such ways that one feels sorry for them. Once I was staying with a woman; she was a great lover of Krishna. So much so, that she had stopped sleeping with her husband – how can you love two people? That is a betrayal. She believed that her true husband was Krishna. Her poor husband was really in a very mad state. He could not say that she was wrong because he was also brought up in the same Krishna-ite tradition. He could not say it, although he was well educated, a doctor. In India, education makes no difference to people, not at all. Their conditioning is so old, so ancient, so deep-rooted that education remains just on the surface. Scratch any educated Indian and inside you will find the whole rotten past. So intellectually he knew that his wife was crazy, but only intellectually. Deep down, he himself was afraid that she might be right because Meera used to think the same way. She left her own husband, thinking that Krishna was her true husband.At least this woman had not left her husband, she had simply stopped sleeping with him. She used to sleep in another room; she would lock the room from the inside. She would sleep with Krishna’s statue.When I stayed in their home, I watched the whole game. In the morning she would sing songs to wake up Krishna. Now Krishna needs to wake you up! But she would sing songs to wake Krishna up. When Krishna had got up, then the whole morning’s routine: he would take a bath, he would be given a bath, then breakfast… The whole day was devoted to Krishna. And just a silver statue – there was nobody there! But she used to talk to Krishna. If you could have seen her you would have been impressed because she would cry tears of joy and dance in utter ecstasy – at least on the surface it would look like that.The more repressive she became about her sex – because she was not having any sexual relationship with the husband – the more and more obsessed she became with Krishna. She started dreaming that Krishna was making love to her in the night. Once she even got falsely pregnant – just hot air in her belly and nothing else.When I talked to her… It was really cruel of me, but I am a cruel man – I have to be. I had originally gone for only three days; I stayed for seven, just to bring her to her senses. Finally she understood the point – she was an intelligent woman. She presented the statue to me and said, “Now you take it away, otherwise I can again get entangled in this stupidity. I have wasted my whole life. I can see the point that I am just living in my own dream. There is no Krishna, nobody comes to make love to me, it is all my own dream. It is just sexual repression.” And this whole nonsense of waking him up and giving him a bath, then breakfast and lunch; then Krishna retires for his afternoon sleep, then the tea – and everything, as if she was serving a real person.The statue remained with me for many days; I think I have given it to Mukta. Mukta must have it even now. But the woman was freed, freed from that stupid monologue.It is madness. It is the same madness, even a little worse because when you love a real person there is at least somebody real, good or bad, frustrating or not frustrating. But when you start longing for the divine it is simply living absolutely in the abstract.You ask me: “What is the difference between longing for the divine and loving another?” There is no difference at all – longing is longing. Then what do I suggest? – try to understand the nature of longing, the nature of desire. When you understand the nature of desire, in that very understanding the desiring disappears. You start enjoying your aloneness, you become utterly joyous with yourself. There is no need for the other, there is no dependence on the other.I am not saying that you will not be able to love then. In fact, you will be able to love then and only then, because love will have a totally different quality – the quality of sharing. You will not be a beggar, you will be an emperor. You will love because you have something to give, not something to get. You will love because you are overflowing with joy and you would like to share it with people. But then it will not be a relationship at all.I call it relating. You can relate, but there is no need to create any bondage, there is no need to create any marriage. You can relate with somebody, you can relate to the same person your whole life, but tomorrow remains open, it is not closed. Tomorrow is not settled today, you cannot take it for granted. Tomorrow you may feel like sharing with the same person; the same person may like sharing or may not like sharing. Even if one of the two decides not to share, then you say good-bye to each other with great gratitude because one is grateful for all that joy and all that has happened before and all that has transpired before. With no grudge, complaint, quarrel, you simply depart. You know, “Our ways are parting now, we may not meet again.” You depart with a song in the heart, with a smile on the lips; with a hug, with a kiss you depart. You depart in deep friendliness. It is not a divorce because there has not been any marriage in the first place. You were not bound to each other so you are not getting free from each other. You had always been free, you had always remained individuals.Two individuals relating remain individuals; two individuals getting into a relationship lose their individuality. They become a couple and to be a couple is an ugly thing. That means you have lost your freedom, you are no longer yourself; the other is also no longer himself or herself. Both have lost their freedom and nobody has gained anything out of it.That’s why Sartre says, “The other is hell.” But still I would like to remind you that it is not the other, it is the desire for the other. When you have understood the futility of desire, the utter stupidity of desire, you relate in a totally different way; a qualitative change happens to you. You are happy with yourself; you are not seeking happiness through the other. You are so happy that you would like to share it with somebody, that’s why you relate.Relationship originates in misery, relating originates in bliss.When you start relating with people, you also start relating with existence. That’s what true religion is: relating with existence. It is not a longing for God. You can call existence God, there is no problem in it, but it is better to call it existence. Once you call it God, all the old associations with the word creep in and you start thinking of an old man sitting somewhere above in the sky on a golden throne looking at you, watching you; then strange ideas happen out of it.Carl Gustav Jung remembers in his memoirs that for the whole of his childhood he was obsessed with only one idea: that if God sits above and sometimes he pisses, then? Or shits, then? His father was a priest, so he used to ask his father and his father would get very angry. He would say, “Stop! Never ask me such questions!” So he had to repress those questions. The more he repressed them, the more they were there. He was continuously obsessed with the idea: “What happens then?” He must be eating, he must be drinking and sitting above the head, anytime… He started dreaming that God was urinating and it was falling all over the earth and his shit was falling all over the earth. He himself became very guilty, “What am I…?” See! If you think of him above, this is what is going to happen – any moment! Stupid questions arise; they are bound to come out of a stupid idea.God is not a person at all, God is a quality – godliness, not God. Existence is full of godliness. When you are capable of feeling joyous, fulfilled, contented, then meditating on desires and seeing the futility of them, they disappear and you are left without any desires at all.Suddenly a great peace descends on you. In that peace your self-nature starts exploding. That is bliss. That bliss radiates as love; it reaches to people, to trees, to animals; it reaches to the clouds and the stars. Finally, it starts reaching to the whole existence. That’s what relating to existence is. You see the sunset and in the very sunset you see God – not Jesus crucified or Krishna playing on his flute; those are all childish ideas. You see godliness.Have you ever observed a beautiful sunset? What more godliness can there be? You see a roseflower – what more godliness can there be? Or just grass leaves swaying in the wind… All this green, red, gold. This whole existence is so full, so over-full; overflowing with silence, with peace, joy, ecstasy. When you are able to be silent, peaceful, joyous, you start relating with it. That relating is religion.Religion is not a desire for God, it is an experience of godliness. The question is not how to find God, the question is how to drop desiring. It has to be remembered, very emphatically remembered that if you start seeking and searching for God you will remain the same person, you will never change. If you start trying to understand the nature of desire, you are bound to go through a radical revolution because anybody who is a little bit intelligent is bound to see the utter futility of desire – it leads nowhere. The moment desire disappears from your being you have arrived.You have always been there; it was only desire that was distracting you. Sometimes the desire was for money, sometimes for God; sometimes for power, prestige; sometimes for heaven, paradise. But any desire is enough to distract you from your nature. When there is no desire, where can you go? All desires lead you away from yourself. When there is no desire you are simply centered in your being. That very centeredness is bliss, ecstasy, samadhi, nirvana.The second question:Osho,Why are people constantly pouring scorn on you?It is absolutely natural. If they were not pouring scorn on me, that would have been very unnatural. This is expected, this is how it should be. This is how people have always behaved. People are very predictable, they function like machines. They go on functioning in the same way; their consciousness has not changed at all. Although they are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists, these are only words; deep down they are as unconscious as ever. It makes no difference to them what philosophy they believe in, it is only a belief – convenient, comfortable, consolatory – a kind of solace but not a transformation. They don’t want any transformation at all, they are afraid of it. Hence, whenever there is a person with whom transformation is possible, they naturally behave in a very antagonistic way.Yoka says:Some men pour scorn on Zen or hold it in question. They play with fire, trying in vain to burn the sky. A true student of Zen should hear what they say as if their words were sweet drops of dew, forgetting even their sweetness however when he enters into the realm of the non-mental.I consider hurtful words as virtuous actions. And I treat those who hurt me as good masters, for I feel neither for nor against the man who insults me.I do not need to explain the two powers of perseverance, the understanding of without-birth and without-death, suchness, nirvana….The Buddhas, as numberless as the sands of the Ganges, all bear witness to this fact.Once you have known yourself, nothing disturbs you, no insult can insult you. The people who go on pouring scorn on me will burn their own fingers, they will suffer because what they are doing and what they are saying is absolutely untrue. But we cannot expect truth from them – they don’t know what truth is.But you need not be worried about them – they are lying. Everybody lies, but it does not matter since nobody listens. And remember, a man like me is bound to be punished. Virtue is its own punishment. Virtuous actions will never go unpunished, otherwise why was Jesus crucified? Why was Socrates poisoned? Why was Mansoor murdered? Virtuous actions will never go unpunished. Why? – for the simple reason that a man like Socrates is a danger to the society, which is rooted in lies. A man of truth is dangerous to all those who are living in lies. A man with eyes, living with people who are blind, cannot be tolerated because it is this man who has eyes who makes the blind people feel that they are blind. If he were not there they would have never felt themselves as blind. Now his presence hurts them; his very presence shows them that something is wrong with them. And of course, there are millions of them and how can millions be wrong? Obviously this man must be wrong; the crowds cannot be wrong. The crowds have to defend themselves.Pouring scorn on me is nothing but sheer self-defense, but it is a good sign. A good sign in the sense that they have become aware that I am here; that I am a danger to them and to their society and to their structures; to their minds, to their philosophies and ideologies. Now they will find every possible way to detract people from coming to me, to prevent people from reaching me. They will do all that they can do.But truth, even if crucified, becomes victorious; lies, even if crowned, are bound to be defeated. That is the ultimate law. Buddha says: “Aes dhammo sanantano, this is the eternal law of existence.” So let them do what they want to do. Don’t be worried about what they say; in fact, be happy that they have started taking note of me. The only thing that can be bad is if they ignore me.Just think, if they had ignored Jesus, if they had behaved as if he never existed, he would have died by himself; there would have been no need to crucify him. He may have lived a few more years, but he was bound to die. If they had ignored him there would have been no Christianity. Christianity exists because they could not ignore Jesus.If they had ignored Socrates, you would have never have heard the name Socrates. Now we don’t know who were the people who insulted him, who were the people who gathered together to kill this beautiful man. But Socrates has become immortal, his message has become immortal; his message still resounds and wherever someone is searching for truth, he is bound to feel tremendous respect for Socrates. No country, no race, can prevent Socrates from penetrating the heart of a true seeker. If they had ignored this man – he was already very old when they poisoned him – he would not have survived more than another five to ten years at the most.What wrong could he have done in five, ten years? But they could not ignore him; it is good that they became very antagonistic. They created so much fuss about this single individual with no power, that twenty-five centuries have passed, thousands of powerful people have been born, but nobody has that power over seekers of truth that Socrates has.The same is true about Buddha; they could not tolerate his existence. Many attempts were made on his life. They could not succeed in killing him – that is another matter – but they tried their best. Now, nobody knows who those people were – they must have been just like people you come across everywhere; the crowds, the mob. But Buddha became the greatest star in the whole history of human consciousness. Nobody shines so brilliantly as he. If they had ignored him we would have missed, we would have missed something of tremendous value.So don’t be worried what people say about me. Be happy that they are becoming interested. And not only in this country, all over the world…A bishop in England has written to one of my sannyasins who is also a priest – he is a chaplain at the University of Cambridge. The bishop has written to him: “We have heard that you have also become involved with this dangerous man and this is not right for a Christian priest. Please explain.” Our sannyasin – Chinmaya is his name – has written a beautiful letter to the bishop saying: “Listening to this man I became convinced that Jesus was a reality. Coming closer to this man, for the first time I became aware that Jesus is not a myth.” Now, from a chaplain at Cambridge University, an important person… The bishop must be feeling very disturbed. “What to do with this man?” And now Dynamic Meditation is being held in his church in Cambridge!The Protestant Church of Germany has circulated an order to all its churches in Germany that my name should not be mentioned in any church. No books, no quotations should be used. That simply shows that they must be being used, people must be quoting me, otherwise why should they get worried? A committee was appointed to investigate. Just the other day the West German government published a pamphlet to make people aware of the danger, particularly for young people. The pamphlet says: “Although this man says that you need not leave the marketplace, you need not renounce your home or your job, still people become so magnetized that they do leave their jobs. And so many people are missing from Germany that it is not a small problem. It is taking on epidemic proportions.”When a government becomes worried – and a faraway government… Seminars are being arranged all over the world, for and against me. I don’t even go outside my room, but they cannot even ignore a man who just lives in his room, who never goes outside. I have even stopped walking in the garden – it may be objectionable to somebody! But this is, in a way, a good sign.Jesus was only criticized in the small vicinity where he lived. Buddha was criticized only in the small province where he moved around, Bihar. The name comes from his movement. The word bihar means, where Buddha moved. So just in that small province he was criticized. I may be the first man who is being criticized all over the world; irrespective of race, country, religion. But all are agreed about one thing: “This man is dangerous!” This is really something to make one happy. You should rejoice – something great is going to happen out of it. If the criticism of Buddha in only a small province created so much energy, if the criticism of Jesus in a small area around Jerusalem created such an impact on history, then there is great promise.The criticism of me around the world is going to affect the whole of humanity, the whole future of humanity. Right now you cannot visualize it because right now you are in the very birth pains of the whole process. The followers of Jesus could have never conceived… When he was being crucified they escaped. There were not many followers, only twelve apostles and not more than one hundred people who were deeply devoted to him; not more than one thousand people who were in some way related to him. Everybody was against him. Who would have conceived that this carpenter’s son who was being crucified in such a humiliating way, with a thief on either side, just like an ordinary criminal, would have such an impact on history? And that history would be divided with his name; that his name would become a demarcation line: “Before Christ” and “After Christ”? Who would have conceived it? It would have been impossible.You cannot conceive what is happening right now, but I can see. All these things are good tidings. Don’t be worried. Continue in your way, go on living in your suchness, go on living in your meditation, in your celebration. That is the only message that I have given to you: celebrate life, rejoice in life. Don’t be bothered about what others say; that is their business.The third question:Osho,Sometimes I do not know whether I am stupid or just mad. What is the difference between stupidity and madness?You can’t be stupid because the stupid person cannot ask such a question. The stupid person cannot ask any question at all. The stupid person has no curiosity, has no inquiry. He does not live, he vegetates.This question which is arising in you, “What is the difference between stupidity and madness?” shows a clear sign of intelligence.You are certainly not mad either because a mad person never thinks that he is mad. That is one of the essential qualities of madness, that a mad person never thinks that he is mad; he thinks the whole world is mad except him. The moment the mad person starts inquiring, questioning, “Am I mad?” it is a good sign. That shows that some sanity is happening, that he is coming back to his senses. To know “I am mad” is to be free of madness.You can go to any madhouse, ask people; they don’t think that they are mad.Kahlil Gibran remembers one of his friends who went nuts and was put in a mental asylum. Gibran went to see him. He was sitting underneath a tree enjoying himself, singing a song; he was very happy. Gibran sat by his side and said to him, “You must be feeling worried that you have been put inside these walls?”The man said, “What are you talking about? Sorry? Sad? Why should I feel sorry and sad? In fact, I am feeling very happy. These walls are not around me, these walls are around all the mad people of the world. Only a very few, sane people live here. We have left all the insane outside. Since I have come in, I have come across such intelligent people, such beautiful people. Outside everybody is ugly.”Naturally, because everybody was telling him, “You are mad”; now nobody there is telling him he is mad. In fact, everybody is enjoying each other’s madness, accepting it. It’s perfectly okay, there is no problem with it.You are neither stupid – otherwise the question could not arise – nor are you mad; you are only asleep. That is far more dangerous because a madman can be cured and a stupid man can be helped to become intelligent, but the man who is asleep and is dreaming is really in bad shape. If you try to wake him up he becomes angry – you are disturbing his dreams. He has invested so much in his dreams; he is seeing such great dreams and you are disturbing him.Now, to tell any president that all power is just a childish desire, is to shatter his dream. To tell a rich man that money is nothing but an effort to stuff yourself somehow with things, with junk, so that you can feel that you are not empty… He will become angry with you. To say to people: “Whatever you are doing in your life is nothing but playing with toys” will drive them crazy and against you; they will jump on you. How dare you call their lives just a sleep? That’s why they cannot forgive the buddhas.But you are my sannyasin and you have to forgive me. There is no problem, you are only asleep. All that is needed is a clear-cut awareness, consciousness, wakefulness and watchfulness that can bring you out of your sleep. But if you want to remain in your sleep, nobody can pull you out; it is impossible. Only you can bring yourself out of your sleep. Madness can be cured by others, but not sleep. Stupidity can be cured, it can be helped because no child is born really stupid.Every child learns stupidity from the stupid people all around. He imitates – he has to imitate. If you have to live with stupid people you have to behave like them, otherwise you start falling out of line, separate from them. They want you to be part of the collective mind; they don’t like individuals. So everybody has to become stupid in some way or other – Catholic stupid or Protestant stupid, Hindu stupid or Mohammedan stupid, but you have to become some kind of stupid. Maybe a communist stupid, an atheist stupid, but you have to bring yourself to some kind of stupidity so that you can belong to a crowd.But there is a clear-cut difference between madness and stupidity. Mad people are the ones who are really more sensitive than others, that’s why they go mad. They are more intelligent than others, that’s why they go mad. They are so intelligent that they cannot cope with all the stupid masses around; they are so intelligent that they cannot force themselves to behave stupidly. They start functioning like individuals and that creates trouble. They are so intelligent that they can see the futility of many projects that have been imposed upon you.You have been taught to be ambitious. An intelligent person can immediately see that it is nonsense – it can never give you any joy. Yes, it will destroy many other people’s lives – it is violent, it is ugly, it is destructive – and it is not going to give you anything in return.The ambitious person is a stupid person. The intelligent person is not ambitious, he simply lives with no hankering to compete with others because he knows everybody is unique. There is no question of competition. He never compares. The really intelligent person never compares himself with anybody. He never thinks himself higher or lower. He never suffers from a superiority complex or an inferiority complex – which are two sides of the same coin. He simply knows, “I am who I am and you are who you are,” and there is no question of comparison. How can you compare a rose with a lotus? All comparison will be wrong from the very beginning. Each individual has such a beauty, such a unique beauty, that no comparison is possible.What is the point of becoming ambitious? Ambition means: “I have to be superior; I have to prove myself, I am superior to others.” Now for this you have to lose your intelligence, you have to become stupid. That’s why politicians are utterly stupid people, they can’t be otherwise. They are all bananas – and rotten bananas at that!A man was driving along an outer suburban road. He was just passing a hospital for the mentally insane when his car had a flat tire.He got out of his car, got his tools out of the trunk, undid the wheel-nuts and put them in the hubcap in the gutter beside him. Just then there was a burst of thunder and torrents of rain started to fall. In his hurry to change the wheel he knocked over the hubcap and the wheel-nuts were washed down a drain just near him.Now he was in trouble, but after puzzling for ten minutes or so he heard someone calling him. Looking up, he saw a head poking up over the top of the high wall opposite him. This guy had been watching all that was going on and said, “Why don’t you take one nut off each of the other wheels and put the wheel back on and drive to the next garage where you can get some more?”The driver was pleased and did what had been suggested to him. Then looking over to this man on the wall he said, “Hey, what are you doing inside that place? You’re supposed to be mad!”The guy on the wall yelled back, “Maybe we are mad in here, but we’re not stupid!”A very sensitive person in this stupid world is bound to become mad. He has to learn the art of meditation… Otherwise he is bound to become mad. Only meditation can save him from becoming mad.Now even psychologists are becoming aware of the phenomenon that mad people are very sensitive and vulnerable people – intelligent people – who cannot cope with the reality that surrounds them. It is too much and they are too fragile for it. They break down under its weight. If they can be helped through meditation their breakdowns can become breakthroughs.Meditation is the only hope, otherwise as people become more intelligent, more and more of them will go mad. And that is happening.In backward countries fewer people go mad; in advanced countries more people go mad. Why? For example, in a country like India, utterly poor, dying of starvation, illness, disease, not so many people go mad as they do in America. The Hindu swamis and the Hindu mahatmas brag about it. They go on talking all around the world – the Muktanandas and Maharishi Mahesh Yogis, etcetera – and they go on bragging: “Why don’t Indians go mad? – for the simple reason that they are religious people.” It is not so; the fact is something else, something totally different. The fact is that because India is undernourished it doesn’t have that much intelligence with which to go mad.The Indian mind is undernourished. How many Nobel Prizes does India get? Such a vast country, one-sixth of the whole globe! Out of six people, one is an Indian; one out of six Nobel Prizes should go to India, but how many Nobel Prizes…? Why isn’t it happening? Why can’t Indians be great discoverers? – for the simple reason that their bodies are undernourished; they are lacking the essential ingredients that make intelligence bloom. Intelligence does not grow on an empty stomach. If you want beautiful roses and big roses, you have to have a rich soil. You have to give them fertilizers and manure; you have to take care of them. But in India people are undernourished; what they eat is not sufficient. It does not provide the right vitamins, the right proteins, the right amount of chemicals to their brains. Hence, all they can do is stand on their heads and do yoga postures. That does not need any intelligence. All they can do is repeat scriptures that are thousands of years old, like parrots; which are really irrelevant.One sannyasin has written that he was in New York and Muktananda was answering questions. All the answers were absolutely patent answers which one can find in the Gita, which one can find in any Hindu book. There was only one question that the Gita had no answer for and the Vedas had no reference to – they cannot have. The question was: “What do you think about Osho and his Tantra?” Now his mind must have ceased completely. My name functions like a sword. The answer was: “We are doing research on this matter. When the research is complete we will answer.”These are the “enlightened” people. These are the people who go on trotting around the world initiating people. They are doing research on Tantra, on me. The simple reason why he could not answer is because no patent answer is available. He goes on asking people about me; that’s what he calls “research.”Nirgrantha has arrived. Muktananda saw Nirgrantha walking on the beach in Miami. He called out to him – he must have seen the mala and the locket – and wanted him to stay with him. Nirgrantha stayed there for two days and there were long interrogations, three-hour-long interrogations: “Has Osho said this against me?” Nirgrantha said, “They are all openly said things, they are all published. You need not inquire of me, you can just look in the books.” This is the research work that is going on!They don’t have intelligence, they don’t even have guts, but they go on telling the whole world that Indians don’t go mad; that Indians don’t commit so many suicides because they are religious. They are not religious – not at all. They are not mad because to go mad, first you need intelligence. Have you ever heard of any stupid person going mad? That’s impossible. Have you ever heard of any idiot going mad? How can an idiot go mad? To go mad you need some intelligence in the first place; to lose it you have to have it!Only very intelligent people can commit suicide – and these are the same people who can become sannyasins. The same people who can commit suicide can become sannyasins; for the simple reason that they have seen that this life is useless. Now either they have to find another life, another way of living, or it is pointless to continue. They have courage enough, guts enough.It does not need much intelligence to see that this life is really futile.Murphy says: “If the shoe fits, it is ugly. If you like it, they don’t have it in your size. If you like it and it is in your size, it doesn’t fit anyway. If you like it and it fits, you can’t afford it. If you like it, it fits and you can afford it, it falls apart the first time you wear it.”Just a little intelligence and you will be able to see that’s what life is. Then if you have guts, either you commit suicide and simply say to existence, “Enough is enough!” Or you transform your being – you become a sannyasin.Many people ask me, “Why aren’t Indians coming to you?” – because they are not religious people, they are not intelligent. They don’t have guts and they don’t yet have the intelligence to see that life is futile – although they go on repeating like parrots that life is futile; that life is illusion; that it is all maya. But it is just a way of talking. Just as the English talk about the weather, Indians talk about metaphysics. Neither do the English mean anything…An Englishman was leaving a town where he had gone to visit some friends. His horse, who was pulling his cart, suddenly said, “It is too hot.”The Englishman could not believe his ears. There was nobody else there, just his dog sitting in the cart, so he said to the dog, “Did you hear that?” He had to say it to somebody! “Did you hear that?”The dog said, “I have heard it many times. Everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it!”So English horses and dogs also talk about the weather. Indian horses and dogs talk about metaphysics, god-realization; they recite the Gita and the Vedas. But you don’t see any intelligence, you don’t see any brilliance; you don’t see any light in their eyes, you don’t see any response to reality.It is better to be mad than to be stupid. But ordinarily people are not mad, they are just on the verge of going mad at any moment. If you don’t turn your energies to meditation, you will go mad.The difference between you and the mad people is only one of degree, remember. Maybe you are at ninety-nine degrees and the madman has crossed the boundary of one hundred degrees. Any small incident, any accident, can push you one degree more. Your wife runs off with somebody and that’s enough. Your business fails, the bank goes bankrupt, the government nationalizes – anything; just one degree and you can be mad at any moment. But remember, it is better to be mad than to be stupid.There is no need to be mad. Why not meditate? I have created so many mad kinds of meditations that you can be both together – mad and meditators. Slowly, slowly meditation is bound to win over.Sujata has asked, “Osho, I have three questions to ask you. The first question: How did you discover Kundalini meditation?” – simple, Sujata: Meditating down by the river upon a hill of red ants!The second: “And Dynamic?” That is even more simple, Sujata; it was almost impossible not to discover it. I came upon it driving on Indian roads in Indian cars!The third: “And what about Nadabrahma?” Hm!And the last question:Osho,Why am I afraid of you?It is a good sign. It means something is on the way. You become afraid of me only when you start coming closer to me; it is natural. To be close to a master is to be close to a certain kind of death. Only stupid people are not afraid because they can’t see what is going to happen – that I am taking you slowly, slowly to the cliff. And once you are there and enjoying a joke, I will push you!Sitting in an armchair at his club, a retired British colonial army officer was recounting one of his heroic adventures to a young captain.“There I was, me boy, stalking through the jungle, when out jumps this enormous great tiger right in front of me.”“Gosh, golly, sir, what happened?”“It stood there and went ‘Roar!’”“Gosh, golly, sir, what happened next?”“I fouled me breeches.”“Great Scot! That must have been incapacitating – what happened next?”“No, no, no,” stuttered the old colonel, “I fouled me breeches.”“Yes?” said the young captain, watching the old man evidently in some discomfort.“No, no, no, I fouled me breeches when I went ‘Roar!’”Get it?Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 08 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/walking-in-zen-sitting-in-zen-08/

The first question:Osho,How is it possible that Gurdjieff needed another head, an Ouspensky, to work on a third psychology – the psychology of the buddhas – while you work by yourself and can be both in the state of mind and no-mind?There have been two kinds of masters in the world. The first kind, has always needed somebody else to express, to interpret, to philosophize, to communicate what the master has experienced. Gurdjieff is not alone in that; he needed P. D. Ouspensky. Without Ouspensky he would not have been known at all. Ramakrishna comes in the same category; he needed a Vivekananda. Without Vivekananda, Ramakrishna would have remained absolutely unheard-of.This has been the case with many masters, for the simple reason that their whole work concerned the heart center. They became crystallized in the heart center – so much so that it was impossible for them to move to the head and to use their own head. It appeared far easier for them to use somebody else’s head rather than their own.But there was a difficulty in it. One thing was good about it: the master himself was not constantly moving between two extremes; from mind to no-mind, from no-mind to mind. There was no movement in his being; he was absolutely crystallized. But there was another kind of trouble: the man who was being used as a medium – Ouspensky, Vivekananda, or others – was himself not an enlightened person. Gurdjieff could use Ouspensky’s head, but not exactly the way he would have liked to. Ouspensky’s own mind was bound to color Gurdjieff’s experience; he was bound to bring his own prejudices, his own philosophy, his own understanding to it. He had no experience of his own, he was simply a medium. But the medium is not just an empty vehicle. He has his own mind and anything passing through his mind is going to be changed a little bit here, a little bit there.Ouspensky introduced Gurdjieff to the world, but he introduced Gurdjieff in his own way. One cannot blame Ouspensky. What could he do? He tried his best. I think he was one of the best interpreters that any master has ever been able to find. But still an interpreter is an interpreter. It can’t be the same; it is impossible to be the same. Hence, sooner or later they had to part from each other.In the last days of Ouspensky’s life, he became almost an enemy to Gurdjieff. He started saying, “Now Gurdjieff has gone mad. At first he was moving in the right direction, but the later Gurdjieff has gone astray.” He could not say that the whole of Gurdjieff’s teaching was wrong because his own teaching was based on Gurdjieff’s teaching. He divided Gurdjieff in two. The first part of Gurdjieff – when Ouspensky was with him – was right and the later part was wrong. In fact, the later part was the culmination of the first part.Why did this happen? It was bound to happen because sooner or later Ouspensky’s own mind was going to become a barrier. When he first came to Gurdjieff he was absolutely surrendered to him – surrendered in the sense that he was fascinated by his personality, fascinated intellectually – because he was a great intellectual. Absolutely surrendered in the intellectual sense, not in the existential sense. If he had been existentially surrendered, he would have been of no use because Gurdjieff needed a head, he was in search of a head. He had many other followers who were devoted to him from their very innermost core, but they were not going to become his interpreters to the world.When Ouspensky came to Gurdjieff, he was already a world-famous mathematician, a philosopher. His own book, Tertium Organum, had already been translated into almost all the great languages of the world. And that book, Tertium Organum, is really something tremendous; coming out of a man who was unenlightened, it is almost a miracle. Intellectually he managed something which nobody has ever been able to manage. He knew nothing, he had not experienced anything, but his intellectual grasp… His intellect was really sharp. He belongs to the topmost intellectuals of the whole history of humanity. There are very few competitors to rival him. Only once in a while…Socrates had such a man, Plato. Socrates was the heart of the teaching, Plato was the head. In the case of Gurdjieff, exactly the same was repeated; Gurdjieff was the heart, Ouspensky became the head. If I have to choose between the two, my choice would be Ouspensky, not Plato. Ouspensky is simply unbelievable; his insight, without any self-realization, is so accurate that anybody who has not experienced will think that Ouspensky was a buddha, a christ. Only a buddha would be able to detect the flaws, otherwise not. The flaws are there, but ordinarily undetectable.He started writing books on Gurdjieff. He wrote one of his greatest contributions: In Search of the Miraculous. And then wrote: The Fourth Way. These two books introduced Gurdjieff to the world; otherwise, he would have remained an absolutely unknown master. Maybe a few people would have come in personal contact with him and would have been benefited, but Ouspensky made him available to millions.But as those books spread all over the world and thousands of people started moving toward Gurdjieff, Ouspensky became very egoistic – naturally because he was the cause of the whole thing. In fact, he started thinking: “Without me, what is Gurdjieff? Who is Gurdjieff without me? Who was he? When I met him he was just a refugee living in a refugee camp in Constantinople, almost starving. Nobody had ever heard of him. I have made him world famous; the whole credit goes to me.” This idea went to his head – it became too much for him. He started, in subtle ways, to dominate the movement. And you cannot dominate a man like Gurdjieff, you cannot dictate to a man like Gurdjieff. They had to part.In the last days of his life, Ouspensky was so against Gurdjieff that he would not tolerate anybody mentioning Gurdjieff’s name to him; in his presence Gurdjieff’s name was not mentioned. Even in his books Gurdjieff’s name was reduced to only “G”; the full name disappeared. After the break just “G” remained – somebody anonymous: “‘G’ said…,” not “Gurdjieff.” And he made it clear, very clear: “We have parted and I have developed my own system.” He started gathering his own followers. Those followers were not allowed to read Gurdjieff’s books; those followers were not allowed to go and see Gurdjieff. While Ouspensky was alive he was very suspicious of anybody who wanted to go to Gurdjieff, or even wanted to study his books.Gurdjieff was aware that this was going to happen. Still, there was no other way; a head had to be used. Gurdjieff’s work was such that he was absolutely crystallized in his heart; he could not move to the head.So was the case with Ramakrishna. Vivekananda was an ordinary intellectual, not even of the caliber of Ouspensky, but he made Ramakrishna world famous. Ramakrishna died very early, that’s why Vivekananda and Ramakrishna never parted; otherwise the parting would have been absolutely certain. Ramakrishna died and Vivekananda became his whole and sole representative. He dominated all the followers, he dominated the whole movement. He became the representative of Ramakrishna for them. If Ramakrishna had lived, the same thing would have happened sooner or later because Vivekananda was just head and nothing else, nothing of the heart. Even if he talks about the heart, it is head-talk: the head talking about the heart – it is not heart-full. There is no love in it; there is no meditation in it; there is no prayer in it, just intellectual analysis. He knew the scriptures and he forced his ideas on Ramakrishna’s ideas. And Ramakrishna died so there was nobody to say no to it.Vivekananda destroyed the whole beauty of Ramakrishna. But that was going to happen because Ramakrishna was not a man of the head at all.But this has not always been the case. Buddha never depended on anybody else. He was capable of moving from mind to no-mind, from no-mind to mind; that is his greatness. That is a far greater achievement than that of Gurdjieff or Ramakrishna because their achievements are in a way limited. Buddha is very liquid. He is not solid like a rock, he is more fluid – like a river.So was the case with Lao Tzu; he never depended on anybody else, he said whatever he had to say. He said it himself and as beautifully as it could be said. Their philosophies are bound to be far more pure because they come from the original man. They come from the original realization, from the very source; there is no via media. So is the case with Zarathustra, Jesus, Krishna, Mahavira.This is the second category of masters. The first category is easier in a way; it is easy to be crystallized at one center. It is a far more complex process, a longer and far more arduous journey, to remain alive at both extremes. These are the two extremes: the head and the heart. But it is possible. It has happened before. It is happening right now in front of you.I live in silence, but my work consists of much intellectual communication. I live in silence, but I have to use words. But when I use words, those words contain my silence. I don’t need anybody else to interpret me, hence there is a far greater possibility that whatever I am saying will remain pure for a longer period of time.And now, since Buddha, many scientific developments have happened…We don’t know what Buddha actually said; he never used anybody like Ouspensky, Plato or Vivekananda. He was his own interpreter. But when he died, a problem arose. He spoke for forty-two years – he became enlightened when he was about forty and then he lived to eighty-two. For forty-two years he was speaking morning, afternoon, evening. Now there were no scientific methods for recording what he was saying. When he died, the first question was how to collect it all. He had said so much – forty-two years is a long time and many had become enlightened in those forty-two years. Those who became enlightened had become crystallized in the heart because that is easier, simpler and people tend to move to the simplest process, to the shortcut. Why bother? If you can reach a point directly, straight, why go roundabout? When Buddha was alive there was no need for anybody else to interpret him; he was his own spokesman, so the need was never felt.There were thousands of arhats and bodhisattvas; they gathered together. Only those who had become enlightened were called to the gathering – obviously, because they would not misinterpret Buddha. And that’s true, they could not misinterpret him – it was impossible for them. They had also experienced the same universe of the beyond, they had also moved to the farther shore.But they all said: “Since we became enlightened we have never bothered much about his words. We have listened to him because his words were sweet. We have listened to him because his words were pure music. We have listened to him because just listening to him was a joy. We have listened to him because that was the only way to be close to him. Just to sit by his side and listen to him was a rejoicing; it was a benediction. But we did not bother about what he was saying; once we attained there was no need. We were not listening from the head and we were not collecting anything in our memory; our own heads and memories stopped functioning long ago.”Somebody became enlightened thirty years before Buddha died. Now, for thirty years he sat by the side of Buddha listening as one listens to the wind passing through the pine trees; as one listens to the song of the birds; as one listens to the rain falling on the roof. They were not listening intellectually. So they said, “We have not carried any memory of it. Whatever he must have said was beautiful, but we cannot recollect what he said. Just to be with him was such a joy.”It was very difficult now – how to collect his words? The only man who had lived continuously with Buddha for forty-two years was Ananda; he was his personal attendant, his caretaker. He had listened to him; almost every word that he had uttered was heard by Ananda. Even if he was talking to somebody privately, Ananda was present. Ananda was almost always present, like a shadow. He had heard everything – whatever had fallen from his lips. And he must have said many things to Ananda when there was nobody there. They must have talked on going to bed at night. Ananda used to sleep in the same room, just to take care of him – he may need something during the night. He may feel cold, he may feel hot; he may like the window to be opened or closed; he may feel thirsty and may need some water or something, or – he was getting old – he may feel sick. So Ananda was there continuously.All of them agreed, “We should ask Ananda.” But there was a great problem: Ananda was not yet enlightened. He had heard everything that Buddha uttered publicly, uttered privately. They must have gossiped together; there was nobody else who could have said, “I am friendly with Buddha,” except Ananda. Ananda was also his cousin-brother and not only a cousin-brother, but two years older than Buddha. So when he came to be initiated, he asked for a few things before his initiation. In India the elder brother has to be respected just like your father. Even the elder cousin-brother has to be respected just like your father.So Ananda said to Buddha, “Before I take initiation… Once I become your bhikku, your sannyasin, I will have to follow your orders, your commandments. Then whatever you say I will have to do. But before that I order you, as your elder brother, to grant me three things. Remember these three things. First: I will always be with you. You cannot say to me, ‘Ananda, go somewhere else, do something else.’ You cannot send me to some other village to preach, to convert people, to give your message. This is my first order to you. Second: I will be always present. Even if you are talking to somebody privately, I want to hear everything. Whatever you are going to say in your life, I want to be an audience to it. So you will not be able to say to me, ‘This is a private talk, go outside.’ I will not go, remember it! And thirdly: I am not very interested in becoming enlightened, I am much more interested in just being with you. So if enlightenment means separating from you, I don’t care a bit about it. Only if I can remain with you even after enlightenment, am I willing to be enlightened, otherwise forget about it.”And Buddha nodded his yes to all these three orders – he had to, he was younger than Ananda – and he followed those three things his whole life.The conference of the arhats and the bodhisattvas decided that only Ananda could relate Buddha’s words. And he had a beautiful memory; he had listened to everything very attentively. “But the problem is he is not yet enlightened; we cannot rely on him. His mind may play tricks, his mind may change things unconsciously. He may not do it deliberately, he may not do it consciously, but he still has a great unconscious in him. He may think he had heard that Buddha said this and he may never have said it. He may delete a few words, he may add a few words. Who knows? We don’t have any criterion because many things that he has heard, only he has heard; there is no other witness.”Ananda was sitting outside the hall. The doors were closed and he was weeping outside on the steps. He was weeping because he was not allowed inside. An eighty-four-year-old man weeping like a child! The man who had lived for forty-two years with Buddha was not allowed in. Now he was really in anguish. Why had he not become enlightened? Why did he not insist on it? He made a vow, a decision: “I will not move from these steps until I become enlightened.” He closed his eyes, he forgot the whole world. And it is said that within twenty-four hours, without changing his posture, he became enlightened.When he became enlightened he was allowed in. Then he related… All these scriptures were related by Ananda. But who knows? He became enlightened afterward. All those memories belong to the mind of an unenlightened person; even though he had become enlightened, those memories were not those of an enlightened person. It is not absolutely certain that what is reported is exactly what Buddha said.But now science has given us all the technology. Each single word – not only the word but the pauses in between – the very nuances of the words, the way they are uttered, the very gestures, can all be recorded. The words can be recorded; the gestures can be photographed; films can be made, tapes can be made.Now the best way for any enlightened person is not to depend on anybody else, although that path is difficult. It is far more difficult because you have to do two things together. You have to constantly shuttle back and forth, back and forth. You have to constantly go into wordlessness and come out from that emptiness into the world of words. It is a difficult phenomenon. The most difficult phenomenon in the whole of existence because when you enter into silence it is so beautiful that to come back to the universe of words looks absurd, meaningless. It is as if you have reached to the sunlit peaks and you come back to the dark holes where people live in the valley, the slums. When you have touched the sunlit peaks; when you can live there and can float like a cloud in the infinite sky, to come back to the muddy earth, to crawl again with people who are living in mud seems to be very absurd. But there is no other way. If you have enough compassion, you have to go into this difficult process.It depends on many things too. It depends on the whole process by which a master has reached through many lives. Ramakrishna was never an intellectual in any of his lives. A simple man – in this life he was a simple man. Even if he had wanted to, it would have been impossible for him to become a Vivekananda too. It was easier to find somebody who could do that work.When Gurdjieff was very young, only twelve years old, he became part of a group of seekers: thirty people who made a decision that they would go to the different parts of the world and find out whether truth was only talk or if there were a few people who had known it. Just a twelve-year-old boy, but he was chosen to join the party for the simple reason that he had great stamina, he had great power. One thing was certain about him: whatever he decided, he would risk all for it. He wouldn’t look back, he would never escape, even if he had to lose his life, he would lose his life. He was almost shot dead three times – but he pulled himself back into life somehow; the purpose was still unfulfilled.Those thirty people traveled all over the world. They came to India, they went to Tibet and the whole Middle East; to all the Sufi monasteries and to all the Himalayan monasteries. They had decided to come back to a certain place in the Middle East and to relate whatever they had gained; after each twelve years they were going to meet. At the end of the first twelve years almost half of them did not return; they must have somehow died, or forgotten the mission, or become entangled somewhere. Somebody could have got married, fallen in love. A thousand and one things could have happened – people are accident-prone. Only fifteen people returned. After the next twelve years only three people came back. And after the third twelve year period, only Gurdjieff returned. All the others had disappeared. What happened to them nobody knows.But this man had very great decisiveness; if he had made a decision, nothing was going to deter him. He was almost killed three times; the only thing that saved him was his mission, that he had to go back. He pulled himself out of his death. It needed great inner power.He had no time to become an intellectual. He was moving with mystics – from one monastery to another; from one cave to another; from one country to another. He came to India, he went to Tibet and he went up to Japan; he gathered knowledge from all over the world. By the time he became enlightened there was no time left for him to intellectualize it, to put it into words. He knew the taste, but the words were not there. He needed a man like Ouspensky.My own approach has been totally different. I began as an intellectual – not only in this life, but in many lives. My whole work in many lives has been concerned with the intellect – refining the intellect, sharpening the intellect. In this life I began as an atheist with an absolute denial of God. You cannot be an atheist if you are not supra-intellectual. And I was an absolute atheist. People used to avoid me because I was doubting each and every thing and my doubt was contagious. Even my teachers would avoid me…One of my teachers was dying; I went to see him. He said, “Please… I am happy that you have come, but don’t say a single word because this is not the time. I am dying and I want to die believing that God is.”I said, “You cannot die… Seeing me, the doubt has already arisen.”He said, “What do you mean?”And the thing started. Before he died, just after twelve hours, he died an atheist. I was so happy. I had to work continuously for twelve hours. Out of desperation he said, “Okay, let me die peacefully. I say that there is no God. Are you happy? Now leave me alone!”My university professors were always in difficulties with me. I was expelled from one college, then another, and thrown out of one university. Finally, a university admitted me with the condition – I had to sign a written condition – that I would not ask any questions and I would not argue with the professors.I said, “Okay.” I signed it and the vice-chancellor was very happy. I then said, “Now, a few things. What do you mean by ‘argument’?”He said, “Here you go!”I said, “I haven’t written that I wouldn’t ask for any clarification. I can ask for a clarification. What do you mean by an ‘argument’? If I cannot ask a question, what is the point of your whole department of philosophy? – all your philosophers ask questions. The whole of philosophy depends on doubt; doubt is the base of all philosophy. If I cannot doubt your stupid philosophers, your stupid professors, how am I going to learn philosophy?”He said, “Look at what you’re saying! You are calling my professors stupid in front of me!”I said, “They are stupid, otherwise why these conditions? Can you think of anybody being intelligent and asking his students not to question him? Is this a sign of intelligence? A professor will invite questions. An intelligent professor will be happy with a student who can argue well.”That remained a problem. From the very beginning, my whole approach was not that of a Ramakrishna. I am not a devotional type, not at all. I have arrived at godliness through atheism, not through theism. I have arrived at godliness not by believing but by absolutely doubting. I have come to a certainty because I have doubted. I went on doubting till there was no possibility to doubt anymore, till I came across something indubitable. That has been my process.That was not the process of Gurdjieff. He was learning from masters; moving from one master to another, learning techniques and methods and devices. He learned many devices, but he learned in a very surrendered spirit – that of a disciple.I have never been anybody’s disciple; nobody has been my master. In fact, nobody was ready to accept me as a disciple because who would like to create trouble?One of my professors, who is now dead, Dr. S. K. Saxena, loved me very much. The only man out of all my professors… Because I came across many professors and I had to leave many colleges and many universities. Rarely does one come across as many professors as I came across. He was the only man that I had some respect for because he never prevented me from doubting, from questioning; even though a thousand and one times he had to accept defeat. I respected him because he was capable of accepting defeat even from a student. He would simply say, “I accept defeat. You win. I cannot argue anymore. I have put forward all the arguments that I can muster and you have destroyed them all. Now I am ready to listen to you, if you have something to say.”He was very afraid… When I was doing my final MA examination in philosophy he was very afraid because he loved me so much. He wanted me to get through the examination, but he was afraid – afraid that I might write things which were not according to the textbooks or were against the textbooks. I might say things which were not acceptable to the ordinary professors. Just to save me he gave the papers to people all over the country who were his friends and informed them: “Please take care of this young man, don’t be offended by him; that is his way. But he has great potential.”There was only one thing he couldn’t manage; that was something to be decided by the vice-chancellor himself – the verbal examination. That was the last thing. The vice-chancellor invited a Mohammedan professor from Aligarh University, the head of the department of philosophy there, a very fanatic Mohammedan. My professor was very worried. He said to me again and again, “Don’t argue with this man. In the first place, he is a Mohammedan – Mohammedans don’t know what argument is. He is very fanatical; if he cannot argue with you he will take revenge. I know he cannot argue – I know him, I know you. But just remain quiet because this is the last thing. Don’t destroy all the effort I have made for you.” He said to me, “It is not your examination – it seems that I am being examined!”I said, “I will see.”The first question the Mohammedan professor asked was: “What is the difference between Indian and Western philosophy?”I replied, “This is a stupid question. The very idea! This is nonsense. Philosophy is philosophy. How can philosophy be Indian? How can philosophy be Eastern or Western? If science is not Eastern nor Western, then why philosophy? Philosophy is a quest for truth. How can the quest be Eastern or Western? The quest is the same!”My professor started pulling my leg underneath the table. I said, “Sir, stop. Don’t pull my leg! Forget about the examination – this thing has to be decided!”The Mohammedan professor was at a loss. What was going on? He said, “What is the matter?”I said, “He is pulling my leg. He is telling me that you are a Mohammedan – and a fanatic Mohammedan. He says that if you cannot argue well with me, you will take revenge! So do whatever you want, but I have to say what I feel. I don’t believe in all these distinctions. In fact, to me the very idea of somebody being a philosopher and yet a Mohammedan is simply illogical, it is ridiculous. How can you be a real inquirer if you have already accepted a certain dogma, a certain creed? If you start from a priori assumptions, if you start from a belief, you can never reach the truth. Real philosophy starts in a state of not-knowing. That is the beauty of doubt; it destroys all beliefs.”For a moment he was shocked and felt almost dumb, but he had to give me ninety-nine marks out of a hundred. I asked him, “What happened to the last one?”He said, “This is something! In the whole of my life, I have never given anybody ninety-nine marks out of a hundred. And you are asking me, ‘What happened to the last one?’”I said, “Yes! Since you are giving me ninety-nine, I have every right to ask why you are so miserly. Just one! Make it a hundred – at least be generous for once!”He had to make it a hundred.My whole approach has been a totally different one to that of Ramakrishna and Gurdjieff. I have arrived through doubt, I have arrived through deep and profound skepticism. I have arrived, not through belief, but through the denial of all belief and disbelief too, because disbelief is belief in a negative form.A moment came in my life when all beliefs and all disbeliefs disappeared and I was left utterly empty. In that emptiness the explosion happened. Hence, it is not so difficult for me, so I can argue easily. I can even argue against argument; that’s what I am going to continue to do. I can argue against intellect because I know how to use intellect.Ramakrishna had never used his intellect; he started from the heart. The same is the case with Gurdjieff. Buddha could use the intellect because he was the son of a king, well educated, well cultured. All the great philosophers of the country were called to teach him; he knew what the intellectual approach was. And then he became fed up with it.The same happened with me. I know what can be achieved through intellectual effort – nothing can be achieved through it. When I say it, I say it through my own experience.But it has been beautiful in one way. It did not result in giving me truth – it cannot give truth to anybody – but in an indirect way it has cleansed the ground, it has prepared the ground. It has not helped me to realize myself, but it has helped me to communicate whatever I have realized.I can communicate with you very easily, with no problem. You can ask all kinds of questions – you can ask, you can doubt – because I know that all these questions and doubts can be quashed, they can be destroyed. It is good that you should ask because then I can destroy your questions. Once all your questions are destroyed, the answer arises in your own being. In that utter emptiness something wells up; it is already there.I am not in favor of repressing doubt by believing. You are not here to believe in me, you are here to bring out all your disbelief. Your doubts, your questions, all are respected, welcome, so that they can be taken out from you. Slowly, slowly a silence, a state of not-knowing arises. The state of not-knowing is the state of wisdom, is the state of enlightenment.The second question:Osho,I belong to the legal profession and have a very legal mind. Can I also become a sannyasin?Sannyas makes no conditions on you. Everybody is welcome – sinner and saint, legal experts, lawbreakers, virtuous people, criminals – all are welcome. Sannyas makes no precondition, although it will be a little difficult for you. But that is your problem, not mine. If you belong to the legal profession and have a very legal mind, it is going to be a little difficult for you. So what? Accept it as a challenge. Let it be difficult. In fact, the more difficult it is, the more challenging; the more interesting, intriguing it should be; the more attractive it should be. When something is very simple, who wants to do it? When something is difficult it provokes a challenge in you, it provokes intelligence in you.It is difficult – and certainly difficult for a person who has a legal mind because a legal mind means a cunning mind. It is not necessarily intelligent; in fact, if it is intelligent it will not be cunning. Cunningness is a poor substitute for intelligence. The legal profession is the most cunning profession in the world.It is known that Jesus moved with drunkards and gamblers and even a prostitute, but I have not heard that he moved with legal experts. In fact, the Jewish rabbi is nothing but a legal expert because the Jewish religion is more or less law and less of a religion. It is more or less a legal code. It does not have much metaphysics, it does not have great flights; it is very earthly. It tells you in detail what to do and what not to do. Those ten commandments – that may have been the beginning of the legal profession.You can become a sannyasin. If even the desire has arisen in you, there seems to be a spark of intelligence. Behind all your cunningness there must be a little fire still left.Don’t be worried. Come into this orange fire – it burns everything; it will burn you too. It consumes everything; it will consume the legal expert too. But only if you are ready to be consumed, if you are ready to drop your cunningness, because that will have to be dropped. Not that I say it is a condition, but as you become a sannyasin and as you move into meditation, you will start becoming more and more intelligent and, naturally, as a by-product, cunningness disappears.If the legal profession disappears from the world, ninety percent of the cunningness will disappear with it. It is the people who know the law who go on creating confusion.One of my vice-chancellors was a great law expert, a world-renowned law expert. He used to relate again and again that once he was fighting a case for an Indian maharajah in the Privy Council. He was such a drunkard… On the last night he had drunk too much and he still had a hangover, so he forgot whether he was for or against the maharajah. So for one hour he spoke against the maharajah! The maharajah was perspiring, his assistants were trembling: “What is he doing?” In the tea break they said to him, “What have you done? You have destroyed our client! Now there is no way to save him.”He replied, “What has happened?”“You have been speaking against our own client!”He said, “Don’t be worried, there is still time.”When the court started again he said, “You heard me, Your Honor, for one hour. Thank you for your patience because I was only giving all those arguments that are possible from the opposite side. Now I will defend my client.”And he destroyed his own arguments and won the case!The legal expert has no dedication to truth, he does not care about truth; he simply cares about whoever pays him. He is far worse than a prostitute. The prostitute only sells her body; the legal expert sells his mind. He is ready to be purchased by anybody – whoever is ready to pay the price. He does not care about what is right and what is wrong.But if you become a meditator, you will start caring about what is right and what is wrong. Not that you will have to, not that it is a commandment, not that it is something like a character that has to be cultivated. It happens naturally that cunningness starts disappearing. So you have to be alerted to that.You can become a sannyasin, there is no problem for me. I never ask anyone, “Who are you?” If you want to take sannyas I give you sannyas, unconditionally. Out of my love I give you sannyas, out of my respect for you I give sannyas. I respect each and every individual because to me each and every individual represents God, godliness. Even if the god has fallen very low and has become a legal expert, still the god is a god! Even in your fallen state I respect you, I will give you sannyas. It is for you to decide because this is risky – risky for you, for your profession.In the days of the Raj in India, a British soldier was expected to do his duty and very little else. Any display of human weakness by the troops was regarded as letting the side down in front of the natives.So naturally, the new commanding officer was very worried when an angry crowd of Hindus approached the barracks, complaining that one of their sacred cows had been outraged by an infantryman. They demanded an immediate court martial.“Don’t worry, sir,” said an experienced law expert. “Our man is bound to get off. This cow has a very bad reputation – it has already been cited in seven previous cases.”You get the idea? You will have to drop such legal expertise, you will have to drop such cunning approaches. You will have to become more human. But these are the consequences of meditation; nothing is imposed here.Just the other day I was reading an article written by a bishop in The Times against me. He says: “Beware of this man.” He quotes me: “This man says, ‘Character is the concern of the stupid. The really intelligent people are only concerned with consciousness.’” He is quoting me to make people beware because this is a dangerous statement. He says: “Rather than publishing articles on this man, The Times should publish more articles on Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who teaches character. And character is the only thing, the real thing.”Character is not the real thing at all. But the poor bishop has not understood what I have been saying. He does not understand the consequences of consciousness. Character is a consequence of consciousness. If character comes out of your consciousness, it has a beauty of its own; if it is just imposed from the outside, it is ugly. But that’s what Christians are doing all over the world – Hindus and Mohammedans too, they are all in the same boat.My whole concern is consciousness. I teach you how to be more conscious because I know one thing for certain: that if you are more conscious your character will change of its own accord. A conscious person lives in a totally different way; he is more compassionate. Mother Teresa of Calcutta is not compassionate – she behaves compassionately, but is not compassionate. All her compassion is nothing but a means to reach heaven. To reduce compassion to a means is ugly; compassion is an end unto itself.An ancient Taoist parable says…A man fell into a well. He started shouting loudly, “Save me! I am drowning!”A Buddhist monk passed by. He looked in the well and said, “Be calm, be quiet, don’t be disturbed. Life is a flux. It comes, it goes. Remember what Gautam the Buddha has said: ‘It is all dream.’ Your drowning is a dream, my seeing is a dream. Don’t shout. And even if you are saved, what is the point? Sooner or later you will have to die, so why not now? Why postpone it? Die silently, peacefully, so that you are not born again. Get out of the wheel of birth and death!”The man was aghast. He said, “What nonsense are you saying! You can sermonize later on. First get me out! This is no time to teach me great philosophy.”But the Buddhist said, “I cannot be distracted by things. The Buddha has said: ‘Walk on undistracted.’ Goodbye.” And he walked on, undistracted.Then a Confucian monk looked in the well and the man said, “Now please save me. Don’t waste time!”The Confucian monk said, “Do you know what the master has said? Confucius has said that each well should have a protective wall around it. Don’t be worried. I will create a great movement all over the country so that no well is unprotected like this.”The man said, “But that is not going to save me!”The Confucian monk said, “It is not a question of individuals. The master says that the question is always of the society, the question is of the future. Think of the future and think of the society. Don’t be so selfish!”And he went into the marketplace and started teaching the people: “Look at this example of what is happening. Our master has already said that each well should have a protective wall. He is always right, but people have not listened to him and they are suffering.”Then a Christian missionary looked into the well and the man said, “It seems my death is certain. Today no layman is coming to the side of the well! Now you will teach me your gospel!”But the Christian said, “Don’t be worried.” Out of his bag he pulled a rope, threw the rope in, told the man to tie the rope around his waist and he would pull him out. The man was surprised – no metaphysics, no religion. He was pulled out, he was very thankful. He fell at his feet and he said, “You are the only really religious person! But I’m curious – how come you were carrying a rope in your bag?”He said, “We always keep all kinds of arrangements with us. Who knows when the opportunity will arise to serve? Service is religion and it is through serving people that one can reach to heaven. I am not concerned with you,” said the missionary, “my concern is with my own place in heaven. Now I have scored! In fact, I am grateful to you. Go on falling in! Help us poor missionaries to serve you. Go on teaching that to your children and don’t listen to these Confucian people who say that every well needs a wall to protect it. If every well has a wall, nobody will fall in and how are we going to save people? And without saving people there is no way to heaven. Go on falling into wells, go on making wells without walls. Teach your children to fall in, because unless we serve you there is no way to God!”Don’t laugh at it – this is the real situation. Just think: if there was no poverty in India, no orphans, no paralyzed people, no people suffering from leprosy, where would Mother Teresa of Calcutta be? Then no Nobel Prize either. These people are needed to create a Mother Teresa. These missionaries will not like a world where all are rich, happy.Bertrand Russell used to say – and I agree with him absolutely – that much of religion will disappear if the world becomes rich and people are healthy, if people live long lives and their lives are joyous. It is true because much of religion depends on all these things, particularly Christianity.Now, that bishop in London is saying that Mother Teresa is doing great work. But how will you be able to do great work if there are no longer any poor people; if there are no blind people, if there are no lepers? What are you going to do? The missionaries will be at a loss. You have to keep this world in the same misery and mess as it is still in. Otherwise, just think of the poor missionaries – they will be nowhere.My concern is certainly with consciousness, not with character. My concern is to make you more aware, more alert, and out of that alertness whatever happens is good. If out of that alertness service happens, it is good; if love happens it is good; if compassion happens it is good; if sharing happens it is good because out of that awareness evil is impossible.You are welcome. I am not concerned with what you are doing. My whole concern is with your being, not with your doing.The last question:Osho,No! No! I don't get it! Breeches? Roar? What? Am I just dumb or something?You are neither dumb nor “something.” Either you are British or you must have been British in your past life!A seventy-five-year-old British field marshal tells his adjutant to bring his brigade to attention and announces: “Gentlemen, I am proud to tell you that at 08:30 hours, Greenwich Mean Time, my wife gave birth to a seven-and-a-half-pound baby boy! Gentlemen, I thank you!”Get it?This very proper Englishman walks into a pet shop. As he closes the door behind him he hears a voice welcoming him, “I know something about you! I know something about you!”Embarrassed, he looks around and finds that it is a parrot. Impressed, he asks to buy the bird.“So sorry, sir,” replies the owner, “I cannot sell it. But I can sell you a couple of eggs which after incubation will give you the same breed.”The man buys the eggs, takes them home and puts them in the incubator. After ten days two little ducklings crawl out of the eggshells. Furious, he goes back to the shop to complain. As he enters he hears, “I know something about you! I know something about you!”He hurries over to the parrot, looks it straight in the eyes and says, “Shut up! I know something about you too!”Get it? Or not yet.An Englishman and a Scotsman are sharing a train compartment with a lady and her pretty daughter. On entering a pitch black tunnel, a smacking kiss and a slap is heard. As they come out into daylight, the Englishman thinks, “Damn it, the Scot kissed her and I got paid off.”The lady thinks, “God Almighty, one of these fellows kissed my daughter, but the good girl knew what to do. Whoever it was, he got his punishment.”The girl thinks, “Pity, one of these fellows tried to kiss me and got my mother instead.”Thinks the Scot, “When it comes to the next tunnel, I will kiss my hand again and give that English prick another whacking slap.”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 09 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/walking-in-zen-sitting-in-zen-09/

The first question:Osho,I have been here now for almost two and a half years, but I still feel that something in my life goes basically wrong. Except for short glimpses, I am unable to find any lasting meaning in it. Most of the time I'm hanging in a bottomless, quite frightening, uncomfortable “nowhere.” What is wrong? Please comment.Prem Gayan, the whole problem is rooted in the desire of attaining a permanent meaning for life. Life is not a problem at all, but we expect things which are against the fundamental law of life and then we are in trouble. Life is constantly changing and it is good that it is constantly changing; that’s its beauty, its splendor. If it were permanent, static, it would be not life but death and it would be utterly boring. It would stink because it would be stagnant. The mind is constantly asking for something permanent. The mind is the desire for the permanent and life is impermanence.Hence, if you really want to be blissful you have to live the impermanent life as it is, without any expectation, without any imposition on your part. Flow with life. It changes – you change with it. Why bother about a permanent meaning? What will you do with a permanent meaning?Meaning exists only when something functions as a means to some other end. Life is not a means to some other end, it is an end unto itself; hence, really it cannot have any meaning. That does not mean it is meaningless, it simply means it is transcendental to meaning or no-meaning. Those words are irrelevant.What is the meaning of a roseflower? What is the meaning of a sunset? What is the meaning of love? What is the meaning of beauty? There are no meanings because they are not means to anything else. A sunset is simply beautiful just for its own sake. It has no utility, you cannot use it as a commodity. A car has meaning, a machine has meaning, a house has meaning, but what is the meaning of a roseflower? There is no meaning in it, but because there is no meaning in it, it has tremendous beauty. A machine, however meaningful, is never beautiful; it can’t be – it is a commodity, it is utilitarian, it is not poetry.Life is poetry, life is a song, life is a dance.Gayan, your very approach is wrong, that’s why you go on missing. You say: “Except for short glimpses, I am unable to find any lasting meaning in it.” Just meditate over those short glimpses. Those glimpses must have happened when you were not seeking for meaning; when you were relaxed; when you had forgotten all about meaning; when you were not concerned about meaning. Then, suddenly there was joy, there was bliss.The moment you start grabbing, clinging to those beautiful glimpses, those moments; the moment your mind says, “Make it permanent. Now this is the thing that I have been always asking for, now don’t let it go,” you destroy it, you kill it. The glimpse disappears; it remains only a memory and it goes on fading far away. Soon you will not be able even to believe that it had existed. It will happen again only when you have forgotten the constant desire for meaning, the constant desire for permanency, the constant desire that things should be according to you.No, that is not the way of a sannyasin, Gayan. A sannyasin has no expectations from existence. He simply flows with existence without any resistance. The sannyasin allows existence to have its own course; wherever it leads, the sannyasin is ready to go with it. The sannyasin has no destination, no goal as such. And these glimpses will be coming more and more.But you have to meditate on these glimpses – when they happen, how they happen, what makes them happen. You will find a few essential things: you are relaxed when they happen; you are at rest when they happen; you have no desire when they happen; you are not greedy when they happen; you are not thinking of meaning, significance, value when they happen. There is the secret. Drop all these hindrances forever. Let life exist according to its own harmony. Simply be a part in it, just a wave in the ocean. Don’t try to dominate the ocean – that very effort is an ego trip.Meditate over Murphy’s maxim: “If you don’t care where you are, you ain’t lost.”And also: “Nothing is ever so bad that it can’t get worse.”Rejoice! Why be afraid of the “nowhere”? Everywhere is nowhere. Wherever you are it is nowhere. Existence is infinite, so you will always be in the nowhere. You have to accept it. Buddha calls it tathata – suchness. Such is the case: wherever you are it is nowhere, whoever you are, you are a nobody.Once these truths are accepted, life starts happening in a totally different way because in this acceptance the ego dies. The ego can exist only through resistance, through fight, through struggle.That’s what you have been doing, Gayan. But it is nothing especially about you, that’s how the whole German mind is conditioned.Gayan is a German – one hundred percent German. Once, I wanted to choose her as one of my mediums, but I had to drop that idea, at least for the time being, for the simple reason that the German conditioning is very deep-rooted in her. She could not flow with my energy – unconsciously, she was not aware. She wanted to be a medium and she was immensely happy that I had called her; she was hoping that she would be chosen. She would have been chosen, but there was a deep resistance, unconsciously. Consciously she was totally in my hands, but unconsciously she was trying to give my energy a certain shape, a certain pattern, a certain flow. Hence, I thought it better to wait a little longer.Gayan, you will have to drop your German conditioning. That conditioning is good if you want to become a soldier, but it is not good if you want to become a sannyasin. They are poles apart – they are just the opposite of each other. The sannyasin has to be utterly restful, relaxed, a resistanceless hollow bamboo – so he can become a flute for the divine lips, so a song can flow through him.It will happen, Gayan; it is going to happen. If glimpses are happening then there is no problem. If, once in a while, a few windows open, then doors will also open. You can escape through those windows into the open sky. But you are too involved in becoming perfect. Drop that idea. Imperfection is perfectly good. Don’t try to do the impossible. Just being ordinary is immensely beautiful.But I can see her problems. The fundamental problem: she is a German. The second problem: she has worked as a fashion model so she has the idea of how to be perfectly beautiful. Those things have gone deep inside her. She is a perfectionist, so wherever she has been in these two and a half years she has come into conflict with people. Because this place is not for perfectionists, this place is a crazy place – it is absolutely un-German. And the problem is that I have got so many German sannyasins. I can understand why the German government is so worried because I am destroying their young people – I am destroying their conditioning as Germans. Once they have been sannyasins, once they have understood the art of being a sannyasin, then no Adolf Hitler can ever dominate them; that is impossible.Perfectionism is a kind of neurosis. It is neurotic – it is a beautiful name for neurosis. Gayan, drop that idea. Just be ordinary, simple, nobody, and things will start happening in leaps and bounds.I am sending her back to Germany for a few days, just to see and compare what has happened to her. She won’t be able to realize it here; she will be able to realize it only in Germany. There she will be able to see that in these two and half years much water has gone down the Ganges; she is no longer the same person. There, she will be able to recognize how people are behaving, how people are being trained to be neurotics. And when she is back, I hope she will come with a better understanding, more relaxed, more restful.I have great hopes about you, Gayan – much is possible. You are just on the verge. If you start accepting things as they are and drop the idea of how they should be, if you drop the “shoulds” and “should-nots,” there is not much trouble. Life starts helping you, caring about you. Life is very caring, very loving; we just never allow it. We are always trying to force it our way and that is not possible. Life cannot go our way, we have to go life’s way.That’s what I mean when I emphasize again and again the philosophy of let-go. Let-go is my only approach toward life and existence.The second question:Osho,I just decided to take sannyas because I wanted to do it during my five weeks of being here. Now inner struggles start again; I feel under pressure and that it was not a free decision and did not really come from my heart.Please don’t take sannyas. Wait. This is not the right time. If it is not really coming from your heart don’t force it upon yourself; it will be something imposed and ugly. Anything imposed becomes ugly, even sannyas. It will be plastic, it will not be real, it will not be alive. There is no need. If it happens spontaneously without any feeling of pressure, only then; otherwise it will create trouble for you and I am not here to create unnecessary trouble for you. Once you are a sannyasin there are many, many, necessary troubles, so avoid unnecessary troubles as far as possible because there are too many necessary ones.Never do anything for the wrong reasons – so many people are taking sannyas because their friends have taken sannyas, “There must be something in it – why are so many people attracted.” These are all the wrong reasons.Murphy says: “Nothing is ever done for the right reasons.”He is right in almost ninety-nine point nine percent of cases; nothing is ever done for the right reasons. People go on doing things for the wrong reasons and complain that their life is miserable. It is bound to be so. They are responsible for it, nobody else is.Do things only for the right reasons. The right reasons always come from your heart, not from your head.Murphy also says: “No matter where you go, there you are.”So how is it going to help? You may become a sannyasin, you may wear orange, but there you are underneath the orange clothes, behind a new name. Everything will be old, just the label will be changed. By changing the label you don’t go through a revolution, you are not reborn. And unless you are reborn you cannot be a sannyasin.Wait. This is not the right time. Never be in a hurry about such important matters. It is a question of life and death – in fact far more important than life and death because it can take you beyond life and death. That’s the whole alchemy of sannyas: to take you beyond life and death. It is far more important than anything else, so one should not be in a hurry. Don’t be impatient.During these five weeks just be here, meditate, do a few groups, watch the sannyasins, then go back home. Don’t create this anxiety in your mind: “To be or not to be…” Otherwise your five weeks will be wasted. You will not be able to participate in anything totally because your constant worry will be: “When am I going to take sannyas?” If you don’t take sannyas you will feel you are missing; if you do, you will think you have done something which was not coming out of your heart. Either way you will be a loser.There is a season, a right season, when things happen easily, when you need not do them, when they simply happen; you are only a witness that they are happening. Just as the snake leaves its old skin one day, slips out of it – it did not make the decision; the time had come. One day the child is born out of the womb; nine months are over. It is not a decision on the child’s part, “Now is the time for me to be born.” Spring comes and flowers and flowers… The whole earth rejoices.Sannyas also happens like that. There is beauty, there is grace and only then are you a sannyasin. It is not a question of being recruited; it is not some discipline that has to be forced on you; it is not a question of arguing for or against. When it comes from your heart there is no alternative, there is no either/or; it is not philosophy.Søren Kierkegaard has written a beautiful book. The name of the book is: Either/Or. It is not only the name of the book, his whole life can be called an experiment in either/or. During his whole life, he was never decisive – always thinking whether to do it or not to do it.For years a woman waited for him and he was unable to decide whether to marry her or not. He pondered and pondered, consulted encyclopedias; great treatises on marriage and love; took many notes for and against; weighed it this way and that, but could not come to a conclusion. All the arguments came out almost equal. Much could be said for, much could be said against, and it was so equally balanced – how to decide? Tired, the woman married somebody else.This was his whole life: he went on pondering and pondering about everything; he never could do anything. If death had also been a question to be decided by him he would not have died yet; he would be sitting in Copenhagen and pondering over death. If birth had been a question about a decision on his part he would have never been born; he would have pondered and pondered in the mother’s womb, sitting there – to come out or not?His approach, this stupid approach toward life, became so famous that when he used to walk down the streets – only once a month; he had to go to the bank to draw some money… His father, seeing his son and his inability to decide about anything, had deposited some money in his name because it was absolutely certain he would not be able to do anything in his life. A good offer had come for a professorship. He pondered so long that the university decided to appoint somebody else. So he lived in a very poor way, because the money in the bank was limited – that was his only money and he had to live his whole life on just that money.Once a month, the first day of the month, he would go to the bank to withdraw a small sum of money and come back home. Even going to the bank, he would ponder whether to go this way or that. He would stand at the crossroads for hours – and not just once, it was an every-month affair Every month, again and again he had to decide. His approach became so famous that urchins used to follow him from his house to the bank and from the bank to the house, calling out behind him, “Either/Or, Either/Or, Either/Or!” Copenhagen knew him not by his name, Søren Kierkegaard, his name became Either/Or.Wait. When you come next time – if I am still here… Up to then, wait. When you want to postpone a thing, there is no better time than the present. And who knows? We may not be made for each other. I am not saying that you are not made for me, that I cannot say, but I may not be made for you; that much I can say. I may not deserve you. So leave it aside – the very question has to be put aside.She has also asked another question: “Osho, when you tell jokes I cannot laugh. I can only listen to serious things.” That’s enough indication that we don’t deserve each other. Certainly I don’t deserve you – I take the whole responsibility on myself. This place will not fit with you and it will be difficult for me to make the whole lot fit with you, and according to you. If you can only listen to serious things… Listen! The world is full of serious things.This is a place of laughter and love. We don’t believe in serious things, we believe in living nonseriously.The third question:Osho,What is Gautam the Buddha's message in short?All things being equal, you lose. All things being in your favor, you still lose. Win or lose, you lose.The fourth question:Osho,I am a fool. What should I do?That’s just far out! Don’t do a thing. Please remain as you are. Remember… Fools rush in and get the best seats.The fifth question:Osho,You said today that all women are essentially nuns, but that no men are monks. But since I came to live in Pune my sexual energy seems to have disappeared – I think I'm just terrified of all the vibrant, alive women here!Swami Anand Neeraj, I think you are turning into a nun – miracles happen! I will have to change your name; just wait a little longer. If you finally decide that it has really happened and it was not just a passing phase, you will be known as Ma Anand Neeraj.An old man phoned his son-in-law – he had just married his daughter – and asked him, “How are things going?”The son-in-law said, “I am sorry to say, sir, but it seems I am married to a nun.”The old man said, “What do you mean – ‘married to a nun’?”The young man said, “None in the night, none in the morning.”The old man laughed and he said, “Now I understand. Then tonight come for dinner at my home and see the Mother Superior.”If, Neeraj, you have turned into a nun, then slowly you will grow into a Mother Superior. Don’t be worried. Growth is all that is needed – this is a growth center. Just go on growing. Don’t be worried about what you are growing into; growth is the point. If you are growing, all is right.The sixth question:Osho,A few questions…Now I always get puzzled with Dutch names. The spelling says “Joke,” but Dutch people are strange, they pronounce it as “Yokay” – they destroy the whole beauty of it! Okay, Yokay…The first question:How many Women Libbers does it take to screw in a light bulb? – five: one to screw it in and four to consider the implications.Second:And how many Buddhists does it take to screw in a light bulb? – two: one to screw it in and one not to screw it in.Third:And how many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? – none: the Jewish mother says, “So? I will sit in the dark!”And fourth:How many sannyasins does it take to change a light bulb? – only one to screw in the light bulb and ten thousand to celebrate the great occasion.The seventh question:Osho,What is being open?Being open simply means being without mind. If the mind is present you are closed. Mind is a wall surrounding you. It is a transparent wall. Hence, you can see through it and you can go on living behind it without ever becoming aware that you are living in a prison cell. Prisons should be made of glass, then very few people will suffer so much in prisons. They will be able to see the people walking and talking on the road; they will be able to see everything and believe that they are free. If they are not going out and mixing with people, that is simply their own decision that they don’t want to mix with the crowds. They are “aristocrats,” they are not ordinary people, they are “special” people. And these walls which cannot be seen will not be thought of as walls, they will look like protection.That’s how the mind is: mind is a transparent wall of glass, very transparent glass – Belgian-made, not Indian, because in India you cannot make transparent glass; it is impossible.If you have a mind then politically it is going to be either communist, socialist or fascist; religiously it is going to be Catholic, Protestant, Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan; philosophically it will belong to a certain school of philosophy. It can’t be free. Mind cannot have freedom – its very existence is a slavery – and it keeps you closed. You always look from a certain fixed angle, from a certain fixed obsession; you can’t see things as they are. It is impossible for the mind to see things as they are – it is inevitable that it will distort them according to its own a priori conclusions.I was telling you just the other day that I received a letter from an Irish mother, written to her daughter who is a sannyasin here. She says that she has been reading my books, has looked at pictures of me, and feels something – the books are beautiful. The only question she wants to ask is: “Is this man a Catholic or not? If he is a Catholic then everything is okay; if he is not a Catholic, then come back home as soon as possible.”And Irish Mukta has also received a letter from her mother, a totally different letter, but in a way the same. Mukta’s mother says, “As I have understood it, you are in the best place in the world. The only thing that disturbs me is that it is a religious place; if it were not for the religion, then it would be one hundred percent beautiful.” Now, for one, the word religion is creating trouble; for the other, if it is not Catholic then there is trouble.People go on inquiring who I am: Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. I say that I am neither this nor that; I am simply a blissful man who is enjoying life in its totality. I call this religion – the only real religiousness.Dropping the mind is becoming open. Meditation is an effort to dismantle the wall brick by brick. Sannyas is a decision that we will behead ourselves and we will start living as no-minds. We will function from a state of not-knowing because only then are you innocent and only then are you open. That’s the really scientific attitude, the scientific approach toward life.At the ultimate peak, science and religion have to meet. If both are seeking truth – and both are seeking truth – then at the ultimate peak they are bound to meet. However different are the paths they follow, their fundamental, their essential core cannot be different. The essential core of the scientific approach is that you should not approach any fact with a conclusion; you should approach the fact in a state of not-knowing. Only then will you be able to encounter it as it is. If you have a certain idea, your idea is going to influence your conclusion; your observation will become prejudiced. A prejudiced mind can never be scientific; in fact, a prejudiced mind is the only mind there is. Hence, I say a mind can never be scientific, nor can a mind be religious.Science approaches the outer world of facts without any fanatical attitudes, and religion approaches the inner world of facts without any fanatical attitudes. The fanatic believes more in his fiction than in the facts. He imposes his fictions on the facts.A certain Dr. Bannerji came to me; he wanted my help. He said, “I am a scientist.” He is the head of a department at Rajasthan University, doing some research work in parapsychology. He is the head of the parapsychology department. He told me that he wanted my help because he was doing some scientific work on the theory of reincarnation: that man is born many times, again and again.I talked with him and asked, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”He replied, “Certainly. I am a Hindu and I believe that it is true. Now I want to prove it scientifically.”I said, “From the very beginning, your research is unscientific. If you are a Hindu and you believe that it is true without experimenting – without going into the process of experimentation; without gathering the facts –and already the belief is there, then you will impose your belief. You will not listen to the facts. You will try to distort the facts according to your theory, according to your a priori belief. You are not a scientist at all. Forget that idea that you are a scientist. Who has given you a PhD? And what nonsense are you doing in your parapsychology department? Better call it the teaching of Hindu religion. Why call it parapsychology?“Some Christian will try to prove scientifically that there is no reincarnation, that there is only one life. And if it is to be proved democratically, Christians, Jews and Mohammedans outnumber Hindus. And if it is to be decided democratically, by vote, then they will win because how many Hindus are there? Almost half of humanity is Christian; the second great religion is Mohammedanism, then there are Jews – all three together are enough to defeat a small community of Hindus very easily. If everybody sets out with his belief to find out facts to prove it; it is not scientific.”He had come to stay for a few days; he immediately escaped and since then I haven’t heard of him. He was not interested in inquiring, he did not have an open mind, but he confessed to me that he was a Hindu thinking that I was also a Hindu. He would not have said that to any Christian, Mohammedan or Jew. He was very embarrassed when I said these things to him. The last thing he asked was, “You are not a Hindu?”I said, “I am nobody. Why should I be a Hindu? Blood is neither Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, nor bones are Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian. How can consciousness be Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian? I am just my consciousness, I am my bliss. How can bliss be Hindu or Mohammedan?”Being open means dropping your mind politically, religiously, philosophically; dismantling it brick by brick. It is a painful process, but it is the only way to know the truth and it is the only way to be free from all kinds of superstitions; from all kinds of fanatical beliefs. The idea of the fanatic is: “My religion is true and don’t be misled by the facts.” He does not trust the facts; he believes his dogma. The more ancient it is, the more he believes in it. His idea is: “How could people have believed in it for such a long period? It must be true.”But the Jews are as old as the Hindus and they have always believed that there is only one life; Hindus have always believed that there are many lives. The religions that were born out of Hinduism – Jainism and Buddhism – both believe in many lives. The religions that were born out of Judaism – Christianity and Islam – believe that there is no other life, only one life. Time cannot be decisive, nor can numbers be decisive.Only a scientific approach or a religious approach… It is the same to me. I call it science when your inquiry is objective; I call it religious when your inquiry is subjective, but for both inquiries, an open consciousness is absolutely required. That is the first, fundamental requirement: a consciousness without any mind – and that can happen only through meditation. Meditation is the only magic that can help you to be free from the mind; can help you to be free from yourself, your past and all the burden of the past.The eighth question:Osho,What is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?Not much. An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears this is true.The ninth question:Osho,Can I count on you to kill me?Prem Kavita, certainly but you are not ready yet. I am ready to kill, but you can be killed only at the right moment, not even a single minute before. You are not ready yet. Your desire is good, but it is only a desire. You will have to deserve it.Just last night, I killed Magga. Now she is crying, not understanding what has happened. She was a medium; suddenly I dropped her. It is ego-shattering. The mediums are bound to feel special; they can start gathering a certain ego in themselves – they can become serious.I have been looking at your questions, Kavita. All your questions show a certain sarcastic attitude. This is the first question that I have chosen worth answering, otherwise I simply throw them in the wastepaper basket. They don’t show love, they don’t show trust, they don’t show surrender. If I kill you without your love it will be murder. If I kill you with your love it is transformation. You will have to look deep within yourself; somewhere the bridge has not happened yet. You are here, but your questions show that you are still functioning from knowledge.Kavita is a breath therapist here; that may be the cause of the whole trouble. If you are a therapist here you start feeling a certain ego, a subtle ego. The cleaners, the toilet cleaners are in a far better situation. They cannot carry any ego. It has been my experience that they come far closer to me than the therapists, because the therapist comes with the idea that he “knows.” Somewhere, deep down he also carries the idea that he is helping Osho’s work; that he is very essential to the work; that he is indispensable; that without him there will be a gap – he is needed. The cleaner cannot feel that, hence sometimes the toilet cleaners blossom.Just three days ago I chose Nandan as a new medium. She has been a cleaner, but I am surprised at her availability, at her total surrender, at her absolute trust. I can flow through her just as the wind can pass through the pine trees – no hindrance, no obstruction.Kavita, I don’t feel that in you yet. I am ready to kill – that’s my whole function here. A master is needed only because you cannot kill your own ego, it is a difficult task. It can be done, but it is a very difficult task. It is almost like pulling yourself up by your shoestrings. It is difficult; some help is needed. Some help can be given, but it can be given only when there is no ego.Kavita, meditate over it. The day you are ready… My sword is always ready! What am I doing in my room the whole day? – polishing my sword so it does not gather rust.The tenth question:Osho,You said that there is a Russian here. What do you think of Russians? Will there be a Third World War?Russians are beautiful people, but they are victims of a very stupid philosophy, of a very stupid political ideology. The people are beautiful, but they are dominated by the most ugly regime ever.A few of my sannyasins in Russia – of course they are underground sannyasins – have sent me a few jokes. Just the other day I received them. They have been translating jokes, newsletters, Sannyas magazine and circulating them underground. They gather once in a while to listen to a tape, to meditate. They have been hearing so many jokes about everybody that they must be feeling that I am not paying any attention to them, so they have sent me two beautiful jokes.First:A man goes into a food shop in Moscow and asks for two kilos of meat. As usual, the shopgirl answers, “No meat today, Comrade.”“No meat!” he shouts. “No meat! They haven’t got any meat!” He runs into the street with both arms raised, shouting at the top of his voice, “No meat! No meat! They haven’t got any meat!” On he continues down the street shouting at everyone, “They haven’t got any meat! No meat!”He makes such a noise that the police come running. They see him shouting his head off, immediately arrest him and take him off to prison. In his cell he continues to cry out as he shakes the bars, “No meat! They haven’t got any meat!”“We’ll have to teach this chap a lesson,” says the prison officer. “Take him out into the yard and pretend you’re going to shoot him. That’ll soon shut him up!”So the guard marches the man, still shouting, into the yard. They line him up against the wall, load the rifles with empty cartridges, take aim and fire.There are a few seconds’ silence and suddenly the cry goes up. “No bullets! No bullets! They haven’t got any bullets either!”And the second:A Swede, a Pole and a Russian met and naturally their conversation got round to sex.“Sex in Sweden,” said the Swede, “is a group of people getting together in someone’s flat and having an orgy.”“Sex in Poland,” said the second man, “is a group of people watching a program on TV about people having an orgy in a flat in Sweden.”“What does sex mean in Russia?” they both asked the third man.“Sex in Russia,” said the man sadly, “is a group of people meeting someone from Poland who saw the TV program about the Swedish people having an orgy…”They are beautiful people but under a rotten regime. They need to be freed – they need to be freed from this violence, this dictatorship that is imposed on them against their will. But the imposers say that this is for their own sake. In the beginning the communists used to say that the dictatorship was only a temporary phenomenon; soon it would disappear. Once socialism was established even the state would wither away, so what to say about dictatorship? But now sixty years have passed since the Revolution; just the contrary has happened. The state has become more and more powerful. There seems to be no sign of its ever withering away. It is the first time in the whole history of humanity that a state is so powerful that there is no possibility of any revolution against it.No people have ever been so crippled and paralyzed. Before there was at least a possibility of rebelling against a regime. If it was too much you could always throw it away. But now, for the first time it has happened: the Russian government is so powerful, so immensely powerful, that the individual is nothing.And they have learned one thing: how to prevent a revolution from the very beginning, from the very seeds of revolution, so not even freedom of opinion is allowed. You are even afraid to talk to your own wife because, who knows? – she may be an informer. Nobody knows about anybody. You are afraid to talk to your own children because they belong to the Young Communists’ League and they inform against their parents. Only in Russia do walls have ears – only in Russia. Everywhere else it is only a proverb, in Russia it is a reality. You cannot even think independently because to think independently you need certain things to be made available. If Marx had been born in Russia he would not have been able to write Das Kapital because there is no British Museum where he could have gone and consulted all kinds of books.My books cannot enter Russia legally. They enter illegally, but not legally. The government watches everything that comes in. For freedom of thought you need some kind of climate; that climate has been destroyed. Every child is conditioned according to the state religion – communism is the state religion.Russians are beautiful people, as all people are beautiful. They deserve the love, sympathy, compassion and help of the whole world because there is only one possibility: if the free world helps them from the outside, only then can they be freed. Otherwise now, the government is so powerful scientifically and technologically that it is impossible to overthrow it, absolutely impossible to throw it. Even to talk about overthrowing is enough – you will disappear. Wherever you have gone, you will never be found again. Anybody who disagrees politically is immediately declared a mental case. According to their definition, according to their belief, only a madman can disagree with communism. How can a sane man disagree with communism? That’s what fanaticism is. Even if the person is a Nobel prize-winner, it does not matter – if he disagrees about anything he is insane. Now, he is not even declared a political prisoner, he is not thrown in jail, because that has certain respect.Jesus was crucified; that was respectful. At least they accepted him as a dangerous man. But if Jesus was born in Russia he would not be crucified, remember; they would simply declare him mad. They would give him electric shocks, not crucifixion. They would give him insulin shock therapy; they would operate on his brain. They would destroy his whole nervous system – they would make him a wreck of a man. They would not kill him; that way they would look very compassionate. They would not crucify him; there is no need to crucify now. He would be put in a mental hospital where he would be given treatment along with the mad people; that would be far more dangerous.Treating Socrates in a madhouse would have been far more disrespectful. At least the Greeks were respectful; they poisoned him – that’s okay. If you don’t agree with the man and the man is not ready to agree with you, you kill him. It seems perfectly okay. But to make him a madman and then torture him and slowly, slowly destroy his whole mechanism of thinking, his whole brain system; to operate on his brain and do damage to his brain, that is ugly. That’s what is happening in Russia.Russians are beautiful people, but they are living under a very ugly regime. It is the responsibility of the whole of humanity to help them to be free of this big prison, these iron walls that surround them.You also ask me: “Will there be a Third World War?” It is impossible. A Third World War is not possible for the simple reason that science has given us so much technology to destroy each other that a Third World War means a total world war. A total world war means that nobody will be the survivor – there will be neither any winner or any loser. For the first time, war has lost all its meaning. It is not because of Buddha or Christ that the Third World War is not going to happen. It is because of scientific technology – atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, super hydrogen bombs, death rays. They have made it impossible. Unless we decide on a global suicide, a Third World War is impossible.Small conflicts will go on happening because they are needed; they are an economic need. Sometimes it will happen in Vietnam, sometimes in Korea, in Israel, in Kashmir, in Afghanistan – small wars, not a third world war. Small wars have to happen, otherwise where are these big powers going to sell their weapons? And those weapons are accumulating. Every day, new developments are happening, so their old weapons become out of date. Who is going to use them? They cannot use them; they cannot be used by themselves. Poor countries, backward countries, like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran; these small countries can be sold out-of-date weapons. So these countries have to continuously quarrel with each other – small quarrels, lukewarm fights. The superpowers, America and Russia, need these wars to sell their weapons, otherwise their stockpile of weapons will be so great that they themselves will die under the burden. So these small wars are an absolute necessity.The backward countries are so foolish that they can’t see the point, so somewhere or other a war erupts. One country starts purchasing weapons from America, another country starts purchasing weapons from Russia. Both are in a way in the same business. Those who can see, they can see they are partners – they both need wars to continue somewhere or other. But they would not trigger a Third World War, no, because a Third World War means those two superpowers coming in conflict directly.If Russia attacks America, it will take only ten minutes for America to retaliate; or if America attacks Russia, it will take only ten minutes for Russia to retaliate. There will be only a ten-minute gap, that’s all. If you think that is a victory, it is okay. After ten minutes both are finished. In fact, if the superpowers come into conflict, there is every possibility that people who are very primitive and living far away in the forests of South Africa or in the Himalayas, or in Tibet, may be the only survivors. They will be the only people who will be benefited. For the first time their backwardness will pay off, for the first time they will be the winners and the winners will be the losers. But that too is a far, faraway, a remote possibility because a Third World War will trigger so much fire around the earth that there seems to be no possibility that anybody can survive. Not only human beings – trees, birds, animals, all will be gone.Hence, I can say categorically that there is not going to be any Third World War. With the Second World War, world wars were finished. Now there will be only small fights – battles but not wars.The last question:Osho,I am leaving for Italy. Would you please tell me a joke to tell to the Italiano?Sarjano, never ask for one joke. You can ask Laxmi that whenever I order one thing, she always orders two – she knows me. So whenever you ask for one joke you have to suffer two.First:Two Italian nuns were sitting at the table talking about the beauty of the flowers, plants and vegetables in the garden of their nunnery.One of the nuns says, “Did you see the big, red, juicy tomatoes in the vegetable garden?”As she is talking she joins both hands into a circle, showing the size of the tomatoes.“Yes,” answers the other nun, “and did you see the size of the cucumbers this year?”While she is describing them, her hands indicate the size of the long cucumbers.An elderly nun sitting in the corner of the same room, nearly deaf but not blind yet, asks with an eager voice, “Which Father are you talking about?”And second:Once, an explosion happened in an Italian salami factory and one of the salamis is blown into heaven. An angel flying around heaven bumps into the salami and grabs it with her wing. “This is a funny thing,” she says. “I wonder what it is?”She flies to Joseph swinging the salami in front of his nose and asks, “Have you ever seen such a thing before?”Joseph, staring at the salami, says, “No, I’ve never seen one before!”The angel flies away and meets Mary. “Mary, do you know what this is?” she says, swinging the salami in front of her.“Oh!” exclaims Mary, “You know, if there wasn’t that funny net around it, I would say it is the Holy Ghost!”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 10 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the goal of meditation?There is no goal of meditation. Meditation is the dropping of all goals, hence it can’t have a goal of its own; that will be against its very nature. Goals exist in the future; meditation is to be in the present. There is no meeting ground between the present and the future – the future exists not – how can the nonexistential meet the existential? That is impossible The future is our creation, it is our imagination. We create it for a certain purpose; the purpose is to avoid the present. We don’t want to be in the present, we want to escape from the present. The future gives us an escape. To live in the future is to be an escapist.Whatever the goal… It does not matter what that goal is – it may be God-realization, it may be attainment of nirvana; still it is a goal and any goal is against meditation. But our whole mind exists in the future; our mind is against the present. In the present the mind dies. How can the mind exist in the present? If you are utterly now, utterly here, there is no question of the mind. You cannot think because thinking needs space and the present has no space in it. It is just like a needle point – it cannot contain anything, not even a single thought.Hence if you want to live in the mind, either you have to live in the past or in the future; these are the two ways. The old-fashioned, the orthodox, the conventional – the Christians, the Mohammedans, the Hindus – they live in the past. And the so-called revolutionaries, the progressives, the avant-garde, they live in the future. The communists, the socialists, the Fabians, the utopians and all kinds of idealists, they live in the future. On the surface they seem to be very different – the Catholic and the communist seem to be antagonistic. Deep down they are not antagonistic at all. They belong to the same category, they are doing the same work: they both are escaping from the present.The Hindu lives in the golden age that has passed. His golden age was somewhere far, far away in the past. It is only a memory – it has never been there. That past is simply a creation of imaginative people, but it helps them to escape from the present. Hindus call it ramrajya – the kingdom of God; it was so in the past, and since then man has been falling down. Hence Hindus cannot agree with Charles Darwin about the idea of evolution. Hindus have a totally different idea – the idea of involution, not evolution. Man is not progressing, man is regressing. Man is falling every day; he is going downhill. The peaks are left in the past – the golden peaks, the sunlit peaks.The communist lives in the future; his golden age has still to come. It will come one day, somewhere far away in the future when the state withers away; when the society becomes classless; when there is no exploitation; when there is no need for any government; when people live in equality. That will be the kingdom of God – but that is in the future. That too is never going to happen.The communist and the Hindu are both doing the same thing, they are partners in the same business. The business is how to escape from the present, how not to live in the present. Hence you will see a strange thing happening: Hindus are against me, Mohammedans are against me; Christians are against me, communists are against me. On one thing they all agree, at least on one thing they all agree. At least I am happy that I give them one point to agree about. But in fact, they do agree because my insistence is against the past and against the future. My insistence is on being in the present. Hence meditation cannot allow any desire for goals.I can understand your question, because the mind always asks, “Why are you doing it?” It can’t do anything simply, spontaneously – the “why” is always there. In your life, you don’t know any action which is spontaneous, you don’t know any response. All that you do is not action, but in fact, reaction. You do it because there are reasons for doing it, there are motives for doing it, there are desires behind it. Something is either pushing from behind or pulling from the front. You are never acting out of freedom; you are a slave. Hence you always ask why.A man was sent by his psychiatrist to the mountains just for a change, to rest, relax and to enjoy nature. The next day his telegram arrived: “I am feeling very happy. Why?”One cannot accept anything without asking why. Now, one thing has to be understood about happiness; misery may have causes, happiness has no cause. If it has a cause, it is nothing but misery masquerading as happiness. When happiness is true – that’s what is meant by bliss. It has no cause, no causality. It is beyond cause and effect; it is beyond the chain of cause and effect. You cannot answer why.Buddha was asked many times, “Why are you so blissful, so peaceful? He always said, “Such is the nature of awareness – tathata.”Now his answer has to be deeply pondered over. He says, “There is no ‘why’ to it – such is the case. The trees are green and the flowers are red, and the man who is awakened is blissful. There is no ‘why’ to it.”But the people who were asking again and again… I think he must have been asked the same question thousands of times by different people. People may look different from the outside, but deep down they are all unconscious. So the same question arises again and again out of their unconscious mind: “Why? There must be some reason. Have you discovered some treasure? Have you found some Kohinoor? Have you found some alchemy to transform baser metal into gold? Have you found some secret that can make you immortal? Why are you so blissful?”The people who are asking are saying something about themselves. They are not really asking why Buddha is blissful – they can’t understand Buddha. They know only themselves. They know they are miserable and that their misery has a cause, and once in a while, when they feel happy, that happiness is also caused by something. You win a lottery and you are happy; without the lottery how can you be happy? And Buddha has not won any lottery. In fact, he has renounced his palace and kingdom and all riches. The people must have been searching, trying to find out: “There must be something he has found which he is hiding and not telling us about. What is it? Why do you look so happy?”Prabhu Maya has asked me a question – the same question that buddhas have always been asked, is being asked here too again and again. She asks, “Osho, I have recently been discovering the phoniness behind the smile I sometimes wear. Now I wonder about you – the same face, the same smile every morning, year in, year out. Is it for real?”I can understand her question because whenever she is smiling she knows it is phony, and I am constantly smiling. Naturally, year in and year out, it must be phony; otherwise there must be some hidden cause for it which is not visible to you. Either it is phony or I have discovered something which I am not telling you, which I am hiding from you.Even Ananda, Buddha’s closest disciple, asked the question one day when they were walking through a forest. It was autumn and the leaves were falling from the trees. The whole forest was full of dry leaves and the wind was blowing them about and there was a great sound of the leaves moving here and there. As they were passing through the forest, Ananda asked Buddha, “Bhagwan, one question persists. I have been repressing it, but I cannot repress it anymore. And today we are alone; the other followers have been left behind so nobody will know that I have asked you. I don’t want to ask it in front of the others. My question is: Are you telling us all that you have discovered or are you still hiding something? Because what you are telling us does not clarify your bliss, your peace. It seems you are hiding something.”Buddha laughed and he showed a fist to Ananda and asked, “Ananda, do you see what this is?”Ananda replied, “Yes, I can see it is a fist – your hand is closed.”Buddha said, “A buddha is never like a fist.” He opened his hand and he said, “A buddha is like an open hand – he hides nothing. There is nothing to hide! I have said everything, I am absolutely open.”Ananda still insisted, “But we cannot explain your constant bliss – and I have been watching you day in, day out. In the day you are blissful, in the night when you go to sleep you are blissful. Your face seems so innocent even in sleep. Even in sleep you look so peaceful, so serene, tranquil, calm, as if not a dream is passing within you. You are always a still pool with no ripples. How is it possible? I have also tried, but I do only a little bit and then I feel tired.”If you are trying you will feel tired. Prabhu Maya, if you try to wear a smile you will feel tired because wearing a smile means making a great effort. You have to practice it like Jimmy Carter… Then it is not a smile at all. Your mouth is simply open, your teeth are simply showing, that’s all.I have heard that his wife has to close his mouth every night because once a rat went in his open mouth. She phoned the doctor and he said, “I am coming, but it will take time. Meanwhile hang some cheese in front of his mouth.”When the doctor came he was very surprised as she was hanging up another rat. He said, “What are you doing? I told you to hang cheese in front of his mouth!”She said, “That’s right, but a cat came in behind the rat, so first the cat had to be taken out!”Since then she has to forcibly close his mouth every night. It is dangerous! And the White House is an old building – it has many rats. In fact, who lives in the White House except rats? Who is interested in living in the White House? And because rats live there, cats also live there.Meditation has no goal. It has no desire to attain anything. The dropping of the achieving mind is what meditation is all about. The understanding of desire and of the constant ambition for goals, for achievement, for ambition, brings you to a point – a point of tremendous awareness. You can see clearly that all goals are false; that you need not go anywhere; that you need not attain anything to be blissful; that to be blissful is your nature. You are missing it because you are running here and there, and in that running, in that hustle and bustle, you go on forgetting yourself.Stop running here and there and discover yourself. The discovery of yourself is not a goal. How can it be a goal? A goal needs a distance between you and itself. The discovery of yourself is not a goal because you are already it! All that is needed is that you stop running here and there; sit silently, relax, and rest. Let the mind become calm and cool. When the mind is no longer running toward the past and toward the future; when all running has disappeared; when there is no mind as such; when you are simply there doing nothing, just being – this is meditation. Suddenly you know who you are. Suddenly you are inundated with bliss, overwhelmed by light, by eternity. Your life becomes a natural phenomenon. You needn’t wear smiles – a smile becomes natural. You needn’t pretend to be happy.Only an unhappy person pretends to be happy. A happy person has even no idea that he is happy, he is simply happy. Others may think that he is happy; he has no idea. He is simply just being himself.Yoka says:Those who understand always act naturally.Out of his understanding his actions are natural – his laughter is natural, his smile is natural, his whole life is natural. Your whole life is artificial, arbitrary. You are always trying to do something which is not really there. You are trying to love. Now, trying to love is to start from the very beginning in a wrong way. You are trying to be happy. How can you be happy? It is not a question of trying. You are making all kinds of efforts to be graceful. Now, grace is not an effort; if there is effort, there is no grace. Grace is an effortless beauty. The really graceful person knows no effort.Yoka says:Those who understand always act naturally. Most men live in impermanence, the unreal, but the man of Zen lives in the real.You live in the phony, in the unreal. When you come across a man of Zen – remember the man of Zen means the man of meditation – there is a problem for you. Never try to understand the man of Zen according to your ideas; they are irrelevant. You can understand the man of Zen only through meditation. Learn the art of meditation, of being here and now – not for peace, not for bliss, not for anything. Effort without a goal… That’s what meditation is: effort without a goal.Now, you only know effort when there is a goal. Otherwise you will ask, “This is illogical – effort without goal? Then why should we make an effort?” You have been making efforts for goals and what have you attained? It is time to try something else. Enough is enough.Yoka says:Effort without goal is quite different.Quite different from all that you have done up to now.It opens the door of truth which leads to the garden of Tathagata.The word tathagata comes from the same word I used just a few moments ago: tathata. Buddha says, “I am peaceful because this is my suchness, my tathata.” Ask him anything and he always says, “This is my nature, my tathata.” Slowly, slowly it became known to his disciples that tathata is his most important word, his key word. Hence he is called Tathagata: one who lives in suchness; one who lives now and knows no other time; one who lives here and knows no other space.If you can also be here and now:It opens the door of truth which leads to the garden of Tathagata. A true man of Zen ignores the branches and the leaves, and aims for the root.What is the root of your misery? – this goal-oriented mind. What is the root of your misery? – this constant escape into goals. What is the root of your misery? – your mind is the root of your misery. But you never cut the root; you go on pruning the branches, you go on pruning the leaves. And remember, the more you prune the leaves and the branches, the thicker will be the foliage; the tree will become stronger.I have initiated more than one hundred thousand sannyasins and I have been teaching meditation for twenty years to millions of people, but not a single person has come with a root question to ask. They all come with “How to cut this branch?” and “How to cut this leaf?” Somebody says, “I am suffering from anger. What should I do with it?” Somebody else says, “I am suffering from too much greed. What should I do about it? How can I drop greed?” Somebody is suffering from jealousy and somebody is suffering from something else – and these are all branches and leaves. Nobody comes and says, “I am suffering from my mind. How should I get rid of it?” That is the root question.The day you see the root, things are very easy. Cut the root and the whole thing withers away of its own accord. Anger, greed, sexuality, jealousy, possessiveness – everything disappears.But you don’t want to cut the root. You are living a very paradoxical life. You go on watering the root; you go on training and refining your mind; you go on making your mind more informed, more nourished. And on the other hand you go on trying… That there should be less anger, less ambition, less greed, less ego. You ask, “How to be humble?” And you go on pouring water and giving fertilizer to the roots and cutting the leaves. You cut one leaf and three leaves will come in its place. The tree immediately accepts your challenge and instead of one it brings three leaves.Hence, a society that has been against sex becomes morbid and sexually obsessed. It has happened in India. You will not find such a sex-obsessed country anywhere else. For the simple reason that they have been cutting the leaf again and again. They are constantly cutting that leaf and the tree goes on growing more leaves. So sexuality has penetrated in such subtle ways that unless you are very alert you will not be able to see how it has penetrated in different ways. And how the Indian mind has become more sexual than anybody else’s.Do you know that India was the first country to think about sexual postures? The Kama Sutra was written in India – the first treatise on sexology. Sigmund Freud came after five thousand years. Masters and Johnson, and other researchers into sex, are just breaking ground in the West. They have not yet the sophistication which Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra has – even the French are not as sophisticated. Vatsyayana has discovered almost everything about sex, nothing is left. His treatise is almost complete. It is a “how to” book; it gives you all the techniques.Why did India discover the Kama Sutra? The country which has been celebrating celibacy for centuries, which has been teaching and preaching celibacy – this country discovers the Kama Sutra. This country gives birth to a man like Vatsyayana. And then came Pandit Koka, another Vatsyayana. Now, modern pornography is nothing compared to Koka. Modern pornography is very ordinary. Pandit Koka is a perfect pornographer.But why were these people born in India? And thousands of temples are devoted to the shivalinga; that is a phallic symbol. No other country worships phallic symbols except India. It is both: it represents both man and woman. If you go to a Shiva temple, observe well. It represents the feminine sexual organ, it represents the masculine sexual organ. It represents them in a state of meeting, in a state of orgasm. And this is worshipped.People have completely forgotten what they are worshipping. If you look into Indian scriptures you will be surprised. You will find them so obsessed with sex. On the one hand continuously condemning and on the other hand continuously, in subtle ways, depicting it. No other country has temples like Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri. Why? Why did this have to happen in India? – for the simple reason that if you cut one leaf, three arrive. Cut three and nine leaves arrive. Cut nine – remember – twenty-seven leaves will arrive. Nature believes in the magic number three. It believes in trinity.This is not the way to transform a man; this is a way to deform humanity. So on the surface the Indian tries to show that he is not interested in sex at all and deep down he is boiling with sexuality, he is constantly looking for sexuality. His whole mind is full of sexuality. If we could make windows in the heads of people, Indian heads would be really worth seeing.This was bound to happen. Whatever you repress, whatever you cut, if it is not cut at the roots, is bound to grow, is bound to grow in subtle ways. It may start asserting itself in morbid and perverted ways.Yoka says:A true man of Zen ignores the branches and the leaves, and aims for the root. Like the image of the moon reflected in a jade bowl I know the true beauty of the jewel of freedom. For myself and for others.There is only one freedom: the freedom from all goals.Don’t ask me what the goal of meditation is. Try to understand why you are constantly hankering for goals. In that very understanding meditation will arise in you, meditation will flower in you.Meditation is not something that you can enforce, that you can practice. It is something very mysterious, tremendously vast. It comes only when your heart opens its doors to understand everything with no prejudice, with no a priori conclusions.Being here with me, learn to be without goals. My sannyasins have to know perfectly well that we are not working for any goal at all. Our whole point is to live in the present moment so totally that all past and all future disappear.Who cares about that which is already gone? Who cares about that which has not yet come? The moment is enough unto itself. And that is the way of meditation: the moment is enough unto itself. Living the moment in its totality, in joy; diving deep into it without holding anything back, is bliss. Getting rid of all goals – worldly and otherworldly, material and spiritual – one knows the taste of meditation. It is the taste of absolute freedom.The second question:Osho,Why does everyone here understand you in his own way?It is just natural – tathata. How can it be otherwise? Everybody has to understand me in his own way because everybody has a mind – and right now the understanding is happening through the mind. When mind disappears of course then everybody will understand in my way. Then there will be no problem, there will be no question. There will be no need for me to say anything – I will be sitting in silence, you will be sitting in silence, and we will enjoy silence. There will be communion, a heart-to-heart communion.But right now you have minds and there is no other way for me to communicate with you. One has to accept this: when you are communicating with minds you have to accept that they will understand differently, they will understand in their own way.Each mind is different. And here we have all kinds of minds – this is not a community of people from one certain society.If just Hindus were here they would understand or misunderstand in the same way. But here there are Hindus and Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Zarathustrians – they all have their own religious backgrounds and all kinds of political ideologies. We have people from all the nations of the world; nearabout forty nations are represented here. How can you expect…? This is not a Catholic church, this is not a Hindu temple; this is a miniature universe. In fact, it is a miracle that some understanding is happening, that people are not cutting each other’s throats and are being very friendly and loving.These are the people who have been cutting each other’s throats for centuries. Hindus killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans killing Hindus. And here you will see the miracle – you will find a man called Krishna Mohammed. You cannot find this anywhere else in the world. Krishna Mohammed?In fact, I am very worried. When I die and I go to the other world then all these people – Krishna, Moses, Mohammed, Mahavira, Buddha – they will jump on me. They will say, “What have you been doing? Calling a man Krishna Mohammed?” Because I have heard that even in heaven they have compartments. Hindus live in one compartment, the Hindu colony. Mohammedans live in another compartment and they don’t see each other face-to-face. In fact, everybody believes he is in heaven and that nobody else is in heaven. God has to maintain that illusion, otherwise they will be creating trouble for God. So big walls surround those sections.Now God is also going to be in trouble. Where will he put Krishna Mohammed – in the Hindu section or in the Mohammedan section? Our people will be flying all over the place.It is natural that people should understand differently – people have different minds.Julius: “How many Commandments are there?”Julia: “Ten.”Julius: “What would happen if you er… Well, you know, if you broke one of them?”Julia: “So, there’d be nine!”On Mother’s Day, her husband presented her with a beautiful skunk coat.“I can’t see how such a beautiful coat comes from such a foul-smelling beast,” said the mother.“I don’t ask for thanks, dear,” replied the husband, “but I do demand respect.”An Italian calls Alitalia’s office and is answered by the office boy.“Please, sir, is-a that-a the Alitalia office?”“Yes,” answers the boy.“Can you tell-a me how long-a it takes from Roma to Pune?”“Just a minute, sir.”“Thank-a-you!” answers the Italian and hangs up.“Have you ever been bedridden?” the new doctor asked Mrs. Longo.“Sure I have. And I’ve been screwed lots-a other ways, too,” the lady said proudly.“What do you want for your birthday, son?” the indulgent Italian father asked his kid.“I want-a watch,” the kid said.Shrugged the father, “If it’s all right with your mother, it’s okay by me.”During an official ceremony in a European country, the Brazilian ambassador is in a carriage with the Queen of England when suddenly the horse farts noisily.Very embarrassed, the Queen apologizes, “I’m very sorry, Ambassador.”“It was nothing, Your Majesty, it happens. Mind you, I even thought it was the horse!”The third question:Osho,What is courage?There is only one courage and that is the courage to go on dying to the past; not to collect it, not to accumulate it, not to cling to it. We all cling to the past, and because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present. There are reasons – valid reasons – for the mind to cling to the past.First: mind itself is the past. Just look at your mind – what it is. It is nothing but the past: all that you have read, listened to, experienced, observed, all that has been. Mind never is; it consists of the past tense. So naturally mind feeds on the past, it clings to the past because that gives it strength, power, energy, life. But the more the past accumulates around you, the more you become like a mirror covered with layers of dust. And of course, the past is comfortable. It feels cozy because you are well-acquainted with it. You know it perfectly well, so you know how to deal with it. You are skillful with it, you are artful with it; your whole intelligence depends on it. To drop it will mean that you will have to learn again and again. And that is inconvenient, uncomfortable.To drop the past will mean that you have to become a child every day, and your ego wants to be an adult not a child. Your ego wants to pile up the past and sit upon it so that it looks higher than others. Without the past you will always remain a child with no knowledge, but full of wonder, of awe.That is the only courage: to drop the known and to move into the unknown. It has not to be done only once, it has to be done every moment. It is not a question that once done it is done forever, you have to do it every moment, every day, till the very last moment of your life when you are dying on your bed. Then too you have to continue the process of dying to the past so that you can live each moment with pristine clarity, with no dust on your mirror. When you can reflect the present as it is, you know what God is, what godliness is. Godliness is another name for what is, for that which is.But you are collecting information about it and that is one of the greatest barriers. Hence I have heard of sinners reaching, but I have never heard of scholars ever reaching to godliness. Pundits are the most impossible people. The more they know, the farther away they are from godliness. So many scriptures are preventing them. They cannot reach existence and existence cannot reach them. They are absolutely closed in their knowledge.Courage means: courage to drop knowledge, courage to be innocent again, courage to function from a state of not-knowing. I don’t know of any other courage.When I use the word courage I don’t mean the courage of a soldier. That is just stupidity, that is not courage. That is just stubbornness, that is not courage. That is just forced. You have to train the soldier so that he becomes dull. It is unintelligence, not intelligence. Hence soldiers become unintelligent people. The more medals they have, you can be certain, the more unintelligent they are. Just count the medals on their chest and you know how foolish they are.The whole process of the army is to destroy intelligence because an intelligent person will not be able to kill. An intelligent person will ask a thousand and one questions before killing somebody for no reason at all. An Indian killing a Pakistani whom he has never met before, whom he has never seen before, with whom there is no enmity; a Pakistani killing an Indian for no reason at all, who has not done any harm to him…If they were a little bit intelligent, would they be able to do it? Would the Indian or the Pakistani be able to do it without thinking of this man’s wife who is waiting at home, just as his wife is waiting at home for him; his small children are waiting, just as his small children are waiting for him; his old mother and his old father who depend on him, just as his mother and his father depend on him? Would he be able to do this stupidity of killing or being killed?If soldiers are allowed to be intelligent, wars will disappear from the earth. Wars exist only if soldiers are made in such a way, conditioned in such a way that they lose all intelligence. That’s why for years unintelligent training has to be forced on them. Now, for years the soldier goes on doing things which make no sense. Early in the morning he gets up, he has to line up and the parade begins. “Left turn,” and “right turn,” “about turn,” “go forward,” and “go backward.” For what? And for hours after hours.A philosopher was recruited in the Second World War. When the commanding officer said, “Right turn!” everybody turned right except the philosopher. The commanding officer asked, “Why? Why are you not turning right?”He said, “Why should I turn? I have no business there; I don’t see the need. I think all these people are fools. You just say ‘Right turn’ and they have turned. You will have to prove to me what the purpose of it is. Why should I turn right?”The commanding officer knew that he was a famous philosopher. He said, “This man is not right for the military. This type of person is not needed.” Even the other soldiers started thinking, “That’s right! Why? We are certainly fools. This man just says, ‘Right turn!’ and he has no answer for it and we turned right!”The commanding officer thought, “This man will create trouble. Not only will he be trouble for me, even the others will start getting ideas from him.” He took him out and said, “This is not for you. Come into the kitchen. I will give you some other job, some simple job which will be good.” So he gave him a pile of potatoes and said to him, “Just sort them out – bigger ones on one side, smaller ones on the other.”When he came back after an hour the philosopher was sitting silently, just in zazen – sitting silently, doing nothing. He had not even touched a single potato. The commanding officer said, “Can’t you even do that?”He said, “I can do it, but there is a great problem. Yes, there are a few potatoes which are big and a few which are small, but a few that are in between. First it has to be settled where those in between ones go. Unless everything is clear I never take any step. What about the middle-class potatoes?”He had to be freed. This man was not for the army. In fact, no intelligent man is for the army. Parading six hours a day, turning right, turning left, being ordered to do stupid things and following those orders… Then one day the commanding officer says, “Shoot!” and they just function like machines. Just as they were turning left and right they shoot, without a single thought of what they are doing – destroying life.A sannyasin needs a totally different kind of courage. This is not courage, this is simply dullness, stupidity – thickness of the head and nothing else. Their intelligence has been completely destroyed, they have been conditioned to be robots. That’s why all army races prove to be very unintelligent.In India the Punjabis, particularly the Sikhs, the sirdars, are the most warlike people, and the most unintelligent people too. Very courageous because where an intelligent person will think twice, they will rush in; they will not bother. You just order them and they will go into the fire. For centuries, this type of courage has been taught to humanity. This is a wrong type of courage. When I use the word courage, I am using it with a totally different connotation, a different meaning.Courage to me means courage to be intelligent against this unintelligent crowd that surrounds you. Courage means fearlessness. Society will try in every way to force you according to its ideas. It is better to suffer than to compromise because through suffering your soul will be born. Through compromise you may save your skin, but your soul will be lost.Courage means to be an individual; not to be a sheep, but to be a lion. Courage means the capacity to assert: “I am myself and my life is my life, and I am going to live it in my way. I am not here to live according to others and I won’t allow anybody to dictate to me how I should live, what I should do. I will live according to my light whatever the cost, even if I go astray.” It is better to go to hell by your own decision than to go to heaven by somebody else’s order because then heaven will be just slavery.Courage means the courage to be free. Courage means freedom. If you reduce it to the essential core, it is in fact dying to the past. If you die to the past you die to the tradition you are born in; you die to the religion you are born in; you die to the society you are born in; you die to the whole past. You die to history and time, and you are born anew – a new human being who belongs to no race, to no country, to no religion, but who belongs to existence. A religious person but not a Christian, not a Hindu, not a Mohammedan.The fourth question:Osho,What is your English – British or American?It is certainly not British. To be British is not easy. One has to be born British at least seven times. It takes a very long time to be British. It is not American either because I am not a tourist. You know I don’t even leave my room – what kind of American can I be?Why should my English be British or American? My English is my English – Osho English! This is a democratic country and the constitution declares freedom of speech as one of the fundamental rights. I speak my own language. Why should I speak American or English? In fact, English is too uptight, it is too tense, and American has become too lousy – just the opposite; it is a reaction.“Mine American-born daughter she’s telling me: ‘Yeah, Popsi-wopsi, I gotcha, but you’ll hafta lay some heavy bread on me so’s I kin strut new threads at the establishment bust-out, ya dig?’“So I am digging for maybe a half hour to learn she needs money so she can have a new dress by the school dance… And she is criticizing mine dialect!” her father was saying to me.Now it is very difficult for me to understand…“Yeah, Popsi-wopsi, I gotcha, but you’ll hafta lay some heavy bread on me so’s I kin strut new threads at the establishment bust-out, ya dig?”I don’t dig it at all. And why should I dig? I have never done such a job in my whole life.So I simply speak whatever way comes to me, whatever way comes spontaneously to me. You will have to be a little patient with me.The fifth question:Osho,Have you completely forgotten us poor Australians?I have not forgotten. I am collecting jokes about the Australians. Everybody is welcome to send me jokes about Australians. I have only one.A man walked into a London pub and ordered twelve pints of bitter. He put them on a tray, took them outside to a car and passed them through the window. Later he brought back the empty glasses, bought another round and passed them into the car.Curious, the bartender went outside with the next round and looking into the car, saw twelve midgets carousing and drinking beer.“Who are they?” he asked.“Oh,” said the man, “they’re just Australians with all the bullshit knocked out of them.”The sixth question:Osho,You always talk about masters – and all of them are men. Does that mean that a woman can't become a master?No, that doesn’t mean that a woman cannot become a master; many women have become masters. But then there is a problem. The problem is: unless a man becomes a master he is not allowed to speak by the wife. And he has not been a master for thousands of lives, so when he becomes a master he starts speaking. And when a woman becomes a master she becomes silent – she is tired. For thousands of lives she has been speaking and speaking and speaking; she has done enough speaking, so she becomes silent.Now it is very difficult – how to know about silent masters? Unless you speak nobody will know about you. If Buddha had not spoken, if there had not been any Dhammapada, then I would not have talked on his sutras.A man takes revenge when he becomes a master. And, do you see that whenever there is a master, more women gather to hear him than men? In fact, the proportion is: in four, three are women, one is a man. That was the proportion with Buddha’s disciples and that was the proportion with Mahavira’s disciples. So he really takes revenge – so many women and he remembers all those wives… Many of them may have been his wives in past lives. Wives, mothers, daughters, sisters – they have all tortured him. Now he says to himself, “Now it is my turn. Nobody can prevent me now.”But women, by the time they become masters, have run out of gas.The seventh question:Osho,Please, before I leave say something to me without words.Okay.Dig it? Get it? It is not difficult for me, it will be difficult for you.But a little more…The eighth question:Osho,How do they catch a lion in Russia?Please don’t ask such difficult questions.They arrest a cat and torture him until he admits he is a lion.The ninth question:Osho,What is the secret of success?You are asking me – a man who is an utter failure?The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.The tenth question:Osho,What is the right Catholic Christian way to prevent a population explosion in the world?You should go to the Vatican and ask the Polack. I’m not a Catholic, I’m not a pope. You create trouble for me. But I can suggest… This is only a piece of advice: sow your wild oats on Saturday night, then on Sunday pray for crop failure.And the last question:Osho,What is a blow job?Muktananda, you fool! Now this question is just the right question from you. I always knew you would ask something really great. The moment I saw you I realized immediately that here is a great fool, hence the name Muktananda – although I didn’t explain it to you that way. I give a beautiful explanation just to be polite. Truth can be said only later on when you are ready.For example, you know our great guard, Sant. Somebody has asked me, “Osho, why have you given him the name Sant?” In Hindi sant means saint; the English word saint comes from sant. But in Hindi we also have one beautiful expression: ant sant. Ant sant means, nonsense. So when I saw Sant for the first time, I said, “Here comes ant sant!” But ant I had to drop because just in the beginning that would have been too much. So I called him Sant. But now it can be said; there is no trouble.Muktananda, I saw the fool in you immediately. But even I was not so sure that you would be a perfect fool. Otherwise I would have called you Paramahansa Muktananda. Paramahansa means perfect. Now you deserve to be called Paramahansa Muktananda.Now, what kind of question is this?“Drinks on the house,” the Italian said to the bartender. “I feel great – just had my first blow job.”“What was it like?” the barkeep asked.“Okay, I guess,” the wop said. “But it did taste kind-a funny.”A brave young Irish Revolutionary comes to London to blow up a bus and burns his mouth on the exhaust pipe.An Italian dwarf was very famous among his friends for the size of his prick. A sex-starved American female tourist heard about him and visited his home to offer him twenty dollars to see his massive member.Luigino agreed and pulled down his zipper to display his pride and joy.The American lady was awestruck at the sight and asked hesitantly, “Is it all right if I kiss it?”“Please, Missus,” said the dwarf, “no more blow jobs. Ten years ago I was seven feet tall with a tiny prick. Just look at what all these blow jobs have done to me!”Muktananda, never ask me such dangerous questions. You are expected to ask spiritual questions, esoteric questions, supramental questions – and you are asking such questions which no buddha had to answer before. And I don’t think anybody else in the future will have to answer them because I will finish them all!Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 11 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is the meaning of existence?Meaning is a human invention; there is no meaning in existence itself. It is beyond meaning. It is not meaningless either because a thing can be meaningless only if it is possible for it to have meaning. Meaning and meaninglessness are two sides of the same coin. As far as existence is concerned meaning is totally irrelevant, so is meaninglessness.For centuries man has been imposing meaning on existence because it needs guts to live joyously without meaning. It needs real intelligence to live in ecstasy without any meaning at all. The crowds don’t have that much intelligence, they need some excuse. However false the excuse does not matter – even a false excuse is good enough for them to live for. But they are absolutely in need of a meaning. It is man’s need that imposes meaning on existence. The more immature a man is, the more his need for meaning. As he becomes mature the need becomes less.When man really comes of age there is no need for meaning at all. One simply lives, for no other reason; one lives for life’s sake. Then existence is not a means to something else, it is beautiful as it is; it is not fulfilling any purpose. In fact, it is because it is not fulfilling any purpose that it is so beautiful, so utterly beautiful. It has no utility, it is not full of commodities; it is full of poetry. What meaning does a poem have, what purpose? What meaning does a roseflower have, what purpose? What is the meaning of a night full of stars? And what is the meaning of love? What is the meaning of all that you are surrounded by? There is no meaning in it. If you are in need of meaning, you will project. Then existence becomes just a screen and you project your meaning on it.For centuries humanity has done that and because of it, now we are suffering tremendously. Now man has become more mature; he is not as childish as he was before and he can see that all those projections are nothing but projections. All the meanings are collapsing and now a great chaos is created by those meanings collapsing that we have believed in for thousands of years. A great meaninglessness is felt all over the world.All modern thinkers from Søren Kierkegaard to Martin Heidegger are concerned with one single question; that question is the question of meaning. And all are convinced that there is no meaning in life. But then why live? Naturally, inevitably, the second question arises: “If there is no meaning, why live? Why not commit suicide?”Marcel used to say that the only significant philosophical question is suicide. Why go on living when there is no meaning? It is sheer cowardice to live when there is no meaning. And in the context of the whole human history of thought, philosophy, religion, Marcel has some relevance. All the values are disappearing and man wants anything to cling to. Because the old gods have failed, man is inventing new gods.It is difficult now to believe in the Christian trinity: God the Father, Christ the Son and the Holy Ghost. It is almost impossible for any contemporary person to believe in this nonsense. But when this belief disappears a vacuum is felt; you start missing something. You cannot continue in the old belief and you cannot tolerate the emptiness that is left behind. Something has to be substituted – anything will do. There are many substitutes.Communists have provided their own unholy trinity: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. You see the point? The Christian trinity was all male, the communist trinity is also all male. There was no woman in the Christian trinity, there is no woman in the communist trinity. It is a replica, exactly the same. Many theologians have tried to bring Christ’s mother Mary into the trinity from the back door, but they have all failed. For centuries, the effort has been made again and again, but it has not succeeded. The same has happened with the communist trinity. Stalin tried to become one of the parts, but the magic number of three cannot be disturbed. So while he was alive he imposed himself, he became one. The trinity was no longer a trinity; it started consisting of four people. The moment he died the fourth was dropped. Even his grave was removed from its close proximity to Lenin’s grave. They could not even tolerate his dead body there.Mao Zedong tried to enter the trinity in China; the day he died he was removed. When old gods fail a great vacuum is felt. It is not accidental that in this century Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and people like them became so powerful. Their power was not their own; their power existed in the vacuum that was left in the human heart, because of the old values disappearing. Man has lived for so long with a certain meaning in life that he has become incapable of living without it. Either commit suicide or invent a new meaning.My own approach is totally different. There is no need to commit suicide; that is sheer stupidity. There is no need to invent any new meaning. That is falling back; it is regressive, it is becoming immature again. It is a great opportunity that is knocking on your doors. Humanity as a whole has come to a certain point of growth from which a quantum leap is possible. Man can start living without any meaning and still live beautifully, with tremendous joy.That was one of the greatest contributions of Gautam the Buddha. He has not been understood yet, but now his time has come. He came a little too early – twenty-five centuries before his time – but he speaks like a contemporary. Jesus speaks the old language, the language which children can understand. And so is the case with many others – with Moses, with Mohammed. But Buddha speaks the language of maturity. He says, “There is no meaning in life and there is no need for any meaning.” Drop the hankering and don’t try to fill this vacuum. This vacuum is good, it is healthy. Abide in this emptiness, rejoice in this emptiness. Don’t go on stuffing it with unnecessary things. This emptiness, which is being felt now by many more people than it was ever felt before, has a purity. Only once in a while has a man like Buddha felt that all ideals are false, imaginary, inventions – toys to play with, to keep children engaged so they don’t create mischief.Temples, churches, mosques, gurdwaras are places to keep children engaged so they don’t create any trouble, so they don’t create any mischief. These are sedatives so that you go on sleeping; these are sleeping pills, tranquilizers which help you to remain nonviolent, nondestructive, peacefully sleepy; otherwise there is danger. You cannot be trusted. You cannot be allowed freedom.These are your bondages. These are prisons which you think of as temples; they are not temples. The gods you worship are not gods. They are just playthings to keep you occupied; to keep you afraid; to keep you frightened; to keep you greedy. They don’t transform you. Their whole function is to serve the status quo, to serve the vested interests of the society.Buddha says: “The inner emptiness is so beautiful, don’t stuff it with junk, leave it as it is.” And that’s what meditation is all about. That’s what Zen is. It means living out of emptiness, asking nothing from life; living moment to moment for no other reason, just enjoying being alive. It is more than you can ask for. What more meaning do you need? Is breathing not enough? Is this chirping of the birds not enough? Is the green and the red and the gold of the trees not enough? Is this vast existence with all its splendor not enough? Do you want some meaning?Yoka says:The moon rises above the river. On the bank the wind plays softly in the pines all night long, pure and calm. What is the meaning of that serenity?Look on the Buddha’s precepts of nature. Winter and autumn mists, dew, clouds, spring mists are the true robe which covers our body.What is the meaning of that serenity? There is no meaning at all, but let me remind you again: I am not saying that life is meaningless. You are so obsessed with meaning that the moment I say that there is no meaning, immediately you conclude the opposite. Immediately something inside you says, “So there is no meaning in life, that means life is meaningless?” I am not saying life is meaningless, I am simply saying meaning is absolutely irrelevant. Life is more than meaning, far more. Machines have meaning, flowers don’t have meaning; meaning means utility. A car has meaning because it serves a certain purpose. A railway train has meaning, an airplane has meaning; they are utilitarian. But what is the meaning of a beautiful sunset and the clouds turning all the colors of the rainbow? What is the meaning of it? What is the meaning of a rainbow?Can’t you see things just as they are? Can’t you just be a mirror without projecting any meaning? If you can be just a mirror, there is no meaning and no meaninglessness. You rise above both, you rise above duality, and then there is great serenity.The moon rises above the river. On the bank the wind plays softly in the pines all night long, pure and calm. What is the meaning of that serenity?And realize it this very moment! Don’t think about it. If you think, you have already gone astray. A single thought and you are as far away from the truth as you can be. Just see it. I am not preaching a certain ideology to you, I am not imparting any information. I am not concerned with any creed, I am simply sharing my vision. Just for a moment, look through my eyes. For a moment, feel through my heart. Let your heartbeats be rhythmic with my heartbeats. That is satsang. That is communion with the master. For a moment, breathe with me. For a moment disappear; for a moment don’t think; for a moment forget that you are. Only then will you be able to understand. Seeing is understanding, it is not a question of thinking.Once you are freed from meaning and meaninglessness you are freed from all the prisons of beliefs, ideologies, scriptures – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jaina. You are suddenly out of all the prisons; for the first time you are under the sky. When you are utterly empty, just as the sky is outside you, infinite, so there is a sky within you as infinite as the outer one. When you are not asking for any meaning, both these skies meet, merge into oneness. That experience is God. God is not a person, that experience is God.The second question:Osho,It is impossible to find jokes about Aussies; they are so lukewarm, so boring, so nice, they never offend anyone. There is no character to poke fun at. Have you noticed?In a certain way you are right. They are lukewarm and they are nice. And certainly lukewarm people are boring; to be interesting you need a certain intensity. Nice people are boring. You can have nice people around only for a little while, you cannot live with nice people for long – they will kill you with boredom. They don’t have any spice in them; they don’t have any salt; they don’t have any taste at all – they are tasteless. In that sense you are right. But that is enough to create many jokes. In fact, that is a perfectly beautiful jumping board!An Englishman decided that he wanted to become Irish. After much research he discovered that the only way to become truly Irish was to have half his brain removed. He managed to find a surgeon who would operate, but during the operation the doctor made a dreadful mistake and removed his entire brain.When the man woke up, the doctor said, “I’m very sorry, I’ve made a mistake. Instead of taking half your brain, I removed it all!”To which the patient replied, “No worries, cobber!”He had become an Australian!A young Australian got married.“Look, son,” said his father. “When you are alone tonight with your bride, take her clothes off, take your clothes off, put your hand on her belly and say, ‘I love you, darling!’”“Yes, pa,” said the young man.When the feast was over he took his eager bride to the room, dimmed the lights, stripped off all her clothes, sat naked by her side, laid his hand on her stomach and said, “I love you, darling!”“Ah, lower, lower!” groaned the girl, patting his hand.“Mm,” says the Aussie, lowering his voice, “I love you, I love you!”The third question:Osho,Please talk about surrender and obedience.On the surface they appear alike, but they are polar opposites. One who is surrendered need not be obedient; obedience is needed only if there is no surrender. You will be a little puzzled because you have been told and taught and conditioned that obedience and surrender are synonymous. Obedience means you are not surrendered, so you are forced to be obedient – there is ego inside you which you are repressing, hence obedience is needed. In the army obedience is needed; it has to be enforced. Those who are obedient have to be rewarded and those who are not obedient have to be punished. Slowly, slowly everybody becomes obedient.This is just a conditioned reflex. This is what they do with rats in psychology labs, this is how they train them. Psychologists don’t think there is any difference between rats and man. About ninety-nine point nine percent of people are right, there is not much difference.Only once in a while a Socrates, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Buddha may not fit their idea, but they never come across such people. And even if they do come across a Buddha they will not be able to persuade Buddha to come to their lab so that they can experiment on him. They can get hold of rats; they can get hold of monkeys; they can purchase ordinary human beings who are ready to be experimented upon if they are paid well. And anything can be taught to you.For example, now Skinner and company propose that there is no need to tell people that smoking is bad or dangerous for their health; there is no need to tell them that it is a sin, immoral. All that is needed is to give them a few electric shocks. Whenever the urge to smoke arises in them, the moment they take out a cigarette from the packet, give them an electric shock so that a shiver goes down their spine. Soon just the idea of smoking a cigarette will be enough – there will be no need to give them electric shocks – they will get the shock. The cigarette will drop from their hands. Slowly, slowly even the urge will disappear.They say, “We can condition a man in whatever way you want. There is no need to follow these very long, old, rotten tracks of moral preaching and teaching which still have no effect. Nobody is afraid of them.” Who is afraid of hell now? Maybe in the beginning it was like an electric shock, but now people have become accustomed to it. They have become adjusted to the shock, now hell is not a shock at all. If somebody says to you, “Don’t smoke cigarettes – you will go to hell!” it’s not a shock to you. But five thousand years ago it was enough to give you a shock. The idea was the same: make people frightened.Modern technology makes it easier; they have found short cuts. They think that there is no difference between rats and man because rats learn the same way. Punish them and they will stop doing a certain thing; reward them and they will start doing it again and again. That is the way to create obedience. That’s how it is created in the army; that’s how it is created in the scouts; that’s how it is created in the police. That’s how it is imposed on the whole society.Surrender is a totally different phenomenon. Surrender means you are in deep love and a great trust has arisen in you – such trust that there is no question of repressing yourself.You are sannyasins here. I have nothing to reward you with; in fact, you have to go through all kinds of difficulties here. You come from far better, far more advanced countries. You have had beautiful homes and have lived more comfortably, with all the luxuries, with all the gadgets that science has made available. You would never have thought that you would have to suffer this nightmare in Pune – this heat, mosquitoes, rats, cockroaches. In the West many things have disappeared, but here you have to live in very primitive conditions. You have to live as if it was almost two thousand years ago.I am not offering you any reward, I am not promising you any paradise either. I say drop the very idea of the future, live in the moment. To live in the moment and in Pune – it is arduous, it is difficult.Why are you here? I don’t promise you anything at all. You are here just out of sheer love – you have fallen in love with me. It is not a question of obedience. You are not drilled to be obedient, you are not conditioned in any way to be obedient.Just the other day Prem Zareen asked a question: “Osho, you say, ‘I give freedom to my sannyasins.’ Is this applicable to sannyas, too?”She means: is she free to drop sannyas? Yes, Zareen, I give you total freedom. Total means total, without any exception.If you have taken sannyas out of love, there is no question of dropping it. If sannyas has really happened, how can you drop it? It is not something that you have put upon yourself; it is something that has grown in you. Just as you cannot drop your heart, how can you drop your sannyas? If it is your heart you cannot drop it. From my side yes, absolutely yes. I give you total freedom – there is no question about it – you are free to drop sannyas. It was your freedom to be a sannyasin, it is your freedom not to be a sannyasin. But the whole question hangs on something very deep. If sannyas has happened out of a love affair, it is impossible to drop it even though the freedom is available. But if you have taken sannyas for some other, ulterior motive then of course it can be dropped. In that case, it is better to drop it because it has not happened in the first place. Why carry an unnecessary burden?In short, if sannyas has happened you cannot drop it; if you can drop it, it has not happened in the very first place and then you must drop it. Not only do I give you freedom to drop it, I will help you to drop it because I am not in favor of you being burdened by anything that is not growing in you.You are already too burdened, Zareen. A thousand and one things have been imposed upon you. I will be the last person to make your life more of a burden. Sannyas is not like an arranged marriage, it is a love affair. In a love affair there is no question of divorce because we are never married, so the question of divorce does not arise at all. If love is authentic, if love is really there, it is forever; there is no end to it. It begins, but it never ends. Hence, I can give you total freedom because I am not imposing any obedience on you. Where obedience is imposed, freedom cannot be given because if you give freedom then obedience will disappear.Here trust is happening, surrender is happening, love is happening. From your side, trust, surrender; from my side, freedom. From the disciple’s side, surrender; from the master’s side, freedom. Where this freedom and surrender meet there is communion, there is satsang. It is not a question of obedience.When I say something to you and you do it, you do it out of your love, not because it is an order and you have to do it. There is no question of forcing yourself to do it. In obedience you are doing it even against yourself, even in spite of yourself. In surrender the ego is no longer there to resist; the ego is absent.When I move my hand, what is happening? Is the hand obeying me or is the hand totally surrendered to me? The hand is totally surrendered to me; there is no question of obeying me. The hand no longer exists as a separate entity.Zareen, in sannyas the disciple disappears, becomes part of the master. He becomes his hands, his eyes.Ramakrishna was dying. He had cancer of the throat and in his last days it became impossible for him even to drink water.Vivekananda said to him, “Bhagwan, can’t you ask God to do you just a little favor? If you simply ask God that you should at least be allowed to eat and drink, it is bound to happen. It is becoming too great a suffering for your body – and not only for your body, but for us all. We cannot eat because we know you cannot eat. It has become impossible for us to drink because we know you cannot drink. How can we drink? So if you don’t care about yourself, okay, but think of us – we are also suffering. Just for our sake close your eyes and say to God, ‘Do me just a small favor.’”Ramakrishna closed his eyes, opened them and started laughing. He said, “You fool! If I listen to your advice God will laugh at me. I asked him…” That was his way. He had not asked – there is nobody to ask – that was his way. He would not hurt Vivekananda. He closed his eyes, he may have even moved his lips to show Vivekananda that he was praying to God. And then he opened his eyes and said, “God laughed at me and said, ‘Ramakrishna, you are listening to these fools? Do you follow their advice? Are they your disciples or are you their disciple? Who is who? You have eaten with this throat for so many years – can’t you now eat and drink with the throats of your disciples?’” And Ramakrishna said, “Vivekananda, his argument appeals to me. So stop torturing yourself, stop suffering because now that I have lost my throat, I have to depend on your throats. Eat as much as you can – a little more than usual, because a part of it has to go to me. Drink a little more than usual because there will be my share too. So eat, drink and rejoice because God has said, ‘Ramakrishna, you can eat through your disciples’ bodies. Why depend on this body? This body is gone and rotten.’”There is a certain invisible unity, an organic unity, between the master and the disciple.Zareen, one is free, absolutely free with me. If one wants to drop sannyas one should not think twice; one should simply drop it and forget all about it. If it can be dropped it should be dropped. If it cannot be dropped, only then is it worthwhile. I give you total freedom. But if surrender is there, there is not going to be any difference. In fact, total freedom will make your surrender easier. When there is somebody to impose something upon you, a natural resistance arises. It is very natural. If I am here to impose something upon you and to make you obedient, you will resist; it is just human. But I am not imposing anything.That is the beauty of this commune. That is something unique that is not happening anywhere else in the world. Everywhere obedience is being imposed either directly or indirectly, in subtle ways or not even in such subtle ways: “Do this, don’t do that.” People are being treated like slaves, with no respect.I respect you. I love you far more than you can ever love me. I respect you far more than you can ever respect me because whatever you do will be limited and whatsoever I do will be unlimited.Your so-called gurus and your pseudo masters all depend on your obedience. They force it upon you. You are willing for the simple reason that when somebody is there to impose something upon you he becomes a father figure to you. He takes the responsibility – you need not feel responsible for yourself. You need to depend on somebody and you have to pay the price for that. They go on ordering you about as if you were small children.A little boy went to school for the first time and the teacher asked, “What is your name?”He said, “Johnny Don’t.”The teacher said, “I have never heard such a name before – Johnny Don’t?”He said, “That’s my name. Whatever I do, my mother shouts, ‘Johnny, don’t!’ my father shouts ‘Johnny, don’t!’ Wherever I go, somebody or other immediately says, ‘Johnny, don’t!’ So I assume that this is my name. This must be my name.”From the very beginning your father, your mother, your parents, your teachers, your priests are all teaching you, “Do this, don’t do that.” And by doing that they create a certain obedience in you. You become addicted to obedience; it is a drug.So when you come to me you would like… People go on asking me – I never answer their questions and they go on asking me, “Give us detailed instructions what we should and what we should not do. We want clear instructions from you.” I give you clarity, not clear instructions because my instructions may be right today and tomorrow they may not be right. My instructions may be a hindrance to your growth tomorrow because nobody knows about tomorrow – it is unpredictable. So I give you clarity so that you can find your own way of life today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Wherever you are, if you have clarity, you will be able to find your way.I give you total freedom. I share my light with you, I share my joy with you, I share my freedom with you. I don’t want in any way to become a father figure to you. Always remember me only as a friend.You ask me: “Please talk about surrender and obedience.” Surrender happens through love, trust, egolessness; surrender means surrendering the ego. Obedience is a cultivation of the ego; of pruning the ego here and there; of bringing it into a certain shape, into a certain form so that it can exist with the society – so that it can exist with the already established order of things. Obedience is in the service of the past. Surrender is not in the service of anybody else.Surrender is simply becoming free of your ego. The moment you are free of the ego, your life starts growing wings. Ego is heavy; it is like a rock hanging around your neck. It goes on keeping you tethered to the earth, it gravitates toward the earth. Once the ego is dropped, suddenly you start rising upward; your life becomes a tremendous upward movement, you are uplifted. Surrender makes you weightless; it allows you to go against gravitation. Another law of life starts functioning: the law of grace.There are two laws. Science knows one law: the law of gravitation, that everything falls downward. Religion knows another law: that everything rises upward if you are ready to drop the ego.It is said about a Hasid mystic, Zusiya – who could have been a Zen master, who could have been a Sufi… In fact, enlightened people don’t belong to any tradition. They are born somewhere – one has to be born somewhere, you cannot be born everywhere… So it was a coincidence that he was born a Jew in the Hasidic tradition. But he was a strange Hasid. Hasids are strange, but he was the strangest; he was very unpredictable.I, at least, come here and tell you a joke so that you can laugh. He was far stranger; he would simply come here and start laughing. Not even a joke! Hasids love beautiful jokes and stories.So once he was asked, “Zusiya, what kind of Hasid are you? At least tell some jokes, some stories. You simply come and start laughing.”He said, “I am saving all my jokes for God because I don’t have anything else. I don’t know how to pray, I don’t know any scriptures; I am saving some beautiful jokes for him. And when Zusiya dies you will see!”And it actually happened. When he died there was great thunder and people said, “He has arrived, and God is laughing.”Zusiya was staying in a house, in a disciple’s house. The family was a little worried about the man because his ways were strange – he might do anything. In the middle of the night he might start laughing, he might wake up the neighbors, he might create a scene. So they put him in the basement and locked the door for the night so that they could at least rest and the neighbors could rest. In the middle of the night, suddenly they heard laughter from the terrace. They could not believe it. They rushed out and Zusiya was rolling about on the roof laughing. They said, “Zusiya, what is the matter?”He said, “That’s why I am laughing. I was sleeping in the basement and suddenly I started rising upward.”But he was simply making it clear that there is another law which does not believe in locks and does not believe in falling downward. His actual words were, “Suddenly I found myself rising upward.”That is the law of grace: surrender, and suddenly you are in a totally different law; your gestalt changes, you start rising upward. And there is great laughter in you and the whole existence laughs with you.There is no question of obedience here. Obedience is an ugly word.The fourth question:Osho,Please tell a British lady a British lady joke for those of us learning to laugh at ourselves.Half way through her world cruise the English lady attended the ship’s ball, became slightly intoxicated by champagne and ended up sleeping with a good-looking Italian steward. But the very next day when the steward approached her on the quarterdeck, the English lady cut him dead.“Hey, contessa mia,” said the steward, “donna you remember the good times we had last-a night?”The English lady looked up briefly from her game of bridge. “In the circles in which I move, young man,” she said crisply, “sleeping with someone does not constitute an introduction!”The fifth question:Osho,I am always worried about what others are thinking about me. What should I do?There is no need to do anything because I know about those others – they are constantly worried about what you are thinking about them.The sixth question:Osho,Is it true that the meek shall inherit the earth?Yes, because the rest of us will escape to the stars!The seventh question:Osho,Who are the noisiest while making love?Two skeletons on a tin roof.The eighth question:Osho,Gurdjieff had a beautiful water pipe and did not hate cigarettes either. All his life Baal Shem had a clay pipe in his mouth. Does smoking really have to drop? And if so, how come the only temple in the ashram is the smoking temple?My whole effort here is to transform the mundane into the sacred. It is an alchemical school; we change base metals into gold. That’s why the smoking place is called a temple. That is the only temple we have.I am not against smoking. I don’t smoke myself because now there is so much smoke in the air that one need not bother carrying a clay pipe or a water pipe in one’s hand; just ordinary air is enough – it is so polluted.In fact, ecologists say that it is a wonder man has survived because just fifty years ago scientists thought that if the air became as polluted as it has become today in New York, Mumbai, Kolkata, London, then people would die. But man has a tremendous capacity to adjust to any situation. Where so many cars, trains and planes are moving around and where there are factories and so much smoke, there is no need to carry your own pipe anymore; you simply breathe in the air and you are smoking.I am a lazy person. Gurdjieff was not a lazy person, that’s why he used to carry his beautiful water pipe. And in Baal Shem’s days the air was not so polluted. If you wanted some smoke to go in your lungs you had to make private arrangements. Now it is universal.I am not against it because at the most it can kill you a little earlier. So what? If you don’t live eighty years and only live seventy-eight, does it matter? In fact, the world is so overcrowded that everybody will be happy that you are gone. Do you know how much we celebrate when somebody goes? We don’t celebrate anything else like that. A little space is created.So you can smoke as much as you want: “Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.”You can go a little quicker. And in these days of speed where everything is going faster and faster, this is old-fashioned just to go on dying in a healthy way, to go on lingering and lingering. Health is the longest route. But finally you have to reach the grave and when shortcuts are available, the wise people always choose the shortcuts. So don’t be worried.In the new commune we are going to make many temples. We are really going to make them beautiful because when somebody is in such a hurry we should make every arrangement that we can, we should give him all the help that we can. We will make beautiful temples, well-decorated, comfortable, luxurious, so that you can rest and smoke to your heart’s content.If you are living in an unconscious way it makes no difference whether you live to seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred; it does not matter. Living consciously even for a single moment is enough.My whole effort here is to help you to become conscious. Even if for a single moment in your whole life you become absolutely conscious, you will not be coming back. You are well-gone. You are really gone into the universal source.That is one of the names of Buddha: Sugata. Sugata means well-gone – one who has really gone and will not be coming back.If you are conscious, it is up to you to decide whether you would like to live a little longer or little less; nobody else should decide it for you. How can anybody else decide?Morarji Desai’s government was trying to impose prohibition on the whole of the country – and eighty percent of his cabinet ministers were drunkards. He himself was worse than all of them – he was drinking his own urine. I would rather drink wine. If one has to choose between wine and urine, wine seems to be far more aesthetic – and it is far more vegetarian, too. Urine seems to be an animal food. Just think of the whole passage it comes along, the long journey it takes… Now the second step after that is not very far away.When Indira became Prime Minister, I was wondering why she was not moving into the Prime Minister’s house; she took two months to move in. I inquired, “What is the matter?” And I was informed that she was changing all the tiles in the bathrooms because… Who knows what he was doing inside the bathroom? Almost the whole house was being renovated. Everything had to be cleaned, all the utensils had to be removed. Who knows what he was doing? In his bathrooms, all that was found were different kinds of enemas. It took two months to change the whole house – it must have been stinking!I am not against smoking or even against drinking. Once in a while it is really beautiful to drink. There is no need to be so superhuman – be human.That’s what I love more in Jesus than I love in Mahavira or Buddha. Buddha and Mahavira are too abstract, almost inhuman; Jesus is very human. He drinks and he eats and he loves feasting. Late in the night they eat and drink and gossip.The new commune is not going to be a commune of ascetics – ascetics are pathological people. My sannyasins are not ascetics, my sannyasins love life. Of course, when you live consciously it is up to you to decide. If you want to drink a little beer once in a while there is nothing wrong with it, but the decision comes through your own awareness. If you don’t want to drink there is no need to.In fact, I don’t drink for the simple reason that just soda water gives me enough intoxication, so there is no need to mix it with whiskey. Why waste whiskey? I keep it for others. Whenever Paritosh celebrates his birthday I send him a bottle of whiskey or brandy. Whenever somebody brings brandy I keep it because Paritosh will need it soon, his birthday will be coming. For me, just soda is enough.The last question:Osho,Please, just one more joke about the blow job phenomenon.Muktananda… Sorry, Paramahansa Muktananda… I mean, you son of a bitch! Are you mad or something? Why are you obsessed with this great phenomenon? But if you want, it is okay.George Stearman was a legendary businessman, a great success in America. He began as an IBM salesman of typewriters. Within ten years his sales and executive leadership was so outstanding that he became sales director for all office products and small computers for a nine-state area from Texas to California. When Xerox expanded into computers he was lured away to their corporate headquarters outside New York. Within ten years of record achievement he was national sales director for Xerox. With a position on the executive committee, all he lacked before the presidency was a seat on the board of directors.He had a beautiful wife and three children in college. A house in Darien, Connecticut, that looked like Mount Vernon. Then, on Christmas Eve, when the other chief executives had all gone off to the Bahamas, Florida or Aspen for the holidays, George went into the office to get his year-end pay check with the expected large bonus. When he opened his pay check, instead of a big bonus he had a check for severance pay. He was fired.George felt totally destroyed, but made it home after a few martinis. When he opened the door, there was a note on the Christmas tree that said: “George, I’ve had it. I want a divorce. The children and I are gone.”Blindly he went back to the city, got himself thoroughly drunk, took the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building and was about to jump off when he felt a small tug on his pants leg. He looked back – there stood Santa Claus.George said, “Santa, get lost! Get away! I’ve lost everything. My job is on the rocks and my wife and children have left me.”Santa replied, “Wait, George, I’ll give you two wishes if you give me one.”“Okay,” said George, “I want my wife and kids.”“No problem,” said Santa, “in two days they will be back.”“Great!” exclaimed George. “What about my job?”“Well,” said Santa, “there has been a power play. Just wait until New Year and you will be the director of Xerox.”“Wow!” said George, “That’s great. And what can I do for you?”“Well,” said Santa, unzipping his fly, “my wish is for you to give me a blow job.”“What!” screamed George. “I’m forty-five years old and I’ve never done a thing like that.”“Well,” said Santa, “a deal is a deal!”After George had finished, Santa zipped up his fly. Looking up George saw tears streaming down Santa’s face. “What’s wrong?” he asked.Santa looked down at George and said, “It is rather touching to find a forty-year-old man still believing in Santa Claus.”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 12 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Buddha said, “If you want to see, see at once. Don't let the mind enter into it.” Can you tell us more about “seeing”?Seeing is a state of no-mind, a state of no-thought, a state of pure awareness. You simply reflect that which is without any interference, any judgment, any like or dislike; when you don’t say a thing about it, you just function like a mirror.That’s why Buddha says, “If you want to see, see at once,” because if you start thinking you have already missed. Seeing at once means, don’t bring the mind in. Mind brings time, it brings the future and the past. Mind starts comparing whether it is right or wrong. It compares with the old prejudices – with the Gita, the Koran, the Bible, and with all your conditionings. Or it starts projecting itself into the future, into the world of desires: “If I believe in this, what am I going to attain? What will be the achievement?” The moment the mind comes in, it brings the whole world of the past and the future. Suddenly you are in a turmoil. Memories are there, desires are there, and that which was said to you is lost in the turmoil, in the noise.Buddha says: “See it, right now. Not even a single moment’s thinking. Thinking means missing.”Hence this has been Buddha’s constant practice: that whenever a new seeker came to him asking questions, inquiring about truth, God, the afterlife, he would always say: “Wait, don’t be in a hurry. Just sit by my side for at least two years not asking anything. If you really want to be answered, forget all your questions for two years. If you don’t want to be answered, I am ready to answer right now. But you are not ready to listen. Your very question is coming out of an inner insanity. There are a thousand and one questions inside asking for attention. While I am answering your question you will be preparing a new question to be asked; you won’t be listening to me. So if you really want to be answered, wait for two years. Sit silently by my side not asking, simply watching what is happening here.“Much will transpire in these two years, you will see many people flowering. You will see all kinds of people coming to me; the curious ones who come empty-handed and go empty-handed; the real seekers who come empty-handed but never go empty-handed – they stay, they remain with me till they are fulfilled. You will see the slow ones who take a very long, long time, a gradual process. You will see the quick ones, the intelligent ones who understand immediately. Simply watch. Walk with me from one village to another; sit with me under this tree and that tree; imbibe my spirit, feel my silence; look into my eyes, watch the way I walk, watch the way I sit. Simply watch for two years and forget all your questions, don’t formulate any questions. And after two years, if you can fulfill this condition, you will be allowed to ask and I will answer you. I promise you that whatever the question is, it will be solved; whatever your thirst is, it will be quenched.”A great philosopher, Maulingaputta came to him. Of course, he was asking great philosophical questions. Buddha listened – he was very famous, he was well-known all over the country. He had not come alone, he had come with five hundred of his own disciples. They were sitting behind him. Buddha listened patiently. For one hour he was asking this question and that question – some very complicated, some complex, some subtle. Then he said, “I have asked so many questions, but you have not answered.”Buddha said, “My way of answering is that you will have to wait for two years with me. These are the questions that you have asked many people. Have you or haven’t you asked them of other people before asking me?”Maulingaputta said, “That’s true. I have asked Mahavira and he immediately answered. I have asked Sanjay Vilethiputta” – he was another famous teacher of those days – “and he immediately answered. I have asked Ajit Keshkambal” – he was a very skeptical philosopher – “and he was very, very interested in my questions. And I have asked so many others. We have been traveling all over the country.”Buddha said, “You have asked so many people and they have all answered, but have you got the answers? If you have got the answers, why waste my time?”Maulingaputta said, “They have answered, but I have not got the answers yet. My questions remain the same – untouched. Their answers have not satisfied me.”Buddha said, “I can also answer right now as they have answered – it will not satisfy you either. Now you have to decide. If you really are interested, risk two years of your time and sit silently by my side.”Maulingaputta waited for two years, but before he said, “Yes, I am ready to wait,” one of Buddha’s great disciples, Manjushree, started laughing. Maulingaputta asked, “Why is this man laughing like mad?”Buddha said, “He is not mad – he is the first of my disciples to become enlightened. I know why he is laughing – you can ask him yourself.”Maulingaputta asked Manjushree, “Why are you laughing?”Manjushree replied, “I am laughing because this Gautam Buddha is tricky. He tricked me the same way. Listening to what he is saying to you, I remembered my own journey to him. Twenty years have passed; suddenly I remembered – I had completely forgotten – that these were my questions too. It is as if history is repeating itself. It is strange because I came with five hundred disciples of my own, just as you have. I also asked Buddha and the same reply was given to me: ‘Wait for two years.’ I waited for two years, and I am laughing. I would like to say this to you as a warning: if you want to ask this man anything, ask right now because after the two years you will not ask him and he will not answer.”Buddha said, “I will be ready to answer, but if you refuse to ask, what can I do? My promise will stand – I am a man of my word.”And the story happened as Manjushree had predicted. Two years passed – Maulingaputta had completely forgotten, because who remembers time when one is with a man like Buddha?You remember time only when you are miserable; when you are blissful, time is forgotten. Time depends… If you are very miserable, one hour appears as if many days have passed. If you are blissful, many days appear as if just a few moments have passed. If you are totally blissful time stops, time disappears, evaporates; there is no time anymore. You simply live beyond time.Two years passed. Maulingaputta had forgotten, but Buddha reminded him. Suddenly one day he said, “Maulingaputta, two years have passed. It is now time that you should ask your questions. I am ready to answer.”Maulingaputta laughed. Buddha said, “You are laughing like mad. What has happened? Do you remember Manjushree’s laughter that day?”Maulingaputta said, “My questions have fallen. I have nothing to ask. I have become utterly silent. You have not answered and yet you have answered.”This is the true answer. The real master kills your questions in such a subtle way that you never become aware of it; without any bloodshed he goes on destroying your questions. Slowly, slowly, by and by, you become aware of the absurdity of all your questions. Slowly, slowly you become aware of the utter mystery of life. Life is not a problem and it cannot be reduced to questions; there is no answer for it. It is a mystery, unanswerable, insoluble. You have to live it, you have to taste it, you have to experience it. It is experienced in silence.Hence meditation contains all the answers because meditation is the art of getting beyond the mind. Once the mind has gone with all its chattering, you are able to see; seeing happens. Seeing is transformation. When you see that which is, your whole life is transformed. You cannot live now against existence; it is impossible. You start living in harmony with existence.Knowing, seeing, how can you go against the ultimate law of life? Nobody is so foolish. You go against it because you are not aware of it. When you are aware of it, you simply become a harmonious part of it; you fall into the organic unity of existence, you disappear as an ego – the dewdrop disappears into the ocean and becomes the ocean. That is fulfillment; that is contentment; that is the ultimate bliss, nirvana.The second question:Osho,I have four specialties: I sleep very deeply in your discourse; I eat lots of chocolate and ice cream; I am a German girl and I am fooling around with an Indian swami. Can I get enlightened?Sleep is very helpful. Enlightenment is very close to sleep. Patanjali has exactly defined samadhi as sleep with only one little difference: that it is conscious sleep. The body sleeps, the mind sleeps, but something far more deep in you remains awake – at the very center of your being, a flame of awareness. So deep sleep is nothing to be worried about; deep sleep – that is very good. These discourses are meant for that. Just keep a little alert deep inside. If you don’t listen to my discourse, don’t worry about it; just remain a little alert inside. If my discourse can help you to fall into a deep sleep, at least something is happening. You are on the right track. Just a little deeper…If you eat lots of chocolate and ice cream it’s perfectly good because you may not be coming again, so be finished with it. Eat as much chocolate and ice cream as you want because on the farther shore there is no ice cream, no chocolate – and I am telling you from my experience. Do you know how miserable I feel? Now I repent – why didn’t I eat chocolate and ice cream and all kinds of things? But when I was as asleep as you are, Deeksha was not around!There is no need to worry that you are a German girl. If you had been a Californian girl, there would be trouble. Germans are one-pointed people; they go like arrows, direct to the point; they don’t go zigzag. That is not their way. Once they have decided something, they follow it to the very end – whatever happens. They don’t look here and there, they don’t look backward. That’s why I have such a soft spot for German people. That’s perfectly okay. Just Californians are in difficulty.A Californian bumper sticker: Warning. I Brake For Hallucinations.As far as enlightenment is concerned, one has to beware only of hallucinations because one can hallucinate that one has become enlightened. Many Californians are hallucinating. Now there are as many enlightened people in California as there have ever been anywhere in the world. In the whole history of humanity there have not been so many enlightened people as you will find everywhere in California. Almost in every house you will find enlightened people. Anybody can hallucinate. So I am perfectly happy that you are a German girl.The only problem is that you are fooling around with an Indian swami. I have to ask you two questions. Is this Indian swami by any chance called Paramahansa Muktananda? Then avoid this fellow! He is trying to hide his name, remember it. He is not telling people his name. Now everybody is inquiring about him, “Who is this Paramahansa Muktananda?” Fooling around is okay, but avoid this fellow because with him there is no possibility of enlightenment at all. I have known people who have become enlightened and just by being with this man they have become unenlightened again.How will you recognize him? – he goes on laughing like Jimmy Carter. So you have to watch that. And now because I am saying it, he may try to hide even that. So watch him during the night when he sleeps because then he completely forgets, naturally. He has the face, the same diplomatic face, the same stupid face as Jimmy Carter.Mrs. Carter went for a checkup at the dentist’s.“How is the mouth?” asked the dentist.“Ah, he is away playing golf this weekend,” she replied.Otherwise everything is going well. If you can be aware of this Paramahansa Muktananda, then all is perfectly okay with you. I can guarantee your enlightenment.The third question:Osho,I took sannyas for the wrong reasons, not from the heart. I had thought, “As I'm fucked up anyway, I might as well try sannyas.” But the very day after darshan everything changed. Now I feel you in my heart stronger and stronger. Wearing the mala is no longer a sacrifice but a grace and a pleasure. Even some old problems just disappeared. How could the wrong moment prove to be the right one?You are not aware of your own heart, that’s all. You were thinking that it was not coming from your heart – it must have come from your heart, otherwise what has happened would have been impossible. Many people are not aware of their hearts for the simple reason that our whole society, culture, education, condition us to bypass the heart; they want us to reach the head as quickly as possible. They try to find a shortcut and the heart is left by the side. Your energies become completely oblivious to the fact that there is a heart beating inside you. The physiologists go on saying to you that your heart is nothing but a part of your physiology. Yes, they are right. The heart has two aspects: its outer aspect is part of physiology, its inner aspect is part of your spirituality. The physiologists are concerned only with the outer aspect, but the inner goes on working. Even though you are not aware of it, it works continuously in you. It goes on influencing your life in many ways.That’s why many times you feel something has happened which you never wanted to happen. You fall in love with a woman; your mind says, “It is simply madness. What am I doing?” It seems so irrational – it does not appeal to your mind and your reason. Still, something deeper than the mind is pulling you. You cannot resist it. You fall in love in spite of all your rationality, your mind, your scientific training, your thinking. And the mind goes on saying, “What foolishness are you doing? This is not right. You should not do it.” It can find a thousand and one excuses not to do it. But something far more powerful, far more intrinsic, far deeper is working, and the mind feels almost impotent. And the mind is very clever, it never accepts its defeat; it says, “Okay, let’s try.”That’s what has happened with you. Your mind says to you, “As I’m fucked up anyway, I might as well try sannyas.” Something deep was stirred, but the mind won’t accept it because it does not want to accept that there is anything deeper than it. It won’t accept its defeat.I have heard something about Mulla Nasruddin. He was riding very fast on his donkey; the donkey was almost running. The people asked, “Nasruddin, where are you going?” He was passing through the marketplace.He said, “Don’t ask me, ask the donkey.”They said, “This is strange!”Nasruddin said, “There is nothing strange about it. This donkey is so stubborn that whenever I try to direct him he gives me such a fight – he won’t go that way. So when I am alone on the road I beat him and I direct him to the place where I want to go, but in a marketplace people gather around and start laughing at me: ‘Your own donkey and you are not the master of it!’ And the more he sees the crowd, the more stubborn he becomes. So I have learned one lesson: that when passing through the marketplace I simply go wherever he is going. Outside the town I will see to the fool, but in the marketplace I allow him to lead me. That at least gives a false impression to the whole town that I am the master.”That’s the way of the mind.Mulla Nasruddin was saying to his son, “Sit silently, don’t make a noise!”But the son was not listening. The more he was telling him to sit silently, not to make a noise and obey his father, the more rebellious the child was becoming.Finally Nasruddin said, “Okay, now disobey me and let me see how you can disobey this order! Disobey me – this is my order. And now let me see how you can disobey me.”This is the strategy of the mind; the mind knows. First it tries to overpower the heart; if it cannot, then it says to itself, “Let us try – what is wrong with it? We have tried so many things.”But something deep down, of which you are not clearly aware, was pulling you into sannyas. It is a magnetic force. Certainly you are in it in spite of your mind, but not in spite of your heart, otherwise what has happened would not have happened at all.You say: “But the very day after darshan everything changed.” That shows that the heart bloomed, flowered. For the first time something of the heart has been heard. For the first time you have given it a chance. For the first time you have listened to love rather than logic. For the first time you have been a little poetic rather than just a thinker. For the first time you have put aside all your arithmetic and you have taken a jump into something mysterious, incalculable. For the first time you have not been calculative.You say: “Now I feel you in my heart stronger and stronger.” The seed must have been there, but you cannot see the seed. When it starts sprouting, you can see it. When leaves start coming out of the soil, it becomes visible. But without the seed the leaves cannot come. Now you are seeing the leaves; retrospectively they are proof enough that there must have been a seed. You were unaware of it; now those leaves are making you aware of it.“Wearing the mala is no longer a sacrifice but a grace and a pleasure.” Not only leaves, but buds and small flowers are on the way. “Even some old problems just disappeared.” That’s the miracle of the heart; the heart simply helps to get rid of those problems that the mind cannot solve. The mind goes on and on moving in circles. The heart simply takes a jump out of those circles, and suddenly has transcended those problems which have always tortured you. Suddenly you see that they are irrelevant: there is no need to solve them. There is no need even to bother about them; they are not your concern and they don’t belong to you. It is as if a person has come out of sleep, and the problems that he was facing in his dreams evaporate and are suddenly no longer relevant. That’s what has happened.Now you say: “Even some old problems just disappeared. How could the wrong moment prove to be the right one?” It simply proves it was not the wrong moment; it was the right moment, but you were just not aware of it. Now you are aware of it.Now move consciously deeper into it. If unconsciously so much has happened – if just by groping in the dark so much has happened – if you start moving consciously, the possibility of your growth is immense, and great is the hope. Greater flowers are waiting. The spring has come, you have seen the first blossoms; now soon all the trees will be blossoming. Your whole being will become a fragrance.But drop that idea that you have moved out of a wrong decision. It was not wrong. Your mind was thinking that it was wrong, but your heart knew far better. The heart always knows better than the mind.The fourth question:Osho,What do you say to a mind which goes on thinking in four different languages: Persian, English, French, German?Whether you speak one language or one dozen languages makes no difference – it is the same mind. All those languages will be speaking the same mind. If a madman speaks Persian, do you think it will be different when he speaks English, French or German? A madman is a madman – in any language he will be mad.An enlightened person is an enlightened person; in any language he will be enlightened. Whether he speaks or not, he remains the same. Of course, four languages will make it a little more complicated, but the basic problem is the same. Your mind is one, your mind’s disease is one. You can express that disease in four languages, that’s all; only the expression will be different, the root can’t be different.When Johnny Fuckerfaster went to school one day, the teacher decided to review the alphabet. She said her students, “I’ll name a letter of the alphabet and you tell me a word that begins with that letter. We’ll start with A.”Johnny Fuckerfaster raised his hand shouting, “I know, I know!”The teacher knew Johnny had a dirty mind and thought to herself, “He’ll say ‘asshole’ and embarrass the class.” So she called on another student who answered, “Apple.” The teacher called out the letter B and again Johnny raised his hand furiously and yelled, “Please, me, call on me, I know!” The teacher imagined he would say “bastard,” so she asked another child for the answer. He replied, “Boy.” The teacher continued through the alphabet until she got to the letter R. By this time Johnny was jumping up and down in his seat and making such a commotion she could no longer avoid him. “What dirty word could he possibly make with R?” she thought. None came to mind so she called on Johnny.“Rat…” he said.The teacher breathed an enormous sigh of relief, smiled and said, “Very good, Johnny!”Then Johnny added, “…and it had a fucking tail that long and took a shit on the floor!”You can’t avoid your mind; it will find its way. Any language will do – four languages or forty languages. Yes, it is a little more complicated, but mind is capable, so capable that one staggers to think of its potential.The people who understand, who have worked on the inner mechanism of the mind, say that a single human mind can contain all the libraries of the world; its capacity is almost infinite. But if you are a fool, even if you know all that is written, even if you become a walking Encyclopedia Britannica, it won’t make much difference. You will remain a fool. Of course, your foolishness will now be a little more decorated. That’s what scholars are: decorated fools with great degrees, certificates, diplomas. They can pretend that they know – and they can pretend more logically than anybody else because they are well informed – but deep down there is just the same darkness, the same unconscious.You say: “What do you say to a mind which goes on thinking in four different languages?” It is the same – thinking is the same, the disease is the same. The remedy is not different; meditation can help you to get rid of one language, it can help you to get rid of four languages or four hundred languages. Meditation gets you into a space where mind is left behind with all its knowledge. Suddenly you start functioning from a state of not-knowing, from innocence. That innocence is beautiful and that innocence is fragrant. That innocence is the essential religion.The fifth question:Osho,Why am I so very afraid of death?One is afraid of death because one is unaware of what life is. If you know what life is, the fear of death disappears of its own accord. The question is not of death at all, the question is of life – because we don’t know what life is, hence we are afraid that it is going to end one day. We have not even lived. How can you live without knowing what it is? You have neither lived nor loved; you have simply been dragging, vegetating. You know that one thing is certain: death is coming closer every day, every moment, hence the fear. The fear is natural because death will close the door forever. And without ever knowing what life was, you will be taken away. You were given an opportunity, a great opportunity, and you missed it.You go on postponing for tomorrow. You say, “Tomorrow I am going to live.” But simultaneously, side by side, there is a fear; you know, “Tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow maybe death will come, then what?” You have postponed life for tomorrow and there is no more tomorrow – then what? Fear arises. You don’t know how to live right now. Nobody tells you how to live right now.The preachers, the politicians, the parents, they tell you about the tomorrows. When you are a child they say to you, “When you are a young man, you will know what life is.” When you are a young man they say, “You are young fools – youth is foolishness. When you are old, you will understand.” When you are old they say, “You are finished. Now there is nothing left. You are like a used cartridge.” This is a strange world!In my childhood, as it happens in every child’s life, I used to ask all the available elders thousands of questions. It almost became a torture for them because my questions were embarrassing. So the easiest way was: “You are too young. Wait.”One of my father’s friends was known throughout the town as a sage. I used to go to him with my father, I used to torture him the most. And he would always say, “Wait. You are too young and your questions are too complicated. When you are a little more grown-up, you will be able to understand.”I asked him, “Please give me in writing what year I will be grown up. Then I will ask you these questions. Because this is a tricky thing. Whenever I ask – I have been asking for at least five years – you always say the same thing: ‘When you grow up…’ You can go on saying this to me again and again! Just write it down on paper and sign it.”I saw his hand was shaking. I said, “Why is your hand shaking? Why are you afraid? If you know what age a person becomes able to understand, write it down. If you say at twenty, I will ask at twenty-one – I will give you one more year.”So he wrote, “Twenty-one years.”So I said, “Okay, I will come only after I am twenty-two.”He must have thought, “At least the problem is solved for the time being. Who knows? After he is twenty-two…?” I must have been nearabout fourteen at that time.When I became exactly twenty-two I arrived. I arrived with a crowd – I had gathered many people together. I said, “Come with me,” I had his signed letter with me. I said to him, “This is your letter. Now answer.”He said, “You are such a nuisance! Why have you gathered all these people together?”I replied, “Just to witness that you have been cheating me. And not only have you been cheating me, this has been going on all over the world. Every elderly person is cheating young people, telling them ‘Tomorrow’ – and tomorrow never comes. Now I am twenty-two years old and you have written twenty-one. I have given you one more year just in case I am not intelligent enough and I take a little longer time to grow up. But now I am not going to leave, I will be here. I want all my questions answered.”He said, “To tell you the truth, I don’t know anything. Please don’t ask me again. Forgive me. You are right, I have been lying to you.”“Why did you lie to a child?” I asked him. “How could you lie to a child who was asking out of such innocence, who trusted you? – and you deceived him! You don’t know whether God exists or not, and you were telling me that God exists and that I would be able to understand later on. I knew that very moment that even you didn’t understand. You don’t know anything about God, you are just repeating like a parrot.”But this is the situation; teachers don’t know, professors don’t know, priests don’t know. Without knowing, they go on pretending that they know. The whole strategy consists of a single trick: go on postponing. “You will also know when the time is ripe.” Of course it is never ripe, you never grow up. By the time you are old enough you have to save your own face, so you start saying the same things to your children.If you love your children, if you love your younger brothers and sisters, never tell them lies. Your whole religion consists of lies. Be truthful, tell them, “I don’t know and I am searching.” Don’t postpone it for tomorrow. Our whole life is a postponement, hence the fear of death: “I have not known yet and death is coming.”It is not you alone who is afraid of death. You ask: “Why am I so very afraid of death?” Everybody is afraid of death for the simple reason that we have not tasted of life yet. The man who knows what life is, is never afraid of death; he welcomes death. Whenever death comes he hugs death, he embraces death, he welcomes death; he receives death as a guest. To the man who has not known what life is, death is an enemy. To the man who knows what life is, death is the ultimate crescendo of life.But everybody is afraid of death and that too is contagious. Your parents are afraid of death, your neighbors are afraid of death. Small children get infected by this constant fear all around them. Everybody is afraid of death. People don’t even want to talk about death.There have been only two taboos in the world: sex and death. It is very strange why sex and death have both been the two taboos not to be talked about, to be avoided. They are deeply connected. Sex represents life because all life arises out of sex, and death represents the end. Both have been taboo – don’t talk about sex and don’t talk about death.There have been only two types of cultures in the world. One category consists of the cultures for whom sex is taboo. They can talk about death, in fact, they talk about death too much. For example, in India, listen to the mahatmas, to the saints, and you will find it. Nobody talks about sex, everybody talks about death – to frighten you, to create fear in you. Out of fear you can be enslaved; out of fear you can be forced to be religious; out of fear you can be forced to bow down to some stupid idea of God, to some stupid idol of God. People are worshipping anything.Just put a stone in front of your house, paint it red and just wait on the side and watch. Within an hour somebody is going to pass and bow down to it, thinking it is Hanumanaji. Somebody else will come and put two flowers there and somebody else will follow with a coconut. This is the beginning of a temple. Soon you will find that a temple has arisen.People are so afraid, they are ready to bow down to any nonsense, to any stupidity. We call religious people “god-fearing.” In fact, a religious person is never god-fearing; he is god-loving certainly, but never god-fearing. Fear has no place in a religious man’s life. Love and only love… And where love exists, fear disappears; where fear exists, love has no possibility to grow.In a society like India, death is not taboo. Indian scriptures are full of very detailed descriptions of death. They describe with gusto how ugly death is. You will be surprised at these people, they describe your body in such ugly, disgusting ways. Why are they so interested, so obsessed with all that is disgusting and nauseating? – for the simple reason that they want you to become so afraid, so antagonistic, so negative to life… By talking about death, by making it as big and as dark as possible and by depicting death in all the ugliest colors, they destroy your love for life, your affirmation of life.Then there are societies… For example, for centuries Christianity has been a society, a culture against sex; sex is the taboo. “Don’t talk about sex.” Hence the idea – a sheer nonsense idea – that Jesus is born of a virgin mother. They have to create this fiction because how can Jesus, a man of such purity, come out of sexuality? Such purity coming out of such impurity? Impossible, illogical! A lotus coming out of mud? Impossible! But, in fact, all lotuses come out of mud.Jesus is born as naturally as you are – he is not a freak. He is not abnormal. And this whole nonsense about the Holy Ghost, that the Holy Ghost makes Mary pregnant… Now ghosts are making love!Hamid guards near my room. He stands there just outside the curtain with a big staff. One day I asked, “Hamid, have you seen the Holy Ghost or not?”He said, “Holy Ghost?”“Yes,” I said, “someday he will come, so be alert – because if the Holy Ghost does not come to visit me, where will he go?”One day Rajen was standing there and I said to him, “Keep your staff in your hand, otherwise the Holy Ghost may use it against you. Rather than this staff being a protection, he will hit your head with your own staff.”Since then he has left his staff somewhere; I don’t see it anymore. Maybe afraid… Sometimes you are not so attentive, and keeping your staff in your hand the whole time… Sometimes one has to relax too. Even guards have to go to sleep. And the Holy Ghost comes and finds the staff and hits him on the head. If the Holy Ghost can make a woman pregnant, what can he not do? He can do anything – he can even make a man pregnant! Anything is possible, with the Holy Ghost nothing is impossible.Sex is a taboo for Christianity: “Don’t talk about sex!” Now, after Sigmund Freud, the first taboo is broken. Sex is no longer a taboo. We have shifted to another taboo; death has become the taboo. Now don’t talk about death. It seems as if man needs some taboo or other. Victorian society was a society rooted in the taboo of sex. Now the modern society, Western society, is rooted in the taboo of death. Don’t talk about death at all, forget all about death as if it does not happen – at least it does not happen to you; at least it has not happened to you up to now. So why bother about it? Forget all about it.When a man dies in the West, there are experts to decorate him. He may never have looked so beautiful as he looks after death – painted and his cheeks so red as if he has just come from a three months vacation in Florida. And so healthy, as if he has just been exercising and is now doing shavasan – the death posture; not really dead. The pretension has to be created that he is not dead. Even on the gravestone it is written: “He is not dead, he is only asleep.”In all the languages, whenever somebody dies, nobody says that he is simply dead. We say, “He has gone to God. He has become beloved of God. God has chosen and called him. He has gone to the other world. He has become heavenly.”One man was saying to another, his friend, “My wife is just divine.”The other replied, “But my wife is still alive.”You talk about people’s divinity, etcetera, when they are dead.There was a great conflict between Voltaire and Rousseau; for the whole of their lives they were quarreling. Voltaire died. Somebody informed Rousseau that Voltaire had died. He said, “Really? He was a great man – provided that he is really dead.” If he is not dead then he will withdraw his words. Alive, they are enemies; dead, “He was a great man.” So he makes a condition: provided that he is really dead, he was a great man.Once a man dies, nobody speaks against him, nobody says anything against him. Suddenly he becomes a saint, suddenly great. His place will never be filled again, his place will always remain empty. The world will always miss him. He was so essential. And nobody had taken any notice of him while he was alive. These are tricks – tricks to keep death away, to shut the doors and to forget all about death.A real humanity will not have any taboos: no taboo about sex, no taboo about death. Life should be lived in its totality; death is part of life. One should live totally and one should die totally.That’s my message to my sannyasins.You ask: “Why am I so very afraid of death?”– because you are not yet living totally. Live totally and the fear of death will disappear. You are not alone. Everybody is in the same boat.It was a typical British Men’s Club: pipe smoke hanging in the air, thick leather chairs, carved oak panels.The old retired colonel was recounting his daring exploits in Africa. “Nearly lost me life to a black-maned lion once!”“Oh, really, sir?” said a young officer, feigning interest. “Do tell about it.”“Well, fella me lad, there I was striding through the thickest part of the Congo jungle with my faithful gun-bearer, Umbogo, when across a small clearing I saw the biggest lion you have ever seen. Cool as a cucumber sandwich, I took my trusty rifle from Umbogo, took aim, and pulled the trigger. ‘Click’ – the damn thing was a dud. Unperturbed, I handed back the dud and took a second rifle. ‘Click’ – another dud. By this time Umbogo had gone and I thought I had better get going, too. I ran as fast as I could, but in no time the beast was close behind. I could feel his breath down the back of my neck and I knew he was about to pounce. But just as he was about to, he slipped. This gave me my chance and I ran as fast as I could. But he was soon there again – his breath down the back of my neck, about to pounce, and again he slipped. This happened three times. The third time I managed to get into the jolly old Land Rover and get away.”“How amazing, sir,” said the young officer. “I am sure that if that had been me I would have messed my pants.”“Messed your pants?” bellowed the old colonel. “What do you think the lion was slipping on?”The sixth question:Osho,What do you do for exercise?I just tell a few really good jokes to myself and then laugh loudly and roll on the ground. I know no other better exercise. You can ask Vivek – once in a while she catches me rolling on the ground.Just the other day I was telling myself these jokes:Richard Nixon was suspicious of some of the politicians surrounding him, thinking there was a conspiracy developing against him.So he gathered together his closest aides and they went to a small village somewhere in the Alps to investigate the problem.On the second morning Nixon opened the blinds of his bedroom window, and there in the snow someone had pissed: “Nixon is an asshole.” Disturbed by this, Nixon set his smartest forensic scientists to work to find the culprit.After forty-eight hours they reported back to him. ‘We have bad news,” they said. “We’ve analyzed the urine and found that it came from Henry Kissinger.”“Oh no!” said Nixon.“But there is even worse news to come, sir. We’ve also discovered it is Mrs. Nixon’s handwriting.”Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, a Catholic priest and a hippie were riding in a small airplane when the landing gear fell off.The panic stricken pilot rushed out of the cockpit. “I’m sorry, boys, this plane’s not going to make it. There are only four parachutes and as I’m the captain I get one.”He grabbed a parachute and jumped out.Richard Nixon stood up and said, “I’m the President; the nation needs me – sorry, gentlemen…” He grabbed a parachute and jumped.Henry Kissinger jumped up shouting, “I’m the smartest man in the world! The world cannot afford such a sacrifice!” He grabbed a parachute and jumped out.The priest spoke next: “My son, you are still young – take the last one.”“Don’t worry, father,” the hippie said. “There is a parachute for each of us – ‘the smartest man in the world’ just grabbed my backpack and jumped with it.”The last question:Osho,Are there really any coincidences?While he is unconscious, man lives only in coincidences; his life consists of only coincidences and nothing else. The unconscious life is an accidental life.Only the conscious man goes beyond the accidental and enters into the intrinsic. The conscious man transcends coincidences. Without being totally conscious you are a victim of all kinds of unknown forces that surround you. You don’t know why things are happening to you, why you have done this and why not that; why you have chosen this and why not that.When I passed my matriculation and went to university I wanted to fill in my form, but I had no fountain pen with me. So I asked the next student who was filling in his form, “Will you be kind enough to give me your fountain pen so that I can fill in my form?”He was very happy and willing. He said, “First you fill in your form.”I filled in my form and asked, “Why did you want me to fill in my form first?”He said, “Because I cannot decide what subjects to take.” He looked at my form and whatever subjects I had taken, he filled in the same subjects.I said, “Are you mad or something?”He replied, “It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same to me. Whether I read philosophy, politics or economics, it is all the same to me. I had to copy somebody’s form; you are as good as anybody.” He continued, “In fact, I have been passing all my examinations by copying other people’s answers. I don’t know how I have passed the matriculation.”Now this man is a professor of philosophy. What will you call it? Just a coincidence, accidental. I might have been just a few minutes late that day and he would have never been a professor of philosophy. I may have had a fountain pen; he would have never been a professor of philosophy. He may have copied from somebody else and then he would have been a professor of politics or economics or who knows what.A Jewish novelist writes…My father was traveling in a train; the train was late. It arrived in the middle of the night somewhere in Russia. He was hungry and cold; it was a cold Russian night, snow was falling. He rushed to find out whether he could get some coffee or something hot to drink.The woman who owned the restaurant was just closing. He pleaded, he said, “Just five minutes. Give me two cups of coffee – I am tired and I am hungry. If you can give me something to eat I will be grateful.”The woman opened the door again – she was just going to lock up – poured coffee and gave him something to eat. Naturally, they started talking and the woman asked from where he had come – the usual conversation with a stranger. “And where are you going to stay?” The woman continued, “It is good that you arrived at this moment because now the taxis have all left – the train was so late. And we were not hoping – nobody ever gets down from this train. So please come in my car and I will drive you wherever you want.”The man said, “I don’t know where to go. Can you recommend me a good hotel?”The woman replied, “There are hotels, but no good ones. And they will all be closed. It will be better if you come with me and rest at my place. In the morning you can find a hotel.”The man, of course, very gratefully agreed. And this is how the story begins. They fall in love… And then you can develop the whole story yourself.Now this Jewish novelist says: If the train had not been late I would not have been born at all. If the train was a little later I would have missed again, I would not have been born. If the woman had been a little hardhearted and had refused to open the restaurant again, I would not have been born at all. If the woman had left my father at a hotel, the story would have ended then and there. But he stayed with the woman; the woman was a widow. In the morning she invited him for breakfast, and one thing led to another.This is how ordinary life is. Unconscious man lives in coincidences; he is accidental.Vidhan has written to me: “Osho, I would like you to know that sometimes meditation can be very dangerous. I was doing a visualization technique, imagining I was a tree. I was imagining what kind of roots I had; what color and texture I was; which kind of leaves I had, and there I was swaying in the breeze… When suddenly a dog came trotting along and pissed on my leg.”Now Vidhan thinks the dog knows that he is visualizing, that he is thinking he is a tree. The dog must have been as mad as you are, otherwise dogs don’t get so easily deceived – very difficult to deceive dogs.It is said that after three months when Columbus saw leaves, green leaves floating in the ocean, he was tremendously happy. But his biographers say that was nothing and that you should have seen his dog. He was jumping! For three months… Think of the dog, poor dog – no tree. That is celibacy. If the dog were an Indian he would have been a mahatma.A black man, an Arab and a Jew are walking together in the desert. Suddenly a horrible witch appears in front of them, riding a dragon. As they beg for their lives, the witch softens.“Okay,” she says, “if the length of your pricks, added together, measures exactly one meter, I’ll spare your lives.”The black man takes his prick out – seventy-five centimeters. The Arab measures his prick – twenty-four and a half centimeters. With trembling hands, the Jew takes off his trousers and what a relief – exactly half a centimeter. As they happily part from the witch, the black brags, “Ah, you are lucky you had a black with you – seventy-five centimeters!”“Nonsense,” says the Arab. “It was my prick, the gift of Allah, that saved us.”“That’s what you think.” says the Jew. “What would have happened if she hadn’t turned me on?”Enough for today.

