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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have said that right and wrong are determined by each society. Is there no universal right and wrong?There is no possibility of any division between right and wrong on the highest level of universal consciousnesses, for the simple reason that there are no divisions at all. It is one.In the East, those who have attained universal consciousness are not even willing to say that it is one, because “one” implies two, three, four – the whole infinity of numbers; one is only the beginning. Hence they have used a very strange concept. They say in universal consciousness there is not-two; it is non-dual. To avoid the implications of one they have used a negative: not-two.The concepts of right and wrong are local, social, cultural. In every society, in different times they had to change their concepts continuously because circumstances change, climates change; then naturally, something that was right becomes wrong, something that was wrong becomes right: Let us take a few examples.Mohammed married nine women, and he made it a rule for every Mohammedan to marry at least four women. Not to marry four was falling below the Mohammedan concept of right; marrying more was good. A strange thing it appears to us, but it was really right in Mohammed’s time – that was the proportion between men and women in Arabia: four women, one man. The reason for this strange proportion was because men were continually fighting and killing each other, and it was thought unmanly to kill a woman. So women were surviving and men were dying.When in a society there are four women to one man there is bound to be trouble, great trouble: only one woman is going to get a husband. The other three women are going to sabotage the marriage in every possible way. They will become prostitutes, and there will be so much jealousy and so much conflict…. To avoid this, Mohammed made a moral rule – but it is applicable only in that circumstance.Now, Mohammedans marrying several wives in other countries are simply stupid, because circumstances have changed. Now even in Arabia the proportion is equal: one man to one woman. It seems that once a certain rule is accepted, people become so much addicted to it they completely forget in what circumstance the rule was made.It was perfectly okay in Mahavira’s time in India to allow millions of sannyasins to be celibate. It was something not only moral but, they thought, spiritual too. But if you look into the mechanism of the concept it becomes very clear.In Mahavira’s time women were fewer, men were more. The reason was that many tribes in India in those days used to kill girls when they were born, just to avoid the trouble of raising them and then getting them married. It was such a trouble, because girls could be married only if you gave enough money, land with the girl to the man whom she was going to marry – unless the girl was exceptionally beautiful, which was rarely the case. And people were so poor, they could not afford to have one dozen girls. It was simply impossible for them to manage.You cannot blame them for killing the girls. It was better than leaving them beggars on the streets, or having them become prostitutes. It was better, but then the problem arose that there were fewer women, more men; hence celibacy was not objected to – on the contrary, it was praised. But if you look into it, there was nothing spiritual in it, nothing moral in it; it was simply certain circumstances….They wanted many men to remain unmarried. How to manage it? Unless you give celibacy a certain prestige, a higher status than marriage; unless you put it on a holier pedestal, it is impossible for people to remain unmarried. You can’t just say to them, “Women are fewer, men are more; simply look at the figures and remain unmarried. Just do a little service to society.”You cannot hope that people will be ready to do such a service to society. No, you have to give them some incentive; celibacy was given an incentive. Only the celibate ones would reach heaven. The married people were worldly, ordinary; the celibate ones were other-worldly, spiritual. They were respected, given great honor, worshipped almost like gods.That continues even today, although the situation has changed. Now in India the proportion is exactly the same. If you allow nature, if you don’t interfere with nature, nature always goes on keeping its balance in every way; it never loses balance. Balance is something very fundamental to existence – in every dimension.When one hundred girls are born, there are one hundred and ten boys born at the same time, because boys are not so strong as far as resistance against sickness is concerned. Girls are stronger, not in a muscular way but in a very different way. They are more resistant to sickness, to disease, to death.All over the world it is the same proportion, one hundred and ten boys to one hundred girls, because one hundred girls are going to survive up to the marriageable age, but ten boys will go down the drain. By the time they are marriageable the balance will be regained.You will be surprised to know that in wartime when many more men die because they go to the front, to the war, naturally the proportion of women becomes higher. But in these two world wars it has been discovered that the birthrate also changes. Nature, in a strange way, keeps the balance. In wartime and after war for a few years fewer girls are born, more boys are born. Afterward, the balance is established again, the same proportion – one hundred girls, one hundred and ten boys.Celibacy was preached by Buddha, Mahavira, Shankara – all the great teachers of India; and the reason was that it looked right and nobody objected to it because it was serving the society in a very subtle way. But today it is not true.I said to the Jaina monks, Buddhist bhikkhus, and Hindu sages: “Now celibacy should not be given the same respect; now it is dangerous to go on praising celibacy, because the more you praise celibacy, the more women will remain unmarried. What are they going to do? What is going to happen to their biological instinct? You are forcing them to find some perverted way, something ugly, in the name of your celibacy.”They said, “We have never thought about celibacy in this way, that it is a social condition.”I said, “Whether you have thought about it in that way or not, all rights and all wrongs are social by-products.” For example, of all the people in the world only India, a very small minority, is vegetarian, for the simple reason that if the whole world becomes vegetarian we cannot support the existing population; it is impossible. Only very small groups can become vegetarian; the majority will remain non-vegetarian, has to remain non-vegetarian.Even the small group that becomes vegetarian has to be given great incentives. You are not doing something great, you are just eating vegetables. So what! Eat well, enjoy. I don’t think that just by eating grass you are attaining some spiritual quality, that you will reach paradise just on that merit. That is not something great – but something great is needed to make people go on eating grass their whole life.If you simply say that it is just an aesthetic value – that’s what I say. My people are vegetarian, but not for any religious or spiritual reason. I am absolutely existential, factual. My people are vegetarian for an aesthetic reason. I cannot conceive somebody eating meat, somebody destroying life for his taste, killing millions of animals every day.I once met a man, an African, who himself was not a cannibal – but in Africa there are a few small tribes of cannibals still in existence. The tribes go on becoming smaller and smaller because they go on eating their own people. They will disappear.This man was caught by a cannibal tribe and they were going to eat him. But he happened to have so much money – he told them, “I can give you much money if you spare me.” The money was so much, those poor cannibals could not resist the temptation; they said, “Okay, we can spare you, but we cannot trust you; the money has to arrive first. Our man will go with your letter. The money has to be here and then we will release you.”So he had to stay three days with them, and while he was with them he had to eat what they were eating; he became a cannibal for three days, because that was the only food. He told me, “I have never tasted anything so delicious. Although I was feeling bad, the food was delicious.” And he inquired of those people, “You eat man – what kind of man, what age of man is most delicious?”They said, “Small children are the best.” They served him the meat of a small child. And he told me, “Although I don’t want to be known as a cannibal, it is true what they said. I have tasted it.” He was a rich man, had toured the world almost a dozen times, knew many languages, had many industries around the world. He said, “I have to confess that it is true. I have eaten everything that man eats around the globe, the best, but nothing is comparable to the food cannibals eat.”Now, how can you teach the cannibals not to eat man? They say, “Then you give us something better to eat.” You don’t have anything better to give them, so they have remained cannibals. One tribe was three thousand in number just at the beginning of this century; now they are only three hundred. They have eaten all the rest. If anybody commits a mistake it is enough; they are in search of people who are doing something wrong so they can eat them.I have heard about a Christian missionary who was trying to change the minds of cannibals, trying to convert them to Christianity. But before you can convert them you have to meet them. So he went to meet them, but those people said, “You just go on saying whatsoever you want to – we are preparing the place to cook you.”He said, “But I have come to convert you. Have you ever tasted Christianity?”They said, “No – for the first time we will be tasting! When you are cooked, for the first time we will be tasting Christianity.”Nobody has been able to convert them and have them drop this cannibalism. Just for the taste, people are eating other people, their own people. People are eating animals; that is not very different – life is life. But I know that it is impossible to keep the whole population of the world on a vegetarian diet unless science helps and provides new ways, means and methods; then it is possible. But the problem is how to convince people that eating non-vegetarian foods is ugly?People are not so sensitive to beauty, aesthetics, art; they are greedy. They can be ready if you tell them, “You will reach paradise if you drop eating this food; the food that you are eating is going to prevent you from finding eternal bliss.” You have to give them something so big that their desire for taste becomes so small that just out of greed they are ready to change. That’s what religions have been doing.In India two religions have tried vegetarianism. One is Jainism, which has tried fanatically; the ultimate result was that Jainism remained a small community. The Jaina monk cannot even go outside India to teach because who is going to provide him with vegetarian food? He cannot eat anything non-vegetarian – and the whole world is non-vegetarian. Hence Jainism remained confined to India. Only a few – I think two or three Jaina monks, very daring people – risked their lives and reached to Egypt.This is the only case in the whole of history – when three Jaina monks tried to contact the outside world. And we know about these three Jaina monks through Pythagoras, because Pythagoras was going to India through Egypt. He met these three Jaina monks in Egypt; he refers to them as Zenosophists. That seems to be a perfectly right translation for a Jaina philosopher – Zenosophist.It cannot be anybody else because the description was of a Jaina monk. They were nude, and they ate only vegetables and fruits. It was very difficult for them to get food every day because they had to beg – the Jaina monk lives on begging. Sometimes some kind people would provide for them because they would say, “We cannot eat anything else.” So there is only one reference in Pythagoras, that he met three Jaina monks in Egypt; otherwise Jainas have never crossed the boundaries of India, for the simple reason, who is going to provide them with food? How are they going to live?Buddhists also taught vegetarianism, but when they crossed India’s borders they all became non-vegetarian; they had to, there was no other way to survive.A small section of Hindus, the highest class of Hindus, brahmins, are vegetarians – but not all brahmins. Kashmiri brahmins are non-vegetarians because they live in a community of Mohammedans: ninety-two percent Mohammedans, eight percent Hindus. It is very difficult for them to survive. They have to be in a certain harmony with the community where they are living. It is such a vast majority, and they have to depend on them for everything. If the Mohammedans simply boycott them they will die.In Bengal the brahmins don’t eat any meat, but they eat fish, because in Bengal it is difficult to survive without eating fish; fish is the main food – fish and rice. In South India the brahmins eat fish because of the same problem: without fish the food is not enough.So I cannot say that vegetarianism is something universally right. I am absolutely a non-fanatic person. About nothing am I fanatic. I try to see all the aspects of a thing, and I am utterly liberal, human. I don’t try to make any principle more valuable than humanity itself.Nothing is above man.Nothing should be above man.So all these concepts of right and wrong are social, climatic. For example, in Tibet…. The holy book of the Tibetans says that one bath per year is absolutely necessary. In Tibet even that is a difficult job, and many must be trying to avoid it – even that one bath per year.In India a person takes two baths every day, and there are people who take three baths every day; I myself used to take three baths every day. When a Tibetan monk was a guest with me, he could not believe it. He said, “You are wasting your whole life in taking baths! Morning, evening, and at night before you go to bed – three times! In Tibet once a year is enough.”I said, “I know,” because one of my friends, a professor, Doctor Rajbali Pandey, was studying translations from Sanskrit into Tibetan. He was a scholar of Tibetan and Sanskrit, so he was working on this. He went to Tibet. I told him – he was a brahmin – “You are going to be in trouble.” And he was a very orthodox brahmin too: early in the morning, five o’clock, a cold bath; then the prayer, the religious ritual – only then can you take a cup of tea.He went and came back. He remained only one day in Tibet, although it took him three months coming and going because he had to travel just on horseback. Three months he traveled just to stay one day in Tibet!I said, “What happened?”He said, “Even one bath early in the morning, five o’clock, was such an experience that I said, it is better that I leave sooner, because I cannot go against my rules. My dying father took my promise that I would follow all the orthodox rules of my family – that five o’clock bath is the beginning of the day, and that will kill me!”In Tibet, people don’t change their clothes for years, because there is no dust, no perspiration. The air is as clean as you can imagine. It is the highest country as far as altitude is concerned. It lives in the purest air; no contamination. It is not L.A.! So there is no need either for a bath every day. But the difficulty is that my friend insisted on continuing his idea, which was a by-product of an Indian milieu where there is so much dust and so much perspiration that it is perfectly right to have two baths – one in the morning, one in the evening. And if you can afford it, then three.This Tibetan guest who was staying with me would not change his clothes.I said, “You will drive me mad! You stink. This is India, it is not Tibet.”And their clothes…it is not just one dress, it is layers of dresses – four, five, six, seven layers of dresses. And he wouldn’t take a bath because only one bath is required by his religion. To take a bath every day was going against his religion.I said, “Nonsense! Your religion simply says you should take one bath at least every year; it does not prohibit you from taking two baths or three baths in a year; it says nothing about it.”He said, “Because it says nothing about it, that simply means that we are not supposed to do such a thing; otherwise those sages would have said so.”I said, “Those sages never came to India! And if you want to stay with me you will have to take two baths every day; otherwise get lost!” He preferred to get lost rather than change. People take their local, geographical, social ideas spiritually, which is nonsense.There is nothing universally right, there is nothing universally wrong. And you should be very clear about it: everything is very relative, relative to many things.A conscious man tries to change according to the changing situations, conditions, geographies. He should live consciously, not according to fixed rules. He should live in freedom.You are asking, is there something universally right and wrong?The man who comes to know the universal, the man who becomes so awakened that he is no longer part of any geography, any body, any mind, he is just pure awareness…. In that state there is nothing right, nothing wrong.The man of that state will also have to function on lower levels. Hungry, he will have to eat; thirsty, he will have to drink. He will have to live in some kind of society, with some kind of people. The awakened man is very adjustable, infinitely adjustable, because for him there is nothing that prevents him from adjusting. He is free from all conditions, all barriers. The only thing is for him to see what is applicable in this particular case. He does not live according to principles. Only idiots live according to principles, only unconscious people need principles.It is just like the staff of a blind man. The blind man needs the staff just to grope his way because he does not have eyes. But when you have eyes you can drop the staff.I have heard – I don’t know whether it is true or not, but it certainly is significant – Jesus cured a blind man who had come with his staff. He was cured, he could see; he thanked Jesus and started going away, still carrying his staff.Jesus said, “At least leave the staff now with me – you have got your eyes.”The blind man said, “But without the staff it will be very difficult to find the way.” He had no idea yet – his eyes were so new, he had no idea that now the staff was not needed.Sariputta, one of Gautam Buddha’s disciples, became enlightened while Buddha was alive, and still continued to follow the old principles that were given to him before his enlightenment. Buddha had to call him and say, “Sariputta, are you mad or something? Now that you are enlightened you don’t need to follow those principles which were given to you when you were unconscious; you can drop them.”But Sariputta was really a genius, of the same quality as Gautam Buddha. He said, “Master, you are right, I can drop them; but I am not dropping them, for the simple reason that there are millions of unconscious people around me. Seeing me drop them, they will all start dropping them. What about them? To me it is not a problem at all – I am accustomed to all those principles, they are no trouble to me. I know now dropping them makes no difference; carrying them also makes no difference. It is kind of you to bring it to my notice but I was aware of it.”Buddha conceded the next morning in his discourse to his ten thousand sannyasins: “Sariputta is right. Not that I was wrong – I was worried that after enlightenment, why was he carrying those principles that were given as a substitute for enlightenment? Now he need not carry them, he can simply drop them. He can live now in total freedom on his own. He can live spontaneously.“So I was concerned and called him, but he has brought something significant to my notice, and I would like you all to remember that what he has said is right. He can drop them, but he is not dropping them out of compassion for all those who are unconscious. Seeing Sariputta dropping them they will think, ‘There is no problem: if Sariputta can drop them, we can drop them.’“They don’t know that Sariputta is now one of the awakened ones and they are not. So I support Sariputta and I want you to remember this: when you become enlightened, remember all those souls around you who are groping in the dark. Drop anything that is not going to harm the people around you, and with other things there is no problem for you: out of your freedom you can choose to follow them if it is going to help anybody anywhere.”Sariputta used to go to spread the word of Buddha but wherever he was, five times a day he would bow down in the direction where Buddha was dwelling and he would do his gachchhamis: Buddham sharanam gachchhami ‘I go to the feet of the awakened one.’Many times he was asked, “Now you are yourself awakened, there is no need for you to go to the feet of another awakened one.”Sariputta said, “I know there is no need for me, but for you there is need. I am doing this gachchhami not for myself but for you. If I stop it, that will be enough excuse for you to stop. And secondly, I am awakened because of that man; without him I don’t think that in this life it would have happened.“If you ask him he will say, ‘I have nothing to do with it, because nobody can make anybody else awakened – it is all Sariputta’s own doing.’ And he is right; he has not forced me to be awakened. But just his presence was enough to bring me out of my dreams, nightmares, my sleep. He was not doing anything.”The master is only a catalytic agent, just like the sunrise in the morning – the birds all around start singing. Not that the sun comes to each bird’s nest and knocks on the door or presses the buzzer and says, “It is time now – get up and sing!”The flowers start opening, releasing their fragrance – not that they are being told, “It is morning and you have to do it”; the very presence of the sun is a catalytic agent. The sun is not doing anything, but millions of things are happening just by its presence.The master is exactly that – a catalytic agent. He does nothing, but millions of things happen around him.They happen because of him but are not caused by him – and the difference is great.Those things…the people to whom they happen may feel gratitude, are going to feel gratitude, but the master cannot expect gratitude from anybody. It is impossible even to think of it, because he has not done anything. He has not done it, but it has happened to you; and it has happened to you because of him.From your side gratitude is perfectly right, but from his side to request it, to expect it, is absolutely wrong. Then he is not a master in fact. Then what has happened to you must have happened for some other reason, you were mistaken. Yes, many times it has happened that the master was not a real master but still the disciple became awakened.A beautiful story is told about Marpa…a Tibetan story. He was with his master – who was not a master at all, just a con man, cheating people, gullible people. Marpa was so innocent that he surrendered himself to this hocus-pocus man. His surrender was total, there was no doubt in his mind; he was just like a small child.Within just a few days all the other disciples became very angry with Marpa. They told the master, “This man is dangerous; he seems to be a magician of some kind, because he is doing things which are not supposed to be done. He walks on water, he flies from the top of one mountain to the top of another mountain!”The master said, “This cannot be done, this is against nature. Call Marpa.”Marpa was called and asked, “How are you doing these things? Are you a magician?”He said, “No, I do it just by using your name. I take your name and I say, ‘My beloved master, let me pass over this river by walking,’ and I walk! It is just the glory or your name.”The master was in great difficulty: now what to do? But a natural idea came to his mind: “If he can walk on water taking my name, I can walk, of course, without any doubt.” He tried – and drowned immediately. That man was not authentic, but what had happened to Marpa was authentic. His trust was so total – the transformation came through trust. But naturally he misunderstood and thought that it was coming through the master.So it has happened many times that there have been wrong masters and right disciples. Vice versa always happens: right masters, wrong disciples! That is universal, that is not something special. But this is possible because the real thing is going to happen inside the disciple; anything can trigger it. The master’s presence triggers it.And once you have a taste of the universal consciousness, you immediately know there is nothing right, nothing wrong. Hence it has been one of the greatest problems down the centuries – no great masters are similar in their life patterns.You cannot find people more different from each other than religious masters, because they live out of freedom, knowing nothing is wrong and nothing is right.I am reminded of a story about Kabir. Kabir was a poor man, a great master. His wife and his son were both in constant trouble because of this strange father, because every day in the morning devotees would come in hundreds. Kabir would sing his songs, would dance. He was not literate, he never gave any sermon, but he danced; he sang – simple songs but of tremendous beauty, of immense depth – and he danced. And the whole gathering sang and danced with him.And it continued for hours. Then it would be lunchtime and then he would ask everybody, “Please don’t go – first share your poor master’s lunch.” And the wife and the son were in trouble: from where to get food for so many people every day? It was difficult to manage even for the three of them.The son was also a unique person who became in his own right one day a master. But he was totally different from Kabir, they never agreed on any point. Kabir was so fed up with Kamal that he wrote, “Just because Kamal is born to me, my whole heritage is finished. This son cannot carry the treasures that I am going to give to him.” – because Kamal had his own ways, not agreeing on any point.Kamal called all this singing and dancing nonsense. He said, “Just sitting silently it can happen – why unnecessarily make so much noise and disturb the neighbors? And I don’t see that for hours you have to dance. In old age…and because of you, other people, old people, are also dancing and getting tired.” He never participated in any dance, he never participated in singing. He said, “There is no need: silence is enough of a song. And sitting silently I know a far more beautiful dance than what you do here.”A point came that when, again and again they asked Kabir, “You stop requesting people to stay for lunch. We have borrowed from everybody in the town. Now nobody is ready to give us anything because they say, ‘How are you going to return it?’ Now we don’t have anything in the house; you have to stop.”Kabir said, “That is impossible, because after the dance and the song and such a beautiful rejoicing, not to offer food to people who come to my house for lunch…. No, I cannot do that. Find some way. What kind of son are you? Can’t you just find some way?”Kamal said, “Now the only way is that I become a thief.”Kabir said, “Great! Why did you never think of it before?”This is universal consciousness. Even stealing is not wrong. Even the people who follow Kabir in India – he has a small religion, very small – don’t mention this story. When I was speaking to his followers and I mentioned the story, the high priest whispered in my ear, “Please don’t tell that story because it puts us in great trouble – Kabir saying that stealing is a great idea.”But Kamal was really an extraordinary man. That’s the meaning of the word kamal. Kamal means extra-ordinary, exceptional. He was not going to be stopped just by Kabir’s outrageous saying: “Great!” He said, “Okay, tonight I go, but you will have to come with me. I will try my best – you try to help me. At least I can bring things out of the house; you can carry them from outside the house to our place. This much you can do.”Kabir said, “Perfectly good!” So they went into a rich man’s house. From the back Kamal made a hole in the wall, and Kabir was sitting outside, slowly singing his song.Kamal said, “This is strange. You just stop that song. We are now thieves, we are not saints here.”Kabir said, “We are the same wherever we are – it doesn’t matter what you are doing. You just do your work and let me do mine. When you bring things, I will carry them. I am old; otherwise I would have come in with you.” So Kamal went in. Still he carried the logic to its very end. He brought things, from the hole – he dropped them outside and told his father, “These are the things….”He was half leaning out of the hole telling him, “These are the things – you take them.” At that moment the people in the house, the servants, woke up. All this was going on – the breaking of the wall and somebody singing – and when Kamal went inside, Kabir completely forgot where he was. He started dancing and singing so loudly that the people were awakened.They came and they caught hold of the legs of Kamal – because he was half inside. The story is very strange, cannot be factual. Kamal said, “Father, you take those things. I am caught – those people are holding my legs. You have put me in enough trouble, this is the last – good-bye! Now I am going to be finished in jail.”Kabir said, “Jail? There is no need to be finished in a jail. I have brought a knife with me.”Kamal said, “What do you mean?”He said, “I will cut off your head and take it with me. Nobody will ever know who was the thief!”Kamal could not believe it. He was thinking that he was carrying the logic to its very end – but this old guy was carrying the logic to the very end! But Kamal was really a man of guts: he said, “Okay, cut off my head.” He was still hoping that this was not going to happen, but Kabir cut off Kamal’s head, and took home the head and the things that Kamal had dropped.The poor people pulled Kamal in. They found the head missing, and they said, “Now this is a problem. Who is this man?”One servant said, “As far as I know, I think this is Kabir’s son, Kamal, and the voice that I heard which wakened me was Kabir’s. He must have been outside. But this is strange that he should participate in such an act – he is such a great sage. And his own son…and it seems he has cut off his head and taken it away!”This servant used to go once in a while into Kabir’s congregation, the devotional meeting that used to happen every morning. He said to the rich man, “Do one thing: tomorrow morning, when Kabir and his followers go to the Ganges to take their morning bath before they start singing and dancing, just on the crossroads hang this body.”The rich man who owned the house said, “But what is this going to do?” The servant said, “You simply do this – there is no harm,” and the body was hung at the crossroad. As Kabir came dancing, singing, after the bath, Kamal immediately raised his hand and said, “Stop all this nonsense!”That’s how he was recognized as Kamal – certainly kamal! And they asked Kabir, “Do you recognize him?”He said, “Of course, because his head is in my house; I cut it off myself.”The rich man could not believe it. He said, “But you are supposed to be a saint.”Kabir said, “Not supposed to be – I am! If I was only ‘supposed to be’ a saint then I would not have participated in this act of stealing. And I would not have murdered my own son if I were only ‘supposed to be’ a saint. I am really a saint, and at my peak of consciousness, nothing matters.“Your money is not your money, so what is wrong in taking it away? Nothing belongs to anybody, so what is wrong in stealing? And this son was going to die sooner or later, so what is wrong in cutting off his head? Death is bound to happen. In my consciousness there is nothing right, nothing wrong.”The followers of Kabir deny the story. Perhaps after five hundred years I was the first man to start telling it around India, and the followers of Kabir were very angry. They said, “We knew that something like that was there but it has not been written in our records, and nobody ever repeats it because it seems to be so strange – stealing, killing, Kabir participating in it…. What will happen to right and wrong?”I said to them, “You have to understand that right and wrong belong to the dark valleys of life. They don’t belong to the sunlit peaks of consciousness. Yes, this story is dangerous and difficult and harmful in the dark valleys, but who is insisting that you remain in the dark valleys? Come to the sunlit peaks.“This is the message of the story: why live in a world which is divided between wrong and right? Why not move to a world of oneness, where nothing is right and nothing is wrong?”The man of universal consciousness does not follow any principle, but whatsoever he does is right, and whatsoever he avoids is wrong. That is for those who are in the valley. They can try to figure out that what the man of pure consciousness does, that is right; and what he avoids, that is wrong.He avoids that only for you; for him there is nothing to be avoided. It is just out of compassion that he avoids anything; otherwise for him everything is very simple, undivided, one.I can understand your question. In your life you will be facing every moment the choice of what to do, what not to do. In the dark world where humanity lives, each moment is a moment of decision: what to do, what not to do. And the trouble is, whatever you do proves to be wrong. Whatever you do you have to repent, for the simple reason that existence is one and undivided. In your unconsciousness you divide it in two, right and wrong. Your division is arbitrary. So what you think is right you do and what you think is wrong you don’t do.But the wrong is an indivisible part of the right, so sooner or later it will take revenge. You will start feeling guilty about why you did this and not that, why you chose this and not that – perhaps that was right….In your wavering state you are bound to think, “Perhaps that was right which I have not done.” You can’t be certain about your doing because you are not yet certain of your being.Being comes first, and once being is realized, all doing is right: it does not matter what you do. But in the dark valleys of unconsciousness, doing is first – and that is your problem.One thing is right this moment; the next moment the same thing is not right. Then you are split continuously. Yesterday you did something thinking it was right; today you found it was not. Now it cannot be undone, it will hang over you your whole life. And don’t think that if you have done the other thing, things would have been different – no, not at all.I have seen people who are married and are suffering and continually thinking that if they had chosen to remain unmarried, that would have been right. And I know people who have remained unmarried and are continually worried: perhaps they are missing the real joys of life – it would have been better if they had married. People who have children are constantly harassed by the children. Those who don’t have children are constantly harassed because they don’t have children; they are missing something.It seems in this world you cannot be in the right place, whatever you do. Whichever way you go you always reach the wrong spot. It looks very strange and weird but it is not, it is very mathematical. Because you are wrong, wherever you go, whatever you do, turns out to be wrong. You cannot do right remaining the way you are.So my emphasis is not on action. All the religions in the world emphasize action: do the right action.First be, and then the right action follows of its own accord.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why do I cling to my misery? Why can I not drop it?The I, the ego, is not something separate from the misery, that’s why it is absolutely impossible for anyone to drop it. Who is going to drop it? They are not two, the dropper and the dropped.The ego is nothing but a complex of all your miseries, sufferings, anxieties, anguishes, wounds; your anger, your jealousy, your hate – they are, all together, one complex.The problem arises because when you start feeling miserable, it is not the whole complex which is feeling miserable – just a part, a fragment, and the remaining whole becomes your I; a false division is created. you want to drop the misery; you think yourself separate from the misery.The same goes on happening with everything else: you feel anger – then anger is taken as a separate thing from you. Or jealousy…. It never happens that all these things, this whole hell, you want to drop completely.Why do you want to drop misery in the first place? – because it is unpleasant; you would like to be joyous, blissful. But in the very liking, the very desiring of joy and bliss and happiness, you have created the misery. The desire is the cause of the misery, and the same desire is befooling you – now you want to drop misery. You have created it. You, and only you, are responsible, and still you will go on creating more and more, even while you are thinking of dropping it.This becomes now a new misery: “I cannot drop my misery.” Do you see the game? You were miserable enough, now you want to drop it. More misery is added. You were angry, now you want to drop anger. You become even more angry because you cannot drop it. You feel trapped.Your ego, the whole of you, consists of a thousand and one things; hence it becomes possible that you can separate yourself from one thing. Anger, jealousy, misery, hatred, you can separate, but those one thousand things that are now playing the role of being your I are not your I at all. They are part and parcel of the same complex system; they are all interrelated.If one can be dropped, then the whole can be dropped. But because the whole is trying to drop one, you are in a mess. You cannot figure out what is happening. “I don’t want to be miserable” – still the misery continues. It continues because everything else that supports it, nourishes it, helps it, has become your I. Every time you separate a fragment from yourself, this is going to be the case.I cannot suggest to you how to drop it. There are not methods to drop, there is no possibility to drop. I am not saying that you are going to remain miserable forever. I am simply trying to make it emphatically clear that it is not a question of dropping; it is a question of understanding. And in the very understanding of misery, it disappears. Not that you have to drop it – who are you?Just try to look around, and you will find yourself nothing but a combination of a thousand and one things; the whole junk of the world is within you. And the major part of junk tries to drop a small part of junk. And they are related, they are relatives. They are one family, they cannot really be separated.Just see: Can you separate anger from hate? Can you separate hate from love? To separate anger from hate obviously seems to be impossible, because without hate, anger is not possible. Without anger, hate is not possible.Then try to separate hate from love. Just try to think: don’t you hate the man you love also? Haven’t you been destructive in a thousand ways to the same man you love? Have you not tried to possess the man or the woman? Is possessiveness love? Can a man who loves even think of possessing? Is it not very clear that to possess someone is to reduce him from a being to a thing? There is nothing worse that you can do.Let me repeat, there is nothing worse than this that you can do, that you are capable of: reducing a being to a thing. And that’s what possession is. Only things can be possessed; beings cannot be possessed.You can have a communion with a being.You can share your love, your poetry, your beauty, your body, your mind.You can share but you cannot do business.You cannot bargain.You cannot possess a man or a woman.But everybody is trying to do that all over the earth.The result is this madhouse we call the planet earth. You try to possess – it is naturally impossible, it cannot happen in the very nature of things. Then there is misery. The more you try to possess a person, the more that person tries to become independent of you, because every person has a birthright to be free, to be himself or herself.You are trespassing on the privacy of the person, which is the only sacred place in the whole world. Neither Israel is sacred, nor is Kashi sacred, nor is Mecca sacred. The only sacred space in the true sense is the privacy of a person – his or her independence, the beinghood.If you love a person you will never trespass.You will never try to be a detective, to be a Peeping Tom, peeping into the privacy of the other person. You will respect the privacy of the other person. But just look at the so-called lovers – husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. All they are doing, around the clock, is finding ways to trespass, to enter into the private world of the other person. They don’t want the other person to have any privacy. Why?If the person has independence, privacy, individuality, they are afraid. The person tomorrow may not love them – because love is not something stagnant. It is a moment, it is nothing to do with permanency. It may continue for eternity, but basically love is a phenomenon of the moment. If it happens again in the next moment you are blessed. If it does not happen you should be thankful that at least it did happen before.Remain open: perhaps it may happen again – if not with this person, then with another person. The question is not persons, the question is of love. Love should remain flowing, it should not be stopped.But in their stupidity people start thinking, “If this person goes out of my hands then I am going to starve my whole life without love.” And he does not know that by trying to hold this person permanently in his captivity, he will starve. He will not get love. You cannot get love from a slave. You cannot get love from your possessions; from your chair, table, house, your furniture, you cannot get love.You can get love only from a free agent whose uniqueness is respected by you, whose freedom is respected by you. It is out of the freedom of the other that this moment of love has happened. Don’t destroy it by trying to possess, by trying to hold, by creating a legal bondage, a marriage. Let the other be free, and remain free yourself. Don’t let anybody else possess you either.To possess or to be possessed, both are ugly.If you are possessed you lose your very soul.Just look at husbands when they are going with their wives; do they look like individuals? I was traveling in a train; in my compartment – it was a coupe – there was only one woman passenger. There were only two seats and one was reserved for me. The man who was with the woman had to travel in another compartment, but at each station, if even for two minutes the train was to stop, he would come rushing just to ask her whether she needed anything, water or tea or anything to eat – at each station.When it went on happening for at least ten stations I could not resist the temptation. I asked the woman, “It is not good of me to ask you, but I cannot resist the temptation: How long have you been married to each other?”She said, “For seven years.”I said, “Don’t lie to me.”She was shocked when I said that. She said, “How can you say that?”I said, “It is so apparent. I cannot conceive of a husband who has been married for seven years coming at each station to ask you…to hold your hand for two minutes, to give you a kiss. If it is true then this must be the rarest husband in the whole of history. I cannot believe it, it is an absolute lie.”For a moment she was silent and then she said, “You are right. He is not my husband, we are not married. And we have not known each other for seven years either. Just three or four days ago we met. We don’t have any relationship yet.”I said, “Go on being this way. Don’t have any relationship ever, because the moment you have a relationship this man will not come at every station. In fact if he was your husband, once he had dropped you in this compartment he would have escaped for the whole journey, because there are so many women traveling in this train – he would not bother about you. In fact he would pray to God that somebody takes you away, or you elope with somebody, or something happens, some accident.”Husbands are praying, wives are praying, that accidents happen; “Everybody dies, but my husband never does. No accident happens to him. Every evening he is back home, the same old guy, and the same old story is repeated every day.”Lovers love only while they are not yet in a fixed relationship. As the relationship settles, love disappears. Once the relationship is fixed, instead of love, something else takes place: possessiveness.They still go on calling it love, but you cannot deceive existence. Just by calling it love you cannot change anything.It is now hate, not love.It is fear, not love.It is adjustment, not love.It is compromise, not love.It can be anything – but not love.The deeper you try to understand, the more it will become clear to you that love and hate are not two things. It is just a linguistic mistake to call them love and hate. In the future, at least in psychological treatises and books, they will not be using “and” between the two. In fact it is better to make one word, lovehate. They are two sides of the same coin.You want to drop hate and you want to preserve love? Now, you are asking something impossible. All these things are interconnected. Wherever there is love you will find jealousy. It is impossible to find love without jealousy surrounding it. Everybody wants to drop jealousy, but jealousy is an intrinsic part of love.The moment you love someone, immediately you become jealous of so many things…. The woman you fall in love with is talking with someone and looking so happy; she never looks so happy with you. Now, you are twenty-four hours a day with the woman – nobody can be twenty-four hours happy except a crazy man like me who has nothing else to do other than just to be happy. It is possible.But a poor woman, living with a dodo twenty-four hours a day, and you both expect that she will be continuously laughing and enjoying and being a fairy…. You are expecting too much, you are being too esoteric. Be a little more real, more pragmatic; come down to earth.And it is just because of you that she is enjoying those few moments with somebody else; you have bored her enough. And it is not going to do any harm to anybody. Let her have a little laughter – it will be healthy for her. You should be happy because she will be back a little healthier. Perhaps for a few moments she may laugh with you too. But your jealousy…and your jealous mind starts thinking, What is going to happen? Is she in love with that man? – because she never looks so happy with me.And then the struggle, the constant conflict, the nagging. And naturally it is not one-sided; the woman is even more jealous than the man. But the responsibility goes on man because he has not allowed the woman as much freedom as he had allowed himself.Can’t you see it? There are women prostitutes. For centuries they have existed – it is said that they are the oldest profession…perhaps. I say perhaps, because in my opinion the priests are the oldest profession. Without the priests there cannot be prostitutes. Who will call them prostitutes? Who will condemn them?But whether the first or the second, it is really one of the oldest professions. But male prostitutes are a very recent development. Strange – why for centuries did only women remain prostitutes? Why were there not, parallel to women, male prostitutes?The reason is simple. Man has his world of freedom; those prostitutes are his freedom. He does not allow the woman the same freedom. Just in this decade, and that too only in very sophisticated cites like London and Tokyo, have male prostitutes appeared. This is a good symptom, because if man has the freedom to purchase love, if he has a market, a love market, then the woman should also have the right.In the same way, in every field, man has cut the woman’s freedom. In most countries, in most cultures, for most of the time, the woman was economically dependent. She is still, in ninety-nine percent of the world, dependent on man. And you can see the simple arithmetic.When you are economically dependent you cannot be independent spiritually either. Then spiritual freedom is just talk; economically you are dependent on the man. You are continually afraid he may leave you, he may disappear – just like Werner Erhard, the founder of “est.”One day he disappeared from his home, leaving his wife, his children, his old parents. He not only disappeared, he changed his name. He is a Jew – and Werner Erhard is a German name. You can see the logic; moving from being a Jew to being a German is going to the opposite pole. Nobody now will recognize him as a Jew. Have you ever heard of a Jew adopting a German name?Now, if a husband escapes, starts a new relationship somewhere…. The woman is dependent on him economically, children are there – how is she going to live now? In almost every culture, woman has not been allowed education because education will make her independent, at least potentially independent: if a time of difficulty comes she can stand on her own feet.Uneducated, without any knowledge of the world, of business, how is she going to survive? The only way left for her is to be a prostitute. All that she knows is that she can sell her body. She has nothing else to sell. Naturally she was more jealous, afraid, clinging – clinging as a creeper clings to a tree.Without the tree the creeper will fall down on the earth. It is only with the support of the tree that the creeper can move upward toward the sun, can open its flowers and can have the joys of the sky; otherwise it will be on the earth, trodden on by people, eaten by animals, finished. The woman has been continually compared to the creeper. She has not been allowed by any religion to be a tree. Naturally she is jealous and continually keeps an eye on the husband – where he is going, what he is doing….Mulla Nasruddin was so fed up with his wife every day finding some woman’s hair on his clothes, and there was no excuse: “How can you explain this hair on your coat? You must have been hugging, you must have been sleeping with some woman. The proof is here.”So one day before going into the house, Mulla Nasruddin went into a friend’s house and told him to look all over his clothes. “Give me a brush so I can clean all my clothes. And today I am not going to give her any proof. These hairs…the women are strange on both sides. On one side they leave hairs on you, on the other side they catch the hairs. That seems to be a conspiracy against man. Today I am not going….”So he really cleaned himself up and went home. His wife looked for the evidence, but there was no evidence. She started crying. Nasruddin said, “Now what? Why are you crying?”She said, “My God, now you have started going with bald women. No hair! Where did you manage to find a bald woman? This is very rare.”I have seen millions of people but I have yet to see a bald woman; I have not seen one. In fact the woman’s brain has not been allowed to work, how can she become bald? It is the proof, the same kind of proof. The woman’s brain never uses all the nourishment, hence her hair goes on getting the nourishment. Man’s mind uses the nourishment – his hairs starve and die.I remember a scientist’s prediction that in four thousand years all boys will be born bald. They will not need to wait for forty, fifty, sixty years to become bald; they will be born bald just four thousand years from now because man will have used so much of the nourishment that the very genetic program of the boys will change. There seems to be a possibility…. Baldness in men has been growing each decade – more and more people are getting bald earlier and earlier.The woman is not allowed education, not allowed social mobility. The only place she can go is the temple, the church; every other area of life is closed to her. And the church, the temple, and the synagogue are all male chauvinist. They are poisoning the minds of women. They have convinced the women, “You are a somewhat lower category of human being.”In Jainism a woman cannot become enlightened directly from a woman’s body. First she has to be born as a man and then she can become enlightened. I have been talking to Jaina priests and monks – they have no argument to support this.I was asking them, “Does enlightenment happen in the body? Has it something to do with hormones, female or male? Obviously it has nothing to do with hormones, nothing to do with the body itself. No chemistry is involved, no physics is involved, no physiology is involved. It is a question of consciousness, and consciousness is neither male nor female. Then on what grounds do you go on saying that a woman cannot become enlightened?”But for twenty-five centuries not a single woman in the East has protested against it. Is it not strange, unbelievable? But no; the reason is, they were completely conditioned by the male chauvinist priests, and that was their only education. Whatever the priest was saying was all that they knew. They had no other way of becoming acquainted with other kinds of views.So all their freedom is cut, the woman is enclosed in the house. Naturally she is visualizing her husband flirting here and there. She knows him perfectly well, and mostly she is right; it is not that she is just imagining it. Her imagination is very close to reality – that’s what the husband is doing with his secretary in the office, with his students in the college.The reason why her imagination comes close to truth is because she knows – deep down everybody knows – that you cannot remain interested in each other forever. Once the man knows the woman’s whole geography, her whole topography; the woman knows the man and what kind of lousy lover he is….When they are well acquainted, one thing is certain, that both become suspicious, both become jealous. Suspicion follows jealousy. And when you are suspicious, jealous, how can you be loving? How can you even be friendly?Husbands and wives I have never seen to be friendly. Once they may have been lovers, now they are enemies. To be friendly means to respect the other person, his privacy. But no, the moment the husband comes in the house, the first question is, “Where have you been?” But if you are respectful to a person it is none of your business where he has been; that is his business, wherever he has been. With whom have you been?And the husband coming home goes on figuring out in his mind excuses, explanations of where he has been, what he has been doing. He knows those questions are going to be there. And he also knows that his wife is not going to believe his explanations. The wife knows what explanations he is going to give. It is a strange game.But nobody is ready to stop this nonsense and just be straightforward; “We don’t feel interested in each other anymore, and that is natural. Why should we feel interested in each other? We felt interested because we were unacquainted.” It is always the unknown that is interesting, it is always the hidden that gives you the challenge. Once you know it, the challenge disappears.If you are understanding, then a friendship can grow; otherwise all these things will be there – jealousy, suspicion, doubt, a continuous fight. And then you say, “I cannot get rid of my misery.”Do you really want to get rid of your misery? Then you will have to get rid of many other things too which you don’t want to get rid of, that’s the trouble. If you want to get rid of misery, you will have to get rid of your idea of permanent love. You will have to get rid of the idea that you are going to be always beautiful to the person you love. The beauty disappears once you are acquainted. It is always a mirage; the farther away you are, the better.The grass is really greener…but don’t come too close. But when you see the grass is greener, you want to graze. And then you ask how to get rid of misery because when you come close the grass is not so green. It has never been. It is not anybody’s fault, it is just the way things are.Try to understand what your misery is. And the first principle to understand is: Drop the idea of dropping, because if you are already determined to drop it, how can you understand it? You are already prejudiced, you are already against it.First drop the idea of dropping misery, and you have taken really a great step.Now the second thing is, try to understand what misery is. From where is it arising? Move into all its connections, find out its whole complex unity within you, and you will be surprised that it is not something separate, or separable. It is joined with a thousand and one things. And you will be shocked that all that you always wanted to drop is part of that which you have been told is the ideal, that this is what you should be.Jesus says to love your enemy. Have you ever thought, if you don’t have any hate in you, can you have love? That is not possible. All these religious teachers have been telling you things which are unnatural: “Love everybody.” It is not possible. You can neither love everybody nor can you hate everybody.If you love somebody, that means you have a choice, a liking; anybody who doesn’t fit with that liking, that choice, you cannot love. You will have to decide; if you love, you will have to hate somebody; if you have friends, you will have enemies.A man like me has no friends and no enemies. Only then can you be free of misery. But you have been told that there are good ideals which have to be saved, and there are evil things which have to be dropped; that there are divine values, and that there are evil temptations. The trouble is that they are not separate.You will be surprised to know that the word divine and the word devil come from the same Sanskrit root, deva. They are not separate; devil and divine mean the same. But you have been told that they are just polar opposites and that there is a universal fight going on between God and Satan, God and evil. If that is true then it seems God is losing continually.The devil is winning because everywhere you can see crime increasing, people becoming more and more inhuman. It does not seem that God is winning. Seventy-five percent of every country’s income goes to the devil, twenty-five percent goes – I am not saying to God: it goes to small devils. But seventy-five percent goes to the chief, the great devil. Every country is wasting seventy-five percent of its income for war. God is not winning. God cannot win because He is the other side of the devil. They are together, they are partners in the business.If you try to understand the complexity of your misery you will see that all that is good is connected with all that has been condemned as bad. And you have been told to drop the bad and save the good. This is the dilemma you have been put into by your priests, by all your religions, by all do-gooders. They have put you in such a schizophrenic state….Once you see that good and bad are together you will be immensely relieved, you will feel such a relief, because the whole conflict was baseless. You were fighting against shadows, you were fighting against yourself. It is as if my left hand is fighting with my right hand. Do you think there is any possibility of coming to a conclusion? There is no possibility. Both are my hands; there is no need for them to fight, they can be together and friendly. They can be helpful to each other, they can be a tremendous support to each other.And that’s the whole difference between me and all the religions of the world. They have been trying to create a conflict in you between good and bad, and I am trying to bring your good and bad closer and closer so that you can start using them in a harmonious unity. When I started calling the new man that is going to come into the world, “Zorba the Buddha,” this was the idea behind it.The Ceylonese ambassador to America wrote a letter to me – apparently very humble but one could see he is boiling within, even in his letter, between the lines. He said, “You have to stop calling your restaurants and your discos, ‘Zorba the Buddha,’ because Buddha is our spiritual founder; to put him with a materialist like Zorba is insulting, and it will create great antagonism toward you among all the Buddhists of the world.”I told my secretary to write him: In the first place Buddha is nobody’s copyright. And you have to understand that we are not calling it Zorba Gautam the Buddha. The founder of your religion was Gautam the Buddha. His name was Gautam; “the buddha” was not his name. The buddha means the enlightened one. There have been many, there will be many; this is nobody’s monopoly.And even Zorba has the potential to become the Buddha. Just look into your own scriptures. Your Buddha says that the lowest has the potential to be the highest. The sinner has the potential to be the saint. So what is wrong with Zorba? And as far as I am concerned, I don’t want Zorba to become the Buddha by dropping being Zorba. I want Zorba to become the Buddha remaining Zorba – and this is a totally new concept. If it creates inconvenience to some fools around the world, I am not concerned; I have never been concerned about fools.My effort is not to create a division between Zorba and Buddha, but to create a bridge.Zorba as Zorba can become the Buddha, that’s my approach.You need not drop anything. You have simply to understand your complex being, where good and bad are one. But you have been told they are not one and you have accepted that nonsense; hence, you have been trying to drop the bad. And you cannot.I don’t want you to drop it, because that is your energy. It is good that you cannot drop it. I want you to transform it, not drop it. A man who cannot feel suffering cannot feel compassion either. What is compassion? If you cannot feel suffering you cannot feel compassion for somebody else’s suffering because for you suffering does not exist. Your experience of suffering can be used for your growth.All the stones on your path can become stepping stones.They need not hinder you, you just have to know that they are steps.Look into your suffering, find out that good and bad are all together there. You cannot separate them, so the question of dropping does not arise. You have to use them together – not as opposites, but as complementaries. And that is possible.Even poison can be used as medicine – it is used. In fact, on most of the medicines you will find written: poison – in red letters. Poison is to kill, but by understanding it you can use it to save somebody who is dying. But if you are foolish, even nectar will kill you; you may drink too much of it. In fact you will drink too much nectar if you can find it.I am reminded of one of the experiments of Delgado. He had put an electrode in a white rat’s brain. And he put a small remote control in front of the rat and taught him to push the button. That button gave the rat the same experience as sexual orgasm.Remember, sexual orgasm does not happen in our genitals, it happens in your brain. Genitals are only the outermost posts of your brain, they simply inform the brain, they simply say, “Okay.” The brain goes berserk – the actual orgasm happens in the brain. So it is possible to have a man’s brain just kept in alcohol, and he can have a sexual orgasm without anybody, without any genitals. Nothing is needed because the real experience happens in the brain.And that white rat…these white rats are poor fellows. Scientists are after them, they are being imported from all over the world. Once the rat learned the trick, how to push the button, you cannot believe what happened to him: in one hour he pushed the button six hundred times!He wouldn’t stop, he went on pushing it. He died! – because that much orgasm nobody has ever had: six hundred times in one hour. Good food was provided there; everything that he liked…beautiful white rat girls – no interest at all in anybody. His only interest was in the button.He forgot food, he forgot the women, he forgot even to drink, or just to take a little rest. What was happening was so far out, he could not miss a single second. He died on that red button.You just have to be a little alert about your inner composition and you will be surprised to know many things. You will come to know that all your joys are within you, all your miseries are within you. Nobody else creates them, you simply find an excuse in somebody. Everything is within you, and except you nobody else is responsible.Then what is the question of dropping misery? If you want to continue, continue. If you don’t want to continue, who is telling you to continue? The very understanding that “it is my own work” becomes the dropping.And the second realization that comes is: “What I used to call ‘I’ was nothing but this combination.” When this whole combination subsides, falls into a deep harmony, the discordant notes become a symphony. You suddenly become aware of a new I, which was standing far back because the noise of your mind was so much, and you were so much engaged in all that. Your real self was simply waiting for you to look inward. But you were focused outward, and you were so much struggling with things…. You cannot be victorious – and you cannot be defeated either; you will always remain in a limbo, in a confusion.Once all that confusion is gone, suddenly from the background a new concept of your being emerges.It is more like am-ness than I; it is more existential. It is not egoistic, it is simply a feeling of am-ness. And then you know that it was simply foolish to ask, “How can I drop misery?” because I is the misery, I is the jealousy, I is the hell.And you don’t know your real I.The real I you can know only when the false is gone.The moment the false disappears the real appears.The death of the false is the birth of the real.And that quality which I am calling am-ness is the very center of life, the very center of bliss. You will remain the same person in a way, but in another way you will be absolutely discontinuous with the old; you will be absolutely new.You will love, but now your love will not be the same as it was before. It will not have hate as its opposite side.Your love will be now so great that it can absorb hate, it can transform its poison into nectar.You will love but you will not possess.You will love to give, not to get.You will love because you are so full of love you have to share it; otherwise it becomes a burden.You will be like a raincloud so full of rain that it wants to shower. Then it does not even care where it is showering – whether on the hills where nothing grows, or in a fertile land where flowers will grow. No, the cloud is just as mad as any enlightened man. It knows nothing of who is to be avoided and who is to be taken into one’s confidence. No, it simply goes on showering on all. It has no friend, no foe. It is grateful because the earth is ready to receive it with joy.The enlightened man is grateful to his own disciples, to his own devotees, because they are so open, receptive, vulnerable, ready. Your love is to get something; his love is to give all. He receives much, much more than you can ever receive by trying to get. You remain a beggar.The enlightened man receives much without ever asking.These are the mysteries of existence.If you can give without asking, the whole existence will start pouring on you. You are no longer a beggar, now you are an emperor; and existence exalts only emperors, not beggars.I cannot say, “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God.” Sheer nonsense!I say, “Blessed are the emperors because they have already inherited the kingdom of God; there is nothing else to be inherited.”My sannyasins have to be emperors – for the first time in the whole history of the world. All the sannyasins of all the religions have been beggars. Enough of that beggary!I want you to be rich in every possible way – material, psychological, spiritual. I want you to live the richest life that has ever been lived on the earth.This whole earth is like a desert.I want you to become small oases.Perhaps in those small oases lies the very hope of humanity’s future.Yes, Zorba the Buddha is humanity’s future.And you all have to become Zorba the Buddhas.Nothing has to be denied, nothing has to be dropped.Everything has to be enjoyed, everything has to be understood. Everything has to be transformed in such a way that it becomes a new source of richness, nourishment, rejuvenation to you.Please don’t try to drop your suffering.Try to understand it.And in that very understanding suffering will disappear. But the energy involved in suffering will be left with you. The same energy becomes blissfulness.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have heard you say that religion and politics are opposite dimensions: a religious man cannot be interested in politics, and a politician can never become religious while remaining a politician. If this is true, is there no chance for a better world?I have said that, and I repeat it: the really religious person cannot be interested in politics. And the politician, remaining a politician, cannot have any religious experience, any taste of that flight to the unknown.But I have never said that there is no hope for a better world.This is true, that the politician cannot become religious – for the simple reason that politics, all politics, politics as such, is power politics. It is will-to-power. One wants to dominate, one wants to possess, one wants to be the decisive factor in people’s lives. These are the qualities of the ego.Obviously this type of person cannot be religious because religion is basically the experience of egolessness.In religion there is no place for will-to-power. In fact, in religion there is no place even for will. Will-to-power is far away; even will-to-be is not there. One is in the hands of existence, in a deep let-go. This let-go is what I call religiousness. That’s why I said that religion and politics are opposite dimensions.But don’t be worried; it does not mean that there is no hope for humanity, no hope for the future.I am a man who hopes even against hope. It is impossible for me to be hopeless. And when there is hope you can always find a way. The proverb is: “Wherever there is a will there is a way.” I don’t think it is right. Everywhere there is will, and there is no way. Some idiot must have made this proverb. But wherever there is hope there is always a way.I would like to change the proverb. I don’t have any right to change anything, but I am simply crazy, you can’t help it. I go on changing the meanings of words because my feeling is that no word has any ultimate meaning. All meanings are given meanings. If somebody else can give a meaning to it, why can’t I give a meaning to it too? Words in themselves are just sounds. A word means what you want it to mean – it depends on you. So I would like to change this old proverb.For my people, will is poison because will ultimately leads to politics. Will means, “I want to be something, somewhere, somebody.” I teach you will-lessness; that’s my meaning of let-go. The will clings, the will tries to force its own way; it wants existence to follow it.When I say will-lessness, I am saying to you, don’t force your way. Just let nature take its own course. You just be a cloud. Wherever the wind blows the cloud moves, with no resistance, with no grumpiness: “I wanted to go south and what is happening? – I am going north, I hate it! I was destined toward the south, dreaming of the south, and everything is shattered by this wind.”No, the cloud simply moves with the wind.There is no conflict, there is no resistance.The wind and the cloud are not two.If the wind suddenly changes its movement – from going north it starts moving toward east or west – the cloud does not even raise a question: “This is inconsistent. We were going north; I had agreed, irrespective of the fact that I was destined to go to the south. I had sacrificed my goal just to be with you. Now this is too much! Somehow I managed to make myself agreeable to the idea of going to the north. And you seem to be just mad! You have started moving toward east or west, this is inconsistent. This is not friendly, this is not the way of lovers.“This is a divorce. I cannot always be a follower, so that wherever you go I have to go. I am not just a hen-pecked husband. If you want to go to hell, go! I am not going.”No, there is no question even that the wind is inconsistent. The cloud has no will; hence no conflict, no question, no doubt. The way of the wind is accepted as the way of existence, that’s what existence wants. The cloud is in a tremendous let-go, it has no will of its own. The cloud is not and cannot be a politician.The religious man cannot be interested in politics for the simple reason that he has nowhere to reach – he has reached there already. He is there where the politician is trying to reach and never reaches – cannot reach because of the very nature of things. The religious person is already there.He has not reached there, he has discovered that he has always been there, always and always, from the very beginning; he has never been anywhere else. Even if he wants to move, it is impossible. He can only be where he is, nowhere else can he move.How can you move from yourself, from your being? And nothing is higher than that, nothing is more blissful.There is no need either.Hence the religious man cannot be interested in politics, because the politician’s way is against the flow, against the current. The politician is trying to move above everybody’s head; whatsoever the cost, whatever evil means he has to use does not matter. All that matters is that he is determined to become somebody significant; he has to leave his name in the pages of history, although nobody reads those names.And as history grows bigger – and it goes on becoming bigger every day – bigger names go on becoming smaller. Naturally, those who were very prominent go on slipping into the footnotes, or are just referred to. Once they ruled over the whole world.Genghis Khan was one of the greatest emperors ever. He ruled from one corner of Asia to the opposite corner of Europe; both the continents were under his thumb. He was called “The Great Khan.” But now, if you look in the history of the world, you will find his name referred to in some footnote. History will become bigger sooner or later. First you slip into the footnotes, then you start disappearing from the footnotes. Leaving your name in the history books is like writing your name on the sand.One of my teachers, a history teacher, used to say again and again, and this has been said to almost everybody: “Leave your name in the pages of history. Write your name in golden letters. You should leave your mark that you have been here.”The first day I entered his class…of course the first day the teacher is at his best. He tries hard to impress, because the first impression is a lasting impression. So he was at his peak – not speaking but thundering. I could not tolerate it when he said, “You have to leave your name in history, it has to be written in golden letters. You have to make a mark that you have been here.”I stood up and I said, “You are shouting too loudly – and only forty students are here. Are you leaving your mark on the walls of this classroom, or on the tables and chairs? You are thundering as if you are addressing a meeting of at least ten thousand people. And can I ask a few things?“One thing, I have never seen any history book written in golden letters. So of all those who have lived up to now, nobody has been able to write his name in golden letters. Are you proposing that, for me especially, a book will be written in golden letters? And even if it is written in golden letters, I will not be here to see it; so what is the point, whether my name is written in it or not?“In fact, when I came into this world I had no name. The name is given to me; the name is just arbitrary, it is not mine. So whether it is written in the history book or not does not matter.“Secondly, you are saying, ‘Leave your mark here, to prove that you have been here.’ You are talking just like a dog.”He said, “What!”I said, “Yes – because dogs leave their mark wherever they are. They raise one of their legs up and leave their mark there. And when I am saying that, I am simply stating a biological fact. You can ask the scientists why the dog does that. He leaves his mark: ‘I have been here and this is my territory.’ Pissing is golden. He is making history.”But all the politicians are doing that, pissing and thinking that they are leaving golden marks. Yes, pissing is a little yellow but I cannot say it is golden, that would be exaggerating. And all that the dog is leaving as his mark, and making as a declaration to existence, is that “This is my territory” – it stinks!I said to him, “The whole of history stinks, and all your politicians simply stink. You please just stop thundering and stop telling us nonsense. You just start the story of all the idiots of the past. And please forgive us for not being added to that list.”The politician suffers from a tremendous inferiority complex. Deep down he knows he is nothing, and he wants to prove to the world that he is huge, powerful. He wants to stand first in the line of the whole humanity. But the trouble is, humanity follows a general universal law; it is one of the fundamental laws of the universe that things move in circles. The earth goes around the sun, the moon goes around the earth, the sun itself is going around some bigger sun which we have not yet been able to discover.But everything moves in circles, and that is true about humanity too. We are standing in a circle and moving in a circle, so there is always somebody ahead of you. This is the trouble, you cannot get out of it; somebody is always ahead of you. Yes, somebody is behind you – that gives a little satisfaction, but the person who is ahead of you kills it immediately. You are trying to pull the person back by his leg and be ahead of him. He will try his hardest not to be pulled that way, he will kick you as hard as he can.But even if you succeed…. If you fail, you fail; but if you succeed, then too you fail, this is the trouble, because again you find that there is somebody else ahead. And you will always find that, because it is a circle.As you go on succeeding, go on succeeding, go on succeeding, one day you will find that a man who was once behind you is ahead of you. That is the ultimate failure. When somebody becomes a president, a prime minister, then he comes to know: “My God! The man ahead of me now is the same man who was behind me when I started the journey.” And you can see it every four years in America, and in India every five years: the president is begging for the vote of the man who was behind him. Now he has to ask and beg a vote from him, now his presidentship, his premiership depends on the vote of that man; he is ahead.I have been saying again and again that the leaders are the followers of their own followers. It is a very strange game. You have to pretend to be first, and yet you know the last man has the power to keep you there or not to keep you there.The politician’s life is a life of constant struggle and constant anguish. He tries hard to get beyond them, but if he remains a politician this is not possible. All these sufferings, miseries, are part and parcel of his political game.One education minister used to come to see me. He was a very rich man, very well educated. Before he became the education minister he was the vice-chancellor of a university. When he was vice-chancellor of the university there, he heard me in a conference and became my friend. Once in a while he used to come, just to relax for one or two days, away from the world of the capital and the politicians.He would ask me again and again: “You teach people methods of meditation, of becoming peaceful, silent. And I can understand that what you are saying is right, that unless you become silent and peaceful you cannot hope to be blissful. You have to create the ground for bliss to happen. But you never tell me anything.”I said, “I will tell you only when you drop your politics, because your politics and my teachings together will make you even more miserable. You are miserable enough. If you start trying to be peaceful also, to be silent even for a few moments, to meditate every day even for half an hour, you will become more miserable than you have ever been, because you cannot succeed in doing it. It is better for you to accept that this is all that life has in it: suffering, misery, sleeplessness, and continuous turmoil.“It is better, in a way, that this is all life is. If you become aware that life is more and you start trying for it, you will be unnecessarily multiplying your suffering. You cannot be peaceful, you cannot meditate, you cannot sit silently. And that will be a very painful defeat; a great successful politician who has become a cabinet minister of a country like India – big, vast, the biggest democracy in the world; and you have one of the most important portfolios, education – such a great successful man cannot be silent even for one moment? That will be very disturbing.”But he didn’t listen to me. He started meditating and reading my books. And what I had said would happen, happened – a complete nervous breakdown. He was brought to me. I said, “I told you before, these two things cannot go together. You are trying to run east and west at the same time; then one leg goes to the east and one leg goes to the west, and you will be torn apart. It is a very simple thing: if you are in politics then just be in politics. There is no such thing as religion for you.”The politician cannot be religious while remaining a politician. Remember the condition.The religious person is on such a fantastic journey, what does he care about being a president of a country, or a prime minister, a king or a queen? What value do these kings and queens have? In fact, there are only five kings in the world: four in the playing cards and one in England. And they have a similar value: nothing much. Do you want to be the sixth king?Politicians for centuries have been living in hell, for the simple reason that they think that through this hell they will attain one day to the highest power and position. But what are you going to do with the highest power and position?This education minister was one day sitting with me in his car; we were just going for a ride, and a dog started chasing the car. I said to the driver, “Slow down a little – the poor dog is huffing and puffing so much, just slow down. Let him catch the car and see what happens.”The politician said, “What will happen?”I said, “You will see – exactly that which happens to a politician.”The driver slowed down the car. The dog came close to us – and looked silly, because now what?I told the education minister, “This is your position – now what? Chasing the car, he was far happier. At least there was something to do, a great challenge. But once he reaches the car he feels embarrassed, because now the challenge has disappeared. And he looks all around: he must be foolish, why are you staring? He never thought about why he is chasing the car, what he is going to do if he gets to the car. Even if he sits in the seat of the driver, what is he going to do?”These great politicians sitting in great power in the White House and the Kremlin – just dogs sitting in a car looking all around, feeling silly, thinking, “Is this the end?” There is nowhere else to go. Once you have reached the White House you have nowhere to go. You are really caught – and by your own efforts – in a prison.The politician cannot be religious because religion means understanding, awareness, silence, harmony, and a deep let-go with existence, a feeling of being at peace with everything as it is: no desire to be anybody else, no desire to be anywhere else, no desire for tomorrow. All is fulfilled in this moment. The politician cannot afford this. And the religious man who is in this situation, in this ultimate state of being, for him politicians are just foolish people, although he may not say so just out of etiquette.I am not a man of etiquette, I don’t know manners. I simply call a spade a fucking spade, because that’s what it is. I have made the spade actually what it is. The old proverb is, a spade is a spade. That doesn’t sound of any import. Of course a spade is a spade – so what! It does not say anything about the spade. So I simply say that these are all idiots.But there is still hope for humanity. The hope is not that religious people will become politicians, or that religious people will start taking an interest in politics, no. But religious people can become, should become, rebellious against all political stupidity. There is the hope. The religious person should not remain just contented with his blissfulness and allow all these idiots to go on doing harm to innocent humanity.To me this is the only compassion:To rebel against the whole history of humanity.The religious person should rebel.In the past he has not done that. That’s why I say, in the past religion has been just immature. Even the greatest religious personalities in the past will look like pygmies compared to the authentic religious person who is going to be born, because the authentic religion is basically rebellion – rebellion against all superstition, rebellion against all stupidity, rebellion against all the nonsense that goes on being imposed on the human mind continuously.A rebellious religious man is a fire; his words will be words on fire.His silence is not going to be the silence of a cemetery.His silence will be the silence of a song, of a dance.His silence will be the silence of two lovers meeting, and not capable to find words to convey their love. Their love makes them wordless. The moment lovers start talking too much you can understand; love has disappeared. Conversation has started; conflict is not very far away. Conversation is the beginning, soon there will be argument. Where else can conversation lead except to controversy? But two lovers when they are really in love, throbbing with a new energy, feel themselves stuck, suddenly wordless. Even to say “I love you” seems to be difficult, seems to be far below the fact of love. It seems somehow to be sacrilegious to bring words into something which is so silent, and so glowing in silence, and so alive in silence.The religious person is silent, but it is not the silence of a cemetery, not the silence of a dead man.It is the silence of one who is really alive, fully alive, intensely alive.This intense aliveness is going to become his rebellion.What have I been doing for thirty years continuously? – fighting every kind of nonsense. Was there any reward, was I seeking any reward out of all this fight? No, it was not for any reward. It was just the way my aliveness was asserting itself. It was not goal-oriented, there was no motivation; I was simply being myself.I enjoyed all that fight. In fact the people who came in conflict with me were very much surprised because it was an agony for them. To me it was an ecstasy. They could not understand how I was enjoying it. And I was surrounded on all sides with enemies. Alone, single-handedly I was moving among millions of people and against them, saying things which were very hurtful to their beliefs.One shankaracharya even asked me, “What are you going to get out of it? You are simply making so many enemies. Politicians are your enemies, all kinds of religious people are your enemies. The rich are your enemies, the poor are your enemies, the capitalists are your enemies, the communists are your enemies.” He said, “This is strange; Mohammedans, Hindus, Jainas, Buddhists, Parsis, Sikhs, Christians – they are all your enemies.”I said to him, “I am going to write a book, How to Impress People and Create Enemies. This is just an experience for it.He said, “You are never serious. I was just being concerned.” He was a young man, newly appointed to be a shankaracharya; he had known me before he was a shankaracharya. He was genuinely concerned, he said, “I don’t see anything that you can get out of this except making everybody an enemy; and yet you enjoy it.”It happened in Faridabad, a place near New Delhi, that there was a great Hindu world conference. This shankaracharya told me, “There is danger.”He was still being friendly toward me, and he said, “In public I cannot be on your side but deep down I feel your authenticity, your sincerity. I cannot say this before the public because I don’t have that much courage. But I want you to be warned because there is much conspiracy going on: ‘Today something has to be done to this man because he has been hammering all our beliefs, all our heritage, all our institutions. Nobody seems to have any answer for him, nobody seems to have any argument.’ So they are thinking, just the way idiots will think, ‘Why not kill this man, why not destroy this man?’ So today’s meeting can become fatal to you.”I said, “Don’t be worried. Every moment is fatal because any moment death can come. And this is great: with fifty thousand people I will enjoy my death too!”He said, “You are incurable. I am just being friendly to you, and I am certain there is something going on.”I said, “If you are certain, I trust you. I will do my best to let it happen.” And really, in the evening conference there must have been at least one hundred thousand people. In the morning conference there were only fifty thousand; the number had doubled because the gossip that something was going to happen, something was boiling up, brought many more people to the evening meeting.As I started speaking I could see that three persons, strong men, came and sat just behind me. They looked like professional criminals. Perhaps they were borrowed for the occasion. Before speaking I said, “I want to say a few things about these three strong men who are sitting behind me.” There was deep silence on the stage. They were all great Hindu monks, three shankaracharyas, prominent politicians – at least fifty people were there. Delhi was so close, so great politicians were available – and they don’t miss such a gathering. One hundred thousand people…just seeing them on the stage is enough!Those three people had not expected that I was going to speak about them first. And how did I know about them? I said, “These three persons are here to kill me, so you all have to be aware – at least they should be patient. There is no problem in killing, they can kill me, but first let me finish what I want to say to you. If they kill me in the middle you will be at a loss; you will have missed what I was going to say to you.“So I want to ask you one thing: Do you want me to say all that I have to say? If you want me to, then please raise your hands. If you don’t want me to, then what is the point of saying half the things; half the truth is far worse than a lie. Then I would rather remain silent and tell these three people to kill me.”One hundred thousand hands shot up, with shouts of “We want to hear you, and we will see who can attack you” – and many people, hundreds of people, came behind me, to prevent those three people. You will be surprised; I spoke the way I always speak, I said things as strongly as possible. And the miracle was that I was speaking against those people’s beliefs!But somewhere, deep down, man remains innocent. You just have to know the knack of reaching that point, to touch his heart.All those shankaracharyas and politicians by and by started getting off the stage. I had been given only twenty minutes to speak…but the president had left, the other organizers had left, seeing the situation, that the whole thing had backfired. But the people would not let those three persons go, they were holding them.The whole meeting became my meeting. I spoke for almost two and a half hours because there was nobody else to speak, and nobody to tell me to stop or anything. The chairman was missing – they had all escaped because they were all part of the conspiracy. And those three men fell at my feet and said, “Somehow save us. If you leave, these people will kill us.”I told the crowd, “Just leave them, because they have not done anything; moreover, they are professionals, they have nothing personal against me. They may have got some money, and I am not against that. Have you got the money?” I asked them, “or have you not got it yet?”And these are the moments when you see realities which are not ordinarily available. They said…they could not tell a lie. They were professional criminals, murderers, they had been charged with murder before, they had been in jail many times – but they could not tell a lie. Just seeing my truth, a synchronicity…something in them also was touched. They said, “Half they have given us and half they have promised after we kill you.”“So,” I said, “you will lose half. You kill me and get the other half.”They said, “We don’t want to kill you. We had no idea who you are. Listening to you we wanted to kill all those people who were trying to kill you.”I said to the people, “Leave these simple, innocent people, don’t harass them, I would like them to move away before I leave the place because I don’t know…this is such a big crowd and you look so angry.”The conference was going to be for three days; this was the first day, so I said, “The conference will continue. Now it is my conference. Every arrangement is here, so for three days we will continue.” And we continued for three days. You will be surprised, those three men were continuously coming to listen and sitting in front of me with tears in their eyes.When I was leaving Faridabad, among the people who had come to give me a send-off were those three people, with garlands and with tears. And they said, “You have changed our whole life. We have always played like puppets in the hands of politicians and priests. We are not criminals; these people have made us criminals, they pay us to commit a crime. If we are caught then they try to save us; they give us all legal support, any bribery that is needed for the judges. They do everything to save us because they need criminals for their political careers, for their religious careers.”I said, “Yes, a priest is not a religious man, he has a religious career. He is a professional.”For thirty years I have been hammering as hard as possible. And a few things I have realized: howsoever thick the conditioning may be that has happened to humanity in the past, it can all be broken. We just need a few authentic religious persons – not priests, not professionals but people who have experienced. They will become burning torches in the darkness of the night.They will not become politicians, but they can destroy the whole political structure of the world – and that’s what is needed.They will not be interested in politics – but they will certainly be interested in the humanity that the politicians have been exploiting for centuries.They will not take power in their hands, they will simply destroy these parasites and let the power be with everybody.In fact, power should be distributed to everybody. It should be decentralized; there is not need for power to be centralized.Centralized, power is bound to corrupt.With power decentralized, everybody is powerful in his own way.What is the need of having politicians?The animal called politician has to disappear from the earth; this is the hope. And I know that now – and only now – is it possible. Before it was not possible, for two reasons: the authentic religious people were not there; and secondly, the politician had not yet done his worst. Now both things are available. The sincere, authentic religion is being born among you. And the politician has come to his tether’s end. He has done the worst, now he cannot do anything more. What more can he do than to bring about a nuclear war, destroying the whole world?Before the politician and his nuclear weapons destroy the whole humanity, the few authentic religious people have to bring fire to every heart, a fire in which the whole political game is finished. And with the political game finished, the politician will disappear. This is the only hope.The third world war is a great hope because it will reveal the politician in his true colors.Up to now there have been wars, big wars – the first world war, the second world war, and thousands of other wars – but they were not total. Somebody was going to win, somebody was going to be defeated. The third world war is going to be a total world war: nobody is going to win, nobody is going to be defeated. All are going to be finished.Now this is the ultimate in war, the ultimate in idiocy. What is the point of fighting if both are going to be finished? The whole point was that you can win, there is a possibility of your winning. At the worst you can lose, but the other will win; somebody is going to be victorious.In the third world war nobody is going to be victorious because nobody is going to survive it. Neither democracy nor communism, neither American nor Russia – nobody is going to survive it, so what is the point? But the politician has come to such a state, he cannot go back. He has to go on, knowing perfectly well that this is going to end finally in the ultimate destruction of this whole planet, this beautiful planet.There are millions of planets in the universe but perhaps the earth is the most beautiful. All those planets are without greenery, without flowers, without birds, without animals, without human beings; without poetry, without music, without dance, without celebration. They are just dead – the earth is so alive.It is not only the question of humanity’s future. It is also the questions of existence missing its most precious planet.It is an existential question, not just a planetary one, not confined to this small earth.It is a question for the whole infinite universe, because in this whole universe this small planet has become an oasis of consciousness. And there are more possibilities; they should not be stopped.Hence I say there is hope – but the hope lies in the religious person’s rebelliousness.I have been asked thousands of times, “You go on teaching religion, there is no problem; but why do you mix religion with rebellion? That creates a problem.”One of the prime ministers of India, Lalbahadur Shastri, was a very good man, as good as a politician can be. I have known so many politicians that I can say perhaps he was the best out of all those criminals. He said, “If you are a little less sincere and a little more diplomatic, you can become the greatest mahatma in the country. But you go on saying the naked truth without bothering that this is going to create more enemies for you. Can’t you be a little diplomatic?”I said, “You are asking me to be diplomatic? That means being a hypocrite; knowing something but saying something else, doing something else. I am going to remain the same. I can drop being religious if it is needed, but I cannot drop being rebellious because to me that is the very soul of religion. I can drop every other thing which is thought to be religious, but I cannot drop rebellion; that is the very soul.”The day I became convinced that now I have enough people who can move toward that Everest I have been pointing to all my life, I dropped my contact with the masses completely, so that I can give my whole time – whatsoever there remains – so that I can give my whole energy, whatsoever existence allows me, to a small concentrated group. The need is not of millions of religious people, no. The need is only of a few chosen ones.If I can ignite fire in my sannyasins then I have done my work.Then each of my sannyasins will be capable of doing the same as I have done to him.And we can put this whole earth afire, aglow with a new humanity and with a new sunrise.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is truth? And whatever it is, why are most people not interested in it?The way the question is formed says more than is apparent. The first thing it says is that you are not interested in truth at all. It is strange that sometimes the formulation of the question has much more significance than the question itself.You are asking: “What is truth? and whatever it is….” Does this show any inquiry? Does it mean that you are committed to seek and search for truth? If it were so, you could not have said “whatever it is.” It shows such an indifference, just like government office letters – “whomsoever it may concern.”“Whatever it is…?” It makes no difference to you. And you are asking why people are not interested in it. Why blame people? Why can’t you be sincere and say, “why am I not interested in it?” Who are these people you are talking about? What concern do you have about these people? They don’t have any names; it is just a word, empty: people.With me be honest, be sincere, be direct. Don’t bring anonymous people into the question. The question has to be yours. You are asking for an answer, and the question is not even yours. And how is it possible to answer you when the question belongs to “people”? Who are these people? I don’t know, and I don’t think you know either.A question has to be individual, then it is alive; and I can answer only an alive question. A dead question deserves only a dead answer. I am incapable of doing that.So first, remember always the question must be your quest.The question must arise from the depths of your heart; it must be rooted in your being.It must be nourished by your life; then it deserves an alive answer.You ask me, what is truth? This is the greatest question ever asked. And you ask it in such a stupid way, you put the ultimate question in such a silly form. This is simply unawareness, unconsciousness. You don’t know what you are doing, what you are saying; You don’t know what you are asking, and why you are asking.What business is it of yours to be bothered about unknown people? Are you in a state where no question of your own exists? Have you dropped all your questions? If that had been the case there would have been no need to ask this question either, because you would have known the answer.When all questions disappear, that consciousness, that questionless consciousness, is the answer, is the truth.The question is yours but you are a coward: you cannot even accept your ignorance. Of course, to accept that “this is my question” certainly means that you are an ignorant person; hence the question is thrown on the shoulders of some unknown people. I cannot find those people anywhere. Neither can you. Consciousness never exists in collectivities: people, nation, society, culture, civilization. You will not find these things anywhere; they don’t exist.Whenever and wherever you come across “people”, you will come across the individual. That is solid reality. And “people” can’t have any questions. The “people” don’t have any soul, the “people” is only a collective name.It is just like a forest. From far away you can see the forest but as you come closer and closer the forest starts disappearing. When you are exactly in the forest there is no forest, there are only trees. You will come across trees and trees and trees; unique trees, individual, having their own world; their own foliage, their own fragrance.You cannot find even two trees exactly the same in the whole so-called forest. What to say about the forest? – even two trees are not exactly the same. The forest is only a word. Yes, it denotes a collectivity, but no collectivity has any consciousness of its own.The society – have you come across society anywhere? Or do you hope some day to say, “Hi, society! How are you?” These words are just hollow, empty. They are only containers without any content in them. But man is so idiotic that he is more interested in containers than in the content.I have heard that in a book shop a certain dictionary was not being sold at all. And the bookshop had kept the dictionary for ten years. They had purchased the wholesale rights to the dictionary, but not a single copy had they been able to sell in ten years, and they had been selling other books in thousands. The dictionary was really very significant, a milestone in the world of dictionaries; that’s why they had purchased the wholesale rights to it. But the book was not selling.It just happened that the shopkeeper mentioned it to a painter who was looking for a book. The painter looked at the dictionary and he laughed. He said, “The whole problem is, its cover is wrong. Who bothers what is inside the dictionary? The cover is repulsive, that’s why you have not been able to sell it. I will make a cover for it. You change the cover.”But the man said, “Just by changing the cover…? The dictionary will be the same.”The painter said, “Don’t be worried – you just do what I am saying.” He made a new cover, beautiful, glossy, attractive…. Now, what has a dictionary to do with a nude woman? – but a nude woman was on the cover looking into the dictionary, the same dictionary. Again on that dictionary’s cover was the nude woman looking into the dictionary, the same dictionary. It was a beautiful cover.But the owner was simply shocked – there was a queue! People were dying to purchase the dictionary. What he had not been able to do in ten years was done within a week. He had to order a reprint. He told the painter, “This is strange.”The painter said, “It is not strange – it is just human.”When you fall in love with a woman do you think of the content? When you fall in love with a man do you think of the content? Just the container…a little longer nose and you may fall in love. If the nose were a little shorter you might not have looked twice at the woman.That’s the meaning of the word respect. You may not have thought about it; people don’t think about words. Respect means looking again: re-spect. When you see somebody and you feel like looking again at the person, that’s the meaning of the word respect. The person is so attractive, spectacular, that you would like to look again and again. But what you are looking at is the container, still.I know of a professor…he was my colleague in the university, one of the most intelligent people I have ever met – but he was ugly. The content was just great, but the container…that too was just great! He was head of the department of psychology. Just because of him, students were not taking the subject of psychology.He told me, “This is a strange university, where nobody seems to be interested in psychology. We have a full-fledged department, perhaps one of the best departments in the university. All the staff are very qualified people, but somehow students take psychology up to their BA, and after getting a BA nobody turns up for postgraduate study” – because the head of the department gives classes only for postgraduate students or research scholars.I said to him, “It may shock you but you are the reason.”He said, “Me? I have done no harm to anybody.”I said, “You simply look into the mirror and don’t ask me. Your container is all wrong.”And the postgraduate philosophy and psychology courses are mostly filled by girls, because psychology or philosophy are not going to be of much help in life. They may create trouble perhaps, but they are not going to help you. So, in India particularly, only girls turn to psychology because they are not interested in business, in service, in a career; they are interested, in India, in catching hold of a rich husband. And a postgraduate girl obviously has more chances of catching hold of a good-salaried husband.In any other department there is much competition; in psychology and philosophy there is not much competition. Moreover, professors are very generous in passing people, giving them better marks, higher distinctions, more first classes, so that more people will become attracted. Those departments are dying all over the world.There are hundreds of universities where no student takes postgraduate classes in philosophy for the simple reason that wherever you go, although you may have a first class MA in philosophy, that is not a qualification. In fact, it is a kind of disqualification – nobody is going to take you just because of that. It is enough proof that you are not going to be of any use; your degree shows you are useless. Philosophy has no market value.When I went to study philosophy in the university, my family were absolutely against it, unanimously. Everybody was bothering me continuously: “Don’t go in for philosophy. You know perfectly well,” they told me, “in our town there are postgraduates in philosophy who have been unemployed for years. Nobody takes any interest in them. The moment they hear you are a postgraduate in philosophy, they say, ‘You are not of any use in the world.’“But I told them, “Don’t be worried, I am not interested at all in your world. And I will be the last person to ask anybody to employ me. I am going to create my own world.”My father said, “You are simply crazy. How are you going to create your own world?”I said, “You will see. I am not going to use your world. I will create my own world.”Reluctantly, sadly, they sent me to the university. You will be surprised – even my professors, becoming acquainted with me, told me, “An intelligent student like you should be in the department of politics, economics. What the hell are you doing in the department of philosophy?“This is only for girls, and they are not interested in philosophy at all. But we go on passing them because without them the department will be closed and we will be unemployed. So whether they are interested in philosophy or not, whether they do their work or not, we go on passing them. They need certificates, and their certificates are not for the marketplace, they are for marriage – that is a totally different thing. But what are you doing here?”Even the professors were worried about me. After my graduation they all suggested, “You move.”I said, “You don’t understand – it is my subject. You people don’t belong to this subject. You have somehow wrongly entered philosophy. Perhaps you could not get entry into any other department; that’s why you entered to study philosophy. And once you studied philosophy there was no other profession left for you except to be a professor of philosophy; that was the only profession left. But you don’t belong to philosophy at all; otherwise you should be happy that I am joining it. It is my world.I was also a student of that professor who was really ugly; later on I became his colleague. When I told him, “You just look at your face in the mirror,” he said, “But, then, why have you joined our department?”I said, “Because I am not interested in containers – my interest is in content. I don’t care in what kind of boxes you are presented; I just look inside. My interest is in your inside. Whether your nose is flat, your eyes are crooked – I have no interest in what kind of case you have been imprisoned. I am interested in you.” But this is a human weakness: just to see the cover of a book, the advertisement of a certain thing, and be impressed by things which have nothing to do with the reality, things not concerned with reality.If you want to sell a car, you have to advertise the car with a beautiful woman standing just by the side of the bonnet, looking at the car, enchanted. She is enchanted by the car, you become enchanted by her. Strange game! And then you purchase the car – as if that woman is going to come as part and parcel of the car. Later on you understand and feel silly, but then it is too late. That woman has nothing to do with the car.In fact, such kinds of advertisements will show people of the future, what kind of people have existed on the earth before. After two thousand years people will think, “It seems it was just a madhouse! These advertisements show something about the people who were advertising, who were looking at the advertisements; these advertisements must have worked.” They are working.You purchase a thing not because you need it but because it is advertised so much, hammered so much in your mind, from all sides. Wherever you go the billboards are there; in the movie it is there: Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola…wherever you go. It is difficult to get rid of Coca-Cola – and then naturally you decide it is better to taste it, because if the whole world is talking about Coca-Cola there must be something in it.The question you have asked is your question – you are not interested in truth. But you don’t have the courage even to say that. Why be afraid? If you are not interested, it is perfectly okay. Then the truth is not interested in you either. The truth is not going to follow you, it is not going to nag you, “Be interested in me! Why are you not interested in me?” It is not your wife.Asking what truth is would have been enough. If you had stopped there…. The same question was asked by Pontius Pilate – his last question to Jesus Christ. He had asked many other things and Jesus had answered them. His last question was, “What is truth?” – and this is the only question that Jesus did not answer.Now, Jesus not answering the question can have many interpretations. Perhaps he knew nothing about truth. Perhaps he knew, but he also knew that the questioner was not going to understand it; it was futile, because the questioner was asking from a space which was absolutely wrong. Pontius Pilate was the governor-general; he was going to decide the fate of this young outrageous person who was just a hobo, a nobody. Perhaps he was the first hippie in the world.To ask about truth you have to be in a certain space.You cannot be in power and ask the person who is standing before you as a criminal, whose life is in your hands – you are going to decide whether he is going to be crucified tomorrow or not. This is not the way to ask such a vital, ultimately meaningful question. You have to come down. You have to sit as a disciple by the side of the man you want to question about truth. Only a disciple has the qualification to ask such a question. Perhaps Jesus did not answer because there was no disciple; there was a governor-general.Or, it is possible Jesus wanted to answer but language was a barrier. Truth cannot be expressed through language; the moment you put it into words something goes wrong.It is just as when you take a completely straight staff and put it in the water halfway: you will be surprised that the straight staff is no longer straight. Where it meets the water – half of it is out, half is in the water – something has gone wrong, it is no longer straight. It has taken an angle, it is crooked. You take the staff back out of the water…and it is a miracle! – it is again absolutely straight. Nothing happens to the staff in water, but the nature of water and the nature of air cause them to function differently. The straight line becomes no longer the same; it is under different laws.The same happens to truth the moment it enters the world of language.Language is all human creation:Truth is not.We are a creation of truth.Language is our creation; hence it cannot express our origin, it is superficial.Language is just a toy in our hands.I was talking to a great scholar, Doctor Hiralal Jain; he was a world-famous scholar on Jainism, and a man of words. He knows seven languages and was so efficient in every one that it was difficult to decide which was his mother tongue. His whole life he had devoted to words, their roots…. Words have traveled for thousands of years in so many lands, in so many climates; they have changed with every move of the society. It is really a very, very interesting inquiry – how words have come to be what they are, from where they have come.We were traveling in the train, in the same compartment. We knew each other – he was an old man but he belonged to the same city where I was brought up. We were neighbors, his whole family lived next door to my family. He used to come once in a while when I was a child, only in the summer vacations, because he was engaged all over the world in different universities. But finally I also became a professor in the same university where he had become head of the department of the Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit languages. These three languages are the ancientmost in the East, and he was perhaps the best scholar of all the three.So traveling in the train…we were both going to the same conference. I said, “You have wasted your whole life with words. You have never bothered about meanings.”He said, “Meanings? But words have meanings!”I said, “Words don’t have any meaning.” I said to him, “For example I can say, ‘What is this whole hullabaloo?’ Now what does this word hullaballoo mean? I can change it. I can say, ‘What is all this Honolulu?’ If you are a little bit intelligent you will understand that it is the same – Honolulu or hullabaloo. Words mean what we want them to mean, they don’t have any intrinsic meaning.Meaning is something different, totally different – and truth is pure meaning, pure content without any container. The moment you put a container around it you are doing something….It is as if you see a bird on the wing in the sky. It is so beautiful – the flight, the freedom, the space, the sunrays, and the joy of the bird on the wing…life throbbing, pulsating. You can catch the bird, you can put it into a golden cage – do you think it is the same bird?, the same bird that was on the wing when the sun was rising, the same bird fluttering in the strong wind in the vast sky with no barriers? Yes, your cage is beautiful, golden; but the bird has no longer the same freedom, it has no longer the same beauty, it has no longer the same truth. You have killed everything.In a very superficial way it is the same bird because the body is the same, but what about the soul? What about the innermost core of the bird? Can it be the same in the cage and in the open sky on the wing? This is a little bit delicate, but not beyond intelligence: it is no longer the same bird.The same happens to truth.The moment you put it into language, the whole freedom, the whole beauty, the whole authenticity is gone.Truth said is truth dead.You are asking what is truth.I can show you the way so that you can see what is the truth.You cannot see through my eyes; you cannot get a glimpse of it through my words.If you are really interested in knowing, then I can show you the path which leads to truth.I have been calling that path meditation.You be silent – because truth is your innermost property, your own treasure: not the kingdom of God somewhere else in the heavens, but the kingdom of God within you just now, throbbing, pulsating – your heartbeat.It is here, but you are not here.You have to be brought back home. You have gone too far away from yourself. Perhaps you have got lost and you don’t know how to come back home. Perhaps you are standing in front of your home, but you cannot remember that this is your home.I have heard about a drunkard who comes to his home in the middle of the night, but he is so drunk, it is a miracle that he reaches his house. Not really a miracle, just an old habit of the body: the poor body, simply like a robot, mechanically brings him home. But he cannot recognize that this is his home.A woman opens the door; she is his mother. He falls at the feet of the old woman and says, “Help me, – my old mother must be waiting for me. Where is my house? Just lead me.”The mother tries to tell him, “I am your mother. This is your house.”He says, “Don’t be ridiculous. My old mother waits for me without eating, and half the night is gone. It happens every day, and every day somebody or other helps me and leads me to my home. You be kind enough…just think of my old mother and help to show me where my house is. I cannot figure it out.”At that very moment another drunkard, a friend, comes staggering along, and he says, “Don’t be deceived by anybody. I am here, your friend; I will take you to your home. Just hold my hand, hold it tight, and I will take you to your home.”The mother says, “Don’t go with that idiot! He is drunk just like you, and wherever he takes you, it is not going to be your home. This is your home. The farther he takes you, the farther away you will be from your mother and your home.”All your so-called religious leaders have been taking you away from yourself, toward God.God is the longest distance from you.If you want a definition of God, that will do: The longest distance from you, the absolute distance from you.And all the religions are taking you toward God. They are really taking you away from yourself. Their whole conditioning is to help you forget yourself. They teach you to remember God, they don’t teach you to remember yourself.They poison people who teach that sort of thing. They poisoned Socrates because he was teaching: Know thyself. They wanted him to say: Know the way to God, the way to heaven. It was heretical in their eyes to say to people, know thyself. Know God, know anything else, but not thyself.Now, what crime was Socrates committing? If he was saying to people, “Know thyself,” why did the religious people of his days become so angry? There is a reason: he was cutting their very roots by telling them, “Be yourself, know yourself; then there is no need of any religion, no need of any pope, no need of any priest, no need of any mediator between you and God.”Mediators are needed because God is so far away.You cannot see, you cannot conceive…. Somebody else is needed who is capable of seeing God – a prophet, a messiah. He will become your mediator; it is enough for you to know him. Not even that, it is enough for you to believe in him, and to believe that he knows God; you just blindly follow him.And remember, all following is blind.There is no other kind.I cannot show you anything other than yourself because that is the truth:You are the truth.And you are asking why people are not interested in it? They are not interested in it because they have been conditioned. For centuries they have been continuously conditioned: You are just a sinner, you are born in sin. This life is a punishment. You are not of any value, of any worth. There is nothing to be searched for within you, you have to look outward. You have to approach some god, some truth, which is far away, a long, long journey.”And the problem is that truth is just within you.Truth needs no journey.It needs only a remembrance.People are not interested in truth because they have been taught not to be interested in themselves.All the religions are telling you: be unselfish, be interested in others, serve others, love your enemy – even love your neighbor, which is certainly more difficult. But nobody says, “Love yourself.”“Love God” – I don’t know how you are going to love God. You don’t know what God looks like. You don’t know from where to approach Him, which side is His face. The Indian god has three faces; from all the three sides you can approach him. The Hindu god has thousands of hands; you can hold any. But where are you going to meet these gods with thousands of hands, three heads…? Just all junk. Nobody knows….A small child was making a drawing. His father asked him, “What are you doing, so absorbed?”He said, “I am drawing a picture of God.”The father said, “A picture of God? But nobody has seen Him, nobody knows how He looks. How can you make a picture of God?”The child said, “Just wait. Let me finish the picture and everybody will know how He looks.” All these gods that you know in the temples, in the churches, are the drawings of children, nothing more.You have been told to seek and search for something which always takes you away from yourself. That’s why people are not interested in truth – because truth is within you, it is you.You have been programmed so criminally, such a deep harm has been done to you, that your priests, your prophets, your messiahs cannot be forgiven. They have spoiled millions of people’s lives; just for the sheer joy of being a messiah or a prophet, they have crushed you all.I am teaching you to be selfish.Let me repeat it, because the word selfishness has been condemned so much that there is every possibility you will misunderstand me. But the word is really beautiful.To be selfish simply means to be yourself.I say to you: don’t consider anybody else in the world, just consider yourself; and in that very consideration you will have considered the whole world. In being selfish you will find all the altruism that you have been seeking and seeking and not finding, because the whole thing was upside down.You are told to love your neighbor – but you have never loved yourself. And a person who has not loved himself, how can he love the neighbor? From where can he get love? First you have to have it. You are loving the neighbor – you who knows nothing of love because you have never loved yourself. The neighbor is loving you – he has never loved himself. Such insanity is happening in the world: people who know nothing of love are loving each other.It is like beggars begging from each other, each thinking the other is the emperor. Both are thinking in the same way: the other is the emperor. Both are beggars. Sooner or later the reality manifests itself; then there is misery, suffering. Then you think you have been cheated, this beggar has been trying to prove himself an emperor. Now this is absolutely absurd – it is you who were thinking him an emperor. And the same is the situation from the other side: the other person thinks you have been cheating him, pretending to be an emperor and you are just a beggar.When both beggars find that they are beggars, what else can they do other than be angry, enraged, violent to each other, hating each other as deeply as possible? And the love…? It was nothing; they don’t know what love is.To know anything, you have to begin with yourself.Once it happened…I was sitting by the side of a river, and just a few feet away another man was sitting. A small boat in a strong wind turned over, and the man who was in the boat cried loudly, “Save me!” – he was drowning. The man who was sitting just a few feet away from me was closer to the man, so he jumped in to save him…and then both started crying, “Save me!”I said, “This is something!” I had to jump in. It was difficult to save two people – because they both were trying to drown me! – but it was not a long distance from the shore; somehow I carried them both. And I told the man who had jumped in to help, “If you don’t know swimming you should not be so compassionate.”He said, “But I forgot. Seeing the man drowning I completely forgot that I don’t know swimming. I realized only when I had jumped into the water, what I had done. But it was too late.”And I said, “I had to think twice before I jumped, because to save two drowning men is very difficult” – they both try to be on top of you, they are so much afraid of drowning. “It was just fortunate that the bank was not far away, so even underwater….” I remained underwater while carrying them to the bank. “Otherwise you would have killed me! You were two, and I was alone.” I knew swimming but that was of no help because these two persons, both strong, were holding onto my neck as tight as possible.But during the whole of your life this is happening. You go on forgetting that you don’t know what love is. You have never loved yourself, you have never respected yourself, you have never considered yourself.I teach you to be selfish. Learn swimming first; then perhaps you can save somebody. There is no need to go in search of somebody to save.That’s what the Christian missionary does – he is in search of people to save. They even approach us here – where everybody is saved! They try to convince sannyasins – and our sannyasins enjoy it tremendously. It is really hilarious: trying to save somebody who is saved! On dry land, in a desert, in Oregon, trying to save somebody…!Do you think in this dry creek…even if you try to kill yourself by drowning, it is impossible.Our sannyasins say to them, “We are saved” – but they don’t listen, they go on saying that, “Christ is the savior.” But this is strange. If a man is not sick why should he enter your hospital, or drink your medicine? Isn’t anybody allowed to be just healthy?No! According to these religions everybody is born sick, and from your very birth they are trying to save you. And they have created this world where nobody knows what love is, nobody knows what respect is, nobody knows what truth is; nobody knows anything which can make life bliss. Yes, everybody knows how to create troubles for himself and for others. Everybody is so skilled in creating misery – and the whole cause is that you have been told to be unselfish. You have been told to sacrifice yourself for some idiotic ideal.I want you just to be simply selfish.And you will be surprised that if you are selfish you discover so many treasures within yourself that soon you start sharing them – because finding a treasure is a lesser joy than sharing it.And the treasures that are within you don’t follow the ordinary economics and its laws. They are just the very opposite, diametrically opposite to the ordinary economic structure.In the ordinary economics if you give something, you will have less. If you go on giving, soon you will be a beggar. In the ordinary economic world you have to snatch as much from everybody as possible then you have more and more and more. The treasures I am talking about to you, follow a different law: if you cling to them they shrink, if you cling too much you can even kill them. If you want to destroy them, then close all the windows and doors, become a grave so nothing can escape outside you – but you will be a dead man, with all your treasures also dead with you; your truth, your freedom, your love, your joy. Everything will be dead with you – securely dead, well-insured.But if you want to grow your treasures, share them, share to all and sundry – don’t bother whether this is a friend or a foe. When you are sharing, the question is of sharing, it is not with whom. Whomever it may concern, you simply give. Don’t be concerned about the address, you simply go on sending love letters. Somebody will receive them somewhere. And the more you go on sharing, the more goes on entering you from unknown sources. A man is just like a well….It happens in hot countries – in India, in many places – that there are only two wells in the village: one that belongs to the richest man, in his compound, and the other for everybody, the people. Certainly the well of the rich man is deeper, bigger; the people’s well is as poor as the people are. In summer the people’s well will dry out, but they cannot be allowed to use the rich man’s well because – this is ordinary economics – if they go on taking the water from his well, his well will dry out too.It happened in one village, the rich man was so afraid of his well going dry, that not only did he disallow anybody from the town to take water, he disallowed his own family. He simply closed the well, locked it.His servants brought water from many miles away, from a river. It seemed sane because for three years there had been no rain and there was a danger that his well might dry out; even the river was becoming thinner and thinner every day. So he was saving his well for the last moment when there would be no water anywhere available; at least he would have water in the last moments of the summer.The river dried out, and he had to open his well. It was full of water, but the water was not drinkable anymore, it had become poisoned.A well remains drinkable if you go on taking water from it. The more water is taken out, the more water from the hidden sources all around the earth goes on coming into the well; fresh water goes on coming into it. Because the well was closed there was no need for the fresh water to come in, there was no way. So all the sources closed, and the water died; it became poisonous.The same happens to the person who is afraid of sharing himself. He cannot save his treasures – this is not the way to save them, this is the way to destroy them.So when I say be selfish, I am really trying to help you to become as unselfish as possible; that’s the only way.Be selfish.Find out your truth, your love, your compassion – all that you have brought into the world with your birth.And start giving it to those who need, to those who do not need; to those whom you love, to those whom you don’t love. You should not make any distinctions; only then can you expand. When there are no distinctions, no categories, you start expanding.And that expansion is the truth;That expanding consciousness is the truth.And it is right this very moment within you, you have not to go anywhere else.But at least let the question be yours so that I can help you to find the answer which will be yours.My answer is of no help:My answer will be only words to you.You can make holy scriptures of those words, you can worship those words. That’s what humanity has been doing for thousands of years. It is time to stop this garbage.I want you to find your answer, but that is possible only when you start with your question.So ask, “What is truth?” and don’t be so insulting to truth that you ask, “Whatsoever it is, why are people not interested in it?” Don’t shift it to somebody else’s shoulders. Say sincerely, “Why am I not interested in it?”This is not a Sunday sermon. I am not a speaker, a lecturer, an orator. I don’t know anything about oratory. I am simply talking to you, man to man, human being to human being. It has to be immediate, direct.I am not somebody sent by God.I am just born among you, just like you.If there is any difference, this is the difference: I began with my own questions. And that’s almost half the journey finished. The first half is the most difficult, the second half is not so difficult.Accept your ignorance.In that very acceptance you have taken a wise step; perhaps you have had the first glimpse of wisdom.Recognize that “I am not interested in truth.” In that very recognition there will be a shocking realization; perhaps a door that was closed may open in that shock.But remember, it is your quest:It has to be your question.And I do not want to give you any answer.I can only show you the way to find your own answer. Truth liberates, but it has to be your own.Otherwise, if it is somebody else’s, truth binds. Jesus Christ’s truth, Mohammed’s truth, Buddha’s truth, have all become prisons. I don’t want my truth to become a prison for anybody.I want my truth to be an inspiration.I want my truth to trigger something in you which is yours.My truth simply gives you an assurance that a human being, just like you, can attain to truth.That will give you immense respect toward yourself. You will not feel unworthy sinners, that somebody has to come to save you – some Christ, some Buddha has to come, and then you will be saved. You don’t have to wait for anybody to save you. You are born saved, just a little insight…. If my presence can do that, then my work is finished.I don’t want to become a prison around you.I want to become a freedom around you, an open sky around you, not a golden cage – so that you can open your wings and feel the joy of flying higher and higher toward the stars.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,If people don't like what we are doing, why don't they just leave us alone to do it?There are many reasons for it, and of great importance. First; why do people not like what we are doing here? It is none of their concern in fact. We are not doing anything to them. If we are doing anything at all, we are doing it to ourselves. Particularly my whole philosophy is selfish, self-centered. Why do they not like it?There is tremendous fear behind it, because we are doing something they have stood against for the whole past history of humanity.If we succeed, their whole history, all their religions, culture, civilizations, are proved to be wrong.Our success is risky.Our success is dangerous, it is a challenge – and not to a single individual, not to a single society, not a single religion, but to all that they have been doing; their philosophy, their religion…. If you just see the great implication: you are standing against the whole history of man – your success cannot be allowed. Somehow or other they want you to fail; in your failure is their success. That’s why they are against it. It is a great question – who is right?We are a small commune. On their side is the whole history of man – millions and millions of men, thousands of cultures, civilizations; but they have all lived according to some basic principles and we are against those basic principles.The trouble arises because they have not succeeded; otherwise they would not have bothered about you. If they had succeeded they would have pitied you, they would not have been against you. But they have not succeeded, that’s where the real trouble lies. They have failed, utterly failed. On every single point they have failed, and they cannot allow anybody else to succeed because that success will make them a thousandfold miserable.Right now at least they have the consolation that “this is the way things happen.” There has never been real opposition to them. Hindus against Mohammedans – that is not real opposition; Jews against Christianity – that is not real opposition, because on fundamental points they are all in agreement.We are in total disagreement on every step, on every single point. This has never happened before; naturally, they are freaking out. We can’t help that. They are facing a great danger: our success will make their whole history a history of stupidity. And we are succeeding. Every day we are succeeding, and we are proving to them that they have been wrong.And now it is not just an argument. For thirty years I have been arguing; finally I decided that just argumentation is not going to help. They have no answer, but argument just disappears into the air. It may remain in the books, but it won’t transform the whole life of man. It will not make a complete break with the past and a totally new beginning, fresh, as if man has arrived on the earth for the first time.That realization slowly, slowly made me decide to create a commune – a reality, not just an argument; a reality which they cannot ignore, not just a philosophy.Philosophies – ninety-nine percent of people remain unaware of them. The one percent who become aware are the professional philosophers. Philosophy is any easy-chair affair; you enjoy it but gives you no challenge. It became clear to me that I have to translate my argument into a real phenomenon or people are not going to be affected by what I am saying. In the first place they cannot understand it because their whole past is against it. Their mind is conditioned by the past. When they listen to me they cannot listen with an open mind.I have seen people listening to me nodding their heads when something is in agreement with them, or shaking their heads sideways if something is not in agreement. They are not aware that their heads are showing that which is going on within.Only with Japanese was I in trouble. They are the rarest people in the whole world. They just do the opposite: when they want to say no they say yes! So when I came in contact with a Japanese then I was really confused – what to make of it? In the beginning I thought they were saying yes, but what I was asking them…they were supposed to say no, and they were saying yes. When they were supposed to say yes, they were saying no…. Only Japanese do it in a different way.Except Japan – but why did it happen in Japan? – the whole world nods in the same way. You can read their minds just by their facial expressions, their heads nodding, their eyes, their hands, even their posture of sitting. When somebody is interested, he leans toward you. When somebody simply wants to show his arrogance, he leans away from you.Arguments cannot penetrate their thick minds, and they go on becoming thicker and thicker, because as time passes more and more dust goes on gathering on the mirror. Now the mirror is nowhere to be seen; it is only a thick layer of dust. Still, I tried my best, for the simple reason that I am a lazy man. I never wanted to do such a thing as I had to do: create a commune.It is easy for me to talk about everything in the world. Whether I know about something or not, it does not matter, I don’t care at all. I simply enjoy talking. So it is not a question of whether I know about it or not, I enjoy in both cases. Talking is easy; that I have done from my very childhood.I used to sleep in the room with my grandfather. I asked him, “You always cover your head with the blanket, even when it is not so cold….”He said, “It is not a question of the cold, it is you. You tell stories even in your sleep, and you talk so relevantly that I become interested.”It is that old man who gave me also the habit of covering my head, because I said, “This is not good, to disturb the old man in the night.” Since then, I also sleep with my head covered, so even if I start talking nobody is disturbed.Talking has been to me just like breathing. That’s the only thing I have done in my whole life. So I recognized the problem, but it took years for me to collect myself and get involved – not just to go on standing on the bank of the river, talking, talking, while the river goes on flowing without listening…. I had to decide that I would jump in and do something, although it was against my nature; this flow of the river had to be disturbed.So even though I have created communes, I am almost outside the commune. But I have found the rarest people in the contemporary world, the very cream, intelligent…. There is no need for me to do anything, I just have to give a hint. And sometimes even a hint is not necessary. Everything goes on happening exactly the way I would have liked it to happen.I can love you but I cannot dictate to you.I cannot say to you, “Do this,” and I cannot nag you if you don’t do it.But I have found my people.Now it is no longer a question of my two hands; millions of hands are with me around the world. They are all my hands. I can now afford to be absolutely lazy.And you know that I am lazy. I don’t do anything, or I do things which only lazy people like me can afford: two hours in the morning taking a bath – I don’t think even Alexander the Great was able to afford that – two hours again in the evening taking a bath. You should one day come and see my bath. Vivek does not allow anybody to enter – it is enough that she allows me! She is otherwise a very strict manager, but she allows me.Vivek and Hasya together have made my bath really pleasant, because they must be thinking: that two hours this man takes in the morning, and two hours in the evening…just with the water! So now you must see my bathroom; they have arranged so many things there, that two hours are falling short. Now I am thinking to start a third bath at night, because two more hours are needed.And the remaining time I just sit with closed eyes listening to music – and mostly I fall asleep, to be frank with you, because I have been listening to the same music for thirty years. There is a limit to patience too.It is strange: as the music starts I start dozing and I wake up immediately as the music stops. I am myself surprised; this is something strange, I should be awake when the music is on. I am awake before it is put on, and I am immediately awake when it is going to stop; I just hear the last line and the first line. But I know the middle so there is no problem in it; nothing, nothing is missed.And this is just in the morning. The whole night I have been asleep. And I must be sleeping…just as I finish talking with you, I go to sleep within half an hour. And I sleep up to seven, just because there is nothing else to do; sleeping is a great activity. And I cannot believe it, that at seven I have got out of bed and by nine, after my bath, listening to the music I am again asleep.Up to eleven this goes on with music; then I take my lunch and go to sleep again. And I had to tell Vivek, “Remember, I have to go for the two o’clock ride to see my people. So wake me up, because I may continue to sleep.” I can sleep twenty-four hours – and not one day, every day. When I came from India to here I was completely asleep the whole time. I enjoyed it very much – such a long sleep!After the ride I come back…and again that music. it seems to have something to do with my past karmas that I have to listen to the same music again and again…and I fall asleep again. It is good that there is nobody, I am alone. I wake up at four-thirty and again my bath time….Now do you think this kind of a man can create a revolution? But somehow it is happening.People think walking on water is a miracle – idiots! I just saw last week’s Stern magazine. They have a cartoon about me. The cartoon has the outlines of Krishnamurti Lake and sannyasins are standing on one side, and my Rolls Royce is moving on the lake! One of the sannyasins says, “It must be Osho!” That is not much of a miracle.What is really happening here is a miracle.I do nothing but, I don’t know why, you have fallen in love with me.I don’t deserve it either because I have never done anything; how can I deserve so many people’s love?But your love is doing the miracle.You are here for no other reason.Sometimes you also must be wondering why you are here. I also wonder why; but love is such a thing, that you go on wondering why, and it goes on happening.I don’t know where your office is, I don’t know how your finances are managed. I don’t know who is doing what. What to say about the commune? – I don’t know even in this house what is going on, where my kitchen is; I have not seen it.People are afraid because they have never seen love at work. They have tried by force to create culture, civilization, by violence, and they have failed.Here love is at work. And when love is at work, it attracts intelligence. There is an inner attunement between love and intelligence.It is not accidental that so many intelligent people from all over the world have become interested in me – who is against everything that they have been brought up to believe in: who is against their culture, who is against their country, who is against their religion, who is against their parents; who is against even their children who are not born yet, who won’t allow them to be born. If it were in my power I would not have allowed your parents to be born. It is too late; but your children I am not going to allow.This is the only place in the whole world where love is doing things; and love never says, it never dictates.Love is the most mysterious energy in the whole world.It makes things happen.Perhaps love is the very center of all that moves, of all the stars that are moving.Scientists are searching for the center; there must be a center to the universe. I am not a scientist but I know the center. Let them search, they will never find it, because their very methodology will not allow them to find love.Love is the center of the whole universe; the suns, the moons, the planets, the stars – all are moving around it. And we have created this small commune on the same existential principle.Everybody feels responsible. I don’t say to you that you are responsible toward the commune, toward me, toward my philosophy; I have never said anything like that.But you feel to be responsible because somebody trusts you. Somebody loves you in spite of yourself. Somebody accepts you in your totality, as you are.I never judge anybody – love knows no judgment. I don’t see that somebody is good and somebody is bad. To me you are all one energy, different manifestations, and all are needed to make an organic unity.Sheela comes again and again to me and says, “These are the topmost workers, ace workers. These are second class, these are third class, and these are just to be thrown out.”I say to her, “You don’t understand. If the fourth class disappears you will start thinking of throwing out the third class – naturally, it is a simple logic. If the third class disappears you will start throwing out the second class. And if you throw out the second class, how are you going to know the ace workers, the first class? They are all one organic whole – they are all needed.”The first class needs the second class, they support each other. If the second class disappears the first class will be in a limbo, hanging in the air, there will be no support for it. Somebody is needed to support it. It is just like a staircase; every step is needed. The lowest step is the support of the highest step.Don’t judge that the lowest is in any way lower as a value. It can be the lowest as a physical status but there should be no evaluation involved, it is not “lower”. The highest…that is simply a way of measuring things, but it is not higher.Nobody is lower and nobody is higher. There may be lower steps and there may be higher steps but they are all connected in one symphony.Love knows no judgment, that’s why love can do miracles.What humanity has not been able to do is happening here without anybody doing it. About nobody can it be said, “He is doing it.” Everybody is involved except me.So I am always grateful to you all that you allow me to remain just a guest, and I am grateful to the American government that they allow me just to be a tourist. And I hope I will die just as a tourist. People have only said that life is a journey; I am going to prove it! It is not only a journey, it is a tour, without a visa, without a passport; it is a tour.People are afraid because they can see things they have tried so hard to do and they have not worked…and nobody is trying here; still somehow they are working. Three thousand people are here…no management, but some inner feeling keeps you all connected. No fanaticism – because when there is love to connect you, you need not have ugly substitutes for it.A fanatic Mohammedan is connected by his fanaticism to other Mohammedans. A fanatic Christian is connected by his fanaticism to other fanatic Christians, it is the fanatic element that connects them. Here, nobody is a fanatic.How can you be a fanatic with a man like me, who takes nothing seriously?I have never in my whole life taken anything seriously because I don’t see the point, why one should take things seriously. Life is really such a joke, so hilarious.I have heard of a man who was sitting in a railway station waiting room; sometimes he was sitting alone, sometimes there were other passengers also. Sometimes he would gesture as if to throw something with his hands. Everybody was interested in what he was doing because there seemed to be nothing that he was throwing away. Sometimes he would giggle and sometimes he would even laugh. Finally he was driving everybody crazy – although it was nobody’s business. It was his hand; if he wants to make some gesture, who are you to be bothered by it? And if he wants to giggle, that is his business. And if he wants to laugh….But the whole place became very tense, hot. Only that man was enjoying, with his eyes closed. Finally it was too much: one man stood up and he said, “I have to ask, because he is driving us crazy, what he is doing.” So he shook him and told him, “You are driving the whole waiting room crazy; nobody can take his eyes off you. What are you doing? Why are you giggling? There is nothing happening here, on this ugly platform, in this dirty waiting room – and you laugh?”The man said, “It is something…just an old habit. You need not be worried. I am in the habit of telling jokes to myself. When some very old joke that I have told many times comes by, I just shake it off: ‘Get lost again!’ And when some juicy one comes, I have to giggle – although I know the joke, it is an old joke, but so juicy that even to hear it a thousand times…still, I have to go the whole way.“I know everything that is going to happen in the joke but that doesn’t matter, it is so juicy. And sometimes the joke is so great that I cannot just giggle, I have to laugh out loud. I know that perhaps it may disturb others, but what can I do?”I think this man is no one but me; because this is how I have lived my whole life. I have never taken anything seriously. This was not a decision on my part; otherwise that decision would have become serious. Just looking at life I found it was so humorous, so ridiculous, that if you cannot make yourself giggle and laugh you are just an idiot, and missing such a great opportunity.People come here, and when they see you working twelve hours a day, fourteen hours a day and still laughing and giggling and dancing, they cannot believe it. They have to believe, but they cannot. And of course they have to find some explanation – perhaps you are all hypnotized; perhaps it is all just show business, you are just trying to show those idiot spectators your laughter, your dance, your song. They think it is just managed for them; once they are gone, you will be crying and hurting all over from so much jumping.Back home that’s what they think, that it was all made up. They write articles, they have written books about me, that all my people are trained in such a way that the moment they see any spectators immediately they start laughing, singing, dancing, hugging…. They are poor fellows just trying to console themselves that this is not for real; otherwise how will they explain to themselves their misery, their suffering?If it is for real – if your laughter, your joy, your dance, your song, is for real – then they have missed the train. Then their whole life is nothing but foolishness. And this is too much to accept. Only very intelligent people will be able to accept it. And in that very acceptance there will be a change, the beginning of a revolution.But people are mediocre. Intelligent people are few and far between, they are not all over the place. Ninety-nine percent, the crowd, is just mediocre. And with the mediocre mind the problem is, how to console oneself?You are enjoying so much you don’t know how much it hurts those who have never enjoyed.You say we are doing our thing, why are they angry, why are they against us? Can’t you see a simple fact? They are not against you; just be miserable like them, be in suffering, in anguish, and they will be very sympathetic to you. They will donate to your commune. All opposition to you will disappear. The opposition is for a certain consolation: they want to believe that you are pretending, they want to convince themselves and others that this cannot be true. Yes, it may be true in paradise, but it cannot be true in Oregon. It is against their whole way of misery.Our way is of humor, our way is of bliss.We don’t care about gods and heaven and theories of karma and hell. We have dropped all that crap – and they are carrying that crap as holy scripture. When they see you so light, and they look at themselves carrying mountains of crap…. And you say they should not be angry at you, they should not be against you.They are crying, and you are laughing. Their hearts are full of wounds, and you are hugging each other. This is too much! That’s why they are against you. And they will become more and more angry, more and more against you because as you become more successful – which you are going to become…. Love knows no failure. Intelligence knows no failure, failure is only for fools.Humor knows no failure.If a man who has some sense of humor slips on a banana skin and falls down, even he will laugh – he is capable of laughing at himself too. That is a true sense of humor. To laugh at somebody else slipping on the banana skin is not much – anybody can do it, any Tom, Dick, Harry…. I think for the first time I am right, and the reason that I am right is because of our poor Harry.Last time, when I was told the correct sequence I tried hard – how to remember it? Then I remembered poor Harry. He is the last. And he is a man so simple that he will stand at the last. He will not try to push himself ahead, he will not try to be the first. Whosoever invented the sequence must have been a man of tremendous insight, putting our Harry at the last.Then it became easy for me: Dick comes in the middle. What can I do? – it simply comes in the middle. And then only Tom is there. And this Tom who is standing first must be the most idiotic person.Now I think I will not forget the sequence – but you cannot rely on me, I can forget. The whole credit goes to Harry, because he was last; that made things very clear.These Toms, Dicks, Harrys…the world is full of mediocre people who are in great suffering and who have no way to get out of it, who cannot conceive that there is any way out. And when they see you, that you are out – when they see the goose is out – they are naturally offended. They have been worshipping in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques, in the synagogues, and God has not heard them yet – and these godless people are living in the lotus paradise!They have been doing all the virtuous acts: serving the poor, opening hospitals, schools, doing everything that is thought to be good, but it doesn’t heal their wounds. It does not change anything in their miserable lives. In fact they go on becoming more and more miserable, because slowly, slowly even the hope that by being virtuous, religious, they will get over this dark night of the soul…. But they have done everything that their scriptures prescribe. They have followed all the recipes that their priests and so-called wise people have given them. Nothing works. Their hope starts dwindling.And then they see you; no prayer, no god, no temple, no synagogue, no church; strange people! – and yet without wounds, yet without tears, yet without any misery.I saw an interview: one Oregonian woman was being asked, on the television, “What do you think about Osho?” She said, “I hate him! He is not a gentleman. He is not even a Christian!”That made me so happy. It was really something great that she said. First she said, “I hate him.” That’s perfectly good because at least she relates with me, she has some relationship with me. And if today it is hate, tomorrow it can be love. At least one woman hates me. Do you think that is something small? I was thinking that women had forgotten me but at least one women hates me; she must be thinking of me.I enjoyed it – because how can you hate me without thinking of me? In fact, how can you hate me without loving me? Hate is secondary; you cannot hate directly, first you have to love. It is a simple thing: if you want somebody to be your enemy you cannot directly make him your enemy, there is no way. First you have to make him your friend; friendship is a necessary bridge if you want him to be your enemy. The woman, knowingly or unknowingly, loves me; otherwise from where can the hate arise? And the way she said, emphatically, “I hate him….”And the second thing was even more important: “He is not a gentleman.” This is true, absolutely true. I agree with her. I am not a gentleman because all the gentlemen of your whole history have simply dragged you into hell. I am not part of that company.And the third thing is even more significant: she said, “He is not even a Christian.” I started thinking, can somebody be a Christian without being a gentleman? – because first she says, “He is not a gentleman” And then she says, “He is not even a Christian.” That simply shows a Christian need not be a gentleman. And she is not interested in my being a gentleman. If I were a Christian, then gentleman or not, she would not have hated me; I just had to be a Christian.But what was she going to gain by my being a Christian? There are millions of Christians, what has she gained out of them?What is going to be added to her happiness if I am a Christian?I am such a non-serious person that if somebody can convince me that my being Christian is going to help the poor woman, I will become a Christian. What does it matter? I can be a Christian, I can be a Jew, I can be a Hindu…if it can help some woman. But I don’t see that it can help, because there are so many Christians already and they are not helpful. And a man who is not even a gentleman….But the point is: my not being a Christian and yet being happy, hurts. It is not necessary to be a Christian to be happy, it is not necessary to be a Christian to be blissful. It is not necessary to be a Christian to be loved by so many people. Christ was not loved by so many people. If he is anywhere he must be feeling jealous, just like this woman. He must be saying, “I hate this man. He is not a gentleman, he is not even a Christian!”But even if the whole world hates me that makes no difference to me. I will remain just as blissful as I am. This is what troubles them.Jesus was not a happy man. Have you seen any of Jesus’ pictures, statues, where he looks smiling, happy, blissful? No, he always looks tortured, he always looks to be on the cross. He was not always on the cross because for thirty-three years he lived without being on the cross. What was this man doing for thirty-three years?In the Christian gospels there is not a single reference that he laughed, that he smiled, that he joked. No, he is always serious, he is always with a long face. And it seems if Jews had not crucified him it would not have made any difference; he himself was always on the cross – the Jews simply fulfilled his desire. They said, “Okay, if you are going to remain this way let us fulfill your desire. Once and for all be finished” – because even before his crucifixion he was telling his disciples, “Each one has to carry his cross.”Why a cross? Why not a flute? or a guitar? “Everyone has to carry his own guitar….” That is natural – you cannot play on somebody else’s guitar, two persons cannot play on one flute. You may even be lovers, that does not matter; you cannot play on the same flute together, simultaneously. You have to carry your flute yourself.But Jesus chooses the cross. In this whole world he could not find anything else to carry! This man must have been utterly miserable. My feeling is the Jews finally got fed up with his misery. They said, “This man is not going to change. This man is never going to be satisfied unless he is crucified.”He had not gathered intelligent people around him. Those who had come were very mediocre, below average. They were also miserable. They had come in the hope that with him…he is the son of God, so “one day, when we reach the kingdom of God, the world of bliss, he is going to be helpful.” They had gathered around him, in deep misery, with a hope….All miserable people go on living, tolerating misery because they have a hallucination of hope somewhere: “Today is bad, yesterday was bad, but tomorrow? – things are going to change. And we are with the messiah, we are with the only begotten son of God. Tomorrow things are going to be different.”Jesus’ disciples were again and again asking him, “How long will it take?” You can understand it – the same way a patient asks the doctor in the hospital, “How long will it take? How much longer do I have to remain in the hospital?” And the doctor goes on saying, “Soon you will be released.” But his face says something else. He has not even courage enough to look eye to eye with the patient. The doctor goes on saying to the patient, “Soon you will be all right,” and goes on looking at the chart of the patient’s disease; and his face goes on becoming sadder and sadder because the patient’s health is falling every day.The doctor cannot say that to the patient. He has to say, “You will be okay, soon you will be okay.” But the patient can see the face of the doctor. He can see the eyes, that the doctor is avoiding him. He can see the silence on the face of the nurse. He cannot believe what he is being told, because there is much more, tangibly present, which says his time is limited, his days are finished. But yet he goes on asking; and knowing perfectly well that the doctor’s face is saying something else, he goes on believing what he says – knowing it is not true. But he wants it to be true.Those disciples of Jesus knew perfectly well, deep down, that this whole paradise is just a mirage. Yes, it is helpful for the time being, it helps them to tolerate misery. They want to believe in it, that it is true. That’s why religious people become fanatics.What is fanaticism? Have you looked into it? The fanatic person is saying he knows perfectly well that what he believes is not true. That’s why he shouts loudly that it is true, and the only truth. He is not shouting at you, he is shouting against his own still, small voice. He wants to drown that voice in his shouting. But he knows perfectly well it is not true.When such people see you, you can understand how much it hurts that, for a few people it is really true, and true now.Nobody here is asking about paradise, nobody is asking about life after death, nobody is asking about God and how to find Him. Nobody is bothered by all this.This shows something so glaringly – that you are happy where you are, as you are.You are not bothered about the future.You are not hoping, because you are not miserable. You are not fanatic, because you don’t have any belief. You are simply living sincerely, honestly, totally; and for whatever small joys this life provides, you are grateful to it. You don’t ask for more.Once you ask for more you become miserable. Hence all the religions have been telling you, “Ask for less.” But that is not going to help. It is the same logic, the same line, the same continuity: seeing that asking for more creates misery, ask for less. But you are simply reacting. Nothing will be changed in your consciousness because you will ask again for less, for more less; the more will come back. All your monks are doing that; they start by asking for less, but then it becomes for more less. The “more” never leaves you – and more is misery.In fact, more or less, the moment you ask, you ask for misery.The people who are blissful simply don’t ask. They live, and they thank existence; they don’t ask either for more or for less. They don’t make any demands on existence, that is ugly. They simply drop demanding.And the miracle of life is that the moment you don’t demand, the whole existence is yours; all its joys and beauties are yours – and the people surrounding you can see it.So don’t be disturbed because they are angry. Why shouldn’t they be? But if they are intelligent they should be angry with themselves their society, their culture and their religion, their history and their past. But if they are idiots they will be angry against you. Now, if they are idiots what can I do? What can you do? Let them enjoy their anger, hate. But they are simply punishing themselves.This is one of the fundamentals of life:If you hate, you punish yourself. If you are angry you punish yourself.If you are loving, you reward yourself. If you are happy, you create possibilities for more happiness.They have a saying that money attracts money. It is true. It is true on other levels of life too.Happiness attracts happiness.Lovingness attracts more love.Blissfulness attracts more bliss.Giggle, and soon you will be laughing. Just try to move your hands and legs and soon you will be dancing – what else to do? I see it happen every day during the drive-by. First people just try, because it is so much against their upbringing. But then they see that others are also doing it; they look to both sides, people are doing it. Against themselves, reluctantly, they start moving a little bit – and soon they are dancing.One old man is there: at first he used to just stand. I went on watching him, what happens. He is old, has a thick past, but by and by he started moving. One day I saw – he had brought a flute, but he was keeping the flute under his arm. Then he started playing the flute. Then he started dancing and playing on the flute, together.And today he was just dancing with the flute above his head, in his hand; he had dropped everything. He had forgotten he is old; he forgot that he is not supposed to do such a thing – and he was so happy! Just to see his face…it was a beautiful moment. He again became a child, again the same innocence was in his eyes.So those outside the commune who are intelligent are sooner or later going to be part of you. And it is good that idiots remain against us because that is a great safety: they will never enter.To me it is of great significance that idiots don’t get interested in me. They get angry at me, that’s very good. And I try my best to keep them angry, hating me, against me, because I don’t want them to be here. I don’t want this place to turn into a commune of idiots.Sometimes an idiot comes by accident. But soon he escapes, it is too much for him, to look so high. He has always crawled on the earth; he is a creature who, by some accident, started walking on two legs. He should be walking on all fours – that’s where he belongs. I am not interested in that kind of people. And of course they are the majority – so I am not interested in the majority.I am perfectly happy that they are angry. Please keep them angry. And I will go on doing things so that they will remain angry and will not come in. We are not afraid of people going out. Those who go out we are very happy, relieved of a burden. We are worried about people coming in, people who cannot really belong to an intelligent, loving, responsible commune.I want you to be just the chosen few, because if the chosen few are really transformed, that will be the only proof for the millions – no other argument can convince them. That will be the only possibility for their mutation.So my interest is not in the mob, in the crowd. My interest is in a few individuals – and I have found them. That’s why I stopped traveling. I had a certain number in my mind, and when that number was complete I stopped traveling. I have taken account how many of them will fall out; those who remain, that is my number, and they are going to become a magnetic force. They will attract new generations immensely.You are going to become the world’s most significant people because there is no other alternative. All other ways are finished. This is the only living way arriving right now.This is the birth of a new man that you are witnessing. You should rejoice that you are witnessing something which is going to be the most significant factor in human history, which is going to divide the past and the future.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I have heard you say that tribes which are not sex-repressive remain poor, and societies which are sex-repressive become rich and creative. Osho, your communes are not sex-repressive and yet they are rich and creative. Can you comment?It is one of the most sensitive areas of life because it is concerned with the very life force – sex. The word has become too condemned. The reason sex became condemned was because all the religions had to be against everything that man can enjoy. It was their vested interest to keep man miserable, to destroy every possibility of his finding some kind of peace, solace, a moment of oasis in the desert. This was absolutely necessary for religions, that man be made completely devoid of any possibility, of any potentiality for rejoicing.Why was it so important for them? It was important because they wanted to shift you, your mind, somewhere else – toward the other world. If you are really happy here, why should you be bothered about the other world? Your misery is absolutely needed for the other world to exist. It does not exist in itself; it exists in your misery, in your suffering, in your anguish.All the religions have been doing that harm to you. They are creating more misery, more suffering, more wounds, more hatred, anger – and all in the name of God, all in the name of beautiful words.They talk about love and they destroy every possibility of your ever being in love.They talk about peace and create every situation for war.The strategy is very simple – go on talking about beautiful things, keep people engaged in words, ideologies; and while they are engaged in words and ideologies, philosophies, go on cutting their roots from the soil, from the life energy.And your life energy is rooted in your sex.All the societies became aware of the fact that it is only sex that can stand against God. If your sex is fulfilled your don’t need God, because your life is fulfilled. Then God is just Godot. But if your sex is destroyed, repressed, condemned, if you are made to feel guilty about it, then God can go on living forever. He derives His energy through your suicide.Yes, I have said somewhere that sex-repressive societies have become civilized, cultured, richer, philosophical, scientific. They developed in all possible ways. Sex-expressive societies – which are very few now; the aboriginals are poor, they are uncultured, uncivilized. They have not evolved the way sex-repressive societies have evolved.This gave a great impetus to religious stupidity – because religion could prove on a basis in reality, that the societies that have been sex-expressive have remained poor, starving, hungry. And the sex-repressive societies have evolved in every possible way.The more sex repression, the higher becomes your cultural development. This became a proof for religions that sex repression is something absolutely needed; otherwise you will be simply barbarians. And in a way it is true, factually true. Hence, naturally, the question arises.I am not against sex. To me sex is as sacred as everything in life.There is nothing profane, nothing sacred.Life is one – all divisions are false.And sex is the very center of life. So you have to understand what has been happening down the centuries. The moment you repress sex, your energy starts finding new ways to express itself. Energy cannot remain static. This is something of a fundamental law: energy cannot remain static, it is always dynamic, it is dynamism. If you force it, and close one door upon it, it will open other doors; but you cannot keep it in bondage. If the natural flow of the energy is prevented, then it will flow in some unnatural way. That is why sex-repressive societies became richer.When you repress sex you have to substitute something for your love, some object. Now the woman is dangerous, she is the way to hell. Because all the scriptures have been written by men, it is only the woman who is the way to hell. What about men?I have been telling Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, that if woman is the way to hell, then only men can go to hell; women can never go. The way always remains wherever it is, it never goes anywhere. People go on the way. We say that this way goes to that place, but that is a linguistic fallacy: the way never goes anywhere, it simply lies down there. People go. So if women are the way to hell, then hell must be full of only men. It will be just a male-chauvinist club.Woman is not the way to hell, but once your mind is conditioned in that way, you are going to project the woman into something else; you need an object for your love. Money can become your object of love.Why is there so much greed? Why are people clinging to money like crazy? It is their love object. Somehow they have managed to move their whole life energy toward money. Now you want them even to drop money; again they will be in trouble.Politics becomes their love object. Rising higher and higher in the political bureaucracy becomes their love object. The politician looks toward the presidentship, the prime ministership, with the same lust as a lover looks to his or her beloved. This is perversion. Somebody may become directed into other ways, such as education; then books become his love object.Somebody may become religious; then God becomes his love object. And if you look into the lives of your so-called saints you will be really puzzled. I am always surprised why a man like Sigmund Freud missed this point. He should have looked into the lives of Saint Teresa, Saint Meera and other women saints first, because women are more straightforward.Meera’s songs are full of lust, because she denied herself the company of men; God became her only companion. Of course it is just a fantasy, but in her fantasy she is absolutely romantic. She talks to Krishna, her God; she sleeps with Krishna – of course she cannot find the real Krishna so she keeps a statue of Krishna close to her heart when she sleeps.The way she sings about Krishna can, without any interpretation, be easily understood as sexual perversion. She says, “I am married to you, my lord. I can only be yours, I cannot be anyone else’s. You are my heart, and I am waiting for you, waiting for you. And I will wait till eternity.”The word she uses – because in India when a couple gets married, the first night…. In India there is no honeymoon as such. Instead of a honeymoon is the first night. It is called suhagrat ‘the night of bliss’. The wife prepares the bed with beautiful flowers, roses, bela – and there are thousands of beautiful flowers in the East. She hangs garlands all around, she almost covers herself with flowers. That night, gold is worth nothing; the fragrance of the flowers is the most valuable. She prepares the bed and waits for her husband to come in.Meera goes on singing the same thing: “I have been preparing the bed every day with beautiful flowers, and I go on waiting and you have not come yet.” Now, is there any doubt that in her mind Krishna has become just an object of love? She cries, she weeps, she sings, she dances, but it is always in the name of Krishna. Sigmund Freud would have found tremendous support, from Meera and her songs and her life, for his idea that if you repress sex it takes some other path.But energy has to move. It can take a religious way; then the priests are happy. It can become academic; then the academicians are happy. It can become scientific; then the scientists are happy. It has to become something – that’s why sex-repressive societies have developed in so many directions. Yes, they have become very cultured, polished, civilized, educated, scientific, technological. But at what cost?They have lost all joy. They have lost all peace. They have lost all silence. They have lost all love.You can project your love toward an imaginary object but it is not going to give you fulfillment. You can go on writing poetry about Krishna or Christ, but that poetry is not going to give you the experience of love. You will remain starved. So the society has become really rich in every possible way – but the individual has died. And what is the point of the society becoming cultured, civilized, educated, technological? For whom?The individual is dead.This society is nothing but corpses walking all around – of course very culturally: corpses, but very polished. They all speak English with an Oxford accent. But corpses, even if they speak with an Oxford accent, are still corpses. They become great politicians, they become great religious leaders, but just look inside those people: they are hollow. There is no substance inside, there is no soul. If they get defeated in one direction, then they start moving in another direction.Just now I was reading one statement of an ex-president of America, Ford. In a meeting which was called by Governor Atiyeh of Oregon, Ford said that religion and state should not be separate, cannot be separate: this separation is unnatural. Without religion you cannot help man. This is the defeated politician who is now trying to be religious. He never said such a thing when he was president.He should remember that he was never really a president of America, it was just accidental; he was chosen by Nixon as his vice-president. Now a man chosen by Nixon…can you think of him becoming holy, religious? But because Nixon had to leave, Ford became the president. And then he got it into his head that he was somebody important.He was nothing; he was just a puppet in the hands of Nixon. And to be a puppet in the hands of somebody like Nixon is to be nothing but a criminal. But because he became president for two years he started thinking that now he could be elected – and he could not be elected, he had no guts. I have seen a few of his pictures when some attempts on his life were made. You can see by his face…I have never seen anybody so afraid. He is so much afraid of death, such a coward.And when he got defeated…. Now he is taking a different direction. Now he knows politics is not for him; that door is closed. He is talking of bringing religion and state together. I am surprised; Governor Atiyeh silently listened to it, the party was given by Governor Atiyeh. And we are being dragged into the court for the simple reason that we believe, and we experience, that in life nothing can be separated.Life is an organic unity.If religiousness has any reality you cannot leave it at home when you go to the office. Then it is not a real thing, if you can leave it at home. Then it is something separate, a thing; it has no life. You cannot leave your heart at home. Wherever you go your heart will be with you, beating.Religion is your heart – how can you leave it?Love is your very being – how can you leave it? Wherever you are, you will breathe, your heart will beat. Everything is absolutely organic, united, one.But from Ford these words don’t mean anything. The same energy that was moving into politics now wants to become holier, to play another game – the game of religion. And Atiyeh must have listened silently because soon he is going to be retired too. It is better to keep silent because after a few months he will have to be religious too.Religion is for all kinds of retired people.We are the only people in the whole world who are young and in religion, who are alive and in religion.Our religion is not something posthumous.The society that did not repress sex naturally remained undeveloped for the simple reason that they were contented. There was no energy available to go after money, to go after politics, to go after God. No, they danced, they sang; they had a small but beautiful architecture – huts, but made beautifully. They lived a very clean life; there was no crime because there was no energy for crime.And now you have to understand how the things are related. When there is no crime what is the need of a judge, what is the need of a court, what is the need of the cops? When everybody is happy and enjoying and is not feeling guilty for being happy, why should he go to a Catholic priest to confess that “I am feeling guilty.”I have heard…. A woman went to confess and she said, “I have been raped.”The priest said, “But if you have been raped, you have not committed any crime. The person who has raped, he should come to confess.”The woman said, “I know. but I did not resist – that’s why I am feeling guilty. I did not resist.”The priest asked, “When did it happen?”She said, “Last night – three times.”The priest said, “What kind of rape is this!”The woman said, “That’s why I have come to confess. The first time I was a little afraid; the next time I really enjoyed it, and the third time it was fantastic.”The next week she came again.The priest said, “What! Have you been raped again?”She said, “Not again. I have come to confess about the same old night.”The priest said, “You are strange – you have confessed it already.”She said, “But I even enjoyed confessing it – now that makes me feel guilty. I want to say it again. Please forgive me but….”When people are happy and don’t feel guilty because nobody has told them that happiness is sin, naturally there will be no priests, no cathedrals, no temples, no synagogues. That is why there is no culture – in your eyes. What you understand as culture is not there: of course they are uncultured. They don’t have a religion, they don’t have holy books, they don’t have universities, they don’t have libraries – how can they be called cultured, how can they be called civilized?But they are immensely contented.I have lived with these people and I have never heard them complain about anything. They have no problems as such. They accept life as it comes, and they enjoy it as much as they can. They live joyously, they die joyously – without any fear in life nor any fear about what will happen after death. They don’t care, there is no energy for all these things. Yes, they don’t produce a George Bernard Shaw. Their life itself is such a beautiful drama, there is no need for a George Bernard Shaw.George Bernard Shaw himself was not a happy man. He may have written great dramas; his life itself was very poor. The woman he wanted to love refused him. She was one of the most beautiful women of the past century – Annie Besant. Not only was she beautiful, she was very intelligent and had a charisma of her own. She became the world president of the Theosophical movement.She didn’t care about George Bernard Shaw, and the wound went deep. Refusal from a woman…George Bernard Shaw became a great writer. Why? – because Annie Besant was a great writer, Annie Besant was a great orator. You can see the logic: refused by the woman, George Bernard Shaw tried to prove himself, became a celebrity, a Nobel prize-winner. He wanted Annie Besant to feel that she had missed a beautiful man. But she never bothered about him, and the hurt went very deep.He went on producing dramas, he wrote more dramas than anybody else in the whole world – one hundred dramas. His life was spent in writing dramas, but his life was not a drama, there was no drama in it.Now, the question is: who is civilized? – the people who write dramas, paint paintings, compose music, or the people who live a very simple, poor life, but with tremendous joy?Yes, they also paint, but their painting is not that of a Picasso; they don’t have energy for that. They just paint small things on their small houses. They also create music, but their music is simple – simple drums. Once in a while they gather together; they dance, they have flutes, bamboo flutes. Their musical instruments are not sophisticated, they cannot produce Yehudi Menuhin or Ravi Shankar; there is no need. Ravi Shankar can play so beautifully on the sitar, but what about his life? Nobody bothers about his life.I know his wife. He married a very beautiful woman, the daughter of his own master who taught him music. He fell in love…. Because he used to live with his master, he fell in love with the master’s daughter, who is as great a musician as he is. But he could not manage to live together in love.He had ambitions – and that woman is as great a musician as Ravi Shankar, perhaps better, but she has no ambitions. She is utterly fulfilled in playing on the sitar for herself. Once in a while a friend comes and sits, that is another matter. But she has never given a public performance: to her that is prostitution.Now their ways have separated. Ravi Shankar wanted to become a world figure, world famous. The woman was not interested in fame. He had become world famous, but his life is utterly empty. he still loves that woman but he cannot manage to be with her. He does not know – no ambitious man knows – how to love. Ambition takes all his energy away. Love remains starving; energy is not available for love, it has been all invested in ambition. Ambition has become the parasite.So one thing to be understood: these sex-repressive societies became very cultured, very civilized, very rich, very scientific, but at what cost? They died, they are no longer alive.My problem is, I want you to be alive and yet as rich in every dimension as possible.I am not ready to choose between these two, either/or. I would not like you to be aboriginals. I would not like you to become very civilized, cultured, running after money and power and prestige. I would not like you to become politicians, priests. But I would like you to have a fuller life. And anything that develops out of a fuller life, to me that is true culture.Aboriginals live a life that is full, but not overflowing. The civilized societies of the world have all kinds of developments – but the man for whom they have been developing these things has disappeared long ago. They go on making skyscrapers; they have completely forgotten for whom they are making these skyscrapers. That man is dead – you should make, rather, small graves, not skyscrapers. Nobody needs graves that tall; just six feet long and two feet deep will do.So on one hand are the aboriginals – alive but not overflowingly alive. They don’t know that life energy can shrink, can expand. You can use it as it is available from nature – and you can be contented – but you will remain poor in many ways. You will not know flights of music. You will not know flights of painting and sculpture; you will not know flights of meditation. You will live almost like animals – contented.All animals are contented. Have you seen any animals discontented, bothering you, saying, “My life is just a misery – can you help me? What am I supposed to do with my wife? And the children are growing up….” No, there are no problems for them. They are living, and living far better than your civilized man, because your civilized man has ceased living. He sacrificed himself for civilization, culture, technology.I cannot choose between these two.I would like you to rise higher than the animals; and the only way to rise higher than the animals is to find ways to expand your energy.And that’s what I call religion:The science of expanding energy, so that you have so much energy that you can be a zorba and yet so much is left that you can be a buddha too, together, simultaneously.Zorba is alive but knows nothing of higher flights. he is happy crawling on the earth, while he is capable of opening his wings – but he is not aware of that.His boss is a cultured man, very educated, fish – but miserable, continuously in anxiety. Zorba says to his boss, “Boss, only one thing is wrong with you: you think too much. Why not live? I don’t see the point – why go on thinking? What are you going to get out of it? Live! Come with me!”He takes his musical instrument, drags his boss to the bank of the river where they live, and starts playing on his instrument, starts dancing. And the boss is standing there, embarrassed: If somebody sees this crazy man, and I am here standing with him, what will he think? He is not dancing but he is afraid that if somebody sees him there…. Zorba pulls him up and he says, “Start dancing!”The boss says, “I don’t know dancing.”Zorba says, “Nobody needs to know dancing.Dancing is not something that you have to learn. Just start jumping, it will come. And I will give you the music – you simply start.”Seeing that the man is not going to leave him, he starts moving, and Zorba goes on pushing him. And finally on that full-moon night he forgets completely about his culture, education, civilization – and for the first time he realizes he can also live, he can also dance; his legs are not meant just to walk. He has wings, Zorba teaches him something of the earth.I feel sorry for Zorba, sorry because he died before I could meet him; otherwise I would have taught him that there is a higher dance too. And I am certain – I don’t know why but I am absolutely certain he would have understood. Because he has known the lower steps, he could have understood the possibility of higher steps.I would have made him a buddha. That is what I am doing here for you.You come here either an aboriginal, or – which is far worse – a civilized man. Once in a while, yes, a zorba also comes. This Patipada sitting here – she is a zorba. Once in a while…. There are many zorbas here who are learning to rise above, who are moving higher, touching the fringes of buddhahood.My methods of meditation are the ways that will make you expand your energy. Energy is like seeds….I am reminded of a story. An old man, very rich, was puzzled because he had three sons; the problem was that all three sons were born simultaneously, their age was the same. Otherwise, in the East, the eldest son, inherits. The problem for the old man was who was going to inherit, because all these three were of the same age.He asked a wise man, “What should I do? How should I decide who should inherit?” The old wise man gave him a certain method. The old man went home, he gave one thousand silver pieces to each son and told them, “Go to the market, purchase seeds of flowers.”They went, they purchased seeds. Carts and carts came, full of seeds, because one thousand silver pieces in ancient days was big money, and just flower seeds…. When all the flower seeds had come, all that the three had bought, they said, “Now?”Their father said, “I am going on a pilgrimage. It may take one year, two years, three years. You have to keep these seeds with you, and when I come back I will ask for the seeds to be given to me. And this is going to be a test also, because whosoever proves wise will inherit my whole property, so be careful.” He went on the pilgrimage.The first son thought, “This is a strange test. If he comes after three years…these seeds will simply die, and he will ask for the living seeds. So the best way is to sell them in the market, keep the money, and when he comes back purchase new seeds again – fresh, young.” Very economical, mathematical – he did that.The second son thought, “What this brother is doing is not right, does not seem to be right, because our father emphatically said, ‘These same seeds I would like to be returned.’ So I will keep these seeds.” He made arrangements in the basement of the house, put all the seeds there, locked it, and said, “Now whenever he comes I will give him the key and say, ‘These are the seeds.’“But the third one had a different idea. He said, “Seeds kept in a basement will not remain alive; they need soil. By the time our father returns they will not be the same seeds because they will be dead. They cannot sprout – how can you call them the same seeds? The seeds that our father has given us can sprout, can become trees. One seed can produce millions of seeds; that is what he has given. And when he comes after three years those seeds will not be able to produce a single seed, a single sprout. This is not the way.”He went behind their house – they had much land – and he sowed the seeds all over the land. Each year they became a thousandfold more. After three years when the father came, he could not believe his eyes – as far as he could see his whole land was full of flowers! He asked the other sons…. They had certainly failed the test. He said, “The third son inherits my property because he knows how to expand, how to increase.”One seed can make a whole earth green.One small sparkle or energy in you can fill the whole earth with dance, song, music.Just a little sparkle is enough.If you know how to expand it, it can become a wildfire.It may be just a little flame within you.Meditation is nothing but an effort to expand your inner flame so that you can become afire, aflame, aglow, overflowing.The there will be a science, but totally different than the science that has been produced by repressed sexuality. There will be a qualitative change. This science is destructive because it has come out of perversion; it is perverted sexual energy which has become nuclear energy. When it comes out of meditation, overflowing love, it will be creative science – a totally different science which we are not even aware of.This whole scientific project has to be dropped because it is bringing you closer and closer to death. Anything that goes against sex will bring death closer to you, because sex is life.You see paintings by Picasso. Looking at his paintings you will feel – not peace, silence, joy, no. Looking at his paintings you will feel anguish, worry, a trembling, a fear, because those paintings are out of repressed sex. Those paintings cannot be life-affirmative. Looking at Picasso’s paintings you will see the world of a madman. He is insane. He is a genius – that does not matter. You can be a genius and yet you can be mad.In fact it is easier to be mad when you are a genius. Mediocre people cannot afford to be mad, they are so mediocre, so middle-class. Insanity happens only when you are at the extreme. Only from the extreme can you see the abyss which drives you insane, which drives Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and all the other great painters of this century mad. And this is true not only about painting. The same is true about your dancers, jazz music – do you think it is music? Music has some spiritual quality to it; jazz is simply insanity. But repressed sexuality is bound to produce these developments.Jean-Paul Sartre or Marcel or Jaspers – great writers, but what are they writing? They are writing about the meaninglessness of life; that life is accidental, that it does not matter whether you live or you die, it does not matter whether you commit suicide or murder. It doesn’t matter because life is accidental, it has no meaning. Great writers, but what they are writing is just spreading their insanity into other people’s minds.My people have to keep the innocence of the zorbas, of the children, of the aboriginals. They have to be as innocent as Adam was when he was turned out of the garden of Eden.And yet they have to learn methods of expanding the seed of consciousness in them to such a luxurious growth, that as far as you can see, you can see only yourself flowering. You can feel your fragrance twenty-four hours a day; and not only can you feel it, you cannot help it: you will have to share it. Whether you want to or not, that does not matter.When a roseflower opens, the fragrance starts spreading. It does not ask the permission of the roseflower, there is no need. The very opening of the roseflower is the permission for the fragrance to spread to all the directions, to all the winds.The moment your consciousness flowers in meditation there is a tremendous explosion.Yes, you will have music, but it will have a spiritual quality to it.You will have dance, but your dance will not be sexual. The repressed society has many kinds of dances but they are all sexual, perverted sex.You will have poetry, but your poetry will not be just unsatisfied sexual lust. It will be a fulfilled love. Your poetry will become like the mantras of the Upanishads. Each word coming out of your fulfillment will catch something of what I call godliness.You will have a science which will be creative, helpful to life.You will have everything – but with a different quality.Up to now those two societies have existed. We are not going to be either of them.We are the third alternative – for the first time proposed in the world.Nobody has ever dared to think of man as Zorba the Buddha. Neither Zorba had any idea of Buddha nor Buddha had any idea of Zorba. Both are half.I want you to be the whole man.To me the whole man is the only holy man there is.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I know it is certain that one day I am going to die, but I don't feel any fear – why?It is not something exceptional, it is almost the rule. Nobody is afraid of death; otherwise living will become impossible. There is a natural safety measure, and that is something of a very basic nature to be understood.You know that it is always the other who dies, never you. It is always somebody else, but never you. That gives an unconscious foundation for the hope that perhaps you are the exception, everybody dies except you.That’s why you don’t feel fear. Nature does not want you to feel fear of death for the simple reason that if fear of death becomes overwhelming, you will not be able to live. Life can be lived only if somehow you can go on believing that you are going to be here forever. Things will change, people will die, but you will remain outside all this change. And it is based on your experience.The poet says: “Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” But when it tolls for thee, you are not there to hear it, that’s the trouble. I say to you, it always tolls for somebody else, that’s why you can hear it. The poet does not know the deeper realms of human consciousness. In a way he is saying a truth. Yes, it tolls for thee. But you are hearing it….You can understand the implication, but that implication will not create fear in you. I can say for certain that even the poet who wrote that was not afraid of death. Even he, hearing the bell tolling, would not have thought that it is tolling for him. It is always for somebody else. It is always for the other. So this is one fundamental thing: you are not an exception, you are just the rule.But I have to go deep into your question. It has many layers you may not be aware of. You say, “It is certain that I am going to die one day.” On what grounds do you say it is certain? Have you seen anything in life as a certainty? Life is a flux, nothing is certain. Everything goes on moving in new directions, unpredictable; you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow.Talking of certainty is absurd.A conscious man will never talk about certainty. A life is just a perhaps, it is never a certainty.I can understand when you say, “I am certain that one day I am going to die.” I know what you mean. But you don’t know what you mean. It is only an inference, not a certainty. You have seen people dying; your grandfather died, your father died, neighbors died, teachers, your professors – people go on dying. You are also one of the members of this dying queue, and the queue is moving. Each time somebody dies you have to move a little closer. You don’t know where you are moving, but one thing is certain: whoever moves, it is when somebody dies. Every step in this queue brings you closer to death. But it is an inference. Have you really seen a man die? You will say yes. Almost everybody has seen somebody die. But I say to you emphatically, you have not seen a single man die. You have seen only a man stopping breathing, his heart stopping beating, his pulse disappearing. Yes, you have seen this. And the medical profession will say that the man is dead. But now even the medical profession is not so certain as it used to be.There are at least ten bodies in America being preserved because science has become aware that when somebody stops breathing, if his brain cells can be preserved, if his brain can be preserved from dying – and it simply means that the brain has to be provided nourishment, oxygen, or whatsoever is needed – then the body will remain dead but the brain will remain alive. And they hope that within twenty years’ time there will be methods available to bring the body back – to pulsate, to breathe. The heart will start beating again; if the brain has been kept alive, the man will come back to life again.Of course it will be very difficult for the man who has been dead for twenty years to come back to life. Everything will have changed by that time. His generation will have disappeared from the earth; new kinds of people will be there – new ideas, everything new. I don’t think he will be able to adjust. The very shock is going to kill him again, because what he will see will be absolutely against his beliefs, against his conventional mind which he has been carrying for a century. A century-old mind – it cannot bear the shock.But that apart, whether it can bear the shock or not…even medical science is no longer certain that what we have always called death, is death. Yes, there are symptoms; the man is no longer capable of doing things he used to do. This is a very negative definition of death. Medical science has not been able to provide a positive definition of death: no breathing, no pulse, no heartbeat – can’t you see it is all negative?One yogi in India – his name was Brahma Yogi – devoted his whole life to prove that all the symptoms that make the medical profession certain about death are wrong. His work was of tremendous value. He practiced methods very ancient in the East, simple methods, but requiring one thing which has disappeared from the world: patience. The methods are very simple, but…twenty years’, thirty years’ practice – in this world of hurry and blurry, who is going to practice a certain breathing technique for thirty years?People are speedy. People are not walking, people are running, faster and faster every day; their vehicles are becoming faster and faster every day.Now in Japan they have trains which can move at four hundred miles per hour. And this cannot be the end – the Japanese scientists say that soon it will be possible to move the train at any speed you want, because four hundred was the barrier, which we have crossed. When a train moves at four hundred miles per hour, it rises one foot above its rails – because of the speed. It is almost in the air, it is an airplane – one foot above the ground.Now there is no reason why it cannot move one thousand miles per hour. The Japanese say – because Japan is such a small country – “We don’t need that much speed. Four hundred is too much, because in four hundred miles you can move from one end to the other end of Japan, and the train is so speedy it cannot stop in between.” You can’t have so many stops and stations. And if a train moves at one thousand miles an hour then it will have only two stops, the beginning and the terminus.Speed is one of the great diseases of the modern man, because it has made impossible many things which can happen only in patience.Love grows in patience, but you are so speedy, only divorce can grow out of it. With your speed, love is non-existential. It needs patience.There are seasonal flowers; within six weeks they blossom – but within six weeks they are gone too. Their whole life span from seed to death is only twelve weeks at the most. But if you want a tree like the cedars of Lebanon, or the redwoods of California, thousands of years old, reaching hundreds of feet into the sky…. They have a certain pride and a certain personality.The cedars of Lebanon have a grandeur, just like emperors; everything is just pygmy compared to them – but they take time. Four hundred years, five hundred years is nothing. They can go on growing for two thousand years; at two thousand years they will still be young. They will become old somewhere near four or five thousand years.Now, you cannot grow these cedars like seasonal flowers. And if you are stubborn and insist that everything has to grow within six weeks’ time, then of course you will have to deny the existence of the cedars of Lebanon.That’s what has happened to the Eastern methods which have proved totally different conclusions about what indicates death. Brahma Yogi practiced for thirty years a certain method of breathing which makes you capable of stopping the breath, the pulse and the heartbeat for ten minutes. He exhibited what he attained to almost all the great medical centers in the world, the great universities of the world.In Oxford ten doctors, the topmost, looked in every possible way, and they all certified that the man was dead. But after ten minutes the man was back, and he said, “Now what do you say? You were deciding by symptoms – symptoms may not be there. Life energy is something else. It is not breathing. Yes, it needs breathing, it uses breathing, breathing is its means; but life energy itself is not breathing. It can exist without breathing.”If it can exist for ten minutes it can exist for ten years. The question is whether life energy can remain separate from breathing, from the heartbeat, the pulse. Brahma Yogi’s effort was to prove that your symptoms of death are simply symptoms of a body which has become incapable of keeping the life energy in itself. It is not a proof of death.But it is a strange world. The man proved his point in front of all the scientists of the world. But the problem for the scientist is, who is going to be trained for thirty years in a certain breathing technique? Who is going to be ready for that? People want instant coffee, and you are talking about thirty years of a breathing technique!Brahma Yogi had also trained himself for another miraculous feat. Science says that there are certain poisons that if your tongue even touches them, you will die. There is no way to help you, your death is certain. He practiced for that too – not only touching those certain poisons , he would drink cups of those poisons. He baffled the scientists.But in Rangoon an accident happened. His practice had made Brahma Yogi capable of containing anything in his stomach for thirty minutes without it mixing with his body in any way; but within thirty minutes it had to be thrown out. In Rangoon University he gave the demonstration of drinking poison, and then he moved to the hotel where he was staying – but you don’t know the traffic in the East; it is simply crazy. It is just a miracle that people go on reaching the places they want to reach. It is a miracle that every day you come back home alive.The Eastern traffic has difficulties because it contains so many centuries together. Somebody is going on his donkey, somebody on his horse, somebody – in countries like China – sitting on a buffalo…bullock carts, camels, elephants…and added to all this, modern speedy vehicles; buses, trucks, cars. In the East you can find all the models of cars that have ever existed since God drove Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden. That first car you can find in Bombay – still moving!All the centuries together – and the roads were not made for buses and trucks, they are small, not broad enough. And people have no traditional sense that they have to keep to the right or to the left. People believe in freedom, and many people believe in the middle way; they just move in the middle of the road. And of course all the constitutions of the world say that man has a birthright of freedom to move, movement is man’s birthright. So Eastern traffic is really something worth seeing.And how people go on managing in it is just a miracle: so many horns honking continuously, and nobody listening – who cares? These idiots go on honking and people go on moving at their own pace….Brahma Yogi could not reach the hotel in time to throw out the poison; he died. But before dying he had demonstrated, almost all over the world, both these things: the poisons you think can kill man, can kill only if the man is not trained and disciplined in a certain way to keep the poison away from his blood stream; and all the symptoms of death are not at all symptoms of death, they are symptoms only of a body failure. Your deeper life force, elan vital, is eternal.You say, “I am certain that I am going to die one day.” How can you be certain? You have not seen death yet, you have seen only symptoms, outward symptoms. You have never seen any life dying. You have seen only a dead body stop functioning; it was always dead, it is nothing new for it. It was a mechanism functioning for a certain period, programmed to function for a certain period. When the period is over the mechanism stops.You wind your watch, and for twenty-four hours it goes on ticking; after twenty-four hours it stops. That does not mean that something has died. But if you believe that there was a life inside the watch which has died, because now the hands are no longer moving, then you are believing in a fallacy.So the first thing I would like to say to you is, don’t be so certain. Never be certain about anything that you have not experienced. You have not seen anybody really dying. And even if you can see somebody dying then too you cannot be certain – unless you see yourself dying – because these things are so intimate.You can see two persons loving – that does not help in any way for you to become certain what love is. You can seen two persons hugging each other, kissing each other, looking at each other like lunatics….This word lunatic I like. It comes from the moon, lunar; a lunatic is one who goes on looking at the moon. Two lovers look at each other like lunatics looking at the moon. Why did it become synonymous with insanity, madness? – because of a certain fact, that the moon has an effect on the human mind: it can drive it mad.On the full-moon night more people go mad than on any other night. On the full-moon night more people commit suicide than on any other night. On the full-moon night more people murder than on any other night. It is not coincidental; it is just as when, on the full-moon night, the ocean starts stirring, tries to rise toward the moon. Some immense force, some immense magnetism in the moon pulls the ocean.Man also comes from the ocean. Man’s body still contains ninety percent elements of the ocean. It is very natural that when the ocean gets stirred, your little ponds also get stirred; hence, the word “lunatic” became synonymous with madness.Literally it means moonstruck. But lovers are moonstruck – just watch two lovers. But don’t start being certain that you know what love is, because in a movie you can see two lovers even more mad, more moonstruck – but they are just acting. They may be really husband and wife, nagging before they act, and nagging after they act; just between the two naggings they have to play at being lovers. And they play it.You cannot be certain by seeing the symptoms in others’ lives. You can infer, but your inference should be preceded by a perhaps: perhaps these people are in love. But what is love? You can watch the symptoms; they are holding hands, they are saying sweet nothings, telling each other dialogues – great dialogues that they have crammed from movies and novels.One student was my roommate in the university. He was a simple boy and he was always worried because everybody was saying that somebody was in love with some girl, somebody was in love with some woman teacher but, “Nothing happens to me.” He would tell me, “Nothing happens to me.”I said, “If you go on sitting in this room nothing is going to happen to you. At least while I am present here nothing is going to happen to you. If you want something to happen then do something!”He said, “What should I do? Before I get close to a girl I start trembling. I cannot take my hands out of my pants pockets because my hands are trembling. Even my pants start shaking – with no wind, and the pants…. I simply turn away. I try to say something beautiful but nothing comes out, I end up saying something stupid. And I have tried for hours, crammed the whole dialogue – and at the very last moment, something snaps and I am no longer together. And because of this, girls get bored with me, nobody wants to have me as a lover.”I said, “You do one thing – start writing love letters.He said, “You are telling me? I have been writing love letters but nobody returns…the answer never comes. I must have written love letters to all the girls in the university, but nobody bothers.”I said, “You just show me one of your love letters.” I saw his love letter, and I said, “This is a love letter? – or some bureaucratic…. Reference number, subject matter….” I said, “You are the first lover to write such a scientific letter – reference number, subject matter: Love. Who is going to answer you? You are a fool.”He said, “I have only seen this kind of letter; I thought that this must be the right manner in which to write, so I have been writing like this.”I told him, “I will write love letters for you. You just choose the girl.”He said, “Really?”I said, “You go and you just choose the girl and bring her address and I will write the letter for you.”He chose a certain girl, a very beautiful girl – she was a Kashmiri girl, and by chance she was in the same department, in the same class as me. I knew her. I said, “That’s perfectly good,” and I started writing love letters for him. Only the signature was his. That too I had to teach him because a lover’s signature should not be businesslike; it should have some art, some beauty.And the answer came. He was just mad with joy, that the answer has come! Then I went on writing for him, and answers started coming – more and more loving. One day the girl invited him to meet her: “I have not even seen you, but just by your letters I can understand how beautiful a person you must be, what great poetry must be in your heart. You seem to be a born poet, an artist.”He said, “Now the difficulty has come. You never said to me that I would also have to meet her, you just told me to write letters. And I am enjoying enough, this is enough; I don’t want…. I see the girl from far away, here and there, but that is enough. More than that I don’t want, because I know myself.”I said, “What do you want? Should I go in place of you? Now gather courage and go and meet her. “I almost had to push him – in fact, to throw him out of the room. And I said, “You go – first you meet the girl and then come back; otherwise I will not allow you into the room. Are you a man or…!”So almost with tears in his eyes he went to meet his girlfriend. And you can imagine what happened there. She simply threw him out. She said, “You were writing those letters to me?”He said, “To be true to you, I was not writing them; somebody else was. And before I leave you I want my letters back!”That was the climax! The girl said, “What are you going to do with the letters?”He said, “I will send them to somebody else. I cannot write, and the man who used to write them will refuse now. He will say ‘You are useless – what is the point?’“ I will write these same letters again, and this time I will try to be a little stronger; I will start yoga and join the gymnasium. But please give my letters back.”The girl mentioned to me, by the way, “Something strange happened today. An idiot has been writing letters to me. His letters were so beautiful, so intelligent, I had almost fallen in love with him through the letters. I asked him to meet me; I told him, ‘You go on hiding, remaining anonymous. I am just hankering to meet you.’ The man came – and I have never seen such a lousy fellow! And the last thing that he did was just unimaginable: he asked for his letters back, ‘because,’ he said, ‘these letters I will use for some other girl’!”You can imitate, you can borrow, you can act; somebody watching you may think this is love. These are only symptoms; they may be true, they may not be true. They may be just acting. They may be just out of habit. They may be just etiquette, mannerism. But you cannot be certain that it is love.You can be certain only when you are in love, when you experience it; when it suddenly changes the whole climate of your being, when it makes you a totally new man; when you cannot walk because your legs want to dance, when your prose becomes poetry not by any effort; when you are surprised by yourself – you had never thought that you are beautiful, that you are of any worth, that you can be needed by somebody.One of the greatest needs of man is to be needed. And the moment somebody needs you, your spirits start flying high; you are not unnecessarily here. You are not a burden, somebody needs you. You are here to fulfill somebody’s life, you are here to make somebody complete. But you have to experience it; only then can you be certain.The same is true about death. You will be surprised; why am I comparing death with love? It is not accidental – they are alike, very much alike. In love there is death; the old dies and the new is born. There is a death and there is eternity; death of something non-essential and the revelation of eternity, which is essential.The same is true about death. There is something of love in it. The old dies, the old body disappears, and suddenly there is a new freedom, unbounded. You cannot believe that you can be so huge, that stars can move within you.Love is a tiny death: death is immense love.Love happens between two small individuals:Death happens between two universes.Love makes two individuals one:Death makes two universes one.That’s why I have purposely chosen love to be an example.You say, ‘I am certain….’ Please, don’t be certain. Without experiencing anything, to be certain is stupid. First know, then certainty follows as a shadow, but without knowing…. You have only heard the bell tolling for others; you are not certain, you cannot be.And you say, “One day I am going to die.” This is very strange; you have not lived yet, how can you die? At least follow the natural course of things; first live. Without being alive, nobody can die. I mean unless you have experienced life in its totality, you will not be able to experience death in its totality either, because death is not separate from life. It is just an episode in your life. And there have been many episodes like that in your life.Your life is from one eternity – the beginningless beginning – to another eternity, the endless end.Millions of times the episode of death will happen, but you will be able to experience it only if before it, preceding it, there is the vital experience of life.It is something like you see in schools: they all have blackboards. Why don’t they have whiteboards? When I entered my first grade that was my first question. The teacher could not believe that such a small boy…and he looked embarrassed because he had no answer.I said, “Why are all these boards black? Black is the color of the devil, the color of death, the color of mourning. Why? Why can’t you have white boards?”The teacher looked at me and he said, “But nobody ever asked that before.”I said, “That has nothing to do with me, whether anybody asked or not. I am asking it, and I want the answer.” And the fool could not give the simple answer, “We have white chalk to write.” That was the simple answer. You can’t write with white chalk on a white board. You can, but it will not be visible to anybody, to you or to anybody else. You have to write on a black board. And white chalk was easily available; it is just white mud, refined – cheap.Exactly that is the case in life. Your life has to have an intensity, because death is a very momentary, fleeting experience. If you have not lived a life of tremendous depth, intensity – so intense that in one moment the whole eternity becomes joined – you will not be able to detect when death comes and when it goes.Death comes and it goes so fast that unless you are in the moment, totally present, you will miss it.You may think of it: it is coming, it is coming, the queue is becoming smaller, smaller…and then suddenly it is gone: you are out of the queue. You will know it before, you will know it after, but you will not know it when it is really with you. It is a very fleeting moment, it is an episode. It has no continuity.It is not that you can say, “Okay, I have missed today, tomorrow I catch up with the train.” Then tomorrow may come after one life, and you may not remember at all that in the past you had missed. Do you remember how many times you have missed the train in the past? You have missed so many times that you have started living in the waiting room, thinking this is your house.This is not your house. But you have missed the train so many times that it is natural to believe that this is where you belong – the waiting room, the platform. The train comes but you can never get to the train, you are always late. That has become your pattern of life.In India, along the superhighways they have billboards saying, “It is better to be late than never.” It is for people who are going beyond the legal speed: It is better to be late than never.I would like to say to you, it is better to be never than to be late.You have always been late. And if you say that you know, “I am going to die one day, I am certain;” you are going to miss again, you will be late. Death will have passed by your side and you will not have been able to detect it. You will remain certain in your knowledge. You will be shocked only when you see that it has happened without even making you alert, giving you no warning, not even knocking on your door. It has passed.Death does not believe in knocking on your doors. It is a very fleeting moment, and it is a momentary thing. Life has a length – death has no length.So please drop this idea that “I am certain.” Drop this idea that, “I know that death is coming one day.” How do you know? It may come, it may not come. How can you be certain? There is no way. Yes, you see people dying but you are not those people; you may live. This is an inference. What I want to emphasize is, there is an inference, a logical inference.Aristotle, in his logical treatises, takes the example of his own master’s master. Plato was his master, and Plato’s master was Socrates. So Aristotle takes the example that Socrates is a man – this is a logical syllogism – Socrates is a man, obviously; all men are mortal, obviously; hence, Socrates is mortal…not so obvious.Socrates is a man, but such a unique man that there can be no other Socrates before or after. Socrates is a man, but you are forgetting that he is a unique man. All men are mortal, yes, as far as we know up to now – except a few fictions like Jesus Christ ascending to heaven, Mohammed ascending to heaven with his horse. Except for a few fictions all men are mortals; up to now it is true.But Socrates is so unique you cannot put him just as a number in the collectivity of all men. No, I don’t agree with Aristotle.Although his syllogism is simple – all men are mortal, hence therefore, Socrates is mortal – no, I say no, because Socrates is not a number, Socrates is not just a part of all men. He is an individual, so unique that you cannot predict anything about him according to the rule. Perhaps he is the exception.Why do you think yourself to be just a number in the crowd? Why can’t you respect yourself as an individual? You say, “I am going to die one day….” Be a little respectful to yourself. I am not saying that you will not die, I am saying at least before dying, don’t die.Die only once, don’t die every day; otherwise whenever the bell tolls you die again. How many deaths in such a small life! – so many deaths that there is no time left for living. From one death to another death – there is no gap even where you can breathe.Don’t say that “I am going to die one day.”First live! And live this very day.And I promise you that if you can live this very day, death will happen, but not to you, only to your outward imprisonment – your body, the shell in which you are imprisoned.You are not going to die on any day.And fortunately there are only seven days.So I give the guarantee that in these seven days you are not going to die, unless you invent the eighth day, which is very difficult.It is very strange that around the world all the cultures, all the societies, all the languages, not in connection with each other, all have seven days. And their seven days have all the same meanings. For example in English Monday is the moon’s day, that’s why Monday. In Hindi it is Somvar; som is the Hindi name for moon. Sunday is the day of the sun. In Hindi, it is ravivar, ravi means the sun.In all the languages there are only seven days, and all the seven days have the same meaning.In fact, five thousand years ago when days were decided and developed, we knew only seven great planets around the earth. At that time the sun was also considered to be a planet moving round the earth, just like the moon. Earth was the center, and seven were the planets moving round it. So according to those seven planets…now there are eleven. The sun is counted out; otherwise there would be twelve. The sun is not a planet. The moon is a planet, earth itself is a planet, and they all are moving around the sun.Now things have become different, but even when things become different old traditions continue, old worlds continue. Old words are like old habits, they die hard.There are only seven days – please live! And I am not a Christian so I don’t even give a holiday.The Christian God to me seems to be really lousy. Just six days’ work – and not a great work. Just look around the world to see the mess that He has created! And He had some nerve to say “Good.” This world, in which there is even Oregon, and the old fool said, “Good”! Then he went on a weekend holiday, and since then nothing has been heard of Him.It is very strange – Monday He should have come back to the office. I have always wondered why He didn’t come back to the office on Monday. What happened to the old guy? The only reason I could find was, after making man, He became so disgusted…. That was his last creation on Saturday evening. He must have said, “Good” before that. Once He created man He became so disgusted. He really freaked out. He dropped the whole idea of creating anything anymore. He had created a monster.And since then nothing has been heard of Him. Either He committed suicide, started taking drugs…. Nothing is known so nothing can be said positively, just inferences – He just felt so guilty, so Catholic, that He hanged himself.There are only seven days – please live!Even Sunday is not a holiday – make it an intense day of life.Live each moment, don’t leave a single moment unlived. Then only will you become capable of knowing death. When death comes you will be in the moment, available, open.And a man who is open and available to death comes to know in death the most beautiful experience of life – because death is silence, utter silence, abysmal silence.And you ask me, “I am not afraid of it – why?”Nobody is afraid of death. I have never come across a person who is afraid of death. People are afraid of having cancer, people are afraid of having AIDS, people are afraid of becoming blind, people are afraid of becoming crippled; people are afraid of all kinds of things that can happen in old age; they are afraid of old age. Nobody is afraid of death. Death is so clean – why should one be afraid of death?In fact the closer you come to your old age and the closer to death, the more you start hoping that death comes soon. Death is absolute clean, pure. It has never bothered anybody, it has never tortured anybody. And the contrary, it has relieved millions of people from torture, from disease, from concentration camps, from suffering, misery, anguish. Death has been a great friend to the whole of humanity.That’s why I say to my sannyasins:When death happens, celebrate!It is the coming of a great friend.Death is not the enemy. Death is very compassionate. It is the universe getting rid of all the junk that you have gathered around yourself and freeing you again, making you again fresh, young, giving you another chance to live – this one you have lost again.Nobody is afraid of death. I have never come across a person who is afraid of death. People are certainly afraid of lying down in strange kinds of beds in the hospitals – legs up, hands down, all kinds of instruments attached to the head and to the chest. People are afraid of all this, but death…have you seen death doing any harm to anybody ever? Why should anybody be afraid? That’s why I said it is not exceptional that you are not afraid. Don’t start patting your own back, that “I’m not afraid of death.” Nobody is.People are afraid of life, not of death, because life is a problem to be solved. Life has thousands of complexities to be resolved. Life has so many dimensions that you are continuously in a worry…is the dimension you are moving in the right one, or have you left the right one behind?Whatever you are doing, this question mark never leaves you: is this the kind of thing you really wanted to do, or are you really destined to do this? Everybody is in constant turmoil because of life. People are afraid to live, so people try to live as limitedly as possible. They have made life a limited concern.They try to create a fence around their life. They don’t want to live in the wilderness of life – that is very fear-creating. They make a nice fence around their house, they make a beautiful British garden inside – everything symmetrical, well-cut, groomed – and they think this is life. This is not life, this is just an effort to avoid life.Life can only be wild.It cannot have fences, it cannot be like the British garden. It is not Victorian, everything symmetrical.A famous story I have always loved…. A great king sent his eldest son – who was going to succeed him as the king – to a master to learn gardening. Masters have used all kinds of methods to teach. Gardening can become meditation, swordsmanship can become meditation, wrestling can become meditation; anything can become meditation, because meditation is a certain quality. You have just to bring that quality to any act and that act becomes meditation.This master was known as the greatest master of gardening. He taught his disciples gardening, and through gardening, meditation. The prince came to him, and the master said, “You start right now.”The prince said, “I thought you would say, ‘Come from tomorrow morning.’