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

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 13 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/walking-in-zen-sitting-in-zen-13/

The first question:Osho,How can I become a light unto myself?These were the last words of Gautam the Buddha; his parting message to his disciples: “Be a light unto yourself.” But when he says, “Be a light unto yourself,” he does not mean become a light unto yourself. There is a great difference between being and becoming.Becoming is a process, being is a discovery.The seed only appears to become the tree, that is an appearance. The seed already had the tree within itself, it was its very being. The seed does not become the flowers. The flowers were there unmanifest, now they are manifest. It is not a question of becoming, otherwise a pebble could become a flower. But that doesn’t happen. A rock cannot become a rose; that doesn’t happen because the rock has no potential for being a rose. The seed simply discovers itself through dying into the soil; dropping its outer shell, it becomes revealed in its inner reality.Man is a light in seed. You are already buddhas. It is not that you have to become buddhas; it is not a question of learning, of achieving. It is only a question of recognition – it is a question of going within yourself and seeing what is there. It is self-discovery.You are not to become a light unto yourself, it is already the case. But you don’t go in; your whole journey is outward. We are being brought up in such a way that we all become extroverts. Our eyes become focused on the outside. We are always seeking and searching for some goal “there,” far away. The farther the goal, the more challenging it appears to the ego. The more difficult it is, the more attractive it appears. The ego exists through challenges; it wants to prove itself. It is not interested in the simple, it is not interested in the ordinary, it is not interested in the natural. It is interested in something which is neither natural, nor simple, nor ordinary. Its desire is for the extraordinary. And the reality is very ordinary, it is very simple. The reality is not there but here, not then but now, not outside but in the innermost sanctum of your being. You have just to close your eyes and look in.In the beginning it is difficult because eyes only know how to look out. They have become so accustomed to looking out that when you close them, they continue to look out – they start dreaming, they start fantasizing. Those dreams are nothing but reflections of the outside. So you are only apparently with closed eyes. But your eyes are still open to the outside world, you are not in. In fact, every meditator comes across this strange phenomenon: that whenever you close your eyes your mind becomes more restless, your mind becomes more insane. It starts chattering in a crazy way; relevant, irrelevant thoughts crisscross your being. It is never so when you are looking outside. Naturally you become tired; naturally you think it is better to remain occupied in something, in some work, rather than sit silently with closed eyes. Because nothing seems to happen except a long, long procession of thoughts, desires, memories. They go on coming, unending.But this is only in the beginning. Just a little patience, just a little awaiting… If you go on looking, watching these thoughts, silently, with no judgment, with no antagonism, with no desire even to stop them – as if you have no concern with them, you are unconcerned… Just as one watches the traffic on the road, or one watches the clouds in the sky, or a river flowing by; you simply watch your thoughts. You are not those thoughts, you are the watcher; remembering that “I am the watcher, not the watched.” You cannot be the watched, you cannot be the object of your own subjectivity. You are your subjectivity, you are the witness, you are consciousness – and remembering it! It takes a little time; slowly, slowly the old habit dies. It dies hard but it dies, certainly. The day the traffic stops, suddenly you are full of light. You have always been full of light, just those thoughts were not allowing you to see that which you are.When all objects have disappeared, there is nothing else to see; you recognize yourself for the first time. You realize yourself for the first time.It is not becoming; it is a discovery of being. The outer shell of the thoughts of the mind is dropped and you have discovered your flowers, you have discovered your fragrance. This fragrance is freedom.Hence don’t ask, “How can I become a light unto myself?” You are already a light unto yourself, you are just not aware of it. You have forgotten about it – you have to discover it. And the how of discovery is simple, very simple; a simple process of watching your thoughts.To help this process you can start watching other things too because the process of watching is the same. What you are watching is not significant. Watch anything and you are learning watchfulness. Listen to the birds, it is the same. One day you will be able to listen to your own thoughts. The birds are a little farther away, your thoughts are a little closer. In the fall, watch the dry leaves falling from the trees. Anything will do that helps you to be watchful. Walking, watch your own walking.Buddha used to say to his disciples: “Take each step watchfully.” He used to say: “Watch your breath.” That is one of the most significant practices for watching, because the breath is continuously available for twenty-four hours a day wherever you are. The birds may be singing one day, they may not be singing some other day, but breathing is always happening. Sitting, walking, lying down, it is always there. Go on watching the breath coming in, the breath going out.Not that watching the breath is the point, the point is learning how to watch. Go to the river and watch the river. Sit in the marketplace and watch people passing by. Watch anything, just remember that you are a watcher. Don’t become judgmental, don’t be a judge. Once you start judging you have forgotten that you are a watcher; you have become involved; you have taken sides, you have chosen: “I am in favor of this thought and I am against that thought.” Once you choose, you become identified. Watchfulness is the method of destroying all identification.Hence Gurdjieff called his process: the process of nonidentification. It is the same, his word is different.Don’t identify yourself with anything, and slowly, slowly one learns the ultimate art of watchfulness. That’s what meditation is all about. Through meditation one discovers one’s own light. That light you can call your soul, your self, your godliness – whatever word you choose – or you can remain just silent because it has no name. It is a nameless experience, tremendously beautiful, ecstatic, utterly silent, but it gives you the taste of eternity, of timelessness, of something beyond death.The second question:Osho,Will surrender happen only when I am ready to die for you?Veet Marc, I am not telling you to die for me. I am telling you just the opposite: to live for me. The surrender will happen only when you start living for me. I am not a worshipper of death, I am a worshipper of life. I am not here to teach you some kind of martyrhood. Enough of it! For thousands of years stupid people have been sacrificed by the cunning ones. Somebody was dying for Christianity; somebody was dying for Mohammedanism; somebody was dying for Hinduism. Everybody was dying – as if death were the goal – and nobody was being taught how to live.Live for godliness because godliness is life. Of course, godliness is also death, but death is beautiful only when it comes out of a fulfilled life, when it is an ultimate flowering of life. When death is a sacrifice it is ugly. Then you are dying for some cause, for some purpose, for some vested interest. Then some cunning politician, some cunning priest is using you as a means to his own ends. Of course, he makes promises to you, otherwise how are you going to sacrifice your life? He promises you everything – after death. Now, nobody knows what happens after death so it is very easy to promise something after death.I promise you everything before death, not after death. That is the way of the cunning people – promising you something after death. You sacrifice now and the rewards will be given after your death. Now nobody knows what happens after death. Mohammedans say if you die in a jihad, in a religious war, you may be a sinner, but you will go directly to heaven because you are dying for religion. The same is the attitude of the Christians and the same is the attitude of all the religions.And who would not like to go to heaven? All the heavenly pleasures… And they are eternal and this life is momentary, this life is going to finish anyway sooner or later. What is there to be so worried about in this life? It is ugly, it is painful, it is suffering, it is misery. These same people have made this life so miserable that anybody would like to die.I have heard…A British politician was talking to Adolf Hitler just before the Second World War started. He had gone to persuade him not to enter this foolish war: “It is not going to help anybody; it will be destructive to the whole world.”Adolf Hitler was adamant. In fact, he thought that the visit of this diplomat simply showed the weakness of the English people. He made it a point to prove to the diplomat: “We are going to fight. It will be better and in your favor if you surrender easily, otherwise you will be massacred, killed and destroyed unnecessarily.”He showed him all the scientific developments that they had made, that they were going to use in war. Of course, they were the most superior power of those days; they had the most developed technology, particularly war technology. And then, finally, to prove: “Not only are there machines which are far bigger and better than you have, we also have men who are ready to die.” And to make the point absolutely clear, he came out of his room with the diplomat.They were on the fourth story of a building. Three guards were standing there. He ordered the first guard to jump out of the window. The man simply jumped. The British diplomat was aghast. He could not believe his eyes. The man did not even think twice. When Adolf Hitler said, “Jump!” he jumped. There was no question of asking why. He could not believe his eyes.Then he said to the second, “Jump!” and the second man jumped. By that time the English diplomat became aware what was happening – two lives were lost. He looked from the window; their bodies were just in pieces, in fragments, spread all over the road.Adolf Hitler saw that he was impressed, tremendously impressed. In fact, he was in such shock; he could not believe such an inhuman act. To strike while the iron was hot he ordered the third man to jump.By this time the diplomat was alert again. He jumped up immediately, took hold of the arm of the third man and said, “Are you mad or what? Why are you jumping? Why are you so eager to die? Don’t you want to live?”The man looked at him with anger and said, “Do you call this life? Is it life? Is it worth living? Death is far better. Life is so miserable – death is a relief. Let go of my arm and let me jump!”If life is so miserable – and Adolf Hitler had made life miserable – everybody was ready to die. First, make people’s lives miserable and don’t let them enjoy life. Destroy all the roots of enjoyment: teach them all kinds of inhibitions; tell them that sex is sin, love is sin; teach them that to drink, to eat, to be merry are the goals of ugly materialists. Tell them to be self-destructive and prepare them for a kind of masochistic lifestyle in which they become ascetics, in which they become experts at torturing themselves. And naturally, they would like to get rid of this life as soon as possible. It is very easy to persuade them; in fact there is no need to persuade them, they are already prepared and just waiting for the opportunity. Whenever such a great opportunity arises to die in a religious war, when heaven is so close and so easily available, who would like to miss it? Everybody is ready to die.No, that is not my idea of religion, Marc. Do you know that the name Marc means a warrior, a soldier? Mythologically it means the god of war. I have changed his name, but by changing his name it is not so easy to change his mind. I have given him the name Veet Marc. Veet Marc means to go beyond war, beyond fighting; beyond the very idea of fight.But he asks: “Will surrender happen only when I am ready to die for you?” Veet Marc, I don’t want anybody to die for me – I am not a sadist. I want you to live for me. I want you to blossom and flower for me. I want you to eat, drink and be merry for me. I want you to celebrate for me. I want you to live your life as totally, as fully as possible. Yes, death will come, but when it comes out of a fulfilled life, it has a beauty of its own. It is not death, not at all; it is the door to the divine. But you need not die. Your work is to live; that is your sadhana.That’s my whole teaching: live, because that’s the only way to show gratitude toward existence. It has given you life and you want to die. No reason is worth dying for. Find every excuse to live and live to the utmost, live to the maximum; don’t live in a minimum way. That’s how people are living. People are living only a very minor percent of their potential, of their total; just a small percent of their potential – not more than seven percent. Even your greatest geniuses live not more than fifteen percent of their potential – while you can live a hundred percent. Only once in a while a Buddha, a Krishna, a Christ lives a hundred percent.If you can live a hundred percent, if you can burn your life’s torch at both ends, simultaneously, then you are surrendered to me. Surrender to life is surrender to me. I don’t stand against life, I simply represent life, love, laughter.Of course, I know this is far more difficult. Dying is so simple, it is so easy; living is difficult, arduous. Dying does not need much intelligence. Any fool can be a soldier – in fact only fools can be soldiers – and anybody can commit suicide. What intelligence is needed? Any idiot can do it. Just jump from any mountain, into any river, into any ocean. Or now even better and simpler processes are available; just take a few sleeping pills and die silently. There is no need to make much fuss because even jumping from the mountain peak you may hesitate, you will have to make a decision. Just swallowing some pills is not that big a problem; you can easily do it. You can inject poison.Dying is not of any value. To live is to really accept a great challenge, moment to moment. One has to live with a thousand and one problems; through a thousand and one problems and yet one has to keep one’s cool.That’s the way of a sannyasin. A sannyasin is not a soldier, so you are not expected to be martyrs. You are expected to be lovers of life. And the more you love life, the closer you are to existence because it is its gift. Destroying this gift is ugly, is irreligious, is a sin.Veet Marc, learn to live for me. I am giving you a bigger task, I know. It is a lifelong process; death can happen in a single moment. Unless you are really unfortunate death can happen in a single moment.Mulla Nasruddin wanted to commit suicide. Being a man of a very calculative nature he made all the arrangements possible so that in case one arrangement failed, another would work. He went to the top of a small hillock with a rope, kerosene, a matchbox, a pistol. He found a beautiful place where the branch of a tree hung out over, just above the river from the top of the hill. He made arrangements to hang himself on the tree. There was every possibility that just the rope would do and he would die, but if something were to go wrong he had other arrangements, alternatives.So he hangs himself. Before hanging himself he pours kerosene on his body, hangs himself and sets fire to his clothes. But who knows? So as a final precaution he also shoots himself. The bullet hits the rope, he falls into the river, and the river puts the fire out.The next day I met him in the marketplace and said, “Nasruddin, what happened?”He replied, “It was just luck!”He told the whole story and I said, “This is really something. You had made so many arrangements!”He said, “Yes, I had made so many arrangements. If I had not known how to swim I would have died!” But he knew how to swim, so he is still alive.Unless something like this happens – which is very rare – unless the whole existence conspires against you, you can kill yourself very easily. But living is a long process. It will need guts, not stupidity; it will need intelligence. The more intelligent you are the deeper will be the quality of your life, the higher will be the value of your life. The more meditative you are the more you will be able to know what life really is. It is nothing but godliness in a manifest form. To destroy this for any reason whatever is wrong, is a sin. So remember it.You are not here to die for me, you are here to learn how to live. Let death come as an ultimate reward of living. And if you have lived rightly you will be able to live through death too; you will be able to live death too. That is the most beautiful experience because it is through living death that one transcends death and becomes one with the eternal.The third question:Osho,I still don't accept myself. Why not?It is because you are conditioned to be perfectionists, and perfection is such an ideal that everybody falls short of it. Then condemnation, self-condemnation arises. These are the tricks that have been played upon you – beware of these tricks. It is time for man to be mature enough to know that imperfection is the way of life. Everything is imperfect, and it is beautiful that things are imperfect. If everything was perfect and everyone was perfect, life would be so dull and boring that it would be impossible to tolerate it even for a single moment.I agree perfectly with Bertrand Russell. He used to say that he did not want to go to heaven – jokingly, humorously, because in fact, he never believed that there was any heaven or hell. But he used to say, “Even if there is heaven, I would prefer hell because in hell you will find good company.”In heaven you are bound to be bored, utterly bored. Just think – living with saints for eternity! Mahatma Gandhi sitting on one side and so many saints: Jaina, Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Buddhist – and to only live with them… They don’t even know how to play poker, they don’t even drink beer! Beer? They will not even be ready to drink Coca-Cola because there is cocaine in it. And smoking of course is not possible in heaven because cigarettes contain nicotine. In fact, life will be so impossible with these saints. They will never laugh – laughter is for imperfect human beings.Christians say that Jesus never laughed. If Christians are right, Jesus must have been absolutely wrong. But I know that they are not right. Jesus must have laughed, must have – his whole life says so. He enjoyed the small things of life; he even enjoyed drinking wine. Now I don’t think your saints will allow him into heaven. They will call him a drunkard and throw him out. He lived with drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes. Your saints will be very angry. The rabbis who crucified Jesus may be allowed into heaven, but not Jesus. He is too human, too alive, too imperfect.Bertrand Russell is right that in heaven you are not going to find good company. You will see sad faces, long faces, everybody almost dead. What will these people be doing there? No gossiping – you cannot even sermonize because to whom will you sermonize? They are all sermonizers. You cannot find disciples in heaven – they are all masters. Jainas say that no woman has ever entered heaven. Now you see the utter boredom? Just these ugly, half-starved saints and not even a single woman. It will be like a desert without any oasis.Have you noticed? If a dozen men are sitting in a room, it is full of a certain vibe. Let one beautiful woman enter and the vibration immediately changes. The desert is no longer a desert; an oasis has come in. They all become alive, their kundalini starts rising! Those who had fallen asleep wake up. Buddhas go on saying, “Wake up!” and they don’t listen. But just let Sophia Loren enter and immediately all the saints are alive, awake, fully awake.But Jainas say that no woman can enter heaven. If a woman is religious and spiritual, in her next life she will be born as a man and then she can go to heaven, but only from a man’s body, never from a woman’s. As if souls were also male and female. As if bodies also went to heaven! What kind of stupidity is this? But the fear… A woman can create a disturbance and naturally, if for centuries no woman has entered heaven and suddenly one does, there will be a great commotion; there will be a great disturbance; there will be chaos and a great fight will break out. All the saints will be at each others’ throats – a jihad, a religious war for the woman! Everybody will be ready to die.You have been told to be perfectionists. That’s why this problem arises. It is not only your problem, it is everybody’s problem. But remember a few things. First: all evil is potential vitality in need of transformation.Even evil is to be accepted because evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. Anger is potential vitality – accept it. I am not saying that you should remain angry; it is through acceptance that you can transform anger into compassion. It is the same energy that becomes compassion. I am not saying remain sexual for the whole of your life, but it is the energy of sex that becomes love and it is the energy of love that becomes prayer. Go on transforming it. But if you reject it from the very beginning, how are you going to transform it? If you condemn it you create a barrier between yourself and your own energy; now no transformation is possible. You become antagonistic, you become split. You are divided, constantly in conflict with yourself. Your life becomes a sheer wastage.I know that you commit many mistakes, but to err is human. It is nothing to be worried about, nothing to make so much fuss about. It is how one learns, it is how by and by, one becomes mature. The man who never commits any mistakes never grows either. It is by going astray that one learns.Hence, learn to forgive yourself again and again and again and again, because life is a constant growth. You will have to forgive yourself thousands of times. If you cannot forgive yourself, who is going to forgive you? But you have been taught wrong values, wrong ideals and they are heavy on your head. Don’t be worried about small things – enjoy them. Everyone lies, cheats, pretends – yes, you too, and most certainly I myself. So don’t be worried at all.Even buddhas have to create false devices. I have to trick you into things which you will not enter in any other way. I have to create devices. All devices are false; they have to be false because your illnesses are false.For example, you are suffering from ego; now I say, “Surrender.” In the first place the ego is a false entity, there is no ego at all. You are simply dreaming, you are making it up. But what to do? You have made it such a big thing that I say to you, “Please, surrender it to me.” Rather than saying to you that it doesn’t exist – you won’t understand right now – it is better to say to you, “Give it to me, surrender it.” And you feel good that you can at least do something with your ego – you can surrender. It appeals to your logic.It is like homeopathy; the illness is false, the medicine is false – just sugar pills, so nothing to be worried about. Whenever you are suffering from false diseases – and remember, out of one hundred, almost seventy-five percent are false – rather than torture my doctors in the Medical Center, go to Narendra Bodhisattva. He is the homeopath, although he has not been able to cure his own headache. He has suffered from headaches his whole life. He will not be able to cure himself – that is the difficulty – because he knows that all those pills are just sugar pills, but he helps others. He has helped many people, he has cured many people’s headaches, but he’s puzzled, “What is the matter? Why can’t I cure my own headache?”That’s the difficulty with false medicines: if you know, they are useless. But you can cure others easily. That’s why there are so many “pathies.” Except for allopathy, all “pathies” are more or less psychological. But they have a great appeal for the simple reason that if you go to the allopath and your illness is false he will say, “It is all in your mind.” That does not feel good: “All in my mind?” You don’t like that idea at all. You immediately start looking for some ayurvedic physician. They are clever people – they have to be very clever. You start searching for some homeopath, some naturopath and there are hundreds of “pathies” available. And all “pathies” work, they all help, so as far as help is concerned they are all helpful.If you go to the ayurvedic physician he will never say that it is in your mind, never. He will talk a lot about your disease, he will analyze the disease. He may even go to your past lives; he may look at your hand, he may read the lines; he may even ask you to bring your birth chart. Now this man seems to know what he is doing and that foolish allopathic doctor, he was simply saying, “It is in your head.” Now he is puffing up your ego. He is telling you that your disease is really very dangerous and it needs a long treatment; a very careful treatment and you need a real genius of a physician – and now you have come to the right person. He will be able to help you. He will give you all kinds of things which are really of no value, no medicinal value. But if you start believing in him… If you go to the homeopath he will ask your whole life history – he will give you three hours of his time.Now people who suffer from false diseases also suffer from talking about their diseases. They like to talk about their diseases all the time. They magnify their diseases, they make them as big as possible. They have nothing else to brag about, but they have big diseases, great diseases. And the homeopath buttresses your ego.I used to know a very famous homeopathic doctor, a certain Dr Mukherji. He was a famous homeopath all over India. For three days he would simply talk about your past diseases – from your very childhood when you were three years of age, as far back as you can remember. He would write down everything. And you are just suffering from a headache! He would go back to the age of three because he would say that a history begins there. “No disease is a separate phenomenon, it is a continuity.” It seems logical: “Everything is connected with everything else, nothing is discontinuous. Everything relates to everything else so unless we go to the roots…” He used to say, “I don’t touch the leaves, I go to the roots.”Once I took my father to him. My father was very interested in homeopathy, so much so that when he started talking about his childhood he started talking about the childhood of his grandfather; he always started from there.Dr. Mukherji looked a little worried. I laughed. I said, “Now you have the right patient. Now you will know – three days won’t do.”My father always used to start from his grandfather’s illnesses, then his father’s illnesses, then his illnesses. It took almost ten days.Dr. Mukherji met me one day in the garden. He said, “I am tired. Please take your father to some other doctor – he is a very dangerous person. I have never come across such a person, but I cannot say anything to him because he is following the homeopathic principle exactly. If one man’s life diseases are connected, then certainly the son’s diseases are connected with the father’s diseases and the father’s with the grandfather’s.”I said, “You should be happy that he does not know anything about his other ancestors. He knows only up to his grandfather. Otherwise it would have taken years for him to come to his own illness.” And what was his illness? – for two or three days he had been suffering from a stomach upset. I knew what the reason was: he always used to suffer whenever he ate cucumbers. That was the simple reason – cucumbers, nothing else! No need to go back to the father and the grandfather.I told Mukherji, “Now you know your homeopathic principle can be dangerous. You are a homeopathic doctor and he is a homeopathic patient – be patient! Listen silently to him. That’s why I have brought him to you – he will put you right. His problem is very simple, not connected at all with any disease; he has just eaten cucumbers and they always give him stomachache. It is as simple as that!”Homeopathy helps you because it takes your illnesses very seriously and that’s what you want really, that’s exactly what your desire is: you want attention, and a doctor listening to you silently…That’s the whole secret of psychoanalysis, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis. It helps the patient without doing anything; the psychotherapist just goes on listening. The patient goes on talking for months, for even years, and the doctor has to be very patient and just listen. Whether he listens or not, that is not the point. He has to pretend at least that he is listening very attentively; that helps.The buddhas have devised many false methods. In fact, all methods are bound to be false because your spiritual illnesses are all false, because your spiritual being can never be ill. It is just your belief. Your belief has to be destroyed by something which can appeal to you in the mind in which you are right now.Don’t be worried. You say: “I still don’t accept myself.” Why? What you have done? A few mistakes here and there. Maybe you lied once to somebody, maybe you deceived somebody. So what? This whole life is a drama and we are all actors. A little bit of cheating is perfectly okay – it makes life a little juicy, it gives life a little spice. Otherwise everybody just telling the truth…That happens to a few foolish people who go through Encounter and Gestalt – this happens. They start telling the truth to anybody. Stupid people are stupid people – they won’t understand anything.They write to me: “Osho, now I am in trouble. I have been through the Encounter Group and I have learned that one has to be authentic and one has to be true. So I told my wife that many times I feel like going with some other woman. Now there is great trouble – my life has become a nightmare. We are quarreling continuously. Before this Encounter Group everything was going smoothly. Now that it is finished, Teertha has gone, but the Encounter continues with my wife. And now there seems to be no end to it. What should I do now?”You need not be so foolish. In an Encounter group be authentic – even if you have to lie, lie and be authentic. If you don’t know how to be authentic, pretend to be authentic, enjoy being authentic. But don’t carry this nonsense everywhere and don’t create troubles for yourself.Just think: if even for twenty-four hours everybody on the earth decides to tell the exact truth, there will be no world – finished! Just think to yourself: twenty-four hours… Everybody telling the exact truth and nothing else… Nobody will be a friend; you will not find two friends in the whole world. Every couple will be divorced. Children will leave their parents, parents will leave their children. All will be finished! No customers will come to any shop. The world will come to a stop immediately – nirvana for the whole world in a single blow.This world needs a few lies too. It makes life smooth, it helps. Lies are like lubricants.Start accepting yourself as you are. Watch, be alert. Of course, ninety percent of it will be transformed – and the ten percent will become more skillful.The fourth question:Osho,How many British ladies are here?Fortunately not many – only three. One is Prem Lisa, but she is new, very new and I hope she will melt. She gets very offended; whenever I say anything – lovingly – against the British, she gets offended.Just the other day she wrote to me, “Osho, of course the Australians are such nice people. They were originally chosen by some of the best English judges.” Judges are never very nice people. Socrates was condemned by very nice Greek judges and sentenced to death. Jesus was also condemned by very nice judges – the highest rabbis and the greatest Roman magistrates and the governor – highly cultured people, well-educated. Jesus himself was uncultured, uneducated, just a carpenter’s son; he belonged to the proletariat. Pontius Pilate certainly belonged to the highest strata of society, but do you think that just because Pilate belonged to the highest strata of society – was one of the best Roman governors – he was right and Jesus was wrong? That Socrates was wrong and the judges, who were certainly the best judges of those days in Athens… And no city has ever seen such culture, such sophistication as Athens has seen. But who was right?If you ask my preference, I am always for the poor criminals and sinners rather than for the saints and for the judges.Yes, it is true that the first people to reach Australia were criminals, but so was the case with America. The first people to reach America were criminals, sinners because sinners and criminals are more courageous adventurous, people. They were not bourgeois. The bourgeoisie is never courageous and judges are always in the service of the vested interests.Who knows really what is right and what is wrong?Lao Tzu was once made a magistrate. Knowing that he was one of the wisest men in the country, the Chinese emperor appointed him a magistrate. He wanted to escape, he wanted to be forgotten, but the emperor was very insistent. He said, “No. You are the wisest man, you should be my greatest magistrate.”He said, “Okay.” The first case came to court: a thief had been caught red-handed. Lao Tzu gave him six months jail and also gave six months jail to the rich man from whom he had stolen.The rich man said, “Are you in your senses? Six months jail for me too? For what?”Lao Tzu said, “In fact, I am being very lenient with you – you should get one year’s jail. You have accumulated the whole wealth of the town – you are the original criminal. This man comes only second. If you had not accumulated all the wealth, there would have been no need for him to steal. You have created the need to steal. In fact, you are the culprit.”The rich man went to the emperor. He said, “What nonsense is this? Have you ever heard of this before? Is there any precedent?”The king was also worried because if this rich man was a criminal, then what about the emperor? He immediately relieved Lao Tzu from his duties. He said “You may be a wise man, but you are not needed. You are not able to be a judge. A judge has to follow the rules.”Lao Tzu said, “I am following the ultimate law.”The king said, “There is no question of ultimate law. The law that I have decided, has to be followed.”Lao Tzu said, “Your law is all nonsense. I follow Tao. You are also one of the criminals.”Now who were these judges? Whom were they serving? Whom were they representing? – they were representing the vested interests.But Lisa became angry. She is a British lady here. Even in the discourse she sits wearing dark sunglasses. I cannot even see her expression, her eyes – impossible. That’s very British-like! Now there is no need for sunglasses here. It is already too dark really; to see is difficult. People are writing to me, “Osho, we cannot see you. Should we start wearing glasses?” And Lisa is wearing dark sunglasses – it is impossible to see her eyes. That is very diplomatic and very British. But she will melt – she has fallen into my trap, now there is no exit. It will take time. It is a difficult thing for a British lady to melt and become a sannyasin. It is such a change, such a transformation.The second British lady is Somendra. This British lady is not in the form of a lady, but I don’t look at the form, I look at the formless. This is the first time that he is laughing; otherwise I go on telling jokes and he goes on looking at the floor.The third British lady is not yet a sannyasin so I cannot tell you her name, but she has been here for seven months, just thinking whether to take sannyas or not – “to be or not to be…” Seems to be very Shakespearean! Seven months… And I don’t think that even seven years will be enough. I cannot tell you her name because unless somebody becomes a sannyasin I remain very polite, very British with the non-sannyasin, very mannerly. I talk about the climate and the weather, etcetera; I don’t talk about true matters. Once you are a sannyasin I start showing my true colors. So I am waiting. But she is also taking such a long time, even my patience is coming to a point… Even I have started doubting whether I can wait anymore. Should I drop the very idea?Several thousand football fans turned up to watch the match between the elephants and the insects. For the first half, the insect team came out onto the field with only ten members and the match was a slaughterhouse. By the time the whistle blew for half-time, the elephants were winning by ten goals to nil.When the second half of the game was resumed, the eleventh member of the insect team – a centipede – took the field and the entire match changed completely. The centipede whipped through the elephant defense time and time again. When the final whistle blew, the insects had won by three hundred and ninety-nine goals to ten. As the players marched off the field, the elephant captain strolled up to the insect captain.“How come you didn’t bring your star player on in the first half?” he asked.“Ah, well,” explained the insect captain, “it takes him so long to get his boots on!”So I am waiting. This lady seems to be a centipede, a British centipede. She is just getting ready, getting ready, getting ready… She goes on writing to me, “What to do? Should I take sannyas or not?” I cannot say to her, “Take,” because this is such a risky thing, I don’t want to take the responsibility. If a Britisher comes on his own, it is okay. Because it is not an easy job – even after sannyas it is going to be a difficult thing. If it takes seven months to decide whether to take sannyas or not, how many years will it take to be really one with me; to be in tune with me; to understand the humor, the laughter, the joy, the bliss, the music, the poetry that prevails here?The fifth question:Osho,Do you use your mind when you speak in discourse?What discourse? You call this discourse? And what mind? One can easily see that whatever I utter is absolutely mindless. I am a madman. What mind?A madman arrived at the house of another and knocked at the door. The man opened the window from above and shouted down, “I’m not at home!”The madman below looked up and said, “Well, then I’m glad I didn’t come!”And the last question:Osho,Will you please tell a few jokes about the Portuguese? We poor Portuguese sannyasins feel completely ignored by you.From today it will not be so.Late one night, Manuel, staggering home drunk, passed through a cemetery, stumbled and fell on the ground.Just in front of his nose he saw a hand sticking out of a grave and a voice cried, “Help me! Help me! Let me out – I’m alive!The Portuguese shakily covering the hand with earth, replied, “No, you’re not alive – just badly buried.”A bunch of Portuguese rogues enter a bank.“Hands up, everybody!” shouts Joachim, the chief. “This is a holdup! Manuel, lock everybody in the toilets. Antonio, bring the manager here.”The manager is brought trembling to Joachim who asks him for the key of the safe.“Please, for God’s sake, don’t kill me. I’ve left the key at home.” cries the manager.“Don’t worry, man,” replies Joachim. “It’s only the rehearsal today – tomorrow is the real thing!”A Portuguese enters a hospital and says, “Doctor, I want to have my testicles removed.”Shocked, the doctor asks, “Have you really given this decision your full consideration?”“Yes, doctor, I’ve really decided. I want my testicles removed.”So the doctor operates on him.Weeks later, fully recovered, Manuel visits his friend who asks him, “So, Manuel, did you follow my advice? Have you had your tonsils removed?”“Oh, my God!” cries Manuel. “Was it ‘tonsils’?”A Portuguese was on his first flight – Lisbon to Rio.As the plane was ready to take off, the voice of the pilot came through the speakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard our Jumbo Boeing 747. Our plane is equipped with the most modern and sophisticated equipment for your comfort and security. We have three hundred and eighty passengers aboard, a crew of twenty-five people and thirty tons of cargo. We have two super-equipped kitchens that can provide five hundred meals, two bars, twelve toilets, a gambling hall, two cinemas with two hundred seats, a TV for each passenger, and on the upper floor a disco with an orchestra of twenty musicians.“Now, please, fasten your belts, extinguish your cigarettes and say your prayers – we are trying to take off with all this junk.”Manuel and Joaquim were hunting in the Amazon jungle when suddenly a wild animal appeared. Scared, they started to run away, but the animal followed them. Finally Manuel climbed a tree while Joaquim started running around the tree.From the top of the tree, Manuel shouted, “Aie, Joaquim, the beast is almost on you.”“Don’t worry, Manuel,” replied Joaquim, “I’m two rounds ahead of him!”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 14 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Is it not necessary to desire, to long for and seek truth and avoid the untrue; to seek truth and renounce the false?There is no way to seek truth because truth is not far away. Truth is not there, somewhere, so that you have to go to it, so that you have to reach it; truth is not to be sought because truth is the very being of the seeker. How can you seek the seeker? How can you know the knower? That is impossible. You cannot encounter yourself. You are the truth.Hence all seeking is futile, but one learns only through seeking. One learns the tremendously important fact that all seeking is useless only through seeking, there is no other way to learn it. You seek and you fail, you seek again and you fail; slowly, slowly it becomes clear to you that seeking itself is the cause of missing it. Then seeking drops of its own accord. When there is no longing, no desire; when you are utterly silent; when the very mind of the achiever has disappeared, you are surprised that what you have been seeking all along has always been within you.Yoka says:It is not necessary to look for truth or avoid illusion.Why? – because to look for it is to begin in a wrong direction and to avoid illusion is foolish because illusion means that which is not. How can you avoid that which is not and how can you seek that which is? That which is, is and that which is not, is not.Yoka also says:We know that both are comprised in emptiness, that they have no form and bounds. Non-form is neither empty nor non-empty. It is the true reality of Buddha.One has simply to become utterly empty. When I say “utterly empty” I mean one has not to be just empty. “Utterly empty” means empty of everything and also empty of emptiness. Otherwise the mind is so cunning it can now cling to a new idea of emptiness.A disciple of Yoka was continually coming to him, bringing experiences that were happening to him in his deep meditation, and Yoka was hitting him. Whatever he said he would be hit, irrespective of what he was saying. He was bringing beautiful experiences: the rising of the kundalini; a great experience of light; a beautiful inner fragrance; the sound of one hand clapping. He was bringing whatever he had heard that people had achieved through meditation, but he was being hit again and again.One day he came with absolute trust: “Now the master is going to accept my experience, to recognize it – the time has come.” Because that day he was going to say, “I have achieved emptiness.” That is the ultimate. What more can there be? What can there be beyond emptiness? He was very happy that for the first time he was not going to be hit – but even before he had spoken, the master hit him.He said, “This is too much! I have not even uttered a single word.”Yoka said, “It doesn’t matter what you say, it does not matter whether you say it or not – I know. I knew the moment you entered the room that you were again here with some foolish idea.”He said, “But sir, you should have listened. This is not a foolish idea, this is the experience of all the buddhas!”So Yoka said, “Yes, so you say. It seems you are hankering for another hit.”And the disciple said, “Sir, I have experienced emptiness.”Yoka laughed, hit him and said, “Throw it away. It is all nonsense.”The disciple replied, “How can I throw emptiness? I can throw everything else.” That was the first time that he argued with the master; obviously, his argument seems to be logical. You can throw the experience of light because you are the experiencer. You can throw the experience of energy – you are the experiencer. Any experience can be thrown, but how can you throw the experience of emptiness? There is nothing to throw.The disciple said, “How can I throw emptiness?”The master hit him hard and said, “Then carry it out – but do something. Either throw it or carry it out.”The disciple said, “What are you asking me? I cannot carry it out because it is just empty and I cannot throw it either.”The master said, “Now you are clinging to the idea of emptiness. This is not emptiness – this is not true emptiness. Now you are full of the idea of emptiness. Once it was light, once it was energy, once it was fragrance; now it is emptiness. It is nothing but changing labels. Unless you also throw this, you will not be truly empty.”A truly empty person is neither empty nor non-empty. There is nothing to experience, not even emptiness. In that state of silence when there is nothing to experience – no object, no content, but only consciousness; only the observer and nothing to observe, only the seer and nothing to see – one attains truth.”Yoka says:Our spirit is like a clear mirror, thus it reflects the universe harmoniously. Our spirit and the universe are one.Once you are utterly empty you are a mirror. You are not only aware of your inner truth, you become aware of the truth of the whole existence. They are not two. They are two aspects of the same phenomenon, two sides of the same coin – the outer and the inner.All manner of troubles arise if we abandon existence to obtain emptiness; that too is sickness.Listen to these tremendously significant words of Yoka. Yoka is one of the great Zen masters. He says:All manner of troubles arise if we abandon existence to obtain emptiness; that too is sickness. It is like throwing oneself into the fire to escape drowning.Don’t abandon existence. Don’t abandon the ordinary existence in any effort for some illusory truth, for some illusory longing for God. Leave that for the fools. The intelligent person simply lives moment to moment with no desire to seek anything, with no expectation of finding anything. He simply lives moment to moment, joyously. His life is very ordinary; he has no desire to be extraordinary. He has no desire to be a buddha, hence he is a buddha. He has no desire to be extraordinary, hence he is extraordinary. Because every ordinary person has the desire to be extraordinary; only extraordinary people don’t have that desire.If we try to grasp truth or if we wish to escape error and illusion, we practice discrimination, an artificial and erroneous attitude.Once you say, “This is truth and this is untruth,” you have started discriminating – and to discriminate is the disease of the mind. That is the function of the mind: to discriminate. “This is right, that is wrong. This is true, that is false. This is worldly, this is spiritual. This is materialist, this is religious.” Once you start discriminating there is no end to it and you are in the grip of the mind. Drop discriminating and you are out of the grip of the mind. To be out of the grip of the mind is to be free, is to know what freedom is.Most men forget spirit treasure, they have to recourse to dualist thinking and abandon the true nature of spirit. To pass the barrier of Zen by means of zazen, we should finish with reason, knowledge, illusion. Then we shall attain to supreme wisdom and enter into the place of nirvana.Nirvana is not somewhere else; it is your inner space. Just get out of the clutches of the mind. Your mind is like an octopus; if somehow you get free of one of the legs of the octopus, there are other legs. There are gross legs and there are subtle legs. By the time you start getting free of the other legs you are getting entangled into the other ones. It goes on and on in circles.The man who escapes from the world, what is he saying? For thousands of years in the East, people have been renouncing the world because they say it is illusion. If you truly understand that it is illusion, what is there to renounce?These fools even come to me and ask, “What kind of sannyas are you teaching people? Sannyas means renunciation. They should leave the world, but they live in the world. Not only do they live in the world, they live more deeply and totally in the world than other worldly people. What kind of sannyas is this?” They think I am teaching a wrong kind of sannyas.I am teaching the ultimate sannyas, not a wrong kind, but for the first time the right kind. The wrong kind has prevailed for a long time, for centuries. See the stupidity of the whole thing. You call something illusory and then you escape from it. If it is illusory there is no need to escape. It should be so simple. If it is real, why escape? If it is real, how can you escape?Nobody renounces their dreams. Or do you renounce them every morning when you wake up – “I renounce all my dreams. I renounce all the treasures that I had in my dreams. I renounce the kingdom of my dreams?” You don’t renounce them, otherwise people would laugh at you – you have gone mad. Dreams are dreams.These so-called spiritual people have been telling the world: “The world is a dream – renounce it.” What nerve – to call it a dream and in the same breath to say, “Renounce it!” Either it is not a dream or it is a dream. Make sure of what it is. And either way you cannot renounce it. If it is a dream there is no point in renouncing; if it is a reality, how can you renounce reality? – because reality is synonymous with godliness.Hence I teach: rejoice. There is no need to renounce anything – there is nothing to be renounced. Rejoice, and rejoice more totally. Rejoice in a multidimensional way. Dance, sing, be blissful. Let laughter be your life, let love be your life. That is the only true way to know what is.The second question:Osho,Much of my Catholic mind has been tense with struggle for power, approval, love, sex. Meditation stirs up frustration. What is “just looking”?Mind, any kind of mind – Catholic or communist, Jew or Jaina – is the same. Mind is a disease and every mind creates a prison around you. There are different kinds of prisons; their architecture is different, they are made of different material. Some are made of stones; some are made of bricks; some are made of wood, and so on and so forth, but it does not matter. The material is not important – you are imprisoned. A Catholic mind has different concepts; a Hindu mind is rooted in a different ideology, but every mind needs an ideology. Even the atheist lives in a prison although he does not believe in God. He thinks he is a disbeliever – he is not. His disbelief is his belief. He fanatically disbelieves, in the same fanatical way that believers believe and sometimes even more fanatically because the people who believe in God remember God only once in a while, maybe on Sundays – it is a Sunday religion – but the atheist continuously argues against God. He continuously remembers God.In Indian scriptures, there is a very beautiful story:When Narda, a devotee, a great devotee, was dying God appeared to him. Such things used to happen in the past. They don’t happen anymore. God asked him what he would like, if he had any desire to be fulfilled in the next life.He said, “Yes, I want to be born an atheist.”Even God was puzzled. Remember, such things used to happen in the past. Now they no longer happen. God said, “What? You want to be an atheist? Such a great devotee, such a believer, such a religious man who has been singing and singing my name?”Narda said, “Yes, because although I am a devotee, I continuously go on forgetting you, but I have seen atheists who never forget you. That’s why I want to be an atheist next time, so that I can remember you continuously. I don’t want to forget you even for a single moment. Now you are only one of the items of my mind, but for the atheist you seem to be his whole heart – although he denies you, he remembers you. So just give me one blessing, that I should be born an atheist so that I can talk about you continuously.”This story is beautiful. It says in a very symbolic way that the atheist and the theist are not in different boats.The communist goes on arguing against God. Now he has no business with God, nothing to do with God. How was Karl Marx concerned with God? God does not come into it as far as economics is concerned, he is not an economic theory or anything. But Marx was obsessed, continuously obsessed. Again and again he denied God, as if he were haunting him.These are all fanatics. Believers, nonbelievers, Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians – all are fanatics. The fanatic never looks at the facts, that’s why he is a fanatic. The creed of the fanatic is: “We are right and don’t be distracted by the facts – whatever the facts say they are bound to be wrong.” The fanatic’s creed is: “We have already concluded what is true. Now the facts have to fit with our creed, not vice versa.”All these so-called ideologies have created very crippled people. Of course the Catholic mind is one of the most crippled and paralyzed minds in the world, because it is repressive – and whenever you repress something you grow ugly. Whatever is repressed remains there. Not only does it remain there, it becomes more and more powerful every day. It accumulates energy. If you express it, it evaporates.For example, a man who gets angry in an ordinary way, just as everybody else does – if you insult him, he gets angry – is not a dangerous person because he will never accumulate so much anger that he can prove dangerous. But a man who goes on repressing his anger is sitting on a volcano. Any day the volcano can erupt; either he is going to commit suicide or murder – less than that won’t do.It is because of repressive religions that so much pornography exists in the world. Pornography exists because of the priests, not because of Playboy. In fact, Playboy is only a by-product of the priests. So much pornography exists simply because so much sex has been repressed; it wants to find some way, some outlet. Once you repress sex it starts finding perverted ways. It can become a political trip – it is sexuality, nothing else, repressed sexuality.That’s why sex is repressed in all the armies of the world. And American soldiers have been continuously in difficulty, for the simple reason that it is the first time that any army has been allowed some sexual outlet. American soldiers cannot win; their defeat is certain. Whatever they do, wherever they go, they will be defeated for the simple reason that American soldiers are a new phenomenon in the world – they are not sexually repressive. They can’t win against the Russians, they could not even win against the Vietnamese. The poor Vietnamese defeated one of the greatest world powers that has ever existed in the whole history of man, for the simple reason that if sex is repressed then a man is very dangerous, really dangerous – he is boiling within. He wants to hit hard, he wants to be violent.The person who is sexually satisfied is not really interested in killing. In fact, all the surveys of American armies show that at least thirty percent of the soldiers did not use their weapons in the war; thirty percent is a big percentage. If thirty percent of the soldiers are not using their weapons at all, they simply go every day to the front and come back without killing anybody, how are they going to win? They are not interested in killing, there is no desire to kill.Killing arises only if sex is very much repressed. It is a strange fact that whenever a society has been affluent, rich, sexually free, it was destroyed by poor, backward, repressive societies. That was the fate of the Greek civilization; that was the fate of the Roman civilization; that was the fate of the Hindu civilization. And that is going to be the fate of the American civilization. It is very strange that the further evolved a society is, the more it is vulnerable to being easily destroyed by the less evolved, because the less evolved are more repressive. They are more foolish, they are more stupid; they still go on listening to the priests.Now Ayatollah Khomeini-type people cannot have any influence in an advanced, cultured country, but they have tremendous power in Iran. The mullas of Iran are the most powerful people there. The Ayatollah is just a madman. But that madman has become powerful. Now he is doing all kinds of things. People are being killed; people are continuously being killed, butchered, in the name of Islamic justice – as if justice can also be Islamic, Christian and Hindu.Just a few days ago Pakistan decided that women will not be able to participate in any sports with men because that is against Islam. The woman has to be completely covered. Now you cannot play hockey if you are completely covered in a black veil with only two holes for your eyes to see out of. A very strange kind of hockey will have to be evolved. And then they run, and while running, their bodies sway and their breasts jump; that is against Islam! So they cannot participate in Pakistan anymore – this is the twentieth century – they can only play with other women and the spectators can only be women. And even then they have to use clothes which cover their bodies – they have to use Punjabi clothes, salwar and kurta, so their whole body is covered. They cannot play tennis in shorts because their legs will show and that is against Islam.These are the foolish people, but these foolish people are dangerous. They can defeat anybody because they repress sexuality so much, so much energy is repressed, that it will be ready to explode. Any excuse will be enough. These are the people who are responsible for all the rapes in the world.This is the experience of my female sannyasins in India. They love me so much, that’s why they are here and suffering so much. It is really a sacrifice to be here because wherever they go they will be watched with such greedy eyes by the so-called cultured, religious Hindus; as if these people are just there to tear them apart. And whenever they have a chance they hit and push them; they do the ugliest things they can. Women have been molested, raped. These are the great Hindus, the great religious people, the great spiritual people of the world! But it is natural; I don’t see any contradiction. This is repression – any chance and it surfaces.Two nuns were walking from the nunnery toward town to do some shopping. To save time they decided to take a shortcut across a dimly-lit, deserted wood. While they were in the wood, both of the nuns got raped.“Oh no! How are we going to explain to the Mother Superior that we both got raped twice?”“Just a minute,” retorted the other nun, “we only got raped once.”“Yes, I know, but we’re going back that way, aren’t we?”There are rapists and there are women who are waiting for these rapists.You ask me: “Much of my Catholic mind has been tense…” It can’t be otherwise. You will have to drop it, root and all. You cannot save anything of it. Don’t try to save anything of it because it is all contaminated.You say: “It is tense with struggle for power…” It is bound to be. If sex is repressed it starts moving into other dimensions. It becomes a great lust for power. If sex is repressed you start asking for approval; that is a poor substitute for love, for appreciation. And now that you are here you are becoming aware that there is a great need for love, but you are afraid – your Catholic mind is against love. The Catholic mind says, “Love only God.” Now how can you love God? That is sheer nonsense.You have to love human beings; that is the only way to love God. Love unconditionally, love without any demands. But you have to love the people that surround you – these are God’s available forms; you cannot love the formless. They say, “Love God and avoid man.” Now they are teaching nuns, “Love Christ,” and nuns are called “brides of Christ.” What nonsense! The poor man was never married and now so many nuns are married to the poor man. Brides of Christ. Of course they start imagining, projecting and their minds starts playing tricks on them.If you look into the history of monasteries and nunneries in the Middle Ages you will be surprised. There are on record thousands of cases where nuns were reportedly raped by the Devil and his disciples; not only that, nuns even used to have false pregnancies. What imagination! When a woman imagines, she can imagine far-out things. Men are not that capable of imagining, but women can really imagine things. Women confessed in the courts. What were these courts doing? These courts consisted of bishops, archbishops, popes. These courts were inquiring about details; in fact, they were enjoying the details of how the Devil made love to the nuns as much as possible. If you go into the details you will find them more pornographic, more obscene than anything ever written. They had to confess and they confessed strange things: that the Devil came in the night and made love to them; that they were absolutely unable, incapable… They could not do anything else. What could they do when the Devil came and took possession of them?All kinds of sexual perversions arose out of the monasteries. Sex would never have become perverted if it were not for the monasteries and nunneries. The whole world is dominated by some kind of repression or other.You have to drop this whole mind. You say: “Meditation stirs up frustration.” It will stir up frustration. It is nothing to do with meditation. Meditation simply brings your reality to you and that encounter is frustrating. Seeing the ugliness of your own mind you feel frustrated. But don’t be worried. Meditation is bringing up all that is repressed in you; you will have to pass through it. If you know what is there, it can be dropped; if you don’t know, how can you drop it? Before something can be dropped it has to be known, well understood. In fact, to understand it perfectly is the only way to drop it.The day you drop your mind in toto you are freed from the priests. Priests are the most cunning people in the world and the most foolish too because only foolish people are cunning. Intelligent people are never cunning. They need not be cunning – intelligence is enough. When you are not intelligent you have to be cunning as a substitute; you have to learn the ways of cunningness.But remember, all these priests – Catholic or Protestant, Hindu or Mohammedan – all these ayatollahs, mullas, pundits are stupid people, but they have dominated humanity and they have reduced the whole of humanity to a big mass of stupidity. Get out of it!Meditation is bound to stir up all that has been done to you for centuries, but that cannot be avoided. If you want to avoid it you will remain the same. You will have to go through this pain of seeing all these ugly things that are in you. But better to see and go through it to reach your innermost core, so that you can find your own intrinsic intelligence; so that you can find your own lost consciousness.Once freed from the priests, you are free from stupidity. Then you are neither Catholic nor Christian, Hindu nor Mohammedan. You are simply a human being and great beauty arises in you.A Catholic priest went into a pet shop to buy a parrot. He was shown an especially fine one which he liked the look of, but he was puzzled by the two strings which were tied to its feet.“What are they for?” he asked the pet shop manager.“Ah well, father,” came the reply, “that’s a very unusual feature of this particular parrot. You see, he is a trained parrot, father – used to be in a circus. If you pull the string on his left foot he says ‘Hello,’ and if you pull the string on his right foot he says ‘Goodbye.’”“And what happens if I pull both the strings at the same time?”“I fall off me perch, you fool!” screeched the parrot.Even parrots are far more intelligent than your priests, your politicians and the people who have been dominating you.Get rid of them. Meditation is a process of getting rid of the whole past; of getting rid of all diseases; of getting rid of all the pus that has gathered in you. It is painful, but it is cleansing. And there is no other way to cleanse you.The third question:Osho,I know that you have left one British lady out of your account. Why?Yes, I too am aware that I have left one person out of the account and I think everyone else is also aware of it. That person is “Proper” Sagar. But I had to leave him out – he is too proper! He is a category in himself. He cannot be put with others. Moreover, he is really a gentleman.I can count Somendra with the ladies – he is an energy phenomenon, a Holy Ghost type. Now nobody knows who the Holy Ghost is, male or female; you can put him here or there. So Somendra can be counted anywhere. But Sagar is too proper a British gentleman, that’s why I left him out. And, moreover, I thought there was no need to tell you his name – everybody knows anyway. Secondly, even if I had counted him he would have missed the joke.Mulla Nasruddin was brought to court. He was accused of telling a joke to his wife. When she heard the joke, said the police report, she exploded into laughter and laughed so hard that she died.“I don’t believe it,” said the judge, who was a proper Englishman. “Tell the joke.”Mulla tried to refuse, but the Englishman insisted: “Tell the joke. I order you!”So he told the joke and everybody exploded into laughter, and one by one they all died laughing – except the Englishman, who died one week later.The fourth question:Osho,I believe that you are one of the greatest men who has ever lived. Am I right?You are absolutely wrong – there are no great men. If you have a hero, look again; you have diminished yourself in some way.This is the truth. This is it. There are no hidden meanings.I am just an ordinary man – as you are, as everybody else is. The difference is not that I am great and you are not great; the difference is that I am awake and you are asleep. But that does not make you small, that does not make me great either. Nobody is great. This whole nonsense has to be dropped.Don’t start looking at me as a hero. I am still alive. You can do whatever you want to do when I am dead because I cannot prevent you, but right now I won’t allow such things.The fifth question:Osho,Did Gautam the Buddha and Jesus the Christ have any idea that you would be here one day on earth?I suspect… Gautam the Buddha used to say that after twenty-five centuries there would arise one awakened man whose name would be Maitreya. Maitreya means the friend. Now for twenty-five centuries it has been thought that this would be the name of the awakened person, but my own interpretation is that Buddha is not talking about the name, he is talking about the quality of the person. He is saying that he will be the first master who will be a friend; who will not pretend to be a master; who will simply say, “I am your friend.”And that’s what I am saying to you: “I am your friend.” Hence, I say I suspect he may have had some idea.But Jesus certainly had a very clear-cut idea about me, because there is an ancient story… You may not have heard it because it has been whispered from master to disciple in deep privacy; it has been kept private up to now. I am telling you for the first time…It was the Last Supper and Jesus was talking to his disciples: “Peter, you will be the founder of my church. Andrew, you, will spread my gospel to the four corners of the earth. John, you will go forth and heal the sick and feed the poor. Thomas, you will write a gospel for Osho to speak about two thousand years from now. Judas, you will pay the bill, as no one else has money!”The sixth question:Dear-a Osho-a,I dig-a it a lot-a.It was-a far out-a.Can you-a lay-a some-a more-a on us-a?You are out-a sight-a!Like-a thank you a lot-a!PS-a: You see-a, I am-a American-Italiano – a real mess-a!Prem Patipada, I know, because just the other day somebody was talking about you.A swami was saying to another swami, “Boy, she is a high explosive girl.”“High explosive girl?”“Yes, dangerous when dropped.”Italian plus American – it is the most dangerous combination.“That wasn’t your daughter screaming,” the Italian told the horny broad’s father when he came down to the living room with a loaded shotgun. “That was me!”Get it? Let me repeat it: “That wasn’t your daughter screaming,” the Italian told the horny broad’s father when he came down to the living room with a loaded shotgun, “That was me!”An Englishman sits down beside a beautiful blonde Italian girl in a pub. After a few drinks she says to the Englishman, “Amore, I love you.”“I love you, too,” he replies hesitatingly and a little embarrassed.“I love you three,” says the Italian girl.A week before the wedding, the young Italian girl came to her mother in tears. “I’m so afraid about getting married,” she said. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to please my sweetheart.”Her mother, who wanted to make the girl’s trials easier, undertook to explain to her the secrets of married life. With some hesitation she began to explain to the girl what she would have to go through.“Oh, that doesn’t bother me, mother,” said the daughter. “I can screw all right, but I can’t cook!”Roberto and his over-developed wife were sitting in the stands waiting for the football game to begin. A friend walked over and said, “Hello, Roberto,” gave his wife’s breasts a little squeeze, and walked away.A few minutes later another guy walked over and said, “Hello, Roberto,” fondled the wife’s breasts and walked on. This strange sequence of events went on for some time.Finally a man sitting next to Roberto spoke up: “Listen, pal, it’s none of my business, but isn’t it a little odd? At least twelve guys came by, said hello to you and then grabbed your wife by the breasts. What’s the story?”Roberto looked at him and moaned, “What-a can-a I do? If-a I leave-a her-a at home, she-a sleeps with-a everybody-a!”Streetcorner hood: “You want a little action, honey?”Italian girl: “How dare you speak to a strange girl like that? A strange girl who lives at 22 Mulberry Street, telephone, Algonquin 55857.”Patipada, will it do, or you want some more-a? It is good. I am happy that together you are enjoying both worlds, the Italian and the American. You are doubly blessed.Patipada is a really beautiful woman, very courageous; wants, and also knows how to live dangerously. They are always to my liking – the people who want and are ready, to live dangerously. Patipada is almost a crazy girl, but if a woman is a real woman she is a little crazy. If she is not a little crazy she is cold, she is half-dead.That’s why I am joking so much about English ladies – they are half-dead. Italian women are so alive. For centuries Italy has been fortunate in a way. Since the days of the Roman Empire, Italy is the only country which has never been very repressive. The Romans were never phony spiritual people, never. Never for a single period did they become so-called holy people. They were very earthly people and even now that has remained in the Italian blood. Even the Catholic Church has not been able to corrupt them very much, although the Vatican is there. But the Italians are incorruptible – they corrupt the Pope!I like that quality of earthiness, that smell of earth that makes people alive.I have chosen a few of the Italians as my mediums. Now, many ugly women, flat-chested women, go on writing letters to me. It has now reached epidemic proportions: “Osho, it seems we can never be your mediums – we are ugly and flat-chested!”Don’t worry. You will have your reward in the other world. You can’t have both worlds. To be a medium, a woman at least has to look like a woman! The day I start choosing flat-chested women, then why not choose men? What is wrong with them? Just a little bit of difference – a difference of little tits and bits. So please stop writing such letters to me. I may be enlightened, but I am not so enlightened – I still have some aesthetic sense. When I choose a woman I choose a woman. At least she should look like a woman. And I have to see those mediums every day… And I am finished with all my karmas so I am not ready to suffer anymore – enough is enough! I have suffered a lot in my past lives – I have suffered many flat-chested women.But you should be happy that I will try in every possible way that you become enlightened in this life, so that you need not come again and torture people. I will send you to the farther shore – let the saints suffer! So in that way you are fortunate. My mediums may have to come back – some other enlightened person may need them – but you, rest assured, this is your last life. I am going to finish you! So be happy on that account. You will be immensely rewarded in the other world.That’s why Jesus goes on saying… Look at his beatitudes. He never said, “Blessed are the rich,” he said, “Blessed are the poor.” Why? – because the poor need consolation. He never said, “Blessed are the successful,” he said, “Blessed are the meek.” Those meek people, poor people, they need some consolation – they will inherit the kingdom of God.I say to you: “Blessed are the flat-chested for theirs is the kingdom of God… But please, leave the earth alone.”The seventh question:Osho,What is reincarnation?I will tell you a small story that will explain my attitude toward reincarnation.Surmano explains the theory of reincarnation to the rabbi: “Let’s say, your holiness, that you die tomorrow. A flower blooms on your grave after a few days. A cow comes and eats the flower. The next morning the cow has a good shit. I go for a walk, see the shit and say, ‘Ah, your holiness, you haven’t changed a bit!’”The eighth question:Osho,How about some good Jewish jokes? I love to laugh at myself!One afternoon, two Jewish businessmen were relaxing in Harlem when one said to the other, “We forgot to lock the safe.”“What does it matter?” asked his partner. “We’re both here, ain’t we?”A group of Jewish friends discuss if it would have been better not to have been born.“Of course it would,” says one of them, “but how many of us have such luck?”It is a little subtle. It will take you seven days.Two Jews were walking in a concentration camp. One of them asked, “Hey, Moshe, do you know what time it is?”“Why?” answered the second. “Do you have to go somewhere?”A Scotsman, an Englishman and a Jew went to an expensive place to eat, somewhere in London.The Scotsman was heard to say at the end of the evening, “It’s okay, lads, I’ll pay tonight.”The next day the newspaper headlines read: “Jewish Ventriloquist Found Dead Outside Restaurant.”And the last:A man traveling in a train is reading a novel; sitting by his side is a young woman.“Hey, Jew!” says the woman. “What time is it?”The man is shocked, but plays it cool and does not answer.A minute later she asks again, “Hey, Jew! What time is it?”No answer. So she asks five more times.Finally the man gets angry and says, “Myna watch is in myna pocket. Just take a look and see what time it is.”“How can I see inside your pockets?” she asks.“How did you discover that I was a Jew?” he replies.The ninth question:Osho,I have been here in the East for eight years now and I keep becoming more and more lazy. Why?Nothing to worry about – you are just catching the local disease!And the last question:Osho,Why am I afraid to ask my real questions?Everybody is afraid of asking the real questions. That’s why people ask metaphysical questions, philosophical questions – questions about God, the creation, after-life, reincarnation – because these questions are not in any way related to you; you remain outside.It is dangerous to ask a real question because when you ask a real question you have to encounter me directly and you have to face the consequences. I am not a predictable man; one never knows what I am going to say. One never knows whether I am going to hit you or to pat you; you can never be sure. So, to ask a real question needs the courage to open your heart, to show your wounds, to show where it hurts. Nobody wants to show one’s wounds; nobody wants to show one’s tears – and everybody is full of tears and full of wounds, and everybody is pretending that he is happy.Ask anybody, “How are you?” and he will say, “Beautiful. Perfectly okay.” And nobody is okay and nobody is in a beautiful state. But people have to keep face.Now, asking me a question before three thousand people means exposing yourself. It is standing naked, spiritually naked. It is easy to stand naked physically – that is nothing much, one can drop the clothes very easily – but to stand spiritually naked needs tremendous courage. One has to be a daredevil because it is like dropping your skin, showing your skeleton. It is like showing all your ugliness; nobody wants to be exposed.We are all covering our faces with masks – beautiful masks. The original face has never been shown to anybody; you yourself have forgotten what your original face is. In fact, when you look for the real questions, first you will come across unreal questions – a thousand and one unreal questions. Unless you are very persistent and go on digging and throwing out the unreal questions… When the mind says, “Ask who created the world,” if you are a real seeker you will say, “What nonsense! What does it matter? Anybody will do.” The whole point is that the world is there. X created it, Y created it, Z created it, what does it matter? And whether anybody created it or did not create it, is immaterial. This question is nonsense and it is not going to affect my life. If God created it, so what? Or if, as the Buddhists and Jainas say, nobody created it, so what? The Jainas and Buddhists live in the same way as the Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians, in the same stupid way; it makes no difference to their lives.Any question is unreal which does not make a difference to your life, but it is easy to ask such questions. In the first place, it shows your knowledgeability, that you are a great student of metaphysics, philosophy, religion. It shows that you know the scriptures.People go on writing to me, “Krishna has said this in the Gita – what does he mean?” Whatever he means, it is not going to affect your life. There are one thousand commentaries already available; if they are not making any difference – the one thousand commentaries are useless – then my statement is going to go the same way. It is not going to affect your life.Once I was delivering a talk on Mahavira, the Jaina tirthankara. A Jaina scholar, a very famous scholar whose books I had read and whose scholarship I had always appreciated, stood up. I was not aware that this was the man who had written so many books, whom I had always appreciated. He asked, “I have only one question. Buddha and Mahavira were contemporaries. Who was the eldest? For almost fifty years I have been working on it, but no conclusive decision has been reached yet. There are reasons to suppose that Buddha was older and there are reasons to suppose that Mahavira was older.”I looked at the man for a few moments. There was absolute silence. The scholar started feeling a little embarrassed – why was I looking at him in such a way? “Have I asked something wrong?” He asked, “Why are you looking at me in such a strange way? Have I asked something wrong?”I replied, “Not only wrong – you have wasted your whole life! Fifty years! What does it matter? If Buddha was older, so what? If Mahavira was older, so what? It does not affect their philosophy; it does not affect their approach to life. It is not going to affect you either. Why have you wasted your fifty years? You seem to be just a goddamned fool.”Somebody, the man who was presiding, nudged me and said, “Do you know who he is? He is a very famous Jaina scholar!” And he told me his name.I said, “I will hit him even harder because I have always appreciated his books, but this man is stupid. How did he manage to write such good books? He must be functioning like a biocomputer because looking at him, seeing him, listening to his question… He says fifty years – and he is almost bragging that he has devoted so much time to such a great question.” He was showing his scholarship.It is easy to ask metaphysical, philosophical questions; it shows your knowledge, it shows your ego, your pride. But when you ask a real question it can hurt, it can expose you; it can show your ignorance. It is bound to show your ignorance – not only your ignorance, it is bound to show your insanity; it is bound to show your schizophrenia; it is bound to show your neurosis.That’s why. And you are an Indian; the Indians are super-egoists. They have nothing else to brag about. They don’t have money, they don’t have power; they don’t have technology, they don’t have science; they don’t have anything else. They have only one thing: that egoistic attitude of “holier than thou.” So Indians are very afraid to ask real questions; they never ask real questions. I have never come across any Indians who ask real questions. They will never expose themselves. Even if they are going insane, they try to cover it up in some beautiful way.Just the other day I received a letter saying that a woman had gone a little berserk. But the people who had written it, wrote not that she had gone mad or berserk, they wrote: “She is behaving like Ramakrishna, like Meera, so, Osho, only you can help.”A few days ago they phoned. A message was given to them: “Take her to a psychiatrist there.” Now a very angry letter has come back: “When you are here, why should we take her to a psychiatrist? She is not mad, she is in a very high state. Going to a psychiatrist can be dangerous for her because he will give her shock treatment or tranquilizers. He may bring her down to earth, back to her ordinariness – and she is flying very high. Only you can understand it.”Now that woman is simply mad – I know that woman. She was here just a few days ago and while here came to touch my feet. I felt that she could go mad at any time. But in India if you go mad you become a mystic, not mad. It is just the reverse in the West. If you become a mystic they immediately put you in a mental asylum. Indians don’t like the idea that she is mad.Nobody likes to bring his real problems. No Indian will talk about his sexual fantasies. He will come and ask, “How to attain celibacy, brahmacharya?” Now really he is suffering from sexuality, but he will not talk about it. People have become afraid that others will laugh. And that’s what happens in an ordinary world.This is not an ordinary place. Nobody is going to laugh at you. People will have every compassion for you if your problem is real; in fact they will be more compassionate toward you if your problem is real. But people are hiding their real problems. And it is true as far as the outside world is concerned. If you tell the outside world your real problems, people will start laughing at you. They will not feel compassion, they will make you a laughingstock. But not here. Here we have so many other things to laugh about. I give you so many opportunities to laugh that nobody has any laughter to spare for your real problems. That’s why I go on telling so many jokes, so that when real problems arise people can have compassion for you. In the outside world it happens so – but this is a very special kind of place.A man entered the doctor’s office wearing a robe. Surprised, the doctor asked, “Why do you wear a robe?”“Ah, you saw the problem right away,” said the patient. “I have one huge ball and I can’t wear trousers.”“Okay,” said the doctor, “let me examine it.”“No, doc, you’ll laugh at me.”“Show me,” said the doctor.“I know you’ll laugh.”“No, I won’t.”“Promise?”“Promise!”So the man lifts his robe, exposing his left leg. The doctor, seeing the oversized ball hanging down to the man’s knee, forgets himself and roars with laughter.“You sonofabitch!” yells the patient. “You promised you wouldn’t laugh. Now I ain’t gonna show you the big one.”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 15 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,How does it happen that I feel so at home and so lost in this buddhafield?There is no contradiction in it; it is as it should be. To be lost, utterly lost, is to be at home. Man ordinarily lives as an ego, separate from the whole; like an island, with a definite identity – the name, the form. He is somebody. For the whole of our life we make every effort to go on defining ourselves – who we are – for the simple reason that we don’t know who we are. So we create an artificial, arbitrary identity. That’s what the ego is.When you enter a love relationship with a master – that’s what entering a buddhafield is – you start losing your old identity. Your definition becomes blurred. It was arbitrary anyway. It starts melting and your limits start merging with the unlimited. You are no longer somebody; you start becoming a nobody, a nothingness.Hence the feeling of being lost because you are missing your old games, trips. You are missing your old miseries, your so-called old pleasures. You are missing all that you had known before as part of your being. A new being is arising, a being which is not isolated from the whole, not encapsulated, but one with the whole – a wave which is part of the ocean. It is still a wave, but now a deep understanding is happening that “I am not separate”; that “I need not be worried about myself”; that “I have been before I was born and I will be after I am gone. This being a wave is only a phase, a momentary phenomenon. It is only a question of form. Deep down I am one with the formless ocean. I am oceanic.”This is the experience that is happening to you; hence you will feel lost – lost if you compare it with your old identity. The comparison comes naturally because the old is well known. Maybe you have been decorating it for many lives, maintaining it, nourishing it, nurturing it. It is an ancient habit, almost perennial; you have forgotten when it began. It is as old as the creation itself. It has gone very deep – its roots have gone very deep. Now all that is changing. The old is dying and you are acquainted only with the old, hence you will feel like a death is happening.But if you look to the new, which is very fresh, just like a breeze, a dewdrop, a newly opening bud of a rose, very fresh… You are not yet fully aware of it. It is so new, you will need a little time to be introduced to it, to become acquainted with it. But it is happening because both these processes happen simultaneously. The death of the old and the birth of the new are two sides of the same coin.If you start looking at the new, you will feel at home. That too is happening. In a very, very vague way you are becoming aware of that too. Slowly, slowly the new will become settled. The old will become just a memory, a fading memory; a dream that you had dreamed while you were asleep; something that had not happened to you – maybe you had seen it in a movie or read it in a novel. It was somebody else’s story. Slowly, slowly it will go so far away from you that it will become difficult even to recollect it. Then the discontinuity has happened totally. Your umbilical cord is cut; you are really out of the womb of the past. You have started breathing on your own, in a new way, as a nobody.It feels strange to be impersonal, but to be impersonal is the only way to be universal. Not to be is the only way of being. Shakespeare’s dilemma, “To be or not to be…” cannot be resolved by philosophy; it can only be resolved by meditation because in meditation, not to be prepares the way for you to be. There is no question of choosing. You need not choose between the two, there is no question of either/or – not to be is the way for you to be. If you choose not to be, you have chosen the other too; if you choose to be, you will have to pass through the process of nonbeing.Meditation is a process of death, of nonbeing; of becoming nothing on your own accord; of disappearing into the whole, into the harmony of the whole. But it is a miracle, the greatest paradoxical experience of life. There is no contradiction in it, but there is a paradox. Seen from the intellectual standpoint, there is a paradox.You ask: “How does it happen that I feel so at home and so lost in this buddhafield?” That’s how it happens, that’s the way it happens. That’s the way of the ultimate law – aes dhammo sanantano. If you had asked Buddha he would have said: “Suchness, tathata.” This is how the universal law functions. You disappear and you appear for the first time. But you appear in such a new way – not as a person, a name, a form, a separate identity, but just as a total oneness with the whole, in unison with the whole.That’s what is happening here. Slowly, slowly the energies of the sannyasins are melting and merging and becoming one. Thousands of my sannyasins are functioning in a kind of deep orchestra; they are no longer solo players. They have drowned themselves in this buddhafield.It needs guts, it needs courage; it needs intelligence, it needs awareness to move from the known into the unknown and to go into the uncharted sea.You have left this shore. Your small boat is moving toward the unknown. Never look back. The old shore will call you back, it will try to seduce you and it will give you many promises, but remember, it has never fulfilled any promise. You have lived on this shore for so long; don’t forget the misery, the pain, the anguish, the nightmare it has been for you year after year. Now go on moving. Don’t look back, look ahead. Always look for the new, the fragile; that which is just arriving on the scene. You will need alertness to recognize it.The second question:Osho,I have been a sannyasin for only three days and yet I have started to dislike the non-sannyasins. What is happening?That’s how fanaticism is born. That’s how Christians, Mohammedans and Hindus have lived for centuries. That’s how the foolish mind functions – beware of it. Being a sannyasin does not mean that you have to dislike the non-sannyasins. Never look at anybody as a non-sannyasin; always look at the non-sannyasins as potential sannyasins. They are all potential sannyasins – three days ago you were a non-sannyasin! Love them more because your love you can help their potential to be actualized. If you dislike them, you will become a cause of preventing them from becoming sannyasins. Help them.This is not the way, but this is how the mind functions. I can understand it. The mind is so ugly that it immediately starts creating new trips for the ego; even sannyas can become a trip for the ego. “Now I am a sannyasin, I am special. And the non-sannyasins? They are stupid people.” Only three days ago you were a non-sannyasin – just three days ago. But it does not matter whether it is three days or three years, it is the same. Even after three minutes the mind starts spinning and weaving. It starts walking in a different way, looking at others with condemnation and with that ancient saintly look of “holier than thou.”Rastus was tired of being black. One day he came across an advertisement in the local paper which said: “Super Omo special skin-whitening cream – makes skin whiter than white.”Very excited, he purchased a packet and went home. He took a bath and scrubbed himself with the product. When he was finished, he looked in the mirror and found that his skin looked like that of a white man’s.Ecstatic, he ran out to show his wife who wasted no time in jumping into the bath herself. She too was very happy when she emerged looking like a white lady.They found their young son and told him, “Hey, boy – this is your chance to become a white boy.”“But I don’t want to be a white boy.” he exclaimed. “I’m happy the way I am – I’m happy to be black.”Rastus turned to his wife and said, “You know, I have been white for only one hour and already these blacks are giving me shit.”Beware of this mind. These are the ways of the mind. A sannyasin has to drop the mind. You have to be alert about the ways the ego takes grip of you. You are not to become holier than others. On the contrary, sannyas simply means an initiation into being ordinary.The pope is addressed as Your Holiness; the shankaracharya is addressed as Your Divinity; the founder of the Hare Krishna Movement was addressed as His Divine Grace. You have to remember that I address you as Your Holy Ordinariness! There is nothing more beautiful than just being ordinary. The moment you are ready to be ordinary you become divine; that’s the only way to become divine.The divine is very ordinary. If it were not ordinary it would not become the rocks, it would not become the trees; it would not become the animals, it would not become human beings. It would not descend to such lower states. But it is so ordinary and it is so happy to be a fish or even to be a cockroach or a beetle.I have heard…George Harrison was walking in the garden where he came across a beetle and said, “Hey, beetle, do you know? You must be happy that we have called our group The Beatles – we have called our group after your name.”The beetle looked at Harrison and said, “Do you call your group Eric? My name is Eric. I am no ordinary beetle.”Nobody is ordinary except a very few people – a Buddha, a Jesus, a Zarathustra. These people are ordinary people; they have the courage to be ordinary. In that very courage they reach the ultimate depth of being and existence.My sannyasins have to gather that courage to be nobodies; that’s what I mean by being ordinary. Our whole effort here is to transform the mundane into the sacred. We don’t want to create a rift between the mundane and the sacred; that has been the way for centuries – the rift. That rift has created a schizophrenic humanity.People are constantly in a tense state of affairs. The mundane pulls them to one side and the sacred to the very opposite. If they go with the mundane they feel guilty. If you enjoy eating and drinking and making merry you feel guilty – you are doing something wrong. If you stop eating, drinking, making merry and become an ascetic, you start feeling very anxious, very troubled, because you are going against nature. You start feeling, “What am I doing to myself? Is it right?” And you have to constantly repress. You have to avoid the world, you have to escape to a monastery or to the Himalayas. And each small thing creates a problem for you. Rather than solving your problems you have created a thousand and one problems.Your so-called saints live only in problems; everything is a problem. Eating is such a problem, they make so much fuss about it. They will eat this and they will not eat that. The Jaina monk cannot eat the poor potatoes. Why? What is wrong with potatoes? They look so innocent; one has never heard anything wrong about them – they have never done any wrong to anybody. But a Jaina monk cannot eat potatoes. It is prohibited in his scriptures because they grow underground. They don’t grow in the sunlight, so something is wrong with them. They grow in darkness; eating them will create darkness in you, you know? You have to be a light unto yourself. So anything that grows underneath the earth is prohibited, carrots and all – anything that grows underneath the earth. They don’t believe in underground things.I am a firm believer in underground things because they are very revolutionary! If you eat them they will help you to go underground. And finally everybody has to go underground, so why not prepare?I was once traveling with a Hindu monk. He would not drink milk from buffaloes. Why? – because Hindu scriptures say that buffalo milk creates laziness. As if Indians can be more lazy! That Hindu saint was not doing anything, so I said to him, “I don’t see that there will be any trouble – you don’t do anything at all. The buffalo milk can’t harm you. You are already lazy, so why be worried about it?”Not only that, he only used to drink milk from a white cow. I said, “What is the matter with black cows?”“Black is an evil color.”I said to the saint. “We should part our ways; we cannot travel together, not even for a single moment. You are the most stupid person I have come across because milk from a black cow is white, the milk does not become black. If the milk became black maybe there would have been some point in your idea.”But he wouldn’t listen. He would only take warm milk straight from the cow, not heated on the stove or on a fire. The cow had to be milked just in front of him so that he could drink it warm from the cow itself. I said, “Why don’t you just do what the kids do? Just drink from the tits. That will be even warmer. Even with milking it and then bringing it to you… And it is not so hot that it remains really warm. Just drink directly from the cow’s tits.”He said, “What are you saying?”I said, “Yes, that will make you a far greater saint.”But these fools are worshipped by people.He would only eat food prepared by a virgin girl, otherwise not. How is the food affected? Whether it is prepared by a virgin girl or by a nonvirgin, how is the food affected? He said, “There are subtle vibrations.”I said, “I can trust you only if… I will bring two, three thalis prepared for you: one by a virgin girl, another by a woman who is married and has children, the third by a prostitute. Just show me which one belongs to whom, just by their vibe. If you cannot judge then stop this nonsense. Don’t talk nonsense. What vibes are you talking about?”You should drop this idea that only hippies talk about vibes; Indian saints have been talking about them for at least five thousand years.Now he was at a loss; he could not discriminate. So I said, “Drop it – you don’t know what vibes are. You are just talking any stupid jargon. It may impress foolish people, but what vibes are you talking about?”Hindu saints, Jaina saints and Buddhist monks are not allowed to sit in a place where a woman has just been sitting because that place goes on radiating sexual vibes from the woman. A certain time has to elapse; after that they can sit there. These people are utterly mad.But these are the ways of the ego in order to make the demarcation that they are special, spiritual. They are not ordinary, mundane, worldly. Otherwise, how to make a discrimination? How to condemn ordinary people? You have to create something; anything will do.Jaina monks pull out their hair; they can’t shave, they can’t use scissors. As if scissors were great technology! They avoid technology – as if a blade were great technology. They pull out their hair. Utterly stupid! But thousands of people gather to see them pulling out their hair because they are doing a great austerity. Do anything stupid, but do something which is unnatural and people will start worshipping you.Christian monks used to beat themselves every morning. There were sects of Christian monks who would whip themselves every morning. Their bodies were continuously bleeding; their bodies had wounds all over them from head to foot. The man who would whip himself the most would be thought to be the greatest saint. People would gather to watch and count who was whipping himself more, who was bleeding more. Now these people who were whipping themselves were masochists and the people who had gathered to see them were sadists. They were both ill, pathological, but this pathology has persisted.My whole work here is to drop this division between the mundane and the sacred. I want you to live a very ordinary life so that you don’t have to go on any ego trips.Remember three days or three years or thirty years, it is all the same; time makes no difference. Be aware of the fact that the ego is very cunning and it will try to find out ways to puff you up. This is a very simple way: to dislike the non-sannyasins. Immediately you are special and they are ordinary people, they don’t understand and you understand.They are all people with potential. Love them, help them, respect them. That is their decision whether to be a sannyasin or not to be a sannyasin; that is their freedom, it is your freedom. And freedom should be respected.The third question:Osho,Can you give me a new Zen koan to meditate on because for all the old ones I can find the answers in the Zen scriptures.Okay.Just the other day a young German took sannyas. He was a man of deep feelings, a man of heart. He was sobbing with joy. I asked him, “How long are you going to stay?”He said, “Osho, forever.”I said to him, “When you come next time, stay a little longer.”Now meditate over it. This is a Zen koan! You will not find the answer in any scriptures; even I don’t know the answer.The fourth question:Osho,Why are you talking about tits so much?I know that it is a touchy subject, but you know me – and that explains everything!The fifth question:Osho,Are children really as intelligent as you always say they are?They are far more intelligent than I say they are. Every child is born absolutely intelligent because there is nothing to distract his intelligence. He has no prejudices to make him unintelligent, he has no information to make him unintelligent – he has no knowledge yet. Even if he wants to he cannot function in a knowledgeable way. How can he be stupid?Stupidity needs a few qualifications. You have to go to school, to college, to university. Stupidity needs a few degrees: you have to have MA’s, MSc’s, PhD’s, DLitt’s. Stupidity depends on knowledgeability. The more knowledgeable you are, the less intelligence is needed because knowledge starts functioning as a substitute. You can depend on knowledge. Why bother? – you can simply look into the memory and the answer is there.But the child has no memory, he has no ready-made answer. Whenever there is a problem he has to face it, he has to encounter it. He has to respond, he cannot react. To be responsive is to be intelligent. He functions from a state of not-knowing. That’s why I say every child is born intelligent.But almost everybody dies stupid because this whole life is structured in such a way that it is impossible to remain intelligent – almost impossible. The trap is such that only very few people have been able to escape from it. The trap gives you all kinds of comforts, conveniences. It is supported by the government, by religion, by society; it has all the supports.The day I resigned my post of professor in a university, I burned all my certificates. A friend who used to live with me, said, “What are you doing? If you have resigned… I don’t agree that you have done the right thing, but burning your certificates is absolutely unnecessary. You may need them someday, keep them. What is wrong in keeping them? You have such a big library – they won’t take up much space, just a small file will be enough. If you cannot keep them, I will keep them; just give them to me. Someday you may need them.”I said, “I am finished with all this stupidity. I want to burn all the bridges. I will never need them because I never look back and I never go back. I am finished with it. It was all nonsense and I have been in it long enough.”But I had not compromised with any vested interest, that’s why I had to resign – because I was not teaching what I was supposed to teach. In fact, I was doing just the opposite. So many complaints against me reached the Vice-Chancellor that finally he gathered courage to call me. He never used to call me because to call me was an encounter. Finally he called me and said, “Just look at all these complaints here.”I said to him, “There is no need to bother about the complaints – here is my resignation.”He said, “What are you saying? I am not saying that you should resign!”I said, “You are not saying it, but I am resigning because I can only do the things that I want to do. If there is any imposition put on me, if any kind of pressure is put on me, I am not going to be here even for a single moment. This is my resignation and I will never enter this building again.”He could not believe it; I left his office and he came running after me. As I was getting into my car he said, “Wait. What is the hurry? Ponder over it!”I said, “I never ponder over anything. I was doing the right thing. If there are complaints – and of course I know there are complaints. There must be, because I am not teaching what your stupid syllabus binds me to teach; I am teaching something else. I am not talking about philosophy, I am talking against philosophy, because to me the whole project of philosophy is a sheer stupid exercise in futility. It has not given a single conclusion to humanity. It has been a long, long unnecessary journey and wastage. It is time we drop the very subject completely.“Either a person should be a scientist or he should be a mystic; there is no other way. A scientist experiments with objects and the mystic experiments with his subjectivity. Both are scientists in a way. One is of the outer, the other is of the inner. The philosopher is nowhere; he is in a limbo. He is neither man nor woman, he is neither here nor there. He is impotent, hence he has not been able to contribute anything. So I cannot teach philosophy – I will go on sabotaging it. I was just waiting. Whenever you decided to call me, I had to resign immediately.”It was very difficult to get out of it because all my friends came to try to persuade me not to; the professors and all my relatives came and tried to persuade me not to: “What are you doing?”Even the education minister phoned me: “Don’t do such a thing. I know that your ways are a little strange, but we will tolerate them. Continue. Don’t take any notice of the complaints. Complaints have been coming to me too, but I have not taken any notice of them. We don’t want to lose you.”I said, “That is not the point. Once I have finished with something, I am finished with it. Now no pressure can bring me back.”It was very difficult for me to be at school because I could see the stupidity of the teachers. They used to get angry. They used to think that I was trying to be mischievous. I was not trying to be mischievous, I was simply trying to show them that what they were teaching was all nonsense. It was not concerned with life.My geography teacher used to talk about places. I said to him, “I am never going to visit these places so why should I remember them? Now, why should I be concerned with Constantinople or Timbuktu? Whether they exist or not is irrelevant. All that I want to know is where I am right now – tell me this.”He was almost dumb. He said, “Where you are right now…? No student has ever asked me this and I have been teaching geography my whole life.”I said, “Then you’ve never had a single student. I want to know where I am right now. My whole concern is now and here.”My history teacher used to teach me about stupid kings and their names. I said, “I am not going to memorize them. Why? What have they done for me? They didn’t even know my name so why should I remember their names? It should be a give-and-take. Now Nadir Shah, Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, what have they done?”But this is how we go on imposing stupid, unnecessary information. And the load becomes heavier. The person who carries the biggest load earns the biggest rewards. Naturally, when stupidity is rewarded you settle for it. Intelligence is punished.I was punished so much – you cannot imagine how much I was punished. From my primary school up to university, I was continuously punished and nobody was ever able to tell me why they were punishing me. It was almost always the case that I would be standing outside the classroom. It was very rare for me to sit inside the classroom. But that exercise has helped me. I have done so much exercise walking outside a classroom that now I need not do anything. I have done enough.Whenever my headmaster used to come on his rounds, I was the only person who was always walking in the corridor. Whenever he would not see me he would come to my class and say, “What is the matter? What are you doing inside?”I said, “I don’t know. I myself am puzzled because just a single question and the teacher will say, ‘Go out! Unless you stop asking questions you cannot come in.’” It was a good excuse for me to be outside in the air. And that was so beautiful to be outside with the birds and with the trees. So whenever I wanted to go out, just a question, any question would do – any question that was unanswerable.I was turned out of one college, expelled from this university and from that university. One university accepted me, but accepted me with the condition that I would not ask any questions…I said, “I can accept that, but then you have to do one thing: I should not have to go to the classes, because if I am in class and the professor says something stupid, I will not be able to resist myself – the temptation will be too great – and there will be an argument. And I will forget all about the promise I have given to not ask questions. So you have to give me permission that I need not attend classes and that I will be able to appear in the examination without fulfilling the absolutely necessary requirement of being in class for at least seventy-five percent of the time.”He said, “That is my promise.”I was so happy. For two years I simply never turned up at the college, I came only when there was an examination.The principal said, “You are a strange man. I was thinking that you may come only once in a while, but I have not seen you at all for two years.I was even sending my fee by post because I said, “Something may happen even giving the fee or saying hello to the head clerk,. He may ask me, ‘How are you?’ and that’s enough. You know me! You just ask, ‘How are you?’ and I go on for ninety minutes – and that has been my usual practice.”So I avoided all contact just to fulfill my promise, but it has been a boon, a blessing.Children are certainly intelligent, very intelligent.A little boy was overheard saying to another, “If I had known what trouble parents were, I would never have had any.”“How did you like the new preacher, son?” asked the mother.“Don’t like him much. He preached so long I couldn’t keep awake and he hollered so loud I couldn’t go to sleep!”A little boy loses his mother in a big department store. A young man who was working there sees the boy crying and asks him, “What is the matter?”“I’ve lost my mother,” the boy mumbles through his tears.“What does she look like?” the man inquires.“She looks like a woman without me.”One six-year-old boy was reprimanded by his Sunday School teacher: “You’ve been nothing but trouble – you’re just a rotten kid.”The little boy pulled himself up to his full three-foot height and answered, “That’s not true. I am such a good boy – God made me and he didn’t make me junk.”“I had a funny dream last night, Mum.”“Did you?”“I dreamed I was awake, but when I woke up I found I was asleep!”Two small boys were swinging on a gate together, passing the time of day. In the course of their conversation one asked the other, “How old are you?”“I don’t know,” said the other.“You mean you don’t know how old you are?”“No.”“Do women bother you?”“No.”“You’re four in that case,” observed his companion.“Papa,” said little Johnny, “how do babies come into the world?”“The stork brings them, son.”“Hey, pa, don’t tell me you did it with a stork!”A little boy comes home from school one day and says, “Hey, mommy, I just saw a flat cat.”“Oh,” says his mother. “How did you know it was flat?”“Because there was another cat pumping it up.”The sixth question:Osho,It took you seven hundred years to get here. What happened?Don’t you know Indian trains?The seventh question:Osho,I'm going to tell the truth. I'm a British lady: my great-grandfather was governor of Delhi and my great-uncle was prime minister of Kashmir. I know there's very little hope for me, but is it not possible to defy the laws of nature and fall in tune with you in spite of this unfortunate heritage?Don’t be worried – truth liberates! You have confessed the sin. That’s the beauty of confession. Now there is no worry.Heinrich Heine was dying and these were his last words: “God will forgive me – it is his trait.”So don’t be worried. Even if you are British, God is going to forgive you. All that is needed on your part is to confess. And don’t take my jokes seriously. The British are beautiful people – I love them.The eighth question:Osho,I cannot control myself when insulted. What should I do?Tit for tat – till you become enlightened. Do it quickly, because once you become enlightened it is very difficult to do anything. When somebody insults you, somebody insults you. You have simply to accept it: aes dhammo sanantano. So whatever you want to do, do it right now, finish it because here you will soon become enlightened; it is not very far away.It is natural that when somebody insults you, you cannot control yourself. I have never been telling you to control yourself because control can’t help. If you control you repress; control is another name for repression. If you can watch, watch; otherwise if there is a choice between repression and indulging, prefer indulgence because indulgence will teach you a lesson. Repression won’t teach you anything. You are not a machine, you are a man.Warning in the year 2000: due to robot shortage, some of our bartenders are human and will react unpredictably when insulted.You are not a robot so it is natural. It is better to react truly. But remember one thing: you are free to do whatever you like, you need only face the consequences – because I am not saying that you won’t receive blows back. So first see who the other guy is, be a little careful. You are alive, you are not dead yet. Once you are enlightened you are almost dead – alive on the other shore, dead on this shore. So before that calamity happens, enjoy doing whatever you can manage to do.Mulla Nasruddin was studying electricity. To show the class its practical uses, the teacher commanded that each pupil bring some electric tool to class the next day.The following morning the class held a small exhibition: electric bulbs, irons, a hair drier, an oven…When Mulla arrived he was sweating and carrying a big artificial lung on his back.“Mulla,” said the teacher, “where did you get that electric lung?”“I took it from grandpa, teacher.”“And he didn’t mind?” she cried.“I don’t think so, teacher. He just said, ‘Hrrr…’”So before that happens don’t try to control, do something – there is nothing to be worried about. Accept your humanity; it is part of you. If somebody insults you he is challenging you to a fight, so give him a good fight. If you see that he is too big, then meditate – what else to do?The ninth question:Osho,I am a mathematician. Can I also become a sannyasin?I don’t see that there is any difficulty – you can be a sannyasin. Of course, you will have to learn something more than mathematics. You will have to learn a little poetry, a little music, a little dance. You will have to go beyond the calculative mind. You will have to take a little jump into the illogical, into the paradoxical. And of course habits die hard so I can understand your problem.Mathematics is pure logic, it is nothing but logic. Sannyas is very illogical – or if you like big words, then it is supralogical. But that is only a word; the fact is, it is illogical. So if you are ready to go a little beyond the boundaries of logic, you are welcome. It is going to be a little difficult, but not impossible.There are mathematicians here; there are scientists here whose whole life was devoted to some logical methodology, but now they have moved – moved beyond it. And they can move only if they have a deep longing to know whether there is something more than arithmetic, or if that is all. If you are really an explorer, if you have some adventure in your life, there is no problem.I can understand your question. You may be too addicted to your mathematics – then there will be difficulty. All addictions create difficulties and these are deep addictions. If you are addicted to some drug, it is not so difficult. Within six weeks you can be hospitalized, treated, and can get out of it. But if you are addicted to logic, it may take a very long time. Unless you decide to come out of it with your total being, there may be no possibility of anybody else bringing you out of it.A mathematician goes to the whorehouse. Very excited, he picks the prettiest girl and goes off into a room with her.“They say you girls from the capital do very incredible things in bed.”“Yes, we certainly do.” she replied.“So, I want one of your specialties!”“I have one that you are going to love – come here. Let’s do a sixty-nine.”That appealed to the mathematician – sixty-nine. Immediately he understood the language – sixty-nine, that comes within his world. So they jump into bed and the woman does it very well. He loves it.When they finish, he falls over onto his side, takes a deep breath and says, “This is too much. I think I am going to quit the other sixty-eight!”But a mathematician is a mathematician – he is still calculating.If you remain calculative… You can become a sannyasin and you may still remain calculative: “What is happening? What is not happening? How many days have I been meditating? How many hours have I meditated? What is the result? What is the outcome? Is it worth it?” All these things will have to be dropped.Meditation is the world of lovers; not the world of calculation, but the world of love. If you have fallen in love with me, you are welcome.You say: “I am a mathematician. Can I also become a sannyasin?” Yes. But my feeling is that the trouble will come from somewhere else – you are also an Indian. To be an Indian and to be my sannyasin, that is far more difficult than to be a mathematician and to be my sannyasin. The Indian has lived with an idea of sannyas for at least ten thousand years. I am putting things completely into a chaos; I am putting things topsy-turvy.My sannyas is not the sannyas that you have always understood it to be. It is totally different. I call it sannyas only to confuse you. I could have given it a new name, but that is not my way. I thrive on your confusion, on your chaos. My whole effort is to sabotage all patterns, all patterned thinking. That’s why I chose the color orange – I could have chosen any color. In fact, the best color that would have fitted my idea of sannyas would have been a rainbow dress – all seven colors – because my sannyas is a rainbow phenomenon, multidimensional. That would have been absolutely in tune with my idea of sannyas, but I sacrificed it. I have to destroy this Hindu idea of sannyas. I have to create so many orange people that the old saints and sannyasins get lost – nobody knows who is who.Your being Indian may create a little trouble. You have learned mathematics only in this life, but being Indian may be part of your collective heritage, may be part of your collective unconsciousness. So when Indians become sannyasins they come with a priori conclusions, expectations. When they don’t find those expectations here, they feel very disturbed.I would like you to be alert from the very beginning that this is a totally new vision of sannyas. The old sannyas was renunciation, my sannyas is rejoicing. The old sannyas was otherworldly, my sannyas contains both worlds; it is not one-dimensional. It does not condemn this world, it makes this world the foundation for the other. The old sannyas was spiritualistic; my sannyas is not spiritualistic and against materialism; my sannyas is materialistic-spiritualistic. My sannyas is not anti-scientific, it contains science in it – it is vast enough to contain it. It goes far beyond it, but it is not against it.An Arab, lost with his camel in the desert, felt very horny. Finally he grabbed the camel and tried to make love to it. But every time he tried, the camel moved aside and the Arab missed.After a month of wandering in the desert, he came across a road which led to a town on the edge of the desert. There, sobbing, sat a sexy young lady next to her broken chariot.Seeing him, the young lady begged him to fix her chariot, promising that he wouldn’t regret it if he helped her.“Ah, my sweet savior,” she said as he finished, “come to me and I will reward you.”“Thank you, lady,” replied the Arab. “Would you just hold this camel for me for a minute?”The tenth question:Osho,Is there any such thing as a real marriage?Never heard… Real marriage? There are real mirages, but no real marriage! If it is real there is no need for marriage. The very need for marriage arises because there is fear. If you love a person, you love a person; you can be together with the person. But there is constantly a fear that the other person may leave you, and the other person is also afraid that you may leave him or her. To make the future guaranteed, so that you cannot leave, so that the other cannot leave – easily at least – marriage was invented.Marriage was invented only because love was missing. If love is missing, how can the marriage be real? There is no need for marriage. If love is there, marriage is an unnecessary phenomenon. In a better world, where people will be more mature, they will be together because they love. And they will keep each other free because one never knows, love may disappear. That does not mean that the love was unreal and that was why it disappeared. That too is a very wrong idea that has prevailed for centuries. We have been obsessed by wrong ideas and they are creating such trouble in our lives. Still, we can’t see their wrongness because they are so old and we have become so conditioned by them. If love disappears, we start thinking it was not real.In fact, a real roseflower is bound to disappear by the evening; only the plastic roseflower does not disappear. The real roseflower blooms, opens up, dances in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, and by the evening is gone. That does not mean that it was unreal. In fact it was so real, that’s why it appeared and disappeared. The plastic flower is so unreal, it does not appear and does not disappear. It remains; it is far more permanent.Marriage is like a plastic flower; love is a real rose. People are such cowards that they don’t want to live with real roses. They are hankering after security, safety, guarantees, permanency so much that they are not ready to risk the real roses and they purchase plastic flowers. Of course, those plastic flowers cannot satisfy you – you will remain miserable.Just one month ago Sagarpriya wrote to me: “Osho, what has happened? I have been here for two and a half years – has something gone wrong because Bindu and I are still together?” I did not answer her question because I was afraid that if I answered it something would happen immediately. So I kept quiet – and it has happened. Now I can answer because now I will not be thought responsible for it. Now Bindu wants to escape, but Sagarpriya is not going to leave him so easily. He wants to go to America for a few weeks, just to escape from Sagarpriya. Now Sagarpriya is following him; she also wants to go with him.We don’t allow each other freedom; we cling to the very end. We try every possible way. Even when everything disappears we go on clinging, we go on hoping against all hope. The more we cling, the more we destroy the possibility of love renewing itself again.Now if Sagarpriya can allow Bindu to go and be there alone for a few weeks… He needs his own space – everybody needs it once in a while because love alone is not enough. Love is beautiful, but meditation is far more important. Meditation needs a deep aloneness; nobody should interfere. Only lovers can interfere in meditation because only lovers are so close. The marketplace does not interfere, the people who are not related to you cannot interfere, but the people who are very close, very intimate, can be a real disturbance. They don’t allow you any space, and if you want to be alone they immediately start feeling that they are being rejected. You simply want your own space – and everybody has a need, a tremendous need to have his own space.But now Sagarpriya will follow him. If there is any possibility she will destroy even that. The best thing is to let him go, to say goodbye to him in a nice, beautiful, human way; with no grudge, with no complaint, with no quarreling. If you quarrel too much, if you make such a fuss, then people start compromising, but compromise cannot fulfill you.Remember, men are so tortured in the outside world, in the office, in the factory, in the shop, everywhere, that at least at home they want peace. For their peace they compromise. Hence, almost all husbands become henpecked. The problem is, no wife can love a henpecked husband; every wife tries to henpeck her husband. This is how we create misery.In the first place marriage is wrong. Marriage means clinging, legal clinging; you have legal support. You can force the person to the court, you can create so much financial trouble for him that he will think, “It is better to tolerate whatever is. And howsoever it is going I have become accustomed to it. Tolerate it.” It is only a question of a few hours at night and then he escapes in the morning and finds a thousand and one excuses: overtime at the office, a party somewhere, or something else. He becomes a Rotarian, he becomes a member of the Lions Club; he finds ways and means to avoid. He starts drinking, so that when he comes home he is so drunk he can’t hear what the wife is saying; he does not know what is being done to him. But how can you love such a person? You hate such a person, but this is how you create the person.The man also clings. This is a very strange thing: in each couple, one always clings. This is my experience of thousands of couples. It seems that one of the couple has to cling – anyone of them will do, either the wife or the husband, but one has to cling. Whoever clings is miserable and the other is miserable because he has lost his freedom – and you cannot be happy with a person who has lost his freedom.Love is a meeting of two free individuals; it is not a marriage. Love does not need marriage. If love disappears – which is far more possible than vice versa – that does not mean it was unreal. The more real it is, the quicker it will disappear. The more intense it is, the quicker it will disappear because it will give you such ecstasy. And those peaks cannot be reached every day; it is bound to disappear.But man does not want peaks of joy; rather he wants a smooth, comfortable, convenient, bourgeois life, which is almost not life at all but just vegetating. So people are vegetating together – cabbages and cauliflowers vegetating together.There is no real marriage, there is only real love. All marriages are unreal. But to live a real love needs a really courageous heart. It needs that you should live moment to moment and remain open for the tomorrow – whatever surprises it brings, it brings and you accept them. Even if your lover departs, you have to be courageous enough to give him a beautiful goodbye. As beautifully as you say hello you have to say goodbye too, because he has given you such moments of joy. You have to be grateful to him.The eleventh question:Osho,What do you say about divorce?Some great philosopher said about divorce – I forget the philosopher’s name… In fact, I forget what he said – but I say divorce is useless. You get married from lack of judgment; get divorced from lack of patience; you remarry for lack of memory.In fact, marriage is wrong. Once marriage disappears from the world, divorce will disappear of its own accord. I am against divorce – I want divorce to disappear from the world absolutely; the only way to do it is to destroy marriage completely.The last question:Osho,Laughing this morning was so pleasurable. I felt like a baby that is being played with and tickled. Please tickle some more.The traveling salesman’s car broke down on a lonely country road just before nightfall. Being unable to repair it he trudged to the nearest farmhouse to beg shelter for the night.The farmer said okay but as there was only one bed, the salesman would have to share it with the farmer and his pretty young wife.In the middle of the night the salesman, feeling horny, began making love to the wife. She said, “Okay, but please see if my husband is asleep – pull a hair from his chest to check.”The salesman did and the farmer slept on.Some time later, feeling horny again, the same thing happened – another hair, more lovemaking. And then again a third time.But this time the farmer exploded.“Look,” he shouted, “it’s okay to fuck my wife, but quit keeping score on my chest!”An Italian arriving in Australia for the first time gets a job on a farm. The first day the farmer’s wife complains that the new worker has been chasing her chickens around the yard. The farmer says he is new and to give him a chance.But later she is even more outraged when she sees him drinking his own piss. The farmer tries to console her by saying he is a good worker and that this is probably normal in Italy.But later on the farmer sees the Italian with his head right next to his prize bull’s arse while it’s having a shit. This is too much for the farmer. Racing up to the Italian he shouts, “What the hell are you doing? First you chase my chickens, then you drink your own piss and now what are you doing with my bull?”The Italian says, “But my friends-a tell me that-a when I get-a to Australia I’m-a supposed to chase-a the chicks, drink-a plenty of piss, and-a listen to all-a the bullshit!”Enough for today.

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Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 01-16Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

Walking in Zen Sitting in Zen 16 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I cannot understand the philosophy of Zen. What should I do to understand it?Zen is not a philosophy at all. To approach Zen as if it is a philosophy is the wrong way from the very beginning. A philosophy is something of the mind; Zen is totally beyond the mind. Zen is the process of going above the mind, far away from the mind; it is the process of transcendence, of surpassing the mind. You cannot understand it by the mind, mind has no function in it.Zen is a state of no-mind, that has to be remembered. It is not Vedanta. Vedanta is a philosophy; you can understand it perfectly well. Zen is not even Buddhism; Buddhism is also a philosophy.Zen is a very rare flowering – it is one of the strangest things that has happened in the history of consciousness – it is the meeting of Buddha’s experience and Lao Tzu’s experience. Buddha, after all, was part of the Indian heritage; he spoke the language of philosophy. He is perfectly clear, you can understand him. In fact, he avoided all metaphysical questions; he was very simple, clear, logical. But his experience was not of the mind. He was trying to destroy your philosophy by providing you with a negative philosophy. Just as you can take out a thorn from your foot with another thorn, Buddha’s effort was to take out the philosophy from your mind with another philosophy. Once the first thorn has been taken out, both thorns can be thrown away and you will be beyond mind.But when Buddha’s teachings reached China, a tremendously beautiful thing happened: a crossbreeding happened. In China, Lao Tzu has given his experience of Tao in a totally nonphilosophical way, in a very absurd way, in a very illogical way. But when the Buddhist meditators, Buddhist mystics, met the Taoist mystics they immediately could understand each other heart to heart, not mind to mind. They could feel the same vibe; they could see that the same inner world had opened; they could smell the same fragrance. They came closer, and by their coming closer, by their meetings and merging with each other, something new started growing up; that is Zen. It has both the beauty of Buddha and the beauty of Lao Tzu; it is the child of both. Such a meeting has never happened before or since.Zen is neither Taoist nor Buddhist. It is both and neither. Hence the traditional Buddhists reject Zen and the traditional Taoists also reject Zen. For the traditional Buddhist it is absurd, for the traditional Taoist it is too philosophical. But to those who are really interested in meditation, Zen is an experience. It is neither absurd nor philosophical because both are terms of the mind. It is something transcendental.The word zen comes from dhyana. Buddha used a certain language, a local language of his times, Pali. In Pali dhyana is pronounced jhan; it is from jhan that zen has arisen. The word comes from jhan; jhan comes from the Sanskrit dhyana.To understand Zen you need not make a philosophical effort; you have to go deep into meditation. And what is meditation all about? Meditation is a jump from the mind into no-mind, from thoughts to no-thought. Mind means thinking, no-mind means pure awareness. One simply is aware. Only then will you be able to understand Zen – through experience, not through any intellectual effort.Yoka says:There is one nature, perfect and penetrative, present in all natures;one reality which includes all, comprising all realities in itself.The one moon is reflected wherever there is water.And all moons in water are comprised in the one moon.The moment you move beyond the mind, suddenly you have moved from the many to the one. Minds are many, consciousness is one. On the circumference we are different, at the center we are one. That one can be called brahman, can be called God, the absolute, the truth, nirvana.Zen calls it no-mind for a particular reason. If you call it God, people start thinking in terms of a person. They start imagining a person – of course the suprememost person, but their idea of personality is derived from human personality; it is a projection, it is not truth.The Bible says that God created man in his own image; that is not true. Man has created God in his own image; that is far more true. The God that we have created is our idea, it is anthropocentric. If horses were philosophers, God could not be a man, he would be a supreme horse. If donkeys were philosophers – and who knows – they may be; they look very serious, always brooding, as if in deep contemplation, thinking of great things… Watch a donkey and you will be certainly aware of this simple fact that donkeys are great thinkers. They are constantly somewhere else far away, involved in great esoteric things; that’s why people think they are fools. They are not fools, they are philosophers. If donkeys are thinking – if they are theologians, theosophists, philosophers – then God will be a supreme donkey. God cannot be a man, that’s impossible. They cannot imagine God to be a man.Hence, Zen avoids any anthropocentric terminologies, any words that can become associated with our circumference. It does not call God brahman because that is a philosophical term. Maybe the best philosophical term, but even the best philosophical term is still philosophy, and philosophy is something of the mind – you can think about brahman.In India, we have been thinking about brahman for centuries and there are as many interpretations of brahman as there have been philosophers: Shankara interprets in one way, Nimbarka in another; Ramanuja still in a different way and so on and so forth. Even two philosophers cannot agree and the dispute still continues. Philosophers go on quarreling. They never come to any conclusions, they cannot because the mind has no capacity to conclude about “the One.”Even Shankara, the greatest non-dualist, remains a dualist deep down. He talks about brahman, the One, but to talk about the One he has to bring in maya, illusion; then one becomes two. If you want to talk about the real you will have to talk about the unreal; that is a necessity, an absolute necessity. Without talking about the unreal, you cannot talk about the real; without the unreal, the real loses all meaning. Human languages are dualistic, hence Shankara got into trouble, great trouble. He tried to sort it out but he could not. For one thousand years many philosophers who have followed Shankara have tried to find a way out, but they have not been able to. Even if you say that maya means illusion, maya means that which does not exist, you have to talk about it. To define brahman you have to use illusion as a support, otherwise who will define it? How will you define it? The One remains indefinable; the One needs something else to define it. So although the philosophy of Shankara is thought to be non-dualist, it is not. No philosophy can be non-dualist.Zen is neither dualist nor non-dualist; it is not a philosophy at all. It simply says, “Move from the mind into the no-mind and see.” It believes in seeing.Yoka says:The spirit operates naturally through the organs of sense. Thus the objective world is perceived. This dualism mists the mirror. But when the haze is removed, the light shines forth. Thus when each individual spirit and the objective world are forgotten and emptied, suchness affirms truth.When all words are gone, your mirror has no more dust on it, no more mist on it. When you look at things you collect impressions; that is the dust – that’s what you call thinking. When you see a roseflower, the roseflower is outside you, but it makes a reflection inside you. The roseflower will fade away by the evening, the petals will fall and disappear, but the inner roseflower, the rose that has become imprinted in your memory will continue. It will remain forever with you, you can always remember it. If you are a sensitive, aesthetic, artistic person you can visualize it again and again; you can imagine it as if it is true. In fact, if you try you will be surprised: you can even experience the fragrance of the rose again. If you create the whole situation in your imagination: the garden, the green grass, the dew on the grass, and you are walking with naked feet on the grass… And the sweet smell of the earth and the cool air and the birds singing; you just create the whole atmosphere… And then suddenly you discover a beautiful roseflower hidden behind a bush. And the fragrance. Suddenly you will see that the fragrance has come back to you; the imprint is there. The outer rose is gone, but the inner rose is alive.Now scientists, particularly brain experts, have discovered that if certain spots in the brain are touched by electrodes, certain memories immediately become active. Those memories are lying there deep, frozen and when touched by the electrode, they start becoming alive. A very strange experience. If your brain is touched by an electrode at the point where the rose memory is lying there deep, suddenly you will forget the present; you will be in the same garden again. Maybe twenty years have passed, but it will be as real as if you were in the garden again: the same smell, the same wind, the same coolness, the same flower. If the electrode is taken out, the memory disappears. Put the electrode back in the same spot and again the memory starts revealing itself.One more thing has been discovered – you can do it thousands of times. The same memory comes again and again; the memory repeats itself from the very beginning. The moment you remove the electrode it seems that there is an automatic rewinding; the memory coils back into the same original state. Touch it again with the electrode – as the electricity starts flowing, the memory begins from the beginning and you again enter the garden… And the same sequence of events. This can be done thousands of times. In fact, scientists say that there is no limit to it; it can be done millions of times.The outer reality goes on changing, but the mind goes on collecting dust. Your consciousness is a mirror and you are carrying so much dust from this life and from other lives – such a thick layer of dust. That’s why you cannot understand Zen because you cannot understand yourself; because you cannot understand life, because you cannot understand existence. Zen is not philosophy; it is existential, not philosophical.…when the haze is removed…says Yoka,…the light shines forth.Thus when each individual spirit and the objective world are forgotten and emptied, suchness affirms truth.When all is emptied – you have forgotten all the memories; you have forgotten even your individual existence, your separate existence; you are no longer an island, you have melted into the whole; you are not like an ice cube floating in the water, you have become water itself – this is what Zen is. And suddenly, truth is revealed.Yoka says,Vision is clear.These four lines are of tremendous importance:Vision is clear.But there are no objects to see.There is no person.There is no Buddha.This is the ultimate declaration of Zen. This is the lion’s roar.Vision is clear. This is a strange phenomenon. When there are objects to see, your vision is not clear because those objects are making impressions on you. Your vision cannot be clear; it is full of mist. When vision is clear, there are no objects at all, just clarity, just pure consciousness; no content, just seeing and nothing to see, just watchfulness and nothing to watch. A pure observer, a pure witness and nothing to witness.There is no person.When there is nothing to witness, nothing to see, you cannot exist as a separate entity. The “I” can exist only with the “thou”; if the “thou” disappears, the “I” disappears. They are part of each other, they are always together like two sides of a coin; you cannot say “one.” This is what many stupid religious people go on doing; they go on saying to God, “I am not. Thou art.” That is sheer stupidity. In the very saying you are, otherwise who is saying “Thou art”?There is a famous poem of Jalaluddin Rumi; I agree with him up to a point and then my disagreement starts. On the really essential point, I cannot agree with him. My feeling is he must have written that poem before he became enlightened. He was an enlightened man, but the poem is decisive – it must have been written before he became enlightened. The poem is beautiful, because sometimes poets say things almost like seers, but remember they are almost like seers. There is bound to be some flaw, it can’t be flawless. You may not be able to find the flaw.Listen to the story of this poem. Jalaluddin says:A lover comes to his beloved’s home, knocks on the door.The beloved asks, “Who is there?”And the lover says, “I am – your lover.”The beloved says, “The house of love is so small, it cannot contain two, so please go back. When you are no more, then come again. The house of love cannot contain two, it can only contain one.”So far so good!The lover goes to the forest, he becomes an ascetic. He meditates, he prays to God. His prayer is only one: “Dissolve me!” Many moons come and go, months pass, years pass, and one day he comes back. He knocks again on the door; the beloved asks the same question: “Who is there?”He says, “Now I am no more, only you are.”And Rumi says: The doors open and the lover is received in the home of love.There I don’t agree – it is too early! Who is the person who is saying “I am no more”? Even to say “I am no more,” you are needed. It is as foolish as if you go and knock at somebody’s house and he leans out of the window and says, “I am not at home.” That is self-contradictory; you cannot say that. To say it is to prove that you are.Jalaluddin must have written this poem before he became enlightened. He should have corrected it. But these enlightened people are crazy people. He may have forgotten all about the poem, but it needs correction. I can do the correction. I would like to say that the beloved says, “Go back again because you are there still. First you were positively there, now you are negatively there, but it makes no difference.”The lover goes back. Now there is no point in praying because prayer has not helped. In fact, prayer cannot help; in prayer the duality persists. You are praying to somebody; God becomes your “thou.” God cannot help. Now he becomes a Zen monk – not a devotee, but really a meditator. He simply goes deep within himself, searching and seeking: “Where is this ‘I’?” He tries to find out where it is. And anybody who goes in is bound not to find it because it is not there; it is nonexistential, it is only a belief. So he searches and searches and finds it nowhere.So he comes back, knocks on the door. The beloved asks the same question: “Who is there?” And there is no answer because there is nobody to answer. Just silence. She asks again, “Who is there?” but the silence deepens. She asks again, “Who is there?” but the silence is absolute. She opens the door. Now the lover has come, but he is no more; there is nobody to answer. He has to be taken inside the home, taken by the hand. He is completely, utterly empty. This is what Zen people call “emptied suchness.”Vision is clear.But there are no objects to see.There is no person.There is no Buddha.Everything has disappeared. Zen has achieved the ultimate peak of enlightenment; hence it can say that there is no enlightenment either because if the enlightened person goes on thinking, “I am enlightened,” he is not enlightened. If he claims enlightenment, he is not enlightened, because every claim is an ego claim. Enlightenment is not a claim, it is a silent presence.Don’t try to understand Zen. Go within yourself to find out who you are, where you are. You will not find anybody there, just pure emptiness. And then vision is clear. No person, no Buddha. All is silent, utterly silent. There is nothing to say. In that silence one becomes truth. Not only that one knows truth, one becomes truth. That is the only way to know it.The second question:Osho,I find all questions to be false because they imply answers. In my experience there are no answers, only discovery. If this is so, why do you insist on questions and answers? Are you not misleading people into believing their questions have answers?Now what should I do about your question? If I answer you, I will be misleading you; if I don’t answer you, I will not be showing respect toward you. If you think that all questions are false, why do you bother to ask? If you think any question that implies answers is false, then do you think your question does not imply any answer? Either it is false if it implies an answer, or it is true, but then it cannot be answered.You say: “In my experience there are no answers, only discovery.” What are answers? – they are the discoveries of somebody else. I have discovered something; it is a discovery for me. When you ask a question and I answer you, it is an answer to you, not a discovery. The answer can be misleading if you start believing in it as if it were your discovery. If you don’t believe in the answer as your discovery, but you keep remembering that it is somebody else’s discovery – “I have to discover it too” – then the answer is not misleading you, the answer is a great encouragement. It is an encouragement to go on the great journey, the great pilgrimage of discovering. Discovery also needs encouragement.Have you noticed that when birds are born and come out of their eggs, the mother and father teach them to fly? Watch it – it is one of the most beautiful processes to watch because it is the same process that transpires between a master and a disciple. The older birds fly around the nest. The younger ones become intrigued by the idea of flying; they start fluttering their wings. They have small wings, but they start fluttering them; they become aware of their wings. Just by seeing their mother, their father and other birds flying around the nest, a great curiosity arises in them. They would also like to fly; they are intrigued by the very idea and they start wondering whether they can manage it. Fear grips them. They come to the very edge of the nest – watch – they look around. It seems difficult, it seems impossible – they are so small and they have never done such a thing before. Who knows? They may not be able to manage, they may fall, they may die; this may prove suicidal. The mother goes and sits on a tree nearby and starts calling them, wooing them, persuading them: “Come on!”That is the function of the answers of the master: it is just to woo you, to call you: “Come on! Don’t be worried, don’t be afraid.”They try, they flutter, but the fear is there – the fear of the unknown. They do both things, and in their small way they try to take the jump, but they also cling to the nest. It is so safe and warm and comfortable, so secure – and the insecurity of the sky and the winds… And who knows what else may be there in the unknown?Finally the mother has to push them. Of course, once pushed they have to make all the effort they can – and suddenly they discover that they can fly. They immediately come back to the nest, but they are radically changed – you can see their joy. Now they know they have wings and their wings can function; they need not be so afraid. Now when the mother goes to the other tree, they follow her. Soon, they would prefer not to follow the mother because that looks so childish. They would like the mother to sit in the nest and watch; to see that they can do the miracle themselves. They fly around the nest and go to the other tree and start calling the mother, “Come on! See, we have managed it. We have done it.”That’s the way of discovery. It all depends on you. If you believe in my answers as your answers, you are misguiding yourself. I am not misguiding you. I am constantly making you aware that my answers are my answers, not yours. So I am not telling you to believe in my answers, I am simply telling you that answers are possible. If they are possible for me they are possible for you. What I can do, you can do because I am an ordinary man just like you.That’s why I am against the whole traditional idea of God’s reincarnations or incarnations – avatars. I am against the idea that Jesus is a son of God; I would prefer that he is the son of the carpenter Joseph, not the son of God. If he is the only-begotten son of God, then of course he is a totally different kind of person; what he can do you cannot do. He can walk on water; you cannot walk on water. He can raise the dead from their graves and make them alive again; you cannot do that. All these stories have been invented to emphasize the fact that he is special and you are ordinary. All these stories are false, irreligious, dangerous. They have not helped humanity, they have degraded humanity. They have insulted you, they have humiliated you.The Hindus say that Krishna, Rama, Buddha, are God’s incarnations. God himself comes from above, from beyond. They are special people; what they can do you cannot do. Krishna can take the whole mountain into his hand; you cannot do that. He can do miracles; that is not possible for you.These stories are the cunning inventions of the priests to create a distance between you and Krishna, between you and Buddha, between you and Mahavira; to make a special category so that you know your limits perfectly well.I emphasize the fact that Krishna is as much a man as you are; there is nothing special about him. He needs food the way you need it; he needs water the way you need it; he sleeps the way you sleep; he dies the way you die. The only difference is that he has become aware of his infinite potential and you are not aware of it. There is no difference in the potential, but you are unaware and he is aware; that’s the only difference. Of course, it is a difference that makes a difference, but it is not a difference that can make him a separate category. Nobody belongs to a separate category. Nobody comes from above, everybody grows from below. Life is a growth. You are growing from your humanity toward your divinity. If I can discover who I am, you can discover it.All these answers are not to be made into dogmas, not to be made into beliefs. I am not preaching any theology to you – I am utterly against all creeds. What am I doing then? – I am simply trying to persuade you that this is humanly possible. You are as divine as Krishna, Buddha, Christ and as anybody else. You have just fallen asleep and you are dreaming nightmares. Just wake up! All that is needed is an awakening.But you seem to be a philosophical type. The philosophical type goes on brooding about pros and cons. He goes on thinking about everything. This is not the place where you are supposed to think too much. This is a place to take a jump into a silent state of non-thinking, because thinking is parrotlike. Can you see that you have asked the question, yet you are asking a question against questions? You are asking for an answer, yet you think that all answers are misleading, misguiding – and yet you are asking! Do you see the philosophical complexity of the mind? Do you see the game?A wandering Jew visiting Paris passes by a pet shop. He notices a sign on the window proclaiming that inside the shop there’s a parrot that speaks many languages. The “yeedil,” considering himself a linguist, enters. Slowly, slowly he approaches the wonder-bird, stands by the side of the cage and gives the bird a look over.Clearing his throat, he starts testing the parrot:“Parlez-vous francais?”“Parlez-vous francais?” comes the reply.“Speak English?”“Speak English?” is the reply.“Govarish po rauskiu?” he then asks.“Govarish po rauskiu?” the parrot replies.The Jew moves closer to the bird, clears his throat, looks at it again and asks confidentially, “Ahem…! Tell me, little bird, if you are so smart, do you speak Yiddish, mm?”The bird gives a look at the Jew, clears its throat, points to its beak with its wing and says, “Nu… With such a nose, you think I should not speak Yiddish?”Even parrots are far better than philosophers. They have more understanding, they have more insight. Man becomes so burdened with ideas that he completely forgets what he is doing.Be a little more aware. See what is happening here. I certainly insist on questions from you because I know there are questions. You are full of questions – it is natural – and it is better to bring them out. My answers will not be your answers, but my answers will help you to see the point that answers are possible; that one need not live in questions. One can come to a point where all questions disappear and life is no longer a problem. When all problems disappear, life is no longer a problem, but a mystery to be lived, to be loved, to be sung, to be danced.The third question:Osho,Just two small questions. First: how many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a light bulb?Only one, but that bulb has got to want to change!And the second: How many enlightened ones does it take to screw in a light bulb?None because they are already a light unto themselves!The fourth question:Osho,How do you decide which questions to answer?It is a secret. I will just give you a clue. I will not tell you the full secret, you have to find it out.A priest, a minister and a rabbi have a talk together. They tell each other how God provides them with their daily bread.“Every Sunday after the plate has been passed around in church, I empty it in a box with a hole in the bottom,” explains the priest. “Whatever falls through it is for me; the rest is for God.”The minister has a different way of withdrawing his weekly pocket money. “I draw a line on the floor,” he says, “and then I drop Sunday’s collection from one meter above – the money that lands on the left side is mine, the right side is for God.”“Well,” says the rabbi, “my system is much easier. I simply throw the money in the air and whatever God needs he can grab…”The fifth question:Osho,I was born a New York Jew. And for seventeen years I have been a promising tourist in California in four different learned professions, numerous avocations and an unsuccessful marriage. Joy and satisfaction have not been my experience, except for momentary glimpses. I am quietly desperate. Please comment or tell some appropriate jokes.Heinrich Heine says: “Sleep is good, death is better; of course the best thing would be never to have been born at all.”Life certainly is a problem, particularly in New York and for a Jew. For the Jews, life has always been a bigger problem than for anybody else, for the simple reason that they have this crazy idea that they are the chosen people of God. This has made their lives impossible. Such crazy ideas have to be dropped. There is no chosen people of God. Jews have suffered from this nonsense and now everybody hates them. If you are one of the chosen people of God everybody hates you; everybody tries to find fault with you and to prove to you that you are not one of the chosen people of God.Jews have insisted on this egoistic standpoint for three thousand years. They are not alone in it; there are other peoples too. Hindus are there with them; they also think that their country is the most sacred land, and they have also suffered. You can see their sacred land and their suffering.It is time you dropped the idea of being a Jew. Once you are a sannyasin you are neither a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian nor a Jew; you are simply a human being. By dropping that idea you will feel unburdened; otherwise there is three thousand years of burden. The Jews are carrying a long, long, traditional, inherited burden; they have become so attached to the burden that it becomes impossible to live.You say that your marriage was unsuccessful. Have you ever heard of any marriage which was successful? I haven’t heard of any! If marriages were successful there would have been no sannyas in the world; in fact, no religion at all. From the very beginning, God has made it absolutely certain that marriage will not succeed; if marriage succeeds, God fails! The whole of religion depends on the “unsuccess” of marriage. If you are happy, blissful, who cares about the other world? This world has to be such a misery that whether you want to believe in the other world or not you have to believe; that is the only consolation, the only solace.Bertrand Russell is right when he says, “If people really become happy, religion will disappear from the world.” I agree with him ninety-nine percent; only about the one percent I will not agree with him. He was an atheist, but he is ninety-nine percent true. Ninety-nine percent of people who are religious, are religious for the wrong reasons – because their marriage fails, their ambition brings frustration and they waste their whole life in earning money, power and prestige. And then the same emptiness, the same meaninglessness remains, the same hollowness; nothing changes at all. Life is gone, death is knocking on the doors, and nothing is fulfilled. That’s why people become religious.People become religious out of misery; hence the priests have a vested interest in your misery, remember it. They wouldn’t like your life to be happy and joyous. If you are joyous and blissful, all their religions will disappear. Their religion depends on your dis-ease, your pathology, your restlessness, your anguish, anxiety.All the priests in the world are in favor of marriage. Why? – for the simple reason that marriage fails, and when marriage fails where do you have to go? – to the priest! In a subtle way, all priests support educational systems which create a desire in you to succeed. All the educational systems prevalent in the world are nothing but strategies to create ego trips, to create ambitious minds. Priests and politicians support them because if ambition is not inflamed in you, there will be no politics; if ambition is not inflamed in you, you will never feel frustrated. A non-ambitious man never feels frustrated. Why should he feel frustrated? He never expected anything in the first place; you can’t frustrate him.Lao Tzu says: “You cannot defeat me because I don’t want to be victorious at all.” Jesus says: “Blessed are those who are the last.” Now such people are dangerous; they have to be crucified because they will destroy the whole structure of society. They will destroy the priesthood and the power of the politicians. If this idea, “Blessed are those who are the last,” spreads, then who would like to become the president of a country? – only fools, only stupid people. Even now only stupid people want to be presidents and prime ministers, but you don’t think them stupid because you are also contaminated and poisoned in the same ways. You respect them. You think they have succeeded, they have attained their goals. Their names will remain in history. So what? They will just torture small children who will have to remember their stupid names, that’s all. Their whole effort will succeed only in torturing small children and nothing else.Priests are against me, politicians are against me. They are against me for the simple reason that I am teaching you a life of nonambition, a life of egolessness – and I am teaching you that marriage is bound to fail. Hence, if you want to be happy and blissful, love is enough, marriage is too much.Love is enough. So while the love lasts, good, be together. When the love disappears, say goodbye in deep gratitude, but don’t cling to each other. Marriage means clinging.You never see the illogicality of your priests. On the one hand they say “detachment” and on the other hand they teach marriage. Marriage is attachment; it is legal attachment… Not only attachment, but legal support is also there. The court, police and the magistrate are behind you. If you want to leave your wife you will be in trouble, and to live with your wife you are also in trouble. If you want to leave your wife you will be in trouble, so one decides that when there is trouble anyway, why not remain in the conformist, traditional trouble; the conventional trouble? Why find individual and private troubles? They can be more dangerous because everybody else will be against you.You say: “Joy and satisfaction have not been my experience, except for momentary glimpses.” Yes, in this life, the way we have managed this life, they can only be momentary glimpses. Even that is a miracle – how even for moments those glimpses can happen is unbelievable because the way you are made and conditioned will not allow even moments. You are supposed to be miserable. Ambition, ego, marriage, money, power – all these ideas are bound to make you miserable; you can’t be blissful here. The only thing that can make you blissful is never taught anywhere. That is meditation, that is Zen; that is not taught anywhere. People are really afraid of meditation – afraid because it will transform your whole way of life.Now, meditate. Go deeper into yourself. You have tried all kinds of professions; you have tried marriage; you have tried everything that the West can make available to you. Try meditation. Go deeper into yourself, into your own aloneness, into your own solitude. Find your center of being; it is there that eternal bliss prevails. Right now it prevails there. It is always there, we have just lost contact with it. It has to be discovered, or rediscovered.You say: “I am quietly desperate.” That is not good for a Jew! Jews always find a way to get out of any kind of problem. For three thousand years that’s what they have been doing.Mr. Goldberg was trying to sell a suit to Mrs. Rubinstein for her young son. “Take it, madam,” he said. “First quality. I can give you a nice price for it.”She tried the suit on her son and it was a perfect fit so she bought it.The first time the suit was cleaned, Mrs. Rubinstein noticed that it looked quite a bit smaller, so she tried it on her son again. The sleeves only came to his elbows and the trouser legs came only to his knees.Of course she was furious, so grabbing her son’s hand she stomped over to the tailor’s shop. As she entered the shop, Mr. Goldberg looked up and said, “My God! Isn’t it amazing how the boy has grown.”It is not good for a Jew to be desperate.Two men were discussing optimism and pessimism.The one turned to the other and said, “Well, have you ever met a real optimist yourself?”“Yes,” said the other. “I was standing on the balcony of my fourth floor apartment when I saw a Jewish window cleaner high up on the twentieth floor slip and fall.”“How does that make him an optimist?” asked the friend.“Well, because as he went by my balcony I heard him say, ‘Alright so far!’”An American, an Englishman and a Jew were in a small German airplane when a terrible hurricane hit them. The German pilot screamed from his cockpit, “One of you has to jump out of the plane because it is too heavy!”They tried to decide who had to sacrifice his life, but none of the three were willing. The pilot came in between and said, “Okay, I’ll ask each of you a question. The one who doesn’t know the answer has to jump out of the plane.”He turned to the American and asked, “At what date was the atom bomb thrown on Hiroshima?”The American answered, “August 6th, 1945.”Next the pilot asked the Englishman, “How many people were killed at that time?”“About two hundred and fifty thousand” was the answer.He finally turned to the Jew and asked, “Can you give me the names and the addresses of the victims?”But wait!The Jew started to give the names and addresses of the two hundred and fifty thousand victims! The American and the Englishman both jumped out of the plane to save themselves from the Jew. And finally the pilot had to threaten him to shut up. If he did not stop, the pilot said that he would also jump out of the plane!A Jew and desperate? Never! A Jew always finds a way.You say: “Please comment or tell some appropriate jokes.” Appropriate jokes? I have never done that in my life and I am never going to – I always tell inappropriate jokes. I will tell you a few inappropriate jokes.Tarzan goes into town for a vacation. When he comes back to the jungle, his chimpanzee friend, Cheeta, meets him and says, “Tarzan, Tarzan! All the animals are rebelling. They have forgotten you. Everywhere there is chaos!”Angry, Tarzan rushes deep into of the jungle, where he meets a lion. He grabs the lion, lifts it up, and looking into its eyes he asks, “Do you know who I am?”“Of course I know,” says the lion. “You are the boss of the jungle.”Still Tarzan is not satisfied, so when he meets a giraffe he grabs the animal by the neck and again asks, “Speak up – who am I?”Trembling, the giraffe answers, “You are Tarzan, the king of the jungle.”Then he meets an elephant. Grabbing the balls of the elephant, he throws it on the ground shouting, “Who am I? Answer!”As the elephant doesn’t answer he becomes even more furious and smashes the elephant’s balls together shouting, “Now speak! Tell me, who am I?”The elephant, very calmly, with a compassionate look, says, “Just look at this son of a bitch… He doesn’t know who he is and he comes and breaks my balls!”Now try to find out, if you can, whether it is appropriate or not!An English army officer retired to the country and lost no time in enrolling at the local golf club. On his first appearance he was disappointed to find that the only prospective partner was a rather scruffy young man who sat picking his teeth at the bar, but as he was anxious for a game he went up to the man and after making polite conversation for a few minutes offered to partner him in a round.They met on the first green. The officer was surprised to see the man appear with a sack on his shoulder from which he selected a garden spade. And even more surprised when he used it instead of a golf club and drove the ball straight down the center of the fairway – a magnificent shot – almost to the green. This was followed by a second using an ax, and finally the putt was sunk with an old walking stick. He continued in this manner, completing the course with all kinds of implements and eventually winning hands down. The officer, however, did not like to make any comment on this surprising behavior until they were back in the bar. Even then he continued to make polite conversation, but when the man began drinking his beer through a straw up his nose, balancing his glass on his shoulder, his curiosity was uncontainable.“Excuse me asking,” he said, “but I couldn’t help noticing your strange conduct just now.”“Yes,” replied the man, “it is a little odd, but it is the only way I am able to make life interesting. You see, I was born with this amazing dexterity which I need to exercise now and then.”The officer was thoughtful for a minute and then said, “Tell me, are you married?”“Yes,” said the other.“And do you have any children?”“Yes, three,” said the man with a sigh, “and the answer to your next question is ‘standing up, in a hammock.’”The sixth question:Osho,Why do you tell so many jokes? Are you not interested at all in higher things?Is there anything higher than a joke? You have not understood my jokes at all! These jokes are not just jokes; this is serious matter.Paul Reps was invited to give a lecture at the University of BC. He was advertised as a well-known mystic and philosopher and author of the famous: Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.The occasion attracted a number of noted intellectuals. Paul Reps sat very relaxed in a simple wooden chair telling his little Zen stories. Many people in the audience enjoyed the stories, but some of the great intellects got bored. Finally one of the more knowing ones stood up and said, “Sir, could you please speak on a somewhat higher level?”Without pausing, Paul Reps placed his chair on the table and continued with his beautiful Zen stories.Do you want me to do that? I can speak on as high a level as possible. I can sit on the roof. You will not be able to see me. That will be very esoteric! Just the way God used to speak in the past, from high above. You will only hear the voice… But I will still tell jokes.The seventh question:Osho,I am going madder and madder, but this seems nothing compared to you. Each day you appear more and more mad. Where will it all end?I have always to be ahead of my disciples – you can’t beat me! If you want me to be sane you have to be saner; if you go a little mad, I will be madder; if you go madder, I will go more mad. This has been decided once and for all. There is no end to it – even after I am gone from my body I will haunt you!The eighth question:Osho,Have you got a really good joke I can bring to a non-orange lover in the West who is a scientist and has been reading and underlining you for four years?Tell him not to destroy my books because the real thing is between the lines and that’s what he is crossing out with his underlining! But it may be just an old habit. Otherwise, a man who has been reading me for four years, can he still remain there and non-orange? It is impossible – just an old habit. He can go on doing it for four lives or forty lives. Tell him it is time. Tell him enough is enough!Maria was a student of sociology. For her research paper she decided to make a trip into the interior of Brazil. Caught in a tropical downpour she lost her way in the jungle. Finally two men found her, drenched to the skin.“You’ll never find your way out in this storm,” said one. “The river is flooded. You’re welcome to spend the night at our place.”Maria felt relieved and happy to have an opportunity to experience the authentic lives of some people of the interior. Once at the house, the men prepared a meal for her and afterward played the guitar and sang folk songs. When they grew tired, the Brazilian informed her that there was only one bed.“That’s okay,” she said, “I can sleep in bed with the two of you.”The men were reluctant, but finally agreed. After the three tossed and turned for a while, they decided to give in and make love. Maria gave each man a condom and then the three of them had a wonderful time for the rest of the night.The next morning Maria thanked the two men for their hospitality and went on her way back home to write up her report.Several days passed and the two guys were turning yellow and feeling quite uncomfortable. Finally one says to the other, “Hey, brother! I really don’t care if that girl has a baby or not.”The other says, “I can’t stand it anymore! Let’s take these plastic bags off our cocks… Enough is enough!”So you tell him enough is enough! It is time for him to come here and go orange – that means go mad. That is a new way of saying “Go mad”; “Go orange.” But he is a scientist and he must be calculating, measuring; thinking about the pros and cons, hesitating, observing, watching. He will miss the opportunity. That’s how people go on postponing. Tell him there are a few things which have to be done immediately if he ever wants to do them – now or never. His old habit of being a scientist must be there; he will have to put it aside.Dave was going to marry Mabel, so Dad thought it best to tell him about the birds and the bees. “Now, Dave, see that knothole in the tree over there? I want you to go and practice in that hole so that on your wedding night you will know what to do!”A few days later Dave got married. That night frantic screams were heard coming from Dave and Mabel’s room. Dad burst in to find Dave ramming a broomstick up between Mabel’s legs.‘What are you doing, Dave?” Dad shouted.“I’m making quite sure that there are no bees in this one!”The ninth question:Osho,Please tell me – enough what for today?Enough of the nonsense – in other words, enough of Zen!And the last question:Osho,What is: Walking in Zen, sitting in Zen?There is no need to say anything about it. I will walk to my car and sit in the car. That is walking in Zen, sitting in Zen.Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 01 (Listen & Download)

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Question: What is buddha-mind?Answer: Your mind is it. When you see the selfsame essence of it, you can call it suchness. When you see the changeless nature of it, you can call it dharmakaya. It does not belong to anything; therefore, it is called emancipation. It works easily and freely, never being disturbed by others; therefore, it is called the true path. It was not born and, therefore, it is not going to perish, so it is called nirvana.Question: What is tathagata?Answer: One who knows that he comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.Question: What is buddha?Answer: One who realizes the truth, and holds nothing that is to be realized.Question: What is dharma?Answer: It was never produced, and will never be reduced; therefore, it is called dharma, the norm of the universe.Question: What is sangha?Answer: It is so named because of the beauty of its harmony.I am ecstatic because just the name of Bodhidharma is psychedelic to me. In the long evolution of human consciousness, there has never been such an outlandish buddha as Bodhidharma: very rare, unique, exotic. Only in some small ways George Gurdjieff comes close to him, but not very close, and only in some ways, not in all ways.There have been many buddhas in the world, but Bodhidharma stands out like Everest. His way of being, living, and expressing the truth, is simply his. It is incomparable. Even his own master, Gautama the Buddha, cannot be compared with Bodhidharma. Even Buddha would have found it difficult to digest this man.This man Bodhidharma traveled from India to China to spread the message of his master. They are separated by a thousand years, but to Bodhidharma and such men there is no time, no space. For Bodhidharma, Buddha was as contemporary as Buddha is contemporary to me.On the surface you are my contemporaries, but between me and you there is a long, long distance. We live on different planets. In reality, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Pythagoras, Bahauddin, Bodhidharma: these are my contemporaries. Between them and me there is no gap either of time or of space.Superficially there is a one-thousand-year gap between Buddha and Bodhidharma, but not even a single moment’s gap in reality, in truth. On the circumference Buddha was already dead for one thousand years when Bodhidharma arrived on the scene, but at the center he is together with Buddha. Bodhidharma speaks the essence of Buddha. Of course he has his own way, his own style, even Buddha will find it strange.Buddha was a very cultured man, very sophisticated, very graceful. Bodhidharma is just the opposite in his expression. He is not a man but a lion. He does not speak, he roars. He has not that grace which belonged to Gautama the Buddha. He is rough, raw. He is not polished like a diamond. He is just from the mine, absolutely raw, no polishing. That is his beauty. Buddha has a beauty of his own: very feminine, very polished, very fragile. Bodhidharma has his own beauty, like that of a rock: strong, masculine, indestructible, a great power.Buddha also radiates power, but his power is very silent, like a whisper, a cool breeze. Bodhidharma is a storm, thundering and lightning. Buddha comes to your door without making any noise. He will not even knock on your door, you will not even hear his footsteps. But when Bodhidharma comes to you he will shake the whole house from its very foundations. Buddha will not shake you even if you are asleep. And Bodhidharma? He will wake you up from your grave! He hits hard, he is a hammer.In his expression, he is just the opposite of Buddha, but his message is the same. He bows down to Buddha as his master. He never says, “This is my message.” He simply says, “This belongs to the buddhas, the ancient buddhas. I am just a messenger. Nothing is mine, because I am not. I am only a hollow bamboo who has been chosen by the buddhas to be a flute for them. They sing; I simply let them sing through me.”When Bodhidharma reached China, the Emperor Wu came to receive him on the borders. A great enlightened person is coming! And of course Wu was imagining him as something like Gautama the Buddha: very gentle, graceful, kingly.When he saw Bodhidharma, he was shocked. He looked very primitive. And not only that, he looked very absurd because he was carrying one of his shoes on his head: one shoe on one foot, another shoe on his head!The emperor was embarrassed. He had come with his whole court and the queens. “What will they think? And what kind of man have I come to receive?” He tried to overlook it, out of politeness. He did not want to ask the question, “Why is this shoe on your head?”But Bodhidharma would not leave him. He said, “Don’t try to overlook it. Ask directly and be straight from the very beginning. I have already read the question in your head.”The emperor was at a loss. He had to ask. Now, what to do with such a man? He said, “Yes, you are right, the question has arisen in me. Why are you carrying this shoe on your head?”Bodhidharma said, “To put things in the right perspective from the very beginning. I am an absurd man. You have to understand it from the very beginning. I don’t want to create any trouble later on. Either you accept me as I am or you simply say that you cannot accept me, and I will leave your kingdom. I will go to the mountains. I will wait there for my people to come to me. This is just to show you that I am illogical, I can be as absurd as one can imagine. That is my way of working. That is my way of destroying your mind. And unless your mind is destroyed you will not know who you are. So what do you say?”The king was at a loss. He had come with a few questions, but whether to ask this man those questions or not? Bodhidharma may say something ridiculous. Not only that, he may do something ridiculous.But Bodhidharma insisted: “It is better that you ask whatever you have come to ask.”The king said, “The first question is: I have been doing many virtuous deeds…”And Bodhidharma looked deeply into the eyes of the king – a shiver must have gone through his spine – and said, “All nonsense! How can you do a virtuous deed? You are not yet aware. Virtue is a by-product of awareness. What virtuous deeds do you mean? You look like a fool. How can you do a virtuous deed? Virtue follows a buddha, virtue is my shadow.” He said, “You can only do vice, not virtue. It is impossible.”The king still tried to make some conversation and get rid of this man as politely as possible. He did not want to offend him. He said, “By virtuous deeds I mean that I have made many temples for Buddha, many shrines. I have made many ashrams for the Buddhist bhikkus, sannyasins. I have arranged for thousands of scholars to translate Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. I have put millions and millions of rupees in the service of Gautam Buddha. What is going to be the result, the consequence, of all my virtue and of all my virtuous deeds? Millions of bhikkus take food every day from the palace and all over the country. What is going to be the outcome of it?”And Bodhidharma laughed. The king had never heard such laughter: a belly laughter that can shake mountains. Bodhidharma laughed and laughed and he said, “You are simply foolish. All your efforts have been a sheer waste. There is going to be no result out of it.“Don’t try, and don’t imagine that you are going to the seventh heaven, as other Buddhist bhikkus must have been telling you. They have been exploiting you. This is their strategy to exploit foolish people like you. They exploit your greed for the other world. They give you great promises, and their promises cannot be proved wrong because nobody comes back from the other world to say whether those promises have been fulfilled or not. They are exploiters, they are parasites. You have been a victim. Nothing is going to happen out of this which you think is very virtuous. In fact, you will fall in the seventh hell because a man who lives with such wrong desires, who lives with desires, is going to fall into hell.”The emperor tried to change the subject. He said, “Is there anything holy or not?”Bodhidharma said, “There is nothing holy, there is nothing unholy. Everything is as it is. Holiness, unholiness, are our mind attitudes, prejudices. This is tathata, suchness: things are simply as they are. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right. Nothing is sin and nothing is virtue.”The emperor said, “You are too much for me and for my people.”Bodhidharma said good-bye, turned back, and moved to the mountains. For nine years he was sitting in the mountains facing a wall. People would come because this conversation – if you can call it a conversation – reached faraway places. “The emperor has been hammered like anything, has been crushed. And this Bodhidharma is really something very strange, but he has the quality…some integrity, some strange perfume surrounds him. He is surrounded by an aura of his own.”People started coming from faraway places to see him, and they would ask, “Why don’t you look at us? Why do you go on looking at the wall?”And Bodhidharma would say, “I am waiting for the right man. When he comes, I will look at him. Otherwise it is all the same whether I look at the wall or I look at your faces. And the wall can be forgiven because it is a wall. You cannot be forgiven. Hence, it is better for me to look at the wall and not to look at you. You have fallen into such unawareness that I would like to shake you out of it. But then you feel angry, then you feel offended. I don’t want to bother you. I will turn only toward the man who has the capacity, the courage to be with me, to be my disciple.”And only after many years did one man turn up. He stood for twenty-four hours behind Bodhidharma not saying a single word. Finally Bodhidharma had to ask, “Why are you standing behind me?”The man said, “Now it is you who are starting it. I have come to kill myself if you don’t turn toward me.”And he cut off his hand with his sword and presented it to Bodhidharma, saying, “Take it as a token. Next I will cut off my head. Otherwise turn toward me immediately!”Bodhidharma had to turn. He looked at the man, smiling, and said, “So you are my disciple. So the man has come for whom I have been waiting.”Bodhidharma was the first patriarch of Zen, and this man was the second patriarch of Zen, and a new tradition started. A new river was born from the source of Bodhidharma.These fragments were found just at the beginning of this century. They were excavated by M. A. Stein from Tun-Huang – they are notes from some unknown disciples of Bodhidharma. They consist of a question by a disciple and the answer by Bodhidharma.These notes, fragmentary as they are, still are of great significance: they represent the essential core of Buddha’s message. It is going to be a little arduous to understand them. Be very attentive and silent because these are not ordinary words.When a man like Bodhidharma speaks, small questions, ordinary questions, are transformed into great inquiries. And whatever he says about those ordinary questions is of immense significance. His every word has to be pondered over, meditated upon. This will also give you a little taste of communion between the disciple and the master.The first thing that you will note is: the question is asked, the answer is given, but the disciple never asks any question about the answer given. The answer has been totally accepted. It is not an inquiry from a student. It is an inquiry from a disciple. So the answer of Bodhidharma does not create any more questions, it simply ends the question. The disciple asks another question but never raises a question about the answer, concerning the answer.That is the first thing to be noted. That is a very central part of communion. It is trust, it is faith. It is not belief, but it is certainly faith. And there is a difference between belief and faith. When you believe in something, doubt still persists in you. The belief can only cover it up, it never destroys it. It will rise again and again and again. No belief can destroy your doubt, because belief is in the head and doubt is also in the head. Faith is of the heart, something far superior to the head. The question comes from the head. The answer is received in the heart, at a higher altitude of your being. And then the question simply disappears from the head. The heart knows how to trust, the heart knows what faith is.Faith is not against doubt, faith is the absence of doubt. Belief is against doubt. Belief represses doubt, faith dissolves it. Belief is like a blind man believing that there is light. Faith is like one who has opened his eyes and seen the light. The moment you see the light there is no question of doubting anymore.Communion means the communion of two hearts. The student functions from the head, the disciple through the heart. And only the disciple can understand the master. And when all the questions of the disciple are dissolved he becomes a devotee. Then the head has disappeared totally. Then there is only the heart, functioning in rhythm with the master’s heart, in deep accord. This will give you an insight into communion.The question is:What is buddha-mind?It has been asked again and again down the centuries. For twenty-five centuries all those who have become interested in Gautama the Buddha have asked the question: What is buddha-mind?The question is significant. It is significant because the very question creates a paradox. The buddha-mind is a no-mind. To say anything about the buddha-mind is to say something about no-mind. We live in the mind. The buddha has gone beyond it. He is no longer a mind, he is only a no-mind. So the buddha-mind does not mean a certain type of mind, it simply means a transcendence of mind. The question is significant, is very fundamental. It is the beginning of inquiry, real inquiry.The disciple is not asking, “What is God?” He is not asking, “What is paradise?” He is not asking, “What is sin?” He is asking a very existential question: What is buddha-mind? Because to understand the reality of the buddha-mind is to understand the very foundation of existence itself.A buddha-mind is a pure consciousness. It is like a mirror: it simply reflects, it does not project. It has no ideas, no content, no thoughts, no desires, no imagination, no memory. It is present to the ever-present, it lives in the present. And when you are totally in the present, the mind disappears, it loses all its boundaries. A great emptiness arises in you. Of course that emptiness is not empty in the ordinary sense of the word. It is also a kind of fullness: empty as far as the world is concerned, but full, overfull, flooded, as far as truth is concerned. Empty because all misery has been thrown out, overflowing because bliss has descended in.What is buddha-mind? should be the beginning for all seekers. Asking about God, asking about hell and heaven, are just ordinary things. Asking about the buddha-mind is asking something that – if you can understand it – is bound to transform you, is going to give you a new birth.The mind is very cunning. It can create questions that are only distractions from your being. The mind is so subtle it can deceive you. It can make you feel that you are a great seeker because you are asking: “What is God? Who created the world? Why are we here? What is the purpose of life?” And all these questions are stupid. The whole of philosophy consists of such stupid questions.Buddha again and again says, “I am not a philosopher, I am a physician. I don’t want to intellectualize, I want to make you intelligent. I don’t want to give you answers to cling to, I want to give you insights in which questions melt, evaporate.”One has to be very aware of the mind, because the mind can give you questions that will lead you into wrong directions of philosophizing. And then there is no end. You can go on and on forever. Ten thousand years of philosophizing, and not a single conclusion has been arrived at.Be aware that your mind is a great deceiver. And just as your mind is a deceiver, so are the minds of others. If you ask wrong questions you will get wrong answers. There are people who are always ready to supply whatever you demand. It is just the ordinary law of economics: wherever there is a demand there will be a supply. What you demand is not the question. Whatever you demand – the world is a marketplace – somebody is going to create the supply.You are cunning, others are also cunning. There are more cunning people than you. The less cunning become the followers, the more cunning become the leaders. The less cunning question, and the more cunning go on answering.Buddha says, “I am not interested in your questions unless you ask something existential, unless you ask something in order to be transformed – not just to be informed, not just to be made more knowledgeable.”There exist so many teachers in the world because you ask the wrong questions – and they are ready with many, many answers, with all kinds of answers. And answers come in all shapes and sizes to fit everybody. But remember: there is you and your cunning mind, and there are others who are more cunning.To safeguard his pint while he left the bar for a moment, a man left a note, “I have spat in this beer.”When he returned he found another note, “So have I.”Remember, the world is full of cunning people. These cunning people become politicians, priests. They can even pretend to be prophets. You can avoid them only by asking the right question. They can’t answer the right question because to answer the right question they will have to experience something. It cannot be done by borrowed knowledge. It can be done only if they have authentically experienced truth.This is a beautiful question, the right question: What is buddha-mind?Bodhidharma answers:Your mind is it.The first thing he says is: Don’t be bothered about Gautama the Buddha. Your mind is it.It is not a question about the historical person called Gautama the Buddha. He gives a new turn to the question. He immediately makes it more existential, more personal. The question is no longer philosophical, it has become a question about you. You may have asked about Buddha, but in the hands of a Bodhidharma the question is immediately transformed, changed. It becomes an arrow moving toward your heart.He says: Your mind is it. Buddhahood is not something that happens to somebody else, buddhahood is your potential. It is something that is waiting to happen within you. So the first thing he says: It is your mind. Buddha-mind is not something foreign to you: it is your innermost core, it is your very nature. You are buddhas: maybe unaware of the fact, maybe fast asleep – but that makes no difference. A buddha asleep is still a buddha. A buddha unaware of his own buddhahood is still a buddha.Your mind is it. It is not somebody else’s mind, because how can you understand somebody else’s mind? In the hands of masters like Bodhidharma everything is changed into the concrete, into the personal. It is taken out from its abstraction and made concrete and real.People enjoy abstract questions because they are safer. They don’t touch you, they leave you aside. You can ask about God. You can ask about who created the world and when. And cunning and stupid people are always there: the cunning to lead and the stupid to be led.A Christian theologian has even calculated the exact time when the world was created: four thousand and four years before Jesus was born, the first of January – of course – and on Monday. Now how can there be a first of January if there has not been a December before it? And how can there be a Monday if there has not been a Sunday preceding it? From nowhere – Monday! From nowhere the first of January! And Christians have believed it.They have believed it so deeply that when Darwin and other scientists discovered the theory of evolution and said that the world has existed for millions of years, Christians were very much offended. Their whole religion was at stake. “The world has existed only for six thousand years, not more than that.”But scientists discovered and proved that this can’t be the case, because in the earth they have found bodies of animals, bones of animals, skeletons of animals and men, which are ten thousand years old, twenty thousand years old, fifty thousand years old, one hundred thousand years old. How to explain that?But as I told you, there are cunning people. Christian theologians even found a way out. They said, “Everything is possible for God. God created the world exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus, but he created bones, skeletons, that appear to be millions of years old – just to test the faith of humanity.” You see the cunningness? God created those skeletons so that it can be decided who is really faithful to the Christian dogma and who is not. God created those skeletons to see whether you still have some doubt within your being; then the doubt will surface. It is a strategy of God, and nothing is impossible for him. If he can create the whole world, why can’t he create skeletons that only appear to be millions of years old, although they are not.When I was reading such Christian theologians, I was reminded of one of my friends who lives in Mumbai but has a factory in Nepal. He creates antiques, he manufactures antiques: buddha statues. They are manufactured right now in his factory in Nepal. Then they are dipped into acids to disfigure them, then they are buried deep down in the earth for six months, and then they are taken out. With inscriptions in ancient languages, with dates reaching far back – three thousand years, two thousand years, one thousand years – in the languages which were prevalent in those days. And then they are sold all over the world.When I had stayed with this friend for the first time and I saw so many antiques in his house, I asked, “From where did you get them?”He said, “I cannot lie to you. We manufacture them.”I was puzzled. I said, “You are doing something so Christian. Do you follow the Christian God? He has also done the same thing. He manufactured everything four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ, but with marks, distortions, which can deceive people.”People go on clinging to their dogmas, but the whole thing is because we start by asking wrong questions.When you come to a master be very alert and ask things which are really a deep concern for you, the ultimate concern for you. Ask things upon which your life and death depend.What is buddha-mind?Bodhidharma says: Your mind is it. He immediately changes the very flavor of the question. It is no longer abstract, nothing to do with Buddha. Buddha may have been, may not have been. He may not be a historical person, who knows, he may never have existed. He may be just a beautiful fiction. But you are not a fiction, you are here, you are present. The question has to be concerned with you.Your mind is it. When you see the selfsame essence of it, you can call it suchness.Now Bodhidharma has started to enter you. He says the mind can manifest in many ways. The ordinary manifestation is that of insanity: thousands of thoughts and desires and memories running inside, clashing with each other, conflicting. A great war going on: sometimes very hot, sometimes very cold, but the war continues. Awake, asleep, it is always there. You are just a battlefield. This is the ordinary state.But, if you: see the selfsame essence of it… What does he mean by selfsame essence? Your ordinary mind changes every moment. It is never the same for even two seconds. One moment you are angry, another moment you are sad, another moment you are happy. You go on changing, you change so easily. You are a flux. But if you watch this flux, then a totally different kind of mind arises in you – witnessing.This witnessing is selfsame. Sadness comes, you witness it; happiness comes, you witness it; despair comes, you witness it; joy comes, you witness it. Now, the contents are continuously changing, but the witnessing is the selfsame. It is always the same, it never changes. The mirror remains the same. People go on and go on passing in front of the mirror. It reflects one face for a moment, then another face, but the mirror remains the same.Bodhidharma says: When you see the selfsame essence of it, you can call it suchness. You can call it tathata, suchness. Suchness is a Buddhist way of expressing that there is something in you which always remains in its intrinsic nature, never changes. It always remains in its selfsame essence, eternally so. That is your real nature. That which changes is not you; that is mind. That which does not change in you is the buddha-mind. You can call it no-mind, you can call it samadhi, satori. It depends upon you. You can give it whatever name you want. You can call it Christ consciousness.When you see the changeless nature of it, you can call it dharmakaya.Seeing that it never changes, you can call it the very embodiment of the ultimate law, the very body of dharma.It does not belong to anything…It is not identified with anything: It does not belong to anything… The witness in you is always a transcendence, always a surpassing phenomenon. It transcends everything. Whatever is seen, whatever comes before it, it is never one with it.It does not belong to anything; therefore, it is called emancipation.It is called liberation. Liberation from the mind brings the buddha-mind into your vision. Liberation from identification, liberation from the body, from the mind, from ideologies, from prejudices, from all that makes you – liberation from you brings you to the reality.Then you have to understand one thing. Ordinarily, whenever you think of liberation, you think – my liberation. There is nothing like that. There is no liberation which can be called “my liberation.” All liberation is from the idea of the ego. You will not be liberated, you will be liberated from yourself. It is not your liberation, it is liberation from you. It is emancipation from all that you have become identified with.The Upanishads say: neti, neti: neither this nor that. When you go on negating and saying, “I am not this, I am not that,” a moment comes: nothing is left, nothing to reflect in the mirror, only the mirror. Then you know who you are. But now you cannot say, “This is what I am,” because that will bring the thought back. You cannot say anything about it, you have to be utterly silent about it.We are deep asleep. The name of that sleep is the ego. And in our sleep anything can happen, all kinds of accidents – and they are happening. You are talking in your sleep and you are getting into trouble because you talk in your sleep. You go on saying things which you are not supposed to say. You decide not to say them again because they bring trouble, but again you go on repeating the same pattern. You go on doing things which you have decided not to do. But you are asleep and others around you are also asleep. People are talking in their sleep, answering each other in their sleep. Great dialogues are going on, great fights, quarrels. And the whole thing is that if you wake up, all this nonsense will disappear.The buddha-mind is one who has become awakened.A beautiful, young unmarried movie starlet was throwing a large party in her swanky home for all the men she knew. As the party went on into the wee hours, the hefty-chested young babe drank more and more liquor, but she resisted the advances of her bachelor guests.Finally, at about 5:30 A.M., she said good night to the last guest and slumped down on the living room couch, dead drunk.The next morning she found herself in her own bed, clad in her sheerest nightgown. Surprised, she went down to breakfast.“Wang Lee,” she asked her Chinese manservant, “how did I get to my room last night?”“I put you there, Missy,” he answered.“Gee!” she said, “I must have really been on my back.”“First time on back, Missy,” he replied, “second time on side, third time on stairs, fourth time…”Everybody is asleep. People are doing things to you in your sleep; you are doing things to people in their sleep. You are all interfering in each other’s sleep. When you look from the vantage point of a buddha, the world simply seems to be a madhouse.An elephant was walking through the jungle when she suddenly heard a voice behind her. She turned around and saw a little mouse sitting on the ground. The mouse asked if she could give him a ride on her back and she said, “Sure, just crawl up.”Sometime later the elephant suddenly heard the mouse laughing. She turned her head and asked, “Hey, what’s the matter? Why are you laughing?”But the mouse replied, “Oh, never mind. Just keep on walking.”So she trotted on, but after a while the mouse started giggling again. He jumped up and down on her back, choking with laughter.This time the elephant was really pissed off and said, “Listen, if you don’t tell me why you are laughing I am gonna throw you off my back!”So the mouse finally said, “Ha, ha, ha! I raped you twice and you didn’t even notice it!”But this is how it is with everybody. You go on doing great things in your sleep, thinking that the whole world is noticing it, that the whole universe is taking great note of it, that you will be remembered for centuries, that you will have a place in history, that your name is going to be written in golden letters.In sleep one lives in the ego. As you wake up, suddenly you find the ego disappearing. Just as the sun rises and the mist of the early morning disappears, the ego disappears when you wake up.A buddha-mind is a mind which has become awakened.It works easily and freely, being never disturbed by others; therefore, it is called the true path.The moment you are awakened, the moment you are egoless, all the rocks on the path are removed. The greatest is the ego, and then there are many small rocks: rocks of greed and lust and anger and jealousy and possessiveness. All these rocks are hindering your natural flow, your spontaneity. Once these rocks are gone, your river of consciousness starts flowing easily, freely, and then you are never disturbed by others.It is impossible to disturb a buddha. You can kill him, but you cannot disturb him. You can destroy him, but you cannot disturb him; that is impossible.…it is called the true path. That’s why Bodhidharma says: …it is called the true path – because it leads you to the absolute, undisturbed state, to the absolute calmness, quietude, stillness.It was not born and, therefore, it is not going to perish, so it is called nirvana.The buddha-mind is never born and is never going to die. It has always been there, you are just not aware of it. You have to turn in and look at it. You are looking outside, you are continuously looking outside, and all the time it is waiting behind you. Just a little turn – a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, of course – just a small turn and suddenly you face the buddha.You cannot meet the buddha in Bodhgaya, you cannot meet him in the great temples raised in his name. There are temples, the greatest temples, raised in Buddha’s name, but you will not find the buddha there. Buddha is within you and has always been there. It is your eternity: never born, hence can never die. You can call it nirvana. Here, by nirvana, Bodhidharma means that which is eternal.The ego is born and dies. You can put the ego together, you can dismantle it any moment. You cannot put your nature together or dismantle it. It is simply there.The second question:What is tathagata?One of the names of Buddha is Tathagata. We have given many names to Buddha, just to signify different qualities of buddhahood. One of the most used is Tathagata; Buddha himself used it. He rarely used the word I, he used Tathagata. He would say, “Tathagata was dwelling in a certain garden and then this happened…” “Tathagata was on the way, moving toward a certain city, then this happened…” He would use Tathagata more often than he would use the word I.The question is: What is tathagata? Literally it means “one who comes like the wind and goes like the wind,” “thus come, thus gone.” That is the literal meaning of the word tathagata: just a breeze that suddenly comes. It was not there one moment before and then it is there, and then next moment it is gone. And it leaves no trace behind. You cannot see the breeze, you can only feel it. You cannot see the buddha, you can only feel him. Hence those who come to see the buddha will go empty-handed, because whatever they will see is not the buddha.Seeing my body is not seeing the buddha. The body is only a house where the buddha is dwelling. Seeing the house is not seeing the one who is dwelling inside. But you cannot see the one who is dwelling inside, you can only feel him. Hence those who come with a thinking mind miss. Those who come with a feeling heart are immediately moved, touched, transformed.It is like the wind: you cannot see it but you can feel it. You can feel the touch of it, the coolness of it. It is so refreshing, it is so rejuvenating, it makes you so alive.To be in a buddhafield is to be in the field where the wind is blowing constantly. It can be seen only by the disciples. By seen I mean it can be felt only by the disciples. That’s how it has to be seen. And it can be breathed in and out only by the devotees. The disciple feels it touching his body, playing with his hair, moving his clothes. He feels it, he infers that it is there. But the devotee breathes it in; it circulates in his being, it becomes part of his being.The student comes to see, the disciple to feel, the devotee to be.What is tathagata?Bodhidharma says:One who knows that he comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.From where does the wind come and to where does it go? It has no destination; it has no motive. It is not going anywhere and not coming from anywhere. It has always been here.Swami Ramteertha used to tell a parable…There was a great atheist. In his drawing room he had written in big letters: “God is nowhere.”His small son was playing one day while he was reading his newspaper. The small son was trying, was learning how to read, so he tried to read the sentence on the wall: “God is nowhere.” But nowhere was a big word, so he broke it into two. He read, “God is now here.”The father was shocked. He had never read the sentence that way. The whole gestalt changed: “God is nowhere,” and the child was reading, “God is now here.” There is great difference between “nowhere” and “now here”! For the first time he read that sentence with the vision of a child, with the innocence of a child.It is said that since that day he could not read the old sentence in the old way: “God is nowhere.” Whenever he would look he had to read, “God is now here.” It became something fixed – the impact of the child was such.A buddha is always here. You have always been here. You don’t come from anywhere and you don’t go to somewhere else. This whole universe contains you. We are part of it.Bodhidharma says the tathagata is: One who knows that he comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Read “nowhere” as “now here.” The tathagata is one who is now here and knows that he is always now here. He has not come and he is not going.Ramana Maharshi was dying, and a disciple asked, “Bhagwan, where will you go?”He opened his eyes, laughed. That was not the time to laugh at all. He was dying, his death was absolutely certain. He was dying of cancer. There was great pain. Still he laughed and he said, “You fool! My whole life I have been telling you that there is nowhere to go, we are always here. So where can I go? I will be here! The body will be gone, dust unto dust, but where can I go? I will be part of this universe as I am part of it now. Now, the body gives you the idea that I am separate. That is your idea, not mine. For me, my body does not separate me from existence but bridges me.”You see the difference between the ignorant and the wise? To the ignorant, the body is a wall that separates you from existence. To the wise, to the enlightened, the same body is a bridge. It joins you with existence.Just watch your body and you will be aware of it. Your body is continuously breathing air in and out. Not only through the nose but through every pore of the body you are breathing in and out. Scientists say that if all the pores of your body are closed, if your body is heavily painted and all the pores are closed and filled with paint but the nose is left to breathe, still you will die within three hours, because just the nose is not enough. Every part of your body needs its own breathing.You are continuously in communication with existence. If the sun is not going to rise tomorrow, we will all be dead. We will not be able to live at all, not even for a few minutes, because without the sun the whole warmth will disappear. And without warmth, life is impossible. We will become so cold, so frozen, that death is bound to happen. We are continuously in exchange with existence. We are not separate, we are one.And this is about the body, what about the inner consciousness? That inner consciousness is not divided at all. Your courtyard is surrounded by a wall, but your courtyard still belongs to the sky, is part of the sky.Just like that: One who knows that he comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. He is tathagata. He is always like the fresh breeze blowing. Those who can understand this, they will be refreshed by the breeze. They will dance in the breeze of the buddha, in his sunlight. They will laugh with the buddha, they will dance with the buddha.The third question:What is buddha?Buddha is awareness, simple awareness. It is awakening, it is waking up. Buddha is nothing to do with Gautam Siddhartha. He is only one of the buddhas. Many more have preceded him, many more have succeeded him. And one day or other you are also going to become a buddha.You can become one right now, because you are it. It is only a question of recognizing your reality, of remembering.Bodhidharma says:One who realizes the truth, and holds nothing that is to be realized.This is one of the most beautiful statements ever made. What an answer! What great insight! There is nothing to be achieved because you are already the buddha. Achievement is always of something which you are not. You cannot achieve buddhahood, you can only wake up and find that you are a buddha. And then of course you will laugh. You will laugh because you have been trying to be something that you have always been.In Zen there is a saying:When the big belly thunders with loud roars of laughter,Thousands of white lotuses rain through the worlds.And when it happens: “When the big belly thunders with loud roars of laughter…” Whenever a person becomes awakened, whenever he sees the stupidity he has lived for centuries… First, trying to find things that he had already inside himself. Second, trying to renounce things in order to get something that has nothing to do with those things. First, trying to achieve money, power, prestige. When one is already a buddha, what more richness can you ever have, and what more power, and what more glory? First, one was trying to achieve these things.Failing in achieving them or succeeding in achieving them, one comes to know the futility of it all. Failure brings frustration and success brings frustration. Nothing fails like success, remember. And then one starts renouncing these things, as if renouncing these things is a condition for achieving that which you are already. That is not a condition at all. There is no need to chase shadows and there is no need to escape from shadows. Shadows are shadows: only this much has to be recognized.That’s why I say to my sannyasins: Don’t escape from the world. The world is only a shadow. Let it be there, it can’t disturb you. Just become aware of who you are, and that’s enough.One who realizes the truth – you see the paradox of the statement – One who realizes the truth, and holds nothing that is to be realized.The ultimate truth can always only be said in a paradoxical way. Paradox is the only way to express it: one who realizes that there is nothing to realize, he is a buddha.Once Buddha asked Subhuti, one of his most significant disciples, “Subhuti, when in ancient days Tathagata was with another buddha, Dipankara Buddha, did he attain anything? What was his achievement then?”Subhuti said, “No, World-honored One, he did not attain anything. Nothing was his attainment. When Tathagata was with another buddha, Dipankara Buddha, he had not achieved, attained, realized anything at all.”Buddha laughed and said, “Subhuti, you have understood the truth very well: because there is nothing to achieve, nothing to attain.”Then Buddha asked Subhuti, “What have you attained living with me?”And Subhuti said, “World-honored One, nothing. I have not attained anything living with you. That’s why I bow down to you, I touch your feet, because you have made me aware that there is nothing to achieve, there is nothing to attain. All that is already is. It is as it should be.”Buddhahood cannot be desired. One cannot be ambitious for it. If one is ambitious, that is the barrier. One has to relax, be still, and see that the universe has already provided you with everything that you need. Even the ultimate buddhahood is already built-in.The fourth question:What is dharma?Simple questions from innocent disciples.Bodhidharma says:It was never produced, and will never be reduced; therefore, it is called dharma, the norm of the universe.Dharma simply means the ultimate law that keeps the universe together, that keeps the universe in harmony, in accord, the norm that makes the universe a cosmos and not a chaos.The definition of dharma is totally different from the definition of religion. Ordinarily religion is translated as dharma: dharma is translated as religion. Christianity is a religion, Hinduism is a religion, but what Buddha means by dharma is not a religion. It is not definable, containable in a creed. It is not a dogma. It is a very scientific truth.It is like gravitation. You cannot make a religion out of gravitation. Nobody worships gravitation, nobody makes temples for gravitation – although gravitation has been doing so much for you. If there was no gravitation none of us would be here. We would simply fly upward. It is gravitation that keeps you tethered to the earth, otherwise you will be lost. Even mountains, even trees, will become uprooted with nothing to hold them to the earth. Earth itself would fall into fragments and the whole universe would simply be a chaos. There would be no order of any kind. And life is not possible without order. And consciousness is impossible unless there is something like an ultimate law which keeps everything together.Dharma simply means the law. You cannot worship it, you can only understand it. You can live it, but you cannot worship it. That is the great contribution of Buddha to the world: religion, in his understanding, is law. You have to live it. You have to live according to the law, according to the norm of the universe. Whenever you go against it you are in misery, and whenever you are in tune with it you are in bliss.His definition of bliss and misery is very simple. To be in tune with the ultimate law is bliss; that very harmony is bliss. And to be disharmonious, to go astray from the law, is misery. Hell is when you are running away from the universal law and heaven is when you are running toward it. And when you have become one with it, it is nirvana. It is the ultimate peak of bliss, of truth, of consciousness: sat-chit-anand.One has to be very, very watchful to be aware of the ultimate law. Do you see the meditativeness of the trees surrounding you? Such stillness. Just as you are listening to me, they are listening to me, not even a leaf moving. The birds are singing. The whole universe is still and yet a song… Silent, yet musical. A tremendous harmony permeates everything. From the grass leaf to the greatest star it is the same law.But you have to be a little more aware. And then the very earth you move on becomes sacred, then trees are gods, then birds are buddhas. Then each person you meet is a potential buddha. How can you hurt anybody? How can you be destructive to anybody, disrespectful to anybody? Impossible! Then it is not etiquette; then it is simple, natural understanding.But people are so unaware that it is difficult for them to see the greatest thing that surrounds them within and without.The owner of a big furniture store went to New York to buy some stock, and met a really beautiful girl in the hotel elevator. But she was French and they could not understand a word of each other’s language.So he took out a pencil and notebook and drew a sketch of a taxi. She nodded her head and laughed, and they went for a ride in the park.Then he drew a picture of a table in a restaurant with a question mark and she nodded, so they went to dinner.After dinner he sketched two dancers and she was delighted. They went to a nightclub and danced and had a lovely evening.At length she motioned for the pencil and drew a picture of a four-poster bed.He was dumbfounded. He has never been able to figure out how she knew he was in the furniture business.One has to be aware, otherwise you can miss the obvious! And dharma is the obvious, God is the obvious. It is not a complicated, complex thing. It is not far away, it is very close by. It is dharma that beats in your heart, it is dharma that pulsates in your blood. It is dharma that breathes, it is dharma that lives in you. It is dharma that you are made of: the very stuff that you are made of. And yet you are unaware of it.The last question:What is sangha?Sangha means commune.Bodhidharma says:It is so named because of the beauty of its harmony.A sangha, a commune, is the brotherhood of those disciples and devotees who have gathered around a buddha. It is a brotherhood of the bees who have come to the flowering of the buddha. They have smelled the perfume from far away. Something mysterious has pulled them toward the center. Wherever the buddha is, is the center of the world at that moment.The center of the world goes on changing because wherever the buddha is, there is the center of the world. For that moment, that place functions as the center of the whole existence. And whoever is a little bit aware, just a little bit aware, is bound to become attracted, enchanted, magnetized, hypnotized. And soon people start gathering around a buddha.Many circles gather around a buddha. The first circle is of the devotees, the second circle of the disciples, the third circle of the students, the fourth circle of the curious spectators.Just at the center is a man who has come to know who he is. He is not a priest, he is not a preacher. He is not a psychoanalyst, a therapist. He is simply the one who has become awakened, whose problems have all disappeared, who has the insight to see through and through you. Just being with him is enough to be transformed. Just being with him is enough to be charged, magnetized.This brotherhood is called a sangha, a commune: a commune because communion is happening. The buddha radiates rays of consciousness around himself, creates vibes of a totally different plane. Those who become affected by those vibes, those who become interested in the rays that reach them and want to seek and search the source of those rays, they make the sangha.Whenever there is a buddha, a sangha arises automatically. It cannot be avoided. It should not be avoided, it need not be avoided, because this is the only way the buddha can share his being with others, his understanding with others.He does not solve your particular problems. He simply solves the very root of your problems. He is not an expert. If you bring a particular problem, he is not interested in your particular problem. His whole interest is: Why do problems arise in your life at all? Why solve one problem? Because by solving one, nothing is solved, many more will be there. And if you try to solve problems one by one, it will take millions of lives. And even then there is no hope because by the time you solve one problem, others are arising. When you solve others, the first problem that you thought you had solved has arisen again in a new form.The buddha is one who has no problems, who lives a nonproblematic life, who lives innocently like a child. His innocence is contagious. He allows people to come close to him, to become infected. He pours his being into those who are available and ready to receive him. Just being with him is more than is needed. It is such a radical change to be with a buddha, but it is something invisible. The world remains absolutely oblivious of it.Only a few people, sensitive, alert, intelligent, become aware of the existence of a buddha. And the moment they become aware they risk all. They take the plunge because then there is nothing that can hold them back.Bodhidharma says: It is so named because of the beauty of its harmony. And you will find the brotherhood in absolute harmony around a buddha. No discipline is imposed, but there is discipline, great discipline. No order is imposed, yet there is order, immense order. Just the presence of the buddha is enough. It creates love in the disciples, in the devotees. It creates prayerfulness, gratitude.If a buddha is not available, it is very difficult to attain that state where you can see that there is nothing to be attained. If a buddha is available, it is very easy. You can ride on the wind. If a buddha is available, you can become part of his being.And he is already on the other shore. He exists with you on this shore only in the body. His consciousness is on the other shore. If you move closer and closer and become really intimate, surrendered… Slowly, slowly your consciousness also starts reaching the other shore.And that is the perfection of a sannyasin: to live on the shore, yet not be of this shore.Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 02 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Sometimes I want to scream, “Stop, Osho! Not so fast! I'm not up to it!”I haven't been here for few days before I am having to confront my attachments, my possessiveness, my jealousy, my fear of dying, and distrust, in addition to diarrhea. Just at the point when I fear that you have asked too much, it all passes. What I feared was too hard to face breaks away and I'm not there – joy and gratitude rush in. Everything that is happening is a gift – the very gift that I needed to grow. A sense comes that all is possible.Thank you, beloved one.Amitabh, it is an arduous journey: the journey to the ultimate core of your being. It is an uphill task, it is moving toward the peak. And when you are moving toward the peak you have to unburden yourself of many things. You have to become more and more weightless. You can’t go on carrying rubbish with you.Slowly, slowly attachments, possessiveness, jealousy, greed, fear, anger: all have to be dropped because as you move toward higher altitudes, things start becoming heavier and heavier. As you move toward purer layers of being, many things which you were never aware of become so clear, and you feel so stupid that you are carrying them, that you have carried them for lives together.It is difficult to drop them because one becomes accustomed to one’s habits. Those habits may be creating misery, but still it is difficult to drop them because they have become so familiar. They have become part of your style of life. You are identified with them. Without them you will be somebody else. And one is afraid: afraid to be somebody other than one is. One is always afraid to go into the unknown. The fear of death is nothing but the fear of the unknown.How can you be afraid of death? You have not encountered it yet. You have not seen its face, whether it is ugly or beautiful. You cannot say anything, whether it is going to be a curse or a blessing. You have no idea about it. How can you be afraid of death?No, no one is ever afraid of death. People are really afraid of losing their attachments with life, with their lifestyles. One thing is certain: death will change you totally, death will take you into a dimension of which you are absolutely unaware.One thing is certain: death will not leave you intact as you are. It will take away your body, it will take away your mind. It will take away all that you had thought you consist of. It will leave only the purest consciousness within you. Hence the fear of death, and hence the fear of going deep into meditation. They are the same.Meditation does the same work as death. Meditation is a willful death. On your own accord you start dying, disappearing, evaporating. And to be close to me has no other purpose. To be close to me is to be close to your death.The ancient Eastern sutras say that the master is nothing but death, and the disciple is one who is ready to die. But death is a prerequisite to be reborn. Jesus cannot be resurrected if he is not crucified.Once a Christian missionary was asking me, “How do you explain the fact that God allowed Jesus to be crucified?” Christians have been at a loss to explain it. On the one hand they say Jesus is the only begotten son of God…and the father must be absolutely cruel that he allowed Jesus to be crucified.Everybody was waiting that day for a miracle to happen. Even the enemies were thinking that something was going to happen. Thousands of people gathered to see the miracle. They have seen Jesus, known Jesus, they have looked into his eyes, they had felt his vibe – he was a rare man. He had something of the supernatural about him. He had something which is not ordinarily available: a depth, a height. He had roots deep into the earth, and wings to fly to the ultimate.People had felt all this: the grace, the beauty, the grandeur of his being. They have felt the peace, the silence surrounding him. They have felt the nourishing love that continuously flowed from his being toward others. Something is bound to happen. God cannot leave Jesus; God is going to do something. They were waiting for the last moment.It seems even Jesus himself was waiting for something to happen because in the last moments he says, “Why have you forsaken me? What have I done?” It shows that deep down somewhere he was also hoping that something would happen, maybe at the last moment he would be saved.But there seems to be nothing happening. God seems to be absolutely cold, indifferent, not concerned. Of course, Christian theologians, priests, have been worried about it. They can’t answer why God did not do anything on that day.This missionary was asking me. I said, “You don’t understand the whole phenomenon. If God had done a miracle and Jesus was saved, the whole story would be very ordinary. God did not do anything. He allowed Jesus to die. In fact, he helped in every possible way for him to die, because that is the only way to be resurrected.”The real miracle is resurrection – not saving you, but helping you to die as you are, so that you can be as you should be. God allowed Jesus to die on the cross. And the story is beautiful: on the third day Jesus is back, resurrected, new, young, no longer the son of man but only the son of God. He is so new, so fresh, that even his own disciples miss recognizing him.He meets two of his disciples who are going toward a village, escaping from Jerusalem because they are afraid now that the next thing is going to be the disciples will be caught and killed. The rumor is hot: the master has been killed, now the disciples will be killed. So everything is destroyed and not even a trace is left behind of this man and his work. So they were escaping.Jesus meets them on the way, believing that at least his own disciples will recognize him. But they don’t recognize him. They talk with him as if he is a stranger. Jesus is very much puzzled.Then they enter a small restaurant to eat something – they are tired – and Jesus breaks bread. Then they suddenly recognize, because that is the way Jesus used to break bread. Something of the old, then recognition happens.Then they suddenly become awakened, as if they have come out of sleep or out of a dream, and they say, “Is it you? We could not recognize you on the way.” And they walked for at least three hours, talking – they were talking about their master being crucified to the master himself. Jesus must have been laughing inside himself, that they are talking about the master but they can’t recognize him.People are recognized only by their old habits. When Jesus breaks bread, immediately the disciples recognize because: “That is the way of Jesus. Only he used to break bread that way.” As if suddenly the clouds disperse, the darkness is gone, and they see that Jesus has come back. The form is so new…no trace of the old. My own feeling is that Jesus must have deliberately broken bread in the old way just to give them a clue.God allowed Jesus to die so that a resurrection becomes possible.Amitabh, I am going to help you to die. That’s the function of a master: he has to be a death. And, yes, to die is difficult, hard. That diarrhea is nothing but a mind thing. You are so afraid that the fear is creating diarrhea. But it is good; it will cleanse the body. Your body, your mind, both need deep cleaning.That’s why whenever clouds are not there, “…joy and gratitude rush in.” Whenever you are ready to die you will find joy and gratitude rushing in – whenever you accept. If you resist, then there is a problem. If you resist, then you will scream, your very being will scream, “Stop, Osho! Not so fast! I’m not up to it!” Nobody is up to it! Who wants to die?And dropping all your old patterns is a great death, greater than the ordinary, physical death. Because when you die, ordinarily you only change the body, you change the garments. Your old habits, old patterns of thinking and feeling, continue in a new life, in a new body. Just the surface changes, nothing else.The ordinary death is really ordinary. It is not a death, not much of a death. It only scratches the surface; it changes your skin, that’s all. Otherwise you remain the same person. Death after death you remain the same person.But the death that happens in a love affair with a master is absolute, irrevocable. It is a point of no return. You cannot go back, you cannot fall back to the old patterns again; that becomes impossible. You have to go on moving ahead. And, of course, the mind screams, “Stop, Osho!” But because I love you, I cannot stop. Because I love you, I have to kill you.“Sweetheart,” gushed the ardent swain, “let me adore your lovely face and I will buy you a sable muff. Let me hold your hand and I will give you a red fox scarf. Let me kiss you and I will give you a mink cape. Let me…”“Stop!” cried the girl. “That’s fur enough!”Yes, Amitabh, many times you will scream, “That is far enough!” But I cannot stop. I am utterly helpless in that way. It is not within my hands to stop. I have to go on. The more you scream, the faster I have to go, so that soon the work is done.Your screaming is coming from your mind. And your question is significant, because your heart is feeling deep joy and gratitude. Your mind is saying, “No, stop!” Your heart is saying, “Everything that is happening is a gift – the very gift that I needed to grow. A sense comes that all is possible. Thank you, beloved one.”Two different layers, two different planes of your being – the head and the heart – both are expressed in your question. A part of you, the superficial part that is afraid of death – the ego, the mind – they are crying, begging, “Stop!” It is because of this superficial plane of your being that you have been escaping again and again from here.Of course, the mind is very cunning and it tries to find excuses. If there are not any, it can invent. It is very capable of managing. It can create illnesses in the body so that you don’t blame the mind. What can you do?This has been happening to Amitabh for at least three years continuously. He comes, he comes with great love, and then the mind starts playing tricks. And the mind has been playing a really subtle trick on him: each time he comes he starts losing weight, and naturally a point comes when he becomes afraid that he is losing so much weight he has to go back.This is a mind trick. If you become aware of it this time, the mind will not be able to do it. And the excuse is such that nobody can blame you, you cannot blame yourself. It is natural: when the body starts losing weight you have to go.There is no visible reason why his body should lose weight, because Amitabh remains a vegetarian in America and here too he is a vegetarian. Even people who are nonvegetarians in the West and come here and become vegetarians don’t lose weight. So a vegetarian coming to India will not lose weight. There is no reason. The doctors cannot find any reason at all. It is something in the mind. It is a trick of the mind, a subtle strategy.And the mind has to be very subtle, because Amitabh’s love for me is tremendous. But as the moment of death comes close, the mind freaks out. And Amitabh will not listen to the mind, hence the mind has to take support from the body. And the body is always following the mind. If the mind wants to create a certain illness, the body is simply to submit to the mind, surrender to the mind.Ninety percent of diseases are now known to be mind created, mind oriented. Many diseases that happen here around me are more or less mind created. You want a valid reason to escape, and a small thing won’t do because your love for me is great. Something really dangerous has to be created. Your life is at risk, only then you will go.On one plane your mind says, “I’m not up to it. Stop, it is enough. Go slowly!” But there are a few things which can only be done in a sudden blow, in a single blow. The slower you go, the more painful they are. It is better to cut the knot with a single blow of the sword rather than going very slowly and making the whole process unnecessarily painful.Secondly: you are aware of another plane, too. Your heart says, “This is what you need. You need a death, because only after death is a resurrection possible. The old has to cease for the new to be.” The mind has to go for the heart to take total possession of your being.Hence you feel gratitude, you feel joy, you feel great thankfulness. And you understand that for you to grow, it is needed that all these things – attachments, possessiveness, jealousy, fear of death, distrust – have to be dropped. They are ugly. They are hanging around you. They are parasites; they suck your blood. They don’t allow you freedom. They don’t allow you the impossible.But in those rare, crystal-clear moments when the heart is functioning as a master and not as a slave, you know: “A sense comes that all is possible.” Yes, all is possible, even the impossible is possible – because what I am really trying to do is put you in order. You are in a disorder. Everything is there but upside down. Things have to be put right side up, things have to be rearranged.You have all that can create the orchestra, but everybody is trying to play on his instrument within you as if it is not an orchestra but everybody is a solo performer. The flute player is playing his flute with no idea of what others are doing. The sitar player is playing his sitar with no connection with the flute. The tabla player is playing the tabla absolutely unaware of the flute and the sitar, and so on and so forth. They are doing all that they can do, but they are only creating a chaos, a noise, which is destructive. They all have to be put in tune with each other, and then the same noise will become a great music.Yes, Amitabh, all is possible, because you are carrying within you a buddha. Amitabh is one of the names of Buddha: it means infinite light. In the East we love to give many names to those who have arrived home. Each name represents a certain aspect.Buddha is called Tathagata because he is like a wind which comes and goes from nowhere to nowhere: eternal movement, no beginning, no end. Buddha is also called Amitabh. Amitabh means infinite light, pure light, knowing no boundaries. When the mind disappears, all darkness disappears. When the mind dies, only light is left: and a light that needs no fuel, a light that is uncaused.You are carrying a buddha within you as a seed. It is difficult to believe because you know only your mind: and thinking of a buddha and your mind, the distance seems to be unbridgeable. And it is unbridgeable! If we have to reach the buddha through the mind the distance is unbridgeable. But if we have to reach the buddha through the heart there is no distance at all, there is no need for any bridge.Just the other day Bodhidharma was saying that there is no attainment. How can you attain the already attained? There is no question of becoming. Becoming is not needed because you already have the being. Your future is not in the future, it is already in the present. Your now contains all – your past, your future – all that you have been and all that you will be and all that you can be. Your present moment contains infinity in it.Just the other day we were talking about Buddha asking Subhuti, “Subhuti, what do you say? When I was living with another buddha in my past life, Dipankara Buddha, what had I attained?”Now, anybody who is only knowledgeable will answer, “You attained buddhahood. You have attained truth, nirvana.” But Subhuti says, “Bhagwan, you did not attain anything when you were with Dipankara Buddha because there is nothing to be attained. You simply became aware of your inner treasures. That is not attainment. You had simply forgotten about it – you remembered. Where is the question of attainment?”A forgetfulness and a remembering, that’s all. The whole story of man, of every man: a forgetfulness and a remembering.A girl was walking along a country road and almost stepped on a frog. She was about to go on, when he began to speak.“I have not always been a frog,” he croaked. “I was once a tall, dark, handsome man, but was transformed into this creature you know now by a wicked and magical genie. The spell can only be broken if I spend a night under the pillow of a beautiful girl.”The girl, of course, was skeptical, but the pleading eyes of the unhappy frog caused her to take him home that night and put him under her pillow.Sure enough, when she awoke the next morning, there beside her she found a tall, dark, gorgeous hunk of a man.Well, you know, to this very day her mother does not believe that story!Amitabh, frogs can turn into princes because princes have turned into frogs. You can become buddhas because you are buddhas turned into frogs. Maybe orange frogs…but buddhahood is already the case. It is not something that is going to happen in future, it is already the case. You have only to look in. But your attachments keep you engaged outside. Your jealousies, your possessiveness, don’t give you time to look in, space to look in.In a subtle, surgical way I have to help you to come out of your dreams, attachments, jealousies, possessiveness. Once you are out of these illusions you are a buddha, as everybody else is.Yes, all is possible, Amitabh, and I am here to help you to make it possible. The impossible can happen, and I am trying to create the right space for it to happen. But there are going to be a few painful moments, and you will have to accept those painful moments too, because they are only creating the right context in which bliss can descend in you. That’s why again and again you feel joy and gratitude rushing in.Allow me, cooperate with me. Let your head be cut off by me. Surrender your head. It is happening. Slowly, slowly you are gaining courage. And it is not very far away.But all depends on you. I cannot enforce buddhahood on you. I can only help you to discover it within your own being. But before you discover it, a few things that are hindrances have to be dropped, and you will not be a loser.On the way toward Buddhahood, nobody has ever lost anything. And whatever we lose is not worth keeping. What we gain is so infinite, is so eternal, that one never feels sorry for what has been lost.We are carrying pebbles, colored pebbles, thinking that they are precious diamonds. They are not. Your hands have to be emptied first and then diamonds will go on showering on you. They are always showering, just that your hands are not empty. Your hands are so full of ordinary stones that there is no space for the diamonds to be.Be a little more empty. And this time don’t allow the mind to play tricks upon you.The second question:Osho,I believe in discipline, law and order, and that's why I am hesitating to take a jump into sannyas. What should I do?Sannyas is the greatest discipline there is. It is the greatest order possible. Sannyas belongs to the ultimate law, what Buddha calls aes dhammo sanantano: the inexhaustible, ultimate law.You say, “I believe in discipline, law and order…” If you really understand what discipline is, what order and law is, then there is no question of hesitating. Then sannyas is the only way for you. There will be no other way, no alternative. But you don’t understand what discipline is. You believe, but you don’t understand. In fact, if you understand there is no need to believe.Belief is a state of non-understanding. People believe because they don’t know. You don’t believe in the sun, you don’t believe in the trees, you don’t believe that the trees are green; you simply know. But you believe that God exists, that heaven and hell exist. These are beliefs, because you don’t know.Belief is a substitute for knowing; it deceives you. It keeps you in a state of ignorance because it helps you to pretend. And if you have been pretending long enough, you are so deeply befooled by your own belief that you don’t suspect, you don’t doubt. Your belief starts becoming your wisdom, and belief can never become your wisdom.Remember one thing: believing is a wrong approach. Don’t believe in God. Why believe in God when God can be known? Don’t believe in love when love can be lived. Don’t believe in me while you can experience the truth of my being present to you. When you can commune with me, why believe in me? Belief is a barrier, not a bridge. If you believe in me, you will never understand me.Drop believing and start knowing. Sannyas is a jump from belief to understanding. You were a believing Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. Sannyas is a jump from your Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. Sannyas is a jump from belief into a real, authentic search for the truth.Belief simply means that others have told you, and you have believed them: maybe your parents, your teachers, priests, politicians, friends, or just the climate around you, the social conditioning. You were born into a certain society, into a certain structure. You have imbibed the spirit of it unknowingly. Just as you breathe in air, you breathe in beliefs.But you have not experienced anything. And these beliefs can be dangerous because if you are a sincere man, you may start imposing your beliefs upon your life. You may start creating a character, cultivating a character.And that’s what you must be doing. You must be trying to live a very disciplined life. But if a man is conscious, he need not live a disciplined life. He only needs to live a conscious life, and discipline follows him like a shadow.A disciplined life is rigid, frozen, cold, dead. You simply go on doing things mechanically. Sometimes it may suit the situation, many more times it is absolutely irrelevant. Then the disciplined man, the so-called disciplined man, is always lagging behind. The situation demands something else, but his discipline reacts in its own way, so he is never in a deep communion with reality. He is always isolated, alienated.It happened…A Sufi mystic, Junnaid, was going for a pilgrimage, a holy pilgrimage to Kaaba. He told his disciples, “It will take one month for us to reach Kaaba, and we will fast so that by the time we reach Kaaba our bodies will be absolutely purified.”The disciples agreed. The journey started and the third day they reached a village. The whole village had come to receive them. Junnaid had a disciple there who was a very poor man, and because Junnaid was coming for the first and maybe the last time to his village and was going to be his guest, he sold his field, his house, everything, to give a feast to the whole village. He was not aware at all that Junnaid was on a fast and that he was followed by hundreds of disciples.Junnaid saw the joy of the disciple. He was just ecstatic, although he had gambled everything just to give a feast to the whole village in welcoming his master. Junnaid did not say anything. He did not even mention that he was keeping a fast. When Junnaid did not say anything the disciples were also silent, but they were boiling within.The feast started. Junnaid ate well and thanked the disciple, blessed the disciple. The other disciples also had to eat when Junnaid was eating. They could not say, “We are on a fast,” when the master had himself forgotten about the fast. And moreover the food was delicious, and for three days they had been hungry too. But deep down they were feeling angry: “What kind of discipline is this?”When they departed, the first thing they did on the way was to ask the master, “This we can’t understand. Did you forget all about the fast? You did not even mention it.”He said, “No, I never forget anything, but his joy was such and his ecstasy was such. It would have been such a pain to his heart if I had said, ‘I am not going to eat.’ He had prepared the food with such love. There is no problem,” said Junnaid, “we can keep our fast for three more days. Forget about those three days. We start our fast from today, and we will keep the fast for one month. There is no problem in it. Why hurt the poor man for a simple thing? We can continue the fast three more days.”But the disciples said, “But it is a question of discipline: when we had taken the vow we should have followed it.”Junnaid said, “Live consciously, don’t live according to a dead discipline. You were feeling irritated. I saw it on your faces. You were angry at me – I watched it – because you were simply following a dead rule: ‘We have taken a vow so it has to be followed.’ We are the masters. We take the vow, we can break it. And the situation was such that what we did was the right thing.“Our fast is just ordinary. His love was something really holy. Eating or not eating does not matter much, but you missed his joy, you could not share his ecstasy. A great opportunity has been lost.“If it happens again,” said the master, “because we may be coming across other disciples in other towns, don’t be worried. I act out of the moment. I see the situation and I act. That is my discipline. I don’t act according to the past.”And the people who act according to the past are not necessarily in order, in discipline, in accord, because the people who have a law-abiding mind can be very cunning and they can always find ways to bypass the laws. They can find loopholes to get out of obeying. There is not much of a problem in it.In the Buddhist scriptures there are ten thousand major rules and thirty-three thousand minor rules for the disciple. Now, even to remember them is impossible: forty-three thousand rules in all! How are you going to remember those rules? And why were they created? It was not Buddha who created them but the tradition, the priests that followed him. And even forty-three thousand rules are not enough, because people go on doing things.They can always find a way to do what they really want to do: where there’s a will there’s a way. No law can prevent you. And every law can be interpreted in such a way that it is very easy to wriggle out of anything.During an inspection a lieutenant discovered that a young soldier’s laundry bag was full of books. Being a stickler for having everything in the proper place, he bawled out the guilty private in no uncertain terms. When he was just about out of breath he asked, “Now, how by any stretch of imagination can you justify stuffing your laundry with books?”Quietly the lad replied, “With all due respect, sir – they’re dirty books.”It is very easy to play with words. It is very easy to get out of any discipline that you have imposed upon yourself. And exceptions are always allowed.A disciple was going on a pilgrimage. He asked Buddha, “I will be away from you for many months. The only thing that I am afraid of is the existence of women. Here with you I can keep myself disciplined, but alone I am afraid, afraid of myself. If I see a woman, what am I supposed to do?”Buddha said, “Just look at the ground four feet ahead. Don’t look at the woman. That will be enough to avoid the woman. Just looking down four feet ahead of you is enough to walk. And you will not be seeing the face and the beauty, and whether it is a man or a woman.”The disciple said, “That’s right, but sometimes there may be a situation in which I will not be aware that a woman is coming, and before I look down I will have already seen her. Then what to do? Then even looking down on the earth won’t help. And the possibility is there…” So he asked, “Then what to do?”Buddha smiled and he said, “Then don’t talk to her. Just go on moving and don’t look back.”But the disciple asked, “But there could be a situation in which the woman starts talking. Then just out of etiquette… And a bhikku, a disciple of Buddha, has to be graceful and cultured. If a woman asks something, am I not supposed to listen to it? Am I not supposed to answer her?”Buddha said, “Okay, so you can talk, but don’t touch her.”The disciple said, “Just one more thing: in a certain situation it can happen that you have to touch a woman. For example, some accident has happened. A woman has fallen into a ditch, or a bullock cart has gone into a ditch and the woman is underneath the bullock cart. Do you suppose that I should simply go on moving without saying anything, without touching her? Because I will have to take her out of the ditch or from underneath the cart, and then I will have to touch her. What do you say about that?”Buddha laughed and he said, “Then do only one thing: just remain aware.”The bhikku said, “That’s okay, that I can do.”Now, small things he cannot do. Awareness? “Yes,” he says, “that I can do.” Because who can see your awareness? It is simply an inside phenomenon, only you know whether you are aware or not aware. Now he has asked permission to do everything. Creating imaginary situations, he has asked for exceptions.So although there are thirty-three thousand minor rules and ten thousand major rules, Buddhists have been doing all the same things that others are doing who have not even heard about these forty-three thousand rules.Rules can’t help. If they are imposed from the outside they are utterly useless. Not only useless but they burden you, and unnecessarily burden you.Drop the legal mind. If you really want to know the law, the ultimate law, and if you want to live according to the ultimate law, don’t be legal. Man-made laws are worthless.The young woman was depositing a fifty-dollar bill at the bank.“I can’t accept this,” said the teller, “it’s counterfeit.”“Oh, my god!” exclaimed the woman, “I have been raped!”Now immediately the interpretation changes. It all depends on you: your law, your words.When the next patient is called, a skeleton walks in. “Hmm!” says the doctor. “A bit late, aren’t you?”Must have been a very legal-minded man.You say, “I believe in discipline, law and order, and that’s why I am thinking but hesitating to take a jump into sannyas.” Many people think that my sannyas has no discipline, no law, no order. They are utterly wrong. Yes, I have not given you thirty-three thousand minor rules and ten thousand major rules to live by. I give you a single commandment: Be aware.Even Buddha had to do that after seeing the man trying to find ways out. Finally he has to say, “Then just be aware.” He said it only at the end. I say it from the very beginning, so that you need not find excuses, exceptions, strategies, tricks. You need not be diplomatic. I simply say it from the beginning.This is the only commandment – the eleventh commandment. And the eleventh is enough. The other ten are not needed at all. Be aware and let your discipline come out of your awareness. And there will come a discipline which has a beauty. It will not be like a plastic flower, it will be a real rose. It will have perfume, it will have life. And there will come a certain order, but not imposed, not cultivated – natural.Just the other day Bodhidharma was saying: When you know the ultimate law, the dharma, when you have become aware of it, when you are attuned to it, your life becomes simple, easy, natural, flowing. No hindrances, no obstructions are there, no blocks are there. That is order.Order is not like railroad tracks, where the train goes on moving on the rails, the same rails, every day. Order is like a river coming down from the Himalayas and moving toward the ocean. The river is alive. It is not following a certain map, it is not running like a canal, it is not man-made. It simply flows freely, but it still reaches the ocean. And a canal always looks ugly, artificial, because it does not have the natural turns, sudden surprises; it is straight, geometrical. The real river is zigzag, sometimes going to the south and sometimes moving to the north.If you are too legal you will say, “This is a waste of time and waste of land and waste of energy.” If you are too legal minded you start believing only in straight lines: the shortest path is to go straight from one point to the other.But the river goes zigzag, takes a long route, sometimes flows fast and sometimes goes very lazy. And there are different moods and different climates and different lands which it passes through. It takes sudden turns. It goes in a dancing way – not confined, not like a slave, not like a prisoner, chained, following the policeman. It goes in freedom. Then each step has its own beauty.My sannyasin is like a river, not like a canal. Yes, there is a discipline, but very subtle: that of love, that of understanding, that of meditation. Yes, there is an order, but not imposed, not cultivated – natural, spontaneous. Yes, there is a law, but not the law made by stupid politicians or stupid priests – the law of nature itself, the law of God.Buddha calls God the ultimate law. My sannyasin is working out how to be more attuned with nature, with the whole, how to drop this ego, how not to be separate from the whole. Because to me, to be one with the whole is to be holy.There is no need to hesitate. Try what I am saying. Experiment with it and come to your own conclusions. But never believe. Experiment, experience, and your experience will prove the truth of what I am saying.The third question:Osho,I am a God-fearing man, but you say that all fear has to be dropped. Is the fear of God also to be dropped?Fear is fear. It does not matter of what, of whom. The object makes no difference. Your subjectivity is full of fear. And if you are God-fearing you can never be God-loving.In all the languages of the world this ugly type of phrase exists: God-fearing. This is ugly, because fear and love cannot exist together, like light and darkness. If there is fear you cannot love God. How can you love God if you are afraid of him? You may submit and surrender, but deep down there will be resistance, anger. Somewhere in your unconscious there will persist the idea of taking revenge. You cannot forgive a God of whom you are afraid.And fear is just the opposite of love. Hate is not really the opposite of love. You will be surprised – fear is the exact opposite. Hate is love standing upside down. Fear is just the opposite. You cannot be afraid of God if you understand what God is. This total universe is God. In fact, there is no God as a person. The whole existence is permeated, overflowing, with a quality called godliness. It is in the flowers and in the grass and in the stars. It is in you: it is everywhere. The whole existence is made of the stuff called godliness. God is not a person. How can you be afraid?If you follow a religious life out of fear it will be the life of a slave, not of a man who is free. And if you start in fear you cannot end in freedom. You will end in slavery. And all that you will do out of fear is going to be wrong. It is going to be false, superficial.The young couple were canoeing in the middle of the lake when a sudden squall hit.Terrified at the intensity of the wind and rain, the boy started to pray: “O Lord, save us, and I’ll give up smoking. I’ll give up drinking. I’ll give up…”At this moment the young lady yelled, “Don’t give up anything else! I think the storm is over!”Out of fear nothing radical is possible.I have heard a story about Mulla Nasruddin. He was also coming from a faraway journey in a small ship, and a great storm arose and it appeared that there seemed to be no chance of surviving.Nasruddin had a beautiful palace, a marble palace of which he was very proud, in the capital of his country. Even the king was jealous of him and he had offered him whatever money he wanted to take, “…but give the palace to me.”But Nasruddin was insistent that he was not going to give the palace to anybody at any price. Great offers had come, but he had always refused.Now that his life was in danger he prayed to God and he said, “Listen! I will give the palace to the poor. I will sell the palace and distribute the money to the poor.”It so happened that the moment he said it the storm started subsiding. As the storm started to subside, Nasruddin started having second thoughts. This is too much! And maybe the storm was going to subside anyway. I have unnecessarily risked my palace.But then he was in for a big surprise: the storm started rising again. Then he really became afraid. He said, “Listen! Don’t be bothered with my thoughts – I am a foolish man – but whatever I have said, I am going to do. I promise you that I will sell the house and distribute the money to the poor.”The storm subsided again. Again he wanted to have second thoughts, but now he was afraid.He reached the shore and the next day he informed the whole capital that he was going to auction his palace. All the rich people, the king, the prime minister, other ministers, the general, all came, because everybody was interested in his palace. And they were all surprised at what he was doing. They thought him crazy.Just in front of the palace he had kept a cat, and he told the people who had gathered, “The price of the cat is ten lakh rupees, and the price of the palace is only one rupee, but I am going to sell them together.”The whole thing looked crazy: the cat, ten lakh rupees – just an ordinary cat! He must have caught any wandering cat. But people thought, “Why be worried? That is not our business.”The king purchased them. Ten lakh rupees were paid for the cat, one rupee for the palace. Nasruddin gave one rupee to a beggar and said to God, “Look! What I promised, I have fulfilled!”If you do things out of fear you can’t do them with your heart. You will be cunning, you will find ways. And whenever the fear will be gone, you will be the same again.Please don’t be God-fearing. Be God-loving: that is my essential message.Up to now, religion has been based in fear. That’s why the earth has remained irreligious or only superficially religious. Religion has remained something just like a painted face: false, pseudo. And the basic reason why it has failed is fear.The priests have based religion on fear and greed, which are two aspects of the same coin. Because of fear they have created the idea of hell, to make people really God-fearing.And they have also created the idea of heaven to make people really greedy. Greed creates fear. Greed means: if you don’t follow God, if you don’t pray to God regularly, you may miss all the joys of heaven. Missing the joys of heaven is a great fear-creating situation. And you will be thrown into hell, hellfire.In the scriptures they have invented so many methods of torture that it seems that Adolf Hitler must have read all the scriptures of the world. Otherwise, how had he come across so many methods to torture people? They can be found only in religious scriptures. He must have asked the advice of knowledgeable priests, because whatever is written in the scriptures he managed to do in his concentration camps, in his gas chambers. And the only thing that is not written in the scriptures he also managed to do.In the scriptures it is not written that there are windows in hell which you can go and look through to see what is happening inside. He made windows in his gas chambers. Those windows had the kind of glass that you can look in through, but through which the people who are being gassed inside cannot look out at the spectators.And see the inhumanity of man: thousands of people waited for months to look through those windows and thousands of people came to see through those windows. They stood in queues for hours to gain entry and to see people disappearing in smoke. Those gas chambers were such that within seconds one thousand people in one gas chamber would be just smoke and nothing would be left. It was almost like an entertainment for the people. People enjoyed seeing it very much.The Devil should learn something from Adolf Hitler. He can earn much money if he makes a few windows in hell and sells tickets. The tickets will be sold out for almost one century ahead. Who would not like to have a look into hell?The priests have based their religion on two basic, ugly instincts: fear and greed. And both have nothing to do with real religion. Real religion is freedom from greed and freedom from fear.You will have to get rid of all fear. Yes, the fear of God is included in it. It has to be dropped if you really want to understand what God is. But our whole life is so covered with fear. We love out of fear, we pray out of fear.There are people like Dale Carnegie who write books which are sold in millions. I think his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, has sold only next to the Bible – millions of copies in almost all the languages of the world. Why do people read such rubbish? And what is he teaching in those books? – cunningness, diplomacy.He suggests that even if you don’t love your wife, that is not the point. At least whenever you have a chance to say to her, “I love you,” say it. Repeat it as many times as possible because she only hears your words, she does not know your heart.Your wife is not a veterinary doctor. The vet has to look and decide about the disease of the animal himself, he cannot ask the animal, “How are you? How do you feel? How is your sleep?” Your wife is not a vet. She depends on your words. She does not know what goes on inside you. That is your business.But if you repeat ten times a day – whenever you come across her, just say, “Darling, I love you!” And say it with great fervor. Be an actor, that’s what he is saying. And she will believe you, and your life will be smooth. There will be less conflict. This he calls love! This is just fear of conflict, fear that something disturbing may happen. So just keep things smooth.Your saying again and again, “I love you,” is like a lubricant. And be afraid, that is the message. If you are not afraid you will be in trouble. Wives are afraid of their husbands, and husbands are afraid of their wives. Parents are afraid of their children, and children are afraid of their parents. Children are afraid of their teachers, and teachers are afraid of their pupils. Everybody is afraid of everybody else. As if fear seems is the only climate we live in.A traveling salesman who was not feeling up to snuff visited a doctor for a checkup. A routine examination did not reveal any particular ailment. The doctor then questioned his patient about his living habits.“Now I’m going to get personal,” said the doc. “How often do you engage in sexual relationship?”“Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, regularly,” replied the salesman.“Well,” went on the doctor, “your trouble may lie there. I suggest you eliminate Wednesdays.”“Oh, no,” answered the salesman, “l couldn’t do that. That’s the only night of the week I’m home!”People are even loving… Even love is nothing but fear: a diplomacy, a strategy, to keep things running smoothly. And that’s why you pray regularly. Morning, evening, you go on praying, hoping that God will hear your prayer. There is nobody to hear your prayers! Your prayer is simply a monologue. You are praying to the empty sky. Nobody is going to reward you for your prayers, remember.If you really know what prayer is, then prayer itself is its own reward. There is nobody else to reward you. The reward is not there in the future, not in the afterlife. But praying itself is such a beautiful phenomenon, who cares about the future and who bothers about the reward? The idea of a reward is greed.Prayer in itself is such a celebration, it brings such great joy and ecstasy, that one prays for the prayer’s sake. One does not pray out of fear and one does not pray out of greed. One prays because one enjoys it. One does not even bother whether there is a God or not.If you enjoy dancing, you don’t ask whether there is a God or not. If you enjoy dancing, you simply dance. Whether anybody sees the dance from the sky or not is not your concern. Whether the stars and the sun and the moon are going to reward you for your dance, you don’t care. The dance is enough of a reward in itself. If you love singing you sing. Whether anybody listens or not is not the point.So is prayer. It is a dance, it is a song, it is music, it is love. You enjoy it, and there it is finished. Prayer is the means and prayer is the end. The ends and the means are not separate. Only then do you know what prayer is. And prayer is far more important than God.Patanjali says God is only an excuse to pray. It is like a peg on the wall to hang your coat on. If the peg is not there you can hang your coat somewhere else. You can hang it on the door, on the window, anywhere. Patanjali has great insight when he says that God is just a peg, because it will be difficult for you to pray, hence God has been invented. Ordinarily you think prayer is a means to reach God. Patanjali says God is only a means so that you can pray. But it is only for the beginners: to help them.It is just like when a small child goes to school to learn the alphabet, we give him a few helpful clues. We say, “D is for donkey.” Now, D has nothing to do with the donkey in particular; donkey is not the owner of D. D is as much for dog as it is for donkey, and D is for many things. “D is for donkey” is just to help the child because he can visualize the donkey more easily. He giggles and enjoys – he knows the donkey perfectly well – and in this way he remembers D.But if a grown-up reading always reads “D for donkey” and then goes on, then something has gone wrong. Then he will be in difficulty, he will not be able to read anything. “M is for monkey, and D is for donkey” – if he goes on reading that way, the donkeys and monkeys will get so mixed that he will not be able to make any sense out of it. No, the child soon learns that it was only a device.God is a device – according to Patanjali, one of the greatest masters of the world – a device to help you pray. Once you have learned to pray, forget all about God. Prayer itself is enough, more than enough.Prayer means surrender. Prayer means bowing down to existence. Prayer means gratitude. Prayer means thankfulness. Prayer means silence. Prayer means: “I am happy that I am.” Prayer simply means: “This tremendous gift of life is so much for such an unworthy man like me. I don’t deserve it, yet the unknown has showered it on me.” Seeing it, gratitude arises.You ask me, “I am a God-fearing man, but you say that all fear has to be dropped. Is the fear of God also to be dropped?” Yes, absolutely yes. Only then will you know what God is, and only then will you know what love is, and only then will you know what being religious means, what it is all about.The last question:Osho,Can't psychoanalysis help people to know themselves? Is religion really necessary?Psychoanalysis can help a little bit, it can prepare the ground, but it cannot be a substitute for religion. In the West it is becoming a substitute for religion, and that is going to destroy something immensely beautiful. Religion is a totally different phenomenon from psychoanalysis. Religion is not analysis at all, religion is meditation. It is not thinking, it is not analysis.Psychoanalysis is concerned with the mind and helping the mind to become adjusted to society, whatever is thought to be normal. It may be, it may not be. Usually the average is thought to be normal, but the average is not necessarily normal. The word normal comes from norm; norm means “the law.” Normal is one who lives according to the law, the ultimate law, the ultimate norm.A Buddha is normal, a Jesus is normal, a Zarathustra is normal, a Bodhidharma is normal. You are not normal, you are simply average. You are not following the norm. You don’t know anything about the norm. But psychoanalysis simply helps you to adjust yourself with the society you live in. It makes your life a little easier.Sigmund Freud is reported to have said, “We cannot make man happy, because there is no possibility of man ever being happy. All that we can do is we can make him less unhappy.” This is a significant statement, and coming from the founder of psychoanalysis it has great importance. And he is being true.One thing must be said about Freud: that he is always sincere. Even though his sincerity goes against many things he wants, goes against his own psychoanalysis, still he remains sincere. He never hides behind facades and masks. He is a simple man in that way. In that way he has some religious quality about him.But otherwise, psychoanalysis can help you in particular problems: it can give you a little insight into your problems, it can make you accept them. It can bring you down from your feverish state to the average, and that too at a very great cost and years of work.Meditation can do it within days, and meditation can do far more. It does not help you to become adjusted with the society. It helps you to be adjusted with God, with godliness. The society means the crowd. To be adjusted with the crowd is not growth, it is just the opposite of growth. The crowd consists of the lowest, and to be adjusted with the lowest you have to remain the lowest. Religion takes you to the heights, it takes you toward the sky, it gives you wings.Religion will always be needed. Psychoanalysis may not be needed one day. Psychoanalysis is a temporary phenomenon. It is only the contemporary mind that needs it. For centuries man had lived without psychoanalysis. In the East we have not given birth to any system like psychoanalysis. We have lived without it, we are still living without it.It is just the contemporary Western mind that has become too tense, that needs psychoanalysis. It is something like a phase which is going to pass.Psychoanalysis will soon be part of history, but religion is going to remain forever. Religion is something without which man cannot be man.And the psychoanalyst himself is in the same trap as you are. He needs religion as much as you. He needs meditation as much as you, or maybe he needs it more than you because he has to live with mentally ill people. He becomes infected by all their illnesses.Patient: “People seem to think I’m brash, provocative and forward.”Psychiatrist: “I quite understand, Miss. Now, I want to make a few notes. Would you mind getting off my lap for a few minutes?”If you live with people like this long enough, you may be helping them, bits of insight may be given to them, but they are also changing you meanwhile.More psychoanalysts commit suicide than any other profession. More psychoanalysts go mad than any other profession. It is very strange. Psychoanalysts going mad is enough condemnation of psychoanalysis.A gorgeous girl walked into the psychiatrist’s office. No sooner had she closed the door, when the doctor ripped off her clothes and attacked her.After fifteen minutes he got up and said, “Well, that takes care of my problem. What’s yours?”Now, how can these people help you and how much can they help? Professionally they know much about the mind, but they know nothing about the soul. In fact, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, should not be named the way that they are, because psyche means soul and they don’t believe in the soul.Psychology means the science of the soul. Religion is the science of the soul. Psychology is not the science of the soul. Psychology is the science of the mind, and not even a science yet, just a very primitive, crude state, just at the beginning.Religion is the science of the soul. It is an effort to help you to meet and merge with the totality of existence: call it dharma, Tao, God, or anything you like. It is an effort to destroy all barriers between you and the whole so that you can start feeling the whole merging in you and you merging in the whole.When you simply become a wave in the ocean there is great joy because all fear of death disappears. You are no longer separate so you cannot die. When you are just a wave in the ocean, all anxiety disappears because anxiety is possible only if you think of yourself as an individual – separate. When you are just a wave in the ocean, then the ocean takes care.Sometimes you are there manifest and sometimes you are there unmanifest, but you are there always and forever.Religion is a totally different phenomenon. Psychoanalysis cannot become a substitute for it. It is good that psychoanalysis helps a little bit – people need help – but it is not religion, because psychoanalysis never transforms you. Religion is the science of transformation.You need a radical transformation, you need a mutation, you need a new birth. Psychology cannot become that.Religion is nothing but the process of rebirthing. You are born anew, you are born in God, you are resurrected. Religion is death and resurrection.Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 03 (Listen & Download)