“The master said, “Listen carefully: here, tomorrow does not exist; it is either now or never., Start now! Come with me to the garden.”The prince had never met anybody who behaved like this – but you have to forgive people like me. We don’t know good behavior, we don’t know good manners. And it is good that there are once in a while a few people who don’t know good manners, who don’t know etiquette.Once I was invited to Hyderabad University in India – and while I was touring in India and speaking to all kinds of audiences, I used to sit on the table. Ordinarily the speaker stands behind the table, between the chair and the table; the microphone is on the table. That’s how it is. But I am not a man of manners or any thing, I would simply step up on the table. And that would be enough shock – people could not believe what I was doing! And I would tell the machine operator to put the mike in front of me. I would sit on the table, and I would simply start speaking.The vice-chancellor asked me – he was a learned man – “You did not address people as gentlemen and ladies…?”I said, “Yes, because I didn’t see any gentlemen or any ladies there. It is not my fault. I looked around, you must have watched.” I had looked around to see if there was any gentleman or any lady. “So I thought it was better to leave it unaddressed, I should just start talking to the walls. And walls don’t believe in being gentlemen and ladies, male and female.”He said, “What are you talking about? This is just good manners – whether they are gentlemen or not is not the point.”I said, “I cannot do anything just for the sake of good manners.”The prince was very angry but he could not do anything because this was a different world. This was the world of the master, it was not under his empire. No master’s world is part of anybody’s empire.Do you think Rajneeshpuram is under America? Forget it. It is my world. If America wants to, it can be part of it. We are not part of anybody.The master dragged the prince, started showing him how to do things. The prince saw the garden of the master and he said, “But this looks like a wild forest. You call it a garden?”The master said, “Yes, because we do not disturb any tree’s individuality. We try to help the tree as much as we can to be whatever it can be. But we do not cut, we do not prune. We are not interested in creating symmetries, because in existence there is nothing that indicates symmetries. Existence is asymmetrical.”For three years the prince had to learn; and of course in his own palace he had one hundred gardeners, so whatsoever he learned, he told the gardeners to follow: – “And prepare the garden, because after three years, one day the master will come just to see the garden. If he is happy, I have passed. If he is not happy, remains serious, I have failed. He is such a man – he won’t even say ‘you have failed’ or ‘you have passed.’ If he smiles, that’s enough, enough of a certificate; you have passed. If he leaves without a smile, that means I have failed; three more years again…!”So he did everything, and he had as many servants, as many gardeners as he wanted. And he made a really beautiful forest-like garden. But it was made forest-like – it was, after all, man-made – and there is a great difference. The master’s garden was not man-made. The garden was supported by man, nourished by man; it was a friendship with the trees. This was a totally different thing.Of course the prince’s garden was almost like the master’s garden. And the last finishing touch…. The prince went, before the master was to come, and he saw a few dead leaves in the garden, fallen on the path. He said, “Remove these. Make the garden absolutely clean, young, fresh; no yellow leaves, no dead leaves on the ground.” So all yellow leaves, all dead leaves were removed. And then the master came. He was very serious, and the prince was trembling.Finally the prince said, “Will you say something? Is my garden in any way satisfactory to you?”The master said, “My foot! Everywhere I see the signs of man. Where are the dead leaves? In a forest, dead leaves create a music of their own; when the wind blows and the dead leaves start moving, there is a sound. Or when you walk on a path, under your feet the dead leaves cracking, making sound…. Where are the yellow leaves on the trees? – because unless there are yellow leaves the trees are man-made. Where are the old trees? All the trees look young. In existence always there are young trees, there are children, there are old people – all the generations together. Then it is totally different.”The prince said, “I am sorry. The leaves were there – just now we threw them out.”The master went out, collected all the old leaves, brought them, and threw them on the garden path. And as the wind blew and the dry leaves started fluttering and making a sound, he smiled. He said, “Now there is something which is not made by you, something which is happening between the dead leaves and the wind. Something existential is there. Only this was missing. Now I can leave smiling.”People are afraid of life, and they are afraid of life because life is only possible if you are capable of being wild – wild in your love, wild in your song, wild in your dance. This is where fear is.Who is afraid of death? I have never come across such a person. And almost every person I have come across is afraid of life.Drop fear of life…. Because either you can be afraid or you can live; it is up to you. And what is there to be afraid of? You can’t lose anything. You have everything to gain.Drop all fears and jump totally into life.Then one day death will come as a welcome guest, not your enemy, and you will enjoy death more than you have enjoyed life, because death has its own beauties.And death is very rare because it happens once in a while – life is everyday.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,History shows that when a great master appears on the earth, other, lesser leaders recognize him and bring their followers with them. Do you see this happening here?It has never happened, and it cannot ever happen either. There is a fundamental reason why it cannot happen. The lesser cannot recognize the higher, the lower cannot recognize the higher. The higher can recognize the lower. So it is existentially impossible. What history are you talking about? History cannot go against existence and its principles.The first thing to be remembered – which is very simple – is, the man who has eyes can recognize the man who has no eyes; he can see that this man is blind. But do you think the blind can recognize that this man has eyes? That is sheer impossibility. And this is about the physical eyes….When you think of the inner eye, the third eye, then it becomes absolutely impossible. Those who live on higher planes of consciousness are simply beyond your grasp. You cannot see them, you cannot understand them. Your intelligence is not capable of understanding planes of silence, meditation, experience of bliss.You live in suffering; you know the language of suffering. That’s all your experience is. You can understand somebody is in suffering, but you cannot understand when you come across somebody who is in blissfulness, “the blessed one.” How will you recognize him? From where will you find the criterion? What measurements do you have? In your experience there is nothing similar to it, not even a faraway echo.You must have heard an ancient fable: A frog from the ocean was just on a pilgrimage – it must have been on religious pilgrimage. He comes across a well; he is thirsty – it has been a long journey, a hot day – he takes a jump into the well and drinks to his heart’s content. There lives another frog in the well, who is sitting in his corner looking at the stranger and his arrogant behavior – without permission, not even saying, “Can I come in, Sir?” And this is my territory….But he waited: let the stranger first drink – he can see the day is hot. When the stranger is satisfied, he looks around. Seeing another frog, he says, “Hello, how are you?” Then they start a conversation, and one thing leads to another. The frog from the ocean asks the other frog, “Have you ever been to the ocean? Come sometime – I invite you. I have been your guest without asking you; I was so thirsty that I could not take care of manners before I drank water. But you are welcome – you come to the ocean.”The frog in the well looked with suspicion, as strangers are always looked on with suspicion…the way we are looked on with suspicion. We are the people from the ocean. Oregon is a small well. The attorney-general of Oregon is nothing but a frog, worried that these strangers have suddenly appeared; afraid, and out of fear he is going nuts, doing everything illegal.The frog in the well looked with suspicion. He said, “Ocean? Never heard about such a thing! How big is your ocean?”The frog from the ocean said, “It is very difficult to describe.”The frog from the well laughed; he said, “Ha ha! I knew it, I knew it from the very beginning: how can you describe a thing which does not exist? If a thing exists it can be described. It is simple; if it exists, then howsoever difficult the description will be, you cannot say that it cannot be described. It is not indescribable; it must have some attributes.”The frog from the ocean is at a loss. The frog from the ocean is always at a loss because he has known something which this poor frog has never dreamt of. But the poor frog thinks the frog from the ocean crazy. He says, “I will help you. I will take a jump, and I will ask you, ‘Is your ocean this big?’ If not, I will take another jump: ‘Is your ocean this big – two jumps of mine?’“He jumped one fourth of the well. The frog from the ocean said, “Forgive me – this kind of measurement cannot be applicable.” But the frog from the well jumped a second time, a third time, a fourth time – that was the whole area of the well. And then the stranger said again, “Excuse me, your well is too small – and the ocean is so vast. Your well cannot be used as a measurement.”“The well so small?” – the frog from the well was really offended, just the way the Oregonians are offended. Their religion so small? Their Jesus Christ so small? Their churches meaningless? Their Bible nothing but superstitions?But he felt compassionate. Strange is the story – that the well’s frog felt compassionate toward the frog from the ocean. He said, “You must be mad, you must have dreamt it. Once in a while I also dream of bigger things; but there exists nothing bigger than this well. And don’t try to seduce me – I am not such a fool as to go in search of utopias. You just get lost! I don’t want to hear more of this nonsense. There has never been anything bigger than this well. Since my very birth I have seen…. My father was here; my forefathers have lived here, and they have all told us that this is all the world is. There is no world outside this well.”But the frog from the well can be understood; and the frog from the ocean also can be understood – he is also very much embarrassed. He cannot answer; he can only show. He invites the frog from the well, but he refuses. He says, “Unless you convince me that something as vast as you are talking about exists in reality, unless I am intellectually convinced of it, I cannot leave my beautiful well.”How to convince him? The only way is to invite him. But he is not ready to accept the invitation before being convinced. The frog from the ocean is doing the right thing. He is saying, “Come with me and I can show it to you. I cannot explain, I cannot describe, I cannot convince you. This is my fault, but because of my fault don’t deny the existence of the ocean. That’s dangerous: you are denying your own possibilities – that you can live in an unlimited space with tremendous beauty, thewind, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars….”I am not interested in convincing you that the ocean exists; I am interested in showing you that you are capable of being part of an oceanic existence.”You are asking me, “History says….” I don’t know which history you mean. I have read enough to destroy my eyes – I have never come across any history where it describes that when a great religious master appears, lesser leaders recognize him and come to him.Who had come to Jesus? Yes, there is one story only: three wise men from the East. Their names are not known. If they were really wise people, at least their names must have been known. If they were so wise, so insightful, as to see in the seed the whole future of the tree, of the flowering and the fruits and the birds and their nests and all the beauty of it, their names must have been known in the East.But in the Eastern scriptures there is no mention of any wise men going to Jerusalem to pay tribute to a recently-born child who is going to become a messiah. This is not history – this is fiction. And why do they have to bring three wise men from the East? Weren’t there any wise men in Jerusalem? There were so many rabbis, the high priest…and Jews had their own tradition of intellectual, philosophical growth. Not a single Jew recognized Jesus.What to say of recognition? – he is born in a stable. Because it was a religious festival time, all the hotels, all the caravansaries were packed with people; and he was going to be born to a very poor couple, Joseph and Mary – Joseph was just a poor carpenter.No door opened. Joseph begged: “My wife is pregnant, and her time has come to give birth. It may happen any moment, and I am standing on the street. Just for the night give us some shelter.”Perhaps all caravansaries were packed with people, all hotels were packed with people; it is never so. In India there is perhaps the biggest gathering that happens anywhere in the world. It is after each twelve years in Allahabad, where three rivers – the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati – meet. This meeting of three is thought to be very symbolic, so Allahabad has become the most sacred meeting place. After each twelve years there is a huge gathering; millions and millions of people gather there. Naturally all hotels are packed, all caravansaries are packed. There is no place anywhere.I had been there, the first time when I was only twelve or thirteen; with my uncles I went there. And the whole day, from morning – in the morning we had arrived; my two uncles were with me – up to evening, we looked for some place for the night because we were going to stay there for at least three days. The festival continues for one month.I was just a child so I simply remained silent. They tried their hardest. Finally, in a hotel, I said to them, “You please keep quiet. The whole day you have wasted; let me talk to the manager.”They said, “What can you do in this matter? It is a problem: hundreds of people are wandering about; there is no place. Ten million people have already arrived, and people are continually arriving. Hundreds of special planes are running from all over the country; thousands of special buses, planes…. Everybody is going to Allahabad. What will you do?”I said, “Just watching you the whole day…. Give me a chance.”They said, “Okay.”I asked the manager, “Is there really no place?”He said, “There is no place at all.”I said, “If the prime minister comes to the hotel, will there be a place or not?”He said, “For the prime minister or for the president or for the governor we have emergency rooms. Of course they are empty.”So I said, “Give us the emergency room, and if the prime minister comes we will immediately vacate it – there is no problem in it. If nobody comes, you need not be worried.” He looked here and there, he could not find what to say.I said, “If you need the room, we promise as you get the information…. It is not going to be that the prime minister will come directly to you, his secretary will phone. As you get the information…. And you are not the best hotel in this city. Don’t be foolish. If the prime minister comes, he will be staying in the Hilton, in the Oberoi. He is not going to come to your third-class hotel. But if he comes, we are willing – we can give it in writing – we will leave immediately.”He said, “Your argument seems to be right. In fact in my whole life they have never come, and I don’t think they are ever going to come. You are right – they always go to the Hilton. And we are really foolish, we are keeping the most beautiful room empty. You just get into it. You are the first person who has made me aware that we are wasting our best room for years. Now I am not going to bother.”I told my uncles, “Get in!” And I told the manager, “Because I am the first person who has given you the idea, just be courteous. Anyway your room was empty for years; you give us three days more.”He said, “Absolutely right. You are our guests: for three days you live here.” And we became really very friendly, so friendly that he would take us in his car to the festival place which was almost ten miles away and impossible to get any taxi or any bus to: everything was overloaded. My uncles were very much impressed for the first time.They said, “For the first time we are impressed; otherwise we always thought you are a nuisance. But sometimes nuisance works. The way you were arguing with that manager, we were thinking, ‘He is going to throw us out! At least during the whole day the hotel-owners were polite; this man is going to throw us out – he will kick us out of the place!’ But it is strange, that you managed.”I said, “It was so simple, and the man is intelligent: he understood.”Joseph and Mary could not find a wise manager. Jesus may have helped; he was just there inside the belly of Mary – he could have managed some miracle. He was born in a stable – this is history. The three men coming from the East is fiction because no Eastern source refers to them. And even the Christian sources don’t mention their names. The reason is obvious: Whose name were they going to mention?If they mention a Hindu, Hindus will deny it and say, “This is nonsense – no wise man has gone from India.” If they mention a Buddhist, Buddhists are going to deny it; if they mention a Jaina, Jainas are going to deny it. Hence the best way is, don’t mention the names of those three anonymous fools. And they brought immensely valuable gifts for the just-born child….Except in this fiction, who is mentioned in the Christian sources as a lesser religious leader who recognizes Jesus as the messiah and brings his following and becomes a follower of Jesus? Those three fools were also to come when Jesus was just born. All that is left about those three fools is, when the first fool entered – it was a stable – he hit his head. It was a small door; because he hit his head he said, “Jesus!”Mary said to Joseph, “This seems to be a very good name for the child.”This is the only impact those three wise men have left on the world; so whenever you get hit, you say, “Jesus!”I have not heard of any religious leader coming to Buddha and recognizing him, or to Mahavira and recognizing him, or to Mohammed or to Moses or to Zarathustra. Yes, people had come but they were not religious leaders.For example, Sariputta came to Buddha, Mahakashyap came to Buddha – but they were not religious leaders, they were great philosophers. A philosopher is always a thinker; a philosopher is always ready to accept something which seems logical, rational, even though it goes against the whole philosophy of his past. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. He has not arrived; he is making all the efforts to arrive. In all those efforts, this was also an effort.Sariputta had gone to many people in search of the truth. He wanted to find someone whose presence could give him just a little taste of what religion was. Arguments he had heard enough; arguments he had given enough. He was a well-known philosopher in India, and he had defeated many philosophers – which was a unique tradition in India. It must prevail all over the world.Philosophers used to move from one place to another place, challenging other philosophers – an open challenge. Thousands heard them – and this raised the whole intelligence of the country. When two giants are struggling, going to finer and finer logical levels, splitting hairs, certainly if thousands have come to watch…. It is better than to watch a bullfight or Mohammed Ali’s boxing. The people who are watching boxing can’t be accepted as human beings. Yes, they may be Americans, but not human beings; they are a subhuman species.Darwin was continually concerned about one thing his whole life. He lived with the problem; he died with the problem; it remained unsolved because the person who could have solved it was not there. I could have solved the problem – it is so simple. The problem was that monkeys became man, but there must have been a middle link. Monkeys cannot just jump down and become man; first they will become something in the middle: half monkey, half man. About this problem poor Charles Darwin continually worried. It was so simple: Americans – they are the middle link! There is no need to be worried about the problem, it is so simple. It just needs a simple man like me to state it.But in India they were not watching football matches, boxing, bullfights – all that nonsense was not there. Huge crowds gathered to listen to great philosophical discussions in utter silence. Of course when a man like Shankara or Ramanuja is arguing, it is time to be silent. Nobody will even whisper, nobody will move for days. Every day the discussion will continue until one is defeated, and you will have to accept that. They are what I call cultured human beings. When one was defeated, he accepted it; there was no need for a judge. That’s what I call culture. There was no need for a judge to decide who has won the debate. The people who were fighting tooth and nail, they themselves decided who is victorious and who is defeated.This was honest, sincere. It was not just an effort to defeat the other, it was a search for truth; and if the other has better arguments than you, certainly he deserves to be your master. Then the defeated one will become the follower of the victorious, and all the followers of the defeated one automatically will become followers of the victorious. This way philosophers roamed around the country with thousands of disciples. And wherever they came, they created a climate of great depth, intensity, alertness.But these were philosophers: your question says, “lesser religious leaders.” That has never happened. Not a single religious leader came to Buddha or Mahavira. Religious leaders went against them – that’s history. In fact the lesser the religious leader was, the more he was against them, because his whole profession was at stake. Can’t you understand simple business?The religious leaders were doing a tremendously beautiful business: no investment, all profit, no income tax. The religious profession is really the only superb business. You don’t have to invest any money into it, no risk of losing, no risk of the dollar going down. Wherever the dollar goes it doesn’t matter; it is always profit, never loss. In religious business it is always profit.And you don’t have to manufacture any commodity; you don’t have to create factories and bring labor and labor problems – strikes and lock-outs. No problems at all. You deal in invisible commodities. Nobody can see the god, nobody can see the angels, nobody can see the heaven. It is really a strange business.I have heard of a Jewish real estate man who was very angry with one of his agents; he was boiling! This man was always late coming to the office: the real estate man was looking again and again at the clock and the agent was still not there. But he could not even fire him because he was the best agent. The agent really did miracles, so he could not afford to lose him. He used to boil and be angry when the agent was not there, but when he came the real estate man would become absolutely cool and smiling. The agent came, but today it was really too much, what he had done. The owner of the firm said, “Today you have done really too much! Do you think people are blind? – you sold to a man one property which is six feet under water, and you told the man that it can become a beautiful place to live. The poor man purchased it, and yesterday he was here: when he saw the property…. And I have been waiting for you; I could not sleep the whole night thinking that this is too much. I know you are a great artist in seducing people’s minds, but this is too much! Sooner or later he is going to see his property six feet under water. Where is he going to make his house?”The agent said, “Cool down – don’t be worried. I have seen him – I have sold him two boats also. Those two boats we were stuck with for years, they are rotten. So just cool down and smile again. When I do something I have my whole plan. I knew that this was going to happen, that he would come; but if he is foolish enough that without seeing the land he purchases it – I trusted in his foolishness, that he would purchase those two boats also once he sees the land. But even though the land was six feet under water, it was there. It is Jewish business, but at least the land existed. Those two boats were rotten; they will not float, but at least they were boats.”But religious business goes far higher than anything Jews have ever done. It sells you things which don’t exist. It sells you heaven.I used to go to the university, and one day my car was stopped by a beautiful lady. I never give lifts to anyone, particularly beautiful ladies, because it is easy to give them lifts but it is difficult then to get rid of them. But she was standing just in front of me so I had to stop. I said to her, “Lady, this is not the way to get a lift; and anyway I never give lifts. Just standing in front….”She said, “I don’t want a lift, I just want to give you this little piece of literature about our religion” – she was a Christian. She handed over a few pamphlets. I just looked: the first pamphlet was a beautiful house, a picture of a beautiful house surrounded by beautiful gardens, a river flowing by the side. And the pamphlet had the caption, “Do you want a house like this?”I became interested; I said, “Why not!” Otherwise I was not going to read that nonsense, but because of that house I turned the page and it said, “It is in the garden of God.” I said, “That’s perfectly good: if you follow Jesus Christ you will have such beautiful houses to live in near God Himself.” This is real salesmanship!Religion is doing the greatest criminal act in the world: deceiving people on such a mass scale that whenever a really religious person appears, all religious leaders go against him, nobody goes to him.Of what history are you talking? I don’t think you have written your question consciously. History says only one thing, that whenever there was a man of the caliber of Buddha or Jesus or Socrates, then all religious people – the so-called established, organized churches – went against them.It was the religious people who crucified Jesus. Not a single rabbi ever came to him, except one, and that too, in the middle of the night when the whole city was asleep – a rabbi called Nicodemus. He was a professor in the Jewish university of Jerusalem…a learned man, but he could not gather courage to come in the daylight. In the middle of the night he woke Jesus.Jesus was surprised. He said, “You could have come in the day, anytime – I am just staying next to your house.”Nicodemus said, “Speak silently! If any of your disciples wakes up and sees me here, there will be trouble.”Jesus said, “What trouble?”Nicodemus said, “I don’t want to be seen with you. I don’t want it to be known that I had gone to you to ask a few things.”Jesus said, “If you don’t have even this much courage then forget all about religion. If you cannot come even in the daytime, if you are such a coward, then nobody can be of any help to you. In the search for truth the most significant qualification is courage – and you don’t have any courage.“Go home, and unless you are born again, remember: you will not be able to understand what religion is. ‘Unless you are born again’ – what does that mean? It means unless you drop your cowardliness and become just the opposite of what you are today – a courageous man…. That is rebirth, and unless you are reborn again, don’t come to me; I cannot help you. If you want to be helped, at least you should prepare the ground.”Except this Nicodemus, no rabbi ever approached Jesus – and Nicodemus approached him in the night. It would have been better that he also had not approached Jesus, because he shows the cowardliness of your so-called religious people and who crucified Jesus? The high priest and the supreme command of rabbis who overruled the whole community of Jews – they decided that he should be crucified.There were many attempts made on Buddha’s life by religious people, and I have always suspected – although it is impossible now after twenty-five centuries to find out whether my suspicion is right or wrong, but there is a ninety-nine percent possibility that it is right…. It has to be right because some fundamental principles are involved. Buddha died of food poisoning. I suspect he was given poison, that it was not a coincidence.There were many attempts on the life of Mahavira. Yes, in India it was not as primitive as it was in Judea. Even the cross on which they hanged poor Jesus was not a piece of art – so ugly. At least they should have shown some respect. Even if they were in disagreement, even if they were going to crucify him, they should have found something beautiful – just out of respect for a human being. But no, what did they do?For miles they forced him to carry his own cross – which is really ugly, big. Jesus was young, thirty-three years old, and healthy, but he fell down three times; the weight of the cross was so much.When you are killing a person at least you should be a little more courteous, a little more human. You are doing your worst, but do it the best way you can. There was no need for the cross to be carried by Jesus himself, and there was no need to go miles uphill. Anywhere else it would have been perfectly good, he would have died anywhere else. The cross would have worked – there was no need to go on that hill, Golgotha. But it was purposely done so he had to carry that load uphill. They wanted to torture him as much as possible.Even in the most primitive societies, whenever a person is sentenced to death, at the last moment he is asked if he has any wish that he would like to be fulfilled. That is a simple courtesy. A man is going to die: why not let him die at least with the contentment that his last wish was fulfilled?This is almost universal.But Jews behaved very brutally. The reason was that Jesus was not an ordinary criminal. With ordinary criminals they were also courteous. In fact on that day there were three crucifixions happening: two were of murderers, well-known criminals – who had been visitors to the prison many times, better known than Jesus himself.Those two criminals were going to be crucified, and Jesus. It was a privilege for the priest, the high priest of the Jewish temple, that he could release one man every year from being crucified. And every year he had released criminals.The Roman governor-general, Pontius Pilate, was hoping…it seemed natural that he would ask for Jesus’ release, because those two were such notorious criminals, and Jesus had done nothing illegal, no harm to anybody, was an innocent man. Yes, he talked outrageously, but that does not harm anybody; and if you don’t want to hear, you don’t hear it, you just plug your ears and go home. You ignore him. He is simply a talker, he is not a doer.But it was a shock and a surprise that Jesus was not released. The high priest asked for a murderer who had committed seven murders to be released. Strange it seems, but no; deep down there is logic. The murderer is not a danger to the priest; in fact he is a help. Anybody who creates crime, anybody who creates misery, anybody who makes people suffer, is a help to the religious leaders, to the organized church.Jesus was dangerous. Although he had done nothing, he had been saying things which could become dynamite and destroy the whole organized religion: he had to be stopped.And you tell me that history proves that whenever there was a religious man, lesser leaders of religion had recognized him. Nobody has ever been recognized by lesser religious leaders or bigger bigshots.Buddha was not recognized, while he was alive, as being religious; on the contrary, he was condemned by all other religions that were established as sabotaging the very roots of religion. And in fact he was sabotaging, not the roots of religion, but the roots of the organized religion – which is nothing but an exploitation mechanism.But when Buddha died, then things changed. Then the same people recognized him. History never says that Buddha was recognized by religious people while he was alive, but it certainly says he was recognized after his death. But let me tell you the way he was recognized.Hindus accepted him as one of the incarnations of God. They had to. It was just impossible to ignore him, because he had left such a great influence over India that almost the whole country was under his wings; Hindus had completely lost all hold over the masses. So this was a political strategy: recognize Buddha. And now there is no danger in recognizing him – he is dead. Now he can be recognized as not only religious but as an incarnation of the Hindu god, so the people who have become Buddhist can be under the Hindu fold again. Bring Buddha himself into the Hindu fold. And he is dead; he cannot do anything. He cannot resist; he cannot say, “I don’t want to come into your fold; I have been always against you – I have fought my whole life against you. For forty-two years I have argued against all your scriptures.”But Buddha was no longer alive. It was easy to bring him into the Hindu fold; but in a very cunning way it had to be done because his statements were against the Hindu religion. His whole philosophy – it was not a question of one or two sentences here and there. They could have been edited, they could have been commented on, their meaning would have been changed – everything is possible – but the whole philosophy…. For forty-two years he taught the same thing continuously – that the Vedas are rubbish.And Hindus say the Vedas are written by God. If God is writing rubbish…. Buddha was continually against all Hindu rituals, saying that this was simple exploitation of poor people. There is not a single sentence in favor of Hinduism. In forty-two years of continual talking, not a single statement for Hinduism; all are against. How can you manage this man?But Hindus are of a very ancient religion, and have been logical for centuries; they can play with logic – they manage. They invented a simple story and changed the whole substance of Buddha’s philosophy…changed his whole life’s efforts by a small story.The story is that God created the world; He also created at the same time, hell and heaven. Heaven for those who do good, virtuous acts, believe in God, have faith in the Vedas – the holy scriptures of the Hindus – follow the Hindu priest from birth to death; they will reach heaven. And those who deny all these things will fall into hell and the tortures of hell.Centuries upon centuries pass; the man in charge of hell became tired and bored because nobody came there. You see the beautiful story? He approached God and he said, “What is the point of keeping this space – nobody ever comes. And I have been waiting and waiting and getting more and more bored. And I have not committed any sin. You have made me in charge of the place; it seems only I am suffering in hell. I don’t want this job – you can give it to anybody.God said, “Don’t be so much in a hurry. You should have come before. For me, centuries mean nothing because it is an eternal existence; centuries are not even seconds. You should not have waited that long. For you it looks so long, for me it seems as if I have just created hell and heaven and the earth. My time-scale is different from your time scale.”This story in fact was invented twenty-four centuries ago, but it contains the whole content of Albert Einstein’s philosophy of relativity. God said, “The time-scale in hell is one thing; in heaven it is different. For me of course it is totally different.” In hell even a single moment seems like a century. And we can understand it….When you are in pain, just a single moment seems to be so long. You start suspecting that perhaps your clock has stopped, or is it some conspiracy against you by the clock, that it is going so slow? Pain makes time longer. The greater the pain, the longer you will feel the time.Just the opposite happens with pleasure: it makes time shorter. The greater the pleasure, the shorter the time; hence, in hell, moments turn into centuries, and in heaven, centuries turn into seconds. And beyond these both is the Hindu concept of moksha, ‘ultimate freedom,’ where no time exists. It is all eternity; hence there is no question of small, long. There is no question of relativity – it is beyond relativity.But the very idea of scales of time is the whole content of Albert Einstein’s philosophy, that time is not something fixed; it is relative, relative to many things – particularly to pain and pleasure.God said, “You should have come, knowing perfectly well that you are in hell where each moment looks like centuries; and without your coming here there was no way for me to know. I was thinking you must be enjoying.”He said, “I cannot remain there unless you start sending people. Heaven is full of people. There are people who are not dying because they are on the waiting list! Death is simply waiting; when there is space she can take them. And on the other hand I am sitting there with all the space, and nobody is coming.God said, “You go back – I will manage…. I will come back to the world in a new incarnation – as Gautam the Buddha – and I will teach people everything that leads to hell.”This is superb sophistry, cunningness. Hindus have defeated Jews. Putting Jesus on the cross seems to be stupid. This is the real cross, and with what art they have managed it! So Buddha, on the one hand, is declared an incarnation of God and taken back into the fold with all his following naturally becoming part of the Hindus; and yet they have condemned Buddha and his philosophy, because whosoever follows that philosophy is going to fall into hell. It is God’s strategy to fill the space which is lying down there empty.And the story says that since Buddha’s time, things have changed to just the reverse, heaven is becoming emptier every day, and hell is overcrowded. Now people are on the waiting list for hell. You can see them in the hospitals, hanging their legs up. What are these people doing? They are on a waiting list! And the doctors are going to push them as hard as possible on respirators, on drugs…people are in coma; their brains have died, only their bodies are there – but what to do? Hell is so full that unless there is some space, unless some people are released from hell – unless some people have received their full punishment and are released – the queue cannot move.There will be more and more hospitals, there will be more and more people hanging upside down, there will be more and more doctors. It is nothing but in the service of death, because death cannot take these people. Where to take them? They are not worthy of heaven, and hell has no space.Such a beautiful story, and yet with such ugly intentions. Can you see the trick? But when Buddha was alive, even to accept him as religious was not possible; and when he was dead he was an incarnation of God.The same is the situation with all religious authentically, existentially religious people: no organized religion, their heads, the leaders, their priests, their popes, have ever gone to them. They cannot – they want to destroy these people.You are asking me: “Is something like this happening here too?” It has never happened; how can it happen here? The same thing is happening here as it has happened always. Intelligent people are coming, people who are in search of truth are coming; people who are seekers – who want to know on their own, who want to feel and experience – they are coming, but not religious leaders.All the religious leaders are against me. They would like to crucify me, they would like to poison me – they have made attempts on my life. But I have learned much since Buddha’s time. Twenty-five centuries is enough – I have learned much. If I know that in Jerusalem they are going to crucify me, I am the last person to go there. Why should I go to Jerusalem? – unless I want to be crucified. That’s why I say Jesus must be carrying some suicidal instinct, some will to die.Perhaps seeing that nobody listens to him, nobody understands him – only a few illiterate, uneducated poor people have gathered around him hoping that they will inherit the kingdom of God…. But nobody of real caliber ever comes. Perhaps he got tired; perhaps he was too impatient. And you can see it in Christian gospels that this man is impatient. The way he talks is the way of an impatient mind.He tells people, “In this very life, in your life, you are going to see the glory of God.” This is utter nonsense. And now there is no need to prove it – it is proved already. Twenty centuries have passed: how many generations in twenty centuries? – at least a hundred generations. If you think that one generation changes in twenty years, and in one century, five generations change – in twenty centuries at least one hundred generations have existed and disappeared.Jesus was telling his contemporaries, “In your very life, in this very life, you will see the glory of God descending. You will see the kingdom of God attained by the poor.”He was teaching only for three years – not more than that – but it seems that even in three years he became utterly tired. Impatient people become really tired very soon. Buddha was teaching for forty-two years; Mahavira was teaching for forty years; Lao Tzu was teaching for sixty years – but not a single statement of impatience. Even in the time after teaching for sixty years, Lao Tzu is not impatient.In these centuries, which are crystal-clear before me…. I don’t have any suicidal instinct because to me the suicidal instinct means that something in you has still remained unreligious. Religion can only be life, equivalent to life. There cannot be even a small dark corner for death, and death is….If I am still alive it is not because the twentieth century has become more civilized, no…because people are being killed, people are being shot – people who are not more dangerous than me. Now, what danger is Mahatma Gandhi? It was just unnecessarily wasting one cartridge. That old man was going to die soon himself. But he had also started to think of dying.Before India’s freedom he used to say, “I want to live one hundred and twenty-five years.” After India’s freedom he started saying, “I feel that it is time for me to be finished; perhaps I am no longer needed.” That suicidal instinct was arising in him.I don’t have any desire to die. That does not mean that I want to live forever. It simply means that as long as life is, I enjoy; if death comes, I will enjoy it too. But I am not going to Jerusalem knowing perfectly well that they are preparing a crucifixion.It happened in Amritsar when I was getting out of the train, I was blocked. Two hundred Hindu chauvinist people wanted me to get back into the train and not enter Amritsar. The people who had come to take me had no idea that there would be two hundred people, so only twenty or twenty-five people were there just to take me home. And there was to be a meeting immediately – just time enough for me to take a cup of tea and go to the meeting. So everybody was in the meeting – ten thousand people waiting there – and these twenty-five people surrounding me in case those two hundred Hindu chauvinists do any harm to me. I could see in the faces of those two hundred people nothing but murder.The stationmaster by chance happened to be one of my lovers. He phoned to the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, “This is the situation: We are not moving the train, because if we move the train there will immediately be trouble. We are not moving the train. Those people are insisting that he should get into the train and he is not going to get into the train, so immediately send a few temple guards.The temple guards have naked swords, so a few temple guards came. As they came the crowd started dispersing, because naked swords – there would have been a massacre. And for the first time I had to be escorted, protected from all sides with naked swords, into the city.I said, “This is my last time in this city.”They said, “Why?”I said, “Because I don’t want this kind of nonsense.” And that was not only my last time in that city, I stopped moving altogether. I said, “Those who want to understand me will come, and those who do not want to understand me – in fact why should I interfere in their lives? If they don’t want me to be in their city…. It is their city: if they want to remain idiots forever they have the freedom, and I respect their intention. I cannot force them to be enlightened. Let them remain endarkened – this is their choice. Why should I bother?”That day became decisive: I was not going to move anywhere. Still, even when I stopped moving absolutely, one man made an attempt on my life. Many of you were present there; seven thousand sannyasins were present there. The police were present there, the police officers were present there, the police commissioner himself was present there – because they got some information: some anonymous person phoned to say that a certain gang was going to throw a knife at me.So they arrived before the gang arrived. They all witnessed the man throwing the knife. But you know, Indians are lousy. It seems that man has never thrown anything in his life: the knife fell some eight feet away from me. Even I felt sorry.This country – how long can it remain free, with such people? If he wanted to kill me then he should have practiced a little bit. Eight feet away…even eight inches cannot be allowed. And what kind of knife? When I saw the knife I simply laughed: Indians will always remain without any intelligence it seems.The knife was, at the most, capable of cutting vegetables. That too it has not been used at least for a few decades. It could not kill a man at all, not even a man like me who is absolutely fragile. But seven thousand eyewitnesses, twenty policemen eyewitnesses, ten police officers, one police commissioner – still the court freed the man.If the court can simply release the man – not even a three-day punishment or a five-rupee punishment – with all the evidence against him…. The court was under pressure from the political sources to free that man; perhaps political and religious sources were behind him.The man was completely free. I said, “If this is the case, then to remain in this country means going to Jerusalem. I am not interested in committing suicide or being available to be murdered. My work is not finished, my people are growing. It is still a nursery.I have to see it become a wild garden; only then can I say good-bye. Before that, to leave you will be an act not of love, not of trust, not of compassion.It is very difficult for me to go on living in this body, because my work was finished long ago. I am not sick; I am not suffering from any diseases the way medicine will understand. Of course, medicine will understand in its own way that there is diabetes, that there is asthma and this and that; they will find their own way. But I know I am not medically sick – of course I am not medically fit either.My problem is existential, not medical. My work is finished. My ship has arrived long ago; it is waiting there. Where? Do you know? Portland! That’s why I had to come so far. The ship was waiting in Portland. I have to be nearby: any moment the captain of the ship can say, “Enough!”My problem is existential.There is nothing for me to go on breathing for. There is no need. What has to happen has happened; it is already past.For you there is future:For me there is no future…no present even.In my inner world all stopped long ago. That’s why there is a disparity between my body and my life. That disparity creates many kinds of sicknesses. That disparity has made my body very fragile.I am somehow hanging around; but I will insist on hanging around until you understand your responsibility, until you give me the proof that not only my inner work, but my outer work is also complete…that now I can leave without looking back…that I know now that the seeds I have sown will go on growing forever.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why has it happened that in the East, religion came to its highest flowering, and in the West the same has happened to science? Is there some difference of consciousness between the Eastern man and the Western man?Consciousness is one and can only be one.It is just like the light. East and West make no difference at all. Geography has no effect as far as consciousness is concerned.But it is true that in the East religion blossomed, reached to the highest peaks. The same was not the case with science in the East. It began its journey but it never reached to the peaks the same way as religion reached.Just the opposite has happened in the West. Religion is still primitive, just the beginnings, while science has taken a tremendous flight. Naturally the question is very relevant, but it has nothing to do with any difference between Eastern and Western man and his consciousness. It has to do with some other factors.One thing that is most significant to understand is that religion happens only when a civilization, a culture, reaches to the state of ultimate luxury – the omega point beyond which you cannot conceive that things can be better. All your physical needs are fulfilled, all your psychological needs are fulfilled. Only then do you start feeling the spiritual urge.Religion in fact is the only luxury, because it happens when you are rich in every possible way.Blessed are not the poor, because they shall never know the kingdom of God; the question of inheritance does not arise.Blessed are the rich, those rich in every dimension of life.They need not bother about God; the kingdom of God is theirs, not God’s. But the basic thing is the richness in all dimensions.This will help you to understand why East and West have developed differently. The East is very ancient; Western history starts with Jesus Christ. That’s why you use “before Christ, “after Christ” – Christ is the demarcating line. Before Christ it is prehistory, mythology, there is no evidence for it. After Christ things start becoming more factual; you have evidence for them.But Christ is only two thousand years old. Centuries before Western history began the East had reached to its highest peak of material richness – in all dimensions. Not only had it reached to its ultimate peak of development, it had also fallen. This all happened before the West started its history. In comparison to the East the West is childish.The East is ancient. This is the reason why religion reached its highest peak in the East. Science too began there. For example, arithmetic began in India many centuries before Jesus Christ. Astronomy began in India many centuries before Jesus Christ. Medicine began in India. Printing, the mechanism to print, began in China one thousand years before Jesus Christ. Guns, machine guns, all were invented in China.If we look into the past of the East there is every evidence that they might have invented something like airplanes. There is so much evidence that it cannot be simply overlooked.As far as richness is concerned, India was known all over the world as a golden bird. Columbus, who stumbled on and discovered America, was not trying to discover America, remember. He had started his journey to go to India. There were connections between the West and India. Columbus was trying to reach India by a new route because of the scientific discovery of the fact that the earth is a globe.Columbus thought, “If it is a globe then even if you move in the opposite direction, sooner or later you will reach India. And if you go on moving, finally you will come back to your home, because the earth is round.”And when he saw, for the first time, American soil, he thought it was India; he thought he had reached India. That’s why those poor people of America are still called “Red Indians.” They don’t like it, they have never called themselves Red Indians. They are not Indians. It is Columbus’ mistake that they are still carrying. Columbus thought that he had arrived in India from the long route, proving the theory that the earth is round. Everybody who had any adventurous spirit was headed toward India because all kinds of riches were there, easily available.We have enough evidence that at the time of Mahabharata – which happened three thousand years before Jesus Christ – something like nuclear weapons were used. So it is not that science had not developed – but it was prevented; its direction was changed.Seeing its destructiveness, seeing that it is against ecology, seeing that sooner of later it would destroy humanity itself…all scientific movement was directed into other dimensions. For example, yoga, Tantra, ayurveda – these are all scientific methods, but not against nature, not against man; they are creative. And of course people were so rich and the soil was so rich and fertile, and the population was so small, and the land was so vast….You will be surprised to know that even my maternal grandfather received land free from the government because the land was so available and the people so few. It was difficult to find a market for land. Just my maternal grandfather…it was not very long ago, at the most a hundred years. Just a hundred years ago fifteen acres of land were given by the government free of charge. That was the way.In India even in my early childhood, milk was freely available. To think of selling milk was inhuman, ugly, for the simple reason that there was so much milk in the country. Who was going to purchase it? And secondly, to sell milk looks bad because milk is nourishment, and if somebody is in need of nourishment and you are doing business, you are trying to exploit his hunger, his thirst. Food was not sold. If you asked for food you were invited to be a guest. And this was in my childhood, just fifty years ago.I have seen my own mother distributing milk because there was so much – what to do with it? Every morning at my house there used to be a queue of people to receive milk – people who didn’t have their own cows – and as much as they wanted. This can give you an idea of what it would have been like in Buddha’s time.Now, India’s population is forty times more than in Buddha’s time. Naturally the land has become poor; people are starving and dying. What to say of not selling milk? – in the famine of Bengal, mothers sold their own children.Looking at India today you cannot comprehend what this country was in the past: millions of monks, Buddhist, Hindu, Jaina, all lived without doing anything. Only a very rich country could afford them; otherwise who was going to give these millions of people clothes, shelter, food? And they were not productive in any way, they were not doing anything. But they were not thought to be beggars; remember, they were respected, they were almost worshipped.If they receive food from you – you will be certainly surprised to know – first, if the monk is willing to receive food from you, it is a great blessing – to you. He receives the food from you and eats it and you have to be grateful. The monk will never thank you, you have to thank the monk. This strange tradition was there: first you give the food and your are fortunate if the monk accepts it. Then, because he has accepted it, you give something as a symbol of your gratitude; that is called dakshina. The country must have been immensely rich.Jaina monks used to go from one house to another, and people were standing in front of their houses welcoming them. But the monks had a certain idea: in their morning meditation they would decide where they were going to accept their food, what kind of a house, what kind of a situation. That was part of their religion, because if existence wants you to live, it will provide the situation. If existence does not want you to live, it will not provide the situation.Strange situations they would imagine, and they would go around the town. Everybody was begging them…but they would look for their situation. If their situation was fulfilled they would receive food; otherwise they would come back without food. The whole town would feel sad, unfortunate, that a monk had returned without food – “That simply shows that we are unfortunate people. We have missed a blessing that could have happened.”This luxurious, rich country was not only luxurious and rich in money, in gold, in precious diamonds, stones; it was also rich in music. It created one of the most perfect sciences of music. In five thousand years nothing has been added to it because it reached such perfection that there is no possibility of adding anything to it.For five thousand years thousands of musicians have tried to do something more, to bring something more to music, and have failed. And I don’t see that there is any possibility…. It simply reached its perfection. Whatever you can do is only new combinations – which are not in any way new; just from the old you gather fragments and make a new combination, a new composition – but it is not creation.Language reached its peak. There is no other language in the world which is more scientific than Sanskrit. It is so scientific that you cannot find fault with it. Every other language in the world looks very immature compared to Sanskrit.For example, you can see in English that you pronounce a word in one way, you spell it in another. Now what kind of stupidity is this? In Sanskrit you spell the word the way you pronounce it. There should not be two ways because this is unnecessary and very unscientific; it is creating unnecessary troubles for people. Sanskrit is perhaps the only language you can learn perfectly just by reading. You cannot do that with any other language.I don’t know much English. I know enough to hit people, but that is not much. But one thing I can see that English grammarians, linguistics experts, are not able to answer: b-u-t is but, and p-u-t is put. That seems to be strange. Either b-u-t should be boot, or p-u-t should be putt. There is no way to explain all these. In Sanskrit you cannot find a single example in which there is any difference between the pronunciation and the spelling.In English you have only twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Sanskrit has fifty-two, just double the amount of English. There cannot be more than fifty-two, that’s why Sanskrit has stopped at fifty-two. That exhausts the possibility of all kinds of sounds – fifty-two is the limit. Twenty-six is just the minimum, not the maximum, hence, it is such a difficulty to translate Sanskrit words into English – or just to write them in Roman letters, because in English there is only one “s”, in Sanskrit there are three. There are very subtle phonetic differences, but they are there.According to the Western historians, Sanskrit also reached to its ultimate peak of refinement in some prehistoric age; since then there has been no change. Not that they are against change; you cannot change it because it has been refined to the very last. All the finishing touches were done five thousand years ago.People were scientific, but their devotion was to human growth – in music, in art, in poetry, in drama, in dance.In India there are so many schools of dance, centuries old; so many schools of music, centuries old. And the teaching of dance or drama is not the way it is in the West; it is very religious. The man who teaches you drama, dance, music, is as much respected as a master is. And he is a master, because music is not only music; it is, deep down, meditation. It is music used for meditation.You may have come to learn music; you will return with something more, something more precious than you have every imagined. Music of course you will learn, but side by side something will start growing in you which is far more musical, which is the music of silence.Ordinary music is the music of sound.It is just playing with sound, creating rhythm with sound.Meditation is the rhythm of silence.Unless a master can teach music plus meditation he is not really a maestro, he is only a teacher, a mere teacher of music. He becomes a master of music when his music is an instrument to teach, to create, the space called meditation.The same is true about dance, the same is true about all the arts. Great sculpture exists in the East unparalleled anywhere else, but all the sculpture is devoted basically to mediation, in some way or other.You can see Roman sculpture – naked men, pornographic. And why naked men – because Romans were homosexuals; they thought the woman was not beautiful. The male, the athletic male, was thought to be the pinnacle of beauty; hence, you will not find in Roman sculpture women represented at all.The same was the case in Greece. And you will be surprised that even people like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, were all homosexuals. Homosexuality was thought to be a refinement, a more cultured thing because heterosexuality exists in animals, that is nothing special. The logic is perfect: All animals are heterosexuals, so what is great in it? If man is heterosexual he is just an animal.That’s how Aristotle has defined man, as the only political animal. In every other aspect he is animal; only politics is something that is more, a plus factor.But in India you will find sculpture a thousandfold greater, millions of temples with tremendously beautiful statues of men, of women – but all devoted basically to meditation. Just looking at the statue of Buddha you will feel some serenity within you – the proportion of the Buddha, the body, the posture the way he is sitting, the half-closed eyes. You just sit silently, look at the statue, and you will start falling into a silence.Gurdjieff used to call Eastern art “objective art” and Western art “subjective art.” He means by objective art, art which has some intrinsic quality which can be imparted for thousands of years. The work of art is a code word. After experiencing meditation for thousands of years, meditators have come to recognize that a certain posture, a certain way of sitting, a certain way of the eyes, can create in anybody a synchronicity, a sympathy; some sympathetic note can be stirred by the statue.In the East a statue is not made for its own sake. It is made as a code language for centuries to follow. Scriptures may disappear, languages may change, words may be interpreted. Doctrines can be wrongly interpreted, commented upon. There may be dispute about theories – and there has been – so they thought there must be a different way than language.Now what dispute can there be about the statue of a Buddha or Mahavira? There is no question of dispute, there is no need of any commentary. Anybody who is capable of sitting silently by the side of this statue will have a certain thing stirred in his heart. This is objective art.Picasso’s pictures are subjective art. Seeing a painting by Picasso…he has not considered you, who are going to see the painting. You are not taken into account at all. He has simply vomited his own madness on the canvas. It is simply vomit; hence you cannot go on looking at a Picasso painting for a long time. You will start feeling tense, your stomach will start feeling weird – because Picasso is not concerned with you, what happens to you, he is simply subjective. He is pouring out his own mind, what is happening to him; unconcerned about humanity or anybody. He is going crazy, that’s why his painting is crazy.Almost all the painters in the West have gone mad once or twice in their life, and have been put into mad asylums. Many of the Western painters have committed suicide. This has never happened in the East. There is not a single instance in ten thousand years that a painter, a musician, a poet, has been mad, or has committed suicide. The reason is, it was art on the surface, but meditation in depth. In the West it is just surface, there is no depth in it. And the surface is without any compassion, without any consideration, without any responsibility.When you compose music or poetry you are to understand that somebody will be reading it – what effect it is going to have on the person? Will it drive him sane or insane?I myself have been very interested in painting. From my very childhood I started many paintings but not a single painting have I left intact. I have burned all of them.One of my professors was a painter himself. I used to visit his studio, and I used to say sometimes, “This seems to be wrong. If you do a little change here then the whole impact of the painting will be different.”He started asking me, “Are you a painter? – because whatsoever you suggest, reluctantly I do it, and certainly it improves the painting. And by and by I have dropped my reluctance. I simply accept your suggestion. But this is possible only if you are a painter…because there are so many people coming here. Even my own students who are painters never suggest that this is wrong; just a slight change will do a miracle. And it does. So you have to explain to me the truth.”I said, “Yes, I am not a painter, but I paint.”He said, “What is the difference between being a painter and painting?”I said, “There is much difference: I don’t allow my paintings to be exhibited because I am still not in a position to create objective art; they are all subjective. They represent and reflect my mind, and what can my mind be to others? They are already burdened with mind; now, burdening them more is inhuman. So I paint because I enjoy painting. I love colors.”And I don’t know why Sagar University in India…. I have traveled all over India continually for thirty years, but I have never seen such colors in the sky as happens over the lake by the side of the university in Sagar. Never have I seen anywhere such splendor; the sunrise, the sunset, are just divine…without there being any God.I painted, and destroyed my paintings. Only a few friends have seen them. I allowed this professor to see a few of my paintings. He said, “You are mad – these paintings are far superior to mine. You can earn so much money, you can become world famous.I said, “I accept your first statement. You said, ‘You are mad’ – I am! That’s why I am not going to leave these footprints of a madman for others to travel and follow.” I have destroyed all those.I love poetry. I have written poetry. But I continued to destroy it. My basic standpoint was that unless I am no more, whatever I do is going to harm others. This is the Eastern way.Now it is unfortunate that when I disappeared, the desire to paint or to make a statue or to compose poetry all disappeared too. Perhaps they were just part of that madman who died. And I am happy that nothing of it survives.In the East they had reached, five thousand years ago, to such a peak in every direction and dimension that only religion was left to be an adventure. So those who had any adventurous spirit were attracted toward religion – the best, the chosen ones, the most intelligent, the genius, the giants, became interested in religion because there was nothing else left.These people, like Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna, Nagarjuna, Shankara – these people gave tremendous heights to religion, and all the best minds moved toward religion because that was the only challenge left. Everything else was being done by mediocre people. And they were doing perfectly well, there was no need….If Einstein had been born in Buddha’s time he would have been another Buddha, for the simple reason that that was the only challenge for a man like him. Mathematics was done by mediocre people, and they were doing perfectly well. There was no need for an Albert Einstein to get caught in a mediocre game. No, he would have moved in the same way as Buddha or Mahavira. All the best people were attracted toward religion; that’s why religion touched the pinnacles of height.But science was ignored, consciously ignored, because the people who had reached religious consciousness could see the destructiveness of science. They changed the direction of science. Rather than science becoming Allopathy, in the East it became ayurveda, it became acupuncture, it became yoga…. These are the same kind of people who, in the West, created Allopathy. They were the same kind of mind, but in the East they created acupuncture, they created herbal sciences.The word for medical science in the East is ayurveda. Even the word will show you the difference. In the West you call it “medicine.” Medicine means curing, healing, but can you see the implication: it does not mean health, it comes after the disease has already come in. It is a follow-up. First you are sick, then comes the doctor. The doctor follows sickness, with his bag of medicines.Ayurveda means the science of life. The very word has nothing to do with disease, sickness; it has something to do with life, health, longevity. It is positive, it is not negative. It shows you the way to remain healthy, to remain young as long as you want, to live longer if that’s what you want. Its focus is not on sickness, its focus is on health.In China, Confucius advised the emperor of China that doctors should be paid not for curing a sick man – that is dangerous because that means the doctor will like people to be sick so that he can cure them. If everybody remains healthy then only the doctor will be sick, he will die of hunger. So to create a system in which the doctor is paid by curing and healing people is to create a dilemma.The doctor’s business is to cure people, but his prayers will be that people should fall sick. There should be as many epidemics as possible.One doctor came to Mulla Nasruddin and said, “You have not paid me. I visited eight times to cure your child of smallpox; you have neither paid for my eight visits nor have you paid for my medicines. And you have some nerve, you go on in front of my medical clinic as if you own it.”Nasruddin said, “You should remember who started the epidemic – it was my child. You should pay me! Who made the whole school sick? In fact I own your medical clinic. My boy has done so much for you, and not even gratitude…. you should pay me, and remember that!”If the doctor is paid when people are sick, then Nasruddin is perfectly right, logically right. His boy has done such a great job making the whole city sick; all the doctors should pay him.Confucius suggested that doctors should be paid for keeping people healthy, not for curing them. Everybody should have a personal physician. Every body should register himself with one physician as his personal physician, and he should pay him every month a certain amount of money for keeping him healthy, If he becomes sick the money is not to be paid to the doctor any more.If the doctor cannot cure him then the doctor has to pay him because he is not able to cure him and he has to go to another doctor. Till the patient becomes healthy again the doctor has to pay for his medicines, his doctors, anything that is needed. Confucius turned the whole direction of medicine around.This is how it happened in the East with every science. Science was in the service of humanity, in the service of health, life. Yoga is devoted to making you almost a citadel against sickness. One who practices yoga is not supposed to be sick. If he is sick that means whatever he is doing with yoga, something is basically wrong.One hypocrite in India is Satya Sai Baba. I call him a hypocrite because he knows nothing of yoga. There is nothing wrong if you don’t know anything of yoga – I don’t. I can afford to be sick, nobody can object; it is my birthright to be sick. I don’t know yoga. But Satya Sai Baba declares himself a great yogi; then the problem arises. Then for his appendix operation he has to go to Goa secretly. And he has to pay ten times more to the doctor so the secret should not be known, because a great yogi going for an operation? What control has he over his physiology?But it is difficult to hide because his whole ashram became curious: where has Baba disappeared? His own people became curious about where he had gone. And after the operation he had to rest for two or three days in Goa. They found out, and the media and the press – everybody was there, and the doctor had to confess that he had done the operation.Eastern science was indicating something, it was saying that yoga is basically transforming your body in such a way that your resistance to sickness increases a thousandfold. It becomes impossible for sickness to enter you. This was a positive change in science.Tantra is basically spiritual sexology…because man’s mind is perverted throughout the world by religions teaching repression of sex. Tantra is the only science which teaches you expression of sex – not as indulgence, but as a spiritual discipline. This is a transformation of a biological phenomenon into spirituality.For example, Ramakrishna was one of the great Tantrikas of this century. The story is beautiful…. He had his first glimpse of superconsciousness when he was only fourteen. But that age, fourteen, is also the age when sexuality starts its journey. And he had his first experience of superconsciousness at the same time. He was coming home from the field – it was evening – and he was passing the lake that was between his hut and the field.It was rainy season – black clouds had gathered over the lake. Soon it was going to rain, so Ramakrishna was rushing toward his house – and just at that moment he saw a line of white cranes flying above the lake, against the backdrop of black clouds. It was a tremendously silent and beautiful moment. Both were reflected in the lake, the silent lake: the black clouds and the white cranes in a line, flying. He was struck by the beauty of the moment; he fell down and became unconscious. And from that day he became a different person. He was only fourteen….His parents certainly became worried, the whole village became worried: something had to be done. The boy was talking almost like a madman – who would think otherwise of a fourteen-year-old child if he starts speaking like the seers of the Upanishads, and talks as if he is a great wise man? They simply thought that he had gone crazy: “This boy we know. Only the other day he was simply an ordinary boy, and just in one day he has become a sage.” So they all thought – as it is thought all over India, if some trouble arises like this – the best way is marriage. It is the medicine for almost every kind of sickness. Perhaps the reason is that whenever you are in pain, if something of a bigger trouble happens, you forget the pain. For example, you have a headache and your house starts burning; do you think you will remember about the headache? – you will forget all about the headache. It simply means you needed a bigger headache, that’s all.So marriage is thought to be the cure of all kinds of sickness in India. But the parents were a little concerned. They thought that he was not going to say yes, he would not agree; but there seemed to be nothing else. The whole village suggested only one thing, marriage, so they finally asked him.His name at that time was Gadadhar. He became Ramakrishna when he became enlightened and his name was changed by his master. They asked Gadadhar, “Would you like to be married?”He said, “Yes, why not? Even great seers have married.”They said, “He is really crazy, completely crazy! ‘Great seers were married…’ he is saying. He does not know anything about marriage, and he says, ‘Yes, why not?’“ But the whole village said, “If he is saying yes, then why not? – let him be married. Marriage will bring him to his senses. All these great seers and strange things that he talks about, he will forget. He needs a beautiful girl. It is just the age.” They said, “He is a little young, and it is just a sexual upheaval in his mind that is making him say all these things.”So they arranged for him to see the girl – just in the next village there was a beautiful girl. Gadadhar was so happy when he was dressed in new clothes, and it was almost a procession which went to the other village to see the girl. His mother had put one silver rupee in his pocket “just in case you need it.” They were poor people – one rupee was a lot of money.The girl came; the way it happens in India is, the girl comes to put food in your plates. That is the only time you see her. When the girl came to put food in the plate of Ramakrishna, he took out his one rupee and put it at her feet. He touched her feet, and said, “Mother, you are really beautiful. The seers have said rightly.”His family and the villagers that had come said, “This boy – even marriage cannot cure him; he is beyond cure. Look at this nonsense – his own wife, and he is touching her feet, putting the rupee, and is saying that, “The great seers have said rightly that the woman is always a mother.”The family of the girl was also in a dilemma…what to do? This boy seems to be crazy, and looks nice, beautiful; but the way he has behaved – no boy has ever behaved. But they were poor, and this was a good chance. They married the girl. And Ramakrishna continued to have the same relationship his whole life: his wife Sharda, remained his mother. He continued to call her mother.He practiced Tantra with Sharda…he would put Sharda naked on a high pedestal and sit underneath just like a devoted son. This was an old and ancient method of Tantra: that if you can see in a beautiful naked woman your mother and still no desire arises, or if it arises you simply watch it pass. It will pass because nothing remains in the mind forever. The mind is in a constant flux – nothing remains stable, so don’t be worried if anything comes, just be watchful, but underneath let the basic idea remain – that of the mother.Yes, in the beginning there were, ideas. Ramakrishna was young and sexuality was there; but he watched, and he watched year in, year out – with the basic concept clear. Slowly, slowly all those ideas, when they are not received well, start disappearing. If a guest comes and you don’t even say, “Hello,” how long is he going to come to you?Soon the basic idea remained there. All sex ideas, desires disappeared. Sharda became his mother. It took years, every night, but it was a double-edged sword because while he was practicing, Sharda was also practicing – just an ancient Indian idea. If the husband is moving above sex, then the wife should follow him; she should be a shadow. She never objected, she never said anything like, “What nonsense is this?”As Ramakrishna grew, Sharda was also growing; their growth was simultaneous, so much so that when Ramakrishna died…. It is a custom in India – that the wife becomes a widow. She cannot use any symbols of a married woman: bangles, a tikas, colored clothes – only white saris without borders.But Sharda did not follow any of it. She continued to wear the bangles, colored saris; she continued to use the red mark on the forehead which declares that the woman is married, and her husband is alive. People objected. She said, “You may not know, but I know he is alive. I know, and my relationship with him remains the same as it was always: I am his mother, he is my son.”They said, “This woman also has gone mad with that madman. He was mad, that was certain, but we never knew that he will drive this woman also mad.”Tantra is a scientific methodology; it has many techniques to transform sex. Yoga is scientific physiology; it has methods to make it almost impossible for your body to be sick. It gives you control over the body so you can live as long as you want, and you can decide your own death whenever you want. Science was there, but in a totally different dimension. It was not devoted to war and politicians.In the West it is the same consciousness – but the West is very new. Science is only three hundred years old, and the West is so new that when the East was at its peak of culture and richness – the West was just barbarous. It was simply fighting with nature just to survive. That’s how the famous doctrine became so important – survival of the fittest.In the East they were thinking of transcending life to attain eternal life; in the West it was a question of survival. The climate was harsh, cold; the land was not fertile; most of the year, the sun was not available. Man was fighting with nature to survive; there was no possibility for religion. Life was at risk – who is going to think of eternal life? Even moment to moment survival was difficult.In fact, this curse turned out to be a blessing in the end because the East became very, very relaxed – good climate, warm climate, good soil, enough of everything. People became non-fighting, they dropped weapons, they forgot about weapons; there was no need. The West became strong and started creating empires.It was not very difficult for a small country like England – which is just as big as a district of India, not even a state – to manage the biggest empire in the world. It was said, “In the British empire, the sun never sets.” Somewhere or other, it is always rising. The empire was around the world. And the people who controlled this whole empire…what gave them the strength? – the fight with nature, the continuous fight for survival.When you have nothing to lose, you have a certain strength; when you have everything to lose you are weak, you are afraid, because in fight the other party is not going to lose anything. If you win, you win nothing.From India, never in the whole history, did people come out to conquer any country – never. They never invaded anybody. Who bothers? They had so much, and the poor people around…to invade them was just inhuman. And for what? Taking unnecessary responsibility over your head to feed them, to clothe them.India never invaded anybody, and India was invaded by almost everybody – Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Arabians. Everybody who was capable of fighting made his way to India. That was the easiest place to be victorious. These people – Spaniards, English, French, Portuguese – had not much resistance in India, almost no resistance. People were not interested in fighting.The logic is clear: in fighting, they will be the losers. And the people who have come have nothing. So rather than fighting, they simply let them control the country. They had become so relaxed for thousands of years; it was impossible suddenly to become warriors again; it needs training, centuries of training.So the West found a blessing in disguise. The climate was antagonistic but it made the people strong, hard, cruel, cunning, inhuman – that became their strength. They were not interested in religion, they were interested in becoming more stronger, they were interested in creating bigger empires, they were interested in being all powerful because their own land was poor. They wanted other people’s land. Their own country was not of any worth.You can see it, as the British empire has disappeared, England is going down the drain everyday. England must be now in a more depressive state than any other country in the world – Ethiopia included. In Ethiopia people are dying; in England they are not dying, but they are dead. Which is worse? Dying is clean, but dead with your umbrella?England has no hope now because that old empire cannot come back. The whole situation has changed: England is no longer a power. Now Russia is a power, America is a power, China is a power; but England is almost nobody. Why do they go on keeping England on the map? – I don’t know. It should not be on the map; finished is finished.But there was a day when England was the very center of the world – London was the world capital. Now it is the ugliest city, most depressive. It is impossible to smile in London – just the climate won’t allow you. And if you smile, then a crowd will gather asking, “What has happened? Why is this man smiling?” Laughter is unheard of; everybody is sad and with a long face.This was the situation of the whole West. They needed science and destructive science because they were fighting and creating empires all around the world. They needed more and more superior weapons to kill, to destroy, to invade. They gave science a turn which is destructive, which has brought you to the very verge of a third world war. They were not interested in religion, because religion is possible only in a very relaxed climate, in a very relaxed milieu of your soul…when everything is fulfilled, and you don’t have anything else to do than just sitting silently.To sit silently, certainly you need every other need to be fulfilled. In the West they have the proverb, “the empty mind is the devil’s workshop.” Obviously, the West could not afford the empty mind; it has to be condemned. The West would not have allowed anybody to just sit silently, doing nothing. It was a question of life and death…. You are sitting silently doing nothing, and you say, “And the grass grows by itself.”“But what are we going to do with grass? The wheat does not grow by itself, and we need wheat, we need rice, we need food, we need machine guns, we need airplanes. They don’t grow by themselves….”It is possible only in a very different milieu where you can say, “Sitting silently doing nothing and the grass grows by itself,” and you can be understood.In the East, the empty mind is the ultimate experience of existence. When you are empty, it is not the devil’s workshop; when you are not empty, then you are the devil’s workshop.The whole West emphasizing, “Do something,” has become a devil’s workshop. They go on telling their children: “Don’t sit silently. Do something!” Nobody says to them,: “Don’t do anything, just sit silently.” That is possible only when you have enough luxury that you can allow your children to sit silently, you can enjoy sitting around a bonfire gossiping, sipping tea, you can sit by the fireplace playing on your guitar, listening to poetry, reading Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. But for that you first need food, clothes, house, enough wood for the fireplace. When everything is available, then only mind starts searching for the truth. In the East, everything was available.There is no difference of consciousness in the East and the West. The difference was in the climate, in the geography, in the situation; the difference was outside, not inside. Hence, religion became the only challenge in the East, and science became the only challenge in the West.But now the situation is totally different. The East has fallen into bankruptcy, which is natural…that too is a law to be understood. When you are affluent, luxurious, religion is born. Once religion is born, immediately religion starts teaching you to be poor. That is a very strange thing, but there is some inner consistency in it.When you are luxurious, and the whole country is enjoying, and eating, and drinking, and being merry – this is their only religion. Naturally, those who attain to samadhi and superconsciousness – start condemning, “What are you doing, wasting your life eating, drinking, and merrying. Do you think this is life? Stop all this nonsense…renounce it, because the real life is something else which you are missing.”So they become against all comfort, all luxury, all richness, because the best minds of the country, those who are loved by people, respected by people those who have charismatic influence on people are all saying, “Renounce all this,” they don’t know what they are doing. They don’t know why they have been able to find truth.They have been able to find truth because of all this luxury, and comfort, and richness. It gave them an opportunity to sit silently, to not be worried about anything, to not do anything. There was no question of surviving, so they could inquire into eternal life.That is why I say Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, all are right in some way, but wrong in some other ways; and we have to see what wrong they have committed. This was their fallacy: they forgot the ladder, that had brought them to this peak, and they started condemning those people who were on the same ladder, but on lower rungs: “You idiots, why are you clinging to the ladder? Renounce the ladder.” They had moved away from the ladder, far away; they had renounced the ladder, but they forgot completely that they came to that point of renunciation through the ladder. Without the ladder, they would not have been able to renounce it.What can you renounce if you don’t have riches? What can you renounce if you don’t have in the first place? – the poor cannot renounce, the hungry cannot renounce. So this is a strange circle, a vicious circle: The country becomes rich, people become affluent. Then a few geniuses start rising higher than the ordinary human consciousness, and they become so enchanted with the bliss, they forget all about the ladder which has led them there. They start condemning everything that is lower.Perhaps their intention is good. They want you to fly as high as they are flying, but they completely forget that without the ladder these people will simply crawl on the earth. That is what is happening in the East – people are crawling on the earth. They have renounced the ladder because they trusted Buddha, they trusted Mahavira, they trusted Krishna. They renounced the ladder – but the ladder can be renounced from two points – either from the first rung or from the last rung.In both ways you are renouncing the ladder; but if you renounce from the first rung you will crawl on the earth. The whole East is crawling – it is ugly, disgusting, nauseating. You can also renounce the ladder from the highest rung. That happened only in the life of a few people.Now the situation has changed; the West is affluent, rich, and now facing a great problem. On the one hand, in three hundred years it has created a science which is destructive and has helped to exploit the whole world; to spread imperialism, to make empires, it has helped. But all those empires have disappeared.Now, Western science is like an old, ancient fable…. A man found a bottle in the lake. He had gone fishing, and in his net, with the fishes, came a bottle also. He looked in the bottle and he was amazed; there was a very tiny man inside. And not only that, the tiny man said, “If you open the bottle I can serve you in any way you want – I am not so tiny. I have been cursed and closed in this bottle, but the man who cursed me has said that if somebody opens the bottle and takes me out, I will be free from the curse.“I have been waiting in this lake for centuries. It is just by coincidence that you have caught me. Now, please – I am a djinn; open the bottle and I will do anything you want.”The poor man thought, “This is a good opportunity” – he opened the bottle. Great smoke came out of the bottle and with the smoke, almost like a cloud, was the djinn. The man now looked so small before the djinn, and the djinn said from the sky, “Now, I am free. Thank you for making me free. I will do everything, I will be your servant, but there is one condition. I cannot sit silently. I need work continuously, twenty-four hours a day, day in, day out. If you cannot give me work I will kill you.”The man said, “Don’t be worried, I will give you work. But what work can you do?”The djinn was such that if you gave him some work, any work, you were thinking that at least for a few hours he would leave you; but within seconds he would be back, the work was done! You would tell him to make a palace; within seconds he would be back, the palace was ready.Work? – he was driving the man crazy! Within two or three days the man thought, “I am going to be killed,” because he could not even think of anything more. All that he could imagine he told the djinn and he did it.The man said, “Wait, I have an appointment with a wise man. Till then you clean the palace and the garden – I will be back.” He ran to the wise man and asked, “Save me, because this is my last day. I don’t think that I will be alive by the evening because all the work that I could think of, he has done. Tell me what I am to do.”The wise man said, “Nothing to be worried about. You take this ladder and tell that idiot, ‘Go up, come down, go up, come down.’ Let him do that, no other work, just ‘Go up, come down.’“The djinn is still doing that! The man has died long ago, but the djinn continues because he needs work.Science has proved to be almost the djinn in the bottle. The West opened the bottle; science served beautifully, it did miracles. It made the whole world a slave under the West. For the first time there was really one world, dominated by a few people. Otherwise, in India itself, in Buddha’s time there were two thousand nations just in India. But this three hundred years of scientific technological growth gave the West so much power that nobody could stand against it.But now science is threatening the West itself.Those empires have disappeared, they had to disappear. How long can you exploit a people? A moment comes when you have exploited them so much that now they are hungry, starving, and they become a responsibility and a burden on you.Never be befooled by the historians and the politicians who go on saying that India, Pakistan, China, Burma – these countries became independent because of their freedom struggle. Nonsense! The reality is that all these empires became burdens on the imperialists. England could not manage India any more. Now it was not a place to exploit. You have exploited enough, you have taken everything. Now the situation was the reverse.The country was a responsibility on you: you have to feed the people, you have to make schools for them, you have to make hospitals for them. If you don’t, you are condemned by the whole world. It was time to somehow get rid of these people. But how to get rid of these people? These idiots themselves started saying, “We want to be free.”If I was there…. I was, but I was too young. And nobody hears me even now, so at that time certainly, nobody was going to listen to me. I used to say to my parents – because they were all for freedom, they all had been to jails, they all had been beaten, tortured. I used to tell my uncles, my father, my grandfather, “It is all nonsense. What are you going to get with freedom? Freedom is not food. Freedom is not clothes. Freedom is not science. Freedom is not technology. In fact your freedom struggle is really greatly needed by Britain. They want you to fight for freedom, then they can give you freedom.”And they gave it without much trouble. They simply gave it, they wanted to give it. They were really looking for the right time so that it was understood that “you have asked for it, we have not given it. You were fighting for it. You forced us, so we gave it to you.” And slowly, slowly the same happened in Africa, in other parts of Asia, where there were no freedom struggles either. There too freedom came. It had to come; how much can you exploit?In India, people worship cows. They cannot kill them and they cannot sell them to butchers, but there is a time when the cow becomes old, it gives no milk, no children; now it is a burden to feed it. The people are so poor they cannot feed themselves, how can they feed these cows and these buffaloes? And they cannot sell them either – they make them free! They simply leave them on the roads. Nobody knows whose those cows are. That’s what has happened. Cows have become free: they no longer give milk, they no longer give anything, so what to do with them?So in Africa and Ethiopia, in India, in Burma, in Thailand, cows are on the streets dying, hungry. They cannot even now condemn anybody: “It is because you are making us slaves, that’s why we are dying.” Now there is nobody to condemn either, it is their own responsibility. So the empires had to die – a natural death.Now science is there, like the djinn, asking for more work “otherwise I will kill you.” And that’s why the West is facing a great crisis.This crisis is going to be very decisive. The West either will have to commit suicide – and of course, with the West, the East will die. It cannot survive separate from the West, it needs all the technology of the West for productive and creative things. Or, if the West turns the whole train of science toward creativity and drops this idiotic idea of war, then both these things will happen: science will take on a new dimension, as it took on once in the East; and the second thing will be a rise in religious consciousness. If you are no longer preparing for war and wasting seventy-five to eighty percent of your energy, life, and money preparing to destroy – if that eighty percent of energy is released to eat, drink, and be merry, if the eighty percent of energy is released to go to Zorba the Buddha, then soon there will be people rising, flying higher, reaching to the topmost layers of human consciousness.Both the things are possible: science can be turned into creativity, and that creativity will make you capable of rising in religious consciousness.And this time it need not be East and West.This time it can be one earth, our home.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Do politicians have brains?I am sorry, but I doubt it. If one has brains there are so many beautiful things in life to do; it is impossible for such a man to be interested in politics at all. Politics is for the lowest category of intellect. You can see it all over the world.I am reminded of one of my friends who was a national figure in politics. His whole life he devoted to two things: one, which was his priority, that cow slaughter should be stopped; and the second was, that Hindi should become the national language.I once asked him, “You go on calling the cow ‘the holy mother’; then who is the bull – the holy father?”He became angry. I said, “It is a simple thing. If the cow is your mother, then the bull has to be your father.”He said, “You always confuse me.”Another time I asked him, “What about Charles Darwin’s theory that man is evolved out of monkeys?”He said, “Absurd! Monkeys are animals, man is not. Man is divine. God has made man in His own image.”I said, “Then what about the cow? The monkey is an animal. You cannot accept that man evolves out of monkeys but you go on calling the cow your mother. Isn’t the cow an animal?”And, moreover, you reject the bull, the poor bull, who has done no harm to you except given you birth – without the bull the cow cannot be your mother. You should be all-grateful to the bull. You became angry on that point; now you are denying Charles Darwin’s theory simply because monkeys are animals – but what about the cow? Can’t you see such a simple logic? Then only one thing remains – which will be very absurd….”He said, “What? Nothing can be more absurd than Charles Darwin’s theory.”I said, “You just wait. The cow is the mother, and the monkey is the father and man is a cross-breed. It is not that I am saying it – it is you who should say it, but you are not capable of any intelligence. This is a simple thing. You have the mother; the father is missing – the bull is not acceptable. Charles Darwin has the father; the mother is missing. That is very strange of Charles Darwin too, that he talks about the male monkeys becoming man. Then who became the woman? Very strange – what about the female monkeys?“Charles Darwin nowhere mentions female monkeys. It is strange, a man who continually worked on the theory must have come across the question that, okay, the monkey becomes the man, but who becomes the woman? Female monkeys must become women, but there is no reference to them in Charles Darwin’s books. So the monkeys are our forefathers and cows are our foremothers.“I don’t know whether such a word exists or not and I don’t care either – I have never come across such a word as foremothers; but if forefathers makes sense, then foremothers also makes sense.”He was so angry that he said, “You will never talk sense.”I said, “What can be more sensible? Man is a cross-breed – all the qualities of the cow, and all the qualities of the monkey. Man is so rich! No other animal is a cross-breed; that’s why man has become the supreme-most, the highest animal in the world.”And this man – Seth Govindas was his name – was respected all over the country; but he couldn’t see simple things.In India there are thirty languages of almost equal importance. There are a few differences; for example, Hindi is spoken by more people, but Bengali has a far richer literature, more refined language. Just to hear two Bengalis talking is such an experience in itself. Their language is so sweet, every word is so rounded.I had one Bengali girl as my post-graduate student. In Hindi her name would be Rama. Rama means beautiful, attractive, but when I asked her her name – she was a Bengali – she said, “Roma.” I tried hard…” Roma? Has it something to do with Rome?” She said, “No, it is your Hindi ‘Rama,’ but in Bengali it becomes Roma.” Roma certainly is more romantic; Rama looks hard, harsh, clear-cut but not rounded.Bengalis have their claim that they have the best literature, not only in India, but perhaps in the whole world – a great tradition of the best poetry.What does it mean, just counting numbers? Hindi may be spoken by many people; the numbers are not much different. If Pakistan had not been divided from India then Bengali would have been spoken by more people than Hindi, because half of Bengal went into Pakistan. Otherwise Bengali is spoken by more people than Hindi. So it is just a political accident that the country got divided and half of Bengal became Bangladesh and half of Bengal remained in India. But if you look at world languages, Bengali will come before Hindi.But numbers don’t count. Tamil has its own literature, far more ancient than the literature of Sanskrit, because the people of South India are the original Indians. The people of North India are invaders. The people of North India who speak Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati are all Aryans. They are blood brothers of the French, Italians, Germans, English, Swedish, Russians, but they have no relationship of blood with the South Indians. South Indians have a blood relationship with the Negroes.There was a time when Africa and India were connected. It is now a well-known fact that continents go on shifting – they are not stable. You just cut out the maps of India and Africa and put them together and you will be surprised – they fit perfectly. The south of India fits perfectly with the lines of Africa. Some time in the past the land parted; Africa shifted away, over thousands of years.South Indians are Negroid, their blood is connected with the Negroes; their skin is black, their language has no connection with Sanskrit at all. You will be surprised: Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada – the four main languages of South India – have not a single word from Sanskrit, while Russian has forty percent, German has sixty percent, Lithuanian has seventy percent, English has thirty percent. French, Swedish – all the European languages originated predominantly from Sanskrit.Naturally, South India does not want to be dominated by a Sanskrit-originated language, Hindi. They have no connection with it.I told Seth Govindas, “These are simple facts. This country cannot have a national language. Just as Russian has no national language, the country can have only provincial languages. And it can use one language, for example English – because English is only understood by two percent of Indians, but those two percent of Indians are spread all over India, in every language group. So English remains a link language, not a national language, because two percent of the people speaking it cannot make it a national language. But it can become a link language.“Every language has its own state, its own independence, so that it can grow independently without any pressure from any other language. There is no need for a national language, just a link language so that all these thirty languages don’t fall apart.” That’s how in Russia…Russian is only a link language. The same is the problem in Russia: thirty six languages, so widely apart – you cannot impose one language as the national language.India is not a small country like England or Switzerland or France; it is a sub-continent. England can have one language, but a sub-continent cannot have one language. You cannot impose it – and for thirty years, forty years continuously, they have been trying. English remains the national language and there is no hope of an Indian national language ever.I told that old man, “Just see the facts.”But certainly politicians don’t have brains.In India I knew many politicians, but I have not seen any brains in them.Simple things that anybody will understand, things which don’t need great genius, politicians will miss. One of my friends was commander-in-chief of the Indian armies. When Pakistan invaded India, this man – his name was General Chaudhuri – asked permission of the prime minister to counter attack; it was needed, just being defensive would not help. That’s a simple military strategy: if you become defensive you are already defeated; the best way is to be aggressive.If Pakistan has invaded one part of Kashmir, Chaudhuris idea was that we invade Pakistan from four or five fronts. They will be confused, they will run amok; they will not be able to decide where they have to send their armies. Their attack will become a failure because they have to defend all the borders of their country.But politicians. The prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, informed him, “Wait till six o’clock in the morning.”General Chaudhuri told me that he was thrown out of the army – not publicly: publicly he retired honorably, but he was kicked out. He was told, “Either you resign or we will throw you out.”The reason was that he attacked Pakistan at five o’clock in the morning, one hour before the order. That was the right time; by six o’clock it would be sunrise, people would be awake. Five o’clock was the perfectly right time – everybody was asleep – to drive them crazy. And he did what he was saying – he made the whole of Pakistan tremble. He was just fifteen miles from Pakistan’s biggest city, Lahore.The whole night Jawaharlal and his cabinet were discussing this way and that way, to do it or not to do it. And even by six o’clock in the morning they had not come to any conclusion; they just heard on the radio that “General Chaudhuri is entering Lahore.”That was too much for the politicians. They stopped him just fifteen miles away from Lahore. And I can see that was sheer stupidity. If the man had taken Lahore, the problem of Kashmir and India would have been solved forever. It is not ever going to be solved, the problem of the territory of Kashmir which Pakistan has occupied – and it was because General Chaudhuri was told to come back, “because India is a non-violent country and you did not wait for the order.”He said to them, “I do understand military strategy; you don’t. Even by six o’clock – where was your order? Pakistan has already occupied a certain territory, the most beautiful part of Kashmir – and you were just discussing the whole night. This is not a question to be discussed, this has to be decided in the warfield. If you had allowed me to take over Lahore then we would have been in a position to bargain. Now we are not in a position to bargain. You pulled me back, I had to come back.”The UN decided for a cease-fire line. So now for forty years, UN armies have been there patrolling; on the other side Pakistans armies are patrolling, on this side Indian armies are patrolling. For forty years – just nonsense! And in the UN they go on discussing and nothing comes out of it.And the territory that has been occupied by Pakistan you cannot take back because of the cease-fire. They have really decided in their parliament that the territory occupied by them is combined with Pakistan. Now they show it on their maps. It is no longer occupied territory, it is Pakistan’s territory.I had told General Chaudhuri, “This was such a simple thing, that you have to be in a bargaining position. If you had taken Lahore they would have immediately agreed to leave Kashmir because they could not lose Lahore. Or if a cease-fire was to come, okay, then Lahore remains with us when we cease fire. Either way there will be something to bargain. India doesn’t have anything to bargain with – why should Pakistan bother?”But politicians certainly don’t have brains.I was thinking that perhaps this is applicable only to Indian politicians, but coming to Oregon I was really surprised because I saw greater idiots.Just the other day Oregon’s assembly decided that the post office of the City of Rajneesh will continue to be called the post office of Antelope. Now can you see the foolishness? Antelope is dead; there is no longer any Antelope anywhere, the people of Antelope buried it. But the post office should be called the post office of Antelope.The city is called the City of Rajneesh. It has no post office. The real, the living city, has no post office; the dead, the unreal city has the post office. And naturally the postmaster goes on rejecting all mail that comes in the name of the City of Rajneesh because it is the post office of Antelope. Can you think these politician have brains?If they wanted to destroy the City of Rajneesh they should have had the guts, and they should have resolved in the assembly that the City of Rajneesh should be again called Antelope. That would have been logical, and the post office would certainly be the post office of Antelope. Or they should have changed the name of the post office.Both were logical. But what they have done – the city they cannot touch because it is against the constitution. The people of the city have changed the name. They have the right to change the name; that is their constitutional right. The majority decided to change it, and the assembly cannot interfere.But those idiots think that they can at least save the post office, the post office of Antelope – and nobody in that assembly asked, “When the city is no longer there…how can there be a post office of a city which is non-existential?” And this is going to create unnecessary problems.I would like my people to go to court first against the postmaster general of America – because it is just a simple rule that whenever a city changes its name, within one month the post office has to change its name. But a year has passed and we have been asking the postmaster general and he has been delaying. He must have been waiting for these politicians to decide in the assembly.So first go against the postmaster general, asking why he delayed for one year when the simple rule is one month. And who is he to decide that the post office should continue to be called Antelope’s post office? Then go against the assembly also; their decision is stupid. Either change the name of the city if you have guts – go against the constitution – or if you don’t have guts then let the post office name be changed.But politicians don’t show any sign of brains.I am reminded of a story. A great politician had developed a tumor in his brain, perhaps a canceric growth. It was a very complicated operation, his whole brain had to be taken out. He was lying down on the table; it was a long and very delicate operation. The doctors were operating on the brain in another room. When the operation was over, they came back to take the politician…he was missing! “My God, where has he gone?”The nurse said, “A man came running and he said, ‘You have been chosen the president.’ The patient stood up and started walking. I tried to prevent him, I said, ‘Your brain is in the surgery, and they are working on it.’ He said, ‘Now that I am the president I don’t need the brain. Let them work on it. Whenever I need it I will come, but at least for five years forget all about it. I am the president; brains are needed by small people, nobodies. Where is the need for brains for a man who has risen to the highest post?’“The whole of history proves it, that politicians have been the most idiotic people around. But the strange fact is that the more idiotic the politician is, the more possibility there is for his success. That’s what happened in Adolf Hitler’s case.Perhaps Adolf Hitler was the most idiotic politician ever, but he went on succeeding. He went on conquering countries. It was an amazing phenomenon. The reason is very strange. He knew nothing of military science – that was the reason for his success. His generals would tell him that this is absolutely wrong, this step is absolutely wrong.But he never listened to the generals, he listened to the astrologers. He had his astrologers who said, “This is the right time – move into France, move into Poland, or move anywhere.” That was decided by the astrologers and the stars, not by military science. Naturally he baffled everybody. If he had moved according to military science, then on the other side the same military science is known.If he had bombed London according to military science, then London would have been ready and prepared. But it was being decided by the stars, by an idiot astrologer. His generals were absolutely impotent. They could see that this was nonsense, but this nonsense was succeeding so they also slowly, slowly became silent: “Perhaps he is right.”You will be surprised that Churchill had to call astrologers from India – because Western astrology is different from Eastern astrology. These are just fictions, so there can be as many astrologies as you want. Stars don’t care about you, so you can manage anything. They don’t object either, they don’t have any idea that you are here.I have heard: one elephant was passing across a bridge and a small fly was sitting on top of the head of the elephant. When they were just in the middle of the bridge – the bridge was not made for elephants to cross; it was a poor village, and a poor bridge temporarily made for the rainy season – the bridge started shaking. The fly said, “Uncle, our weight is too much.”The elephant heard some buzzing noise. He said, “Just say it loudly – who are you? And where are you?”The fly said, “I am just sitting on your head and our weight is too much.”The elephant said, “My God, I was not even aware that you were here.” But the fly included itself; He said, “Our weight is shaking the bridge.”Man is not even a fly so far as stars are concerned. And people are such…they ask the astrologers, “What time will it be good to start a business; are the stars in the right position? When will it be good to get married; are the stars in the right position?” All stars are in the right position – but all marriages are in the wrong position. This is enough proof that stars don’t care about you, they don’t know about you. But you can create fictions. Churchill did not ask the Western astrologers because they would give him the same advice as was being given to Adolf Hitler. That wouldn’t be the right thing. Churchill understood why this man was succeeding. He was succeeding because whenever they expected him to attack, he never attacked. And whenever they never expected, could never conceive, there he attacked.It was a simple rule of war that you attack at the weakest point. It is so obvious; you don’t attack the enemy at his strongest point. But those astrologers don’t know what is a weak point and what is a strong point. They look toward the stars – and the stars have no idea that there is a war going on.He called those astrologers from India; the war took a turn, because now Churchill was also functioning like a fool. He was also no longer listening to his generals. He said, “You keep out of it – because that man is mad. He knows no military science and it is not going to help. Now astrology is going to help.” And astrology did help. Poor Adolf Hitler was defeated. He was succeeding because of astrology – he was defeated because of astrology.But the man was absolutely an idiot about everything. When Germany started retreating, the generals would not inform him, “We are being defeated,” because any general who said that would be shot immediately. Adolf Hitler could not be defeated, so this general must have gone mad.”When the bombs were falling on Berlin itself, just outside the house where Adolf Hitler was living in the basement, then too the German radio continued to say that “we are winning all over the world.” Nobody was ready to get shot unnecessarily – what was the point? This man was not going to listen.Adolf Hitler thought himself almost a demigod. His word was the law, and if he said that he was going to conquer the world, it was going to happen. The bombs were falling outside his house; he could hear the buildings falling, people crying, the noise, the explosions, still he was consulting the astrologers: “Which country are we going to invade next?” To the very last moment he was convinced he was winning. Can you think that a man who has a little bit of brain would be so thick?But other politicians are not different either – maybe more of less, but the brain is not the business of the politician. The politician has to be stubborn, adamant, fanatic; these are the qualities that make him succeed. He has to be foolish enough to believe that he has, by birth, a determined future, a destiny. He is the man of destiny. Only fools can believe that.The more intelligent you are, the less stubborn, the less fanatic; more thinking, doubting, more skeptical. Skeptical about yourself – you cannot think of yourself as a man of destiny. You cannot think that you are born to dominate the world.And these people are what our whole history is about. Our whole history needs to be burned, completely burned, erased. We should start writing from ABC again, because this history is being taught to every child. And these people are called Alexander the Great, Genghis the Great Khan, Ivan the Terrible – and they are praised, their qualities are praised. And much of the praise is just fiction because those histories were written by their court clerks. Those court clerks who were writing those histories were paid. The better the praise, the more they were paid.One of the great emperors in India was Akbar. He was making a new capital. He wanted to shift the capital from Delhi to a fresh capital, completely newly-made. His whole life he poured as much money into it as possible – and he created a city, Fateh-pur Sikri – a beautiful city, almost a miracle city. All stonework….He gathered all the best stone artists and craftsmen from the world, and the best stones, marble. He made the whole city his whole life. Nobody has ever lived in it, because to create a capital so that the whole of Delhi could be shifted in just a single move…. Akbar died and Fateh-pur Sikri remains incomplete, although a vast city. So much money wasted, such huge and beautiful buildings, each inch a piece of art – but for what? Nobody has ever lived there. Nobody is going to live there ever, for the simple reason that when the city was made nobody thought of water. Nobody thought that many more things are needed when people live there – land is needed for crops….It is a very weird experience to be in Fateh-pur Sikri, a city made with so much money. I think no other city has ever been made in that way – and nobody ever lived in it. It was a ghost town from the very beginning, and it is going to remain a ghost town.Even now thousands of people can be accommodated there, but other necessities are not available. And Akbar never went there to see what was happening. He wanted to wait for it to be completed; then he would go there. Akbar is thought to have been one of the intelligent emperors, but I don’t think so. What kind of intelligence is this?There was another Mohammedan emperor who almost surpassed Akbar. He simply ordered the whole of Delhi to move – from Delhi thousands of miles away to Aurangabad. Aurangabad was very close to Pune.Now his order had to be followed, the whole city had to be emptied immediately. It was a military operation. Everybody was thrown out of his house; the whole of Delhi was emptied – almost half a million people moving thousands of miles, not knowing what was going to happen in Aurangabad. And nothing was prepared there!At least Akbar had planned the city, made the city. Aurangabad was a small place. Where were these people going to live? And nobody bothered about their food supply for this whole journey. It took months; almost eighty percent of the people died, twenty percent reached Aurangabad. And you can think in what condition they were if eighty percent died on the way.Those twenty percent had become sick, old. The journey took at least ten years from their life. They were utterly wiped out – in fact, feeling jealous of those who had died, because it was so terrible to live. And then in Aurangabad there was no space and that idiot king said, “No, this is not the right place – we should go back.” The whole journey again! This man’s name was Muhammed Tughlaq.Do you think these type of people have any brains? By the time they reached Delhi almost everybody was dead. Delhi was empty; it became a military camp. And all this for no reason at all! The only reason was that Muhammad Tughlaq’s father had died in Aurangabad and he wanted Aurangabad to be made the capital of India in his memory.But to make a capital for half a million people, to move them thousands of miles – and trains were not there, buses were not there. People were moving by foot, on camels, on horses, on donkeys, on bullock carts. And nobody bothered about how the food was to be managed for the whole journey, how water was to be managed…. And they had to pass through the whole desert of Rajasthan, where most of the people died, just because of thirst.If you look at history you will be surprised – why do we go on teaching these people’s lives to our children, why do we contaminate our children? What is the point?I feel that politics and politicians should be completely debarred as far as the education of the new generation is concerned. The new generation should be helped to forget the whole past so they can start living anew.There is a saying that history repeats itself. Yes, it repeats itself because you go on teaching it.Just stop teaching history and it won’t repeat any more.You teach it, you poison the minds of children, and they start having political ambitions themselves.You make them ambitious. In every possible way you make them ambitious.Your whole education system is not to make children intelligent but to make them ambitious.Yes, you try to make them intellectuals – that too is a help for being ambitious.If they are intelligent they won’t be ambitious at all. If they are intelligent they would like to live a very simple and ordinary life in tune with nature, in harmony with existence, with trees, with birds, with animals, with people. They would not like to dominate anyone or be dominated by anyone. They would like to live together in friendliness, not as masters or slaves.There can never be a friendship between the owner and the owned, the boss and the servant, the leader and the led. There can never be any friendship. Friendship can happen only when there is a very subtle undeclared form of equality – not the equality communism talks about, because that is politics, that is forced equality.I have heard…there was a very strange Greek king who had a very beautiful, very precious, golden bed, made of twenty-four carat gold, studded with diamonds and all kinds of precious stones. It was kept only for guests. But whosoever was unfortunate enough to be his guest never came out of the king’s guest house alive because he was determined on one point: the guest had to fit his bed. His bed was so precious that if the guest was a little longer, then cut his feet off; if needed, cut off his head – but make him to the size of the bed. If he was a little smaller, then stretch him. Perhaps this king was the man who invented traction.They used traction on me. When I first heard about traction I started wondering, from where does this word traction come? I found that it comes from Christian churches of the Middle Ages where they used to torture people, pulling them from both sides – hands on one side, legs on the other – to confess that they were in contact with devils, with witches, that nuns were having intercourse with the devil, that monks were having intercourse with ghosts…all kinds of things. And unless you confessed, this traction would continue.It was by chance that a monk had a bad back; and when they did this traction to him, he confessed, and he also said, “One thing more: my back was bad and I have been suffering for years; your traction has been a great blessing to me. I am grateful; my back is perfectly okay, I can walk!” That’s how this traction came – it is a religious device used by medical science.But that Greek king was even more ancient, he was really the pioneer. People got killed in both cases, because it was very, very difficult to find a person exactly the same size as his bed. And he was a king – no ordinary person was going to be his guest, only very extraordinary people.The bed was not made according to anybody’s size, so everybody was either too long or too short. Everybody came out dead in the morning. From his guest house nobody came back alive because he never could find a man who could fit his bed. And the bed was so precious that people’s lives did not matter at all.These people have dominated humanity – they are still dominating humanity.Their whole game is one of retarded minds.It is time we burned the whole of history and started from the very beginning, fresh.That’s my whole work with you.Talking to you I am really trying to burn your conditionings, trying to remove all the rubbish that you have been carrying your whole life…just trying to clean you and make you utterly blank so that you can start sprouting your self – otherwise you are so full of junk that there is no space for your self.I used to stay in a very rich man’s house in Indore. The man was certainly one of the richest men in the world. I don’t know anybody who has been given as many titles as that man. In India Seth is a title which is given to super-rich people. He was called Sir Seth, not just ordinary Seth, Seth of the Seths: Sir Seth means above the head, the chief. And he was the only man who has ever been called Sir Seth in the whole of history.And he had so many titles…. When you saw his letterhead, you could not believe it: Sir Seth, Rao Raja Sir, knight and whatnot; everything was there. And he had a huge palace, but so full of junk – precious junk, but junk after all, is junk. Everything that came into the market anywhere in the world was immediately purchased, and things went on gathering in his palace.He asked me, “How do you like it?”I said, “I just wonder if I can get out of this palace alive, because there is no space to live in this place. You cannot move!” I took him to my bedroom, that was his best room. I said, “You just look – you move anywhere and you stumble into something.” All models of television, all models of radio were there, and I said, “Television has not come to Indore yet – why possess these sets?”He said, “That is my order to all of my offices around the world: anything new, purchase immediately for the palace.”Useless models of television sets…I said to him, “One day I would like to go around your whole palace with you, because if this is the situation of the guest house, I would like to know what the situation of the host is. It must be worse.” And it was.This guest house was a small house in the garden; between the garden and the palace there were beautiful fountains and trees and lawns, and then his palace. The first floor was full of horses! I said, “My God! Do you like riding?”He said, “No.”I said, “Then what are these horses doing here?” – and such beautiful horses I have never seen.He said, “Just my orders. Anywhere, any beautiful horse, immediately it has to be purchased.” Rare horses I have seen but nothing to be compared to Sir Hukumchand’s horses. Then elephants in one corner; in another corner, camels – and they stink!I said, “Sir Seth, you must be going crazy with all this stink.”He said, “No; in fact I have become so accustomed to it I don’t go anywhere because I can’t sleep without this fragrance.”He had to feel that in the whole world he was the only man – that was his liking. He wanted, in everything, to be at the top. He had one Rolls Royce made of solid gold; it is still there. It was useless because he was afraid to take it out – it was dangerous. It was too costly – all solid gold, completely; even the mechanism inside was solid gold. It never moved, it simply remained in a showcase.I said, “What is the point?”He said, “The point is that I am the only person in the whole world….”I said, “That is very easy, it can be done in a very simple way. Just shave half your hair, and you will be the only man in the whole world with half the head shaved. Why waste so much money? Just cut half of your mustache and you will be a walking exhibition. This car is stuck here – people have come to see it. They will not need to come anymore. You go to the temple, you go to the office; wherever you will go, your half-mustache will declare that you are the only man in the whole world….The palace was three-storied – not even space to go into the rooms which were fully packed with strange things; even he had no idea what they were, but they had been purchased because they had come new in the market.I told him, “Sir Seth, your palace represents exactly the mind of people. You have money so you can fill your palace with all kinds of junk. People don’t have that much money so they fill their minds – that is cheaper – with all kinds of junk.”And politicians particularly do this because the politician has to deal with the lowest mob. He has to descend to the lowest, only then can he communicate. And slowly, slowly he becomes that person – retarded, mediocre, having a mob psychology. You become that which you go on practicing continuously.You ask me, “Do politicians have brains?”I can only say what I have experienced and seen. Certainly the question will arise, because if I say they don’t have any brains then how do they go on working? They go on working just like computers, just like robots. They go on working, not intelligently, but mechanically.Two thousand years of history we know clearly, with evidence. One thing comes out absolutely clearly, that all political leaders have functioned mechanically. That’s why history is repeated – because of the mechanical behavior of the politicians. It is the same wheel that goes on moving: the same ambition, the same desire, the same strategy, the same tricks, the same exploitations – and the same results.But now the game has come to a point where either the game has to finish or humanity has to be ready to commit suicide.The game is not so precious, the game is just worthless. Humanity cannot be sacrificed to the political game.Human individuals should start declaring that the earth is one, the whole of humanity is one; that we don’t want any nations, we don’t want this dirty politics; that we don’t see any problem, why Russia should be against America, or America be against Russia.The Russian people are as innocent and simple as Americans. It is just the topmost politicians who cannot let you relax, because your relaxation is their death. They want you to remain continuously tense, afraid, so that they go on playing the game that “the war is coming and we have to prepare for it.”I want my people to declare that there is going to be no war and we are not going to be participants in it, that this war is absolute absurdity.And it is good that politics has brought you to this logical conclusion. Without it there would be no hope of getting rid of politicians. Now there is a chance, and we should not miss it. It is so glaringly clear that it is a question of either/or.Either the politicians remain or humanity remains.And this is where politicians themselves have dragged us. They cannot back out, there is no way back. Life only goes on forward, never backward. And they are all pushing toward war – reluctantly, afraid, because they are going to be killed in it themselves.It is time that consciousness be raised, that people be made alert and aware that the question is no longer of communism or democracy, Russia or America; the question is politics, or religion. And when I say religion I don’t mean religions. When I say religion I mean religiousness.The religions are all fictitious.Just the other day I was talking to you about three fools visiting at the birth of Jesus Christ, coming from the East to touch his feet. But the story is so fictitious that I would like you to be reminded of one thing: what led them to the place where Jesus was born, in an unknown corner of Bethlehem, in a stable?The story says that a great star led the way. They followed the star and then the star stopped, just on top of the stable, so they knew Jesus was there, and they went in. This star makes the whole thing clearly fictitious, because stars don’t move in a direct line. They don’t move in any other way than in orbit; every star moves in a circle.And the stars are so far away that it would be very difficult to decide which stable the star was above! They are millions and millions of miles away. The distance is so great…but the story sounds as if the star was just sitting on the roof of the stable; only then would it have been possible. But do you know, stars are very huge, they cannot come that low; otherwise the whole earth would be destroyed, with Jesus Christ included.Our sun is a star. It is sixty thousand times bigger than this earth – and this sun is a very mediocre star. There are stars which you see in the sky which are millions of times bigger than our sun.Now, a star leading the way seems almost like somebody holding a torch ahead, or a lamp, and then coming to the stable and telling them, “This is the stable.” Stars can’t do that. They cannot move out of their orbit – even for Jesus Christ they won’t do it.But all religions are fictitious.Just as there are science fictions there are religious fictions.All holy scriptures are religious fictions, and not of first grade quality. In fact, they cannot be counted as great literature – only fragments are great.For example, in the whole of the Old Testament, just one small piece can be counted as literature, all else is rubbish. That small piece is “The Song of Solomon,” which Jews don’t even want to talk about – and that is the only important thing in their whole scripture! But they want to ignore it for the simple reason that Solomon certainly seems to be a wise man, certainly a religious man; a man of tremendous sensibility, aesthetic, moral; a man who knows what beauty is, what poetry is.Except for that small piece, everything else is only worth burning. In the New Testament, just a small piece, “The Sermon on the Mount,” is enough for Jesus to be counted as a man of some worth. All else is just written for the mob. The same is true about other religions.So when I say religion I simply mean the religious consciousness: a certain quality – not a certain dogma, not a creed, not a cult, not something organized but something felt deep in the heart, something closer to when you see in the morning a beautiful sunrise…. You feel something, something is stirred in you. You cannot express it, you cannot tell anybody what you are feeling. All you can do is, you can hold the other person, and with your finger you can show the sunrise without saying a single word.If the man has any aesthetic sense, any sensibility, he may be able to feel it; otherwise there is no way. You cannot argue, you cannot make a statement, you cannot do a commentary. You can only point it out…fingers pointing to the moon.All religious sages have only pointed to the moon. And all organized religions have caught hold of the fingers, forgotten all about the moon, and are worshipping the fingers. Now, the fingers are not the moon – they never were.In Kashmir there is one hair of Hazrat Mohammed which is worshipped. A few years ago, the hair was stolen. Now there was great turmoil; riots happened, because certainly some Hindu must have stolen it. Many people were killed, many houses were burned, many temples destroyed, many mosques were burned. And after three days the hair was found back in its place. I know for certain it is not the same hair.But what difference does it make? To the idiots…who knows whether the first hair was of Hazrat Mohammed or not? And even if it was of Hazrat Mohammed, what does it matter?In Kandi in Ceylon there is a huge temple, one of the most important in Ceylon – important because it has one too of Gautam Buddha. I have been to Kandi. The tooth is not of Gautam Buddha, for the simple reason that it is not a human tooth at all! It is so big – and I got it confirmed from people who understand animals, man. I had taken a vet with me. He said, “It is certainly of some animal; it cannot be of a man in any way.”And now it is confirmed by other sources also that it is from some animal. But it makes no difference; every year the festival continues, millions of Buddhists go on worshipping.Organized religion clings to fingers.Fingers are not in the moon.If you really want to see the moon you will have to forget the fingers completely; otherwise fingers will come in between you and the moon. They have to be ignored. They have done their work, they have indicated; say good-bye to them.Religious consciousness is a receptivity, a vulnerability to the existence that surrounds you, so alive that if you are open, its living vibes start moving within you, dancing within you. It is so full of joy – just you are closed. It is overflowing with bliss – just you are not there to receive it.Religious consciousness means receptivity to the joy the universe is made of.Yes, that is the stuff the universe is made of.Any intelligent person is of necessity going to be religious.Politics is only for idiots. Its day is finished. We have to begin a new history in which there will be no place for politics. We want to get rid of all this retardedness, this mediocrity. We want the earth to become really the very cream of the whole universe. It can become, it has the potential. Unfortunately we have not used it. But the time has come – and I am preparing you to use it.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 29 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,America has been likened to Rome prior to its fall. Is it appropriate to see the fall of these two powers as being connected to the predominance of Christianity at the time?History has moved, up to now, in circles. That is what is meant when it is said that history repeats itself. It need not be so, it should not be so, but unfortunately it has been so up to now.There is a certain law behind this phenomenon of history moving in circles. I call it the law of mediocrity, because anybody who has any intelligence could have seen that we have been making the same kind of mistakes again and again and again. The mistakes are the same, the situations are the same. It is unbelievable how mediocre the human mind is.First let me explain to you the law of mediocrity. I have said to you that religion comes into existence only when a society reaches the peaks of luxury.Religion is the ultimate expression of all luxuries.It is simple to understand and obvious. There are physical needs which should be fulfilled first, because without the body the soul may melt and merge into the cosmos, but it cannot live on the earth.Jesus says man cannot live by bread alone. This is only half of the truth – and remember, half-truths are more dangerous than complete lies. At least they are complete, and because they are lies, sooner or later they will be found out. But the half-truth is dangerous because in the first place it is half, and truth cannot be half, just as a circle cannot be half.You cannot say, “This is a half-circle.” Circle means complete. If it is half then it is only an arc, not a circle; it is just part of a circle. It will only be a circle when it is complete. The half-truth is dangerous in the first place because the truth can only be when it is total, whole, it cannot be half. But because it pretends to be the truth, you will not be able to detect it as a lie either.The half-truth has some fragment, it may be an arc only, but still it is part of the circle. It is not a circle but it is part of a circle. In some way it is a fragment of truth. That fragmentariness is very deceptive. You can go on believing in it for centuries.Jesus says, man cannot live by bread alone. It is a half-truth. It will be whole only when the other half is also added to it. Yes, it is true man cannot live by bread alone, but it is even more true that man cannot live without bread either. In fact, man may be able to live without music, art, religion, literature, science, but man cannot live without bread. Bread is a basic necessity.So when the physical needs are not fulfilled no great music is born, no great literature is born, no poetry is written. Hungry stomachs don’t produce poetry. Dying bodies cannot dance. So when the society is poor and its basic needs are not fulfilled, there is no possibility of an authentic religion. Yes, there will be something in the name of religion, but that religion will be a religion not of affluence, of overflowing ecstasies; it will be a religion of the beggar.You can look at poor countries: their religion consists of demands, their prayers consist of asking God, “Give us this, give us that. Give us our daily bread.” Their rituals are continuously to persuade God about something or other. Perhaps the rains have not come and they will do some religious ritual. Or perhaps too much rain is there and it has to be stopped; they have to pray to God. One thing is certain: whatever they do in the name of religion is concerned with their physical needs. God is just a father figure, and they believe that the father will help them in times of need.Poor societies, civilizations, cultures, have a very poor religion too. It is a kind of compensation. What they are missing here they project onto heaven.Look at the ancient scriptures: they say that in heaven there will never be starvation. Those people must have been starving, whoever has written that must be starving. We don’t know who wrote that but this can be said absolutely, that he was starving, his society was starving, and they were trying to find some consolation: “It is only a question of a few years; they will pass. In heaven there is no starvation, nobody will be sleeping hungry.”All the religions in their scriptures provide things in heaven which are being missed here: beautiful palaces – and to people who don’t have even grass huts or bamboo huts, to these poor people they are giving the hope of marble palaces in heaven! You can see the simple strategy. They are giving them dreams. And all poor societies have lived out of those dreams; hoping, hoping, hoping – and then death comes. And nobody knows what happens after death; nobody comes back, so the others continue to hope.In Indian scriptures heaven is air-conditioned. The word is not used because the word was not available at that time. Air-conditioning is a new phenomenon, and this is the first ashram in the whole history of man which is air-conditioned. In a centrally air-conditioned ashram three thousand sannyasins have never lived before! But air-conditioning was in the mind….In a hot country like India, where people die from sunstroke every year, hundreds of people, a hope was needed that in heaven it would always be cool, neither hot nor cold – because the poor person suffers from both. When it is too hot he suffers because he has no protection, no shelter; when it is too cold he suffers because he has no clothes, no shelter. Cool, just the morning cool when the sun rises, and there is no heat…in heaven it is always sunrise time. It never becomes noon, evening, no; the sun is simply hung there for eternity and cool air continues to blow.There is no dust in heaven, obviously. If you have lived in India you will know – in heaven, if there there is also dust, then what is the point of the religion and all the practices and all the prayers? No perspiration…. You can see the psychological strategy. In India everybody is perspiring the whole day, it is so hot. They have to compensated there, they have suffered enough here. So their heaven has to be just the opposite of here.Poor people, poor countries, have a very bogus religion. It is not religion, it is a psychological compensation. It is selling dreams to hungry people, just trying to convince them: Don’t be worried; blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God.Jesus gives no argument why the poor are blessed. It is strange that nobody ever asked this man, “Whatqualifications does poverty fulfill? It must be fulfilling some qualifications. As we see it, it is just the opposite: cursed are the poor. Who says blessed are the poor? They are condemned and cursed – these are actual facts. To cover it up, just the opposite is proposed: blessed are the poor.”Why did nobody ask the simple question, “What are the reasons that you call the poor blessed? – because we see all the blessings are with the people who are rich.” And Jesus says that “even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle but a rich man cannot enter into the kingdom of my God.” Naturally, the rich people were very few, and they were not even bothered about this carpenter’s son – uneducated, illiterate. Jesus was trying to convince the ninety-nine percent of the people, who were poor.It was worth sacrificing the one percent. To make his statement “blessed are the poor,” he has also to make another statement, “cursed are the rich.” What greater curse can there be than not to be able to enter into the kingdom of God? What more punishment can there be? They will be falling into hell for eternity.At least Eastern religions have some arithmetic; Christianity has none. Eastern religions have some logic; Christianity has none. Eastern religions believe that you have thousands of lives. Naturally, when you live millions of years you can commit an immense number of sins. But still the Eastern hell is not eternal. They say you will suffer in hell to the degree that you have committed sins. Once your sins have been punished and your punishment is equal to your sins, you will be released.In Christianity there is only one life; seventy years, eighty years, ninety years, a hundred years. In a hundred years’ time how can you commit so many sins that the punishment will be eternal? Do you see that Christianity lacks all arithmetic?But Jesus was not interested in, nor was he capable of giving, a logical, rational explanation. He was exploiting people through their emotions, their sentiments.The poor were happy to hear that they were blessed. They felt proud of being poor. Why should they inquire: “What qualifications do we have which make us blessed?” They were afraid themselves; if Jesus could not prove his statement then all their hope was lost. So the poor would not ask. And the rich people never came to listen to him, they never bothered about him; he was nobody, a nonentity. The poor were happy that they were blessed and the rich were cursed.So it is only a question of waiting a few years, not even a few lives. In the Eastern religions you will have to wait thousands of lives. In Christianity one life is all, so it is only a question of a few years. You have already passed so many; you will pass others also and then will come the day of compensation, which Jesus calls the day of judgment. It is really the day of compensation.The poor will enter heaven and the rich will be thrown into the depths of hell. I call it the day of compensation. The rich have enjoyed enough, now it is time for them to suffer.It is strange why enjoyment…is it a sin? – that you have to suffer for it? Is suffering a virtue? – that you will be blessed because you suffered? Then the natural conclusion is: suffer more, be miserable more. The more miserable, the more anguish, the more you will be blessed.In fact I sometimes have been thinking that there are so many poor people, who will be first in the queue? It is going to be almost impossible to decide who is the poorest. Ethiopians I think are going to defeat everybody. Americans are going to hell without question; they need not wait for the judgment day – I give the judgment. They are bound toward hell. Ethiopians are really blessed…according to Christianity.These religions are just exploiting people, giving them dreams and hopes. And because you give them dreams and hopes you become messiahs, prophets. You gain out of it. You give them empty dreams – and they make you great leaders of humanity.The law is: when a country is poor, its religion is false. Its real need is material. A poor country needs science and technology. So whatever is said on the surface is one thing, but a poor country goes on trying to become rich. In India you can see that.People from all over the world were coming to me, but the number of Indians coming was very small. Once in a while an Indian was puzzled, and he would ask me, “What is happening? People from all over the world are coming to you, and Indians…?”I would say, “Once in a while they also come, but their needs are different. They come here to get some financial help from me or from my followers; some recommendations because they want to go for studies to England, to America, to Germany. They want to become engineers, doctors, professors. They were not coming to me for meditation.”Just the other day I received a letter – and I receive letters almost every day – from a famous Indian film actor, Shashi Kapoor. He had come to see me for ten minutes, one time only, in 1970. After that I remained in Bombay…where he lives and has his studio and produces his films; he is one of the topmost film people in India. After that I lived for four years in Bombay – he never came back. For seven years I lived in Pune; he never came to see me – and he was always coming to Pune to shoot his films.On the contrary, he was telling people everything possible against me. I came to know it because he was working as the hero in Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, which was being made into a film. Some English producer wanted to see me, and Shashi Kapoor was his hero. Kapoor discouraged him; he said, “There is no need. This man was really “Bhagwan, the blessed one” before he was known as Bhagwan. Since he became known as Bhagwan and he has not denied it, he has fallen. He is no longer in the same state of consciousness.”So he was very much against me being called Bhagwan. He wanted me to make a public statement that I am not what people think I am. It was really a dilemma for me. I can say that, but it will be a lie. I don’t want anybody to call me anything, but specifically to say that I am not the blessed one would be to lie. And that I cannot do.Yesterday I received his letter. He is now in great financial trouble; four million dollars he needs. Now he remembers me. This was the situation in India, this is the situation here. Now he is immensely interested – but the interest is not in me, the interest is in four million dollars. Now he knows that this is one of the richest communes in the world. We have already poured into this Big Muddy Ranch almost two hundred million dollars, so naturally he can think that four million dollars is nothing for us.But to approach me for finances is idiotic. I don’t possess anything, I am the poorest man. In fact, if blessed are the poor, then the Ethiopians should remember I will be first in the queue, because howsoever poor they may be they must possess something. I don’t possess anything. I simply use things, I don’t possess them. You cannot find another man as poor as me.For almost thirty years I have not had any pockets because there is nothing to keep; I told my tailors, “Drop the pockets, because unnecessarily some pickpocket may follow and waste his time – he would finally find an empty pocket, because I don’t have anything. I don’t need pockets even to keep my hands in, because if I keep my hands in the pockets then I cannot talk. Pockets are absolutely useless. “So for thirty years I have not been having any pockets. I don’t possess a single cent.But the Indians are poor. Their religion today – I am not talking about their past – is a poor religion. They go to the temple to ask God for something. And whenever you go to the temple or the church to ask, that’s an indication of a false religion. Whenever you go to the temple to give something then it is the sign of a real religion.The authentic religion has nothing to ask.It has much to share, much to give.To understand the law of mediocrity you will have to see this. The poor country remains interested in science, technology, engineering, medicine; and of course if it continues to remain interested in these things sooner or later it will become rich. When it becomes rich then of course its interest changes; it starts thinking of painting, of music, of art, of literature, of poetry. If it goes on becoming richer, which is a simple process…once you know how to be rich then you go on becoming richer and richer. Money goes on attracting more money, money goes on producing more money.It is something autonomous: once the wheel starts moving then it goes on moving of its own accord. When you are satisfied with all the pleasures of the body, then certainly your psychological needs are there which can be fulfilled by music, art, dance, drama, literature, sculpture. Soon they are also satisfied, because these are limited needs. The body has a limitation, its pleasures are very few: food and sex. How much can you eat? And you cannot eat gold, you cannot eat diamonds – what a shame! You have gold, you have diamonds – all these beautiful things and you cannot eat them.You can have sex, but there again is the trouble: there is a limitation. By the time a man becomes rich he becomes impotent – or almost impotent, which is even worse. If you are really impotent you are finished with it, and you know it. But if you are almost impotent then you mind goes on thinking of it, trying to find some panacea, some doctor, some plastic surgeon – a Leeladhar; some hope that something can be done…some injections, some hormones. You are in real misery.But even if you don’t become impotent by the time you become rich, or perhaps you are born rich with a silver spoon in your mouth…. This idea of a silver spoon in the mouth must have arisen in a poor country; otherwise, why not a golden spoon in the mouth? Why say silver spoon? It must have arisen in a very middle class society where silver is something very valuable. Why not a diamond-studded spoon? Your proverbs, your words – everything has a history and a psychology behind it.If you are born rich then there are even more problems, because then you can have as many relationships with as many women as you want. And that is one of the calamities that can happen to a man. Monogamy is really something very protective, protective of your dreams, hopes; protective of your flights of imagination. Stuck with one woman you are certainly fed up with her, she is fed up with you. But both are free in their imaginations and both can enjoy, in imagination, other men, other women. Both can go on thinking, “that man, that woman, is a real beauty.”Once can never think of one’s wife as a beauty. When Mulla Nasruddin got married…. Among Mohammedans this is a tradition: as the wife enters the husband’s house the first thing she asks the husband is – because Mohammedan women use burqa, a black veil on their face…. You cannot see them, they just have two small holes in their veil so they can see. You cannot see them.The tradition is that the woman asks her husband the first thing, “Before whom am I allowed to open my veil?” The husband’s permission is needed. So he tells her, “Before my father, or before my brother, or before my uncle – these are the people before whom you can open your veil, there’s no problem. Except for these people you have always to keep yourself veiled.”Mulla Nasruddin’s wife asked him. He said, “It is very simple: except for me you can open you veil to anybody. Just forgive me – anyway, in the daytime I will never be home. And in the night I cannot see, it is dark; moreover, my eyesight is not right. But in the day, if by chance I have to come home, please, don’t open your veil.”You are not interested in anything that you have got, your interest is only until you get it. In fact, it is an egoistic trip, a challenge. In monogamy, every other woman is a challenge to you, every other man is a challenge to you. You cannot get them, and they look so beautiful, so smiling, so happy, that when you compare them with your wife who is always nagging and is always bothering you for this and for that….When you compare these beautiful women on the beach, smiling in the wind, in the sun, you feel so sad. But you don’t know that these women’s husbands are also in the same trap. These women on the beach turn into bitches when they go home – these same women.So monogamy is really very protective, it keeps your interest alive. Men remain alive thinking of women, women remain alive thinking of men. All poetry, pornography, novels, films, are filled with only one thing: the love story, because that is the only thing that is missing – everybody is missing it. At least in the story you can have a certain satisfaction. You can get identified with the actors, with the characters, and forget your personal misery for two hours while you are looking at a movie, sitting in a moviehouse.If you are rich enough you can have as many women, as many men, as you want – and that is the tragedy. When you come in contact with many women, you are surprised that it is the same woman again and again and again. She comes in all shapes, all sizes, but it is the same woman – just scratch a little bit and you find the same woman again. And the same is true about men.They may look different, but that is only the container. Containers can be different, just like American cars – Cadillac, Lincoln. Just the containers are different, the content is absolutely the same. Under the bonnet…don’t look. I have never looked under the bonnet and I am not going to look, ever; why unnecessarily kill your dreams? It is murderous.I never go to the garage. Avesh is waiting – he is the director of my garage; he is waiting. I am not going to come, because to see under the bonnet is so disappointing. But when you are rich you open so many bonnets…and it is nobody’s fault, it is just that you have money enough so you can open many bonnets; and under the bonnet it is always the same mechanism.You get fed up with food, with sex. You start looking for something higher. That’s when you start moving into higher dimensions, psychological satisfactions. The physical world is finished; now you would like Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. Then many dimensions open.Of course the psychological world is wider than the physical, but it is not unlimited; soon that is finished too. Soon you know all the best music, all the best literature, all the best art: then what? That is the point when real religion enters life – the spiritual need.The real religion happens only in a very luxurious, rich, affluent society. Now, I can explain to you the law of mediocrity.When somebody becomes interested in religion, really involved and committed to a search for truth, for some experience of consciousness, he realizes that he wasted his whole life unnecessarily in food and sex, in music and in literature; it was all a waste. He could have been in this ecstasy for all that time. He starts condemning. He condemns food, he condemns sex, he condemns music, he condemns literature, he condemns every body and mind need. And these are the topmost people, the geniuses of society, who have reached to religious consciousness. When they all start condemning, the circle starts moving downward.The society listens to them – and they are evidence of what they are saying. Everybody is miserable and they are not; everybody is in suffering and they are so blissful. There is no need for any other argument; they are their argument.It happened…one of the most famous logicians of this century in India was Keshav Chandra Sen. He was really the same type of man as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, men who could go to any depth arguing. Ramakrishna was at his highest peak of samadhi, superconsciousness. Keshav Chandra said, “I will go and put that old idiot….” Ramakrishna was illiterate and Keshav Chandra was world famous, everywhere recognized as one of the finest logicians who had ever existed.It was a challenge, because people were going to Ramakrishna – they both lived in Calcutta; the whole of Calcutta was moving toward Ramakrishna, and nobody was coming to Keshav Chandra. This was a great challenge. He informed Ramakrishna, “I want to argue with you, because I can prove there is no God, I can prove there is no heaven, I can prove there is no superconsciousness, I can prove there is no soul; it is all nonsense and you are exploiting people. And if you cannot prove them, then you will have to become my disciple. If you do, I will become your disciple.”Ramakrishna’s disciples were very worried and concerned. Ramakrishna was a simple man, innocent, childlike; so childlike that even in the middle of the street, if somebody uttered the name of God, he would go into ecstasy, he would start dancing there in the middle of the road. The whole traffic would be blocked. The policeman would come and say, “Paramahansa Deva, please, this is the road….” But he was such a simple man, so innocent, loved by everybody.All his disciples were very much afraid – it was difficult to face Keshav Chandra. What would Ramakrishna do? What would he argue? He had never given any argument for anything. But Ramakrishna was very happy; he said, “Tell him to come tomorrow, or come right now. Why wait?”Keshav Chandra came with all his great logician disciples to show them how he could dismantle this old idiot who was dominating the whole of Bengal and had become the topmost religious leader in the country. Many people from Calcutta came just to see what was going to happen because it was a rare occasion. Perhaps never before had it happened that a man of the quality of Ramakrishna and a man of the qualities of Keshav Chandra, argued.Ramakrishna, seeing Keshav Chandra, ran and hugged him. That was enough to make Keshav Chandra embarrassed; he was not expecting that. When Ramakrishna said, “I am so happy – so you have come to defeat me? Great! Nobody comes…. At least you thought of me, so kind of you – just come and defeat me.”“But,” Keshav Chandra said, “how to defeat you? First give some argument.”Ramakrishna said, “Argument? I am the argument. You defeat me.”There was absolute silence in the crowd. Keshav Chandra looked silly. He had never thought that a man would say, “I am the argument, you defeat me.” But Keshav Chandra was also a sincere man, not just a poor logician. He looked into the eyes of Ramakrishna and fell at his feet. And he said, “I am defeated if you are the argument. And certainly you are the argument, I can see it.”When a religious man is there his presence creates a climate.And when there are many religious people, the whole country is vibrant with their being.They all, up to now, have been condemning everything that has really led them to their state of consciousness. So when all the religious leaders of a country condemn materialism, attachment to body, attachment to this, attachment to that, and start teaching people tastelessness, celibacy, the country starts shrinking. It stops being creative. It drops its sciences, its technology. It starts following these great religious people, not knowing that you cannot follow them. You are destroying the very ladder they have climbed up on!And it is very easy for them, standing on the roof, to tell you, “Destroy this ladder, it is useless. It wasted so much of our time. On each rung of the ladder we wasted our life. Just burn it.” It is so easy from the roof. And these poor idiots burn the ladder and destroy the very basis upon which religion becomes authentic. The country starts becoming poor again. Civilization disappears, culture disappears.This is the circle, the vicious circle. The country will continue to become poorer and poorer and poorer and poorer, till the very last, when poverty means death. One more step into poverty and there will be death. It is at that moment – but it takes centuries to reach that state. And by that time all those dwellers on the roof have disappeared. Nobody is there to condemn. They start again from the very ABC: technology, science, wealth, how to be rich. The circle moves again.This is the circle – I call it the law of mediocrity.Poor countries go on trying to become richer; richer countries start becoming poor.This has been the case up to now. History has moved in circles. It should move in a line. It should be linear, not circular. When it is linear then it cannot be repeated, then you go on and on. But that needs intelligence; to break out of this law of mediocrity you need intelligence to understand how it has been happening up to now.The East was very rich. Then its Gautam Buddhas, Lao Tzus, Mahaviras, they condemned riches; it became poor, it became dependent on other people. Now it has reached the very depths of poverty.Talking in India about meditation I have felt as if I am committing a crime. People are hungry and they ask me, “If we do meditation will our financial situation become better?” And that’s what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi goes on telling them. These charlatans have some nerve! Maharishi Mahesh Yogi teaches people that his transcendental meditation will make them prosperous in all possible ways: materially, spiritually, psychologically. Whatever your need is, he has the panacea.I cannot say that, that meditation will fulfill your physical needs. It is impossible for me to cheat in such a way. So even in India, while I was traveling, I was speaking only to the very rich people. I was condemned as the rich man’s guru. I said, “This is not a condemnation, this is really the fact. I am the rich man’s guru because only the rich man can understand what I am trying to say, to convey.“The poor man has needs, I know. But what I can offer to him will not meet his needs. I am not for him. Mother Teresa is for him, I am not for him. What can I do if I deal in some higher things? I don’t own a grocery store. I cannot give you anything less than ultimate consciousness. But for that you have to be hungry – and you are not hungry for that. I have something to offer to you; but you are not ready to receive it, so it is not my fault.”Naturally, people from all over the world started coming to me, but these were all from rich countries, rich cultures, well-educated, very intelligent people, young people. To them I could convey. Something was possible now; they were ready, they were open, they were finished with the marketplace, the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the mind. They had had enough of it. They were at a point that if something else was not possible then only suicide was the way to get rid of this whole nonsense called life.Sannyas is possible only when you are ready to commit suicide – only at that critical moment, when nothing else matters.The old life is finished.Unless a new life begins – you are not going to continue to live in the old pattern – you will finish yourself.This is the moment when a man becomes a sannyasin.Your question is that Rome, its civilization, its great culture, suddenly fell and disappeared, leaving only beautiful ruins. It happened at a time when Christianity was at its peak and Rome had become the citadel of Christianity. Yes, Christianity is responsible for Rome’s fall. You will have to understand a few things.Roman people were pagans, they had never been religious. They had never been interested in airy-fairy things, they were not esoteric at all; very earthbound, very earthly people, solid. Christianity condemned them, condemned their paganism, condemned their life of “eat, drink and be merry.” That was their whole religion in three words – the simplest religion in the world. You cannot make a more condensed catechism than this: Eat, drink, be merry. That is the whole Roman philosophy.Christianity condemned them, condemned them so much that they stopped being pagans and started becoming religious. They dropped their old way of living joyously, luxuriously. They dropped being warriors, they dropped being imperialists; they dropped expanding, they started shrinking.When they became Christians they started believing, “Blessed are the poor.” And they wanted to get through the doors of heaven, so they started becoming poor. First psychologically you start shrinking, and then outwardly you start shrinking.There was a time when all roads led to Rome, Rome was the world capital. Now Rome does not matter at all: whether it exists at all or not will not make any difference. Who bothers about Rome now? This is what Christianity has done to the Roman empire, culture, civilization, just with the condemnation of their material life, the condemnation of Zorba – and the Roman people were just zorbas.The trouble is that just by condemning the zorba you cannot transform people into buddhas. If you condemn them as being zorbas then you simply destroy them. You are not a help, you are simply poisoning them. The zorba has to be made into the foundation for the buddha. Don’t condemn the foundation; otherwise the whole edifice will become impossible. Christians committed the crime, and Rome suffered.The same is the situation of America today. It is at the peak of its wealth, scientific knowledge, technological expertise – and it is getting caught in the hands of the Christians. Christians have never been so powerful in America as they are today.Americans should learn a lesson from Rome; otherwise history will be repeated and the law of mediocrity will go on functioning; but I don’t think Americans are going to listen.The American president, Ronald Reagan, is a fanatic Christian, and is trying in every possible way to make the country as Christian oriented as possible. In fact he thinks that Christianity is the only answer to communism. He is wrong.Christianity is not the answer to communism.In fact, communism is a by-product of Christianity.It is that idiotic statement, “Blessed are the poor,” which is the base of the whole communist philosophy.But Ronald Reagan is not a man of intelligence. He was just a poor, third-class, cowboy-film actor. I have not seen a single statement from him which seems to be coming from an intelligent source. His going to the Vatican, his meeting with the pope…and he is continually talking about religion and Christianity and Christ. His idea is that you don’t have anything parallel to the ideology of communism to use against Russia. Democracy is not such a strong thing that it can make anybody fanatic.Have you seen any fanatic democrat? It is a contradiction in terms. If you are a democrat you cannot be fanatic. So who is going to fight against the fanatic communist? Yes, a fanatic fascist can fight, a fanatic Christian can fight, a fanatic Mohammedan can fight. But remember one thing: it is really fanaticism that is going to fight. Communists are fanatic. They have an absolute faith that they are going to take over the world.I had one communist friend – he was really a great intellectual. He had written many, nearabout a hundred, books, all on the communist theme but in a very indirect way: they were novels. But through the novel he was preaching the communist theme, so indirectly that you would be influenced by the novel. The novels that he has written are first rate – he was a first-rate creative writer – but the result ultimately will be that he will be pulling you toward communism.His name was Yashpal. I told him, “Yashpal, you are against all religions” – and communism is against all religions, it is an atheist philosophy. “But the way you behave and other communists behave simply proves that communism is another religion.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I simply mean that you are as fanatic as any Mohammedan, as any Christian. You have your trinity: Marx, Engels, Lenin. You have your Mecca – Moscow; you have your Kaaba – the Kremlin; you have your holy book – Das Kapital. And although Das Kapital is now a hundred years old you are not ready to change a single word in it. In a hundred years economics has changed totally – Das Kapital is absolutely out of date.”He was ready to fight. I said, “It is not a question of fight. Even if you kill me that will not prove that you were right. That will simply prove that I was right and you could not tolerate my existence. You give me arguments.”Communism has no argument.I said to him, “Your whole philosophy is based on the idea that the whole of humanity is equal. This is psychologically wrong. The whole of psychological science says that each individual is unique. How can unique individuals be equal?”But communism is fanatic. He stopped speaking with me, he stopped writing letters to me. I used to pass through his city, Lucknow. He always used to come to the station to see me – he stopped coming to see me.When many of my letters were not answered I wrote a letter to his wife. She was a very loving woman. She wrote to me saying, “You can understand – there is no need for me to tell you that he is a fanatic. And you touched his weakest point. Even I keep myself alert not to say anything against communism. I can do anything, I can say anything against him, but I should not say anything against communism because, “That he cannot conceive, that anybody can be against communism.”He told me once, “We are going to take over the whole world.”I said, “Your project is a very small one, this earth is very small. Why don’t you join in my project?”He said, “What is your project?”I said, “My project is very simple. I am a man of very simple taste and very easily satisfied. I am just going to take over the universe. Why bother about a small earth which will be included in the universe? No need to be worried about it.” But communism believes it is going to take over the whole earth, and almost half of the earth they have already taken.Their fanatic attitude will create the reaction in America to become fanatically Christian. That seems to be the only alternative for Americans, but they don’t know…. You can survive communism, but you cannot survive fanatic Christianity.Just trying to save yourself from one danger your are falling into a greater danger.I can show you the way to survive communism – not only for you to survive communism, but for you to help the whole world to get rid of communism. it is very simple: just make people more rich. Let poverty disappear, and there will be no communism left.Marx, in his best book, The Communist Manifesto, declares in the end, “Proletariat of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your chains; you have the whole world to gain.” I am saying, if you want the world not to be communist, let everybody have something of value to lose and he will never be a communist.Make people richer – and you can do it. Now there is no difficulty. If you divert your attention from fighting with communism, and pour your energies into making people richer and richer, the whole country will become rich, so rich that even the iron curtain of Russia cannot prevent the people of Russia from seeing what is happening in America. They are poor; it just has to be made clear to them that the only way to be rich is capitalism – and the only way to remain forever poor is communism.Christianity cannot do that – only capitalism.Christianity will kill you; before communism kills you, Christianity will kill you. Christianity is really the father of communism. Trying to save yourself from the son, you are getting into the clutches of the father, who is far more dangerous, who has destroyed many civilizations before.But I doubt that any intelligent thing is going to be heard. The circle seems to be repeating itself. We have to be just helpless spectators because these idiots will not hear; even if they hear they will not understand; even if they understand, they will not follow it.It is such a strange situation. In Russia I am thought to be an American agent sabotaging communism in the name of religion. In America they think I am certainly a communist, and by creating a commune I am creating the basis for communism – “communism” comes from “commune.” The original idea in Marx’s mind was of a commune.Because of the commune and the red robes…. Just two days ago one of our Australian communes tried to purchase a holiday resort there. It has a huge building, and they wanted to make it a school for sannyasin children – it could manage at least one hundred and fifty children – and the resort could become a beautiful commune. The commune is in the city but they wanted to move out and to spread.The fear went all over Australia. The whole media – television, the newspapers – was full of the same fear. Just as we have heard here that we are going to take over Wasco County…. I am sitting here, and they are saying in Australia that I am planning to come to Australia and we will try to take over. Already there are posters in Australia: Better dead than red. Strange, that red color seems to have become the monopoly of the communists.Communists think that I am against them; capitalists think that I am against them…sometimes I wonder, am I against myself?But if there is even a little bit of intelligence in America then it is time to stop now; otherwise, the country is going to have the same fate as that of Rome and Roman civilization.In these last ten years all the decisions of the Supreme Court of America have become more and more favorable to the government against individual freedom. They have been more protective in these ten years; it was not the case before. Before, ten years ago, the Supreme Court of America was really a fair institution, and it was protecting the individual – who is helpless against the state, against the government.The individual has to be protected. His freedom of speech, his freedom of thinking, his freedom of living, have to be protected. The Supreme Court exists for that; otherwise the state, the monster of state, can simply destroy your freedom, your democracy, your individuality. It is just a steamroller, it can go on killing you.But in these ten years there has been a trend continuously toward the Supreme Court supporting the government against the individual. And particularly at this moment they are supporting the government too much, for a simple reason: five Supreme Court judges out of nine are going to retire this year. It is a rare thing. The people who made the constitution had never thought about this. They had provided in the constitution that the Supreme Court judges will be appointed by the president – and for their whole lifetime, so they are not under any pressure.Once they are appointed, even the president cannot do anything to them. And they should not be elected, because elections mean politicians. They should not come through bureaucracy, just by seniority, because seniority means by the time a person becomes senior enough he is also senile enough. To become a judge of the Supreme Court, if he has to move from the lower courts to higher courts, state courts, state Supreme Court, then by the time he reaches he is bound to be sixty, sixty-five, almost senile.That’s how it happens in India: Supreme Court judges there are almost senile. One of my friends became the Supreme Court chief justice. He was first chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh Supreme Court; Hidayatulla was his name, a Mohammedan. We became friends in a very strange way. I used to organize a world religious conference every year while I was in Jabalpur. I invited prominent intellectuals from all over the country. Hidayatulla was a very cultured man and he had just come to Jabalpur as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, so I phoned him and asked him for an appointment.I invited him to preside over the conference at least one day. “The conference is going to be for seven days and there will be seven presidents; one day you preside, any day you choose, whenever you are free.”He said, “I would love to, but the problem is, being chief justice, I should not participate in anything public. I should not come in contact with the public, I should not become intimate with people. I should not have friends because that can put pressure on my judgment.”I said, “I don’t know about your situation but I am determined to have you for one day as president.”He said, “How can you have me if I am saying no?” I said, “We will see.”Next day I told a press conference that Hidayatulla was going to be the president for the first day. And I sent one taxi with a loudspeaker, with a student in it, and told him, “The whole day you go around Hidayatulla’s house declaring the same thing again and again. Unless he comes out, drive him insane.”So that student went around his house declaring, “President Hidayatulla is going to preside over the first day of the world conference of religions.”Of course he was getting…. In the newspaper he read it, on the radio he heard it. He said, “This is something!” And then this man was continuously….His wife told him, “You better preside. That is simple, that is not such a big deal. And these people are not going to leave you alone. You go out; otherwise they will drive the whole family mad.”He came out, and told the student, “You go and tell your professor that I will be coming, but let this be the first and the last time.”The student said, “We never ask anybody to be the president of the conference twice. We never do that, don’t be worried.” That’s how we became friends.Finally he became the chief justice of the Supreme Court of India, but by that time he was seventy. When I saw him in New Delhi, he could not even recognize me. I said, “Hidayatulla, you have gone really senile.”He said, “Perhaps, because I go on forgetting everything. But I have to pretend; otherwise I will lose the job; so I keep quiet. I don’t say anything in case I may say something wrong. I am simply pretending, just passing time – it is only a question of two years more. Why lose a good job, the greatest, highest salary, and the most prestigious position?” – because he gives the oath to the president of India, so in a certain way he is higher than the president.The American constitution decided something really very significant, that the president will appoint the judges. But history does not move according to your constitutions. They have never though of a situation where five judges will be retiring in one year. If one judge retires, eight judges are there. Even if the president puts his man in it makes no difference because those eight judges will be the majority.But this year it is going to happen that five judges are going to be appointed by Ronald Reagan. They are all going to be Christian fanatics. And seeing this, all the judgments of the lower courts, state Supreme Courts, are going in favor of Ronald Reagan. Whatsoever he says now is right, because now everybody is hankering to be appointed to the Supreme Court. And he will appoint only those five people who are going to support him in every way.Now the majority in the Supreme Court will be in his hands. For the first time in American history the Supreme Court will be under the thumb of the president…and the president is such an idiot!He is influencing the Supreme Court continuously, and it is becoming more and more a government agency rather than a protector of individual freedom. It is no longer fair, it is no longer the same institution it used to be. America has lost one of its most beautiful things, the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court is in Ronald Reagan’s hands, then he can enforce anything upon this country – and he wants to enforce Christianity.But let this be a reminder to all:Christianity means committing suicide, and nothing else.

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From Darkness to Light 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Darkness to Light 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Does a pagan living a natural life need religion?It is one of the most basic questions that can be asked. The first thing to understand is, who is a pagan? It is not what Christians go on calling a pagan. The pagan is a natural man – sincere, not a hypocrite, living life naturally without an domination of the mind.The pagan is part of existence.He is not trying to go in some other direction but is always in a let-go and moving with existence wherever it leads.There is no goal in the life of a pagan.There is no question of any meaning in the life of a pagan. Life in itself is so beautiful that to ask the question of the meaning of life is simply nonsense. It has to be remembered – we ask about meaning only when something goes wrong.If you have a headache, you certainly inquire why; you go to the doctor to find out the cause. But when you don’t have any headache, what to say about headache? – you even forget about the head. Without the headache is there any head? There is no need even to remember it. When you are healthy you never ask the question, What is the meaning of health? Such a question only arises in the mind of a man who is not healthy.The people who ask what is the meaning of life are the people who have missed life, who are alive because they are still breathing, their heart is still beating, their pulse is still going on; otherwise they are dead. Except for these three things there is nothing in their life. Naturally the question arises: What is the meaning?Heart beating, breathing continuing, pulse perfectly right – but can these three things give you any fulfillment, any joy? Can these three things be the meaning of existence, the meaning of being? This is vegetating, not living. These are the people who ask, “What is the meaning of life?” – because they are missing it.The people who are really living are in love with life, in love with the small things of life, not hankering for any great things, non-ambitious.Sipping a cup of tea is enough of a joy for them.Just to see the sunrise is such a glory that who bothers what is the meaning of life? They enjoy their food, they enjoy their clothes, they enjoy their houses, they enjoy their gardens, they enjoy their lovers, their beloveds. They enjoy music, they enjoy poetry.They enjoy everything that is enjoyable, with no guilt.Joy is not a sin, and to be happy is not a crime. On the contrary, not to enjoy is a sin, not to be happy is to be a criminal, because the person who is not happy is going to do something wrong sooner or later. He is potentially on the way to crime. If he cannot be happy, he cannot allow anybody else to be happy; that is intolerable to him. He will be destructive of other people’s happiness, of other people’s joys. If he cannot enjoy, he is not going to allow anybody else to enjoy either. It hurts him that others are enjoying: “What is wrong with me?”There is certainly something wrong with you. Perhaps you are a Christian, perhaps you are a Hindu – these are diseases, and they go so deep in you, they contaminate you all the way. Your blood, your bones, your marrow – everything becomes contaminated.Just look at the face of Jesus. If you are a Christian you should look like Jesus, always carrying the cross, always sad, with a long face because the burden of the whole world is on his shoulders. He has to be the savior.The savior cannot be blissful. There is so much to save, so many people are drowning, dying; so many people are committing sins – and you are being blissful? Sitting silently doing nothing – and the crime grows by itself! The savior cannot have any holiday. He cannot go to a holiday resort for a few days to relax and enjoy the sun and the sand and the sea. No, it is not for saviors. This is for pagans.The pagan is never a savior, for the simple reason that if somebody wants to be miserable, it is his birthright – let him enjoy his misery! If he is enjoying his misery who are we to interrupt? If he wants to go to hell, then who are you to prevent him? He is not preventing you from going to heaven – you just go and take your flock with you, but leave him alone.But saviors cannot leave people alone. That’s why I say they are the most dangerous people on the earth: in the name of good they will interfere with your privacy. They won’t allow you to live according to your own nature. They will force you according to their ideas of how a man should be. They have a certain mold, and they will try to fit you into that mold; and nobody is going to fit into their mold, because their mold is according to their size, their height, their weight, their shape. It is their mold – it fits them perfectly.But all these saviors carrying this idiotic idea that what fits them is going to fit everybody; not only is going to, has to fit. The man is for the mold, not vice versa; the mold is not for the man. The mold cannot be changed according to you; you have to change according to their mold.Perhaps Jesus enjoyed being sad and long-faced. I have no objection to it – it is his life. If he wants to paint it with dark and dismal colors, it is his birthright; but he cannot say to anybody that, “You cannot paint your life with such shiny, such colorful moments.”But that’s what all these saviors have been doing. You have to paint your life just like a blackboard in a school. The darker it is, the happier the savior feels – he has saved one soul who otherwise was going to fall into the world of colors and songs, into the world of beauty and love. He was going to be distracted. Now he will remain with the dark color.It is not strange that Christian priests use black for their robes. Strange, they call those robes ‘habits.’ I used to wonder: habit, for a robe? Then slowly I understood that really it is a habit, an idiotic habit. It is not a robe – they are not wearing clothes – they are habits, conditionings. That black, to them, is the color of mourning too. Why should the Christian priest be in the color of mourning? That’s what he wants you all to be, continuously in mourning. That’s what he calls “saving people from sin.”Sin is really colorful. In the world of sin the color black does not exist…very alive colors, smiling, laughing, roaring.The pagan lives without any principles.To live according to principles is not to live. To live according to principles means you have to cut much of your living according to the principle – the principle is more important than your life itself. You have to sacrifice your life to the principle; you cannot sacrifice the principle to your life.The pagan has nothing higher than his life.Christians have condemned pagans; they had to condemn them because either the pagan can exist in the world, or millions of Christians – and they have destroyed the pagans almost completely. Now there are very few pagans in the world. They too have to live a double life. Just on the surface they have to show they are Christians, they are Hindus, they are Mohammedans; and underneath, underground, they have to live life as they would have loved to live it openly.These Christians have made the whole of humanity schizophrenic. They have divided every man in two, one thing on the surface and just the opposite underneath. And the life you live underneath you cannot enjoy fully; in fact, you feel guilty about it, you know that you are deceiving God. You know you are going against religion, you know you are not following the holy scripture.So even those who are living something true and natural, underground of course they are not living joyously; the guilt poisons everything.You are asking me, “Does a pagan need religion?”I am a pagan.I do not need religion because I am religion.The authentic pagan has no need of religion because, whatever religion can provide, he already has it.Religion gives you only hopes; the pagan has all those hopes realized herenow. Religion tells you that somewhere in the future, in the kingdom of God, you will be happy, continuously playing on the harp and singing, “Alleluia, Alleluia!” But sometimes I think, “How long can you play on the harp?” And in heaven there is no other work, at least no religion says that there is any work; just be happy and go on singing alleluia.Those saints, who must have been doing this for centuries – feel compassion for them.And the difficulty with heaven is, there is an entrance but there is no exit. Jean-Paul Sartre has written a play, No Exit; it is about hell. That’s where he is wrong. The book should have been about heaven. Hell has an exit but heaven has none. In hell there is so much going on – in every religion’s hell. It is really a fantastic place, so much is going on. You will never be tired and bored – all kinds of colorful people are there. In heaven you will find only dodos.I have experienced many times – because I have lived with many so-called saints – that saints are the worst company in the world. You cannot imagine: to live with a saint for twenty-four hours is enough to make you decide never to be a saint. From the morning till the night they are moving like robots, everything according to principle.The Buddhist monk has thirty-three thousand principles. I told one Buddhist monk…he is an Englishman, converted at an early age – now he is very old. Bhikkhu Shankra Chitta is his name, and he has lived in Kalimpong between Tibet and India, almost his whole life. He has written beautiful books on Tibetanism, and is certainly one of its authorities as far as scholarship is concerned.Just by chance I was holding a camp in Bodh Gaya where Buddha became enlightened, and he had come to pay homage to the temple and to the tree where Buddha became enlightened. Just by coincidence I was also there sitting under the tree when he came. We became friends.I told Shankra Chitta, “I cannot visualize myself ever becoming a Buddhist monk because my memory is not good. Thirty-three thousand principles! Following all those principles is out of the question; I cannot even remember them. And if you are following thirty-three thousand principles in such a small life, where will you find time to live or to breathe? Those thirty-three thousand principles will kill you from all sides.”But all religions have done that. They have given you guidelines without knowing you, who you are. But they don’t bother – “whomsoever it may concern.” They decide for a non-existential human being – just an imaginary idea – how that human being should be. Nobody is interested in the real human being, because it is not a question as far as the real human being is concerned – how he should be; the question is how he is. “Should” is nonsense; “is” is the reality. But all religions are imposing the “should” on your “isness.”The pagan is one who has no shoulds; his life is should-free.He simply lives without any guidelines, without any principles, without any savior, prophet, messiah. He himself is his savior, his messiah, his prophet, his holy book.The pagan is really a unique individual.I have called him Zorba.The pagan goes on living peacefully in harmony with nature; and without any effort on his part, religiousness flowers in him.If a man can be authentically a zorba he is not far away from being a buddha. He has traveled almost half the path. And the first half is the most difficult because all the religions are against it. All the religions drag you somewhere else, away from the first half; and once you are dragged in some other direction you can never be a buddha – because only this way goes to buddha.Zorba is the way to Buddha.If you are taken somewhere else – you become a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Jaina, a Mohammedan – then there is no hope of your ever becoming a buddha. You have been distracted from your nature; You have been taken away from the harmony between you and existence; You have been turned unnatural.A pagan is natural – as natural as trees and birds and rivers and mountains.Why don’t you ask me, “Does a flower need religion?” What will the poor flower do with religion? The flower blossoms. Its fragrance is released. The flower dances in the wind, in the sun, in the rain. That’s its religion. What else is needed? A dance in the rain, in the sun, in the wind…what more do you want? Your fragrance released to all directions…what more do you want? – because this is fulfillment. You have matured, blossomed. You have come to your ultimate peak. There is nothing higher than that.This is the religion of a flower.A Zorba is a bud, a Buddha is a flower; but you can distract the bud, you can destroy the bud – and millions of buds are being destroyed all over the world. They never become flowers, they never come to know what it means to blossom.To blossom is ecstasy.When the flower opens its petals it is just like a bird opening its wings into the sky.When the flower starts sharing its innermost treasure of fragrance with all and sundry, there is tremendous contentment. One has arrived.The Zorba is a bud.Yes, a bud should not remain a bud, but the bud needs no religion. It needs to go on growing the way it has been going on. The way, the same way as it has become a bud – it has to go on the same path – and the flowering will come of its own accord. And remember, when flowering comes of its own accord, it has a beauty, a grace. When it is forced, then it is just painted – make-up – but not beauty.In Buddha’s time there was one very beautiful woman; she was a prostitute, her name was Amrapali. I remembered her at this moment because she never used any make-up. Ordinarily prostitutes use more make-up than anybody else; in fact, prostitutes always use make-up, and the older they become, the thicker becomes the make-up.Amrapali was so beautiful. To indicate that – that she was so beautiful – the scriptures say that she never used any make-up. There was always a queue in front of her palace, of kings, princes, the super rich. It was very difficult to get permission to enter her palace. She was a singer, a musician, a dancer.In the East, the meaning of the prostitute is different from in the West. In the West it is simply a sexual object. One goes to a prostitute – that means one goes to a woman as an object, a commodity. A man pays for his sexual pleasure.In the East the prostitute is not just an object of sex; in fact it is not easy to persuade a prostitute to be an object of sex. Particularly in the past that was so. Still, in places like Lucknow, where the old tradition of prostitutes still continues, the prostitute is a musician, a dancer, a singer. She dances, sings, she plays on instruments. She tries to make you forget all your worries.That does not mean you are purchasing her as an object for sex. You will have to pay for all the pleasures that you enjoyed in her music, her dance; she is an artist. It is very rare that she falls in love with somebody; then she is just a woman as any other woman. She is not purchasable, she is not a commodity.These princes and these kings and these super rich people all hankered – and they were beautiful people – to somehow persuade Amrapali to be their queen, their wife. But she fell in love with Gautam Buddha.Buddha was coming to the city of Vaishali where Amrapali lived. Everybody who was of any significance had gone to receive him. The king was there, the prime minister was there; Amrapali was also there in her golden chariot. Seeing Buddha – she had seen so many beautiful people in her life, but she had never seen such a man – so silent, so serene, so peaceful, so relaxed, so at home. The way he walked – because he came walking; he used to move only on his feet – the way he walked into the city…the grace that surrounded him….Amrapali fell at Buddha’s feet and said, “Initiate me as your disciple, give me sannyas.”The prime minister, the king and the princes, and all the so-called big shots could not believer their eyes. Buddha said to Amrapali, “It is better, Amrapali, that you think about it. You are young, you are beautiful. So many people have been waiting for you, they are ready to give you everything you want. You have not looked at any of them, I am a poor man, a beggar, and becoming my disciple means becoming a beggar. You think twice. It is a difficult life. We eat only one time a day, we travel on our feet – just look at my feet. You think again.”It is said that even Buddha felt sorry to give this woman sannyas because she had lived in such luxury, she was such a flower. But Amrapali said to him, “Yes, so many people are waiting for me, but I was waiting for you. And I don’t want what they want to give me. They can give me the whole world, but I don’t want that. I would love just to follow you in the dusty roads, with naked feet. I will be immensely happy just to eat food once a day. I am ready to be a beggar. Just to be under your shadow is enough.”Amrapali was a pagan; she had lived very instinctively. Buddha gave her sannyas, but gave her no guidelines. That is the most important thing. He gave sannyas to millions of people but Amrapali was the only exception: to her no principle was given, no guidelines.Buddha said, “You go on following the way – you are on the right path. If you had not been on the right path you would not have chosen me. I have got nothing; on the other side is the whole world, and you chose me. That’s indication enough that up to now you have been on the right path. Now don’t ask for any guidance – that will be a distraction. You simply go on following your own innermost being.”And Amrapali became enlightened one day. Buddha not giving her any instructions shows tremendous insight which is missing in Jesus, Mahavira, Krishna. Buddha has something special about him. That’s why I have Zorba the Buddha. I could have said Zorba the Christ, but that would not have been right. It would be simply a contradiction in terms. Zorba and Christ simply don’t mix – like oil and water. However you try, they don’t mix. Zorba will go on playing on his – Mukta, what is it? – kontukki? The instrument that Zorba plays?“I forget.”You forgot! That’s a good sign – my people have to forget everything. I call it kontukki – I think it will do. Who understands Greek anyway!He will go on playing on his kontukki, and Jesus will go on carrying his cross. The company will be absolutely in discord, there will be no harmony. Jesus will be simply angry and tell him: “Stop it and get lost!” And Zorba is not a man anyone can stop, not even Christ.He will say, “You shut up! You put that cross down and come with me and have a dance.”When I said Zorba the Buddha, the reason was Amrapali. Amrapali was a female zorba. She had lived the life of music and song and dance. Buddha allowed her to remain herself. It is here that I see Buddha’s insight, which is missing in every other so-called prophet and messiah of the world. This man is not interested in interfering; if anything at all, he is interested in just helping you to be yourself, to be on your own feet. Amrapali was a pagan. She did not need any religion; that’s why Buddha gave her no guidelines.I have not given you any guidelines.I have not given you a certain mode of life, so that you have to do this and you have not to do that.There are no commandments in my vision.I simply love you as you are, and I would like you also to love yourself as you are, and just go on growing, just remain simply yourself.Be a little alert because there are so many crocodiles around, religious crocodiles. Just be watchful. Those crocodiles have killed almost the whole humanity. They don’t want human beings on the earth; they want Catholics, Protestant, Mohammedans, Hindus, communists, atheists – but they don’t want anybody just to be a simple human being without any adjective.I would like you to be just yourself without any adjective.You don’t need any religion; nobody does.Your question is such – as if you are asking me, “Does a healthy man need medicine?” If the healthy man is a crackpot, then it is up to him; but if he is not a crackpot I don’t see why he should need medicine. And if he is a crackpot then he is not healthy. To be a crackpot is enough proof that he is not healthy; he is as unhealthy as he can be. He will need all kinds of medicines, therapies, analysis, synthesis and what-not, and still he will remain a crackpot. He will go on becoming worse.Moving from Freud to Adler, from Adler to Jung, from Jung to Assagioli, he will become more and more of a crackpot – because these are all crackpots! He will become a very learned crackpot; he will know all the theories of Sigmund Freud, he will know all the philosophy of Adler and Jung and Assagioli. But a crackpot he will remain, because these people themselves are crackpots. Their philosophies are crazy, their theories are insane. None of them is a man who has arrived home; none of them is a buddha, none of them is an enlightened person.Blind people are trying to lead other blind people. They are going to fall in a ditch all together – but then it will be too late.Do you know that more psychoanalysts commit suicide than any other profession? The number is exactly double that of any other profession. Strange, that psychoanalysts should commit suicide twice as much as any other profession. They go mad also twice as much as any other profession. The world of the psychiatrist, the psychoanalyst, is a very strange world. Sometimes the patient is more healthy than the doctor.I have heard of one patient who was going through psychoanalysis for months, two sessions every week. The psychiatrist was getting fed up with the man because his problem was only one; anybody would get fed up. But because he was paying, what could you do? For money, people are doing all kinds of things – even psychiatry. Siddha is here – he is a psychiatrist. But for money people can commit suicide, people can murder, people can do any crime. They can even do psychiatry, psychoanalysis!This patient was really driving the psychoanalyst crazy. But he was paying, he was never late in his payments; his checks were exactly on time. He would never be late even for one moment; at the exact time he would enter in…and the same problem.The problem was very simple, nothing great. The problem was that he had this fantasy that some kind of strange creatures go on crawling up all over his body the whole day; even in the night he cannot sleep, they go on crawling up, and he goes on throwing them off. And after all this psychoanalysis there was not even a single creature less – the same number, the same problem.He sat in the chair and started scratching. The psychoanalyst said, “Wait! Don’t throw them on me!”This profession is the strangest in the world. Sooner or later the psychoanalyst has to go to be psychoanalyzed by another psychoanalyst. This is the only profession where they psychoanalyze each other.A pagan is healthy and whole.He needs no religion, but religion comes to him.So please don’t misunderstand me. I am saying he needs no religion, but religion happens to him.Without the pagan needing religion, it blossoms in him.Does the rose bush need the rose flowers? What need can there be? The rosebush is perfectly good without rose flowers; but they come. If the rosebush is healthy, well-nourished – the soil is good, the watering is right and the gardener is not a psychoanalyst – then those roses are bound to come. They’re on the way. The rosebush just has to be perfectly healthy: out of its health, out of it overflowing vitality, those flowers will blossom. And the more vital the rosebush is, the more fragrance will be there.I have, my whole life, loved trees. I have lived everywhere with trees growing wild around me. I am a lazy man, you know, so somebody had to look after my trees. And I had to be careful about those people who were looking after them, because they were all prophets, messiahs, messengers of God: they all tried to do something to the tree, they wouldn’t allow the tree to be itself. They would prune it, they would cut it.I had one gardener in Jabalpur – a beautiful old man – but I told him, “The moment I catch you cutting anything, you are fired. I love you, I respect you, but I love and respect my trees more, so be careful! Don’t be caught.”He said, “What kind of garden is this? And I am a gardener – I have to cut. I cannot allow trees to go wild, the whole garden will be destroyed. And if I don’t cut” – he was just working on a rosebush. He said, “If I don’t prune this rosebush then the flowers will be small. I have to go on cutting many buds, then there will be few flowers but really big. And I have been winning prizes my whole life for my flowers’ bigness.”I said, “You will have to forget about your prizes now, I am not interested in your prizes. I don’t care whether the flower is big or small. If the tree wants to blossom in a hundred flowers, who are you to manage just to create one flower? I understand, your logic is simple: if all the buds are cut then the whole juice of the tree moves into one flower; it certainly becomes big.”He had been winning prizes. Each year there was a state-wide competition and he was always winning the prizes. In fact I got hold of him just because of that, because that year he had won the prizes, and I saw his flowers and I could not believe…. So I told him, “You just come and be my gardener.”He said, “What about my salary?”“Salary” I said, “you decide; gardening I will decide.” Poor man – he was getting only seventy rupees per month, wherever he was working. Now a poor man cannot even imagine much.I told him, “You decide.”He must have stretched his whole imagination, and he came up with one hundred and forty – double. He could not believe that I was going to say yes.He said, “If it is too much then….”I said, “No, it is not too much. I was wondering how far you could stretch your imagination: only seventy rupees more? Seventy has become a fixed idea in your mind, and asking for one hundred and forty you are feeling guilty. That is decided – if you had asked any amount I was going to give it to you. But now I am sorry – you have asked one hundred and forty, you get one hundred and forty. But gardening you have to do according to me. No more big flowers, no more exhibitions, because the rosebushes are not interested in exhibition. And they don’t get the prize, you get the prize.”Perhaps Jesus gets the prize because he has cut so many buds and made so many Catholics and so many Christians. Perhaps Krishna gets the prize. But what about these people you are cutting in the name of saving them?I said, “This is your last year of prizes. Now – if my garden goes wild, let it go wild; that’s what nature wants it to be.”But his whole life…. Whenever I was out – I would go to the university and he would start doing his thing. I had to come in the middle of the day when he was not expecting me. I had to leave my car far away so he could not see the car coming. And then I would come and I would catch the old man. He would say, “Excuse me – just an old habit! I cannot see this garden being destroyed. And I feel guilty that I am getting double the salary – for what? Just letting this garden get destroyed?”I said, “It is not destroyed. You have to understand. This is the way it would have been if we were not here; if all men disappeared, it would be this way. Let it be the way it would be if man had not interfered. You can support, you can help, you can be a friend, but don’t be a savior.”A pagan is a natural human being.He needs no religion.Do you think I need religion?What will I do with religion?I don’t see that it has any utility, it will be just useless junk.I have lived without religion my whole life, and I have never missed it, for the simple reason that the bud has become the flower.And I have this immense feeling of arriving.Now there is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve.I have become what nature, existence, life, wanted me to become. Good, bad, famous, notorious, it doesn’t matter what; but this is what existence wanted me to be.I feel immensely blissful that I have not in any way interfered with nature, life, existence; I have not let them down.I am a religionless man.Every religious person is a religionless man.Only those who are religionless in the sense that they don’t need religion, are fulfilled. If you need religion something is wrong with you.If you need God something is really very, very wrong with you; otherwise what are you going to do with God? Have you ever thought that if by chance you meet God…. People have come to me asking how to see God, how to meet God. I said, “That I will arrange. But first tell me, what will you do if you by chance meet God? What is your next program? You will look silly, God will look silly; and once you have found God then your life will be pointless.” That’s why nobody ever finds God. Life remains a searching, a seeking.God is like the horizon: it seems to be just there, so close; it is meeting the earth, the sky is meeting the earth. You go on and on and on, but the distance between you and the horizon remains exactly the same. As you move, the horizon goes on moving away from you. The horizon does not exist, it only appears to.And remember, appearance is not reality. The sky and the earth meet nowhere. It is an illusion.God does not exist. But the hungry, starving, unfulfilled, discontented human mind wants something there – close enough so that you can believe in it; and yet, however, whatever way you try to reach it, the distance remains the same.“God” is as distant from Judas as it is from Jesus, equally distant – because it is a horizon. It doesn’t matter if you are a Judas or a Jesus: “God” is as far away from the greatest criminal of the world as it is from the greatest saint of the world. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t exist, it is simply a horizon point. That horizon point is called religion.You need it if you are not fulfilled here and now.If you are fulfilled here and now, who bothers about the horizon?I have never bothered, I have never tried to reach the horizon; there is no need. And even if I meet the horizon what am I going to do with it? I will have to come back home again.Religion is the need of the sick mind – a pagan is not sick.Religion is not his need, but religion is his gift to existence.I don’t need religion, but whatever I have been giving to the world is religion.And only a man who does not need religion can give. If you yourself are in need, how can you give it? I don’t need it. In fact I am so much burdened by it that I go on giving it to anybody.I am reminded of an ancient parable. A sage in the Himalayas refused throughout his whole life to initiate anybody. He became famous for that, that he is the greatest sage because he does not hanker for followers. Kings came to be initiated; he refused point-blank, telling them, “Just get lost!”He had only one boy, a poor orphan who had no place anywhere to go to; so he said, “You can live with me and you can do a few things for me.” That was the only person who was with the old sage.One day suddenly he called the boy and said, “Go down to the plains and tell anybody you meet, ‘If you want to become a disciple, don’t waste time – go immediately. This is the last day of my master. By the evening, as the sun is setting he will leave the body.’“The boy could not believe it, because he had seen even kings being refused. He said, “Anybody? or do I have some guidelines about whom I have to tell? – because you have refused great scholars, great saints. Whom am I to call? And so suddenly – where am I going to get them? And by evening you will be gone so there is not much time. I will run, but I cannot promise you that I will bring persons who are qualified, because I have seen every kind of person refused by you; nobody was qualified.”The old man laughed, and said, “You don’t understand. You simply go. Everybody is qualified, you just bring anybody! And when I say ‘anybody’ I mean anybody; anybody you meet just bring. Time is short – by the evening I will be gone.”The boy went. By the afternoon he came with thirteen people, a strange bunch. One man was going to commit suicide, he was just climbing up the mountain. The boy met him first. The boy said, “First take initiation, then you can jump. What is the hurry? And my master is willing today. This will be simply foolish…I am not against your suicide – that is your business – but my business is right now to find people, anybody.”The man said, “Will he give me initiation?”The boy said, “Certainly. You just follow me. And we have to find more people: evening is coming close.”He said, “Okay, I can commit suicide at any time, that’s not a big deal. I was going to commit suicide because of my wife. This is better; becoming a sannyasin, one is finished with the wife, one has renounced the world – this is better than suicide. You came at the right time. But will he accept me? – because I am in every way disqualified. I am a thief, I have been in and out of jail many times; I am a drunkard. There is nothing evil that I have not done in my life. Will he accept me?”The boy said, “Don’t be worried, you just come with me.” Shopkeepers, unemployed people who were standing before the employment office…the boy said to them, “At least today don’t waste your time – you can stand here tomorrow. Come take the initiation. The great master is willing.”They said, “If he gives initiation, then who cares about employment? Just to be known as his disciple will be enough. Even this employment exchange officer will come and touch our feet. We are coming!”It was a strange lot. The boy was worried: “I don’t think that these people that I am taking….He will hit me, but what can I do? Where can I find kings and great scholars in this small village? And there is no time for me to go to Varanasi and find real scholars, wise people. He did not give them the chance when they came before. He is such a strange old guy.”Very afraid, he entered. He said, “I have brought thirteen people. I could not manage to bring more because somebody was too busy with his work, somebody was going in a marriage procession; they said, ‘Today it is not possible. After three days….’ Only thirteen people I have brought, and they are not qualified in any way. All are the rottenmost people because they were uselessly sitting there. They said, ‘Okay, let us see what this initiation is. They are not even religious.”:The old man said, “Don’t be worried – you bring all of them.”The boy said, “All of them?”“Yes,” he said, “all of them, because time is short and I have to initiate them.”He initiated all those thirteen people. Those thirteen people were also shocked. They said, “You are going to leave? Then this will always remain a mystery, that your whole life you refused, refused such qualified people – anybody would have been proud to have them as his disciples. And you are accepting us – just third-rate, rotten people living in this village. And we have come here just because we had nothing to do, so we thought, ‘Let us see what is this initiation.’ We don’t know anything about religion, about initiation.”The old sage said, “Don’t be worried. There is no mystery in it. The times I refused were the times I had nothing to give. It was not a question of their qualifications, it was a question of my qualification. I had nothing to give them. I had not blossomed myself, and I cannot cheat people.“Today I have blossomed, but unfortunately I am the kind of flower which blossoms in the morning and by the evening the petals fall and disappear. Now I have something to give. It doesn’t matter who you are – qualified, unqualified does not matter at all. Does a flower ask you, ‘Are you qualified to receive my fragrance?’ So why should I ask that? You just take it, I am burdened; before I leave this world I want to share something. I want to go with the contentment that I am not a poor man, that I am dying an emperor, not a beggar.”Religion is given by those people who have no need of religion.Only a pagan can become a buddha.And only a pagan becoming a buddha releases the fragrance called religion.But it is not his need.His need is to share it.His need is to shower it on all – known, unknown, familiar, stranger, it doesn’t matter.His need is that of a raincloud; just to shower.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You said that you lie out of compassion, and we, your sannyasins, can understand what you are saying. But can the outside world ever understand? Won't it create more misunderstanding about you, about Rajneeshism, about your sannyasins? Please comment.Compassion knows no conditions. It can do anything, it knows no right and no wrong. Compassion can lie to help you. In fact, in your sleep you can only understand lies, you cannot understand the truth.Many things are involved. First, the experience of enlightenment, awakening, illumination, happens when there is no mind present. Enlightenment is a no-mind experience. Words are not there, language is not there. In fact, you are not there either. It is such a silence, so profound and infinite, it cannot be expressed without lying.The moment the truth is said, it is no longer true. Just the process of saying it makes it a lie. To bring the wordless experience into words is to change the very quality of the experience.So in fact, anything that is great – if it has been experienced at any time, by any individual – out of sheer necessity that person has to use lies to speak of it. But the lie of the awakened one is far more true than the truth of the sleeping one.I am reminded of a small anecdote…. A man went to a nearby big city. His children had asked, “Bring us this, bring us that,” and he had promised that he would. But by the time he had returned home, his house was on fire. There was a great crowd around, and they were all concerned about the children who were inside.The crowd told him, “We have been shouting, ‘The house is on fire, and there is still time – you can get out.’ But they are enjoying the whole scene, they are not aware of the danger. Now you are here, somehow bring them out.”He had forgotten to bring the toys, the trains, the cars and the dolls that the children had asked him to bring. He went to the only door which was not yet burning, but it was locked from inside. He knocked on the door. He tried to tell them, to explain that the house is on fire. They said, “We are enjoying it so much. It is so beautiful!”The man was shocked. He said, “Forget about what you are enjoying. I have brought your cars, your trains, your dolls” – and he had not brought anything. The moment they heard about their toys, they opened the door and ran out. Then he could explain to them why he had to lie. “Forgive me, I could not manage time enough to find your things; next time I will bring them. But forgive me for saying a lie to you – because that was the only way to save you; you would not come out.”Do you think this lie is a sin? And this is about an ordinary man and his children. What about me and my children? It does not matter to me whether I lie or not, because it makes no difference to my consciousness anymore, it is just a game. But to you, it matters immensely.I can go on telling the truth – nobody among you is going to understand, and nobody among you is going to be benefited by it. It will pass over your heads. Hence I said the man of compassion has to lie. The lie is only a device to wake you up. Once you are awakened I can say to you, “I am sorry that I had to say so many lies to you.” And I am absolutely certain you are going to forgive me.As far as the outside world is concerned – for me you are my world, there is no outside world – they should take care of themselves. I am existing for you, not for them. If they get disturbed or confused, so far so good. Perhaps out of their disturbance and confusion they may start becoming curious about what is going on. Many of you have come here out of such curiosity, and then you got caught, and you have not been able to leave.So I never take the outside world into consideration. Let them sleep. But if they get disturbed, if they get hostile, it is good; then a certain relationship between me and them begins. Enmity is a relationship just as friendship is. In fact, enmity is far deeper and stronger than any friendship.I am doing it absolutely knowingly. I want to shock the outside world. Perhaps that is the only hope for them, perhaps the shock will create an opening for them. They may come here hostile, as enemies, but about that there is no problem. We have this buddhafield of love, singing, dancing, rejoicing. All their hostility and opposition will be simply gone. The moment they see you and me, they are finished.So don’t take it seriously. You are afraid that I am creating difficulty for you sannyasins. Of course, I am continuously creating difficulties. What else can I do? You go on falling asleep again and again! I have to create difficulties because only in difficulties can you remain awake. Once you learn the beauty, the ecstasy of being awake, then certainly there will be no need to give you shocks unnecessarily.So, don’t be worried about that. If you go into the outside world, people will be hostile to you, but you have to be compassionate to them. Let hostility and compassion stand facing each other. It is one of the fundamental laws of life that compassion cannot be defeated by hostility. Compassion simply changes the hostile person. So don’t be worried that you will be facing hostility. Be concerned about compassion, love. Just start looking into people’s eyes with grace. That will disturb them more – and I want to disturb them!There was a man in Gautam Buddha’s time whose name was Angulimal. He had taken a vow to cut off one thousand heads, and to take one finger from each dead person and make a garland of one thousand fingers. Angulimal means the man with the garland of one thousand fingers.He was a ferocious man. People stopped going close to him. The road that passed by the hill where he was staying was no longer being used. He had already cut off nine hundred and ninety-nine heads; he was waiting for only one more. The road that passed by his hill was utterly empty, nobody was coming. And then Buddha came to pass. That road was the shortcut, but people were going the long way around, just to avoid Angulimal. Naturally, Buddha took the shortcut.His disciples said, “Bhagwan, you don’t know what you are doing! Haven’t you heard about that madman, Angulimal? It is better to go the long, roundabout way, rather than to take the shortcut.”But people like Gautam Buddha never turn back. He said, “I cannot turn back, now even more than before. If I had not known about Angulimal, perhaps I might have taken the other road. That poor fellow is waiting for only one head! My work is done; I have known all that can be known, I have experienced all that can be experienced. Now there is no reason for me…. If I can be of some service to that poor man, it will be good.”He went. Angulimal saw him. Buddha’s disciples, who were always clambering around him, by and by started creating a distance between him and themselves. If he was caught, at least they could escape. Angulimal saw Gautam Buddha coming. Even that dangerous man, who had murdered nine hundred and ninety-nine people already, felt for the first time that he also had a heart. Gautam Buddha was looking so innocent, so childlike and so beautiful in the early morning sun.Angulimal shouted, “You please turn back, because only one head is missing! Perhaps you are a stranger…but looking at you, something in me says ‘Let this man go – there are many idiots, I can cut off their heads.’ Even if my mother comes here, I will cut off her head! But you please go back. Don’t come close to me – I am dangerous! Do you see my sword? It is waiting for the last head.”Gautam Buddha continued. He stepped off the road and started moving into the mountains, closer to Angulimal.Angulimal said, “It seems you are more mad than me. Why are you going on and on and on?”Buddha said, “Angulimal, I stopped going anywhere a long time ago. I am not going anywhere, it is you who are.” Angulimal was standing there – Buddha was walking!Angulimal said, “Certainly you are mad. You are walking, moving, and you say you have stopped a long time ago. I am standing, and you say, ‘You are moving.’”Buddha said, “Just try to understand. Your mind is moving, thinking. My mind is silent, there is no movement. And you will not get a better head. It is really a joy to fulfill your vow. Prepare your sword.”Angulimal could not understand what kind of man he was. He was in a great shock; he had never come across such a man! He was ashamed of himself for the first time in his life. He could not look at Buddha eye to eye, because those eyes were radiating compassion, love, grace, joy, blissfulness, ecstasy – things that he had never known, but the fragrance was reaching him.He said again to Buddha, “You please go, sir. I don’t want to kill you. You are unnecessarily insisting that I do something that I don’t want to do.” But Buddha went on coming closer and closer. And finally he was standing before Angulimal.Angulimal said, “I used to think I was a stubborn man – you are a thousandfold more stubborn. Now I cannot help you, I have to cut your head.”Buddha said, “It is an old tradition and convention to fulfill the last wish of a person who is going to die, and I have a very small wish. You fulfill it and then kill me.”He said, “What is your wish? Even if it is the biggest thing, I will manage it for you.”Buddha said, “No, it is a very small thing. Just cut off a branch of the tree under which you are standing.”Angulimal said, “What kind of thing are you asking? But okay, if that is your wish.” With his sword he cut off a branch.Buddha said, “Now, put it back. Let it be part of the tree again. Let it blossom again.”Angulimal said, “That is impossible. How can I join it with the tree?”Buddha said, “If you cannot even join a small branch to the tree, do you see the implications of it? Any child could have broken that branch off the tree, and you are a strong man – you have not done a great job. You can cut off my head, but can you manage to give me life again? And if you cannot create, what right have you to destroy?”There was a moment of silence. The sword fell from Angulimal’s hands. He threw away that garland of nine hundred and ninety-nine fingers, and fell at Buddha’s feet. He said, “I never thought about it, that destroying something – any mediocre person, any coward, any idiot can do that. The real genius is creative – you are right. Please accept me as your disciple.”Buddha initiated him.He came back to the town. Even the king, Prasenjita, when he heard that Angulimal had become a sannyasin of Gautam Buddha…. He was a lover of Gautam Buddha, but he was afraid to go there because that man Angulimal could not be trusted, he could do anything any moment. But he wanted to see the man; he was so famous all around – hearing his name, even kings used to tremble.He came, he touched Buddha’s feet and asked, “I have heard that Angulimal has also become your initiate.”Buddha said, “Yes, he is sitting by my side.”Prasenjita became so afraid, he pulled out his sword. Buddha said, “Now it is not needed, put it back in the sheath. The Angulimal that you used to know is dead; this is a totally new man who cannot harm anybody. Don’t be afraid.”And that very day when Angulimal went to beg in the city, the same cowards who had stopped even going on the road that passed nearby Angulimal’s place locked their doors, stood on their terraces with large piles of rocks, and started throwing rocks at the poor man.He fell down; blood was flowing from all over his body. Buddha was informed, and he came. Just a few more minutes and Angulimal would be gone. Buddha said to him, “Remember one thing, that this act of yours – that you have not in any way reacted to the hostility of the people – is enough. You are dying as a truly awakened man.” Smiling, touching Buddha’s feet, Angulimal died.Don’t be afraid of people’s hostility. Just be aware of your compassion, your love, and nothing is going to be wrong.As far as I am concerned, out of necessity I will have to create devices. I will have to tell you things which can wake you up. They may not be true, because the truth, in the first place, is inexpressible. In the second place, even if somehow one manages to express it, it never reaches the sleeping person.The sleeping person is living in lies, that is the language he understands. And if I have to make you understand me, I am going to do everything possible – telling lies included – because the goal of lying is not to lie, it is just to wake you up.Osho,Could you speak of the creative female? I am a woman, and the creative spirit burns strongly in me. Recently, you mentioned that there should be much art and music, but it was in reference to men. I know women can offer a vision, an insight, a softness to the world of art that has never before been seen. I feel it has a different base to start from. Perhaps it is because art can be born out of love and no longer needs to be conquered.The first thing to be understood is that I am not speaking only of men. Whenever I am speaking, I am speaking to you all. In fact, there are more women here than men.Drop that idea from your mind that I make any distinction between man and woman. You seem to be part of that stupid movement called women’s liberation. Here there is no need for any women’s liberation. Here the situation is totally opposite – the men are afraid of the women. They are writing letters to me, “How can we be liberated?”In my commune there is no need to make any distinction. And this is the same stupidity – man used to think for centuries that he is higher, he is better, he has more intelligence. Now the woman starts the same idiotic game. I won’t allow it.Creativity is not concerned whether you are man or woman. If you feel to be creative, do it. But don’t think that you are going to give creativity something higher, something that man has failed to do.Why always go on putting dividing lines between man and woman? The truth is that every man carries a woman within him, and every woman carries a man within her. And it is bound to be so, because whether you are man or woman, you are created by one man, one woman. They have contributed to you half and half. Your father and your mother both are alive in you. It is only a question of which side of the coin is facing up and which side is underneath.That’s why it is so easy for Leeladhar to change a man into a woman, or a woman into a man, because the basic reality is similar – just a little bit of difference which makes no difference. Even a plastic surgeon can do it, you don’t need a spiritual surgeon for it.Certainly, it will be a better art if both men and women are creating from their different angles. But the way you say it, you don’t understand creativity at all. You say creativity can be out of love; painting, sculpture and dancing need not be conquered. But the possibility is ninety-nine percent that love is so fulfilling you will not bother to paint. You will not bother to waste your time in making a statue.Love is so fulfilling that who cares about writing poetry? Poetry is written by people who have missed the train. Now they are somehow consoling themselves by writing poetry about love – love they do not know.It is very difficult to be creative out of love. Yes, a different kind of creativity will be there. If you love a man, perhaps your kitchen will become the field of your creativity. You would like your man to have the best food. You would like the man to have the best clothes. Just look at my clothes! This is creativity out of love.Rarely is it possible for a woman who loves, to be bothered about painting, poetry, dancing, et cetera. It is really man’s inferiority complex – that he cannot love so deeply, that he cannot give birth to a child – that makes him have to find some substitutes to compete with the woman. He creates painting, he creates sculpture, he creates architecture, he creates the landscape for a garden. He wants to feel that he can also create.It is basically coming out of his inferiority. He can see the woman and her immense power of creating life. He creates a dead statue – howsoever beautiful it is, it is dead.Whoever has asked the question seems to be against men, and any woman who is against men is herself becoming something unnatural. Being against men, she is becoming a man herself. Psychologically she is now feeling inferior because the man can paint and create music and dance. Naturally, she will have to stop giving birth to children so her own creativity can be directed toward these things: painting, poetry, music.But I would like you to know that you will be a loser. You are competing with man, and you need not compete; you are already superior. You need not write poetry, you are poetry. Your love is your music. Your heart throbbing with your lover is your dance!But if you want to create poetry, music and dance, you will have to deprive yourself of love. You will have to be in the same space where man is: feeling inferior and then finding substitutes for creativity. That is ugly. I cannot give my support to it. The woman is the superior sex; she need not prove it.Why does man have to conquer? – because he is in a difficulty. Be compassionate to man, he is in a great difficulty. He has to reach the peak of the Everest, he has to go to the moon – all stupid things, because what are you going to do on Everest? You will not find even a Coca-Cola there. And what are you going to do on the moon? Life is almost impossible on the moon, because there is not enough oxygen, and water is not available at all.The one person who has walked on the moon was walking with all kinds of gadgets, carrying many things, oxygen and other emergency things. And he was covered completely so he would not get any infection that might exist on the moon. Now do you want to live like that, covered with a plastic bag, carrying oxygen and other things? What kind of life will that be? And for how long? It is okay for half an hour to have a walk on it and come back home. The man on the moon must have looked silly. It is a dead planet, you cannot live on it.It is a strange world the politicians have created. They want to destroy a living earth, a living planet which has everything life needs. And they want to go to the moon, a dead planet which can provide nothing to support you – not a single tree, not a single bird, no animals, no rivers, no oceans. The politicians seem to be really nuts! How much money has been wasted to reach the moon! The same money could have saved Ethiopia.Man is continuously trying to prove himself superior.One of my friends, who was also a colleague of mine in the university, told me, “I am in a difficulty and I cannot talk about it to anybody. You are the only one I know who may perhaps understand my situation, and may be of some help.”I said, “What is the problem?”He said, “The problem is I am in love with a woman who is taller than me. Now, should I marry her even though she is taller?” No man wants to marry a woman who is taller – just out of an inferiority complex; otherwise what is the problem?I said, “There is no problem. You can always carry a small stool with you, so whenever you want to kiss your woman, stand on the stool. If women can manage with taller men, then why can’t a man manage with a taller woman? Just watch women, how they are managing with taller men, and do the same. Perhaps you will have to use shoes with high heels – so use them! People in love say, ‘I could die for you’ – but you cannot use shoes with high heels so that you can reach your woman?”He said, “I came to find some solution, and you are making a joke of me.”I said, “No, I am not making a joke.”It is really because of the inferiority complex in man that he has to marry a woman who is not taller than him, that he has to marry a woman who is at least three or four years younger than him. And that is absolutely unscientific.If you listen to science, everybody should marry a woman who is at least five years older than him because women live longer than men – five years longer than men. Why should you marry a woman five years younger than you? Then you are creating a ten-year distance. You will be dead and your widow will be suffering alone for ten years. The most scientific way will be to marry a woman who is five years older than you, so you can both live together and die together! But man’s inferiority is such….The woman who has asked the question should remember she is already superior. There is no need to prove it, that’s why there is no need to conquer anything. But if she feels that she has no desire for children, and she wants to paint and she wants to compose music, it is perfectly good.In fact, many women should do that, because the earth is so overpopulated. You will be a great help if you divert your creativity from children to paintings, because paintings don’t need food. Dancing is perfectly good. Dance as much as you want, it creates no Ethiopia. Write poetry. Because of your poetry, perhaps a few people will have to suffer listening to it, getting bored with it, but that is not much of a problem. They can manage to avoid you.But if there is no desire to give birth to children, it is absolutely right. Certainly you will have to create something else. Do it, but don’t think that your creativity will be higher than that of man. It cannot be, for the simple reason that you are the superior sex, you don’t have that inferiority in you which is the incentive for man to put all his life into his painting.He is competing with your baby! And even if he is a Picasso, he dies in despair. His whole life he tried to paint something, but no painting can be alive, no poetry can be alive. So remember that a woman can create, but most probably her creativity will be just third-rate.But it is good for the world. We don’t want any more population, we want to cut the population to one-fourth of what it is today. So you will be helping a great project. You will be a blessing not giving birth to a child.But drop the idea that you will be creating something superior out of love. If you really want to create something, don’t think of love either, because love is so satisfying, so fulfilling. It is such a miracle, who wants to write poetry?I have never come across a single lover, man or woman, who has created poetry, who has created paintings, who has created sculptures, for the simple reason that they are so contented. All these creative things need a discontent, a wound which you have to cover up.I am perfectly happy with your idea. Just do whatever creative endeavor you want to; but remember, you don’t have the inferiority complex of man, so you cannot compete with man in any way. You are already in a better position. Man is poor; just have compassion on the poor guy.Osho,It is my experience that outside our international communes mankind has based life on a system of penalty and reward. Are our communes the only places where there is complete acceptance of responsibility, and mistakes are recognized as opportunities to learn? Please comment.Yes. Our communes are the only places in the whole world where you are accepted totally, you are not judged, you are not labeled as a sinner or as a saint, and you are not condemned for your small mistakes. You are accepted in your totality. Those mistakes come with you.Yes, we would like you to learn from your mistakes, but condemnation is not the way. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn something; but the moment people start condemning you, they destroy your opportunity and they make you stubborn. They force you to commit the same mistake again and again just as a resistance. Your ego is hurt.It is true that outside my communes the society is run by punishment or by reward. Reduced to the roots, the whole society outside is based on fear and greed. Fear as an ultimate consequence creates the idea of hell; greed, on the other hand, as a logical conclusion creates the idea of heaven.The moment there is no fear in you and no greed, you will be surprised: hell and heaven have disappeared. They were just projections of your psychology; they disappear the moment you accept yourself – and you can accept yourself only if people around you accept you, if they do not create some guilt in you, do not make you feel unworthy.In a commune it is so easy to accept yourself, because everybody else is accepting you. Acceptance is the very climate of the commune. And there are great implications in it. If a man accepts himself without any guilt, God will disappear. God is your guilt projected. It was God who condemned Adam and Eve in the first place. It was God who drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden as a punishment, because they had disobeyed. This God seems to be more like Adolf Hitler – no compassion even for his own creation.And if Adam and Eve disobeyed, the whole responsibility goes to God, because why did he create disobedience in Adam and Eve in the first place?God begins condemnation, expulsion, punishment – and what a punishment! We do not know when Adam and Eve existed – at least one million years ago, perhaps two million, three million years, or perhaps never. Most probably never. But we are still sinners because four million years ago Adam and Eve disobeyed God.Do you think it is fair? Even the most fanatic Christian cannot say that it is fair. It is absolutely unfair. We have not done anything. This is strange, that four million years ago somebody did something, and you are jailed for it, imprisoned, sentenced to death. You don’t even know whether these people existed at all. In fact, it is only a story, and the story has been created in almost all the religions, with small differences in the details.The story has a function – to make you feel guilty from your very birth. You are born in sin – it has nothing to do with your actions. Do you see the unfairness of the idea? You have not done anything, you are just born; but you are born into sin because four million years ago Adam and Eve disobeyed God. He punished them, so the story should be closed. They disobeyed, he punished them – the chapter is closed. But no, it goes on and on.From the very beginning they start creating guilt in you. For that very purpose the story has been invented. But what purpose does it serve to the outside world? It serves great things. If they can manage to convince you that you are guilty, they have destroyed your individuality from the very beginning. If they go on punishing you for your mistakes, which are human….You arrive here unprepared for anything; you have not had any rehearsal before your birth. It is natural that when you enter into a new world, with no guidelines given to you by nature, you will commit a few mistakes. Nothing is wrong in committing mistakes, just don’t commit them again and again.Whenever you commit a mistake, it is an opportunity to learn that this door leads to darkness. Knock on some other door. It is through mistakes that a man grows, learns, becomes mature.In my commune there is no punishment because I accept your mistakes as human, natural. To punish you for something natural and human is to destroy you, your humanity and your natural spontaneity.Nobody is rewarded, because punishment and reward are together. The reward says, “You have done right. Now go on doing right until you get the Nobel Prize.” It is a bribe. It is an effort to mold your life according to the vested interests. The society needs slaves, it does not need independent rebels.And my commune consists only of independent individuals, rebels. They have gathered together – not that they believe in a certain catechism, not that they believe in a certain dogma.I don’t give you any dogma, any doctrine. You have gathered here because you have found a certain synchronicity with other sannyasins. You are all rebels. Your rebellion joins you together. Your rebellious spirit is the only hope for the world. Spread it!If we can make the world know the beauty of the rebellious spirit, then there can be no third world war. Then politicians have to hang themselves; nobody is going to bother about them, they are no longer needed.Strange…small things have great implications. Punishment and reward is a political strategy. It is a religious exploitation. It is creating slaves on a mass scale – and for centuries they have been doing that. They are still doing it, and because we are no longer part of their ugly game, they are hostile toward us. That is natural. They could destroy a single rebellious man very easily, but they cannot destroy communes of rebellious spirits.You have the power to take over the whole world spiritually. Politically, I am not interested. But if your rebellion spreads…it has to spread like a wildfire. Your red clothes are symbolic of the fire that you have to go on spreading all around.And in returning humanity to the slave and giving him back his dignity, his individuality, his freedom of thinking and expression, we are saving this living, beautiful planet from the clutches of the politicians.The politicians and the priests are the greatest criminals in the whole history of man.Osho,All my dreams feel fulfilled. My master is dancing. My heart has wings. How can there be anything more after this? Osho, thank you.There is much more. There is no end to it! Soon your master will be drinking wine with you. Soon your master will be dancing in the disco. You have got a very unreliable man here. I can do anything – and I am going to!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have often used the word “existentialism,” and you have referred to yourself as an existentialist. Please define these words.There has been a contemporary school of philosophy in Europe called existentialism. I have nothing to do with it. That is only a philosophy, a mind game. These people were talking about existence, but they knew nothing of what it means to be existential. I also use the word “existentialist” for myself, but the difference between Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, and me is vast, unbridgeable.When I say I am an existentialist, I am not saying that I believe in the philosophy of existentialism.Existence needs no philosophy. Birds don’t need philosophy, flowers don’t need philosophy, rivers and oceans don’t need philosophy – but they are all existential; they exist, and they exist with totality and intensity.I am not a philosopher. To be a philosopher is just to be a “foolosopher.” It is a sheer waste of time. Down the centuries philosophers have been struggling intellectually to find the truth. Not a single one of them has found it, for the simple reason that intellect and its way goes round and round, about and about, but it never penetrates to the center.To love, you do not have to be a philosopher of love. Love needs no philosophy; love is an existential experience.I call myself an existentialist. I call you existentialists. But it has nothing to do with those dodos in France. It is not a philosophy but a way of life – not according to any dogma, cult, doctrine, discipline, no! – just living without any idea of how to live. The moment the “how” enters, it opens the door for all the philosophies to come in, all the theologies to come in.I want you to live like the trees, like the birds, like the clouds. Without man, do you think existence will disappear? Without man, after the third world war, do you think the sun will not rise? And the nights will not rejoice in millions of stars?My insistence is: live spontaneously without any discipline. Live in freedom and live in totality, because one never knows the next moment. I may not be here, you may not be here. The next moment is meaningless. As far as existence is concerned, it knows only one tense, and that is the present tense. The past is no more, the future is not yet.Only idiots bother about the past; they are gravediggers. And only idiots are concerned about the future, for the simple reason that they have lost contact with existence now. They are hoping perhaps tomorrow the miracle will happen, perhaps tomorrow the messiah, Jesus Christ, will come down and give you salvation, liberation, paradise.I want you to know: that guy, Jesus Christ, is never going to come, for the simple reason that the way you behaved with him…. If he has any intelligence he is not coming back to this earth. And I know that you will do the same or even worse to him if he comes again. I think he is not that retarded. And just think: what salvation did he bring when he was here? He could not save himself, and he was proposing to save the whole humanity.But people who have missed life start hanging onto some hope. They know perfectly well they themselves are not capable, so they start projecting messiahs, prophets, incarnations of God. This is just to console themselves: “Let the tomorrow come; somebody is going to arrive. God is merciful, compassionate…” Seeing your misery he is bound to send a messenger or his only begotten son or a prophet. This gives you a certain kind of opium so you can tolerate the suffering through which you are passing.One thing: there is no God. It is your hope – and what a hope! An absolutely hopeless hope. And God is not merciful; otherwise through what more misery does he want to show his mercy?In the first world war people were waiting for the merciful God to do something. He never did anything. In the second world war when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were suffering the worst that humanity has ever suffered, the merciful God did nothing. He is just a lousy fellow – and not even real. It is your projection. You would like a god, a father figure who takes care of you. You would like prophets who have a direct communication line with God.Do you know that the Mormons believe their leader has a private phone line direct to God, so whatever he says is God’s word. There is no way to argue about it; you cannot argue with God.Rather than hoping…. Have you not seen entering Rajneeshpuram? – the Christians have put up a beautiful sign: “Abandon hope all those who enter here.” Those fools don’t know that they are preaching my thing.Yes, abandon hope all those who enter here, because we don’t live through hope. We live in the present, and hope is always in the future. Abandon all future, and start living moment to moment rejoicing in the small things of life.Remember, life is not made of great things; it is made of very small things. In the early morning, sipping a cup of tea, do it totally, as if this is the last cup of tea you will ever sip again. Take each moment and squeeze the whole juice of it.I call this my existentialist approach. It has nothing to do with God, it has nothing to do with heaven and hell. It has nothing to do with religion and all kinds of stupid subtleties that theology has created.My approach has nothing to do with philosophy. It has something to do with you. And it has something to do with now, because to me there is only one time, that is now; and only one space, that is here. Once you have learned the art, the knack of being herenow, you will be so fulfilled, so contented – you will not need any opium for yourself.On the one hand, you will not need the opium which the religions of the world have been providing for people to keep them dreaming for centuries. On the other hand, you will not find what the so-called existentialists in Europe have found: meaninglessness, anguish, anxiety, despair.Those people were finding meaninglessness because all other philosophers and theologians had proposed that life is very meaningful. But their meaning was derived from God, heaven, hell, the holy Bible, and all kinds of garbage. Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers and people like him were searching for the meaning. There is no need to search for the meaning. Life is neither meaningless nor meaningful. Meaning is a mind thing. Life is a taste!Do you ever think what meaning taste has? Eating spaghetti, do you ask what meaning the taste has? Having a beautiful shower, the freshness of it, have you ever asked what the meaning of freshness is? Looking at the sunset with so many colors spread all over the horizon, have you asked what meaning the sunset has?Ask the wrong question and you will find the wrong answer. The existentialists of Europe accepted the questions of religions, which were wrong. Naturally, they found wrong answers. They are not existentialists, I am – because I don’t see any question about meaning. Life is such a beautiful experience, who bothers whether that beautiful experience has any meaning or not? Love is such an ecstasy, who bothers whether love has any meaning or not?To be silent and meditative is so ecstatic, you will forget all about your search for meaning, truth, God. And once you have dropped the wrong questions, the wrong answers disappear of their own accord. Then between you and existence there is no question, there is no answer, but there is a communion. Your heart slowly, slowly starts beating in the same rhythm as the whole existence. You start feeling yourself part of this immense organic whole. You enjoy tremendously. How can there be anguish?Those existentialists were feeling anxiety, anguish, despair, because death is there, and death will destroy everything. Life has no meaning, and facing them, there is just death closing in on them. The darkness of death makes them feel lost. They start trembling deep inside their being. Their life has been empty, and now comes death. What kind of existence is this? – just despair.It seems to be created not by God but by the devil. Perhaps the devil enjoys torturing people. He enjoys wars, he enjoys Ethiopias, he enjoys poverty, he enjoys all kinds of crimes. Courts go on increasing, and crimes are always far ahead of them. Governments go on becoming more and more dictatorial, anti-individual, because they think if the individual is left free, there will be havoc.With all the armies and police forces and government agencies, still rape goes on happening, murder goes on happening, suicide goes on happening – and always on a larger scale! Looking at the world, the existentialists of Europe found nothing but despair.But I am puzzled about one thing: why didn’t they commit suicide? They talked about suicide, that suicide seems to be the only exit out of this mess, this madness, but none of them committed suicide. Somewhere deep down, they were still hoping that perhaps they were wrong. Perhaps the messiah is going to come, the misery has reached to its Everest peak, just a little more – a little more patience, a little more waiting, and God is going to save them. All this misery perhaps is only a test of your faith.That’s what religions have been telling you down the centuries – that misery, suffering, poverty, is just a test of your faith. God is watching you round the clock. Perhaps, deep in the unconscious of the existentialists the same conditioning still prevails. So on the conscious level they go on saying that this is worthless, this life is accidental, that it has no meaning, that all that it gives is anguish, despair, death, and the only way out is suicide. But none of them committed suicide, they all lived long lives. It is just a game with words.I want you to remember that I am the only existentialist ever!I have tasted from the cup of existence. There is no meaning. There is no meaninglessness either. There is no hope. There is no hopelessness either.These things are absolutely irrelevant. If you enter into existence…And the miracle is you cannot enter existence through the mind. Mind consists only of past and future – both are non-existential.If you want to enter existence, you will have to shut up your mind completely. And in that small gap – when there are no past memories surrounding your consciousness, and no future imaginations or hopes present – in that small moment of pure silence you meet existence for the first time. And immediately all questions disappear. You are so abundantly fulfilled, so content, so whole, that who bothers about meanings?Have you watched a simple thing? When you are sick, then you ask, “Why am I sick? What is the cause of it?” You go to the doctor to find out the cause so that some medicine can be given to you. But when you are healthy, have you ever asked, “Why am I healthy?” Have you become worried that “I am healthy”? Have you gone to the doctor to say, “Please tell me the cause of my health?” No, when you are healthy and feeling a great well-being, you don’t ask such questions. Health is natural; disease is a disturbance.To be in tune with existence is the most healthy experience. There is nothing more than that, but it is so much you cannot exhaust it.My existentialism simply means meditativeness. And Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger – their existentialism is simply mumbo jumbo. They don’t know what it is to be meditative.The existentialism in Europe is an outcome of Christianity, Judaism. If you search for its roots, from where it has come with so much despair, you will find Christian and Judaic traditions behind it; it is a by-product. Because for centuries the Jewish religion…and the Christian religion is just a by-product of Judaism, because Jesus was born as a Jew, lived as a Jew, died as a Jew. He never heard that he was a Christian.Christianity is only an offshoot of Judaism. Their basic theology is not different. They differ only on one point, that Jews will not accept Jesus as their prophet, as their messiah. Just that single point; otherwise there is no problem. You can see it: the Christian Bible consists of both – the Old Testament which is Jewish, and the New Testament, which contains the gospels of Jesus. But the Christian has not denied the Old Testament, it is still his holy book.Look at the bible of the Jews; it has only the Old Testament, the New Testament is not there – cannot be there. They crucified the man as a criminal. They crucified Jesus as one who was against the whole tradition, convention; he was a heretic.These two religions are not really two, and both these religions are the roots; existentialism is their ultimate fruit. For centuries they have been giving hope – there is bound to come a time when some intelligent person is going to ask, “How long do we have to wait for Godot?”I used to think that Godot must be the German word for God. I asked Haridas, my German sannyasin, “Does Godot mean God?”He said, “No!”I asked, “Then what is equivalent to God in German?”He said, “Gott!”I said, “That is even worse that Godot! Godot sounds nearer than Gott!”But people have been waiting and waiting for centuries; neither the messiah comes, nor does human misery disappear. On the contrary, it goes on increasing. We have made the world more educated, more cultured, without seeing the fact that if people are more intelligent they are going to ask questions which uneducated masses have never asked before. They are going to ask, “How long will it take for the fulfillment of our hopes?” And there is no answer.They were asking the same question of Jesus two thousand years ago, and he said, “Don’t be worried. Soon I will be coming.” Now, two thousand years…isn’t the “soon” finished?If the “soon” takes two thousand years, then any intelligent person will have doubts. And what is the guarantee that he is coming in the future? Two thousand years can pass, ten thousand years can pass. His “soon” seems to be very elastic, you can do anything with it. You can go on stretching it out for thousands of years and man’s suffering goes on becoming more and more.Man has never suffered so much as he is suffering now, for the simple reason that man has never been so intelligent before. Buffaloes don’t suffer. Have you seen a buffalo sad, bored? Have you seen a donkey in very great despair?Religions have tried hard to make sure that people should not become intelligent. Intelligence was their monopoly: the priest knows, and you should just have faith. The masses went on believing this up to this twentieth century, and it is not a coincidence that existentialism burst out in Europe – not in India, not in Ethiopia.One would think it would have been more logical for existentialism to be born in Ethiopia, where people are dying in thousands every day; they know what despair is. But they are not intelligent enough. They accept it still as a test of God, perhaps the last test; and beyond that is all they have always wanted, available in paradise forever and forever.I have watched it in poor countries – because I have been in India – the poor are the least discontented people. It is shocking. They cannot manage even one meal a day; sometimes they have just to drink water and go to sleep. I have asked them, “Why are you drinking so much water?” And they have said, “Just so that the stomach feels full. Food is not available.”But I have not seen these people feeling despair – they should. They don’t think life is meaningless – they should. They don’t raise a question about God – they should. But poor people are not discontented. They have accepted poverty as fate, as something God-given. And crackpots like Jesus have been telling people, “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God.” So it is only a question of a few days more, or a few years. The kingdom of God is not far away.And they have a certain joy imagining that they will be in paradise enjoying everything possible – beautiful women, rivers of wine – and the rich people will be suffering in hellfire. They will be able to look from above at what is happening to Henry Ford and Rockefeller and the Kennedys. They still believe this. In India, for five thousand years there has been no revolution. People have taken suffering as something natural, to be taken for granted.Why did it happen on the continent of Europe that existentialism became the most important philosophical movement? For the simple reason that Europe was affluent, rich. And when you are rich, affluent, when you have all that you want, paradise means nothing to you. What can paradise give to you which Paris cannot give?And when they had all that a man can desire, they suddenly became aware – even if all these things are given, something is still missing: the meaning. They have everything, but that black hole of anguish inside them is not diminished; it has really become more clear in contrast to all the riches and all the comforts and all the luxuries. Now they can see that nothing can help.A tremendous helplessness – that is anguish. An ultimate hopelessness – that is despair.But I don’t think these people are really existentialist in my sense. They are just reacting against the whole past, which had great hope of great things. Now they have managed through science every great thing which for centuries man has been hoping, and it has not given them any contentment. It has not fulfilled them. They are poorer than the poor. The poor at least have hope; they don’t even have hope.My existentialism is not an “ism.” It is unfortunate that I have to use the language that is available; otherwise I would not call it “ism.” That word stinks.The only way to existence is through meditation. Jean-Paul Sartre never heard what meditation is. Kierkegaard had no idea what meditation is. Meditation is simply to be totally in the present, and to be in rhythm with the existence that surrounds you. Meditation is the only existentialist approach. It is not intellectual, it is total: your whole being is involved in it.And if even for a moment you can taste the wine of existence, that transforms your whole life. You don’t bother about meanings, you don’t bother about gods, you don’t bother about heaven and hell, you don’t bother about messiahs and prophets. You have the whole existence in your hands, and it is tremendously beautiful. Remember, I am not saying it is tremendously meaningful, I am saying it is beautiful.When you see a roseflower, and you say it is beautiful, some idiot can ask you, “What is the meaning of beauty? It has to be meaningful too.” But existence knows nothing about your logic, your philosophy, your theology. They are your creations. Existentialism is simply the frustration from thousands of years of waiting, and Godot has not come. In fact, nobody has seen Godot. Nobody knows that Godot has promised to come – there is no appointment.All the centuries of ignorance, darkness, exploitation by religions have come to an end, for the simple reason that science has released man’s intelligence into a freedom. But that freedom can be misused, and it has been misused by the so-called existentialists. I am using that intelligence and that freedom for its right purpose and dimension.Live abundantly here, now, and you will never have any despair. And remember you will not be a Christian, you will not be a Jew, you will not be a Hindu or a Mohammedan. Those are just different names of hopes. The opium is the same, only the labels differ.I am against drugs, and all religions are supplying drugs to you. It is symbolic that Jesus turned water into alcohol. I don’t do miracles; otherwise I would turn alcohol into water. All the religions have been turning water into alcohol and befooling you. It is strange; alcohol is a far worse drug to your health, to your life, than LSD or marijuana. But LSD and marijuana are prohibited, you will be punished. Alcohol, of course, is a religious drug.If Jesus had done a little more turning, he could have turned ordinary grass into real “grass.” Then it would have been a religious thing. But the poor fellow had not heard the name of LSD, he had no idea of marijuana.The function of a government should be to keep people awake. But they are afraid of your awakening; hence, their hostility toward me. If I was also turning water into alcohol, your presidents and your premiers and your governors would have come to touch my feet. That’s what they want: that people should remain in a hazy, unintelligent state. Then they can be exploited, they can be enslaved, and any kind of nonsense can be poured into their heads – they won’t resist.And you can see – no child is born as a Christian, or a Jew, or a Hindu, but the parents and the society immediately start pouring all kinds of crap into the poor, innocent child’s mind. By the time he can think, it is too late: he is full of garbage. And he has been told that it is not garbage; it is something holy, something very precious. He goes on clinging to it, and that keeps him mediocre.Existentialism in Europe came after the second world war. The second world war struck the intelligent people: if the second world war was not enough for a messiah to come and God to do some miracle, then all those hopes were absurd, then they had been befooled for centuries. But they moved to the other extreme. Because for centuries they had been told life is meaningful, they started saying it is absolutely meaningless.Because they were told God created man in his own image, they started saying it is all accidental. Nobody has created man, it is just an accident. Some monkeys – must have been mischievous monkeys – jumped on the ground from the trees and started walking on two feet. Man is not a creation – because there is no proof that he is created in God’s own image. This is the image of God! Adolf Hitler is the image of God, Winston Churchill with his cigar is the image of God.The second world war was such a shock to the intelligent people of Europe that they revolted against the whole past. But when you react – it is a logical thing – you move to the very opposite extreme, and the truth is always somewhere in the middle. It is never at this extreme or that extreme. Truth is always somewhere in the middle, because at the extremes there is always tension, strain, fear. In the middle you can relax.I teach you not to react to the past. They wasted their life on one extreme, now you should not waste your life reacting to them on another extreme. I show you the way which is exactly in the middle: no past, no future, no reaction, but a meditative space.And once a man has tasted a meditative state, then there is no problem for him. He knows the secret key, he knows the alchemy of transformation. He can go on moving deeper and deeper into the present – it is infinite. You can never come to the borderline where it ends. And your joy goes on growing, your laughter goes on becoming more and more crystal clear and more and more innocent. Now you are not laughing because somebody has told you a joke; there is no cause to your laughter, it is simply bubbling inside you, uncaused. Now you cannot resist singing.All prayers are bogus, unless the song comes from your heart for no reason at all. Perhaps just as flowers blossom in the trees, songs blossom in the meditative man. Soon you will be dancing. And the crowd will think you certainly mad. But one who is entering an authentic paradise does not care what people think about him.First, they will call you mad. But we have to go on growing these mad people around the world. Looking at so many people mad, they will have to think, “One man can be mad, but so many people? And they are intelligent people – they are doctors, they are professors, they are engineers, they are computer experts. And in their whole lives they are working so intelligently. They cannot be called mad.”We have just to spread our madness fast enough before the idiotic politicians destroy this whole beautiful earth. The time is short, but it is a beautiful challenge.The more red people there are around the earth, the more people will start inquiring of you, “What is it that you are enjoying? What is it that you are singing for? Why is it that you are dancing?” And once they become curious, inquiring, they are already on the path. Take their hands in your hands and let them move also into singing, dancing, rejoicing.I am giving you, for the first time, an authentic religion: a religion which has wings to fly, a religion which does not condemn you, but accepts you as the highest evolution of consciousness on earth, a religion which gives you freedom to laugh, to sing, to dance.The pioneers are going to be in a little difficulty, because the sad people who are living in despair – who have never known a single moment of love, who have never known a single moment of silence or peace – seeing you enjoying, are going to become hostile to you. That’s why the whole of Oregon is hostile to us. We are not hostile to them.One journalist has asked me, “Cannot your commune and the Oregonians coexist?”I said, “Never!”We are going to change the whole of Oregon to red. Why should we coexist? Coexistence means we keep our hostility hidden, and we become hypocrites, and we say nice nothings to each other. No.I am for either or. Either they change us and make us sad and frustrated, or we are going to change them and make them dance and sing!Osho,Years ago I had contact with certain psychologists, and their ideas seemed to set me free. I found new ways to understand myself, and met people with integrity that I respected. I still love the poetry of psychology. Now, reading some psychologists writing about so-called cults, they sound like fanatics, priests and politicians. They want to control people, not to free them. Can you please comment?That first idea of yours about psychologists was childish. There is no poetry in psychology. Psychology is the latest instrument to keep people oppressed. Because the priests have failed, new priests are needed. The psychologists are the new priests, and obviously they have come with a new jargon, but the basis is the same.The politician has been conspiring against you with the priest for centuries. But now it seems the priest has lost hold of people. Churches are empty, so empty that my people have purchased a church in Holland and are turning it into a disco. In fact, that is a good beginning. I would like all beautiful cathedrals and churches to be turned into discos. Now nobody goes into them, they are cold and dismal and dead.The politician is very cunning. He can see the priests have lost their hold – at least on the younger generation. He has to find a substitute. The psychologist has come in handy, because he speaks a different language than the priest. He pretends that his psychology is a science. That is absolutely wrong!It is not science; how can it be science when Freud, Jung, Adler, Assagioli, are not agreeing on a single point? The four great psychologists – and not agreeing on a single point! Science always comes to an agreement. When the truth is known about anything, the scientist is humble enough to drop his prejudices and accept it. It does not matter who has discovered it, what matters is that it has been discovered!But the psychologists are divided into so many schools – the same way as religion was divided into so many religions, so many subdivisions of religions, cults, creeds. The same is the situation now of psychology. But the psychologist does not bring God in, does not bring heaven and hell in. He has found different names for these entities. He does not talk about man in the old terms the priests have always used; hence, you got caught in their jargon.The psychologists don’t say that you have to become an ascetic, that you have to practice a certain discipline for years together – or perhaps for lives together – and then you will be liberated, no. They say psychoanalysis will do, just go on being psychoanalyzed.I have never come across a single man whose psychoanalysis is complete. In fact, even Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, is an unpsychoanalyzed person. I have been trying to psychoanalyze him, and I am finding treasures. I would not have believed it if somebody had told me that Freud was so afraid of ghosts that even the word “ghost” was enough, and he would freak out.Once he was talking to Jung, his most intimate follower at that time, who was very much interested in ghosts. Jung started talking about ghosts, and Sigmund Freud fainted. These are your founders of psychoanalysis. That was the point where Sigmund Freud and Jung parted. Jung could see, “This man, who cannot even listen to what I have to say about ghosts without fainting, is not going to be my master.” And Sigmund Freud also realized, “This man is not going to be my successor.” Sigmund Freud and Jung parted.Listening to me, you may be thinking that Jung was very much more courageous than Sigmund Freud, because he was so interested in ghosts, but that is not true. He was interested in ghosts because he was very much afraid of death, and afraid of becoming a ghost!Jung wanted to go to Egypt to see the ancient mummies of kings and queens preserved there. Almost ten times he booked his trip, but at the last moment he would find some excuse and cancel the trip. On the tenth time, he even went to the airport; and the moment the departure of the plane was announced, he chickened out. After that, he never made any attempt to go to Egypt. He was very much afraid of a dead body. These people are certainly in need of much psychological help.You say you were very much impressed. It was not that you had come across something very impressive, it was only because you were ignorant, impressionable – anything would have impressed you, you were just soft clay. Otherwise, to see poetry in psychology is insanity.There may be some psychology in poetry, but in psychology…In psychology you will find your psychologists talking about masturbation, schizophrenia, nightmares, all kinds of madnesses. I don’t think you can find any poetry in all this. Nobody has found poetry in a medical book, and the psychologist is dealing with far worse sicknesses than any medical book can.But the politicians found that a substitute was urgently needed, and psychoanalysis has become a worldwide movement. It was bound to. Sigmund Freud was a Jew, and whenever a Jew starts a business, it is going to become a worldwide chain.What did Jesus do? He was a Jew. And Jews have not forgiven him yet, for the simple reason that they are angry with themselves for losing the greatest business that Jesus had made available to them. Now Christianity is the biggest business firm in the world. Sigmund Freud also made a great business out of psychoanalysis. Jews know how to do business.Seeing that psychoanalysis was spreading fast, and people were trying to find the meaning of life, some hope, trying to get rid of despair – it was simple for the politicians to use psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, in the service of the vested interests. That’s what they have been doing.Now you are a little more mature. Seeing what the psychologists are writing about cults, new movements – they are all against new movements, new religious beginnings – it is very simple to see that they are in the service of the past, not in the service of humanity’s future. They have been purchased. They are the new priesthood! Beware of these people. Because they are new, they are more dangerous.Now psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, are providing deprogramming. If somebody moves out of Christianity – bored with all its nonsense – and joins a new movement, the psychologists are offering their services to the parents, to the society, “Bring your boy or your girl and we will deprogram the person.” And they do it. Of course, they charge enough money. And particularly in America they are very successful, for the simple reason that the American mind is always ready to change. It has not very deep roots in the past. Americans are the uprooted people.It has been found that three years are enough for an American to be in a job. Three years is also the limit for an American to remain married to a woman. Three years are also enough to have a honeymoon with a new cult, a new creed. There is no need to deprogram them; within three years they will move themselves.And this is not just about small children or young people. One old man – perhaps seventy years old – has been coming here throughout the whole year, almost every month. He is a billionaire – and you know perfectly well I am not averse to money.Money is a perfectly beautiful method of exchanging things, one of the greatest inventions of man. It was so difficult before money came in. You had a camel to sell, but nobody was ready to purchase a camel. You had to find someone who wanted a camel and was willing to give his two cows in barter. It must have been a very difficult world. Money has made it easier. You need not bother to find the purchaser, you can simply sell the camel and purchase the cows. It is one of the greatest inventions of man to make exchange easier. I am not averse to money. I want the whole world to become rich and luxurious.I say to you, “Blessed are the rich and the luxurious. Even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but no poor man can enter the gates of heaven.” For a simple reason; what is the poor man going to do there? He will simply feel silly with all that luxury in paradise. The poor man will lose his mind, because all these things were condemned on the earth, they were sins, and here saints are dancing with naked girls! And this is what the saints are doing – who knows what God is doing? Perhaps having a sexual orgy.The poor man will find hell perfectly suitable. He has always lived in hell, he is accustomed to it, he has experience of it. And of course, the experiencer should be sent to the place where his experience can be of some use.Jesus’ whole theology is absurd, sending the poor to paradise – they have never enjoyed anything, they have not rehearsed before they entered paradise. And whatever they have been practicing is perfectly suitable in hell.I would like poverty to disappear from the world. I am all for richness in all dimensions. The poor cannot understand classical music. The poor cannot understand the beautiful poetries of great poets. The poor cannot understand the paintings of Van Gogh or Picasso. The poor will be absolutely at a loss to understand what is going on, if you play Mozart; he cannot figure out that this is something celestial.This old man was a billionaire, but I don’t believe in persuading anybody to become a sannyasin, and I don’t allow my sannyasins to convert anybody. We are not missionaries. The word missionary is a four-letter word. The missionary is trying to interfere in your life against your will. We are here. If somebody finds the place beautiful, rejuvenating, it is up to him to decide.His family became disturbed because one time was okay – he had come out of curiosity – but now he has been coming every month for one week at a time, and they are afraid that he may become a sannyasin. He is the head of the family and of all their international corporations: he has the authority over all the money the family has. Naturally, they are afraid.But how to take a seventy-year-old man to a deprogrammer psychologist? They went alone, not taking him, to ask advice. The psychologist said, “It is really a difficult situation. Your people you can bring forcibly, but this old man you cannot bring forcibly. If you do, it is certain he will become a sannyasin. And I don’t think that I can deprogram him either.”The simple reason is that no sannyasin can be deprogrammed, we have already deprogrammed him. You don’t have any programs, so what can they do? You are not being given a certain program. They can deprogram the Moonies, they can deprogram the Hare Krishna people. They can deprogram any cult: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jesus freaks….I am surprised…Jesus himself was a freak. In fact, Jesus freaks are really doing the right thing; to follow Jesus you have to be a Jesus freak. Jesus was not a gentleman, not dressed in a gray business suit. You can think of him as a freak, as a hippie, or anything, but he was not part of the old conditioned mind. That’s why he was rewarded by crucifixion.At that time deprogrammer psychologists had not arrived; otherwise Jesus would have been saved from crucifixion. Just deprogramming would have been enough. He had just to be constantly hammered: “You are not the only son of God. Drop this nonsense. If you are the messiah for whom the whole Judaic tradition is waiting, let them recognize you. Why do you go on shouting that you are the awaited messiah?” It would have been very easy to deprogram that poor carpenter, but the psychologists were not around there.In America they are doing great business, particularly in California. They are spreading in other countries also.You have found now the right attitude about these people. They don’t want any revolution in the world. They don’t want any kind of religiousness in the world. They don’t want the new man in the world. And they are against humanity, because only the new man can save it. Only the new man can throw these politicians with their nuclear weapons into the Pacific – pacific, certainly, so they can be at peace forever.These deprogrammers are writing against cults, dogmas, and they don’t know anything about them. They don’t come here. Not a single deprogrammer psychologist has appeared, because he knows he will be deprogrammed.We have our own deprogrammers, who are certainly far more efficient, for the simple reason that they are not giving you any program. So their work is simple: they simply deprogram you and leave you alone to yourself. They do not reprogram you. They give you freedom. Deprogrammed, you are no longer a Christian, no longer a Hindu, no longer a Mohammedan. You are no longer an American, a Russian, a German. Completely deprogrammed, you are simply an innocent, reborn child.My sannyasins are again reclaiming their childhoodness, their innocence, which has been disturbed by the priests, by the politicians, by the educationists. In every way you have been cut to a certain size, according to the dress that they have prepared for you. This is strange! The dress should be cut according to you, and for centuries they have been cutting you according to the dress. The dress is already available – the Christian dress, the Hindu dress, the Buddhist dress – and you have to fit into it. It is imprisonment.It is good that you have understood that these psychologists are the new jailers. Beware of them.If anybody needs deprogramming, these are the people who need it. So if you can catch hold of a deprogrammer, bring him here. We have to start deprogramming the new priesthood, because we want the whole humanity to be one. We don’t want any priests, we don’t want any religions and we don’t want any nations. We want the world to be one, because only in one world is there no need for nuclear weapons, is there no need for war.Right now, seventy-five percent of human energy, income, resources, is going in to creating more and more nuclear weapons. And these politicians who go on piling up nuclear weapons also go on shedding crocodile tears for Ethiopia.Ethiopia, with all its wounds, can be immediately healed. Half of the population of India need not be existing below survival level. In America itself, thirty million people, are so poor that it is simply ugly and insane for the American president to go on pouring money into nuclear weapons.And the amazing thing is, you have enough nuclear weapons to destroy humanity seven hundred times! Strange! I don’t see the arithmetic. Have these politicians forgotten even the basic three R’s? Russia and America both can destroy this planet seven hundred times. There is no need, one time is enough! You have already got weapons seven hundred times more than you need. Just an average mind can see the foolishness of it.Stop nuclear weapons, stop this whole idea of war. But the politician knows if the priest disappears he will be in difficulty. He wants to substitute the priest with the psychologist – a more up-to-date version of the same priesthood. There is no difference.It has to be stopped. So whenever you see a deprogrammer, catch hold of him and bring him here. The way they are catching hold of people…what a strange world! – Parents are hijacking their own children and giving them into the hands of the psychologist, and he hammers them.The method is very simple. He goes on hammering for two days, three days. The man had been a Christian, now he has become a Hare Krishna. The Hare Krishna ideology is only on the surface, very fragile, new; his Christianity is centuries old in his unconscious. It is very easy to deprogram him; his unconscious will be supporting you. You have just to scratch a little and his unconscious will start coming up.You have to make him feel guilty: “You betrayed Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God; you betrayed your country, you betrayed your community.” You have just to make him feel guilty-that is scratching – and soon his unconscious will come up.But nobody can deprogram my sannyasins, because we already do it and we never give another program to people. We leave them completely free, individual. We give them the dignity of being and individual and not just a member of some religion. We give them the pride to be themselves and not to be an American or a Russian.Nobody can deprogram my sannyasins.In fact, if you find yourself in a situation where you are forced to be deprogrammed, don’t be afraid. Deprogram the deprogrammer! Don’t miss the chance. And I know you can do it!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I trust you unconditionally. At the same time, I don't believe you. Can you speak about trust and belief?Baby, that is really great! Just groovy. I don’t believe in my own statements either! We are in perfect agreement. I trust myself, I trust you, because I trust love.Trust is of the heart, belief is of the mind. They are diametrically opposite, they never meet. They can run parallel to each other, but they will never meet. Belief will remain hollow, without any content, and trust is overflowing with joy, blissfulness.You say you trust me. That’s enough, more than enough. I don’t want you to believe in my statements, because my statements go on changing every day. If you believe in my statements you are going to be crazy. They are so contradictory, you will not be able to figure out what I actually want to say to you.But trust remains the same – the same flavor, the same grace, the same beauty, because it is not a statement of the mind. It is not a statement at all. It is a silent communion between two hearts, a silent communion in which two hearts synchronize; their beats become a rhythm, their vibe takes the same color and aroma.I am not a man who wants you to believe in anything, including me. I am against belief as such.That’s why I have been continuously contradicting myself, so nobody can make any belief out of my statements. No scholar, no theologian is going to make any system out of my statements. In thirty years I must have contradicted myself thirty thousand times. Anybody working on me for a PhD will soon be found in a madhouse. And my reason for doing so is crystal clear. If I were making statements consistent with each other, you would not listen to me, you would make a belief system out of it. I am a little outlandish.In the forty-two years Buddha spoke, you cannot find a single inconsistency, no contradiction. Now it is so easy to make the whole living religion into a dead belief, a dogma. The religion becomes a cult.Religion is religion only when the master is there continuously watching that you don’t get into the head, that you remain centered in the heart. But when the master is gone, all that you have left with you is his statements. If they are consistent, then it is very easy for you to make a theology, a Christianity, a Buddhism, a Hinduism, Mohammedanism, and then cling to it. You have forgotten the master; now you have only words, which mean nothing. It was the man behind the words who had meant something to you. Can’t you see the difference?When Gautam Buddha spoke, many hearts started melting into him. The same words are written in the books; the Buddhist theologian is not speaking any other words, he is speaking the same words Buddha used – but nothing stirs in your heart. On the contrary, your head becomes interested; you start arguing for and against.My strategy has never been used before. No master has been self-contradictory, and because they were not self-contradictory they have all failed. Although Buddha goes on saying, “Don’t believe in me,” that does not make any difference. When Buddha is gone, they need some substitute – a holy book, the Dhammapada, the Bible, the Koran – they need something substantial to hold on to. They will make a belief, they will make a theology, they will make a philosophy. And that’s how all the religions have slowly, slowly died.By the time a religion becomes a theology, it is only a cult. Christianity is a cult, Hinduism is a cult, Buddhism is a cult. But the miracle of miracles is, they call my people a cult and I am managing things in such a way that whatsoever you do, you cannot make it a cult. Either it remains as religion or it disappears. It is better that it disappears than that it becomes a cult.I am not going to leave any successor because we have seen what happens to successors. Two thousand years of popes coming and going…. If you want to find idiots in history, it is so easy – take the names of all the popes, because other names have disappeared. These popes are representing Jesus Christ, and because they are representing Jesus Christ they are infallible. I am not going to leave any successor behind me, because in the first place I, myself, am fallible. How can my representative be infallible?I am not special, not holier-than-thou. I am not a messiah, not a prophet, just a simple, ordinary human being like you. You cannot manage with such a man to have anything like the whole history of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism. They fall into the same pit, into the same darkness. And the basic reason is that their prophets and messiahs and their founders were trying hard to be consistent, because consistency has been thought to be of immense value. It is of immense value, but only for the head. No scientist can afford self-contradictions, he has to be consistent.I am not a scientist. I am a mystic.Science tries to demystify things. What does knowing everything about existence mean? In other words, it is demystifying existence.I do just the opposite: I mystify the rose, I mystify the cloud. I mystify the sky, the stars. I mystify you. And remember, it is no mystification-that is bogus. I simply reveal your reality to you. And it is such a mystery.I can afford contradictions, because I am not aiming at your head. My aim is somewhere else. You can ask, then why do I talk? I talk to keep your head engaged; meanwhile, my arrow goes directly to your heart. Continuously I am throwing arrows to your heart; but the head knows nothing about it, cannot know anything about it. They are not on talking terms either.And I have to contradict; otherwise my arrows will be futile. Your head will find rationality, consistency, a better philosophy, better argument, more contemporary, and you will be satisfied with your head. And your head is just a computer, it is not you.Anything can be fed into the head. It can contain almost all the books of all the libraries of the world; a single head can contain that much information. And the more information you have, the more your head starts swelling up, becoming bigger and bigger. And in the noise and the clamor, who is going to listen to the still, small voice of the heart? Hence, you need not believe my contradictions; you should not believe what I say.When I am here, why not have a heart-to-heart meeting? That is trust. Behead yourself completely!You are right, and I can see your difficulty, because in ordinary dictionaries “belief,” “faith,” and “trust,” are all synonymous. They are not. Belief is rational, it is in favor of the better argument, it simply goes on following a long line since Adam and Eve – blindly, faithfully. If so many people are ahead of him, they must be going in the right direction. And everybody thinks so too.My word is “trust,” and it has a different orientation altogether. It is simply a love affair.Just think of a situation: a man says to a woman, “I believe I love you.” The statement will offend the woman. He believes he loves you. You simply say, “I love you.” There is no question of belief or faith. You cannot say to a beautiful woman, “I have faith, that are beautiful.” That is enough proof that the woman is not beautiful.Just the other night, I was talking to a very beautiful heart, a Dutch journalist – which is rare, because journalism is worse than politics. In fact, of the people who become journalists, ninety-nine percent are the people who wanted to be politicians but could not manage. They did not have guts enough to fight and struggle. They could not race in competition, so the second alternative was standing by the side and throwing stones at anybody who is going up higher. The whole function of journalism has become nothing but a frustration, and out of frustration, naturally, comes revengefulness against the politicians.But this man was not of that category. Accidentally it seems, he became a journalist. He had as pure a heart as you have. I was asked by him, “I have been reading so many contradictions in your books. You say one thing today, tomorrow you contradict it. Then how do your sannyasins go on believing in you?”A consistent question, relevant. You can believe in a person who says the same thing. You cannot believe in a person when you know perfectly well tomorrow he may say just the opposite: “So at least let us wait for tomorrow, then we can see what to do.” But tomorrow never comes, it is always coming.And I don’t take any account of my past statements. For me there is no contradiction at all, because unless I compare two statements how can I find there is contradiction? By the time I go to bed I am finished with that day. In the morning I wake up fresh – just like an innocent child, carrying no burden of the past. I speak to you from that innocence.And I speak not to emphasize a certain psychology, a certain theology – I do not speak to program your mind. I cannot humiliate any human being by programming his mind. Programming the mind of a human being means you are reducing the man to a machine.His question was relevant. He was puzzled: “There are people who have been with you for twenty, thirty years – can’t they see these many contradictions? And they go on believing in you?” He was simply using the word belief wrongly.My people trust me, love me. It is not a question of my statements to them. They enjoy my statements, it is good entertainment, but it is not a belief system for which you have to live and die. It is only pure entertainment. You have just to laugh and enjoy.My real work is going on underground. Whatever I am doing is just creating a situation so your head is engaged. And my real approach, my target, is your heart, not your skull. And it is the best way I have found to sort out people. Those who approach me rationally will soon find the way toward Santa Fe. Santa Fe is going to be a world-famous place. All the camels of different sizes and shapes!To be with me you have to learn one art, and that is, don’t take my statements seriously. For the moment enjoy them, but don’t expect that I am not going to contradict them. Don’t impose any expectations of yours on me. I never impose any expectations on you. At least this much you can do – a simple thing.For centuries masters have been imposing their ideas on the disciples. I am not imposing any of my ideas on you. Don’t from your side insist on how I should behave, what I should say or not say; accept that saying something will create contradiction, saying it will create hostility in people outside, saying it will create unnecessary confusion. Don’t expect anything from me. Open your heart. That is where the real surgery has to happen.And once you have known the beauty, the joy, the blessing of dancing in tune with my heart, you will never be bothered by what I said yesterday, what I said ten years ago. Leave all this to people whose profession is grave digging. Let them settle with the skeletons of the past.You be here now in this moment, part of my life, part of my love, part of my being. Let me reach you in your innermost core. Allow me to touch your center.The head is only the periphery, and I am not interested in your heads. I don’t count heads, I count the hearts.The Dutch journalist could understand. When I stood up and started dancing with the sannyasins, he was dancing behind me – in absolute abandon, as if nothing else existed in that moment but the dance.I told the man, “You can write anything you want about me. Even if you want to say things which I have not said, I give you the authority, because I have been able to touch your heart. And beware, soon you will be a sannyasin!”I could see the glow in his eyes – just the idea of being a sannyasin, a great adventure ahead, a great pilgrimage. And the way he was dancing was absolutely drunk. It is just coincidence that he happens to be a journalist, that is not his place. His place is among the sannyasins, he is a seeker. And he trusts me….The second problem that you have raised is about believing. But who is asking you to believe me? I go on destroying every possibility of believing in me. Even if you want to believe in me, you cannot; I will not allow it. To the very last breath of my life I will go on contradicting continuously.Perhaps at the last breath I may say all this enlightenment business is just bullshit. Forget all about it! Just be human, ordinary, enjoying the small things of life, relishing the beauty of nature, drowning yourself in love, friendship – and you have something better than enlightenment.Yes, I want it to be remembered: It is difficult to be enlightened, but enlightenment is not the end. One has to transcend enlightenment too. Then one is completely free. Enlightenment helps one to be free from every other bondage, but then one becomes dependent on enlightenment. The real enlightened person transcends it, and he becomes again simple, ordinary, with no idea of any holiness, no idea of meditation, no idea about anything. He lives moment to moment, joyously.It is good that you trust me unconditionally. Trust can only be unconditional. Belief is always conditional. A better argument, and your belief can be destroyed. But your trust is unconditional, nothing can destroy it. If there is a condition, then it is easy to argue and prove that the condition is wrong, that the condition has loopholes. And when you see that in your condition there are loopholes, your belief falls down.Trust has to be intrinsically unconditional; hence, nobody can argue against my people. My people are not believers. They have known something far deeper and far higher: they have tasted the juice of trust.You are fortunate. Don’t be worried that you don’t believe in me. I don’t want you to believe in me! And what you are feeling, an unconditional trust, is what is needed between me and you.Belief is a barrier. Trust is a bridge.So rejoice, and forget all about beliefs. Anyway you cannot believe because I am going to contradict myself.When I was talking to the Dutch journalist, he was worried. He loves me, he has been here before at celebrations, he has been reading my books. He himself has paid his fare, because the editor was not ready to pay the fare. The editor is ready to publish whatsoever the journalist writes, but he was not ready to pay the fare from Holland to here. The journalist has paid it himself.It was a problem for him, and naturally he said: “I cannot conceive – you go on contradicting and still your people are not disturbed by your contradictions.”I said, “That is one of the fire tests for becoming a sannyasin. I will contradict my statements. I can start contradicting them by my actions, but trust has no condition.”He asked me, “In the world press conference you said that you are a showman.”I said, “Me, a showman? What are you asking?”He was, for a moment, silent. And then he said, “You said in the press conference, ‘My people are a circus.’”I said, “my people? The whole world is a circus except my people! These are the sanest people in the whole world, and anybody who is sane is going to join my people.”Naturally one gets puzzled. But if you trust, you don’t get puzzled at all. You can enjoy. You laughed when I said I am a showman, and you are laughing when I am saying I am not! You were laughing when I said you are my circus, and now you are laughing when I am saying you are the only people who are not a circus.This is the beauty of trust.Osho,I have been a sannyasin for one year, and feel like a kangaroo who has to make big jumps to follow you. Today, I was shocked to read that you had said you may not remain celibate when you are healthy again. I thought you had said that an enlightened person has transcended sex. Yet, I know how beautiful it is to make love. Why do I feel so confused?Please comment.One always feels confused if one has expectations. Now who told you that enlightened people transcend sex? And immediately you are saying, “…although love is such a beautiful experience.” So why prevent enlightened people from having such a beautiful experience? But the idea has been created down the centuries that the truly religious people are celibate, and particularly that the enlightened person is celibate.I have never been celibate. Among so many beautiful women, you want me to be celibate? It is like standing by a beautiful spring, purest water flowing from the top of the hill, and you are standing thirsty by the side of it because you are enlightened. Forget all about it! I will take care of enlightenment later on – right now I am going to drink from this beautiful spring.And you have also misunderstood. I have said enlightened people transcend sex, but I have never said they transcend love. It is a complicated phenomenon.You think sex is love? It is simply biological bondage. In fact, only an enlightened person can make love. What you call making love is just biological gymnastics. You don’t know what making love means. So I say to you that the enlightened man and the enlightened woman are the most beautiful lovers. It need not necessarily be sexual, it need not necessarily be non-sexual. An enlightened man is free.My mother came to me yesterday; she was a little worried. She said, “It is beautiful to see you dancing, but now you have started dancing with girls!” She was concerned that if people in India see this, in the pictures, on the video, they will be very much shocked. I said, “So far, so good.”But I am free – more free than Gautam Buddha, more free than Mahavira. Gautam Buddha did not have the guts to dance with a girl.I can dance because I don’t see any problem. There is no hindrance, no boundary to me; I can do anything.Just the other night, Vivek was asking me, “Should we go to the disco?”I said, “I am going to the disco one day, but right now it is too late.”My discos, my restaurants are called Zorba the Buddha. First I am a zorba, and then I am a buddha. And remember, if I have to choose between the two, I will choose Zorba, not Buddha…because the Zorba can always become the Buddha, but the Buddha becomes confined to his own holiness. He cannot go to the disco and become the zorba. And to me, freedom is the highest value; there is nothing greater, more precious, than freedom.My enlightenment has freed me from everything, including enlightenment.Now will be the crucial point. Those who trust me will trust me even when I am drinking champagne, because there was no condition. You had not told me, “I will trust you only until you start drinking champagne.” The trust is unconditional.The heart knows different ways of seeing. The mind is linear, it looks only toward one line. The heart is multi-dimensional. And the more I feel my people’s trust, the more dimensions of my being I can reveal to them.I would like you to know me in my total freedom, because that is what I want you to be – totally free, no strings attached.Blessed is the sannyasin who can trust me without bothering about my statements or my actions. His is the kingdom of God right now!Osho,Like yours, my tastes are simple: I like the best. However, I take this to the extreme, and want the ultimate in everything – and not only in material things. I want, especially with women, each meeting, each love affair to be the perfect, ultimate experience. Consequently I remain separate, miss much, and make myself miserable. Please comment.Strange…you compare yourself with me, and I don’t know what misery is, what frustration is.You say that your tastes are just like mine: for the best. But before you can have that taste for the best, you will have to become like me – and you are far away.I have said it, that my tastes are simple; I am easily satisfied with the best of anything. But remember, I am easily satisfied, and your question ends with misery and frustration. You cannot be simple.And who does not want the best? And do you think I always get the best? For example, you are here…. Now, what am I supposed to do with you? You certainly are not the best – miserable, frustrated – but I will still love you, whether you are the best or not the best.You have heard only half the statement. It is time you should know the other half also. There are people who want the best; these are the people who fill the whole world, all frustrated, all miserable. There are also a few people who make the best out of anything. They are the people who can say they are like me. I make the best out of anything.Yes, I am satisfied with the best, but the best is not always handed over to you. You have to learn to transform it into the best. And it is easy, if you understand toward what I am taking you.Don’t think that there are great things in life and small things in life. It all depends on you, how you look at them. It is your attitude which is determining. You can enjoy a small grass flower, there is no need for lotuses to blossom for you. The joy comes from within you – anything can trigger it.You need not have what is considered the best by the society, but you can make anything that you have the best. Enjoy it, live it totally, squeeze the whole juice of it – and you will find that everything is the best.You say particularly with women you would like each experience to be the very ultimate. Have you seen your face in the mirror? Before you think of having the ultimate experience every time, just go into the bathroom and see your face first. That will cool you down.To get the ultimate, you have to be ultimate. You are just a monkey, and trying to have the ultimate experience with a woman. Thank God that she is tolerating you! Thank God that she only throws pillows at you, and does not throw you out of the window.Deserve it! Earn it! Nothing comes without your capacity to absorb it. You get only that which you deserve. Remember that maxim: you get only that which you deserve. And there is no need to be frustrated, you always get that which you deserve. Nature is very compassionate. It never gives you less, it never gives you more; it is very fair.So if you are not getting the best from your women, have you asked the women what they are getting? You may not be getting the best, but you must be getting something. And those poor women may not be getting even that!Love needs two partners. It is almost like two musical instruments playing together in symphony. If you want the best, then create the capacity to be the best lover, and help the woman also to be the best lover.There are biological discrepancies for which nobody can be blamed, because biology’s purpose in your love affairs is different. It is not to give you joy. It is just to give reproductions of you, carbon copies, because soon the originals will be in the grave. Biology’s function is finished there. And if you remain only biologically oriented, you are not going to get anything – except frustration.Every man after making love feels frustrated. It is good that sex helps him to fall asleep; otherwise the whole night he will remain in frustration. It is good that sex helps his heart to be healthier; otherwise the whole night of frustration, and a heart weakening and drowning – by the morning you will find the man finished. Those are biological strategies that make the man go to sleep immediately. There is no sleeping medication which is more effective than sex.And one thing you must remember: men have died in all kinds of actions – people have died praying – but nobody has ever died while making love. In the whole history of man…not a single exception.Strange. People die in all kinds of situations – because there are so many people, and so many people have been before, and before them, it seems to be logical that somebody will die while making love. Somebody will die just walking on the street, somebody will die doing something good: painting, music, poetry – or serving the poor. But biology has its own ways. It has made it intrinsically impossible for a man to die while he is making love.Although all the religions have been teaching just the opposite, that if you make love you will die sooner, it is not medically true. The people who love – their hearts are functioning better. Lovers don’t have heart attacks. The celibate can have a heart attack. Do you want your enlightened people to have heart attacks?Please, don’t compare yourself with a poor man like me, who owns nothing – not a single cent. Even if I have to be deported, the Oregon government will have to pay for my ticket. But I will make the best out of it. Even if they deport me, I will make international news. I will make so much fuss about it that they will be condemned all over the world.That’s why for four years they have been silent. They neither say yes to my green card, nor do they say no. They don’t want to say yes; they are afraid to say no, because I am not going to accept their no easily. So they have been, for four years, just sitting, working out what to do. Both ways it is dangerous. Saying yes is a danger, saying no is an even bigger danger.If they deport me, I will go around the world – I have my people around the world. And I am going to expose the American mask completely: that it is not a democracy, that it simply has a different name, but it is exactly what the Soviet Union is – with one difference. The Soviet Union is straightforward, and Americans do the same thing with hypocrisy; they go round about, round about, and try to make it look democratic.My deportation – I am going to enjoy it as the best. Anything that has happened in my life, I have enjoyed as the best. I make it the best. Even if I have to make love to an ugly, disgusting woman, I put the light off! In darkness, whether you are making love to Cleopatra or your own wife makes no difference.Just be a little clever. There is no need to be frustrated. Find out ways, whatsoever is available, to make the best of it.Yes, I enjoy the best because I know how to turn everything to its best. You also want to enjoy the best, but you don’t want to take the trouble to change it to its utmost beauty and flavor.As a sannyasin you should learn that life consists of small things, but each small thing can be transformed into something glorious.You can ask Vivek, who carries my tea, my food – and now I am going for Coca-Cola. Just ask her: whatsoever food is offered to me, I enjoy it as the best food anybody will be enjoying in the whole world. I enjoy my tea – which has no sugar in it, no milk in it, just water and tea leaves; but I really enjoy it, each sip of it. And I feel as if I am in paradise each moment.So please, learn the alchemy of transforming things.Osho,If the brain of an enlightened man was transplanted into an ordinary man, would he start behaving like an enlightened man? Would he experience enlightenment?No, because the brain has nothing to do with enlightenment. If you put the enlightened man’s brain into some unenlightened man’s body, he will not behave like the enlightened man. He will simply behave the way he had been behaving. Perhaps for a few days he will be in a little difficulty, but soon he will get adjusted.The brain has to be adjusted to the soul, not vice versa.Osho,Could it be possible for scientists to develop enlightened people in a test-tube?Never. Don’t wait for such stupid things. In the test-tube the scientist can produce a great painter, a great artist, a great dancer, a great musician, a great poet. But the scientist cannot produce an enlightened man in the test-tube, because that is the only quality which you have to work for. Nobody can give it to you.You have to become more conscious. It does not matter whether you are born in a test-tube or in a mother’s womb – both are wombs. It does not matter at all. Enlightenment is the only thing in human life which will remain forever and forever the glory of individuality. Everything else can be produced; enlightenment you have to grow yourself. It is something so intrinsic to you, it is your very soul.The scientist can give you a better, stronger body, he can give you a longer life, he can give you a better mind – but he cannot give you awareness. He himself is not aware. He is as unconscious as you are. And do you think these unconscious scientists will be able to produce the consciousness of the awakened one? It is absolutely impossible.So don’t wait for test-tube babies to become enlightened. Don’t waste your time. You become enlightened yourself. Test-tube babies will have to work their way toward enlightenment on their own.It is something so individual…and that is the beauty of it, that it is individual. It is not something mechanical. It cannot be produced on an assembly line; otherwise, just as Ford cars go on coming out off the assembly line – every minute one car comes out the same as the one before, the same as the one after…. Enlightenment cannot be created on an assembly line.It is an absolutely individual growth. It is your responsibility to become enlightened or remain in darkness. That is the only area where science cannot be of any help.Osho,I have often heard the expression: when a woman says no, she means yes. But in this commune, it does not seem to be true. In your discourse the other day, however, it seemed that you are not against these games. Can you please comment?I am not against any games. And it is true. This commune is going to create its own proverbs. Here yes means yes, no means no. In the old society outside, when a woman says no she means yes, because that woman is a slave. For centuries she has been taught to be shy, to be nonagressive, not to chase men.Here, the situation is totally different. Nobody need be shy about anything. So when the woman says no, don’t try to interpret it as yes – she will give you a good punch on your nose! And when she says yes, she means it. If you can escape fast enough…it is up to you. But here, we mean what we say, and we say what we mean!And I am perfectly in favor of all these beautiful games – men chasing women – but that has become difficult here. In the outside world when the man chases the woman, the woman runs, escapes, hides. Here, the moment a man even starts chasing, the woman catches hold of him: “There is no need, all this unnecessary huffing, puffing, no need! Why waste time in chasing? Why not do the real thing?”So beware! In the first place, keep quiet, don’t ask.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I seem to have heard you say that people are attracted to war because it is exciting, whereas peace is boring. In my own experience I seem to enjoy indulging my personal dramas and traumas, and when I'm not indulging them life is a bit flat. Is it possible to be attracted to peace? Will the new humanity find peace, rather than war, exciting?It has never happened. Man has never found peace exciting. It seems that the way man is, war certainly will remain exciting, because the peace that you know is not the real peace; it is the peace of a cemetery, not the peace of this mandir! No war is going on, everything is silent – do you think it is flat?The new man will know this peace twenty-four hours round the clock, waking or sleeping. And the peace that is not only absence of war but a positive flowering within you, a positive wordless song within you, is totally different.Up to now man has known peace, but that peace was only preparation for war. History can be divided into two parts: the period when people are fighting, and the period when people are exhausted, tired, ruined, preparing for another war from scratch. War or preparation for war: these are the only two periods human history has known up to now.Peace has never been known, because peace is something which the individual has to create. War is something which the crowd, the nation, the politician, the ideologies, the churches create. Peace, each individual has to create. It will be far better to say that he has to discover it, because it has not to be created, it is already there inside you.But you are surrounded so much by the mind and its turmoil, you never come to hear the still, small voice within you. And if you cannot hear even the still, small voice within you, how can you taste peace – which is beyond that voice – where you simply exist? There is no thought in the mind, no emotion in the heart. In that nothingness you come to know, for the first time, the taste of peace.I am saying it from my own experience. For thirty-two years I have been in that peace, and I have not found it for a single moment flat. It is always opening new doors, new dimensions, new depths.When for the first time you know your inner peace, you think, “This is the end.” Soon you have to change this idea, because the peace goes on growing. And the day comes when you understand that there is no end, the peace is going to become as vast as the universe itself – and the universe has no limits.You must be feeling flat when you are not passing through some drama or trauma, because in your life what have you got? If there is nothing going on: a fight, a love affair, a marriage, a divorce, fighting for an election or going bankrupt – if all these things are not going on around you, naturally you feel flat. It seems nothing is happening, time has stopped; you feel dead.It is a well-established fact that whenever there is war in the world, wherever it is, people look more happy, excited. They wake up early in the morning waiting for the newspaper to come. What is happening? What has happened last night? They cannot wait, they want to know it immediately.People are carrying their transistors glued to their ears not to miss a single bit of information. Life is no longer flat, there is excitement, because every moment something new is happening – victory or defeat, something is happening. You can look forward to some news. When there is no war, then tomorrow’s newspaper will be carrying exactly the same as today’s news.I used to live in a place…just in front of my house lived the family of a doctor. The doctor was thought to be a little crazy; still, he was a good doctor. People used to come to him, knowing perfectly well that he was a little crazy – but as far as his profession was concerned he was perfectly sane. He used to come every day in the early morning to my house, to read all the newspapers and magazines available there. He would come and ask for the latest newspaper.One day I gave him a newspaper of the same date but from the year before. And he enjoyed it, he loved it. He said he had never expected these things to happen, because they didn’t seem to be connected with yesterday’s newspaper.I said, “Now that I know that, every day you will be excited.”He said, “But how did you do it?”I said, “This newspaper is one year old.”He said, “My God! If reading old newspapers makes you so excited, why have you been keeping it a secret from me? Sometimes I used to wonder why you go on collecting old newspapers, magazines. Now I know! Now I don’t care whether today’s newspaper comes or not. There are so many piled up in your room. I can pull one out from anywhere, and it will be exciting.”People are excited with something that is unexpected. Politicians rule over you because they provide excitement. Wars have been condemned for centuries but nobody listens, because everybody knows that a long peace will be so flat – people will start committing suicide, there is nothing happening.Just think of one year…no news happens. You just go on waiting and waiting and waiting. Then finally you decide to create news yourself: you commit suicide or you murder somebody. Something has to be done to break this peace.In one of the dramas of an existentialist philosopher, a man is brought before the court because he has killed a stranger, someone whom he had never known before. He had not even seen the man’s face. The man was sitting on the beach looking at the sea, and this fellow came from behind with a big dagger and pushed it into his back.He had never seen that man before; he did not even see him while he was murdering him. What could be the cause? – because that stranger was absolutely innocent.The man was, of course, caught and presented before a court. The judge was also puzzled. He inquired of a few witnesses, “Is this man mad?”They said, “No. In our neighborhood, this is the most rational and sane man.” The judge was trying to find out something in his past which could make some sense of this act which he had done.One man said, “I remember one thing, that when his mother died, it was Sunday morning, and we were both sitting in the garden. He said, ‘I knew that old bitch was going to spoil my beautiful holy day. Now, couldn’t she have died on Friday, or Tuesday, or Monday? Why on Sunday? I was ready to go boating on the lake, and I have to cancel my whole program.’”The neighbor said, “That day I thought this man was strange. His mother dies and he says, ‘That woman died purposely on Sunday. She was always making efforts to spoil all my happiness. Even in death she continued her old habit.’”Another witness said, “When all the proceedings for the funeral were over, this man immediately rushed to the house of his girlfriend, and they went to see a movie. In the morning, the mother dies; by the evening, he is at a movie with his girlfriend.”A third witness said, “That is nothing, because after the movie, he was drinking and dancing! His behavior has always been a little bizarre.”The magistrate asked the man himself, “Do you have any explanation for these things?”He said, “For everything that I have done I have explanations. My mother dies on Sunday morning: my Sunday, my plan to go to the lake is spoiled – is it wrong to say it clearly, rather than repress it? And anyway whether I say it or not, my mother is dead, so what difference does it make?“And certainly I was angry. She could have died…there are seven days in the week – why choose Sunday especially? And she knew, because the previous night I had told her, ‘Tomorrow morning I am going to the lake.’ And I am absolutely certain she died on purpose because she was the only one who knew that I was going to the lake in the morning. And as I was preparing to leave, she died. You think I have to give an explanation, or does that dead woman have to give an explanation?”The magistrate said, “Okay. About that nothing can be done; your mother is dead, she cannot be asked. It may have been just a coincidence. But does it look right to you that in the morning your mother dies and in the evening you go to a movie? And in the night you are found in a nightclub drinking, dancing – do you think it looks right?”He said, “Absolutely right. Because now, whenever I go to a movie it will be after my mother’s death. Do you mean that for the rest of life I cannot go to a movie? Whenever I go to the nightclub and drink and dance, it will be after my mother’s death. Do you want me to commit suicide because now I cannot enjoy anything – it is after my mother’s death? And what difference does it make whether her death was ten hours ago or ten days ago, or ten years ago?”There was great silence in the court. The man looked rational, what he was saying was meaningful.“Now everything I am going to do is going to be after my mother’s death! What do you want me to do? Should I also die with my mother because now there is no point in living any longer; will I be a criminal if I live? If I laugh, somebody will say, ‘What? You are laughing, and your mother is dead?’ And the time factor…can you tell me what is the demarcation line? Ten hours, twelve hours, ten days, twelve days, ten years, twelve years? And what is the criterion to decide that now it is all right to dance and drink – now let my mother be dead.“I thought that if I am to love, I have to accept the fact that my mother is dead; and then there is no point in wasting time. Moreover I had purchased those two tickets already. Wasting those two tickets over a dead person, I don’t think is sane.”The magistrate said, “Drop all these things. You just tell me exactly why you killed that man on the sea beach. You had never known him, he had never done any harm to you. You were not even aware whom you were killing.”The man said, “It is very simple. My life was going very flat. I used to think, ‘Once my mother is gone there will be peace.’ But once she had gone everything became flat. I would come home drunk in the middle of the night and nobody was there to nag me and instruct me as to what time to come home, what to do and what not to do. Life became flat, and I wanted some excitement. And I got it. Does it matter whom I killed?”He said, “When I pushed the dagger into the man’s back, and a fountain of blood came out, for the first time in years I was excited: what was happening? Something new! I have never seen a fountain coming out of a man’s back. Red blood! Yes, I do not know who the man was, I have no enmity with him. I have not killed him for any reason except for my own excitement. And I got it, and since then life has been very exciting.“I escaped, and the police chased me; finally I was caught, then I was jailed. Things started moving! And now I am standing in the court listening to all these idiots who are my neighbors. And it gives me great joy to contradict what they are saying. And you are sitting there looking so silly, and these people are saying, ‘Your Honor.’