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Question: What is meditation in emptiness?Answer: One observes things in the phenomenal world, yet always dwells in emptiness. That is meditation in emptiness.Question: How can one dwell in dharma?Answer: One should stay neither in in-dwelling dharma nor in non-dwelling dharma. He should live naturally in dharma. This is what you call dwelling in dharma.Question: How can a man live as not-man and a woman as not-woman?Answer: There is no difference in buddha-nature between a man and a woman, nor an entity designated as man or woman. Physical matter produces the grass and trees as it does human beings. In comparison you say “grass” or “trees.” You give all sorts of names to your illusions. Buddha said, “If one sees that everything exists as an illusion, he can live in a higher sphere than ordinary man.”Question: If one attains the nirvana of an arhat, has he Zen realization?Answer: He is just dreaming and so are you.Question: If one practices the six paramitas, and passes through the ten stages of bodhisattvahood, and completes ten thousand virtues, he should know that all things are not born, therefore, they are not going to perish. Such realization is neither intuition nor intellectuality. He has nothing to receive and there is nothing to receive him. Has this man Zen realization?Answer: He is just dreaming and so are you.Question: If a man has ten powers, and accomplishes four forms of fearlessness, and completes eighteen systems of the teaching, he is the same as Buddha who attained enlightenment under the pippala tree. He can save sentient beings and then enter into nirvana. Is he not a real buddha?Answer: He is just dreaming and so are you.The most important question that man has ever encountered is “What is meditation?” The English word meditation is not as pregnant with meaning as the original Sanskrit word dhyana is.Meditation has a wrong connotation. The moment you say meditation, immediately the idea arises “On what?” Meditation, in the English sense of the word, is always on some object. But in the Sanskrit sense of the word dhyana, there is no object as such. On the contrary, to be absolutely objectless, to be utterly empty of all content is dhyana.Hence, when Buddha’s message reached China, the word was left untranslated, because there was no equivalent in the Chinese language either. And the Chinese language is far richer than any other language of the world. Yet there was no word which could be called synonymous with the word dhyana – for a simple reason: such a word was missing because dhyana has never been practiced anywhere else except in this country.This country has contributed only one thing to the world, and that is the art of dhyana. And that one contribution is enough, more than enough.The whole of science can be put on one side and still it will not be weightier than the single word dhyana. All the knowledge of the world can be put on one side, but the word dhyana will still weigh more. It has infinite significance. It is a totally new vision of consciousness: a consciousness without content, a consciousness without any thought, desire – an ocean without ripples, waves, utterly silent and still, reflecting the whole sky with all the stars. So is dhyana.In China it was left untranslated, but when you write a word from one language in another language, even if you don’t translate it, it changes its color, its form. That’s natural; it has happened many times.Now, you know the word India. It is simply a different pronunciation for Sindu, the great river that now passes through Pakistan. When the Persians crossed that river for the first time they pronounced it Indu not Sindu. From Indu it became Indus, from Indus it became India. And then some other language group passed and pronounced it not Sindu but Hindu: hence Hindu, Hinduism, Hindustan. But they have all arisen out of the name Sindu. Now it seems so far away that Hindu and India seem not to be related at all.When the Indian constitution was being prepared, there was great discussion about what to call this country: India or Hindustan? Great controversy over the same word – because they both arise from the same word, the name of the great river that now passes through Pakistan, Sindu. It traveled in one direction and became Hindu and Hindustan, traveled into another direction and became Indus, India.The same has happened with dhyana. Buddha never spoke Sanskrit; that was also one of his originalities. In India, Sanskrit has always been the language of the priests, of the cultured, of the sophisticated. Buddha was the first to bring about a radical change: he started talking in the language of the people.Sanskrit has never been a language of the people, it has always been the language of the highest strata of the society. And they have guarded it with great care, so that it never falls into the hands of the common people.It has been one of the strategies of all the priests all over the world that their language should not be understood by the common people, because if their language is understood by the common people then they will be exposed. Because what they go on saying is simple, very ordinary, but in a language that you don’t understand it appears as if they are saying something superb, something very supernatural.If you read the Vedas in your language you will be surprised: there is not much there. Not more than one percent of the sutras is significant, ninety-nine percent is simply rubbish. But if you hear it chanted in Sanskrit you will be enchanted, you will be simply hypnotized. So is the case with the Koran. If you hear it in Arabic it will have something magical. Translated into your own language, you will be puzzled: it looks very ordinary.Priests have always been aware that their scriptures can be valued and appreciated and respected and worshipped only if they are not translated into the ordinary people’s languages.Buddha is one of the revolutionaries in that sense, too. He started talking in the language of the people. The language of the people that surrounded Buddha was Pali. In Pali, dhyana became jhana: more rounded, more used.When a word is used more, it starts having a roundness to it, it loses its corners. It is like a rock in a flowing river: slowly, slowly it becomes rounder, softer. It attains beauty, it attains a lovely form.Dhyana is harsh, jhana is round, soft, easy to pronounce. So when Buddhist messengers reached China, jhana became chan in Chinese. And when the same word reached Japan from China it became Zen. The root is dhyana.In English also there is no equivalent word. Meditation can be used because that is the most approximate, but that has to be used with very great care, because meditation itself means meditating upon something, and dhyana means being in meditation, not meditating upon something.It is not a relationship with an object, it is absolute emptiness: no object, not even God. Simple objectlessness, the mirror reflecting nothing, the mirror simply in its nature, as it is. When you come to that simplicity, to that innocence, you are in meditation.You cannot do meditation, you can only be in meditation. It is not a question of doing something, it is a question of being. It is not an act but a state.The disciple asks Bodhidharma, the master:What is meditation in emptiness?He must have been puzzled. Many people ask me, “On what should we meditate? On what form? What should we visualize? What mantra should we chant, or what thought form should we create inside our minds, so that we can focus on it?”They are asking about concentration but they think they are asking about meditation. And there are thousands of books written on concentration but they all go on using the word meditation. This is one of the most misinterpreted words. And the experience is so rare that you will never understand that somebody is using the word in an absolutely wrong sense.I have come across hundreds of books which go on using the word meditation as if it were a higher state of concentration. It has nothing to do with concentration. In fact, it is just the opposite of concentration. In concentration there is an object. You have to focus on the object, you have to be absolutely concentrated on it, your whole consciousness falling on the object, not missing the object even for a single moment: that is concentration.Concentration has its own value. It is a great method in the hands of science, but it has no religious value at all. It has scientific value, it has artistic value, but no religious value at all. Science cannot move a single step without concentration. Art cannot create without concentration.The artist becomes so concentrated on his painting, or sculpture, or music, that he forgets the whole world. In his concentration everything else is excluded, bracketed out. Only one thing remains in his mind, as if the whole world consisted of that one thing. That thing is the whole world for the moment; nothing else exists.There is an ancient story…One very famous book, one of the greatest ever written, is a commentary on the Brahma Sutras written by Vrihaspati. The name of the commentary is very strange: the name of the commentary is Bhamati. It is strange because it has nothing to do with the Brahma Sutras: one of the greatest expositions of the philosophy of advaita, non-dualism.Bhamati is the name of Vrihaspati’s wife. What connection can there be between the commentary on the Brahma Sutras and Vrihaspati’s wife? There is some secret hidden in it. Vrihaspati must have been a man of deep concentration: he was a great philosopher.He got married because his father was getting old and wanted Vrihaspati to be married. And in the old days, obedience was the simple way. It was naturally so; people used to follow their parents’ wishes. There was no question of saying no, so Vrihaspati said yes.He was married to Bhamati but he was not a man who needed a wife or needed a family. His whole concentration was on the great commentary that he was writing on the Brahma Sutras. He was so absorbed that he brought the wife home and forgot all about her.His wife took every care of Vrihaspati. That too is no longer possible. And who can take care of such a husband who has completely forgotten her? He had no idea who she was or what her name was. He had never even asked her name. She served him like a shadow. She never came in front of him because he might get distracted, disturbed.And he was continuously writing his commentary. He was in a hurry because he had taken a vow inside his heart that the day the commentary was complete he would renounce the world, and he wanted to renounce the world as soon as possible.Day in, day out, he was writing. Late in the night he would go on writing. Sometimes the candle would burn out, and the wife would come up from behind and just put a candle there. Once in a while he would see the wife’s hand bringing food, taking away the thali and the plates, but he was so concentrated on his work he never inquired, “Who is this woman?”It is a beautiful story; whether it really happened or not is not the point. But I don’t think that wives could have been so nice even in those old days. One hopes, but hopes are never fulfilled.Years passed and the night came when the commentary was completed. Vrihaspati closed the book, the wife came and removed the candle. Now he was free from the commentary and the absorption.He asked the woman, “Who are you? And why do you go on serving me like this?”The woman said, “I am absolutely blessed that at least you ask my name. It is more than I could have asked for. You must have forgotten – many days have passed. And you were so absorbed in your work, how can you remember, how can one expect to remember? I am Bhamati; you married me a few years ago. Since then I have been serving you.”Tears rolled down Vrihaspati’s cheeks and he said, “Now it is too late because I have taken a vow that the day the commentary was completed I would renounce the world. It is too late. I cannot be a husband to you anymore. I have renounced the world. Closing the book is closing this chapter of my life. I am now a sannyasin. But I feel tremendously grateful to you. You are a rare woman. Just out of gratitude I will call my commentary, Bhamati.”Hence his commentary on the Brahma Sutras is called Bhamati. On the surface there is no relation between Bhamati and the Brahma Sutras, but that is what Vrihaspati called it. And he said to his wife, “That way your story will be remembered for centuries.” Yes, many centuries have passed, and I have remembered it, and now you will remember it. A rare woman, and a rare man, and a rare story.This is concentration, absolute concentration. It is possible to be so concentrated on something that everything else is excluded.It is said of Thomas Alva Edison, a great scientist – the greatest because he alone discovered at least one thousand things. Nobody else has done so much. Many things that you are using are Edison’s inventions: the electric bulb, the gramophone – many things.He used to become so absorbed in his work that once he forgot his own name. It is very difficult to forget your own name even if you want to. It becomes so ingrained, it goes so deep in the memory that it becomes part of your unconscious. Even in your sleep you remember your name.If you all fall asleep here – as you can, if I go on and on talking about meditation. What will you do? Where will you escape? You will start falling asleep. If you all fall asleep and suddenly I call somebody’s name – I call, “Mukta!” – then nobody else will hear. Only Mukta will hear. Mukta will open her eyes and will say, “Who is disturbing? And why me?” Even in deep sleep you remember your name. It is very difficult to forget it.But Edison once forgot his own name. Somebody else had to remind him. During the First World War, he was standing in a queue. When his name was called, he looked here and there. The clerk called again, then a man standing behind him told him, “As far as I know from the newspapers – I have seen your picture – you appear to be Thomas Alva Edison.”He said, “Yes, you are right! I was thinking, who is this man? Sounds as if I have heard this name before. I can recognize the name but I completely forgot that this is my own name.” He said, “I am very sorry.”This can happen to a scientist. He used to keep notes because he was working on so many things together, but then he would forget where he had put the notes. And he would use pieces of paper – that was his habit, something eccentric – on just small pieces of paper he would write great things. His whole study was full of pieces of paper. Every piece of paper had to be preserved because nobody knew what he had written on it. His wife had to take every care that no piece was ever lost because he asked, “Where is that piece?” And then he would go for hours because there were so many pieces of paper.The wife told him, “Why not use a notebook?”He said, “That’s such a great idea, why didn’t you tell me before?” So he used to carry a notebook but then he would forget the notebook, forget where he kept it. His concentration was so total on whatever he was working.It is not meditation – remember. Science needs concentration. Meditation is just the opposite of concentration. Concentration means bracketing out the whole world and pouring your consciousness on a single object.Meditation means no object at all, nothing to be excluded, nothing to be bracketed out. One simply relaxes, open, alert, available – available to all that is. The distant call of the cuckoo, and the noise of the train, and somebody honking his horn, and a child giggling. One is available to all and yet one is far away, transcendental.The first question the disciple asks is: What is meditation in emptiness?He can understand what meditation is, because then he will be able to understand it as concentration. But the condition is: in emptiness – that creates the problem.Meditation in emptiness. You have to be utterly empty, no thought, no desire, no object, no content of the mind. You are just an emptiness. Everything passes through you with no hindrance, no block. Winds come and go through the empty temple, sunrays come and go through the empty temple, people come and pass through the empty temple, and the temple remains empty. Everything comes and goes like shadows passing by and nothing distracts you. That point has to be remembered.In concentration everything distracts you. If you are concentratedly working on something and your wife starts talking to you, that is a distraction. If your child wants to ask a question, that is a distraction. If a dog starts barking in the neighborhood, that is a distraction. If you are trying to concentrate, everything is a distraction because concentration is an unnatural state, forced. Hence anything can distract you.But meditation is a natural, spontaneous flow. Nothing can distract you. That is the beauty of meditation: distraction is impossible. The dog can bark, and the child can ask a question, and the airplanes can go on flying in the sky making all kinds of noises. Nothing distracts because you are not concentrating at all. From where can you be distracted?If you are focusing, you can be distracted. If you are not focusing, how can you be distracted? See the point: meditation knows nothing of distraction. That’s its grace, its beauty, its grandeur. Nothing can disturb it. If your meditation can be disturbed, that simply means that you are concentrating and have not yet tasted meditation.Meditation is so vast it can contain everything, absorb everything, and yet remain empty.The disciple asks: What is meditation in emptiness? The disciple must have thought about meditation in terms of concentration. That’s how it always happens: the master says one thing, the disciple understands something else. That too is a natural process. I am not complaining about it.It is bound to happen because the master speaks from one plane and the disciple understands from a different plane. Something coming from the heights has to come down to the darkness of the valley, and the valley is bound to affect it. What to say about a master and disciple dialogue?Even in ordinary dialogue, when you are talking with people, you constantly feel you have not been understood. Sometimes the more you try, the more impossible it becomes, particularly when you are intimately related with people. A husband talking to his wife, the wife talking to the husband; the parents talking to the children, the children talking to the parents. It seems there is no possibility of communication at all.The husband says one thing, the wife immediately jumps to some other conclusion. The wife says something, the husband starts talking about something else. Their minds are preoccupied. They go on misinterpreting each other. Hence so much argumentation continues with no understanding at all.He called his doctor and began shouting hysterically, “My five-year-old son just swallowed a contraceptive!”“Don’t worry. I’ll be right over.”As the doctor was about to leave his office, his phone rang again and the same caller announced, “Forget it, Doc. I found another one!”It is very difficult to exactly know the meaning of the other.Grant had gone to France on vacation, met a pretty French girl, married her, and returned home with his bride to Cleveland. After being in this country only three weeks the poor little Parisian went to a clinic for an operation.On coming out from under the ether, she asked the doctor, “How soon can my husband and I resume our usual sex life?”“I’ll have to look in my medical book,” gulped the physician. “You’re the first patient who asked me that after a tonsillectomy.”You simply don’t know about the French and their ways of lovemaking!I have heard a story…A French professor of sexology was talking with an American professor of the same subject whom he met in a conference. The Frenchman was saying, “There are one hundred ways of making love.”The American was puzzled, “A hundred?” And when the Frenchman started relating all the ways, he was more and more puzzled. The hundredth way was: the husband hangs onto a chandelier, making love to his wife.The American said, “There are a hundred and one ways to make love.”The Frenchman could not believe it. He said, “That is not possible, because nobody knows more about love than us.”But the American insisted that there are a hundred and one.So the Frenchman said, “Yes, okay, start relating.”The American said, “The first is: the wife lying down on her back and the husband on top of her.”The Frenchman said, “Wait! I never thought about that!”Different people, different minds, different conditionings, different preoccupations, different prejudices. So when you talk, the words can’t have the same meaning. When you say something, you say it with one meaning and when it reaches the other, it has the meaning that he can give to those words. This is so in ordinary conversation. What to say about when a buddha talks to a disciple?The buddha is standing on the other shore, and the disciple is on this shore. The buddha is awakened and the disciple is fast asleep and snoring. The buddha speaks as an awakened one and the disciple listens as one who is asleep. In his dreams he distorts the meaning, he gives his own ideas, imposes his own concepts, philosophies, his own conclusions upon the words. Hence unless the master and disciple relationship is of a deep love affair, communication is not possible; it is impossible.Only in a deep, deep loving relationship, in deep intimacy where the disciple is simply in a let-go, he puts his mind aside and listens, not interfering at all. Never giving his own meanings, just listening attentively. Not being bothered whether what is said is right or wrong, or what it means. Only then can he listen, and that listening can be a transforming experience.From the disciple’s side great silence is needed, only then what the master speaks can be understood.The disciple’s question is: What is meditation in emptiness? He must have heard Bodhidharma talking again and again about meditation because in the East, masters have been talking only about meditation. You can ask any question. They will bring the subject to meditation sooner or later, and it is going to be sooner than later.You ask about God and they will talk about meditation. You ask, “Who am I?” and they will talk about meditation. You ask, “Who created the world?” and they will talk about meditation – because the East knows the key.Meditation is the key to all the mysteries of life and existence. Hence it is pointless to go on talking about other subjects. If we can make the disciple understand what meditation is, then he is going to open, unlock all the doors on his own, and he will be able to see and experience on his own. And only your experience is liberating, because then it is authentically your truth.Jesus says: “Truth liberates.” Certainly, truth liberates. Absolutely, truth liberates. I agree with him, but his statement seems to be only half. The full statement should be: Truth liberates, but the truth has to be your own. If it is somebody else’s truth, rather than liberating, it binds you, it chains you, it imprisons you.Bodhidharma says:One observes things in the phenomenal world, yet always dwells in emptiness. That is meditation in emptiness.A simple answer, just the essential answer, but if you can understand the answer in an existential way, you will never be the same again. Simple words, but they can become a ladder to the other world.One observes things in the phenomenal world, yet always dwells in emptiness. That is meditation… See the whole world as if it consists of shadows. It really consists of shadows. It is made of dream stuff. Because we believe in it, it gains reality in the same proportion that we believe in it. The moment your belief disappears, the thing that you believed in also disappears.You see a woman and you project beauty on her, and she looks so beautiful, so golden, not of this world at all, and you fall in love. And you are falling in love with your own dream, remember. The woman has nothing to do with it. That’s why lovers are thought to be blind and mad, because nobody else can agree with them.Majnu was mad about a woman, Laila, so mad that there never has been such a mad lover. He tops the list. The king of the country called him because he started feeling sorry for this young man. And because Majnu was so much in love with Laila, even the king had become interested, “Who is this woman?” He was also interested in beautiful women, so he made inquiries.He saw the woman and he was shocked. She was just very plain, homely, very ordinary. Then he felt even sorrier for this young man. “He is just a fool, or mad, or gone blind, or what has happened to him?”And he was the most intelligent young man in the capital – beautiful, healthy – destroying his health, destroying his intelligence for an ordinary woman.The king called him to court. He said, “You must be mad, because I have seen your Laila. She is just an ordinary woman. But I feel sorry for you. We have been hoping much from you. We were thinking you would become a great man, but you are destroying yourself. I will give you one of the best women from my family. I have many beautiful women.”He called a dozen girls and he told Majnu, “You can choose any, and that one will be yours.”Majnu looked from one girl to another and shook his head and said, “No. This is not Laila, this too is not Laila.” He rejected all twelve girls. He said, “Not one is Laila.”The king said, “You are certainly mad. Laila is nothing compared to these beautiful girls. They belong to the royal family!”Majnu said, “Sir, I can understand your compassion for me, but I am sorry to say that you cannot see Laila unless you see her through my eyes.”This is a significant statement, from a madman of course, but sometimes mad people make very sane statements. “Unless you see from my eyes,” Majnu says, “you will not be able to see the beauty of Laila.” In a way he is true, because the beauty is not there in Laila, it is projected through his eyes. Laila is just the screen on which he is projecting a certain idea.Every lover is doing it. You fall in love with your own projection. That’s why it is always frustrating. If you happen to get your woman or your man, you will be frustrated. Blessed are those who never get their man or their woman because they never get frustrated. They always remain loving, they always go on hoping.Cursed are those who succeed because then it is very difficult to go on carrying the old projection. When you come closer to the screen and you touch the screen, how long can you feel that there is beauty? Sooner or later you will see that there is only a plain screen; you have been projecting. Hence all lovers, if they succeed, become very frustrated.This world consists of our projections. In fact, when Bodhidharma talks about the world, he is talking only about your projections. He is not talking about the trees and the rocks and the mountains and the stars. He is talking about your projections. The rose is a rose is a rose – neither beautiful nor ugly. It simply is itself; you project your idea.Just a hundred years ago, nobody thought that cactuses were beautiful. But now they are in, and the rose is out. Now to talk about roses looks a little old fashioned. If you tell your woman, “Your face is like a rose,” she will think you are just old hat. Tell her, “You look like a cactus,” and she will think, “Yes, you are modern, up-to-date. You understand Picasso and Dali and modern art.”Now people keep cactuses in their drawing rooms. They used to put cactuses only on the fences of their fields and gardens to protect. Now the cactus has entered the drawing room. Suddenly the beauty is discovered. For centuries nobody had ever thought – neither Shakespeare nor Kalidas, neither Milton nor Tennyson – nobody had ever talked about the cactus and praised the cactus. But now we have started projecting beauty on the cactus.We are tired of roses: enough is enough. Thousands of years, and we have said everything about roses; we are finished. Nothing new can be said about roses. All that could be said has been said, and said so beautifully that there is no way to improve upon it. And we have a great need to project. Hence fashions change, because everybody has a need to project his ideas. Hence we need new screens.And the idea of beauty goes on changing. In every country there is a different idea of beauty. What is beautiful to the American is not beautiful to the Indian; what is beautiful to the Indian is not beautiful to the African; what is beautiful to the African is not beautiful to the Chinese. Different ideas.Then is there something like objective beauty? There is none. Existence is simply there with no adjective. There is neither good nor bad, there is neither beautiful nor ugly. Hence Bodhidharma says, “Drop likings and dislikings. Stop choosing, stop projecting, and the world disappears.”Not that the trees will not be there and the mountains will not be there, not that you will be able to pass through the walls. The walls will be there and the trees will be there and the mountains will be there, and everything will be there in its absolute truth, but your dreams will not be there at all. And we have become so attached to our dreams; that’s why meditation seems to be difficult.Patient: “Doctor, all night long I dream about baseball, and it happens night after night.”Psychiatrist: “Well, that can be easily remedied. Do you have any favorite actress?”Patient: “Yes, Elizabeth Taylor.”Psychiatrist: “Well then, all you do is think of her at night.”Patient: “What! And lose my turn at bat!”I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin nudged his wife in the bed one night and said, “Quick, bring my specs!”The wife said, “In the middle of the night? What do you want your specs for?”He said, “Don’t waste time, bring my specs!”But the wife insisted, “First I have to know why, for what. What are you going to see in the middle of the night?”Mullah said, “You’re going to destroy the whole thing. I was just having a dream. Three beautiful women: Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren… Two I could recognize; the third, the most beautiful, I couldn’t recognize. Bring me my specs!“You know that my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I’m getting old and I can’t see things clearly.”People are living in dreams. There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who live in dreams and those who live in awareness. To be a sannyasin means the beginning of living in awareness.Bodhidharma says: One observes things in the phenomenal world, yet always dwells in emptiness. One goes on seeing shadows, dreams, projections, but remembers that all this is just dream stuff. Remembering it, deep down, one remains utterly empty. The mirror never clings to any reflection. However beautiful the face may be looking into the mirror, it never clings to it. The face is reflected. When the person has moved, the face disappears. The mirror remains empty, so is the meditator. He reflects everything and yet remains empty because he clings not.The second question:How can one dwell in dharma?Bodhidharma says:One should stay neither in in-dwelling dharma nor in non-dwelling dharma. He should live naturally in dharma. This is what you call dwelling in dharma.Bodhidharma’s way of expression may seem a little strange, but he can’t help it. He has to say it as it is.The disciple asks: How can one dwell in dharma? By dharma, remember: ordinarily it is translated as religion. That too is not right. Dharma is not religion. Religion is an attitude toward reality. Dharma is not an attitude toward reality. Dharma is simply living naturally, spontaneously. To live in tune with nature is dharma.That is Bodhidharma’s experience and that is my experience too: to live naturally, without interfering with your spontaneity, to live moment to moment without being dominated by the past or the future is dharma.Bodhidharma says: Forget about in-dwelling dharma and non-dwelling dharma. That is bringing your mind in, creating categories. Live simply and naturally.A Zen master is reported to have said… When asked, “What is dharma?” he said “When I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel sleepy I sleep.”What a tremendously beautiful answer. What height, what depth! One would never expect such an answer, but so simple, so innocent: “When I feel hungry, I eat.” The master is saying: “Be natural, that is dharma.”Another Zen master was asked, “Before you became enlightened, what did you used to do?”He said, “I used to chop wood and carry water from the well.”And then he was asked, “Now that you have become enlightened, a buddha, what do you do?”He said, “What else can I do? I chop wood and carry water from the well.”The questioner was naturally puzzled. He said, “Then what is the difference? Before enlightenment you used to do the same thing, after enlightenment you are doing the same thing, then what is the difference?”And the master laughed and he said, “The difference is great. Before, I had to do it. Now it is all naturally happening. Before, I had to make an effort. Before I became enlightened it was a duty to be fulfilled, somehow done, grudgingly, reluctantly. I was doing it because I was ordered to do it. It was my master’s order to chop wood, so I was chopping. But deep down I was angry: ‘How long is this old fool going to force me to chop wood and carry water from the well? How long?’ Although on the surface I was not saying anything.“Now, I simply chop wood because I know the beauty of it, the joy of it. I carry water from the well because it is needed. It is no longer a duty, it is my love. I love the old man. It is getting cold, winter is just knocking on the doors. We will need wood. The master is getting older and older every day. He needs more warmth. We will have to heat his place. It is out of love that I chop wood. It is out of love that I carry water for him from the well.“Now a great difference has happened. There is no reluctance, no resistance. There is no ego, I am not following anybody’s orders. I am not being obedient. I am simply responding to the moment and its necessity.”Bodhidharma says: To live naturally is to dwell in dharma. You need not be a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist, you have only to be natural, just as natural as you breathe. Live your life. Don’t live according to certain commandments. Don’t live according to others’ ideas. Don’t live because people want you to live that way. Listen to your own heart. Be silent and listen to the still, small voice within and follow it. And that is dwelling in dharma.The third question:How can a man live as not-man and a woman as not-woman?Buddha has said, “The deeper you go, the more you become aware that you are not the body, you are not the mind, you are not even the heart. You are only a being, a consciousness, a pure witness.” Hence in meditation there is nobody who is a man or a woman. In meditation you are so deep in your being, from that peak all differences – biological differences, physiological differences – disappear.Bodhidharma says:There is no difference in buddha-nature between a man and a woman, nor an entity designated as man or woman. Physical matter produces the grass and trees as it does human beings. In comparison you say “grass” or “trees.” You give all sorts of names to your illusions. Buddha said, “If one sees that everything exists as an illusion, he can live in a higher sphere than ordinary man.”The ordinary man lives in the body, thinking that he is the body; in the mind, thinking that he is the mind. The moment you start transcending the bodymind complex, you start becoming extraordinary. You start living on higher planes, and from higher planes things are totally different.There is a story in Buddha’s life…He was meditating under a tree. It was a full-moon night. A group of young men had come to the forest for a picnic. They had brought a prostitute with them, and much wine and delicious food. They drank, they ate, they danced. They drank so much that they forgot all about the prostitute. The prostitute escaped, but she had to escape naked because before they started drinking they had taken her clothes away.As the night was coming closer and closer to the morn, a cool breeze started blowing, and they became a little alert and they remembered, “Where is the prostitute?” Her clothes were there, but she was missing. So they went to search. There was only one way for the prostitute to escape to the town and they remembered that they had seen a certain man meditating under a tree. So they went to the man. She must have passed him. They were not aware that he is Gautama the Buddha.They asked Buddha, “Sir, have you seen a naked woman, a beautiful woman, going toward the town? Because this is the only possible path. We had brought a woman with us. She has escaped, and she was naked.”Buddha said, “Yes, somebody did pass, but it is impossible for me to say whether the person who passed was a he or a she. Yes, somebody did pass, but it is difficult for me to say whether the person was naked or clothed.”The young people were puzzled. They said, “If you have seen the person, you must have seen…because the woman was really beautiful. You must have seen that she is a woman and you must have seen that she is naked.”Buddha said, “You have come a little late. Before, I used to see women and men. And, of course, when you see a naked woman, how can you not recognize her? But those days are gone. I was in meditation, so when somebody passed, I was bound to see…”Buddha used to meditate with half-open eyes. He always followed the middle course.There are three possibilities. You can meditate with closed eyes. Buddha has said: “Don’t do that, because there is every possibility you will fall asleep.” With closed eyes the tendency of the mind is to fall asleep, to go into a reverie, into dreams, because for centuries, for lives together, closed eyes have become associated with sleep and dreaming. So, the moment you close your eyes, it immediately triggers a process of sleep in you. It is very difficult to remain awake with closed eyes, so Buddha has said, “Don’t do that.”The other possibility is concentrate with open eyes, but that is concentration. Concentration can be done with open eyes. You can focus your eyes on something. But meditation is a relaxed state. With open eyes, fully open eyes, there will be a certain tension in the eyes.The eyes are part of your brain: eighty percent of your brain energy functions through the eyes. If your eyes are tense your brain will be tense. That’s why if you have to watch TV for hours, you become so tired. You go to the movie and you go on watching for hours. You forget blinking. That’s why you become tired: you don’t blink – you can’t afford to – so much is happening on the screen. You don’t want to miss any of it, so you drop blinking. Looking at the screen for three hours, unblinking, is bound to tire your eyes and your brain too.Now recent research shows that people who are watching TV for four, five, six hours a day are bound to suffer some brain damage. There is every possibility they will become victims of brain cancer. So much tension is bound to create damage to the very delicate and fragile nervous system of your brain.Buddha said, “Meditate with eyes half open; that is the most relaxed state.” You can’t see anything clearly; everything becomes vague. And that’s what Buddha wants you to know: that everything is vague, shadowy, dreamy. You cannot fall asleep because you have to keep your eyes half open, and you cannot be tired and tense because you are not forcing your eyes to be fully open. With half-open eyes is the most relaxed state. Try it and you will see. Whenever you sit with half-open eyes, you will feel a great relaxation descending on you.So Buddha said, “I was meditating with my eyes half open. Somebody passed, certainly somebody passed, but I can’t make any distinction whether the person was a man or a woman. Because I am no longer identified with my own body, hence I don’t think in terms of the body for others too. And who cares whether the person was naked or clothed because I am not interested in their bodies!”Ordinarily just the opposite happens. When you see a beautiful woman passing by, you start disrobing her, at least in your mind. You start penetrating her clothes, you start visualizing her. How she will be when she is naked. That’s why a woman hidden behind clothes is far more beautiful than when she is naked. For a certain reason: when she is clothed, your imagination can imagine anything. You have full freedom to imagine.But when she is naked there is no scope left for the imagination. And man’s sexuality is rooted in his imagination. So whenever a woman is hiding her body, you become more interested in her because you start imagining: the curves – which may not be there; the proportion – which may not be there.Clothes are very deceptive. Clothes have been discovered to create more sexuality in the world. It is because of clothes that people are obsessed with the sexual. If clothes disappear from the world, sexuality will be reduced to its natural proportion. If clothes disappear from the world, nobody will be interested in pornography. Pornography is interesting because of clothes.If people become a little more natural… I am not saying go to your office naked, but if people are natural then at least in their homes they will be naked. With their children they will play naked, at least in their own garden. If children know their parents naked from the very beginning they will never be interested in magazines like Playboy. Those magazines will look stupid.But the priests are against nudity. It seems there is a conspiracy between the priests and the people who deal in obscenity; there is a secret deal. Obscenity can exist only, obscene things can remain interesting only, if priests go on condemning nudity. Allow nudity on all the beaches and soon you will see nobody is interested in nudity at all. And because imagination has no more freedom, you see things more as they are.Right now you imagine. Hence the neighborhood woman is more interesting to you than your own wife. Your neighbor is more interested in your wife than he is interested in his wife. It seems everybody is interested in everybody else’s wife, everybody else’s husband. Nobody is interested in one’s own wife or husband.You already know the whole geography of the woman or the man. You know the whole topography. Now there is nothing to discover. It is a known territory. Imagination dies and with imagination, ninety-nine percent of sex disappears. And it will be a great thing in the world if ninety-nine percent of sexuality disappears, because then ninety-nine percent of your energy will be available for higher purposes.What I am saying is bound to be misunderstood, is being misunderstood. For years I have been saying these things but I have been condemned for these things. And the irony is that if I am listened to, I will prove to be the greatest danger to sexuality in the world. If I am allowed, the world can become absolutely nonsexual.Sex will be there but sexuality will disappear. Sex is a biological phenomenon, sexuality is a psychological phenomenon. In a primitive society, where people are nude, there is sex but no sexuality. And in cultured societies there is sexuality and not much sex.Buddha said, “Because I am no longer interested in sexuality, hence somebody passed, somebody certainly passed, but I cannot say absolutely, I cannot guarantee that the person was a woman.”Meditation means going deeper and deeper, closer to your being. The being is neither man nor woman. The being is simply transcendental to all categories.The fourth question:If one attains the nirvana of an arhat, has he Zen realization?The disciple is still thinking in terms of the mind, in categories. When you think, you are always full of ifs and buts. When you know, there is no if and no but.The disciple asks: If one attains the nirvana… In the first place nirvana is never attained. It is your nature. It is simply discovered, remembered rather. It is not attained. And: …the nirvana of an arhat… The Buddhist scholars divide nirvana into two categories. Scholars cannot remain without creating categories; that is their whole work, their whole function. There are two kinds of buddhas according to the scholars: one is called an arhat, the other is called a bodhisattva.An arhat is one who attains buddhahood and disappears into the ultimate, does not care about others, does not bother about sharing his insight with others. And the bodhisattva is one who attains buddhahood, but resists the temptation to disappear into the ultimate and helps people, is compassionate.Now, even with nirvana the mind of the scholar has created a category. He has created a division, a duality.Bodhidharma simply answers in his own unique, inimitable way. He says:He is just dreaming and so are you.These scholars are dreamers. A real seeker has nothing to do with ifs and buts. A real seeker does not bother what happens after nirvana. First he moves toward it, knows it by his own experience, and then whatever happens, happens. One becomes natural and allows it to happen, one remains in a let-go. One does not go on thinking and philosophizing.The fifth question:If one practices the six paramitas, and passes through the ten stages of bodhisattvahood, and completes ten thousand virtues, he should know that all things are not born, therefore they are not going to perish. Such realization is neither intuition nor intellectuality. He has nothing to receive and there is nothing to receive him. Has this man Zen realization?All speculative questions, questions out of the mind: irrelevant, insignificant, meaningless, absurd. But they look like great questions and scholars devote their whole lives on such questions.In the Middle Ages there was a great controversy among Christian theologians. Still, the controversy is there: indecisive, no conclusion has yet been reached, but the whole thing started looking so foolish that the project has been dropped. But for three hundred years in the Middle Ages, the controversy was such that the whole Christian world was involved in it.The problem was: How many angels can dance on one needle-point? Now it looks foolish, but it was not foolish to those people. And they were great scholars, people who knew the scriptures, subtleties of logic. For them it was really a great question, because angels don’t have any weight and angels have the capacity to become big or small as they wish, so how many angels can you accommodate on a single needle-point? Now you will throw the question into the dustbin, but for three hundred years, people remained concerned with it.These questions are of the same type. If one practices the six paramitas – the six methods of being perfect… And buddhas say you are already perfect, so there is no question of practicing perfection. One who practices perfection will remain imperfect. His perfection will be just on the surface, deep down he will be imperfect. He will repress his imperfections and cultivate a kind of perfection and will remain divided. He is not truly perfect. You cannot be anything other than you are. You are already perfect. You are gods in disguise. You are buddhas asleep. Wake up, and there is no need to practice anything.In your dream you can go on practicing a thousand and one things and nothing is going to happen. When you will wake up, you will find that all that effort was useless.Now these six paramitas……and passes through the ten stages of bodhisattvahood…There are no stages at all. Are there stages between sleep and awakening? There are no stages. Either you are asleep or you are awake. It is a jump, a quantum leap.Are there stages when water evaporates? There are no stages. At ninety degrees the water is water. At ninety-nine degrees the water is still water although hot. At ninety-nine point nine degrees the water is still water although utterly hot. And one step more, just one step, one single jump, and the water evaporates. There are no gradual stages in evaporating.A man either is alive or dead. You never find somebody who is half dead, quarter dead, one-tenth dead. It is not attained in parts.I have heard a story…In the Second World War, an English general shot down a German plane and the pilot was very much wounded. The English general talked to the pilot, who was also a general, so he gave him all the respect due to a general of the enemy. He was taken to hospital, taken care of. One leg was so damaged that it had to be cut off, amputated. The English general asked the German, “Can I be of any help?”The German said, “It will be of great compassion toward me if you can send my leg back to my home, because it has been my longest desire to be buried in my own fatherland.”The English general said, “That is not a problem at all.”They packed the leg, sent it to Germany, to his home. But then one of his hands had to be cut off. That too was sent. Then another leg, then another hand.When the last hand was being sent, the English general asked, “Can I ask you a question? Are you trying to escape part by part?”You cannot escape part by part, and you cannot become enlightened part by part. It is not a gradual process, it is sudden enlightenment. But scholars need some work, so they go on dividing. Buddhas go on saying that it is a quantum leap and scholars go on dividing: there are ten stages of bodhisattva-hood and ten thousand virtues. One virtue is enough: awareness. They talk about ten thousand virtues. There is only one virtue: to be awake. All else follows on its own accord.The disciple asks:…he should know that all things are not born, therefore, they are not going to perish. Such realization is neither intuition nor intellectuality. He has nothing to receive and there is nothing to receive him. Has this man Zen realization?Bodhidharma says:He is just dreaming, so are you.Bodhidharma does not even bother to answer and explain. He is not a philosopher, he simply puts the question aside. He said: Don’t talk nonsense. You are dreaming, and not only are you dreaming: if there is somebody who thinks that he is at the ninth stage of bodhisattva-hood, he is dreaming too. If somebody thinks that he has fulfilled all the six paramitas, all six perfections, he is dreaming too. In fact, the person who thinks, “I have attained buddhahood” is simply dreaming because buddhahood is not something to be attained.And when you reach that realization, you simply become aware that there was nothing to attain from the very beginning. From the very beginning you are a buddha. You have always been a buddha. You had just fallen asleep, you had just forgotten who you are. It is only a question of remembering, of recognizing, of rediscovering.The last question:If a man has ten powers, and accomplishes four forms of fearlessness, and completes eighteen systems of the teaching, he is the same as Buddha who attained enlightenment under the pippala tree. He can save sentient beings and then enter into nirvana. Is he not a real buddha?Bodhidharma must be feeling very sorry for this man, because he goes on asking the same question in different ways. It is the same stupidity – called scholarship. Again and again he brings the same question in a different form. But the masters are always patient. They have to be, otherwise it is impossible to work with the disciples.Bodhidharma again says:He is just dreaming and so are you.A simple statement, but with great potential. The moment you start thinking you have become enlightened, beware. If you think you have become enlightened then you have not become yet. If you think you have become a buddha and you start proving that you have become a buddha, know perfectly well you are not yet.A buddha needs no proof. He does not argue for it, he simply knows it. And there is no way to prove it. He knows it is not something great that he has done, not a big deal. It is a simple phenomenon: he has looked in. He could have looked any time, any day, and he would have found the buddha inside.When Buddha became enlightened, the first question that he was asked was, “What have you attained?”He laughed. He said, “Nothing. I have not attained anything. On the contrary, I have lost many things.”Naturally, the questioner was shocked. He said, “We have always been hearing that to become a buddha is to attain the perfect, the ultimate, the eternal. And you are saying that rather than attaining anything, you have lost many things. What do you mean?”Buddha said, “Exactly what I have said. I have lost my ego, I have lost my knowledge, I have lost my ignorance. I have lost my being a man. I have lost my body, my mind, my heart. I have lost thousands of things and I have not gained a single thing – because whatever I have gained has always been mine, it is my nature. The unnatural has been lost, and the natural has blossomed. It is not an attainment at all. To think in terms of attainment is to remain in a dream.”Bodhidharma is right: He is just dreaming and so are you.Remember these words of Bodhidharma, let them resound in your being, because you will dream these things many times. Many people go on writing to me: “Osho, this has happened… Is this the first satori or the second or the third? I have experienced great light. How far am I from buddhahood now?” Every day people go on asking.Remember Bodhidharma. Next time such a question arises in you and you start writing a letter to me, don’t send it to me. Just write on top of your letter: “I am dreaming.”Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 04 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is a poet? What is poetry?There are three ways of looking at existence: feeling it, seeing it, being it. The first is science, the second is art, the third is religion.Science looks at the universe in an objective way. It looks at the universe as if it is there, outside. Hence science concludes that there is only matter and nothing else. The very method of science limits it; it is a great limitation. If you look in an objective way, you can catch hold only of the objectivity of existence. That is matter. Matter is the objectiveness of existence.The word object is significant. It means: that which obstructs, objects you. Anything that obstructs your vision is an object. Hence science becomes antagonistic toward the world. It starts trying to conquer it because the object is the enemy and has to be conquered.It is because of the scientific approach that man has become so alienated from nature. And now he feels so isolated and alone that it seems suicide is the only way to get rid of the whole misery that this isolation has created.The second approach, the second way, is that of art, aesthetics, poetry. It is a subjective approach toward existence. Art is not concerned what is there, but what is here, inside you.It is not concerned with the roseflower itself but how it feels to you. When you see the roseflower, what happens in your inner world? When you see the sunrise, how does it reflect in your being? When the cuckoo starts calling from a distance, how does it echo in your innermost recesses?Art is concerned with your response: not what is there but what is inside you. Art is closer to home than science, although not yet exactly in the home, but on the way. It is a midpoint between science and religion. Art gives you more freedom than science.The poet has more freedom than the mathematician; the musician has more freedom than the physicist. The scientist is obstructed by his own objects. The scientist cannot go beyond matter, and matter defines his world. But the poet can soar, can go beyond, can create his own worlds.Science discovers, art creates. Science can only discover that which is already there. Art creates, hence art brings you closer to the creator.And whenever I talk about poetry, I mean the essence of art. Poetry is the essence of art. The sculptor is creating poetry in stone, the musician is creating poetry in sound, the painter is creating poetry on a canvas with colors. They are all poets. Their mediums differ, their expressions differ, but their basic approach is not of arithmetic but of poetry.Because science has become too dominant, art has almost disappeared. It is no longer thriving, it is no longer as alive as it always has been in the past. Science has taken over everything. Hence the great boredom felt in the world, because unless you are creative you are bound to be bored.Only a creative person knows how to drop boredom. The creative person knows no boredom at all. He is thrilled, enchanted, he is constantly in a state of adventure. And small things create such ecstatic states within him. A butterfly is enough to trigger a process in his being. Just a small flower is enough to bring a spring into his heart. A silent lake reflecting the stars, and the poet himself becomes a silent lake and starts reflecting millions of stars.Science is the root cause of boredom in the world. First it creates isolation: man is no longer part of nature, he stands outside. He becomes just an observer, a spectator, no longer a participant.And unless you participate in the celebration, unless you participate in the dance, you are bound to be bored. Isolated from existence, antagonistic to existence, trying to conquer it, you are simply killing yourself. And you become fed up, bored. Life loses meaning, there is no significance, there are only things without any significance, and life appears only to be an accident with no intrinsic value. Yes, things have a price, but nothing has value as far as science is concerned.As far as poetry is concerned, things are valuable, they don’t have any price. How can you price a beautiful roseflower? It is impossible. Its beauty is immeasurable. It is not possible to fix its price. Yes, a value is there… And remember, value is not price, value is your appreciation. The rose and the star and the moon and the sun are not marketable. You cannot sell them, you cannot purchase them. You can enjoy them, but you cannot possess them.A price means you can possess a thing, you can sell and purchase it; it is a commodity. Value means it is not a commodity. It is an experience, it is a love phenomenon.Science lives through logic, poetry lives through love. Poetry is a loving approach toward existence. Science is a kind of rape. Poetry is a love affair. Yes, in rape also you go through the act of penetration, and in love too, but there is such a vast distance; unbridgeable is the gap. You can rape a woman, she may even get pregnant, but it is not knowing the mystery of the woman. You will not know the joy of love. And if rape becomes your very style, you will be missing something of tremendous value. Your life will remain empty, hollow.Poetry is a love affair with existence. Existence has to be persuaded: seduced, not conquered – loved. And love never tries to conquer. On the contrary, love is surrender. The poet is closer to home because he starts surrendering, he starts loving, he starts living subjectively. He starts living from the center. The scientist lives from the circumference.I have deep respect for poetry and the people who have a poetic vision, the poets of all kinds: musicians, sculptors, painters, singers, dancers, actors. Whoever is creative in whatever way is a poet. Poetry is the essence of all art. But there is one step still to be taken.Religion is transcendental. It is neither objective nor subjective, because both are halves of one whole. Science has chosen one half: the outside, the objective. Poetry has chosen the other half: the subjective, the inner. But both are half, and half can never be fulfilling.One needs the whole to become whole. Religion is whole. It is neither objective nor subjective; it is transcendental. It goes beyond both and includes both. It encompasses both and yet is not limited by either. That is the highest flight possible for human consciousness.Religion dissolves all dualities. And the duality between the subjective and the objective is the fundamental duality between within and without. Religion dissolves both, then there is only one single phenomenon. The within is without and the without is within. There is no distinction, no gap. The within is becoming without every moment and the without is becoming within every moment: just like breathing. Just a second before it was without, now it is within, again it is without. The breath comes in, goes out, comes in, goes out. Just like that, existence is continuously merging. It is one orgasmic unity, it is not two.The scientist is approaching reality as a male mind. It is the masculine approach: conquer nature. And the poet approaches reality with the feminine mind: surrender, be receptive, open up to reality, be in a let-go, relax. Religion is neither male nor female. It is just a witnessing of both. But the scientist is very far away from religion. The poet is a little closer.That’s why I sometimes talk about poetry, the poet, because before you can become transcendental you will have to learn how to be poetic. Science is taught by the society, by the school, the college, the university. Poetry is missing. Because it has no market value, nobody cares about it. If you have a poetic approach, your approach is so private it can’t be used by the society. And in fact, you may be a little problematic to the society because you will bring your private vision and your private vision can be a disturbance.The society lives with the collective; the object is collective. The rose as an object is a collective phenomenon, but when you approach the rose you approach in your own unique way. Somebody else will approach in his own unique way.Poetry is private. It is individual, it is not collective. And the society is always beware, alert, watchful, that private visions should not be supported because they become disruptive, they create chaos. The collective vision should be imposed on people.Christianity is a collective vision, Hinduism is a collective vision, Communism is a collective vision. Impose a collective thing on everybody so they all look alike and they all live alike, then they are all conformists.The poet is basically a rebel. The real poet is bound to be a revolutionary.Vincent van Gogh has painted his trees so high that they reach beyond the stars. Somebody asked him, “We have never seen such trees. What kind of trees are these and how can they go beyond the stars?”Van Gogh is reported to have said, “It doesn’t matter whether any tree succeeds or not. This is the desire of the tree that I have painted. This is the ambition of the tree, this is the very spirit, the longing of the tree. Every tree longs to go beyond the stars. I have seen it in trees, I have listened to the trees, I have watched them. I understand their language, and the message is clear and loud from every tree, from the smallest to the biggest, that they all are trying to go beyond the stars. Whether they succeed or not is another matter. I am not concerned with it, I am concerned with the inner feeling of the tree.”Now, Vincent van Gogh is right in a poetic way, not right in a scientific way. In a scientific way he looks absurd, but in a poetic way he is absolutely right. He says, “Trees are nothing but longings of the earth to meet the stars, desires of the earth to bridge the gap between itself and other stars. It may succeed, it may not succeed, that is beside the point.” That is irrelevant for van Gogh.The poet has his own vision. It is private, it is not collective. Hence all the people who believe in collectivity are antipoetic.Plato, the first collectivist in the world, writes in his utopian book, The Republic, that collectivity is his idea of the future society as societies should be. In his republic, poets won’t be allowed. Particularly poets – nobody else is prevented, but poets are prevented. They should not be allowed in the Platonic republic. Why? Why is he so afraid of the poets? – for the simple reason that the poet brings the individual, private vision, and that can create disruption.Plato wants to impose a certain pattern, one type of lifestyle, on everybody. He wants a kind of unity, forcibly imposed, and poets in that way are not reliable.It is not an accident that in Soviet Russia, after the revolution, poetry died. Before the revolution, Russia had given the greatest poets and novelists the world has ever known, in fact incomparable. No other country can compete. Who can compete with Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Turgenev? Who can compete with these giants? No other country has produced such great artists. If one has to decide about ten great novelists of the world, then five will be Russians – but prerevolution.After the revolution, suddenly the poetic activity fell down. The country of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky and Turgenev simply disappeared from the earth. It stopped producing that kind of man, that quality; it stopped soaring high.Communism was imposed, a collective vision was imposed. Now every poet had to serve Communism, every painter had to serve Communism, every singer had to sing songs in praise of Communism. Now the government was the deciding factor about what true literature is and what is true art and who is a true poet. Stupid government officials were going to decide: those who have no idea of poetry. If they had any idea of poetry in the first place they would not be government officials at all.Just think of a collector, a commissioner, a governor: do you think these people can have poetic ideas? They seem to be worlds apart. And the people who were reading Marx and Engels and Lenin, can they have any idea of poetry?Marx is so unpoetic in his writings. It is so tedious to read him. I have gone through the torture, so I tell you from my experience. Who has read Das Kapital? It is so ugly, it really needs guts to go through it. Otherwise two, three pages are enough and one feels finished. Even Communists don’t read it. I know. Many of my friends are Communists and they have not read it. Just tedium, boredom: nothing of poetry in it, nothing of beauty in it.Jesus has poetry, he speaks poetry. Buddha has poetry, he lives poetry. Marx has no poetry at all, just dry, dull logic. Even the logic is not very sharp. People who have been living on such rubbish, they are going to decide about Dostoevsky, about Tolstoy, about Turgenev? They will not be able to understand these people, they are bound to misunderstand.In Russia, poetry died; that has been one of the greatest losses to humanity. In China it is dead, because poets are in the service of the state now. They are rewarded, they are respected, they have been given big posts in the universities, but on the condition that they are not to be poets of freedom. They have to be poets of slavery, they have to serve the state.And a real poet cannot serve anybody, he serves only poetry. He writes, he sings, not for any other motive. Art for art’s sake. There is no motive and no goal in it. His singing is just like the birds singing in the early morning sun, flowers blooming, bees humming. Yes, exactly like that: utterly free, natural, spontaneous.I am absolutely in support of the poetic way of life, because it brings you closer to religion. But don’t stop there. The poet has only glimpses of the truth, only glimpses, faraway glimpses, as if a window suddenly opens in a strong wind and closes again. As if on a dark, dark night you are lost in a forest, and clouds are in the sky, dark clouds, and then there is thunder and lightning.When the lightning is there, for a moment all is light, you can see everything: the trees, the path, the rocks, the mountains. But only for a moment, and then the lightning is gone and the darkness deepens, becomes darker than ever before. You are dazed, more in darkness. You may stumble upon a rock, because before the lightning you were taking every care. You were moving cautiously, but now a glimpse that you are on the right path, you may become less careful, less aware. You may stumble upon a rock, you may fall in a ditch, you may go astray. And the lightning naturally makes you see less. It is so sudden, it blinds you.The poet has only lightning experiences. Once in a while he rises to the heights of consciousness, but then he falls – and falls badly, falls deeper than he was before. The poet has only enlightening experiences. And the mystic is enlightened: he has become light itself. Now there will never be any darkness again. But the lightning can give you an idea, what it will be to be full of light.The poet has glimpses, the mystic abides on those heights. Not far away glimpses: he has reached Everest, he has made his hermitage there, he stays there. Even if he comes sometimes to visit you in your dark valley he brings his heights with him, his peaks with him. His Everest follows him. It has become his very climate.The scientist is the farthest, the poet is in the middle, and the mystic is at the very center of existence. Move from being a scientist toward being a poet. But don’t stop there either, go on moving.Buddha said, “Charaiveti, charaiveti.” Walk on, walk on, till you arrive at a point from where there is nowhere to go. Unless you come to that point, to that ultimate point from where there is no way to go anywhere – then settle, only then settle. Then you are at home. Then life is a bliss, then life is a blessing, then life is a benediction.The second question:Osho,Who am I?How am I to know? How can I answer this question? Except you, nobody can answer it for you. I cannot answer it on your behalf. I know who I am, but how can I say who you are? You will have to dive deep within your own self. And the people who have been answering on your behalf are your enemies, because you will start collecting, accumulating their answers. You will become knowledgeable, and to become knowledgeable is to prevent wisdom from arising.Yes, thousands of answers are available. I can also answer you very easily: that you are a soul, eternal, deathless. Amritasya putrah: that you are sons of god, sons of immortality. I can say to you all these beautiful things that have been said down the ages, but they are not going to help. If you cling to them, I have not helped you, I have hindered you. I have not been a master to you but an enemy, not a friend.I cannot answer it for you. It is not a question that can be answered by anybody other than yourself. You have to go into your own self. You have to search. You have to ask and inquire, “Who am I?” It is a very private, absolutely private question, and only you are capable of knowing the answer. And not through scriptures, remember, but through a deep inquiry into your own being. That very inquiry is meditation.Ramana Maharshi used to give only one meditation to his disciples: sit silently and go on inquiring within yourself, “Who am I?” First verbally, and then slowly, slowly let the words disappear and let the question become a feeling. “Who am I?” – just a feeling, just a question mark deep down in your heart. And go on asking. One day even that feeling disappears. There is no question; suddenly you are questionless.The question “Who am I?” will help you to destroy all other questions, and then finally it commits suicide. You are left with no question. And that is the moment of the answer arising in you. And even if you know, you will not be able to communicate it to anybody else. It is incommunicable.You ask me, “Who am I?” You are Sanjaya; this is your name. You are a man; you have a body of a man. You are an educated person; you have a medical degree. These things can be answered by anybody, but these are not you. You are a Hindu; you have lived the life of a so-called Hindu religious man. You know the Gita. You have read it so many times that you can simply repeat it by memory. And in the Gita, Krishna has answered so many times, “Who are you?” so you must be knowing those answers too.Beware of people who answer such deep questions of yours. Only superficial questions can be answered by others. If somebody starts telling you about your deepest core, stop him immediately. It is none of his business and he is going to make a mess of you.A bachelor sent in his income tax return.One of the agents working for the Internal Revenue Service noticed that he claimed a six-hundred-dollar deduction for the upbringing of a baby. He wrote the man a letter saying, “That obviously must be a stenographical error.”The return letter read: “Sir, Are you telling me!”Get it?Whenever somebody else tells you who you are, stop him immediately. This is none of his business, and whatever he says to you is going to harm you. It is poisonous.The real master will not tell you who you are, of course. He will shake you and shock you into awareness.The two patients met with each other in the asylum grounds.“Good morning, Fosdike, how are you?”“I’m fine, Cartwright, but my name isn’t Fosdike.”“Mine’s not Cartwright either.”“Not to worry, we’re probably not ourselves today.”But this is the situation of the whole world: the whole earth is almost like a madhouse. Nobody knows who he is. People who don’t know who they are go on telling others about their innermost selves. They are simply repeating like parrots. Scriptures, beautiful scriptures, but in their hands all scriptures lose their truth.When somebody who is awakened says something, it has a truth in it, but when unawakened people repeat it, it becomes untrue. Truth repeated by those who have not experienced becomes untrue. Truth borrowed becomes untrue.Only one thing can be said: that you are in a deep unconsciousness. The unconsciousness has to be broken. The ice has to be melted. Once your unconsciousness is broken, once you have become a little conscious, you will be able to see who you are. You will be the first person to know who you are. See the unfortunate situation that we have to ask others, “Who am I?”The captain told the prisoner that he would be released if he fulfilled three conditions: “First, you must drink this gallon of Kentucky rotgut whiskey without stopping. Should you survive this, you must go outside to the animal cage where a lion has a bad tooth. You must remove the tooth barehanded, without anesthetic. And finally, if you survive the first two conditions, you must go out the back to a tent where a woman who has never, I repeat never, been sexually satisfied, is waiting for you to satisfy her. If you accomplish all three, I will set you free.”The prisoner shuddered, but feeling that he had no choice agreed to try. First he drank the whiskey, turning all shades of the color spectrum. He then stumbled out the front door. For an hour all that could be heard were screams and roars, shouts and more roars.Finally the prisoner returned, his clothes in shreds, his body covered in blood.“Okay,” he mumbled. “Now where’s the lady with the bad tooth?”The third question:Osho,Can meditation be learned, or is it, like love, a state of being that comes as a present?Meditation cannot be learned in a positive way, but it can be learned in a negative way. This is very important to understand: the basic method of meditation is negative.What do I mean when I say meditation can be learned negatively, only negatively? I mean that the mind can be unlearned, and the moment you unlearn the mind you are learning meditation. Unlearning the mind is learning meditation. When the mind has been completely unlearned you have learned meditation. You cannot go directly into learning meditation. All that is needed is to remove the mind.The mind is like a block. The river is there but blocked, it can’t flow. It is covered with rocks. Those rocks don’t allow it any outlet. It is surging inside you, it is longing for the ocean, it wants to get out of this prison. That’s why everybody feels so restless. This restlessness is nothing but your consciousness longing to meet with the ultimate. The river wants to reach the ocean.The seed wants to sprout, but it is covered, blocked by a big rock. That rock is of your mind. And it is a big rock because for many, many lives you have been accumulating it. Your meditation is simply crushed underneath it.You cannot reach meditation directly, but you can remove this rock chunk by chunk. You can take a chisel and a hammer – that’s what I go on providing you. Go on hammering on the rock. Slowly, slowly the rock will disappear. The day the rock disappears, suddenly a flow, a fresh flow of water, will start running toward the ocean. That is meditation.Hence in one sense, meditation cannot be learned. You cannot practice it because all practicing is of the mind. All practices strengthen the mind, make it stronger. And the mind has to be made weaker. Its power over you has to be destroyed. It has to be put in its right place. It is not the master – it has become the master. You have to stop cooperating with it; you have to stop giving more and more nourishment to it.That’s what I mean by unlearning the mind. Don’t support it. Don’t cling to it. Don’t rely on it. Don’t be possessed by it. Don’t live according to its dictates. And then slowly, slowly the master is free from the slave. That master is your meditative quality.You ask me, “Can meditation be learned, or is it, like love, a state of being that comes as a present?” It is already there. It does not come like a present: nobody presents it to you. It is your very nature, svabhava, it is your very being. And so is love.When meditation has happened, love is its aroma, its perfume. A meditative person is naturally loving; it can’t be otherwise. A loving person is naturally meditative. If it is not so, then you are deceived, then you are carrying false coins.If a man thinks he is meditative and is not loving, then his meditation is nothing but a mind practice, something false, pseudo. Something which is not meditation is masquerading as meditation. He has been deceived by his mind.If a man thinks that he is very loving and is not meditative, his love is nothing but another name for lust. He knows nothing of love; he can’t know in the very nature of things.Aes dhammo sanantano. This is the ultimate law: meditation brings love naturally. It is its aroma, its fragrance. And love exists only around the flower called meditation, never otherwise. They are together.Either search for love or for meditation. And you can search only for one, because things are already too complicated. If you start searching for both, you will make them even more complicated. You may become more confused. Hence I say, search one. If you can find one, the other is found without any effort on your part. Either find love or find meditation and the other will be following it like a shadow.But they are not learned in a direct way as you learn mathematics, as you learn geography, history, as you learn a new language. That is not the way to learn meditation or love; they are learned in an indirect way.If you want to learn meditation, you will have to unlearn the ways of the mind. If you want to learn about love, if you want to learn love, you will have to unlearn the unloving ways that have become very ingrained in you. Anger, possessiveness, jealousy: these will have to be unlearned.And it never comes as a gift because it is already given. It is your innermost nature. Yes, it is a grace, a gift, but it is not going to happen in the future, it has already happened. You have never been without it, you can’t be without it. Love and meditation constitute your real essential core.The fourth question:Osho,I am amazed at your memory. To what do you attribute your remarkable memory?What are you talking about, man? I must have the worst memory possible! The reason you cannot detect it is only that I don’t care.Just the other day I was telling you a story about Vrihaspati and his wife – and it is not about Vrihaspati. But I don’t care! Just in the middle of telling it I remembered: it is about Vachaspati not about Vrihaspati! But so what? Vrihaspati or Vachaspati: they sound so alike. And that is not the point either. The name of the person does not matter. Whether I call him Vrihaspati or Vachaspati, the point is made all the same. I was talking about a concentrated mind: to whom it belonged need not be worried about.Once in Ahmedabad I was delivering a discourse. I mentioned a small story by Marcel. When I was going away from the hall and was entering the car, a professor approached and he said, “Sir, that story is not written by Marcel, it is written by Kafka.”I said, “Perfectly okay. So you can correct – at least for yourself you can correct it. As far as I am concerned it doesn’t matter.”He said, “But the story was written by Kafka!”I said, “I agree. And if somebody says it is written by Jean-Paul Sartre I will agree. I can even agree if somebody comes and says, ‘Sir, that story is written by yourself.’ I will agree. It doesn’t matter. The point is that the story was used to indicate something.”My memory is not good, but I go on speaking so confidently and that confidence deceives you.Father Ferrucio and Father Messina were sitting in a grotto chatting.“Do you think the pope will ever allow priests to marry?” asked Father Ferrucio.“It won’t happen in our time,” replied Father Messina. “Maybe in our children’s!”Yes, I also have that kind of memory.Mrs. Brown could hardly believe her eyes. A mouse! Of all things: a mouse in her home! She was a perfect housekeeper, everybody said so. Her spotless home was the pride of her life. But, yes, that was a mouse that just ran across the kitchen floor.Mrs. Brown shuddered and called her husband. “Charlie,” she said, “go down to the store and buy a mousetrap. But,” she added quickly, “for goodness sake don’t tell them what it’s for!”That’s the kind of memory I have.The memory expert had been given his turn in the village hall. The audience had not been enthusiastic, and the questions asked at the end of the show really infuriated the man.When one dear old lady came up and asked him to what he attributed his remarkable memory, he thought it was time to call it a day.“Well, madam,” he explained without a smile, “when I was in the air force, I once had to make a record parachute jump from a height never before attempted. Just as I jumped from the plane, the pilot leaned out from the side and yelled, ‘Hey! You’ve forgotten your parachute!’”“Believe it or not, madam, that taught me a lesson. And I’ve never forgotten anything since.”I don’t have a good memory. And a good memory is not necessarily a sign of intelligence either. In fact, just the reverse is the case.It has been found that people who have very good memory are unintelligent people. You will be surprised, but this is one of the very strange findings which is becoming more and more established: that people who have very good memory are unintelligent people – because memory is a mechanical phenomenon. It needs no intelligence. It is just like a gramophone record.Memory is part of your mind. Your mind goes on recording. A good recording system, a very good record does not mean that it has any intelligence. Yes, it is a good record, your mind is a biocomputer. And a few minds are very good records: so good that it seems sometimes incredible, unbelievable.Lord Curzon, one of the viceroys of India, has written in his autobiography… Now, don’t believe me: it may be Lord Curzon, it may be somebody else! And I don’t know whether Lord Curzon has ever written any autobiography or not, but still I am going to tell you the story.Lord Curzon has written in his autobiography… And the story is true! Lord Curzon or no Lord Curzon, the story is true.There was a very famous man in Rajasthan whose memory was unbelievable. He was absolutely uneducated and very stupid too, but his memory was simply, absolutely rare, unique. Maybe there had never been before him or after him a man who could prove his memory so one-hundred-percent correct.Lord Curzon heard about him, called him to the viceroy’s court to demonstrate his memory. And Curzon planned such a complicated situation that anybody, however good his memory may be, would be bound to fail. It was impossible to succeed: such was the situation created.Thirty people were to examine the man: thirty people knowing thirty different languages. Each person had to remember in his mind one sentence of his language. And this man from Rajasthan knew only Rajasthani, the local dialect of his village – no other language. The people of the court: somebody knew French, somebody knew Latin, somebody Greek, somebody German. Curzon told them to make the sentences as difficult as possible in their own languages.The man comes to the first man in the row, who has to say the first word of his sentence: “Whisper in his ear the first word of your sentence.” Then a great gong – just to disturb his mind so he forgets. Then he reaches the other person and he says his first word. Another gong. He goes to these thirty persons, comes back to the first again. Now that first man says his second word – and the gong… And he goes in a round…they say the third word. And at the end, when they have finished their sentences, he has to repeat each single sentence: thirty sentences in thirty languages, and he knows nothing of those languages!Even the people who were telling it had to write their sentences, because by the time he comes back, they may have forgotten whether they had said the third word or the fourth.And you know I always go on forgetting which question it is! From the second comes the fourth, from the fourth comes the fifth. Only one thing is not happening, which is bound to happen someday: from the fifth comes the first. That has not happened yet, but you can be certain and sure it is going to happen one day.So they had to write their sentences to remember them, because a sentence may consist of twenty words and the person would come twenty times… And the gong was hammering on their heads too. So they had to write their sentences and mark which word they had said.And the man repeated separately thirty sentences in thirty languages without any fault. Not even a single word was missed. But the man was utterly stupid; he was an idiot.Now it is becoming a psychological fact that people with very good memory are unintelligent, and people with great intelligence are not so good with memory.Just the other day I was telling you about Edison.I have heard about Immanuel Kant, one of the most intelligent persons that Germany has ever produced. He was very bad as far as memory is concerned.One evening he came back from his routine walk; it was getting dark. He knocked on the door. In the darkness the servant could not recognize that the professor had come back, so he said, “The professor has gone for a walk, so if you want to see him, come a little later on.”Immanuel Kant said, “Okay,” and went away. After half an hour of walking he remembered: “This is too much! This servant is a fool. I am the professor!” He was very angry at the servant.One night it happened, he came from his walk, tired. He always used to carry his walking stick with him – and he forgot what is what. So he put the walking stick on the bed, thinking, “This is Immanuel Kant” and he himself stood in the corner of the room.In the middle of the night he suddenly looked, “What is the matter?” Then he remembered: “Things have got mixed up. I am Immanuel Kant and that is the walking stick!”This is possible; it is not difficult because intelligence is a totally different phenomenon than memory.Ordinarily people have a little bit of intelligence and a little bit of memory. They are called the mediocres. It is enough for carrying routine life and work.One of my friends, Doctor Ram Manohar Lohia, went to see Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein had given him an exact time to come, and he went fifteen minutes early.The wife said, “You have come, that’s very good. Take tea, rest, but we can’t be sure when he will come out because he has gone into the bathroom. Even I cannot predict it, although I have lived with him for thirty years now. It is unpredictable.”Doctor Lohia said tentatively, “But he has given me a time.”The wife said, “He goes on giving times to people, and it is a constant trouble for me because I have to look after those people, sometimes three hours, four hours, five hours.”Doctor Lohia asked, “But what does he do for five hours in the bathroom?”The wife said, “Don’t ask: all kinds of things. Particularly he sits in his bath and plays with soap bubbles. In fact, it is there that he has discovered all his great theories. Playing with soap bubbles, he is relaxed and he completely forgets the world.”It was a kind of meditation for Einstein. He stumbled upon the theory of relativity in his bathtub. The whole credit goes to the bathtub! Playing with soap bubbles he was like a child: innocent.And the wife said, “We can’t disturb him because one never knows where he is, and to disturb him may be destroying something beautiful that is arising in him.”It is said, once he went to see a friend. The friend was very happy. He had been inviting him again and again, then one day he turned up. They drank, they ate, they talked about the old days. And then the night started becoming darker and darker and darker, and it was getting too late. The friend was feeling sleepy and he was hoping, “Now he will leave, now he will leave, now he will leave.”But Einstein had completely forgotten… Finally the man gave him a hint. He looked at his watch and said, “It is so late.”Albert Einstein: “That’s what I have been thinking: it is getting so late. Why don’t you go to your home? I am also feeling tired.”The man said, “This is too much! This is my home!”Albert Einstein said, “Then why didn’t you say before? Because I was hoping and hoping that you would leave now! I also want to go to sleep. And how long can I say these nonsense things that we have been saying, wasting time? But I am sorry, because I thought this is my home.”It has been happening again and again, because intelligence is a totally different energy in you. It comes from your consciousness, and memory is only part of the biocomputer. Memory is just utilitarian. Intelligence has no utilitarian purposive quality about it, but it brings freedom, it brings insight, it brings you to the truth.I don’t have a good memory at all. Hence, many times you will find many faults, many errors in what I say. Don’t take much note of them. Just remember the point that I want to make.All that I am saying is like fingers pointing to the moon. Don’t cling to the fingers, they are irrelevant. Look at the moon and forget the fingers completely.The sixth question…is it fifth?Osho,What is it that happens when one becomes awakened?Nothing special, nothing that’s a big deal: really nothing happens. All happening stops, the world stops. The smoke from the eyes disappears. You start looking at things as they are.Don’t make much fuss about it. Sooner or later many of you are going to become enlightened. Don’t make much fuss about it. When you become enlightened, just keep quiet. Don’t say it to anybody. It is nothing to brag about.When the nearsighted Nancy first met Kazantzakis, she thought he looked like a Greek god. But now that she has been fitted with contact lenses she thinks he looks like a goddamned Greek.That’s what happens: you start seeing things as they are. Greek gods become goddamned Greeks.The last question:Osho,When I stand back and watch it all, it seems so incredibly and absurdly humorous. Is life really so unserious? Is that all there is to it?What else do you want? What else is your expectation out of life? Is this not more than one can ask for? Life is tremendously absurd, that’s its beauty. It is ridiculous, that’s its joy. It is playful, it is not serious at all. Except stupid people, nobody is ever serious.Stupid people are bound to be serious because that is the only way to cover their stupidity. Intelligent people have a sense of humor. Stupid people cannot afford it because a sense of humor needs great intelligence.To be miserable is very easy; anybody can do it. It needs nothing: no intelligence, no courage. That’s why there are so many miserable people all over the world. It is cheap, it costs nothing, it is available free of cost. But to be blissful one needs to risk much.To have a sense of humor one needs a kind of transcendence. Seriousness is a disease.Now, you are asking, “When I stand back and watch it all, it seems so incredibly and absurdly humorous.” It is so. Just go on watching more and more, and stand back as far as possible. Become a witness.But you don’t go so far, it seems; just one step and then you jump back into it. You become afraid because it looks so incredibly absurd. You become afraid: are you going mad or something? Don’t be worried – you are mad already! Now nothing more can happen to you; that is your security.You ask, “Is life really so unserious?” Life knows nothing of seriousness, hence you cannot call it unserious either. If there is something serious, then something can be called unserious. Life knows nothing of seriousness, hence it knows nothing of unseriousness either. It simply is: neither serious nor unserious. It is what it is.And when you see it from a distance in a cool way, calm way, that’s what meditation is all about. You will start dancing, you will start laughing a great belly laughter.The Zen saying is: Whenever such belly laughter happens – laughter like Bodhidharma’s – white lotuses start showering from the sky, from nowhere.The white lotus is a beautiful symbol. White represents multidimensionality because white has all the colors of the spectrum. That is the most strange, unbelievable phenomenon about white: it contains all colors yet it seems to be colorless. It is not red, it is, not blue, it is not green, although it contains all the colors. But it contains all those colors in such synthesis, in such harmony, that they all disappear. They dissolve into oneness, and that oneness is white.White represents ultimate synthesis and harmony. It is the greatest orchestra, where all the instruments of music dissolve into each other: not only the instruments but the musicians, too. The whole orchestra functions as a single, organic, orgasmic unity. White represents that.And the lotus also is a great symbol, particularly in the East. Naturally, because the East knows what great lotuses are. In the West you only have small lotuses – they need hot sun. The East knows fragrant great lotuses, and the lotus became one of the central symbols of the East. You may have seen buddha statues: Buddha sitting on a lotus; Vishnu, the Hindu god, standing on the lotus.The lotus represents the essential meaning of sannyas. The lotus lives in the lake and yet the water cannot touch it. It lives in the water and yet remains untouched by the water. The lotus represents the witnessing quality of your being: you live in the world, but you remain a witness. You remain in the world and yet you are not part of it. You participate and yet you are not part of it. You are in the world, but the world is not in you.When you become a calm and cool observer of life you are going to laugh. Not ordinary laughter but a belly laugh like a lion’s roar. And white lotuses start showering on you.Life is neither serious nor nonserious. It is a tremendous play, playfulness. Yes, many times it is ridiculous, incredibly absurd, but in our minds those words have a very wrong connotation, something negative. When we say something is absurd, we mean it is something wrong. No, it is not so.Absurd simply means beyond our logic. Absurd simply means beyond our expectations. Absurd simply means that there is always a surprise. Absurd simply means that life is unpredictable, cannot be reduced to cause and effect – that life is more than logic, more than language can contain, more than can be expressed.And it is tremendously humorous because here you see gods pretending to be beggars. Yes, it is a pretension. Here you will see buddhas being miserable.Have you ever gone to see a drama, not from the audience, but from the backstage where the actors and actresses dress themselves up, prepare themselves? Then you will be surprised.That was one of my hobbies in my childhood, to somehow enter the back of the stage. In my village every year they used to play Ramleela, the great story of Rama. And it is far more beautiful if you look at what happens at the back.I have seen Sita, the wife of Rama… In India she is worshipped as the greatest woman ever born, absolutely virtuous, pure. It is impossible to conceive a purer woman and a purer love. It is absolutely impossible to conceive of a more religious, more pious, more holy woman. But at the back of the stage I have seen Sita smoking beedies before she goes on the stage!Now Krishna Prem need not be worried about beedies!Just to prepare herself, just to give a shot of nicotine… It was so absurd: Sita smoking beedies. I have enjoyed it so much.And Ravana, the man who is the criminal in the drama of Rama’s life, who steals Sita, and who represents evil in India, was telling Rama, “Be aware! Last night you were continuously looking at my wife in the audience, and if I see you doing that again I will teach you a lesson!”Now, Rama is the incarnation of God, but in the drama it is just a schoolboy: and schoolboys are schoolboys. Ravana teaching him, evil incarnate teaching God, “Don’t look at my wife. That is not right!”I have enjoyed the backstage so much that what happens on the stage looks very ordinary.When you become a witness you enter the backstage of life, and there things are really absurd. You start looking at things as they are. Everything is illogical, nothing makes sense. But that is the beauty of life: that nothing makes sense. If everything made sense, life would be a boredom. Because nothing makes sense, life is always a constant joy, a constant surprise.The man looked at the psychiatrist and said, “I work at the pickle factory and I have an incredible desire to put my prick in the pickle cutter.”The doctor thought for a moment and then replied, “I see. Perhaps it is a result of some suppressed childhood behavior: could be an Oedipus complex. I suggest you take a two-week vacation, then go back to work for a week, and then return to me to start therapy.”Three weeks later the man returned and told the doctor that he had done it.“You stuck your prick in the pickle cutter?”“Yes,” the man replied.“Well, what happened?” the psychiatrist asked.“I was fired,” he said.“Yes, of course, but didn’t something else happen?”“Oh yes,” the man replied, “the pickle cutter, she was fired too.”Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 05 (Listen & Download)

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Question: I have heard that all buddhas in the past, present and future preached the same dharma and countless beings were saved from suffering. Is this not true?Answer: You have heard someone speak of dreams, and you yourself are actually dreaming. Whatever you figure with your dualistic mind never makes a true account of mind essence, therefore, I call you a dreamer. Dream is one thing and realization another. Do not mix them together. Wisdom in the dream is not the real wisdom. One who has true wisdom does not hold self-recognition. Buddhas in the past, present and future are in the realm beyond cognition. If you shut off your thinking faculty, blocking off the road of your mind, you will enter a different sphere. Until that time, whatever you think, whatever you say, whatever you do is nothing but foolishness in dreamland.Question: What kind of wisdom should one use to cut off delusions?Answer: When you observe your delusions, you will know that they are baseless and not dependable. In this way you can cut confusion and doubt. This is what I call wisdom.Question: What sort of delusions will be cleared by Zen?Answer: Any delusions of mediocrity, of a philosopher, of a shravaka, of a pratyeka-buddha, or of a bodhisattva.Question: What is the difference between a sage’s most excellent life and the common people’s everyday life?Answer: It is like gossamer. Some mistake it for vapor, but it is in fact a spider’s silk that floats in the air. A mediocre person sees the sage’s life, and believes it to be the same as his own everyday life; whereas the enlightened man sees the holy path in a life of mediocrity. If you will observe in the sutras that all buddhas preach for two groups, the mediocre and the wise, but in the eyes of Zen, a sage’s life is one of mediocrity and the mediocre person’s as the sage’s. This one life has no form and is empty by nature. If you become attached to any form, you should reject it. If you see an ego, a soul, a birth or a death, reject them all.Question: Why and how do we reject them?Answer: If you have Zen, you should not see a thing. “The most firmly established in the path appears the most remiss.”The path to reality is full of paradoxes, hence the logical mind cannot comprehend it. Logic is incapable of understanding a paradox. Logic tries to dissolve all paradoxes, to make things straight, clear. But paradox is intrinsic to nature: nature exists through contradictions. Contradictions are not really contradictions but complementaries.The person who thinks about truth is bound to think wrongly. All thinking about truth is wrong because the moment you start thinking, you follow the path of logic, and reality is paradoxical. They never crisscross. They run parallel, but they never meet.Another name for this paradoxicality of existence is mystery. A mystery is not a riddle, a mystery is not a problem, because it cannot be solved. There is simply no way to solve it. It is to be lived, experienced. Yet you will not be able to answer what it is because the moment you try to answer it, you have to bring in language, and language is logical. Language is created by the logical mind, hence language is inadequate, absolutely inadequate to express the truth. Truth can be expressed only through silence, but then silence again is a mystery.The first paradox that you will come to on the path is: the mind cannot ask a right question. It is not within its powers to ask a right question, because to ask a right question is to find the answer immediately. In fact, the right question is the answer.In the world of the mind there is a duality: the question and the answer; they are separate. In the world of reality, the right question is the answer. If you can ask the right question, there is no need even to ask. The very understanding of the right question is enough to understand the answer. But the right question cannot be asked by the mind. It can be asked only by the no-mind. But the no-mind never asks anything.This is the first paradox one comes across: the mind asks questions, but all questions raised by the mind are bound to be wrong, because the mind itself is wrong. Anything that arises out of that state is going to be wrong, and a wrong question cannot lead you to the right answer. The mind can ask millions of questions, but there is no answer anywhere for those questions.No-mind knows the answer, but no-mind never asks the question. It is so at ease, so at home with reality, that the question does not arise. Non-arising of the question is the answer.So the whole effort of Bodhidharma is to change the gestalt of your being, your focus. You are focused on the dualistic mind. The dualistic mind always thinks in either–or: “Either God is light or God is darkness. How can God be both?” It becomes impossible for the mind to conceive that God is both simultaneously: light and darkness, life and death – that God is and is not, and he is both together simultaneously.The mind starts feeling crazy if you force the mind to think upon such matters. The mind simply recoils. It says, “This is nonsense!”One of the very keenest minds of the modern West is Arthur Koestler. He went to study Zen. Now, Zen cannot be studied in the first place. It is not a question of studying. You cannot approach it through the mind, through the intellect, but that is the only approach available to the contemporary man. Contemporary man is far poorer than man has ever been before: rich in things but poor in understanding.Arthur Koestler went to India, to Japan, traveled in search of what Zen is: studying scriptures, questioning masters, collecting notes of their answers. And then he wrote a book against Zen. I can understand why he wrote against: because he felt the whole thing is nonsense. The whole thing appeared to him so illogical. I cannot condemn him. He represents the modern mind, he represents intellect.If you approach through the intellect, then Zen is illogical, but so is life, so is this whole existence. Here, day and night are one. Here, summer and winter are one. Here, life and death are one.Koestler should think a little bit more about life, too. Life is more like Zen than like anything else. Zen may be illogical because life is illogical. Logic is a man-made phenomenon. Logic is a frame imposed by us on existence – we try to sort things out. And existence is a beautiful chaos. We want to figure things out, what is what. And in existence everything is turning and changing into everything else.The mud becomes the lotus, and one day the lotus falls back into the mud again. The mud becomes the body of a human being, a beautiful body, and one day it goes back to the earth. The earth rises into a tree, becomes green, red roses flower, great fragrance is released, and one day all disappears like a dream. Again the earth is back.Existence has no trouble with contradictions. It is the Aristotelian logic that is creating trouble for us.The first paradox is that the mind that can ask the question is not capable of understanding the answer, and the mind, or no-mind, or buddha-mind, that is capable of asking the right question need not ask it. Before you ask, the answer is there. Let us say it in other words: the head only has questions and the heart only has answers.Unless you reach that depth of the heart you will not have any real answers. Yes, you will have answers because the mind is very clever in supplying false answers. It raises false questions, it supplies false answers. That’s what philosophy is all about, that’s what doing philosophy means. Each false question is followed by many false answers. You can choose any, but they are all false. They are false because they are just guesswork.Reality has to be encountered, embraced, tasted. One has not to be separate from it to know it, one has to dissolve oneself into it to know it.The first question:I have heard that all buddhas in the past, present and future preached the same dharma and countless beings were saved from suffering. Is it not true?The question starts from: …I have heard. From the very beginning it is wrong, because it is not even your question. The question is borrowed. It is based on other people’s experience. It is just an opinion that you have gathered from somewhere and now you are making a question out of it. It has no roots in you. It is like a plastic flower you have purchased from the market. It will not have any fragrance, it is not alive.The real question cannot arise out of others’ opinions. You have to be in a meditative mood to find the real question. You have to learn how to commune with existence.The question starts: I have heard – it goes wrong from the very beginning – that all buddhas in the past, present and future… Now, for a buddha there is no past, no present, no future. The buddha exists only in the eternal. That’s why he is called the buddha: he has transcended time.To be in time is to be asleep. Time is our sleep, time is our mind, time is our dreaming. To go beyond dreaming, thinking, mind, means to go beyond time. Time does not consist of the present, remember. It consists only of past and future. Have you ever encountered the present?The moment you say, “Yes, this is the present,” it is no longer the present, it is already the past. The moment you recognize through the mind “This is the present,” it has already slipped by. The mind cannot grasp it, it is so fast. The moment mind becomes aware, the bird has already flown out of the cage.The mind can think of the past because it is a dead phenomenon. The mind can accumulate dead things very easily: it is an antique collector. Or, the mind can think of the future. The past is no longer, the future not yet. In one sense they both are the same, because both are nonexistential. And the mind is clever with the nonexistential. It can go on into the future because it can dream, project, imagine, and there is no hindrance.But as the question arises of the present, the mind is absolutely impotent, because the present is so alive and the mind is clever only with the dead. And the present is present, and the mind is clever only in dreaming, desiring, projecting, imagining. You cannot dream in the present, you cannot desire in the present. If you desire, it is in the future. Desire brings tomorrow in.Jesus says to his disciples, “Look at the lilies in the field. How beautiful they are!” And what is the secret of their beauty? Why are they so beautiful? More beautiful, Jesus says, than Solomon was ever in all his grandeur. The poor lilies are far more beautiful than Solomon. Why? For the simple reason they think not of the morrow. For the simple reason they are in the present.That is the beauty of the trees, of the roses, of the lotuses, of the stars, of the earth, of the sky, of the animals. Look into the eyes of a cat or a dog, look into the eyes of a small child. What depth and what innocence and what clarity! What is the secret of it all? A simple phenomenon: they live in the present, they are not yet corrupted by the past and the future. The mind has not yet appeared. Time has not yet appeared.You have been told and taught that time has three tenses: past, present, future. That is utterly wrong. Time has only two tenses, past and future. The present is part of eternity, not part of time. So when you are in the present, you are in the eternal.The question is wrong on every step. It is going to be so, because the question is from the mind. First the questioner says: I have heard… That must have been enough for Bodhidharma to start laughing, or he must have taken his staff in his hand to hit and beat this man.It happens many times that you enter the room of the Zen master and before you have even uttered a single word he says, “Wrong, wrong!” You have not uttered a single word, but the way you enter is enough. The body language: you are entering hesitant, doubtful, suspicious. Or you are trying to prove yourself, trying to be very courageous, formulating a certain question or some experience: how to say it. And the master has seen it all and has heard it before you have even uttered a single word.A disciple of Rinzai told him one day, “When I come with an answer – because you have given me a koan…”A koan is a mystery; it represents existence. A koan is a riddle which is not solvable. A koan is something absurd. “The sound of one hand clapping,” that is a koan.“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Now, the disciple has been meditating on it. Every day he comes, he has to come to answer to the master. “What have you found? What is the outcome of your meditations?” And he brings all kinds of answers – and whatever answer he brings is wrong, and he is beaten and thrown out.One day the disciple could not bear it anymore. It was too much, because he had not said anything and the master started beating him. He said, “But wait! I have not even said anything!”The master said, “There is no need to say it, I have heard it. I have seen it in your eyes, I have seen it in your walk. I recognize immediately. When you have found the answer you will not need to say it, I will know it.”And, yes, it happened exactly like that. When the disciple found the answer… There is no answer; that’s what he found. One day he found that “I am just being foolish. There is no answer.”You can say from the very beginning, “This is foolish!” but that won’t do. You have to pass through all that fire of tackling an absurd question, knowing deep down that there is no answer to it and yet still searching for the answer. That’s how you dig deep within yourself.One day, when he reached his core, there was no question, no answer. He started laughing. That day he didn’t come to report. There was nothing to report.But that day the master appeared in his room and he said, “Now you have found. No need even to come to me. When you have found, I will come to you. Now the whole commune is affected by your finding,” the master said. “Your vibe is pulsating so loudly all around that those who understand the language of vibes know that somebody has attained, that somebody has arrived home, that a traveler has reached.”Bodhidharma must have started laughing from the very beginning. It is not reported, because it is a notebook of a disciple. Many things are not reported in it because the disciple cannot report them. He can’t understand the inner reflections that happen in the mirror of the master. All that he can report are words that the master utters. Hence nothing is said about Bodhidharma.The disciple goes on asking questions and he goes on noting down the answers. The report seems to be a little dull, it has no touch of aliveness because it is the disciple’s notes. Hence, many things are missing. Many things that the master must have done are not being reported because the disciple cannot understand them.For example, if Bodhidharma has started laughing, listening to the question, the disciple will not report it. It will look too humiliating. He simply reports the words: words that he feels fit with his answer, although what Bodhidharma is saying is totally different from what he is asking.I have heard – he asked – that all buddhas in the past, present and future preached the same dharma… Remember, for buddhas there is no past, no present, no future. A buddha is one who has become awakened. Time is a dream phenomenon.Have you ever observed how time changes as you change? If you are miserable, time becomes long, lengthy. If you are joyous, time becomes small. The clock will show the same time. If it is one hour then the clock will show that one hour has passed. Whether you are miserable or blissful, the clock is not affected. The clock goes on moving. It is a mechanical device. It simply reports chronological time, it does not report your inner experiences of time.If you are sitting with a friend after many years, time passes so fast. If you are lonely, miserable, anxious, restless, time seems to pass with such slowness. This is your experience, that time becomes longer or shorter according to you, according to your mind.You must have known some moments when time had totally stopped. Ordinarily, the biological, the sleepy man, only knows such moments through lovemaking – because it is only in lovemaking that he loses his mind. It is only in lovemaking that he gets lost. But that happens only for moments.The peak, the orgasmic peak in which he loses all mind, becomes just a vibration, becomes just energy, liquid energy – no thought, no past, no future, no desire. It is only through love and the orgasmic experience that you become aware that there is a possibility of time stopping totally.Hence I say that sexual orgasm is the lowest but the fundamental experience of meditation. The lowest and the fundamental. It is through sexual orgasm that man became aware of the infinite possibility of stopping time completely, of getting out of time. If you can get out of time for one moment, that means one can get out of time forever, too. Then ways and means have to be found.That’s how Tantra, Yoga, Zen, Tao, Sufism – all kinds of ways and means – have been found. Once man became aware that the possibility exists, that there is a window through which you can escape, even though it happens only once in a while…Many times people ask me why women have not become great masters like Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, Bodhidharma, Jesus. Why? One of the fundamental reasons is that man has denied women the orgasmic experience. You will be surprised by my answer. You will not have imagined that that will be the root cause why women could not rise so high as a Buddha, as a Bodhidharma.What went wrong? One thing: man has not allowed women to have the orgasmic experience. And it became possible because there is a little difference between a man’s orgasm and a woman’s orgasm. Man comes to his orgasmic peak very quickly, so he can have his orgasm easily, quickly.The woman comes to the orgasmic plane slowly. Her pace is different. Unless a man loves the woman tremendously and helps her to come to the orgasmic state and moves slowly with her – is caring about her, is not using the woman only as a means to attain his own orgasm but is also careful and attentive and loving enough that she should also have her orgasm, then he moves slowly.That’s what Tantra discovered centuries before: that man has to move very slowly. Man’s orgasm is local, genital, and the woman’s orgasm is more total. Her whole body becomes involved in it, hence it takes time. Man’s orgasm is so local that it does not take much time. Unless a man loves the woman, caresses her body, helps her whole body to rise to the peak… It is a subtle art to come to the orgasmic state together.When man and woman both come to the orgasmic state together, simultaneously, it is a great experience of ecstasy – very rich. Man coming alone to orgasm is one thing: it misses much, it is not so rich, it is not multidimensional. It is more or less masturbatory: the woman has been used only as a means for masturbation. It is not true orgasm, and the woman remains behind. For centuries man has been doing that, and so many women have completely forgotten that there is any possibility of orgasm for them.It is only now with the liberation movement that women are becoming aware that they have been missing something very valuable in their life in the past ages. In the East they are not yet aware of it. It is very rare in the East to find an orgasmic woman, who knows what orgasm is. Even in the West only a very small percentage of women are becoming capable of orgasm.This has been the greatest oppression, the greatest exploitation of women, because if they are deprived of orgasm, they are deprived of one of the most fundamental experiences of meditation. The only window toward godliness remains closed. They never become aware that there is a moment when time disappears. There is a moment when “I am no longer a body, no longer a mind, but a pure consciousness: absolutely thoughtless, desireless, dreamless and utterly blissful.”This is the lowest experience. Remember: one has not to stop there. This is the first step of a long journey, only then you reach the temple. But it is a necessary step. It is very fundamental.So once in a while you may have become aware that time stops, but time stops only when you are blissful. Time stops only when you are absolutely without mind: conscious, yet mind is not there. Because you are not minding, you are not thinking…a simple existence.It can happen in music, it can happen watching a sunset, it can happen while you are painting. But those are far rarer experiences, because sex is available to each and everybody. It is a biological gift of nature. To be a musician of such a caliber that you can lose yourself as you lose yourself in a woman or a man is a rare phenomenon: only once in a while. Or to be a painter, a sculptor, a dancer, a poet – these need great talents. One may not have them; but the same thing happens.That’s why it is possible for a great painter to go beyond sex very easily. He has another window to experience the orgasm, to experience the timeless moment, to experience godliness. It is easier for a poet or a dancer to go beyond sex than it is for others, because they have an alternative from where they can experience the same thing – and maybe with a greater depth.But whatever the cause, if you have ever experienced a moment when time stops, that is the moment which has to be understood because that is the nature of meditation. That’s what brings you home finally, ultimately. Before that, all kinds of questions will arise. They are all meaningless. Masters answer them because of compassion, otherwise they are all foolish.The mind is stupid. The mind as such is stupid. It asks very stupid questions.The questioner is asking: I have heard that all buddhas in the past, present and future preached the same dharma… Now, a buddha does not preach. Yes, much happens through him, but he is not a preacher. He is not a sermonizer, he is not a priest. He is not even a prophet.Somebody asked Krishnamurti, “Why do you talk?” Krishnamurti says, “Why does the rose bloom? Ask the rose – and the same is my answer.”For a buddha it is not a question of preaching, it is simply his overflowing compassion. These words don’t apply to the buddhas. No ordinary word is applicable to the buddha. Or you have to change its meaning so totally that it is no longer the same word.The questioner says they have: …preached the same dharma and countless beings were saved from suffering. Now, suffering is a dream. You suffer because you are asleep. It is a nightmare, it is not a reality. So there is no question of saving you. You are already saved.Remember, a buddha is not a savior, a buddha is only an awakener. Nobody needs to be saved. You are already saved. You may be having a nightmare and you may be suffering in your nightmare, but it is all dream. It is not true, it is not real, and whenever you awake you will laugh at the whole absurdity of it.But we understand things according to ourselves, hence these questions. Our minds are so conditioned that we go on asking questions which are not relevant at all. And there are people who will answer our questions, and we may be consoled, and we may start clinging to ideas and philosophies.The real master is not going to give you an answer as a consolation, because that will be strengthening your old mind. The real master will hammer, shatter your head completely. He will cut off your head. He will make you aware that this mind can accumulate many answers, but they are all useless, meaningless, because this mind itself is wrong.The American diplomatic courier had just arrived in the tiny Latin American capital, and, as he strode briskly out of the airport terminal, he was obviously charged with a sense of his own self-importance, snapping instructions at the porters carrying his luggage and looking about impatiently for the car that was supposed to be there to meet him. He certainly had no time for the dirty little street urchins who trailed after him, trying to sell everything from a shoeshine to their sisters.“Hey, Americano!” called out one lad, especially worldly-wise for his years. “I get what you like if you pay: feelthy pictures, marijuana, girls, boys.”“I can’t be bothered with this vermin,” the undiplomatic messenger disdainfully proclaimed, brushing his ragged pursuer aside. “My business here is with the American ambassador.”“Can do, señor,” responded the boy, “but for an ambassador you weel have to pay extra.”People have their own conditioning, their own thinking, their own ways of looking at things. They hear from a preoccupied mind, they question from a preoccupied mind, and any answer given to them never reaches undistorted.The questioner asks: Is it not true?Bodhidharma says:You have heard someone speak of dreams, and you yourself are actually dreaming. Whatever you figure with your dualistic mind never makes a true account of mind essence, therefore, I call you a dreamer. Dream is one thing and realization another. Do not mix them together. Wisdom in the dream is not the real wisdom. One who has true wisdom does not hold self-recognition. Buddhas in the past, present and future are in the realm beyond cognition. If you shut off your thinking faculty, blocking off the road of your mind, you will enter a different sphere. Until that time, whatever you think, whatever you say, whatever you do is nothing but foolishness in dreamland.To cut down on expenses, two secretaries decided to vacation together and to share a hotel room. On the first night, one turned to her friend and rested her hand on her shoulder.“There’s something about myself I’ve never told you,” she admitted. “I’ll be frank…”“No,” said the other girl, “I’ll be Frank.”“I’d like to buy some body makeup for my girlfriend,” the young musician told the clerk at the cosmetics counter.“Certainly, sir,” said the clerk. “What color would you like?”“Never mind the color,” said the musician. “What flavors do you have?”This is the state of everybody: we are living in our own dreams. What Bodhidharma calls dreamland you can call Disneyland or California-land! Now the whole world is slowly, slowly turning into a Disneyland. In fact, it has always been so. People live in their dreams. The so-called ordinary people live in their dreams and the so-called VVIP’s live in the same kind of dream world.The pope was reading in his Vatican sanctuary when suddenly he was called to the telephone.“This is Father Novelli in New York,” said the voice. “Your Holiness, I think that Jesus Christ is walking down the middle of Fifth Avenue. What should I do?”“Look-a busy!” replied the pontiff.Look-a busy: what else can you do? These people, whether the small or the so-called big ones, are in the same world.I have heard…Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of a church. He was alone on top of a big stool. A woman came in and started praying loudly, talking to God. Michelangelo heard her saying things to God. He enjoyed the way she was talking as if God was really there, so he played a trick on her. He said, “Listen! I am Jesus Christ!”The woman said, “You shut up! I am talking to your father!”Just look around. Just watch people. You need not go to the movies, you need not read detective novels. Just sit by the side of the road and watch people’s faces: how they are moving, how they are walking, their gestures. A few are talking to themselves, their lips are moving. Everybody seems to be in a dream, in his own world.That’s why there is such a clash: because each one has his own worldview and his own world. Whenever two persons come close, sooner or later the clash happens. The clash is bound to happen because their dreams cannot coincide. And everybody wants to impose his dreams on the other.Now, nobody can dream your dreams; that is impossible. Dreams cannot be imposed on others. You cannot share your dreams with others. You cannot invite your wife, your husband into your dream; that is impossible. Dreaming is such a private phenomenon. Hence, people who live in dreams live in a private world. They never become aware of the real world that surrounds us. They see, but through a thick mist. They see, and yet they see not.You have heard someone speak of dreams – Bodhidharma says – and you yourself are actually dreaming. Whatever you figure with your dualistic mind never makes a true account of mind essence, therefore, I call you a dreamer.Unless thinking disappears totally you will remain a dreamer. Thinking is dualistic, thinking is logical, thinking is Aristotelian. Unless thinking is dropped totally, your mind will go on playing tricks upon you. It will go on deceiving you, and you will never be able to know the real essence of your being, which is freedom, which is bliss, which is godliness.Dream is one thing and realization another. Realization is possible only when dreaming evaporates. Do not mix them together. What you have heard is meaningless, only what you have known on your own has meaning.Wisdom in the dream is not the real wisdom. You can be a very wise dreamer but a dreamer is a dreamer. You can be very knowledgeable in your dreams. You can dream of beautiful things – sweet dreams of golden palaces, of paradise – but they are all dreams. Whether you dream of heaven or hell, it is the same. Hell is a dream, heaven is a dream.In Western languages these are the only two possibilities after death: heaven or hell. Hence, Western religions have never been able to be free of dreaming. They don’t talk of being free of dreaming. They don’t talk of absolute desirelessness. They have not risen to the ultimate purity of religiousness.The Eastern religions talk of a third state: moksha, nirvana, freedom. Freedom from both heaven and hell: because buddhas in the East have been saying that your fetters may be made of gold or of iron, but fetters are fetters. You are chained, you are a prisoner. You can be free only when you are free of all fetters. Made of iron, made of gold, all fetters, all chains, have to be dropped.Then a third phenomenon becomes possible: moksha, nirvana. There is no word to translate it. It simply means getting free of both hell and heaven, because both are dreams.One who has true wisdom does not hold self-recognition. This is one of the fundamentals of Buddha’s teaching: One who has true wisdom does not hold self-recognition. One who knows, one who has come to terms with his true essence, knows no ego, no I, no self is recognized. He is part of the universal flow; he is no longer separate. His private world disappears. He is no longer an idiot.The word idiot means one who lives in his own private world. It comes from the root idios. From the same root comes idiosyncrasy. An idiot is one who never takes note of the real world and goes on living in his private world, thinking that is the real world. In that sense, unless you become a buddha, you are an idiot.Buddhas in the past, present and future are in the realm beyond cognition. You cannot see them: buddhas cannot be seen. Ordinary eyes are not capable of seeing them, neither are ordinary minds capable of understanding them. If you really want to understand a buddha, you will have to become a buddha. There is no other way. You will have to taste awakening. By becoming a buddha you will have understood all the buddhas of the past, present and future.If you shut off your thinking faculty, blocking off the road of your mind, you will enter a different sphere. The only thing to be done is to shut off the constant, feverish activity of the mind. Put it off, put it aside, and then you enter a different space, a different sphere.Until that time, whatever you think, whatever you say, whatever you do is nothing but foolishness in dreamland.Thurmon, Pickens, and Diggs were discussing the world’s greatest inventions.“I believe,” said Thurmon, “that electricity is the best invention. It turns on the lights, makes the TV work. It do everything.”“Yeah,” agreed Pickens, “but ah believe that atomic power is the most important invention. It can do everything electricity can, and you can push a button and blow up the world.”“Well, gennamen,” said Diggs, “to me the greatest invention is the thermos. It keeps da hot food hot and da cold food cold.”“What so great about that?” asked Thurmon.“How do it know?” replied Diggs.Your mind, whatever it thinks, small things about the thermos or great things, great metaphysical things about God…because it is the same mind, it makes no difference. The object of thinking can be the thermos or God, Coca-Cola or paradise, but the mind that thinks about it is the same.Bodhidharma is saying, “Don’t go on changing the subject of your thinking, don’t go on changing the subject matter of your thinking, change your very inner space. Let us have a totally different mind, which thinks not, desires not, dreams not. Then you enter the world of the buddhas.”The second question:What kind of wisdom should one use to cut off delusions?Each question again and again shows one thing very clearly: that the answer has not been heard. As if the questioner is more interested in his questions than in the answers. Just out of politeness he listens to the answer, but he is preparing his question. Otherwise a single answer is enough. All the questions are solved.Again he asks the same thing from a different angle: What kind of wisdom should one use to cut off delusions? As if you can use wisdom. As if wisdom is a tool to be used, a means. As if after you have become wise, you will have to cut your delusions.It is like a man who says, “When I have become awakened, how will I get rid of my dreams? What kind of awakening has to be used to cut all the dreams?”It is like a man who in the night sees a rope on the road, and projects a snake on the rope, escapes, runs away, freaks out. And somebody says, “Don’t be worried. I know it is a rope. Come with me. I will show you that it is a rope. Let us take a lamp with us.”He says, “Okay. Even if with a lamp I come to know that it is a rope, then tell me how to get rid of the snake.”This question is exactly like that: What kind of wisdom should one use to cut off delusions? When you are wise, delusions are not there. In fact, delusions have to go first, only then do you become wise. But our so-called wise people are living in deep illusions, that’s why the question seems to be relevant.Stephanie woke up with a sore shoulder one morning and went to see her doctor about it. After examining it, the doctor said he couldn’t find anything wrong with it. She insisted it hurt her, so the doctor said, “Well, tell me what you did last night.”She told him that she’d gone riding in the country with her boyfriend and that they took a walk in a cemetery and read some of the tombstone inscriptions.The doctor said, “Possibly you caught a cold in your muscle from the chilly air. Will you get undressed so I can give you a more thorough examination?”She did so and the doctor examined her entire back.After a minute or so he said, “Stephanie, I can’t find a thing wrong with your shoulder, but your buttocks state that you’ve been dead since 1892.”Our so-called wise people are in the same boat. They are not a bit different from you. The people you go to for advice – the pundits, the priests, the scholars – are themselves in the dark. Of course they are more informed than you, but it is not a question of information. Wisdom comes through transformation, not through information.Bodhidharma says:When you observe your delusions, you will know that they are baseless and not dependable. In this way you can cut confusion and doubt. This is what I call wisdom.When you observe your delusions as delusions you are finished with them. The moment you know that something is a dream you are free of it. Nothing else is needed to be done.That’s why I insist for my sannyasins that there is no need to go anywhere else. Live in the world, but become aware. Just becoming aware is being a sannyasin. No need to renounce, no need to escape anywhere. Become aware and you will see what is illusion, what is dream. And whatever is known as illusion disappears. Nothing else needs to be done.A frank female rebel named GlutzDisdained any ifs, ands, or buts.When they asked what she’d needto be totally freedof her hang-up, her answer was, “Nuts!”Everybody is in need of nuts, because everybody is nuts. Mad people are in need of other mad people, because only mad people can support your illusions. You support their illusions, they support your illusions. That is what is called friendship, love, in the ordinary world: companionship.A friend in need is a friend indeed. And when is the need? When your illusions start disappearing he helps you to hold on, to cling hard to them. He does not allow you to let go of your illusions. Whatever happens, he helps you to remain the same as you have always been. He does not allow you to change.Life is trying to change you every moment, but you have so many friends, protectors, parents, family, teachers. The whole management of the government, the church, is such that it helps you to remain as you are. It is a great conspiracy to keep people dreaming, because nobody wants you to be awake.It is dangerous because people who have become awakened have always proved dangerous to the status quo, to the established church, state, society, to the establishment as such. The awakened people have always proved a kind of nuisance because they start helping other people to become awake.When you observe your delusions, you will know that they are baseless and not dependable. In this way you can cut confusion and doubt. Nothing else is needed. Just becoming aware of them, that they are illusions, you are finished. The moment you know that two plus two is not five, that two plus two is four, you are finished with two plus two equals five. You need not do anything else. It is enough to understand.The way of the buddha is that of understanding.The third question:What sort of delusions will be cleared by Zen?Again and again… There are only two things which are infinite in the world: the stupidity of the disciples and the compassion of the masters.Now he asks: What sort of delusions…? As if there are many kinds of illusions! Illusion is illusion. It has only one quality: that it is not true, that it is not so, that it is not part of reality, that it is your projection.Now, what you project does not matter. You can project a bullock cart, that is an illusion. You can project a golden chariot, that is an illusion. You can project anything, but the basic nature of illusion is the same. There are not many kinds of illusion.But the logical mind is always after, “How many kinds, what categories?” And: What sort of delusions will be cleared by Zen? As if a few will be cleared by Zen and a few will still remain.“What kind of dreams will disappear when you become awake?” As if a few kinds of dreams will still continue, will still persist.But the compassion of a master is such that Bodhidharma says:Any delusions of mediocrity, of a philosopher, of a shravaka, of a pratyeka-buddha, or of a bodhisattva.He says: Any idea that “I am this or that” will disappear. The basic illusion is the illusion of I, the ego – and the ego will disappear.Some people think they are inferior, and the ego persists: “I am inferior.” And somebody thinks he is superior. The same ego persists: “I am superior.” Somebody thinks, “I am mediocre.” Somebody thinks, “I am very, very wise.” Somebody thinks, “I am just a follower of Buddha, a shravaka,” and somebody thinks, “I am a buddha himself.”All kinds of illusions that are rooted in the idea of the ego will disappear. When you wake up, the ego disappears, and with it all its paraphernalia. The whole lot that is created by the ego goes with it. Those are all shadows of the ego.The fourth question:What is the difference between a sage’s most excellent life and the common people’s everyday life?Bodhidharma says:It is like gossamer. Some mistake it for vapor, but it is in fact a spider’s silk that floats in the air. A mediocre person sees the sage’s life, and believes it to be the same as his own everyday life; whereas the enlightened man sees the holy path in a life of mediocrity. You will observe in the sutras that all buddhas preach for two groups, the mediocre and the wise, but in the eye of Zen, a sage’s life is one of mediocrity and the mediocre person’s as the sage’s. This one life has no form and is empty by nature. If you become attached to any form, you should reject it. If you see an ego, a soul, a birth or a death, reject them all.It is a very significant answer. Meditate over it: It is like gossamer.Our life is just our own ego playing all kinds of games with us. The ego is not a reality but only a belief. It is just like your name. When you were born, you were born without a name. Everybody is born without a name. Then a name is given. A name is a necessity; it has certain utility in the world. It will be very difficult if all people were without names. So it is utilitarian, a necessity, but it is not reality, remember.You are not your name, but slowly, slowly you become your name. If somebody says something against your name you are infuriated, you are ready to fight, you are enraged: as if you are your name!Swami Rama one day came laughing. He was in New York. His host could not find out why he was laughing so much. “What has happened?” He had gone for a walk and he came with such laughter. The laughter looked almost mad, eccentric.His host asked, “What is the matter? What has happened?”And Rama said, “A few people started abusing Rama, insulting Rama, and I enjoyed the whole thing so much! I watched it, I saw Rama being insulted. But I am not Rama! Those people were unnecessarily wasting their breath. I am not my name, that’s why I am laughing. And it is good that I don’t have any name. Nobody can insult me, nobody can abuse me. I am nameless, I am formless.”But we are in an unconscious state and we become identified with anything.It was at the office Christmas party. As they lay on the office reception couch in the darkened room, their breath came hot and fast.“Ah, Herbie,” she said passionately, “you have never made love to me like this before. Is it because of the holiday spirit?”“No,” he panted, “it is probably because I am not Herbie.”Unconscious people! Who knows who is Herbie and who is not Herbie? Even Herbie himself is not Herbie. But we go on living our life with all this unconsciousness.Cantor, Klein, Levy, and Strulowitz met for lunch.After ordering, Cantor said, “Oy, oy, oy!”“Ay, ay, ay!” answered Klein.“Yai, yai, yai!” added Levy.“Look,” said Strulowitz, “if you fellas are gonna talk business, I ain’t gonna stay!”We have certain ideas in the mind. We project those ideas on others. We interpret them according to our ideas, and we live in an encaged world of our own creation.This is what Bodhidharma calls the mind, the ego. Drop it. See that which is. Don’t interfere with it; don’t interpret it in any way.See the roseflower. Don’t even say “It is beautiful,” because that is interference. Don’t say anything at all. The rose is silent. You also be silent. Let there be a meeting, a deep meeting between you and the rose. No mind in between you and the rose, and you will be surprised that the observer becomes the observed. There comes a moment when you are the rose and the rose is you.And that is the moment when you know, never before. That is the moment when wisdom arises in you. And once you have the knack of finding wisdom you can find it each moment of your life. Slowly, slowly it becomes your natural climate.It is like gossamer. Some mistake it for vapor – but it is not – in fact, it is a spider’s silk that floats in the air. A mediocre person sees the sage’s life, and believes it to be the same as his own everyday life… If the mediocre person, the ordinary person, goes to see a buddha, he will not see any difference.Many have asked Buddha, “You sleep just like we sleep, you eat just like we eat, you become tired just like we become tired, so what is the difference?” The ordinary person projects his ordinariness even on the buddha. That’s why later on, when the followers see that ordinary people will not be able to understand the buddha if they really write down his actual life, they start creating fictions around their masters. Hence, whatever you now have about Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, Mahavira, are all fictions. They are not true.Jesus walking on water is a fiction invented by the followers so that ordinary people can see that the master is extraordinary, he is no ordinary man. Jesus reviving the dead or curing the blind: these are fictions. If they are metaphors, then they are beautiful. That is the function of every buddha: to give eyes to the blind. In a metaphorical sense. To revive the dead, because you are all dead. The way you are, you are in your graves. And each buddha calls Lazarus out of the grave.If it is a metaphor, if it is a poetic, symbolic way of saying something – beautiful. But if you try to prove that it is something historical, factual, then you are simply trying to befool the ordinary people. This is not going to help. The ordinary people cannot be helped in this way.This only creates a problem for the ordinary people because whenever they will come across a real buddha, they will expect him to walk on water. And if he cannot walk on water – and no buddha is foolish enough to walk on water – then they will think he is not a buddha.Your expectations are created by the followers. They were created in order to help you to understand their master. In fact, they have done just the opposite: you will never be able to understand any living master. And dead masters are of no use. Only a living master, the touch of a living master, can change you from base metal into gold.But great difficulties have been created: around Buddha, so many stories; around Zarathustra, so many stories. And all those stories are fictions created by the followers. As time passes by, more and more fictions are being added every day so that it is difficult to sort out what is true and what is untrue.But the reason is what Bodhidharma is saying: the ordinary person believes that the buddha is also ordinary – “just like us” – whereas the enlightened man sees the holy path in a life of mediocrity. Just the opposite is the case with the buddha.Buddha is reported to have said, “The moment I became enlightened, the whole existence became enlightened for me.” And I can vouch for it: the moment I became enlightened, the whole existence became enlightened for me too.When I see you, I don’t see you as mediocre, ordinary. I see you as buddhas: asleep of course, snoring too, but that does not make any difference in your buddhahood. Buddhahood has every freedom to snore and sleep. But I can see deep down your snoring is only superficial, your sleep is only superficial. Deep down there is a light burning eternally. I see you as buddhas. You have not yet seen it.The function of the master is to help you to see what he is already seeing in you. He helps you also to see it: that’s the whole function of a master.You will observe in the sutras that all buddhas preach for two groups, the mediocre and the wise, but in the eye of Zen, a sage’s life is one of mediocrity and the mediocre person’s as the sage’s. Buddhas have to teach two kinds of people, because superficially there are two kinds of people, the mediocre and the wise, hence there are two kinds of statements in all the statements of all the buddhas.A few statements are made to foolish people. Don’t judge the buddha by those statements. Remember the context, remember to whom they were given, who was being answered. Don’t forget the person. And a few answers are for the wise ones. It is very difficult to sort it out because they are all compiled together.In the Vedas there is only one percent of statements that are worth keeping. Ninety-nine percent is just worth throwing away. So is the case with the Old Testament. So is the case with the Koran, because Mohammed comes across all kinds of people. And these are the basic categories: the stupid – the mediocre, the dreamers, the sleepy – and the wise ones.To the wise ones he will say one thing. For example, Jesus says, “Knock, and the doors shall be opened unto you.” This must have been told to somebody very, very asleep.Rabiya was passing one day and she saw Hassan sitting before a mosque, tears rolling down his cheeks. He was crying, with raised hands, in deep prayer. He was saying to God, “I am knocking and knocking on your doors. For years I have been knocking. Why don’t you open the doors? When will you receive me?”Rabiya was passing. She came close to Hassan, shook him from his prayer and said, “Stupid! The doors are open. They have never been closed. Simply get up and enter!”Now, Hassan is just on the border. One step and he will become wise.There is no contradiction in Jesus saying, “Knock, and the doors shall be opened,” and Rabiya saying, “What nonsense you are saying: ‘I am knocking’! The doors are already open!” There is no contradiction, remember; there can’t be. It is impossible to find a contradiction between two buddhas’ statements. But the context is different: Jesus must have been talking to ordinary, mediocre people, and Rabiya is talking to one who is just on the verge of becoming enlightened.That very moment Hassan opened his eyes and said, “Right, you are right! The doors have never been closed. I have been a fool. It is so compassionate of you that you disturbed my sleep. I am immensely grateful to you. Yes, the doors are never closed. And I would have prayed my whole life, believing that the doors are closed and that I have to knock and to pray.”Since that day nobody ever saw Hassan praying. He stopped going to the mosque. What is the point? The doors are everywhere.Wherever you are, God is there confronting you, challenging you.Buddhas have to speak in two ways.But Bodhidharma says: I am not interested in the mediocre. He says: …but in the eyes of Zen, a sage’s life is one of mediocrity and the mediocre person’s as the sage’s. We don’t see any difference. To us the sage lives just like the ordinary person and we see in the ordinary person a buddha. We see the profound in the ordinary and the ordinary in the profound.Hence Zen monks have lived a very ordinary life, with no holier than thou nonsense.This one life has no form and is empty by nature. If you become attached to any form, you should reject it. If you see an ego, a soul, a birth or a death, reject them all.Bodhidharma says, “Reject the very idea that ‘I am a buddha.’” Reject the very idea that “I am special, extraordinary, spiritual, holy” because these are all tricks of the ego. The ego is coming from the backdoor again. Reject all identifications.Simply be a total emptiness. And then whatever you will say and whatever you will do and whatever you will be is going to be right, is going to be beautiful, is going to be graceful.And the last question:Why and how do we reject them?The stupidity continues: Why and how do we reject them?Bodhidharma says:If you have Zen, you should not see a thing.There will be no question of rejecting. It is only a way of saying “Reject the ego.” If you meditate, if you become silent, there is no ego to reject. You won’t see a thing: neither life nor death, neither matter nor mind. All things will disappear. You will be an empty space, a mirror reflecting nothing. So don’t be worried.First enter meditation, have the meditative quality in you. Become silent and thoughtless, contentless, still. And then there is no need to worry how and why to reject. There will be nothing to reject. You will not see a thing.“The most firmly established in the path appears the most remiss.”One of the greatest statements ever made.Bodhidharma says: “The most firmly established in the path appears the most remiss.” That’s why one who is really a buddha will always be condemned by the ordinary people: because he appears to be most remiss. He fits in no category, he fits in no morality.You cannot predict anything about him; he is unpredictable. Why? Because he is so established in his being that he cares nothing about anything.He lives spontaneously, whatever the consequence. He will look careless to you because he is so conscious he need not care. He will look negligent to you; he is not. He is so conscious; there is no question of negligence. He will look lazy to you, but he is not. There is no question of it. He is so conscious, laziness cannot exist in his consciousness.But to the outside world he will not fit into any category. The Christian church will not call him a saint. The Hindus will not call him a mahatma. The Jainas will not call him a muni. Even if Buddha comes back today, Buddhists will not recognize him as a buddha. He will look very remiss, very astray.It is said that when a Zen master became enlightened, he came from the caves in the mountains to the marketplace with a bottle of wine. People looked at him. They could not believe their eyes. They had always thought that he is a very holy man. Now, coming back to the marketplace with a bottle of wine! Has he gone mad?But he is simply saying, “I have gone beyond all rules, regulations. I have gone beyond all morals, all rituals. Now you will not be able to predict about me anymore. I am no longer ordinary and no longer holy. I am simply whatever I am.”He has come to the marketplace to destroy your idea of his holiness.Sufis, Taoists, and Zen masters are very well known to destroy your idea of their holiness – their speciality. They manage to devise many methods to simply destroy your expectations, to undermine you. They never fulfill your expectations.That is the true sign of a master: that he never fulfills your expectations. If somebody fulfills your expectations, be sure and certain that he is a phony. Remember this beautiful statement: “The most firmly established in the path appears the most remiss.”Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 06 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is innocence? Does being innocent require one to live a simple life?Innocence is a state of thoughtless awareness. It is another name for no-mind. It is the very essence of buddhahood. You become attuned with the ultimate law of things. You stop fighting, you start flowing with it.The cunning mind fights because it is through fight the ego arises, and the cunning mind can exist only around the ego. They can only be together, they are inseparable. If the ego disappears, the cunning mind disappears, and what is left is innocence. If you are fighting with life, if you are going against the current, if you are not natural, spontaneous, if you are living out of the past and not in the present, you are not innocent.To live according to the past is to live an irresponsible life. It is a life of reaction. You don’t see what the situation is, you simply go on repeating your old solutions. And problems are new every day, every moment. Life goes on changing and the mind remains static. That is the whole problem: the mind remains a static mechanism and life is a constant flux. Hence there can be no communion between life and the mind.If you remain identified with the mind you will remain almost dead. You will not have any share of the joy that overwhelms existence. You will not be a participant in the celebration that is continuously going on: the birds singing, the trees dancing, the rivers flowing. You also have to be a part of this whole.You want to be separate, you want to prove yourself higher than others, superior than others, then you become cunning. It is only through cunningness that you can prove your superiority. It is a dream, it is phony, because in existence there is nobody who is superior and nobody who is inferior. The blade of grass and the great star are absolutely equal.Existence is fundamentally communist. There is no hierarchy. But man wants to be higher than others, wants to conquer nature, hence has to fight continuously. All complexity arises out of this fight.The innocent person is one who has renounced fighting; who is no longer interested in being higher, who is no longer interested in performing, in proving that he is something special. Who has become like a roseflower or like a dewdrop on the lotus leaf. Who has become part of this infinity. Who has melted, merged, become one with the ocean, is just a wave, has no idea of the “I.” The disappearance of the “I” is innocence.Hence innocence cannot require that you should live a simple life, innocence cannot require anything of you. All requirements are cunning. All requirements are basically to fight, to be somebody.The so-called simple saint is not simple because he is fighting: fighting with his instincts, fighting with his body. He is continuously at war, never at peace. How can he be simple? He is more complex than ordinary people are. His complexity is, of course, very subtle and invisible. He cannot even sleep peacefully.Mahatma Gandhi was very much afraid of sleep for the simple reason that while he was awake he was able to repress his sexual desire. He believed in celibacy. He believed that celibacy is a basic requirement for a simple life, innocent life. While awake he was able to repress, to control, to be the master of the instinct, but in sleep all control disappears. The mind goes to sleep. The controlling, the fighting mind is no longer in power and the repressed starts surfacing. Hence, sexual dreams. He was suffering from sexual dreams even when he was seventy, and he was afraid of sleep.Saints have always been afraid of sleep. What kind of saints are these people? Sleep should be one of the most innocent things in life, and they are afraid of it. The fear comes because of a certain requirement that they have imposed upon themselves, which they cannot fulfill in sleep. In sleep, sex will surface. You may start dreaming things that you don’t want, but now you cannot have control over things.It is because of this fact that psychoanalysis is more interested in your dreams than in your waking life. It is strange, it is ironical, but it is very indicative: indicative of man and his repressions.You can’t trust a man while he is in the so-called awake state. You cannot trust him. He is bound to falsify things, he is bound to be phony. And it may not be that he is deliberately phony. He may have become so accustomed to his phoniness that that’s all he knows about himself. He may have repressed his natural instincts so deeply, buried them so deep underground, that he himself has become absolutely unaware of their presence. You cannot trust what he says about himself when he is awake. You can only trust his dreams.Hence psychoanalysis has to go into your dreams, because your dreams show your reality more clearly than what you say when you are awake. What kind of awakening is this? Your dreams are far more natural, far more authentic, than your waking life.Mahatma Gandhi suffered to the very end from sexual dreams. He was very much afraid of sleep, as all the saints have always been. They always go on cutting their hours of sleep. And people think if the saint sleeps only two hours he is such a great saint. He only sleeps for two hours! And the reason he sleeps for two hours is fear: fear of his own unconscious. It is not a simple life, it is very complex.He goes on starving himself in the name of fasting. As if starving your body is in any way going to help you to come closer to God: as if God is a sadist and he wants you to be tortured. Do you think God is an Adolf Hitler, a Mussolini, a Genghis Khan, a Tamerlane or a Nadir Shah? What do you think about God? No father would like his children be starved. But all religions, the so-called religions – Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Mohammedanism – all preach fasting because fasting gives you great ego.These two are basic instincts: food and sex. Food is needed for your survival, and sex is needed for the survival of the race. Both are basically needed for survival. If everybody fasts, and everybody becomes a celibate, there is no need for atom bombs! There will be no third world war. People will die on their own accord. Sex and food are deeply joined: food keeps the individual alive, and sex keeps the race alive. That is their similarity: sex is food for the race, and food is sex for the individual.Hence, one more point is to be remembered: if you repress sex you will start eating more food because you will have to compensate. If you stop eating enough food for the body, you will become more and more sexual. You will have to compensate. And your saints are against both.Your saints are suicidal. Of course, their suicide is a very, very slow suicide. They are not even courageous enough to commit it in a single blow. They go on cutting themselves limb by limb, they go on destroying themselves slowly. They enjoy the whole process, they are masochists. They torture themselves and they feel that by torturing themselves they are purifying themselves and they are becoming holier.They are simply becoming pious egoists. And the pious egoist is far more dangerous than the ordinary egoist, because the ordinary egoist has a very gross ego. He knows he has it, everybody else knows he has it.The politician lives with the gross ego, and the saint, the mahatma, lives with a very subtle ego – and with such a facade of holiness that others will not be able to see it. He is so humble, he is so surrendered to God… And he lives such a simple life – little food, clothes are… There are saints who don’t use clothes at all.Jaina saints live naked. Their requirements are almost none. Living a naked life in a cave, in a primitive way, they seem to be very nonpossessive. But that is only an appearance. Deep down they are hankering for heaven, deep down they are greedy. Deep down they are thinking nobody is more humble, more pious than they are. Deep down they think about you as sinners and themselves as saints.This is a very complex situation. This is a fight with themselves. They have divided themselves into two: the higher and the lower. Even in the body they have a division: the higher part and the lower part. Above the sexual organs the body is higher, below the sexual organs it is lower – as if the body is divided anywhere.These stupid people should know that the body is one. The blood circulates continuously from the feet to the head, from the head to the feet. It knows no division. Life pulsates all over the body. The body is an orgasm, an organic unity, a deep ecstasy. But if you divide it, you disturb its orgasmic quality. If you divide it, you become schizophrenic.And they divide the body, they divide the mind: the good mind, the bad mind, the sinner’s mind, the saint’s mind. And this way they go on becoming more and more schizophrenic. This is not simplicity, this is pathology. And they live in misery. They will never know anything of joy, they will not know anything of laughter. They have condemned laughter as a sin.That’s why Christians say Jesus never laughed. They can’t believe Jesus laughing; that looks so profane, almost sacrilegious. Ask the Jainas. They don’t say anything in their scriptures, but they will also agree with Christians, that Mahavira also never laughed.How can these ideas create simple human beings? Those who cannot laugh, those who cannot dance, those who cannot sing, those who cannot enjoy the very ordinariness of life…I don’t think that Christians or Jainas are right. I know Jesus, he laughed. I know him not through the scriptures. I know Mahavira. If he cannot laugh, then who will laugh? I know them from my innermost being.But the people who have imposed on them the idea of no laughter, of no joy, are the people who have been driving the whole humanity crazy, mad, insane. They have converted the whole earth into a mad asylum.You ask me, “What is innocence? Does being innocent require one to live a simple life?” Innocence requires nothing. If it requires, it becomes complex. Innocence simply lives without any idea of how to live. Bring in the “how” and you become complex. Innocence is a simple response to the present.Ideas are the accumulated past. How Buddha lived – live like that and you will be a Buddhist. How Jesus lived – live like that and you will be a Christian. But you will be imposing something upon yourself.Existence never creates two persons alike. Each individual is unique. So if you impose Jesus upon yourself you will be phony. All Christians are bound to be phony – all Hindus, all Jainas, all Buddhists – because they are trying to be somebody they cannot be.You can’t be Gautam Buddha. You can be a buddha, but not Gautam Buddha. Buddha means awakened – that is your birthright – but Gautam is an individual. You can be a christ, but not Jesus Christ; Jesus is an individual. Christ is another name for buddhahood. It is the ultimate state of consciousness. Yes, that is possible, that is your potential. You can bloom and flower into christ consciousness, but you can never be Jesus, that is not possible and it is good that it is not possible.But that’s how so-called religious people have lived: trying to follow somebody else, imitating. Now, an imitator cannot be simple. He constantly has to adjust life to his ideas.A really innocent person goes with life, he simply flows with life. He has no goal as such. If you have a goal you can’t be innocent. You will have to be clever, cunning, manipulating. You will have to plan, and you will have to follow certain maps. How can you be innocent? You will be carrying so much rubbish from others. You will be just a carbon copy of Jesus, Buddha, or Mahavira. You will not be the original.Bodhidharma says again and again, “Find your original face.” And the only way to find your original face is to drop all imitation. Who is going to decide what the requirement is? Nobody can decide, and any decision is bound to disturb because life may not turn the way you expect it to turn. It really never turns the way it is expected. Life is a constant surprise. You cannot prepare beforehand. Life needs no rehearsal.You have to be spontaneous; that is innocence. Now, if you are spontaneous you cannot be Christian and you cannot be Hindu and you cannot be Buddhist. You have to be a simple human being.Simplicity is not a requirement but a by-product of innocence. It comes just like your shadow. Don’t try to be simple. If you try to be simple, the very effort destroys simplicity. You cannot cultivate simplicity; a cultivated simplicity is superficial. Simplicity has to follow you like a shadow. You need not bother about it. You need not look back again and again to see whether the shadow is following you or not. The shadow is bound to follow you.Attain innocence, and simplicity comes as a gift from existence. And innocence means becoming a no-mind, a no-ego: dropping all ideas of goals, achievements, ambitions, and living just as it happens in the moment.So I don’t tell you to be celibate. Yes, one day celibacy can happen, but it will not be something to be practiced. It will be something that you will see happening. Yes, certainly, before one becomes a buddha, one becomes celibate, but that is not a requirement, remember. Remember again and again: it is not a requirement that you have to fulfill, then you will become a buddha.No, if you simply go on becoming more aware of your mind, as the mind starts disappearing, becomes distant and distant from you, and you become unidentified with the mind, and you start seeing that you are separate, that you are not the mind, you will find many things happening with this disappearance of the mind.You will start living moment to moment, because it is the mind that collects the past. You cannot depend on it. Your eyes will be clear, not covered with the dust of the past. You will be free from the dead past. And one who is free from the dead past is free to live: to live authentically, sincerely, passionately, intensely. One can become aflame with life and its celebration.But the mind is continuously distorting, continuously interfering, continuously telling you, “Do this. Do that.” It is like a schoolmaster.A meditator becomes free of the mind. And once the past is no longer dominating you, the future simply disappears because the future is nothing but a projection of the past.In the past you have experienced certain pleasures and you would like to repeat them again and again; that is your projection for the future. In the past you have been through many miseries. Now you project into the future that you don’t want those miseries again. Your future is nothing but a modified form of the past. Once the past is gone, the future is gone. Then what is left? This moment – now.To live in the now and in the here is innocence. You cannot follow religious commandments if you really want to be innocent. A man who constantly has to think what to do and what not to do, a man who has constantly worried about what is right and what is wrong, cannot live innocently.Even if he goes on doing right according to his conditioning, it is not right. He is simply following others, how can it be right? It may have been right for them. What was right for one person two thousand years ago can’t be right for you today. So much water has gone down the Ganges! Life is never the same for even two consecutive seconds.Heraclitus is right: you cannot step twice in the same river. And I say to you: you cannot step even once in the same river. The river is so fast flowing.An innocent person lives not according to certain requirements imposed by the society, church, state, parents, education. The innocent person lives out of his own being, responsibly. He responds to the situation that is confronting him. He takes the challenge, he accepts the challenge, and does whatever in this moment his being wants to do – not according to certain principles.The innocent man has no principles, no ideology; the innocent man is absolutely unprincipled. The innocent man has no character. He is absolutely characterless – because to have a character means to have a past. To have a character means to be dominated by others. To have a character means the mind is still the dictator and you are just a slave.To be characterless, to be unprincipled, and to live in the moment… Just as the mirror reflects whatever is in front of the mirror, your consciousness reflects and you act out of that reflection. That is awareness, that is meditativeness, that is samadhi; that is innocence, that is godliness, that is buddhahood.There is no requirement in innocence, not even the requirement to live a simple life. You can live a simple life, you can force a simple life upon yourself: it will not be simple.And you can live in a palace in all the luxuries, but if you live in the moment you are living a simple life. You can live like a beggar and you will not be simple if your effort to be a beggar is something you have imposed upon yourself. If it has become your character then you are not simple. Yes, once in a while it has happened that even a king lives a simple life. A simple life not in the sense that he had not the palace and the possessions – they were there – but he was not possessive.This has to be understood: you may not have any possessions yet you may be possessive. Possessiveness can exist without possessions. If that is so, then the vice-versa is also true: nonpossessiveness can exist with all kinds of possessions. One can live in the palace and yet be totally free of it.There is a Zen story…A king was very much impressed by the simple and innocent life of a Buddhist monk. Slowly, slowly he accepted him as his master. The king watched: he was a very calculating man. He inquired about the monk’s character: “Is there any loophole in his life?” When he was totally convinced logically… His detectives informed him that “This man has no dark spots in his life, he is absolutely pure, simple. He is really a great saint, he is a buddha” – then he went to the man, touched his feet and said, “Sir, I invite you to come to my palace and live there. Why live here?”Deep down, although he was inviting the saint, he was expecting that the saint would reject, that he would say, “No, I am a simple man. How can I live in the palace?” Although he was inviting him! You see the complexity of human mind: he was inviting him, he was hoping that if the invitation was accepted he would be greatly joyous, and still there was an undercurrent: that the saint, if he is truly a saint, would reject him.He will say, “No, I am a simple man, I will live under the tree. This is my simple life. I have left the world, I have renounced the world. I cannot come back to it.”But the saint was really a saint; he must have been a buddha. He said, “Okay. So where is the vehicle? Bring your chariot and I will come to the palace.” He said, “Of course, when one comes to the palace one has to come in style. Bring the chariot!”The king was very much shocked: “This man seems to be a cheat, a fraud. It seems that he was pretending all this simplicity just to catch hold of me.” But now it was too late. He had invited him and he could not go against his own word. Being a man of his word – a samurai, a warrior, a great king – he said, “Okay, now I am caught. This man is not worth anything: he did not even reject once. He should have rejected!”He had to bring the chariot, but he was no longer happy, he was not joyous. But the saint was very happy. He sat in the chariot like a king, and the king sat in the chariot very sad, looking a little silly. And people were watching on the streets: “What is happening? The naked fakir…” And he was really sitting like an emperor, and the king was looking very poor compared to this man. The monk was so joyous, so bouncing with ecstasy. And the more ecstatic he was, the sadder the king became.“Now, how to get rid of this man? I have become caught in his net on my own. All those detectives and spies are fools. They could not see that this man had a plan.” As if he was sitting under that tree for years so that the king became impressed. All these ideas came into the head of the king.The king had arranged the best room for the saint, if he was to come. But he did not believe that he would ever come. You see the split of the human mind: you go on doing one thing, you go on expecting something else. If the man was cunning he would have simply denied. He would have said, “No!”If you take money to Vinoba Bhave, he closes his eyes, and deep down you say, “Now, this is a saint!” Bring the money to me and I will take the money and I will not even thank you. Then you will be very shocked: “What kind of man is this?”I was travelling in the Impala and people started writing to me: “You should not move in an Impala.”I said, “That is true. So,” I told Laxmi, “find something else, something better, because in America the Impala is just a plumber’s car.” So Laxmi has brought a Buick.Now people are saying, “Are you going to travel in a Buick?”I told Laxmi, “This won’t do. Find something better, because the Buick is the pimp’s car in America!” So now Laxmi is bringing a Cadillac.The king had arranged the best room. The saint reached the room – he was sitting under the tree for years – and he said, “Bring this, bring that… If you have to live in the palace you have to live like a king!”The king was getting more and more puzzled. Of course, he had invited him, so whatever was asked for was brought. But it was heavy on the heart of the king; it was becoming heavier every day, because the saint started living like a king – in fact, better than the king because the king had his own worries and the saint had none.He would sleep in the day, in the night. He would enjoy the garden and the swimming pool, and he would rest and rest. And the king thought, “This is a parasite!”One day it became unbearable. He said to the saint… The saint was in the garden for a morning walk, and the king came and said, “I want to say something to you.”The saint said, “Yes, I know. You wanted to say it even before I had left my tree. You wanted to say it when I accepted your invitation. Why did you wait so long? You are unnecessarily suffering. I can see you have become sad. You don’t come to me anymore. You don’t ask great metaphysical, religious questions as you used to ask me when I used to live under the tree. I know – but why did you waste six months? That I can’t see. You should have asked immediately, and things would have settled then and there. I know what you want to ask, but ask!”The king said, “I want to ask only one thing. Now what is the difference between me and you? You are living more luxuriously than I am living. And I have to work and I have to worry and I have to carry all kinds of responsibilities, and you have no work, no worry, no responsibility. I am feeling jealous of you! And I have certainly stopped coming to you, because I don’t think there is any difference between me and you. I live in possessions, you live in more possessions than I. Every day you inquire, ‘Bring the golden chariot. I want to go for a walk in the country. Bring this and bring that!’ And you are eating delicious food. And you have stopped being naked, now you are using the best clothes possible. Then what is the difference between me and you?”The saint laughed and he said, “The question is such that I can answer it only if you come with me. Let us go outside the capital.”The king followed. They crossed the river and they continued. The king asked again and again, “Now what is the point of going on further? Why not answer now?”The saint said, “Wait a little. I am in search of the right spot where to answer.”Then they came to the very boundary of his kingdom, and the king said, “Now it is time, this is the very boundary.”The saint said, “That’s what I have been searching for. Now I am not going back. Are you coming with me or are you going back?”The king said, “How can I come with you? I have my kingdom, my possessions, my wives, my children. How can I come with you?”And the saint said, “Now you see the difference? But I am going and I will not look backward even once. I was in the palace, I lived with all kinds of possessions, but I was not possessive. You are possessive. That is the difference. I am going.”He undressed, became naked, gave the clothes to the king and said, “Keep your clothes and be happy again.”Now the king realized that he had been foolish: this man was rare, a rare gem. He fell at his feet and he said, “Don’t go. Come back. I have not understood you yet. Today I have seen the difference. Yes, that is true sainthood.”The saint said, “I can come back, but remember, you will become sad again. For me there is no difference whether to go this side or that side, but you will become sad again. Now, let me make you happy. I am not coming, I am going.”The more the saint insisted to go, the more the king insisted for him to come back. But the saint said, “Once is enough. I have seen you are a stupid person. I can come, but the moment I say ‘I can come,’ I can see in your eyes the old ideas coming back: ‘Maybe he is cheating me again. Maybe this is just an empty gesture, giving me the clothes and saying “I am going,” so I become impressed again.’ If I come, you will be miserable again and I don’t want to make you miserable.”Remember the difference: the difference is not in possessions, the difference is in possessiveness. A simple person is not one who possesses nothing, a simple person is one who has no possessiveness, who never looks back.This simplicity cannot be practiced. This simplicity can come only as a consequence of innocence. Otherwise, you will practice on one hand, and from some other corner of your being… And you are a vast continent; you are not like an island, you are a really vast continent.In the deepest core of your being there is still uncharted territory, unmapped territory. You still carry a great, dark, continent like Africa inside you, which you have never traveled, of which you are not even aware: of its presence you are unaware.If you repress – and that’s what cultivation is – then it will start coming in another form from somewhere else. You will become more and more complex in this way. More and more cunning and calculating in this way. More disciplined, more with a character which people respect and honor.If you want to enjoy your ego, the best way is to be a holy man. But if you really want to celebrate existence, the best way is to be absolutely ordinary, utterly ordinary, and live an ordinary life with no pretensions.Live moment to moment: that is innocence, and innocence is enough. Don’t try to become simple. Millions of people have tried, and they have not become simple at all. On the contrary, they have become very, very complex, entangled in their own jungle, in their own ideas.Get out of the mind: that is innocence. Be a no-mind: that is innocence. And everything else follows. When everything else follows, it has a beauty of its own.Cultivated, it is plastic, synthetic, not natural. Uncultivated, when it comes, it is a grace, it is a benediction.The second question:Osho,Sometimes it feels as if physical death would be the only shock powerful enough to wake me up, and I find myself wishing for it – as perhaps an escape from or an end to this gray slumber that surrounds me. What can break this dream when the dreamer is so sleepy?If you really want to commit suicide, follow the wise Irishman I have heard about.An Irishman wanted to commit suicide. He bought a bottle of aspirin, took two, and felt better.Death cannot wake you up because you have died many times before and it has not awakened you yet. You are not new here, nobody is new. All are ancient pilgrims, very ancient.You have seen Buddhas, Christs, Zarathustras, Lao Tzus. You have seen the whole evolution of human consciousness, you have been part of it. You have been here many times and death has happened again and again.It has not helped in any way. It can’t help because death has a natural mechanism: before you die, you become unconscious. As if death uses anesthesia – so is birth. Birth also happens in unconsciousness.Just think. One thing is certain: that you have been born. You may not be so certain about your past lives – maybe it is just a theory – but one thing is absolutely certain: that you were born one day. At least this life is there. Do you remember anything of the birth? And birth and death are not separate. They are two aspects of the same coin. On one side it is birth, on another side it is death. On one side it is death, another side it is birth. It is the same coin. Heads or tails, it makes no difference; it is the same coin.You see a person dying: here he is dying, somewhere else he has started being born. The moment he is dead here, he would have entered another womb somewhere. It takes seconds, only seconds, to enter another womb.There are always millions of foolish people making love, twenty-four hours. You will not have to search long, you will not have to search and wait, you will not even have to stand in a queue, remember.That’s why it happens again and again that if a person dies in India he is born again in India. More or less, it happens that way. Who cares to go far away? Just in the neighborhood some foolish couple is ready to receive you.The birth was there, but you were unconscious. Birth also happens in unconsciousness because that too is a very painful process. It is a kind of death. You lived in the womb for nine months, it was your life for nine months; and the nine months in the womb are not nine months for the child. For the child it is almost an eternity because he has no sense of time.And then suddenly one day the womb is ready to expel you. To the child it looks like death, he is dying. His world is disappearing, his way of life, of which he has become accustomed, is being taken away from him. All that he knows about life is going to be destroyed. Without the womb he cannot conceive what life there can be. The womb is all that he knows. Beyond the womb all is unknown.Death is painful, so is birth. Hence, there is a natural mechanism: the child is born in an unconscious state, and the old man dies in an unconscious state. Doctors, surgeons, have starting using anesthetic processes only recently – chloroform, etcetera – but death and birth have been using them since eternity. When you die, before the exact moment of death, you become unconscious because it is going to be very painful.Just think. Your consciousness, which has become so attached to the body for seventy, eighty or ninety years… You have become so identified with the body, you will cling. You will do everything that you can do to remain in the body.Now again you are being thrown out of the body, and so many desires are unfulfilled, and so many ambitions are still hovering around you. So many desires and dreams still, and everything is shattering! And your body is being taken away from you – not only the body but your brain too. And that’s what you have become identified with. You need a great anesthesia.The body has its own ways to release anesthesia in you. Sooner or later medical science is going to discover it. They have not yet discovered it. But sooner or later they will find that the body has chemical processes which are released at the time of death and the person becomes unconscious.It is just as in anger when certain chemicals are released into your blood and you become mad: a momentary kind of madness, your own glands do it. When you become sexually possessed, it is your glands releasing certain secretions. And you are not conscious, you become almost unconscious.Death is one of the most painful processes. So you can die, but you will die unconsciously. Death will not wake you up, it will make you more unconscious.The only way to be awakened is to be in communion with someone who is already awakened. The only way – there is no other – is to be in the company of the awakened one, is to be in the commune of the awakened one. And you are fortunate: you are in the company of the awakened one and in the communion of those who are seeking awakening. You are in a buddhafield. If this cannot wake you up, nothing else can do it.But don’t be so worried about it; that worry is unnecessary. Leave it to me. Leave all your gray slumber, all your dreams, to me. I don’t ask for anything from you. At least give me your dreams, give me your worries, give me your sleep.Rather than worrying about how to wake up, start watching your dreams. A little bit of alertness will start arising in you. Instead of being worried, start watching your worries, and watching the worries will help you to come out of the worries.There are only two things to worry about: either you are sick or you are well. If you are well, there is nothing to worry about.But if you are sick, there are only two things to worry about: either you get better or you die.If you get better, there is nothing to worry about, but if you die, there are only two things to worry about: either you go to heaven or you go to hell.If you go to heaven, there is nothing to worry about. But if you go to hell, you’ll be so darn busy shaking hands with your friends you won’t have time to worry!So why worry? Rather start enjoying. Enjoy your sleep; that will help you to wake up faster. Enjoy your dreams, because if you can enjoy your dreams, enjoy your sleep, you have already become a little distant.When you are worried, you become more involved. When you are enjoying, you can be a watcher.And don’t be in a hurry, either. Nothing happens before its right time. There is a season for everything to happen, so just wait for the spring. Meanwhile, enjoy whatever is there. Clouds are there, dark clouds, enjoy them. They have their own beauty. Once in a while the sun breaks through, enjoy it. Sometimes it is raining, enjoy it. Enjoy all the moods of life; that’s how one becomes mature, ripe.This life is an opportunity to become seasoned. Don’t avoid anything. Gray slumber also has something to contribute to your growth, and your dreams are also to become steps, stepping stones toward awakening.Everybody seems to be in such a hurry that nobody wants to wait for the spring. But spring comes when it comes. Your hurrying will simply create chaos in you, your impatience will create a mess of you. Be patient, and whatever the situation, accept it and enjoy it.Yes, there is a silver lining to every dark cloud, but people are so impatient, so pessimistic, that I have heard they have changed the old proverb. The old proverb is: Every dark cloud has a silver lining. They have changed it. Now they say: Every silver lining has a dark cloud. It all depends on how you look at things.Be a little more optimistic. Be a little more rejoicing. Yes, even if you sing in your dream, even if you dance in your dream, it is helpful, because your singing and your dancing may wake you up.But if you worry and you think of suicide, and you think of getting rid of this life because you are not waking up as soon as you would like, it is a very pessimistic attitude. It is not life-enhancing, it is destructive. Beware of such destructive tendencies. Death is not going to help.I am here to hammer, to shatter you. Just give me a little chance. Things are moving beautifully.Many are coming closer and closer to maturity, but unless you come to the hundred-degree point you can’t evaporate. Even at ninety-nine degrees you are still water, hot water, and the heat becomes more and more painful before it reaches a hundred degrees and you simply evaporate.And then the last change; then you enter a different field. Water flows downward and vapor floats upward. Water is visible, vapor is invisible. Water seeks the lowest place on the earth and vapor seeks the highest. The vapor goes toward the peaks.But I cannot give you more heat than you can absorb at the moment. I have to be very, very careful because too much heat may prove destructive. Too much heat may destroy something fragile in you. Too much heat and you may escape. Too much heat will make you so hot that you may start thinking life is unbearable.I have to give you heat in homeopathic doses so that slowly, slowly you become accustomed to it – because I have to take you up to a hundred degrees.But many are moving toward it, and whenever it starts happening many are going to become awakened almost simultaneously.That’s how it happened in Buddha’s time. Just one person, Manjushri, became enlightened – his first disciple to become enlightened – and immediately a chain: Sariputra, Maudgalyan, Purnakashyapa and others immediately followed, as if Manjushri triggered the process. Maybe he was the first flower of spring, and then the whole spring burst forth.That’s how it is going to be here. Slowly, slowly you are getting ready. The spring is coming closer. Wait. Wait and watch.The third question:Osho,When a master dies, suddenly a myth springs up around him. Man makes stone or wooden idols of him. The master becomes a distant god to be worshipped and becomes unattainable to ordinary man. The thought of the master being an example of what we should and can be disappears. Why does this phenomenon happen time and time again?It is something very natural to the unconscious state of humanity. The living master is a danger, but the dead master is no longer a danger. The living master can wake you up. You cannot dodge him. He simply goes like an arrow into the heart. But a dead master is a dead master. He is just a memory, he is no longer there.And now the disciples start worshipping him. Why? It is out of a guilt feeling that they never heard him while he was alive. They feel guilty, they repent. Now they have to do something to get rid of guilt. Worshipping is out of guilt, you will be surprised to know. You may not have thought that worship is guilt standing upside down.The people crucified Jesus, and the same people started worshipping him. It is repentance. They started feeling a great pain, a great heaviness, a great anxiety. They have done something wrong. They have to compensate for it. They have to worship this man. They condemned him like a criminal, and they worshipped him like God. The same has been happening again and again. Worship comes out of guilt, one thing.Second: worship is a way to avoid the master. By worshipping you start feeling that you are doing whatever you can do. What more is there? You need not change, worship is enough.If the master is alive and you only worship him and you don’t change, he is going to hit on your heads. The living master, even if he allows you to worship him, allows you to worship him only so that you can come closer to him, that’s all. He allows you to worship him so that you can come close and he can really destroy your ego.He wants you to become intimate with him. If this is the only way you know – and this is the only way you know, because you have always been worshipping Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, Mohammed. You have been worshipping. So when you come to a living master, the first thing that you can do is worship him. He allows you to worship him so that you can come closer, so that you can be caught into his net.But a dead master is no longer there to do anything to you. Now you can start doing things to the master. You can take revenge! You can make a stone or wooden statue of the master and you can bow down to the statue that you have made. You are bowing down to yourself, to your own creation. It is like…and it will be far better…When you make a temple in your house, it is better to fix a big mirror and sit before the mirror and bow down to your own image. Because the master that you create is the master that you create in your own image.The Bible says God created man in his own image. Maybe. In the beginning he did, but man has paid him well, and in the same coin. Man has made God in his own image.When you worship a master you start creating a master of your own idea, hence the myth springs up. The myth comes from your unconscious. The master is physically dead, now you want him to be spiritually dead too. The myth will do it; he will become spiritually dead too. Your myth is a lie. And the more the master becomes surrounded by myths, fictions, the more and more unreal he becomes.That’s why it is very difficult to believe that Jesus is a historical person, very difficult to believe. It is because of the mythology that has been created around him: he walks on water, he turns water into wine, he turns stones into bread and out of a few loaves he makes millions of people eat.The people who created these myths are really getting rid of the reality of the master. Although he is dead, a certain impact of the master still continues that has to be effaced. The myth will do the work. Death has destroyed his body, the myth will destroy his spirituality. He will become just a mythological figure, utterly impotent, useless.The myth is a process in which you change the master’s historic reality into a fiction. Jesus as a historical person may be embarrassing. Jesus as myth is beautiful – because a myth is created by you, according to your expectations.No living master ever fulfills anybody’s expectations. He lives his own life. Whether you accept him or you reject him makes no difference. You can kill him, you can worship him. It makes no difference. He goes on living in his own way, he goes on doing his own thing. He cannot be forced to fulfill your requirements of him.People try in every possible way. They come to me… Letters reach me: “Osho, if you do only one thing, millions of people will be benefited because they will start coming to you. Please stop talking about sex. India will worship you. People are ready to accept you, but you disturb them.” Now, these people who are fast asleep are advising me what I should say, what I should not say.In these twenty years, thousands of people have come to me. Very few have remained because they all came with expectations, and I have not been fulfilling anybody’s expectations. In fact if I see somebody expecting, I immediately destroy it.I only want people here without expectations of me. Otherwise followers try to become masters of the masters. They start dictating to them: “Do this. Eat this. Live like this, because then more and more people will come.” It is not a question that more and more are needed. Only those are needed who have no expectations, because only they are capable of being awakened.But once the master is gone he cannot prevent you from creating a myth. So whatever was hurting you, you will change. Whatever was offensive to you, you will drop, and you will replace it with something beautiful. That has been the root cause of myths springing up.Jesus lived a very human life, utterly human – with great godliness, but he lived a human life. He is a rare master in that way. He moved with gamblers, drunkards. There is every possibility once in a while he may have played poker. And I don’t see that there is anything wrong in it. He used to drink wine, he enjoyed it. And I don’t think that there is anything wrong in it once in a while. It is sheer playfulness. Don’t become addicted to it. He was not addicted to it, but he participated in the ordinary life.There is every possibility that Mary Magdalene fell in a very human kind of love with him, and it cannot be only one-sided, he may have responded. But Christians will feel offended: a prostitute falling in love with Jesus. And Jesus may have responded in a human way. In fact, he was such a courageous man, such a rebel, that he must have responded in a human way.Rock Hudson dies and goes to heaven, knocks at the gate and requests permission to enter.Saint Peter says, “Sure. All you need is two passport photographs and to fill in this Form B-31. Now, what’s your name?”“Rock Hudson.”“Occupation?”“Film actor.”“Sorry,” says Saint Peter. “No film actors allowed.”“Why?” asks Rock, amazed.Saint Peter says, “Because you people are known to be great sinners: all this nudity in films, scandals, all kinds of vices. Sorry, you can’t come in.”“But I’m a personal friend of Jesus,” says Rock. “Go and ask him.”Saint Peter goes to Jesus and says, “There is a big guy at the gate. He says he is a friend of yours. His name is Rock Hudson.”“Rock Hudson!” says Jesus. “Oh, my God! And I haven’t got a thing to wear!”Jesus must have been a very human master. It is because of his great humanity that he is to suffer, that he is to be crucified. It is because of his great humanity. If he had lived just like a god, just a holy saint, chanting mantras, fasting, living in a cave, the same rabbis would have worshipped him. Before Jesus they had not killed anybody. Why Jesus? This is strange. The Jewish history has no precedent. What was his sin? What was his crime?His crime was that he was trying to live a very ordinary life. He wanted to show you that if you are living an ordinary life, you can still be enlightened. You can move with prostitutes and gamblers and drunkards and yet you can be absolutely holy. He wanted to show you this paradox. He wanted to become an example of it, that’s why he is crucified.In India, Buddha is not crucified, Mahavira is not crucified. Why? They never lived in any human way. They lived aloof, very aloof, cool, faraway, distant. There was no need to crucify them. Hence my love for Jesus is immense. Buddha you can respect, but you cannot love. Jesus you can love, too. And if you respect him, you respect out of love.And the same has to be the situation here. I don’t want your respect. If your respect comes as part of your love it is welcome, otherwise I don’t want your respect. I don’t want to be respectable. It is better to be crucified by people than to be respectable. Respectable means you have bowed down to the sleepers, that you have surrendered your freedom. This is possible only if you fulfill their expectations, then they will respect you. They will call you holy.But if you live an ordinary life just as people live it and you enjoy the ordinary things of life – of course, with a difference, with a great difference, a difference that really makes a difference: you bring God closer to the earth, you bring heaven closer to the earth – then they are going to kill you while you are alive.And when you are gone, the same people will start changing your life, painting your life again and again. As the demands change according to the changes in time and fashions, they will go on painting you.There are many christs really. If you go through these two thousand years you will find many christs, not one, because each age demands a different kind of holy man. So each age has to paint Jesus according to its expectations. That’s how myths are created. Then another age has to impose its myths, and this goes on and on, and the whole of life becomes fictitious. Now the whole thing is so fictitious…The virgin birth is an impossibility, but they have to impose that myth of virgin birth because ordinary people are born out of sexual intercourse. How can Jesus be born out of sexual intercourse? He is born without any sexuality. This is unbiological, unscientific. But the followers will do such things just to make him look separate, different, supernatural.The Buddhists say when Buddha was born, his mother was standing. Buddhists say when buddhas are born, the mothers are always standing. Strange! Why can’t a buddha be born while the mother is lying on her back? That is how everybody is born. Buddhas have to be born in a special way. And then what did Buddha do? He comes out of the womb standing. He falls on the ground standing, and then he takes seven steps and he declares, “I am the greatest of the greatest!” That is the first thing he does – after seven steps. Now, such foolish things.Jainas say that their tirthankaras are always born in the warrior caste, the kshatriyas. Mahavira entered the womb of a brahmin woman, but that is not according to the law. You see the expectations of people: not only in life they will expect of you, but even before life they will force their expectations! So they have created a story that the gods were very much disturbed. This had never happened. A tirthankara, a Jaina master, an enlightened master, has to be born of a kshatriya woman, a warrior-caste woman. It was an antagonism against the brahmins. Mahavira entered the womb of a brahmin woman, so the gods could not tolerate it.When he was three months old in the woman’s womb, they removed him, they took him out. That seems to be the first surgery. They removed Mahavira from the brahmin woman’s womb, and they removed another child from the queen’s womb. The queen’s child, a girl, was put into the brahmin womb and Mahavira was replaced.Two things were wrong. First: the tirthankara has to be a man. Second: he has to be born of a kshatriya woman. What expectations! What foolish kinds of expectations! But these myths go on growing later on.These myths are for a certain reason. The disciples want, the followers want their master to be special: special compared to ordinary people and special compared to other masters, too.You ask me, “When a master dies, suddenly a myth springs up around him. Man makes stone or wooden idols of him. The master becomes a distant god to be worshipped and becomes unattainable to ordinary man.” That’s precisely the purpose of worship: to make the man so distant and so far away that you can only worship. You need not practice whatever has been his teaching. You need not wake up from your sleep. Worshipping can continue in your sleep beautifully. It does not disturb your sleep. In fact, it functions as a sedative, a tranquilizer.You ask me, “The thought of the master being an example of what we should and can be disappears.” That is precisely the purpose, that it should disappear so that there is no need for us to try, to endeavor for the peaks. Then we can live in our sleep peacefully. There is nobody to disturb.If Buddha is a human being, if Jesus is a human being, and they can become so enlightened, so full of light, so full of love, so full of bliss, then the idea of them will haunt you. It will not leave you alone. It will continuously be there inside you, that you have to attain this state too. Otherwise you are not fulfilling. Otherwise you are not doing what is needed to be done. You are missing an opportunity.You ask me, “Why does this phenomenon happen time and time again?”Because man’s stupidity is the same.The last question:Osho,I am a scientist. Science teaches to observe detachedly. Is it not the same with religion?Science teaches a detached observation, art teaches a nondetached observation, religion simply teaches observation, neither detached nor nondetached.The scientist has to be there just as a spectator: indifferent, cold. That’s how he can come to know the secrets of matter.The artist has to participate in nature. Without participation he will not know the beauty of the flower, of the moon, of the sunset, of the clouds. He will have to become a participant, he will have to dissolve himself into their reality. The observer has to become the observed in the world of art. Only then he can be able to paint, to sculpt, to create music or poetry.A man came to a great painter and asked him, “I want to paint bamboos. What should I do?”The master said, “First go into the jungle and live with the bamboos for three years. When you start feeling that you have become a bamboo, come back.”The man never returned. Three years passed. The master waited and waited and then he had to go in search of the man. What has happened? Because when you have become a bamboo, how can you come back to the master?When the master reached he saw the man was standing in a bamboo grove. The wind was blowing, the bamboos were swaying and dancing, and the man was swaying and dancing.The master shook him. He said, “What are you doing? When are you going to paint?”He said, “Forget all about it. Get lost! Don’t disturb me.”The master had to drag him back home. He said, “Now you are ready to paint the bamboo, because now you know from the inside what a bamboo is.”Science observes from the outside. Art enters the inside of things. But religion is a transcendence. It is beyond science and beyond art. Science is objective, art is subjective. Religion is neither. It is pure awareness, neither cold nor hot. That’s why I call it cool. Science is cold, art is hot, religion is cool.But observation is needed all the same in all the three planes. It changes its quality. The lowest observation is detached observation. A little higher is art: participant observation. And the highest is just observation. But observation is the essential phenomenon; that is the thread that joins science, art, and religion.This happened in the auditorium of a faculty of medicine…The well-known professor begins his first course with this declaration: “To be a good practitioner, two qualities are required. The first is, you should not be disgusted with anything. The second is, you should be able to observe accurately.“As an illustration of this, watch. You see this age-old corpse lying on the table? I dip one finger in the anus of the corpse, and then you see, I take it out, put it in my mouth and suck it.”The whole class is horrified.The professor goes on, “Now, who of you will be able to do this?”A very zealous student comes up and, without hesitation, dips his finger into the corpse’s anus and sucks it.A great silence follows this performance.The professor congratulates the student, “Very good, young man, you certainly have the first quality required to be a good doctor. That is, not to be disgusted with anything. However, the second quality is missing: you have no sense of observation at all. You see, it was this finger, the index, that I dipped. And it was this finger, the medius, that I put into my mouth!”Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 07 (Listen & Download)

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Question: What do you call the mind of greediness?Answer: It is the mind of ignorance.Question: What do you call the mind of egolessness?Answer: It is the mind of shravaka, Buddha’s actual disciple.Question: What do you call the mind of no-entity?Answer: It is the mind of the sages who have no connection with the teaching of Buddha, but discover the truth of no-entity by themselves.Question: What do you call the mind which has no particular understanding, and also no painful delusions?Answer: It is the mind of bodhisattvas.Question: What do you call the mind which has nothing to know and also nothing to realize?Answer: No answer from Bodhidharma.Bodhidharma said, “Dharmakaya has no form, therefore one sees it without seeing. Dharma has no voice, therefore one hears it without hearing. Prajna has nothing to be known, therefore one knows it without knowing. If he thinks that he is seeing, he sees it incompletely. If he thinks that he knows it, he does not know it thoroughly. When he knows it without knowing, he knows it completely. If one does not know this, he is not a true knower. If one thinks that he is gaining, he is not gaining entirely. When he gains non-gaining, he owns everything. If one thinks that he is right, his righteousness is not perfect. When he transcends right and wrong, his virtues are accomplished. Such wisdom is the gate-opener to a hundred thousand gates of the higher wisdom.”….Said Bodhidharma, “All buddhas preach emptiness. Why? Because they wish to crush the concrete ideas of the students. If a student even clings to an idea of emptiness, he betrays all buddhas. One clings to life although there is nothing to be called life; another clings to death although there is nothing to be called death. In reality there is nothing to be born, consequently there is nothing to perish.“By clinging one recognizes a thing or an idea. Reality has neither inside, outside, nor middle part. An ignorant person creates delusions and suffers from discrimination. Right and wrong do not exist in reality. An ignorant person creates them, recognizes them, near or far, inward or outward. He then suffers from discrimination. This is the general way of the phenomenal world.”All questions are childish. Mind you, they are not childlike, they are childish, they are stupid. They may appear very knowledgeable, they may consist of great words, but with no significance, no meaning, because those great words are empty, borrowed. They have no roots in your own existential experience.Philosophy as such is a very childish affair. Religion has maturity, but not philosophy. Philosophy is curiosity: curiosity without any worthiness to know. Questions raised in the hope of getting the answers. But even if the answers are given, you will not be able to receive them because there is no readiness on your part to receive them. The answers will only create new questions in the childish mind.That has been the whole history of philosophical endeavor. For ten thousand years, philosophy has raised great questions and has been greatly involved in finding the answers, but not a single answer has been found. No effort has been as futile as philosophy. Each answer that philosophers think they have arrived at, that they think is going to change the whole vision of man, simply creates more questions. Philosophy has not solved anything at all. It cannot. It is basically a movement in the wrong direction.The mind can only raise questions, but cannot find the answers. Just as leaves grow on trees, questions grow in the mind. You can prune the leaves, but by pruning, more leaves will be coming, the foliage will become thicker. You can prune the questions – that’s what philosophy goes on doing – but more questions will be arising because the source of the questions, the mind, remains intact, protected, secure.To find the answer one has to go beyond the mind, and to go beyond the mind is the only maturity. You are really a grown-up person when you have gone beyond the mind. The buddhas are nothing but grown-up people, mature, ripe, integrated, and gone beyond the mind, gone to the other shore, the further shore.From that height, questions simply disappear. Not that they are solved, remember. Questions are not solved when you go beyond the mind. Going beyond the mind, you go beyond questions too. They become irrelevant, they look stupid, they lose all meaning. They are simply nonsense.Not that you find answers but when questions are dissolved and you are in a state of questionless consciousness, this is the answer. Without any particular answer this is the answer, this is the solution.Hence in the East we call it samadhi. Samadhi simply means the solution. All is solved, questions are dissolved. You are absolutely silent, with no curiosity, with nothing to ask. When you have nothing to ask, you know; and when you have something to ask, you do not know.Yes, out of compassion buddhas go on answering your questions in the hope that sooner or later you will see the utter absurdity, ridiculousness of questions.Existence simply is. It is not a question–answer thing, it is not a puzzle. It is a mystery to be experienced, lived, loved. You can sing it, you can dance it, but it is not a question. It is a quest, an adventure, an ecstatic adventure, an exploration. And when you enter the mysterious without any curiosity, all the secrets of existence are available to you.If you enter with a curious mind, nothing is available to you because the curious mind itself prevents you from seeing. You are preoccupied with your question. You are preoccupied with your knowledge. You ask because you think you know. Somebody comes and says, “Who created the world?” In fact he already carries the idea that God created the world. He has come to ask only to be confirmed. If you confirm him, he is very happy. If you negate, he becomes angry at you. He was not a real seeker, he was seeking support for his belief.A man asked Buddha one day, early in the morning… Buddha was on his morning walk and the man asked, “Is there a God?”Buddha looked for a moment into the eyes of the man and said, “No. There is no God at all – never has been, never will be. Get rid of all this nonsense.”The man was shocked.Ananda was following Buddha. He always followed him like a shadow, just to be at his service any moment, if any need arises. He listened, he had listened to many answers from Buddha, but it was like a hammer; it looked so crude, so cruel. But he saw the face of Buddha – tremendous compassion.In the afternoon, another man came and he asked, “Is there a God?”Buddha said, “Yes, there is – always has been, always will be. Seek and find.”Ananda was very much puzzled. He has not forgotten the answer Buddha gave just this morning, but he could not ask because there were so many other people.And before he could ask, in the evening another man came, as the sun was setting. Buddha was sitting outside underneath a tree, just watching the sunset, the beautiful clouds, and the man asked, “Is there a God?”Buddha simply motioned his hand, gestured to the man – sit down. Closed his eyes. The man followed. They sat in silence for a few moments, then the man rose. It was getting dark, the sun had set. He touched the feet of Buddha, said, “I am grateful for the answer. Thank you very much,” and went away.Now Ananda was all boiling up. When there was nobody, Ananda asked, “I will not be able to sleep tonight unless you answer me. In a single day, the same question – and you answered in three ways. To the first person you said, ‘No, there is no God.’ To the second you said, ‘Yes, there is.’ And to the third you simply motioned with such love to sit down and close his eyes. You didn’t answer anything to him, but something must have transpired because the man fell into deep silence. He touched your feet, thanked you also for your answer, although I was there and you had not answered at all. What is going on? You have puzzled me very much.”Buddha said, “No answer was given to you. Why should you be puzzled? It was their question, it was my answer. You were not a party to it.”But Ananda said, “I am not deaf, I was there and I simply listened. And now those three answers are keeping me very much confused.”Buddha said, “The first man was a believer, he believed in God. He had not come really to inquire, he had come to be confirmed. He wanted his belief to be supported by me, so he could go and tell people, ‘Not only I believe in God, Buddha also believes.’ He wanted to use me for his own purposes, hence I had to say no.“And I had to be very hard with him. Otherwise he wouldn’t listen. He was so full of his own ideas. He was a scholar, well acquainted with the scriptures. I could hear the noise in his head. I could see the turmoil in his being. I had to be very cruel and hard like a hammer, only then there was a possibility that he may hear. He needed a shock. I shocked him because I don’t want to support anybody’s beliefs. All beliefs are wrong. Knowing is a totally different matter.“And the second man was an atheist, he did not believe in God. He was also a scholar. He was also full of all kinds of ideas, but he was just the opposite of the first man. He had also come for the same purpose. They were opposites, enemies, but the purpose was the same. He wanted me to support his nonbelief, his disbelief. That’s why I had to say to him with such authority: ‘Yes, there is a God. Only God is, nothing else is.’ That way I shattered his belief.“And the third man was really a seeker. He did not want an answer. He wanted an experience. He had not come to question. He had no idea, no prejudice. He had come open, available. He was vulnerable to me, he was a man of great trust. He wanted me to reveal something to him, hence I did not answer him. I simply told him to sit by my side. And, yes, you are right, something transpired.”Something always transpires when two persons can manage to sit in deep silence. And if you can manage to sit in deep silence with a buddha, something of tremendous value is going to happen. His silence is contagious. If you are available and open, his silence will pour into your being. It will be like a bath. You will be bathed in his consciousness. You will be cleansed, you will be purified. Your dust will disappear from your mirror. Suddenly you will be able to see. Your eyes will be clear.“So without giving him any answer, he received the answer. He received the answer of all answers, which is silence. That’s why he was so grateful. That’s why he bowed down and touched my feet. That’s why he thanked me.”When you come to a Buddha or a Bodhidharma you have to be very alert how you come. Don’t come with prejudices, otherwise you will ask childish questions.A little boy went to school for the first time, and the teacher explained that if he wanted to go to the washroom he should raise two fingers.The boy, looking puzzled, asked, “How’s that going to stop it?”He has a certain idea – childish – but he is puzzled.“Why don’t you smile?” the teacher asked young Johnny.“I didn’t have no breakfast,” Johnny replied.“You poor dear,” said the teacher. “But to return to our geography lesson, Johnny. Where is the Polish border?”“In bed with Momma – that’s why I didn’t have no breakfast.”Not only children are full of childish ideas, the so-called grown-ups are not different at all. Yes, they are aged, but not grown up. They have been growing in age but not growing in consciousness. The more you grow in age the more ideas you accumulate – obviously. More experiences, more words, more theories, more ideologies.The more you grow in consciousness, the fewer ideas, the fewer philosophies, the fewer theologies. Instead, silence grows in you. Beware of being knowledgeable; that is the greatest hindrance between you and the truth. Knowledgeability deceives you. It makes you feel that you already know.That’s how thousands of pundits, scholars, professors, pedagogues go on living. Believing that they know, they know nothing. They have not even entered the temple of wisdom. They have not even moved toward the temple. In fact, they are moving in just the opposite direction. To know is one thing, and to be knowledgeable is just the opposite of it. Beware of knowledgeability so that one day you can know.It is not a question of accumulating information. On the contrary, it is a question of emptying your mind totally of all its content. When the mind is empty, has nothing to say, has nothing to believe, has no ideas about anything, then suddenly the reality is revealed to you.In that emptiness, you become a mirror. To be empty is to be a mirror. And then, simply, all that is, is reflected in you.The first question. All these questions are stupid, but Bodhidharma is very patient. Knowing that they are stupid, he answers in the hope, not that they will be answered in this way, but in the hope that you will one day understand that life is not a matter of questioning and answering. His answers are such that they don’t answer your question, they destroy your question.That’s the way of the real master. He does not answer your question, he simply destroys it. So if you are waiting for a particular answer, you will be at a loss. Many have come from the buddhas empty-handed just because they were expecting ready-made, particular answers. Buddhas don’t do that. On the contrary, they take away your question.These answers are just to take away the questions from you, so that you can be left cleaner, more spacious. These questions are like clouds in the sky. Once these clouds disappear, the infinity of the sky becomes available to you with all its beauty and glory and grandeur.The first question:What do you call the mind of greediness?On the surface the question looks perfectly okay. But if you look carefully, the questioner himself is greedy. He is asking questions – Bodhidharma answers one; he has not even answered it and another question pops up. And the other question that pops up is nothing but a new formulation of the old question.It is not that there is: …a mind of greediness. The mind is greed. Greed and the mind are not two things, greed is the nature of the mind. The mind is greedy because it wants to accumulate more and more. It may be money, it may be power, it may be knowledge, it may be good deeds, virtue. Whatever it is, the mind is greed. It wants to accumulate more and more. It is afraid of being empty because in emptiness, the mind disappears, evaporates. Only when you are cluttered with unnecessary furniture…Just the other day I was looking at a photographic record of Sigmund Freud’s house. It really is something worth going into. The whole house seems to be so cluttered with things that one wonders how Sigmund Freud managed to live in it. There is no space at all. Even in his study there are at least a hundred statues, small and big. It looks like a museum. Things and things all over the place. One should be very, very careful and cautious to move in his room, otherwise something will fall. You will stumble upon something.To live in such a room is indicative of his mind: the mind of greed. No space in the room indicates his inner state, no space is there either. Sigmund Freud is a very knowledgeable person.Going through that book, I became more and more sorry for the poor man. What kind of life must he have lived? It must have been a long, long nightmare. Whatever must have been presented to him – necessary, unnecessary – he has accumulated. At least one’s study should be spacious; it looks like a shop. He is sitting in his chair, and on his table there are fifty statues, and he is reading. So many things to distract. And on the walls, pictures and calendars. All the walls are covered. And so many tables and chairs.He is living as if afraid of emptiness. He was very afraid of death. It is said that even to mention the word death was enough for him to be shocked. Twice or thrice he fainted because somebody started talking about death. Actually fainted, fell from the chair onto the ground. So afraid of death? That simply means he must have been afraid of emptiness too, because death and emptiness are the same.Why do you accumulate so many things? Why do you accumulate so many ideas? Just to go on feeling that you are full. People eat too much just to feel full. People are constantly moving from one crowd to another crowd. People are members of religions, that is, members of crowds, members of clubs, members of political parties. A person is a Rotarian, and he is a Christian or a Hindu, and he also belongs to this political party or that. And he goes on moving from one crowd to another crowd. He keeps himself occupied, so that he never becomes aware of the inner emptiness.Inner emptiness seems to be falling into an abyss, bottomless abyss. So people go on filling themselves with anything. That is greed. Greed has nothing to do with money as such. Anything that you go on filling yourself with is greed. And there is no: …mind of greediness. The mind is greediness.Berkowitz met a beautiful brunette in Bermuda and tried to get her to fly home with him to New York.“Come with me tonight and I’ll buy you a mink coat,” propositioned Berkowitz.“I’ve got two minks hanging in my closet.”“A Buick convertible?”“And what would I do with my Cadillac?”“All right, I’ll give you a stunning diamond bracelet.”She displayed the gems on her wrist: “Already have one. However, I’d be willing to consider a sizable chunk of cash.”“Sorry,” said Berkowitz, “that’s the one thing I can’t get wholesale!”All minds are Jewish. Remember: to be a Jew has nothing to do with a race. There are only two types of people in the world: Jews and buddhas. Whosoever is greedy is a Jew. It is a quality – nothing to do with blood.A young woman was married to an old man. The husband caught a cold which developed into pneumonia. He was immediately rushed to a hospital and placed in an oxygen tent.Knowing that the odds were against his pulling through, he summoned his wife to his side and said, “The will is in order. The stocks and bonds and securities are in the safety vault. But there is something no one else knows. There is a safe hidden in the corner of the attic, with two hundred thousand dollars in cash. The key is taped at the bottom of my dresser drawer. Gloria dear! Why are you squeezing the oxygen tube?”People are ready to kill, people are ready to be killed for greed. What are these people: Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alexander, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong? What are these people? Greed multiplied, greed gone mad. The whole effort is how to forget the inner emptiness.And you cannot destroy inner emptiness. It is your very being. You can cover it with things, but sooner or later you will have to encounter it. And it is better if you encounter it sooner. Death will reveal it to you, but then it will be too late. You may not be able to do anything. Death is bound to reveal it to you; all your accumulations will be of no help. Death will make you clearly aware that your hands are empty – not only your hands, your being is also empty. Death is a shock because it reveals your emptiness and destroys your illusions of being full.The meditator comes upon this experience before death. That is the beginning of transformation. You start knowing your emptiness, and the more you know, the more you are surprised: it is emptiness only in the sense that there is nothing of the outside world with which you are acquainted. Yes, in that sense it is empty, but as you go deeper into it, you start feeling that it is also a fullness, a plenitude. It is empty of the world but full of godliness. The first experience is going to be that it is empty, and the second experience that it is full of godliness.The questioner asks Bodhidharma: What do you call the mind of greediness?Bodhidharma simply says:It is the mind of ignorance.Because you don’t know yourself, that’s why you are greedy. If you know yourself, you will know the beauty of emptiness, the cleanliness of emptiness, the utter purity of emptiness. When the emptiness flowers in you, you will know its plenitude too, its fullness too. You will be full of emptiness, and that is the only fullness which death cannot destroy. But for that, one thing is needed: that you should not be ignorant.What does he mean by ignorance? These people who are asking him questions are not ignorant, they are knowledgeable people. Their questions show it. What is the: …mind of greediness? They must have read it in the scriptures, must have heard, must have discussed about it. What is egolessness? What is the mind of no-entity? Look at their questions – great metaphysical questions. They are not ignorant people in the sense that they know nothing. They are ignorant people in the sense that they know too much without knowing anything at all. They are full of knowledge but without any knowing. The world is full of such ignorant people.Christian mystics have divided people into two categories, beautiful categories: one they call knowledgeable ignorance, and the second they call ignorant knowing. There is a certain type of mind who is very knowledgeable and ignorant. And there is also a certain no-mind, utterly ignorant and yet knowing. That is the mind of the buddha. You can call it no-mind or mind, it doesn’t matter what you call it, but remember the quality: it is not stuffed from the outside. Something has welled up within. It has come home.The knowledgeable people go on playing with words. They use beautiful words: God, paradise, life, beauty, truth, bliss. And all words are empty for them. They know nothing of beauty, nothing of bliss. Or whatever they think they know is bound to be wrong because they have only heard it from others. These are opinions they are carrying, not experiences.Sometimes even ignorant people – the so-called ignorant people, the villagers, the primitive people – have far more meaning in their words because they don’t know many words. They are not skillful with words, their vocabularies are very limited, but their vocabularies have significance because they are down-to-earth people. Whatever they have learned is from experience. They have a certain quality of wisdom. You can see it in farmers, gardeners, in villagers. And when you go deeper into the jungles, you will find primitive people who have not heard of the Bible, fortunately. Who have not heard of the Gita, fortunately. Who know nothing of the Vedas and the Koran. Who don’t know how to write and how to read, but in their eyes you will see a clarity.I have lived with the most sophisticated people, the most cultured: the academicians, the professors, the DLitt’s – and I have lived with primitive people too, very primitive. A few of them have not seen a car or a railway train. They don’t know anything about the movies, radio, TV. They are still living as if the world has not changed for ten thousand years.But if you look into their eyes, they are crystal clear. They don’t talk much, but whatever they say seems to have more weight than what your DLitt’s and your PhD’s say, because whatever primitive people say has come from their own experience. It is not very much, but even a small iota of your own experience is far more valuable than a whole load of borrowed knowledge.The judge looked down at the farmer who was suing his wife for divorce on the grounds that she was hobosexual.“Just a minute, Luther,” interrupted the judge, “that term usually applies to a man, and it’s homosexual.”Luther shook his head stubbornly. “No, sir, Your Honor, I mean hobosexual. My wife’s a bum lay!”Now, he has created a new word: hobosexual. It has more meaning, it is rooted in his experience. You will not find it in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but what he is saying is not based on knowledge but on his knowing, his experience.The question seems to be knowledgeable: What do you call the mind of greediness? Bodhidharma simply answers in one sentence: It is the mind of ignorance. It seems that even Bodhidharma is getting a little tired of all these foolish questions.The second question:What do you call the mind of egolessness?Now, it is the same game. Ego is greed, greed is ego. That’s how the knowledgeable person becomes very cunning and clever with words. He is not interested at all what Bodhidharma has said. He again brings the same question in another form. What do you call the mind of egolessness?These people need to be really hit hard. And Bodhidharma must have been in a very, very polite mood that day. Must not have been his ordinary, usual self. Maybe the morning was very beautiful and the birds were singing and the sun rays were coming through the trees – otherwise he would have hit this man. He is not that kind of man who will go on answering stupid questions. And the most stupid question is that which you go on bringing again and again in new forms. That simply means you have not heard the answer.Two call girls seated themselves at a plush bar and the bar jockey, without being asked, served them two bottles of their separate brands of beer. The girls were amazed and asked him how he’d known what they had wanted.“Aw, I’m just a smart bartender, that’s all,” he replied.“Baloney!” answered the girls. “You only guessed what we would order; you only guessed.”“Oh, yeah? See that guy that just came in? He’ll want a Scotch on the rocks. Now watch, I’ll go and ask him.”Sure enough, the new customer ordered a Scotch on ice, to the girls’ astonishment.“Smart bartender, better believe it!” said the barman as he passed the girls again. A while later, when business slowed, the bartender leaned over the bar toward the two call girls.“Look,” he asked confidentially, “I’ve always wanted to ask this question. Can prostitutes ever get pregnant?”“Why,” quickly answered one of the girls, smiling at the other, knowingly, “certainly they can. Where do you think all these smart bartenders come from?”And I think the scholars also come from the same source. Smart scholars asking smart questions. In fact, Bodhidharma’s answer must have looked very poor to the questioner because he simply says: It is the mind of ignorance.What kind of answer is this? As if he is simply avoiding the question. The questioner again brings the same question in a new form: What do you call the mind of egolessness?Bodhidharma says:It is the mind of shravaka, Buddha’s actual disciple.This is a beautiful answer to be remembered because this is what you are trying to do here. Bodhidharma says, “A shravaka.” Just as I call my disciples sannyasins, Buddha’s disciples are called shravakas. It is a beautiful word. It means one who is capable of hearing. One who is capable of listening, one who can listen in silence, that is a shravaka. One who can listen so attentively, so totally that even before the words are uttered, he has heard them.Yes, that starts happening. It is happening here. Many letters come to me saying, “Osho, what are you doing? Before you utter the word, I have already heard it.” “Before I ask a question,” many people write to me, “you have answered it.” This is nothing but a simple process of communion.Whether you write a question or not does not matter much, it is bound to be answered. Sometimes when you write it I may not answer it. But when you don’t write it, I am bound to answer it because you have trusted me. You are waiting for the answer without asking it. How can I forget you? And, slowly, slowly as you become more intimate and close to me, before I have said anything it will be heard. That is shravaka.Bodhidharma says: It is the mind of shravaka – egolessness is the nature of the shravaka, of the disciple – Buddha’s actual disciple. He has to add the word actual because there are many who pretend to be disciples but who are not disciples.It happens almost every day. In evening darshans, every day there are a few people who are only pretending to be disciples and are not. When I touch their third eye there is nothing, no vibration. When a true disciple comes to me and I touch his third eye, there is an energy connection. I become plugged with him, he becomes plugged with me. Immediately an exchange of energy happens. It is an actual life energy exchange. But a few people come, I touch their third eye…but they are just pretenders, they are not disciples.When a disciple bows down and touches my feet, immediately there is an energy exchange. My feet can immediately feel his touch. It is not just a touch of his hands, his whole life is pouring there. But then there are others who simply touch as a formality. Their touch is ugly, their hearts are not in it.In close-up sessions the same thing happens. There are many who are moved to their very depths. Yogi and Rakesh have to carry them. They are so moved, so thrilled, they become so liquid, that they cannot move on their own. It is impossible for them to walk back to their places. They have to be carried.But then there are a few people to whom nothing has happened. They come empty, they go empty.Santosh was here one day for a close-up. Nothing happened to him because nothing can happen unless you are in a surrendered mood. If you are not in an egoless mood, nothing is possible. I cannot impose anything on you. I can pour, but you have to be open to receive it. Nothing happened. And when Yogi came to help him, he gestured with his hand that “There is no need to help me.” He walked on his own. He must have thought that he was doing something great. He does not need any help. But I felt sorry for him. The day he will need to be carried will be a great day in his life.A shravaka is one who has really surrendered to the master. Whether he is with Jesus or Gautama or Mahavira or with me does not matter. Whoever has come into your life as a buddha, as the awakened one, your surrender has to be total.Bodhidharma says, “That is the mind of egolessness, surrender. You are no longer there. You allow the master to have total possession of your being. You give him the whole space, holding back nothing. You simply expose yourself. You say, ‘Whatever you want to do, do. If you want to kill me, kill. I am ready.’ You have simply bowed down your head. If the sword of the master descends on your head, you will be grateful, you will not shrink back.”But the questioner is not listening to all these things. He goes on asking absentmindedly. Otherwise, such profound truths… How can you go on asking anything more?Immediately, the third question:What do you call the mind of no-entity?Now, it is the same question: no-ego or no-entity. But the compassion of the master is always immense.Bodhidharma says:It is the mind of sages who have no connection with the teaching of Buddha, but discover the truth of no-entity by themselves.If you happen to meet a buddha, you can be related to him in two ways: one is his teaching, another is his being. If you become related to his teaching, you will become knowledgeable and you will become more egoistic. You will start thinking, “I am very special, a disciple of Buddha,” that “I am privileged,” that “I am not ordinary.” You will become more egoistic. If you become related to the teaching only, then this is going to happen.But if you become related to the teacher himself… The teacher is a nonentity. There is nobody inside a buddha as a person. He is only a presence. You can feel him, but you cannot touch him. You can imbibe his spirit. You can drink out of his cup, but it is all an invisible phenomenon. If you listen to the buddhas, their most fundamental message is: Be a light unto yourself. Don’t depend on others, don’t follow others, because the ultimate core of your being has to be discovered only by you. Buddhas can only point the way, but you have to travel. Nobody can travel for you, it is not possible. It can’t be done on your behalf.Bodhidharma says: It is the mind of sages who have no connection with the teaching of Buddha, but discover the truth of no-entity by themselves. You can start believing in the idea of no-entity if you become convinced of the teaching of the buddha, but that will be only knowledge: poor, meaningless, a burden, a bondage. It is not going to liberate you.But if you understand the message, if you are a shravaka, if you listen to the message, to the very heart of it, the heartbeat of it, if you pulsate with the buddha’s being and you see the point that a buddha is only a catalytic agent… He is not going to do anything to you, but his presence can ignite, can trigger something in you and then you move on your own.You will have to go to your innermost core alone, absolutely alone. That’s why it is said by Zen people, “If you meet the buddha on the way, kill him immediately” – because you have to go so alone that not even a buddha, not even your master, will be there in the ultimate experience.Yes, before that, just one step before that, you will have to depart from the master too. You will have to say good-bye. Just one step before the ultimate leap, with great gratitude, the disciple says good-bye and takes the jump. But that jump has to be alone. It is a “flight of the alone to the alone,” as Plotinus says it.But the questioner is not at all interested in these answers. He is too preoccupied with his own words. While Bodhidharma is answering, he must be making another question.The fourth question:What do you call the mind which has no particular understanding, and also no painful delusions?These are the same questions asked again and again, but the questioner is thinking that he is asking different questions – certainly formulated in different ways.What do you call the mind which has no particular understanding and also no painful delusions? Before one becomes a buddha there is a period, a gap, an interval. From the ordinary, unconscious human being and the conscious buddha, there is a small gap – when you are no longer unconscious, no longer in your old patterns and structures. The old gestalt has disappeared but the new has not appeared yet.It is just the moment before the sunrise. The night has gone, the last star has disappeared, but the sun has not risen yet. It is all light, the darkness is no longer there, but it is a very diffused light because the sun has not risen yet. Those few moments are the moments when a person is called a bodhisattva: one who is ready to become a buddha any moment. Any moment the horizon will become red and the sun will rise. It is not far away, it is just close by. The last star has disappeared, no trace of the night anywhere.In the East this particular interval of time is called sandhya. And you will be surprised to know that in the East, prayer is also called sandhya. Sandhya means the in-between time.There are two special times for prayer. In the morning, early morning: the sun has not risen and the night is no longer, just that beautiful interval when a great change is happening – night is turning into day – that is the moment of prayer. Or in the night, when the sun is setting, has just gone below the horizon and the first star has not yet appeared, that too is called sandhya. These two moments are thought to be very auspicious, very sacred, for the certain reason: they symbolize your inner process. They are the moments of the bodhisattvas.Before somebody becomes a buddha, he becomes a bodhisattva. Literally, the word bodhisattva means: essentially a buddha. When the sun has not risen it is essentially morning. It is going to happen within seconds, it is inevitable now. When one is a bodhisattva, buddhahood is inevitable. In that interval, this happens.The questioner asks: What do you call the mind which has no particular understanding… In this interval there is no particular understanding because the buddha has not yet appeared.…and also no painful delusions? All painful delusions have disappeared because the night is over. The last star has gone. This is a beautiful moment, but very scary too. You are almost in a state of limbo, hanging between two worlds, two totally different worlds.If you are not with a master, you may become so scared you may fall back to the old pattern: at least there was something to cling to, to hold to. At least you knew something. It may be only knowledgeability, but something was there that you knew. Now you know nothing, nothing in particular.The gap can be very, very scary. It is. The master is never needed more than in this gap because he can hold your hand. He can persuade you to wait a little more, he can tell you his own story: “This has happened to me and this has always happened to those who have become buddhas. This is a necessary process. Don’t be worried. Just a few more minutes and the sun will be on the horizon, and you will be full of light. Don’t be afraid. Go on, move on.”Such beautiful answers, such pregnant answers, but the questioner goes on. He does not even meditate. He does not even give a little time so that the question that he has raised and the answer that Bodhidharma has given can have a meeting. He does not give any opportunity for Bodhidharma’s answer to sink deep in his heart. Here, Bodhidharma ends one answer, he immediately brings another question.The fifth question:What do you call the mind which has nothing to know and also nothing to realize?Now it seems Bodhidharma also is tired:No answer from Bodhidharma.For this question there is no answer – or this is his answer, maybe seeing that the man cannot understand words, that the man will go on and on forever, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. This man is not going to stop. He will go on creating the same question again and again. Maybe if words cannot help, then silence may be of some help.Bodhidharma remains silent. Maybe silence will disturb him, maybe in silence he may be able to hear. At least he will have to take note of it, that Bodhidharma has not answered the question. Maybe sudden silence…up to now he has been answering. Sudden silence will shake the man up. But it doesn’t seem to happen.Bodhidharma must have seen that words can’t help him, silence can’t help him either, because when Bodhidharma is silent the questioner must be going more and more into his mind. No occupation outside, so he must have become more occupied inside. Hence after a time Bodhidharma speaks on his own, without waiting for his answer. Maybe that may help him. Maybe that is the question that is arising in his mind. So Bodhidharma does not wait for his question to be raised, he starts answering. What is the point to wait for his question? He has misunderstood words.People who are very clever with words will always misunderstand words. Words can have many meanings, many connotations. You can always find a new interpretation of your own.A woman who was riding on a bus was startled when a famous professor who had only just caught the bus sat down opposite her with his prick still exposed.“Ahem!” she said sharply, pointing disgustedly toward the offending member. “Ahem!” she repeated more loudly, as the man failed to respond.After a third attempt she leaned forward and said, “Professor, excuse me, but your thing is sticking out!”“Oh!” said the professor, adjusting himself, “you flatter yourself. It was hanging out.”Professors are professors, they are clever with words. He is not disturbed at all, rather he finds fault with the woman.Bodhidharma does not wait. First he remains silent…There is a famous Zen saying:When the soft rain moistens my clothes,I see the buddha without seeing.When a petal of a flower falls quietly,I hear the voice of the buddha without hearing.If you are a shravaka, there is no need for the buddha to speak. You listen to his words if he speaks, you listen to his silence if he is silent. His message is the same, whether he uses words or not is irrelevant. Sitting, walking, eating, sleeping, he is constantly radiating the same message.And when you have really become a shravaka this is how you will also feel: “When the soft rain moistens my clothes, I see the buddha without seeing.” Then you will find him everywhere. The rain falling on you softly, and you will feel his touch. The wind blowing your clothes, and you will feel his invisible presence. The warm sunrays and you will feel his compassion. “When a petal of a flower falls quietly, I hear the voice of the buddha without hearing.” Just a petal falling from the rose, or a leaf from the tree coming slowly, falling toward the earth, and you will hear the whisper of the buddha.Once you have become accustomed, once you have become attuned to the master, the whole existence has the same color. You see the master everywhere. The whole existence becomes his voice, his body. Then everything reminds you of him. And remember, I say categorically: everything reminds you of him. A child giggling, and you will remember the buddha. A dead body being carried, and you will remember the buddha. Whatever happens around you, you become so attuned to the master that everywhere you will find his signature.Bodhidharma remains silent, just as Buddha had remained silent with the third visitor who came in the evening. In those few moments something jumped from Buddha’s flame to the inquirer. He bowed down, was grateful, thanked him and went away.But this man is not that type of questioner it seems. He’s too heady, too much in the head, has no heart. Seeing that, Bodhidharma speaks on his own. What is the point? He will go on asking. It is better to say things as they are. If he understands – good, if he does not understand, then be finished with it. He says:“Dharmakaya has no form, therefore one sees it without seeing.”These are very deep, profound, pregnant words. Reality has no form. Truth has no form, no body. Truth is unmanifest, unembodied. Dharmakaya is the Buddhist word for truth, the reality, the ultimate. Or you can use the word God but that is not Buddha’s word: he uses dharmakaya. “Dharmakaya has no form, therefore one sees it without seeing.”So if you want to see God, you will have to learn the art of seeing without seeing. You will have to learn the art of closing your eyes to the outside reality, to the manifest reality. You will have to close your eyes so that you can move into the unmanifest dimension.A great mystic, Paltu, has said, “Those who are blind, only they can understand me.” A rare statement, a very rare statement, I have never come across anywhere… Thousands of mystics have happened on the earth, but what Paltu says… He is a villager. His speech is direct. He says, “Unless you are blind, you will not understand what I am saying.” What does he mean by blind? He means: if you know how to see without seeing.“Dharma has no voice…”The ultimate has no voice, no language.“…therefore one hears it without hearing.”You will have to become so silent that nothing stirs in you, and then without hearing, it will be heard. These are paradoxes. But the closer you come to the truth, the more paradoxical is the experience. Be prepared to encounter paradoxes.The first paradox the disciple has to encounter is: victory through surrender. That is the first encounter because that is how disciplehood begins. You surrender to the master. And the rare beauty is that, in that very surrender you are for the first time victorious. You become a slave to the master and in becoming a slave you are for the first time your master. You have never been a master. And then the path is full of paradoxes.“Prajna has nothing to be known…”Prajna means the ultimate understanding.“…has nothing to be known, therefore one knows it without knowing. If he thinks that he is seeing, he sees it incompletely.”Because if you think, “I am seeing,” you think that you are there, your presence is going to be a disturbance. You are a disturbance, you are a barrier. However subtle your ego is, however transparent your ego has become, still it is a barrier and you will see incompletely. The ego has to go totally, then your vision is free. Then there is no barrier, no hindrance, no obstruction.“If he thinks that he knows it, he does not know it thoroughly.”So if a person thinks he knows it – “it” means the truth, dharmakaya, God, the unmanifest reality – if somebody thinks he knows it, then: …he does not know it thoroughly.Before Buddha, the Upanishads have said, “The person who thinks ‘I know,’ knows not, and the person who thinks he does not know, knows it.” After Buddha, Socrates has said the same thing in Greece, “I know only one thing: that I know nothing.”This is the way to approach reality: you go on melting, you melt so much that there is nobody to claim knowledge, nobody to claim realization.“When he knows it without knowing, he knows it completely.”The mirror does not say, “I am reflecting you.” The mirror simply reflects you, that’s all. The mirror claims nothing and absolutely pure consciousness claims nothing. All claims are of the ego.“If one does not know this, he is not a true knower. If one thinks that he is gaining, he is not gaining entirely. When he gains non-gaining, he owns everything.”This is what I say is victory through surrender. Lose all if you want to possess all. This is true renunciation and true rejoicing too. And the ultimate paradox is that of rejoicing and renunciation. Die totally if you want to be resurrected.“If one thinks that he is right, his righteousness is not perfect.”Because to feel “I am right” simply means you are still trying to be somebody in particular – to be right – and you are trying to prove others wrong. The whole game of superiority, of holier-than-thou continues.The real man of virtue is absolutely unaware of his virtues. His virtues are natural. Just as you breathe and your blood circulates and your heart beats, he is virtuous. The really virtuous person knows nothing of virtue, knows nothing of right and wrong.“When he transcends right and wrong, his virtues are accomplished. Such wisdom is the gate-opener to a hundred thousand gates of the higher wisdom.”Bodhidharma was answering in single simple statements to the questions of this man, but now, seeing that he cannot see, cannot understand, he tried silence. Seeing that that too fails, now he tries to answer all that can be asked. Why give the man the trouble of asking again and again?He says:“All buddhas preach emptiness. Why? Because they wish to crush the concrete ideas of the students. If a student even clings to an idea of emptiness, he betrays all buddhas. One clings to life although there is nothing to be called life; another clings to death although there is nothing to be called death. In reality there is nothing to be born, consequently, there is nothing to perish.”These are all our ideas, our make-believes: life, death, love, hate, good, bad, right, wrong, moral, immoral, virtue, sin. These are all our ideas. We are trying to impose our ideas on reality, on others, on our own selves.The really awakened person has no ideas. Nothing is good for him, and nothing is bad. Things are as they are. He simply lives in the suchness of existence, in tathata. He does not follow a certain morality because there is nothing immoral, nothing moral for him. He lives moment to moment, spontaneously, without being bothered about what is right, what is wrong, about what to choose and what not to choose. He lives in choiceless awareness and he acts out of choiceless awareness. Then whatever happens is good.Try to understand this point: you are always choosing what to do, what is right, what is wrong. A buddha is never choosing, he simply lives. But whatever you choose by thinking it is right cannot be right, because it is your choice. The chooser is always the mind, and the mind contaminates, poisons everything, pollutes everything. The chooser is the ego, and the shadow of the ego makes everything wrong. Even if you do right, it will turn into wrong. If the ego touches nectar, it turns into poison. Buddha chooses not, he simply lives without any choice. Lives in total awareness and lets that total awareness do, respond to reality. Then in that awareness, if you touch poison, it becomes nectar.Whatever a buddha does is right. It is not a question of choice.“By clinging one recognizes a thing or an idea. Reality has neither inside, outside, nor middle part. An ignorant person creates delusions and suffers from discrimination. Right and wrong to not exist in reality. An ignorant person creates them, recognizes them, near or far, inward or outward. He then suffers from discrimination. This is the general way of the phenomenal world.”You are suffering from your own ideas. You think, “This is life,” then immediately you create the idea that “The opposite must be death.” But there is no life, no death. All is eternal. You were never born and you will never die. What you think is birth is just an episode in the eternal life, and so is death. In birth, nothing is born, only something unmanifest becomes manifest, something hidden becomes unhidden. In death, the manifest again moves into the unmanifest, to rest, to rejuvenate, and it will come again when the season comes. It will lie down as a seed and wait, and will be back again.Nothing is ever born, nothing ever dies. But if you discriminate between life and death, you will be crushed between your own ideas. Then you will cling to life, and you cannot cling, because life is continuously flowing. Then clinging will become your misery, and you will be afraid of death. And you cannot avoid it either because rest is a great need. After seventy, eighty, ninety years of continuous functioning the body needs rest, the brain cells need rest, the soul needs rest.But first you cling to life and become miserable because you cannot hold to it – it goes on slipping out of your hands – then you become afraid of death and you want to keep it away, you push it away in every possible way. You cannot push it away, you cannot stop it. It is part of nature. It is just like a wave rising in the ocean and falling back: nothing comes, nothing goes. It is the same ocean. And whether the wave has risen or fallen back, what is the difference? The water remains the same.Don’t cling to ideas.This is very strange: Bodhidharma’s long statement. After silence, the master tries every possible way. First he was giving small answers. He must have hoped that the man was intelligent. Buddhas believe that all are intelligent, that is their perception. They can’t see anybody as unintelligent because they see your ultimate possibility. They think from there, they believe in your hidden buddhahood.They start by answering you, but that device failed. Then the opposite was tried: Bodhidharma became silent. That too failed. The man cannot understand words, cannot understand silence. Then Bodhidharma gives a long answer – an answer for which the person has not raised the question at all, but an answer that contains the essence that can answer all his questions if he listens. He has missed the small answers. Bodhidharma must have been hoping that now this long answer may help.My feeling is that his answer must have been even longer than this, because these are the notes of the same person who was asking. So he must have condensed it.But one thing must be said: that he seems to be a good stenographer. He has not added anything. He may have deleted a few things – we cannot be certain about that – but one thing is certain, that whatever he is saying are true words of Bodhidharma. That I can vouch for. On my own authority I can say to you: these words can come only from a buddha. So one thing is good about the man, however stupid he is, he is a good stenographer. He has a good memory, and he must have been taking notes, it seems. While Bodhidharma was talking, he must have been taking notes. There are a few foolish people who go on doing that.When you are encountering a Bodhidharma, a man like Bodhidharma, listen to him wholeheartedly. Don’t distract yourself in taking notes. If you cannot understand while he is present before you, you will not be able to understand through your notes. I don’t think that these notes would have had any impact on the person who took them. But he has done a great service to you, to humanity.For near about fourteen hundred years the notes were lying deep down in the earth. Just at the beginning of the century they were excavated. But if they had disappeared in the earth then too nothing was lost.Without them, Bodhidharma’s teaching has also flowered, has blossomed, in many people’s lives. From direct transmission from one master to another disciple, Bodhidharma’s chain is still alive. The flame that he burned is still alive. There are still people who are gaining much from Bodhidharma’s message. But still these words can be useful to you, not as words but as triggers for meditation.Speaking on Bodhidharma is just like speaking on myself. I don’t see any difference, not at all. It is the same message. Bodhidharma is very close to my heart. This unique man, unique not only among men but unique among buddhas, is very close to my heart because of his uniqueness. He is a rare flower: wild, but very rare. Meditate over these words. Each word is pregnant. Each word is a seed. Each single word, if allowed to fall into the heart, can transform you totally.Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 08 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I give up. I'm reaching nowhere. I came here full of hope and joy, but I now realize that it is all meaningless. Before, you touched me to tears, but they were tears of ecstasy, relief, the ones that flow when one listens to beautiful music. Now even my love for you hurts. My tears give no relief. I cannot get in touch with my inner core. I cannot separate my ego from my real self, and even while I write to you, doubts come up as to whether this is self-pity or I am on a mind trip. Do I want your attention?There is nowhere to go, nowhere to reach.Because you have come with an expectation, you are creating your misery. Your expectation is the cause of your frustration. It is always so: expect, and you create a hell around yourself. The seeds of expectation, sooner or later, bring a whole jungle of misery around you.You say, “I give up.” If you really mean it, then the work is done. If you are not just saying it, then you have arrived home. It is in giving up that one comes home, but it has to be an existential giving up. You are writing it, you are saying it, but you don’t mean it because if you really mean it, then there would be no need to be in such grief and pain. If you have given up, then from where can misery come to you? The very root is cut.To give up is to be a sannyasin. To give up is the most fundamental thing that can ever happen to you. It simply means that now there is no more desiring, no more dreaming. “I am finished with it, I have seen through and through, and it is all meaningless.” Because you are not yet ready to accept the meaninglessness of your desires and dreams, you are in a self-torture manufactured by your own mind.You say, “I came here full of hope…” Whoever comes here with hope is bound to feel hopeless sooner or later. Hope cannot lead you anywhere else. Hope is already moving toward hopelessness. Hope is like a small river moving to the ocean of hopelessness. It will reach the ocean sooner or later.Yes, when you are far away from me you can hope. You can go on dreaming, you can fantasize – beautiful dreams, occult fantasies, esoteric nonsense – because you are totally free. But when you come close to me it becomes more and more impossible to dream because the whole work is against dreaming.I want you to wake up, and waking up is a painful process because it will destroy all your hopes. It will destroy all that you have cherished and thought very beautiful. Waking up is destructive in the sense that it will destroy your unconsciousness.And we all live in unconsciousness. Unconsciousness has been our way of life for many lives. It has become our second nature. In fact, it has covered our nature so deeply that you don’t know that there is another nature to you, that this is not your nature, that the way you are is not the natural way – not the way of dharma, Tao, religion. Unconsciousness is deep, and the whole work here consists to bring you to consciousness. It will destroy all kinds of desires, hopes, fantasies, future.It is a difficult task for me to destroy your dreams because sometimes they are so sweet, so cute. It is difficult to take away your unconscious habits from you. It is not like taking your clothes away, it is like peeling your skin – it hurts.The first thing to recognize is that coming from unconsciousness, after many, many lives, into consciousness is a painful process. Growth is painful.The health service doctor told the shapely co-ed, “Miss Wellbuilt, if I have to find out just what’s wrong with you I’ll have to examine you thoroughly, so please undress completely.”To which she blushed and replied, “Okay, doctor, but you first.”Just old habit! We are in the grip of our old habits, patterns, structures, strategies.A Western salesman did not get home except about once in six months. On the night he went home, after supper he and his wife were sitting in the living room quietly reading. Suddenly there was a knock at the door.“My husband!” exclaimed the woman, dropping her newspaper.“Good-bye!” cried her man, leaping out of a back window.I understand exactly where your trouble is. You have a gestalt. It has penetrated the body, in the mind it has gone deep. It is even reaching your very essence, your very core. Now uprooting it all, shaking you, shocking you into awareness is a hard task. It is not only painful for you, it is painful for me too.It is like snatching toys away from a child. He will cry and he will weep and he will implore you to give his toys back. But one day or other those toys have to be taken away, otherwise when will he be able to live in the real world? How long can he be allowed to fantasize?Small children don’t know the difference between reality and dreaming. That’s why when they wake up in the morning sometimes they start crying, “Where are my toys?” They were dreaming about toys and they want them back. They don’t know that now they are awake those toys and dreams have disappeared. That’s what has happened to you.Moses Cohen came back home in the middle of the night and slipped silently into the bedroom and began to undress.Sarah Cohen woke up and asked, “Moses, where did you leave your underpants?”“They must have been stolen,” replied Moses.Now you cannot steal anybody’s underpants…but the unconscious mind goes on saying, doing, being unconscious.Bill: “I think I’m starting to walk in my sleep.”Will: “What makes you think that?”Bill: “I woke up in my own bed this morning.”It is really something tremendously significant that is happening to you, but you will only be able to understand later on. When you reach a little farther away from your dreams and you will have a better perspective, you will be able to feel grateful. Right now there may be anger and rage.That happens to almost every sannyasin who comes here with expectations and hopes – and who does not come with expectations and hopes?You say, “I give up.” Please, give up. That’s exactly what is to be done. But you are not doing it, you are simply saying it – maybe in unconscious utterance, maybe in desperation, but not in understanding. Yes, one can give up in desperation, but then wounds are left, scars are left. When you give up with understanding, seeing the futility of it all, then there is tremendous peace.You say, “I am reaching nowhere.” My effort is to bring you now here, and you are trying to reach somewhere else. I am not trying to help you to reach somewhere. You are already all over the place except now and here. My function is to pull you back to your present moment, to the real: however difficult it is to come back home, however you have become accustomed to wandering. But you have to be brought back home because only then there can be blissfulness, benediction, freedom – what Bodhidharma will call nirvana: cessation of the ego and the birth of the soul.You say: “I am reaching nowhere. I came here full of hope and joy.” That hope was false, all hopes are false. To hope simply means to postpone. To hope means your present is ugly and you want to avoid it for some beautiful future. To hope means you don’t want to see the present. You want to remain occupied with the future. Tomorrow is more important to you than today, and the next moment more important than this moment. Either you escape in the past or you escape in the future – and the reality consists only of the present.Yes, I can understand: you must have come full of hope. But that is your problem. What can I do about it? You have come to a wrong person. I cannot give you more hope, because hope is poison. I would like to take all possibilities of hope from you.And remember: when all possibilities of hope are taken away from you, when the whole poison is taken out of your system, you don’t feel hopeless. You simply feel freed from both hope and hopelessness – because hopelessness can exist only as a shadow of hope. It can’t exist without hope. Your shadow can’t exist without you; you are needed there. Hopelessness is just the shadow of hope.Drop the hope, and see a miracle happening: hopelessness also disappears. And when there is neither hope nor hopelessness, great freedom arises in you. You are out of the prison of desire.You say, “I came here full of hope and joy…” That joy was just an idea, an idea that something is going to happen, that your hope is going to be fulfilled, that now you have found the right master. This is what you always wanted to do: to find the man who can fulfill all your hopes. Now you have found him, hence the joy. The joy was a by-product of hope. If hope itself is false, how can the joy which is a by-product of it be real? It was not real joy, it was a false phenomenon because now that the hope is disappearing, the joy is disappearing.And you say, “…but I now realize that it’s all meaningless.” Yes, it is all meaningless. The hope, the joy that hope creates, the fantasies and the joy that the idea of their fulfillment creates, are all meaningless. Not that there is no meaning in life; the meaning is revealed to you only when you have stopped all these meaningless activities. When all these activities disappear, meaning appears. These are the activities which are preventing your meaningfulness. And when that meaning appears in your being, it is inexpressible. It is absolutely incommunicable, but it transforms your whole being. It makes you luminous.It is said of Moses that when he saw God on the mountain, his face became so luminous, so full of light, so shining, that he had to cover it, he had to veil it. He came to his people with a veil on his face. They were surprised. They said, “Why are you covering your face?”He said, “Because it has become so luminous, so full of light, and I don’t want to look holier than others.” This is real sainthood. “I don’t want to prove myself superior to others, and my face is so full of light that if I move among you without a veil everybody is bound to feel that I have become the chosen one, that God has descended in me, that my heart has been touched and transformed.”It is a beautiful story, of tremendous significance. That’s how the really holy people have always lived: in a veiled way. They live as ordinary human beings, that is the meaning of the story. Not that they really cover their faces, there is no need. That is not the way to hide yourself. If you move with a covered face you will attract more attention. People may not look at your shining face because who cares about other faces and others’ faces? Everybody is preoccupied with his own face. People stand before the mirror for hours. Who cares about others? Who has the time?And if they see the light they may find a thousand and one ways to explain why it is so. They may even think, “This man is ill, diseased, something has gone wrong in his chemistry. Maybe his body electricity is leaking out or something – short-circuited or something.”But if you move around with a veiled face, everybody is bound to be attracted toward you. Mohammedan women attract more attention than anybody else. The veil becomes a provocation, an invitation: one wants to uncover the face and see what is inside. A great curiosity arises.So the story does not relate anything factual – I don’t think Moses would have done such a stupid thing – but it has a significant meaning. It is a metaphor. It simply says that the really holy person lives in such an ordinary way that nobody becomes aware of his holiness unless you come very close to him, become almost part of his being.He eats like you – that’s why Jesus eats like you, drinks wine, mixes with ordinary people. He just remains ordinary, in no way does he pretend. The really holy man is unselfconscious about his holiness, that is the meaning.But I have read one philosopher who thinks otherwise. Philosophers are strange people. They can find loopholes where none exist. They are only concerned with finding loopholes. I have come across one analysis of this metaphor.The philosopher says that Moses was hiding his face not because he did not want to prove his holiness to people, but he was afraid that sooner or later that light will fade away and then where will his holiness be? So it is better to keep the face hidden so nobody ever comes to know that the light had faded away.Now, you see the tricky mind, the cunning mind! The cunning mind always destroys; it is always destructive. Now a beautiful metaphor is turned into an ugly thing. Now Moses looks cunning, afraid, scared of the people. Because the light will fade away and when people see that the light has faded they will think, “Now Moses is no longer our prophet, our leader.” Afraid of the future, he keeps his face covered so that he can go on deceiving people.There are people who will find thorns in the roses and there are people who will find roses in the thorns. Belong to the second category if you ever want to know godliness, if you ever want to know the real meaningfulness of your life: the grandeur, the glory, the beauty of your being.Don’t be concerned with your hopes. Existence is not obliging to anybody. It never fulfills anybody’s hopes. It goes on in its own way. You have to become attuned to it. Don’t have any private goals and you will have tremendous contentment. Don’t struggle for private ambitions and egoistic ideas. There is no need to prove anything, there is no need to be anything – you are already that. God has made you in his own image. Nothing is lacking and nothing is missing.You say, “Before, you touched me to tears, but they were tears of ecstasy, relief, the ones that flow when one listens to beautiful music.” I am still speaking the same words, it is the same music, but your interpretation has changed. Then, you were interpreting my words through your hopes. There was a curtain between me and you. Now, I am trying to pull away that curtain so that you can see me as I am and I can see you as you are.The disciple and the master have to be utterly nude to each other – naked beings.You say, “Now, even my love for you hurts.” Real love always hurts because it transforms. The love that you felt before was your imagination. Now something real is happening. It was your love; you had not known my love. It was your projection. Now I am here, present. I will destroy all your projections.I have to bring you down to earth. I am a very down-to-earth man, I am very pragmatic. I can’t help your great ideals and dreams, they are all stupid: the greater they are, the more stupid they are. I will destroy all your old-fashioned ecstasies and tears and emotionality and sentimentality.Remember, to be sensitive does not mean to be sentimental. To be sensitive does not mean to be touchy. You must have been very touchy, moved by anything. But you were moved by your own ideas; I was not part of it.Please don’t blame me for your joy, for your ecstasy, for your hope, for those great tears that were coming to you listening to my music. Don’t blame me for them. I am not responsible for them at all, but I am certainly responsible for the love that is hurting you now.If you are courageous enough and you can absorb the hurt, the pain, the agony of transformation, you will feel grateful later on. Only later on can you feel grateful. Right now it is rough going.You say, “My tears give no relief.” They won’t give you any, anymore. I am here, I won’t allow it.“I cannot get in touch with my inner core.” Don’t be worried about the inner core. Let me destroy your outer core, and you will be in touch with your inner core, no problem about it. The first thing is to destroy the hard crust that has grown around you, and it is hurting.You would like to remain as you are and be in touch with your inner core. That is not possible. I am helpless, I cannot help you that way. I have to dismantle the whole house. I don’t believe in renovation. First the whole house, the whole rotten ruins have to be destroyed and removed.But people love old, rotten things so much. They give them beautiful names – antiques. I am not a lover of antiques, not at all. I love the new, the fresh, the young.I have heard…There was an old church, so old that people stopped going into it. They were afraid it might fall down any moment. The priest was against making a new church.Priests are always against the new, they are always for the old – the older the better – because with the old they are safe, with the dead they are safe. They are priests of death not of life.And the board of trustees was against it. They were all elderly people, the elder brothers of the community. But when everybody stopped coming… Even the priest was afraid to enter. Just a little strong wind and the whole building would shake. It was so rotten that it was a miracle how it was standing at all.Finally they had to call a meeting of the trustees. They met – not inside the church – far away, outside the church. And they decided a few things.The first resolution was: the old church has to be demolished. Unfortunately, we are helpless. It has to be done, God forgive us.The second proposal was: the new church will be made exactly on the old spot, and exactly like the old church.And the third proposal was: the material of the old church: the bricks, the doors, the windows, everything, has to be used in the new church. Nothing new has to be used. It will be new in name only. Everything from the old church has to be used and the new church has to be made out of the old. Nothing new has to be added.And the fourth proposal was: until the new is ready we will not demolish the old.This is how the stupid human mind goes on working. This is how your mind works. This is how mind as such works.Marion, don’t be worried about the inner core. It is there, whether you know it or not it is there. You can’t be without an inner core, and you can’t know it unless the outer core is demolished. The bird cannot come out of the egg unless the egg is demolished, broken. Once the egg is broken the bird can be free. The bird can have the whole sky; it can be on its wings. Be a little patient.Marion came just a few days ago. Just a few days ago she became a sannyasin. Don’t be in such a hurry. Don’t be so American!A Frenchwoman was talking to an American woman. The Frenchwoman said, “The Frenchmen know how to love. First they kiss your forehead, then they kiss your cheeks, then they kiss your earlobes, then they kiss your neck, then they kiss your back…”The American woman said, “Wait! By that time the American is back from his honeymoon!”Don’t be so American. Wait. Go slowly. Kiss the forehead and the eyes and the cheek… Be a little French about it! What is the hurry?There are a few things which cannot be done in a hurry. Neither love can be done in a hurry nor prayer. Neither meditation can be done in a hurry nor self-transformation. These are very, very silent, slow processes. And the more patient you are, the faster they happen. The less patient you are, the longer they take.The second question:Osho,The other day in discourse you referred to the Jews as being very intelligent people. At other times you have described the Jew negatively as cunning businessmen. Intelligence seems to have a positive and a negative aspect. Please comment.You got the point! But remember, you belong to the negative aspect.Yes, intelligence, like everything else, has both the possibilities: it can be positive, it can be negative. If intelligence is negative it is sheer cunningness. If intelligence is positive it is pure meditation. And the negative is easy because the negative is a fall, and the positive is difficult because the positive is an uphill task. The negative is easy because it asks no sacrifice from you, and the positive is arduous because it asks the ultimate sacrifice – the sacrifice of the ego. The negative supports the ego and the positive is possible only when the ego is surrendered.We have both kinds of Jews here. You belong to the negative. I am sorry to say it. Please forgive me. It is very difficult for negative people to forgive, too. They feel very offended.But there are positive Jews also. You should move with some positive Jews, for example, Pradeepa. She is a positive Jew. I have been joking about Jews and so many letters come to me asking, “Are you against Jews?” Except Pradeepa, all the Jews at some time or other have raised the question: “Are you against the Jews?” How can I be against the Jews? I myself am an old Jew…very ancient. You may be very new.I am not against anybody, neither for anybody, but I am exposing to you things which needed to be exposed because only then you can get rid of them.Yes, intelligence is cunningness if it starts falling downward. And the fall is so easy and so ego supporting and nourishing that everybody, almost everybody, chooses the fall. To be cunning seems to be the only way to exist and survive in this world, because everybody else is cunning. If you are more cunning you can survive. If you are less cunning you will be exploited.Cohen visited his doctor for a check-up. He carried with him a large amount of liquid specimen which the MD examined in his laboratory.“Everything’s fine,” announced the physician. “Couldn’t find a thing wrong with your specimen.”“No sugar? No albumen?” asked Cohen.“None at all. You’re okay.”“May I use your phone to call my wife?”“Of course.”“Good news, dear,” announced the Jew over the phone. “Neither you nor I nor the kids nor even grandma have a thing the matter with us.”He had brought everybody’s specimen!During the reign of the Gestapo in Germany, Schloss and Hirsch were walking along a Munich street, when an SS officer approached them. Schloss had proper credentials but Hirsch did not.“Quick,” said Hirsch, “run that way. The Nazi will follow you and I’ll be able to get away.”Schloss tore off in the direction indicated, pursued by the SS man, while Hirsch escaped. When the Nazi finally caught up with him, he demanded to see Schloss’ papers. He saw that they were in order.“So why did you run?” he asked.“I just took a physic,” said Schloss, “and my doctor told me to run after taking the medicine.”“But didn’t you see me running after you?”“Yeah, I thought maybe we both had the same doctor, and you took a physic too.”In this cunning world it seems the only way to exist is to be more cunning. Where everybody is exploiting everybody else, to be cunning seems to be armor, so everybody becomes cunning.Every child is born innocent and every person becomes cunning, hypocritical, pseudo, deceptive. Every child is born a saint and every child turns into a scoundrel. Every child is born religious and every child becomes a politician. And that is the worst that can happen to a man.Be aware that to survive in the world should not be the goal because even if you survive, death is going to come. Even if you have all the money possible, death is going to come. Even if you have all the power and prestige, it is all bogus, because inside you are poor, empty.The really intelligent person is one who discovers the inner treasures, who discovers the inner eternity, who discovers godliness. That’s my definition of the intelligent person: one who discovers godliness. Unless you have discovered godliness, don’t think yourself to be an intelligent person. You may be intellectual but you are not intelligent.And to be intellectual is easy. You can go to the university and you can get a degree, a diploma. You can study books, you can visit the libraries, and you can become acquainted with great words, great systems of thought. You can become a good talker, a good conversationalist, a good writer, author, philosopher, but still you will not be an intelligent person, remember.Intelligence is possible only through meditation. When the mind dissolves into meditation, when thoughts are no longer your constant obsession, when you can put the thoughts aside whenever you want, and you can move into inner emptiness at your own will, when you are not a victim of your mind but a master – then you are intelligent.And those are the moments when you discover who you are. You discover what this life is. You discover the meaning of the word God. You cannot find the meaning in the dictionaries, in the encyclopedias. It has to be found within your own being.Become positively intelligent. I have been watching you from the very beginning. While you have been here, you have been trying to be clever. And trying to be clever with me is utter stupidity. You can succeed with me only if you are totally innocent, otherwise there is no bridge between you and me.You are a sannyasin, but I have never really felt you as a sannyasin. To be true I have to say it. Maybe that shock brings you alertness and you start looking at the whole thing that is happening between me and you. You are trying to be clever. And you are not alone in that, there are many, so don’t feel lonely. Don’t be clever with me, otherwise your being here with me is of no use.This place only belongs to those who can trust, who can be innocent, who can be utterly childlike. Then great intelligence is released, and that intelligence will be a light in the darkness of your soul. That intelligence will become a lamp, and it will be able to guide you to the ultimate goal.The third question:Osho,Why was Buddha so reluctant to allow women into his sangha? Why did he feel, what did he feel about women?It must have been his experience with women. When I became enlightened I was only twenty-one and absolutely inexperienced about women, so I had no problem accepting women into my sangha. But when Buddha became enlightened he was forty years old. Now you can understand: he had so much experience – poor man – that he wanted to save his other disciples from the same experience.Mulla Nasruddin becomes very much afraid whenever he is walking on the road, and if he sees a truck or bus coming toward him he starts trembling, perspiring.One day I was walking with him along the road and I asked him, “What’s the matter? Whenever a bus or a truck passes by, you suddenly start perspiring and shaking and trembling.”He replied, “My wife ran away with a truck driver and every time I hear a horn I’m afraid he’s bringing her back.”Buddha had much experience with women, much more than anybody else, much more than any other enlightened man in the world.Mahavira did not object, he immediately accepted women. When they asked to be initiated, he initiated them without any hesitation. He was Buddha’s contemporary. Why did he not object? He seems to be more of an ascetic type than Buddha; Buddha follows the middle way.Mahavira is an extremist, utterly extremist. He is absolutely ascetic. According to him, one has to go to the very extreme. One has to deny everything, renounce everything. Only then can the ultimate jump, the ultimate leap into the divine happen.Buddha is more relaxed about it. He says, “Follow the middle course. There is no need to go to the extreme. There is no need to be too worldly and there is no need to be too otherworldly. Just be in the middle.”One would expect that Buddha would allow women more easily into his sangha than Mahavira. But Mahavira allowed them with no hesitation: not even a single time he said no. The day the first woman asked, he immediately initiated her the same way as he initiated men.But Buddha continued to deny women for at least ten years. He was almost forced, compelled, by his own disciples. They started crying and weeping and they said, “This is not right!” Still he said, “I will think, I will think over it.”But finally, when his stepmother asked to be initiated, it was difficult for him to say no. His mother died immediately after he was born; so, in fact he knew nothing of his mother. He was brought up by his stepmother. The stepmother was his mother; he knew her as his mother. And when the mother asks to be initiated, how can he say no?So reluctantly, not very happily… And this was a strategy of other women and other disciples, a conspiracy against the master. They persuaded his mother, “If you come to ask, he will not be able to say no, and then the door opens. Then he will not be able to say no to any other woman.” A conspiracy because of great compassion.Why was Buddha so hesitant? For the simple reason: you will have to go into the life story of Buddha to understand his psychology, to understand his mind. Because even when you become enlightened you have to function through the mind, and the mind remains the old.The enlightenment is the same – Mahavira, Buddha, Zarathustra, Jesus, it makes no difference, but they have different minds. And when they communicate with you the mind has to be used, and the mind is made by the past. Buddha has a different mind. Mahavira has a different mind.What happened to Buddha was really very rare, unique…When Buddha was born, all the great astrologers were called by his father to inquire what he was going to become. All the astrologers except the youngest raised two fingers.The father asked, “What do you mean by two fingers?”They said, “Either he is going to become a chakravartin, a world conqueror, a world emperor, who will rule all the six continents, or he is to become a renunciate, a sannyasin, and he will renounce the world and will live like a beggar. These are the two possibilities. Both are open and we cannot say decisively which is going to happen.”Then the father was very much afraid; the son had been born in his old age, and he had been hoping for so long. It would have been better if he was not born. Now, in old age, all his hopes were on him: he was going to carry all the father’s incomplete ambitions. And if Buddha renounced the world, that would be a great shock to him. He may die of the shock. He could not conceive or accept the possibility.He asked Kondanna, the youngest astrologer who had raised only one finger. Very afraid, he asked Kondanna, because although he was the youngest he was the most famous astrologer. His perception was the most clear. He was afraid because he was raising only one finger: maybe he was raising it for sannyas; maybe he was raising it for a chakravartin, that he would become a great emperor.The king asked him, “What do you mean by raising one finger?”Kondanna said, “It will hurt you, but I can’t help it. Your son is going to become a sannyasin. It is absolutely certain. He will renounce the world, he will renounce the family, he will renounce the palaces, renounce the kingdom, and he will move to the jungles to meditate – because he is destined to become the greatest buddha.”The father started crying. He said, “Save him! I am ready to do anything.”Kondanna said, “I cannot help. This is absolutely destined. For many lives he has been searching and searching and searching. Now the search has come to its ultimate peak. This is his last life. And I am not going to be part of distracting him.”Kondanna left, but the other old astrologers remained and they said, “There is a possibility. Don’t be worried about this Kondanna. Although he is very famous, he is inexperienced, he is young. But we are more experienced, we know life more. We know that life is always a choice, nothing is so absolutely determined.“Astrology can only vaguely indicate the alternatives. Astrology is not such a science that you can say, ‘Two plus two is bound to be four.’ Sometimes it is three, sometimes it is five. Don’t be worried.”They consoled the king and they said to him, “Do one thing: from the very beginning keep him in such luxury, keep him in such comfort, that he never thinks about renouncing. Let him become so accustomed to luxury and comfort that the very idea of going into the forest will scare him. Build him three palaces in different places for the three seasons, so that each season is beautiful for him.”Those three palaces were built in three different places. In summer he would be in a place almost like a hill station where there was no summer, where it was cool. In winter he would come to hotter places where it was warm. In the rains he would move to places where it was not too rainy – just little showers once in a while – and he would enjoy those little showers. Beautiful palaces with lakes, with gardens spreading for miles.And the old astrologers suggested, “Find the most beautiful women in the country. Let those beautiful women take care of him.”So all the beautiful women of the country were called and they were in the service of Siddhartha, who was going to become the Buddha finally. He lived with these women.The astrologers said that he should never be allowed to see an old man because that could raise the question in his mind: “Am I also going to become old?” “Never allow him to see anybody dead, not even a dead leaf.”Because Lao Tzu had become enlightened by seeing a dead leaf falling from the tree. That was a very shaking incident, a tremendously important incident for Lao Tzu. Seeing the dead leaf, he immediately thought, “I am also going to die one day like this leaf – dust unto dust. Before that something has to be done. Before that I have to know if there is more to life, or only this mundane, superficial, so-called life. Is there something more than time?”So they said, “Even in his garden he should not be allowed to see a dead leaf or a withering flower.” And the king managed it that way – I think nobody has lived in such luxury as Gautama the Buddha up to his twenty-ninth year. All the beautiful women were available to him. His whole day from morning to night was just a picnic, a holiday: dancing, singing, music, beautiful women available, all the luxuries – no problems, no anxieties. And it is basically because of this that he escaped one day. He became fed up.Too much luxury is a dangerous thing. It is easy to be poor and be in the world because one goes on hoping. It is very difficult to be really rich and not to renounce the world, because richness is more frustrating than anything else. When you have all the riches and you see that you are as miserable as before, the riches lose all meaning.Arnold has written one of the most beautiful books on Buddha, The Light of Asia, in which he depicts the scene when Buddha leaves the house, the palace. Up to twelve o’clock in the late night, there was dance and music and beautiful women dancing around him. Then it was too late, he fell asleep and the women also fell asleep in the same room.In the middle of the night – it was a full-moon night, the moon was peeking through the window, the moonlight was coming into the room – Buddha looked around at the beautiful faces.Some mouths were open and the saliva was flowing out, and it was disgusting. Some women were snoring: they were beautiful musicians, and yet snoring so loudly and with such ugliness that he felt very disgusted. He went around the room – it was a chaos. He saw all those beautiful women for the first time in their reality. Their makeup was gone, their false eyelashes had fallen. He could see how they really looked.He left the palace that very night.Just think of a man who had lived for twenty-nine years with women – and only women… That must have been the cause.You ask me, “Why was Buddha so reluctant to allow women into his sangha?” Out of compassion for the poor bhikkus, the sannyasins, because he knew they can be victims. They had not lived in such luxury. Many of them had not known the reality of women.Sick of American bigotry and of his nagging wife, Ashford went to New Guinea and became a cannibal. Six months later his wife tracked him down with a nonsupport summons. There was only one thing to do: he ate her.Guess what? She still disagreed with him!Too much experience of the other sex is boring. And it is not so just with women, it is the same with men. If Buddha had been a woman he would have been reluctant to initiate men. So what I am saying has nothing to do with women as such. It is just an accident that he was a man. If he had not been a man, if he had been a woman who had lived with men for twenty-nine years, the same would have been the case. He would not have easily allowed men into his sangha.An elderly Englishman was sitting quietly in his London club when an old friend came up and said, “Sorry, old boy, to hear that you buried your wife yesterday.”“Had to,” replied the other man. “Dead, you know.”The fourth question:Osho,Does hell really exist?Yes. In the beginning God wanted to create hell, but after creating India he changed his mind. Once he created India it was useless to create hell…sheer waste of time and space. And you are here in India, and still you ask, “Does hell really exist?”It is all over the place. India is very representative: it represents hell. Starvation, misery, poverty, and not only that – tremendous stupidity. People cling to their poverty, to their starvation. Not only do they cling, they rationalize: they make much out of it, they brag about it. They think that to be poor is something spiritual, to be ill and starved seems to be something holy.Count Keyserling came to India. His son’s son is one of my sannyasins now. Count Keyserling came to India and in his diary he writes: In India I realized that to be poor is to be spiritual, to be ill is to be spiritual, to be starved is to be spiritual.More than the poverty, more than the starvation, more than the misery, is the stupidity that creates hell. India clings to its misery, it brags about it. It thinks: “The whole world is worldly except us. We are religious people, we are otherworldly.”You have to be otherworldly because that is your only hope. This world you have made so ugly, this life you are living in such misery that it will be impossible for you to live at all if this is the only life. You have to project your ideas after death.So Indians are always thinking about after death. Indians come to me and they ask, “What happens after death?”I tell them, “Don’t talk nonsense – ask what happens before death. The real question is before death, not after death. And whatever happens before death will continue to happen after death. Don’t be worried about it.”But I can understand why they don’t ask about life. They have all settled for the ugliness of it, they are not ready to change it. This is hell, and created by the people themselves. No Devil is responsible for it.You can change it. Even if there is a hell, and the right people go there, they will change it.I have heard a story…An atheist asked a priest – because the priest had said in his sermon that day that people who believe in God and who do virtuous deeds go to heaven, and people who don’t believe in God and who are sinners go to hell.An atheist raised his hand and asked, “Sir, one question has to be solved then. What about those people who don’t believe in God and yet do virtuous deeds, where will they go? And what about those people who believe in God and yet are sinners, where will they go?”The priest was at a loss, naturally. If he says that the virtuous people will go to hell because they don’t believe in God, it doesn’t look right. Then what is the point of being virtuous? Then just believe in God and enjoy all the sins you can enjoy. Why bother about being virtuous?If he says people who believe in God and are still sinners will go to heaven, then just belief is enough. So God is not interested in what you do, is not interested in your acts.You can kill; you can be a Genghis Khan or an Adolf Hitler. Still, if you believe in God… And Adolf Hitler believed in God, remember. Genghis Khan believed in God, remember: before massacring thousands of people, in the early morning he would recite the Koran. The first thing was namaz, prayer, and then he would go into all kinds of ugly things, unimaginable butchery.The priest must have been a very sensitive person, alert. He said, “Please give me time. The question is difficult, is not so easy. Next Sunday I will answer.”Those seven days were really hell for the priest. He tried this way and that, but nothing was going to work. Sunday arrived and he knew the atheist would be there: not to turn up would be humiliating.So he came a little early to pray to Jesus Christ. “Help me! I am your servant, I have been speaking on your behalf. Now help me, what is the clue? This man has created such trouble!”Praying to Christ…and for seven days he had not slept: the whole night he was thinking, the whole day he was thinking. He fell asleep before the statue of Christ and he had a dream.In the dream he saw a train ready to leave for heaven. He jumped in. He said, “This is perfectly right. Why shouldn’t I go there and see with my own eyes? If I see Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane there, then the question is solved.Or if I see Socrates, who did not believe in God but was one of the most virtuous of men… If I see Gautama the Buddha in heaven, who did not believe in God but was one of the most godly persons who ever walked on the earth, then the question is solved.”He rushed into the train and the train left. He reached heaven. He was a little surprised, puzzled, because heaven did not look very heavenly. As if very sad, dull and damp: no joy, nothing sunny, no song. He had heard so much that the angels go on playing on their harps and singing and dancing. No harps, no singing, no dancing…a few stupid-looking saints sitting underneath their trees covered with dust.He inquired, he went to the stationmaster and asked, “Is there some mistake? Is this really heaven?”The stationmaster said, “Yes, there is no mistake.”But the priest said, “It looks more like hell! Is there a train leaving for hell? Because I would like to see hell, too, then I can compare.”He got a reservation, went to hell – and he was really more surprised than he was surprised seeing heaven. There was joy, all was sunny and bright: songs and music. People were working. People had lights in their eyes. No Devil, no hellfire, nobody torturing – nothing. He inquired, “This looks more like heaven!”And the stationmaster said, “Yes, now it does, but before it used to be just the way it is described in your scriptures. Since Buddha, Mahavira, and Socrates have come here, they have transformed it.”A very rich man who was about to die asked his wife to promise to bury him without any clothes on. He was such a miserly man that he thought, “Why not save the clothes?”His wife was shocked. But he said, “Listen, I know which way I’m going. I won’t need clothes down there, it is too hot.”When he eventually passed over, his wife kept her promise. A few days later, just as the widow was preparing to go to bed one evening, the man’s ghost appeared through the window and said, “Get out my winter underwear and my tweed overcoat, darling. There are so many rich people in hell now that they have installed air-conditioning!”It all depends on you. Hell is not part of geography, it is part of your psychology, and so is heaven. You create your hell, you create your heaven. And it is not in the future. Herenow somebody is living in heaven and somebody is living in hell. And they may be sitting together, they may be friends.Right now, I say to you, I am in heaven, and I am inviting you to come into my space and share it. That’s what sannyas is all about: an invitation given, an invitation received. An invitation from my side and a gesture from your side that “Yes, I am willing to come into your space.”Don’t be worried about hell and heaven; they are just your states. If you live in the mind, you live in hell. If you live in no-mind, you live in heaven.The fifth question:Osho,Someone has told you that the Buick is the pimp's car, and now the news I break is that the Cadillac is the pimp's car, at least in New York City and Oakland, California! So, how about a Lincoln Continental Mark IV, like the cars the US presidents ride in?That is far worse! Then I would like to go back to my Impala, and be a plumber. That’s what I am: a plumber of the mind, a plumber of the soul.But it seems no car is going to work out. In fact, I need an orange elephant!The last question:Osho,What is philosophy?Philosophy is an obsession with words. The word God becomes more significant than the experience of God: that is philosophy. Philosophers ask, “What do you mean when you use the word God?” “What do you mean when you use the word truth?” “What do you mean when you use the word good?” “What do you mean when you use the word love?”Philosophy is more or less a linguistic phenomenon: a question of language and grammar, hair-splitting and shadowboxing. It is not concerned with reality at all. It talks about reality. But remember, to talk about reality is one thing and to move into reality is quite another. Philosophy is talk, religion is experience.My interest is in religion, not in philosophy at all.Noah Webster’s neighbor came into the pantry and found him kissing the pretty chambermaid.“My, Mr. Webster!” she exclaimed. “I am surprised!”“No, my dear,” said Mr. Webster with a reproving smile. “You are astounded, I am surprised.”It is only a question of words: the reality is put aside. Webster is a linguist, a great grammarian. He changes the words, he says, “No, my dear, you are astounded. You are using the wrong word when you say ‘I am surprised.’ You are astounded, I am surprised.”The emphasis – you see the emphasis – is no longer upon the act of kissing the pretty maid, the emphasis is on the wrong word or the right word.Philosophers go on and on with words, and words have their own way. One word brings another word, and so on and so forth. You can go on and on ad infinitum. There is no end to words. You can fabricate, manufacture new words. And you can create such a fuss about words. You can mystify people. Philosophy is a mind trick, a very sophisticated trick, but a mind trick.Religion has nothing to do with philosophy; religion is just a totally different dimension. It is going beyond words. It is reaching experience. Religion is existential, philosophy is intellectual. And you can’t understand even a small thing like a roseflower intellectually.If you try to understand the roseflower and its beauty intellectually, either you have to say that the beauty is indefinable – that is another way of saying that it is unthinkable – or you have to say there is no beauty at all. It is all projection, it is all illusion. These are the only two alternatives for philosophy to take.The philosopher says, “God is an illusion, truth is an illusion, love is an illusion” – he tries to prove everything is illusion – and then suddenly he is at a loss what to do. He is in a deep misery, in great frustration. Life seems to be just a chaos with no meaning in it. Then suicide seems to be the only outlet of this whole mess.Many philosophers think of committing suicide and many commit suicide, too. And those who cannot commit, they go mad, which is just in between the two: neither alive nor dead, just hanging in limbo – that is madness.G. E. Moore has written a great book, as far as books are concerned, Principia Ethica. For two hundred pages he discusses what good is. If somebody asks me, “What is good?” I will say, “It is indefinable” – right now, immediately. After two hundred pages he comes to the conclusion that it is indefinable – and two hundred pages of great logic. He was one of the greatest logicians of this age.These three names are very important: G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein.Two hundred pages of great hard work – so much perspiration and nothing of inspiration. And then the conclusion is that good is indefinable, because good is a simple quality like yellow. How can you define yellow? Yellow is yellow. What more you can say about yellow?But do you have to go through this hell of two hundred pages to come to the simple conclusion – that the mystic has always been saying – that life is indefinable, it is mysterious. You cannot demystify it.Yes, you can enjoy it. You can go deep into the mystery, become part of it. You can dance it, you can sing it, you can celebrate it, but you cannot understand it.Philosophy tries to understand and comes to no understanding. Religion never tries to understand and comes to deep understanding.Beware of words. Words are very enchanting, hypnotizing. Sometimes you can get caught in nets of words.Two ladies conducting a school survey ring a doorbell which is answered by a man who has been taking a shower and who is covering himself with only a newspaper. He tells them that he is: “Peter Pepperpod, wife Pauline, sons Paul and Peter Jr., both in your school. I’m a peanut packer for Planter’s Peanuts and poke around in part-time party planning on the side.”Later one of the ladies goes to the toilet at the first filling station they pass and does not return for fifteen minutes. She explains to the other, “I just sat there and got to thinking about that personable Mr. Peter Pepperpod, the peanut packer for Planter’s Peanuts and part-time party planner, standing there with his pert, petrified pivot poking through the paper, and it just made my pussy pucker with such peccability that I couldn’t hardly precipitate.”This is what philosophy is.Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 09 (Listen & Download)

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Question: Are there fast and slow ways of attainment?Answer: If one sees that endless time is the mind, he will attain quickly, but if he makes a point in his mind and aims at his destination, he will attain slowly. The wise one knows his mind is the path; the stupid one makes a path beyond his mind. He does not know where the path is nor does he know that mind itself is the path.Question: Why does one attain quickly?Answer: Because mind is the body of the path, therefore, is quickly reached. Stupid ones mark their own time starting according to that standard, therefore they must make their own destination according to their own delusions.Question: What part of the mind is the body of the path?Answer: Mind is like the wood or stone from which a person carves an image. If he carves a dragon or a tiger, and seeing it fears it, he is like a stupid person creating a picture of hell and then afraid to face it. If he does not fear it, then his unnecessary thoughts will vanish. Part of the mind produces sight, sound, taste, odor and sensibility, and from them raises greed, anger and ignorance with all their accompanying likes and dislikes. Thus is planted the seed, which grows to great suffering. If one realizes that from the beginning mind essence is empty and quiet, he should know no specific time or place. Instead he makes an image of a tiger, lion, dragon, demon, warrior or other monster, recognizes them by comparison and produces likes and dislikes. If he knows that from the beginning there is no such thing, then he should know that mind essence is not formed, therefore these images are nothing but illusions. When he realizes this fact, he will be emancipated at that instant.Question: What is the natural, simple mind, and what is the artificial, complicated mind?Answer: Letters and speeches come from the artificial, complicated mind. Both in the material and immaterial world a person stays or goes, sits or lies down, and moves innocently, or, it can be said, in the natural, simple mind. When one remains unmoved by pleasure or suffering, his mind may be called the natural, simple mind.The mind is the problem and the mind is also the solution.The mind as an ego is the problem. The mind without any ego is the solution. The mind with a lower case m is the problem. The Mind with a capital M is the solution. The mind with a lower case m is part of the personality. The Mind with a capital M is universal. It is not yours, it is not mine. It is nobody’s or it is everybody’s. The universal mind contains all consciousness.The other way to say it – that is the Zen way – is that the mind is the problem and no-mind is the solution. No-mind is simply another way of saying the cosmic mind, the universal mind. The “no” denies the ego not the mind, remember. The “no” denies the personal not the universal. The “no” simply denies all limitations and helps you to become as infinite as you really are.This is the most fundamental truth about the buddhas. Their work consists of helping you to dissolve the personal mind, which is like a dewdrop, into the universal, which is the oceanic.A few people have called that oceanic mind, God. The name is beautiful, but it has created its own problems. The moment you call it God, the idea of worship, churches, temples, rituals, arises, and the lower mind comes from the backdoor. You become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, and you are again trapped in the same chains – maybe colored differently – and you are again imprisoned. Again you become defined and limited. Again you lose contact with the whole.The personal is the illusory. It is the personal that makes you an idiot. The universal is the truth. Unless one is ready to die into the universal, one cannot attain truth.Truth is a death: the death of the egoistic mind, although it is also a resurrection: a resurrection into the universal. You die as a person and you are reborn as a god, as a buddha, as a christ. Hence the path consists of understanding the mind and its functioning. The egoistic mind wants to constantly keep itself occupied. That is one of its ways to deceive you. It keeps you so occupied that you don’t have any time to look in. All occupation is extrovert. To look in means to be unoccupied. There is no inner occupation as such. And if you are occupied in an inward way too, then you are deceiving yourself.You may be chanting a mantra inside, but chanting a mantra inside simply deceives you because you are not the mantra and the mantra is still outside you. It may not be outside your body, but it is outside your consciousness. You can witness your chanting, you can see your chanting, you can observe it. That means you are outside it and it is outside you. All occupation is non-meditative.Hence Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation is a false phenomenon. It is neither transcendental nor meditation. It is simply changing one occupation for another occupation. Somebody is singing a film song and somebody is chanting the name of God. No difference in essence: both are occupied.This is the first thing to be understood if you really want go to beyond the mind, the so-called ordinary mind, and reach the universal. And to reach the universal is enlightenment. To remain confined to the lower is ignorance.The first lesson is: learn how to be unoccupied, even for few moments. Just no occupation, inner or outer, because all are outer occupations, even the so-called inner ones. No occupation, and immediately you are beyond the ordinary mind. You go beyond limits, you go beyond boundaries. Suddenly you become the ocean, the dewdrop disappears. In that oceanic experience one is freed, liberated.The ordinary mind always wants business. Any kind of business is okay. Give it business. Have some target, some goal: money, power, prestige. And if you are tired of all that, then meditation, God, paradise, truth. But again you are substituting old goals with new goals, old ambitions with new ambitions. Nothing is radically changed. You remain the same, your gestalt remains the same, just the object is changed. And because of the change of object you can feel very spiritual, very holy.The mind is cunning. Be aware that it can exist only when you are in business, when you are busy. When you are not busy it evaporates, it cannot exist without business. Hence people are busy even without business.The co-ed was lying with her boyfriend and was trying to make an impression on her eager young date. “So you’re named Tom. I know George means lover of horses, and Philip means beloved, and Don means chief. Do you know what Tom means?”“Business, baby, business.”But that’s exactly what the mind means: constant business, day in, day out. If you are awake there is business, if you are asleep there is business. You may be dreaming, but it is business.The mind does not leave you even a few moments of open sky, unclouded, so that you can see the reality as it is. It keeps your eyes clouded, full of dust: the dust of desire, the dust of thought, the dust of memory, imagination. And these layers and layers of dust have completely covered your mirrorlike consciousness which is capable of reflecting all.It always keeps you somewhere else. It never allows you to be herenow because to be herenow means to be unoccupied. That is the second lesson to be learned.Hence the insistence of all the buddhas to live in the present, to be present to the present. The mind can only remain occupied either in the past or in the future. How can it become occupied in the present? It is impossible. The present simply destroys the ego. The present takes away all the rubbish from your mind, all junk. It simply leaves you open, available, vulnerable, receptive. Thrilled, ecstatic, of course, but not occupied.Whenever you are here and now, you are not. Let me repeat it: whenever you are here and now, you are not. God is, buddhahood is. Because here and now, your small mind cannot exist. It melts, it disappears.The mind can exist only with the nonexistential. A rare phenomenon, a contradiction on the surface: the mind can exist only with the nonexistential – because the mind itself is nonexistential, it feeds on the nonexistential.Two things are the most nonexistential in the world: one is the past, which is no more. Another is the future, which is not yet. Mind exists on these two props: the “no more” and the “not yet.” And between the two is the small interval, the atomic interval. It is so small that unless you are absolutely alert and aware you are bound to miss it.To be in the present means not to be. And not to be is the door to godliness, the door to truth, the door to reality.These are simple statements if understood. But we go on pretending to understand without understanding, because understanding seems to be risky, dangerous, deathlike. And, in a way, it is. To understand rightly how the mind exists is to prepare for your death.Sannyas is death – has always been so. Hence only the few courageous people can enter the path: people who are so deeply in love with truth that they are ready to sacrifice themselves. Whatever the cost they are ready to pay for it, but they are fed up with the lies of life.Ginzburg comes home early from work one day, sure that his wife has a lover. He searches the house in a mad frenzy. Sure enough he discovers a little man huddled among the clothes in the closet.“What the hell are you doing here?” screams Ginzburg.“Well, we all have to be somewhere,” replies the culprit.The mind has to be somewhere: either in the past or in the future. If you take those two props away from it, it can’t exist. It simply falls flat on the ground. It dies immediately. It cannot breathe, not even for a single moment.This is the way of meditation: encountering the present in all its tremendous beauty, just being in the present. Inside, the mind stops. Outside, the world changes totally. It is no longer the ordinary world you have known before. In fact, you have not known it at all.Your mind was distorting everything; your mind was creating fantasies. Your eyes were full of fantasies and you were looking though those fantasies. They never allowed you to see that which is. If the mind is gone even for a moment, suddenly the whole existence explodes upon you.Norman lay naked on the grass in a secluded part of the park, a dazed but oddly happy expression on his face.“What happened?” asked the cop.“I was – uh – minding my own business,” mumbled the man, “when a gang of sorority girls from Vassar came along and jumped me and – uh – tore off my clothes. And then…”“And then what?”“And then all heaven broke loose!”That may have happened to Norman or may not have happened, but it happens when the mind is absolutely unoccupied, when the mind is utterly in the moment, when it is nowhere else but here and now. And to be here and now, let me remind you, means it is no more. Yes, then all heaven breaks loose.Suddenly white lotuses start flowering on you. Your whole life has a totally different quality to it. Then whatever you touch becomes gold, and whatever you see is simply incredible, unbelievable.The mind goes on giving you ideas about reality, but those are the mind’s ideas and the mind is utterly idiotic. To believe in your own mind is the most foolish thing in the world one can do, but because you want to believe in your own importance, you go on believing in your own mind. And the mind is very clever at arguing its case. Even if it doesn’t argue…because you want to believe that you are someone special, extraordinary, superior, holier. The mind knows your weaknesses.Just the other day I was reading a statement of Idi Amin’s. He says he is the most beautiful man in the world. Just think of Idi Amin’s face. But he says, “Because the journalists are against me, they print my pictures as if I am a monkey.”The person who was interviewing him asked, “On what grounds do you say that you are the most beautiful man in the world?”He said, “My mother says so, my wife says so, and my other wives also” – because he has many wives – “my girlfriends say so, that ‘I am the most beautiful man in the world,’ and why should they be lying?”You see the argument! Every mother says to her child, “You are the most beautiful person” – and every wife and every husband and every friend. But if you want to believe…and we want to believe! Now, even Idi Amin can believe that he is the most beautiful man in the world. Then anything can be believed.And I agree with him that he does not look like a monkey. He looks like a gorilla. Or even worse – because in the same statement he says that he has tasted human flesh. And he can say with authority that it is the most delicious thing he has ever tasted. The deliciousness of human flesh is such, he says, that to express it is impossible. It is an inexpressible experience. Now, this man thinks himself to be the most beautiful man in the world. But everybody thinks so. Don’t laugh at Idi Amin: that is everybody’s mind. He is foolish enough to make such statements. People don’t make such statements, but deep down they know…A certain rich American lady was visiting an Indian guru who accounted himself as the greatest of all. He had been told in advance that she was thinking of making a very large donation to his work.When the time came for the guru to appear at his darshan – reception time – he saw this visitor in the crowd which had come to pay respects.“Yes?” he said to her at once.“Who is the greatest man in the world?” she asked.“Coca-cola,” answered the guru without a moment’s hesitation.Afterward his chief assistant asked him why he had given such a strange answer. “What secret wisdom is this, oh great master?”“Well,” said the mahatma, “I, of course, knew that the greatest man in the world is me. But when I saw from the inscription on her T-shirt that she respected someone else, I said to myself, ‘Business is business. After all, he’s probably dead, so there’s no harm in honoring him!’”Everybody knows deep down in his self that he is the greatest. It is not only Idi Amin or Muhammad Ali who think they are the greatest. Every idiot thinks like that. That is the very essence of the idiotic mind.Buddhas think themselves to be just ordinary. The really great think of themselves as being just ordinary. There is no inferiority complex in them and no superiority complex either. The really great is without inferiority–superiority complex, because those two complexes are not two, but two sides of the same coin.It is the inferior man who pretends to be superior. It is the inferior man who pretends to be superior who comes against so many problems that he cannot prove his superiority – he fails so many times that inferiority arises in him. They are not different: inferiority projects superiority. When you cannot prove your superiority you fall into a deep depression and you start feeling inferior. But a really alert man is neither. He simply is, and that is more than enough.Don’t listen to the mind, to what it says to you. It is going to give you wrong information. It is bound to give you notions which are not real. It creates hallucinations around you. It does not create dreams only in the night; even in the day it keeps you dreaming. Any moment close your eyes and you will see subtle dreams passing as an undercurrent underneath you. On the surface you remain occupied with things, doing your business, but deep down the mind goes on creating its own dreams. It is constantly keeping you unconscious, sleepy. Beware of these simple facts, and then Bodhidharma’s words will be very clear to you.The first question:Are there fast and slow ways of attainment?Bodhidharma has said to the inquirer that there is no attainment. All that is attained is already contained by you. It is only discovered, not attained – or, not even discovered but only remembered, recognized, because you are carrying everything that you can ever be. And if you are not that, that simply means you are trying to be somebody else.And that’s how you have been taught. You have been taught to be like Christ, to be like Buddha, to be like Krishna, to be like Mohammed. And you have been trying – and very religiously, very sincerely – and all that has happened through that effort is that you have become pseudo, false, phony. You can’t be Christ, you can’t be Buddha, you can’t be Krishna. You cannot imitate anybody else. You can only be yourself. And that is more than enough – you are God! You have only to accept your reality as it is, without distorting it, without painting your face like a buddha: that won’t help. Real life is not a drama. You need not rehearse it, you need not practice it.Bodhidharma has said there is no attainment as such. Nothing has to be attained because you have not lost anything at all. You are already that which you want to be, which you long to be. So it is not a question of attainment, it is just an inquiry into your own being: “Who am I?” That’s enough.But the questioner brings the question from another angle. Now he asks: Are there fast and slow ways of attainment? If there is no attainment, how can there be slow or fast ways? But he has missed that ultimate truth.Seeing that he has missed it, Bodhidharma gives him something less than the ultimate. The masters have to look at you. They can’t give you that which you cannot absorb. Their first effort is always to give you the purest truth, the absolute truth – truth and nothing else – but when they see it is impossible for you to receive, then they have to come down a little bit to become more available to you.Their compassion is such that if it is needed they will come down to the very level where you stand so that they can talk to you as friends, so that you can understand.You can understand only that which is given to you on the same plane that you exist on.A Zen master was again and again caught stealing small things, so small: a button, somebody’s needle, one shoe, somebody’s cap. And he was such a respected master that his disciples said, “Why do you go on doing such ridiculous things? What is the purpose of it all? We are ready to give you whatever you need. You need not steal!”But the master used to laugh and would not say a thing. Again and again he would be imprisoned for a few days, would come out, would steal again, would be imprisoned again.When he was dying, the disciples asked, “Sir, now please tell us the secret.”He said, “The secret is very simple. I wanted to help the prisoners in the jail, and they could understand me only if I was also a prisoner. There was no other way to help them. I had to fall to their level so that I can help them to rise to my plane.”He must have been a tremendously compassionate buddha, falling to the level of the prisoners to help them because they will not understand a saint, they will not understand a Zen master. They can only understand a thief. They know the language, and with a thief they can communicate. And the Zen master really transformed many. He continued to come to the jail again and again, but the people with whom he communicated in the jail never came back again. He liberated many people.And, dying, he said, “The same is the case with the world too. A buddha is born, just like everybody else, from the same womb. Grows in the same way, eats, sleeps, lives in the same way. Because this world is a big prison, he comes into this prison to help other prisoners to escape. You can’t help the prisoners to escape unless you become friendly with them. And they will be friendly only if you exist on their plane, otherwise they will always be suspicious of you. You will remain an outsider and they will not take you inside their hearts.”Bodhidharma has said the ultimate truth: There is nothing to be attained, no goal to be reached, no target. Life is a playful creativity with no goal as such. It is not going anywhere, it is not moving in any direction. It is playful energy. It is just energy dancing for no purpose, for the simple joy of dancing. Existence is a dance.But that has not been understood. The question has come again. Now he has to answer it on a lower plane.Bodhidharma says:If one sees that endless time is the mind, he will attain quickly, but if he makes a point in his mind and aims at his destination, he will attain slowly. The wise one knows his mind is the path; the stupid one makes a path beyond his mind. He does not know where the path is nor does he know that mind itself is the path.Although he speaks in the language of the inquirer, he still goes on giving hints of the beyond. It is not pure, uncontaminated truth. The sun is there, but the clouds are also there. If you are intelligent enough you can look at the sun and you need not be occupied with the clouds, but if you are not so intelligent then this is the only way. You are interested in clouds, then the clouds have to be given to you. Maybe through the clouds, one day accidentally you will become aware of the reality of the sun.If one sees that endless time is the mind… This is something to be understood. Buddha says so, Bodhidharma says so, I say so: the mind and time are not two things. Your mind, the finite mind, the mind that we know as the ego, is nothing but time. Hence, when the mind disappears, eternity opens up, timelessness opens up.If one sees that endless time is the mind – that it is mind that creates endless time, that it is the mind’s creativity, innovation. Why does the mind create time? Because it cannot exist, it needs time to exist. The past is time, the future is time, the present is not time. The present is not created by the mind. The present is the nature of universal mind, of cosmic mind. It has nothing to do with your mind. Your mind fabricates future, fabricates past.You will be surprised that whatever you remember about the past is not factual, it is very fictitious. Every person in his old age starts thinking that his childhood was very beautiful: “My childhood… Those were the days, real days, golden days.”But ask any child, and no child is going to say to you, “These are the golden days.” Every child wants to grow up quick, soon, because he can see grown-ups are enjoying life. He can see that grown-ups are powerful. He can see that he is being dominated, pulled, pushed, forced to do things that he does not want to do. He wants to be grown up as soon as possible. All his prayers are that this childhood should finish. He wants to be powerful, dominating.And small children try in every possible way, at least to pretend to themselves, that they are grown-ups. If the father is not at home, they will sit in his chair with the same gesture. They may smoke his cigar the same way the father does. They may not be able to read the newspaper. They may be holding it upside down, but they will hold the newspaper the same way the father does, because these are signs of grown-up people.One day, twenty years ago, I went for a morning walk and I saw a child, not more than six or seven years old, with a false mustache. And he was walking with such grandeur. Seeing me he became ashamed and ran away inside his house. I followed him; he closed the door. I knocked on the door. His father opened the door, then everything was plain. His father also had the same type of mustache – real, of course.I asked, “Where is your son? I want to see him.”He brought the son out. He had taken off the mustache. I asked him, “Where is the mustache, and why were you wearing it?”He said, “I was pretending to be my daddy, and I enjoy it. I have to go very early in the morning so nobody sees.”Small children are always trying to become bigger. But later on these same people will say that the real golden age was their childhood. It is a fiction. They are creating it, it is not real memory.Hence, I don’t believe in autobiographies, not at all, because people write autobiographies in their late seventies, eighties. And they are reporting about seventy years before. Seventy years have passed and now they are reporting. That whole report is false, fictitious.They are creating their childhood as they would have wanted it to be, although they do it very unconsciously. Not that they are consciously trying to cheat anybody.They brag about their childhood and their achievements and their schooldays and university days, and they go on bragging. Sometimes the bragging can take the form of condemnation too. That too is a way of bragging.Saint Augustine writes about his childhood and his youth in such a condemnatory way that you will be puzzled. You will think at least he must be right because he proves himself to be the greatest sinner possible. But that is just a strategy of the mind. First he proves that he was such a great sinner, and then he transforms. Naturally, when a great sinner is transformed he becomes a greater saint. If you are an ordinary sinner and you become transformed, your saintliness also is going to be ordinary. It will be in the same proportion.Mahatma Gandhi writes about his childhood and youth in a very derogatory sense. He follows Saint Augustine because everything depends on that. He paints it so dark and dismal and black, and with that background, just a little white paint will show and shine like silver. To prove that you are a great mahatma, the only way is first to prove that you have been a great sinner – the greatest. But the ego is such that even when you are talking about sin you cannot be moderate, you have to be the greatest sinner. The greatest saint or the greatest sinner: nobody wants to be mediocre. If you are a sinner, just an ordinary sinner, it hurts.People create their past. I don’t think there is a single autobiography which is really true. It can’t be, because our later experiences go on interpreting, reinterpreting our past. We go on touching up the pictures so much that the original pictures are lost completely, something else appears. We have painted those pictures so often with new insights, new experiences, that they are no longer true. We create the past and we live in the past, and that is one dimension of time.The other dimension is the future; we create the future and we live in the future. Of course, we have more freedom with the future because there is nothing there, it is all empty. We can make anything out of the future.Hence, just sit silently any day and think of your future, and you become the president or the prime minister. Just allow the mind a free flow and you will be surprised: soon you are Alexander the Great, you are the greatest emperor of the world. You will laugh later on, but the mind was doing it and the mind is constantly doing it. Everybody imagines his future, everybody creates his past.Time has two dimensions, not three: the past and the future. The present is not part of time; it is the penetration of eternity.Bodhidharma says: If one sees that endless time is the mind, he will attain quickly… If you can understand that time is mind, then attainment can be very quick, can be immediate, because then you stop creating the past and you stop creating the future. Both are false, imaginary. Suddenly you are thrown into the present, and that’s from where you become aware of the truth.…but if he makes a point in his mind and aims at his destination, he will attain slowly. But if you make a goal, a destination to attain, out of buddhahood, christhood, godhood, if these are the aims, the targets in your mind, then these are again new tricks, new ways of the mind to create another future: a spiritual future, a sacred future. It is far more dangerous because when the poison is thought to be holy, sacred, there is every possibility you will drink it wholeheartedly, without any hesitation.To think, “I am going to become a buddha tomorrow” is more dangerous than to think, “Tomorrow I am going to become a great emperor.” That is not so dangerous because the very idea of becoming a buddha tomorrow is so alluring, so enchanting, so hypnotizing. But it is the same poison. “Tomorrow” is the poison. So what you want to become tomorrow does not matter.If you make it a point in your mind, says Bodhidharma, and your mind starts working toward the future for a certain destination to be achieved, then the growth is going to be very slow. Maybe it is going to take lives and lives. And the mind is so clever and so cunning that whenever you become fed up with one object it immediately gives you another toy, more complicated than before, more difficult than before, so it takes a longer time for you to see that this again is a toy. And the best toys are spiritual goals.Since by definition you cannot pass on the incommunicable, a certain dervish cast about him for a way to convey, by demonstration, something of the wonders which he had experienced.“Analogy is the answer,” he said to himself, and put his mind to it. He learned, after a great deal of trial and error, how to walk on water.Then he called all the local villagers together, headed by the mayor, and paced slowly across a lake.“What do you think of that?” he asked them as he arrived at the other side.“One thing puzzles me,” said the mayor: “why didn’t you learn to swim, like everybody else?”But your so-called spiritual, holy people have all been doing the same thing down the ages. They create some kind of stupid goal: walking on water, reading somebody’s thoughts, producing things out of nowhere, out of nothing, and they think these are spiritual things. They are not. It is again the same ego pretending, trying to prove something, that “I am superior.”The so-called spiritual people have been fasting and destroying their bodies, or doing yoga and distorting their bodies in every possible way, just to prove to other people that “We are special.” Somebody stands on his head for hours and thinks that he is special, and people also think that he is special.I have seen a man who has been standing on his feet for ten years, who has not sat down. Now he cannot even if he wants to. His legs have become so thick, his whole body has become thin. All the blood and everything has gathered in his legs. He is a very ill person, those legs are also dead. He cannot move, he has to be moved by people. But he does not sleep, does not sit. He remains standing. People have to support him in the night so he does not fall. And the whole night there is singing; kirtan, bhajan, goes on around him to keep him awake. He is in such a mess that when I saw him I really felt sorry for him. But he is worshipped by thousands of people for the simple reason that he has been standing for ten years. Now, what kind of achievement is this?But this type of phonies attract the attention of people easily, because people are also too much identified with their bodies. These things seem to be very superior powers. They are nothing.Thus it happened one day that when two pseudo-masters of the mystical path met, one said to the other, after the customary exchange of compliments, “I have a disciple who constantly asks for tasks and illumination. Have you any idea what I might do with him?”The other illuminate replied, “It is interesting that you should say that: I have had a similar case myself. I had him drink a cup of kerosene.”They parted and, after some months, met again.The first mystic said, “I tried your idea on my disciple. He lit a match to have a cigarette, burst into flames and was completely consumed!”“That’s right,” said the other, “the same thing happened to mine!”There are people who go on advising others, not knowing anything about true spirituality. But because they can stand on their heads for hours and they can distort their bodies in many ways, they seem to be yogis, mahatmas. Because they can fast for months… It is a simple practice: if a man is healthy he can fast for at least ninety days without dying. You accumulate so much extra food in your body that you can live on it for three months. You will go on becoming thinner and thinner, but you will not die. So it is not much of an achievement. You have simply become a cannibal; you are eating yourself, that’s all. You are digesting your own blood, your own flesh.In fact, fasting should be thought of as a very violent practice, ugly. Maybe once in a while, for medical reasons, a person should be told to fast, but for no other reason.And standing on the head is dangerous, destructive. Have you ever seen any yogi who stands for hours on his head showing any kind of intelligence? I have known so many yogis, but never with a ray of intelligence in their eyes: dull, stupid, very mediocre. It is bound to be so because standing on the head is destructive to intelligence. It destroys the very subtle nervous system in your brain. Too much blood going into the brain is destructive. And it keeps your brain too tense, it does not allow it to be relaxed.That’s why you need a pillow at night, because with the pillow the blood is not going toward the head. If you try to sleep without a pillow, you can’t sleep because the blood is coming into the head and it keeps your head restless, functioning. The pillow helps. The head becomes a little higher and less blood reaches it.In fact, man became man only because he dropped walking on all fours and stood up. Standing means the blood will reach your brain in the minimum possible way because it will have to move against gravitation. No animal is intelligent for the simple reason that so much blood is going into the head: intelligence is not possible.Yoga is falling back. It is not helping you to grow in intelligence, in genius, in awareness. Yes, it may give you a very strong body; that is possible. Animals have strong bodies. It may have the quality to impart a longer life to you, but whether you live long or not does not matter in the end.All that matters is your intensity of life, not the length: your intensity, your passionate attunement to life, not how long you go on dragging and vegetating.Bodhidharma says: The wise one knows his mind is the path… Don’t be too concerned with the body. There is no need to go into so many yoga postures. Yes, a little bit of exercise is good. And the best exercise is something natural: walking, swimming, running, jogging. Yoga exercises are complicated and dangerous. They may suit one person, they may not suit another at all. What was right for Patanjali may not be right for you. But running, swimming, jogging, are simple exercises. They suit everyone. They are not complicated, and you need not go to anybody to learn them. They are so simple, you know them already.You will be surprised to know that swimming is a natural exercise. One psychologist in Japan has tried it with such small children, six-month-old children, and they learn it immediately. Six-month-old children start swimming. In fact, the child swims in his mother’s womb. He lives in liquid for nine months, because a child starts his life in the mother’s womb as a fish.That’s how humanity started: we all started in the beginning as fish in the ocean. Every child repeats the whole history. Of course, in a very fast way; in nine months he repeats millions of years of history. But each time a child is in the mother’s womb, he starts from the very beginning, as a fish.If man started as a fish, if every child starts as a fish, then swimming is a natural phenomenon. You just need to be helped a little. In fact, you do not need to be taught swimming. All that is needed is some courage, somebody to stand on the bank of the river so you need not be too worried and afraid. If six-month-old children can learn to swim… And now the psychologist is trying to teach three-month-old children and he says he will succeed. If six-month-old children can swim, then why not three-month-old children?Running is natural, jogging is natural. A little exercise is good, but don’t make much fuss about it because the real way is the mind. The real way is not the body.…the stupid one makes a path beyond his mind. The stupid one directs his mind to something far away, beyond his mind. The wise one watches his mind, has no destination: observes his mind, its ways of functioning, its ways of deceiving, its ways of creating hallucinations, and in watching them slowly, slowly becomes so alert, so full of light, that the mind disappears like darkness.Madame: “Mona, just how accomplished are you?”Mona: “I don’t like to brag, but I can make love standing on my head!”Madame: “Then you’re the one I want. There’s a yogi waiting downstairs!”You can make love standing on your head and it may look like an accomplishment, but it is simply keeping yourself occupied with something utterly nonsensical. Beware, your mind can lead you astray very easily.And as you become more and more concentrated on a certain goal, a few energies are released inside you by your mind that are not ordinary energies. You become capable of doing things which ordinary people are not capable of doing; that gives you great ego. Yes, there is a possibility you can read people’s thoughts. There is a possibility you can create some illusions for people. There is a possibility you can hypnotize people very easily, and make them see and feel and realize a few things which are not there.Thirty-three percent of people are so suggestible, so gullible you can manage anything with that thirty-three percent. They are ready to believe it. These are the thirty-three percent who gather around people like Sai Baba. These are the people who help the so-called miracle doers because they are ready to believe in anything. They are hankering to believe, they are starving; they want to believe, so anything will do. They want to cling to some belief, to somebody extraordinary.The man who is a little intelligent, wise, alert, will not fall into such traps. His only effort will be how to be absolutely aware of all the ways, gross and subtle, of the mind because that is the only way to be free from it. And when you are free from your mind you become available to God’s mind and God’s mind becomes available to you.The second question:Why does one attain quickly?Seeing the questions, I again and again feel that Bodhidharma must have been in a really deep compassionate mood. This man needs a good beating! What is the matter with Bodhidharma? That’s what I am puzzled about. This man is not known that way. Has he forgotten his staff, and it is not with him? It is very rare for Bodhidharma to go on answering such questions.With Emperor Wu he was so hard, and with everybody he has been hard.Maybe the inquirer is so stupid that he feels really sorry for him. The inquirer may be so stupid that it is pointless to hit him. He won’t understand it. Hence he goes on answering.Why does one attain quickly? the questioner asks.Bodhidharma says:Because mind is the body of the path, therefore, is quickly reached. Stupid ones mark their own time starting according to that standard, therefore they must make their own destination according to their own delusions.You cannot make a goal because if you make a goal, you will be making it out of your own delusions. It will be part of a dream and hence will be very difficult to arrive at. In fact it is impossible to arrive at, it is a dream. You can go on and on, but the dream will go on receding like the horizon. You will never reach it. Hence, it will take infinite time and yet you will be as far away as ever.Don’t make a goal because right now all that you can do will be illusory. With your mind functioning, whatever you do is going to be wrong. First wake up. Then things start happening quickly.The third question:What part of the mind is the body of the path?Bodhidharma says:Mind is like the wood or stone from which a person carves an image. If he carves a dragon or a tiger, and seeing it fears it, he is like a stupid person creating a picture of hell and then afraid to face it.But that’s what we have all done. We are all doing it. We impose our projections and then we start reacting to our own projections.A Zen story says…A man’s wife was dying. The wife had controlled the man like anything. He was the most perfectly henpecked husband. And he was feeling a little happy that the wife was dying. His day of freedom was not far away.But the wife was not going to leave him so easily. While she was breathing her last she said, “Look! Don’t feel so happy, because I am going to become a ghost and I will haunt you and I will see that you don’t do anything wrong. Never fool around because I will catch you every night!”The wife died. The husband was very much afraid, but after a few days he thought, “Now she is dead. Who knows whether she has become a ghost or not? Why not be really free now?I have always wanted this woman, that woman. I have wanted to go to the pub. Now is the time. And so many days have passed and she has not come.”That night somebody knocked on the door. He opened the door and the wife was there. And she said, “So, you have started dreaming, you have started thinking about and planning such things. Beware! I am not far away, I am always here. You may see me, you may not see me. Don’t think of your freedom, etcetera, stop all that nonsense.”And she said everything that he had thought, every single word that he had thought – going to the pub, thinking of the neighbor’s wife – she said everything. Now it was absolutely clear that she knew. But it was very difficult. His life became that of great misery. He was free and yet not free.From that day, the wife started coming to him almost every night and she would tell him what he had been thinking in the office, what he had been thinking about the typist girl: each single thought.He became so tired that he went to a Zen master and asked him, “Help me! She tortured me my whole life, now she is dead and she is killing me. I have no peace of mind. I cannot even dream freely. At least while she was alive I used to dream freely. Now she even reads my dreams. In the morning she shakes me up and says, ‘So you were having a sexual dream.’”The Zen master laughed. He gave him a small bag and told him not to open it. “It contains a few pebbles. Take it home and when your wife comes, ask her, ‘How many pebbles are in the bag?’ If she can give you the right number – count them immediately – if she can give you the right number then come to me. If she cannot give you the right number then she is just a fantasy of your own mind, your projection. Then too come just to tell me.”The man went home. The wife was waiting already. When he entered the room she was sitting in his chair. She said, “So you went to that phony, that Zen master? I know him well. And he has given you a bag – it contains pebbles – and he has told you to ask me how many pebbles it contains.”The man became so frightened that she knew everything already! But still, the master had said she would. So he remembered, he said, “Okay, you know everything. Now just tell me how many pebbles.”And the wife disappeared. Because he himself did not know the number, he could not project it. The chair was empty. He looked around, she was not there. Since that day the wife stopped coming.He went to the Zen master. He asked, “What trick did you do? What magic is in this bag?”The master said, “There is no magic.” He opened the bag; there were only a few pebbles in it. He said, “There is no magic, nothing. It is a simple process. You were projecting her because you were the projector. Your projection was reflecting your dreams, your ideas, your thoughts. Now, because you did not know how many pebbles this bag has, how could she know? She was your projection! If you had known… She knew that you had been to the Zen master because you knew. She knew what I told you because you knew, but she could not tell you the number of pebbles. Now she will never come back. Be finished with her.”We can create a thousand and one hallucinations about ourselves, and they can look so real. We can pour our reality into them. There are many people who are afraid of hell, and we have created hell. There is no hell. And there are many people who are so greedy for paradise, and we have created paradise. There is no paradise. Our projections. And we become burdened by them: afraid, greedy, frightened.We have created our gods in the temples, in the churches, and we are the worshippers. We go on worshipping our own creations! This is the way of the stupid mind.The intelligent person stops creating, stops projecting, watches the mind so clearly that the mind cannot project anything. As the projections disappear, the world disappears. One day, when the mind is no longer there to project anything, all is transparent.Mind is like the wood or stone from which a person carves an image. If he carves a dragon or a tiger, and seeing it fears it, he is like a stupid person creating a picture of hell and then afraid to face it. If he does not fear it, then his unnecessary thoughts will vanish. Part of the mind produces sight, sound, taste, odor and sensibility, and from them raises greed, anger and ignorance with all their accompanying likes and dislikes. Thus is planted the seed, which grows to great suffering. If one realizes that from the beginning mind essence is empty and quiet, he should know no specific time or place. Instead he makes an image of a tiger, lion, dragon, demon, warrior or other monster, recognizes them by comparison and produces likes and dislikes. If he knows that from the beginning there is no such thing, then he should know that mind essence is not formed, therefore these images are nothing but illusions. When he realizes this fact, he will be emancipated at that instant.Emancipation is emancipation from your tiny mind and its games. You are not really chained, you only believe. You are not imprisoned, it is only your idea. You think you are a Christian? That is only your idea. You can slip out of the idea any moment. So many people here have slipped out of their Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism. That’s why all the religious priests are against me. Their fear is that if people go on coming to me, those people will go on slipping out of their power, their domination, their fold.This may be the only place on the whole face of the earth where nobody bothers about whether you are a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. You are simply human beings.You have slipped out of your cages so easily because the cages are not real. You have to support them. You are the prison, you are the imprisoner, and you are the imprisoned. You are all in all. Nobody else is there. So the moment you decide to come out of your prison, nobody can prevent you; there is nobody to prevent you.You believe, then you are caught. Your belief is your problem, there is no other problem. A man without beliefs, a man without prejudices, is a free man. And to be free is to be intelligent.Bodhidharma says that our mind creates both fear and greed. These are the basic instincts, hence hell and heaven. You are afraid to lose something which you don’t have in the first place, and you want to gain something which you already have from the very beginning. Now, you are creating such unnecessary trouble for yourself.How can you get that which you already have? It is impossible. And why should you be afraid that you may lose that which you don’t have? People are afraid of losing things which they don’t have at all, and people are greedy for things which have been given already from the very birth. They are intrinsic to your being.Seeing this, one has a good laugh at one’s own self. The fools laugh at others. The wise man laughs at himself and his own past ridiculousness, absurdity.The fourth and the last question:What is the natural, simple mind, and what is the artificial, complicated mind?Bodhidharma says:Letters and speeches come from the artificial, complicated mind.Language is the world of the complicated mind. Silence is the world of the simple mind. A real meditation is not verbal, a real meditation is utterly silent. A real prayer is not verbal, a real prayer is an absolute silence in the heart. Nothing stirs, but deep gratitude is felt. It is a feeling, not thinking.Letters and speeches come from the artificial, complicated mind.A tired Joe entered a busy restaurant in the Latin Quarter of Paris one afternoon.“Toc?” said the hurried waitress. Finding Joe completely blank she explained that she was extremely busy. Is it tea or coffee for him, the abbreviation being T.O.C. – toc?Joe asked for coffee.When the waitress passed by again he caught hold of her hand and said, “Piss.” Seeing a blank look on her face he explained, “Put in some sugar.”When the bill was produced he took it to the counter with the waitress following him. He looked at her and whispered, “Cunt.” Finding her puzzled he explained, “Cash up, no tip.”The waitress stood gaping at the exit. Said Joe, “Cock.”“And what does that stand for?” asked the waitress.Joe smiled. “It stands for anything wearing skirts, but not for you.”The mind is very cunning with words. It can fabricate, it can go on fabricating. All your philosophies are produced that way: endless fabrications of words, complicated words, difficult words. And the more meaningless a philosophy is, the more it depends on complicated, big words.If you want an example you should look in Hegel’s books. The sentences go on and on. You will find half-page sentences, full-page sentences, with so many clauses coming in that by the time you reach the end of the sentence you have forgotten the beginning.Hegel was thought to be one of the most profound thinkers of Europe. He was not. His profundity was based on his linguistic jugglery. He was a juggler. He was playing with words and making such complicated sentences that nobody was able to make any sense out of them. And people are such that if they can’t make any sense out of something they think it must be profound.In fact, truth is very simple. It is so simple that it can even be communicated by silence. In fact, it can be communicated only by silence.Letters and speeches come from the artificial, complicated mind. Both in the material and immaterial world a person stays or goes, sits or lies down, and moves innocently, or, it can be said, in the natural, simple mind.To be simple means to be nonverbal, nonlinguistic. Your approach toward reality should not be through language. But we have become so mechanically accustomed of language that the moment you see a rose, immediately your mind says, “What a beautiful flower.” Is it needed? Does it in any way help you to appreciate the rose? Why repeat this in the mind? Can’t you simply see the beauty of the rose and absorb it and drink of it? Is language needed?It happened…A man used to go for a morning walk with Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu said to the man, “Remember one thing – no talking. Then you can come with me.”The man knew Lao Tzu, and when he said something he meant it, so he kept quiet. Many times he would have liked to say something about the weather and the sunrise and the beautiful flowers and the birds, but he repressed.One day a guest was staying with the man and the guest was also interested to come along, just to accompany Lao Tzu. He had heard much about the man. So they both accompanied Lao Tzu.The guest was unaware of what the condition was, and his host had not told him. He had completely forgotten to tell him. For hours they went silently into the hills. Then the sunrise, and the guest said, “What a beautiful sunrise.”Lao Tzu stopped then and there and said to his neighbor, “Finished! No more coming with me. Take your guest away immediately. He talks too much.”After three hours of walking, just one sentence: “What a beautiful morning. What a beautiful sunrise.”And Lao Tzu says that he talks too much and that it is absolutely unnecessary: “I have eyes, I can see the beauty, I can feel the sunrise. Why should he say it? Does he think I am blind? This is very insulting!”And Lao Tzu is right. What is the need? Can’t you simply feel the warmth of the sun rising? Have you to say something?Even if you are alone you go on talking to yourself. You can’t stop this constantly chattering mind. And it has to be stopped, otherwise it won’t allow you to see things as they are.To be simple means to be nonlinguistic, to be full of sensitivity but without words. Words are inadequate to express the truth. Only silence can contain it. To be silent is to be simple and to be silent is to be innocent. To be silent is the bridge from the ordinary mind to the cosmic mind, from the mind to no-mind. Learn silence and the ways of silence.But we are so hypnotized by language and words that if you love a woman you have to repeat again and again, “I love you.” Are you suspicious? Are you afraid that if you don’t say it, it won’t be understood? If your love is not capable of communicating without words it is not much of a love at all. When you really love a person you cannot utter the words, “I love you.” It will look so inadequate, so useless, so superfluous!When you don’t love a person, only then can you say, “I love you,” and you can go on repeating it again and again. Through language you will convince the other person also that you love them, and the other person will also convince you through language.True love needs no language. It overwhelms both the lovers. True experience of beauty leaves you in such awe that you cannot say a single word; it makes you dumb.Bodhidharma is right: to be silent is to be innocent. And to be silent is the natural way, the spontaneous way. Then you act out of your spontaneity, not out of your knowledge.When one remains unmoved by pleasure or suffering, his mind may be called the natural, simple mind.Joe entered a monastery where the rule of silence was very strict. Only once every seven years was a monk allowed to speak briefly to the father abbot.Joe had been a monk for seven years. His time came to speak.“Have you anything to say?” asked the abbot.“Yes,” replied Joe. “Bed is too hard!”Seven more years passed, and again Brother Joe was permitted to speak.“Anything to say?” asked the abbot.“Food is terrible!” said Joe.After seven more years of silence, he came once more before the Father Abbot. “Anything to say?”“Yes, I am leaving!”“Well,” said the abbot, “I’m bloody well glad to hear it. You have done nothing but complain since you’ve been here.”Now, a person who after seven years of silence simply comes to say, “Bed is too hard,” or “Food is terrible,” can’t be silent. For seven years he is continuously thinking, “The bed is too hard, and the food is terrible. Let the time come and I will say so.” Day and night he must be obsessed with it.Otherwise, after seven years of silence, there will not be anything to say. One will bow down. One will not even say, “Thank you” because that is too small, not worth saying. But this is how it is. At least Joe was a man of great control for seven years.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin and three of his friends went into silence. Hearing so much from me about silence, that silence is the golden bridge, the rainbow bridge to God… They retired to a cave for a seven-day experiment in silence.But after one hour they all came back.I asked, “What happened?”They said, “Everything failed. We four sat in silence with closed eyes. After ten, twelve, minutes, one of us said, ‘I wonder whether I have left the electricity on or not.’ And the second one said, ‘Have you forgotten that we have taken a vow of silence for seven days?’ And the third one said, ‘You fool! You have also spoken!’ And then Mulla Nasruddin said, ‘Thank God! I am the only one who has not spoken yet!’”Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 10 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,There is a great deal of hypocrisy in India about sex. People are not even willing to discuss it openly, yet there is a growing proliferation of, and obsession with, nude pictures. Will this flood of pornography help? Can it finally bring sex out into the open in India?Man’s past has been very stupid, and the whole stupidity has arisen out of a life-negative approach, attitude. And all the religions in the past have supported the life-negative approach. Not the Buddhas, not the Christs, not the Zarathustras, but the priests. The professional religious man, who has been exploiting the names of Buddhas, Christs, Zarathustras, and exploiting the masses.The priest has found it very helpful to keep people life negative because the moment a person is life negative, he becomes weak. And it is easy to exploit the weak, to enslave the weak. It is easy to dominate the weak, to destroy the weak.Hence the priest has found that two things are very essential for man’s strength, freedom, consciousness, and both have to be destroyed. One is food, the other is sex: both are basic instincts. Food is needed for the individual to survive, and sex is needed for the race to survive. Without food and sex, humanity will disappear. Knowing this, that these are the essential requirements of a really alive man, the priests have been against both.They have supported fasting and they have supported celibacy. Because they have supported fasting they have made people food obsessed. Any religion that has fasting as its orientation – for example, Jainism – is bound to create food obsession in its followers. Any religion that is rooted in its opposition to sex is bound to create sex obsession.Pornography is a by-product of your so-called religions. It is a religious phenomenon – excuse me. It is because of your priests that pornography exists. And it is not a new thing; it is as ancient as man.Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri, what are they? Pornography in sculpture. And you can go to the ancientmost caves and you will always find pornography of some kind or other. You can look into folk literature, folk songs, folk stories, and you will always find them pornographic.Pornography is as old as the priest. Once the priest comes in, pornography comes as a shadow, is bound to happen. And when you are taught to be life negative, you become afraid of talking about things frankly, authentically. You do not like to talk about sex because what will people think about you? You would like to hide it. You will try to create a facade, as if sex is nonexistential in your life. But deep down you are boiling. Deep down, you are thinking of sex twenty-four hours a day.Modern psychological surveys say that each man thinks about sex at least once every three minutes. And this is about the irreligious, remember. What to say about the religious? He must think about sex every three seconds! Women think about sex once every seven minutes. That is a gap between man and woman.That’s why women can pretend that they are far higher, that they are not concerned, that this whole ugliness of sex is man’s creation. They are superior beings. But the difference is only of four minutes. The man has to go on persuading them – four minutes more, that’s all.Hence the man has to go into a kind of foreplay. Before he can persuade a woman to be normal, to be healthy, at least four minutes’ foreplay is needed. And because man is the aggressive sex, because man’s energies are aggressive energies, and the woman is a receptive sex, that too is a great difference. Man has to take the initiative. The woman can pretend: “I am not running after you.”Mulla Nasruddin and his wife were arguing and Mulla said, “It must have been the most unfortunate moment in my life when I married you.”The woman said, “But I was not running after you.”Mulla said, “That is true. No mousetrap ever runs out after the mouse. The mousetrap simply waits. The mouse comes itself.”That is true. Mouse or Mulla Nasruddin, it makes no difference. Because women are receptive, they are a little cold. Man is hot. And because women are the receptive sex, they are not much interested in pornography because the most aggressive part in man’s or woman’s body is the eye.There is a difference between man’s and woman’s eye. Of course, not a physiological difference, but something very deep and psychological. Man’s eye is aggressive, woman’s eye is receptive. Hence the woman is not very interested in pornography.Moreover, man’s sex has something of extroversion in it and woman’s sex has something of introversion in it. Whenever you are making love to a woman, she will close her eyes because when you are making love to a woman, she is not much interested in you. She is very interested in what is happening inside her. She closes her eyes. She enjoys the feeling that you trigger in her innermost being.But man is more interested in looking at what is happening to the woman. He wants to keep the lights on. Not only that, there are a few really religious people who keep automatic cameras in their bedrooms to take pictures so that later on also, they can enjoy what was happening. Man is more interested in seeing what is happening to the woman, less interested in his own inner feelings.Kiss a woman, and she closes her eyes because she wants to taste the kiss in her interiority. She wants to absorb it. And man wants to see what is happening to the woman. His interest is other-directed. Hence man has always remained interested in pornography.But pornography is not a natural phenomenon. That has to be reminded again and again: it is a religious phenomenon. Because the priests have been so much against sex, man has been repressing it. And when you repress anything so much, it is bound to assert itself in subtle ways, in hidden ways, in such ways that you are not consciously aware what you are doing. It will start moving into your unconscious mind.Hence the tremendous interest in the woman’s body. Pictures, statues, movies: they are all basically either directly or indirectly pornographic. Unless there is something of sex in it you are not interested. Sex and murder are essential for a film to succeed, for a story to be read, for a fiction to be enjoyed. Strange! Sex and murder: why are they connected? They are connected. If you repress so much, you become murderous. In fact, murdering somebody is a perverted act of sex.Man wants to enter the body of the woman. If he is not allowed, he will start finding any possible way to enter the other’s body. He will become homosexual. If he cannot find a woman then he will find a man. If he cannot find a man, he will find animals.If that too becomes difficult then he will start creating rubber women, plastic women which you can keep in your bag so that whenever you need a woman, you just pump her a little. And if there is no possibility at all, he becomes enraged. Sex energy repressed becomes anger, it becomes murderous.In fact, psychologists say that all our weapons are nothing but symbols, metaphors, for the male genital organ. It is a thrust into the other’s body. Our bayonets, our bullets, our swords, they are nothing but another offshoot of the life-negative religions.Now, politicians were also interested in repressing sex for this reason, for this very purpose: if people’s sex is repressed they can easily be made to kill others and be killed by others.And the whole human past has been a history of wars and wars. Out of the past three thousand years, we have fought five thousand wars. It seems absolutely insane – five thousand wars in three thousand years, as if we are living here only to kill each other! What has gone wrong with man?No animal kills any other member of its own species. No lion kills another lion – never. No dog kills another dog – never. It is only man. Why has it happened to man? – because no other animal has the priesthood, the pope, the shankaracharya, etcetera.No other animal has people like Ayatollah Khomeini. Hearing the news that the Shah is suffering from cancer, this so-called religious man, the head of the Iranian religious people, said, “Insh’allah, God willing, the news is true and the cancer kills him.” And he has issued a statement to the American Iranians: “Kill this man! Cut him into pieces and send those pieces to Iran.”But this has always been the attitude of the so-called religious – murderous. It is repressed sex. Repressed sex is bound to create troubles for you.The husband and wife were having difficulty in deciding what to give up for Lent, but finally, in a fervent spirit of atonement, they agreed on sex.As the weeks slowly passed, they began to regret their choice but still stuck to it, sleeping in separate bedrooms and also locking the doors to control temptation.Finally, the glorious Easter sun rose, and the wife was awakened by a series of thunderous knocks on her door.“Oh, George,” she called out, “I know what you are knocking for!”“You are damned right!” he yelled back. “But do you know what I’m knocking with?”This is natural. Man is the only perverted animal on the earth; all kinds of perversions. For centuries you have been conditioned to be very cold about sex. And because you are cold about sex, you are cold about everything else. Your very source of warmth disappears.Sex is the source of life. It is how God creates existence. It should be respected, worshipped. It is sacred. Sex is the most sacred phenomenon in existence because it is the base of all life. If life is not sacred, then sex is not sacred. If life is sacred, then sex is sacred.But the politicians and the priests conspired against man. The politician wanted soldiers. The priests wanted stupid slaves, obedient people. Destroy the dignity of man and he easily becomes an obedient slave. And the best way to destroy his dignity is to make him fight against himself. He starts feeling guilty because he cannot conquer himself.Now, how can you conquer sex or food? If you fight with your sex you are dividing yourself into two: you are becoming split. You are willingly entering the world of the schizophrenic. You are becoming ill and diseased. Fighting with your own energy, you can never be victorious. Fighting with your own energy is as if you are making a great fight between your right hand and left hand. Who is going to win? Nobody can win. Just your energies will be dissipated, you will become weaker.And a greater thing will happen, of far longer-range consequences. If you cannot win against your sex you will start feeling so guilty, so ugly, so condemned, so unworthy, that you will be ready to bow down to any stupid person.Anybody who can be a good pretender, a hypocrite, will become your leader politically, will become your priest religiously. All that he needs is hypocrisy, all that he needs is cunningness, all that he needs is a facade to hide behind.Your politicians live double lives, your priests live double lives: one life from the front door, the other from the back door. And the back-door life is their real life. Those front-door smiles are just false. Those faces looking so innocent are just cultivated. If you want to see the reality of the politician, you will have to see him from his back door. There he is in his nudity, as he is, and so is the priest.These two kinds of cunning people have dominated humanity. And they found out very early on that if you want to dominate humanity, make it weak, make it feel guilty, make it feel unworthy. Destroy its dignity, take all glory away from it, humiliate it. And they have found such subtle ways of humiliation that they don’t come into the picture at all. They leave it to you to humiliate yourself, to destroy yourself. They have taught you a kind of slow suicide.You ask me, “There is a great deal of hypocrisy in India about sex.” It is not only a question of sex. Sex is the most fundamental, but then there are many, many branches of it. India is the most hypocritical country in the world because it pretends to be the most religious. Religion and hypocrisy are cousin-sisters.To be religious and not to be a hypocrite is a very rare phenomenon. Only once in a while a Buddha, a Bodhidharma, a Kabir, a Jesus… Just once in a while will you find a man who is religious and not a hypocrite. But then we never tolerate these people.We poisoned Socrates simply because he was honestly religious. He was so honest that he said, “There is no God. Truth is God.” He was so honest that he could not say that there is heaven and hell. Because he says, “Unless I know, how can I make such great statements?” he was poisoned and killed.What was his crime? The crime brought against him in the court was that he was corrupting the youth. Whenever there is a man like Socrates, a lover of truth, a real lover of God, he seems to be corrupting people. In fact, he is trying to make them authentic and true, he is trying to bring them out of their hypocrisies, but to the crowd that looks like corruption.Jesus was crucified for the simple reason that he was a rebel: a rebel against all hypocrisy.Buddha is stoned; many efforts were made on his life, for the simple reason that he was a sincere man, saying things as he saw them.Yes, there is a possibility of transcending sex, but that is not done by repression. Sex can be transcended and it is a great experience to transcend sex, but it cannot be done if you are against it.It can be done only if you befriend the energy, if you absorb the energy, if you find out what is the secret of sexual longing, if you find the key. And the key is not very difficult to find, but the priests have made things so messy that it is almost impossible now to find the key. The key is simple, but thousands of years of wrong conditioning has made it very difficult to know the most simple, obvious thing.Why are people interested in sex? It is not just a question of biology, it is more a question of spirituality. My own observation is that people are interested in sex because that is the only naturally given window into godliness, a natural gift. In deep orgasmic states when lovers meet and merge and melt and disappear into each other for a single moment, time disappears, the mind disappears, the egos disappear – and one has a taste of meditation, of samadhi, of superconsciousness. That taste will give you the key.If you can attain no-mind, no-ego, no-time, without sex, sex will disappear from your life; there is no need for it. But that is a disappearance. It is not that you have denied it, not that you have rejected a part of your being: it is absorbed, it is transformed.Then the same crude energy of sex, the same biological energy, reaches such heights… First it becomes love, then it becomes prayer. It is the same energy moving, soaring upward.Remember: I am not saying that sex cannot be transcended. Sex can be transcended, it should be transcended, but not through repression. Nobody has ever been able to transcend it through repression. If you repress sex, you become cold. If you become cold, you lose the orgasmic quality.One day, while making love to his wife, Mulla Nasruddin found something new for a moment. He asked his wife, “Am I hurting you, dear?”She said, “No, why? Why do you ask such a question?”He said, “I must have imagined it. I thought for a moment that you moved.”Now, they have been married twenty years. He is the father of seven children, and the wife has never moved. That is not thought to be right. Good women don’t enjoy lovemaking; it is only bad women who enjoy lovemaking. Good women simply lie down there dead, utterly cold. And when the woman remains cold, the man’s orgasmic experience remains local, genital.It does not reach his soul, it does not reach his whole body. All his cells and all his fibers of being are not thrilled, are not in a dance. It is poor, very poor. It is a release, a relief, but not an orgasmic experience. Yes, he is relieved of a burden. His sexual energy was overflooding; he has relieved the energy, but it is not really orgasmic ecstasy.He has not known any timelessness through it, any egolessness through it, any mindlessness through it. He has not penetrated the ultimate through it. It has been a sheer wastage as far as spiritual experience is concerned. Biologically it is okay, he may give birth to children, but he will not be able to give birth to his own being. His soul will remain unborn.Now, women have become so cold because they have listened to the priests for so long. And the priests have been praising them very highly: they have been telling them that they are the most spiritual people in the world. It is through the woman that the priest has destroyed woman’s orgasmic dimension and man’s orgasmic heights. Man can still have a little bit of an orgasm, but it is just a flicker, nothing much. Nothing that can transform you. And the woman has completely forgotten.In the East, particularly in India, I don’t think that any woman ever achieves orgasmic joy. In the West also, the same has been the case in the past. Just within these last thirty, forty years, because of the women’s liberation movement, a few women have become orgasmic – not many: only ten percent. Ninety percent of women in the West are still living in a primitive stage, and one hundred percent of women are living in a primitive stage in India. They don’t know what orgasm is, they have no idea of it. They have never experienced it. Now, nothing can be more cruel. This is really cutting the very roots of humanity. It is destroying humanity from its very foundation. The temple cannot be built.A switchman was accosted by a streetwalker down the railroad yard. She convinced him to visit with her in a nearby shed. The railroad man, not too terribly enthusiastic, decided to use an iron rail spike instead of his pecker.For ten minutes neither of the participants spoke. Then finally he asked, “Like it?”“I’m sure glad you said something,” answered the woman. “Your tool is so cold I was afraid you were dead!”Man has become too cold, and when man becomes too cold in his reality, his fantasies start becoming stronger and stronger. That’s what pornography is. When the body is repressed sexually, sex moves into the head. Pornography is sex through the head.It is as stupid as fantasizing about food in the head and thinking that it is going to nourish you. It is not going to nourish you. You will be starved to death. Real food is needed to nourish you.Pornography is when sex repressed from its natural space has asserted itself into the head. And there are many dangers in it. One danger is: if you become too interested in pornography – which has happened all over the world – then the real woman does not look so appealing and the real man does not look so appealing.Then a great problem arises: your fantasy needs the woman that you have seen in Playboy magazine. But you cannot find that woman anywhere. Whatever you find will fall short. Now nothing will satisfy you. Slowly, slowly reality becomes more unreal and the unreal becomes more real.But the whole blame goes to the so-called religious people, and they are the people who want man to be freed from all kinds of bondage. They want man to be freed from the bondage of sex, and they are the people who are keeping man in sexual bondage. They are the culprits, they are the criminals.But they seem to be great moralists, puritans: against pornography, against kissing in films, against hugging on the streets, against all kinds of warm relationships, against any expression of passionate love. They make everybody cold. Then these cold people start moving toward the head. There is no other way. Where else can you go?Pornography will disappear the day priests disappear; otherwise it is not going to disappear. And remember, prostitutes will also disappear the day the priests disappear. The prostitute is the counterpart of the priest; if the priest remains, the prostitute is going to remain. The prostitute is the creation of the priest.You ask me, “There is a great deal of hypocrisy in India about sex. People are not even willing to discuss it openly, yet there is a growing proliferation of, and obsession with, nude pictures.” That is natural. If people don’t talk about it, if they are not courageous enough to talk about it frankly, if they cannot live their lives naturally, they are bound to find some underground ways. Nature is persistent. It is not easy to transcend nature. To transcend nature needs great skill. Buddha says: great upaya – great skill, great art, great understanding.Yes, transcendence is beautiful, it brings you great benediction, but before that you have to be immensely artful, understanding, meditative. This is not the way to go beyond it.In that sense, pornography is a help in two ways. It is a help for the victims of the priests. The victims need it, otherwise they will go crazy, they will go mad. The pornography keeps them sane. It serves a great humanitarian purpose. You may not have thought about it in that way. Pornography serves a great purpose. It keeps people a little bit sane and healthy because their sexuality can have an underground outlet. If you close all the outlets, then people will start exploding into insanity.And if pornography is allowed, accepted – in movies, on TV, in films, in magazines, in books – it will help people to come out of their hiding places. It will be beneficial. It will help people to talk about sex more clearly, more truly, more sincerely. Sex will not be taboo anymore. And whenever something comes in the open, great changes happen.Bring your inner being out into the open, into the wind, into the sun, into the rain, and you will be surprised: you are becoming cleaner, purer, weightless. Your understanding grows, your integrity grows, your self-respect grows, your independence grows, and you become less and less dependent on others: political leaders, religious priests.In my vision of life, the world will be a beautiful world if we can get rid of the politicians and priests. These are the people who are not allowing humanity to live its life totally.Yes, pornography can help. It can finally bring sex out into the open. And if people start discussing it openly, frankly, without holding anything back, without any prejudices or condemnations… Because it is a natural phenomenon: as natural as the flowers, as natural as the stars.If people start talking about sex and studying it naturally, without any guilt, two things will happen. The strangest will be that pornography will disappear. Who is interested in a nude picture if he can attain orgasmic joy with a woman? Unless he is utterly stupid, why should he be interested? A picture is just a picture. There is nothing, nobody: just a few colors and a few lines arranged in a certain way.You are not deceived by food in a picture. You don’t carry that picture close to your heart, thinking that whenever you are hungry you will look at the picture and it is going to satisfy you. But you go on carrying nude pictures close to your heart. The man who thinks that he can nourish himself and live on this nourishment by looking at pictures of delicious food is a fool. And so is the person who thinks that by carrying nude pictures he can have any insight into the ultimate height of sex, into orgasmic experience.Once a man came to Picasso – he was a realist – and he said, “Your pictures are absolutely unrealistic. I am a realist philosopher and I have come to tell you that you are wasting your time. Be realistic!”Picasso asked, “What do you mean by being realistic?”He immediately took a picture of his wife from his bag, showed it to Picasso, and said, “This is a photograph of my wife. It depicts how my wife is exactly. This is a realistic picture. And I have seen your pictures of women. It is so difficult to find what you really want to depict.”And that is true. Once, a woman had asked Picasso to make a portrait of her. He took six months and demanded a fabulous price for it.The woman said, “Okay, I will pay you, but there is just one thing: my nose is not right in the portrait, so make it right.”Picasso looked at the picture and said, “That is impossible.”The woman said, “Why is it impossible? I am ready to pay.”He said, “That is not the question. Now I don’t know where I have painted the nose!”So this man was right to show him a picture of his wife. Picasso looked at the picture and said, “This is a realistic thing?”The man said, “Yes, absolutely representative, absolutely realistic.”Picasso said, “Then you have a very small wife – and very flat, too!”A photograph is a photograph – flat. You cannot find any of your wife’s curves in the photograph. You can go on searching for lives together, you will not find anything. There is nothing.If pornography becomes an accepted thing, one thing will be… There is nothing wrong in it. If somebody enjoys seeing a nude picture, it is nobody else’s business to interfere. Neither the law nor the government nor the police have any right to interfere. If he enjoys it, he is simply enjoying a picture. He is not interfering with anybody’s life. But he seems to be doing something wrong. In fact, enjoyment has become wrong.For thousands of years we have been told that to enjoy yourself is something like sin. To be miserable is okay, to be joyous is wrong. So we destroy people’s joy in every possible way. We interfere in their private lives.Now, this is absolutely personal: a person enjoying a nude picture. It is nobody’s business to come into it. But the police are there, the magistrate is there, the law is there, the government is there, the priest is there, and the whole crowd, just because he is enjoying a picture. And he is enjoying the picture because of these same people!These are the people who have created the whole problem. First they create the problem and then they are there to advise you how to get rid of it.Two men used to run a business. They were partners. The first would go into a town and in the night throw coal tar on people’s windows and doors. And after three, four days the second would come to clean it off. If anybody wanted him to, he was ready to clean off the coal tar, he would clean it off. By that time the other partner would be destroying some other town.This way they earned much money. A beautiful job, no investment! One goes on destroying people’s windowpanes, and the other comes to clean them.This is what your priests, your police, your politicians, have been doing down the ages: they destroy you and then they are ready to help you. They throw you in the mud and then they are there, great saviors, to save you. In the first place, who has thrown you into the mud? But then, if you are not thrown into the mud, they can’t be saviors. To be saviors they have to throw you into the mud first, then they will save you. Their names will remain in history and they will be talked about for centuries as great men.I love the ordinary, the natural, the simple man. I have no respect for your great men, the so-called great men. I have tremendous respect for the ordinary, natural human being.Pornography can be of great help – it will help you to get rid of your priests – but pornography alone won’t be much of an inner growth. You will have to seek, inquire, into your sexual energy far more deeply. You will have to travel to the deepest core of your being and find out what it is that attracts you.Have you ever watched animals making love? If you have not watched, watch, and you will be surprised. A great revelation will be there waiting for you: that animals don’t enjoy making love. Now, that is an established fact: no animal enjoys making love. It is almost a compulsion, a natural compulsion so he has to go into it.The moment the love act is finished, the female and the male go their ways. And you can see their faces, in their eyes: they are sad, frustrated, maybe wondering deep down why they go into this nonsense again and again. It is only man who has the capacity to attain orgasmic joy.Sex is animal, but sex with joy is human. It is something absolutely human. It is a prerogative of human beings: with great joy, with warmth. Animals making love look almost as if they are fighting, as if there is a quarrel, as if the male is attacking the female and the female is simply accepting it. If she does not accept, the male can get even more aggressive and it may prove fatal. So she simply accepts and yields, but feels humiliated. And the male also seems to be at a loss as to why he is doing it.But in human beings it is a totally different phenomenon. It is a very soft and delicate affair. It is poetry, it is music. It is the source of all poetry, all music, all great art.Just pornography won’t help much – a little bit, of course. But you will have to go into deeper explorations of your sexual energies. You will have to learn something of Tantra again.That’s my whole effort here: to introduce a neo-Tantra to the world, a new vision of love and the possibilities of love, and an insight into the reality of orgasm – because orgasm is your greatest source of finding godliness, harmony, truth, the universal unity of all life. If you can be one with one woman, one man, you have the secret key in your hands. You can be one with the whole universe, with the whole cosmos.I am trying to give you a totally new religion: a religion which loves life, a religion which affirms life, a religion which is in a deep love affair with the universe. The old religions are finished; their days are gone.Humanity needs a new perspective. Humanity needs a totally new mind: a new man who loves life, who is drunk with the joy of life, who knows how to dance with trees and how to sing with birds, and who is not against anything, but who is always ready to transform things onto higher planes.Yes, sex can be transformed into love and love can be transformed into prayer. When sex becomes prayer you have arrived home.The second question:Osho,When you said I was only pretending to be a disciple, you demolished me completely. I was crushed. The bottom of everything dropped out. But now, twenty-four hours later, I must confess that I'm feeling great and awake. It's like a new morning. Whatever you decide to do with me, I'm grateful.Santosh, I hit you hard only to make you awake. It is out of compassion and love. There is no other reason, no other motive at all. I have nothing to gain from you; I have no desire to be fulfilled. I can die this very moment because I have nothing to do tomorrow. Each moment is complete, each moment is more than enough. So if sometimes I hit you, remember always that it must be because I feel you worthy of being hit.I don’t hit anybody and everybody. I hit only chosen people, I hit only when I see the potential, when I see that the hit is going to wake you up. In the beginning, of course, it is a painful experience. It is a thunderbolt from the sky – and so unexpected.Now, Santosh was not expecting – and suddenly the sword descends on his throat, and before he can say anything the work is done. It is a very subtle work. It took Santosh twenty-four hours to see the point but even if you can see it after twenty-four hours, it is very soon. There are people who will not see it for months or for years or for lives.I am happy that you are feeling great and awake, that you are feeling like a new morning. Some rock has been destroyed which was hindering you coming close to me, some door has been opened. And I don’t bother about keys. If the keys are missing I hammer the lock! I am happy that you understood the point. Don’t forget it again.The mind tends to forget. The mind is forgetfulness. You have to continuously remember where you are, why you are here. You are not living in the mundane way, in the marketplace. You are living in a buddhafield. You have become part of a great pilgrimage. Be aware of it, be aware of the great opportunity.Don’t remain unconscious with me because the more conscious you are, the greater the possibility that before I leave the body many of you will have become enlightened. My effort is this: I would like to leave thousands of people enlightened. And it is not impossible. Every day I feel the possibility is becoming more and more actual; more and more people are becoming attuned to me, are feeling at home with me. Don’t lag behind. Remember it now.Of course, if you forget again I will hammer again. And next time it is going to be more painful, because then you will need more hammering so that you can remember. Be like the horse Buddha talks about for whom only the shadow of the whip is enough. Yes, an intelligent person need not be told the same thing again and again.And Santosh is intelligent, one of the most intelligent people here, but asleep. Great potential, great possibility, but in the seed. The time has come, Santosh. Fall into the soil. Let the seed die so that you can be born.The third question:Osho,My love-life drama now reflects an old saying of Humphrey Bogart's: “Women – they're hell to live with, and hell to live without.” What to do?Abhiyana, one has to pass through this hell. One has to experience both the hells: of living with a woman and of living without a woman. And it is not only true about women, it is exactly true about men too. So don’t be a male chauvinist pig. It is applicable both ways, it is a double-edged sword.Women are also tired of living with men and they are also frustrated when they have to live alone. It is one of the most fundamental of human dilemmas. It has to be understood. You cannot live without a woman because you don’t know how to live with yourself. You are not meditative enough.Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, who bothers about the other? If the other comes into his life it is not a need, it is a luxury.And I am all for luxury, because luxury means you can enjoy it if it is there and you can enjoy when it is not there. A need is a difficult phenomenon. For example, bread and butter are needs, but the flowers in the garden are a luxury. You can live without the flowers, you will not die, but you cannot live without bread and butter.For the man who cannot live with himself, the other is a need, an absolute need. Because whenever he is alone he is bored with himself, so bored that he wants some occupation with somebody else. Because it is a need, it becomes a dependence; you have to depend on the other. And because it becomes a dependence, you hate, you rebel, you resist, because it is a slavery. Dependence is a kind of slavery. Nobody wants to be a slave.Abhiyana meets a woman; Abhiyana is not able to live alone. The woman is also not able to live alone, that’s why she is meeting Abhiyana. Otherwise there is no need. Both are bored with themselves, thinking that the other will help to get rid of the boredom. Yes, in the beginning it looks like that, but only in the beginning.As they settle together, soon they see that the boredom is not destroyed. It is not only doubled but multiplied. Now, first they were bored with themselves, now they are bored with the other too. Because the closer you come to the other, the more you know the other, the more the other becomes almost a part of you.That’s why if you see a bored couple walking by, you can be certain they are married. If they are not bored, you can be certain they are not married. The man must be walking with somebody else’s wife, that’s why there is so much joy.Once I was traveling in a train. In my compartment there was a woman, and her companion used to come in at every station, sometimes with ice cream, sometimes with fruit, sometimes with this, sometimes with that.I asked the woman, “Are you married? Who is this man?”She said, “He is my husband and we have been married seven years.”I said, “Absolutely wrong! If he was your husband he would have disappeared into his compartment and he would not have turned up at all. He is coming in at every station. I can’t believe you. Be true with me!”She looked puzzled. She said, “But how did you come to know?”I said, “There is nothing much in it; it is a simple thing. He is so ecstatic when he comes that he can’t be your husband.”She said, “You are right. He is not my husband, he is my friend’s husband, and we are secretly going to the Himalayas just to have seven or ten days there to be together. He is my lover.”When you are in love, when you have not yet persuaded the woman, and the woman has not yet persuaded you to be together forever, you both pretend great joy. And something of it is true, too, because of the hope: “Who knows, I may come out of my boredom, my anguish, my anxiety, my aloneness. This woman may help me.” And the woman is also hoping. But once you are together the hopes soon disappear, despair sets in again. Now you are bored and the problem has been multiplied. Now, how to get rid of this woman?Because you are not meditative you need others to keep you occupied. And because you are not meditative you are not able to love either, because love is an overflowing joy. You are bored with yourself. What have you got to share with the other? Hence, being with the other also becomes hell.Jean-Paul Sartre is right in that sense, that the other is hell. The other is not hell really; it only appears so. The hell exists in you, in your non-meditativeness, in your incapacity to be alone and ecstatic. And both are unable to be alone and ecstatic. Now both are at each other’s throats, continuously trying to snatch some happiness from each other. Both are doing that and both are beggars.I have heard…One psychoanalyst met another psychoanalyst on the street. The first said to the other, “You look fine. How am I?”Nobody knows about oneself, nobody is acquainted with oneself. We see others’ faces. A woman looks beautiful, a man looks beautiful, smiling, all smiles. We don’t know his anguish. Maybe all those smiles are just a facade to deceive others and to deceive himself. Maybe behind those smiles there are great tears. Maybe he is afraid if he does not smile he may start weeping and crying.But when you see the other you simply see the surface, you fall in love with the surface. But when you come closer, you soon know that the inner depths of the other person are as dark as your own. He is a beggar as you are. Now two beggars begging from each other… Then it becomes hell.Yes, you are right: “Women – they’re hell to live with, and hell to live without.” It is not a question of women at all, nor a question of men. It is a question of meditation and love. Meditation is the source from where joy wells up within you and starts overflowing you. If you have joy enough to share, only then will your love be contentment. If you don’t have joy enough to share, your love is going to be tiring, exhausting, boring.So whenever you are with a woman, you are bored and you want to get rid of her. And whenever you are alone, you are bored with yourself and you want to get rid of your loneliness. You seek and search for a woman. This is a vicious circle! You can go on moving like a pendulum from one side to another your whole life.See the real problem. The real problem has nothing to do with man and woman. The real problem has something to do with meditation, and the flowering of meditation in love, in joy, in blissfulness.First meditate, be blissful, then much love will happen on its own accord. Then being with others is beautiful and being alone is also beautiful. Then it is simple, too. You don’t depend on others and you don’t make others dependent on you.Then it is always a friendship, friendliness. It never becomes a relationship, it is always relatedness. You relate, but you don’t create a marriage. Marriage is out of fear, relatedness is out of love.You relate. As long as things are moving beautifully, you share. And if you see that the moment has come to depart because your paths separate from this crossroad, you say good-bye with great gratitude for all that the other has been to you, for all the joys and all the pleasures and all the beautiful moments that you have shared with the other. With no misery, with no pain, you simply separate.Nobody can guarantee that two persons will be happy together always because people change. When you meet a woman she is one person, you are one person. After ten years you will be another person, she will be another person. It is like a river: the water is continuously flowing. The people who had fallen in love are no longer there, both are no longer there. Now you can go on clinging to a certain promise given by somebody else – but you have not given it.A real man of understanding never promises for tomorrow, he can only say for the moment. A really sincere man cannot promise at all. How can he promise? Who knows about tomorrow? Tomorrow may come, may not come. Tomorrow may come: “I will not be the same, you will not be the same.” Tomorrow may come: “You may find somebody with whom you fit more deeply, I may find somebody with whom I go with more harmoniously.” The world is vast. Why exhaust it today? Keep the doors open, keep alternatives open.I am against marriage. It is marriage that creates problems. It is marriage that has become very ugly. The ugliest institution in the world is marriage because it forces people to be phony: they have changed, but they go on pretending that they are the same.One old man, eighty years old, was celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary with his wife who was seventy-five. They went to the same hotel, to the same hill station where they had gone for their honeymoon. The nostalgia! Now he is eighty, she is seventy-five. They booked the same hotel and the same room. They were trying to live those beautiful days of fifty years back again.And when they were going to sleep, the woman said, “Have you forgotten? Are you not going to kiss me the way had you kissed me on our honeymoon night?”The old man said, “Okay.” So he got up.The woman asked, “Where are you going?”He said, “I am going to get my teeth from the bathroom.”Everything has changed. Now this kiss without teeth or with false teeth is not going to be the same kiss. And the man says, “Okay.” The journey must have been tiring, and for an eighty-year-old… But people go on behaving as if they are the same.An old woman and an old man got married. It must have happened in America, where else! In America nobody seems to be getting old, everybody is pretending to be young.So they went on their honeymoon. The old man took the wife’s hand in his hand, pressed it for two, three minutes – that was all they could do as far as love was concerned, then they went to sleep.Next day he again pressed the old woman’s hand – but this time only for one minute – three minutes may have been too long. And the third day, as he was going to press the woman’s hand, she said, turning to the other side, “Today I have a headache.”Very few people really grow up. Even if they become aged, they don’t grow up. Growing old is not growing up. Real maturity comes through meditation.Learn to be silent, peaceful, still. Learn to be a no-mind. That has to be the beginning for all sannyasins. Nothing else can be done before that and everything else becomes easier after that.When you find yourself utterly happy and blissful, then even if the third world war happens and the whole world disappears leaving you alone, it won’t affect you. You will be still sitting under your tree doing vipassana.The day that moment comes in your life, now you can share your joy. Now you are able to give love. Before that it is going to be misery, hopes and frustrations, desires and failures, dreams…and then dust in your hand and in your mouth.Beware, don’t waste time. The earlier you become attuned with no-mind, the better it is. Then many things can flower in you: love, creativity, spontaneity, joy, prayer, gratitude, godliness.The last question:Osho,I never remember what you say to me. What should I do?There is no need to remember what I say. Words are not important at all. You are not students here. There is going to be no examination. You are not required to remember my words. Just imbibe me, the spirit of the place, the taste of my being. Let my silence reach you. If you forget the words it is perfectly okay. They have to be forgotten, otherwise they will clutter your mind.I am not here to give you more information. I am here to give you transformation. For transformation, memory is not a question, so don’t be worried. Many people become worried. “We go on forgetting what you say.”You are still thinking you are in a university or in a school or a college, and you will be examined later on and you will have to reproduce it. Nothing has to be reproduced; nobody is going to ask anything. At least I am never going to ask you any questions.I use words to convey silence. I use words to keep your mind occupied so that there can be a heart-to-heart communion. The mind becomes occupied with the words, and like a thief I can enter your heart. I have my own devices. I tell you a joke, you start laughing, you open your mouth – and I am in!A joke for you…Sol and Abe, two eighty-five-year-old widowers, were sitting on a park bench in St. Petersburg, Florida. Sol was telling Abe about a local gal that he had dated the night before.“What did you do?” asked Abe.“We checked into a motel, got in bed, and I sang ‘Those were the Days.’”“That sounds like a great evening,” said Abe. “Do you mind if I take her out tonight?”“Sure, go ahead.”The next day, Sol said, “How did it go last night?”“Fine.”“What did you do?”“Well, we got a motel room and got into bed. I couldn’t remember the song, so I screwed her.”Enough for today.

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The White Lotus 01-11Category: ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS

The White Lotus 11 (Listen & Download)

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Question: What is right and what is wrong?Answer: Discrimination with no-mind is right. Discrimination with mind is wrong. When one transcends right and wrong, he is truly right. In a sutra it says, “When one dwells on the right road, he does not discriminate ‘This is right, this is wrong.’”Question: What is a sagacious student, and what is a dull student?Answer: A sagacious student does not depend on his teacher’s words, but uses his own experience to find the truth. A dull student depends on coming to a gradual understanding through his teacher’s word. A teacher has two kinds of students; one hears the teacher’s words without clinging to the material nor to the immaterial, without attaching to form or to non-form, without thinking of animate objects or of inanimate objects…this is the sagacious student; the other, who is avid for understanding, accumulates meanings, and mixes good and bad, is the dull student. The sagacious student understands instantly; he does not raise inferior mind when he hears the teaching, nor does he follow the sage’s mind, he transcends both wisdom and ignorance. Even though one hears the teaching and does not cling to worldly desires, does not love Buddha or the true path, if, when he has to select one out of two, he selects quietness from confusion, wisdom from ignorance, inactivity from activity and clings to one or the other of these, then he is a dull student. If one transcends both wisdom and ignorance, has no greed for the teaching, does not live in right recollectedness, does not raise right thinking, and does not have aspirations to be a pratyeka-buddha or a bodhisattva, then he is a sagacious student.One of the most puzzling, confusing mysteries of life is a buddha talking to those who are not buddhas yet. It is almost like talking to a man who is fast asleep.Yes, if you shout loud enough, something of your voice, something of your words may penetrate the slumber of the sleeper, may even reach his mind, although they will have to pass through many, many dreams. They will be distorted, disfigured, they will not be the same, and the meaning that the sleeper is going to give to those words is going to be his own. But there is no other way.There are only three possibilities. The sleeping one talking to another who is also asleep; that is the first possibility. That’s what goes on happening all over the world: sleepers talking to other sleepers, somnambulists trying to communicate with other somnambulists. Only great conflict arises out of it, much noise. “A tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing.” Yes, that’s exactly what happens.The whole world is a chaos because people go on saying things – not knowing what they are saying – to others who can’t hear, who are not in a state to hear it.And we go on interpreting according to our own prejudices, we go on imposing our meanings on the words of others. The others function only as screens and we project our own films on them.I have heard an ancient story…Once a great emperor, a chakravartin who ruled the whole earth, decided that if the whole world stops all kinds of noise even for a single minute, that silence will be an incredible experience. But how to convince people to stop totally for one moment? The whole world stopping for one minute, no talking. Even though he was a great emperor, it was not feasible. He inquired of his wise men.They said, “That seems to be an impossible task. How can we manage it? How will we guard? Who can prevent people from talking, making a noise? Millions of people. Your army is big, but compared to the people your army is nothing.”Then a mystic rose and said to the king, “I can manage it. I know the secret.”He whispered the secret into the ears of the king, and the secret worked. The secret was very strange – as are the ways of the mystics – always very strange. On the surface they look like something, deep down they are something else: maybe exactly the opposite of what they appear on the surface.The mystic told the king, “Make an announcement that on a particular day at twelve o’clock midday, the whole world has to shout together the sound “Hoo” for one minute. The whole world has to shout it. Nobody is allowed not to shout, everybody has to participate.”The king said, “What are you talking about? I want the world to fall into absolute peace for one moment!”The mystic said, “I know people! Just follow what I am saying, and what you want will happen.”And it really happened. The king declared, the day was fixed, and people waited eagerly for that moment. The whole world shouting “Hoo” for one minute: it was going to be something extraordinary!Everybody thought, “I am not going to shout, I will listen. Why miss such an opportunity? The king himself wants to listen, why should I miss the opportunity? And who will find out? When the whole world is shouting “Hoo,” who will find out that I have not been a participant?”And that’s how everybody thought. At exactly twelve o’clock, for one minute there was absolute silence – not even a single noise. The mystic had managed it. And the king was transformed by the silence, it was so deep: its beauty, its music, its exquisite grace. It became the beginning of his own meditation.If just the outside noise stopping for one minute gives you such stillness, such sweet silence, what will happen when your inside mind stops making a noise? It was a turning point in the life of the emperor.But ordinarily the world is continuously making a noise. Everybody is making a noise. The people who make much more noise than others are thought to be leaders, politicians. They are thought to be great men. You will be thought great by newspapers and later on by historians only if you have a nuisance value, if you can create trouble. If you can create trouble like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, then you will be thought a great leader. If you can create trouble like Ayatollah Khomeini, then you will be thought to be a great saint. Your value depends on how much nuisance you can create in the world.Everybody wants to be somebody, hence everybody has to pretend, to shout loudly. Everybody has to prove himself that “You can’t treat me as a nobody.”Among this madness, among these insane people, one who has become awakened has to convey the message. It is almost an impossible feat. It is a miracle that once in a while somebody is capable of listening.The first possibility is: sleepers talking to other sleepers. They talk much, they talk nonsense, obviously they can’t talk sense. Two sleeping persons: they can only make absurd noises. There can be no possibility of any communication.Hence in the world there is no communication: the husband shouting at the wife, the wife shouting at the husband, and nobody understands anybody else. The world absolutely, totally, lacks understanding. Understanding is nil.People somehow go on dragging themselves. Yes, they become adjusted to each other, but it is not understanding. It is just out of continuous failure, despair, disappointment, that they make a few arrangements – because everybody has to live and a few arrangements are needed to live.The second possibility is: two buddhas talking. Then communion is possible, but two buddhas never talk. Sleepers talk too much, communication is not possible. Two buddhas can commune with each other, but they never talk. They can’t talk, there is nothing to say. They are both at the same peak, they are both seeing the same sunset, they are both in the same ecstasy. What is there to talk about? Whatever you say, the other knows it already. Whatever the other will say, you know already. Yes, sometimes it happened in the past, buddhas have met.Once Kabir and Farid – two buddhas – met, and for two days sat in absolute silence. Not a single word was uttered. When they parted, their disciples asked, “What happened? What went wrong? Why didn’t you say a single word?”They both said to their disciples, “It was unnecessary, it would have been a waste of breath. What I know, the other knows. Neither I am anymore nor he is anymore. We are both part of one reality. We taste the same flavor, we experience the same joy. And we know it is inexpressible in any way. Hence, we sat in silence. Silence was our communion.”And then the third possibility is: a buddha talking to one who is asleep or someone who is asleep talking to a buddha. Someone who is asleep can only ask questions. That is what is happening in this beautiful dialogue between a disciple and Bodhidharma. Someone who is not awake can only ask questions. He has no inkling of any answer. His whole life is full of questions. Just as leaves grow on trees, questions grow in your sleepiness, in your unconsciousness.And the buddha can answer, he cannot question. He knows nothing of questions. He is the answer. He has arrived home.The first is meaningless, the second is impossible. The third is possible but very puzzling: puzzling because the buddha speaks from his peaks and the sleeper listens in his sleep, in his dreams, desires. Lost in the darkness of the valley, he knows nothing of the sunlit peaks, he has no idea of the purity of those altitudes. He lives in the polluted world.He knows words. He is unaware of the real, true meaning of the words. Yes, he knows the word love, but he knows nothing of love. He knows the word prayer, but he has never experienced it, and without experiencing it you cannot know it. He knows the word God – empty, hollow, just a husk with nothing inside it – but he knows nothing of God. He goes on repeating the word.And the problem is when the buddha says “love,” he means something totally different than what you mean when you use the word love. Those meanings don’t meet, they don’t crisscross anywhere. They go on running like parallel lines, meeting nowhere. And yet you can think you have understood because the word is the same. Yet you can go on believing that you have come to a great understanding, that understanding is only intellectual. To understand a buddha intellectually is not to understand him at all. He has to be understood existentially.The disciple has not to be only a questioner, he has to move closer to the master. The question is a wall. He has to drop all questioning. He has to start merging, melting into the being of the master, so that he can see through his eyes, can feel through his heart, can have a little experience of the beyond, of the transcendental.This is the last dialogue between the disciple, the unknown disciple, and Bodhidharma.The first question:What is right and what is wrong?You all have been told what is right and what is wrong. Yes, Christians will say one thing, Mohammedans another, Jainas still something else. Hindus have their own ideas of right and wrong, and Confucians and Zoroastrians. And there are so many ideologies in the world, and they all have their own ideas: what is right and what is wrong. And you have been told… Because you were born in a certain family, in a certain conditioning, from the very beginning you have been conditioned. So you all carry some idea, clearly or unclearly, consciously or unconsciously, of what is right and what is wrong. And still you don’t know what is right and what is wrong, because you have not discovered it on your own. You have been told.These are such deep experiences that nobody else can decide them for you. You will have to grope in the darkness of your being to find a window from where you can look at the open sky. You will have to seek and search a door from where you can have an insight of what is right and what is wrong.If you simply listen to people… They are asleep; what they are saying is not their own. Their parents had said those things to them. Neither their parents had their own experience, their parents…and so on and so forth. What they are telling you is only a repetition. They are functioning like gramophone records. They repeat a certain formula because they know nothing else, and they are not courageous enough to say to you, “We don’t know.”It needs guts to announce your ignorance. It needs the courage of Socrates to say, “l know only one thing: that I know nothing.” But it is very difficult to find a father like Socrates. It is very difficult to find a man like Buddha or Jesus to teach you.In your schools, in your churches, it is impossible because these people cannot be confined to schools and churches. These people have known.But the first step toward knowing is knowing that “I am ignorant.” Then you are ready, open, vulnerable. Then something can happen to you. Then truth can reveal itself to you. But you are so full of rubbish. You all think that you know. This is the first thing to be dropped.Your parents, your teachers, your priests, know nothing, and out of their ignorance and out of their pretentious knowledge – false, pseudo, borrowed – they go on teaching you. They say one thing, you will understand another. You will say one thing to your children and they will understand another. That’s how truth deteriorates more and more. That’s how truth becomes a lie.When Buddha utters something, it is coming from the very, very source of life and existence. But the moment he utters, a process sets in, a process which is going to destroy the truth. The hearer will hear it in his own way, then he will say it to somebody else. Now twenty-five centuries have passed, and in twenty-five centuries how many generations have passed? And each generation has been giving its so-called knowledge to the next generation.Now if Buddha comes back he will really have a belly laugh. He will not be able to believe that these are his words. If Bodhidharma comes back he will be surprised. He will be utterly dumb for a moment: “Are these my words?”Because my feeling, reading these questions and answers, has continuously been this: that the disciple, although he is trying to be very true to the master’s words, is still editing.The words don’t have that lion’s roar in them – and that was a basic quality of Bodhidharma. They look too mild from his mouth. They look almost dull. They don’t have that sharpness. He was a sword! He was one of the strangest buddhas who has ever happened on the earth. These words seem to be so mild, so soft.There are only two possibilities: either he was very ill, dying, and was not able to shout… But the second possibility is more closer to the truth. The second possibility is that the disciple is writing in his own words what Bodhidharma has said. These are his disciple’s notes. Bodhidharma has not written them. He has not written a single word. The disciple must be editing. Of course he has tried to be very sincere. He has not added anything which will go against Bodhidharma. But he may have deleted a few things, of which we can never be certain. Looking at his questions, he does not seem to be of great intelligence.“Miss Jones,” said the science professor, “would you care to tell the class what happens when a body is immersed in water?”“Sure,” said Miss Jones, “the telephone rings.”An experienced prostitute tells a younger beginner that the moment to ask men for money is when their eyes go glassy.The next day she asks the beginner how she made out.“Rotten,” she says, “when their eyes go glassy, I go stone-blind.”People function from their state of being, from their understanding. And what understanding have they got? None at all.Scene: an army induction center. The new recruits are lined up by the tough sergeant and told to count off into groups of four.They count off briskly: “One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! A-wahann!”The sergeant strides up to the yodeling number one and looks him up and down in revulsion. “Are you one?”“Of courthe I’m one. Are you one too?”The moment a word reaches you it immediately changes its color. It becomes part of your gestalt. It immediately starts representing you, not the speaker but you. Beware of this fact.And the only way to get rid of this – and one needs to get rid of this if one is really a seeker of truth – the only way to get rid of this is to drop all ideas that have been given to you by others. Empty your mind of all concepts of right and wrong.Be again a child, knowing nothing, collecting seashells on the seashore, running after a butterfly, enchanted by small things: a colored stone. Be as innocent as a child. You don’t know what is right and you don’t know what is wrong. And then there is a possibility to know.The student asked: What is right and what is wrong? Religions have their own predetermined ideas: this is right and this is wrong. And what is right in one religion is wrong in another. There are three hundred religions on the earth and at least three thousand sects of those religions. It is not coincidental that there are also three thousand languages on the earth. Maybe there is some interrelationship. These three thousand sects may be just three thousand religious languages. And each religion has its own definition of right and wrong, and that never suits with another religion.Now, Jainas think to eat meat is wrong, but Mohammedans, Christians, Jews, won’t agree with it. Their scriptures say that God created animals to be eaten by human beings.Jainas say that to fast is the best way to purify your soul. Now, there are religions which will not agree, because how can fasting purify your soul? Maybe it can purify your body of its toxins, its poisons, but how can it purify your soul? What has food to do with the soul? They seem to be absolutely unrelated.Jainas say that to live without any possessions, to live absolutely naked, is the only way to attain moksha, ultimate freedom. Now, no other religion will agree with it, because what has nudity to do with moksha? All animals are nude. It has nothing spiritual about it. And for centuries man has been nude – the primitive man lived in nudity, but they were not all attaining liberation. How can you attain liberation just by being nude?And so on and so forth. The ideas of right and wrong are very sectarian. What Bodhidharma answers is a nonsectarian approach.Bodhidharma says:Discrimination with no-mind is right.A very strange statement, a paradoxical statement: because discrimination is always of the mind. It is the mind which discriminates: “This is right and this is wrong.” Bodhidharma is making a tremendously pregnant statement. He says: Discrimination with no-mind is right.And he is really very close to the point, as close as language can reach. When you function without any mind, when you function out of pure awareness, whatever you do is right. That’s what he calls: discrimination with no-mind. That is right. Not that you decide to do right, not that you decide not to do wrong. When there is no mind in you, no prejudice, no ideology, no thoughts – a pure silence… Out of that silence, the spontaneous act. Out of that silence, the response to reality, moment to moment. That is right.Look at the beautiful definition of right: it has nothing to do with the act, it has something to do with consciousness.All the buddhas try to change the emphasis from the outer to the inner, from action to consciousness – even from conscience to consciousness, because conscience is extrovert. It is created by the society. You have a Hindu conscience or a Mohammedan conscience or a Christian conscience. But consciousness is simply consciousness, neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan.Consciousness, just pure consciousness: a mirrorlike phenomenon reflecting that which is. And out of that reflection: the act, the total act. That is right.See the emphasis. The emphasis is not on the act: what to do and what not to do. Bodhidharma simply drops that. It is not a question of doing this or not doing that, because one thing may be right in one moment of consciousness and may not be right in another moment. In one situation, in one context, in a certain space, one act may be right. And in another space, another context, the same act may be wrong. So acts can’t be decisive.It all depends on your consciousness and the situation that you encounter. The decision is going to happen between you and the situation. And the decision has not to be deliberately taken according to certain ideology, according to certain conclusions, according to certain prejudices, concepts. The decision has to arise in the purity of consciousness, in the state of no-mind, then it is right. If it is not coming out of no-mind then it is wrong. This is a very significant opening: it can open doors and doors and doors of mysteries.See the difference. The Ten Commandments talk about acts: Don’t do this, don’t do that. Bodhidharma is not saying: Don’t do this, don’t do that – because who knows, tomorrow that same act may be needed. Situations change, life is a constant flux. What is right today may not be right tomorrow, hence acts cannot be fixed. And that’s what all so-called religions have done.People even say to me that I should decide what is right and what is wrong for my disciples, for my sannyasins. I am not going to decide what is right and what is wrong. I am simply helping you to create the pure consciousness, so out of that consciousness, whatever happens is right. And whenever you lose that purity, that height, that flight of consciousness and start crawling in the darkness of the earth, then all that you do is wrong.It is possible that an unconscious man may be doing something which is thought to be right by society, but he cannot do it according to Bodhidharma and according to me. Society may respect him for doing right, but we cannot say that he is doing right because he has no right consciousness to do it. The very foundation is missing.His action may on the surface appear to be right, but his intention cannot be right, and it is intention that is decisive. He may donate money to the poor, and of course everybody will say that this is right. Donating money to the poor: who will say it is not right?But Bodhidharma will say, if he is sharing out of joy, not out of an egoistic attitude, only then is it right. If he is sharing, not pitying the poor, if he is sharing for the joy of sharing itself, not obliging the poor, then it is right.But if there is a hidden motive of obliging the poor, if there is a hidden intention to gain something in the other world, some virtue, to gain entry into paradise… If he is doing something like that, the act on the surface will seem to be good, but it is not good. It is wrong because it comes out of a wrong consciousness. It is arising out of a wrong context. It can’t be right.There are millions of Christian missionaries serving poor people for wrong reasons. Their reason for serving poor people is because it is the way to attain heaven. This is greed, this is not service. And on the surface they are good people, nice people, very helpful people, doing good works in every possible way, but deep down their desire is nothing but a great greed, a greed projected toward the other world.They are so greedy – more greedy than ordinary people because ordinary people are satisfied with a little bit of money, a good house, a garden, a car, this and that, a little prestige, power, becoming a prime minister or a president, and they are perfectly happy, satisfied. But these people are not satisfied with such small things: mundane, momentary. They condemn all these things. They want eternal peace, they want eternal bliss, they want the eternal company of God.And there is going to be great competition because God must be surrounded by a great crowd of saints. Who is going to be close to God? In fact, this is what Jesus’ disciples asked him. The last night before he departed from his disciples, this was the question uppermost in their minds.I always feel sorry for Jesus. He was not as fortunate as Buddha, as Mahavira, as Lao Tzu, as far as disciples are concerned. He had a very poor lot.Jesus is going to be crucified tomorrow. He has told them that it is the last night and that he will be caught. He has predicted it. And do you know what they are asking? They are not concerned about Jesus’ crucifixion: how to protect him, how to save him, or what can be done now. They are not worried about that.They ask him, “Lord, tomorrow you are leaving us. Just one question before you go. Let it be settled. Of course, we know you will be on the right-hand side of God in heaven, but who will be next to you? Who among us will be the blessed one to be next to you?”This is pure greed! This is spiritual politics: more ugly than ordinary politics, because ordinary politics is gross and you can see it immediately when it is there, but this type of politics is very subtle and very difficult to see.Serve, if service is your response out of no-mind. Don’t desire anything out of it. Do it for the sheer joy of doing it.That’s what I am trying to create here. You are all involved in all kinds of work in this commune, and this is only the beginning, just the seed of the commune. Soon it will grow into a big tree. But the basic foundation is being laid. You are all working, but it is not service for some greed. You are not here to attain anything in the other world. I am teaching you how to enjoy each moment for its own sake. The joy has to be intrinsic.Just the other day Gyan Bhakti made a silver box for me to keep Jintan in. And she came crying tears of joy that she has been able to do something for me. Nothing to be gained. I cannot promise her, “Gyan Bhakti, you will be exactly on the right side of me in heaven.”There is no heaven and there is no God as such, as a person. Even I am not going to be on his right side. And basically I am a leftist. I don’t believe in the right side at all. The right side is a male chauvinist idea, because the right side represents the left side of the mind, which is reason, mathematics, calculation. The left hand represents poetry, love, dancing, music, sculpture. But there is no God, and there is no right and left to God.There is no other world except this: This very body the buddha. This very earth the lotus paradise. And this very moment is all eternity.Live out of no-mind, then whatever happens is right. And live out of the mind, then whatever you do is wrong.Hence I am not in favor of people like Mother Teresa of Kolkata, not at all: knowing nothing of meditation. She is a good woman, doing hard work, but deep down there is greed. Without meditation you cannot get rid of greed.Yes, serving orphans, widows, poor people, ill people, old people, lepers: anybody will say this is good except Bodhidharma or except me. It is good only apparently. Deep down it is greed. And sometimes I wonder: if lepers disappear through scientific advancement, and if communism comes and poor people are no longer there, and if biochemistry can find ways so that people always remain young and never become old, then what will happen to people like Mother Teresa? They will be at a loss! They will not find anybody who needs their service. They will be in difficulty. They need these people, it is their need. These people are needed for them to be great servants.Hence religious people, the so-called religious people, want the world to continue in poverty because if the world continues to be in poverty, they will have something to serve. They want people to remain ill, starved. Now science has enough technology to change the whole face of the earth, but the religions won’t allow it because their whole business will evaporate. If science makes this earth almost like a paradise, then Mother Teresa will not be needed.I will still be needed. In fact, I will be needed more, because when people have nothing to do then the world of meditation begins. Because meditation is the art of simply being, doing nothing.Sitting silently, doing nothing,Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.If the world is really happy, joyous, rich, affluent, then people like Bodhidharma and me will be needed more. If the world lives in luxury then millions of buddhas can bloom. But it is difficult to understand it.It is easy to understand Mother Teresa and the Nobel Prize that has been given to her. Gurdjieff was not given a Nobel Prize, nor Raman Maharshi. Krishnamurti has been doing only one thing his whole life: how to make people more aware and conscious. Nobody has ever thought of giving a Nobel Prize to him. Their work is subtle, invisible. Real work is always of the roots – you can’t see them. And just ordinary people like Mother Teresa will be awarded Nobel prizes. I don’t think that Buddha will get a Nobel Prize if he comes, or Bodhidharma – impossible.Our whole idea of right and wrong is so superficial that we cannot see deep into the very essence of what is good and what is not good. Bodhidharma is giving you the essential core:Discrimination with no-mind is right. Discrimination with mind is wrong. When one transcends right and wrong, he is truly right.See the point, meditate over it: When one transcends right and wrong – when one has no idea of what is right and what is wrong… Because those ideas are always in the mind; they are mind things. When you have no idea of what is right and what is wrong, when you are utterly innocent, then one is right, truly right. To be innocent, silent, contentless, just a consciousness: that’s what Bodhidharma says is: …truly right.In a sutra it says, “When one dwells on the right road, he does not discriminate…”One simply lives out of his consciousness, not being worried whether one is right or wrong. Who cares? One simply follows one’s spontaneity. One flows with it without any worry whether it is right or wrong. Only wrong people worry about right and wrong. Right people never worry about anything. They simply live their life. They live their life without any imposition. They live their life without any morality, immorality. They live their life without any character. They live in a characterless freedom.In a sutra it says, “When one dwells on the right road, he does not discriminate ‘this is right, this is wrong.’”He never thinks what is right and what is wrong. He simply goes on living silently, joyously, ecstatically, and then whatever he touches is transformed into gold. Dust becomes divine in his hands. And in the hands of your so-called saints even gold turns into dust. In the hands of your so-called saints and mahatmas, nectar becomes poison.The second question:What is a sagacious student, and what is a dull student?Bodhidharma says:A sagacious student does not depend on his teacher’s words, but uses his own experience to find the truth.A very fundamental criterion: the really intelligent disciple: …does not depend on his teacher’s words. He listens to his teacher’s words, but more than words, he listens to his being. More than words, he listens to his silence. More than his words, he observes his gestures. More than words, he looks into his eyes. More than words, he watches how he walks, how he sits, how he talks, how sometimes he remains silent.His approach is not intellectual, his approach is existential. And because he: …does not depend on his teacher’s words, he uses his own experience to find the truth.The masters have always been saying that you have to find the truth on your own. Be a light unto yourself. Nobody can give you the truth. Truth is not a transferable property. It is not some possession that you can inherit. You have to discover it. Everybody has to discover it again and again on his own.That is the difference between scientific truth and religious truth. Scientific truth is discovered by one person and then it becomes the property of the whole world.Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity. It took years for him to work it out. Once discovered, it is the property of the whole humanity. Now anybody can understand it, anybody can read about it. There is no problem about it. Scientific truth is objective, it is outside. Once discovered, everybody can see it and everybody can understand it – just a little intelligence is needed, a little effort is needed – but you need not rediscover it.That is the difference with religious truth: it is subjective, it is inner. You cannot put it in front of others. So when a man becomes a buddha only he knows what has happened – or other buddhas know what has happened – but it never becomes an objective phenomenon so others can see it.You who are in deep love with me, you know what has happened to me, but you cannot prove it to others. It is not an objective phenomenon. If you try to prove it you will feel very inadequate. It is easy to disprove it: it is impossible to prove it.You cannot prove that Christ has attained. Thousands of books have been written, but nothing has been proved yet. For two thousand years, more books have been written on Christ than on anybody else, but what has been proved? There are still people who think that he was insane. There are still psychologists who think that he was neurotic, psychotic, schizophrenic, and they think so very seriously and they have many arguments why it is so.He used to hear voices, which only insane people hear. He used to talk to the sky, which only mad people do. And he was a megalomaniac, according to these great scholars, psychologists, psychiatrists, because he suffered from a very puffed-up ego. He declared, “I am the only son of God.” Now, what pretentiousness. He declared, “I have come to save the whole of humanity.” What ego! And this man talks about humbleness, humility, and goes on saying, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” – and he was not a meek man at all!So the people who want to prove that he is schizophrenic have enough proof. One day he says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” and another day he enters the temple of Jerusalem, beats the moneychangers, throws them out of the temple. Can you think that this man is a meek man? He talks about humbleness, humility, poverty of the spirit, and declares, “I am the king of the Jews. I am the real king.” That is enough proof that this man has many minds, split minds.He talks about forgiveness, says that God is love, and becomes so angry with small things. Not only with people, he became so angry with a fig tree because his disciples were hungry, he was hungry, and there was no fruit on the tree. Now, this man is insane, because the tree is not in any way willfully preventing the fruit from growing at this time. It was not the time for the fruit. They come close to the tree with great expectation, and there is no fruit. Jesus takes it as an insult. The son of God comes, and what kind of fig tree is this? No respect? He goes into a rage, he curses the tree. The tree burns because of his curse: a green tree turns into a dead tree immediately.Now, what kind of man is this? Must be mad! Can you think of him as a buddha? That will be difficult to prove. Two thousand years of scholarship have not been able to prove it. But anybody can disprove it, it is very easy because the experience of christ consciousness is inner. It is so deep and so interior that only he knows what is happening inside him. Only he or those who are crowned with the same glory, who have attained the same samadhi, the same consciousness will be able to understand. But how many of those people are there in the world?Mahavira looks mad because he lives naked. Not only that, he pulls his hair out. He does not go to the barber because he wants to be absolutely independent. Now, what ego! You can immediately translate it as a very egoistic attitude. He does not want to depend on anybody else, he wants to be absolutely independent. It is better to pull your hair out although it hurts, but he will not go to the barber. Can’t he keep a razor, a pair of scissors with him? No, because he can’t possess anything. He does not possess anything, he lives without possessions. To possess something is to be ordinary, so he lives without possessions. Now the only thing left is to pull your hair out.And he does not take a bath, so sooner or later there will be lice in the hair and it will become dirty and dusty, and he has to pull them out. Why doesn’t he take a bath? Seems to be really insane! He does not take a bath because he thinks there is no need to decorate the body. He does not take a bath because he thinks water has very, very small living cells in it. They will be killed. And he does not want to do harm to anybody at all, not even those small cells. Water consists of many, many bacteria, cells, living organisms. So, not to disturb them, not to destroy them, he will not take a bath.And there is a certain kind of insane person whose characteristic is that he pulls his hair out. Sometimes women do it when they are really in a rage: they pull out their hair. That is a temporary madness. But this man continuously does it. He seems to be permanently mad. You can easily prove that Mahavira is mad. It is very difficult to prove that he has attained, because that is his inner experience.Yes, somebody else who has gone so deep, who has dived so deep into his being, may be able to see the point, but even he cannot prove it.Truth, religious truth, is subjective. You know it only when you know it. Nobody can give it to you.Bodhidharma says: A sagacious student does not depend on his teacher’s words, but uses his own experience to find the truth.The voluptuous brunette dreamed that a tall, dark, handsome man appeared at her bedside, pulled the covers off her and carried her to a big Cadillac. Then he drove to a secluded spot in the country, threw her into the back seat and leered at her.“What are you going to do now?” she asked in a quivering voice.“How should I know?” he answered. “It’s your dream.”The words that you hear from the masters are not the masters’ words, they are your words. It is your dream. You can interpret, you can accumulate, you can become very knowledgeable, but it is all your dream. Never for a moment forget that.And you are asleep and you are split and you are subjectively unconscious. You are in a real mess. It is a miracle that you go on keeping yourself together. Why don’t you start falling into parts here and there? You must be using imported glue, because Indian glue can’t do that! It is impossible.A taxi passenger was being buffeted to the right and to the left as his driver careened down the avenue at breakneck speed. When the gentleman was granted an instant to catch his breath, he finally complained to the driver.“You ain’t got no cause to worry,” said the man. “I ain’t goin’ to land back in no hospital now, after eighteen months in one overseas.”Only partially reassured, the rider grumbled, “How dreadful. You must have been seriously wounded.”“Nope. Never got a scratch,” grinned the cabbie. “I was a mental case.”I have heard a similar type of story…An airplane takes off and as it starts rising higher, a great laughter is heard from the cockpit. The passengers become a little worried: “What is the matter?” So one passenger opens the door of the cockpit and asks the pilot, who is almost rolling about laughing, “What’s the matter? What’s so funny?”He said, “I’ve just escaped from the mental asylum and now they can’t find me!”You can imagine the passengers, what must have happened to them.But whether one is really a confirmed insane person or not does not make much difference. The difference is only of degree. All are insane. Unless you become a buddha you are insane. And whatever you go on understanding through the words will not be the words of the master. They are your own interpretations – echoes heard in your insanity.The real, intelligent disciple is not interested in words, he is interested in actual experience. He is interested in self-actualization. He uses the time with the master to rise higher and higher in consciousness. His effort is not that of becoming more knowledgeable. His effort is that of becoming more conscious, more authentic. He tries to attain more being than more knowledge. The stupid student acquires knowledge and the intelligent student acquires being. And it is being that can save you, not knowledge.A dull student depends on coming to a gradual understanding through his teacher’s word.Real knowing is never gradual. It is a quantum leap, it is discontinuous with your past. The old simply disappears and the new appears. Gradual understanding is a trick of the mind. Gradual understanding is not understanding but only accumulation of information.Buddhahood, enlightenment, is sudden; it is never gradual. Yes, if you go on listening to the master, his authenticity, his sincerity, his love for you, his compassion, is going to create great impressions on you. It is going to create an impact on you. And slowly, slowly those words will start gathering inside you. Gradually you will start feeling that now you understand a little more. But what is happening really is that now you believe a little more, not that you understand.A master speaks with authority: not the authority of the scriptures, not the authority of tradition, but the authority of his own experience. His words carry authority because he is a witness to his own words. What he says he knows, what he says he has seen, hence the impact.But the impact can be in two ways: either you accumulate those words full of authority, and then you become knowledgeable. But to be knowledgeable is only to be a believer, not a knower. And no belief is ever going to liberate you; it binds you. And no belief is really trust. It is not faith, it is fake. Belief is fake faith.The farmer’s son entered the kitchen where the table had been set for dinner. The farmer, already seated, asked him, “Son, did you remember to close the door on the chicken house this evening? You remember what happened the last time a fox got in there, don’t you?”“Yes, father, I know. The door is closed,” replied the boy.Several minutes passed, then the old farmer got up and put his coat on. Walking out the door, he suddenly turned and remarked, “It’s not that I don’t believe you, son, I just want to be sure.”But what is the difference between these two? He says, “It is not that I don’t believe you, son, I just want to be sure.”You can believe in the words of the masters, but how are you going to be sure? Unless you experience there is no surety, there is no certainty. Doubt will persist. It will become an undercurrent, it will sabotage all your beliefs. Then the time wasted with the master is really wasted. Otherwise, each moment with the master can be of tremendous value.Don’t gather words; that is the sign of the stupid student. Inquire into your being. Learn from the master how to be thirsty for the self. Learn from the master how to go on the great adventure of self-discovery. Accept his challenge but not only his words.A dull student depends on coming to a gradual understanding through his teacher’s word. A teacher has two kinds of students; one hears his teacher’s words without clinging to the material nor to the immaterial, without attaching to form or to non-form, without thinking of animate objects or of inanimate objects…this is the sagacious student…He simply listens to the master’s words as you listen to the wind passing through the pine trees or you listen to the sound of running water or you listen to the songs of the birds in the morning. You simply listen with no greed to accumulate, with no greed at all. Just a pure listening. You don’t bring your mind in, you don’t interfere.You don’t try to make any sense out of it. What sense is there when the wind passes through the pine trees and you hear the music? What sense is there? When it is raining and you hear the sound on your roof, what sense is there? Yes, there is tremendous beauty but no sense. It is a great experience, but there is no ordinary meaning attached to it. And what meaning can you give to it? You will project your ideas.The wind knocks on your door, and if you are waiting for your girlfriend or your boyfriend you may think that maybe they have come. You run to the door, you open the door, and you are frustrated. It was only the wind blowing, knocking on the door. You projected an idea.A respectable old man heard that his only son had started visiting brothels. One evening the old gentleman got word that the boy was in that area of the town which was full of houses of ill repute, and eager to get him back into the sanctity of his home before the family name was irretrievably ruined, he dashed downtown to find him.Charging along at full steam, distracted and angry, he was accosted by a lady of the evening popping out of her doorway.“Hi, pop,” she caroled pleasantly. “Are you looking for a naughty little girl?”Unthinkingly he replied, “No, I’m looking for a naughty little boy.”The girl recoiled in horror and exclaimed, “You nasty old man!”What meaning are you going to give to words? You don’t know anything of the inner. All meanings will be false. Listen without giving any meaning. Just listen, and it becomes a meditation.Right now, if you are just listening with no idea of yours coming continuously in-between me and you, if you have put your mind aside, if there is a direct contact and I am not being taken by you via the mind, if the connection is direct, then something far more valuable than words can ever contain will be imparted to you.It is like a magnetic field in which suddenly your heart starts dancing. It is a magnetic field to be with the master in which you start moving closer and closer, not deliberately but spontaneously.…the other,the stupid one,who is avid for understanding, accumulates meanings, and mixes good and bad, is the dull student.One who is greedy to have more and more knowledge is bound to mix good and bad. What the master says is good, right, because it comes from no-mind; and what the student hears is bad, wrong, because he hears through the mind. Then both get mixed up and you become a hotchpotch. Rather than becoming more integrated you become more split, more of a chaos. Rather than attaining a higher order of being, you start falling into a more and more disorderly state.The sagacious student understands instantly…Remember the difference. The stupid one thinks that he will understand gradually: a little bit today and then tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow. But the really intelligent disciple understands immediately. When the mind is not interfering there is no question of time coming in.The mind is time, let me remind you again. If you bring the mind in, time will come in, then postponement, then gradualness. If the mind is not there, where is time? Then I am here, you are here, and there is only the present. Then this now joins me with you. Then this now starts pulsating with my energy and your energy. Then this now becomes a dance. Then this here becomes a song. The now and the here are the only true time and true space: true because now time is eternity and space is infinity.The intelligent person understands immediately:…he does not raise inferior mind when he hears the teaching, nor does he follow the sage’s mind…Such a beautiful statement! Bodhidharma says, “I am not saying to you to drop your stupid mind. I am not telling you to drop your inferior mind.” He is saying, “Even if you have a very wise mind – the sage’s mind – drop that too, because the mind can never be wise.” It can pretend, it can deceive. There is nothing like “a sage’s mind”: the sage has no mind. The sinner has a bad mind, the saint has a good mind, the sage has no mind. That is the difference between these three words.He does not allow any kind of mind:…he transcends both wisdom and ignorance.See the point, see it immediately. Because there is no mind, you cannot be ignorant. Because there is no mind, how can you be wise? You have gone beyond duality. Ignorance gone, wisdom gone, you simply are. Just as the roseflower is, the rock is, you are.Even though one hears the teaching and does not cling to worldly desires, does not love Buddha or the true path, if, when he has to select one out of two, he selects quietness from confusion, wisdom from ignorance, inactivity from activity and clings to one or the other of these, then he is a dull student.If you choose between wisdom and ignorance, if you choose between inactivity and activity, if you choose at all between right and wrong, you are a dull student. Choice makes you dull.Krishnamurti repeats again and again that choiceless awareness is ultimate freedom. Don’t choose and be free. Choose and you have chosen your bondage. Choose and you are imprisoned immediately. Each choice is a prison.Sannyas is not a choice: it is dropping of all choices. It is simply a gesture of dropping all choices, likes and dislikes. It is moving beyond duality.If one transcends both wisdom and ignorance, has no greed for the teaching, does not live in right recollectedness, does not raise right thinking, and does not have aspirations to be a pratyeka-buddha nor a bodhisattva, then he is a sagacious student.When there is no choice, no greed, not even for the right-mindfulness – that is Buddha’s basic teaching, sammasati: right-mindfulness – even for that, in the ultimate state of intelligence, there is no choice. Not even the desire to be a buddha or to be a bodhisattva. No desire for nirvana, no desire for godliness. Desire as such has disappeared. One lives moment to moment, without any desire. Tremendous is his richness.There are people who have much but still desire for more. Their poverty is beyond belief. And there are people who don’t have much and still don’t desire anything more. Their richness is beyond measure.A man who has no desires has come home. He has become a chakravartin. He has conquered the world without conquering anything at all, because the whole kingdom of God is his, all inexhaustible treasures are his.The only secret key is choiceless awareness.These answers of Bodhidharma can be reduced to this single phrase: choiceless awareness. But don’t cling to the words, experience it, because it is only experience that liberates.Enough for today.

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The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 01-09Category: SUFISM

The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 01 (Listen & Download)

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The Tale of the Sands.A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered, “The wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream.”The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed; that the wind could fly and this was why it could cross a desert.“By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across. You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over to your destination.”“But how could this happen?”“By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind.”This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality. And once having lost it, how was it to know that it could ever be regained?“The wind,” said the sand, “performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river.”“How can I know that this is true?”“It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years; and it certainly is not the same as a stream.”“But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?”“You cannot in either case remain so,” the whisper said. “Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one.”When he heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts of the stream. Dimly, he remembered a state in which he – or some part of him, was it? – had been held in the arms of a wind. He also remembered – or did he? – that this was the real thing, not necessarily the obvious thing, to do.And the stream raised his vapor into the welcoming arms of the wind, which gently and easily bore it upward and along, letting it fall softly as soon as they reached the roof of a mountain, many, many miles away.And because he had had his doubts, the stream was able to remember and record more strongly in his mind the details of the experience.He reflected, “Yes, now I have learned my true identity.”The stream was learning. But the sands whispered, “We know, because we see it happen day after day: and because we, the sands, extend from the riverside all the way to the mountain.”And that is why it is said that the way in which the stream of life is to continue on its journey is written in the sands.We enter today the world of Sufism. It is a world, but not a worldview. It is a transcendence, but not a philosophy of transcendence. It does not preach any theories; it simply gives you practical hints. Sufism is not speculative. It is utterly realistic, pragmatic, practical. It is down-to-earth, it is not abstract. Hence it has no worldview. And also, because it is not a system, it does not systematize knowledge.A system is a complete explanation of existence. Sufism is not a system; it has no explanation for existence. It is a way into the mysteries of existence. It does not explain anything; it simply points to the mysterious, it leads you into the mysterious. Sufism does not demystify existence. All systems do that: their whole work consists in making the unknown known, destroying the mystery, destroying the wonder. Sufism leads you from one wonder to another, deeper into the wonderland.It is not a system because it never gives any complete explanation about anything. It gives only very, very small hints, flashes of insight. It does not spin and weave philosophies; it spins and weaves stories, anecdotes, metaphors, parables, poetry. It is not metaphysics; it is metaphor. It is a finger pointing to the moon. You cannot understand the moon by analyzing the finger, but if you follow the direction with sympathy, if you fall en rapport, then you will come to see the moon. The finger is not the moon, the finger cannot be the moon, yet the finger can point the way.The Sufi stories are not philosophical, they are just gentle hints, whisperings. Sufism does not shout, it only whispers. Naturally, only those who are ready to listen with sympathy – not only with sympathy, but empathy – only those who are ready to open their hearts in trust and in surrender can understand what Sufism is.Only those who are capable of love can understand what Sufism is, what its message is. It is not a logical analysis; neither is it as illogical as Zen. Sufism says to be logical is one extreme, to be illogical is another. Sufism is just somewhere in the middle: neither logic nor illogic. It does not lean to the left or to the right. It is not absurd. It is not logical like Socrates and it is not absurd like Bodhidharma. It says Bodhidharma and Socrates only look different, but their approaches are the same.In fact, Bodhidharma is more logical than Socrates; that’s why he stumbles into illogic. If you go on following the line of logic, sooner or later you come to a point where you see logic is finished but the journey continues. Bodhidharma is a Socrates who has gone the whole way and has come to that borderland where logic stops but life continues. Bodhidharma looks different, but the approach is Socratic; it is intellectual. Zen is very much against intellect, but to be against intellect is still to be intellectual. Zen is anti-philosophy, but to be anti-philosophical is to be philosophical: that is your philosophy. Sufism avoids the extremes. It follows the middle, the exact middle, the Golden Mean.In Zen the key word is mindfulness. In Sufism the key word is heartfulness. Remember this; it will make it clear where they differ. Zen is against mind, but goes beyond mind through the mind. Sufism is not against the mind; Sufism is completely indifferent to the mind. Sufism is focused on the heart. It simply does not bother about the mind. It believes in heartfulness. Yes, a certain kind of awakening comes to the Sufi too. If we call the Zen awakening “satori,” mind wakefulness, then we will have to coin a word for the Sufi awakening: “heart wakefulness.” The path of the Sufi is the path of the lover, the path of Zen is the path of the warrior, the samurai – and because of this, a basic difference in approach.Both use stories. Zen uses stories and Sufism also uses stories, but their stories have a different flavor, a different tone. The Zen story is absurd: it is a riddle, and a riddle that cannot be solved. You can try, but you will never be able to solve it. That insolubility is built-in; it is intrinsic to the Zen story. It has to be absurd because it is a device to destroy your mind, to shock your mind. It is a sword to kill your mind. It drives you almost mad because there seems to be no solution coming and you have to go on meditating on the story. It is a meditation device. Many solutions are given by the mind, but all solutions are rejected by the master. The disciple goes on, day in, day out, with new solutions, and the master goes on shouting at the disciple, “This is nonsense! Go and search again!” Sometimes months, sometimes years pass, and then a moment comes to the disciple when he sees that there is no solution. And remember, if you simply think there is no solution then you have missed the point. You have to come to a realization that there is no solution. In that state of no-solution, no-conclusion, a transcendence happens, a leap, a quantum leap: you have gone beyond the mind through the mind. The Zen story functions like a sword to cut the knot of the mind.The Sufi story is not a riddle; it is a parable. It is not a shock, it is not a sword, it is persuasion. It is seduction, it is the way of the lover, it is very gentle and soft and feminine. Zen is very masculine, Sufism is feminine. The Zen story drives you mad; through creating a maddening state in the mind, it helps you to go beyond it. It drives you crazy. The Sufi story intoxicates you slowly, slowly but inevitably.The Sufi story has a poetry in it, a rhythm. The Sufi story has to be contemplated, not meditated upon. The Zen story has to be meditated upon. The Sufi story has to be imbibed, sipped like tea, enjoyed in a relaxed mood. The Zen story has to be penetrated with a very, very concentrated mind, in a very tense attitude, in intensity. You have to focus all your energies on the story. You have to forget the whole world; only that small absurd story exists. And you know it cannot be solved, and yet you have to put your whole energy into it. And all the time you know that it is absurd, it is not going to lead you anywhere. But the master says, “Focus! Concentrate! Pay attention! Look into the riddle of the story!”The Sufi story has to be listened to just like a story. Sufis are great storytellers. They will sip tea or coffee, they will sit together in a cozy place, warm. The story will start, and the master will tell the story. And the story only gives glimpses, hints, but very potential, very penetrating. All that is needed on the part of the disciple is to listen, not attentively but sympathetically, with an open heart – not with any tension. The story has to be enjoyed. It reveals its mysteries when you are enjoying it.A few more things before we start enjoying the story: I said to you that Sufism is not a worldview. It is a vision, not a worldview. A worldview means you remain the same and you start believing in a philosophy, in certain explanations about reality. You remain the same, you are not changed at all. The worldview adds some knowledge to you, you become more knowledgeable.A vision transforms you. A vision is possible only when you are transformed, when you are taken to other altitudes, other heights, other depths of life.Sufism is a vision. In fact, to call it “Sufism” is not right because it is not an “ism” at all. Sufis don’t call it “Sufism”; it is the name given by the outsiders. They call their vision tasawwuf a love vision, a loving approach toward reality. It is falling in love with existence. The person who thinks about existence is a little bit antagonistic because he creates a problem out of existence, as if existence is challenging him and he has to decipher it. He has to decode the mystery, he has to destroy the mystery. He fights.Sufis say we and existence are one. There is no need to fight. Persuade, coo, invite, love, befriend, and existence itself starts revealing its mysteries. There is no need to rape it. The philosophic approach, the scientific approach, the intellectual approach, is a rape. It is forcing existence to reveal its heart, it is undressing existence by force and violence. The violence may be of scientific methods or of logical methods – it doesn’t matter – but the violence is there. The philosopher has taken a standpoint as if nature is not ready to reveal its mysteries; it has to be forced. It is a violent approach.Sufism says there is no need. Existence is waiting for you to come close so that it can reveal its heart. Existence is waiting for you to fall in love with it. If you are deeply in love with existence, it starts opening, it starts revealing its secrets. It has been waiting long for you to come close. There is no need to force it, there is no need to rape. You can fall in love.A worldview is an aggressive stance; a vision is a love stance. I said to you that Sufism is not a system, because all systems create bondage, they create prisons around you. Sufism is freedom. It does not create any system around you, it does not tell you to believe in a certain system. Yes, it talks about trust, but not of belief.Trust is a totally different thing. Belief is belief in a theory, in a philosophy, in a worldview: you believe in Islam, you believe in Hinduism, you believe in Christianity. But when you trust, you trust in life. You don’t believe in life, you trust in life. You believe in philosophies. Belief is a poor substitute for trust, and remember, belief is from the head, trust is from the heart. Their qualities are different, altogether different, diametrically opposite. Never become part of a belief system: never become a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Jaina or a Buddhist. When you become part of a belief system, you are becoming a slave.If you can find a place, a space, where belief is not imposed on you but trust is helped, find that place. That is the right place where you can really grow and grow into freedom. There is no other growth – growth in freedom is the only growth.I said to you that Sufism is not a philosophy, but it is not anti-philosophy either. It simply takes no note of philosophies, anti-philosophies. It bypasses them, it is indifferent. It says: “Why be bothered with words while reality is available? When you can drink the water, why be worried about the theories about water? When you can go in the sun and dance with the sun rays, why be bothered about theories? Why not have an experience, an authentic experience?”Philosophy goes round and round, it is about and about. It never penetrates the core of truth. It thinks about truth, but to think about truth is to falsify. Truth has to be encountered, not thought about. Truth has to be lived, not believed. Truth is not a conclusion: you don’t arrive at truth by a syllogistic process. Truth is there – you are truth, the trees are truth, the birds are truth, the sun, the moon. The truth is all over the place, and you close your eyes and you think about truth? All thinking will take you astray. There is no need to think. Live it. Only by living do you come to know it.Sufism is not a way of thinking, but a way of life, a way of living – not a philosophy of life but a way of life.I said Sufism is not speculative. Speculation means you think about things you have not known. Now this is foolish: speculation means a blind man thinking about light, a deaf man thinking about music. When you think about God, do you think you are in any way different from the blind man thinking about light? You have not seen God, you have not tasted anything divine, and you go on thinking. What will you do? Yes, the mind is very clever and it can spin and weave beautiful systems, but those systems are just irrelevant. Good or bad, logical, illogical – they are just irrelevant. They have no relevance to reality, they have no context in reality; they are mind games.Sufism is not a mind game. That’s why it is practical, absolutely practical. If you ask a Sufi about God, he will laugh, or he will sing a song which has no reference to God, or he will tell you a story in which it is never mentioned, or he will say something which seems absolutely unrelated to the question. He is simply saying, “Don’t be foolish. Let us be practical.” You ask about God and he will talk about prayer, not about God. A true Sufi will avoid the subject of God. He will talk about prayer; prayer is practical. You ask about paradise and he will talk about your misery and how to drop it. That is practical because paradise is not somewhere else; when you have dropped your miserable ways, you are in paradise, or to be more true, you are paradise.Sufis always talk about techniques, methods. They never talk about “what,” they only talk about “how.” In that way they are as scientific as any scientist. Sufism is a glimpse of how religion should be. It is pointless to talk about God; create the ladder that takes you to God. It is utterly a waste of time talking about paradise. Give methods so that paradise can be explored inside your being. It is an inner phenomenon, it is your inner space – and so is hell.Sufism is not even a religion; rather, it is religiousness. It has no church, it has no book – Bible or Koran or Veda or Dhammapada. It has no book, no sacred book. It has no church. Sufism is a very, very free-floating religiousness. Anybody can be a Sufi – a Hindu, a Christian, a Mohammedan. Anywhere, one can be a Sufi. It is a practical approach to creating religiousness.People think “How to belong to a religion?” Sufism says that is foolish, stupid. The only meaningful question can be: “How to create religiousness, how to transform one’s own energy so it becomes religious?” If you start belonging to a religion, you will have only a label. But you will not be religious, and your other world will be nothing but a projection of this world.You can go and see the otherworldly people, and if you watch them closely and observe them, you will be surprised: their otherworldliness is nothing but a projection of this-worldliness. In their heaven they are hoping for the same pleasures, of course on a more permanent basis – more intense, more alive – but the same pleasures. In their hell they are afraid of the same pains and the same sufferings – more intense and more permanent. The difference is of quantity. The hellfire will be the same fire that is here, but maybe more intense, more fiery. It burns more, hurts more, wounds more, but it will be the same fire. And in paradise? It will be the same food – more delicious, more nourishing – but the difference is of quantity; and the quantity is not the real difference. A difference arises only when you move from a quantitative vision to a qualitative vision. When you start changing the quality of your life, that’s what religiousness is.A true religious person cannot be Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian. He’s simply religious. Jesus is not Christian, he’s religious. I call him a Sufi. Buddha is not Buddhist; he is simply religious. I call him a Sufi. A Sufi is a person who has looked into the very essentials of religion and has discarded all that is nonessential.I invite you into this benediction called Sufism, but you will be able to enter only if you have great sympathy. Listen with love; argumentation won’t help. Sufism makes no effort to convince you. It simply makes itself available for all those who are ready to partake of it. It is an invitation open to all and sundry, but only those who are courageous enough to be will be able to enter this nonargumentative world of Sufism. Sympathy has to be the foundation; participation has to be the base. Fall en rapport. And remember, argumentation is cowardly. All cowards argue, and all cowards can argue. It is only the courageous who take the jump into the unknown. The unknown cannot be argued about, obviously; that’s why it is called the unknown.You can argue about the known, you can come to conclusions about the known through thinking. But how are you going to come across the unknown? Thinking can give you only the old, that which has been known and experienced. Thinking cannot give you something that has never been experienced and never known. If you remain too obsessed with thinking, you will be stuck.The unknown does not come from your past; the unknown enters from the future. The unknown does not come from your memory – otherwise it would not be unknown. The unknown penetrates your memory, but comes from some source we know nothing of, from some unknown source. Your memory has to give way. That’s what I mean when I say listen sympathetically, get in tune. I’m not proposing a philosophical argument here.I will be simply telling you a story. With a story, you don’t argue. With a story, you simply listen like a child. You enjoy its nuances, its turns, sudden turns. You simply start getting into its spirit, what the story wants to tell. It has much to say and the deeper your empathy grows, the deeper the story will reveal itself to you.Trust. Let trust be your approach toward Sufism. It is available only to those who trust. And remember again, only the courageous can trust; the cowardly always shrink back from the unknown.Now the story. It is one of the most beautiful.A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert.Each single word is potential, and you will have to get into the spirit of each single word.A stream… A stream is a metaphor for life – for your life, for my life, for everybody’s life. You are not suddenly here, you are not accidentally here. You have been here for ever and ever. From eternity, your stream has been flowing and flowing, and flowing from far-off mountains which you have completely forgotten, from a source you don’t have any idea of anymore.And you have been: …passing through every kind and description of countryside… You have been a rock and you have been a tree and you have been a bird and you have been an animal, and you have been all. All kinds of experiences have been available to you. You have passed through many, many landscapes. You have passed through all varieties, all possibilities. That’s how life goes on enriching you.That’s how life goes on enriching you, but you go on forgetting. It is too much; it cannot be contained. The day-to-day worry is too much; it takes too much of your consciousness so you cannot remember. You have to forget the major part of your experiences because you have a very, very small attention, and that attention can contain only so much. Every day you have to forget almost ninety-nine percent of what you come to experience; that one percent is kept. After a few days even that one percent is not totally kept; part of it disappears. After a few years the whole of it is gone, only the essential fragrance remains.If your attention grows, you will be able to contain more. Buddha has said that if your mind is unburdened of the day-to-day worries, you will be able to remember your past lives. That’s true: if your focus on the mundane is relaxed, then the light will start falling upon the past. Buddha has remembered and talked about all his past lives, thousands of lives – the life when he was an elephant and the life when he was a tree, and so on and so forth.And they are your lives too; you are not suddenly here, you have a continuity. You are a continuum. Consciousness is a stream.In the West, William James used these words for the first time: “stream of consciousness.” He must have heard it from some Sufi source, there is no other way – because Sufis have always been talking about stream of consciousness, stream of life. It is an ongoing, a flowing phenomenon; it is movement, it is not static. Even while you are here, you are not static. Every moment things are changing: the body is a flow, the mind is a flow, your being is a flow. You are not the same even for two consecutive moments. In the morning you were so happy, so trusting, by the afternoon you have become so doubting and untrusting, and by the evening everybody is a skeptic, cynical and sarcastic. Early in the morning everybody seems to be prayerful, innocent. As the day wears on, as you are cheated and pulled and pushed from this side and that, you start losing your innocence.You are constantly changing, a movement. And if you try to remain the same, you will create misery because then you will be fighting against your very life. The message is flow, let go. The message is don’t swim upstream. The message is go with the stream. This is your life, and don’t be afraid because this stream has been flowing down the ages, for centuries. There is no need to be afraid, and this stream will be flowing down the centuries in the future too. From one eternity to another eternity, it continues.You are the fabric of the universe. You will not disappear. Even when you disappear many times, you remain, the essential remains. Only the nonessential goes on disappearing, but the nonessential is not you.A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. There are two more things about this statement. The source is in the mountains, in the heights. That’s what every religion of the world has been saying: man is a descendant of God, the source is high in the mountains, man has descended from the high. That’s why Christianity was so much against the idea of Darwinian evolution – because that idea goes against all the religions.The theory of evolution preaches that man has come not from the mountains, but from the valleys – that man has been coming, growing upward. And all the religions of the world have been teaching just the opposite: they have been saying man is a descendant, he comes from God. And there is something to be understood about it. If you come from God, only then can you go back to God, otherwise not – because the source is always the goal. The circle completes, you reach that point from where you have come.Darwin created a very strange philosophy, a linear progression that you go on evolving and evolving. But where will that evolution end? It is like a line; it goes on and on. It begins somewhere in the dark valleys. Where will it end? It cannot end anywhere. It is a line that goes on and on. It is linear: it will always remain incomplete, it will always remain unsatisfied, it will never be fulfilled.The religions tell a totally different story. They say man comes from God and finally reaches God again. It is a circle, it is a completion, and in completion is fulfillment.A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. “At last…” every consciousness reaches a point of cul-de-sac, a point which Sufis call “the desert.” The desert is a point where you start feeling you are disappearing. The desert is a point where you feel you are dying. The desert is a point when you feel utterly hopeless, meaningless, a point where you start contemplating suicide, a point where you cannot figure it out – what to do, what not to do, to be or not to be. One day or other, every consciousness has to face the desert because without passing through the desert, you will never really be mature. That is part of the training of every soul. In fact when you start encountering the desert, you start thinking of religion. When things are going good, who bothers about religion? Who contemplates? Who meditates? Who prays? When things are not going good, then you start thinking that there must be something basically wrong with you.This is a strange phenomenon – that whenever a person has all that he needs, he encounters the desert. The affluent society encounters the desert. The poor society is still far away from the desert. The affluence brings the desert very close because you have all that you were hoping for. You have the woman that you wanted, the house, the money, the prestige, the power. You have all that you had always dreamed about; now there is nothing left to dream. The desert has come. Now you suddenly feel a kind of insomnia. You cannot even sleep; the desert is all around.How to transcend this desert? The desert of meaninglessness, the desert of anguish, the desert of absurdity.Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one too…Naturally. We always react from our past: it has always worked, so we think it is going to work in every situation. But one day a situation arises where your past is simply irrelevant, it doesn’t work. That is real crisis – and real opportunity too.The Chinese word for crisis – they don’t have a word, they have pictures – the Chinese ideogram for crisis is beautiful. It consists of two small pictures, of two small ideograms: one means danger, the other means opportunity. Crisis is danger and opportunity. It will depend on you: if you go on reacting out of the past, you will be committing suicide. It is dangerous. If you have the intelligence to see that the problem is new so the answer has to be new – old answers won’t do – if you have that intelligence to see, then it is a great opportunity. Passing through the desert, you will attain great maturity and great integration. And remember, this is how it happens every time.Just the other night a beautiful woman took sannyas. She was afraid. The fear was a very significant fear: the fear was that she could not keep one promise, the promise of marriage, so she was afraid of whether she would be able to keep this promise of sannyas or not. But a marriage is a marriage. Sannyas is not a marriage. A marriage is a bondage, sannyas is freedom. A marriage is a chain, it is law. Sannyas is liberation, it is love. But you can understand that her argument must have gone deep inside her. She wanted to become a sannyasin – a sincere woman – but she was afraid about whether she would be able to keep this promise because she had failed before. She could not keep the promise that she had given to her husband.We always think out of the past. That is how everybody reacts – that is the meaning of reaction. That is the difference between reaction and response. A response means seeing that the situation is so new that you cannot have any answer from the past. Seeing this, you respond to the situation, you go with the situation, you don’t think of the past. If you think of the past and if you bring your past into it, you will destroy the opportunity for growth and you will go on behaving in the old pattern, the old rut. That’s what happens.You have been a Christian, you have been a Hindu, and now you are afraid of being a sannyasin. You think it is also another church. It is not. You think it is again an organization. This is not. You think now it is again becoming part of a belief system. It is not. You are confronting something utterly new, but naturally you react out of the past. You think, “I was a Christian. Now what is the point of becoming a sannyasin?”It happens every day. A Buddhist monk came and he said, “I am fed up with being a monk, so I don’t want to become a sannyasin.” I said, “But this is not being a monk. My sannyasins are not monks.”The word monk means one who lives alone, in loneliness. Monastery comes from the same word monk, a person who renounces the world and lives alone. Monopoly comes from the same word, and monogamy also comes from the same word. They all mean “one” – one husband to one wife, monogamy. A monopoly means one person possesses the power of the whole thing.My sannyasins are not monks; they are non-monks. My sannyasins are not nuns. I don’t destroy people. A nun is a ruin of a woman. A monk is a caricature of a man. I enhance their humanity, I enhance their life and their love. But naturally, when a Buddhist monk comes he thinks, when a Catholic monk comes he thinks, “What is the point?”Just a few days ago there was a Catholic monk here. Living in a Catholic monastery for twelve, thirteen years, he escaped somehow. Now he was afraid. He said, “Now I am very much afraid. I am afraid of you, Osho, because you appeal to me so much that I fear I may become a sannyasin. And I have escaped just now, and I don’t want to get into any other system.”Naturally, we can understand, but the natural is not necessarily true. There are situations when you are facing something so new, something that you have never faced before, but your eyes are full of the past. They interpret in the old, rotten ways.Just as it had crossed every other barrier… It had crossed mountains, it had crossed plains, it had crossed valleys. The stream had crossed many, many things. Coming from the high mountains, from some unknown source, it had traveled long, it had been on a great pilgrimage. It had many experiences of how to cross over the hard rocks. It had always been victorious. Now all that experience will become a barrier.…the stream tried to cross this one too – this desert – but it found as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.It was a new situation. Intelligence consists in seeing the fact that when a situation is new, never try the old. When the situation is new, be new, be inventive. Just drop the past. Look anew, let your consciousness respond to the new. Mirror it. And don’t be afraid of errors and mistakes because in a new situation, the only error that is unforgivable is the error of using something which was useful in some other situation – the only error which cannot be forgiven. All other errors and mistakes are perfectly good, are okay; you will learn through them.It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way.This word conviction is used in a very strange way by Sufis. You say, “I am a convinced Christian” or “I am a convinced Hindu” – that is not the meaning, not the Sufi meaning. Sufis say conviction only means “that which arises from your innermost core, not from the outside.” For example, everybody searches for happiness – that is a conviction. It is natural. Nobody has told you to seek and search for happiness, it is intrinsic to you. Everybody is seeking and searching for it. Nobody has told you that happiness would be possible. In fact, many philosophers are saying that happiness is not possible. Freud says that happiness is not possible. Nietzsche says that happiness is impossible – it has never happened and it can’t happen. It can’t happen in the very nature of things; it is impossible. But still, who bothers about Nietzsche and Freud? People go on searching. Even Nietzsche went on searching. Even Freud went on searching; in his philosophical moments he knew it was not possible, but there were nonphilosophical moments too, when he was a human being and not a psychoanalyst, not the founder of psychoanalysis but just a human being – a father, a husband, a lover, a friend. Then he started searching for happiness, and he knew it was not possible. But that knowing remains superficial.Conviction is that which is inbuilt. The bird making a nest in the tree is convinced of something which she has no knowledge of. She has never made a nest before, she has never given birth to any children before. This is for the first time, and she has never been to any school to learn how to make a nest either. Nobody has told her, nobody has taught her, and suddenly a conviction arises. The moment the bird is pregnant, a conviction arises from some unknown depth that a nest has to be built – not so much in the head, but in the very fibers of her being. She starts moving, arranging things. A thousand and one things have to be arranged, and by the time the children come the nest will be ready. She has no idea of the children, what type of children, no idea of the nest, but it happens. This is conviction in the Sufi sense of the word.Sufis use words in their own way. They twist and turn the language. They make it fit into their own vision. And my feeling is that their use of the word conviction is exactly as it should be.It was convinced, however… against all knowledge, against all experience. The stream was seeing itself disappearing into the desert, but still there was a conviction that its destiny was to cross this desert.Is not that conviction in you too? Are you not convinced? Is there not a conviction somewhere deep down in your being that this earth is not your home, that you have to find your home; that here, somehow you are a stranger, that the love that you are living is somehow superficial – there is much more that must be your destiny – that the life that you are living is not the life that you were meant to live? This conviction is there – hence the search, hence the adventure. Hence one goes on looking here and there, in this direction and that direction. Somewhere there must be a way to find your destiny fulfilled.Who has told you that this is not your home? Who has told you that there is more to life? Who has told you that there is a life which goes beyond death? Nobody has returned from the dead, nobody has said, “I have survived.” No Buddha, no Mahavira, no Krishna has returned from the dead, but there is a subtle conviction, an unshakable conviction, that somehow you will go on living. This body will be gone, this life will be gone, but life will continue – life with a capital L.It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered, “The wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream.”Now look very sympathetically into the story; it has a great message for you. It says: …the desert itself whispered… What does it mean? What does it stand for? It means if you listen to the situation, the problem that is facing you, the crisis that you are going through – if you listen silently to the crisis itself, you will find the key to open the door. In the problem is the solution, that is the meaning. In the disease is hidden the medicine, the treatment. If you can go into the problem without any ready-made answers, the problem will whisper to you, will say to you how it can be solved.The desert is the crisis of the stream; the stream is dying in the desert. But look! – even the desert is your friend. You just have to listen.When you are angry, listen to anger, and you will find the key to open the doors of compassion. When you are sexually overwhelmed, listen to your sexuality and you will find the door to samadhi. Listen to your greed, and you will be surprised that in the very phenomenon of greed is hidden the secret of sharing.This is the art of being meditative, this is real meditation. Whenever you are faced with a problem, go into the problem. And you can go only if you don’t have any solutions already. Those solutions are the enemies. Now see the change. You think those solutions that you are carrying in your head as knowledge are your friends, you think: “Where will I be without those solutions?” That is not true; those solutions are the enemies. Because of those solutions, you cannot listen to the silent whisper of the problem, you cannot penetrate the mystery of the problem.Look at it in this way: you know sex is bad because you have read it in the scriptures. You know it is sin because that’s what the priests have been saying down through the ages. Now this has become ingrained in you, this is your knowledge: sex is sin. Because of this, you will never be able to look deeply into sex with sympathy, you will never be able to go into its mystery. This idea that sex is sin will hinder you, prevent you. And you know that you already know, so there is no point in learning.If you listen to the phenomenon of sex that knocks at your door every day, year in, year out, and goes on knocking even while you are dying… You will be surprised to know that whenever prisoners are crucified, sentenced to death, the last thing that happens to a man is ejaculation. We cannot be so certain about the woman because she has no ejaculation. She must have an orgasm, but invisible. And this is my observation of many people I have watched dying. That has been one of my hobbies from my childhood.In my town, I never allowed anybody to die without my being there. The moment I would hear that somebody was on his deathbed, I would be there. If I could not be found for a few hours, my parents would know: “Look for some dying man – he must be there.” I would follow on the last pilgrimage and I would go with every dying person, rich, poor, beggar – even a dying dog or a cat – and I would sit and watch. And I was surprised again and again, the more perceptive I became; I saw it happen again and again that the last idea when the man dies is sexual – and so is it the case with a dog and with a cat.Sex goes on persisting. It leaves you only when you have learned the lesson, and to learn the lesson you will have to listen to it. You will have to be very meditative with sex, not antagonistic. You will have to be very silent. Enter sex as you enter a temple. It is the holy of the holies, and that secret-most key is hidden there, the master key. Because sex is the source of life, it must have the key that can open the doors.That is the meaning when the desert whispered: “The wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream.”The stream objected……just as you object to me many times. Every day I go on receiving letters – objections, objections: “This should not be so, this should be like this” And you don’t know what you are saying. You don’t know where you are, and you go on prescribing, and you go on advising, and you go on objecting.Just the other day I received a letter. The person has a strong desire to become a sannyasin, but he objects to sannyas “because it is a kind of slavery.” You don’t know anything about sannyas. You don’t know anything about surrender. Surrender makes you a master, not a slave. But that is a mystery to be lived, and there is no other way to understand it unless you live it. Whatever objections come, they come from your past knowledge. And that past knowledge is not valid anymore, not valid for sannyas. You have never been a sannyasin.Now this river has never entered a desert, has never crossed a desert. For the first time a desert has arrived in the river’s life.The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed; that the wind could fly and this was why it could cross a desert.“But how can I?” – very logical. “The wind can fly. I cannot fly. The wind can cross the desert, but how can I?”“By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across.”Listen. The desert says: “By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across.” You will have to drop the accustomed way, the habitual way. That’s what surrender is: dropping the habitual, dropping the past, dropping the known, dropping the learned, and facing the new with a new consciousness.“You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over to your destination.”That’s what let-go is. You must let go, you must allow existence itself to take you to your ultimate destiny. This is what surrender is all about. The desert is teaching surrender to the stream.“But how could this happen?”“By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind.”That is death, that is dying – dying in the master, relaxing into the master. One who has disappeared, disappearing in him.This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality.People go on coming to me and they say, “Sannyas is good, but what about our individuality? Will we not be losing our individuality?”You don’t have any, and you are so worried about losing it. What individuality do you have? The river is worried that it will lose its individuality. In fact, remember always: the essential can never be lost. That’s why in surrender, when you surrender, only the nonessential disappears and the essential arises in its total clarity and brilliance. It was hidden in the nonessential. The nonessential was ninety-nine percent, the garbage was ninety-nine percent, and the Kohinoor, the diamond of your being, was behind the garbage. When you surrender, only the garbage can be surrendered, only the nonessential can be surrendered. The essential is that which cannot be surrendered; there is no way to surrender it. So when the garbage is gone, for the first time you realize your essential core, your Kohinoor, your diamond.But the stream is afraid.It did not want to lose its individuality. And once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be regained?That is your fear too. Everybody hesitates before sannyas, this way and that. How is one to be certain that by surrendering your being, you will not be lost? How will you regain it? You cannot be angry with the stream. Natural logic, your logic, everybody’s logic: “How am I going to know that the essential also will not be lost? And how will I come back again into myself?” The fear is natural.“The wind,” said the sand, “performs this function.”The function of the master is the function of the wind: he allows you to be absorbed in him. In that absorption the nonessential disappears and the essential is, for the first time, luminous to you. You surrender to the master and the master gives you back your inner being, your real being. He takes away only that which you are not. He takes away only that which you never had with you, and he gives you back that which you have always had with you, but were never aware of. He gives you that which you are, and he takes away that which you are not.“The wind…performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river.”“How can I know that this is true?”Every seeker asks, one day or other, “How can I know that this is true? This may be just a myth, a story, a belief to exploit streams. It may be fraud, it may be deception. It may be a subtle trick to cheat, it may be a strategy. How can I know that this is true?”The river wants to be convinced logically, the river wants proof. The river wants to have a preview of what is going to happen.“It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years; and it certainly is not the same as a stream.”The desert says: “It is so…” There is no way to prove it, there is no way to have a preview of it. One knows only by going into it.People come to me and they ask, “What is sannyas?” And I am always at a loss. What to tell them? All that I can say is: become a sannyasin and know what it is. It is an experience, a taste; it is known only by tasting it. But they are logical people, rational people, and they say, “That’s okay, but what if we enter it and nothing happens, there is no taste in it, no joy in it? Some guarantee is needed, some proof is needed. And if there is no proof, at least one thing has to be certain: we can come back again to whatever we were before. Once we are dissolving ourselves, we are getting into insecurity, we are moving into something like a dark night. This is risky.”But there is no way to know things of the beyond. The only way is to go into them, to be them. “And one thing is certain,” the desert says, “I cannot give you any proof. I can only say it is so, I have seen it happen again and again. But if you don’t trust it, you cannot become more than a quagmire. So you can choose: either you become a quagmire, or you take the risk and you disappear in the wind. Even by deciding to become a quagmire, you will never be a stream again. Either way, the stream is going to disappear. You can disappear in cowardliness and you will become a quagmire, and you can disappear into a quantum leap, in great courage. There is a possibility; if you can trust you may be again, in a different form, on a different plane.”When the disciple disappears in the master, he disappears on a very low plane and is born on a higher plane. He dies as the gross and is born as the subtle. He dies as body and is born as spirit. He dies as a circumference and is born as a center. But the decision is yours. You can become a quagmire, but remember, that way the river is also no longer there.“But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?”The stream asks a very, very irrelevant question. “Are these two the only alternatives? – that either I have to become a quagmire and lose my individuality, or I have to disappear into the winds and take the risk of some unknown journey, not knowing where it is going to land me or whether I will be back again on the earth or not? Are these two the only alternatives? Is there not a third alternative?”“But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?” That’s what you also think. But you cannot remain the same. Life is moving, and there is no way to go back, and there is no way to stop movement.A great scientist, Eddington, said that the word rest is an empty word, because in life there is no situation which corresponds to the word rest. Everything is moving, nothing is at rest. Stars move and the earth moves and the sun moves and life moves and the tree moves – everything is movement. Never for a single moment is there any rest. Even when you are asleep and you say, “I am resting,” you are not resting. Everything is moving. After eight hours you will be eight hours older. Even in your deep sleep dreams are moving, your consciousness is moving, your body is changing, your mind is changing. All is movement, life is movement, so there is no way to remain the same.“You cannot in either case remain so,” the whisper said. “Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one.”To know the essential, the only way is to drop the nonessential, to discard the nonessential. To know the false as false is the only way to know what truth is.When he heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts of the stream.Yes, the stream could see it was true. The stream was not human –human beings are very blind. Even streams are not so blind. Human beings are very stupid and adamant and stubborn. The stream could see the point: “Yes, I cannot remain the same. I have never been the same even for two consecutive moments. Things have always been changing. That is true; I have been a constant change. Except change, everything changes. It is true.”

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The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 01-09Category: SUFISM

The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 02 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-wisdom-of-sands-vol-1-02/

The first question:Osho,Why are you against ascetic practices? Aren't they religious? Isn't asceticism a path to God?It is just the opposite: it is a path to the madhouse. It is pathological. It is an expression of an ill mind, it is an expression of a violent mind. Ordinarily violence is directed toward others, but violence can be directed toward oneself too. And when violence is directed toward oneself it is more dangerous, because there is nobody to defend you.When you are violent with somebody else, the other is there to defend, to protect himself, to fight with you. When the violence turns upon yourself, it is absolute; there is nobody left to defend you.So to me, Adolf Hitler is less dangerous than Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler is less violent than Mahatma Gandhi. It will be very difficult for you to understand it, but this has been happening down the ages: the people who are masochistic have declared themselves religious. Religion is an excuse to be a masochist: take the excuse away and the masochist is exposed.If you go on thinking that a person who is torturing himself is a spiritual person, you are also nourishing his masochism. He’s simply enjoying torturing himself. There is a joy that comes out of torturing oneself. It consists of the feeling of power. When you torture somebody else, then too it gives you the feeling of power. That’s why violence exists. People simply go on doing violence to each other; that is their only way to feel powerful. They can destroy the other; that is their power. But there is a variety of violence where you can start destroying yourself, and you will feel powerful.For example, the story is told – I don’t believe it is true, but it could be true – that a Hindu mystic, Surdas, was passing through a street and he saw a beautiful woman, and for a moment he forgot that he had renounced the world. He forgot that he was a saint, he forgot all about religion, discipline, Yoga. In that moment, his heart simply moved with great passion and love toward the woman. Just a moment later he caught hold of himself. He went back to his hut and destroyed his eyes, became blind, because the scriptures say if the eyes lead you astray, destroy them. He must have felt immensely powerful while destroying his eyes: “I can do even this!” The ego must have felt very, very subtle nourishment. The ego must have become stronger than ever.It was not the eyes; it was his capacity to become unconscious. The eyes had not led him astray. How can eyes lead you astray? Eyes are just windows into the world. Standing in your room looking out of the window, you see a beautiful woman. You don’t destroy the window. And by destroying the window you will not gain anything: you will not become more spiritual, you will not become less sexual, your passion will not disappear. You will only be closed in your house and your passion will go on boiling within you. Eyes are windows.Just a few days ago – I think just seven days ago – a woman in America cut off one of her hands because the Bible says if your hand offends you, it is better to cut it off and throw it away than to fall into hell and suffer for eternity. Do you call these people religious – Surdas or this woman, and there are millions of that type? Do you call them spiritual? They are pathological.A religious person is a healthy, whole person. He accepts life as it is, and he accepts the joys that life brings. He dances with the dance, he sings a thousand and one songs. His approach is not antagonistic, it is not antilife.The ascetic approach is antilife, it is suicidal. You may be committing suicide very slowly and partially – that doesn’t make much difference. Somebody jumps from a cliff and destroys himself, and somebody slowly, slowly – in installments – goes on destroying himself, takes years to destroy himself. This is slow poisoning, but there is no difference. In fact, the man who jumps from the cliff is more courageous than the man who goes on committing suicide slowly.But down the ages we have praised these insane people, we have worshipped them. Because of this worship, humanity has remained immature and humanity has remained abnormal. The normal people are not normal, they are only called normal. They exist in great numbers, but they are not the norm and they are not healthy either. They somehow manage to live their lives. A man who is destructive to his being is insane, and the people who worship him as a saint are also insane.I am utterly against ascetic practices because those practices are against life. I am all for life, I am all for God. God is a celebration. Look around: the whole of existence is continuously in a celebration, in a kind of “alleluia.” It continues singing and dancing, and loving and enjoying. If you watch existence, you will understand what it is to be religious. To be part of this celebration is to be religious.I have heard…The late Aga Khan III, leader of the Ismaili Moslem sect, was partial to the pleasures of the table. When a visitor asked him how he reconciled his predilection for worldly enjoyment with his status as a religious leader, the Aga replied, “I do not think the Lord meant the good things of this world to be enjoyed only by the sinners.”I perfectly agree with the Aga. It is stupid that only sinners can enjoy and saints have to live in prisons called monasteries. They cannot eat, or even if they eat, they are not allowed to taste. They cannot listen to beautiful music because it is sensuous. They cannot dance because the origin of dance is in sex: the peacock dances when it wants to make love. They cannot sing because a song is nothing but an expression of sex. The birds sing; they are not reciting the Koran or the Vedas or the Gita. These are love calls. The flowers bloom; they are not blooming there for you to cut them and take them to the temple to some altar. The flowers are the expression of the sexuality of the plant. If you watch deeply, everything is sensuous; life is sensuous and everything is rooted in sex because life itself is born in sex.The so-called spiritual person starts eliminating his life. One by one, all things disappear. He is left almost dead, he simply vegetates. I am not for that kind of existence.My sannyasins have to be yea-sayers, not no-sayers. My sannyasins have to affirm life in its totality, in its multidimensionality, in all its possibilities and richness and variety. My sannyasin has to be rooted in existence, and my sannyasin has to live all the planes of life, from sex to samadhi. If something disappears of its own accord, that is another thing; but that is not asceticism. I know a moment comes when your energies start moving into higher planes of being, sex disappears because it is not needed. It is not needed because you are enjoying the same energy on higher planes – not because it is wrong, not because it was something ugly. It is not needed because the same energy is having higher orgasms. Samadhi is the ultimate orgasm; sex is only a glimpse of it. Sex is a momentary samadhi, and samadhi is eternal sex.Naturally, when you have attained samadhi, sex will disappear, but it is not that you have to renounce it. If you renounce it, then you are doing something wrong. Go on moving deeper and higher, and whatever needs to disappear will disappear. Ultimately all disappears. Only God is left, only pure joy is left, uncaused joy is left. But it is not that you renounce. If you renounce, you will never attain that state.I have heard…There was a young man who was searching for greater and greater austerities, for he believed that nothing of real value is obtained easily. Finally, he located an ancient monastery in the Himalayas whose monks had taken the most severe vows of poverty and austerity. This monastery was on the summit of an awesome mountain peak, and the monks had to climb and descend by hauling themselves up and down the iron chains that were hammered into the mountain face. No heat was allowed in the monastery and the monks slept on the cold, stone floor. For sustenance they descended the chains each day to pry up the frozen ground in search of the few lichens that grew there. The remainder of the time they meditated, chanted, and made offerings. Now, these practices pleased the young man and he requested, and he was granted, permission to remain with them.The monks’ form of meditation was to contemplate various riddles and shortly after the young man’s arrival, the abbot of the monastery posed this question: “How high is up?” Then he instructed the young man to meditate for one month and return with the answer. It was difficult to think about anything, since he was constantly shivering. But the harshness was a challenge to the young man, and after a month had passed he was confident of the answer.Again the abbot asked, “How high is up?” and the young man replied, “As high as man’s mind may imagine it to be.”But the abbot gave him a look of disdain and said, “Meditate for another month.” And the young man did.When the month had passed, he met with the abbot and his answer was: “Up is as high as God wills it to be.” Again he was rejected and returned to his meditation. The next month when asked the same question, he said not a word, but raised one cold, stiff finger and pointed up. And again he was sent away. Each month the young man became more and more convinced that no answer could ever satisfy the abbot, and his frustration increased. The next time he saw the abbot and the question was asked, his voice was taut with suppressed anger: “This is foolishness! There is no answer!” And again he was sent away, this time with more mockery than usual, for the abbot knew the young man was close to the truth.As he departed from the presence of the abbot, the young man vowed to make a last attempt to discover the answer. He ceased eating even the few lichens, and maintained a vigil atop the roof that was raised over the mountains. When the long month finally ended, the other monks removed him from the roof and tried to thaw him out so that he could speak with the abbot. Then the question was asked again: “How high is up?”The young man looked blank for a second, then suddenly he screamed and jumped violently up and down several times, and before anyone could stop him, he leaped across the room and kicked the abbot so hard that he was thrown to the floor. The monks rushed to the aid of the abbot and lifted him up. As soon as he had recovered, he smiled and said to the young man: “You have got it.”Then the young man quickly gathered his few possessions and departed from the monastery. By the time he had returned home he was filled with happiness, for he had found truth and achieved enlightenment.Or perhaps the reason he felt so good was because he was warm. Ascetic practices give you a kind of ill, morbid joy. The more you go into them, the more you feel you are becoming a conqueror, you are conquering something. The more the body says, “Don’t destroy me,” the more you become adamant. You create a rift within yourself, between you and your body, and a great battle starts.And the body is natural. The body simply asks for that which is healthy, natural – only for that which God allows and God wants to happen. The body has no unnatural desires. All its needs are natural needs, healthy needs, and the more you starve the body, the more the body prays and asks and haunts you. But you can make it a challenge: you can think that the body is trying to seduce you, that the body is in the hands of the enemy, in the hands of the Devil. And you can go on fighting more and more, with more strength, with more violence, with more aggression. You go on fighting with the body and a moment comes when you can dull the body.If you go on fasting for a long time, the body by and by relaxes into a kind of dullness. It starts accepting, it adjusts itself. There is no point: there is nobody who takes care. So what is the point of going on crying? The body becomes dumb. You lose sensitivity, you become thick. You grow a thick skin around yourself. Then the hot and the cold do not bother you, then starvation does not bother you. Rather, on the contrary, you feel very good deep inside: you are conquering. But you are not conquering; you are losing ground. Each moment you are losing ground because truth can only be known through the body. Truth is known by the consciousness, but known through the body. One has to remain rooted in the body.God himself is rooted in the world. Take a tree out of the soil and it will die. The life of the tree is intertwined with the life of the earth: it needs water, it needs manure, it needs food, it needs the sun, the air, the wind. Those are natural needs; the tree exists through them. Take the tree out of the soil, and for a few days maybe you may not notice that the tree is dying. The old water that it contained in itself may keep it a little bit green; even a few buds may open, a few flowers may bloom, but not for long. Sooner or later, the reservoirs of the tree will be finished and the tree will die.Take yourself out of your body and you will die. Your body is your earth. Your body belongs to the earth, it has come from the earth, it is a small earth around you. It nourishes you, it is not your enemy. It is not in the hands of the Devil. There is no Devil; the Devil is a creation of the pathological mind, the Devil is the creation of the paranoid mind. It has come into the world because of fear. But your so-called God has also come out of fear, so your God and your Devil have both come out of your fear. You have not known the real God. The real God is not out of fear. The real God is out of love, out of joy. The real God can only be experienced by becoming more and more sensitive, by becoming more and more open.Be in your body. Get out of your mind and get into your senses. That is the only way to be religious. It will look paradoxical, but let me say it: the only way to be religious is to be in the world, and deeply in the world, because God is hidden in the world. There is no other world. The “other world” is the deepest core of this world; it is not separate from it.I’m against all ascetic practices and in the future, ascetics will be treated in mad asylums, psychiatric hospitals. Out of a hundred of your so-called saints, ninety-nine have been neurotic, but because you believed, you could not see what was really happening. Once you believe in a certain thing, the belief creates the phenomenon.If you drop all kinds of beliefs and you start looking with clarity, you will be surprised. Man has not suffered through irreligious people; man has suffered in the hands of the so-called religious. Man’s greatest misery has come out of the split between body and soul. Man has become schizophrenic because of your saints, your churches, your scriptures. I’m not saying that there have never been real saints; there have been. Jesus or Diogenes, Buddha and Krishna, Zarathustra and Lao Tzu – these people loved life. And the tradition that says something else is created by the pathological.Now, Christians say Jesus never laughed. This is utter nonsense. This nonsense is imposed by the Christians on Jesus. They have painted Jesus as a sad, long face. The Jesus in the churches is a false Jesus. The churches have created an artificial Jesus of their own. The real Jesus, the authentic Jesus, was a man of laughter, a man of celebration. In fact, it can’t be otherwise.My message to you is: enjoy life as totally as possible and you will be coming closer and closer to the divine, you will be coming closer to home.The second question:Osho,You spoke today of the necessity of having a transparent mind so one can see more clearly and thus eliminate the necessity of choice.Aren't desires, which only come from the ego, the sole cause of the muddying of the mind? Surely with no desires there would be no need for choice – things would simply happen.The problem then comes right back to eliminating the ego and desires. It seems to be a vicious circle whose hold is broken either through a gradual process of attrition of the ego and desires, spanning many lives, or by getting out of the circle by taking the leap or gamble into the unknown. The second method seems to be the preferable one, but where does the motivation come from to break out of the circle? Action is generally motivated by some desire. One can let things happen, or one can act, which again means choice.First, there are not two ways to come out of the desiring mind, there is only one way. If there were two, then again there would be choice. There is only one.The first thing you say: “…through a gradual process of attrition of ego and desires, spanning many lives…” That is out of your muddle headedness. The first is created by your mind because the mind always wants to postpone. It always says “tomorrow,” “next life.” It creates time. Time is a mind creation because mind cannot exist without time. The mind cannot exist in the now-here. The mind can only exist in the future or in the past; it projects. So the mind says, “It is a very complex problem. You will be able to solve it only slowly, slowly, desire by desire. You will have to change, practice. You will have to do a thousand and one methods: following paths, techniques, methods. Finally, somewhere in the distant future, one day you will become enlightened. You will come out of all desiring.”But your practicing in all these lives will be out of motivation, the motivation to become enlightened. All your methods, all your practices, will be basically rooted in the motivation for enlightenment. So for all these lives you will be feeding the motivation to become enlightened; it will become stronger and stronger. You will not be able to get out of it, you will be helping it to become stronger. It will be stronger tomorrow, the day after tomorrow still stronger, and so on and so forth, because each day you will be carrying the motive in your mind. You will be giving energy to it, you will be pouring your life juices into it. If you cannot become enlightened right now, tomorrow it is going to be a little more difficult, and the day after tomorrow still more difficult. And after that one never knows: it may happen, it may not happen at all. Now or never!So the first alternative is not really there. It is a strategy of the mind. And the second: “…by taking the leap or gamble into the unknown. The second method seems to be the preferable one…”There is no other. It is not preferable; that is the only thing there is. It is not a question of choosing. There is no choice in life. Life is simply choicelessly there. There are not two doors in life; it is only a single door. That is why Jesus says, “The way is straight but narrow.” It is very narrow, there is not much possibility to choose – no possibility to choose, really.The problem is how to do the second, which is the only one. How do you do it? Because the question arises again: “Where do you get the motive from?”Have you never seen any action arising in you which comes without any motivation? Later on, you may find out, recapitulate, reconsider the whole situation, and you may think that there was a motive. But in the actual act there was none.For example, you come across a path and you see a snake moving. There is not time enough to think. Motivation will need time, you will have to go into a syllogism: you will have to see the snake, whether it is poisonous or not, dangerous or not. You will have to think about other experiences with snakes and other people’s opinions about the snakes. You will have to ponder. And then you will become afraid and there will be a motivation: how to protect yourself, how to jump, what to do. But all these things are just imaginary. When you face the snake, you simply jump out of the way. The jump comes first; there is no motivation, the act is total. You are the act – it is not that there is an actor and the act, and there is a mind between the two, thinking and pondering what to do. You simply act.Your house is on fire. You rush out, you don’t ponder over it. No thinking happens: in a moment of no-thought the action arises. That action is unmotivated, although if you look backward, if you recapitulate, you can find a motive. That motive is created by the mind. The mind cannot understand anything without a motive; the mind is the motive. Even where no motive exists, the mind imposes a motive. Later on, sitting under a tree, relaxing, you will think, “I acted out of the fear motive. I was afraid of death, that’s why I jumped.” But this is wrong, this is absolutely wrong. There was no death, there was no fear. You simply acted; the act came from intuition, not from thought and intellect. The house was on fire, you simply rushed out. It was a natural phenomenon, it was a happening.People used to come to Buddha again and again and say, “Yes, whatever you say is right, seems right, seems rational, logical. We would also like to get out of this wheel of life and death, but you make things impossible. You say, ‘Just jump without any motive because if you have any motive, then you will remain in the vicious circle of life and death. All motives are spokes of the wheel, so you will be clinging. If you have any motive, any desire, any goal, any future, you will again and again be creating the same pattern. Just come out of it with no idea.’”People would say, “We understand. It looks logical: the world is nothing but a projection of our desires, so if we have any desire – even to get out of the world – that will create another world, ad infinitum, one behind the other. You can go on and on. Then how can you get out of it?”And Buddha would say, “Just see the point that life is meaningless. Be clear that this life is illusory, that there is only misery and pain and nothing else, agony and nothing else.”See that the house is on fire, and then there is no “how.” The man whose house is on fire does not consult a guidebook, How to Get Out of the House When It Is on Fire. He simply finds a way. He jumps from the window, from the back door. He is not worried about the doors and the windows and etiquette and manners; those luxuries are not possible in that moment. You can afford those luxuries only when the house is not on fire and you are resting in your house and thinking and planning: “If the house were on fire, from where would I get out?” But the “if” has to be there – then you can ponder over it, brood over it.When I say “the clarity of mind,” I simply mean seeing a fact as it is. If it is false, it drops of its own accord from your being; you need not have any motive to drop it. Nobody has dropped anything, nobody can drop anything, because in the dropping is the clinging. You cannot renounce anything. In the very renunciation there is attachment.You think, “My living in the family, being with the wife and the children is an attachment. It does not allow me meditativeness. It does not allow me time, space to search for God. I should go to the Himalayas, I should leave this family.” You can manage to leave, you can renounce the family, you can escape to the Himalayas, but sitting in a Himalayan cave you will think of your wife and your children, and God will be as far away as ever – in fact, further away. When you are with your wife and children, you need not think much about them. They are there, so what is the need to think? When they are not there, then you will think continuously. Then all the joys that you had enjoyed with the wife and the children – your child giggling and running in the garden, you sitting by the side of your wife, and all that nostalgia – will come in thousands of ways, in far more beautiful forms, far more luminous, far more psychedelic.Sitting in your cave, what are you going to do? You will think of the home, the warmth of the home, the comfort of the home. The cave will only throw you back to the home again and again. The coldness of the cave will remind you of the warmth of your wife, her warm body – nobody to look after you, nobody to take care of you. And you will be thinking again and again about what you have done to yourself and how you can forgive yourself for leaving your children as orphans. That will torture, that will torture your being, that will hurt. It will become a wound. You will not be able to forget; you will not be able to forgive either.This is a stupid way. Nobody renounces, nobody leaves anything, nobody drops anything. One who understands finds that a few things have disappeared. In the very understanding is the disappearance. I know – living in your home, living with your wife and children, a moment comes when you are no longer a husband and she is no longer a wife. In fact, when you are no longer a husband and she is no longer a wife, love arises in its greatest splendor.To be a husband is ugly, to be a wife is ugly. It is institutional, it is legal, it is a kind of contract. Marriage is ugly. There comes a moment of understanding when marriage simply disappears. And you know – how can you become the master of a woman? The very idea is violent, the very idea is egoistic. How can you possess a woman? How can you reduce a beautiful woman into an ugly wife? She becomes a freedom again, she is no longer in the cage called wifehood. You become free again, you are no longer a husband – you both start flying in the sky, free. You are no longer caged. The marriage has disappeared; the love sky is open.This is the way to get out of attachment: it is not by renouncing the people you love, it is by renouncing the ugly things that you have gathered around the people you love. And that renunciation comes out of a transparent clarity.How can you say, “This is my child”? All children are children of existence. If you are in your senses, how can you claim, “This child is mine”? He comes through you, that is true; you have been a passage for the child, but you can’t own him, you can’t possess him. You can love him, you can celebrate his coming to you, but you can’t become in any way a power over the child. Understanding transforms situations.Just try to understand what you are living, what your life is. Look deeply into it, watch deeply. There is no hurry to change anything. Never be in a hurry to change, just let your insight become profound. Seeing a thing as false, you are freed. And to know the false as the false is to know the truth as the truth. Seeing the false as the false, your eyes start moving toward the true.That’s what I mean when I say enlightenment comes out of choicelessness. It is unmotivated. Seeing the futility of all kinds of motivation, it happens.The third question:Osho,What stands in the way of my saying yes to life, to surrendering totally? And is it always right to say yes?It is difficult to say yes to life because you have been taught to say no. And the conditioning is very ancient. Not only is the conditioning there – which does not allow you to say yes – there is some inner mechanism also that does not allow you to say yes.When a child is born he is a yes-sayer. Slowly, slowly, as he starts feeling himself an individual, the no arises. When the child starts saying no, you can be certain this is the time the ego is born. The ego cannot exist without saying no, so each child has to say no. It is an inner necessity to become an individual. If the child goes on saying yes to everything, he will never become an individual, he will not have any definition to his being. How will he be able to be defined? “Yes” gives you no definition; “no” gives you definition. When you say no, you know it is “I” saying no. When you say yes, there is no “I” in it.Life and you remain one when you say yes. When you say no, you demark a line, you assert yourself. That is the meaning of the Biblical story of Adam disobeying God, saying no. It is a must, otherwise Adam would never have become separate from God. He would never have had any individuality; he would have remained vague, a kind of cloud, nebulous. He has to say no, he has to disobey, he has to rebel.And remember, this is not something that happened in the past and happened only once; it happens with each new Adam, with each new child of man. Each child lives in the Garden of Eden for a few months, a few years, and then slowly, slowly he has to deny, he has to rebel, he has to disobey. The father says, “Don’t do this,” and he has to do it just to say, “I am myself. You cannot go on ordering me like that. I’m not a slave. I have my own preferences, I have my own likes and dislikes.” Sometimes the child even does something which he does not like to do much, but he has to do it because the father is saying don’t do it.Children start smoking cigarettes. No child likes smoking a cigarette for the first time – nobody can like it. Tears come to the eyes, the child starts coughing, the throat feels miserable, the heart does not like it – but he has to do it because the father is saying, “Don’t smoke.” He has to go against the father; that is the only way to have a separate existence. He has to go against the mother, he has to go against the teacher. There is a time for each child to say no, and that is good as it is. I am not against it, otherwise there would be no more individuals. But then you become accustomed to saying no.There is a time, a season to say no, and there is a time to learn to drop unnecessary no’s. Otherwise you will never attain unity with the divine. Just see the point: no helps you to become separate from your father, your mother, your family, your society. It is good, as far as it goes, it is good. But then one day you have to learn to say yes to existence. Otherwise you will always remain separate, and the separation creates misery, the separation creates a kind of struggle in life, a fight. Life becomes a war, and life should not be a war. It should be a relaxed joy. So one has to say yes one day.You ask me, “What stands in the way of my saying yes…?” You are afraid of losing your ego. You stand in the way, your ego stands in the way. It was good that it helped you to get rid of your past heritage, history, your parents, your family, your church. It is good, but its work is finished; you are no longer a child. Now don’t go on fighting. Just don’t go on carrying the old habit of saying no; otherwise you will remain childish.See the paradox: if a child never says no he will never grow, and if a grown-up man goes on saying no he will remain childish. One day you need to say no with your total heart, and one day you need to drop the no too.And you ask, “And is it always right to say yes?” No, not always. No has its own utility. One should not be addicted to it, that’s all. No is not bad in itself. There are moments when you have to say no, there are moments when you have to say yes. One should be free to say yes or no; that’s what I have been telling you. One should not be addicted to either. A free person is one who looks at each situation and says yes or no – whatever the response is, whatever he feels like in that moment. That yes and no should not come from the past, should not come from the memory. It should not be a reaction; it should be a response.A man was alone out in a rowboat on the Potomac shouting, “No! No! No!”Somebody was watching: “Why is this man saying, ‘No! No! No!’?” And there was nobody else, he was alone on the boat. And not only was he saying it, he was shouting to the sky, “No! No! No!” The watcher was naturally puzzled.“Nothing to worry about,” said a passing policeman to the puzzled man. “He’s just a White House yes-man on vacation.”A balance is needed. If you go on saying, “Yes, yes,” if you are a yes-man, that will be lopsided and you will need a vacation. You will have to go on some boat alone and shout, “No! No! No!” Then you will feel good.Yes and no are like inhalation–exhalation; you need not choose. You have to inhale and you have to exhale, and both are needed. Your house is on fire and you rush out: this is no. You are saying to the fire, “I am going out.” A snake crosses your path and you jump out of the way; you say no. You may not be actually saying no, but there are a thousand gestures which are a no.A man should be free to say yes or no. If you are obsessed with yes, you will not have any individuality. If you are obsessed with no, you will have only the ugly ego. A man in a tremendous balance of yes and no is healthy and whole.And to say yes is not always right; it cannot be. Nothing is always right, and nothing is always bad. But you have been taught fixed ideas again and again: this is bad and this is right. Rightness and wrongness change; they change as circumstances change. No act in itself is right, or can be right, or wrong, or can be wrong. Each situation is new, and one ever knows. Never carry fixed ideas, fixed ideas are obsessive. Remain free to act. A religious person is one who responds, who is free to act in each and every situation, whose reactions are not fixed reactions, who is not mechanical.Two men were out mountain climbing when one of them said, “I’m more experienced than you. I’ll go in front and show you how it is done.” So he went up in front and fell down a great big hole about 250 feet deep. The other fellow shouted down, “Are you all right?”“No, I have broken both arms.”“Well, climb up with your legs.”“I have broken both legs too.”“Well, then climb up with your teeth.” So he climbed up with his teeth and it took him ages. He was almost at the top when the fellow shouted down, “Are you all right?”And the answer came: “YEEEEEEeeeeessss” and he went down again.Yes is not always right.The fourth question:Osho,“Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first.” I love this Sufi saying, but I don't know who or what the camel is.It changes. The camel is not a fixed entity; it comes in all shapes and sizes. The camel is only a symbol. It simply says one thing: don’t be passive. God has no hands other than your hands. Trust in Allah, trust in God, but that should not be an excuse for becoming lousy, lazy.There are three types of people in the world. One who thinks he has to do something; he himself is the doer. He does not trust the whole, the encompassing whole. He simply lives on his small energy, and naturally is defeated again and again and proves a failure. If you live on your very small energy against this vast energy that surrounds you, you are going to be a loser, a goner. And you will suffer great agonies and anguish. Your whole life will be nothing but a long, long misery.Then the second type of person is one who thinks, “When God is doing everything, I don’t need to do anything. I’m not supposed to do anything.” He simply sits and waits. His life becomes more and more lazy and there comes a point when he no longer lives; he simply vegetates.These two types represent West and East. The West represents the doer, the active type, and the East represents the non-doer, the passive type.The West is driving itself crazy. The problem of Western humanity is too much action, no trust, too much dependence upon oneself – as if “I have to do everything,” as if “I am alone,” as if “Existence does not care a bit about me.” Naturally it creates anxiety, and the anxiety is too much, unbearable. It creates all kinds of neuroses, psychoses; it keeps people always on the verge, tense, nervous. It is murderous, it is maddening. The West has succeeded in doing many things, has succeeded in getting rid of the idea of God, has succeeded in dropping all kinds of trust and surrender, has dropped all kinds of relaxing moods, knows nothing of let-go – has forgotten completely. That’s why in the West people are finding it more and more difficult even to fall asleep, because sleep needs a certain kind of trust.Once I came to know a man who could not sleep at night. He would keep himself awake. He would sleep in the day, but he would keep himself awake at night. His wife told me, “Do something, because this is creating many problems. He cannot work because he sleeps in the day, and the whole night stays awake and also keeps us awake. He is driving me mad!”I inquired as to what the phenomenon was. The man was a great doubter, an untrusting man. He told me, “I cannot sleep at night because everybody is asleep. If something happens to me, then who is there to take care? I sleep in the day because the children are awake, my wife is awake, the neighbors are awake, the whole world is awake. If something happens to me, it can be taken care of. If I die at night, then…? If I stop breathing in the night, then…?” He was a madman.But that is exactly what is creating insomnia in the West. People think they cannot fall asleep, that something has gone wrong in their bodies. Nothing has gone wrong in their bodies. Their bodies are as healthy as ever, in fact, healthier than ever. But something has gone so deeply into their minds: they have to do everything. And sleep cannot be done; that is not part of doing. Sleep has to be allowed. You cannot do it, it is not an act; sleep comes, it happens. And the West has completely forgotten how to let things happen, how to be in a let-go. So sleep has become difficult, love has become difficult, orgasm has become difficult. Life is so tense and strained that there seems to be no hope and man asks again and again, “What is there to live for? Why go on living?” The West is on the verge of committing suicide. That moment of suicide is coming closer and closer.The East has succeeded in relaxing too much, in being too much in a let-go. It has become very lazy. People go on dying, starving – and they are happy with it, they are not worried about it. They trust existence; they adjust to all kinds of ugly situations, they never change anything. They are good sleepers, and they have a certain calm and quietude about them, but their lives are almost like vegetating. In the East, millions of people die every year just because of hunger. Neither do they do anything, nor does anybody else bother about it: “It must be the will of Allah!”This Sufi saying wants to create the third type of man, the real man: who knows how to do and who knows how not to do; who can be a doer when needed, can say yes and who can be passive when needed and can say no; who is utterly wakeful in the day and utterly asleep in the night; who knows how to inhale and how to exhale, who knows the balance of life.“Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first.” This saying comes from a small story…A master was traveling with one of his disciples. The disciple was in charge of taking care of the camel. They came in the night, tired, to a caravanserai. It was the disciple’s duty to tether the camel, but he didn’t bother about it; he left the camel outside. Instead of that, he simply prayed. He said to Allah, “Take care of the camel,” and fell asleep.In the morning the camel was gone – stolen or had moved away, or whatever happened. The master asked, “What happened to the camel? Where is the camel?”The disciple said, “I don’t know. Ask Allah because I told him to take care of the camel. And I was too tired, so I don’t know. I am not responsible either because I told him, and very clearly – there was no missing the point. In fact, not only once; I told him thrice. And you go on teaching ‘Trust Allah,’ so I trusted. Now don’t look at me with anger.”The master said, “Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first because Allah has no other hands than yours.”If Allah wants to tether the camel, he will have to use somebody’s hands. He has no other hands. And it is your camel: the best way, and the easiest and the shortest, is to use your hands. Trust Allah. Don’t trust only your hands, otherwise you will become tense. Tether the camel and trust Allah. You will ask, “Then why trust existence if you are tethering the camel?” Because a tethered camel can also be stolen. Do whatever you can do. That does not make the result certain, there is no guarantee. So do whatever you can and then whatever happens, accept it. This is the meaning of tether the camel: do whatever is possible for you to do, don’t shirk your responsibility, and then if nothing happens or something goes wrong, trust Allah. Then he knows best. Then maybe it is right for us to travel without the camel.It is very easy to trust Allah and be lazy. It is very easy not to trust Allah and be a doer. The third type of man is difficult – to trust Allah and yet remain a doer. But now you are only instrumental; God is the real doer, you are just instruments in his hands.And you ask: “I love this Sufi saying, but I don’t know who or what the camel is.” It depends on the context. The content of the camel will be there, but the context will be different. Each day it happens: you could have done something but you didn’t do it, and you are using the excuse that if God wants it done, he will do it anyhow. You do something and then you wait for the result, you expect, and the result never comes. Then you are angry, as if you have been cheated, as if God has betrayed you, as if he is against you, partial, prejudiced, unjust. And there arises great complaint in your mind. Then trust is missing.A religious person is one who goes on doing whatever is humanly possible, but creates no tension because of it. Because we are very, very tiny, small atoms in this vast universe, things are very complicated. Nothing depends only on my action; there are thousands of crisscrossing energies. The total of the energies will decide the outcome. How can I decide the outcome? But if I don’t do anything, then things may never be the same. I have to do, and yet I have to learn not to expect. Then doing is a kind of prayer, with no desire that the result should be such. Then there is no frustration. Trust will help you to remain unfrustrated, and tethering the camel will help you to remain alive, intensely alive. And the camel is not a fixed entity; it is not the name of a certain entity. It will depend on the context.The town was in an uproar. An inmate of the local lunatic asylum had escaped and had raped two women. Everybody was horrified. Late that afternoon the local newspaper’s headline ran: “Nut Bolts and Screws.”Now if you read the headline alone, you would never know the meaning of it – “Nut Bolts and Screws.” You would have to read the whole story; the meaning depends on the context.Unfortunately, the lives of most people reflect the insight in the following exchange between two businessmen:“It is remarkable! You have been in the market for only six months and you end up with a million dollars? How did you do it?”“Ah,” the response was, “it’s very easy. I started with two million.”The camel is not a fixed entity. You will have to look into the whole context; it will go on changing. But the saying is of immense value: it is the Sufi approach to create the third man.The fifth question:Osho,What is the law of karma?It is not in fact a law because there is nobody behind it who is a lawgiver. On the contrary, it is intrinsic to existence itself. It is the very nature of life: whatever you sow, you reap. But it is complex, it is not so simple, it is not so obvious.To make it clearer, try to understand it in a psychological way because the modern mind can understand only if something is explained in a psychological way. In the past, when the law of karma was talked about – when Buddha talked about it and Mahavira talked about it – they used physiological, physical analogies. Man has gone far away from that, man has moved far away from that. Now man lives more in the psychological; so this will be helpful.Every crime against one’s own nature, every one, without exception, records itself in our unconscious, what the Buddhists call alaya vigyan, the storehouse of consciousness – each crime.And what is a crime? It is not because of the court of Manu that it is a crime, because that court is no longer relevant; it is not because the Ten Commandments say it is a crime, that too is no longer relevant; and it is not because a certain government says it is a crime, because that goes on changing. Something is a crime in Russia and the same thing is not a crime in America. Something is a crime according to the Hindu tradition and the same thing is not a crime according to the Mohammedan tradition. Then what is crime? There has to be a universal definition for it.My definition is: that which goes against your nature, that which goes against your self, your being, is a crime. And how can you know it is a crime? Whenever you commit that crime, it is recorded in your unconsciousness. It is recorded in a certain way: it is recorded and starts giving you a feeling of guilt. You start despising yourself, you start feeling unworthy, you start feeling you are not as you should be. Something inside you becomes hard, something closes inside you. You are no longer as flowing as you were. Something has become solid, frozen. That hurts, brings pain, and brings a feeling of unworthiness.Karen Horney has a good word to describe this unconscious perceiving and remembering. She says, “It registers.” I like it: “It registers.” Everything you do registers itself automatically. If you have been loving, it registers that you are loving, it gives you a feeling of worth. If you have been hateful, angry, destructive, dishonest, it registers and gives you a feeling of unworthiness, a feeling of being something below human, a feeling of inferiority. And whenever you feel unworthy, you feel cut off from the flow of life. How can you flow with people when you are hiding something? Flow is possible only when you expose yourself, when you are available, totally available.If you have been cheating on your woman and seeing another woman, you cannot be with your woman totally. It is impossible because it registers: deep in your unconscious you know that you have been dishonest, deep in your unconscious you know that you have betrayed, deep in your unconscious you know that you have to hide it, that you are not to reveal it. If you have something to hide, if you have something to keep secret from your beloved, there will be distance. The bigger the secret, the bigger the distance will be. If there are too many secrets, then you are completely closed. You cannot relax with this woman, and you cannot allow this woman to relax with you because your tenseness creates tenseness in her, her tenseness makes you even more tense, and it goes on creating a vicious circle.Yes, it registers in our books, in our beings. Remember, there are no books which God is keeping. That was an old way of saying the same thing. Your being is the book. Whatever you are and whatever you do is constantly being registered. Not that there is somebody writing it; it is a natural phenomenon. If you have been lying, it is registered that you are lying; and now you have to protect those lies, and to protect one lie you will have to tell one thousand lies. And again to protect those one thousand lies you will have to go on and on and on. You become, by and by, a chronic liar. Truth becomes impossible for you because to tell one truth will be dangerous now.See how things go together: if you tell one lie, then many lies are invited. The same attracts the same, and now truth is unwelcome because the darkness of the lies will not like the light of truth. So, even when your lies are not in any danger of being exposed, you will not be able to speak the truth. If you speak one truth, many other truths are invited: like attracts like. If you are naturally truthful, it is very difficult to lie even once because all that truth protects you. And this is a natural phenomenon. There is no God keeping a book. You are the book. You are the God, your being is the book.Abraham Maslow says, “If we do something we are ashamed of, it registers to our discredit. And if we do something good, it registers to our credit.” You can watch it, you can observe it. The law of karma is not some philosophy, some abstraction. It is simply a theory which explains something true inside your being. The net result is either we respect ourselves, or we despise and feel contemptible, worthless and unlovable.Every moment you are creating yourself; either a grace will arise in your being or a disgrace. This is the law of karma. Nobody can avoid it. Nobody should try to cheat on karma because that is not possible. Watch, and once you understand it, things start changing. Once you know the inevitability of it, you will be a totally different person.And the last question:Osho,What is intensity?It is important because it is only through intensity that one arrives. When all your desires, when all your passions, fall and become one flame, it is intensity. When there is only one left inside you and your total being supports that one, it is intensity.It is exactly what the word says: intensity. The opposite word is extensity: you are spread out, you have a thousand and one desires, many fragmentary desires, one going to the north, one going to the south. You are being pulled apart. You are not one, you are a crowd. And if you are a crowd you will be miserable, if you are a crowd you will never feel any fulfillment. You don’t have any center. Intensity means creating a center in yourself.There are two words which are significant to understand. One is centrifugal: it means arrows moving from the center going in different directions, extroverted. Small pieces, small parts of your being flying all over the place, in all directions, in all possible directions: that is centrifugal. That’s how people are: they are centrifugal. Another word is centripetal: when all the arrows are coming toward the center, when all the fragments are joined together. In the first you are falling apart, you are in a kind of de-centering. In the second you are falling together. A kind of integration arises; you are getting centered, concentrated in. That is the meaning of intensity.Sometimes you have known moments in danger – suddenly, in a dark night you are faced with a naked sword and you know what intensity is. Suddenly all your thoughts disappear, the crowd becomes one. In that moment you are one single individual. The word individual means indivisible. You will be undivided, you will be a unity – not only a unity, but a union. You will be utterly one. Your death facing you has created the intensity.Or in love sometimes: you fall in love and there is an intensity. All else becomes irrelevant, peripheral. Only the love is the all and the whole of your heart. When such intensity arises in meditation, it brings you to God, or into prayer, then it brings you to God.A story…The scene was the last Olympic Games. In the quarters of the American wrestling team stood John Mack, the trainer, warning his protégée, Mike “Bull” Flamm, about the forthcoming match.“You know,” Mack said, “the Russian wrestler you are about to tackle, Ivan Katruvsky, is one of the greatest wrestlers in the world. But he really is not as good as you are. The only thing he’s got that makes him a terror is his pretzel hold. If he ever gets a man in his pretzel hold, that man is doomed. He has used the pretzel hold on twenty-seven competitors, and in each case his opponent gave up within ten seconds.“So listen to me, Bull, you have got to be damned careful. Never let him get you in that pretzel hold. If he once clamps you in it, you’re a goner!” Bull listened carefully to Mack’s instructions on how to avoid that crippling grip of Ivan’s.For the first three minutes of the bout, neither the American nor the Russian could gain an advantage. The crowd was on edge. Then, suddenly, pandemonium broke loose – Bull Flamm had fallen into the clutches of Ivan’s pretzel hold and was moaning in agony. Mack knew the match was lost and he left the arena in deep gloom. Down the corridor, the echoes of Bull’s anguished cries still reached him.And then, as Mack was about to enter his quarters, he heard an enormous shout arise from the stadium, a cheer the likes of which he had never heard in all his long experience. The stands were in absolute uproar. From the shouts, Mack knew that Bull had won the match, but he couldn’t understand it. What could have caused the unthinkable turnabout?A minute later, Flamm came trotting into the American dressing room. His trainer threw his arms around him, and said, “Bull, how in hell did you ever get out of that pretzel hold?”“Well,” answered Flamm, “he twisted me into such shapes that I never felt such agony in my life. I thought my bones were going to break. And as I was just about to faint, I saw two balls hanging in front of me. With one desperate lunge, I bit those balls. Well, Mack, you can’t imagine what a man is capable of when he bites his own balls.”Enough for today?

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The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 01-09Category: SUFISM

The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 03 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,One day you emphasize being mature, another day you say, “Be like a child.” If I adopt a mature attitude, I feel my child is repressed and starved for expression. If I let my child dance, sing, then also childish attitudes come up, like clinging to a love object. What should I do?Being mature does not mean adopting a mature attitude. In fact, adopting a mature attitude will be one of the greatest barriers to becoming mature.Adoption means something imposed. Adoption means something cultivated, practiced. It is not arising out of you. It is a mask, a painted face; it is not your real being. That’s what everybody has been doing. That’s why on the earth people only appear to be mature. They are not, they are utterly immature – deep down, the adopted attitudes. They remain childish. Their maturity is only skin deep, or not even that much. Scratch any man a little and you will find a childishness arising out of him. And not only the so-called ordinary people; scratch your saints and you will find immaturity arising. Or scratch your politicians and your leaders. Go and just watch any parliament of the world, and you will never see any other gathering of so many immature and childish people together.Man has been deceiving himself and others. If you adopt, you will be false, pseudo. I have not been telling you to adopt anything. Be! Adoption is a barrier to being. And the only way to be is to start from the very beginning. Because your parents have not allowed you in your childhood just to be, you are stuck somewhere. The mental age of so-called normal people is not more than between ten and thirteen years – not even fourteen. You may be seventy or eighty, but your mental age remains stuck somewhere before you became sexually mature. The moment a person becomes sexually mature, at thirteen or fourteen, he is sealed forever. Then he goes on becoming false, and more false. One falsity has to be protected by other falsities, one lie has to be defended by other lies. And then there is no end to it. You become just a heap of rubbish. That’s what personality is.Personality has to be dropped, only then does individuality arise. They don’t mean the same thing. Personality is just a showcase thing; it is exhibition, it is not your reality. Individuality is your reality, it is not a show thing. One can dig as deeply as one wants into you, and he will find the same taste. Buddha is reported to have said, “Taste me from anywhere and you will find the same taste, just as you taste the ocean from anywhere and you find it salty.” Individuality is one whole, it is organic. Personality is schizophrenic: the center is something and the circumference is something else, and they never meet, and they are not together. Not only do they never meet, not only are they different, but they are diametrically opposed to each other, they are in constant fight.So the first thing to understand: never adopt a mature attitude. Either be mature or be immature. If you are immature, then be immature. By being immature you will be allowing growth. Then let immaturity be there; don’t be false, don’t be insincere about it. If you are childish, you are childish. So what? Be childish. Accept it, go with it. Don’t create a division in your being, otherwise you are creating a fundamental madness. Just be yourself.Nothing is wrong in being childish. Because you have been taught that something is wrong in being childish, you have started adopting attitudes. From your very childhood you have been trying to be mature, and how can a child be mature? A child is a child; he has to be childish.But it is not allowed. So small children become diplomats: they start pretending, they start behaving in false ways, they become a lie from their very beginning. And the lie goes on growing. Then one day you start searching for truth; then you go into the scriptures, and scriptures contain no truth at all. Truth is contained in your being; that is the real scripture. The Vedas, the Koran, the Bible – they are in your consciousness. You are carrying all that is needed by you, it is a gift from existence. Everybody is born with truth in his being. Life is truth, but you started learning lies.Being with me, drop all lies. Be courageous. Of course you will feel great fear arising in you because whenever you drop the personality, your childishness that has never been allowed, will surface. You will feel afraid: “What! Am I going to be childish, at this point? When everybody knows that I am a great professor – or a doctor or an engineer – and I have a PhD, and I am going to be childish?” The fear arises – the fear of public opinion, of what people will think.That same fear has destroyed you from the very beginning. That same fear has been the poison: “What will my mother think? What will my father think? What will people, the teachers and the society think?” And the small child starts becoming cunning; he will not show his heart. He knows that will not be accepted by others, so he will create a face, a camouflage. He will show what people want to see. This is diplomacy, this is being political, this is poison.Everybody is political. You smile because it pays to smile, you cry because it is expected of you to cry. You say a certain thing because that makes things easy. You say, “I love you” to your wife because that keeps her quiet. You say, “I will die without you, you are the only person in my world, you are my life” to your husband because he expects you to say it, not because you are feeling it. If you are feeling it, then it has beauty, then it is a real rose. If you are simply pretending, massaging his male ego, buttressing him because you have some ends to fulfill through him, then it is an artificial flower, a plastic flower.And you are burdened with so much plastic. That is the problem; the world is not the problem. The so-called religious people go on saying, “Renounce the world.” I say to you that the world is not the problem at all. Renounce the falsity, that is the problem; renounce the artificial, that is the problem. There is no need to renounce your family, but renounce all that pseudo family that you have created there. Be true, authentic.Sometimes it will be very painful to be true and to be authentic. It is not cheap. To be untrue and inauthentic is cheap, convenient, comfortable. It is a trick, a strategy to protect yourself; it is an armor. But then you will miss the truth that you have been carrying in your soul. Then you will never know what God is because God can only be known within you: first within, then without. First in, then out because that is the closest thing to you, your own being. If you miss God there, how can you see God in Krishna, Christ, Buddha? All nonsense. You cannot see God in Krishna if you cannot see God in yourself. And how can you see God in yourself if you are continuously creating lies around you? The lies are so many that you have almost forgotten the way to your being. You are lost in the jungle of lies.So the first thing to remember… You say, “One day you emphasize being mature, another day you say ‘Be like a child.’” There is no contradiction in it. Just by being like a child you will become mature. That is the beginning of maturity. You were not allowed by your parents and by your society.Sannyas is just an effort to undo the wrong that has been done to you by the society – to erase, to annihilate all that has been created around you by your society. Sannyas is a revolution, it is rebellion, rebellion against the so-called pseudo life. It is risky, it is dangerous, because you will start falling away from the pseudo people around you. You will become a misfit. You will have troubles.Lies are very convenient. Frederick Nietzsche said that man cannot live without lies and for about ninety-nine percent of people he is right. Why cannot man live without lies? – because lies function as buffers, shock absorbers. Lies function like a lubricant; you don’t go on colliding with people. You smile and the other smiles – this is lubrication. You may be feeling angry inside, you may be full of rage, but you go on saying to your wife, “I love you.” To express the rage is to get into trouble.But remember, unless you can express your rage, you will never know how to express your love. A man who cannot be angry cannot be loving either, because he has to repress his anger so much that he becomes incapable of expressing anything else. All things are joined together inside your being, they are not separate. There are no watertight compartments between anger and love, they are all together, mixed with each other. It is the same energy. If you repress anger, you will have to repress love too. If you express love, you will be surprised – anger is arising with it. Either suppress all or all will have to be expressed. You have to understand this arithmetic of your inner organic unity. Either be expressive or be repressive. The choice is not that you can repress anger and express love. Then your love will be false because it won’t have any heat, it won’t have the quality of warmth. It will just be a mannerism, a mild phenomenon, and you will always be afraid of moving deeper into it.People only pretend to love because they are expected to love. They love their children, they love their wife or husband, their spouses, their friends, because they are expected to do certain things. They fulfill these things as if they are duties. There is no celebration in them. You come home and you pat your child’s head just because that is expected, just because that is the thing to do. But there is no joy in it – it is cold, it is dead. And the child will never be able to forgive you because a cold pat on the head is ugly, And the child feels embarrassed, you feel embarrassed.You make love to your woman, but you never go far into it. It can take you really far, it can take you to the ultimate bliss; you can dissolve into it. But if you have never allowed your anger and you have never been dissolved in your anger, how can you allow love to dissolve you? And it has happened many times – you will be surprised – that a lover has killed the woman because he allowed his love and then suddenly the anger came. It is a well-known fact that many times a lover has simply killed the woman, suffocated her. And he was not a murderer. The society is responsible; he simply dared too much and went too deeply into love. When you go too deep, you become wild because your civilization is on the surface. Then anger arises, then all that is hidden inside you arises, and then you are almost mad.To avoid that madness, you make love in a very superficial way. It is never a tremendous phenomenon. Yes, people are right when they say that it is just like a sneeze: it relaxes tensions, it relieves you of a certain energy that was getting heavy on you. But this is not the real picture of love. Love has to be ecstasy – not like a sneeze, not just a release, but a realization, a liberation. Unless you know love as liberation, as ecstasy, as samadhi, you have not known love. But that is possible only if you are not pseudo, if you have been authentic in everything – if you have allowed anger, if you have allowed laughter, if you have allowed tears, if you have allowed all; if you have never been a preventive force, if you have never been holding anything, if you have never been controlling; if you have lived a life of uncontrol.And remember, by “uncontrol” I do not mean a life of licentiousness. The life of uncontrol can be of great discipline, but the discipline is not imposed from the outside. It is not an adopted attitude. The discipline comes from your own inner experiences. It comes from the encounter with all the possibilities of your being. It comes by experiencing all the aspects, it comes by exploring all the dimensions. It comes out of understanding. You have been in anger and you have understood something in it; that understanding brings discipline. It is not control. Control is ugly, discipline is beautiful.The word discipline basically means capacity to learn, hence the word disciple. It does not mean control; it means to be capable of learning, to be open to learn. A disciplined man is one who goes on learning through life experiences, who goes into everything unafraid: who risks, who explores and adventures; who is always ready to go into the dark night of the unknown; who does not cling to the known and who is always ready to commit mistakes; who is always ready to fall in a ditch and who is always ready to be laughed at by others. Only people who are courageous enough to be called fools are able to live and love and know and be.Maturity comes through more and more, deeper and deeper experiences of life, not by avoiding life. By avoiding life, you remain childish.One more thing: when I say be like a child, I don’t mean be childish. A child has to be childish, otherwise he will miss that great experience of childhood. But whether you are young or old, childishness simply shows that you have not been growing. To be like a child is a totally different phenomenon. What does it mean?Jesus says again and again, “Unless you are like a child, you will not enter my Kingdom of God.” And so I say to you that you will not enter my kingdom of God if you are not like a child. What does he mean by “like a child”? He means many things. One, the child is always total. Whatever the child is doing, he becomes absorbed in it, he is never partial. If he is collecting seashells on the beach, then all else simply disappears from his consciousness, then all that concerns him are the seashells and the beach. He is absorbed in it, utterly lost in it. That quality of being total is one of the fundamentals of being like a child. That is concentration, that is intensity, that is wholeness.And the second thing: a child is innocent. He functions from a state of not knowing. He never functions out of knowledge because he has none.You always function out of knowledge. Knowledge means the past, knowledge means the old and the told, knowledge means that which you have gathered. And every new situation is new; no knowledge is applicable to it. I’m not talking about engineering or technology: there the past is applicable because a machine is a machine. But when you are behaving in a human atmosphere, when you are communicating with alive beings, no situation is a repetition of any other. Each situation is unique. If you want to function rightly in it, you will have to function through a state of ignorance, like a child. Don’t bring your knowledge into it. Forget all knowledge. Respond to the new as new, don’t respond to the new from the old. If you respond from the old, you will miss: there will be no bridge between you and what is happening around you. You will always be late, you will always go on missing the train.Anand Maitreya goes on dreaming again and again of a train, and he always misses it. He’s rushing and running and reaches the station, and by the time he reaches, the train has left. And this is not only Maitreya’s dream, this is the dream of millions of people. This is one of the commonest dreams. Why does this dream come again and again to millions of people on the earth? They are missing life. They are always late. There is always a gap. They try, but the bridge is never made. They cannot commune, they cannot get into anything, something hinders them. What is it? It is knowledge that hinders.I teach you ignorance, and when I say be like a child, I mean always remain learning. Never become knowledgeable. Go on learning; learning is totally different. Knowledge is a dead phenomenon, learning is an alive process. And the learner has to remember this: he cannot function from the standpoint of knowledge.Have you not watched and observed it? Little children learn so fast. If a child lives in a multilingual atmosphere, he learns all the languages. He learns the language that the mother speaks, the father speaks, the neighbors speak – he may learn three, four, five languages very easily, with no problem. Once you have learned a language, it becomes very difficult to learn another language because now you start functioning from the standpoint of knowledgeability. It is said you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. It is true. But what makes a dog old? It is not physical age, because a Socrates goes on learning to the very end, even while he is dying. A Buddha goes on learning to the very end. What makes a dog old? Knowledge makes a dog old.Buddha remains young, Krishna remains young. We don’t have a single statue of Buddha which depicts him as old, or of Krishna which depicts him as old. Not that they never became old: Krishna lived up to the age of eighty, became very old, but something in him remained always young, childlike. He continued to function from the state of not knowing.So first, when I say be like a child I mean be total. The second thing is remain a learner, function from the state of not knowing. That’s what innocence is: to function from not knowing is innocence.The third thing, and the last: a child has a natural quality of trust, otherwise he cannot survive. When the child is born, he trusts the mother, trusts the milk, trusts that the milk will be nourishing him, trusts that everything is okay. His trust is absolute; there is no doubt about anything. He’s not afraid of anything. His trust is so much that the mother is afraid because the child can go and start playing with a snake. His trust is so much that a child can go and poke his hand into the fire. His trust is so much; he knows no fear, he knows no doubting. That is the third quality.If you can know what trust is, if you can again learn the ways of trust, only then will you know what God is, only then will you come to realize what truth is. This has to be understood.Science depends on doubt. That’s why the whole of education has become the education of doubt. Science depends on doubt, it cannot grow without doubt. Religion depends on trust, it cannot happen without trust. These are diametrically opposite directions.Remember, if you bring trust into a scientific work you will miss the whole point. You will not be able to get anything; you will not be able to discover anything. Doubt is the methodology there. You have to doubt and doubt and doubt; you have to go on doubting until you stumble upon something which cannot be doubted, which is indubitable. Only then, in helplessness, you have to accept it – but still with a grain of doubt that tomorrow new facts may arise and the whole thing will have to be dropped. So it is only for the time being.Science never comes to any ultimate truth, but only to tentative truth, approximate truth. Only for the time being is it accepted as truth because who knows, tomorrow researchers will find new facts, new data. So science comes only to hypotheses – tentative, arbitrary. What Newton discovered has been thrown down the drain by Albert Einstein, and what he discovered will be thrown by somebody else. In science, doubt is the methodology, trust is not needed. You have to trust only when there is no possibility to doubt, and that too, only tentatively, for the time being, in a kind of helplessness. No doubt is possible, so what can you do? You have looked from all sides and all doubts are dissolved and a kind of certainty has arisen.Religion is a diametrically opposite dimension. Just as in science doubt is the method, in religion trust is the method.What does trust mean? It means that we are not separate from existence, that we are part of it, that this is our home, that we belong to it, that it belongs to us, that we are not homeless – that the universe is a mothering universe, we can be children with the universe, just as the child trusts that whenever the need arises the mother will come and take care. When he is hungry she will come and feed him, when he feels cold the mother will come and hug him and give warmth, love, care. The child trusts. All that he needs to do whenever he is in need is to scream, cry so that the mother’s attention is attracted toward him, that’s all.Religion says this universe is our mother or our father. Hence these expressions: Jesus called God abba, which is far better than “father.” Father is a formal word, abba is informal. If you have to translate abba rightly, it will be closer to “daddy” than to father. But to call God daddy looks a little absurd; the church won’t allow. The church will say this is not right. But Jesus used to call him abba, which is daddy.In fact, prayer has to be informal: father looks so far away. It is no wonder that by calling God “the Father,” we have put him far away, distant somewhere, in heaven. Daddy feels closer; you can touch him, he is almost tangible, you can talk to him. With a father God sitting somewhere high in the heavens, you can go on shouting and still you cannot trust whether you will be able to reach him.Religion is a childlike approach toward existence: the world becomes a mother or a father. You are not against nature, you are not fighting with nature. There is no fight. There is great cooperation. Fight seems to be stupid and absurd.Doubt does not work in religious experience, just as trust does not work in scientific exploration. Science means exploring the without and religion means exploring within. Science is the religion of things, religion is the science of being. It is just as you cannot see a flower through the ear; howsoever sensitive an ear you have, howsoever musical an ear you have, you cannot see a flower through the ear. The ear can only catch sounds; it has its limitations. If you want to see color, light, and form, you will have to look through the eyes. Eyes are so beautiful, but they have their limitations: you cannot hear music through them. Even the greatest music, Beethoven or Mozart will not be able to penetrate the eyes. The eyes are deaf; you will have to hear through the ears.Doubt is the door to things, trust is the door to being. Only through trust is existence known. And remember, you can commit the fallacy in two ways. So-called religious people have been fighting science, the church has been fighting science. That was a foolish fight because the church wanted science to depend on trust. And now science is taking revenge: now science wants religion to depend on doubt, on skepticism, on logic. Man is so foolish that he goes on repeating the same mistakes again and again. The church in the Middle Ages was stupid, now people who think they are scientists are creating the same stupidity again.The man of understanding will say that doubt has its own world. You can use doubt as a method, but it has its limitations. And trust also has its own world, but it also has its limitations. There is no need to use trust to know about things, there is no need to doubt about the inner. Then you are creating a mess. If trust were used for scientific exploration, science would not have been born at all. That’s why in the East, science has remained very primitive.I have come across Indian scientists. In India, even a scientist who may have all the education that is possible in the West, who may have won awards or is maybe even a Nobel laureate, remains unscientific – superstitious somewhere deep down. He goes on trying in some way – known or unknown to him, aware or unaware – to impose trust on the outside world. And a very religious person from the West remains doubtful somewhere deep down. The West has explored the possibilities of doubt and the East has explored the possibilities of trust. They are different dimensions, they don’t meet anywhere; the inner and the outer don’t meet anywhere. You have to use both.I call that man a man of understanding who can use both: when working in a scientific lab he uses doubt, skepticism, logic; when praying in his temple, meditating, he uses trust. And he is free – he is neither bound by trust nor bound by doubt.This is my approach for my sannyasins. Don’t be bound by your ears or by your eyes; otherwise you will remain poor. You have both, so when you want to see, use eyes, and when you want to listen, close your eyes. It is not accidental that when listening to music people close their eyes. If you know how to listen to music, you close your eyes because they are no longer needed.So it is with doubt and trust. Trust is the quality of the child. These three qualities – the quality of being total, the quality of remaining ignorant in spite of knowledge, and the quality of trust – this is the meaning. Childishness is a kind of sentimental emotional state. That is not needed for you. Every child has to be allowed to be childish, as every adult has to be allowed to be adultish. But an adult can also have the qualities of being a child. Childishness is not needed, that tantrum quality is not needed, that sentimentality is not needed. But maturity can cope perfectly well with the qualities of being like a child. There is no contradiction between them. In fact, you can become mature only if you are like a child.“One day you emphasize being mature, another day you say ‘Be like a child.’ If I adopt a mature attitude, I feel my child is repressed and starved for expression. If I let my child dance, sing, then also childish attitudes come up, like clinging to a love object. What to do?” Allow it: your childishness has remained unfulfilled. Let it come and let it be fulfilled – the sooner the better – otherwise it will go on clinging to you to your very end. Allow it expression and it will be gone. Simply pour it out. And this is the place where you can do it easily and nobody will interfere with you.Just a few days ago there was an old woman sannyasin – she must be seventy – who started feeling like a child, and she was very worried. When I told her, “You need not be worried, be childish,” she started playing with small children. Even the children were a little embarrassed: “What is the matter?” But soon they accepted. Children are very accepting. Soon they forgot her age, and she enjoyed the trip tremendously. She got so much from it that she came to me and told me, “My whole life has been a wastage!” She became really a child again, full of wonder and awe, singing and dancing and playing, running after butterflies and collecting flowers and colored stones. It was a beautiful experience to see that old woman. Her face was transformed; it suddenly became luminous. A great grace descended on her.Allow it; once it is allowed, it will have its time and will go, and it will leave you very much fulfilled. It is better to go into it right now than postpone it because the more you postpone, the more difficult it becomes. Out of it, you will find a childlike quality arising. Childishness will disappear; it will be temporarily there, then it will be gone and your child will be fresh and young. And after that child is attained, you will start growing, then you can become mature. You cannot mature with all the lies that you are carrying around yourself. You can mature only when you become truthful, when you become true.The second question:Osho,Is it possible to live religiously and continue on the road to enlightenment while living in a country like the USA, and involving oneself in a competitive business?What do you think? Can you become religious in India, in a country like India?My own feeling is that if you want to become religious, the USA is the best place because it has succeeded in knowing, in having, all that man has desired for centuries, and in that very success it has failed. That very success has become its failure.It is very apparent that you can have all the money in the world and remain poor inside, that you can have all the gadgets, the latest, and yet you remain unfulfilled. Fulfillment has to be sought in some other direction, in some other dimension. It is apparent in America; it is not so apparent in India. It cannot be so apparent in India – not at least in modern India. It was apparent once.When Buddha lived, India was almost in the same situation as America is today. India was known in the world as a golden bird. It was: it was the richest country in those days. Religion blooms only when a country is affluent – never otherwise. Buddha was the byproduct of that affluence because only in affluence do your hopes disappear. You become hopeless, there is no way outside anymore. You have seen the whole way, to the very end. There is nothing. Eyes start turning inward automatically. It is not an accident that a poor country starts thinking of communism, not of religion.In India, if you want to be politically powerful you have to go on shouting slogans about socialism, communism, and things like that. You never hear any slogan about religion. Why? Why don’t politicians exploit religion in a religious country? They know that nobody wants religion. People are fed up with religion, people are not religious. Traditionally they appear religious, but they are not religious. They are hungry, they are starved, they don’t have shelter, they don’t have food, they don’t have clothes. Their basic needs are not fulfilled, what to say about God?There is a hierarchy of needs. The physical needs are basic; unless they are fulfilled you will not be able to know psychological needs. A hungry man will not be interested in Beethoven, or in Shakespeare, or in Leonardo da Vinci. A hungry man is interested in food – and it is natural, nothing is wrong in it. A hungry man is interested in how to feed the body and how to survive.When the question is of survival, who bothers about classical music? But when your hunger is satisfied, your body is warm, you have a house to live in, suddenly you start becoming interested in new things, things in which you had never been interested – in music, in poetry, in art, in philosophy. These are psychological needs. You start thinking great things. The body is satisfied; the mind says “Now I can also have my needs fulfilled.”When the mind needs are fulfilled, when you have listened to all kinds of music and you have danced all kinds of dances, and you have gone deep into philosophy, art, poetry, sculpture, architecture – when you have seen all these things and you are satisfied, saturated – the third kind of need arises. That is religion; that is the need for God, the spiritual need. That is the highest need.If a hungry man is interested in God, his God cannot be the true God. His God will only be a provider of food. He will say to God, “Give me my daily bread.” That is a poor man’s God. It is not strange that the Christian prayer says it: “Give us our daily bread.” Buddha could not have conceived of it, Krishna could not have conceived of such a prayer. Give us our daily bread? Asking for bread? It looks profane. But Jesus himself was poor, belonged to the poor. He was teaching poor people; he had to create a God who was a provider.It is not accidental that Jesus’ followers go on talking about Jesus’ miracles. What are those miracles? First, they are physiological: a blind man is given eyes, an ill person is healed, or miracles like Jesus’ turning stones into bread. Just think: these miracles say something. Jesus does not turn stones into sermons, but into bread; Jesus does not turn stones into music, but into bread – and he turns water into wine.We don’t have any miracles like that around Buddha. There are miracles, but they are totally different in hierarchy. Buddha’s miracles are so different that you will be surprised.A woman goes to Buddha: her child is dead and she is crying and she is weeping. She is a widow and she will never have another child. Her only child is dead, and he had all her love and all her attention. She goes crying and weeping to Buddha. If she had gone to Christ, then the miracle would have been that Christ would touch and bring the dead back, as he brought Lazarus back. What did Buddha do? Buddha smiled and said to her, “Go into the town and just find a few mustard seeds from a house where nobody has ever died.”The woman rushed into the town, went to each house, and wherever she went they said, “We can give you as many mustard seeds as you want, but the condition will not be fulfilled because so many people have died in our house. And woman, don’t be mad. Buddha has played a trick on you. You will not find a single house on the whole earth…”But she hoped: “Maybe, who knows? There may be some house that has not known death,” and she went around and around the whole day. By the evening a great understanding had dawned on her: “Death is part of life; it happens. It is not something personal, it is not something like a personal calamity that has happened to me.” With that understanding she went to Buddha.He asked, “Where are the mustard seeds?”She smiled, and she said, “You did it!” She fell at his feet and said, “Initiate me. I would like to know that which never dies. I don’t ask for my child back, because even if he is given back he will die again. So what is the point? Teach me something so that I can know inside myself that which never dies.”Now this is a totally different story. Jesus’ miracle looks more miraculous because the earth was still poor. Can’t you see the point? The East is turning Christian and the West is turning Buddhist. The richer the West becomes, the more Buddhist it will be. The new Christians are born in the East: poor tribes, primitive tribes, untouchables, the downtrodden. To them, Jesus has appeal. They would like somebody to turn stones into bread; they are hungry. What have they got to do with Buddha? Buddha seems too aristocratic, talks about great things which make no sense to the poor and the hungry.After the Second World War, a miracle happened. Japan, from the East, had fought with America. That was the first great encounter between East and West in war. And what happened? Now Los Angeles has moved to Japan, and all the Buddhist Zen centers have moved to America. This is a miracle. If you want to find Zen, you will have to go to America. Don’t go to Japan. People will think you are stupid. “Zen? Have you gone mad? You don’t belong to this century,” they will think. “You are not contemporary.”If you want to find Zen centers, they are flourishing in America. But if you want better car technology, better radios, better watches, go to Japan.This has been happening all the time, down the ages, through the ages. There is a hierarchy: Japan is interested in better cars, better radios, better television; America is fed up with the TV.Just a few days ago, in one university, they purchased a brand new Cadillac and burned it. It is very symbolic: people are fed up with cars, people are fed up with gadgets. People want something higher. Jesus will not be relevant anymore; only Buddha can be relevant. Jesus’ miracles will seem very small because science can do those miracles. Buddha’s miracle will seem very, very great because science cannot do it.You ask me, “Can a man be religious in the USA?” Where else? America is the land where religion has a future. In India, in China, religion has no future. Yes, religion has a past in India, but no future. America? – there is no past for religion, but there is a future. In the East the sun is setting, in the West the sun is rising. Don’t be worried about that, about how you can be religious in America.You cannot be religious in India. India only pretends to be religious, and its religion remains a very, very low kind of religion. I’m not talking about the past, remember. I’m not talking about the Upanishads and the Gita and Buddha. In those days, India was America. Now, all that is gone.There is a very subtle point to be understood: this is how the wheel of history moves. Whenever a country becomes very rich, it becomes religious because then the highest need starts asserting itself. And whenever religion starts flowering, sooner or later the country will become poor. Just think: if hippies go on growing in America, and Zen centers go on growing in America, and my sannyasins go on growing in America, how long can America remain rich? Who will take care of the technology that makes America rich? People will meditate. They will not go to the universities, they will be dropouts. Who will bother about ordinary, mundane things, the worldly things? People will become navel gazers. They will close their eyes and be quiet and satisfied and happy. They will not be scientists anymore.This is how the wheel moves. First, a country is poor; it starts rushing toward technology, better science, better ways of living, higher standards of living. Then one day, when it attains and comes to a peak, suddenly it falls flat. Suddenly it comes to know that all the effort has been in vain: “We have not arrived anywhere. We have been chasing an illusion, we have been after a mirage.” Suddenly people start dropping out. That’s what sannyas is.In Buddha’s time, thousands of people dropped out of their world and followed Buddha. They had seen the illusoriness of worldly desire, they had arrived and found it lacking. But then the country started becoming poor. Sooner or later, a country becomes poor. When people meditate too much, the country becomes poor. People think of the other world; this world becomes poor. And when the world becomes poor, they start turning antireligious. They become communists, they become anything else, but not religious. Again the wheel starts moving.Now Japan has dropped Zen, has dropped religion, has dropped meditation. It is one of the most materialistic cultures and now soon it will become rich; it is becoming rich. Once it has become rich, there will be rebellion against richness, and people will start thinking of the beauties of poverty, the beauties of nonpossession, the beauties of being free of all attachment. People will start thinking how to become wanderers. Why bother to live in a house, caged? Why not have a tent and move – one day on this beach and another day on that beach? Why not enjoy the whole earth?This is the circle: poverty, technology, religion, poverty, technology, religion. This is how things move. If you remain too long in India, you will become communist.You ask, “Is it possible to live religiously and continue on the road to enlightenment while living in a country like the USA, and involving oneself in a competitive business?” The best place is America, and to be more particular, California-land.To be religious does not mean to renounce. It simply means to see what is the case. If you can see that competition is a game, there is no problem. Don’t be serious about it. Seriousness is the problem; competition is not the problem at all. Then it is a game; enjoy it, but know it is a game. And whether you succeed or fail does not make much sense; it doesn’t matter, it is irrelevant. All that matters is that you enjoyed the game, that it was fun. The loser and the gainer both enjoyed the game. A kind of sportsmanship is needed, that’s all.When you play cards, the real thing is not to win; the real thing is to pass time. The real thing is to enjoy the game, the nuances of the game, the strategies of the game – that is the real thing. Someone is bound to be defeated, someone is bound to succeed; that is not the point at all, that is not the target.If you can live in the world and play it like a game, if you can live in all kinds of relationships and remember that the world is a great drama – the stage is big and you cannot see where it begins and where it ends, but it is a drama, it is a very dramatic world – if you can remember that it is a drama, there is no problem. Then you are simply playing a role, but it will not create any worry in you, it will not create any strain or tension in you. You will play the game and by the evening, when you come home, you will forget all about it.But if you are serious, then there is trouble. If you are serious, you can renounce the world, you can renounce competitive games and you can move to the Himalayas – sitting in the cave you will remain serious. Then your meditation will take the flavor of seriousness and it will create strain. What will be the difference? Before you were on Wall Street, fighting tooth and nail, cutthroat competition, murderous, and you are seriously in it, and worried day and night about whether you are going to succeed, whether you are going to make it or not. Then you will be sitting in a Himalayan cave, meditating seriously, tooth and nail. Now you will not have any other throat to cut but your own, but it will remain cutthroat. Now you will be in competition with yourself, with your body, with your mind, fighting and fighting. You will divide yourself and the fight will start. And now you will be worried about whether you are going to make it or not: “When is this enlightenment going to happen?” – whether it is going to happen or not. And I would like to tell you that this will be more of a worry than being on Wall Street because many people are known to have made it there, but in the Himalayan caves. very rarely, once in a while. You will be in more trouble.My suggestion is to drop seriousness. Take life as fun, take life as play. Enjoy it, it is worth enjoying. It is a beautiful game, it is a great opportunity to learn, to see, to understand. But don’t be serious.Life is nonpurposive; it is not going anywhere, it has no goal. The journey is the goal itself. That’s what I want my sannyasins to learn: the journey is the goal itself. Move nonseriously, playfully, and then whatever you are doing is meditation. Any act done playfully becomes meditative. Meditation is the quality that arises naturally when you are enjoying nonseriously. Yes, playing cards can be meditative, gambling can be meditative, business can be meditative. Anything can be turned into meditation. The only thing that needs to be added is a nonserious playfulness. Then it doesn’t create any tension in you, no stress is produced. You remain relaxed. Learn how to remain relaxed, and Wall Street is as good as any Himalayan cave.And never be deceived by the so-called Indian spiritual saints who go on trotting around America saying that India is the only religious land. Don’t be deceived by them; India is not. India is one of the most materialistic lands on the earth right now. Its materialism is repressed, deep down repressed. It has a face of religiousness, but behind that face you will find nothing but materialism. Don’t be deceived by the face.I’m not saying that there are no people who are religious; there are. There are religious people everywhere. Religion has nothing to do with the East and the West in fact. Religious people are everywhere. Just as poetry has nothing to do with East and West, poets are everywhere; painting has nothing to do with East and West, painters are everywhere; singing has nothing to do with East and West, singers are everywhere; loving has nothing to do with East and West. So it is with religiousness: religious people are everywhere. They are very few, that is true; it is very difficult to find them, that too is true, but no country has any monopoly. In India, if you watch deeply, if you observe deeply, you will be surprised.Meditate on this small anecdote…A young unsophisticated priest was walking through Times Square when a young lady approached him and asked, “Would you like a blow job? Ten dollars.” The priest did not answer but proceeded on his way.A few blocks later another damsel sauntered up to the priest and sweetly inquired, “How about a blow job, Father? Ten bucks.” Again the priest said nothing.When he reached his church the priest encountered a nun and asked her, “Say, sister, what is a blow job?”She looked him straight in the eye and said, “Ten dollars.”You just try to look straight in the Indian eye and you will find ten dollars. They go on talking against money, but all their talk against money is money-oriented. They go on talking against sex, but that talk is just a symbol of their repressed sexuality. Beware of this phoniness. India is one of the phoniest lands in the world today.And the last question:Osho,Truth is one, you say. Then why are there so many religions?Truth is one, but interpretations are many and can be millions. Truth is one, but the people who see truth are different. Their eyes give different angles.Christ has his own unique personality, as does Krishna. When Christ looks at the truth, the truth reflects in his eyes and that becomes Christianity. When Krishna looks at the truth, truth reflects in his eyes, and that becomes Hinduism. Hinduism is not direct truth, Christianity is not direct truth. They have come via unique people, and the unique person’s uniqueness is always reflected in it. When Buddha comes to truth, truth becomes Buddhist; it has to, it takes the color of Buddha. When you come to see the truth, there will be a meeting of you and the truth. The truth will transform you and you will transform the truth, and the ultimate result will be a crossbreeding between you and truth. So the Bible will be different from the Upanishads, and the Tao Te Ching will be different from the Dhammapada. It is the meeting of the individual with the whole, but the individual brings his uniqueness.When a painter comes into the garden and looks, he sees thousands of colors that you are never aware of. He sees many greens, not one green – different shades of green. He has an eye trained to see color. When you see, you just see trees are green; your eyes are not trained for it. When a poet comes, he will sing a song about the trees, the painter will paint a painting of the trees, and the song and the painting will be different. Although they both happened in the same garden, they both happened through the same garden, interpretations are bound to be different.Truth is one and religiousness is one, but the moment it descends on the earth it takes a form. That form is going to be different. If we understand this, there will be no fight between forms; all those forms will be accepted. In fact, the world is richer because there is Christianity and Buddhism and Taoism and Hinduism and Jainism – the world is far richer. Just think of a world which is only Christian. Just think of a world which is only Buddhist. It would be a poor world, it would not have variety. Truth would suffer.Listen to this anecdote…At a bar in Paris, an American was drinking with three Frenchmen. “Tell me,” he asked, “what is sangfroid? Oh, I know that if you translate it, it means ‘cold blood,’ but I would like to know the connotation of that particular term.”“Well,” answered one Frenchman, “let me try to explain. Suppose you have left your home, presumably on a business trip, and you come home unexpectedly. You find your wife in bed with your best friend. You do not get emotional, you do not get unduly upset. You smile at both of them, and you say, ‘Pardon the intrusion.’ Well, that is what I would call sangfroid.”Another of the Frenchmen standing by, broke in and said, “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call that sangfroid. I think sangfroid is just unusual tact. Suppose in the same situation you wave hello to your friend and your wife who are in bed, and with complete imperturbability you say, ‘Pardon the intrusion, sir. Don’t mind me. Please continue.’ Well now, that’s what I would call sangfroid.”“Ah!” broke in the third, “well, maybe. But as for me, I would go a step further in my definition. If under the same circumstances you said, ‘Pardon the intrusion. Please continue,’ And if your best friend in bed could continue, well that’s what I would call sangfroid.”Truth is one, but interpretations are many. And it is good, and it is a more beautiful and a richer world because of that.Enough for today.

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The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 01-09Category: SUFISM

The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 04 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-wisdom-of-sands-vol-1-04/

A wise man, the wonder of his age, taught his disciples from a seemingly inexhaustible store of wisdom.He attributed all his knowledge to a thick tome which was kept in a place of honor in his room.The sage would allow nobody to open the volume.When he died, those who had surrounded him, regarding themselves as his heirs, ran to open the book, anxious to possess what it contained.They were surprised, confused and disappointed when they found that there was writing on only one page.They became even more bewildered and then annoyed when they tried to penetrate the meaning of the phrase which met their eyes.It was: When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.Man is not born perfect. He is born incomplete, he is born as a process. He is born on the way, as a pilgrim. That is his agony and his ecstasy too – agony because he cannot rest, he has to go ahead, he always has to go ahead. He has to seek and search and explore; he has to become, because his being arises only through becoming. Becoming is his being. He can only be if he is on the move.Evolution is intrinsic to man’s nature. Evolution is his very soul, and those who take themselves for granted remain unfulfilled, those who think they are born complete remain unevolved. Then the seed remains the seed, never becomes a tree, and never knows the joys of spring and the sunshine and the rain, and the ecstasy of bursting into millions of flowers.That explosion is the fulfillment; that explosion is what God is all about – exploding into millions of flowers. When the potential becomes the actual, only then is man fulfilled. Man is born as a potential. That is unique to man; all other animals are born complete, they are born as they are going to die. There is no evolution between their birth and their death: they move on the same plane, they never go through any transformation. No radical change in their life ever happens. They move horizontally, the vertical never penetrates them.If a man also moves horizontally he will miss his manhood, he will not become a soul. That’s what Gurdjieff meant when he used to say that not all people have souls, that it is very rare that a person has a soul. Now this is a very strange statement because down the ages you have been told that you are born with a soul. Gurdjieff says you are born only with the potential of becoming a soul, not with the actual soul. You have a blueprint, but the blueprint has to be worked out. You have the seed, but you have to search for the soil, and the season, and the right climate, and the right moment to explode, to grow.Moving horizontally, you will remain without a soul. When the vertical penetrates you, you become a soul. “Soul” means the vertical has penetrated into the horizontal. Or, as an example, you can think of the egg, the caterpillar and the butterfly.Man is born as a larva. Unfortunately, many die also as larvae, very few become caterpillars. A larva is static: it knows no movement, it remains stuck in one space, in one place, at one stage. Very few people grow into caterpillars. A caterpillar starts moving; dynamism enters. The larva is static, the caterpillar moves. With movement, life is stirred. Again, many remain caterpillars: they go on moving horizontally, on the same plane, in one dimension. Only rarely does a man like Buddha or Jalaluddin Rumi or Jesus or Kabir take the final quantum leap and become a butterfly. Then the vertical enters.The larva is static; the caterpillar moves, knows movement; the butterfly flies, knows heights, starts moving upward. The butterfly grows wings. Those wings are the goal. Unless you grow wings and you become a winged phenomenon, you will not have a soul.Truth is realized through three stages: assimilation, independence, and creativity. Remember these three words, they are [very] seminal.Assimilation – that is the function of the larva. It simply assimilates food, it is getting ready to become a caterpillar. It is arranging, it is a reservoir. When the energy is ready it will become a caterpillar. Before movement, you will need great energy to move.The caterpillar is assimilation complete, the work done; then the second thing starts: independence. The larva is dropped. Now there is no need to stay in one place. The time has come to explore. The time has come for adventure. Real life starts with movement, independence. The larva remains dependent, a prisoner, in chains. The caterpillar has broken the chains, starts moving. The ice has melted; it is no longer frozen. The larva is a frozen state. The caterpillar is movement, riverlike.And then comes the third stage, of creativity. Independence in itself does not mean much. Just by being independent, you will not be fulfilled. It is good to be out of the prison, but for what? Independence for what? Freedom for what?Remember, freedom has two aspects: first, freedom from and second, freedom for. Many people attain only to the first kind of freedom, freedom from – free from the parents, free from the church, free from the organization, free from this and that, free from all kinds of prisons. But for what? This is a very negative freedom. If you know only freedom from, you have not known real freedom. You have known only the negative aspect. The positive has to be known: freedom to create, freedom to be, freedom to express, to sing your song, to dance your dance. That is the third state, creativity.Then the caterpillar becomes a winged phenomenon, a honey taster – searches, discovers, explores, creates. Hence the beauty of the butterfly. Only creative people are beautiful because only creative people know the splendor of life. They have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to feel. They are fully alive, they live at the maximum. They burn their torch at both ends. They live in intensity, they live in totality.Or we can use the metaphors used by Friedrich Nietzsche. He says that man’s life can be divided into three successive metamorphoses of the spirit. The first he calls “the camel,” the second he calls “the lion,” the third he calls “the child.” They are very pregnant metaphors: the camel, the lion, and the child.Each human being has to draw upon and assimilate the cultural heritage of his society: his culture, his religion, his people. He has to assimilate all that the past makes available. He has to assimilate the past. This is what Nietzsche calls the camel stage. The camel has the power of storing up in his body enormous amounts of food and water for his arduous journey across the desert. The same is the situation of the human individual: you have to pass across a desert, you have to assimilate the whole past.And remember, just memorizing is not going to help. Assimilation. Also remember, a person memorizes the past only because he cannot assimilate. If you assimilate the past, you are free from the past. You can use it, but it cannot use you. You possess it, but it does not possess you. When you have assimilated food, you need not remember it. It does not exist separate from you: it has become your blood, your bone, your marrow; it has become you.The past has to be digested. Nothing is wrong with the past. It is your past; you need not begin from ABC because if each individual had to begin from ABC, there would not be much evolution. That’s why animals have not evolved. A dog is the same as it was millions of years ago. Man is the only evolving animal. Where does this evolution come from? It comes because man is the only animal that can assimilate the past. Once the past is assimilated, you are free from it; you can move in freedom and you can use your past. Otherwise you will have to pass through so many experiences. Your life will be wasted.You can stand on the shoulders of your fathers and forefathers and their fathers and their forefathers. Man goes on standing upon others’ shoulders, hence the height that man achieves. Dogs cannot achieve that, wolves cannot achieve that; they depend on themselves. Their height is their height. In your height Buddha is assimilated, Christ is assimilated, Patanjali is assimilated, Moses is assimilated, Lao Tzu is assimilated. The greater the assimilation, the higher you stand. You can look from the peak of a mountain; your vision is great.Assimilate more. There is no need to be confined by your own people. Assimilate the whole past of all the peoples of the whole earth; be a citizen of the planet earth. There is no need to be confined by Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans. Assimilate all! The Koran is yours, the Bible is yours, so is the Talmud, and so are the Vedas and the Tao Te Ching – all are yours. Assimilate all, and the more you assimilate the higher will be the peak on which you can stand and look far away, and distant lands and distant views become yours.Nietzsche calls this the camel stage. But don’t be stuck there. One has to move. The camel is the larva, the camel is a hoarder. But if you are stuck at that stage and always remain a camel, then you will not know the beauties and the benedictions of life. Then you will never know God. You will remain stuck with the past. The camel can assimilate the past, but cannot use it.In the course of his personal development, the time comes when the camel has to become the lion. The lion proceeds to tear apart the huge monster known as “thou shalt not.” The lion in man roars against all authority.The lion is a reaction, a rebellion against the camel. The individual now discovers his own inner light as the ultimate source of all authentic values. He becomes aware of his primary obligation to his own inner creativity, to his innermost hidden potential. A few remain stuck at the stage of the lion: they go on roaring and roaring and become exhausted in their roaring. It is good to become a lion, but one has still to take one more jump – and that jump is to become the child.Now each of you has been a child, but those who know say the first childhood is a false childhood. It is like the first teeth: they only look like teeth but they are of no use, they have to fall out. Then the real teeth come. The first childhood is a false childhood; the second childhood is the real childhood. That second childhood is called the “stage of the child” or the “stage of the sage” – it means the same. A man becomes utterly innocent, free from the past, so free that he is not even against the past.Remember, the person who is still against the past is not really free. He still has some grudges, some complaints, some wounds. The camel still haunts him, the shadow of the camel still follows him. The lion is there, but still afraid somehow of the camel, fearful that it may come back.When the fear of the camel is completely gone, the roaring of the lion stops. Then the song of the child is born. I would like you to go into these three stages very deeply and very penetratingly because they are of immense value.The stage of the camel, assimilation, is just like a child in the womb who does nothing but assimilate, just eats the mother, gets bigger and bigger, is getting ready for the final plunge to move into the world. Right now there is no other work for the child: for nine months in the mother’s womb he eats and sleeps, sleeps and eats. He goes on sleeping and eating; these are the only two functions. Even after the child is born, for months he will be just doing that – eating and sleeping. Slowly, slowly, sleeping will become less and less and eating will also become less and less. He is ready, he is ready to become an individual – and the moment the child becomes ready to be an individual, disobedience enters. The child starts saying no, yes-saying by and by disappears. Obedience dies, disobedience is born.The state of the camel is the state of assimilation. The camel does not know how to say no. The camel is not acquainted with the no. He has not heard the word and he has not tasted the joys of saying no. He only knows yes. His yes cannot be very deep because without knowing no, your yes cannot be very deep; it has to remain superficial. The man who has not known no, how can he really know yes? His yes will be impotent. The camel’s yes is impotent. The camel does not know what is happening; he only goes on saying yes because that is the only word that he has been taught. Obedience, belief – these are the characteristics of the stage called “camel.” Adam was in this state before he ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Each human being passes through this state.This is a state which is pre-mind and pre-self. There is no mind yet. The mind is growing, but is not a complete phenomenon; it is very vague, ambiguous, dark, nebulous. The self is on the way, but still only on the way; there are no clear-cut definitions of it. The child does not know himself as separate yet. Adam, before he ate the fruit, was part of God. He was in the womb, he was obedient, a yea-sayer, but he was not independent. Independence enters only through the door of no; through the door of yes, there is only dependence. So in this stage of the camel there is dependence, helplessness. The other is more important than your own being: God is more important, the father is more important, the mother is more important, the society is more important, the priest is more important, the politician is more important. Except you, everybody is important. The other is important, you are still not there. It is a very unconscious state. The majority of people are stuck there; they remain camels. Almost ninety-nine percent of people remain camels.This is a very sad state of affairs – that ninety-nine percent of human beings remain as larvae. That’s why there is so much misery and no joy. And you can go on searching for joy, but you will not find it because joy is not given there, outside. Unless you become a child – attain the third stage – unless you become a butterfly, you will not be able to know joy. Joy is not something given outside; it is a vision that grows inside you. It is possible only in the third stage.The first state is of misery and the third state is of bliss. And between the two is the state of the lion – which is sometimes miserable and sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful and sometimes pleasurable.At the stage of the camel you are parrots, you are just memories, nothing else. Your whole life consists of beliefs given to you by others. This is where you will find the Christians and the Mohammedans and the Hindus and the Jainas and the Buddhists. Go into the churches and the temples and the mosques and you will find great gatherings of camels. You will not find a single human being. They go on repeating, parrotlike.I have heard a story…The story is told of a medieval knight who attended a course at the local dragon-slaying school. Several other young knights also attended this special class taught by Merlin, the magician.Our antihero went to Merlin the first day to let him know that he would probably not do well in the course because he was a coward and was sure he would be much too frightened and inept ever to be able to slay a dragon. Merlin said he need not worry because there was a magic dragon-slaying sword which he would give this cowardly young knight. With such a sword in hand, there was no way that anyone could fail in slaying any dragon. The knight was delighted to have this official magic prop with which any knight, no matter how worthless, could kill a dragon. From the first field trip on, magic sword in hand, the cowardly knight slew dragon after dragon, freeing one maiden after another.One day, toward the end of the term, Merlin sprung a pop quiz on the class which the young knight was attending. The students were to go out in the field and kill a dragon that very day. In the flurry of excitement as all the young knights rushed off to prove their mettle, our antihero grabbed the wrong sword from the rack. Soon he found himself at the mouth of a cave from which he was to free a bound maiden. Her fire-breathing captor came rushing out. Not knowing that he had picked the wrong weapon, the young knight drew back his sword in preparation for undoing the charging dragon. As he was about to strike he noticed that he had taken the wrong sword. No magic sword this, just your ordinary adequate-for-good-knights-only sword.It was too late to stop. He brought down the ordinary sword with a trained sweep of his arm, and to his surprise and delight, off came the head of still another dragon.Returning to the class, dragon’s head tied to his belt, sword in hand, and maiden in tow, he rushed to tell Merlin of his mistake and of his unexplainable recovery.Merlin laughed when he heard the young knight’s story. His answer to the young knight was, “I thought that you would have guessed by now. None of the swords are magic and none of them have ever been. The only magic is in the believing.”The camel lives in the magic of believing. It works. It can work miracles. But the camel remains a camel: the growth is missing.The people praying in the temples and the churches are under the influence of belief. They don’t know what God is, they have never felt anything like that; they only believe. The magic of their belief goes on doing certain things to them, but that is all make believe, a kind of dream world. They are not yet out of their unconscious, out of their sleep. And remember, I am not saying that this stage is not necessary; it is necessary, but once it is complete one has to jump out of it. One is not here to remain a camel forever.And don’t be angry at your parents, or the teachers, or the priests, or the society. They have to create a kind of obedience in you, because only through obedience will you be able to assimilate. The father has to teach, the mother has to teach, and the child has to simply absorb. If doubt arises prematurely, assimilation will be stopped.Just think of a child in the mother’s womb who becomes doubtful. He will die if he becomes doubtful whether to partake of food from this woman or not, whether the food is really nourishing or not – who knows, it may be poisonous – whether to sleep for twenty-four hours or not, because this is too much, sleeping continuously for twenty-four hours a day for nine months. If the child becomes a little bit doubtful, in that very doubt the child will die. And still a day comes when doubt has to be imbibed, learned. Each thing has its own season.Listen to this beautiful poem by Carl Sandburg: “What shall he tell that son?”A father sees a son nearing manhood.What shall he tell that son?“Life is hard; be steel, be a rock.”and this might stand him for the storms,and serve him for humdrum monotonyand guide him amid sudden betrayalsand tighten him for slack moments.“Life is soft loam; be gentle, go easy.”and this too might serve him.Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.The growth of a frail flower in a path uphas sometimes shattered and split a rock.A tough will counts. So does desire.So does a rich soft wanting.Without rich wanting nothing arrives.Tell him too much money has killed menand left them dead years before burial;and quest of lucre beyond a few easy needshas twisted good enough mensometimes into dry thwarted worms.Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.Tell him to be a fool every so oftenand to have no shame over having been a foolyet learning something out of every follyhoping to repeat none of the cheap folliesthus arriving at intimate understandingof a world numbering many fools.Tell him to be alone often and get at himselfand above all tell himself no lies about himselfwhatever the white lies and protective frontshe may use amongst other people.Tell him solitude is creative if he is strongand the final decisions are made in silent rooms.Tell him to be different from other peopleif it comes natural and easy being different.Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.Let him seek deep for where he is a born natural.Then he may understand Shakespeareand the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,Michael Faraday and free imaginationsbringing changes into a world resenting change.He will be lonely enoughto have time for the workhe knows as his own.Each father is faced with the problem of what to tell the son. Each mother confronts the problem of what to teach the daughter. Every teacher worries about what should be imparted to the new generation. The past has much: many glories, many peaks of understanding, many conclusions which have to be imparted to the child.In the first stage, everybody has to be a camel: yea-saying, believing whatever is given, assimilating, digesting. But this is only the beginning of the journey; this is not the end.The second stage is difficult. The society gives you the first stage; that’s why there are millions of camels and very few lions. The society leaves you when you have become a perfect camel. Beyond that, the society cannot do anything. It is there that the work of the society ends – the work of the school, the college, the university. It leaves you a perfect camel with a certificate.You have to become a lion on your own. Remember it. If you don’t decide to become a lion, you will never become a lion. That risk has to be taken by the individual. That is a gamble. That is very dangerous too, because by becoming a lion you will annoy all the camels around you. And the camels are peace loving animals; they are always ready to compromise. They don’t want to be disturbed, they don’t want any new thing to happen in the world because all new things disturb. They are against the revolutionaries and the rebellious. And not only about great things, mind you – not only about Socrates and Christ who are bringing great revolutions. The camels are afraid of such small things that you will be surprised.I have heard…In December, 1842, Adam Thompson of Cincinnati filled the first bathtub in the United States. The news of Mr. Thompson’s tub was quickly spread. Newspapers said that the newfangled idea would ruin the democratic simplicity of the republic.Just think of it! – a bathtub will ruin the integrity of the democratic republic.Doctors predicted rheumatism, inflammation of the lungs, etc. etc. The wise ones agreed that bathing in the wintertime would result in the decline of the robust population. Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty, tried to put a ban on bathing from the first of November to the first of March. In 1845, Boston made bathing unlawful except on the advice of a doctor. Hartford, Providence, Wilmington, and other cities tried to block the bath habit with extra heavy water rates. The state of Virginia took a slap at bathing by placing a tax of thirty dollars a year on every bathtub brought into the state. But by 1922, there were 889,000 bathtubs manufactured a year. To think that in the lives of people still living, man did not even know that a bath was good for him puts man in a class of absolute unreliability as to his judgment of thinking on any matter.The camels are simply against anything new, it does not matter what. It may be just a bathtub, and they will rationalize their antagonism.In one part of ancient Greece it was long the custom that when a man proposed a new law in the popular assembly, he did so on a platform with a rope around his neck. If the law was passed, they removed the rope. If it failed, they removed the platform.Lions are not welcome. The society creates every kind of difficulty for the lions. The camels are afraid of these people: they disturb their convenience, they disturb their sleep, they create worry. They create a desire in the camels to become lions – that is the real problem.Why is Jesus crucified? His very presence, and many camels start dreaming of becoming lions – and that disturbs their sleep, and that disturbs their ordinary, mundane life.Why is Buddha stoned? Why is Mahavira not allowed to enter cities? Why is Mansoor beheaded? These people disturb; they disturb their sleep, they go on roaring. Buddha has called his sermons “The Lion’s Roar.”The first, the state of the camel, is given by the society. The second state has to be attained by the individual. In attaining it, you become an individual, you become unique. You are no longer a conformist, you are no longer part of a tradition. The larva is dropped: you become a caterpillar, you start moving.The state of the lion has these characteristics: independence, no-saying, disobedience, rebellion against the other, against authority, against dogma, against scripture, against the church, against political power, against the state. The lion is against everything; he wants to shatter everything and create the whole world anew, closer to his heart’s desire. He has great dreams and utopias in his mind. He looks mad to the camels because the camels live in the past and the lion starts living in the future. A great gap arises. The lion heralds the future, and the future can come only if the past is destroyed. The new can enter existence only if the old ceases to exist and creates space for the new. The old has to die for the new to be. So there is a constant fight between the lion and the camel, and the camels are the majority. The lion happens once in a while, the lion is an exception – and the exception only proves the rule.Disbelief is his characteristic, doubt is his characteristic. Adam eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: mind is born, self becomes a defined phenomenon. The camel is non-egoistic, the lion is very egoistic. The camel knows nothing of the ego, the lion only knows the ego. That’s why you will always find revolutionaries, rebellious people – poets, painters, musicians – are very egoistic. They are bohemians. They live their life, they do their thing. They don’t care a bit about others; let the others go to hell. They are no longer a part of any structure. They become free from the structures. Movement, the lion’s roar, is bound to be egoistic. They need a great ego to go into this.In the East you will find more camels, in the West you will find more lions. That’s why in the East to surrender seems so easy. For the Western mind, surrender seems so difficult. But one thing has to be remembered: the Eastern mind finds it very easy to surrender; that’s why his surrender is not of much value. He’s already surrendered. He does not know how to say no, that’s why he says yes. When a Western mind surrenders, it is very difficult. It is a struggle for the Western mind to surrender, but when the Western mind surrenders there is great transformation because the surrender has been hard, arduous, an uphill task. In the East the surrender is cheap, in the West it is costly. Only a few courageous people can afford it.The East surrenders because there is no longer a possibility of becoming a lion. It feels very comfortable, easy to surrender, to become part of a mob, a mass. The West has created the ego. The West has paid more attention to the lion – doubt, disbelief, ego – but whenever the Western mind surrenders, there is really great transformation.The Eastern mind surrenders and remains the camel. If the Western mind surrenders, there is a possibility for the child to be born. When the lion surrenders, he becomes the child; when the camel surrenders, he remains the camel.So I may appear paradoxical to you, but if you understand what I am saying, it will not be very difficult and the paradox will not really look like a paradox. Each individual has to be taught the ego before he will be able to drop it. Each individual has to come to a very crystallized ego, only then is the dropping of any help; otherwise not.The first state, of the camel, is unconscious. The second state, of the lion, is subconscious – a little higher than the unconscious. A few glimpses of the conscious have started coming in. The sun is rising, and a few rays are entering the dark room where you are asleep. The unconscious is no longer unconscious. Something is stirred in the unconscious; it has become subconscious. But remember, the change is not as great from the camel to the lion as it is going to be from the lion to the child. The change is a kind of reversion. The camel starts standing on its head and becomes the lion. The camel says yes, the lion says no. The camel obeys, the lion disobeys. The camel is positive, the lion is negative.It is to be understood that the camel has been saying yes so much – and must have been denying the no. The no accumulates; and a point comes where the no wants to take revenge on the yes, the denied part wants to take revenge. Then the whole wheel turns: the camel turns upside-down and becomes the lion.The difference between the camel and the lion is big, but they exist on the same plane. The larva is static at one place; the caterpillar starts moving, but on the same earth. Movement is born, but the plane is the same. The first thing is given by the society: your being a camel is a gift of the society. Your being a lion will be a gift that you give to yourself. Unless you love yourself, you will not be able to do it. Unless you want to become an individual, unique in your own right – unless you take the risk of going against the current – you will not be able to become a lion.But if you understand the mechanism, in the very heart of the camel the lion is created. Again and again, saying yes and denying no, no goes on accumulating. A day comes when one is fed up with saying yes; just for the change one wants to say no. One is fed up with the positive, the taste of it becomes monotonous; just for the change one wants to taste no. That’s how the camel, for the first time, starts having dreams of the lion. And once you have tasted the no – the doubt, the disbelief – you can never be a camel again because it brings such liberty, such freedom.The majority is stuck at the camel stage, the minority is stuck at the lion stage. The majority means the masses and the minority means the intelligentsia. The artist, the poet, the painter, the musician, the thinker, the philosopher, the revolutionary – they are stuck at the second stage. They are far better than the camels, but the goal is not yet complete. They have not come home. The third stage is the child.Listen attentively: the first stage is given by the society, the second is given by the individual to himself. The third is possible only if the caterpillar comes close to a butterfly; otherwise it is not possible. How will the caterpillar ever think on his own that he can fly, that he can become a winged thing? It is not possible. It is impossible to think it. It will be absurd, illogical. The caterpillar knows how to move, but to fly is just absurd.I have heard about butterflies teaching caterpillars that they can fly, and they object and say, “No. It may be possible for you, but it is not possible for us. You are a butterfly, we are only caterpillars. We only know how to crawl.” How can one who knows only how to crawl imagine flying? That is a different dimension, an altogether different dimension: the vertical dimension.From the camel to the lion is evolution. From the lion to the child is revolution. A master is needed at that stage. The society can make you a camel, you yourself can make yourself a lion. But you will need a master: a Buddha, a Christ, a Rumi; you will need a butterfly who has wings. Only with a winged phenomenon will you be able to start dreaming about wings.How can you dream about something that you have not known at all? Do you think that a very primitive tribe living somewhere in the Himalayas can dream of a car? They have not seen one, they cannot dream about it. The dream is possible only when you have seen something – when you have seen a Christ or a Buddha or a Bodhidharma, and you know that this happens. These people look just like you, and still they are not like you. They have the same body, the same structure, and yet something from the unknown has penetrated their being. The beyond has come into them; the beyond is very, very tangible there. If you approach them with sympathy and love, you will be able to have a few glimpses of their inner sky. And once you have seen that inner sky, you will start dreaming about it, a great longing will arise in you: “How can I become a winged phenomenon?”That is the infection that comes from the master to the disciple. The third phenomenon happens through the master. “The child” means creativity, interdependence.The first stage, the camel, was dependence, the second stage was independence, but in innocence one comes to know that neither there is dependence nor independence. Existence is interdependence – all are dependent on each other. It is all one. The sense of the whole is born: no I, no thou, no fixation with yes or no, no obsession either to say yes always or to say no always – more fluidity, more spontaneity; neither obedience nor disobedience, but spontaneity. Responsibility is born. One responds to existence; one does not react out of the past, and does not react out of the future. The camel lives in the past, the lion lives in the future, the child lives in the present, herenow.The camel is pre-mind, the lion is mind, the child is post-mind. The camel is pre-self, the lion is self, the child is post-self. That’s what the meaning of the state of no-mind is. Sufis call it fana – the ego is gone, the other too. They are both together; you cannot have one without the other. I–thou are part of one energy; they both disappear.The child simply is: ineffable, indefinable, a mystery, a wonder. The camel has memory, the lion has knowledgeability, and the child has wisdom. The camel is either Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan, theist; the lion is atheist; and the child is religious, neither theist nor atheist, neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian nor communist – just a simple religiousness, the quality of love and innocence.Adam eats the fruit, becomes a lion. Adam, before eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, is the camel. And when Adam has vomited the fruit, dropped knowledge, he is the child. That child means Christ. Christ says again and again to his disciples, “Repent.” The word repent in Hebrew means return, go back, the Garden of Eden is still waiting for you. Vomit this apple of knowledge and the doors will be opened unto you.The camel is Adam before eating the fruit, the lion is Adam after eating the fruit, and the child is Adam become Christ, returning home. Buddha calls it nirvana, Jesus calls it the Kingdom of God. You can call it anything you like: Tao, dhamma, moksha. Words don’t mean much there; it is a wordless silence, a thoughtless innocence.Now the story…A wise man, the wonder of his age, taught his disciples from a seemingly inexhaustible source of wisdom.Each word has to be decoded. A wise man… Who is a wise man? – the child. Wisdom does not mean knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom; knowledge is a false coin, pseudo wisdom. It is borrowed, you have gathered it; it is dead. Wisdom is what has arisen in you, it has bloomed in you, it comes out of your own being and out of your own source. It is alive. Wisdom is knowing the truth on your own. Knowledge is collecting information from others, who may have known, may not have known. Who knows? It is belief, it is memory, it is junk.A wise man is one who has entered godliness, who has penetrated the mystery of life, who has encountered reality. A wise man may not be knowledgeable, may be knowledgeable – that is irrelevant – but wisdom has nothing to do with knowledge. Jesus was not a man of knowledge; any other rabbi of his time was more knowledgeable than Jesus. Buddha was not a man of knowledge; any other brahmin pundit was more knowledgeable than him. He knew nothing much about the Vedas, but he was a man of wisdom.Knowledge comes through memory; wisdom comes through meditation. Knowledge is possible even to a machine, that’s why computers are knowledgeable. But no computer can be wise. Have you ever heard of a wise computer? Knowledgeable, of course, more knowledgeable than man, more efficient, more skillful – less possibility of committing errors, very fast, quick, instant. You ask the question and the answer is there, but the answer will only be that which has been fed into the computer before. It can’t be new, it can’t be original, it can’t be wise. It will not relate to you as a person; it will be simply an answer to the question. Observe the difference.If you come to me, your question is less important. You are more important. I answer your question, in fact, to answer you; the question is secondary. But if you go to a computer, to a pundit, to a scholar, you are irrelevant; the question has all the relevance. He answers the question. The man of knowledge answers the question, the man of wisdom answers the questioner. The man of knowledge will always be consistent. You ask, “Does God exist?” and the man of knowledge will always have a definite answer. If he believes yes, he will say yes. Who asks the questions will not make much difference, not at all.Buddha was asked by a man one day, “Does God exist?” and Buddha said, “No.”And the same day, in the afternoon, another man asked, “Does God exist?” and Buddha said, “Yes.”And the same day, in the evening, a third man asked, “Does God exist?” and Buddha kept quiet.Now, this can’t be done by a computer. Either you know or you don’t know. The computer simply knows the answer and supplies the answer. Why does Buddha behave differently with three people? His disciple, Ananda, was very disturbed, could not figure it out. Naturally, he had heard all three answers. That night he asked Buddha, “I will not be able to sleep. Just tell me why. The question was the same, why did you answer differently? To one you said no, to another you said yes, to the third you didn’t say anything, you simply kept quiet. You remained silent and you closed your eyes. Why? The question was the same, exactly the same.”Buddha said, “But the questioners were different. I was answering the questioners. One was an atheist, he did not believe in God. He had come just to make his conviction stronger. He wanted me to say no so that his belief could become stronger, and I cannot help anybody’s belief. I have to destroy beliefs. To that man I said ‘Yes, God is,’ because unless beliefs are loosened, nobody comes to know.“The other man was a theist, he believed in God. He had come to be supported by me. I’m not here to support anybody’s belief. I am here to destroy all beliefs so that the mind can rise above beliefs into knowing. That’s why I had to say something else to him. I had to say no.“And the third man was neither a theist nor an atheist, so yes or no was not needed. I had to keep quiet. I was telling him ‘Become silent, and you will know. Just do what I am doing. Close your eyes and become silent and you will know.’ The question is such that it can’t be answered in a yes or no. The question is so profound that you can know only when you are profoundly silent. You will know only when the question has disappeared. Then the answer will arise in your being.”Now this is a wise man. This you can’t expect from a scholar, from a pundit, from a professor, from a computer, from a machine.A wise man, the wonder of his age… And the wise man is always a wonder because the wise man is indefinable. The wise man is mysterious. The presence of the wise man takes you on such faraway journeys, far out journeys. The wise man helps your wonder to become stronger. He does not supply you knowledge; he destroys your knowledge and releases your wonder, makes you a child again, fills your being with wondering, with poetry, with mystery, with song.A wise man, the wonder of his age, taught his disciples from a seemingly inexhaustible store of wisdom. And wisdom is inexhaustible. Knowledge is exhaustible, wisdom is inexhaustible because to be wise means to be related to the infinite source of the whole. To be in God is to be wise. God is inexhaustible. The wise man is an ocean: you can take as much as you can; nothing is reduced, he remains as he was before. You cannot reduce infinity. Knowledge is finite, it is only so much.He attributed all his knowledge to a thick tome which was kept in a place of honor in his room.Why did he attribute his knowledge to a thick tome? – because of the camels. The camels wouldn’t understand the mysterious source of his wisdom. To make it understandable to them, he kept a big tome in his room and he used to tell them, “All my wisdom comes from that book.”That is understandable. If somebody says, “My wisdom comes from the Vedas,” you understand; somebody says, “My wisdom comes from the Old Testament,” you understand; from the Talmud, you understand. But somebody says, “My wisdom comes from nowhere,” and suddenly there is misunderstanding. The camel cannot understand the “nowhere.” The camel can understand only a certain visible source. He lives in the visible. He can understand the book, he cannot understand the heart. He can understand the theories about God, but he cannot understand God himself.He attributed all his knowledge to a thick tome which was kept in a place of honor in his room.The sage would allow nobody to open the volume.Naturally, because there was nothing in it, it was empty. It was kept very mysterious, nobody was allowed. It was guarded.When he died, those who had surrounded him, regarding themselves as his heirs, ran to open the book, anxious to possess what it contained.Look at the camels – the live source was there, but they were not as interested in the live source as they were in the book. There are millions of camels like that, who are interested in the book. They carry their Bible, they carry their Gita. They memorize their Gita. They go on repeating the same Gita again and again, they go on reading the same Gita every day. They believe in the book. Even Krishna may be there, but they will go on reading their book. They will tell Krishna, “Don’t disturb us.” If Christ comes while you are reading the Bible, you will say, “Keep quiet. I am reading my book, come later on. This is not the time, I am praying.”And don’t laugh; this is the situation. People believe in the book too much. The book becomes more important, the word becomes more important than the truth. The word God has become more important than God himself.So when the master died: …those who had surrounded him, regarding themselves as his heirs… They were not; camels can’t be heirs. Only at the third stage, when you are a child, can you be an heir to a master, not before that. Camels go on saying yes, so they think that they can become heirs because they are so obedient. They cannot because they have not yet learned the no.There is a famous story…A rabbi once heard that one of his disciples had been speaking cynically about the existence of God and his teachings. He called him for an interview and asked, “Tell me, did you study all twenty-four books of the Bible thoroughly?”The honest answer was, “No, not all of them, and certainly not thoroughly.”“How about the Talmud?” was the next question. “Have you gone through all sixty volumes?”“N-no,” was the more frightened answer.“Then let me tell you, my son,” concluded the rabbi, “you did not study enough to have the privilege of doubting!”Doubt is a privilege. Unless you have been assimilating, you will not be able to become the lion. To say no, to doubt, is a privilege. It is a higher stage than belief because any coward can go with belief. For saying no and for creating doubt, courage is needed. It is almost always so: the so-called theists are on a lesser, lower spiritual plane than the atheist. The atheist is on a slightly higher plane, although he denies. He is the lion.These people must have followed the master to the letter, and obviously they were thinking they were the true heirs. They ran to open the book. The master had been there for many years with them, and they had never run to open him, they had never looked into his heart. They had never understood him, they had never drunk out of his source. But now that the master was dead, their first curiosity was to go to the book and see what was written there. Just see how people remain attached to the insignificant and the nonessential.They ran to open the book, anxious to possess what it contained. The camels are camels. They are more interested in possessing knowledge than becoming knowledge, they are more interested in the containers than in the content. The content has gone, the flame is no longer in the lamp, the flame has disappeared – but they were not interested in the flame. They are interested in the lamp, and they will go on worshipping the lamp forever. No light will ever be coming out of the lamp. The light was there. They have missed the master because their whole idea of knowledge was of possession. Knowledge is not something to be possessed; you cannot possess knowledge, and if you possess it, it will be only knowledgeability. Unless you become a knower, you don’t have knowledge. You can only pretend to have it.They were surprised, confused and disappointed when they found that there was writing on only one page.The camels are always interested in quantity, not in quality. They would have been very, very happy if the whole book had been written in, if on all the pages there had been writing. They would have enjoyed that. But there was writing on only one page, and that too only in one corner of the page, and the whole book was empty.They were surprised, confused and disappointed when they found that there was writing on only one page. Remember, the concern of the camel is quantity, the concern of the lion is quality, and the child goes beyond duality. He is not concerned with either quality or quantity. He transcends all dualities.They became even more bewildered and then annoyed when they tried to penetrate the meaning of the phrase which met their eyes.And there was only a little writing, just a single line.It was: When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.Just think of yourself waiting for years, curious for years to look into the book, and then you come across this. You would have been annoyed too – that this master was a cheat, that he had been saying “All my wisdom comes from this book” and there was nothing in it, just this small sentence.But this sentence is a seed. If you understand it, you will understand all the scriptures of the world. This is a condensed thing. All the scriptures are condensed in it: all the Korans, all the Vedas, all the Bibles are condensed in a single sentence, a tremendously powerful sentence. Meditate over it. When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.The camels are interested only in the container; the container is all. They don’t think of the content. The lions are interested only in the content; they are very much against the container. The child accepts both and goes beyond both because the child comes to know that the content cannot exist without the container and the container cannot exist without the content. The container is a container only because it has content, and they both go together. Matter and mind exist together, God and the world exist together; they cannot be separated.The camel thinks the container is all. That is a half vision. Angry with the camel, the lion moves to the other extreme and says, “The content is enough, and I will not bother about the container. Throw the container.” But if you throw the container, you will be throwing the content also because they can’t be separated. If you throw the flower, you will be throwing the fragrance too because they are together just like body and soul. The camel believes in the corpse; there is no soul, he has no idea of the soul. The lion believes in the ghost; he is very much against the body.But when you have transcended both, when you are no longer a yea-sayer or a no-sayer – when you are no longer obsessed with theism or atheism, when you are neither traditional nor antitraditional, when you are simply innocent of all these ideas, when your mirror is completely clean, no dust on it, when you don’t feel any identity with the camel or the lion – you are neither a reactionary nor a revolutionary. When you are simply there, a silent mirror, then you come to know that the container and the content are together. Although the container is not the content and the content is not the container, they are together. Seeing them together and yet separate, knowledge arises. One comes to know. When you realize the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.The last thing: because there are millions of camels, many masters have spoken in the language of the camels – Mohammed, Moses, and people like that. They have spoken in the language of the camels so the camels can understand. There is compassion in it, but there is danger too – that the camels remain camels. A few masters have chosen to speak the language of the lion – Christ, Buddha. As far as the expression is concerned, it is better than that of Moses and Mohammed; but it will not be understood by the masses. That’s a problem; the camels will not be able to absorb it.Jesus was killed because the camels were very angry. He was speaking a different language, utterly unintelligible. It looked like nonsense to them: this man was mad. Just think, in a world full of camels, a lion comes and starts talking. No camel will understand. When Jesus was killed, the disciples that he had, those twelve apostles, were camels. He was a child talking in the language of the lion, they were camels. They created Christianity, and once the camels created Christianity, it became a world religion.The child has no language of its own. Innocence is wordless. Hence, the child has to speak the language of a lion out of necessity. That is the closest that he can come to expressing himself.It happened in Buddha’s time. Buddha talked in the language of the lions. The country was in such a state that there were many lions available. It was at a climax, at a peak. It was not a dark valley, it was a very sunlit peak. For thousands of years in the past, India had been searching and working on truth and what it is and how to attain it. Many people understood Buddha; Buddha’s disciples were not camels, they were lions. Jesus’ disciples were camels, Jesus was a child talking in the language of the lion. When Buddha died, his followers were very, very stubborn. They wouldn’t compromise with the camels. They were bribed, they were persuaded, but they wouldn’t compromise. They continued to roar. Buddhism was uprooted from India: the camels finally destroyed it.When the Buddhists escaped from India, they learned a lesson: if you want to exist as a religion, you will have to speak the language of the camel. In China they dropped Buddha’s roar. In Japan, in Korea, in Ceylon, in Burma, they started speaking the language of the camel. Mahayana is the lion’s roar. Hinayana is a translation, in the camel’s language, of the lion’s roar. Then Buddhism spread all over Asia. A strange thing happened: Buddhism was born in India but disappeared from there, and the whole of Asia became Buddhist.There are a few who have spoken in the language of the child. They never gather many disciples; they cannot. You can gather great masses around you, if you speak the language of the camel. You can gather intelligentsia around you, if you speak in the language of the lion. Krishnamurti gathers intelligentsia around himself – he speaks the language of the lion. Lao Tzu or Ramana, they speak the language of the child. Nobody understands them, but they are not killed, remember; they are not crucified. Nobody understands them, nobody follows them, nobody bothers about them. They are thought to be good people, poets, a little eccentric, crazy. People can sometimes go to them, it is beautiful to be around them, but they don’t create any stir in the world. Lao Tzu comes and disappears, leaves no trace. Ramana came and disappeared, left no trace behind.These are the three languages. I speak all the languages, so you will find camels and lions and children, all kinds of people, around me. Hence I look very contradictory. I can’t be consistent: when I talk to a camel I talk his language, when I talk to a lion I roar, and when a child comes to me, I laugh, smile, and sit silently with him.This experiment has never been done before; nobody has spoken all three languages because it is troublesome. One language is good because one remains consistent. With me you can never be certain, you will always remain confused. But I also use confusion as a device. If the camel is confused he will start growing into a lion because unless he is utterly confused he will never grow. If the lion is confused he will start growing into a child because you grow only when you are very confused. When you see no point in being where you are, you start growing higher and you start looking for higher peaks. Maybe from there a greater vision, a bigger vision is available. I confuse you as a device. I will confuse the camels, I will confuse the lions, and children cannot be confused, they will understand. They will be able to understand that my contradictions are not contradictions at all because I am speaking three languages. That’s why they only appear to be contradictions.Meditate over this story. Here, being with me, don’t think of words. My message is not in my words, but in the pauses in between. My message is not in what I say, but in what I am. My message is not reducible to theories and systems. Either you can live it with me, or you miss it. It is an alive phenomenon. Once I am gone you will start looking into books, and you will be annoyed, and you will be angry with me because you will feel you have missed.While I am here, be nourished by me, get drunk with me, be absorbed. Abandon yourself to this mystery that is being revealed to you, and then there will be the possibility that you will not die as a larva, that you will become a caterpillar, and finally you will be metamorphosed into a butterfly.Grow wings; dream great dreams of growing wings. You have the potential, you are the seed. A great, great phenomenon is possible through you, and only when you have bloomed will you know what God is, what truth is.Enough for today.

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

The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 01-09Category: SUFISM

The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 05 (Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-wisdom-of-sands-vol-1-05/

The first question:Osho,You have said that the Sufis are on the path of love. But then, why do they teach so many methods?Because of the larvae: the camels. The camels need many methods. They can only trust in a method, they can only trust in technology. They are almost like machines, robots. They cannot have the vision of the beyond, and their hearts are not functioning yet. With the heart functioning they will become lions, and with the soul functioning they will become the child.It is like this: larvae or camels need many methods, lions need only one method – either love or awareness. And the child needs no method at all. The child is already at home; he need not arrive, he need not go anywhere.The Sufis are people on the path of love. Love has no techniques, love is enough unto itself, but the heart has to function for it. And the camel has no heart. The larva has no idea of what heart is, what feeling is, what love is; he has never dreamed about it. The larva has never dreamed about being a caterpillar, just as the caterpillar has not dreamed about being a butterfly.Two caterpillars were crawling across the grass when suddenly a butterfly flew over them. They looked up, and one nudged the other one and said, “You couldn’t get me up in one of those things for a million dollars.”The larva cannot trust that something is possible. For him, nothing is possible; the larva lives in a closed world behind walls. Those walls have to be broken. Methods are needed to break those walls, to destroy that prison. The larva almost has to be dragged outside the prison, freedom almost has to be imposed upon it. It is afraid of freedom, it is afraid of wings, it is afraid of the sky. It keeps its eyes closed. It remains within itself, it does not relate, it does not believe that relationship is possible.And the world is full of larvae and camels. Out of compassion, out of love, Sufis talk about other methods. If you understand, then there is no need for any method; then there is either awareness or love. One who follows awareness needs no other method – one is enough. One who follows love needs no method of awareness – one is enough. Awareness cleanses the mind, cleanses the thought process, cleanses your intelligence, and you arrive. Love cleanses your feelings, cleanses your heart, and you arrive. The child needs no method at all. The child does not even need love or awareness. The child is love and awareness.So it depends. If the Sufi is talking to a camel, he will give methods; if the Sufi is talking to a lion, he will give him awareness or love; and if the Sufi is talking to a child, he will not say anything about what to do. There is no need of doing. Non-doing is enough, just being is enough.The second question:Osho,What can a guru do for you?The question is from Vidya’s mother, Sigrid. She must be worried about Vidya, about what is happening to Vidya here. And, deep down, she is nagging Vidya and trying to take her back. It is natural. Nothing is wrong in it. A mother, after all, is a mother. The mother loves, cares, and because you love and you care, you also become afraid. “What is happening to my child here?” Hence the question, “What can a guru do for you?”A guru can do two things: he can undo you and redo you. He can destroy you and give you a new life. A guru is a cross and a resurrection. Those who come here and remain outsiders will only see the cross of the guru because the resurrection is an inner experience. The cross is an outside thing.Have you not seen it in the story of Jesus? When he was crucified, thousands of people witnessed it. It was simple. There was no need for any inner insight to witness Jesus being crucified. Thousands of people, ordinary people who had never seen Jesus, who had just come out of curiosity, witnessed the crucifixion. But when Jesus was resurrected, not even his own disciples could recognize him immediately. Mary Magdalene was the first to recognize him. That is symbolic; that means you need a feminine heart, an intuitive heart, to recognize resurrection.Then Jesus went to find his disciples. They had all escaped thinking, “Now all is finished!” They waited, hiding behind the crowds. They had waited because they were hoping that some miracle would happen. The miracle did happen, but to see the miracle these ordinary eyes are not enough. These ordinary eyes can only see the undoing. To see the redoing, you will need another kind of eyes. The miracle did happen, I say to you. But nobody could see it because nobody was ready to see it, nobody was mature enough to see it.Jesus went in search of his disciples after his resurrection. He found two disciples. They were going to another village. He walked with them for four miles, talked with them for four miles, and they did not recognize him. This seems to be so improbable, but it happened. He was walking with them, he was talking with them, and they could not see who had come. They thought he was a stranger. In fact, Jesus had remained a stranger to these people even when he was alive. Their recognition was superficial.So those who come here just as outsiders will simply see demolishing, will simply see undoing, will simply see that people are being destroyed, brainwashed, hypnotized – and they will see all kinds of things, all kinds of negative things. They will not be able to see the positive. For the positive you will have to become part, a participant. You will have to fall en rapport with me. You will have to come within me and you will have to allow me within you; then you will be able to see what a master can do.If you really want to understand it, then become a disciple, then come closer to a master. And I am not saying to come closer to me, but any master. Go and find your master, but come closer. Understanding one master, you will have understood all masters, past, present and future, because the work is the same. The work is to destroy the disciple so much that the disciple disappears as a disciple and appears as a master in his own right. That’s what a master can do: he can make you a master.The third question:Osho,Listening to you, drinking you so deeply every day, I am getting ridiculously intoxicated. I feel ready to quit my secure and maddening job and face an unknown future. But I have been drunk before and always woke up with a hangover and had the same old shit to deal with. Is it possible I could wake up one day and be left with just a hangover from you?This is a totally different kind of intoxication. It is so different that I can say to you that you are absolutely inexperienced about it.Being intoxicated with me does not make you fall asleep, so you cannot wake up some day with a hangover. It makes you fall awake, so there is no question of waking up sometime with a hangover. Being with me is the awakening. What other awakening are you talking about?This intoxicant drowns you only as far as the ego is concerned, but not your consciousness. It drowns you only as far as the personality is concerned, but not the individuality. It helps you to wake up from the personality and to wake up in the individuality. Right now, you are asleep about your individuality and you are awake in your personality.Let us say it in this way: you have fallen asleep and you are seeing a dream. In the dream you are awake – you are going to the market to purchase a few things, for shopping or something. In the dream you are awake. If in the dream you fall asleep, you will be really awake. But in the dream you are awake. Really you are fast asleep, you are snoring.Your awakening right now is not real awakening. You are in a deep sleep, a slumber, and dreaming a thousand and one dreams. If you allow me to hit you, you will wake up for the first time. Your dreams will disappear, your sleep will be broken, and you will come to know for the first time who you are. Once you have tasted that awakening, you cannot fall asleep again. That taste is such that it permeates your whole being, it pervades you, it overwhelms you, it encompasses you. This intoxication is just to help you to fall awake.That’s why I have given you the name, Ananda Buddha – blissful awareness, blissful awakening. You are asleep and the potential is there – you can fall awake. And the first stirrings are being felt by you.Take the risk. In your dreamworld nothing is secure, not even your so-called secure job. In your so-called world nothing is certain. The dreamworld cannot be certain – it is a flux, everything is changing and moving. Today you are in a secure job, tomorrow you may not be in it. Today you are living with a woman, tomorrow she is gone. Today you have a beautiful child, tomorrow existence has taken it back. What is secure here?Except awakening, nothing is secure here. All is just hallucination, all is just deceiving yourself, creating newer and newer mirages. The oasis exists not; this world is a desert. The oasis exists in your awareness only. Create that oasis of awareness. And whatever is needed for it, do. Whatever price has to be paid, pay. Whatever has to be risked, risk – because all else is going to be taken away from you anyway. Death will come, and your job and your wife and your children and your name and fame will all be taken away. Before death comes, search for awareness because those who become aware in life, for them death never comes. They become deathless. They know what immortality is. In your awareness, you come to know not the body, but the one who resides in it.The fourth question:Osho,Even though I did not understand what was happening, I have had enlightening experiences through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. I know that LSD is false, but what is, if any, the truth about mushrooms?LSD is not false; LSD is as real as anything else. But the experience that is created by LSD is a false samadhi. Remember the distinction that I am making: LSD is not false, but the experience that is created under the impact of LSD is a false experience.You say, “I have had enlightening experiences…” They were not enlightening experiences. They may have been lightning experiences, but not enlightening. They are flashes; you are not enlightened through them, you don’t become a buddha through them. In fact, you become more of a mess out of them. LSD changes your body chemistry, as do mushrooms. It changes your body chemistry, it does not change you. It changes your body, just as food changes your body, air changes your body, the climate changes your body, the moon, the full moon changes your body. But you are not being changed by it. All those changes happen in the body; all those changes are chemical changes – not alchemical but only chemical.What is an alchemical change? It is when your consciousness changes. And the consciousness cannot be changed by anything that comes from the outside. Consciousness cannot be changed by food, eating this food or that. Consciousness cannot be changed by non-eating, by fasting. Remember, there is not much difference between people who take LSD and the people who go on a long fast – no difference. Both are trying to change the body chemistry. The people who take mushrooms and other drugs are not doing anything different from the people who do yoga exercises because in both ways, the body is changed. The change is not happening in consciousness. Consciousness remains beyond all chemicals.If you fast long enough, naturally your body chemistry can’t be the same. A few things disappear from your body chemistry, and a few things accumulate too much. Your body has a different combination of chemicals. After a one month long fast you will feel beautiful things, but those beautiful things are created by the chemical change. Start eating, and those beautiful things will disappear. Do certain yoga postures continuously for years, pressing your body structure at certain points, certain important points, pressing your body meridians at certain junctures continuously. It changes your body chemistry. Breathe in a certain way for years, always in a certain way. It changes your body chemistry because the oxygen and the carbon dioxide balance will be changed by your breathing.Have you not noticed it? When you are angry, you breathe in a different way. Why? That different way of breathing releases some chemicals in your body which are helpful to being angry. If you don’t breathe in a different way, you will not be able to be angry. Try it: breathe in the Buddhist way, and you will not be able to go into anger because the Buddhist way won’t allow your body to release the chemicals that are needed for anger.You are afraid; you breathe in a different way. Different chemicals are needed because a man who is frightened needs to escape fast, as fast as possible. He needs flight; certain chemicals are needed so he can flee fast. When you are in sexual passion, your breathing changes. Continue to breathe normally, and you will not be able to achieve orgasm. For the orgasm to be triggered, a certain kind of breathing is needed.But these changes are physical. These are not going to affect your consciousness: the consciousness is the witness to all changes.Just try to understand. You are hungry, feeling hungry, the body is hungry. The consciousness simply notes the fact that the body is hungry; the consciousness is never hungry, cannot be hungry. It has no stomach, it can only be a witness. Consciousness is nothing but witnessing. Remember this formula; consciousness is witnessing. You are hungry; the consciousness reflects the hunger. It is like a mirror; it says, “The body is hungry.” When you have eaten and your body is satisfied, the consciousness says, “The body is satisfied.” The consciousness was not hungry, and is not satisfied either. In both cases, the consciousness was just witnessing: hunger–satisfaction, sexual passion–sexual contentment, anger–release of anger.You take LSD or some other drug, and there are lightning experiences. The consciousness is simply waiting and watching. It simply says, “Look. Beautiful things are happening.” But they are not happening to the consciousness.Spiritual growth is the growth of this witnessing. Spiritual growth has nothing to do with particular experiences. Spiritual growth is not a search for novel experiences. Spirituality has nothing to do with experiences as such. In fact, to say any experience is a spiritual experience is utterly wrong, because all experiences are non-spiritual. The experiencer is the spirit. The witness is the only spiritual phenomenon.When all experiences have disappeared – of hunger, of satiety, of anger, of release, of love, of hate, of kundalini arising in you, chakras opening in you, lotuses opening in you, lights showering in you, celestial music is heard, you feel great space, you feel joy, you feel bliss; but these are all experiences – the real spiritual point is when there is no experience, and the experiencer is left alone, utterly alone. There is no object to experience; only this witness is there, silently witnessing nothing. Then you have arrived. This is samadhi. Witnessing nothing is samadhi. That’s why Buddha calls it nirvana, nothingness, emptiness.Your question is meaningful. And the question is not only concerned with psychedelic experiences, it is concerned with all kinds of experiences. Experiences as such are non-spiritual. It is when all experiences have gone and you don’t feel anything at all – and you have not fallen asleep either. In sleep, those experiences also disappear. In deep sleep, what Patanjali calls sushupti, where dreams are no longer there, all experiences disappear – but the experiencer is also absent. Patanjali says sushupti and samadhi are similar and yet very different, diametrically opposite. What is their similarity? The similarity is that in both, experiences are not found. And what is their difference? In sushupti, in deep sleep, the experiencer is also not found. In samadhi, experiences are gone, but the experiencer is sitting there silently watching nothing, witnessing nothing. This is enlightenment. Experiences can be lightning experiences, can be beautiful experiences, can give you great joy, but still they are not enlightenment.Enlightenment is when the light is there and it falls on nothing. The light fills nothingness; no object is seen in that light. This is liberation. To be liberated from experiences is to be liberated from the world. “The world” means all kinds of experiences, what the Chinese call “the ten thousand experiences.” That’s what the world consists of.You say, “Even though I did not understand what was happening, I have had enlightening experiences through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. I know that LSD is false, but what is, if any, the truth about mushrooms?” The truth is they can give you beautiful trips, and ugly trips too. They can give you golden dreams, and nightmares too. It all depends on you. The drug only triggers a process. Whatever dream is ready to explode in you will explode; hence contradictory experiences have been reported.Aldous Huxley reports that he experienced heaven, and Karl Rahner reports he experienced hell. Now Karl Rahner is against drugs, is anti drugs, and Aldous Huxley is all for drugs. If you are all for drugs, your very prejudice will help you to create beautiful experiences. You will be waiting and hoping for something beautiful to happen, your belief will do the magic. If you are against drugs from the very beginning – suspicious, doubtful, afraid – and you know that you are going to have some hellish experience through the drugs, it will be created.An ancient Sufi saying says that hell is preserved for those who believe in it, and heaven is also preserved for those who believe in it. But it’s all just make believe. There is no hell, no heaven; you create your hell, you create your heaven. If you are in a kind of negative mood, then take LSD and it will give you nightmares. If you are in a positive mood, flowing, loving, it will take you to paradise.The ancientmost drug takers have been in India. India knows more about drugs than any other country. For at least ten thousand years, ninety-nine percent of Indian sannyasins have been taking drugs, from the Rig Vedas till today. From soma to LSD, India knows much. India has created technologies, techniques, methodologies of how to take a drug. The drug trip should be a very guided trip. It needs a guide; the guide creates the atmosphere, he creates the idea. Slowly, slowly he goes on hypnotizing you about what is happening. And in a drug state, a person becomes very suggestible, absolutely suggestible; all reason is lost. The dream faculty starts functioning, imagination is let loose. Now, imagination can do both: either it can create hell or heaven. You need a guide. The guide slowly, slowly guides you toward heaven, heavenly experiences. He creates a beautiful dream, a poetic dream around you; and you are in a suggestible state, you simply fall a victim.But guided or unguided, a drug experience or a fasting experience – all are false. Experience is false. Samadhi is when the witness has remained alone, witnessing nothing. That is the true spiritual experience, if you will allow me to call it an experience. It is not an experience because in an experience you need three things: the experiencer, the experienced and the experience. There are not three things left at all. There is only one witness, witnessing utter nothingness, shunya, emptiness. That is true experience. The true experience is a no-experience. And when you attain a no-experience, only then can you rely on it being enlightening. Otherwise lightning experiences will come and go, flashes of the mind, dream stuff.The fifth question:Osho,Is to be a sannyasin a moment or a process? Is a guru really needed to be a sannyasin? If a guru lives in somebody's heart all the time, what is the necessity of wearing orange and the mala all the time? Was Eklavya not a real disciple?The question is from some Indian mind, some Indian. Many things have to be understood. First you ask, “Is to be a sannyasin a moment or a process?”It is both, because it is a beginning of a great pilgrimage so it is an event, a moment, and also a process. By becoming a sannyasin, you have not arrived; you have only started arriving. It is a great moment because it is a quantum leap from your ordinary mundane world, from the search for money, power, prestige. You have moved to seek and search for truth. From moving outward, into the world, you have taken a decision to move inward. From the external, your being is turning toward the internal. It is a great moment because interiority is born in it. It is a great change in your pattern of life, in your style of life. You will never be the same again. It is a drastic change, it is a discontinuity: the past is dropped and you start creating yourself anew. But it is also a process because this is just a beginning. You have started moving inward, but you will have to go on moving.Lao Tzu says, “The journey of ten thousand miles starts in the first step.” The first step is a great moment. Just think: the larva becomes the caterpillar – a great moment, because the larva was static and the caterpillar moves, crawls. The caterpillar is not yet a butterfly; it knows nothing of flying, it knows nothing of flowers, it is not yet a winged thing. But the journey has started, the journey of ten thousand miles. The first step has been taken, it has started crawling. If crawling is possible, then one day flying will also be possible.The larva cannot become a butterfly; only a caterpillar can become the butterfly. A worldly man cannot arrive in his being, only a sannyasin can arrive. The sannyasin is between the larva and the butterfly, the link. So a sannyasin is both the beginning of a journey and a process; it is a moment and a process.You ask, “Is a guru really needed to be a sannyasin?” You need me even to ask this question! You can’t answer it yourself. How are you going to answer greater questions? This is a very silly and stupid question, not of any worth. If I am answering it, it is just to respect you, to respect a camel. If you cannot answer a silly, ordinary question like this yourself, how are you going to become a sannyasin on your own?The caterpillar will need a butterfly. Seeing the butterfly flying around enjoying flowers and the honey and enjoying the sunshine will be needed; is a must. That will create a desire, a longing, a thirst in the caterpillar. It will create a dream, a dream which can become a reality. Unless the caterpillar starts dreaming, there is no possibility. How will you start dreaming about unknown things? You have not known them. You can dream only about that which you have known. You can think about a thing which you have experienced in the past. How will you think about the divine, about truth, about nirvana, about samadhi? These are empty words for you, utterly empty of any meaning – meaningless jargon. You will have to come in contact with a person in whom samadhi is alive, throbbing, beating, breathing. You will have to come in close contact with a person in whom truth is born, in whom you can have a glimpse of the divine. That’s all that is needed: you will have to come in contact with someone where the disease called God can become infectious. You will have to move with a drunkard. Seeing his joy, seeing his blissfulness and his silence and his calm and his cool, you may become thirsty – thirsty for something you have never tasted before.That’s what a master is all about. If you can do it on your own, it will be so kind of you. Do it, read American books, “do it yourself” books. But you will create more mess than you are in already. Whatever you do, out of your confusion will come more confusion. You are already a crowd, falling apart. You cannot put yourself together. And I am not saying that it does not happen sometimes. It happens sometimes: there have been people who have put themselves together. But those people are exceptional and they don’t come here to ask questions like this.Once a young man came to me and asked, “What do you say, Osho, about marriage? Should I get married or not? I am a seeker, a searcher for truth.” I told him, “Please get married.” He said, “But this is very unexpected. Why didn’t you get married? I have come to you because I knew you would say, ‘No, don’t get married.’ Why didn’t you get married?” I said, “Because I never went to ask anybody, that has not been my way. I have never asked any question to anybody.”You are tricky. You want to have an answer, you want guidance, and yet you don’t want to commit yourself. You want all guidance cheaply.I have never asked a single question to anybody. That’s why when I was in the university, my professors were very angry with me. I was always answering them, not questioning. Very angry, naturally: if you answer a professor, he becomes angry. I was turned out from many colleges, expelled, and the only crime that I had committed was that I was answering. Even if I was asking, the question was such that it was really an answer, not a question. The professors were angry; they wanted questions so that they could answer because they knew answers.If you are searching for truth, if you have moved into the search, you will need a master. And remember, I repeat again: it is not that it cannot happen alone. It has happened to me alone, so how can I say that it cannot happen alone? Lao Tzu says, “You need not go out of your house, you need not even open your windows and doors. All can be found there, sitting inside your room.” And he is right, but it happens very rarely.You are being cunning: you want guidance and you don’t want to bow down to a master. You ask me, “If a guru lives in somebody’s heart all the time, then what is the necessity of wearing orange and the mala all the time?” Then there is no necessity, then there is no necessity even to ask this question. If a guru lives for twenty-four hours in your heart, you have become a buddha. Even to remember your guru for twenty-four seconds continuously is impossible. What are you talking about – twenty-four hours?Try to remember me for twenty-four seconds. Just keep a wristwatch in front of you and try to remember me for twenty-four seconds. You will miss twenty-four thousand times. A second will pass and you will start thinking of your girlfriend, or what movie to go to today. And then you will have to pull back. Again you will remember, “What am I doing?” Five seconds have passed. And for one second you may be able just to remember, so-so, lukewarm, and again it is lost. Just try for twenty-four seconds. If you can remember me continuously for twenty-four seconds, without a single distraction, you need not have any orange, any mala. I declare you a sannyasin.And you are saying for twenty-four hours. “If a guru lives in somebody’s heart all the time, then what is the necessity of wearing orange and the mala all the time?” But if the guru that lives in your heart says, “Wear orange,” what will you do then? Will you listen to the guru or not? What do you think about the people who are wearing orange here? Are they very willingly wearing orange? But the guru says so. What can they do? And they have fallen in love with the guru. Now, the guru is mad and he says, “Wear orange!” The guru is eccentric. First you fall in love with the guru, and then the guru starts playing tricks on you. He says, “Wear orange, wear a mala and look like a fool. And go into the world and let people laugh.” But if the guru lives for twenty-four hours in your heart, you will be ready to commit suicide if he says to.And then you ask, “Was Eklavya not a real disciple?” I will have to tell you the story first; only then will you be able to understand it.You know of the Bhagavadgita, of Krishna the master and his disciple Arjuna. When Arjuna was learning with Drona… In his student days, he was with a master archer, Drona, who was the greatest master archer in those days. Arjuna belonged to a royal family, so all the children from the royal family were learning with Drona, and Arjuna was the best disciple.Drona was a brahmin. Eklavya came, but Eklavya was an untouchable. Eklavya also wanted to become a disciple. Drona refused. A brahmin – how can he accept an untouchable, a sudra? That has been one of the greatest pathologies of the Hindu mind. The Hindu mind has been ill and unhealthy because of that. Notwithstanding so many great things they have done, that one thing has undone all their great things. They have condemned human beings so utterly that never before, anywhere in the world, have human beings been condemned so badly. And that is done by so-called religious people who claim that they are the greatest religious people of the world. They have been doing something which is so ugly: millions of people have been debarred from being human beings.Eklavya belonged to those downtrodden, oppressed people. But he had a beautiful body, and Drona could see because he was a great teacher. He could see that he could become one of the most famous archers in the world. He could see directly: the way he walked, the way he talked, his one-pointed mind, his concentrated being. Drona could see it: “This young man can become the best archer of this age. But then what will happen to my disciple, Arjuna? And he’s going to be the king.”Now, the vested interest. He refused, he refused for two reasons. One: “You are a sudra and I am a brahmin; I cannot accept you. Even the shadow of a sudra is unacceptable.” Brahmins have been taking baths if the shadow of a sudra falls on them – the shadow; he need not have touched anyone. And these are spiritual people, and the shadow is nonexistential! If you are sitting and a sudra passes by and his shadow touches you, you have to take a bath. You have been polluted by his being. These sudras are not sinners; they are simply poor people, exploited people, the proletariat.“First, you are a sudra so I cannot accept you,” said Drona. In saying that, he also said that he was not a spiritual man at all. He may have been a great master archer, but he was not a spiritual master, he was not a guru. In denying Eklavya, he proved that he was not a guru because a guru cannot deny anybody. Even if a sinner comes, the guru cannot deny him. That is what he exists for.Sometimes people come to me and they say, “We are not worthy. We are sinners. We have done this wrong and that. Osho, will you accept us?” And I say, “For whom do I exist here?” If the doctor says to the patient, “I cannot accept you because you have so many illnesses,” then what is the point of that doctor? Why is he there if he accepts only healthy men?Drona was not a guru, not a spiritual master. He must have been a very ugly politician. It was on the surface that he said, “I cannot accept you because you are a sudra.” But deep down this was his reasoning: “If this Eklavya is accepted and he becomes a great archer, what will happen to my favorite disciple? And my favorite disciple is going to become the king, not Eklavya. My whole future is involved with my favorite disciple. If Arjuna becomes the king, then I will be the master of the king and naturally powerful – even more powerful than the king. The king will touch my feet, and my order will be the order.” He wanted Arjuna to remain the greatest archer. Eklavya was denied.Eklavya went in the forest, but his love for archery was such that he created a statue of Drona and started practicing before the statue. Soon rumors started coming to Drona’s school that Eklavya was attaining alone, without any guidance from him. His totality was such that even the statue was enough.And one day the news came that Arjuna was no longer a competent archer compared to Eklavya. Drona went to see Eklavya, and he committed one thing which can never be forgiven. He went there and he asked Eklavya to show him. And he saw, and it was absolutely certain that Arjuna was no longer a comparison to Eklavya. Eklavya had far transcended Arjuna and all Drona’s disciples – in fact, had far transcended Drona himself.Now he said, “You have learned through me by making my statue. You will have to give me some present, dakshina.” When a disciple has learned all from the master, just in gratitude he gives some gift to the master, any symbolic gift.Eklavya started crying and weeping. He said, “But I have nothing! You can ask anything!” And Drona asked for his thumb, his right hand thumb. Eklavya cut off his thumb immediately and gave it to Drona. He asked for the right hand thumb because without it, Eklavya would never be an archer again.Now this fellow, Drona, is an ugly spot on Hindu consciousness. He was not a spiritual master at all; he was a very, very low politician, a diplomat. He may have been a good archer, but that doesn’t make anybody spiritual. First he had denied Eklavya, and now he comes… What chutzpah! Now he comes and asks that something be given to him as a gift: “I am your master.” He had denied his being a disciple, and now he comes and says, “I am your master.”Eklavya is really rare – such a great soul. Drona is not even worthy enough to touch his feet. He didn’t say anything. He could have said, “You have denied me,” but he didn’t say that. That idea never arose in his mind. He trusted him as the master even if he had been denied. He had loved him and he was ready to give anything. He gave his right thumb, became a cripple forever and was no longer heard of. Since that moment, nothing is known about Eklavya, about what happened. He must have gone to the forest, must have lived in his tribe, sweeping streets. He must have forgotten all about archery – a great archer destroyed.Now this is the story. You have asked, “Was Eklavya not a real disciple?” Eklavya was a real disciple, Drona was not a real guru. But you should not ask this question because you simply want to avoid the mala and orange. And Eklavya, even though denied by the master, although rejected by the master, went in the forest and created an image of the master. You should not bring Eklavya’s name in it. You are just the opposite. What is the mala? – an image.There the master had denied, here the master is ready to accept you. Even though denied by the master, Eklavya created an image of the master, and through that image attained. You should not bring Eklavya in with your question. It is contradictory, it contradicts you. It does not prove that you are right; it simply proves you are utterly wrong. Even a man like Eklavya could not do without the image: it was needed, it helped, it created a certain milieu, it created an atmosphere, a climate. And if love is total, then the mala is not dead, then it is not wood. It is your heart. Then the image in the mala is not just a picture. It depends on your love, how much love you pour into it. That much life it will have. And it is needed; it creates a climate around you, and only in a certain climate will you be able to bloom.The sixth question:Osho,As one evolves spiritually, interest in sex may become less strong. So if I'm not so sexy these days, am I getting older, or closer to enlightenment?There is a criterion to judge it: if your sexuality disappears and you become more loving, then it is not just old age. If with sexuality your loving quality also disappears, then it is old age.Have you not seen? Old people become unloving, nagging, always angry, rude, oppressing – always finding excuses to torture, condemn. What happens? The moment one becomes less sexual, the juices start drying up. Once the magic of desire fades, people become desert-like. All their greenness is of their sexuality and sensuality. All their flowering is that of sex and nothing else. So once sex becomes less and less important, their greenery starts disappearing. They become noncommunicative, they are always angry, and they are very much in their egos.Nobody likes older people, even their own children. The reason is not old age; the reason is once the magic of desire is gone, they become rocklike. And once their own desire is gone, they become very jealous of others’ desires. An old person cannot tolerate you being in love. He’s always there with condemning eyes because he says he knows it is all nonsense. He says “I have lived it and I know it is all futile.” This happens to old people. This happens to old countries too.If in Pune you find that you are condemned if you are walking hand in hand with your woman, and people look with condemning eyes, that is just because the country has gone stale and old. It is a very old country; the magic of desire has died. It has no magic. It is dominated by the old people, it is nonaccepting of the young. The old cannot accept the youth and the joy of youth; it hurts.So this is the criterion: if you are simply becoming old, you will not only become nonsexual; you will become dry, dull, dead, and you will start condemning other people who are still young. That’s a kind of revenge. Deep down it is jealousy: “How come my own desire is gone and people are still desiring? I am dying and you are loving? Death is coming closer every moment and you are still searching for a woman or for a man, still singing and dancing?” It is unacceptable to the old people.But if old age is not just aging but wisdom too, then there will be a totally different thing. The older person will feel very, very happy with people loving each other. He will have a blessing, a benediction always flowing through him. Whenever he will see somebody in love, his eyes will have a joy. He will bless them because he knows each desire has its own time, and one learns only through experience. Yes now he is disillusioned, and he knows perfectly well that when he was young his father was also disillusioned, but he never listened. Now he knows, “My son is also not going to listen. And it is good that he should not listen because if he listens, he will never be able to live his youth.” And youth unlived penetrates old age. And when youth penetrates old age, old age becomes dirty, ugly; it is impotent. Now you cannot live those experiences, but they go on hammering inside your mind. They go on coming as dreams, desires. The body is no longer able to go into them, but the mind continues. Sex becomes cerebral. And that is the most perverted state of sex, when it becomes cerebral. It should be genital, not cerebral – but the sexual mechanism is no longer functioning and the whole energy has moved in the head.If a man has lived his childhood perfectly, he will come out of it a grown-up man. If a man has lived his youth perfectly, he will come out of it a grown-up old man: wise, happy, silent, calm, quiet, loving. With the disappearance of sex, love will not disappear. In fact, love will become more, because the energy that was involved in sex is no longer involved in sex; all that energy has become available for love. An old man can be as loving as no young man can ever be, because the young have other interests.Love is really secondary for a young man; his whole interest is sex. When a young man is telling a girl, “I love you,” he’s just planning how to hop in bed. He knows all this is nonsense, but it has to be done; it is part of the game. If you ask a woman suddenly, “How about it?” she may scream or call the police; it is so unexpected. You have to persuade her. And she is also thinking, so if you go on persuading long enough, she becomes bored. If you go on saying, “I love you, I love you,” and there is no sign of hopping in bed, she becomes fed up. The introduction should not be too long. It should not be like George Bernard Shaw where the book consists of only a hundred pages and the introduction is two hundred pages. Who waits for the book then? An introduction is an introduction: it makes things easy.The young man’s interest is sex, is not love. Love is an excuse, love is politeness, love is culture, sophistication, but his real interest is sex. Love is like the sugar that we coat bitter pills with – that’s how the young man is interested. His real love is sex.It is not incidental that young people all over the world have started calling sex “making love.” That’s what their love is, they cannot know depth. A young man is bound to remain shallow. Sex is shallow, so a young man is shallow. Youth cannot have depth and youth cannot have calm understanding. Youth is feverish, it is a tumultuous time. Good – I’m not saying it is wrong; it creates the possibility to grow. You have to pass through many experiences, sweet and bitter. You have to pass through many stages of feverishness, of ecstasy, of excitement. Only then a moment comes when you start understanding. Those experiences prepare you, they cleanse you; you have to pass through the fire of youth to become the pure gold of old age. A really old man is wise, he has some light in him. He has lived his life, he has become ripe. He knows what life is; he knows its joys, its sorrows, its ups and downs, he knows its hells and its heavens. He has seen all. Seeing all, a great understanding has arisen in him, and a compassion and a love.So this has to be the criterion: if with the disappearance of sex, at the same time, simultaneously, comes the appearance of love, compassion and understanding, then it is not just that you are growing old. You are coming closer to enlightenment. But if it is not so, then you are simply growing old. Growing old is not a great qualification – everybody does it in its own time, it happens – but growing in wisdom is a qualification, certainly a qualification.I have heard…A most attractive young girl was being interviewed by St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. “While you were on earth,” he asked, “did you indulge in promiscuity, smoking, dancing, or any other forms of wickedness?”“Never, never!” protested the girl.“Well, then why have you not reported sooner?” asked St. Peter. “You have been dead for years!”Remember, don’t die before your death. Remain alive.I have also heard…An anthropologist in Java came across a little-known tribe with a strange funeral rite. When a man died, they buried him for sixty days and then dug him up. He was placed in a dark room on a cool slab, and twenty of the tribe’s most beautiful maidens danced erotic dances entirely in the nude around the corpse for three hours.“Why do you do this?” the anthropologist asked the chief of the tribe, who replied, “If he does not get up, we are sure he is dead.”Don’t think that by becoming more and more dead you will be coming closer to enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a quality of death, it is a quality of a ripe life, it is a quality of a rich life. One who has lived his life in many, many ways, good and bad, as the sinner and the saint – one who has the experience of the varieties, of all possibilities – becomes ripe, and in that ripeness is richness, is glory.Let this be the criterion, always judge through this criterion: if love is growing, compassion is coming, understanding is growing, then you are on the right track. If with your sexuality, love is dying, understanding is dying, compassion is dying, then you are on the wrong track.The last question:Osho,You really confused me when you talked about the differences between love and liking. You said love is committed, but I thought commitment was another kind of attachment. There are many people I love but I don't feel committed to. How can I predict if I will love them tomorrow?The question is significant. You will have to be very, very understanding because it is subtle and complex too.When I said that love is commitment, what do I mean by it? I don’t mean that you have to promise for tomorrow, but the promise is there. You don’t have to promise, but the promise is there. This is the complexity and the subtlety of it. You don’t say, “I will love you tomorrow too,” but in the moment of love, that promise is there, utterly present. It needs no expression.When you love a person, you can’t think otherwise. You can’t think that you will not love this person someday. That is impossible, that is not part of love. And I am not saying that you may not be able to get out of this love affair; you may be, you may not be. That is not the point. But when you are in the love moment, when the energy is flowing between two people, there is a bridge, a golden bridge, and they are bridged through it. It simply does not happen: the mind cannot conceive and comprehend that there will be a time when you will not be with this person and this person will not be with you. This is commitment. Not that you say as much, not that you go to a court and make a formal statement: “I will remain forever with you.” In fact, to make that formal statement simply shows there is no love; you need a legal arrangement. If the commitment is there, there is no need for any legal arrangement.Marriage is needed because love is missing. If love is profoundly there, marriage will not be needed. What is the point of marriage? It is like putting legs on a snake, or painting a red rose red. It is unnecessary. Why go to court? There must be some fear inside you, the love is not total.Even while in deep love, you are thinking of the possibility that tomorrow you may desert this woman. The woman is thinking, “Who knows? Tomorrow this man may desert me. It is better to go to the court. First let it become legal, then one can depend.” But what does it show? It simply shows that love is not total. Otherwise, total love has that quality of commitment of its own accord. It does not have to be brought to it; it is its intrinsic quality.And when you are in love, it comes naturally to you, not that you plan. This feeling comes naturally, and sometimes in words too: “I will love you forever.” This is this moment’s depth. It doesn’t say anything about tomorrow, remember. It is not a promise. It is just that the depth and the totality of love is such that it comes automatically to you to say, “I will love you forever and ever. Even death will not be able to part us.” This is the feeling of total love.And let me repeat: that does not mean that tomorrow you will be together. Who knows? That is not the point at all. Tomorrow will take care of itself. Tomorrow never enters the mind that is in love. Tomorrow is not conceived at all. The future disappears, this moment becomes eternity; this is commitment. And tomorrow it is possible you may not be together – but you are not betraying, you are not deceiving, you are not cheating. You will feel sad about it, you will feel sorry about it, but you have to part. And I’m not saying that it has to happen; it may not happen. It depends on a thousand and one things.Life does not depend only on your love. If it were to depend only on your love, then you would live for ever and ever. But life depends on a thousand and one things. Love has the feeling: “We will live together forever,” but love is not the whole of life. When it is there, it is so intense that one is drunk with it. But then there are a thousand and one things, sometimes small things.You may fall in love with a man and in that moment, you are ready to go to hell with him – and you can say so, and you are not cheating. You are utterly true and honest and you say, “If I have to go to hell with you, I will go!” And I say again, you are true, you are not saying anything false. But tomorrow, living with that man, small things – a dirty bathroom may disturb your affair. Hell is too far away, there is no need to go that far – a dirty bathroom. Or just a small habit: the man snores at night and drives you crazy, and you were ready to go to hell, and that was true. It was authentic in that moment, it was not false; you had no other idea, but the man snores at night. Or his perspiration smells like hell, or he has bad breath and when he kisses you you feel you are tortured – just small things, very small things. One never thinks of them when one is in love. Who bothers about a bathroom and who thinks about snoring? But when you live together with a person, a thousand and one things are involved, and any small thing can become a rock and can destroy the flower of love.So I’m not saying that the commitment has any promise in it. I’m simply saying that the moment of love is a moment of commitment. You are utterly in it, it is so decisive. And naturally, out of this moment will come the next, so there is every possibility that you may be together. Out of today, tomorrow will be born. It will not be coming from out of the blue; it will grow out of today. If today has been of great love, tomorrow will also carry the same love. It will be a continuity. So there is every possibility that you may love, but it is always a perhaps. And love understands that.If one day you leave your woman or your woman leaves you, you will not start shouting at her, “What do you mean? You told me: ‘I will live always and always with you.’ Now what? Why are you going?” If you loved, if you had known love, you will understand. Love has that quality of commitment.Love is a mystery. When it is there, everything looks heavenly. When it is gone, everything looks simply stale, meaningless. You could not live without this woman, and now you cannot live with this woman. And both are authentic states.You ask, “You really confused me when you talked about the differences between love and liking. You said love is committed, but I thought commitments were another kind of attachment.” My meaning of commitment and your meaning of commitment are different. Your meaning is legal, my meaning is not legal. I was simply describing to you the quality of love, what happens when you are encompassed in it. The commitment happens.Now, my sannyasins are in a deep commitment, but that deep commitment does not create love. Love creates it. Love is first, commitment follows it. If one day love disappears, that commitment will also disappear. It was the shadow; when love is gone, don’t talk about commitment. Then you are being foolish. It was a shadow of love, it always comes with love and if love is no longer there, it goes, it disappears. You don’t go on harping on that commitment: “What about the commitment?” There is no longer a commitment if love is not there. Love is commitment. Love gone, all commitment is gone. This is my meaning.And I understand your meaning. Your meaning is: “When love is gone, what about the commitment?” That is your meaning. You want the commitment to continue when the love is gone, and love is no longer there. Your meaning of commitment is legal.Always remember: listening to me, try to follow my meaning. It is difficult, but you have to try. In that very trying, you will get out of your meanings. Slowly, slowly a window will open, and you will be able to see what I mean. Otherwise there is going to be confusion: I say something, you hear something else.Listen to this small anecdote…A want ad appeared in a newspaper: “White male needed to service baboon in scientific experiment. $1000.”Finally, after weeks, a man answered the ad, but he made three conditions. First there was to be no foreplay, second the kids had to be raised Catholic, third it would take him a while to raise the $1000.What you understand by a certain thing depends on you. The meaning comes from your past; you supply the meaning. Remember, listening to me, avoid supplying meaning to it. Try to listen to my meaning too. Don’t only listen to my words, but try to find my meaning too. Then there will be no confusion at all. Otherwise the words are mine, meanings are yours – there is going to be a great confusion in your minds.Being with me is a love affair; being with me is creating a kind of energy which I cannot create alone by myself, and you cannot create alone by yourself. That energy happens only when two people are in deep love; both contribute to it. The atmosphere that is being created here cannot be created without me and cannot be created without you. You have to contribute much to it. The disciple is not just there to be a passive phenomenon. He has to be actively in love. When the master and the disciple are both active, actively moving toward each other, something of the beyond penetrates the ordinary world.A buddha alone is one thing. A buddha with his sangha, with his commune, is another thing. A buddha alone is a beautiful flower, but almost unrelated to existence. He will sooner or later disappear, fade away, and will become a myth. And people will wonder whether he ever existed or not.A buddha with a commune is a very, very concrete reality: not just a flower, more rooted in the earth. The master finds roots in the earth through the disciples. The master belongs to the sky. He can fly, he has wings, but he no longer has roots. He can get roots only through you. And when a master has roots in the earth, something of immense value happens to the earth. An atmosphere, a soil is created. A new psychology is created. In that psychology, many, many flowers will bloom. Love is a miracle. It is alchemy.In The Little Prince, this small story comes up.He was with the fox…“I cannot play with you,” the fox said, “I am not tamed.”“Oh! Please excuse me,” said the little prince. But after some thought he added, “What does that mean, ‘tame’?”“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.”“To establish ties?”“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.”“I am beginning to understand,” said the little prince.Between the master and the disciple, the greatest tie of love happens, the greatest taming happens. If you are not a disciple, I am just one man amongst millions of men. To you, I don’t mean much. Once you are a disciple, then I am unique to you, then there is nobody who can be compared to me. Once you are a disciple, you are unique to me; ties are established. I start growing roots through you: the meeting of the sky and the earth. In that meeting all is possible; even the impossible is possible.Listening to me, don’t only listen to my words. Words are needed. They are the container but not the content. And to know the difference between the container and the content is the beginning of wisdom.Enough for today.

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The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 01-09Category: SUFISM

The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 06 (Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,In love as well as in meditation, the moment of dissolving, disappearing, is so tremendously beautiful. Is it possible for a man who is still not egoless, not enlightened, to encounter death consciously and to welcome and enjoy it the same way? You are everywhere. But after we will have died, shall we find ourselves in such a state that it will be possible for us to remain attuned to you whether you are in the body or not? Would you please talk on death?It is a significant question, and very urgent too. It is from Ma Ananda Shefali. She is a very, very old woman, and she will be facing death sooner or later. And it is good to prepare, it is good to go ready in death.The first thing to be understood about death is that if you have known love, you have known death; if you have known meditation, you have known death. Death does not bring anything new. It is new only for those who have not loved and who have not meditated.Shefali need not be afraid; she has been deeply in meditation and she has loved intensely. She’s the old woman I was talking about just a few days ago, who has become like a child, whose child is born, who is no longer a camel and no longer a lion, who has become the child. She has forgotten her body; the body does not matter. Only the body ages. The body lives in time, the innermost core is always beyond time; it is never born and never dies. The body is born and the body dies. The mind is constantly being born and constantly going in death, but there is a witness inside you who goes on watching the whole play. That witnessing is your real being. It simply watches: it watches birth, it watches love, it watches meditation, it watches death. The only quality there is, is one of witnessing, pure mirroring. It simply mirrors whatever happens.Shefali need not be afraid. I am absolutely happy with her work on herself. She has been of great courage. To become a child again needs guts – it needs guts because the whole world will be laughing at you. The whole world will think you have gone mad. You will not find support anywhere; you will lose your respectability. People will start avoiding you. That’s what happened to Shefali. When she went back to Holland, she wrote to me: “It is strange, friends are avoiding me. People whom I have known my whole life simply try not to come across me. And I have brought such joy to them, and I have brought an open heart.” But who wants an open heart? Who wants joy? People are searching for misery. People hoard misery, people cling to their hell. They avoid anything that can bring joy to them as long as they can. They always find alibis, rationalizations. Bliss is condemned, misery is respected.Whenever you see a really blissful man, the idea arises in you: “Has he gone mad?” because the so-called sane are never happy. Sanity has become almost synonymous with misery, a long face, sadness, seriousness. Sanity has become synonymous with a loaded feeling – one is dragging oneself somehow, and dragging for nothing, and there is nowhere to reach except death. Sanity has become synonymous with the idea that life is meaningless, that to be joyous one has to be a fool.It really needs courage to go against this whole crowd of the world, this miserable crowd. Nobody knows the ways of joy; nobody dances, nobody sings. And suddenly you burst into a song! They all feel shocked: “Something has gone wrong.” They all start improving upon you, they all start advising you. They are all together against you. You are dangerous; the fear arises in the mind of the crowd: “Who knows? You may be right.” The doubt arises and if you are right, then they are all wrong. This is unacceptable. You have to be wrong, only then can they feel safe that they are right. Hence, they crucified Jesus.Christians paint Jesus as sad and miserable. If he had really been that type of man, nobody would have bothered to crucify him. People would have loved him, respected him. People would have declared him a saint. But he was a celebrating man, he was celebrating the small things of life – drinking, feasting, meeting friends. He was bringing a different quality to religion. That was unacceptable, that could not be tolerated; they had to crucify him. They had to shut him up, they had to tell him to be quiet. He was so dangerous that to allow him to remain alive was risky. He had to be destroyed. And then they created a Jesus of their own, as they would have liked the real Jesus to be: sad, miserable, on the cross. It is not just an accident that Christianity has taken the cross as the symbol, death as a symbol, a crucified man as a symbol. It makes you sad.When you go in a church, the whole atmosphere is sad. The atmosphere is that of a cemetery. It is bound to be so: the church is created around the cross, not around Christ – remember. So I call Christianity “Crossianity,” not Christianity. The space that is created in church is around the cross. Take the cross away and Christianity will disappear. Let Christ dance and Christianity will disappear. Let him have a flute, let him play, let him sing, and all your bishops and archbishops and popes and priests will be shocked: “What is this man doing?” They will crucify him again. They can only believe in a crucified life, they can only believe in a corpse. They are against life, they are antilife.The people who decided that Jesus should be crucified were also bishops and priests and archbishops. They were not called bishops and they were not called priests and they were not called popes – they were called rabbis – but they were the same kind of people, no difference at all.Shefali has been courageous, and one who is courageous in life will be courageous in death too. She has learned that to be courageous is the only way to be. No need for her to be afraid; she can go into death dancing. Death will only reveal that which has been revealed in love and in meditation; it will reveal it more profoundly, that’s all. What has been just a glimpse in meditation and love will become absolute reality in death. Death is the highest kind of love and the highest kind of meditative energy.If one knows how to die, death is transformed. You are not destroyed; you destroy death when you know how to die. Smiling, a laughter in your being, welcoming – death is not there. It is only God, your beloved coming to you. It is a misunderstanding when you call it death. Death, as such, exists not: one simply changes the body and the journey continues. Death, at the most, is an overnight stay in a caravanserai. In the morning, you go again. Life continues.Death is a rest. Death is not death at all: you are not destroyed. Life cannot be destroyed; life is eternal, death is just an episode in it. And death is not against life either; it is complementary to life. It is a rest, it is a pause. You have been singing so much, you need a little rest. Your throat is tired, your vocal chords are tired. You have been dancing so much. For seventy, eighty years you have been dancing; your legs are tired, you would like to have a little relaxation. Death allows you that relaxation. You have been laughing and living and loving. Death gives you a chance to revive again, death vitalizes you; it does not destroy. Death is nonexistential. It is just like deep sleep: a little longer, a little deeper, but just like sleep.And if you have loved, then your love remains. If you have meditated, your meditation remains. Whatever you have gained in the inner world remains, whatever you have been hoarding in the outer world is gone. Death can only take that which you possess. Death cannot take that which you are. Money you possess; it will be taken. Power you possess; it will be taken away. Meditation you don’t possess. It is not a thing to be possessed by you, it is a quality of your being, it is you. Love you don’t possess; it is not a possession, it is being. The interior wealth will go with you; the exterior wealth will be taken away because the exterior belongs to the body. The body will fall, and the whole exterior world will fall with it and will disappear with it.Shefali can go happily. When death comes, she can go dancing, praying. She will find the beloved in it.Her fear is also true: she’s afraid that she is not yet egoless. That is the beginning of egolessness – to feel “I am not yet egoless.” The egoists never feel that; they think they are egoless. It is the feeling: “I am still with the ego” that gives the first hint, the first ray of the morning sun.She says, “I’m not yet enlightened.” That is the beginning of enlightenment. That is the first feel, the first experience. The “I” is disappearing. When the “I” has disappeared completely, enlightenment happens.My feeling about Shefali is that her death will become her satori, her samadhi. I have been closely watching her progress toward inner being; just a very, very small distance is left. If she can accept death totally, that distance will be destroyed; she will take the quantum leap.These are the three points to become enlightened: one is meditation, another is love, the third is death. And death is the greatest because death is the most natural. Love may happen, may not happen. It is not an inevitability. Millions of people decide to live without love. They live but they never love; so it is not a necessary phenomenon, it can be avoided. And meditation, you have to go into it, you have to make an effort, you have to search and seek. It is arduous; very few people go on that adventure. Love is more natural in that sense because it is something built into your being. Meditation is not so inbuilt. People miss even love, so what to say about meditation? Even fewer people go in the direction of meditation.But death is inevitable; you cannot avoid it, you cannot choose it. It is there. Each and everyone has to go through it. It is absolute, there is no shirking. All that you can do is either go into it dancing or go into it reluctant, clinging to life. If you are reluctant, you will miss the experience of death. If you go joyously, you will have the experience of death. To miss the experience of death is to miss God because in death, love and meditation bloom automatically. Death takes your body away; suddenly ninety percent of your life evaporates. Death takes your mind away; then the remaining ten percent is also gone. Only the witness is left. This is what meditation is. Death takes all your attachments away, all your lusts away, and when all lust and all attachments are gone, love energy is pure. It is no longer a relationship; it becomes a state of being. Death simply cleanses your love and your meditativeness. Your awareness and your love are both bathed, and they come out absolutely clean and purified in death. If you go joyously, death can become your samadhi. It can become, certainly, to Shefali.And she asks, “Is it possible for a man who is still not egoless…to encounter death consciously and to welcome and enjoy it the same way? You are everywhere. But after we will have died, shall we find ourselves in such a state that it will be possible for us to remain attuned to you whether you are in the body or not?” Death makes no difference. Death is absolutely immaterial. If you have loved me, if you have been in tune with me, you will remain in tune with me. Death will simply make it more intense because the barriers will be taken away.The body is a barrier, the mind is a barrier; when all the barriers disappear, there will be great melting. And the disciple comes to know his first experience of God as melting into the master. That is the privilege of a disciple. Then the second melting happens into God. The first is melting into the master because the master has been a god to the disciple, the master has been a symbol of the divine. The first experience will be of melting into the master, becoming one with the master; the second experience will be melting into God. And this is easier.To melt from you directly into God is difficult. The enormity of it is such that you may shrink back. You need a christ between you and God because the christ is human and divine; that is the dual nature of the christ or the master. He is like you, you can hold his hand. Once you hold his hand, slowly, slowly you find that his hand is disappearing and you have entered unknowingly into the enormous, into the infinite. But by that time you cannot shrink back, by that time you have already tasted; you are drunk.God is like an ocean; you may feel afraid. The master is like a small spring; you need not be afraid. You can dance with the spring, you can let the spring fall on you, you can allow the showering. But in that very showering, slowly, slowly you will be gone. And then you will be ready to go into the ocean, into the enormous, into the infinite.The second question:Osho,Do you ever commit mistakes? And if you do, what is your greatest mistake in life?I don’t commit anything else; I only commit mistakes. I live through them, I survive through them. And I don’t like small things; I am simply against the small scale. I only love great things.And you ask me, “What is your greatest mistake in life?” Giving sannyas to you. Now I have fifty thousand alive mistakes moving around the world. I will stand with them and fall with them. Krishnamurti is far safer; he stands on his own. He has not committed a single mistake in giving initiation to anybody.I go on initiating people. Each time I give initiation to a person it will depend: if he becomes enlightened, then I was not wrong; if he does not become, I was wrong. What will the criterion be of whether I committed a mistake in giving initiation to a person or not? Only one: if he becomes enlightened, then I was right in initiating him. If he does not become enlightened, then I was wrong, I initiated the wrong person.But I am not worried about mistakes. I am going to commit even more and more and more. Who cares? Even if one person becomes enlightened out of thousands of sannyasins, it is a great blessing to the world. And remember, the same is the way of existence.Do you know that a single male can populate the whole earth? He has so many seeds of human beings – a single male! In a single lovemaking, the male releases millions of seeds. Actually he will become father of, at the most, a dozen children, but he could have become a father of millions of children. The whole population of the earth today could be fathered by a single man.A single tree brings millions of seeds. All those seeds are not going to become trees, but existence is always working through abundance. Existence is a spendthrift, it is not a miser. It knows that only a few seeds will become a tree, so what is the point of making so many seeds? It makes millions of seeds. The whole of life is an overflowing life, it is not a miserly phenomenon. Existence is very indulgent. Even if a single human being becomes enlightened, I am immensely fulfilled. The remaining ones will prove my mistakes. They will remain as mistakes, but that risk has to be taken.The moment you trust me… You don’t know, you are not even aware that I have trusted you more than you have trusted me. I have risked more than you have risked. You have nothing to risk, really. When you say “I surrender,” what have you got to surrender? Except misery, what have you got? Anxieties, anguish, agonies – what else have you got to surrender? Your darkness, your hell – what else have you got to surrender? What risk are you taking? You think that you are taking a great risk in trusting me. You have nothing to lose. Really, I am taking a risk with you.Christ took the risk when he accepted those twelve apostles, and he must still be thinking, “Why did I accept those twelve apostles?” If he had not accepted those fellows, there would have been no church, no Christianity and all that nonsense. Buddha must be thinking again and again, “Why did I accept so many people as my bhikkus, as my disciples? They created a great nuisance.” But that risk has to be taken.It is good that Jesus took the risk. Without it, it is certain there would have been no church and there would have been no wars between Christians and Mohammedans and there would have been none of the ugliness that the Christian church has been doing down the ages. But there would have been no Eckhart either and no Francis either, no Jakob Boehme either. Out of the whole church history, even if one Meister Eckhart is born it is enough, it is worth taking the risk. If Buddha had not risked, had not committed the mistake of initiating people, there would have been no Bodhidharma, no Mahakashyapa, no Nagarjuna, no Vimalkirti – and the world would have been immensely poorer.Yes, there have been wrong things, millions of wrong things, but a single phenomenon like Bodhidharma is enough to counterbalance. All those million wrongs are nothing; a single Bodhidharma is enough.You ask me what my greatest mistake is. That is not only my greatest mistake, that has always been the greatest mistake of all the masters. They initiate people and they take the risk. Now it depends on you. This is what I call commitment; now this is your commitment to become enlightened, this is your commitment that you have to grow. Don’t remain stuck, start moving. You have a great destiny. You are entitled to miracles; don’t be satisfied with small things. You can possess the whole, so don’t be contented with small things and tiny things – a certificate, a medal, a degree. Don’t be stupid. Be intelligent and work diligently. Go on hammering yourself so all that is wrong is chiseled out. You will have to pass through fire. That’s why I have chosen the orange color, the color of fire: you will have to pass through fire. But only those who pass through fire become pure gold.Let me be your alchemy. Allow me to change your baser metal into pure gold. It is a risky game. The greater possibility is always of failure: the higher you aim, the more the possibility of failure. If you want to become a rich man, you can become easily. If you want to become a politician, you can become easily; intelligence is not needed.I have heard…A politician had a tumor in the head; it was operated upon. When they were removing the tumor, they felt that the whole brain had to be cleaned because the tumor had affected the whole brain system. So they took out the whole brain. The cleansing was going to take a few days. And it is an old story – in those days the anesthesia was not so strong.The next day the politician was lying in bed. A man came and said, “What are you doing here? You have been chosen the prime minister of the country!”He heard it, almost in a sleep – but when you hear that you have become the prime minister, no anesthesia can work. He simply jumped out of the bed and started to leave. The doctor said, “Where are you going? Your brain is not yet back in the skull.”The man said, “Now I won’t need it. I have become the prime minister!”If you want to become a politician you don’t need much intelligence; in fact, the less the better. You will succeed far more easily. But if you want to become enlightened you will have to put all that you have at stake. You will have to become an intense flame of intelligence, of awareness. This is the commitment. I have risked with you, you have to risk with me. This commitment can grow into a great flowering: it all depends on you. Whether what I am doing is a mistake or not will be proved by you. Now it is beyond my hands. This is my trust in you.The third question:Osho,What is love? Why am I so afraid of love? Why does love feel like an unbearable pain?Meditate on these lines of Raymond John Baughan:What is required of us in our time is that we go down into uncertainty, where what is new is old as every morning, and what is well-known is not known as well. That we go down into the most human where living men have vanished and the music of their meaning has been trapped and sealed. What is asked of us in our time is that we break open our blocked caves and find each other. Nothing less will heal the anguished spirit, nor release the heart to act in love.You ask, “What is love?” It is the deep urge to be one with the whole, the deep urge to dissolve I and thou into one unity. Love is that because we are separated from our own source. Out of that separation, the desire arises to fall back into the whole, to become one with it. If you pull a tree out of its soil, if you uproot it, the tree will feel a great desire to be rooted back into the soil because that was its real life. Now it is dying; separate, the tree cannot exist. It has to exist in the earth, with the earth, through the earth. That’s what love is.Your ego has become a barrier between you and your earth: the whole. Man is suffocated, he cannot breathe, he has lost his roots. He is no longer nourished. Love is a desire for nourishment. Love is getting roots in existence. And the phenomenon is easier if you fall into the polar opposite. That’s why man is attracted toward woman, the woman is attracted toward man. Man can find his earth through the woman, he can become earthed again through the woman, and the woman can become earthed through the man. They are complementary. Man alone is half, in a desperate need to be whole. Woman alone is half. When these two halves meet and mingle and merge, for the first time one feels rooted, grounded. Great joy arises in the being.It is not only the woman that you get rooted in; it is through the woman that you get rooted in God. The woman is just a door, the man is just a door. Man and woman are doors into God. The desire for love is the desire for God. You may understand it, you may not understand it, but the desire for love really proves the existence of God. There is no other proof. Because man loves, God is. Because man cannot live without love, God is. The urge to love simply says that alone we suffer and die; together we grow, are nourished, fulfilled, contented.You ask, “What is love? Why am I so afraid of love?” And that’s why one is afraid of love too – because the moment you enter the woman, you lose your ego. The woman enters the man and loses her ego.Now this has to be understood: you can be rooted in the whole only if you lose yourself. There is no other way. You are attracted toward the whole because you are feeling unnourished, and then when the moment comes to disappear into the whole, you start feeling very much afraid. A great fear arises because you are losing yourself. You shrink back. This is the dilemma. Every human being has to face it, encounter it, go through it, understand it, and transcend it. You have to understand that both things are arising out of the same thing. You feel it would be beautiful to disappear: no worry, no anxiety, no responsibility. You will become part of the whole, as trees are and the stars are. Just the idea is fantastic; it opens doors, mysterious doors into your being, it gives birth to poetry, it is romantic. But when you actually go into it, then the fear arises: “I am going to disappear and who knows what will happen next?”Remember the river listening to the whisper of the desert – hesitant, wants to go beyond it, wants to go in search of the ocean, feels that there is a desire and there is a subtle feeling and certainty and conviction that “My destiny is to go beyond.” No visible reason can be supplied, but there is an inner conviction that “I am not to end here. I have to go searching for something bigger.” Something deep down says, “Try, try hard and transcend this desert.” And then the desert says, “Listen to me: the only way is to evaporate into the winds. They will take you, they will take you beyond the desert.”The river wants to go beyond the desert, but the question is very natural: “Then what is the proof and guarantee that the winds will allow me to become a river again? Once I have disappeared, I will not be in control in any way. Then what is the guarantee that I will again become the same river, the same form, the same name, the same body? And who knows? And how should I trust the winds that once I have surrendered to them, they will allow me to become separate again?”That is the fear of love. You know, you are convinced that without love there is no joy, without love there is no life, without love you are hungry for something unknown, unfulfilled, empty. You are hollow, you don’t have anything. You are just a container without the content. You feel the hollowness, the emptiness and the misery of it. And you are convinced that there are ways that can fulfill you. But when you come close to love, a great fear arises, doubt arises. If you relax, if you really go into it, will you ever be able to come back again? Will you be able to protect your identity, your personality? Is it worth taking such a risk? And the mind decides not to take such a risk because at least you are – undernourished, unfed, hungry, miserable – but at least you are.Disappearing into some love, who knows? You will disappear, and then what is the guarantee that there will be joy, there will be bliss, there will be God? It is the same fear that a seed feels when it starts dying into the soil. It is death, and the seed cannot conceive that there will be life arising out of death.Love is death, and lovers cannot comprehend that this death is only death on this side; on the other side is the real birth. That’s why I said yesterday – Vidya’s mother had asked what a guru can do to you, and I told you – “He can undo you and he can redo you.”To be with a master is a great love affair. You will have to allow him to undo you. That is painful. And fear will arise and doubt will arise, and you will escape many times, and you will say, “This is not the thing to do.” The mind will say, “What are you getting into? For what? Save yourself and escape.” And the mind will give a thousand and one reasons to escape. The mind is very clever in inventing reasons, it is a rationalizer. Where no reason exists, it creates, and those reasons will appeal to you because they will appeal to the ego.This is the misery, the dilemma, the anguish: man wants to love and man is afraid to love. Unless you understand it and you go in spite of the fear, you will not be able to love. That’s what trust is. In spite of the fear, going into a thing is trust.The fourth question:Osho,Have your Simons, Peters, Pauls etc. already started establishing a church for non-smelling camels?They need not. I won’t allow that. I am doing that myself because the last time the Pauls and the Peters were allowed to create the church, they messed it up completely. This time I am to create my church myself; Peters and Pauls won’t be allowed to create it. That will be far better.Christ was not unaware of the Eastern ways. He had been in the East, he had learned the wisdom of the East; he had known truth here, on this soil – in India.Christianity has not got the whole story about Jesus. Their story starts when he was thirty and ends when he was thirty-three: only a three-year record. What happened to the thirty years? Where was Jesus? He was traveling in Egypt, in India, in Tibet. He was working hard, he was finding ways and means to enter his own being. When he returned to his own people, he had become almost a foreigner – the same way as my sannyasins will feel back in the West. You will become a foreigner there. In fact, now to be a foreigner will be your destiny. If you are in India you will be a foreigner, if you are in England you will be a foreigner, if you are in America you will be a foreigner. Joining hands with me, you have become a foreigner. I am a foreigner, an outsider, not part of this mad world.When Jesus went back to his own people, to the Jews, he had become almost a foreigner. They could not understand what he was talking about. It was not part of their tradition, although he was quoting from the tradition. But the meaning that he was giving to the quotes was totally strange. Although he was using the names of Moses and Ezekiel, those were just names. They were only the container; the content was totally different. The content was not Jewish; it was Buddhist, it was basically Buddhist. He was pouring Buddhist wine into Jewish bottles, and if Jews became angry, it was natural. And he could not live long; otherwise he would have created his own church. A three-year ministry is not much. He was very young, thirty-three, when he was crucified; he did not have enough time. Buddha created his own church.That’s the reason why very few people have become enlightened through the Christian church. They can be counted on the fingers. They are very few and far between. It is very rare: centuries pass, then one Eckhart or one Francis. Buddha created his own church; he lived a long life, he lived eighty-four years. He became enlightened when he was thirty-five; he had fifty years to work. He created his own church.When a church is created by a Buddha or a Christ, it has a different quality. When a church is created by a Peter and Paul, it is created by Tom and Dick. It can’t have that quality. This time I’m not going to allow that. The Peters and the Pauls can rest, they need not be worried. Whatever is happening here is happening according to me, absolutely according to me, so don’t throw the responsibility on others. I am responsible – for good, for bad. Whatever happens here, I am responsible; I am totally and absolutely responsible.And it is easy for your mind to criticize my sannyasins. It is difficult to criticize me. So you jump on my poor sannyasins; it is easy for you to criticize them. If you want to criticize me, criticize me; don’t find scapegoats. I always like a direct communication, a direct dialogue. There is no Paul here and no Peter, and whatever my sannyasins are doing, they are simply obeying my orders. So if you have to find faults, find faults with me. Never find faults with my sannyasins; they have no responsibility in it. They are simply obedient, they are doing whatever is said. Whatever is given to them, they do it. They do it with totality, with intensity. That is part of their growth work.But don’t call names. Don’t say that the Peters and Pauls, et cetera, have already started establishing a church. No, I have started it. The church starts when a master initiates. Initiate a single man and the church has started. The church exists in the relationship between the master and the disciple; it does not exist in the temples and the churches and the organizations. It exists between the master and the disciple. It is a very intimate phenomenon. Its vibrations will be felt all over the earth, sooner or later; it will go on becoming a tidal wave.The church in itself is not wrong. Who is behind the church? That is the basic thing to be remembered. Christianity went very wrong because of Peter and Paul. Buddhism never went that wrong. A few things are going to be wrong; they have to be accepted, that is the nature of things. When the water falls – the rainwater – it is pure, it is distilled water, but the moment it falls on the soil it will become muddy.When Buddha speaks it is pure rainwater, distilled water, the purest, but when it falls into your ears it becomes muddy. It is natural, it has to be accepted. And when Buddha is gone, of course there is more and more mud, more and more mud. But even if a small part of Buddha’s message remains hidden in the mud, it is worth carrying the mud on your heads, it is worth carrying that mud in your heart because that small fragment of truth can transform you. Truth is never small. Truth cannot be small. It may be very atomic, but its explosion is always infinite.I am going to create my own church. Sannyas is the beginning of it, and I want to create it according to me. So whatever you feel is not according to you, criticize me, encounter me directly.The fifth question:Osho,When you talk about love, tears immediately start running. Please say something about it.Tears are the greatest possible prayer. Don’t worry about analyzing them, don’t try to interpret them; they are beyond interpretation and beyond analysis. Words will not be adequate to say anything about tears. Tears come from a deeper source than words. And if tears are coming, all that is needed is not to think about them but to allow them, to give them an intensity, to give them a kind of totality. You will understand those tears only when you are not hesitant about going into them, when you are not somehow holding yourself back. Go into them utterly. Become tears, and when tears come, enjoy.You are overflowing. If tears don’t come while thinking of love, then you were not thinking about love. If tears don’t come while thinking of God, then your thinking is futile, impotent. If, listening to me, your heart does not start overflowing with tears, then you were listening only through the head – which is not listening. You have been hearing but not listening. When you listen, the heart will start dancing. And the heart has only one way to express itself, and that way is the way of tears.Meditate on these lines of an anonymous poet:Sing until your breath crackles to the last.Note what is caught upon the passing wind.Laugh until the pains squeeze authorityinto chaotic blasts, and then into puny puffs.Cry until the peak of your tears,like the pure tips of a wave before it folds into the gulping sea.Ah, but love when your heart beatsthe beat of nights full of daffodils.For then you are.If you can allow your tears totality, then you are. My message is of laughter and tears. It looks contradictory, but it is not. Deep down in your being, laughter and tears are joined together; they are part of one energy. If you laugh long, tears will come. If you go on crying, you will suddenly see the change – one moment a sudden change – and laughter has entered you. See this polarity. Go into tears as deeply as possible until tears become laughter. Then you have really gone to the very end. From that end, the wheel moves; when you are laughing, laugh so deeply and so totally, so wildly, that laughter turns into tears and your eyes start raining. Then you will know that all paradoxes are only on the surface, deep down they are one, laughter and tears are one. And when your prayer is of laughter and tears, it is true prayer.You need not be worried about what it is. It is a mystery. It has to be lived, known, seen. Through knowing it, through seeing it, through living it, you will understand it. There is no other way of understanding it.The sixth question:Osho,I'm able to feel the divine breath in a sunset, in a tree, in a bird flying, but I'm incredibly afraid to open myself to human beings, to the concrete people around me. I can accept the divine only beyond the human level. Sometimes I feel it is really a problem. Please help me to face this point.It is always simple to love abstract things. It is simpler to love humanity than human beings because by loving humanity you are not risking anything. A single human being is far more dangerous than the whole of humanity. Humanity is a word; there is no corresponding reality to it. A human being is a reality, and when you come across reality there are going to be good times, bad times, pain, pleasure, ups and downs, highs and lows, agonies and ecstasies. Loving humanity, there will be no ecstasy and no agony. In fact, loving humanity is a way of avoiding human beings. Because you can’t love human beings, you start loving humanity just to deceive yourself. Avoid abstractions.The second thing is that it is certainly easier to love a tree because while loving a tree, the tree is almost passive, it does not respond. Loving a tree is just an imagination game on your part. It is easy; whatever you want to make out of it you can. The tree is blowing in the wind, and you can think that she is calling you, she is spreading her hands toward you, she is welcoming you – and the tree is blissfully unaware of you. Whenever you go to the tree, you can always project your imagination on it. You don’t yet know the being of the tree because you don’t even know your own being. To understand a tree will be more difficult because a tree is less evolved. There is a bigger gap between you and the tree. How can you bridge it?There is not so big a gap between you and your neighbor. You are contemporaries, equals, existing on the same plane, or almost the same plane. Understanding is easier, but you say that there you don’t feel at ease. Where understanding is easier, what is the problem? You cannot project. Where there is no possibility of understanding, you are free to project; you can love a rock.In America they are selling rocks in beautiful boxes. Somebody has sent me a rock. It is an ordinary rock; it costs ten dollars. The package is beautiful, and with it come printed instructions on how to love it, how to make it a pet, how to take care of it. The booklet that accompanies it says it is very temperamental; you will have to take care. This is a game you can play, and if you project, the rock will be felt to be responding. You can hold the rock in your hands and if you are really imaginative, of a poetic nature, you will feel the rock is sending vibes. It is saying, “Hi, how are you? I love you, and I am feeling so immensely good in your hand.” And this is simply you: it is a monologue, it is not a dialogue. The rock is simply unaware of you, but you can play the game.With concrete human beings, it is difficult to play the game; it costs. That’s why people start loving dogs and cats, trees, rocks. They want to love, but they want love to be non-risky. To love a dog is non-risky, to love a woman is very risky. She is not just there so that you can go on projecting, she is not like a white screen that you can project anything on and she will dance to your tune – and when you come home she will wag her tail. Not necessarily.A man went to his psychiatrist and said, “What is happening? I am in trouble. When I got married just one year ago, my wife used to come with my slippers and my dog used to bark. Now it is just the opposite: my dog comes with the slippers and my wife barks!”The psychiatrist said, “But I don’t understand. You are getting the same services. What is the problem?”With a human being, sometimes there is barking and sometimes there is wagging of the tail, and sometimes the wife is angry. And when a woman is angry, she is really angry. No man can be that angry because man is always halfhearted. He is neither total in his love nor total in his anger He is calculating; he thinks of what to do and what not to do. He is intellectual, he is hung up in the head. A woman lives without the head. That’s her beauty too, and also the agony of living with her. She’s so graceful, so round, so soft – all because the head is not calculating. She lives through the heart, is more instinctive, is more animal-like. When she loves you, she loves you. She is ready to sacrifice herself. She can die for you; she will not hesitate a single moment. But when she is angry, she can kill you. She will not hesitate a single moment either.A woman still remains total, a woman still remains primitive. And that is good, that is the only hope for humanity – that the woman is still primitive. Educate the woman, make her sophisticated, make her as clever as man, as cunning as man – as the lib movements are doing all over the world – and the world will lose the last hope. The only hope is the woman because she is still part of nature, still somehow rooted in nature, still earthly, has not yet become abstract, does not bother about abstract things. Her problems are concrete. She is a realist.I have heard about a Chinese emperor. He wanted a painting to be made for his bedroom. In a dream he had seen a white crane flying across the full moon. He wanted that. He searched for the greatest painter. A woman was found who was the greatest painter and the emperor said, “Do it, and I will reward you, and whatever you demand I will give you. I need this painting. I have seen it in a dream – a white crane flying across the full moon.”The woman said, “You will have to wait.”One year passed. The emperor inquired again and again, and again and again the woman said, “Wait.”Two years passed and the emperor said, “How long will it take? Just a small painting of the full moon and the crane passing it. How long will it take?”The woman said, “I have been watching every full-moon night, but not a single crane has passed. And until it passes, I cannot paint it. I am not a man, I am a woman. I am a realist.”I love the story. The woman said, “I am not a man, I cannot do it in the abstract. I cannot simply imagine it. I have to see it. Only when I have seen it happen, can I do it.”The emperor understood the point and said, “There is no need. You will be rewarded. No need to be worried about it, but I understand your point.”A woman is still a realist.I have heard…A man was laying a new concrete path. No sooner was his back turned than a crowd of children came running by, leaving footmarks all over the hardening surface. A neighbor who heard his swearing reproached him: “I thought you liked children, George.”“I do like them,” he replied, “in the abstract, but not in the concrete.”It is very easy to love people in the abstract; the real problem arises in the concrete. And remember, unless you love human beings – concrete, real human beings – all your love for trees and birds is bogus, just ho hum.Only if you can love human beings will a point arise in your consciousness where you can love birds and trees and mountains too. But that is only later on. If you cannot penetrate a reality that is so close by, how can you penetrate the reality that is so far off? How can you commune with a rock? There exists no common language. Either you have to become a rock, or the rock has to become a human being. Otherwise the distance is so vast, unbridgeable. Bridge with people first.And I know it is possible to love a tree. But that is only when you have loved human beings so deeply, so totally, that you have found trees in human beings – only then; that you have found animals in human beings – only then; that you have seen birds in human beings – only then. That is because a human being has been all these things, he still carries the marks in his unconscious, or collective unconscious. You have once been a tree, a bird, an animal, a rock. You have been all things, you have been millions of things, and all those experiences are still inside you.The only way to connect with the outside tree is to first connect with the tree that is inside a human being. Fall in love with human beings. Take the risk, be courageous. Suffer the pains of love and the ecstasies. Go deeper into human beings, and soon you will find no human being is just a human being; a human being is a human being plus the whole of existence because a human being is the ultimate evolution. All that man has been in the past is still there, layer upon layer.In a woman, have you not felt it sometimes that she is a cat? Have you not looked into the eyes of a woman and suddenly felt the cat inside? Without being a cat, no woman can be a woman. And you will find the bitch too. And so is the case with a man: you will find the wolf.Man has evolved through all that exists. It is just like you were a child, then you became a young man. Do you think your childhood has completely disappeared? It is there; it has gathered a layer of youth around it, but it is there. It can be provoked. In a certain situation and milieu, you can again become a child. If you happen to see your childhood friend, suddenly you forget that you are a young man; you again become a child. You start thinking of those days, and the nostalgia and the memories and the sweet things and the joys and all that. You forget.You may have become old. Has youth simply disappeared from you? It is there. You have gathered another layer. Just cut a tree and you will find layers upon layers in the tree. That’s how the age of the tree is judged: if it is sixty years old, then there are sixty layers. Each year a new layer arises. If you cut a rock, the rock has layers. If you go deep into human beings you will find layers, like trees and rocks. The deeper you go, the more you will find strange things happening. While making love to a woman, if you can abandon yourself totally you will be making love to animals, to birds, to trees, to rocks, to existence itself.Each single individual is a small world, contains all, a microcosm – contains the whole, the macrocosm. And you cannot avoid human beings, you cannot say, “I will love trees, but not human beings.” Then your trees will be false, you have not approached them rightly. First, they have to be loved in human beings, first they have to be found in human beings. Only then will you know their language.The last question:Osho,When a real lion meets a real master, he recognizes him and he decides to be defeated and decides to have his ego broken because he knows that this is the path and that it will lead him to more ease. But I am afraid that it is still my ego deciding for me. Please explain.The decision to take sannyas has to be of the ego, but it is a decision to commit suicide. These two things have to be understood. When a man decides to commit suicide, life is deciding for death, in favor of death. When a man commits suicide, what happens? He has lived and found something is lacking in life, it is not worth living. He moves in the opposite direction, of death; he searches for death.The same happens in sannyas too. It is the ego deciding to take sannyas. Sannyas means the suicide of the ego. The ego has lived and found only agonies; the ego has searched, groped in the dark, and nothing has ever happened to it – only tension, anguish, misery. The ego has lived through hell; the ego is hell.Jean-Paul Sartre says, “The other is hell.” That is absolutely wrong; the ego is hell – not the other, but the “I” is hell. And when you have felt this in the very guts of your being, in your bones, in your blood, in your marrow – when the ego has utterly failed you – the ego decides to commit suicide. That’s what sannyas is.But once you take sannyas, a totally different world, a totally different vision, starts in your being. You start living egolessly, and suddenly you are surprised: it was not life that was wrong, it was the ego that was wrong. Life is immensely fulfilling; it is sheer joy, it is made of the stuff called bliss. It was the ego that was a barrier and was not allowing you to live. Once you surrender even for a moment, if the window opens in that surrender, that’s what sannyas is, initiation is. Looking into the eyes of the master, for a moment you disappear, for a moment you start seeing through the eyes of the master. For a moment you are not separate, you vibrate with the master. You take his color, you take his vibration, you pulsate with him, you breathe with him. It is a single moment, but in that single moment you have come across the gap from where the door opens, and you can see a totally different world. The same world, yet from a totally different perspective.This is initiation: looking through the master’s eyes. You have looked through your eyes and you have not found anything. Now you close your eyes and you look through the eyes of the master. This is obedience, this is surrender, this is trying to put aside your past patterns and learning something new. It is an unlearning process, unlearning as far as the ego and its ways are concerned, and a learning process as far as the ways of non-ego are concerned.The master is one who has no ego. The disciple is one who has come to understand that the ego and its ways are false. It leads only into a cul-de-sac. The disciple is one who is ready to drop the ego and wants to know how to drop it. He has suffered long with it, he has carried the burden long. Now he’s tired of it. He wants to be unburdened. He does not know how to put it away, how to throw it. He has been clinging to it for so long that he has forgotten that it is separate from him, that it can be put aside. He comes to a man who has put his ego aside, looks into those eyes, starts trembling in a new way. A new streaming energy is felt and suddenly a link is broken between the ego and you.This is what initiation is. It is just a beginning. Certainly, much will have to be done later on. But if you have taken one step, half the journey is complete. Yes, I say half the journey is complete because the first step is the most difficult step. All other steps are going to be the same, repetition of the same step again and again.The question is significant. The questioner says, “When a real lion meets a real master, he recognizes him…” That is true. Camels cannot recognize a master. The camels have to be persuaded, and sometimes a camel comes to me and I persuade really hard.Just a few days ago, I was persuading a woman really hard. I could see that she could become a lion, but that she persists in remaining a camel. I could see the potential, that just in a single step she could become a lion. Ordinarily I don’t persuade too much because persuading a person too much for sannyas can become a barrier. The person can start thinking that he or she is so important, and that’s why I am persuading. That feeling of importance can enhance the ego. But when I see that somebody is just on the verge, a push is needed, I go out of my way to give a push. But it is always moving into the unknown. One never knows how the person is going to react.I persuaded her. She became a sannyasin, but missed the point. While looking into my eyes, she was not looking into my eyes. She was still afraid, she was clinging to the camel. A great opportunity was given to her; she missed it. I have given her a message that she can drop sannyas because really, it has not happened. She wants to remain a camel, so let her be happy as a camel. A camel cannot recognize, a camel is blind. The camel is the larva, a stagnant pool.But a lion can recognize. That’s why it almost always happens that those who have any kind of courage immediately take the jump into sannyas. Not that they will not have to face the world, not that they will not have problems. They will have problems, but that is secondary; those problems can be tackled, that world can be faced. But when a moment arises when one has to take the risk, the lion takes the risk. The lion recognizes the master.The camel cannot recognize; the camel has to be persuaded, goaded into sannyas. The lion can recognize and accept sannyas, ask for it, take the jump on his own accord. And in that very jump, the lion starts moving to the third stage: the child.In surrender you become a child, you become soft, feminine, you allow the master to penetrate you deeply. You allow the master to make you pregnant. You become pregnant with the divine, and the state of the child is really a state of pregnancy. You die and you are born anew as a child, out of your own womb. It is the greatest miracle in the world – man being born out of his own womb.But the decision is going to be of the ego. Just as suicide is the decision of life, sannyas is the decision of the ego. But once you have decided, the ego starts disappearing, the ego has committed suicide. In fact, sannyas and suicide are very similar. Suicide is a false sannyas, sannyas is a real suicide – because in suicide only the body dies and you will be born again. In sannyas the ego dies, and if you work it out totally, you may not be born again.Enough for today.

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The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 01-09Category: SUFISM

The Wisdom of Sands Vol 1 07 (Listen & Download)

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There was once a violent, ignorant and idolatrous king. One day he swore that if his personal idol accorded him a certain advantage in life, he would capture the first three people who passed by his castle and force them to dedicate themselves to idol worship.Sure enough, the king’s wishes were fulfilled, and he immediately sent soldiers on to the highway to bring in the first three people whom they could find.These three were, as it happened, a scholar, a Sayed (a descendant of Mohammed the prophet) and a prostitute.Having them thrown down before his idol, the unbalanced king told them of his vow, and ordered them all to bow down in front of the image.The scholar said, “This situation undoubtedly comes within the doctrine of ‘force majeure.’ There are numerous precedents allowing anyone to appear to conform with custom if compelled, without real or moral culpability being in any way involved.” So he made a deep obeisance to the idol.The Sayed, when it was his turn, said, “As a specially protected person, having in my veins the blood of the holy prophet, my actions themselves purify anything which is done, and therefore there is no bar to my acting as this man demands.” And he bowed down before the idol.The prostitute said, “Alas, I have neither intellectual training nor special prerogatives, and so I am afraid that, whatever you do to me, I cannot worship this idol, even in appearance.”The mad king’s malady was immediately banished by this remark. As if by magic he saw the deceit of the two worshippers of the image. He at once had the scholar and the Sayed decapitated, and set the prostitute free.God cannot be reduced to an image; that is one of the fundamentals of Sufi experience. I will not say Sufi philosophy, because there exists nothing like Sufi philosophy. It is an experience, not speculation. It is a vision.The Sufi vision says that God cannot be reduced to any image, metaphor, symbol or sign, although down through the ages the human mind has been trying to reduce God to something that man can worship, that man can handle, that man can cope with. That has been one of the oldest desires of the human mind: to put God into human categories so that God can be managed, manipulated, so God can be in your hands. The Sufi experience is that this is sacrilege, this is sin. The very effort to reduce God to an image is to falsify reality.In the first place, why do we want God to be reduced to an idol? The very enormity of existence baffles us. The very infinity, and we feel we are falling into an abyss. Out of fear man creates a god, a small god, small like man. Out of fear man creates God in his own image and then he feels at ease. To feel at ease with the enormity of existence, you will have to disappear. Either disappear into the infinity of existence, or create a manageable God. Create a temple in your home, let God be reduced to an image – then you can forget the enormity, the hugeness, the immensity.Because of the eternal silence of existence, man wants to create a song to sing. The song may be of the Vedas or of the Koran; it doesn’t matter. Sound is consoling, silence frightening. The image feels human, part of our world. The imageless God is superhuman, it is beyond us. Unless we go beyond ourselves, we cannot meet true godliness. To avoid that meeting, to avoid that transcendence, we create a small god of our own. We start having dialogues with our created god – man-made, manufactured by the human mind. We worship, we pray, we do rituals and we are happy. It is a kind of dream. It is not entry into reality: your temples are barriers to God, not doors. They pretend to be doors, but they are not. And your ideals, your images, your philosophies, your continuous effort to fill the emptiness of existence with words, philosophies, systems, are nothing but creating a false security around you.God is insecurity. To be with God is to be constantly in danger. To move into God is to move into the unknown and the unknowable. That frightens, that scares. One starts losing oneself, one wants to hold back. One doesn’t want to look into the enormity. Then those small gods created by yourself or by your priests out of your cunning, cleverness, skill, are of great help. They are false because you have created them.The true God is one who has created you, the false God is one that you have created. This is one of the fundamental insights of Sufism. The temple has to be empty, empty of all that is man-made; prayer has to be silent, silent of all that man has fabricated in words. Prayer can only be a dialogue – wordless, silent – with the infinity. It can only be a disappearance on your part. You can only dissolve, melt, merge. Then you are transplanted, taken up, transported. Then the winds take you beyond the desert, beyond the wasteland of the mind.But to be ready for it, great courage is needed. And man is always happy with toys. All your idols are toys; beware of the fact. And man is so cunning: he can create great philosophies around his falsities. He can defend, he can argue, he can rationalize. He can create such clouds of logic that you can be lost in those clouds. That’s how humanity is lost. Somebody is lost in Christian clouds, somebody is lost in Mohammedan clouds, somebody is lost in Hindu clouds. But if you go deep down into them, they are all speculative, logic chopping, philosophizing, around and around. The truth does not reflect in them.Truth reflects only in a meditative consciousness, not in a speculative consciousness. Never. The moment you think, you go astray. Truth reflects only when you are in a state of no-thought, when nothing stirs within you. When there is not even a ripple in the inner lake of consciousness, then truth reflects in you, and that truth has no image. That truth is formless, nameless. All names are our efforts to communicate with the eternal silence, but they all fail.Sufis have a hundred names for God – not exactly a hundred, ninety-nine. I call them “the ninety-nine names of nothingness.” The real, the hundredth, is empty. What it is, is not said, is not provoked; it is left. Ninety-nine names are given; where is the hundredth? That is the true name – which cannot be pronounced, which cannot be uttered. To utter it would be a profanity. How can the ultimate be uttered? And once uttered, how can it remain the ultimate?Lao Tzu says, “I don’t know his name – nobody knows. Hence I will call him Tao.” It has to be called something, but no name is a true name. When all names disappear from your mind and you are there just watching, being, doing nothing, you have the first glimpse, the first penetration of the infinite into the finite. You become pregnant. The first penetration of the sky into the earth, and your seed is broken, and you start growing. That growth is a kind of happening – nothing that you do. You simply allow it. This is the first thing to be remembered.But even Mohammedans, who have been against all kinds of idol worship, have created their own idols. It seems the human mind cannot avoid the temptation. Now Kaaba and its black stone have become the idol. Now people go to Kaaba for a haj, for a pilgrimage. Poor people gather money their whole lives to go just once to kiss that black stone. Now what is this? It is the same.I have heard…A Sufi seeker who later on became a great master, Bayazid of Bistun, was going for a haj, for a pilgrimage. By chance, he came across a master – at least by chance on his part. It was not chance on the part of the master. The master had been waiting for Bayazid, but Bayazid was unaware. He was just staying for the night by the side of the master, and the master was sitting under a tree.In the morning, the sun was rising, and it was beautiful and cool and birds were singing, and the pilgrims started moving – and Bayazid was also getting ready. And the master called him close and said, “Look into my eyes.” And Bayazid looked into those eyes. Something enormous opened, he was transported to some different dimension. When he came back, the master was laughing, and he said, “Now you can make the pilgrimage around me and go home. You have come to Kaaba. There is no other Kaaba. Forget all about that black stone.” And Bayazid understood it. He walked around the master as people do around the Kaaba stone, kissed the feet of the master, and went back home.And then people gathered together, the villagers, and they asked, “Have you been to Kaaba?”He said, “Yes, to the real Kaaba. I have seen the enormous, I have seen the undefined.”And once seen, it is never forgotten; it enters your very existence. It is no longer a memory in the head. Every cell of your body resounds it, every part of your being dances in tune with it.Sufis are not liked very much by the Mohammedans; they cannot be. Real religious people are never liked by the people who have created a false consolatory religion for themselves. How can you like a person who calls your toy a toy? He destroys your joy. You cannot forgive a person who calls a spade a spade. It is impossible to forgive him because you were imagining, you were creating a hallucination for yourself, and here comes a man who simply says that you are a fool, that the idol that you are worshipping is nothing but a stone, that the scriptures that you are reading are nothing but rubbish. “Burn it and throw away the idol. Get rid of all this unnecessary baggage and enter silence. Only through silence will you come to know that which is. Only through a state of no-mind will you enter the real temple.”The real temple is not outside; the real temple is you. If you can enter your own being, you will be entering existence itself. There is no need to go anywhere, not even a single step is needed. And you need not create a God, because whatever you create will be false.I have heard…There was once a child who was lying before a fire and scribbling on a sheet of paper. His father came up to him and said, “What are you drawing there, son?”“God,” said the child.Out of his greater knowledge, the father told the child, “But no one has ever seen God, son. Nobody in all the world knows what he looks like.”The child answered, “Well, I haven’t finished yet.”And that is not only so with children; that is so with great philosophers too. They all think that once they have drawn, painted, described, the whole world will know. Millions of philosophies have existed and disappeared and ignorance about God remains the same. In fact, there is no way to know God, so to call it ignorance is not right.Let me explain it to you. You can call something knowledge. If knowledge is possible, then the state before knowledge is ignorance. But if knowledge is impossible, then the state before it cannot be called ignorance. Ignorance is ignorance only compared to knowledge.Sufis don’t call the state of man ignorance. They call it innocence. And innocence is destroyed by knowledge. You don’t become a knower; simply your innocence is destroyed – which is a loss, not a gain, because God can be felt through innocence, never through knowledge.Don’t think that you are ignorant; you are simply innocent. And God cannot be reduced to knowledge. God is not just the unknown. God is really unknowable. The unknown will be known sooner or later; only time is required. Something was unknown yesterday, today it is known; something is unknown today, tomorrow it will be known. It is only a question of time: between the known and the unknown, the distance is of time. But God is not unknown, God is unknowable, intrinsically unknowable. God is a mystery. You cannot demystify existence. In fact, the more you know it, the more you feel knowing is impossible. The more you know, the less you know. And when you really come to know, all knowledge simply disappears. You again become ignorant, innocent, like a child.The camel is very full of knowledge, hence he is called the camel – because he accumulates, assimilates. The lion throws away knowledge, but becomes anti-knowledge, gets hooked by the opposite. The child is free from both polarities – knowledge, anti-knowledge, philosophy, anti-philosophy. The child is simply free of all dualities. The child is innocent. He knows nothing of knowledge and he knows nothing of ignorance. He simply is. That state of a child is the Sufi state of consciousness. Knowledge is almost a deception, not only to others but to yourself, because you go on repeating the borrowed.A sailor who had been abroad for some years came home on leave, and as he had some time to wait for his train, entered a hall nearby where a conjurer was entertaining. The sailor had a parrot with him, and knowing that he could not stay very long, sat near a door at the side of the hall so that he could slip out just before his train was due.The sailor found the conjurer very entertaining and remarked every now and then, “That’s a very pretty trick. I wonder what he will do next.” Presently the sailor thought he would like a smoke, so he lit a cigarette and threw the match through the open door.Now, as it happened, there was a gas leak outside the hall, and the next thing was a tremendous explosion and a wrecked hall. A few minutes later, a very bedraggled parrot remarked from its perch on a church spire about a mile away, “That’s a very pretty trick. I wonder what he will do next?”The knowledgeable person is just like that parrot: he’s simply repeating something he does not understand. He is repeating something because he has heard it being repeated. He is repeating without any meaning in it.When Buddha speaks, there is meaning; when a Buddhist scholar repeats the same words, they are parrotlike. When Mohammed sang the Koran, there was great significance in it. It was not in the words. It was in Mohammed himself, it was imparted by Mohammed’s being to those words. Those words are ordinary; anybody can learn them, everybody knows them. Mohammed was not a very educated person – in fact, not at all educated, an uneducated person, an innocent person. He had no idea of any knowledge. He was so immensely humble in his innocence that when for the first time, meditating on a mountain, no-mind happened to him, when satori bloomed, when he opened up to existence, when this world disappeared and the other started becoming real to his being – he was very afraid. And then he heard somewhere deep in his being, “Recite! Recite! Recite the name of Allah!”From the word recite comes the word Koran. Koran means recite. That was the first thing that he heard from his innermost core: Recite! Recite! Recite the glory of God! He was entering a glorious universe, he was entering the splendor of life and being. His whole heart was dancing. But he knew that he was an uneducated man. He said, “But I am absolutely uneducated! I don’t know language. How can I recite? How can I read? How can I say anything which will be relevant? I am an ignorant man.” But the voice continued, “Recite!” And he became so frightened, he had a great fever.He went home, told his wife that he was suffering from a great fever. The wife said, “But just before you left you were perfectly healthy. What has happened? And I see something very mysterious around you. You are not the same. Your eyes have such a depth I have never seen, and you have such passion on your face, such fire. You are aflame with something. What has happened? Tell me. This is not ordinary fever. You have stumbled upon some truth.”Mohammed confessed. He said, “Yes, something has happened.” And actually what he said is beautiful. He said, “Either I have gone mad, or I have become a poet.”“Either I have gone mad, or I have become a poet.” They are really synonymous. Unless you are mad you can’t be a poet, and unless you have the capacity to be a poet, you can’t be mad either.He said, “But don’t ask any more, because what has happened will take time for me to recapitulate. The immense has happened! I cannot contain it, I cannot understand it. And why should it have happened to me? I am not a scholar, I am not an ascetic, I have not been in any way a knowledgeable person. I have never been educated, never been to school or college. I am a simple man – what they call an ignorant man. Why should it happen to me?”But it has always been happening to those who are innocent. It has always been happening to those who are humble. It has never happened to the knowledgeable. Let me repeat: sinners have been known to know God, but not pundits, not scholars, not theologians.Then the greatest sin is the sin of knowledge. And of what exactly does the sin called knowledge consist? It consists of reducing godliness to a metaphor, of reducing God to a sign, of reducing God to a symbol, of reducing God to an idol. The idol can be of stone, of wood, of words – that doesn’t matter: But if you think God can be represented by anything whatever, then you are creating an idol.God is all, and there is no way to represent the all because there is nothing except it. I say to you: I am God, you are God, trees are God, rocks are God. Only God is. Isness and God are not two phenomena, just ways of saying the one thing, different ways of saying the same thing. In fact, to say “God is” is repetitive because “God” means “is.” The table is, the house is, the tree is, the man is. But to say “God is” is not right because one day the tree is, another day it is gone; its isness is temporary. Even the mountains will disappear, but God always is. God cannot be “is not.” So God is isness, God is pure existence.This totality cannot be represented by anything except the total. The total is the only metaphor for the total, the total is the only sign for the total. The whole is the only image of the whole; there is no other way to create any other image. All images will be false because they will be small, they will be inadequate. They will say something, but will not say the whole thing – and whenever truth is partial, it is more dangerous than the lie.Those who have known have always remained silent about defining God. They say ten thousand other things – they inspire you to make the journey, they provoke you, they seduce you into the journey, they create a great thirst and longing in you for truth – but they never define what that truth is. It has to be tasted, it has to be seen to be known; it has to be lived.Religion cannot be anything apart from life. Life can either be religious or irreligious, but you cannot have religion apart from life. You cannot say, “I am religious for one hour every day: I go to the temple or to the mosque and I pray,” or, “Every Sunday I go to the church and I pray.” Religion cannot be a Sunday religion. Either your full life, your whole life is permeated by a kind of religiousness… That aroma surrounds you always, day in, day out. Even when he is asleep, a religious man has a different quality than a nonreligious man. If you enter a room where a religious person is fast asleep, you will find a totally different kind of vibration. Even in his sleep he is religious, because even in his sleep he’s relaxed into God. In fact, a religious person does not relax into sleep, he relaxes into God. When he moves, he moves into God, when he sits, he sits in God, when he sleeps, he sleeps in God. He eats God, he drinks God, he looks at God. If all is God, then all has to be godly.Sufis insist that God should not be represented by anything. There should be no idol, no image. Idols and images have created false religions in the world.This story:There was once a violent, ignorant and idolatrous king. One day he swore that if his personal idol accorded him a certain advantage in life, he would capture the first three people who passed by his castle and force them to dedicate themselves to idol worship.Now it is very rare to find a king who is not violent, not ignorant, not idolatrous. If a person is not violent, he will not be a king, he cannot be a king. Even if he finds himself accidentally born as the son of a king, he will renounce it. Buddha renounced, Mahavira renounced. Only a violent man can be a king. In fact, only a violent man is interested in political power. All power is violence, and remember: even if you are interested in spiritual power, then you are violent. Any interest in power is violent. Power means power over others in some way or other – it may be political, it may be financial, it may be religious or spiritual.So many people, in the name of religion, are only hiding their inner politics. They are searching for kundalini power or searching for how to levitate – foolish and stupid desires. They don’t transform your life; even if you can start flying in the sky, nothing will be transformed. So many birds are already flying in the sky and they are not saints and they are not spiritual. If you start living in the deepest ocean, like a fish, you will not become spiritual. So many beings are already living there as fish; they are not spiritual either. Even if your spine vibrates with great energy, you will not become spiritual. Spirituality has nothing to do with power. Even if you attain magical powers, miraculous powers, and you start acting like a magician, that is not going to make you spiritual either. That is sheer nonsense. That is an absolute indication that there is a foolish mind behind it.Whenever you see a man who is trying to do miracles, know well he is a politician. He cannot be a religious person. I am not saying that miracles don’t happen around a religious person. They happen, but they are not done; they happen on their own accord. The religious person is not interested in doing them, the religious person is not a showman. The religious person is not interested in impressing others: “Look, I can create holy ash,” “Look, I can produce Swiss watches through my miraculous power.” Now that man is on a political trip, an ego trip, and those who become interested in him are also somehow interested in politics. They also want to gain power. They will hang around such a person. Thousands hang around such people just in the hope that someday they will also learn the trick – they will have siddhis and they will also do miracles.Miracles happen around a religious person. Those miracles are not visible, those miracles are concerned with the transformation of energies, but they are not done, never done. Whenever a person is doing something he is a magician, a politician. Something happens on its own accord around a person, in the space that is created around him, in the hollow that is created around him; in that hollow, miracles happen, people are transformed, people are transported into new realms of being. That’s another matter. But all political search, all search for power, is ugly and violent.There was once a violent, ignorant and idolatrous king. One day he swore that if his personal idol accorded him a certain advantage in life… Remember, whenever you go to worship an idol you are not concerned with God, you are concerned with some advantage in life. All your prayers are worldly prayers: you are asking for something. Real prayer never asks for anything. Real prayer, on the contrary, pours everything into God, asks nothing. The real worshipper is one who goes and cries out his heart and says to God, “Accept me. I am not worthy, still accept me. Take me away from myself. Dissolve me, destroy me, annihilate me.” He does not go to ask, “Give me money or give me power,” or give me this and that. The really religious person goes to give, not to get.This has to decide the quality of your prayer. If in your prayer somewhere, apparent or hidden, is a desire to get something, then it is not religious prayer. And because of these kinds of prayers, man had to create false gods. A false mind creates false gods. A false mind needs false gods.Now this king one day: …swore that if his personal idol accorded him a certain advantage in life… And remember, God is impersonal, idols are personal: the Hindu has his own, the Christian has his own, the Buddhist has his own. And not only that, each worldly person has a certain idea of God and an idol of God which he wants to possess totally. The worldly mind is possessive.I have heard about a Buddhist nun who used to carry a small, golden Buddha with her, a personal idol of Buddha, because she was very much averse to worshipping public Buddhas. In a temple, a Buddha is public – everybody worships, thousands of people pray to him. The woman wanted to possess her own Buddha. It was a small Buddha, but it was her own Buddha. She would worship only her Buddha.Once she was staying in a temple. The temple had ten thousand Buddha statues, the whole temple was full of Buddha. Early in the morning, she woke up and started praying to her small statue. There were colossal Buddhas, the whole mountain was carved with Buddhas, but she was worshipping her own Buddha. Then an idea came to her mind. She used to burn incense, but you cannot possess incense. Once you burn incense, the fragrance spreads; it may go to other Buddhas – the whole place was full of Buddhas, crowded. So she made a small pipe, maybe a hollow bamboo, fixed the pipe to the nose of her personal Buddha and then burned the incense so it was carried through the pipe to her Buddha’s nose. And don’t laugh; this is what is happening all over the world. This is human stupidity. It is very common, it is almost universal.She was very happy that she had found a way. Now no other Buddha would be sharing her worship, her prayer. But when she removed the pipe, she started crying because the Buddha’s face had become black.The master of that temple, a Zen master who was watching all this stupidity, laughed uproariously. He said, “Look! Not only are you drowned, your Buddha is also drowned with you. You have destroyed your Buddha!”The moment you possess, you destroy. Possessiveness is destructive; God cannot be personal. In fact to know God, you will have to disappear as a person. And you do just the opposite: you reduce God, the impersonal, to a person. Rather than you dissolving and becoming impersonal, you reduce God to your status. These are the two ways: one is to become like God, become impersonal; then you have a meeting. The other is to reduce God to a person, make an idol of him, give him a face and a form and a name. Then he is like you, then there is a possibility of having a dialogue.Your personality is false. You are not really a person; it is just an illusion that you are a person. The deeper you go into yourself, the more you will find the universal. You are the whole universe, just as each wave is the whole ocean. If you dig deep into the wave, you will find the ocean, not the wave. Exactly the same is the case with every person. A person is just a wave; God is waving in you in one form, waving in me in another form, waving in still another way in other forms. All forms are existence. Go behind the form, go deeper, pull the curtain, and you will find one impersonal existence.The right way to have a dialogue with God is to drop your personality. The wrong way to have a dialogue with God is not only not to drop your personality, but to create a personality around God. That’s what idol worship is: make God a Rama, a Krishna, a Christ, a Buddha, then relate with the Rama, with the Krishna, with the Christ. Now you are creating a dream. It is your own work; it has nothing to do with God. What goes on in the name of God has nothing to do with God, and what goes on in the name of religion has nothing to do with religion. There is only one religion, and that religion is the art of disappearing as a person so that you can commune, become one with the impersonal force – the impersonal energy, the impersonal existence.One day he swore that if his personal idol accorded him a certain advantage in life, he would capture the first three people who passed by his castle and force them to dedicate themselves to idol worship. Now this too is something to be understood. He is asking for some advantage, and if it is fulfilled then he is going to catch three people, three innocent people who have nothing to do with the deal, who have no part in it. He is going to force those three people to worship.This has always been done, in many ways. These Sufi stories are just indicative of many things. For example, in India and in other countries also, millions of animals have been sacrificed to your gods. Now what do those animals have to do with your gods? Because your desire is fulfilled, you sacrifice an animal. That animal has not desired, has not prayed, has not said anything. He has nothing to do with it. If you want to sacrifice, sacrifice yourself.Buddha came across a ceremony going on. A great crowd had gathered. He asked, “What is happening?” and they said that the man who was worshipping had asked for something and it had been fulfilled. Now he was sacrificing a bull, he was killing a bull; it was a religious ceremony.Buddha said, “But what has the bull to do with it? If that man feels that existence has given something to him, has been favorable to him, he should sacrifice himself.”Buddha entered the crowd and asked the man, “What are you doing? Why are you being violent to this poor bull? He has not done anything.”The man was a brahmin, a scholar, a knower of scriptures. He quoted scriptures and he said, “You don’t know. I am not being violent to the bull; the scriptures say, the Vedas say, that if in a religious ceremony an animal is crucified, killed, murdered, butchered, the animal soul goes directly to heaven. I’m not being violent to him. He will go to heaven.”Then Buddha said, “Why don’t you kill your father or your mother or yourself? Why are you missing the opportunity to go to heaven? This bull may not want to go to heaven. If this is certain, then kill your father or kill your mother. Or kill yourself; the best thing is to kill yourself.”The brahmin listened to Buddha. Buddha’s presence made it so clear to him: he dropped the weapon there, he renounced the religious ceremony and he asked Buddha, “Now tell me how to be religious, because I have been doing these things my whole life. You have shocked me, but you have made me awake too.”If you search around the globe, there have existed thousands of religions with this stupid idea that God has favored you. Now you are favoring God by finding three innocent people to worship your idol.Sure enough, the king’s wish was fulfilled…The fulfillment of all wishes is just coincidental. If you go on asking God, a few wishes will be fulfilled. God has nothing to do with fulfilling them: a few will not be fulfilled. When a wish is not fulfilled, the worshipper thinks, “I have not been praying rightly. The rituals have not been done rightly. The scripture has not been followed rightly. My performance was not exactly as it should have been. The mantras were not chanted as they should have been chanted. There must have been something wrong if the wish is not fulfilled.” If the wish is fulfilled, then he thinks, “God has been so favorable to me. Now I have to give something as a gift to show my gratitude.”God has nothing to do with your wishes. In fact, God is experienced only when you have no more wishes left in you. Only a desireless consciousness comes to know what God is, and only a desireless consciousness becomes divine. All desires are worldly. Fulfilled or not fulfilled, it is your game. This is how it goes on happening around the world.You go to a saint and your wish is fulfilled. Then you go again; if it is not fulfilled, you go to some other saint. Someday, somewhere, the coincidence will happen and your wish will be fulfilled. Then that saint becomes your god because your wish is fulfilled there. Just try it, it is just a gamble. If you throw a coin, fifty times is the probability that it will fall on this side, fifty times is the probability that it will fall on that side. And if you throw the coin millions of times, then it will come closer and closer to fifty percent. But it is just coincidence. People are very deeply exploited; beware of this.Sure enough, the king’s wish was fulfilled, and he immediately sent soldiers on to the highway to bring in the first three people whom they could find.These three were, as it happened, a scholar, a Sayed (a descendant of Mohammed the prophet) and a prostitute.Three people, and Sufis have much to say about these three types. The first is the scholarly type, the pundit, the knowledgeable man; the second is the virtuous type, the pious type; the third is the sinner, the prostitute. Try to understand the story deeply because there is a great message in it.Having them thrown down before his idol, the unbalanced king told them of his vow, and ordered them all to bow down in front of the image.The scholar said, “This situation undoubtedly comes within the doctrine of ‘force majeure.’ There are numerous precedents allowing anyone to appear to conform with custom if compelled, without real or moral culpability being in any way involved.” So he made a deep obeisance to the idol.This is how the knowledgeable man reacts, responds to reality. He can always find ways to do whatever he wants to do. He is clever enough that he can always find jargon and always find a loophole. His is the way of the legal expert. If he wants to do something wrong, he will find a way. If he does not want to do something right, he will find a way. He’s never in the wrong. He always supports himself; he has a great body of knowledge to support him. He is argumentative, and arguments are just a game with words. You can find a for and against for whatever you want. The argument has no commitment to anything: the argument is not committed to truth, the argument is just sophistry.In ancient Greece there was a great school of Sophists. Their whole teaching was that there is no truth and no untruth. If you are clever you can prove anything to be true, if you are clever you can prove anything to be untrue. It all depends on your cleverness. The only thing that counts is cleverness: there is no truth, no untruth. They used to teach sophistry, they used to teach how to argue. Argument was all. This kind of sophistry has existed in all the countries of the world. It still exists, and it is such a game that you can be lost in it and you can forget what you were searching for. Sophistry is a way to defend your ego.Now this man is faced with a problem. This man must be a Mohammedan – the story comes from a Mohammedan country. His religion does not allow him to worship an idol. And now this mad king forces him, and he knows if he does not worship he will be killed. He has to find a way. He says to himself, “This situation undoubtedly comes within the doctrine of ‘force majeure.’”Now he finds a doctrine for it, an explanation, support from the scripture: “There are numerous precedents allowing anyone to appear to conform with custom if compelled, without real or moral culpability being in any way involved.” “If this mad king wants me to bow down to this idol, I can bow down without really bowing down to it. I can only pretend. I can deceive. I have to save my life.”But rather than seeing the fact: “I am more interested in life than in religion. I am more interested in saving myself than searching God for godliness. I am more interested in protecting myself out of fear” – rather than seeing this exactly as it is, he starts creating a cloud of jargon around himself. You can always find ways and you can go on playing the game of words for millions of lives. There is no end to it. This is what is happening in actual life too: you never see the reality, you hide it. You are afraid, and you will say something else.Just the other night somebody was here. Sannyas creates a fear, a deep fear, but nobody accepts that. They don’t say, “I am afraid, that’s why I cannot take sannyas.” They say something else. They say, “But what is the point of wearing orange? What is the point of changing the name? Can’t we remain in ordinary dress? Can’t we remain sannyasins without declaring it to the world?” “And the real thing has to be inner,” they say. “Why should it be outer?” And all the things that they are saying look beautiful, but this is not the truth. Deep down they are simply afraid of what people will say. People will think you are a fool or a madman. People come to me and they say, “Here it is okay, but when we go to the West there will be trouble.” But very rarely does a person come who says it exactly as it is, authentically as it is. He finds ways and means.There are people who have taken sannyas – cunning people. Then they go to their countries and they simply don’t tell anybody that they are sannyasins. They simply hide their orange, their malas, and they continue as they were. And whenever they come across a sannyasin and he asks, “What has happened? Have you dropped sannyas?” they say, “No, but we have heard an inner voice: Osho has said to us, ‘I make you free.’” Rather than being true, they also bring me into their game – that I have made them free. When they come back to India they are again in orange. Then maybe again I have said to them, “While in India, don’t be free.” They hear the inner voice.Remember, it is good to be authentic, it is good not to be a hypocrite; it helps your growth. All falsities that you go on protecting are poisonous – they will destroy your inner being. And the arguments can be very logical, and the arguments can be very convincing; yet if they are not authentic, they are all rubbish. The real thing is not the validity of the argument as an argument, but the truth.Now this man could have seen the simple truth: “I am afraid to die, that’s why I will do it.” And that would have been a great religious act. To see the truth would have helped him. Or maybe, seeing the truth that he was a coward, he may have resisted and said, “Okay, kill me. But I am not going to bow down.” Either he could have bowed down out of fear – then he would have become humbler, knowing: “I am a coward” – or maybe, seeing the fear, he could have stood his ground and said, “Okay, I am not going to be a coward. Kill me, but I am not going to do something that has no appeal for me.”Now, arguing in a roundabout way he has saved himself. But saved from what? – saved from God, saved from truth. He has been cunning. A cunning mind is a suicidal mind.The Sayed, when it was his turn, said, “As a specially protected person, having in my veins the blood of the holy prophet, my actions themselves purify anything which is done, and therefore there is no bar to my acting as this man demands.” And he bowed before the idol.Now comes the so-called virtuous: the man who thinks that he is protected, that he is special, that he is one of the chosen few, that he belongs to the chosen few. Now what does Mohammed’s blood have to do with it? Blood is blood, and just because you are born in the same line does not make any difference. You may have the blood of Buddha in you and you may be the most stupid man on the earth. Many must have the blood of Buddha, knowingly or unknowingly. Many must have the blood of Krishna, many must have the blood of Moses. But what has that to do with it? Your blood makes no difference, your heritage makes no difference, your tradition makes no difference. Unless your awareness comes in, nothing makes a difference.This man protected himself with the idea, “I am special, specially protected, a descendant of the Holy Prophet Mohammed. God must be protecting me. And whatever I do becomes pure because it is done by me.” He has an even deeper cunningness than the scholar – the scholar may have some doubts, but he can’t have any doubts. His deception is total.Remember, nobody is protecting you – neither Christ nor Mohammed nor Krishna. Nobody can protect you except yourself. Don’t throw the responsibility on the other. People are doing it all the time.A Christian missionary came to me and he said, “Jesus was born to liberate all from sin.” I asked him, “Are you liberated from sin? Jesus has already been here. How many people are liberated? And you go on saying, ‘Jesus was our salvation,’ as if salvation has happened and all are liberated. Who is liberated? And how can Jesus liberate you?”This seems to be so illogical. You create the bondage and Jesus comes to liberate you. Why should he? He has no responsibility. And if you are bent upon remaining in bondage, how can he liberate you?It happened that a man asked Sri Aurobindo, “You are so cool and so indifferent to things that sometimes a problem arises in my mind. If you are standing on the bank of a river and somebody is drowning, will you save him?” Aurobindo said, “No, I will not save him unless he asks to be saved.” The man said, “But this seems to be hard, uncompassionate.” Sri Aurobindo said, “I can save him, but he will drown himself again. If he is bent upon drowning himself, he will find another river, he will find another bank, he will find another time and he will re-drown himself. I can save him, but he will re-drown himself. So what is the point? Unless he asks, he cannot be saved.”And in spiritual growth, asking is being saved. If you ask, you are saved – not that Jesus saves you. Remember those beautiful words of Jesus: “Ask and it shall be given. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” Those doors are really open; they are just waiting for your knock. In fact, God has already given it to you, but because you have not asked you have not recognized the gift yet. The gift is already given. You have the gift with you, but because you have not asked you cannot recognize it. The moment you ask, you will recognize it.Nobody can save anybody else, and it is good that nobody can save anybody else. Otherwise, even your liberation would be a kind of enforcement. It would be as if you have been forced to enter heaven – two people following you with naked swords and forcing you to enter heaven. What kind of heaven would it be? It would be hell: hell is when something is forced upon you. What it is does not matter. Heaven is when you ask for something and you grow in it. Whatever it is, it is salvation.Just being a descendant of Mohammed makes no change, no difference. You are not saved just by being born a Christian. Just by being born in this land, in India, you are not saved. The Indians have the idea that this land is the Holy Land: just being born in India you are saved. They have the idea that if you go and die in Varanasi, you will go directly to heaven – just by dying in Varanasi!Kabir lived his whole life in Varanasi and when he was on his deathbed, he suddenly jumped out of bed and told his disciples, “We have to rush out of Varanasi!”The disciples said, “But why? You are so ill, you are on your deathbed, and the physicians have said that you will be alive only for a few hours. You cannot live even for a day.”Kabir said, “This one day has to be used. Rush and run as far away from Varanasi as possible!”But they said, “Where? And why? People come to Varanasi to die.” People go and live in Varanasi in their old age just to die there because that is the holiest spot on the earth, the city of Shiva, the ancientmost city, the holiest of the holy. If you die there, that’s enough; your sins are no longer counted. Your very death in Varanasi is a purification: you are saved, you go immediately, directly to heaven.Kabir said, “I will go to Maghar” – a small village near Varanasi.And they said, “Out of all places, Maghar!” There is a tradition that says that if you die in Maghar, you will be born a donkey. “Of all places, Maghar! Have you gone mad? You must be mad! You are dying, and you have lost all your senses.” They tried to keep him in Varanasi, but he wouldn’t listen. He left Varanasi and went to Maghar and died there.And when they asked, “But why Maghar?” he said, “If I die in Maghar and go to heaven then it is something. If I die in Varanasi and go to heaven it is pointless. That heaven is not of much worth. If I die in Maghar, where it is said that people dying in Maghar are born as donkeys, and go to heaven, then it is something of my own, authentically my own. I depend only on myself.”And dying, he said to his disciples, “Depend on yourself. Don’t think that just because you follow Kabir you will go to heaven. Heaven is not so cheap.”The Sayed, when it was his turn, said, “As a specially protected person, having in my veins the blood of the holy prophet, my actions themselves purify anything which is done, and therefore there is no bar to my acting as this man demands.” And he bowed before the idol.The prostitute said, “Alas, I have neither intellectual training nor special prerogatives, and so I am afraid that, whatever you do to me, I cannot worship this idol, even in appearance.”The prostitute has nowhere to hide her head and that is her authenticity, her beauty. The prostitute has no intellectual jargon. She knows she cannot hide herself behind scriptures, she knows nothing of the scriptures. She knows she is not virtuous, she knows she does not belong to Mohammed’s family, she has no holy blood in herself. She knows she is a sinner. Knowing this – that she is a sinner, unprotected by any prerogative, unprotected by any intellectual, philosophical argumentation – she’s vulnerable; she cannot be false.Because she cannot find any argument, any protection will be false; she cannot defend herself. She will never feel happy with herself if she bows down to this idol. She will never be able to forgive herself. The scholar will not feel any guilt: he knows that scriptures allow it, that there are precedents. The Sayed will forget all about it. But the prostitute cannot forgive herself if she does something false. A strange story: it is the sinner who is authentic.And this is my own experience too, this is my observation: sinners are more authentic than the so-called virtuous. Ignorant, innocent people are more true than the so-called sophisticated and cultured. Civilization only makes people cunning. They lose all innocence and they lose all the fragrance that comes only out of innocence.Remember Mary Magdalene? She seems to me the only true follower of Jesus. Her authenticity, her daring, is immense. Jesus came to her house and she poured precious perfume on his feet, washed the feet with the perfume, then wiped the feet with her hair. She was sitting there crying tears and tears, and naturally the virtuous were offended.Somebody said to Jesus, “This is not right. She is a sinner and she should not be allowed to touch you!” This is how the egoistic, the virtuous, the intellectual has always behaved.Judas was also not happy with this. Judas seems to be a communist or a socialist. He said, “This is wastage. This perfume is so costly, why waste it? People are starving. The perfume could have been sold; it is rare. We could have fed a few people.”It looks logical. You will tend to agree with Judas rather than with Jesus. What Jesus said is very illogical; he said, “But the poor will always be there; when I am gone, you can take care of them. You don’t understand the heart of this woman. I cannot say no to her. Let her do what she wants to do. Let her unburden herself, let her cry, let her touch me. Let her pour the perfume – costly, not costly, that is irrelevant. I cannot say no to her. I can see a great feeling arising in her heart. This is prayer. She is in a prayerful mood; I cannot disturb her prayer.”Jesus understood that Mary Magdalene had a beauty of the heart. She was the first one who recognized Jesus after the resurrection. There were only three women there when Jesus was taken down from the cross; one was Mary Magdalene. All those great apostles had disappeared. And you must remember, Judas was the only scholar of Jesus’ followers, the only professor, the only intellectually well equipped, the only scholarly person. And he betrayed. It is symbolic: intellect betrays.The mind is cunning. The mind always creates conspiracies against truth. Let Judas be a symbol of the mind. He was the most intellectual, the most articulate person. If he had not betrayed, he would have become the founder of the church. Why did he betray? The mind betrays, logic betrays. Your mind is against your being.The prostitute had no mind. She had lived a very simple existence of selling her body. She knew nothing of the scriptures, she had no time to read them. She could not have the ego of a virtuous person. How could she have? She was simply humble, crying. She couldn’t have any ego and that is the door to the divine. The prostitute said, “Alas, I have neither intellectual training nor special prerogatives, and so I am afraid that, whatever you do to me, I cannot worship this idol, even in appearance.”I have been with saints and I have been with sinners. My own observation is that the so-called sinners are the most authentic people in the world, and the so-called saints the most inauthentic people in the world. The saints are just pseudo. The sinner has a reality and out of that reality, the quantum leap is possible. Only the authentic can go to the authentic. The false remains false, cannot have any meeting with truth.So remember, the greatest barrier between you and God is your ego, and the ego feeds on knowledge, and the ego feeds on virtue, and the ego feeds on respectability – name, fame, power. Remember it, and don’t feed the ego.Become humbler: see your limitations, see your mistakes, see your errors and become humble. That very seeing will make you humble. In that humbleness prayer arises on its own accord, and great courage arises out of that humbleness. Humbleness is strong, ego is very weak. You will think this is a paradox. It only appears so: ego is weak. In fact, the ego is an effort of a weak person to protect himself. Ego is an armor: the person knows that deep down he is very weak. The ego is an effort to protect his weakness. The weakest person will have the biggest ego. They are complementary: the weaker you are, the bigger the ego you need to protect yourself. The really strong person doesn’t need an ego. He needs no protection; he can live unprotected, he can live insecure, he can live vulnerable.The scholar was a weak person. So was the Sayed. This prostitute had a strength, the strength of a roseflower – vulnerable, soft, delicate, yet so strong. Have you not watched a roseflower in the morning playing with the winds? So delicate yet so strong, having a love affair with the sun; so delicate, raising its head high, delicate and yet strong.Lao Tzu calls it the strength of water. The ego has the strength of a rock; the humble person has the strength of water. And Lao Tzu says, “Become like water – the Watercourse Way.” Become soft like water and you will win, finally. Remember, hardness brings defeat. Your very resistance to life sooner or later destroys you. It is your own hardness, your own ego, that becomes poison to you.See a waterfall falling on a great rock, and the rock cannot even think that this humble water, soft, feminine, is going to destroy it. But a day will come when the rock will be gone, will have become sand, and the water will continue on in the same way. Rocks die out of their own hardness. The ego is like a rock, humbleness is like a roseflower. The ego seems to be strong – is not – and humbleness seems to be weak but is not. Don’t be deceived by appearances.The prostitute said, “Whatever you do you can do. I’m not going to be false, not even in appearance.” This strength of humbleness, this purity of sin, this power of a roseflower, did something like a magical phenomenon to the king.The mad king’s malady was immediately banished by this remark.What happened? He could not believe his eyes. It was such a shock. He had forced the great scholar, and he was lying down in deep obeisance. He had forced the Sayed, the descendant of the prophet Mohammed. And a prostitute? He could never have imagined that the prostitute would stand so strong. Such a delicate woman, such a sinner; from where does such power arise in her? Out of innocence – she had no pretensions, she was unguarded.The mad king’s malady was immediately banished by this remark. He had a satori it seems. He could not believe it, it was so shocking. His eyes opened.As if by magic he saw the deceit of the two worshippers of the image. He at once had the scholar and the Sayed decapitated, and set the prostitute free.This is a symbolic story. These stories are parables, these are not historical facts. The parable is saying that before God you will be reduced to nothing if you carry falsities, that you will be decapitated, that you will be thrown unto dust. You will not be able to stand before God. Your untruth will kill you.…and set the prostitute free. And before truth, only that power that comes out of humbleness, that knowing that comes out of innocence, only that is set free, only that is liberated. Freedom is for those who are free of the ego; there is no other kind of freedom. Freedom means freedom from the ego. That is moksha, nirvana, and even a prostitute can attain that freedom – and even a great scholar can miss it. Even a descendant of the prophet Mohammed can miss it. Only one thing is decisive: if you are defending your ego, you will miss God. If you are ready to drop your ego, you will find him. In that very dropping is the finding.“Man and God are not two,” say all those who know. But then why are they separate? From God’s side you are not separate; only from your side are you separate. And why? – because you think you are separate, your thinking makes you separate. You are not really separate; it is make believe, it is autohypnosis. You have been thinking and thinking that you are separate, hence the idea has become a fixed phenomenon in you. This is the ego. Thinking yourself separate from existence is the ego. Thinking yourself one with existence is trust.Don’t protect yourself. Protection means you have believed the false idea that you are separate. Don’t push the river. Go with the flow of existence. While alive, be alive; while dying, be really dying; while dead, be dead. Waking, wake. Sleeping, sleep. Let there be no separation between you and the life that surrounds you.And don’t act out of a state called knowledge. That is creating the separation. Always act out of no-knowledge, act out of no-mind, act out of no-past. Act in the present and act authentically. And whoever you are – you may be a prostitute – if you can act out of the present, if you can respond to reality truly, authentically, sincerely, then there is no barrier between you and God.The only thing that helps you merge and meet with the divine is an authentic response in the present, a truthful response to life. That’s what I call prayer.Enough for today.