“It is hilarious, I have never enjoyed life so much! And I am already tremendously excited waiting for the judgment, to see whether I am released, whether I am sent to a mental hospital, or I am sentenced to death, or twenty years’ imprisonment. There are so many alternatives in my mind.”This man is you.People are doing all kinds of things just to feel excited. And when the whole world becomes dull, starts feeling stale, flat, some politician comes as a savior to you, an Adolf Hitler. Many people in the world are waiting for another Adolf Hitler – life is becoming flat. That man made the five years from 1940 to 1945 tremendously exciting. I don’t think there has ever been such a long period so full of excitement for the whole world. Adolf Hitler should be given as many Nobel Prizes as possible for making the whole world alive, thriving, their hearts beating faster. They are still waiting.I received – I could never have conceived it – I received a letter from the American Nazi party. Can you think that in America there is a Nazi party? I got the letter from the president of the party, and he was very angry, “Because,” he said, “you have been continually speaking against Adolf Hitler; and it hurts our religious feelings.” Even I was excited! This is really great: “religious feelings”?And later on his letter said, “Perhaps you do not know that he was the reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet, Elijah. Soon he will come to deliver humanity from all misery and suffering.”I can understand this man, his party. Their lives have become flat, they are ready even to make Adolf Hitler a religious prophet. They are ready to do anything, but excitement is needed. After each ten or fifteen years the flatness becomes so thick in everybody’s mind that a war becomes a certainty. Any excuse will do.Forty years have passed since the second world war. This is the longest period. The credit does not go to you, the credit goes to the nuclear weapons, because both the parties which are capable of fighting, the Soviet Union and America, are afraid. They know perfectly well nobody is going to win, that everybody is going to be finished forever. The whole of life on the earth is going to disappear.It does not matter who starts the war, the other party will start only ten minutes later. So anybody can start, it does not matter. The other party will be only ten minutes late, and in ten minutes you cannot be victorious. You can destroy a few cities, but you cannot be victorious. Your missiles are aiming at Moscow; their missiles are aiming at New York, Washington, San Francisco – just a push-button game.They are frozen out of fear, that’s why forty years have passed. And I know that unless the war begins accidentally, the third world war is almost impossible. It is very close, any moment it can happen, but it will be just an accident: some technological defect, some scientist getting nagged too much by his wife, some politician losing his power, his grip, some country wanting to have the attention of the whole world, some crackpot somewhere. There are so many crackpots, and most of them are in politics.Pots without cracks don’t go into politics; they have other, useful things to do. A crackpot is of no use. That’s why politics is the only profession in the world where no qualification is needed. Everybody is perfectly qualified.Now there is so much power in the hands of the politicians that they themselves are afraid. They would like to win the war, but it is impossible; both the parties are equally balanced. And the war is not going to be between two countries; nuclear weapons will spread it all over the world. Perhaps within twenty-four hours all life on earth will disappear. This is frightening. That’s why the war has not happened, and perhaps may not happen. But it is always very close; anything can go wrong.I was just talking to one journalist, and I was saying to him that you should not depend on machines. And now the whole war game is not between man and man – that is out of date – the whole war game is between technological nuclear weapons. Even the missiles which will carry the weapons will not have any pilots with them, there is no need. The missile itself can be programmed where to go, where to drop the bomb.I was saying to him that man has become so dependent on technological machines that anything can go wrong any moment. And when I said this, the electricity went off! The journalist had nothing to say anymore. The proof was there! I said, “Now we can move onto another subject. This is finished.”I understand that you are in a very difficult situation. You would love to live in peace, but peace seems to be flat; nothing is happening, you are almost in your grave. To avoid being in such a dead state, you go on doing something or other – falling into a love affair, chasing a man or a woman; and then the whole drama of overpowering each other, of dominating each other, fighting…. That too does not seem to be good – every night a pillow fight. It does not seem good, but excitement is there.Every husband on his way home is thinking of excuses why he is late, figuring out where he has been, what to say, what not to say. And the woman is figuring out…she has phoned all his friends’ houses and she has collected all the information that she knows he will use for his excuses.Yes, there is drama. You tell her, “I have been with one of my friends; we met after such a long time.” And the woman laughs, and she says, “Don’t be stupid, your friend has been here! Now I don’t think your friend is a Jesus Christ who can be in two places simultaneously.” You are caught. Every husband feels guilty, the woman is angry, he is trying to persuade her….At least all these dramas and traumatic experiences keep you from falling into that space you call flat. But at such a cost. The peace is flat, the excitement is a torture; you are caught in a dilemma.The reason is that you don’t know what real peace is. Just not to fight, not to get involved again with another woman, not to go to the pub and drink too much and beat others and be beaten…. You can avoid all these things. You can just close your door and sit inside your room, but you will not find peace. The question is not of the room and you, the question is of your mind.Your mind is born out of the monkeys. Your mind is a monkey. Have you seen a monkey sitting silently? That would be a miracle. The monkey is always doing something or other – jumping from one tree to another tree in search of excitement. He is bored with peace. Even if you have not done anything, just look at the monkey and he will make faces at you. What is he doing? He is just trying to create some entertainment.He will start running after you. If you run, then he will enjoy it very much. Great excitement, although there is no point. If you stop and turn back, the monkey will go up the tree; he does not mean business, it was just a game. He was feeling flat, you were feeling flat, and it was a good game. Both became excited.Your mind is constantly seeking and searching for some involvement, some trouble, because the peace is really killing, poisonous.Let me repeat: this is not the peace which I am talking about. That peace comes out of meditation, that peace comes when you come out of your mind and become centered as a witness, just watching the mind without any judgment, without any evaluation, without saying, “This is good, this is bad, this is really groovy.” If you do such things, then you have already jumped in and become identified with the monkey. The moment you say, “This is groovy,” you cannot remain outside; you are on the track again.You have simply to be a witness, like a mirror that gives no judgment – a beautiful woman, a Cleopatra, or Mother Teresa, it makes no difference.One journalist was asking me about Mother Teresa, and he said, “I agree with you on almost all the points, but why are you against Mother Teresa? She is a beautiful woman….” And he was shocked to think of marrying Mother Teresa. Then he understood it is not easy to use any word in front of me just like that: “She is a beautiful woman.” Then he must have remembered her face. Are you going to make love to the Nobel prize? What are you going to do with that woman? Then in his mind he must have understood that she is exactly the type of woman that Christians were burning alive in the Middle Ages – witches. She is exactly that type.I know her. I would prefer to remain in hell for eternity than to get married to Teresa the Terrible!But the most difficult thing in your life – which should really be the easiest – is to sit by the side of the flow of your mind. Your mind is just like a river. Thoughts and thoughts and a crowd of thoughts go on passing. You simply sit by the bank, unconcerned, just a witness, and you are in for a great surprise.Slowly, slowly as you become more and more centered and simply a witness, thoughts start disappearing. They can exist only with your identification. You give energy to your mind. When you pull yourself out, you have stopped giving nourishment to the mind. And once there is no nourishment – thoughts are very fragile things – they start dying out.Soon there is silence, there is peace. And this peace is not the peace of a cemetery. This peace is not dead, it is not flat. It is such a tremendous experience that once you have reached the first rung of the ladder, the ladder goes to infinity. You can go on and on discovering new layers of peace. This is the real excitement, unending excitement.That’s the meaning of the word “ecstasy”: unending excitement. You cannot exhaust it, you cannot come to a point where you say, “There is no more to discover and I am feeling flat.” It has never happened. On my own authority I say to you, I have been going as fast as possible, deeper and deeper into silence, but there is no bottom, there is no limit.Each moment of silence brings new fragrance. Peace brings new flowers. Nothing is said, but much is heard. Nothing is shown, but much is seen. Nobody guides you, but some magnetic force of peace itself takes you farther and farther away from the mind, from the body, from the neighbors, from the wife, from the husband. And the excitement is continuously deepening.Unless we can create millions of people around the earth who have experienced this kind of peace, war is inevitable, because people cannot survive flat lives. It is better to go into a war and have a little excitement, although it means death.If a man who has not known inner peace is forced to live peacefully, he will either murder or kill himself. Even that will provide some excitement. Excitement is a great nourishment, but only the right kind of excitement is nourishment. The wrong kind of excitement is poison. And up to now humanity has been dominated by the wrong kind of excitement.You are here with me to learn a very simple thing: to enjoy peace, to enjoy silence, to enjoy something that is within you and you do not have to depend on others for. Such a peaceful man radiates peace for others too. His silence starts touching other hearts too. His silence becomes oceanic and very inviting.That’s what I am doing here.Last night, a very nice, juicy journalist was with me. And he was constantly asking me, “Why don’t you go out into the world to teach people meditation, silence, or whatsoever you name it?”It was difficult for him to understand that the well never goes to the thirsty. And remember, if the well goes toward the thirsty, the thirsty will escape! Seeing a well coming toward him, he will do anything but stand there where he was standing. He is thirsty, that is true, but that does not mean that wells have to come toward him. The well has to remain where it is.And what to say of an oceanic peace? The well is a small thing; you can miss it, you may not be able to find it. I am not a well. The whole world knows about this ocean. Few are the friends of the ocean, many are the enemies of the ocean – but on one point they all agree, that the ocean is there.I told the journalist, “I create friends, I create enemies, but I never create a person who can ignore me. I am not ignored. And there is no difficulty; the friend and the foe are just superficially different. The friend will reach me first, and sooner or later the foe will be following. He has already become connected with me – with his hate, with his hostility. He has already married me!” It is only a question of time. He will be watching what is happening to those who are friends.It all depends on you. If you become peaceful, silent, loving, you will create everywhere a certain area of loving energy. People will start stopping you in the street and asking you what has happened to you – it is something invisible, but very tangible. I am going to remain here. You are going to spread like waves in the ocean to the whole earth.I am not fighting against the third world war, for the simple reason that there is only one way to fight it, and that is to create a peaceful humanity, a humanity which refuses to fight because now there is no excitement in fighting. Now there is excitement in sitting silently, doing nothing and letting the grass grow by itself. You have found real, authentic excitement. Now who cares to fight?I am not directly a pacifist, I am not taking protest marches to Washington or Moscow. But I am creating and generating a force which can envelop the whole earth. And that will be the barrier against nuclear weapons, wars, and all kinds of stupidities.Just recognize your responsibility. Man was never required to be so responsible as he is required to be today, because upon him rests the whole thing – of whether the earth is going to be alive, thriving, flowering, or is going to be a dead planet.Osho,You have spoken many times on AIDS and on the third world war, but never about both of them together. Do you think there is still a need for the third world war even if two-thirds of the world population is going to die a natural death from AIDS?Certainly there is no need for the third world war. AIDS will do whatever the politicians want to be done by a third world war. But it is not in my hands.Politicians don’t want to take a chance. Every day they are piling up more and more nuclear weapons. And on the other hand – you will be surprised – every nation is trying to repress information about AIDS.Why is every nation trying to repress the information about how many people are suffering from AIDS, and how many people have been in contact with these people? The cases may not be confirmed, but they are all around, and they will be spreading.Countries are afraid to declare that they have AIDS because it means they accept that there is homosexuality, it means they accept that all kinds of sexual perversions exist in their country, because AIDS is the climax of all perversions together. It is insulting to their ego.But they are not realizing the fact that if you repress information about AIDS, it is going to spread faster. Perhaps they are not worried because they know that anyway the third world war is going to be there – AIDS or no AIDS. In the politician’s mind it seems that there is no way out anymore: they are geared toward the third world war.Yes, it is a concern to me. The third world war can easily be avoided if people learn a little meditativeness. Then their whole excitement and support for war, democracy, communism, socialism, fascism – everything – disappears. They are no longer slaves of any government, any nation, any religion, any party.And a man who is meditative, who knows his inner peace and silence, cannot be a perverted sex maniac. The experience of inner ecstasy is helpful in both ways. On the one hand, it will make you normal human beings, not perverted in any way. Secondly, it will make you capable of creating small fields of energy which will go on spreading on their own. We have to cover the whole earth with a red blanket. That will be the barrier which cannot be broken by any nuclear weapons.But you are right. If AIDS goes on spreading the way it is spreading…. It is not only through sexual intercourse that you can get AIDS. Even by kissing you can get AIDS. There are a few tribes – old, ancient tribes living in the mountains in the Himalayas – who seem to be far more advanced as far as kissing is concerned. They laugh at the whole idea, it is so unhygienic. In each kiss the partners are exchanging millions of germs. You have heard the words “kiss of death.” Up to now it has been only words; now it is a reality.One journalist was asking me, “Then what do you propose as a substitute, because if we stop kissing, we will feel something is missing?”I said, “No, there is no need. Man is so inventive. You just rub noses with each other, and you will enjoy it more.” These aboriginal tribes in the Himalayas do exactly that. They don’t kiss, they simply rub noses.But the journalist was more concerned about catching a cold than about catching AIDS, and he said, “What if one partner has a cold?”I said, “That is such a simple thing. At the most you can catch a cold. If you don’t take any medicine your cold will go in seven days; if you take medicine your cold will go in one week. There is no problem. And it is a show of affection, intimacy, love, that you are willing to rub noses with someone who has a cold.”But please, avoid kissing. You don’t know who has AIDS. Very few people are confirmed, because very few people go to the doctors. And those who know they have AIDS manage to bribe the doctors to keep the information secret. They know that they cannot live more than two years – that is the maximum – perhaps they will live six months, eight months.Just think of a man – put yourself in his position – whose doctor says to him, “You have AIDS and you don’t have more than two years to live, at the maximum; most probably six months will do it.” Naturally, you don’t want people to know that you have AIDS, because it is so humiliating. AIDS simply means you are a homosexual, perverted. So you are going to bribe the doctor, “Please keep your mouth shut.”And there is no medicine for AIDS, so the doctor cannot be of any help. And as for you, when you see that you have at the most two years, or perhaps only six months, you will try to make the best of those six months – make as much love as you can, find as many partners as possible, because life is finishing.The people who have AIDS become more focused on sexuality because their whole life flame is going out any moment. Before it goes out…. Now they have nothing to lose, but they can give something – AIDS – to as many friends, lovers, as possible. And each person who comes in contact with these people will become a new source. Within fifteen years, the world will be covered with people who have AIDS, and it will be impossible to prevent it.So you are right – what is the need of the third world war? The need is that the politicians don’t want to take any chance. Who knows? The medical profession may come up with some medicine. Who knows? Man may start naturally building antibodies to AIDS in his body, because this is a challenge to his whole system. Everything is possible. The body does not want to die, it creates antibodies for all kinds of sicknesses. AIDS is a new phenomenon, our bodies are not yet fully acquainted with it. Perhaps our bodies will start creating antibodies to AIDS.So it is better, the politicians think, to let AIDS do its work – that is the work of God, the father who is in heaven, above the roof – and we should go on doing our own job of piling up nuclear weapons, so no chance is left.They are determined, it seems, that this planet earth, which is a rare planet…. All the planets around you are dead. This is the only planet which is alive with millions of species – animals, birds, insects, fish, trees. All the planets around you are very poor. They don’t have oceans, they don’t have rivers, they don’t have trees. They are just dead stone. Nothing grows there. And your politicians are determined to make this earth the same.This is the greatest responsibility that man has ever faced. But remember, the greater the responsibility, the greater the challenge, the greater is the possibility for you to come to your highest intelligence, potential, capabilities, creativity.So, on the one hand, it is a very sad picture. But on the other hand, never before has humanity faced such a challenge. Who knows? This challenge may give you guts enough to do things which you always wanted to do for many lives, but went on postponing. Now there is no way to postpone – death is knocking on the door.What do you want? To read the newspapers – or do meditation? What do you want? To go on playing cards – or do meditation?Man has to be made aware of the great, the greatest challenge that is standing in front of us.Politicians are trying to keep both AIDS and nuclear weapons hidden. They do not declare exactly how many nuclear weapons they have, all estimates are guesswork. And now they are trying to repress information about the disease AIDS. Their whole effort is so that you do not become aware of the challenge, because the challenge can bring a transformation in the whole of human consciousness.I am hammering continually on these two things, AIDS and nuclear weapons, for the single reason that perhaps this is the moment when you would not like to remain asleep. This is the moment you would like to know something deeper than life and death itself. That is the world of peace. And it belongs to you, you just have to claim it.Osho,As women, our natural creativity is expressed through the bearing and raising of children. What happens to that energy now that that area of expression is no longer viable?Energy is always neutral. It has no program in it. It can save or it can mar, it can make or it can destroy.It is a great opportunity that is becoming available to women, now that they are freed from biological bondage. Of course, man has always praised them for their great creativity in having children. But what kind of children have you produced? Just look around the world: these are your children – what creativity! All the animals are doing it, perhaps better than you.I have been in many jungles and mountains in India. I have never seen any deer which is too fat or too thin; they are all alike. They are not like man: one person is thin and one is so fat and ugly. I have watched all kinds of animals in the wild: nobody teaches them how to produce children. They don’t have any schools, no maternity homes, no guidance from anybody. So don’t take much pride in the fact that you can produce children.Yes, man has been giving woman much juice about it: “You are a great creator because you give birth to a child.” It was really very tricky of man; it meant that the woman should continue to create children. And in poor countries it is still happening – to have a dozen children is not rare. Some women have more than one dozen. I saw one woman who had twenty children. Now her whole life is wasted. Either she is pregnant or she is raising the children. And when the child is not even six months old, she is pregnant again. She is doing a double job.I know about a man who had uniforms for his children. I asked him, “What nonsense this is! Why do you create uniforms for your children?”He said, “Do you know how many children I have? Fifteen. Without their wearing uniforms I cannot recognize which my child is. So the uniform helps me in two ways. I have to take the children to the school and bring them back home. It helps me to recognize my children and sort them out. It also helps me to know if somebody else’s child has not entered into my fold and my child has gone with somebody else.”I said, “Now it is time you should stop; fifteen is too much.”He said, “It is God and his grace. I cannot go against God.” He was a very religious Hindu. “If God wants to give birth to more children, then who am I to prevent it?”All the religions of the world are against birth control methods, the pill. They are against abortion. It means the woman remains biologically in bondage, and her energies continue to create only mediocre people, crowds to serve in the armies, navies, air force, to be killed or to kill-at the most to be clerks, nurses, porters. What do you mean by creativity? You have created a porter. Do you feel proud? How much pride can it give to you?Every parent should feel ashamed. You are creating like animals. Science has given you a chance today to get out of the bondage of biology-a great freedom so that sex becomes, for the first time, not a biological reproductive method; it becomes sheer play, joy.You are asking me, if women’s energies are not poured into creating children, then what will happen to those energies? Why can’t you start…. There are thousands of ways to make this world more beautiful. Anything that makes the world more beautiful is creative. Landscape the garden around your house. Crossbreed plants; create new flowers that have never existed before. And of course, they will give new fragrances which the earth has never experienced.And compete with men in every field. Prove to him that you are equal – not by the women’s liberation movement; prove by your actions that you are equal, perhaps superior. The women’s liberation movement is just idiotic. A few women will gather and just create anger and hatred against men, and they will all smoke continuously, and drink. And they will all become lesbians because they hate men; they cannot love men, they can only love women. It is such a perversion, a woman loving another woman.I cannot conceive the idea of a man loving another man – and not just ordinary people: one of the popes before this pope was a homosexual. He was a bishop in Milan before he became pope. The whole of Milan knew it, because he was always hanging around with his boyfriend. And when he became pope and went to the Vatican, the boyfriend went there as his secretary. And you know secretaries are just an escape from your wife, a refuge from your wife.If the pope is homosexual – and popes are infallible – it creates great suspicion, because Jesus was also hanging out with twelve boys. It may be something coming down from Jesus himself.Monks are well-known homosexuals, and nuns are lesbians; but this is out of necessity. The monks have to live together in a monastery; the nuns have to live in a nunnery, separate – they cannot meet. Naturally, their sexuality starts taking some other forms. And I think it is intelligent, it is not unintelligent: if you cannot get the food you like, then you have to like the food you get. This is simple intelligence.In jungles animals are never homosexuals, never. But in zoos they become homosexuals. When I came to know about this, I started being really concerned about humanity: is it a zoo?This women’s liberation movement has only turned women into lesbians. It has created hate toward men, but this is not going to give you equality. Equality has to be earned, it has to be deserved. So since the pill has released you from the bondage of biology, now you are free to use your energy. And a woman has a more delicate body, a more flexible body. She can become a better dancer than any man can ever manage. The man, howsoever trained, is stiff. It is not his fault, his physiology is stiff. Women can become the best dancers in the world.A woman has a great imagination, but her imagination has remained confined to the home. The reason was children – children kept her in the home, and for millions of years, so it became almost second nature. Otherwise, I don’t see that there is any natural necessity for woman to confine her imagination within the walls of her home.The stars belong to her as much as to any man. The sunrise and sunset – they are also her possessions. She has to spread her wings, her consciousness. She has to widen her vision, imagination, dreaming, beyond children. Right now, the woman goes on thinking about the child, “He should become a doctor, he should become an engineer, he should become this and that.”Now the woman has to become what she used to project through the child. Become a doctor, become an engineer, become a pilot. What you imagined through the child…Why not directly encounter reality, and be yourself what you wanted your child to be? I don’t see that there is any problem.Women are in many ways superior to men, and their superiority can be used for new dimensions of creativity. An experienced mother knows whether there is a boy or a girl in her womb. How does she come to know? Because the boy starts kicking, and the girl never does that. The girl remains more centered, the boy is already freaking out. And you can see in children – girls will be sitting with their dolls in a corner silently enjoying their game, and boys will be creating all kinds of nuisance all over the neighborhood.What man has created is nothing if the woman comes into the field with her centeredness, with her roundedness, with her contentment, with her love. So move in any direction that feels fulfilling to you.The day women start creating all kinds of things that men have been creating up to now…. I say to you, there is no need to ask for equality, because women are the superior sex – naturally, because nature has made the woman to create children. Man’s function in creating children is negligible. Any syringe can do what he is doing, just a plastic syringe, use it and throw it out.Women are more resistant to diseases. From the very beginning, nature has an immense balancing power. If one hundred girls are born, then one hundred and fifteen boys are born, because by the time they reach marriageable age, fifteen boys will have disappeared. They are weaker – any sickness, any disease…. But those hundred girls will be there, so by the marriageable age the balance is equal; those fifteen extras are gone.If nature were producing exactly the same number of girls and boys, there would be great difficulty. Soon the population of women would have gone far beyond the population of men. But nature has its own ways of balancing. Knowing that man has a much weaker body, in the sense that it cannot resist and fight with sickness, it creates fifteen extras.The woman lives longer than the man – five years longer – in every country, in every race. And the woman suffers much, but still she survives. Man cannot survive as much suffering as woman manages to. So don’t be worried about your energies. You have more energy than men.Man started suppressing women only because he felt inferior. His inferiority complex was the cause of his forcing women to become inferior, so he could cover up his wound and feel superior. It is stupid.And now because biology no longer has power over women, don’t waste your energy in being a lesbian. This is the time for you to be creative in every field, and you will be able to have your Picassos, your Mozarts, your Van Goghs, your Shakespeares. There is no reason why not. Perhaps a little better, a little softer, and your sculpture is certainly going to be more alive.There is only one thing in which you will not find yourself equal to men – and please remember, don’t try to be equal in that area – that is muscles. Let men be superior as far as muscles are concerned, because if women start going to gymnasiums and creating muscular bodies, that will be the worst day in the history of humanity.Just closing my eyes…if I see thousands of muscular women sitting here I am not going to come again!And there is a tendency to imitate. You know that man has imitated you; otherwise, what is the need to shave his beard and his mustache? It seems as though he wants to look as beautiful as a woman, but he forgets completely that to a woman, a man looks more beautiful with a beautiful beard and mustache. He is thinking from a man’s side, that a woman looks beautiful. Just think of it the other way: if a woman grows a beard and a mustache – do you think she is going to find a man to chase her?But that’s what man has done, imitate. A simple argument, but without understanding. He feels that the woman is beautiful, and as it is so easy to remove the mustache and the beard, why not be as beautiful as the woman? He forgets the fact that for the woman you are losing much attraction.Just look at my beard! I don’t think any of my sannyasins would like my beard to be shaved. Perhaps many of my women sannyasins are here just because of my gray beard. And anyway, whether I am saved spiritually or not, I am not going to shave my beard!Osho,In a recent interview, I asked an Italian philosopher whether the American-Russian summit on nuclear weapons will ever come to an agreement. He said, “When two contenders are trying to screw each other, they will never come to any conclusion.” And he added, “What is missing is a third party, something above the two contenders, a religious authority like there was in the past, to arbitrate the question. But in these days there is nothing like this. Unfortunately, nobody will listen to the pope at all.”If you were the authority for one day, the third party above all, what would you say to Russia and America?The first thing: I don’t agree with the idea that these two contending parties, the Soviet Union and America, are not going to come to an agreement. They are bound to come to an agreement, because the forces are equal and war is meaningless.The only meaning of war is if someone becomes victorious and someone is defeated. That’s how wars have always been. But if a war is going to destroy the whole globe, and both the forces are equally balanced, and both the forces are aware of the fact that after the war there will be nobody even to write the history – who won the war, who was defeated in the war…. Both the contenders will disappear.This fact is preventing them from clashing. And this fact will become more and more powerful, because they are both piling up more and more nuclear weapons. The more nuclear weapons there are, the less is the possibility of a third world war.So first, I do not agree that they are not capable of coming to an agreement. In fact, without it being said, the agreement is already there. One thing both the parties know: that war is going to destroy all. War for the first time in history has become meaningless. So what the Italian philosopher suggested is wrong.Secondly, he suggested that someone is needed, a third party more powerful than both; then there is a possibility of agreement. But the third party – if it is more powerful than both, why should it bother about their agreement? It should rule over both. What is the point of their agreement or non-agreement? If China becomes the third party, more powerful than both, then certainly China will rule over Russia and America. In the world of politics, “might is right.” So on that point also he is wrong.And on the third point, that if the third party is religious as it was in the past, a pope…. But do you think wars were not happening in the past? Popes themselves were involved in wars, crusades against the heretics, non-Christians, Mohammedans, Jews. The whole history of the popes is the history of bloodshed, burning people alive, destroying cities, putting cities on fire. Which pope has been able to prevent a war? And you say, “Unfortunately, nobody listens to the pope.”And lastly, you ask me if I am given the chance one day, what kind of agreement I would like to have between the Soviet Union and America. One day is too long; I do not need to do that much work, and don’t think I cannot manage it with just one-and-a-half hours.It is so simple! Just take all their nuclear weapons and drown them in the Pacific Ocean. Whoever named it Pacific perhaps was thinking of this time, that one day the Pacific will bring peace. There is no need for any agreement. Just take all their nuclear weapons – and that can be done easily within one-and-a-half hours. I can order them, “Drown your nuclear weapons in the Pacific.”And as far as little wars are concerned, you can go on playing the game, there is no problem. Man needs to fight once in a while; till the whole of humanity becomes meditative he will need to. So with old methods, the methods that were used before the first world war, you can continue to play the game. It is just football, it is not much of a problem.To me, it is so simple. There is no need for any agreement, and agreement is not possible. And you are giving me only twenty-four hours. An agreement between communism and capitalism in twenty-four hours is impossible. It is not possible even in twenty-four centuries. So what will I do? I don’t care about their agreement. And why should they agree? If Russia feels good with communism, let them feel good. They have the right. If America feels good with capitalism, let them enjoy capitalism. There is nothing wrong in it. But one thing I will do immediately and quickly: destroy their nuclear weapons; then you have castrated both.Have you seen a bull? And have you watched? You cannot force the bull to pull your cart; first you have to castrate him. And the castrated bull is no longer the same animal.In India the bull is worshipped as a symbol of the Lord Shiva by the devotees. Those bulls are really worth seeing – their strength, their pride, the way they walk. Particularly in Benares, which is the city of the Lord Shiva – he founded it. According to Hindu mythology, Benares is the oldest city in the world. And that looks right; it is so rotten, it must be the oldest.But the greatest joy in Benares is to see the bulls. They will be resting in the middle of the street: you go on honking your horn, and the bull will not even look at you. The question of his going away does not arise. And don’t disturb him, because he is powerful enough to upturn your car and kill you. But after castration the same bull goes on pulling your bullock carts.So what I will do – and it is a simple operation – I will castrate America and Russia. And castration means take all their nuclear weapons away from them and throw them in the Pacific. And close the Pacific to all ships passing through, because that could be dangerous. Although the Pacific is five miles deep, in any accident – if a ship drowns and hits a nuclear weapon – there will be an explosion immediately. So close the Pacific to travelers.That I can do within one-and-a-half hours. And more I don’t want because of my bladder. Okay?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Since you have become available to us in this earthly, everyday way, I have been amazed at the amount of fear I feel with you so close. It makes me want to hide from you. I love you so much, and I don't understand this fear. Can you explain?Love is always followed by the shadow of fear. The reason is, love is almost a death. Your old self, your old personality dies, and you are born again. Love is a death and a resurrection. Love is a cross. Jesus dies on it, and Christ is born on it.That’s why followers, disciples have always wanted their masters to be prophets, messiahs, gods, far away from themselves – for many reasons. This was one of the most significant reasons: that you could adore your master but you could not love him. And what is adoration without love? It is absolutely meaningless.Adoration without love is a body without a heart beating in it. It is a corpse.Your prophets, your messiahs, your reincarnations of God, they also wanted to keep you as far away from themselves as possible because they had to hide their own secrets from you. For example, scientifically nobody can be celibate, and they were all pretending to be celibate. They were fulfilling your desire that they should be superhuman – and nobody is superhuman. A distance was needed so you would never come to know their reality.Mahavira sits on a high, very high – pedestal. You cannot reach him. Of course you will never know whether he perspires or not. To keep the story going that tirthankaras – the prophets of Jainas – do not perspire, it is certainly necessary to keep a certain distance.When I am sitting here, I don’t know whether you perspire or not. But when I came to your disco I was really surprised. The smoke of the cigarettes…I never feel it here. And, my God, the way you perspire! I was thinking that my disciples had stopped perspiring!Of course, I myself rarely perspire, because moving from one air-conditioned place to another air-conditioned place in an air-conditioned limousine, there is no chance for me to perspire. But once in a while the electricity fails, the compressor in the car stops functioning – then I know certainly that I am not a prophet. I perspire just like you, and I am fortunate that I perspire just like every human being, because I don’t want to be made of plastic. My skin is as real as yours. If Mahavira did not perspire, the only possibility is that he had a plastic body without any pores.Perspiration is absolutely natural. It helps you to keep your temperature always the same. When it is hot, your perspiration glands of which there are seven million, all over your body, start releasing small drops of water. The heat evaporates that water; it becomes engaged in evaporating the water and leaves you alone. It keeps your temperature the same; otherwise, without perspiration your temperature would be the same as the temperature outside. Soon you would burst – any moment.For centuries it has been a good contract – not made knowingly, but made certainly by your unconscious mind, and your prophets and messiahs and tirthankaras, avatars – that a distance is needed. So your prophet is always something so far away from you, you need not be afraid. You can adore, you can love, you can play whatsoever mind games you want to play with him: he is beyond your grasp.I am totally different. If you say you love me, I can come down and catch hold of you wherever you are. I will not wait. Somebody loves me – and you say you love me deeply; I will chase you to the very end of the sky. And particularly more so, because for two months I have been celibate. So your fear is right!And you are hiding? That is the whole game of love. You are not hiding out of fear. Out of the corners of your eyes you are waiting to be found. Just the human, purely human joy of being found, somebody searching for you, chasing, and you are hiding…. It is not out of fear that you are hiding. It is out of love, and love makes you afraid because it brings you to a point where you have to drop your ego. That is a death. And only after the death of the ego will you know the real taste of love – never before it.Please, come out of your hiding. I am a lazy man – you may go on waiting in your hiding place, and I may never come. Anyway I don’t know your address, your name. You have to be a little more daring. So go to the pub, have some strong drinks; the fear will disappear, and you will come rushing toward me like a bull. If anybody is to be afraid, it is me!Osho,Why are so many of your sannyasins German?The whole credit goes to Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler led the strong German spirit – particularly the youth – into such a hell, into such suffering and misery, into such utter failure, that the German mind since then has been searching for somebody who is just the opposite of Adolf Hitler.They have found the anti-Adolf Hitler in me.It is not just a coincidence. Nature follows certain laws. If the second world war was a long nightmare, the reason was that the Germans followed a man who was giving them hope, the promise of a better world. And by the end of his life Adolf Hitler started proclaiming himself the reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet, Elijah. He was not only a political leader, he was a religious prophet; and Nazism was not only a political creed, but a new religion preparing the way for the superman to come.You have been cheated, deceived. Now for centuries the spirit of German youth is not going to forget or forgive Adolf Hitler. They want someone who is just the opposite of Adolf Hitler. I am not a prophet. I am not a reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. My foot! I don’t care a bit about these Old Testament prophets – most of them are idiots, fanatics. The German youth finds in me a friend, not a leader. They are fed up with leaders.I am not giving you any promises for the future. My insistence is on the present. This moment live, love, laugh, but don’t wait for tomorrow.Adolf Hitler was saying to the German youth, “Sacrifice your present, your youth, your love, your mother, your father, your wife, your beloved, your friends, for a better Germany to be born – a Germany which will be ruling over the whole world.”German youth is completely finished with all kinds of promises. They are no longer interested in the future, because in the name of the future they have been exploited.With me, they find a totally different type of man, who gives no hope, no promise, no certainty for tomorrow, but only says, this moment is all that you have got. And never sacrifice this moment for anything, whatsoever it is – not even for God.I teach you how to live! Adolf Hitler was teaching you how to die for the fatherland, for Nazism, for the leader, Adolf Hitler, for the future generations who will rule over the world. And I am saying, drop the very idea of future. Future generations will take care of themselves. Don’t you stupidly sacrifice yourself for future generations – future generations will have their own present.But this foolish idea is very ancient. Your parents sacrificed their love, their life, their joy, their pleasure, their holidays – everything – for you. And you are sacrificing everything for your children, and your parents’ parents were doing the same.Do you see the logic of it? Every generation is sacrificing for another generation, and that generation will sacrifice for another generation. Nobody is living. Nobody has lived up to now.They were all great martyrs. With beautiful phrasing you can hide the reality of a thing. You sacrifice – it is your duty – for your children. Don’t you want your children to be happy? Don’t you want your children to be healthy? Don’t you want your children to be cultured? Obviously, you say yes, but you should say, “The same was said to our parents. They sacrificed themselves; they never lived. They sacrificed for us to live and love, and now you are telling us not to live but to sacrifice again.”It is a very tricky game of postponing your life and love and joy and bliss and dance. And for centuries man has done that, with all good intentions. But the way to hell is paved with good intentions.I am telling you that you are here to enjoy yourself. If you enjoy your children, play with them, teach them, but don’t sacrifice for them! Remember, your sacrifice makes you resentful of your children, and your resentfulness creates anger, rebellion in your children against you. No boy can ever forgive his father, no girl can ever forgive her mother. What kind of a society have you created?Sacrifice is a dirty word. Drop it from your vocabulary.Yes, if you love your children, and if you enjoy your children, do whatsoever you want to do. It is not a sacrifice, it is not duty; it is love, and out of love you can never feel resentful. And if it is out of love, your children cannot be, deep down, angry against you. These so-called beautiful words – sacrifice, duty, responsibility to the nation, to the religion, to the culture, to the civilization – are all ugly.German youth is more attracted toward me for the simple reason that I am teaching just the opposite of what they have suffered at the hands of Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler has paved the way for me. Nobody can prevent me from taking over Germany.The German government is doing everything so that I cannot enter Germany. That is enough indication that the paranoia and fear have already reached into the hearts of those who are holding the power.They have put a few cases against me. I have never been in Germany – I was really amazed. How can I commit any crime? – I have never been there. But they have put cases against me for two reasons. They can refuse entry to a man who is under litigation. Or they can let you enter and then imprison you because so many cases are against you; you cannot leave the country until all the litigations are over.I rejoice at their fear. Whenever a government becomes afraid of me, it brings great joy to my heart. That means my work is happening. The governors, the presidents are somehow trembling within. To hide that trembling they will do all kinds of things.But whatever you do, your edifice is crumbling. The fear is not coming because of me, the fear is in you.And it is a strange experience…. For example, here in Oregon we are such a small commune, but we are not afraid of the Oregonians. We are not frightened by the vast numbers of them-and they are trembling with fear, trying in every way to prepare themselves. They have kept their army on alert. For this small commune you need the army to be on alert? They have told their army that any moment they might be ordered to reach Rajneeshpuram within three hours.We have not done any harm to anybody. In the four years we have been here, we have done great service to this desert, to Oregon. We have made Oregon’s name world-famous. Otherwise, I myself had never heard the name. But now, all around the world Oregon has become the focus; they should be grateful to us. And we have converted their desert into an oasis, full of laughter, love, dance, song, music. No desert is so fortunate as this desert we have turned into an oasis! They should be grateful.For fifty years this land was for sale and there was nobody to purchase it. Who purchases deserts? And what are you going to do with a desert? And not a small one – one hundred and twenty-six square miles! Just to put a fence around it means thousands of dollars.They are frightened. The fear comes from the fact that if the people of Oregon become acquainted with us, they will forget the idea, “It is better to be dead than red.” They will change it to the idea, “It is better to be red than dead.” This is the fear.Why is the German government afraid of me? Why does the German parliament continuously argue about me? I am nobody – not a politician, no power in my hands. Why should I be discussed in the parliaments of Holland, Germany, England, America? It seems to be simply strange.But when one is in paranoia, afraid…. The greatest fear comes when your youth starts moving in another direction; that means you are losing your grip on the future. The youth are the future, and if the youth are moving in some direction, certainly their children will move with their parents, and the old generation will be left behind in their graveyards. It is a real fear. The youth are the life of a land, and when life is slipping out of your hands, great fear arises.But nothing can prevent existence from following its fundamental laws. After Adolf Hitler, I am absolutely needed in Germany! The wound that Adolf Hitler has left behind, nobody else can heal. My love, my people and their love, can heal the wound very easily.In Germany we have many communes, and those are the only places where you will see people laughing, enjoying, dancing, singing. Every day, thousands of non-sannyasins are coming to our German discos. It became a problem to accommodate so many people. People are waiting outside the discos in line, so when the first group leaves they can enter.No church can claim that there is a line outside waiting! Naturally the church is afraid, the government is afraid. What is going to happen to these people? And they cannot understand either your way of life or your freedom, or your thoughts, or your spontaneity. You are the strangest people they have come across.Yes, Germans are one of the biggest groups among my sannyasins, and every day more and more Germans are turning toward me. I can give you the guarantee that Germany cannot remain anything other than a land of sannyasins – and that will be the absolutely certain prevention of any other Adolf Hitler happening.They have suffered so much, they need a little relaxation. They have been in such a mental torture, they need some peace of mind. Their political leaders cannot give it to them. Their religious leaders cannot give it to them. Naturally, they have started seeking, and they have found me. I can give them everything that Adolf Hitler has destroyed in the German spirit.The German spirit is in ruins. We can again make it a beautiful home where you can live, love, dance, sing. And Germans are capable people, strong people. If they could stand alone, against the whole world and maintain that stand for five years, continuously victorious, they can do the same for our vision of the world. Their energy, their strength can be used for creative purposes.Adolf Hitler took advantage of their strength. That’s why, fed up with the politicians and the priests of their land, they have joined hands with me. And I am only a friend. I do not claim any superiority over you, and that’s what the German spirit needs.It needs love, it needs friendship, it needs meditation, it needs silence. It needs to understand poetry, painting, architecture. It needs to understand jokes.It is said that if you tell a joke to an Englishman, he laughs twice: first, when you tell it, out of politeness, not to be rude to you; and second, in the middle of the night when he gets the point. The German laughs only once. He never comes to understand the point. He laughs because others are laughing, so there must be something in it.And never tell a joke to a Jew, because he will not laugh; on the contrary, he will say, “This is an old joke, and moreover you are telling it all wrong!”Perhaps for the first time in their history, Germans who have been sannyasins have been able to understand a joke. And I am going to fill the whole of Germany with beautiful jokes. Such a powerful nation needs some dimension of creativity to put its power, its intelligence into. It does not deserve Adolf Hitlers.There will be many Germans here. Remember, to prevent Germany again falling into the same ditch…it fell into one in the first world war, it fell into it again in the second world war. And Germany still has American soldiers and American missiles; they can be forced into another ditch, and that will be the end of the whole of humanity.Throw out the Bibles and read joke books. Tell the Americans to leave with all their missiles. Tell them, “We are not going to need them, and we are not going to sacrifice ourselves for any nonsense, any fatherland.”Germany is the only country which calls itself “fatherland.” What a male chauvinist mind! All countries of the world are called “motherland,” but Germans could not call their country motherland – it looks as if you are calling your country by the name of the weaker sex. Fatherland seems to be right.Please, start dropping the idea of fatherland. Make Germany a motherland. Give it more feminine qualities, take away its male chauvinistic ideas. And my sannyasins are capable of doing it. Don’t just be satisfied with yourself that you are happy, celebrating, for the simple reason that the more you spread your celebration, the more you rejoice. The more you shower blessings on others, the more blessed you become.Osho,I heard that some of the people that were named on last year's enlightenment list, which you subsequently declared to be a joke, still believe themselves to be enlightened, and have received a certificate to prove it. They say that you said it was a joke only out of your compassion for us unenlightened souls, to spare us from greed and jealousy. Can you please comment?Be compassionate to those enlightened people, because never in the world have certificates been issued for enlightenment. If they had any intelligence, they would have immediately returned the certificate.Certificate for enlightenment? I don’t have any certificate. It seems I am the most unenlightened person here: no degrees from your university, no certificate for enlightenment. Sometimes I start thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? With so many enlightened people….”It was a joke, and those who are still clinging to those certificates are poor souls; just have compassion on them. It is not that I have called it a joke so that those who are not included in the lists will be able to drop jealousy, competitiveness, or an inferiority complex because “somebody else has become enlightened and I am still a camel.”Don’t be worried. This is a caravan of camels!And whenever, once in a while, a camel turns into a lion, I whisper in his ear, “Keep quiet. Don’t start roaring, because the camels are too many: they will simply kill you. They will not tolerate such a nuisance.” And whenever a lion changes into a child, then naturally for his protection I have to tell him, “Now you are a child – vulnerable, open, keep it a secret hidden deep within you.”Certificates have been given to the camels so they can enjoy their camelhood without any inferiority complex. I love jokes. There is no need to be worried. If they are going all around with their certificates, just have a good laugh with them. Pat their backs, tell them, “Boy, you are doing well, just go on. You have received the certificate; sooner or later enlightenment will also come.”Osho,When you were testing your enlightenment by smoking, drinking alcohol, and having sex, did you try eating fish and meat? Does a vegetarian diet have a real value for our consciousness, or is it optional, like smoking?It is not optional. Before enlightenment, it makes you gross, destroys your sensitivity, does not allow you to feel the life that surrounds you. It keeps you blind to the fact that just for your taste, you are killing living beings. Their bodies may be different, but their spirits are not different from yours.Just think of cannibals. Has any cannibal ever become enlightened? Fortunately, it has not happened. If it had happened, the cannibals would have eaten that enlightened man first, just to have a little taste of enlightenment.There is not much difference between cannibals and the people who eat meat and fish; they are all killing living beings. And the person who can kill should not expect his heart to become compassionate, full of love.So before enlightenment, eating meat will prevent you from experiencing the light, experiencing your being. It is not optional.After enlightenment, it is optional, but no enlightened person can eat meat and fish. Not that by eating meat and fish his enlightenment is going to disappear – enlightenment cannot disappear, whatever you do. But the enlightened person becomes so sensitive, so aesthetic, that the very idea of killing somebody just for the few buds on your tongue is simply idiotic.Before enlightenment it is absolutely not optional. After enlightenment, it is optional, but no enlightened person can manage to eat meat or fish. I have tried, but I could not succeed. Fish…I cannot even stand its smell. To think of myself, even in imagination, eating fish, seems to be absolutely impossible. Meat has been placed before me, but I could not touch it. The very idea that life has been destroyed…. And enlightenment is all for life; it cannot accept death just to have a little taste. So it is optional but impossible.I know many of you are brought up in families where meat and fish are normal, routine. You have been conditioned from your very birth to think that God created all these animals for you to eat. And I don’t know why He created you – for the animals to eat?Gurdjieff jokingly has proposed a theory – because Mohammedans, Christians, Jews, all believe God created animals for man to eat. The problem I posed to you was also put before Gurdjieff, that if everything is food for somebody else – one animal eats another animal, that animal is eaten by another animal, and so on and so forth – finally there is man. For whom is he food? Or is he an exception?Gurdjieff was a remarkable man. He said, “Man is also food. He is eaten by the moon.”His disciples could not think what he was talking about, but he had many proofs in his favor. More people go mad on the full-moon night, than on any other night. More people commit suicide on the full-moon night than on any other night. More people commit murder on the full-moon night than on any other night. More people have become enlightened on the full-moon night than on any other night.There seems to be some reason behind it. On the full-moon night, man’s psychology, his body, are all affected by the moon. The people who commit suicide…perhaps the moon has better ways of finding its food than you have.The moon need not come to you with a gun or with an arrow, but in a subtle way its rays come as death to many people, through suicide, murder. Those who somehow escape become mad. And enlightenment is the ultimate death, because the body will be dissolved and the soul will never be reincarnated into any other body. The moon has eaten the enlightened man completely, not leaving even a trace behind.Gurdjieff was simply joking, but he made it very clear that you should not think yourself exceptional. Otherwise, when you kill a lion, it is a game. And when a lion kills you, then? Nobody calls it a game. In a game both parties are equal. Sometimes one party is victorious, sometimes the other party is victorious, but the game remains a game. When man kills animals, it is a game. When animals manage somehow to kill a man, this is disaster.You have been brought up in families where you never gave a single thought to what you were eating. Whatever you were given from the beginning, you accepted. You became accustomed to it. That is one of the reasons why the greatest number of enlightened people happened in India, because that is the only country which is vegetarian. In India also there are non-vegetarians, but from non-vegetarians not a single man has become enlightened.The case is similar in the West. It hurts your conditioning, but the truth is that Moses, Elijah, Jesus, are nothing compared to Gautam Buddha, Vardhaman, Mahavira, Shankara, Nagarjuna-no, just nothing. Their flowering, their height…. The distance between Jesus and Gautam Buddha is so big for the simple reason that these people – Jesus, Moses, Elijah – are all gross, they are not sensitive enough to become enlightened. And because they could not become enlightened, they could not preach vegetarianism to their following. If they had become enlightened, the first thing to teach to their followers would have been vegetarianism.Smoking is a different matter. It does not kill anybody. At the most it can take two or three years off your life. But it is your life, you are not killing anybody else. You are simply settling for seventy years instead of seventy-three. This is purely your personal business. Enlightenment cannot be affected by taking the smoke in and throwing it out. It is just silly, it is nothing like sin.Alcohol can disturb before enlightenment, because it can make you more unconscious – that’s its whole purpose. Your consciousness is burdened so much with anxieties, worries, anguish, that you take a drink and feel good because your consciousness goes to sleep. Hence, before enlightenment, any kind of intoxicant is absolutely to be dropped. It affects your consciousness and drags it downward toward darker realms of unconsciousness. And the whole effort of the seeker is to pull the darker parts out into the light, so this is just the reverse process.But after enlightenment you are free. There is no problem; now no intoxicant can make your consciousness drop from the height it has reached. You can enjoy intoxicants if you like, there is no danger. But ordinarily, all the enlightened people in the past have not used intoxicants after their enlightenment.Gautam Buddha was asked once, “Do you think taking something alcoholic would be a disturbance to your achievement?”He said, “No, but if I start drinking, the problem is for my followers who are not enlightened. Seeing me drink, they will say, ‘Aha! Isn’t it groovy to be a follower of Gautam Buddha?’” But I don’t want you to remain in darkness about anything. Gautam Buddha was trying to keep his followers in ignorance, howsoever compassionate his act. But keeping anybody in ignorance I cannot accept as compassion.So I want to tell you that after enlightenment one can drink any alcoholic beverage. But there is no need, because the enlightened one has no tensions, no anxiety. He has nothing to drown in alcohol, so there is no need for him. But just to be a good companion to you, he can drink a little bit once in a while. That will keep him more human, and that will give you more hope! It will destroy the distance between the enlightened and the unenlightened. And that is my greatest effort – to destroy any distance between the enlightened and the unenlightened.Of course, there is some existential difference which I cannot destroy. But this is not the existential difference – that you smoke and I don’t smoke, that you drink and I don’t drink. This is not existential. The existential difference is very small, and that is: I am awake and you are asleep. It is not much, because I am just sitting on the same bed where you are asleep. Just a little effort will make you awake.Your sleep gives a guarantee: anybody who is capable of sleeping is capable of awakening, they come together. So what is the fuss about? Take your time. Whenever you want to wake up, wake. There is no hurry, you have the whole eternity available to you. Yes, I may not be there to wake you up, that is the only unfortunate thing about it. But somebody else….One day you are going to be awake. If you love me, you would like me to wake you up. That is the only real indication of your love. If your love is just a word, you will go on sleeping and snoring. And you can talk in sleep. I can hear your snoring, and I can see you asleep, and still you are bubbling, “I love you, Osho.”If you really love me, then wake up, because only in your awakened state can we have a communion, a feeling of oneness – not just a feeling, but really a melting into each other.You have mentioned sex too. Biologically, sex is natural. It is not a hindrance to enlightenment. It is just like eating food, drinking water, breathing the air in and out, waking up in the morning, going to sleep in the night. Your digested food becomes your blood, your semen. It is a natural phenomenon.Sex in itself is not a barrier to enlightenment, but all the religions have made it a barrier by repressing it. It is not sex that is the barrier, it is perverted sex that becomes the barrier. Homosexuality is a barrier, lesbianism is a barrier.But because all your religions have been teaching you to be celibate if you want to attain to God, self-realization, liberation, enlightenment – whatsoever their name is for the ultimate experience – then celibacy has been taught to be the basic requirement. It is that idea of celibacy which has driven people into all kinds of perversions.Celibacy has led humanity to the perfect perversion, AIDS. This is a religious disease. This is the blessing your popes and your shankaracharyas and your imams have given to you.Certainly whenever nature is not allowed to be natural, it takes you off the route of your growth, you start growing in a different direction. Enlightenment is your natural growth. The more natural you are, the easier the growth. Sex is not a problem; celibacy is.Before enlightenment, enjoy sex as much as you can because after enlightenment there will not be any sex at all. So do your best and be quick! Life is short, who knows? Tomorrow you may become enlightened. After enlightenment, love is the reality. Sex becomes just a past thing; you are out of the bondage of biology.So please, don’t call your sex “making love.” It is not making love. Only when you are enlightened is it possible to make love, because then it is no longer a biological necessity, but just beautiful fun; you can enjoy it. And the enlightened person can enjoy it more than anybody else. He enjoys everything more than anybody else. His capacity to enjoy is tremendous. But there is no necessity. If he chooses not to play tennis, there is no biological necessity. If he chooses not to play football, existence is not going to ask him, “Why are you not playing football?” It is simply up to him.Making love is simply a game between two body energies. If you like the game, and likings differ – if you like the game, play it, and play it the best you can. If you don’t like the game, there is no necessity, and then celibacy is natural.After enlightenment, sex is no longer a need, but you have all the mechanism: the whole body of a woman or a man. You are still eating, you are still drinking. You are still creating the energy that used to become sex when you were unenlightened. You can use that energy in making love, or in painting, or in creating poetry, or in dancing. And if you don’t want to do anything with the energy, a great change in your chemistry and biology happens. You don’t create that energy anymore if you don’t use it. But then remember, you will become fatter.You can see in India, sannyasins…. Muktananda’s master – perhaps you have seen his picture. I don’t think anybody in the whole world can compete with that man as far as his belly is concerned. It is almost as high as Everest. It was so difficult for Nityananda, Muktananda’s master, to sit – his belly was so big. He was always lying down, and you could see the great slope!Now the energy accumulates. It is better to use it. This is ugly! An enlightened person should become more beautiful, nicer, more proportionate. But the idea that you have to be celibate creates people like Nityananda. And after a certain point….For example, Nityananda, even if I had met him and told him…he died before I reached his place. He did well; otherwise I was going to tell him, “Your belly looks like a very foolish thing, attached to a man who is enlightened. Why don’t you make love?”But I think he would be incapable of making love – the belly would keep the woman miles away! I cannot imagine…. I have looked into the ancientmost scriptures on sexology, Vatsyayana’s Sutras. He describes all the positions, eighty-four positions of making love; there is not a single exercise applicable to Nityananda. Perhaps Vatsyayana never came across such a personality.I have looked into the second great treatise on sex written by Pundit Koka. I think sometimes that Coca-Cola must be some relation to Pundit Koka; perhaps Cola was his girlfriend. And they both together have created such a juicy thing….The Coca-Cola company does not reveal its secrets to anybody. They are preserved in Switzerland in a bank, locked. The company is not ready for any price to sell the secret of the drink. It is ready to lose great markets. For example, in India Coca-Cola became prohibited for the simple reason that the government wanted to know the formula, how it is made – “because unless the Indian medical board passes it, we don’t know what you are supplying.” But the company refused. The company said, “We never give our formula to anybody. We are ready to get out of your market.” And since then in India, they have been trying, making many cold drinks, but nothing comes close to Coca-Cola. It cannot, it has a very ancient source.I looked in Pundit Koka’s book of exercises. He is certainly far more advanced than Vatsyayana, because Vatsyayana is three thousand years old; Coca-Cola is only one thousand years old. The name of the wife or the girlfriend is not known. Just the male chauvinist world – the man gives his name to his wife. Why can’t it be vice versa, that the wife gives her name to the man? No man will be ready for that.I have searched Pundit Koka’s book of sexual exercises in every detail. He has more postures, but still nothing for Nityananda. The belly is so big that it seems almost impossible to reach the woman. Before it happens to you, don’t accumulate energy. It is good that the energy remains flowing, that it remains fresh, it remains young. Your sex energy becoming stale is dangerous; it will create a certain staleness in all dimensions of your life.Sex is perfect, no celibacy is needed before enlightenment. After enlightenment sex disappears, giving place to love – a far more delicate phenomenon. You can have as much fun as you like, in no way can it disturb your enlightenment. It is something bodily, chemical, physiological. How can it affect your consciousness?The enlightened man can make love, and while he is making love he is still centered in his being. He is just a witness, he is seeing himself and the woman making love; he is a third party. And this is what I mean when I say the enlightened man transcends sex, because he becomes a third party. He can see his own body and the body of his woman completely as a witness. His witnessing is not disturbed by anything.Osho,Were you always self-sufficient even as a child? Did you never need cuddling or hugging? Was your body free of this desire?Unfortunately, yes. I don’t remember that I ever needed any cuddling and hugging. I say, unfortunately, yes. Perhaps I have missed something beautiful. Cuddling and hugging are needed by children because they feel so small, so fragile, so afraid of the big world around. I have never felt any fear, and I have had my sources of warmth within myself – as far back as I can remember.I never liked to sleep with my mother, with my father. Particularly my grandfather was very much in love with me. It is something to be understood. Grandfathers are always immensely in love. They may not have loved their own son, but they love their son’s son. There must be some psychological reason behind it. Their own son, because of all the religious teachings in the air, has always reminded them that they have committed something ugly, sinful. This son is the by-product of that act. But with their son’s son, they have no guilt feelings.So it is always the grandfathers and grandmothers who are more loving. My grandfather was very loving, and he always wanted me to sleep with him. I point-blank refused him thousands of times: “You stop! I cannot!”He said, “But what is the matter?”I said, “There are two things. One, you cuddle me and you hug me, and that I don’t like. Secondly, you cover your head with the blanket, and my head also. And it is too much. You snore inside the blanket, and the whole night I have to hear it.”Finally he agreed. He said, “Okay. If you don’t want to sleep in my bed, at least you can sleep in my room.” I said, “That’s okay,” so I had my small bed in his room. But just because of his snoring, I still covered my head. If I didn’t cover my head, I immediately remembered him. He snored really loudly.For years I slept in his room, covering my head just not to hear. I still cover my head. He has been dead for many decades, but he has left a present with me – this covering the head with the blanket. Once in a while I try to get rid of it, but within five minutes, it is back. He is not there snoring, but the air-conditioner, the fan in the other room – and I am surrounded by so many mechanisms. One or the other is making a noise. And I say, “Dear grandfather, will you ever leave me or not?” I don’t think he is going to leave me.I have never liked cuddling and hugging. In fact, it is not good of me – I don’t like the smell of another person’s body, but what can I do about it? About likings and dislikings you cannot do anything. You are born with them and you die with them – enlightenment or no enlightenment.Osho,I remember that I did go for rebellious things, but when I was turned down or shut off or dismissed, it hurt so deeply that I gave up. Can you tell us the secret of how to be strong enough to cope with the consequences?It is very simple. You have been too serious about your rebellion. That’s why you got hurt, because you were thinking you were doing something great, and they told you to shut up! You were expecting a Nobel prize.The secret is very simple. About your rebellion, don’t be serious. On the contrary, when they say, “Shut up!” have a good laugh, be hilarious; then they will be hurt. They will not be able to figure out what is the matter: “I shouted at the boy and rather than getting sad, hurt, he laughed.”That’s what I was doing in my childhood. I turned whatever they gave to me, or were trying to give to me, I turned it back with great force. If somebody told me, “Shut up!” I laughed loudly, and I inquired, “Does your ‘shut up’ apply to laughter too? I will not say a thing, but I will sit here and go on laughing until you ask what is the matter. Better you ask now.”I used to sit in front of my father in his shop, because he had told me to keep quiet. I would go on smiling at him, and he would try to look busy. But I was just sitting there, and I was not doing anything, just smiling. And finally he would have a nervous breakdown, and he would say, “Please tell me what you want!”I said, “Unnecessarily you wasted so much time by telling me to shut up. And you went into a torture, and I had to waste my time. So please, drop this habit of telling me to shut up, just listen carefully to what I say.”The secret is simple: never take yourself too seriously, then nobody can hurt you. You cannot find any man on the whole earth who has been condemned like me. From all corners, from every country, from every religion, from every political party I have only received condemnation as my reward. But nothing has given me even a scratch.Hurt? I don’t know what it means. I never got hurt because I never took myself seriously. I did what I wanted to do, I said what I wanted to say. If they feel hurt and annoyed and start calling me names and condemning me, that is their problem, it is not my problem. I am finished, the moment I have said and done what I wanted to do, I am finished.My teachers were always asking me, “What kind of man are you? We punish you, and you accept it as if it is a reward. That makes us so worried about you, whether something is wrong with you. Even after school we continue to think about you.” Whenever a teacher took his cane and hit my hands – he would stop hitting, but I would go on keeping my hands held out, and I would ask him, “Is that all? I was expecting much more. You can do it – if not for this act, then do it in advance for something that I am bound to do.”Don’t take it seriously – rebellion should be hilarious. It should be with a laugh, then nobody can hurt you. You won’t have any sensitive part, vulnerable; your laughter, your hilariousness will be almost a steel cover over you.Osho,You come every day, dance with us, steal our hearts, smile and disappear. Are you a gypsy or something?I am a gypsy or nothing!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,For years you have talked to us of simplicity: simplicity in love, the simplicity of enlightenment, and now the simple solution to the power game between the United States and Russia. Why has man developed such complexity, and why does he show such mistrust and disbelief in the simple?The simple is not a challenge to man’s ego; the difficult is a challenge; the impossible is really a great challenge. How big an ego you want can be known by the challenge that you have accepted, by your ambition; it is measurable. But the simple is unattractive to the ego. The simple is the death of the ego.And man has chosen complexities even in places where there was no need of complexity at all, for the simple reason that with complexity he can go on growing and strengthening his ego. He goes on becoming more and more important in politics, in religion, in society – everywhere.The whole of psychology is geared to make the ego stronger. Even those fools, the psychologists, stress the point that a man needs a strong ego. So education is a program to give you ambition by punishment and reward, to drive you in a certain direction. Your parents from the very beginning are hoping for too much from you. They think perhaps Alexander the Great has been born to them, or their daughter is nobody but the reincarnation of Cleopatra. Parents condition you from the very beginning that unless you prove yourself, you are good for nothing. The simple man is thought to be a simpleton.The simple man has not been the goal of human society until now. And the simple man cannot be the goal, because you are born simple! Every child is simple, just a clean slate. Then the parents start writing on his slate – what he has to become. Then the teachers, the priests, the leaders – they all go on emphasizing that you have to become somebody; otherwise, you have wasted your life. Just the opposite is the case.You are a being. You need not become anybody else. That is the meaning of simplicity: remaining at ease with one’s being, and not going on any track of becoming – which is unending.There is no place where you will feel, “Now my journey is over. I have come to the highest peak that I had desired.” Nobody in the whole history of humanity has been able to do that, for the simple reason that man is moving in a circle. So somebody is always ahead of you in something or other.You may become the president of America, but before Muhammad Ali the Great you feel inferior. You don’t have that animal strength. Muhammad Ali can give a good punch on the nose of Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan will be flat on the ground. And you can go on counting one, two, three – Ronald Reagan is not going to get up again to get another punch. He is simply waiting for number ten, so that he can get up and go to the hospital.You may become prime minister of a country, but encountering Albert Einstein you will look like a pygmy – not a prime minister, but a pygmy.Life is multi-dimensional. It is impossible for you to reach in all directions, and to be the first in all directions. It is a sheer impossibility; existence does not work that way.The ego is man’s disease.The vested interests want you to remain diseased. They don’t want you to be healthy and whole, because your being healthy and whole is a danger to their vested interests. That’s why nobody wants to be simple, nobody wants to be nobody. And my whole approach is that you should be at ease with yourself, that you should accept your being.Becoming is sickness, being is health. But simple, whole, healthy, blissful: you have not tasted that. Your society has not allowed a single moment for you, so you know only one way: the way of the ego. You have been told to become Jesus Christ. There are societies that are aiming for everybody to become a god. This insane world! You have to come out of all this programming. If you want to enjoy, relax, feel peace and the beauty of existence, that phony ego will have to drop.I don’t want to take anything else from you. I want only to take your ego from you, which is anyway just a fantasy. It is not a reality, so I am not really taking anything from you. And I want to give you your being. Of course I need not give it to you: you have it already! You just have to be shaken and awakened to the tremendous beauty of innocence.That is the moment when the camel has reached the state of the child.Nothing is at risk. And you are running after shadows which you will never be able to catch, forgetting all the treasures that you have brought into the world with you. Before your ego is fulfilled, death will finish you. Life is too short, it is not to be destroyed in such foolish games as the ego.And it is only a question of understanding. You are not supposed to stand on your head in a yoga posture. You are not supposed to contort your body in many ways for many years doing yoga exercises. You are not supposed to fast for months together to purify yourself. In fact, all these ways are also the way of the ego.The man who can stand on his head for twelve hours makes a record. He is destroying his whole intelligence by standing for twelve hours on his head, because all the blood of his body will be rushing toward his head. It will be a flood, because gravitation will be pulling all the blood toward his head. In that flood, your fragile nerves, which are so small, so delicate – you have seven million in your skull – will be simply killed.That’s why no yogi has contributed anything to the world. They have been parasites, and you have been foolish enough to reward them with great respect, for the simple reason that the man is standing on his head. He is an idiot.If God wanted you to stand on your head, I can’t think why he allowed you to stand on two legs. In the very beginning he would have told Adam and Eve, “Just stand on your head.” And that would have been a far better strategy – by standing on their heads, I don’t think they would have reached the tree of knowledge or the tree of eternal life. But you have legs to walk with.The scientific fact is, animals cannot create intelligence. They have brains – some animals have bigger brains than man. The dolphin has a bigger brain than you; the elephant, almost the same size brain as you. But why have elephants not been as intelligent as man? For the simple reason that the elephant cannot walk on two legs. In the circus, once in a while he sits on a stool. That is not going to help. It is certain he cannot walk on two legs for his whole life, that would be torture.It is a very simple phenomenon: if your body is horizontal – as all animals are – then the gravitation is equally forceful all over your body. Man standing on two legs is not an ordinary thing. It is the greatest revolution that has happened in the whole of evolution.When you stand on two feet, your heart has to pump blood against gravitation toward the head because the head needs continuously to be fed with oxygen. Only six seconds are needed – if your head does not get oxygen for six seconds, you are dead. You can be revived because your body is perfectly okay, but you will be just a vegetable; the head will be finished.The brain has developed its delicacies – its very subtle system of nerves and cells which functions as the biocomputer, which collects all the information and stores it – because blood never comes as a flood. Only enough blood comes to keep the brain living.The yogis have not produced anything, have not created anything, have made no contribution to the world. What have your ascetics given to the world? What have your so-called saints been doing all along, except being parasites sucking your blood? And these are the people you have been worshipping. And why have you been worshipping them? For the simple reason that you cannot stand for twelve hours on your head. Try it – even for twelve minutes it is difficult. In fact, when you first try you will fall many times; you may have a broken rib. The yogi is doing something difficult.A man is standing naked in the snow in the Himalayas, and people come from thousands of miles to touch his feet. All that he is doing is getting frozen and dead. What is his contribution? Nobody goes to touch the feet of Albert Einstein, or Bertrand Russell, or Martin Heidegger, or Ludwig Wittgenstein – the people who have contributed to man’s knowledge immensely, who have expanded man’s vision almost to infinity. But you cannot see it, it is not something visible.Bertrand Russell and Whitehead together wrote a book, Principia Mathematica. It takes them one hundred and sixty-five pages to prove that two plus two is really four. Who bothers to read such a book? One hundred and sixty-five pages, and the ultimate outcome is, two plus two is really four. Nobody reads that book.Visiting all the universities of India – and perhaps India has the largest number of universities; one hundred universities – I was always going to their libraries to look at Principia Mathematica, whether anybody has read it. No – even the pages are not cut, they are joined. I inquired of the librarians, “Has anybody read this book?”They said, “Nobody ever asks. People come once in a while, they look at one or two pages and that’s all.” And that was one of the greatest contributions to humanity. Bertrand Russell and Whitehead managed to make mathematics a solid foundation for any science to grow from.You get easily interested…. Somebody is bicycling for twenty-four hours, and hundreds of people go to watch him. He will not eat, or he will eat while bicycling. Of course, he has a certain control over his bladder. He will not drink anything. Perhaps he has not drunk for twelve hours before he started the bicycling. It interests you; he is doing something difficult.And he feels great. His ego is getting higher and higher. From twenty-four hours he will go to forty-eight hours, and so on and so forth. And the more he can manage, the more people will be coming to him. The people are mediocre, and these are their leaders – who are even more mediocre.Simplicity will not attract anybody toward you. In fact, to become as simple as the child – instead of attracting people toward you and making you something great – may keep people away from you, saying, “He is only a child.” Perhaps they may become hostile to you, because your innocence can raise questions which they cannot answer. There is no answer to those questions. Your innocence will create curiosities which will be cutting the roots of their beliefs and their faith.I used to go with my father to all kinds of discourses – religious, political, educational – and he used to take a promise from me that I was not going to ask anything, and I was not going to create a nuisance there. I always promised him, and I always did whatsoever I wanted to do. Coming back home, he would say, “You are not a man of your word.”I said, “I am. But I wanted to go. I wanted to see that spiritual monk, to see whether he knows anything or not. Unless I promise, you will not take me. It was your fault to ask for the promise. You made me lie! After this, never ask for a promise. Why should you make me a slave? Leave me free.”My whole town’s elders were afraid of me – and I was only a child. The man who was most respected in the town was a physician, and he was also thought to be a very learned, religious scholar. I used to visit him almost daily, and the moment he saw me I could see his face going pale, because he could not answer a single question.I would put the Bhagavadgita in front of him, and tell him, “Put your hand on the Gita and say whether you have seen God or not.”This was too much. If the Gita was not there, perhaps he might have lied, but to put your hand on the Gita and lie means a direct ticket to hell.And he would say to me, “Are you some magistrate or what? Is my own house a court? I don’t want to put my hand on the Gita.”“Then,” I said, “whatever you say will be a lie.”His continual statement to me was, “Wait, you are too young. When you are a little older, you will understand all these problems. Right now you cannot understand.”I went on becoming older, and each year I would come from the university to the town. Before going to my home, first I would go to the physician, knock at his door, and say, “One more year has passed; the question is still there.”He would say, “Can’t you wait?”I said, “You just give me the date! How long do I have to wait?”Even when I became a lecturer in the university I used to come to my town once in a while on holiday. His house was just between the station and my house, so first I would stop at his house, knock on his door, and say, “Now I have even become a teacher of philosophy in the university. And what about your statement? How long do I have to wait now?”And then one day when I was in the town, somebody came to my house – because my father was a friend of the man – and informed us, “He is just dying.”I rushed – my father said, “Where are you going? The message is not for you!”I said, “Don’t worry, you take your time. I am going because I have to ask him something before he dies.”I was there with the Bhagavadgita in front of him. And I told him, “Now I have grown up, you cannot deceive me anymore. Put your hand on the Bhagavadgita – and at the moment of dying don’t lie; otherwise you will fall directly into hell.”He said, “Can’t you forgive me?”I said, “You have been deceiving me for almost twenty years. What was the need? You could have simply said, ‘I don’t know.’ The thing would have finished long ago. You have no obligation to know everything, but you pretended. You wanted to be known as the wisest man around, and you have been deceiving not only me, you have been deceiving everybody who has come to you. Now at the last moment, recognize the fact and say, ‘I do not know.’”By that time my father had reached the house, other people had reached. They said, “This is not good. A man is dying and you are making a court here.”I said, “If he dies without doing what I am saying, then I will be responsible for throwing him into hell. This is the moment I can still save him.” And at the moment of death one thing happens: now you know death is there, you cannot go on your ego trips anymore.He put his hand on the Gita and he said, “I am sorry. Please forgive me, and tell everybody else also to forgive me. I know nothing. I was exploiting those people by pretending that I know and they don’t know.” That is a strategy of the ego.The ego can find very subtle ways. It is always afraid of simplicity, innocence; hence, all the societies destroy your simplicity, distract you from your innocence. But it is a very simple thing to come back home, because you have never left it in reality. You have left it only in fantasy. You cannot really go anywhere away from your being.All becoming is false, imagination. Being is the truth. And that truth can be known only when you simply accept your ignorance.I must remind you of Socrates’ last statement on the earth. He said, “When I was young I thought I knew everything. I bragged, because I could argue better than anybody else. When I became a little more mature, I realized that there were many things I didn’t know, I was simply bragging. And because others could argue against me they thought I must be knowing, because my argument was weightier. And as I went on, slowly, slowly it became clear to me that I know nothing. Let this be my last statement on the earth: that I do not know.”Socrates had become a child again, but he had risked all his wisdom, philosophy, his great intelligence, all his arguments, his whole life’s effort of winning against opponents in debates, discussions. He had become the topmost intelligent man in Greece. But he had the tremendous courage to say, “I know nothing.”Nobody knows anything.Existence is a mystery, it cannot be demystified.And because existence is a mystery, it reveals itself only to the heart of the child. It reveals itself not to knowledge, because knowledge is an aggression. It reveals itself to innocence, because innocence is simply receptivity, not aggression; not violence but keeping your doors open, waiting. If the truth comes in, you are ready to welcome it.Truth cannot be conquered. You have to be available to truth, so that truth can conquer you. This is the reason why simplicity is the most significant religious qualification. I want you to become just simple, innocent, not knowing anything – waiting.Jesus says, “Seek and ye shall find.”I say, “Wait! Never seek,” because seeking is interfering, poking your nose into the mysteries of existence. It is not graceful, it is just ugly. I say, “Wait! and you shall find.”Jesus says, “Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you.” Wait. The doors always open for those who have patience, who can wait for infinity, but who will not trespass. Even knocking on somebody’s door is a trespass.Jesus says, “Ask, and it shall be given to you.”I say to you, “Ask, and forget about getting it, ever.” In your very asking you have destroyed the possibility of getting it. Do not ask. Don’t become a question.Let me repeat: don’t become a question! And you are in for a great surprise, because you are the answer. If you had become the question, then you would have fallen into such a trap, there would have been no way out. You would have gone on questioning – and the more you question, the farther away you will be from the answer, because you are the answer!In innocence, in simplicity, you simply find it; it is your very being.Osho,When you talked about trust, tears wouldn't stop coming. You said you trust us, and I feel so untrustworthy. Please comment.Trust is never conditional. I trust you, not because you are trustworthy; I trust you because I cannot distrust.Once in India I was traveling from Indore to Kanva. Kanva was a big junction, and I had to wait there for one hour. I was alone in my air-conditioned compartment. A beggar knocked on the window, and I indicated to him to come in.He came in. He said, “My mother has died, and I don’t have even enough money to bury her.” I gave him one rupee. In those days that was even enough to get wood and burn your mother. The man looked surprised.He was a professional beggar. I knew it, because I passed through Kanva many times, and it was always his mother who was dying. I could have asked, “What a great mother you have got. Is your mother a Jesus Christ?” But I never said anything to him.That day, thinking me mad or something, he came again. He said, “My father has died.”I said, “Great! Take one rupee more.”The man could not believe that so soon…just five minutes before his mother had died, now his father has died. And that gave him courage enough to come again after five minutes.I said, “Has your wife died?”He said, “How do you know? Yes.”I said, “Here is one rupee more. How many relatives do you have? Because it is unnecessarily disturbing me – these people will go on dying and you will have to come again and again. You just tell me the whole number, as if the whole family has died. How many relatives do you have?”The poor man could not imagine more than ten. I said, “Okay, you take ten rupees. And now, get lost.”He said, “Before I accept your ten rupees – three I have already taken – I want to know, do you believe me? So quickly my mother dies, my father dies, my wife dies, and now you are giving me an advance for my whole family.” He felt guilty that he was cheating. He said, “No, although I am a beggar, I cannot cheat you. You still trust me?”I said, “You have done nothing wrong. I have money, you are poor; any excuse will do. And don’t you think that I am also immensely interested in your family? – because your mother has died many times before. I have been passing through this railway station so many times, and it was always your mother. How many mothers did you have?”He said, “I want one thing to be clear; otherwise I will carry this wound in my heart forever. How could you trust me?”I said, “I thought perhaps you went on forgetting that it is the same man you are asking for money: ‘My mother has died, my father has died, my wife has died.’ Perhaps you were thinking you were asking different people” – because he came with different clothes. One time he came with a cap, another time with a basket, the third time with a coat on – just so that he was not recognized as the same man.I said, “I was wondering if perhaps you could not recognize me as the same man. And as far as trust is concerned, I trust you still. It has nothing to do with your trustworthiness; I trust you because I cannot distrust. It is my incapacity, it has nothing to do with your worthiness or unworthiness.”He returned the thirteen rupees. I tried hard to refuse but he said, “No. I will not take these rupees knowing perfectly well that you are aware that I am cheating and still you trust me. You have given me the dignity of being a human being for the first time in my whole life. And I am not going to beg again – without saying a word, you have changed me.”You say you could not stop the tears because I said I trust you, and you feel unworthy. That’s a great step, to feel that you are unworthy. It is a quantum leap. Those tears will take it away, wash you completely clean of your unworthiness. But as far as I am concerned, whether you are worthy or unworthy makes no difference to me: I trust you.Somebody was asking me in a letter…because just a few days ago Shiva has written a letter: “Please forgive me. I have done everything wrong. I have said lies against you, and the burden of it all is so much it is killing me.”The other person was asking, “If Shiva comes back” – because this letter may be just the beginning of the camel coming back from Santa Fe – “would you give him the same position that he used to have, your bodyguard?”I said, “Certainly. I trust him.”Trust is a miracle. If you trust even the person who is going to murder you, his sword will fall from his hands. If you trust the man who is going to shoot you, there is every possibility he may shoot himself. Trust is a tremendous power. Distrust makes you weak.And how many people are you going to distrust? The whole world? That’s what you have been told and taught: never trust anybody; otherwise you will be cheated. But it is better to be cheated than to lose your immense power of trust. And what can you be cheated of? In fact, the people who have told and taught you, “Never trust people because they will take advantage of it,” are your enemies. They have destroyed your greatest power.Trusting unconditionally, you will be relieved of the burden…. Such a big burden you are carrying on your heart, a Himalaya, because there are so many millions of people you have to distrust.Machiavelli, the only significant political philosopher of the West, writes in his masterpiece The Prince: “Don’t trust even your friend, because tomorrow he can become your enemy, the possibility is there.” He also says, “Don’t say things against your enemy, because tomorrow he can become your friend.” These are the teachings he was giving to the princes from all over Europe. Princes were being sent to Machiavelli to learn politics, diplomacy, how to rule over people, how to conquer new lands, how not to be invaded.But a strange thing…. One sannyasin told me she is a direct descendant of Machiavelli.I said, “I wanted to see Machiavelli, but he died a long time ago. It is good you have come to be a sannyasin. Some part of Machiavelli is within you, and I would like to talk to that part, because I always wanted to ask Machiavelli about all these princes whom he had been teaching….” No prince, when he became king, accepted Machiavelli as his prime minister. He applied again and again. Those were his own students; now they had become kings, and he wanted to become their prime minister.It seems so logical that the prince would like his own wise teacher to become his wise adviser. But none of his disciples accepted him, they all refused. They said, “You are too cunning, too clever; we cannot trust you. And this is according to your teaching. We are simply following the dictums that you have given to us. We don’t want to lose our kingdom” – because if Machiavelli is prime minister today, tomorrow he will be the king. Machiavelli died a pauper, poor – and he was the teacher of almost all the kings of Europe!You teach people to distrust that means you are teaching them to distrust you too.I trust you, with no conditions attached to it.Your tears were beautiful. Your tears were real prayer. Your tears washed away all unworthiness. Don’t try to stop them, let them come and clean you. And don’t be worried that if I come to know of your unworthiness I will not trust you. That is impossible.That is my difficulty, that is my problem; I have never distrusted anybody. I cannot, because I know the beauty of trust, the enormous blissfulness of trust. I cannot lose that blessedness by mistrusting, distrusting anybody. I cannot lose my Kingdom of God just because you are unworthy of trust. That is your trouble. Why do you want to create trouble for me?Yes, if I could distrust you, tears would not come to your eyes. You know already that you deserve it. No, I want those tears in your eyes. I want you to recognize that there is a man who is going to trust you; even if you thrust a dagger in the man’s back from behind, it will not make any difference.I will still trust the person if he tries to assassinate me. That is his problem. That is his act, and each act is followed by its consequences. My act is to trust, and it is followed by its own consequences. Just try to trust a little bit, so you can have a little taste. It is groovy!Osho,These days you are spreading the fragrance of nirvana while in the body. Isn't it true?It must be. If you can smell the fragrance of nirvana, it must be. But I do not know. The tree itself never knows its fragrance. It is the people passing by who know. And you are not even passing by, you are just with me.I cannot smell my own being, because even to smell you have to divide: the one who smells, and the one who is the object of smell. I am undivided. To observe anything I have to be separate; only then can I be the observer. To see something, I have to be separate; only then can I be a seer.The same is true about fragrance. I don’t know, but if you are smelling it, if it is reaching your nostrils, it must be true – because there is no way for you to be aware of the fragrance of nirvana, you are absolutely unacquainted with it. Unless you really become awakened to it, you will not know. It is news to me.I am here, available, with all the treasures that are possible in the innermost core of my being. If you are also receptive – not seeking; if you are also waiting – not knocking…. Please don’t knock! I am a fragile man, and if so many people start knocking, before you get the fragrance the flower will be gone. Wait. Don’t ask – because I don’t want anybody to be a beggar. You are all emperors.Just the other night, one journalist was a little nervous to use the world “empire” in connection with me. He wanted to say, “your empire,” but then he became a little shaky, and he said, “Am I using the right word?” I said, “Exactly the right word.”But one thing I have not told him, for the simple reason that he would have never understood it. My empire consists only of emperors. It is a very new kind of empire.Osho,Sometimes I think you are mad. Then, that you are the sanest man alive. The next moment I think you are a crazy prankster; the next moment that you are the most insightful, brilliant being I can imagine. And so it goes on. Obviously, I am a predictable man, but my being yearns for the freedom, the great wildness that I see in you each day. Please comment.I am all that you can conceive: the madman, the awakened one, the crazy or the most sane. I am vast enough to contain all these contradictions in me. And these contradictions in me are no longer contradictions as far as I am concerned; they become complementaries.You say, “So on it goes.” So, I am going too; let it go on! Soon you will realize that if the same man appears in all these contradictions, then these contradictions must not be contradictions, and you are carrying a wrong attitude about contradictions.Life consists of contradictions, and the man who has arrived simply reflects life: the day and the night, the life and the death.Do you conceive of life and death as contradictions? Yes, logically they look like contradictions, but they are not. They are almost like two wheels of a bullock cart going on together. You have been dying since the day you have been born – both the wheels going on together. It is not that death comes at a certain point when you are eighty or ninety, no. Death comes the same moment as life comes to you. They are two sides of the same coin.As you are growing, you are dying too. Every moment both things are happening together: something is dying, something is becoming alive. Hence I say to you, if you can die each moment totally to the past, you will be born each moment totally new for the future. And that is the only life that can give you the freedom, the freedom of wildness you are asking for.I am really wild. I just don’t kill you, because I have much more subtle things to kill. I leave your body alone, but I am continuously killing your ego, your jealousy, your competition-thousands of things you have inside you. I am wild. And certainly to be wild has a freedom unlimited.You would like the same freedom? It is easy, the easiest thing in the world. Just please don’t seek it, don’t want it, don’t chase it, don’t go after it.Sit silently, doing nothing, and let the grass grow by itself.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Every day you make a step descending from the pedestal of being a master to becoming a friend to us, the ultimate friend. And yet my reverence for you is increasing every day. How can this happen? Please explain.The relationship between the master and the disciple is in a subtle way a kind of slavery. To cover it, the disciple reveres the master, adores the master. The master tries to be a fatherly figure to the disciple, but deep down the master is nothing but a politician. By increasing his followers he is increasing his power. He manipulates people. All the disciplines, rules, regulations – they are meant for you as psychological chains.The disciple has hatred deep down in him, for the simple reason that he has to bow down to the master, because the master knows and he does not know. He is angry, enraged, but what can he do? To know as much as the master knows, he represses his feelings and creates a phony personality, hypocrisy, humbleness.You will have to understand one thing very clearly: in all cultures the love relationship between brother and sister is absolutely prohibited. There is no bigger sin than a love relationship between brother and sister. Why? You may not have looked into it. The reason is, if there were no prohibition of that kind, the first love would be bound to happen between brother and sister.To prevent it, they have done two things. They have made it a great sin, so that you are afraid. Secondly, they have raised the relationship between brother and sister to great heights of purity, pure love, spiritual love. But the fact is, both are strategies to hide the simple fact that if there were no inhibition, the love between brother and sister would be bound to happen – they are together in the same home.All the cultures want the son to respect the father. Why? – because psychologically every son disrespects the father. The reasons are clear. The father is trying to mold him in a certain way that is not natural to him. The father is making him according to his own image, just as God did – he made man in his own image. Every father is doing that.But who wants to be made by somebody else in his own image? Everybody wants to be individual. That is a very deep longing and desire in every being – to be himself. And the father is not allowing him to be himself. And the son is helpless, because he is dependent for everything on the father; hence, he has to suppress himself, be obedient.Every father wants the son to be obedient. God wanted Adam and Eve to be obedient. Their only sin was that they disobeyed the father. And the great God – who is compassion, who is love, who is forgiveness – could not forgive his own son, his own daughter? And they had not done anything so big that for thousands of years to come the dependents should also be punished.These stories are significant. There is no God and there has never been any Adam and Eve, but the story is very psychological; it is happening every day in thousands of places. The father wants the son to be just his mirror image; it fulfills his ego. But on the other hand, it hurts the ego of the son. Being helpless he has to compromise, being helpless he has to surrender; but the unconscious bears the scars.It was one of the greatest things that Sigmund Freud said, for the first time in the history of man, that the father is respected by all cultures for the simple reason that in the beginning the first father was killed by his own sons. Every son is doing his best to remove that guilt.Human relationship, because of religions, cultures, education, has become very complicated.The relationship between master and disciple repeats the same circle. The master is your father figure, and the master is trying to create you in his own image. To disobey the master is the greatest fall for the disciple. And what is virtuous? To obey the master blindly without questioning, never thinking whether he is right or wrong. You have just to do it, whatsoever he wants; there is no question of asking why.Can you really love such a man? Can you really respect such a man? It is impossible. You may show love, you may show respect, you may pretend humility, humbleness, but deep down just the opposite is the case.Judas sold Jesus into the hands of the enemies for thirty pieces of silver. This is significant, because Judas was the only educated and cultured disciple among all the apostles of Jesus; the others were simply village fools. Why did he betray him? Every disciple wants to betray deep down, and all the great masters have been betrayed by their disciples. Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus – it cannot be just coincidence.And why am I trying to be just your friend? I don’t want to become your father figure. I don’t want you to be split inside about me – on the surface all that is beautiful, and underneath all that is ugly.I am descending every day from the throne where you have put me. It is a psychological revolution. And for the future I am making the path so that no master should be betrayed again, so that no disciple should be split again. The only way is that the master should not put himself higher than the disciples. He should come closer to the disciple, so close that they become friends. In that friendship the split personality of the disciple will disappear. In that friendship the politics of the master will disappear. He is no longer ruling over millions of people, he is just one among them – a friend, a fellow traveler.That’s why the more I insist on being your friend, the more great reverence arises in you. This is true and authentic reverence. Because I am your friend there is no need to hate me in your unconscious. You cannot be a Judas to me. I am just your friend, you cannot sell me for thirty silver pieces.It is a significant question. Ponder over it, meditate over it.This breaks the whole history of the past, and makes the future discontinuous with it. Masters should be friends, disciples should be fellow travelers. Hand in hand, singing and dancing, they should move toward the real, the true, the beautiful.Naturally, great reverence will arise in you, great humbleness will arise in you. But this is going to be authentic, not out of a personality split against itself; it will come out of your wholeness. And whenever anything comes out of your wholeness, it has a grace, a beauty, a splendor of its own. And that’s what I want to happen here.I want to help you become what you are. I have no designs for you, no disciplines for you.I will explain to you my consciousness and how consciousness dispels all darkness; and with that darkness, anger and hate, sexuality and jealousy, all disappear. But this I am going to do as your friend, hand in hand.Perhaps for the first time in history, a disciple will love his master because the master is no longer pretending to be the master, and he is no longer forcing the disciple to be the disciple.Osho,Recently I heard you say that we have to fight our fears. I don't believe you. For years I tried to fight my fears and they became bigger and stronger. Now, if fear comes up, I go into it totally defenseless, stay with it and go through with it without doing anything – not even judging the situation. I've realized that fear is a tremendous energy, and sometimes I even enjoy this energy – like diving from the three-meter board into Krishnamurti Lake. Can you speak about fighting fear and facing fear?It is good that you don’t believe in me. I am relieved, because if you believe in me, sooner or later you will take revenge. But if the thing had stopped there – that you don’t believe in me – everything would have been perfectly good.You say, I have said fight fear. I cannot conceive myself saying that, ever. Fight is not my teaching. You must have heard something which has not been said. In fact, what you are doing is what I have been teaching: face fear, encounter it, be a witness to it. That’s the only way to overcome, and not only to overcome but to release all the energy that is hidden in fear, for better purposes, for more creative things.Everything has energy: fear, anger, jealousy, hate. You are unaware of the fact that all these things are wasting your life. Your energy is leaking from so many holes. This way you are going to become, sooner or later, bankrupt. In fact, most people become bankrupt by the age of thirty. After that there is nothing. It is posthumous life, dragging on somehow toward the grave.It is good that you have tried to face your fear. Do the same with anger, do the same with jealousy, do the same with hatred.And another significant point to remember: if you witness anything – fear, anger, hate – they will disappear, leaving a tremendous amount of energy in you which you can use for creativity. You will have to use it, the leaking holes have disappeared; you will be overflowing with energy. But if you witness your love, compassion, kindness, humbleness, they will not disappear. They also have tremendous energy, but the more you witness them, the more they will become strong in you; they will overpower you, overwhelm you.So this is the criterion to decide what is right and what is wrong. If by witnessing, something disappears, leaving all its energy to you, it was wrong.I don’t give you ready-made labeled things – this is wrong and this is right, this you have to do, and this you have not to do. I don’t give you ten commandments. I give you the whole secret of spiritual life: witness. If the thing disappears and leaves a great amount of energy behind it, it was wrong. If by witnessing, the phenomenon becomes even bigger, love becomes more Himalayan, that means this is the good you have been searching for.If you become more sensitive to beauty, to poetry, that means your love has blossomed. And all the energy that has been left by fear, anger and hate, will be taken over by your love, your sensitivity, your compassion, your creativity. This is the whole alchemy of changing base metals into gold.This is what alchemists were really doing, but because of Christianity they could not say it openly. This is one of the sad things about religions, that rather than helping really religious people, they prevent them. So the alchemists in Europe had found a device to deceive the pope and his agents.They had small labs in which there were many tubes and bottles, many-colored things, and stoves. It gave the appearance that they were doing something material, that they were scientists, that they were not mystics – because the mystic was dangerous to the pope, the mystic was dangerous to organized religion. These people were just trying to change base metals into gold. That was perfectly good. In fact, if they succeeded, then they would be in the service of the church. So with the blessings of the pope….But this was only a facade. The reality was something else which was going on inside. Being scientists was just the superficial mask. They were not doing anything; not a single iota of base metal was changed into gold in thousands of years. Can’t you see? All those bottles and tubes and water with many colors passing from one bottle into another – that was simply to hide behind. And who is not interested in changing base metal into gold? Everybody was interested. Alchemists were respected for their facade.What they were actually doing was of a different dimension. They were trying to change fear, anger, hatred, into love, compassion, creativity, sensitivity. They were trying to bring a transformation in the soul of man.So this is the basic alchemy: you watch, witness without any judgment. There is no need of any judgment. That which is wrong will disappear, leaving a great energy behind. And that which is good will become bigger and will start absorbing the energies that have been left by wrong things. When everything that is ugly in you has left only a great fragrance of love, light, and laughter remains behind.Osho,I often experience that to relax and to trust existence is good. On the other hand, there is also a pressure to be responsible for everything in my life. Then I start brooding about decisions I need to make. I feel unable to unite “sitting silently the grass grows by itself” with “going for it.” Can you comment?Please, don’t go for it. You may destroy the grass that was growing by itself. If you cannot sit silently and watch, go somewhere else, but not for it!You say, “How to combine both?” That is impossible. Letting the grass grow by itself and going for it? You want to combine both together? Man, you must be greedy. But man, you are asking for the impossible – greed always asks for the impossible. Hence the greedy man always lives like a beggar and dies like a beggar. And I want you to be emperors, because that is your potential.You have not understood what I have been saying to you. You have not become non-serious about life. Life is very non-serious, a beautiful song without any meaning, a colorful sunset without any meaning. The sky full of stars has no purposes.The trouble arises in you because you are serious. You want the grass to grow. In fact, you want it almost like instant coffee. Now, this is asking too much from the poor grass. The grass grows by itself, in its own way, slowly. There is no hurry, the whole eternity is there. The grass can go on growing for the whole eternity. What is the hurry? But you are in a hurry.And what do you mean by “going for it”? Will you start pulling it up so that it grows faster? You will destroy the whole game. Millions of people in the world have destroyed the whole game of life. Never do that! Pulling the grass upward you will take its roots out of the earth. What will be left in your hand will not be something living, but something dead.Learn to wait. Be patient!And why should you think yourself responsible? To think yourself responsible for doing some things – for example, for grass growing faster, quicker, with jet-speed – how do you manage to be responsible for such idiotic things?The word responsibility is beautiful, but it has been made ugly by the priests, by the politicians, by the parents, by everybody around you. Responsibility does not mean responsibility to someone; it is not a duty, that you have to do. Responsibility simply means the capacity to respond. When the sun is rising, what is the responsibility? To make it rise faster? No. Responsibility to the rising sun is that you be silent and respond to its beauty. It has nothing to do with the sun, it has something to do with you.Response means mirroring exactly what is happening. If the grass is growing slowly, you mirror it. And remember, mirrors don’t run after anybody. Don’t go for it. You will destroy the grass, you may even destroy the mirror. And that will be bankruptcy. You are finished; you lost everything for which life was an opportunity.You listen to me saying, “Sitting silently, and the grass grows by itself.” It feels good, that if you can sit silently, and the grass can grow by itself, what more can you desire? But then suddenly you are overtaken by fear: “If the grass does not grow by itself, then? Who knows whether the grass grows by itself or not?”In your life you have been doing everything. You have been taught from your childhood, “Do it! Go for it! Put your whole energy into it!” And I am asking something just the opposite. Please don’t do it! Doing is going to be your undoing! Just rest, relax. Don’t even bother whether the grass is growing or not. Forget all about grass! Your responsibility is to relax, so you can be a pure mirror. And you know perfectly well everything goes on moving, there is no need to push.How did you become a young man from your childhood? Were your parents pulling you, one by the legs, another by the hands, to make you a young man? You would have been in the grave by now. But they allowed the grass to grow itself, although they poisoned the mind of the grass, telling you that in life you have to struggle for everything. Just to survive you have to fight, compete. It is from that conditioning that the other idea arises in you.Yes, the grass grows by itself, but not the gold. So please, understand the meaning of grass. Perhaps you want to sit silently, doing nothing, while the gold grows into mountains by itself, and the dollars go on falling from all sides over you. Who then bothers about grass?The man who wrote these lines, a mystic of Japan, Basho, was not interested in dollars, was not interested in gold, was not interested in the presidentship of the country. These things don’t grow by themselves, remember. These things, you have to go for – and to go with as much speed as possible, because many others are also going. Be cunning, be deceptive, lie as much as you can, promise things which cannot be fulfilled. Do everything that is wrong, only then do you become Ronald Reagan. The White House does not come closer by itself, you have to go for it!That’s why the word running is used when somebody is standing for the presidency. He is running for president. Walking won’t do.There was one question: “Osho, would you like to run for the president of the whole world?” I said, “Run? Never! I don’t even walk. I will be still sitting in my chair.” And I enjoy grass; who bothers about being a president? And basically I love to be lazy, to sit silently, doing nothing.Running is not for me. Even if somebody asks, “Osho, run for God,” I am not going to do that. Running is just not for me. Sitting in my chair, certainly I am sitting more comfortably than Basho who wrote those lines. He was sitting in a yoga posture on a rock. It is not for me – even that kind of sitting is not for me!I love my laziness, because the lazy people are the only people who have never done any harm in the world. Can you give me the name of even a single lazy man who created a war, murdered somebody, committed suicide, raped some woman? A lazy man? Impossible! Even if he finds Cleopatra, he will be still sitting silently and letting the grass grow by itself. He is not going for it!It would have been a great blessing to the world if Adolf Hitler were lazy, if Joseph Stalin were lazy, if Benito Mussolini were lazy and went on eating spaghetti as much as he wanted. The world would have been a far better world. These people were very active – too active, madly active, running all over the place not knowing where they were going. The only thing they knew was that you have to run faster than the other. All these active runners, joggers – they have created this mess all over the earth.So I don’t think the word lazy is in any way condemnatory.Buddha was lazy – did nothing except sit silently under the bo tree, but found the greatest treasure, one that no president can find. Just relaxing all that was inside him, he became aware of it. And just sitting silently, that which was his potential started growing. That is the grass. And it is so satisfying, so utterly blissful that you cannot imagine anything better or beyond it.So please decide. Both cannot be combined. You are trying to have wheels on your chair, with a motor, so you can relax in the chair and still the chair will be running for the president of America. Perhaps that may be possible as far as the president of America is concerned. But for the kingdom I am talking about, there is no way that you can do anything to gain it, except allow it. You just be on the receiving end, not a doer, but a patient waiter.The greatest experiences of life come only to those who are ready to wait for infinity, for eternity.Just this moment you are sitting silently. What is missing? You are full of silence, peace, a great opening inside which leads to the ultimate ecstasy.It is in your hands, but please don’t try to do anything about it. Non-doing is the most difficult thing in life, because you have been prepared always for doing. Your whole education, upbringing, is for doing.My childhood – it was a constant problem, and I know the same must have been the case…it happens to every child – everybody was after me to do this, to do that. And in India there are joint families. In one family you may have many members, and everybody is after you, “Do this, do that.” I simply declared to everyone, “If you say to me to do something, it is certain that I am not going to do it – whatever the consequences.”First, they tried to put me right, but soon they found it was impossible: “This boy is crazy.” By and by they forgot all about me. It used to happen that I might be sitting in the room and my mother from inside the house would tell me, “If you see somebody – because I don’t see anybody in the house….” I am sitting there, and she does not see anybody in the house! With whom is she talking?And she would say to me, “If you see somebody, just tell me that somebody is in the house, because I need some vegetables.” And the market was not very far away, just two minutes walk – not even running was needed. If you started running, you might bypass it; it was a small village. You had to go slowly so that you would reach the market.But I was accepted as absent. They all thought, “He is absent-minded.” For me, it was perfectly good. They stopped asking me to do anything. But it took years for them to understand that “something is impossible with this boy,” because in the family there were many children, and they were all doing whatsoever was said to them.Slowly, slowly that silence became so deep, even the Pacific is not so deep, became so vast that even the sky is not the limit. And I am enjoying, and the grass is growing all over.You are my grass! I have dropped the idea of green grass – red grass, growing all over the world…. And I don’t go anywhere; just sitting in my room, the grass, red grass, goes on growing all around the world, even in countries like the Soviet Union. Nobody can prevent it from growing.You can be the proof of it. I have not gone for you; I had no idea where you are, who you are. I did not have your name or your address, but suddenly from somewhere you have gathered around a lazy man. Just seeing me, just seeing my people, you can understand Basho’s lines.Silence is a tremendous power. You cannot measure it in horsepower. Relaxation is a great opening toward reality.So please, don’t try to mix both. If you are hankering to go for it, then go for it. But remember, you will spoil the whole game. And those who go for it never reach it. That is the sure way of not reaching it.Those who simply sit patiently, trusting existence…. If existence can give you eyes, ears, if existence can do such a miracle…because your eyes are nothing but specialized skin. And what is your ear? – just a specialized bone. If such miracles go on happening on their own, don’t be worried about grass. It will grow.You just shower it with your silence, with your peace, with your love, with your patience, and wait. The miracle certainly happens. I say it on my own authority.Osho,If Aristotle has influenced the national mind, Socrates and Xanthippe have set up the whole pattern for man-woman relationship so far. Is it just a dream of mine, that one day I'll find a woman who doesn't want to run my life? And do I really need a Xanthippe to reach the same level of intelligence as Socrates?I don’t think anybody has known so many women as I can claim – closely, intimately. I can assure you, you will never find the woman for whom you are waiting. That kind of woman does not exist at all. A woman that will not run your life? What are you asking? That is one of the basic qualities of a woman, to run your life. If you fail, it is your fault. If you win, she is the one who made you run.And you say Socrates and his wife, Xanthippe, have set the pattern for all the couples to come. That is not true. It is only half-true, because all the husbands are not Socrates. But with all due respect, every woman is a Xanthippe. Xanthippe is synonymous with woman. There is only one kind of woman, and that is Xanthippe. The faces may be different, the length of noses may be different, the color may be different, but something deep in the very womanhood is exactly similar to Xanthippe.And thirdly, drop the idea that if you get Xanthippe, then you will become as intelligent as Socrates. Don’t be foolish! Otherwise, all husbands would have been Socrates by now. Socrates became not because of Xanthippe, but in spite of her!Osho,Is it significant that in Oregon there are two towns, one called Boring and the other, Fossil? And that in Madras, Oregon there is a place called Grim Drive?We are living in the country of the dead. It is not coincidental that there is a town called Fossil. In fact, it should be the name of the whole state of Oregon.Another town named Boring…. I know people from almost every country, every race, every religion, but nobody can defeat Oregonians as far as their great quality of boring you is concerned. They are bored, utterly bored. I see their faces sometimes on the television, and I cannot believe it. Is there some natural law that all the boring souls are born in Oregon?And I wonder, where have we landed? Perhaps there is some existential purpose in it, because my people are the people who live, laugh, enjoy, rejoice, dance in ecstasy and in abandon. Perhaps existence has a purpose in landing us here in the country of the bored, fossilized, grim. Perhaps we have to bring some laughter to those who are grim, some excitement to those who are bored, some life to those who have been dead for centuries. And we are doing it.Since we have come here, Oregon is no longer the same. The dead have come out of their graves, because your laughter is so loud. Natural curiosity – the dead want to know what is happening. For centuries no laughter was heard here, and now suddenly a strange species of human being has appeared, and they are laughing for no reason at all. They don’t even think of the dead people who are lying in their graves. They laugh so loudly that even the dead have to take another look.We have made Oregon world-famous. And we are changing the name of their towns, so don’t be worried. Fossil cannot remain Fossil for long. We will give it some beautiful name: Resurrection! Just a question of time.What kind of people must be living in a town called Boring? Even if it is boring, why name it Boring? But they must be utterly bored, and they want the world to know that “we are bored!”We are going to take over all these places. Boring will become Laughter, Grim Drive will become Ecstasy Drive. We want to do everything for these dead people, but the dead are after all dead; they obstruct. They cannot do anything else, but they can obstruct. What can a dead body do? It can obstruct the way. And it is not one dead body, the whole land is full of dead people who are still breathing, walking – grim, bored, fossilized. But we are also determined! We have taken the challenge: to change Oregon into Orgasm!Osho,You have been critical of most of the masters, but I don't recall hearing your criticism of Gurdjieff. Is that significant? He talked about the sly man who stole his enlightenment from the master. I'm puzzled about how to do it. How can I steal your silence, your bliss, your grace?Gurdjieff was really a remarkable mystic, one of the most remarkable who has ever walked on the earth. But to understand him is more difficult than to understand anybody else.With Gurdjieff it was true – he was very secretive. If anybody wanted to get anything from him, it was not an easy job. Even if you read his book, you cannot read more than ten pages. It is a one-thousand-page book. All And Everything is the name of the book, but you cannot go on more than ten pages, for the simple reason that he writes in such a way that to find out what he is saying is difficult. One sentence goes on running over the whole page. By the time you end the sentence you have forgotten the beginning. And what happened in the middle, nobody knows.He was inventing words of his own, so you cannot consult any dictionary. Those words belonged to no language, he simply invented them. And they are long words – sometimes half the sentence is only one word. Even to read it is difficult, to pronounce it is difficult.In that book of one thousand pages, perhaps there are ten sentences at the most which are really profound. Gurdjieff could have printed them on a postcard, but that man was a category in himself. He wants you to find those ten sentences in that one-thousand-page book, which he has made as difficult as possible.No book has been written the way Gurdjieff’s book was written. People go to silent places, holiday homes, beaches, mountains, to write books. Gurdjieff used to go to restaurants, pubs. And sitting in the middle of the restaurant where everything was going on – hundreds of people coming in and going out, all kinds of talk – he was writing his book, his masterpiece.Every day, in the evening, his disciples would gather in his house, and one disciple would read what he had written that day. Gurdjieff would watch the faces of the other disciples, to see whether they were understanding it or not. If they understood it, he would have to change it the next day. If nobody understood it, it remained. It took ten years for him to write that book, and he has hidden the secrets in those one thousand pages. He is right: you have to steal. It is almost like stealing.You enter a house you have never been in. In the darkness of the night – when even the people who live in the house cannot move, in case they stumble upon some table or some chair – the man who has come to steal has a tremendous artfulness. In the darkness, in a strange house, he manages not to stumble, not to make any noise. And miraculously, he finds the place where the treasure is. He has no map, he has no way to find out where the treasure is. But the master thieves have an insight.Gurdjieff’s sly man is the man who has a knack for finding the right door when there are thousands of similar doors all around.It is true that Gurdjieff was a difficult man, almost impossible to cope with. One of his disciples, Nicoll, was traveling with Gurdjieff in America. In the middle of the night, they went aboard a train, and Gurdjieff, although not drunk, started behaving like a drunkard, utterly drunk.The disciple said, “What are you doing, master?”Gurdjieff hit Nicoll, and he said, “Who are you? I have never seen you before.” He woke up the whole train, because he was stumbling from one compartment to another compartment, shouting obscenities, waking people who were asleep, throwing their bags out of the train.Finally the train was stopped; the driver and the conductor came in. But Gurdjieff was a very strong man, solid rock, and nobody dared to catch hold of him; he might throw the man out of the window! And Nicoll, poor man, was trying to tell the people that he is a great master! The people started looking at Nicoll and they thought, “You are mad. He is a drunkard and you are mad. He is a great master? – in the middle of the night waking strangers, throwing their things around, shouting obscenities, speaking strange languages!”Somehow Nicoll persuaded the conductor and the driver, “He is a famous master, but what to do? This is his way.”They agreed to let him stay on board only if Gurdjieff and Nicoll went into the compartment and they locked it from the outside. Then whatsoever they wanted to do inside they could do – the great master and the great follower – “But don’t disturb the whole train.”As the door was locked, Gurdjieff relaxed, laughed, and he asked Nicoll, “How was the scene?”Nicoll was perspiring in the air-conditioned compartment. He said, “The scene? You almost killed me. They thought I was mad, and I knew perfectly well you were not drunk, because up to then you were absolutely alright. And suddenly…?”Gurdjieff said, “It was a test for you, whether you can stay with me if I behave in such a manner. Can you still see the master in me?”Nicoll said, “I am ready to go to hell with you. Whatever you do, there is a deep trust in me that it must be for something good. I knew it all the way, but what to do with the passengers, the conductor, with the driver? The whole crowd was against me, and I am not so strong a man as you are.”Gurdjieff was Caucasian, and the Caucasus is famous for producing really strong men. Another Caucasian was Joseph Stalin. The word stalin in Russian means man of steel. But Gurdjieff was far ahead of Joseph Stalin.This was a test for the follower. Just think of yourself – you would have escaped. Seeing the situation, that he is going to be caught and thrown into a jail…. That’s what the driver and the conductor and the engineer were all saying: “If you don’t stop, we are going to throw your master into jail. At the next station the police will be there, we have already informed them.”But to trust a man like me is very simple. I will not put you in any such situation. You need not steal anything from me, because I am putting everything on the table before you. So Gurdjieff’s statement is relevant only to him and to his disciples. It is absolutely irrelevant to me and you.I am not your master, I am not hiding anything from you. You need not steal. I am trying to give you the gift and you go on running! I am trying to present you the truth, as a gift. But truth – even to accept it as a gift – is a difficult phenomenon, because if you accept the truth, then all the lies that you have been living up to now have to be dropped.Gurdjieff was his type. I am my type. And I know there is no need for me to hide anything, because you are hiding from me, and I am trying to push truth, love, compassion, meditation – everything – into your pockets. And you go on running away from me because you know that I am a lazy man and I will not run after you.You have simply to receive with grace. There is no need to steal here. Why should you be reduced to thieves? Why should you be made the sly man? I want you to be the innocent child, who is ready and open and vulnerable.And I am so full of my ecstasy that I want to rain on anybody without asking his qualifications, his characteristics. But you are so afraid seeing the rain cloud coming up, you rush into your homes just to save your clothes, afraid that they will get wet. Yes, it is true you are dry, and if you allow me to shower on you, you are going to become juicy.People have asked, “We see the women here in the commune are becoming juicier and juicier, and the men are becoming more and more tight, straight, afraid.” The reason is simple: the woman is always ready to open her heart. The man thinks a thousand times before opening his heart. He takes all precautions, because “Who knows what a man is going to do when you open your heart?”But the woman is more trusting, more loving, more feeling. That’s why they are becoming juicier and juicier. Soon they will all be rain clouds ready to shower.Now, it is up to you, a great challenge to man. Are you going to save your clothes? Then you will remain dry bones, straight, tight, but with no juice.I am available.You just drink out of me.The well cannot run after you, you have to come to the well. But there is no need to steal, because the well is available, waiting for you.This is one of the fundamental laws of spiritual life, that the more you give, the more you have. And I can say from my own experience that the law is one hundred percent true. The more I have given, suddenly I have found, from unknown sources of existence, more juices have flowed toward me.Osho,The other day you talked about your beautiful white beard. What I like the best about your face are those gorgeous wrinkles around your eyes. I have read that they are called “buddha wrinkles.” Is that because buddhas laugh so much, and therefore have wrinkles around their eyes?(Osho simply laughs and asks for the next question.)Osho,Why has sex always been included with anger, jealousy, cruelty, greed, possessiveness, violence, but never with fun, joy, love, playfulness, friendship and other great things that you have associated it with?Sex has nothing to do with jealousy, anger, possessiveness. But man’s mind has been conditioned in such a way by the vested interests that they have exploited the very source of your life energy – sex – to fulfill their own interests.For example, man is naturally polygamous – and by man I don’t mean only men but women too. Human beings are polygamous, but all the societies have forced monogamy. Now that creates the trouble. The trouble is not coming out of sex, the trouble is coming out of monogamy.You find yourself tied together with a woman or with a man, and it is a natural longing once in a while to have some different food. The same man-the same stink; the same woman – the same geography which you have explored thousands of times. Again you have to explore it and there is nothing left to explore – all is explored. You get fed up. That is intelligent; only intelligence gets fed up. You would love to have once in a while another woman, another man.If society were run by intelligent people, not by people who want to exploit you, but by people who want to fulfill your nature to its uttermost capacity, there would be no jealousy. The wife would understand that once in a while the husband needs some other woman, “just the way I need some other man.” And it is perfectly natural. We are all human beings.What is wrong if you play tennis with one partner today, another partner another day? Is there any jealousy? There is no question of jealousy. And it is nothing more than tennis – two energies meeting and merging. And after the pill, the basic argument of all the religions is completely outdated.All the religions were insisting that monogamy has to remain because of children; otherwise, who will be responsible for children? The pill has made it possible that now sex need not be a bondage, because children are not a problem any more. Sex is free from the bondage of biology. Hence I say again and again that after the discovery of fire, the pill is the greatest revolution, the greatest discovery.When there is no jealousy there is no anger, and all the qualities that I speak of will come automatically. A woman who gives you freedom, a man who never tries to possess you – you are allowed to move in the world according to your own wishes – do you think friendship will not arise between these two persons? A man giving freedom to the wife, a wife giving freedom to the husband – there is bound to be great friendship, great intimacy.The wife can tell her husband how the other man was. The man can describe to his wife how the other woman proved to be. He need not hide it. The friendship makes it possible to come closer, to be more intimate. But the societies of the past never wanted this to happen. They wanted people to remain bored: tie one woman to one man forever, and you have started a pilgrimage to the ultimate boredom. These bored people, suffering, cannot revolt. They cannot achieve their climax of intelligence; the boredom goes on destroying every possibility.Why was Xanthippe angry with Socrates? Why did she use to beat him? Why did she once pour hot boiling water, which was being prepared for the morning tea, over Socrates’ head? Half his face got burned and remained black for his whole life. What was the trouble?The trouble was that he was more interested in his disciples. He was talking to his disciples when this great incident of pouring hot water on his face happened. And his wife was telling him again and again, “Come in, breakfast is ready.” But to a man like Socrates, when there is great intellectual conversation going on, breakfast means nothing.Finally she got mad, threw the water over him. But Socrates was one of the greatest men in history. He wiped his face and continued his conversation where it had stopped. One of the disciples said, “We cannot understand – how can you tolerate this kind of a woman?”Socrates said, “I don’t tolerate her. She has helped me to learn many things – for example, patience. I am grateful to her. Right now, she has again given me another lesson, that even if hot water is poured over you, you can remain cool. Without her, it would have been difficult for me to discover these spaces.” Socrates was never angry toward his wife, he was always compassionate.When two persons give freedom to each other, they both grow rich in experiences. Perhaps there was a treasure in your wife that you were not aware of. Making love to another woman, you discover it; the other woman becomes a tremendous help. Now your wife is not just the old geography: something new, some new opening, some new corner, some new space…. You start searching for that new space that you have found in the other woman – because each woman is unique, just as every man is unique.A man should be allowed to come in contact with as many as women as possible. A woman should be allowed to come in contact with as many men as possible. Both will be richer, and rich in experience, intimacy, friendship; they will know the heights of love which otherwise are missing.But the vested interests don’t want you to be intelligent, to be rich in experience, to reach to the climax of your potential, because that is dangerous to them. You can remain slaves only if you are poor in experience, if you are poor in intelligence. You can remain slaves only if you are a hen-pecked husband. You know perfectly well that you cannot even control your wife. You will never try to make any effort to rise higher in any field, you know your wife can pull you down immediately.And the wife has been imprisoned in the house. On whom is she going to take revenge? Who is responsible for all this? She finds nobody other than the husband.This ugly situation is our own creation.My effort is to help you understand that love is not a commodity. You think that that if your wife goes with another man for a few days, she will be spent; when she comes back she will be hollow and there will be no love. Love is not a commodity. In fact, tasting, experiencing a different man, from different angles, she may become aware of different angles in herself. She may come back more loving because she is more experienced, and she may give you a surprise – you had never known her this way.I am for richness in every dimension of life. I am against poverty in every dimension of life. And you have been kept poor psychologically, spiritually, physically, so that a few people can become presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, a few people can become popes, Ayatollah Khomeini…. Just for a few people the whole humanity is sacrificed!I want you to rebel against any effort that takes away your freedom.Freedom to me is the ultimate experience, the most beautiful, the most divine.Never, for any reason, let your freedom be disturbed. Whatsoever the cost, keep your freedom intact. That will make you real man, real woman. Right now, you are just puppets: nothing real in you, everything unreal. And because everything is unreal, you feel miserable.Reality releases you from misery, and brings you into a new world of blessedness. That is the kingdom I am trying to move you toward.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is it possible to be responsible for oneself without first learning to love oneself?It is absolutely impossible to be responsible for yourself unless you learn to love yourself. Every child is born with tremendous love for himself. It is the society that destroys that love, it is the religion that destroys that love – because if a child goes on growing in loving himself, who is going to love Jesus Christ? Who is going to love the president, Ronald Reagan? Who is going to love the parents?The child’s love for himself has to be distracted. He has to be conditioned so that his love is always toward an object outside himself. It makes man very poor, because when you love somebody outside of yourself, whether it is God, the pope, the father, the wife, the husband, the children – whoever is the object of your love – it makes you dependent on the object. You become secondary in your own eyes, you become a beggar.You were born an emperor, utterly contented within yourself. But the father wants you to love him, the mother wants you to love her. Everybody around you wants to become an object for your love. Nobody bothers that a man who cannot love himself cannot love anybody else either.So a very mad society is created where everybody is trying to love somebody – and they have nothing to give. Nor has the other person anything to give. Why are lovers continuously fighting, nagging, harassing each other? The simple reason is they are not getting what they were thinking to get. Both are beggars, both are empty.A rightly brought up child will be allowed to grow in love toward himself so that he becomes so full of love that sharing becomes a necessity. He is so burdened with love that he wants somebody to share it. And then love never makes you dependent on anybody. You are the giver; the giver is never a beggar. And the other is also a giver.And when two emperors, masters of their own hearts, meet, there is tremendous joy. Nobody is dependent on anybody else; everybody is independent and individual, well-centered in himself, well-grounded in himself. He has roots which go deep down within his being, from where the juice called love comes toward the surface and blossoms in thousands of roses.This type of person has not been possible up to now because of your prophets, your messiahs, your incarnations of God, and all other kinds of idiots. They have destroyed you for their own glory, for their own ego. They have crushed you utterly.You can see the logic. Either the messiah, the savior, becomes the object of your love, and you become just shadows blindly following him; or if you are fully contented, overflowing with love and blossoming in thousands of roses, then who cares to be saved? – you are already saved. Who cares about paradise? – you are in it.The priest will die if you learn how to love yourself, the politician will not have followers; all the vested interests in society will go bankrupt. They are all thriving on a very subtle psychological exploitation of you.But learning to love oneself is not difficult, it is natural. If you have been able to do something which is unnatural, if you have learned how to love others without loving yourself, then the other thing is very simple. You have done the almost impossible. It is only a question of understanding, a simple understanding, that “I am to love myself; otherwise I will miss the meaning of life. I will never grow up, I will simply grow old. I will not have any individuality. I will not be truly human, dignified, integrated.”And moreover, if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anybody else in the world. So many psychological problems have arisen because you have been distracted from yourself. You are unworthy, you are not what you should be; your actions have to be corrected. You have to be molded into a certain personality.In Japan they have four-hundred-year-old trees, but their height is only six inches. They think that it is a form of art. It is murder, sheer murder! The tree looks ancient, but is only six inches high. It would have been one hundred feet high, reaching toward the stars. What have they done? What strategy have they used?The same strategy has been used against humanity, human beings. They put the tree in a pot which has no bottom. So whenever the tree grows its roots, they go on cutting them, because there is no bottom to the pot. The roots they go on cutting, and unless roots grow deeper, the tree cannot rise higher. It grows old, but it never grows up. Exactly the same has been done with human beings.Your love for yourself is a basic necessity for your growth. Hence, I teach you to be selfish-which is natural.All your religions have been teaching you to be altruistic. Sacrifice yourself for any idiotic idea: the flag – just a rotten piece of cloth. You sacrifice yourself to the nation – which is nothing but fantasy, because the earth is not divided anywhere into nations. It is the politicians’ cunningness, to divide the earth on the map. You are sacrificing for the lines drawn on the maps! Die for your religion: Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism. And they have managed it in such a way that the individual is caught.If you die for your nation you will be called a martyr – you are simply committing suicide, and that too for a foolish reason. If you die for your religion you will reach paradise, you will enjoy eternal blessings. They have manipulated you. But one thing is basic in that manipulation, that is, don’t love yourself; hate yourself, because you are not worth anything.Everybody is full of hate for himself. And do you think if you hate yourself you can find someone who is going to love you? Even you are not ready to love yourself; it is impossible for anybody else to love you. You have accepted the idea that unless you follow certain rules, religious dogmas, political ideologies, you are not of any worth.When you were born, you were not born as a Christian, as a Catholic; you were not born as a communist. Every child comes into the world as a tabula rasa, completely clean. Nothing is written on him – the Bible, Koran, Gita, Das Kapital – no, nothing is written on him. He brings no holy book with himself. He comes in utter innocence. But his innocence becomes his greatest trouble, because all around him are wolves – hiding in politicians, in priests, in parents, in teachers. They all jump upon your innocence. They start writing things on you which later on you will believe is your heritage.They have destroyed your heritage. Now it is possible for them to enslave you, to make you do anything they want. If they want you to murder innocent people….They are doing that right now in South Africa. Fifteen percent of the population, white people, are destroying eighty-five percent, black people. The country belongs to the black people; all its gold mines, diamond mines, belong to the black people. These fifteen percent white people are just invaders, thieves. But do you know? – those eighty-five percent of the people have no voting rights. The land is theirs, the gold mines are theirs, but they are the poorest on the earth. They only work as slaves and servants. It is not only South Africa, it is all over the earth.There are religious mafias, there are political mafias, and they go on exploiting you. They may be enemies to each other, but on one point they all agree: that a man should not be allowed to love himself. That cuts his roots from his own being, and then he is helpless, rootless, just a driftwood, so whatever you want to make of him you can.The people of this country were killing innocent, poor people in Vietnam. What business was it of theirs? And it was not one-sided. You were sending your own, who have not tasted anything of life, to kill and to be killed in the name of democracy, in the name of America. But why should one sacrifice oneself in any name? Mohammedans and Christians have been fighting, killing each other, in the name of God. Both are fighting and killing in the same name – God. A strange world we have created!But the strategy is very simple: destroy the person’s natural love for himself. Then he is so unworthy in his own eyes, he is ready to do anything for a gold medal, just to feel a little worth – that he is also somebody. Do you see on your generals many colored stripes? What kind of stupidity is this? Those stripes go on growing as the general goes on killing himself, destroying himself.You can have all those colors on your shirts. I don’t think there is any law that can prevent it, but you will look simply foolish. Those generals, they don’t look foolish, they are respected; they are great heroes. And what have they done? They have murdered many people of your country, they have murdered many people of other countries. These murderers are rewarded.Have you seen any society rewarding its lovers? No, lovers are to be condemned. No society allows lovers any respect; love is an anathema to society.So the first thing all these vested interests have to do is distract you from love – and they have succeeded up to now.Millions of years…and man has remained a slave, feeling a deep inferiority complex in himself, unworthiness, because he is not able to fulfill all that is required of him. In fact, whatever is required is so unnatural that there is no way to fulfill it. And on your worthlessness the messiahs go on becoming bigger and bigger, because they say, they promise that they are the saviors; they are going to save you. You cannot save yourself. They never allowed you to learn swimming. On your own you can only be drowned.The politicians go on giving you hope that soon there will be no poverty – and poverty goes on growing. It is not decreasing, it is increasing. The politicians go on saying that soon you will have a classless society. In Soviet Russia they have managed to create forcibly, against all human values, a classless society. But the people who had promised the classless society had promised that there would be no poor, no poverty. What has actually happened is that nobody is rich in Russia, all are equally poor. Great equality!And the hypocrisy that the society is classless has to be understood. Yes, old class differences have disappeared because the rich are no longer there, so you cannot divide the society into the bourgeois and the proletariat. But a new class has come up: those who have power – the communist bureaucracy – and those who have no power. Just the names have changed.Now, as a member of the communist party you have special powers – just the same way that in other countries rich people have special powers, and there is the rest of the country, powerless. This is not a classless society; new classes have replaced the old classes.In Ethiopia thousands of people are dying every day. And you will be surprised, in America there are half a million people who are suffering from overeating, obesity; they go on becoming fatter and fatter. In Ethiopia people are shrinking, starving and dying. In America people are dying from overeating, in Ethiopia they are dying because they have nothing to eat.Do you think this world that we have created is sane?Half of India is going to face the same fate as Ethiopia soon – and India’s government is selling wheat, exporting wheat to the outside world. Their own people are going to die – not in small numbers: fifty percent of India is just on the borderline. Any moment it can become a bigger Ethiopia. But the political leaders are selling the wheat to other countries because they want nuclear plants, atomic energy, so they can also compete in the foolish race that is going on.Anybody can see that it will take at least three hundred years for India to be a nuclear power equal to America or the Soviet Union. And do you think for these three hundred years America and the Soviet Union will simply wait? They will be growing in the same direction of destruction and death.All this has happened in the name of altruism.I want you to become absolutely selfish. Love yourself, be yourself. Don’t be distracted by any type of people – religious, political, social, educational. Your first responsibility is neither toward religion nor toward nation. Your first responsibility is toward yourself.And just see: if everybody is loving himself, caring about himself, his intelligence will come to its peak, his love will be overflowing. To me, the philosophy of selfishness will make him really altruistic because he will have so much to share, so much to give, that giving will become a joy to him, that sharing will be a celebration to him.Altruism can only be a by-product of self-love.Because you don’t love yourself, you feel weak – because love is nourishment, it is your strength. Naturally, how can you feel responsible? You go on throwing your responsibility on somebody else’s shoulders. God is responsible, fate is responsible, Adam and Eve are responsible. The serpent who seduced Eve to disobey God – that serpent is responsible.Can you see the idiocy of all this dumping your responsibility on somebody? – a serpent, perhaps millions of years ago…. I have tried hard to make some little conversation with a serpent, with a snake – they don’t speak. In fact, they don’t even hear. I discovered that serpents don’t have ears, ears are not part of their physiology. And if they cannot hear, how can they speak? And how could they persuade Eve?But we have to dump our responsibility on somebody else. Adam dumps it on Eve. Eve dumps it on the serpent. The serpent – if he could speak – would dump it on God. This way we go on throwing our responsibility, without understanding that unless your are responsible for yourself you are not truly an individual.Shirking responsibility is destructive to your individuality. But you can accept responsibility only when you have tremendous love for yourself.I accept my responsibility, and I rejoice in it. I have never dumped my responsibility on anybody else, because that is losing freedom, that is becoming enslaved, at the mercy of others. Whatsoever I am, I am wholly and solely responsible for it. This gives me a great strength. It gives me roots, centering. But the source of this responsibility is, I love myself.I have also been through the same type of mass exploitation. But from the very beginning I made it clear that if I am going to be pushed into heaven I will refuse it. Of my own will I am ready to go to hell. At least I will have my independence, my choice.My parents, my teachers, my professors struggled with me. But I said, “One thing is certain: I cannot accept any bribery to become a slave. I would rather suffer for the whole eternity in hellfire, but I will remain myself. At least that much joy I will have – that this is my choice, nobody has forced me.”Taken as a prisoner into paradise, do you think you can enjoy it? Going into paradise following Jesus Christ, or Moses, or Buddha, or Krishna – what kind of paradise will that be, where you are expected to be blind believers; you cannot ask a question, you cannot inquire about anything. That paradise will be worse than hell.But people have been distracted from their very source.I want you to come back home. Respect yourself. Feel the joy and the pride that existence needs you; otherwise you would not have been here. Rejoice that existence cannot be without you. In the first place that’s why you are here: existence has given you an opportunity, a life with tremendous treasures hidden within you – of beauty, of ecstasy, of freedom.But you are not existential! You are Christian, you are Buddhist, you are Hindu. And I want you only to believe in one thing: existence. There is no need to go to any synagogue or any church. If you cannot experience the sky, the stars, the sunset, the sunrise, the flowers blossoming, the birds singing…. The whole of existence is a sermon! Not prepared by some stupid priest – it is all over the place.You just need to trust yourself; that is another name for loving yourself. And when you trust and love yourself, obviously you have taken all the responsibility of whatever you are, whoever you are, upon your own shoulders. That gives such a tremendous experience of being that nobody can enslave you again.My sannyasins are not my followers – that would be very disrespectful toward you. And to be disrespectful toward the people who love him is the ugliest act anybody can do.I want to be just a fellow traveler with you. I am not your leader, I am not your savior. I don’t take any responsibility on myself, and I don’t want you to dump your responsibility on anybody.Can you see the beauty of an individual who is capable of standing on his own feet? And whatever happens – joy or sorrow, life or death – the man who has loved himself is so integrated that he will be able not only to enjoy life, he will be able to enjoy death too.Socrates was punished by his society. People like Socrates are bound to be punished, because they are individuals and they don’t allow anybody to dominate them. He was given poison. He was lying in the bed and the man who was going to give him poison was preparing it. The sun was setting – that was the right time. The court had given the exact time, but the man was delaying in preparing the poison. Socrates asked the man, “Time is passing, the sun is setting – what is the delay?”The man could not believe that somebody who is going to die is so particular about the right time for his own death. In fact, he should be thankful for the delay. The man loved Socrates. He had heard him in the court and seen the beauty of the person: he alone had more intelligence than the whole of Athens. He wanted to delay a little more so Socrates could live a little more. But Socrates would not allow him. He said, “Don’t be lazy. Just bring the poison.”The man giving poison to Socrates asked him, “Why are you so excited? I see such radiance on your face, I see such inquiry in your eyes. Don’t you understand? – you are going to die.”Socrates said, “That’s what I want to know. Life, I have known. It was beautiful; with all its anxieties, anguishes, still it was a joy. Just to breathe is joy enough. I have lived, I have loved; I have done whatever I wanted to do, I have said whatever I wanted to say. Now I want to taste death – and the sooner the better.“There are only two possibilities: either my soul will go on living in other forms as the Eastern mystics say – that is a great excitement, to go on that journey of the soul free from the burden of the body. The body is a cage, it has limitations. Or perhaps the materialists are right, that when your body dies everything dies. Nobody remains afterward. That too, is a great excitement – not to be!“I know what it means to be, and the moment has come to know what it means not to be. And when I am no more, what is the problem? Why should I be worried about it? I will not be there to worry, so why waste time now?”This is the man who loves himself. Even the responsibility of death he has chosen – because the court had nothing against him; it was just public prejudice, the prejudice of the mediocre people who could not understand the great flights of intelligence of Socrates. But they were in the majority, and they all decided on death for Socrates.They could not answer a single argument proposed by him. I think they could not even understand what he was saying – answering was out of the question. And he destroyed all their arguments; still, it was a city democracy – the people decided that this man is dangerous, he should be given poison.What was his fault? His fault was that “He makes our youth rebellious, he makes our youth skeptical, he makes our youth strange. He creates a gap between the older generation and the younger generation. They don’t listen to us anymore, they argue about everything – and it is because of this man.”But the judges were a little better than the common people. They said to Socrates, “We give you a few alternatives. If you leave Athens and promise never to come back again, you can save yourself from death. Or, if you want to remain in Athens, then stop speaking, go into silence. Then too we can persuade the people to let you live. Otherwise, the third alternative is: tomorrow as the sun sets you will have to drink poison.”What did Socrates do? He said, “I am ready to take the poison tomorrow or today, whenever the poison is ready, but I cannot stop saying the truth. If I am alive I will go on saying it till my last breath. And I cannot leave Athens just to save myself, because then I will feel always a weakling who became afraid of death, who escaped death, who could not take the responsibility of death also. I have lived according to my own thinking, feeling, being; I want to die that way also.“And don’t feel guilty. Nobody is responsible for my death, I am responsible. I knew that it was going to happen, because to talk about truth in a society which lives on lies, deceptions, illusions, is to ask for death. Don’t blame these poor people who have decided for my death. If anybody is responsible, I am. And I want you all to know that I lived on my responsibility, and I am dying on my responsibility.“Living, I was an individual. Dying, I am an individual. Nobody decides for me; I am decisive about myself.”This is dignity. This is integrity. This is what a human being should be. And if the whole earth is full of people like these, we can make this earth so beautiful, so ecstatic, so abundant in everything….But the individual is missing, and you have to take responsibility for yourself. But you will be able to take it only if you start loving whatever you are: this is the way existence wanted you to be. If existence wanted another Jesus Christ, it would have created one. To be Christian is ugly, to be Mohammedan is ugly, to be Hindu is ugly.Be yourself, just yourself, simply yourself. And remember, you are taking a great risk when you declare that you are simply yourself. You don’t belong to any crowd, any herd. These are all herds: Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, communists. You are declaring yourself an individual, knowing perfectly well that it is risky. The crowd may not forgive you at all. But it is so beautiful to take the risk, to move on the razor’s edge where every step is dangerous.The more dangerously you live, the more you live. And it is possible to live, in a single moment, the whole eternity, if you are ready to live with totality, risking all and everything.I don’t want you to be a businessman, I want you to be a gambler. And when you are gambling, put everything at stake. Don’t save anything for the next moment. Then whatever happens will bring great blessing to you. Even if you become a beggar, your being will be far more dignified than that of an emperor.Osho,I have a feeling that you already have two hundred enlightened people. Is this true?It is true, but please keep it a secret!Osho,To break our habitual ways of acting, feeling and thinking, and to start witnessing instead, some effort seems to be required. But ultimately all effort, including the effort toward enlightenment, has to be dropped. Can you please speak on effort and non-effort, and how they relate to witnessing?Don’t be bothered about the future. You have not started making an effort, and you are worried that ultimately you will have to drop making an effort also. Just start – make every effort.I can only say one thing to you: when you have made every effort – and all the efforts will fail, as far as the ultimate experience of enlightenment is concerned – when all the efforts fail, you are not required to make no-effort. When all the efforts fail, there is no-effort. You have done everything that was possible, humanly possible, and everything has failed.And everything fails as far as enlightenment is concerned. It is not your doing. But when everything fails, and you have not been miserly in making efforts, you were total – what remains? A great silence. That is the no-effort. You don’t have to do it. If you do it, it again becomes an effort. It is a non-doing that comes of its own accord; you cannot bring it.But before it can happen, you will have to risk everything, make every effort possible. When you are finished with making efforts, a great silence descends, a great relaxation comes over you. That is the moment of no-effort, and in that very moment you find the light you have been seeking for many lives.So please don’t be worried about no-effort. Just take care of all the efforts possible. Leave no-effort to existence itself! When you have done everything, suddenly existence becomes so compassionate toward you that flowers start showering on you. With your effort you were not able even to get a single flower. And with no-effort you suddenly find flowers are raining all over you.And that’s why it can be said, enlightenment is not an achievement. you don’t become enlightened. When you are not, enlightenment happens. The moment your efforts fail, you fail.And this is the mystery of religious experience: in your utter failure is your ultimate success. When you are not, for the first time, you are.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I trust you unconditionally, and now I'm no longer a sannyasin simply to rid myself of my fears. I am now here without any need, hope, desire or expectation. I am no longer feeling dependent on you. I am with you without any reason, just for fun, and I trust you without belief. Is this the state of being a true disciple?Yes and no. Yes, because what you have described is authentically the state of a disciple. No, because you cannot cheat me. The description is right, but it is not about you. And my logic is very simple. If you were really independent, trusting me unconditionally, not out of fear or greed, without any desire or expectation, then this question would not have arisen in the first place.The implication of the question is that you still want my approval and that is dependence. You are asking me, “Is this the true state of a disciple?” Why are you asking me? If you are experiencing it, the experience itself will be the answer. But you are not experiencing it. You may be imagining and you need my approval, you want me to say, “Yes – great, groovy.” But that will make you dependent on me.I would love you all to be independent of me, because if you are dependent on me, in some way you will go on resenting me. Nobody loves a man on whom you are dependent, who has taken away your freedom, your independence, who has possessed you. You are imprisoned. Who loves the jailer? And I don’t want to be anybody’s jailer.Please, don’t be dependent on me, because your dependence is dangerous to me. Behind your dependence will be great resentment, hatred. It is poisonous. I want you to be completely independent of me, so that I can be completely free from any resentment, hatred – at least from my sannyasins. You should understand my situation.The whole world is hostile toward me. All the religions are full of hate toward me. All the politicians are agreed upon one point: that I should be removed as quickly as possible, that I should not be allowed to wake people anymore. The American government and the government of the Soviet Union may be enemies on every point, but on one point they are friends – that is me. Just think of the hostility all over the world, of all kinds of people….Your love is protecting me, keeping me alive. But if your love is that of a dependent person it is no longer love, it is hidden hostility. So if you become independent I am freed from your resentment at least.And I am concerned only with my world of sannyasins. Their love is my nourishment, their love is keeping me in the body. Otherwise, as far as I am concerned my work has been completed long ago. There was no need after that to go on living in the body, with all its troubles. But looking at you, I feel to hang around a little more.But your dependence hurts me, even your dependence on getting approval from me.Who am I? Meditate over your question again and you will see the implication: why have you asked it? You may not have been aware that you were asking for approval. But if your state needs my approval, my certificate, it is not freedom.The true disciple trusts, but has no resentment, because he trusts of his own accord. He is not being forced to trust. He loves because only love is left in him, he cannot do otherwise. He is free and independent because now he feels himself for the first time an integrated individual. He is no longer a beggar – he has become an emperor.I want you all to be emperors.The more you are independent of me, the more you can help me to continue to be in a fragile body. After enlightenment it is really difficult to remain in the body because the function of the body is finished.You are born again and again into new forms, new bodies, only for one thing: because each time you go on missing the train. And existence is very compassionate. It will go on giving you new bodies, fresh bodies, and it trusts that sooner or later you will catch the train, you will become enlightened.After enlightenment, nobody is born again. It is impossible. There is no way to be back in the cage. Experiencing the expanse of the whole sky, experiencing all the stars moving within you, sunrises within you, sunsets within you - all that is, is contained within you. Who would like to enter a cage and destroy the beautiful experience of continuous expansion?After enlightenment nobody is born again. After enlightenment, to keep oneself in the body becomes more and more difficult. The reason is very simple. Enlightenment is exactly what the word means, as if a lightning has fallen upon you. Your being and your body are no longer bridged. You are in the body but your connections with the body are destroyed. That lightning destroyed all connections with the body.The body is affected by gravitation, but when all connections with the body are destroyed you are no longer under the law of gravitation. There is another law which science perhaps may never be able to discover. But the scientist has to understand according to his own rules, that every law has its opposite law to balance it. Everything has its contradiction, to keep the balance of existence. The law of gravitation they have discovered, because it is an objective phenomenon, but they know nothing about the law of levitation.The moment you are disconnected with the body, your body is under the law of gravitation being pulled down, and your being under the totally contradictory law of levitation - it is being pulled upward. It becomes a tug-of-war. Hence most people die after enlightenment. There have been many enlightened people but very few masters, because just to be enlightened is not enough to be a master. You have to remain in the body, to have contacts, connections with other people who are in their bodies, who know only one law – the law of gravitation.I have been able to remain in the body, with all the difficulties, in spite of all the difficulties that were bound to happen because the body is no longer in my control and I am no longer in the body’s control. If I have been able to remain in the body for these thirty-three years, it is because of your love – love which demands nothing, trust which is not based on any reason.You are connected with the gravitation of the earth. Through you I can keep myself still connected with the gravitation of the earth. But through you it is possible only if you give me a passage, clear, and you don’t ask for any expectations, demands, desires to be fulfilled.Your description of the disciple is absolutely true. But because you have asked it, you again missed the train. You are back to zero again. Don’t be sad, start the journey again. And when you start feeling what you are describing, please don’t ask for approval. Enjoy it!Do you ask somebody, “Am I in love with you?” Either you are or you are not – no question of approval or disapproval. Do you ask, “Is this sunset really beautiful?” Your very question indicates that you are not feeling the beauty. You are asking others, as a support, so that your imaginary beautiful sunset becomes more real.But nobody’s approval can make anything real. Even if the whole world denies your enlightenment you will still be enlightened, there will be no difference. Or vice versa: even if the whole world approves your enlightenment and you are not enlightened, all that approval is not going to make you enlightened.You have beautifully described the real state of a disciple. But by asking the question you missed the mark.Osho,The other day you spoke against homosexuality and lesbianism. What about bisexuality? A few years ago you said that bisexuality was the hope for the new man, the only freedom in sex. Is it still so?There are many questions involved in that one question. First, never bother about what I have said before. My memory is not that good – and that has been a great blessing to me. I don’t know what I have said on the yesterdays stretching backward thirty years. I know only what I am saying to you now. This has given me freedom to tell you the truth even if it goes against my past.I am not confined by my yesterdays. I have never read any of my books and I don’t know what kind of things I have been saying. But whatever has been said was true for that moment, and exactly the same is the case now.Never compare my statements with the past statements; otherwise instead of getting enlightened you will find yourself in an insane asylum. I have contradicted myself so many times, that anybody working for a PhD thesis on me will go crazy. He will never get the PhD. Nobody can make a consistent philosophy out of my statements. I have been consistent only in one thing, and that is inconsistency.So first you have to drop all the yesterdays. The past is dead. And I am dying every moment to the past so that I can live in the present. You cannot do both things together – living in the past and living – it is not possible. Existence gives you only one moment at a time. Either you can waste it in remembering the past or you can waste it in fantasizing about the future or you can live it now.My most emphatic thing is that now is the only reality there is. Past is no more, future not yet.But your question must be troubling you. I have to tell you the truth. First, homosexuality and lesbianism are both against nature. I have in the past not said it so clearly for a simple reason: not to hurt many gay people who are around me. I don’t want to hurt my people. Just to avoid wounding them, I can lie. That is not a problem, because my experience of truth is far above any lies: no lies can disturb it.So I have been either silent or telling you that whatsoever you are – homosexual, a lesbian – accept it, don’t condemn it. I never want to create any guilt feelings in anybody, particularly my people. I want them to be completely guiltless, because all other religions have done just the opposite. They have created guilt in you, and through guilt they have enslaved you, because when you are guilty you want to be freed, saved from the guilt. The messiah, the savior is needed. His agents go on creating guilt in you and then he comes to save you.I am not a savior. Nobody has ever been a savior, that is all hocus-pocus. All that I can do is not to make you feel guilty. That’s why either I have been silent, or I have told you to accept.I can lie for you. My love is enough to make me capable of lying for you. And it does not make any difference to me – I am beyond it. So once in a while I have even appreciated your homosexuality, your lesbianism-just to free you of the guilt. Homosexuality was not the point, the point was how to make you free from the guilt.I have gone even to the extent of saying in the future the new man will be bisexual – neither heterosexual nor homosexual. A man who is heterosexual has a limitation: he cannot be homosexual. The man who is homosexual has a limitation: he does not feel any attraction to women. The bisexual man is one who has no limitation. He can be in love with a man, he can be in love with a woman.Yes, I had gone even to that extent, knowing perfectly that it was a lie. But how to make you guilt-free? I have made statements as if homosexuality and lesbianism are progressive steps: the people who are not homosexual are still lagging far behind those who have entered the gay world. But all these are lies, used to erase your guilt from you. But how long can I go on lying to you? One day or other I have to tell you the truth: otherwise I might not have told it at all.AIDS is the ultimate development of homosexuality, and it has no cure. You have gone so far away from nature that there is no way back, you have broken all the bridges behind you. That’s the disease AIDS.Medical science cannot help you. It can only confirm that you have the disease, and at the most you have two years to live. That is at the most, because AIDS is a totally new kind of disease. It cannot be categorized with other diseases. Even cancer can be cured, can be operated on. But AIDS does not allow any treatment.It has to be understood, what it is. AIDS somehow makes you drop, deep down, the desire to live. And the moment somebody gets to the point where he loses the desire to live, he becomes vulnerable to all kinds of infections: he does not create antibodies to fight with disease. He has dropped out of the game of life. No medicine can give back the desire to live. And when you are absolutely vulnerable to any kind of infection – two years is just the longest possibility guessed by the medical profession – most probably within six months you will be gone.And the danger is, when you know that within six months or one year you are going to leave, you would like to make love to as many men, as many women, as possible – because now you cannot postpone, you may die tomorrow. Tomorrow has never been so uncertain. You have to do whatever you want to do now – today, as quickly as possible.And when a man is going to die within six months he becomes irresponsible, careless. He starts making love and having contacts with many people – he has to compress his whole life of sexuality into six months. And there may be something biological in it also. It has been a known fact that when somebody is crucified, before he dies his semen escapes from his body immediately. The man is dying; those people who are there in your semen, millions of people, they don’t want to die; they have not even lived, they have not even been born.Inevitably the dying man on the cross ejaculates before death. Perhaps those poor people hidden in his semen think they may find some way – at least there is no harm in making an effort. This fact has been known for centuries, because whenever a man was put on the gallows this has happened without any exception. Now, AIDS is almost the gallows. Yes, the time period is a little longer – six months, maybe one year. Perhaps if you happen to be in one of my communes, two years.But knowing that you are going to live only for such a little time, why not make the most of it? And your biology also supports you: “Before you leave the body, let all the living beings hidden inside you be released. At least this favor you can do for the unborn.”And the people who have AIDS outside my communes are capable of bribing the doctors so that their disease should not be made public…because just the knowledge that you have AIDS creates such a condemnation by the society – the same society that has created AIDS, the same society that has created homosexuality.You will be condemned by the priests, by the bishops, by the pope. And these are the people who are behind AIDS. These people are the virus. Homosexuality is a religious discipline – putting men into one monastery, not allowing them to meet with women, creating all kinds of barriers so they can remain celibate; putting women into nunneries where no man can enter so that they can remain celibate…. Man is intelligent enough – if he cannot find the natural way, he is going to work out some unnatural way.And we cannot condemn those monks and nuns who invented homosexuality and lesbianism. That was the only way left for them. That is why I say homosexuality is a religious discipline. It is a by-product of the stupid emphasis on celibacy.It is not possible. You go on eating food, you go on drinking water, you go on doing exercises; your body goes on creating blood, new cells, bones, and in the same way it goes on creating semen. Your body has never heard about celibacy; celibacy is not a program in your body. Your mind has decided to be celibate, but what has the mind to do with it?Your mind may decide never to urinate again. What then? There is going to be trouble. You go on drinking water, and the mind has fallen into the hands of a certain religion where urination is the worst sin. So you pretend that you don’t urinate. And the people who follow you for the simple reason that you don’t urinate make a great saint of you, because what is impossible for them you have made possible; you have done it.Now you will have to find some way – perhaps a tube inserted from your side to the bladder so that secretly you can manage to release all that has accumulated in the bladder; otherwise you will go insane. Your urine contains many chemicals, eight chemicals. If they go on accumulating and no way out is given, they will poison you. Urination is a way of getting rid of all these poisons that you are unknowingly eating, breathing; anything that is against your life, urination takes out.Celibacy is absolutely absurd. Nobody except the impotent have been celibate. And one thing to be remembered: no impotent person has been known all down history to have become enlightened. Very strange! In fact, all impotent people should become enlightened before anybody else; they are naturally celibate, with no effort. Even if they don’t want to be celibate they have to be celibate. Their bodies don’t create possibilities for sexual relationship. But impotent people have not become enlightened, not a single one. On the contrary, the people who became enlightened were oversexual.Sex is energy, and when you are oversexual then just sexual relationships cannot give you contentment. They are not enough, you have more energy than they can absorb. That superfluous energy takes you into new inquiries, new spaces, which ultimately culminate in enlightenment.You will be shocked to know that Buddha was oversexual, Mohammed was oversexual. About Jesus I am not so certain, for the simple reason that he was a Jew, most probably a homosexual. And those twelve apostles always hanging around him, day in, day out…. It was a playboy club. And as far as Jews are concerned, homosexuality is their contribution to the world. They have contributed many things. In the Old Testament, which in the West is the oldest scripture available, there is a story about two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom has become in your language “sodomy.” Sodomy means making love to animals. In the city of Sodom people were making love to animals.The Jewish god is not love, compassion – no. The Jewish god himself declares, “I am a very jealous god – I am not nice, I am not your uncle” – exactly these words. He became very angry at Sodom and Gomorrah.I wonder why Gomorrah has not become a name for a certain type of sexuality. In Gomorrah there was homosexuality, lesbianism. Whenever I think of the word Gomorrah, I am reminded of gonorrhea.God became so frustrated with these two big cities that he decided to destroy them; and the Old Testament says those two cities were absolutely destroyed. They had come to a culmination of perversion. God is a myth, but Sodom and Gomorrah are historical facts. It was not God who destroyed those two cities, it was their perverted sex.Perhaps those two cities are the pioneers in experiencing AIDS. It is not mentioned, but just a little reasoning can make it clear. There is no God to destroy anything – but those two cities have existed, their ruins are still there. What happened to those two cities? – because in those days nuclear weapons were not available, atom bombs were not there.What happened to those two big cities? They suddenly evaporated. My conclusion is that they suffered from AIDS. Certainly their medical profession was three thousand years behind ours; they may not have been able to figure out what was happening, but people went on dying.By the way, if you allow me a little drift…. There is a Hassidic story…. Hassids are Jews, but not accepted by the orthodox Jews. There is something in Hassids which I appreciate. Hassids are the only people who can be said to be our predecessors. Their religion consists of celebration, dancing, drinking. And their dances are really graceful, their singing is beautiful. Their being drunk cannot be called a sin because out of their drinking they have never committed any crime. They have just danced more joyously, more fully.The story is…it must be a creation of the Hassids because their history is not that old, only three hundred years. Gomorrah and Sodom are three thousand years old. But the story is beautiful – that’s why I wanted to drift. The story says that when God decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, one Hassid – now this is pure fiction because Hassids were not in existence there. One Hassid approached God and told him, “I have a few questions, and you have to answer them, because it is a question of the lives of thousands of people.”God was willing; he said, “You can ask.” The Hassid said, “You have decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, but have you thought that there are a few people in both cities who are absolutely innocent? I know them, I am one of them. There are one hundred Hassids in both of the cities – are you going to destroy these innocent people too? They have not committed any crime. Are you ready to take this responsibility? Won’t you feel guilty?”God said, “I have never thought about it: one hundred Hassids, innocent people…Perhaps I will have to change my decision to destroy Gomorrah and Sodom.”The Hassid said, “I have to ask another question. For a hundred innocent people you are ready to change your decision, but in fact there are only ten Hassids. Does the quantity make any difference? Will not ten innocent people be enough to save Sodom and Gomorrah?”God thought for a moment, and said, “You are right. It is the quality, not the quantity. Even if there are ten people who are innocent, I am not going to destroy the cities.”The Hassid said, “I have a third question. In fact there is only me who is innocent. Six months I live in Gomorrah and six months in Sodom. Is that going to change your mind? Again it is a question of quantity: from one hundred to ten, from ten to one – the same proportion. And how can I give a guarantee for a hundred people, that they are innocent? How am I to know about ten people that they are innocent? You are asking me inhuman questions. I can absolutely guarantee one thing: that I am innocent. Now tell me what you are going to do.”The Hassidic story says God had to concede to the Hassid – because it is the quality that matters. Millions of criminals can be saved, but one innocent person should not be destroyed. Innocence is so valuable, it is so rare and unique. This is a Hassidic story. It is not in the Old Testament, but it is a beautiful story.A single man of innocence can change the course of existence. Gomorrah and Sodom certainly were destroyed. No Hassid interfered – no Hassid was there.There is no God, so it creates many problems for me and for the queen of England. For me, because I cannot find out what could have destroyed these two cities, except AIDS. And I don’t think the queen of England can find even that much explanation. If there is no God, then who is going to save the queen of England? I don’t think anybody is going to save the queen of England – so homely, so ugly. It is better that she is not saved. And now it is possible, because there is no God; the queen of England has to disappear soon.Because of AIDS which is a new development in human sexuality – I condemn all perversions concerning sex. And I can do it now, because now I have my own people. Even if they are gay they will not feel guilty. They are only victims of history. They will not feel that they are condemned. I am condemning the popes, the priests, Ayatollah Khomeiniacs.And if you are homosexual or lesbian, it is simply a question of changing your mind. And the change is simple because you are changing from the unnatural toward the natural. If you could manage to change yourself from the natural into the unnatural, I trust you, that you can do the opposite very easily. You have done almost the impossible, you have changed the natural into the unnatural – now, please, come back to the natural.I find it absolutely berserk – a man making love to another man while there are so many beautiful women. Love needs contrast, polarity. Man and woman are two polarities of sexual energy. Just as love will go out if there is no polarity between plus sexuality and minus sexuality, between positive sexuality and negative sexuality, the same is true about electricity: the positive electricity and negative electricity. They both have to be there for the lights to remain on. If you want just one pole, the positive electricity or the negative electricity, there is going to be no electricity at all.Sexual energy is very close to electrical energy. Perhaps for sexual energy the right word is “bioelectricity.” And it has been known at least in one case, but one case is enough proof…. A woman in Sweden became a problem: she was very beautiful, but whosoever made love to her got electric shocks. And one shock was enough, nobody wanted to make love to the woman. Soon it became common knowledge to avoid that woman. The shock was so much that one felt one was almost dying.The doctors became interested – what was happening? They persuaded somebody for experimental purposes – in the service of humanity – to make love to the woman. They put a five watt bulb in the hands of the woman, and they were shocked, because the bulb lit up. The man got a shock and fell out of the bed, but the bulb lit up! Sex is bioelectricity.You have to come back to your natural polarities. If you want to avoid a catastrophe destroying the whole humanity, you have – just in the service of humanity – to change your mode of making love man to man, woman to woman. That is not right, and it can never be satisfying.Yes, it is less complex, that is why people have fallen for it. Two men in love are happier than a man with a woman. It is not accidental that these people are called “gay.” They are the only happy people on the earth. Wife and husband – you cannot call them gay. They are tortured by each other so much, nagged, harassed…pillow fights every night – that finally a few intelligent people decided that this arrangement was not working. And man is an experimenting animal. They started trying man with man, woman with woman, and found that this is less troublesome.Yes, there cannot be any orgasmic experience because there is no polarity. There are not two opposites attracted toward each other and meeting. The meeting of the opposites creates orgasm. But you have to pay for that orgasm twenty-four hours a day. And one gets tired, one thinks, “Forget all about that orgasm.”It is good with two men. Of course there is no orgasmic experience; they settle for less but there is no trouble. They don’t harass each other, they don’t nag each other. A woman in love with another woman, a man in love with another man, are more understanding about each other – naturally, because both are men, both have the male energy, the male mind. There is much more understanding between two men.Between man and woman understanding is impossible. Misunderstanding is the law, because they are opposite polarities. The woman has a totally different kind of functioning than the man. You can see it in any dialogue between a husband and wife….I have been a guest in hundreds of homes, and I have been a witness to many couples’ conversations. And I was surprised: the man says one thing, the woman understands something else; the woman says something, the man understands something else. They are both using the same language, the same words, but their interpretations differ.Every talk ends in a fight. Every talk becomes argumentation. It seems as if there is no possibility between man and woman for beautiful conversation. Conversation I have never seen between men and women – only fight, argument. And they are so different, their reactions are so different. The woman cannot argue as well as the man. But she can scream better than the man.People ask me, “Why are there so many women in your communes?” Today I tell you the truth – it is because of dynamic meditation. One hour of huffing and puffing and screaming and throwing tantrums releases the woman for twenty-three hours; she has done enough.The man can argue, and argue rationally, but the woman does not bother about argument. Her counterargument is throwing things, breaking plates, screaming loudly. And you can be sure she is the winner. All that rationality and argumentation the man forgets. He simply starts cooling the woman down: “The neighbors will wake up…. I’m sorry, I was wrong.”Every man, every day, is saying that to the woman, “I am sorry, forgive me – but keep quiet.” He knows he is right. The woman knows he is right. But who bothers about right? The question is might, and the woman has real might for making tantrums, throwing things, screaming, shouting, doing Dynamic Meditation in the middle of the night.For centuries upon centuries this has been going on. Finally, a few people decided that this was too much; it is better for a woman to love another woman because they understand each other’s mind, they can have a conversation very beautifully. And they both know screaming won’t help because they can both scream better than the other. Throwing things will not make any difference because both can throw things better than the other. It is useless.Two men find friendship very easily because they understand each other’s mind, reasoning, argument. They can converse. But this conversation between man and man, woman and woman, has brought AIDS into the world.My people at least – because I can only ask my people – can make the effort of going back to the natural way. And I can ask my sannyasins not to repeat the old pattern, settled for centuries, of fighting. Be friendly to each other.A man and woman in deep friendship will give the best result of two persons meeting. Their love will be orgasmic because they are polar opposites. Their conversation will become more and more friendly, understanding that their minds function differently, that they have different strategies to win. They should both drop their strategies and open their hearts to each other. And if lovers cannot open their hearts to each other, then who is going to do it?In the outside world you can be certain, either they are going to be destroyed by nuclear weapons – that is the heritage of all the politicians of the past – or they are going to die and disappear by the other alternative, that is AIDS. And that is the ultimate conclusion of all your religions. Politics has brought nuclear weapons, religions have brought AIDS.There is a possibility that nuclear weapons may not be used, because all politicians are trembling; because the war is not going to decide who is the winner and who is the loser. The nuclear war will be total war; the victorious and defeated both will die. Not only man, but life as such on earth will disappear. There will not be trees anymore, nor roses anymore, nor birds singing in the morning, nor animals. Anything that has life will be destroyed. It is pointless.I am happy that they have come to nuclear weapons. That way, war has committed suicide. It is impossible for politicians to go for a nuclear war; it is meaningless. One goes into war to be victorious, to come back with glory. But in this war there will be nobody left behind even to write the history as to who was the winner, America or the Soviet Union.This war will be the end, the end of all that man has created for centuries – the poetry, the painting, the music, the dance. All that millions of people have created for thousands of years to make this earth beautiful will be simply erased.Nuclear weapons – just because of their total danger, their total death – are out of the question. They cannot be used. I challenge the politicians to use them, start the third world war. They cannot do that. But AIDS is a different matter. Politicians can see the danger. But the viruses that spread AIDS are worse than politicians: they don’t understand what they are doing.In the outside world, anybody who has AIDS will try to hide it because he will be condemned by the priests – who are really the cause of it – and he will be condemned by the society. People with AIDS will become untouchables. Everybody will avoid them. This will be worse than death.So in the outside world everybody is going to hide the fact that he has AIDS. And that is very dangerous, that means he will go on spreading it. it can be caught through sexual contact. It can be caught just by kissing. Kissing should be absolutely prohibited, it should be declared the most criminal act possible.I know the French will suffer the most, but what can we do? French kissing is the worst. But there are already people on the earth…. Eskimos rub their noses, they don’t kiss. In India there are tribes, aboriginal tribes, very primitive, five thousand years back – they don’t kiss. They became aware of kissing only when Christian missionaries reached their mountains and forests to convert them.They could not stop laughing, seeing these idiots kissing each other. They are not civilized people, they don’t know much, nothing about medicine, but this much they know, that saliva carries all kinds of germs. And when two persons are kissing each other it means they are mixing their saliva and transferring sicknesses to each other.I suggest to my people: stop kissing completely. And don’t be worried that rubbing noses will not be so exciting. It is more exciting because it is a novelty, something new, a discovery. So two things: become natural and stop kissing. Rub noses, it is good exercise for noses. Jews are going to defeat you – they will be known as the best lovers. Chinese, Nepalese, the Mongol races will not find it exciting. Flat noses…what can you rub? They will have to find something else.Because men’s and women’s bodies have many erotic parts, there is no problem. For example, you may not be aware that Vatsyayana, the first sexologist of the world, has written five thousand years ago that the earlobes are the best erotic points. Try it! Rub each other’s earlobes, and you will be surprised that Vatsyayana is never wrong. Whatever he has written in his book has proved right. If your noses are flat, don’t be worried. I am here to suggest something else to you.And in our communes all over the world no sannyasin should try to hide that he has AIDS, because there is no condemnation. In fact, the moment we find that somebody has AIDS, he becomes the focus of all our love. He is going to live a very short time, he deserves all our kindness, friendship, all our compassion.All sannyasins should go through medical tests to find out whether they have any possibility of AIDS and spreading it to our own people. And if they are found to have AIDS, then they have to do two things: one, they have to give the names of all the contacts they had so all those other people can also be checked if they are here.And we are making a beautiful place, the most scenic place, in Desiderata, where two people who have AIDS are already living. There is no condemnation for them, there is only tremendous compassion. We are giving them everything that they need, because they are going to live so short a time. They should know the best of everything. If they smoke they should get the best cigars. If they drink they should get the best wine, not the wine that Jesus created out of water; that wine was bogus. They should get everything they need.And in Desiderata we will create more places. If there are other AIDS victims, we will keep them together. They can be very creative while they are living. They can paint, they can sculpt, they can write poetry. They can read, they can see films, they can read novels.And one thing more, if they want to make love to each other they are free to, because nothing more can happen. Only one thing is possible…. Medical science has not yet been able to find any cure, and they think there is no possibility of finding it either; they are not hopeful.As I see it, if people having AIDS start making love to each other, perhaps their AIDS will disappear. If these people live longer than two years we have proved the point. And perhaps we will be the people to give the cure to the world. No medicine is needed, just put two AIDS victims together. Make a small colony of AIDS victims. Let them make love, let them do whatsoever they want among themselves. And I have this certainty – I know not from where it comes – that that is the only possibility of the disease disappearing.So whatever I have said in the past, forget all about it. What I am saying today, listen to it.Act with responsibility.Act with consciousness.Act with compassion.And remain absolutely certain that the commune is going to take care of you with respect, because you are a victim of the priests, monasteries, nunneries. They are the criminals, you are the victims. So by having AIDS nobody loses respect, he gains more respectability. And we will take care of you. We will see that you live more luxuriously than anybody in the commune, because you are going to live for such a short period. Every luxury should be made available to you – the best scenic spot, the best houses, the best food; everything for you.I am trying to make it possible that around the world all sannyasins should move to the communes. No sannyasins should live outside the commune anymore, it is not safe. I am congregating small centers into bigger communes. There are centers, there are ashrams, and there are communes. Centers are very small; they are where people simply come to meditate, or a few sannyasins live. Ashrams are bigger; many sannyasins live and work there. And the commune is the whole society, self-sufficient. So I am dissolving the centers and ashrams and turning them into bigger communes where we can take care of everything. And we will make all these communes exactly the same – the same standard of living, the same facilities. And now, because I am speaking, I am available around the world on the screen. They are not missing me anymore. Perhaps they can see me better than you can, far away. If I cannot see your face, I know you cannot see my face. But these communes will be having the largest screens possible; they are not going to miss me.Here, I have told Sheela that it is sad that I see people sitting so far away – they cannot see me, they cannot see my eyes, and the changes that come into my eyes. They cannot see my gestures. They can only hear my words which is one-third of the whole thing, because my hands are speaking, they are not silent. My eyes are speaking. When I am speaking, my whole being is involved in it.I had asked Sheela, “Why don’t you put a big screen also by the side?” But the problem was that it would be a distraction: to look at me, or to look at the screen? So you have to make this compensation. Here I am alive. There I will be on the screen, available to everybody – but it will be only a picture. So you are both compensated: they can see me, you can feel me. And every commune is going exactly the way we are going.This commune is the prototype for all the communes around the world. I can help you to save yourself from AIDS.And I am not worried any more about nuclear weapons and the third world war. I was worried in the beginning because there was a possibility four years ago that either America or Russia could have won – at a very great cost. Most of humanity would have gone. But four years ago there was a possibility of somebody becoming victorious. Now that possibility is finished. They are going on piling up more and more nuclear weapons. Already they have so much that they can kill every single individual seven hundred times.And you know, even the only begotten son of God, Jesus Christ, missed resurrection. We are ordinary people, we are not in any special relationship with God. Your mothers were not made pregnant by the Holy Ghost. Dying one time is enough. Seven hundred times seems to be just stupidity. Whom are you going to kill? Who is going to kill seven hundred times? So now a third world war is out of the question. Forget about it, it is not going to happen.Now the only problem that is facing us is AIDS. And from that we can manage to save at least our people. So spread the message to all the sannyasins who are still living in the outside world. Perhaps they have their vested interests there – salaries, positions, employment; forget all about that because AIDS is also there. And it will catch you sooner or later – more probably sooner than later.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I look around your commune and see people hugging the way they do, and feel the energy I have when I hug someone here, I wonder why this doesn't happen in the outside world. Please comment.It cannot happen in the outside world, because for centuries man has been conditioned against the body. It has been told by all the religions that if you want to become spiritual you have to become anti-body. If you want to achieve the other world you have to renounce this world. And hugging is a very sensuous, physical experience of tremendous importance. But what to say about hugging? – even touching has been tabooed.These religious programs that have been given to you are so inhuman that if we can simply drop out of all religions and forget the past completely, you will see an immense explosion of warmth, love, hugging, touching, and for the first time you will feel alive.The whole effort in the past has been to make you as little alive as possible, more dead, just surviving somehow, breathing somehow, dragging yourself to your grave, waiting for death to come to release you.And your body is such a beautiful phenomenon. It is you. It is your circumference, and if you deny the circumference you can never find the center of it. The center is your being; it is not against the body. It cannot survive without the body for a single moment; the body is its nourishment.You see in the whole world people almost dead, somnambulists walking in their sleep, miserable, suffering for thousands of reasons; but the whole thing is based on a simple phenomenon: you have been turned against your own body. Your center and your circumference have been cut off from each other. But to reach you one has to pass the circumference.You have seen in the East, saying hello to someone, you don’t shake hands. That is against spirituality. You are coming in contact with the body of the other person, the warmth of the other person. In the East nobody hugs anybody, because hugging is thought to be something sexual. It is not. Certainly it is sensuous, but not sexual. And you have to understand these two words clearly.The alive man is sensuous. It means all his senses are functioning at the very peak. He sees better. His touch is not like holding a dead branch of a tree in your hand. His touch is alive; it is a language, it has a message. His energy is transferred to you, your energy is transferred to him.The meeting of two energies is always a rejoicing. It is just like two dancers dancing in rhythm, two musical instrument players playing in rhythm, complementary to each other. But even in the West, where people shake hands, energies don’t meet. Christianity is the cause. You shake hands but your energy, rather than going to the other person, shrinks back. The fear of being sexual, the fear of being sensuous, the fear of being interested in the other person’s body – that is thought to be unspiritual.It has been discovered that if you look at a woman for more than three seconds, it is unspiritual. Three seconds is casual. Just passing on the road, you cannot avoid it; a woman comes there, a Cleopatra walks by – three seconds is casual. Beyond that, your eyes are touching the woman – a distant touch, like a remote control. And if you stare in the eyes of the woman more than three seconds, she will feel offended; you have already penetrated her body through her eyes. And it is not allowed by etiquette to look back again and again at the woman.But do you know the meaning of the word respect? It means looking again. Respect does not mean honor, respect means you are enchanted. It is re-spect; you would like to see again…again…. Perhaps you will change your route and follow the woman.In a more humane society the woman will not feel offended. And deep down she does not feel offended now. Even after thousands of centuries’ conditioning, her feeling of being offended is superficial. Deep down she rejoices, deep down the undercurrent of nature is there. Not to look at a woman again, not to look back, is certainly an insult. Not to look in the eyes of a man or woman for more than three seconds is humiliation. You have rejected the person, you have not been nice to the person.Hugging is closer than seeing. If seeing makes people offended, if in shaking hands people shrink their energy back…. People use the phrase “a warm welcome,” but it rarely happens. It is always a cold welcome because your energy moves back. Your hand is just cold, not radiating warmth. There are dangers for the religious people: if your hand feels warm and the other person is also open to receive and give, things are not going to stop there.If just two hands meeting in a warm glow give you so much joy, hugging the whole body will be a thousandfold more. And making love…? These are just steps. Hugging the body, you are close but still separate. Making love means you have entered into each other.Your so-called phony saints, messiahs, prophets, have all been very cunning. They did not allow you the first step, because one thing leads to another, and finally it is going to end in a very deep sexual orgasm.So you will not find the same quality, the same intensity in the outside world. If people hug, it is just out of etiquette, but they keep as distant as the stars are – millions of light-years distant. And have you watched, when you hug? You feel…not joyous, you are doing some duty. You have to hug your mother, your father, your sister on some occasions, but both of you keep aloof. The fear of sex has been so deeply programmed in you that anything that can lead toward sex is prohibited.To me, to my people, warmth is life. In your sharing it, it grows. The more you share it, the more you have it. And each individual has a unique quality in his warmth. If you are sensuous enough-and that is what I want you to be – you will be surprised that in shaking hands with different people you find differences in energy. The quality, the force, the intensity, the flavor, the fragrance of it – everything is unique with every individual. But when you shake hands in a cold way, or hug a body as if two skeletons are meeting in a graveyard, then there is no difference.Life gives you uniqueness; death destroys your uniqueness. Two dead bodies are exactly the same, just dead, but two living bodies are never exactly the same. Existence does not believe in carbon copies. Existence believes in originals; it creates only originals.If you are sensuous you will be surprised how many riches you have been unaware of. Even a beautiful dress touching your body will give you a feeling of well-being. The cloth is not alive, but you are alive and sensuous. Your senses are functioning at their climax. Have you watched it? Wearing some clothes, you feel dirty, although the clothes may be clean. Wearing their clothes the way businessmen wear their gray suits in the marketplace – they don’t feel anything for their clothes. They cannot feel human beings, how can they feel clothes?But I say to you on my own authority, that if you are sensuous enough, even ordinary things – clothes, a cold drink, a hot cup of tea or coffee, the smell of the coffee, the fragrance of tea boiling in the kettle, the aroma that it creates…. You will feel all these things, and they will all make you richer and richer, more and more alive – and there is no limit to it. How alive you can be – and how rich you can be, there is no limit to it. It all depends on you how many programs you are courageous enough to drop.Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans – their religious doctrines may be different, that does not matter. That is simply a verbal game, logical gymnastics, but the base is the same: to make you as dead as possible. They will not say this to you, “We are making you dead.” No, they will use beautiful words: renunciation – renouncing the mundane, the profane.And it is strange that you have not been able to figure out a simple thing. On the one hand they say renounce the world, its pleasure, its warmth, its love, its riches, so that you can have a millionfold of the same riches, of the same warmth, of the same love, of the same joy, in paradise. On the other hand they go on saying, “Don’t be greedy!”I cannot figure out what nonsense they have been teaching to you. And you have been listening, learning, being programmed by their nonsense, so much so that you cannot see a simple contradiction: they are teaching you to be greedy! Here renounce, so after death you can get a millionfold.Great! Is this some kind of spiritual lottery? It cannot be business. In business you can get a few percent profit, but a millionfold? So the greedy people have become religious. And the rewards for your sacrifices are immense. Christians, Mohammedans, Jews – all these three religions believe only in one life. One life means just a small life – seventy years. Those few years don’t count in the world of eternity, they will pass soon. To sacrifice seventy years to gain the joys of eternity is a simple thing. You are just greedy.And you are not seeing a simple phenomenon: if these things are sin here, then your saints in paradise are committing sins a millionfold. You will commit sins only for seventy years and not continuously, because you have to eat, you have to bathe, you have to shave, you have to earn your bread and butter, you have to fight with your wife, with the neighbors, you have to go to the court, you have to be in some politics, you have to go to the churches, synagogues. What is left out of seventy years? Even if you can get seven hours, that will be too much.You have to sleep one-third of your life; eight hours per day you sleep. And you have to do many other things. You have to see the football games, you have to see the Olympics. You have to go to the movies, you have to play cards. Just count, and you will be surprised: not even seven hours are left! For seven hours of joy, warmth and love, you are getting eternity – and what an eternity!I have heard…. A master died, and after a few days one of his disciples also died. Perhaps he could not live without the master, perhaps there was no point in living anymore. He had risked everything to be with the master. He lost the lust for life – he died.Of course, he was absolutely certain that he would be taken to paradise. He was no ordinary man. He was a great disciple of a great master. And certainly he was taken to paradise. As he entered, he could not believe his eyes: he saw his old master sitting under the shade of a tree, with Marilyn Monroe naked in his lap. The disciple closed his eyes.He said, “My God! What is happening?” But then he remembered, those who renounce in the world will get a millionfold in the other, so there was nothing wrong. He fell at the feet of the master and said, “Great master, you have proved what you have been saying all along, that those who renounce in this world will get one thousand or one millionfold in the other world.”Before the master could speak, Marilyn Monroe said, “You idiot! I am not his reward, he is my punishment!”Religions have just been telling you stories. I can manage my own – far better. They have been giving you hope in the other world and taking everything from your life in this world. And this is the only world there is; there is no other world. Yes, this world extends to infinity, multidimensional infinity, but this is the only world, there is no other world. And this seventy-years’ life is a training period.If you are befooled by the religions, by your political leaders, and destroy these seventy years of joy, blessing, love, ecstasy, one thing is absolutely certain: paradise is not for you, because you have not even graduated from this seventy-year life. In seventy years you trained for hell! All your religions are giving you training for hell. Suffering, torturing yourself, fasting, celibacy; no smoking, no drinking, no taste while you are eating.Hinduism makes it one of the first fundamental principles: tastelessness. Now how can these people teach you sensuousness? Taste is a sense.You cannot taste food the way I taste. I can say it because once I was also a camel like you, so I know both kinds of taste. When I see a sunset you may be standing by my side, but you cannot see it; your eyes have lost their sensitivity.Listening to Mozart you may fall asleep, but listening to jazz music you start jumping, shouting, screaming. Jazz is simply crazy! It is not music. These Beatles are really beetles, not human beings, but they appeal to you. To understand the classical music of the East you will need very sensuous ears, very trained, disciplined; the music is so subtle. The same is true about all your five senses.Five senses are the accepted number of senses around the world, although we should change it now because there is a sixth sense hidden in your ears. But old habits die hard. And that sixth sense is far more important than any other; that’s why it has been kept hidden in your ears, so nothing can disturb it. That is the sense of balance.When you drink too much, that sense gets affected; you cannot walk in a straight line, you wobble. Above all, don’t wobble! When you are hit on your head, and you see the whole world moving around you, and you fall, that sense of balance has been hit.If all your six senses are functioning, ready to be receptive, you will have a rich life.When I say I am a rich man’s guru, I don’t mean that Rockefeller, Ford, Morgan, and the Kennedys are my disciples. When I say I am a rich man’s guru, I mean real riches. Dollars are bogus! What richness is there? Richness comes through your senses.I want you to become more and more sensuous.That’s why you feel a difference when you hug somebody here, because the person who is hugging you is absolutely open, vulnerable, available to you; you are open, vulnerable, available to the other person. And when these two vulnerabilities, two opennesses, two skies full of stars meet together, for a moment you are not two; you become one. Your circumferences overlap each other. You feel life throbbing within you with a double force. Nobody is a loser, both are gainers, because both feel the same way – life doubled.In my commune hugging is a way of becoming rich. It is a way of understanding life.It is a way that leads ultimately to the goal of love, and there is no other God than love.I contradict Jesus. He says, “God is love.” He has misunderstood. No, I say to you, “Love is God,” When you say God is love, it means love is only an attribute of God, and there may be thousands of other attributes. When I say love is God, I have really finished God completely: only love is.My communes are universities to learn the ways of a rich life, of love, beauty, warmth, compassion, humanity.We are not gathered here in search of some dodo God who always sits on the roof – I don’t know why; can’t he come down a little bit so people can see him? If you go on the roof, he disappears from there. He has been disappearing constantly. First, he used to live on the peaks of mountains. Then man reached there, and found nobody. God has moved his luggage to the moon, because the silly priests could not think that sooner or later man is going to reach to the moon.One cannot expect much intelligence from priests, for the simple reason, that if they were intelligent people they would not be priests in the first place. They waste their life in teaching nonsense. They destroy other people’s lives, because other people become conditioned by that nonsense. According to me, all your religious prophets and messiahs are criminals. They have only supplied you with consolations, hopes, and they have taken all that is real from you.I want you to drop all hopes.That does not mean that you become hopeless. You can become hopeless only if you have hope. Hopelessness is the shadow of a hope that has failed. The moment you drop hopes you have dropped hopelessness, the moment you drop expectations you have dropped frustrations - two birds with a single stone.And if you are courageous enough to drop your consolations, reality is yours.My people hugging are not two skeletons rattling their rib-bones with each other. My people are flesh, blood, everything that is real. And they know the secret: radiate warmth and love around you, and you will be getting more and more from existence.Existence understands only the language of reality. The moment you are real, you are in a communion with existence.It is not only a question of hugging, it is a question of accepting your body as a beautiful phenomenon. It is the most complex, delicate thing in the whole of existence.You don’t know what is going on inside your skin: continuous work twenty-four hours a day, millions of living cells doing thousands of things. Hairs are growing in the night when you are asleep. Breathing is not dependent on your mind; otherwise you can forget sometimes. Particularly in sleep, who will remember to breathe? And if you have to remember to breathe, how can you fall asleep? Breathing is your life. And your body is supplying you with everything you need.The functioning of the inner body is so miraculous that Jesus walking on water looks just stupid! You eat food. Have you ever imagined how it becomes blood, flesh, bones? Who is doing all this work? How does your body manage to select only that which is nourishing and reject that which will be an unnecessary burden on you? It is continuously throwing all kinds of poison out of your body, and you are not even thankful toward it.And your religious prophets go on saying things against you body without even understanding the simple fact that what they are saying is being said by the body.I want my people, for the first time in the whole history of man, to be lovers of themselves, their bodies.Take care of the body, it is taking care of you. You cannot repay it, there is no way. It is doing so much for you, what have you done for it? fasting, celibacy, standing naked in the burning hot sun, or standing naked in the freezing cold. And these maniacs have been worshipped down the centuries as the greatest heroes of humanity.Get rid of these heroes. They all need to be imprisoned. They all need psychiatric treatment, they are simply mad. But the line of mad prophets and messiahs has impressed strange ideas on your delicate mind.They are all against sex. Why? Because sex is the source of life. They are against life, that’s why they have to be against sex; otherwise, what is so great about celibacy? They are preventing you from giving birth to new life, to more life, to better life. They have stopped you marrying faraway people. Russians won’t marry Americans, Christians won’t marry Hindus, Chinese won’t marry Africans.And that’s how it should be – they should marry someone who is far away from their own lifeline, because crossbreeding has proved in plants, in animals, a significant fact: out of crossbreeding comes a better generation, better than both father and mother. If these religions and nations and races had not prohibited people in these ten thousand years, then we would not be still dragging – sad, burdened, frustrated, still going to the church and to the synagogue.And remember, if crossbreeding becomes normal, all world wars will become impossible, because in one family you will find a Chinese, a Hindu, a Christian, a Mohammedan, a Jew. Who is going to fight whom? – we will all be so intermixed. And that’s my commune. Nobody bothers who you are-black or white, English or German, American or Russian. There are Russian sannyasins here. Nobody even thinks about your race, your religion, your color.We are a life-affirmative religion. And this is happening for the first time in the world: all other religions have been life-negative. That’s why you feel the difference. You will find differences in everything.People talk outside; have you ever watched what they are talking about? If you are in Britain, they are talking about the weather. But strange…because both are there and they both know what kind of weather it is. What is the point of conversation? There is some secret in it, because it is the most non-controversial thing. If you start talking about anything political, immediately conversation stops, argumentation starts. If you talk about anything religious, conversation stops – you are a Catholic and the other one is a Protestant.You cannot talk even about significant things of life; you can talk only about weather. Just watch in the outside world, people are not conversing with each other; in fact, they are all trying not to be in a real confrontation. They are not opening their hearts, they are not saying what they always wanted to say.One German film actress had come to India to my commune there. Her image in Germany was falling down; she was getting fewer and fewer films to work in. She wanted some attention so she could again become a great star.She came to my commune, She did a few groups, meditated, and then suddenly – not saying anything to anybody – she disappeared. And while leaving Bombay airport, she gave a press conference in which everything that she said was a lie: that she has been beaten, she has been raped, that they were going to kill her; somehow she has escaped. In Germany, she became again a great famous star.Her husband wrote a letter to me. I want you to know what was in that letter. Her husband wrote, “I don’t believe what my wife is talking about, because every day she goes on adding more and more against you and your commune. I don’t believe that any such thing has happened to her. If it had happened, she should have gone to the police department nearest to your commune. There was no need to go to, one hundred miles away, give the press conference and get into her plane.”But he said, “I don’t believe any of these things have happened, but if they have happened I am immensely pleased, because this is what I have always wanted to do to her but I could not gather courage. She is a bitch!”What kind of life are people living if the husband carries such ideas about his own wife? And the wife must be doing things to him; otherwise, why should he carry these ideas in his mind? No, no husband and wife have any conversation. They only argue, they fight. What kind of love is this? And the whole world is in the same rut. The reason is that life has been denied, condemned – naturally, if it is condemned, who wants to learn the art of it?My religion is nothing but the art of living, the art of loving. And if you can manage two things – total life, total love – the third thing, enlightenment, will come of its own accord. You have earned it. You need not seek it, you deserve it. It is a reward from existence to those people who have respected life, loved, lived, danced, enjoyed.So it is not only a question of hugging, it has many implications. People in the outside world are not really living. Perhaps hippies were right, when they said, “Don’t believe anybody who is more than thirty years old.” I agree with them, because it is nearabout thirty years of age that people die. And after that they may live fifty years, but that is a posthumous existence. They go on living because they have got into the habit of living. Just the way they go on smoking, they go on living – how to drop the habit?But life is not a habit, life is a continuous inquiry, exploration. Life is a journey of discovery, and unless you have discovered the ultimate truth of your being, don’t stop anywhere. There are many stopping places – very beautiful, very charming, alluring, magical. Remember one thing, that unless you have come to realize who you are, there is no stop. Yes, you can rest a little bit on every stopover, but keep moving, keep flowing. Remain available to all kinds of experiences.Don’t live like a coward! In other words, don’t live like a Christian! Live like a man, not like a gentleman; just a man is enough. Live like a woman, not like a lady. The lady is dead – when a woman is dead she is called a lady. When a man is programmed completely by the society, he is called a gentleman.I want only raw men, raw women – natural, unpolished, free from the mind. And if you can live that way, everything in your life will become a rejoicing. And everything in your life will make you richer.Osho,Although you keep telling us to enjoy sex and to have fun, I often find myself feeling serious and not very alive when I have sex. Somehow I'm afraid to just have fun. I don't understand it. Can you explain?Everybody understands it, including you.It is your conditioning. You have been told so many times that sex is sin, that, whenever you make love, immediately that conditioning comes in between you and your lover. You start feeling guilty and serious. You start thinking, “What am I doing? I am doing something against Jesus, against Buddha, against Confucius.”You are doing something against all the great religious people of the world. You are alone, a tiny, small human being, and you are going against the whole history of thousands of prophets and messiahs of all the countries, of all the nations. Naturally you become serious, and your seriousness makes you feel dead.Seriousness belongs to the dead. Have you ever seen any dead man laughing? Or even smiling?Laughter belongs to life; seriousness is part of death. The living person is always playful, not serious. And because I say making love is nothing but fun…. You have been told it is sin, and I am telling you it is fun. The difference is so much that you become puzzled. It is not sin. If it were sin, existence would have created you without your genitalia. What was the need? Nature would have found some other way to produce children.I have heard about one couple…They were traveling to a faraway star – the story must belong to the twenty-first century. They reached the star. They wanted to know everything, because it was a living planet: human beings, trees, birds, animals. Although it was a bit different, it was recognizable. They wanted to understand as much as possible about the new place because soon they would have to leave and report on the earth what they had found.They entered into the first house. The people were very loving, they asked them, “Would you like something – a cold drink, a hot drink?”They said, “No, all that later on. First, we want to inquire about a few things on this planet.”The host was also interested to know about the earth. He said, “That’s good, because I also want to know about your planet. And the first thing I want to know: how do you create children?”The couple was a little embarrassed because such questions are not asked on the earth. But seeing that nobody was going to report what they said or did, the man said, “An explanation is difficult, so I will make love to my wife, and you can say this is how we create children.”When he started making love to the woman, the host and his wife just went mad laughing. They could not believe that this is the way of producing children. In the first place, the poor woman is under this huge animal – and he is doing pushups! Strange kind of exercise!And because of their laughter, the people from earth were even more embarrassed. First, they were making love; secondly, those two persons were standing there laughing – just going mad. He stopped making love, and he asked, “What is the matter?”The man said, “We are laughing because this is the way we make coffee! As far as children are concerned, we have a very simple method.”They took them to their fridge and opened it. In one jar there was some liquid of a green color, in another jar liquid of a red color, and they mixed both the liquids in a third jar and closed the fridge. The earth people could not understand how a child was going to be born. He said, “Within nine months those two liquids will give us a child. In fact, in our world the most difficult thing is to make coffee – children are very easy.”If existence wanted sex to be a sin, it would have given you some other arrangement for creating children. Existence is not against sex. And you have to be aware of the fact that it does not concern only humanity…. Your saints appreciate flowers – they are ignorant, they don’t know what they are doing. They are appreciating sex, because that flower is not for saints to appreciate, it has nothing to do with the saints.Saints or no saints, poets or no poets, the flower has seeds. And in plants there are male plants, female plants. Of course, those poor fellows cannot walk and hug each other and make love to each other – which would have been far more pleasant. They have to use butterflies to take their sperm to the female eggs, and leave it there with the female eggs. These flowers are very sexual.Why are they so colorful? And why is there so much fragrance? Not for you. The fragrance is to attract the butterflies, the bees. The colors are to attract. If they were colorless, without fragrance, then no butterfly, no bee would be so stupid as to come to them. They have to create a magnetic force for them to come. This is a sexual phenomenon. The birds, the animals, the whole existence depends on sex for giving birth to life.Your religions are against existence. They are telling you sex is sin, and celibacy is virtue. And everybody knows what kind of celibacy is happening in the monasteries, what kind of celibacy is maintained by the bishops, priests.Just the other day I had the information that one Christian minister has been jailed for one and a half years because in the pulpit he was preaching celibacy, and with a fifteen-year-old boy he was making love. Now other boys have also informed that he has been doing the same with them.One of the popes before this polack was a homosexual. He was a bishop in Milan, and everybody knew about his homosexuality because his boyfriend was always hanging around with him everywhere. When he became the Pope, the boyfriend moved from Milan to the Vatican, and became his secretary. These people will go on talking about celibacy, and they will drive you mad; they have driven the whole of humanity mad.That’s why I say sex is playfulness, it is fun. You cannot accept the idea of fun because of your conditioning that it is sin. It is a quantum leap from sin to fun! But what can I do? It is fun.You will have to drop your conditioning. And you will not be a loser, you will be profited by dropping the idea of sin. Even though you know it is sin and you know celibacy is virtue, you are still making love. What does that show? – that these ideas cannot prevent your nature, but they can cloud your mind. When you are making love your mind is clouded with all these ideas.The priests have not been able to abolish sex from the world, but they have poisoned it. A man is in a split state, the woman is in a split state when they are making love. Their minds are clouded with all kinds of theologies going against sex, and their bodies are making love. They are not totally there.It is not a psychological disease that men suffer from premature ejaculation. It is a religious disease, because the mind is so afraid that you are committing a sin – so be quick! Commit it soon and be finished! The whole credit goes to Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira. You cannot take the credit for premature ejaculation; it is a very religious thing. You could not manage to remain celibate, nature forced you. You cannot make love joyously, playfully, because the mind is continuously disturbing you from both sides, telling you something is wrong.You should have a film of yourself making love to your wife or girlfriend, and once in a while look at the film. You will be surprised that your face looks so embarrassed. You look in such a hurry. You seem as if you have been forced, that somebody is keeping a gun behind you: “Make love, otherwise….” And look at the face of the woman: she seems to be going into a fit, her face is distorted. This is not orgasm, this is sheer stupidity.The woman thinks you are a dirty old man. Because she is your wife, it is her duty; so she is fulfilling her duty knowing perfectly well that this is sin. How can the woman come to orgasm? She is not there. She is lying there in the bed almost as a corpse. And no man wants the woman to be very active, because then she is no longer a lady.The word “lady” means a good lay: peaceful, silent, dead – “You do your thing and be finished.” You are in such a hurry, and your mind is so much troubled, you cannot have an orgasm either. Just ejaculation is not orgasm. It is a sheer wastage of energy.And the woman has a different pace. In nature, the male and the female have the same pace. They come to the orgasmic state at the same time, because the animals have not heard that making love is sin, so they are not in a hurry.Your mind is against what you are doing, it is pulling you – you are in a hurry. And the woman has a slow pace. She is a far more delicate mechanism, and her whole body is erotic. Man is poor in that way. Only his genitalia is erotic; the whole body is just attached to the genitalia to keep it functioning.But the woman’s whole body is erotic. Naturally, the whole body takes a longer time to start vibrating with joy, to start feeling the warmth. By the time she starts feeling anything, the man is snoring. He has finished the job, closed the file, fallen asleep – not only that, he is snoring. Many woman have told me that after making love they cry and weep. Who would not cry and weep with this type of man? The woman has not come, and the man is finished.Because of your religious teachings, sex has become for man only a kind of sleeping pill. Relaxed, the energy gone out, you don’t have any more energy for the mind, for it to go on and on and keep you awake – you fall asleep. This is not the purpose of sex. Sleeping pill? You can get any brand you want, any type you want – a woman is not needed. This is insulting, to make woman just your sleeping pill.And because the woman cannot experience any orgasm in such a hurry…. In India, perhaps ninety-eight percent of women don’t know what orgasm is. In the Hindustani language there is no word for orgasm. In the West it is only within these thirty years that woman has become aware of her birthright. But her birthright goes against the whole Judaic and Christian tradition. If a woman has the birthright to experience the most beautiful ecstasy, the orgasmic feeling, ego disappearing, time stopping, utter silence descending on her, and so much joy that she cannot contain it – if this is woman’s birthright, and it is, then man will have to be trained again.He has to learn foreplay – playing with the woman’s body before making love – so that the body becomes warm, starts throbbing with excitement. And when he feels that the whole body is ready, then he should make love. And while he is making love, don’t keep the Bible in between. I don’t think anybody can make love with the Bible in between.Forget all that nonsense that you have been told and conditioned by, and make love delicately, slowly.You will call a man an idiot who drinks a cup of tea in one gulp and is finished. He will burn his mouth, the tea is wasted. He does not know how to drink tea; it has to be sipped, not gulped!Go slowly. Wait for the moment when the woman is also ready, and allow the woman her womanhood. Please, take away this label of lady. Let her also be active, because if she is active, she will be coming sooner to the point of orgasm. With her lying dead you cannot hope….And remember the third thing: when the orgasm has happened and you both are so full of joy, then the last part of it is still to be completed – the appendix, the afterplay. The woman has given you so much joy, the man has given you so much joy-yet without even saying thank you to each other you go to sleep, with no gratitude. The only way to show your thankfulness is to play with the woman’s body again – afterplay, let the woman play with your body….And don’t think that only prostitutes are active and only prostitutes play with your body. Every woman would love to play with your body but is afraid she will be thought of as a prostitute. And can’t you see a simple fact, that people who have beautiful women as their wives still go to prostitutes. For what? Because among prostitutes there is no lady.Now this whole strange situation they have created themselves. The prostitute is more satisfying than any wife, for the simple reason that she is being paid to make you utterly satisfied; she is a professional. Your wife is an amateur, just the way that you are an amateur.Now there are male prostitutes also available, particularly in California. So don’t be worried; if you go to a prostitute, your wife can also go to a prostitute – a male prostitute who gives her more satisfaction because he is just a man – professional, skillful, knowing all the ways to make the woman come to the peak. But this should happen to every lover!My own understanding is, if sex becomes fun, prostitutes will disappear from the world. There is no need for any woman to fall so low as to sell her love. At least leave one thing, love, out of the market-place – just one thing which is not a commodity. It has no price label on it. It is immensely valuable, but it has no price.The man who goes to the prostitute is falling in his own eyes. The woman who is functioning as a prostitute is deep down condemning herself, because she is selling something which is priceless.But remember, priests and prostitutes will disappear together.It’s the priests who have forced millions of women to be prostitutes, because they have created the idea of sin in your mind. All these things are interconnected. And I always go to the very root. That’s why I emphasize, let sex be a playfulness, a fun.And since the invention of the pill, there is no problem, you need not be worried about children. Now it is completely fun, with no responsibility, with no trouble following it. Enjoy it! Put your mind aside. Tell the priest, who is continuously in your mind talking to you – yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak – to go to hell. You are making love and the priest is giving his Sunday sermon!No, love is such a beautiful phenomenon that you should learn the art of love, just as you should learn the art of life.If you can afford it, your room for love should be separate, because it is a temple. And when you enter the room of love, you should leave your shoes out – and your heads too; just put them in the shoes. And before you make love, have a good shower, be clean. Meditate for a few minutes. Make it a beautiful experience.Let the room be lighted not by electricity, but by candles. Let there be some fragrance just as it is in the temples; burn fragrance. And in the room of your love, never do anything else – no fighting, no argument. If you are not in a good mood, then it is better not to go to the room of love.You are unaware of many things…. The same bed in which the husband and wife sleep, they fight there, they argue, they throw pillows at each other, and then they make love too, on the same bed. They don’t understand that each act, each thought, each feeling has its own vibration. The room of love should be full of the vibration of love.I want love to be your only God.And with God you need not be serious.You have to be playful, joyous.It is simply a question of understanding what is happening to you, and the very understanding will change the whole thing.Osho,You recently described yourself as the last barrier to our freedom. I have always felt glad that being in love with you is a way to become ultimately free. But my heart is flooded, and my eyes are full of tears with the realization that I no longer wish to cross the last barrier. I am so in love with you that I don't care for the freedom that costs us your departure. I just want to go on sitting with you forever. Could you say something?Baby, you have already passed the barrier. Don’t be worried!Osho,My father, who is currently visiting here, shocked me yesterday by saying that none of his children were wanted, we were all mistakes. Can I use this as an opportunity to go back and remember and clear up some past conditionings? Do you think that my father, who I feel I resemble at times, is still affecting me today?Don’t feel any resentment toward your father, because everybody is a mistake.There is no way for the father and mother to know who is going to be born to them – Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong? In each sexual intercourse the man releases millions of living cells, and they all rush fast, just the way men are – speedy, more speed…. All men in some way are Americans. But you have to forgive those living cells, because they have only two hours of life. If they don’t reach the female egg before two hours have passed, they are gone forever.And the trouble is, those one million or more living cells are in a great car race, because only one will be able to reach first. Sometimes two reach at the same time – that’s why twins are born; very rarely, three, even more rarely four. The record is nine, but that has happened only once. The rule is that out of these one million living beings – which are all unique; nobody knows their potential, what they could have become if they had been born – one reaches. And once one cell has reached the female egg, the egg closes. The others are left out just to die.And it is not a small passage for those poor people who are hanging between life and death. It is not a simple question. If the living cell was the size of a man, six feet, then the track he has to move along will proportionately be two miles. Two miles they have to go and what a rush, what a competition! And everybody is trying to drag the other back.Whoever reaches first is accidental. Everybody up to now is a mistake. So don’t be offended by your father. He has told you a simple truth, be grateful to him.It will be possible only when we start producing children by scientific accuracy, in the lab, in the tubes, that we can figure out what potential the female egg has and what potential the male egg has…. Every hospital should have banks, just as they have banks for blood: banks for semen, banks for female eggs. And out of those banks they will choose the right combination, which can give a genius to you – healthy, long-living, never getting old, never falling sick. Everything can be managed, just the right cells have to be chosen.My own proposal is that it is going to happen in my commune soon.You cannot be allowed to produce accidental people, mistakes.It is time to understand. Out of millions of people there is one Albert Einstein, out of millions of people there is one Mozart. This is just ugly. We can have as many musicians, dancers, poets, scientists, novelists, sculptors, computer engineers, electronics people, painters – whatsoever we need.You just have to drop the old unnecessary idea: that your child has to be from your cell and from your wife’s egg. What nonsense! Eggs are just eggs, semen cells are just semen cells. You have to become accustomed to blood transfusion, because blood is blood. If it matches with your blood it becomes your blood.So whenever a couple wants a child, they should not produce the child themselves. Love they can make as much as they want. That is fun, it is nobody else’s business to interfere. But if they want a child they should simply go to the medical center and give their specific requirements, what kind of child they want. And it is very simple, it can be managed. They can tell you that after a few months you can come back and have the child. But the child will be born out of the jars, remember.You can go on making your coffee, that’s okay, but don’t create so many mistakes around the world: mediocre people, retarded people, blind people, crippled people. This is your responsibility. All this could have been avoided. There is no need for any Adolf Hitler to be born. There is no need for any Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong to be born. We can simply throw those cells into the garbage can. Choose the best. And you have so many cells of unique qualities that it is stupid to leave it to a blind race.No, man has to live more consciously.Your father is right, and he must be respected for that. He has accepted it. Other fathers are not so courageous as to say, “You are a mistake.”And there is no need to feel any resentment. Just feel happy. Rejoice that you came before my laboratories started working; otherwise, there would have been no chance for you. And you are resentful? Be thankful to your father. Touch his feet: “Father, you made your mistake at the right time! Just a little later and I would not have been anywhere to be found.” There is no need to feel resentful. This is how children have been born down the centuries.But I would like to change this whole thing so no father, no mother can say to their child, “You are our mistake.” They will have asked for the child. Everything – the color of the hair, the color of the eyes, the shape of the face – everything can be filled in on a requirement form, and then it is for the medical people to figure out. And that too is not difficult; computers can do it very easily. You just feed the computer the information, “We want such a kind of child. You figure out and tell us the numbers of the bottles, which two bottles will be used to make the coffee.”Be happy, rejoice, and that will make your father also happy, because he must be feeling bad that he has been going on committing mistakes. All his children are mistakes! No, let him feel happy: “You did well. You did it at the right time. If this crazy man had come before, there would have been no chance for us. If you can commit a few more mistakes, do it soon, because the accidental man is going to disappear by the end of this century.”The twenty-first century will know exactly what kind of people are going to live on this earth.I am introducing you to the twenty-first century.Osho,When you talk about yourself and the natural way for us to be, my heart aches and I feel shaky and joyous. Then when you talk of politics, religion and other more abstract topics, I feel distant and find it hard to relate to them. Is this just my mind getting in the way of the arrows from your heart?You don’t have any mind, that’s why, because when I am talking about religion, philosophy, theology and other abstract subjects, they go above your head. You don’t have any mind. You are unnecessarily bragging that your mind is disturbing you. But you are not losing anything.Let them go above your head. You just rejoice when I am talking about myself, about you, about love, about things that stir your heart.But I am not speaking for one person, you have to remember that. I am speaking to one million sannyasins around the earth, and many I can approach only through philosophy, through religion, through theology. But that is not your problem.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I'm a hypocrite, and a rough man, and I am happy to have a soft master. In my unconscious I have replaced my father by you, and I have replaced my family by the commune. I have created hatred, rage, resentment toward you and the commune. Yet I am enjoying your discourses very much. I am deeply touched by you opening your whole heart to me, and I don't want to hide from you any longer. It makes me sad that I have trapped myself again. Is there any possibility to come to the roots of hatred and be free from it?It is good that you recognize that you are a hypocrite. That is the beginning of finding all the roots of resentment, hatred, cruelty. Once a person recognizes that he is a hypocrite, things become very easy. He has found the disease.But the second thing that you say is not right. You say you are a hypocrite, and a rough man, and you are happy you have found a soft master. That’s wrong. Nobody can be rougher than I can. Who told you that I am a soft master? You cannot find any rascal in the whole world to compete with me. So, drop that completely.You are a hypocrite, that I accept. But I am not a soft master. My ways may look very soft but what I am doing is simply destroying your ego, your hypocrisy, your personality, so that you can discover your authentic individuality. It is hard work, because you are identified with your personality. The moment I hit your personality, you immediately feel as if you have been hit. You have not been hit.Your personality is your enemy. And only those who are ready to see their personality being killed, murdered, butchered, can live with me, because then they will see what is meant by spiritual rebirth. Whatever your parents, your society, your family have done to you, I have to undo it. And you are preventing me from undoing it. Perhaps that is why you call me a soft master – you want me to be a soft master. You cannot deceive me. You can deceive yourself and the whole world, but include me out!This is your desire, that I should be soft. And how can I be soft with you when you are doing every nasty thing to me? You have replaced your father with me. This is criminal. I have never fathered anyone, because I don’t take unnecessary accidental things on my own shoulders.You have replaced your family with the commune? Then naturally as a shadow the resentment against your father will become resentment against me, and the resentment against your family will become resentment against the commune.And don’t say to me that unconsciously you have done it. You are perfectly conscious, you are asking the question! You know perfectly well what you have done. Nobody can ask a question about what his unconscious has done. How are you going to know your unconscious? The very word unconscious means that you are not aware of it.You are perfectly aware, so it is not an unconscious thing that you have replaced your father with me, your family with the commune. No, you are perfectly conscious. But certainly, being a hypocrite, you can go on deceiving others. And finally, the person who goes on deceiving others is bound to deceive himself. He becomes so accustomed to deceiving.I used to have a friend who was a kleptomaniac. He was not interested in stealing – he belonged to a rich family, there was no need for him to steal. And things like a button, a safety pin – absolutely absurd. And he had a box in his house which he always kept locked; nobody knew what was in it.But feeling a deep friendship with me, he said, “I will show you one of my secrets. You come with me to my home.” I went. He locked the room, opened the box, and showed me all kinds of things. I found one of my fountain pens there, one of my notebooks which I had been missing, because it had all the telephone numbers around the country.I said, “This is your secret?” He said, “Yes, I enjoy stealing so much. It does not matter what I steal, what matters is that I have stolen and have not been caught. I have deceived somebody and proved that I am more clever than they are.”I said, “That is good. Is that the whole secret?” He said, “One thing more I have to confess to you. Since I have brought you here, and you are the first man to know that I enjoy stealing, the second thing I also want to say to you in order to get rid of it, because it is very embarrassing to me….”I said, “What is that?” He said, “Sometimes I cannot find anything to steal from anybody; then I steal from my right pocket and put it in the left. I feel embarrassed to accept it, but this is the truth.” You see my point? He has become so accustomed to stealing from others, now without stealing he cannot feel at ease.You say you are a hypocrite; you certainly are. And what is conscious to you, you are trying to put into the unconscious to get out of the responsibility for it. Now you are being a hypocrite to yourself.I would like to tell you another story, very famous in the East. There was a great saint, Eknath. He was going on a pilgrimage to holy places. And in India it is difficult to find an unholy place; there are holy places all around. It takes years for somebody to travel to all the holy places.Thirty of his disciples were going with him. They were all rich people, they could afford a ten, twelve years’ journey, the expenses and the dangers.A new man who had never been to him, came to him and said, “Master, I am a poor man. I would also like to go on this pilgrimage you are going on. And when thirty people are going with you, when food is prepared for thirty, it can easily be managed for one poor man, a little food, a little clothing.”Eknath said, “There is not much of a problem in it, you can come.” The man said, “The problem is that I am a thief, and I am afraid that I may let you down.” Eknath said, “That is difficult. Poverty is okay, we will take care of you, but who is going to take care of your stealing? You have to promise that you will not steal while we are on the pilgrimage. Only then can I accept you in the group.”He promised; he was accepted. But a strange phenomenon started happening in the group, when they were moving from one place to another, staying overnight in a caravanserai, or in a temple. A strange thing started happening; people started missing their things. More strange than that was that everybody found his things in somebody else’s bag. It became a mystery, how things moved from one’s bags into somebody else’s bag. They were not lost, you just had to search again. Everybody asked….Eknath said, “I know what is the matter. Call that thirty-first man we have accepted.” He said, “You have to be true. Have you been doing this?”The man said, “I have promised not to steal, I have not promised that I will not put something from one place into another place. You have to forgive me, I am completely addicted to stealing. This much you will have to tolerate. I have not taken anything from anybody. But when everybody is sleeping, you know, it becomes such a great itch – so many people sleeping with so many beautiful things, and I think ‘What the hell are you doing here?’“Night is my day. For years I have slept in the day and remained awake in the night because that was my business time. And I am feeling in trouble. The whole day I am feeling sleepy, and as the night comes, I become fully awake. Hence, seeing all these rich people with precious diamonds, necklaces, pearls, the temptation is too much. But I have kept my promise. I take somebody’s necklace and put it onto somebody else’s neck. Do you think it is going against my promise?”Eknath laughed. He said, “No, this you can do; these thirty people will just have to work out where their things are! But I can understand you, your trouble.”I can also understand you and your trouble. You are a hypocrite. You have been pretending to be what you are not. And without knowing, in your question you have done the same thing.You say unconsciously you have replaced your father with me, your family with the commune. How do you know it? To know the unconscious is to become enlightened, because the unconscious is nine times bigger than your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is a thin layer. The unconscious mind is deep, dark, and you know nothing about it. So please be clear. At least don’t cheat yourself. It is a conscious thing that you have done and you are dumping it on the unconscious. Understanding this much will destroy the whole thing.I am not your father, I am not even your uncle. And I am not soft. My sword may look very soft but it really cuts deep.And once you drop the idea of this replacement, which is absolutely absurd, then all resentment, hatred, anger, will disappear automatically. You will not have to do anything else, you have simply to accept that you have been deceiving yourself. And this is a deception. What can be more deceptive?But one thing is that now there is no going back. You have already fallen in love with me; you enjoy my talks, you love what I have to say. You cannot go back, the only way is forward. So why be bothered with the past?Your father may have done something to you. Every father does something to every child. He has to; otherwise those children will kill him. They will destroy the house, they will set it on fire – they can do anything! Every father has to be a strict disciplinarian. And that is what creates resentment, because he cuts your freedom.He tries to make you in his own image, as God made man in his own image. And just look at your face in the mirror: this is God? A great God! And a great image! But every father is trying to do it. That is exactly the reason why the story of God creating man in his own image has been invented. Every father tries to make you his carbon copy; that creates resentment.But how can you put me in your father’s place? I am not trying to make you in any way in my image. Just the opposite is the case. I am trying to help you to find who you are, to drop all other paraphernalia that your family, your father, your teachers, your priests have put upon you – clothes upon clothes.Drop those clothes. It will be difficult, because those clothes carry respectability. Those clothes make you the inheritor of your whole family’s past. Those clothes make you a Jew, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. Those clothes make you a cousin to Jesus Christ or Moses or Buddha. That is the difficulty; you cannot drop them.But you seem to be a courageous man, to accept that you are a hypocrite. Just a little more courage: drop all that has been imposed upon you. Be utterly naked, the way existence wanted you to be. That’s the way you had come into the world. I mean metaphorically – you need not walk naked into Portland. Here of course, you can, there is no problem. Nobody will pay any attention, you will simply feel and look silly. Nobody will even ask, “What is the matter?”In my commune everybody is accepted as he is. If he is enjoying the morning sun naked, he is not interfering with anybody, he is not committing any crime. And if you don’t want to see him, there is no need to see him. When you are passing him just keep your eyes closed, or look to the other side. His nakedness is a problem only because in his nakedness you can see your nakedness too. You know you have not been courageous enough to drop your clothes and be open to the wind, to the rain, to the sun.If you really love what I am revealing to you – it is not a revelation from God, it is just opening my human heart, just to give you courage so that you can also open your heart, so that there is no fear. And when two hearts open…there is a symphony that arises out of two hearts open to each other, beating with each other in a certain rhythm.That harmony will give you roots, will make you centered, will make you grounded. And you will also be able to forgive your parents. Not only that, you may feel sorry for them, because the same has been done to them by their parents and family, and so on and so forth, till you reach Adam and Eve – and they have not been treated in a different way even by God.So this is the whole genealogy of humanity. Each individual is part of this long ugly history. But nothing can be done now; gone is gone. You can forgive, you can feel compassion for all those people. And don’t waste time in finding the roots of your resentment. There are no roots, it is just a conscious thing. It is a parasite.In India we have a creeper which has no roots. It simply moves from one tree to another tree; it can be miles long. It simply sucks juices from trees. When I was a child and somebody told me that this creeper has no roots, I could not believe it – I am not a type who believes in anything. I went following the creeper deep into the forest, where it had started its pilgrimage of exploitation. Yes, there were no roots. The creeper had small branches coming out, very thin but very strong, like thorns. Those thorns enter into the trees, and from the trees it exploits.Your resentment has no roots, so don’t waste time. It is a rootless creeper. Your hatred, your anger, all are rootless; they are out of your misunderstanding. They are just in the conscious mind, sucking you, your energy, your intelligence, your silence, your serenity. Just try to understand why it happened. And it is not something that has happened only to you, it has happened to everybody – in that one matter we are all equal. Only in that matter is communism right. So don’t feel that you are the only sufferer.Becoming alert, conscious, looking at how this resentment has grown…just the very understanding of it will dissolve it.My father tried his best to make me in his own image; my mother has tried, all those who loved me. I cannot suspect their intentions, their intentions were good. But that is what has been done to them by their parents, and that was all that they could do to me. How can I feel resentful? It was just pure misunderstanding. I feel sad and sorrowful for them because they suffered, their parents suffered, the whole humanity has been suffering unnecessarily.Just a small revolution will change the whole color of the world. And that small revolution is contained in being free, in being your own self, whatsoever the cost.My father used to take me to the temple. I resisted, I fought with him, but he said, “You will have to come; otherwise you will fall into hell.” I said, “I would rather fall into hell of my own accord – at least the satisfaction will be there that this is my choice. But you cannot force me into paradise. I will suffer there, badly, because I will not be able to forget that I have been pushed there forcibly, against my will.”The day I said this to him, for a moment he was silent, and he said, “Then it is okay. Wherever you want to go, you go.”I said, “I will remain thankful to you for my whole life, because right now I have an appointment to play cards with a few people. You go to your temple, I will go to my appointment. And from this moment there is a possibility of friendship between us.” And from that moment that friendship grew, and a moment came that he became a sannyasin.My mother is a sannyasin. Of course my mother became a sannyasin first – women are more courageous, for the simple reason that they have nothing to lose. They don’t have anything – no respectability, no position in the society; there is no problem.My father took sannyas four years after my mother became a sannyasin. He started feeling bad that he was not courageous enough; but he started meditating, started coming to the meditation camps. And finally, one day, there were two things: the breakdown of the personality and the breakthrough into a new existence, into a new life.If your father is alive, help him. Tell him why you have been feeling resentful, it was simply misunderstanding, “You have done everything that you thought is good. It may not be good – it is not good, but it was not your fault.”The fault goes back to God. That’s why I am continually beheading God. Any moment I find a chance, I behead him immediately, because he is the original source of all the stupidity, suffering, misery in which man has to live.Your father has nothing to do with it. If he is alive, go – and don’t be a hypocrite before him. He has taught you to be a hypocrite. Go naked and nude, just yourself. And please don’t replace your father with me. That is absolutely unfair, unjust.I have never tried in my life to change anybody’s life. Millions of people have changed their lives around me, but that is their responsibility. I have not made any active effort to enter their territory. I respect everybody’s territory. But if they found something that makes them blissful, peaceful, at ease, and they wanted to have all these blessings themselves, it is their business. Nobody can make me feel responsible for anything. Neither do I make anybody responsible for anything. I respect the individual.So if you know there is resentment, drop it. The reason is, your father must have been hard in trying to make you a good boy. Now you can go to him – you are no longer a boy, you are no longer even a son to him. You are a sannyasin; and a sannyasin is nobody’s son, nobody’s father, nobody’s husband, nobody’s wife. I mean in reality, not legally. Legally you may be a husband, a wife, that is a different thing. But in reality you are just yourself, I am just myself.If he is dead, then go to his grave with flowers to offer, with tears to offer. The question is not whether your father listens or not, the question is that you are doing it. In your tears your resentment will be gone, washed away. With your flowers you would have shown respect to the person whose intentions were always good.And don’t replace him with me. Without even asking my permission, you become my son, I become your father! Then naturally all that was directed toward your father – resentment, anger, hatred – you direct toward me, and I am absolutely innocent in the matter. I don’t even know you! I don’t know whom I am answering!And don’t replace your family with the commune. The commune is not the family. The commune is the death of the family. Not one family, many families die, then one commune is created – on their ashes. Your family is dead.All those who have come to me have dropped out of their families, their religions, their churches.And here there is no family, just friends living together, helping each other.Osho,What kind of trust do you have in someone who is cheating you, murdering you? I could not understand.I do not understand myself – but what to do?I have only trust to offer because I don’t have any distrust in me.You ordinarily think that trust has to be given to a trustworthy person. You are very miserly. Perhaps you have only a very small quantity of trust, and you can give it to only a very few trustworthy people. And that too you never give wholeheartedly. You always remain on the boundary, showing trust, but deep down still feeling, “Who knows if this man is really trustworthy or not?” So you are ready; if you find he is not trustworthy, you can step back.You cannot understand my problem. My problem is I don’t have distrust to give to anybody. In that sense I am very poor. There are many things which are missing: I cannot hate anybody, I cannot be angry at anybody, I cannot do any harm to anybody. I am really poor.Your question seems to be relevant; “How can you trust a man who is cheating you?” I would like to ask you, “If you cannot trust a man who is cheating you, what kind of trust do you have?” A very impotent kind of trust. If the man is trustworthy, then anybody will trust him. But if the man is cheating, only a man like me can trust him. I may even help him to cheat me in a better way.It happened in a Sufi mystic’s house that by mistake a thief entered. He was thinking that it was some rich man’s house. The house was beautiful and big; some rich follower had presented it to the Sufi mystic. Seeing the house, the thief could easily calculate how much treasure must be inside it.But when he went in for the first time, he was shocked to see that the doors were open. In such a beautiful mansion, there was not even a guard, and the doors were open. He felt a little shaky and afraid too – perhaps this was some kind of a trap.But his greed was greater than his fear. He said, “I should look around a little bit more. Perhaps they have forgotten to lock the door. Perhaps the guard is on vacation, away for the weekend.”He went in and there he found the Sufi…. It was hot summer but Sufis use only wool. That’s why they are called Sufis – suf in Arabic means wool. They use only woolen clothes – it does not matter whether it is winter or summer or rain. And in Arabia it is almost always summer, hot summer, the sun is burning – and the Sufis use wool.So the Sufi was lying down on a woolen blanket. And there was nothing in the whole house, not a single thing, because the Sufi used the blanket in the day to cover himself and in the night to lie on. The thief was of course very much disappointed. He looked into other rooms, and when he came back to the front of the house where the Sufi was lying he saw that the Sufi had moved to the bare floor and had left the blanket.The thief could not understand what had happened, but he thought, “Whatsoever has happened, at least I can take this blanket.” But he was feeling a little sorry too, “This man will not have anything tomorrow even to wear. I have looked in the house, there is nothing to eat. Such a beautiful mansion, so utterly empty! The only belonging is the blanket.” Even the thief felt compassionate.Just out of habit, first he took the blanket and was going to run away, but on second thoughts he spread the blanket again in its place. The Sufi was awake. He said, “What are you doing? I rolled out of the blanket just so that you could take it. The house is empty and I am very sorry. I never thought that a thief would come here; otherwise I would have arranged a few things.“Next time when you come, just inform me two or three days ahead. I have many followers, I can collect things. They are always giving and I am not taking because I don’t need. But please don’t reject this blanket; otherwise I will always feel wounded that a man had come to find something and I am so utterly poor that I could not offer him anything.”The thief was in a great difficulty: what to do? Nobody before has begged him to steal. And not a single word of condemnation – on the contrary, the Sufi is feeling guilty that the house is empty.Just not to wound the beautiful man, with whom he had almost fallen in love…he had never seen such a man who could be so loving, so trusting, so helpful even to a thief in his own house. So he took away the blanket, but could not go far. It was ugly to distrust such a man who trusts you so totally, who respects your humanity so totally without any condition.He came back, and what he saw he could not believe. The Sufi was sitting outside the mansion. It was a full-moon night and he was singing a song. The song meant: “I am so poor. If I possessed the full moon I would have given it to that poor man.” He was crying because he did not possess the moon; otherwise he would have given the moon to the poor man.The thief listened to his song – it was so beautiful…. He came and fell at the Sufi’s feet and told him, “Just accept me. You have already a big mansion; accept me as your disciple, as your servant – in any way. And please take this blanket back, I cannot take it. And I promise you, I will never steal because, who knows, sometimes one may be stealing in the house of a man like you. I am not dropping stealing because stealing is bad, I am dropping stealing because there are people like you who can trust even a thief.”You ask me, “How can you trust somebody who is cheating you?” I trust the potential of the individual, I trust his innermost purity, which no cheating can destroy. I know he is cheating because he has been trained to cheat, the society has forced him to cheat. But he is not responsible, he is only a victim. And won’t you trust a victim?You are asking me, “How can you trust a man who is murdering you?” I have lived my life so intensely and so totally that if somebody murders me he is not taking anything away from me. I will trust him for the simple reason that he is a human being; his being a murderer does not matter. Anyway, one day I am going to die, and when I die I will not be satisfying anybody. Today I can satisfy this man; even my death becomes valuable.I help people in my life, I am helping this man in my death. If this is his enjoyment, if this is what will bring some rejoicing to him, then I am the last person to interfere in it; I will help him. And I will die trusting him.And the last thing I would like to say to you:Trust is a very alchemical force.If you trust somebody, you can transform the person.Perhaps my trust may stop him being a murderer. My trust may stop somebody cheating me. Trust is a tremendous force, it is not something small. You don’t know about it; your trust is not trust. First you find out the trustworthiness of the person and then you say you trust him. He is trustworthy – you are not trusting. And I don’t care whether he is trustworthy or not. That is his business, that is his problem.I do my thing and I let him do his thing. I will trust and love and shower all my blessings on him. Perhaps he may not come across another man like me. Perhaps this is the only opportunity for him to be transformed, to be reborn.Osho,My lover was going to leave the commune to live with me. Then she changed her mind and said that to be able to live happily in the commune she has to forget me and drop the connection with me. And she has really cut the connection. This is driving me crazy. I cannot understand it. Am I stupid, or is she? Or are we both?Just you are stupid.And you wanted her also to be stupid like you. But she proved far more intelligent than you are. Rather than going away from the commune – which is the only alternative today in the whole world where some transformation can happen – if she dropped you and the connection with you, she did absolutely right. In fact, if you love her you should come back to the commune. Why should she leave the commune to live with you, out of the commune?You say it is driving you crazy. No, you are crazy, nobody can drive you crazy. You could not understand the woman. She loved you. She loved you so much that against her will, reluctantly, she was ready even to go with you and live outside. But it was so much against her whole being that finally she decided she had to choose. She had to choose between me and you.Now who is stupid? If you have a little bit of intelligence left, come back. She has made an opportunity for you too. By remaining here, by clearly, decisively disconnecting from you and your love, she has given you the message that something bigger than your love is happening here.If you love her you should come to the commune. She has made it possible for you to come back to the commune to be near and close to me. She loves you, that’s why she has disconnected completely. This is an electric shock treatment. You know perfectly well she loves you. She knows perfectly well that unless she stops all connections with you, you are not going to come back here.And why were you afraid of being here? You being the man…and she is a woman – she has more courage than you, she has more guts than you. Just slap your face, wake up, and come back. And you will find for the first time what real love is.If you cannot sacrifice perhaps your salary, your position, your respectability in the society, then go to hell! You are not meant to be a lover – with all your respectability and all your salary and position.Your question is a little strange. You have not said why you wanted her to go with you to the outside world. You have some investment in the outside world. It was not out of love that you were persuading her to go with you; it was your respectability there, your position, your business – anything. She could see it, that she is being used. And to use any human being is the ugliest thing in existence. She refused to be used. She declared her independence.But she has not declared that she does not love you. She has simply disconnected herself so that you are free, she is free. This is an act of love. And if you have something of manliness in you then drop all that is keeping you there outside; for the sake of love come back to her here. And in this way she has created a way to come back near me…otherwise what love do you know?The whole world seems to be loving. Fathers are loving their children, children are kissing their moms, moms are loving their husbands. Brothers, sisters, friends, the whole world is entangled – loving. And if you look around the world you don’t see any fragrance of love. Four billion people loving, and there is no fragrance of love. All that you smell is nuclear weapons, Hiroshima still burning, Nagasaki. When the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was seven hundred times less atomic energy in the whole world than there is today.And you are going to a society which is continuously preparing to commit suicide, where AIDS is spreading like wildfire. My communes will be the only refuge where we can prevent AIDS, where we can promote a great world movement of meditation, silence and peace – and destroy the mad dreams of politicians to kill all life on this earth.Osho,The other morning I woke up with these words on my mind: “I'm going to squeeze the juice, the whole juice, and nothing but the juice, out of this moment.” Can this be the new oath when we rewrite the constitution?You woke up with this sentence: “I’m going to squeeze….” Still “going…”? You should have squeezed then and there! “Going to squeeze the whole juice of this moment”? When? When this moment is gone?And you started wondering about the world constitution that sannyasins will write: “Can this be the oath in that constitution?” No!In the first place sannyasins are not going to write any constitution. Constitutions are written by politicians. Constitutions are written by people who are power-lusty, ambitious. Constitutions are needed because they are all nations.I am trying to destroy all divisions between man and man.In my commune nobody knows who is a German, who is an Italian, who is an American. And soon I’m going to suggest to my commune people to create dresses which don’t make any distinction between man and woman.So in the first place we are not going to make any constitution. We are going to destroy all the constitutions of the world. And for argument’s sake, if some idiot sannyasin, some camel, starts writing a constitution, then this sentence cannot be there as an oath; “I am going to squeeze the whole juice of this moment.” But when?Your sentence is exactly against my whole teaching. Squeeze it! Don’t even think, “I’m going to squeeze….” By that time the moment is gone.Squeeze it first, then say whatsoever you want to say!Osho,You say you don't like spaghetti, but spaghetti seems to me a real example of a realized being. If well-cooked, the strings melt into each other, yet each of them remains itself. Please comment.That’s why I don’t like spaghetti, because I don’t like your so-called self-realized men, your prophets, your messiahs, your avataras, your tirthankaras. They are all spaghetti – you are right. And I don’t want to be a spaghetti.I don’t prevent you from enjoying it. It is very difficult for Italians to stop spaghetti. Even if I promised them that if you stop spaghetti you will be enlightened, they would not stop spaghetti. That is the only thing they have contributed to the world; otherwise, what is the contribution of Italy? – a certain kind of greasiness.You have found the right reason why I don’t like spaghetti – because it is very similar to your prophets, your messiahs. I think – were all these people Italians, or what? I will never…. Just visualizing your spaghetti is enough for me to feel sick.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Your contradictions, your lies, and your insistence that we are not to believe you, have made my mind inoperable. All it can say with certainty is, “I don't know.” I used to be quite proud of my mind, but now it simply feels stupid. So far, it's not no-mind, but perhaps someday soon, its dying gasp may be, “I don't know.” Meanwhile, my heart feels better and better. When you contradict yourself it simply has a good laugh and feels grateful. What's happening?My contradictions are meant to do exactly what is happening to you. I don’t want your mind to be convinced by me. I want to relate with your heart, because that is the only true communion. Mind to mind is always superficial.I can be consistent, but then I will be convincing your mind – and that is the last thing I want to do.I am not a missionary, and I have no message for you. I have only experience, and the way to convey the experience to you is not through words, theories, philosophies. The argument is not the answer.So first I have to dismantle your mind, and the best way to dismantle your mind is to contradict myself as much as I can. Either you will escape, feeling that you may go crazy, or if you have guts, you will remain here and really go crazy!When the mind becomes inoperable, that is the moment when the heart starts functioning.You are in a good space. If the mind is saying, “I don’t know,” the mind is closing up shop. And here, when the mind closes the shop, immediately the doors of your heart start opening. They are two sides of the same coin. That’s why when you hear me contradicting myself, you have a good laugh. That is the right response to my contradictions.Yes, it is still not a state of no-mind. It is still mind that is saying, “I do not know.” When the mind is completely gone, in a state of no-mind, there is nobody to say “I do not know.” That is the last knowledge. It is knowledge, “I do not know” – at least this much you know. This is the last barrier. It also drops; then there is no question of knowing or not knowing. For the first time you feel, and feeling is the way of experiencing.When you are in your head you are millions of miles away from me.When you are in your heart you are in my heart too, because hearts don’t know separation.And my whole work is that it beats in the same rhythm in all of you.Then you become an orchestra. There is still much more than the heart in you, but without heart you cannot reach your innermost treasure, the being.So these are the three words: thinking, feeling, being. From thinking, nobody has ever been able to reach being. Nobody can bypass feeling; feeling is the bridge. The first step is from thinking to feeling, and the second step is from feeling to being. And in two steps the whole journey is complete.So remember, feeling will be tremendously beautiful, but don’t stop there. That is only a stopover. You can rest there a little bit, enjoy the world of the heart, but remember there is one step more.Through contradictions I destroy your clinging to the mind and thinking. Through silence I destroy the world of your feeling. And when both these layers are gone, you are as existence wanted you to be, in your purity, in your individuality. You have come home.So don’t be worried, the journey has begun. Don’t stop until you come back home, where there is no thinking, no feeling, but only a sense of existence. In that experience, I will be able to convey to you that which is unconveyable in any other way. Then I am not the master and you are not the disciple.In the mind, I am the teacher, you are the student.In feeling, I am the master, you are the disciple.In being, I am not, you are not – existence is.Osho,What is it that happens when you dance with me? You say you are an ordinary man, but dancing with you is no ordinary experience. It is unlike anything I have felt before.Who told you that I am an ordinary man?It must be me! Only an extraordinary being can have the guts to say that he is ordinary. Every ordinary person thinks in himself that he is extraordinary, although he has not the guts to say it.I am extraordinary! Otherwise there is no reason for all of you to be here with me. What the hell are you doing here with an ordinary man?Yes, while dancing with me you must have experienced something that you cannot experience with anybody else – because it is not a dance of two bodies, not a dance but a deep, very deep meeting.Don’t listen to my words.Trust what you feel with me.That dance has given you the right dimension which I cannot give you with words. Words are ordinary, but the silence, the beautiful dance – mingling, meeting, merging into each other, forgetting who you are…the dance is drinking from the very source of my being.You have tasted something of me.I have to create so many devices for you so that you can be taken out of your imprisonment.You would never have thought that one day you would be dancing with me. Your mind simply stopped. Your heart started functioning with great energy. Looking into my eyes, looking into my gestures, slowly, slowly there is a synchronicity. Then there are not two persons dancing, there is only dance. And that is the state of the divine drunkard.You are blessed. But don’t make it a mind thing; otherwise you will be back to the same old miserable state.What you have experienced in the dance, let it become your life now.And it is not that you have to dance only with me. I only give you the key; then, dance with the wind, dance with the sun, dance with the trees, and everywhere you will find me dancing with you. That’s a promise.Ordinarily, I never give promises.Osho,Isn't enlightenment another idea like heaven? Why should it be that once you are enlightened you are never born again? Life is so juicy and such a blast, it seems crazy to become enlightened and never come back again.So then don’t get enlightened! Who is forcing you to become enlightened? Just get lost!Do you know what you are saying? Do you understand the implications of it? I know what your life is, and I know what you are calling juicy. It is nothing but Coca-Cola. I have known your life, that’s why I can say that. I have been in the same space where you are.When you become enlightened, it is not another idea like heaven, because you never become heaven. Have you ever heard of that, somebody becoming heaven? Heaven is a hope for all those who are miserable and are living in hell. It is for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans; it is not for my people.Enlightenment is a state of your own being.It is not somewhere else far away above the clouds; it is within you. It simply means you start feeling and experiencing life itself. And it is luminous, hence the word enlightenment.You have no idea of your own life, so what juice are you experiencing? Making love to a woman? That is making coffee – and with so much trouble. When there is instant coffee available, why are you doing these gymnastics?A drunkard was roaming around the beach, and he saw a man, a wrestler, doing push-ups. He was very much puzzled. Finally, he could not contain himself; he went to the wrestler and said, “Friend, your girl has escaped! I also do these push-ups,” he said, “but I always do them with my girl. What are you doing?”You say, “Life is so juicy.” Is it really so? Then why are you here? What is the search? What are you seeking? It is not juicy. Yes, once in a while you may get a moment of blissfulness, but that moment makes you more miserable. If misery is continuous you become accustomed to it. Man’s adaptability is almost infinite. If you are in suffering, and suffering remains constant, you settle for it, you start taking it for granted.Here, perhaps you may have some moments when another dimension of being enters you. For a moment you are no longer in suffering, in misery, in jealousy, in greed, in fear, in any kind of paranoia. For a single moment you are where the enlightened person remains twenty-four hours a day. He cannot fall from that state.And your juiciness about life is always a kind of dependence. You have a beautiful man, or a woman – you think life is so juicy. But even Cleopatra – who is known to be the most beautiful woman who has walked on the earth – within two, three days will be just an ordinary woman. All the juice will disappear soon, because a woman is after all a woman, and a man is after all a man. You will start fighting, quarreling, arguing, nagging, and you will wonder what happened to the juice.It was all imagination; imagination cannot last forever. It was a hallucination; you cannot depend on it. And everybody is dependent on different kinds of hallucinations. Sooner or later there is frustration.Enlightenment is independence: the juice is not coming from somebody else. If it is coming from somebody else it can be stopped any moment. It if is coming from somebody else, the person can change his mind – his juice can start flowing toward someone else, not toward you. That’s why there is so much jealousy. If your wife just looks at a beautiful man, stops on the street, forgets all about you – you are standing by the side – will you feel juicy?Just look at husbands walking with their wives on the street in the marketplace, and you can immediately say whether this man is a husband or a boyfriend. There is no need to ask. The husband is burdened, sad, dragging somehow, wanting to escape – so many beautiful women are passing by. He cannot even look at someone, the wife is there watching, a detective. They both are watching each other, detecting something to fight about.Anything that is dependent on something outside you…. You may be feeling very juicy because you have so much money, but soon you see you cannot eat the money, you cannot squeeze the dollar and take the juice out of it. You may hurt your hand. And you can see many people who are far richer than you, and far more miserable also.Have you ever heard of a rich man being blissful? He is worried, continuously in anxiety. Nights, he cannot sleep – in fact, a man’s richness can be measured by how many sleeping pills he needs.Yes, in the beginning, when suddenly you win a lottery, you start jumping and enjoying and you feel life is very juicy. But the lottery is outside you, it is not going to happen every day. Tomorrow you will be miserable because the lottery is not coming today. The day after tomorrow? And what will you do with the lottery money? You may gamble, you may go to a pub and get drunk and fall in a gutter. You may go to a prostitute. What are you going to do with the money that you have got?Anything that is outside you can only give you an illusory feeling of beauty, of joy. But those moments are dangerous because they make you aware of all the darkness of your life. They give you the contrast.Enlightenment is not an idea. It is an experience independent of any object. Nobody can steal it, nobody can borrow it. There is no way to lose it; it is yours forever. And then you will know what real juice means.Right now you may be having a few games here and there. They are simply wasting your time. The same time can be given to finding your reality, your being. Enlightenment is eternal. And there is no way to lose it, because it is you. You have discovered yourself.You are asking, “If the enlightened person is never born again in the body, and since life is so juicy, why bother about enlightenment?” You can ask the question because you don’t have any way to compare. You have only known this life. You don’t know there is an eternal life too, with no disease, no sickness, no AIDS, no old age, no death. That is enlightenment.For what should the enlightened person be born again? To be sick? To be old? To go through this whole rut of life, which is nothing but suffering, continuous pain? The enlightened person does not enter into the body again because he has entered into the cosmos.It is as if you are living in a small hut, and somebody says to you that there is a marble palace of infinite dimensions; but one condition is, you cannot come back to your hut again. You will say, “I don’t want to go after such an idea. Losing my hut? It is so cozy and so comfortable, and I have lived here so long.” The poor man cannot compare, he has no idea….Have you heard the story of a frog from the ocean who happened to come to Oregon? He was on a journey toward the White House. The moment he heard that even chimpanzees can become presidents in America, he said, “What is wrong with me, a perfectly beautiful frog?”Feeling thirsty – in Oregon, who would not feel thirsty? – he jumped into a well. In the well there was another frog who had owned the well as far back as he could remember. He was surprised to see this frog, but frogs are not so hostile to strangers as Oregonians are. He welcomed the new frog and said, “Any news about the outside world? – I don’t go anywhere, I simply live here. It is perfectly beautiful: enough water, enough shade, enough food.”The frog from the outside said, “My boy, you don’t know anything. I come from the ocean.”“Ocean?” the frog said. “What is that? What kind of a well?”The frog from the ocean said, “It is not a well at all.”The frog of the well asked, “Then how big is it?”It was difficult for the ocean frog to give some estimate of the vastness of the ocean. He said, “It is very difficult to express. You have to experience it.”The well frog said, “I will give you some measurements.” He jumped one-fourth of the well, and he said, “Is it that big? No?” Then he jumped half of the well and said, “Is your ocean that big? No?” He jumped the whole well from one corner to the other, and he said, “Is your ocean that big?”The ocean frog said, “Please forgive me, you don’t understand at all. From your well, there is no way to measure the ocean.”And the well frog said, “Just get out of here! You are insulting your host. This is all a lie! There is no such thing. It is just your idea, just to make me feel humiliated. This is not the right attitude, right etiquette! Just get out of this place immediately; otherwise I will kill you!”You cannot be angry with the well frog – that was his only vision, his only perspective. You have to forgive him. You have to forgive him because you are in his position. If you don’t forgive him, you will not be able to forgive yourself either.I am talking about the oceanic juice, and you are comparing it with Coca-Cola.Just come along with me. There is no other way, no other way to explain it to you. All explanations are false. But I can take you to the place, the very space of enlightenment. I know the way. I know your situation. I was one day in your situation, and I would have asked the same question.Unless you know enlightenment, don’t start thinking about it as an idea. It is not an idea. It is reality, your very reality. And a reality so big, so vast, so beautiful, so full of blessings – the whole universe is smaller than it.But if you are satisfied in your well in Oregon, it is perfectly okay. It is not a trouble for me. You can become one day the attorney general of Oregon, or the governor. But remember, whatever you become, you will remain a frog of the wells – limited, very much limited.I am challenging you to jump out of the well. And the ocean is not far away – just come with me up to Portland. It is not a long journey either, because my methods are jet-age methods. By the time you have put the belts on, you have reached, it is time to get out of the plane. And the moment you see the ocean, there will be no need for me to convince you that this is bigger than your well. In fact, I will see tears flowing from your eyes, of sheer joy, of great gratitude that the ocean was so close and you remained confined in a small well your whole life. And you were thinking it was very juicy.Now you know the beauty of vastness.Now you know the song of the tide, the waves.Now you know the sunset on the ocean.In your well it was always night: dark, dismal, dull. Here, confronting the ocean, every moment is change. The ocean is never static; waves upon waves…it is moving. It is so full of energy; it is not something dead, it is alive.But it is up to you; nobody can force you into enlightenment. Only you, if you have any courage, can take the jump.I can guarantee one thing: you would not like to be born again, because what have you gained? In the body, in this life, you are a pauper. Enlightened, you will become an emperor. Why should an emperor want to be a pauper again?But first one has to have both the experiences; only then is there the possibility of comparison. Otherwise, you think what you are living is real, and enlightenment is just an idea like heaven. No. Heaven is just an idea, enlightenment is your consciousness blossoming, flowering with tremendous fragrance – inexhaustible. You can share it with the whole world. You are so blessed, you can bless the whole existence.And this I am saying on my own experience.Osho,You say, “Don't ask, and it shall be given to you,” and also, “Trust in Allah, but tie your camel first.” When is the moment of action and when is the moment of surrender?First, you have asked; and I had said, “Don’t ask; otherwise, it shall not be given to you.” You have not understood it.Second, you quote an Arabian proverb: “Trust in Allah, but first tie down your camel.”In the desert of Arabia in the night, if you go to sleep your camel can move in any direction, and you may not be able to find the camel again. Hence the proverb: “Tie down the camel first; then trust in Allah.” That proverb is not made by any saint nor any prophet, that proverb has come out of generations of human experience. It is the conclusion of millions of people’s lives.Trust in Allah – because there is no Allah, but if you want to trust, trust. But on that trust don’t leave the camel untied; otherwise, you will be in difficulty. Allah is not going to take care of the camel the whole night.This is folk wisdom. It does not say, “There is no Allah, so don’t bother about Allah; just bind your camel, tie your camel.” But that actually is the meaning. Both cannot be true together. If trust in Allah is enough, then just say to Allah, “Please take care of my camel, I am going to sleep.” And just one experience will show you that there is no Allah, and no trust is of any help: the camel has gone.The camel does not believe in your Allah or in your trust; he believes in being tied. So do what the camel believes in, not what you believe in. Use the language of the camel, not your theology, your religion. The camel is not Mohammedan, not Hindu nor Christian.Except for man, no animal worships anybody. All animals are free of religions, theologies, churches. And strange, that you think you are more evolved than animals. At least in this case, you are not. Whom are you worshipping? You have not seen, you have never met, you don’t have any eyewitness nearby – and you are trusting in something absolutely hypothetical.It is folk wisdom. It is practical and pragmatic. I would like to say to you, forget all about Allah and trust: you simply tie down your camel, that will do. Why bring in Allah and trust, when just tying down is enough? That’s actually the meaning of the proverb.And you are not listening to me, or perhaps you are not getting the point although you hear me. I had said, “Ask not, and it shall be given to you.” Asking makes you a beggar, and the blessings of this existence can belong only to an emperor.Do not ask.What is yours will be revealed to you.In asking, in running, in seeking, in searching, you may completely forget that what you are looking for is within you.In my childhood I had a teacher with very weak eyes and very thick glasses; they had almost become part of his body. One day when I was sitting with him, he started looking here and there. I asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “I am looking for my glasses.”I said, “How can you look without glasses?”He said, “That’s right.”I said, “You are getting senile. The glasses are on your nose.”He touched them, and then he said, “This is strange. Perhaps you are right that I am going senile. The glasses are on my eyes, and through the glasses I am looking.” It was a simple thing: he could not look without glasses, and he was looking all around, searching. That was enough proof that the glasses were on his eyes. But in searching…. In fact, he was in a hurry: one of his friends was coming, an old friend. He was an old man, and the station was almost two miles away – so he was in a hurry to get to the station. In the hurry he forgot that the glasses were on his own eyes.The people who are seeking, searching, asking, running all over the world to find the truth, have only forgotten one thing: that before you start searching anywhere, please look within. That is the first place to start with. And whoever has looked within has never searched anywhere else. He has always found – without exception.You are born with the truth.It is your very flavor.You can forget it, but you cannot lose it.And that’s what has happened: you have forgotten. You got so interested in so many things that you have forgotten who you are. Whom are you going to ask? Who is going to give you the answer?I had said that statement in contrast to Jesus Christ’s words. He says, “Seek and ye shall find.” Analyze that sentence. That simply means that what you are seeking is something outside you: “Seek and ye shall find.” But if it is the seeker itself, then seek and you will go on missing.Jesus says, “Ask and it shall be given to you.” He is trying to convince you to pray – that is the meaning of ask. Pray, beg, and God is compassionate: if you pray honestly, it will be given to you. But no prayer has ever been answered – not even Jesus Christ’s prayer. On the cross he was waiting and waiting for God to do the miracle, and finally out of frustration, anger, disillusionment, he shouted, “Have you forsaken me?” Still there was no answer from the sky.There is nobody. You cannot complain; it was your idea to project a God far above the clouds. Now, ideas don’t answer. That’s why I said, “Ask not.” It is already given to you. Just keep quiet, silent.I am against prayer because I am against begging. I am against prayer because there is nobody in the sky to answer your prayer. You are simply wasting your time; not only that, you are living a deception.There is no need to pray. You have it already within you! Just close your eyes and look within. Go deeper, as deep as you can go, and at the very innermost core you are in for a great surprise: the one you were looking for is not above the clouds, it is just within you. It is you. And that moment is the moment of total freedom, total independence.Jesus says, “Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you.” I am reminded of a Sufi woman mystic. There have been very few women who have attained to the state of enlightenment. Her name was Rabiya al-Adabiya.She was passing along the street – she was not much known, it is a man’s world. Who cares about a woman, even if she is enlightened? She saw in front of a mosque a very famous Mohammedan saint, Hassan – who was known all over the country and beyond – with his hands stretched toward the sky, praying to God, “Give me this, give me that.”Rabiya was a rare woman in the history of men. She went, stood behind Hassan, and hit him on his head. He certainly could not believe that he is asking God for beautiful things, and a hit comes! He looked back, and he found a woman. Hassan said, “This is not right, disturbing somebody in his prayer time.”Rabiya said, “You idiot! You were asking, ‘Please open the doors’ – and I tell you the doors have never been closed! So who is going to open them? There is nobody to close them, there is nobody to open them. Just enter!”Jesus says, “Knock, and the doors shall be opened unto you.” There are no doors. If you knock you will be knocking on a wall. Then you can knock with your head, still the doors will not open.As far as existence is concerned there are no doors. It is all open, from all sides. Just enter from anywhere, and the closest place to enter it is within you. Any other place will be distant. Why not start from the point where you are?So first, get there where you are – grounded, centered in your own interiority – and the miracle is, there will be no need for you to go anywhere.No need to knock – the doors are open.Your interiority is the door, the open door for the whole cosmos.Osho,When you spoke about kids, sannyasins, the commune and the world, I was overwhelmed by your love and caring for all of us. There is immense gratefulness that I am living here. And yet frequently in my most joyful moments when I allow myself to be touched by the love and our way of life with you, I cry and feel a deep sadness. Please comment.There is no harm in crying if it comes out of gratefulness, if it comes out of joy, if it comes out of love. Tears are beautiful. What words cannot say, tears can say.And you feel a deep sadness. That too, is not bad. Just as near high mountains there are valleys – you cannot have valleys without mountains, you cannot have mountains without valleys. Mountains have their beauty, valleys have their beauty. Both are one. So when you are full of joy, love and gratitude, you are raised high to a mountain, you are on the peak of Everest. But by the side there is a deep valley – that is your sadness. There is no need to be worried about it.The sannyasin has to enjoy everything. He has to enjoy blissfulness, he has to enjoy sadness, because sadness has its own beauty. Joy can never be as deep as sadness. Sadness is unfathomable. Enter into it, allow its silence to penetrate you. The laughter, the dance, the joy – they have their beauties, but sadness is not without beauty. It has tremendous silence, stillness, serenity. You have just to start looking in the right direction.Your mind is associated with your old sadness – that your husband has not come back home, the night is half over and you are sad. I am not talking about that sadness – that you are going bankrupt and you are sad. I am not talking about that sadness.The sadness you are experiencing is part of the gratitude, blessing, love. It is not negative. This sadness has its own positivity. It is as existential as your joy; in fact, it gives the foundation to all your blessings. A man who has not know the silence of sadness is incomplete. You should know both.Life consists of contradictions. You should know the day, its beauty; you should know the night and its beauty. And remember, they are not separate. Every day brings you to the night, every night brings you back to the day. It is one wheel, one circle, one organic whole. Once you understand that, then in your life there will be a wholeness: nothing is rejected, everything is absorbed.And to me, to experience life in its wholeness is the only holy thing.The word holy is derived from whole. Don’t forget that your saints are not whole, cannot be. They have not accepted life in its wholeness. They have chosen, they have been calculating.My sannyasins can be holy, because I don’t tell you to choose. I tell you to enjoy and celebrate everything. Once in a while, sadness is such a relaxation that if you are continuously laughing, continuously joyous, you will get tired and bored. That sadness gives you relaxation so that you can laugh again. It is not against your laughter, they are all together. In life everything is joined with everything else.That’s why I say, all old religions have been teaching renunciation. I teach you rejoicing, not renunciation, because renunciation means: “Cut off this, cut off that. Drop out of the world, go to the monastery. Forget your family, your wife, your children. Be celibate. Fast. Don’t enjoy your food. Torture yourself. Don’t love your own body.” Renunciation is sick.Rejoice – that is health. And let me remind you, the word health, the word whole, the word holy, all come from the same root. Health means healed; the wound is healed. Now nothing is missing, there is no wound in you. You are complete, you are a circle.Be whole, and health and holiness will follow you like a shadow.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Buddha's religion spread all over Asia except India, and still Buddha's way of life has been accepted by India – to become more and more poor. Is there any way that India can accept your life-affirmative attitude and become rich, even without accepting your religiousness which is spreading all over the world?There are many questions in your single question. First, Buddha’s religion never spread over Asia. It died in India because Buddha was not ready to compromise on anything. He was against God, he was against a permanent soul, he was against the Vedas. While he was alive his charismatic personality impressed millions of people. The moment he was gone they started falling back into the old traps, old consolations, old deceptions, hallucinations.And the Brahmins, who had been completely shaken by Buddha’s assertions, took revenge. Buddhists were killed, burned alive. Those who survived escaped India to Tibet, to Burma, to Ceylon, to China, to Japan – all over Asia.But what they spread there is not Buddhism. They had learned the lesson in India that Buddhism was completely finished there because Buddha would not compromise. They compromised in each country where they went – with the tradition, with their consolations. So what exists in Tibet is not Buddhism but Tibetan superstitions mixed with Buddha’s philosophy. It is a mixture, and only those parts of Buddhism are accepted which fit with the Tibetan mind.The same is true about China, about Ceylon, about Japan, about Korea, about Thailand. All over Asia Buddhists reached and had to compromise with the tradition there. Only the name remained Buddhism; the content completely disappeared. The revolution died. The revolution was in the uncompromising standpoint of Buddha: to be absolutely devoted to experience and not to philosophies and theologies and words. That got lost. They saved the name but Buddhism died.So the first thing, forget that Buddhism spread all over Asia. Buddhism died with the death of Buddha. And in fact that is how it should be. It is dangerous for any religion to survive without an enlightened master. Then that religion becomes a hindrance to human progress. And the unenlightened people start interpreting the enlightened one’s statements. This is sheer nonsense, this cannot be done.The second thing, you say: “Although Buddhism disappeared from India, Buddha’s way of life was accepted, particularly his teaching about renunciation, living in poverty.” That too is not correct. Jainism is at least five thousand years older than Buddhism. And they have been teaching more poverty, more renunciation.Jainas don’t accept Buddha as an enlightened person because he had three sets of robes as his possessions. That was enough to destroy his enlightenment.Hinduism is far older; Hindu scholars themselves think it is ninety thousand years old. And Hinduism is in support of the status quo of the society. The rich man is rich because he was virtuous in his past lives; the poor man is poor because he committed something wrong in his past life. They have shifted the whole burden to the past life.And for thousands of years they have been teaching that you are poor because you deserve to be poor, this is a punishment. And if you revolt against your situation you will be punished again in the coming lives. It is better to accept it, it is better not to do anything against it; then there is a possibility in the next life that you also may be rich.Now you see the whole strategy. This life is completely ignored. The past life – about which you know nothing – is important. And the life that you are living you have to live according to the rules of the society without any revolt, without any effort to do something to destroy poverty, because that is trying to escape from the wheel of the law of action and its consequence. You cannot escape; if you put your hand into the fire you are going to be burned. You go on putting your hand into the fire and you don’t want to be burned.It is because of these people that India has remained a country without any revolution. And India has suffered more than any other land: thousands of years of immense poverty, two thousand years of slavery. Small groups, primitives, nomads invaded India, a vast continent, and became victorious because India was ready to accept anything. They were programmed for acceptance: if slavery was coming that meant God wanted them to be slaves.You will be surprised that even in the twentieth century when one of the states of India, Bihar, had a very great earthquake and thousands of people died, Mahatma Gandhi had only one thing to say – that they were dying because of their bad karmas. The earthquake was not killing them, it was their past lives. And nobody asks Mahatma Gandhi, “Why Bihar only? All over India, all over the world people have been doing the same things in their past lives. Have all the sinners been born in Bihar?” Their sins are bringing the earthquake.These are ways of explaining away situations for which you don’t have any explanation, or you don’t have the guts to say the truth.So it is not that Buddha and his religion were rejected but his teachings about poverty were accepted; teaching about poverty were already accepted thousands of years before Buddha. They have nothing to do with Buddha. Buddha simply joined the whole company who were telling people, “Be contented as you are.”And I am amazed – Buddha was not contented to be in beautiful palaces, with beautiful, gorgeous women, with all the luxuries available to him. And he was going to be the king of his country. His father was old, seventy, and wanted in his own life to see the crowning ceremony of Gautam Buddha. Buddha could not be content with that, and he escaped. And he is teaching the poor people to be content. Can’t you see the contradiction?But poor people have to be given the opium of consolation. It helps the rich to become more rich and the poor to become more poor. If half the world is dying with poverty and starvation, who is responsible? All your prophets, all your messiahs, all your avataras – the whole mafia of your religious leaders. They have made humanity suffer for centuries, and still they are doing the same. Still they are preaching the same thing, that poverty has something spiritual in it.Poverty is the greatest crime, because all other crimes are born out of poverty; it is the source. And your religious leaders are praising poverty. They are agents of the politicians, they are agents of all those who are in power. There is a conspiracy between the politicians and the priests. The politician goes on paying respect to the priest. Ronald Reagan goes to the Vatican to pay his regards to Pope the Polack.And naturally the pope goes on preaching no birth control, no abortion, because these are against God: God is giving children to you and you are preventing God from doing his work. God seems to be doing great work! The earth is already four times overpopulated. If the same rate of growth in population continues, by the end of this century the whole world will be dying of starvation.I want these criminals – the pope, Mother Teresa, etcetera – to be locked up before they do too much harm.You are asking me, cannot my way of life and my approach toward creating more wealth, technology, science, be accepted without my philosophy of religiousness? No. It is impossible.My philosophy of religiousness is an organic whole.You cannot take part of it – that part will be dead. Either you have to accept it whole or you have to reject it whole.And I am not for compromise on any grounds.Just see: if you don’t accept that luxury is man’s birthright, you cannot create wealth. For what? If the rich man cannot enter into the kingdom of God, would you like to become a rich man? This life is small, very small. Compared to the eternity of time it is just a second, or even less. Just be a little patient and you will enter into the kingdom of God with all its beauties and luxuries. They are waiting for you.But if you try to go against God here, if you stop the population explosion on the earth, if you try to convert all the energy that is going into war and death toward life, you are going against the politician, you are going against the priest. And these two, the politician and the priest, are the inventors of God.God is a lie.God is the greatest lie.Unless you are free from God, you cannot make this earth paradise, because then your paradise remains always above the clouds, then your paradise remains only a hope. And I want it to be a reality – now and here.You are asking me, “If they don’t accept your religious ideology, can’t they accept your approach toward wealth?” No. How can they accept it? They remain attached to their old religious traditions which are praising poverty. Before they can be creative of wealth, comfort, luxury, they have to destroy the old program of remaining poor because poverty is something spiritual.I don’t see anything spiritual in poverty. Do you think if somebody is suffering from cancer there is something spiritual in it? Somebody is sick, dying; is there something spiritual in it? If that is so then all great saints are born in Ethiopia and are dying every day; one thousand saints dying in Ethiopia – because if poverty is spiritual then Ethiopia is the land of spirituality.Whatever I am saying to you is an organic unity.If you accept one part of it, you will have to accept the whole of it. You cannot choose; everything is interrelated.I can see your concern for India because it is on the verge of becoming another Ethiopia. Fifty percent of the country is starving. One wants to do something, but one cannot do anything if they think their poverty is spiritual. You cannot do anything because they are programmed for thousands of years to die, starve, be hungry, beg, because that is earning a great bank balance in the kingdom of God. They are doing a great job and you disturb them.This life is a dream. In India that has been preached by all the religions that have arisen there: this life is a dream. What does it matter whether in a dream you are a beggar or an emperor? When you wake up you will find both were just dreams.Hindus say the world is maya, illusion, so don’t be disturbed too much by illusory things. When you wake up you will find that the rich man and you are in the same boat. He was dreaming he was rich, you were dreaming you were poor – but dreaming is dreaming.There is a beautiful story about Chuang Tzu, a great mystic of China. One morning, sitting in his bed, he looked very sad. His disciples had never seen him so sad. And never after waking up had he remained in his bed, sitting. What had happened? Was he sick?They gathered around and asked him, “Master, what is the matter?” He said, “The matter is really difficult, I cannot solve it; perhaps you may be of some help. I will tell you what is the matter. In the night I dreamed that I had become a butterfly, and I was moving from one flower to another flower.”The disciples said, “This is nothing to be sad about. In dreams we all do strange things; and this is not a bad thing, to be a butterfly – colorful, beautiful, moving from one juicy flower to another juicy flower. Why are you so worried?”He said, “You have not heard the whole thing. The problem is, now I am awake and I am wondering whether Chuang Tzu dreamed that he is a butterfly, or now the butterfly has gone to sleep and is dreaming she is Chuang Tzu.”Both are possible. If Chuang Tzu can dream that he is a butterfly, what can’t a butterfly dream that she is a Chuang Tzu?The disciples remained silent; there was no answer to it. Chuang Tzu was pointing toward a certain phenomenon that all religions have been teaching – that everything is a dream. The butterfly is a dream, Chuang Tzu is a dream. Then what is real? The real is far away. And in this dream, don’t get disturbed. Whether you are a camel, or a donkey, or a monkey – it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you accept it without any resentment so that you can reach one day the real world of God.This has been the basis of all religions: deny this world. That’s why they are all against me, because I say rejoice in this world – because there is no other world. Rejoice this moment, because the next moment is not certain. Rejoice today, because tomorrow never comes. And if you know how to rejoice this moment, you have the secret, the golden key, the magical key, in your hands…because whenever you will be, you will be in the present; wherever you will be, you will be in the present. And if you know how to open the doors of the present and its blessings, you know the whole secret of life.I would like India to understand me, but it is almost impossible. For thirty years I have been moving in India like a whirlwind, destroying my health, trying to tell people, “It is you who are responsible for your poverty.” And they were throwing shoes at me, stones at me; I was poisoned twice. Attempts on my life were made.Still I want that one day they should awake. But there is not much possibility.Osho,I used to believe that you were in contact with each of us in some esoteric, magical way. I thought you knew each of us. I felt comfortable, full of trust. Now everything is confused.I feel doubt. I don't know if God exists or not. But I cannot pray to him or believe in his presence like a great father. And you are saying you don't know our names or who we are. I feel abandoned.I am afraid that if I leave and don't hear your words, I am going to miss something. I am afraid I am getting closed instead of open. I feel like a camel lost in the desert. Are you doing other work with us beyond words?First, now you are in a right situation: confused, abandoned; all your consolations have been taken away – God, the master…. You were feeling great trust because I knew your name and you. Was it trust, or just an ego? And anyway, when you were born had you brought any name with you? You are all nameless. So what is the purpose of me knowing your name? It is a false label. And you were consoled because you thought I know you personally.It is good that consolation is gone. My knowing you personally is not going to help. What is going to help is, you have to know yourself personally.It is good that you feel like a camel lost in the desert of Oregon. You may not know that even camels are afraid to enter this desert. Have you seen any camel around? Only junipers are there. Junipers are known as the camels in the world of trees. They are far more capable than any camel.It is good that you feel you are lost because it opens a new dimension for search. It is good that you feel you are alone, abandoned, because that means you have to go inward and be acquainted with your own interiority.You cannot see your father figure in me. I don’t want anybody to see a father figure, a leader, a prophet, a messiah in me, because these are the people who have been keeping you enslaved for centuries. So I am not your father figure, I am not your leader, I am not a prophet. And I do not know you at all.You yourself don’t know yourself – and you expect me to know you? Don’t I have anything else to do? Why should I know you? And how is it going to help you? The only thing that can help is, you have to know yourself.So I am cutting all the bridges that can give you any consolation.Yes, I want you to feel utterly abandoned.Out of that despair is the door.Out of that anguish there is a possibility of your being awakened.All your leaders – political, social, religious, educational – have been deceiving you. They have been giving you false consolations, “Don’t be worried.” Jesus said to his disciples, “Don’t be worried, I will be coming soon.” Two thousand years have passed; how long is his “soon”? Can you stretch “soon” for two thousand years?And the people have been waiting – they are doing the same stupid thing as the Jews. Jews have been waiting for even longer, because Moses told them that “one day the messiah will come and deliver you from all your sufferings.” The messiah has not come, sufferings continue.I don’t want to give you any hope. I want you to be alert so that you can destroy your sufferings. It is good to be confused, good that you don’t know whether God exists or not. Why bother? God has never bothered about you.You say you cannot pray any more – good, because all prayer is false; you are praying to somebody who is not there. No prayer is ever answered. I am against prayer, I am for meditation. And you have to understand the difference.Prayer is addressed to an imaginary god.Meditation is a penetration into your own reality.Prayer is nothing but words.Meditation is utter silence.You are afraid that if you leave here you will miss something. Don’t be afraid, you won’t miss anything. Perhaps in going away from here you may again get your consolations back from Christian missionaries, rabbis. You may get again your lost God; you will be able to pray again. But remember: this you have done before and it has not transformed you. You can do it again, it is not going to transform you.But if you are going to remain here, you will be missing even more things, many more. Any shadow within you of belief, faith, I am going to take away. I want you to be left alone, absolutely clean, without any program, without any ideology, theology, philosophy – just you in your purity, in your silence, centered, grounded. And there is the real door, the door to existence.So it is up to you. If you can stand me a little more, be here, If you cannot stand me, then there are so many esoteric, magical people around. Go to these people. They will keep you as you are – stupid, idiotic. They will give you the belief that you are God’s chosen few, and you will remain a camel, a juniper, and nothing else.It is up to you.Do you want cheap consolation, or a real revolution? If you have guts, ask for revolution. If you are impotent, ask for consolation.All the impotents you can find in the churches, praying in the synagogues, in the temples. Go and mix in that crowd of camels. But it is not going to help you.My effort in destroying your consolations is to help you. I don’t want to lead you, I don’t want to be your savior. I am really going to kill your ego completely – I am a murderer. And unless your ego is completely destroyed you will not know the light that is within you, the life that is within you, the love that is within you.You have such a tremendous treasure, but it is within you. It is not in the synagogues, it is not in the churches, it is not in the Bible, it is not in the Koran, it is not in the Torah. It is in you. So I have to take everything that takes you away from yourself and I have to throw you back again and again to yourself. It hurts, I know. But what can I do? – all operations hurt. And this is the deepest surgery. There are surgeons of the body, there are surgeons of the brain.My surgery goes deeper than both.It is spiritual surgery.Osho,I have heard you say that you are the laziest man in the world. Is this the reason why in your commune the sannyasins are so busy, far more busy than people in the outside world? Please comment.It is true. I am the laziest man in the whole world. And to keep me lazy, my people have to work. To keep me poor, they have to give away all their fortunes. But they are enjoying it. The work they are doing is their love. Hence they have stopped calling it work; they call it worship.And my laziness is just my way of saying to you that the ultimate happens only when you are in a state of non-doing. It does not mean lazy according to your dictionaries. I am busy from six in the morning to eleven in the night. Of course, busy without business – I don’t have any business.I am lazy in my own meaning of the word; I am a non-doer. And that is my whole teaching to you, that even while you are doing something you remain a non-doer.Doing is not against your being a non-doer. The non-doer is your witnessing self.You are digging a hole in the garden, perspiring in the hot sun, but there is something in you which is simply witnessing – relaxed, knowing the perspiration, feeling the hard labor, smelling the beautiful fragrance of the earth. But there is a point in you which is absolutely a non-doer, only a watcher.When I say I am the laziest man in the world I simply mean that I am only my witness, my non-doer – just a watcher, a watcher on the hills.I have done whatever I needed to do. Don’t you want me to retire at some point? And when I have so many lovers and friends around the world, why should I bother not to be lazy? You can afford it. One million sannyasins cannot afford one laziest man?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why are there so few American sannyasins? I recall you saying that America would be a very spiritual country because they had already mastered material abundance and found it did not satisfy. Why are they so sleepy? Please comment.America has no roots. It is just a three-hundred-year-old country; it is passing through its childhood. Compared to a country like India which has been there for at least ninety thousand years, America is a just-born baby. So wait a little; babies don’t tend to be spiritual.Secondly, America has promoted itself as being really rich. That is not true. Thirty million Americans are in utter poverty; millions of black people are not first-class citizens, and the people to whom the country belongs, the Red Indians, are kept in reservations. Those reservations are not very much different to the concentration camps in Germany – in fact, they are more dangerous.In Germany, the concentration camps were made of barbed wire; you could not escape. The American reservations are open. If you want to go out, nobody is preventing you. They have created some psychological barbed wire – invisible. The Red Indians are being paid for doing nothing. Naturally, when a man has nothing to do and gets enough money, he gambles, he drinks, and he produces more and more children, because each child brings with him more money from the government.This is a very psychological slavery; the Red Indians will not want to be freed. If they are free, and the country belongs to them, then what about their gambling, rowdiness, fighting, killing, rape? What about their addiction to drugs? They are not ready to work again; America has crippled them psychologically, spiritually. But the land belongs to them, the country is theirs, everybody else is a foreigner here. Thirdly, the politicians of America would not like the country to become spiritual. They want bigger armies, air forces, navies; they want more nuclear experts. They are not interested in spirituality; spirituality is dangerous to them, because if the American people get involved in meditation, silence, serenity, they will refuse to kill anybody – war or no war. They will simply be able to see that the third world war is going to be a total war in which nothing of life will remain.American politicians would not like people to have such clarity of vision.American religious leaders pretend to provide spirituality to the people, but what they are giving they don’t have themselves. The priests are against, have always been against, real spirituality. This has to be understood. Jesus was crucified by the rabbis – the priests. Buddha was opposed by the brahmins – the priests. Attempts on the life of Mahavira were made by the priests. Strange…it seems whenever they find a man who is genuinely spiritual, they want to kill him. There must be some reason behind it.The reason is that if real spirituality spreads, religion will disappear. Religions are substitute spirituality, saccharin. And if you can get real sugar, who bothers about saccharin? And the latest findings say saccharin creates cancer!The priest is pretending to be your spiritual leader, just pretending. He knows nothing of silence, he knows nothing of reality. He is still talking like primitive people five thousand years ago to a God who does not exist. He is preaching to you from books which are complete rubbish. Just look in the Bible, anywhere – you need not try to find rubbish, it will find you.And it is not only the Bible, the same is true about the Koran, about the Vedas. But priests are imposing the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, on people. And on every child when he is innocent, when he is a clean slate, parents start writing Catholicism, communism, or anything they want. The priest starts programming the child. By the time he can think on his own, he has lost his thinking intelligence. The program, the conditioning has created a big wall between himself and his being. Now he will remain always outside the home, somewhere on the porch, thinking, “This is my palace.”America is dominated too much by Christian priests, Jewish rabbis. And if a few young people escape from the rabbis and the Christian priests, then they get caught by people like Esalen, Est, Muktananda, Satchidananda. These people – Satchidananda, Muktananda, Hari Bhajan – they are in the same profession as the Christian priest. And they are more dangerous in a way, because they bring you new words, a new language, and you start thinking, perhaps you have found the way. Est and Esalen-type movements exploit the youth.America is really in bad shape. Yes, I did say once that America can be the most religious land. I repeat it still: it can be the most religious land. But these hindrances are there, and these hindrances are powerful. Unless these hindrances are removed, America will remain spiritually poor.You are asking me why Americans are not coming here more. There are a few other reasons too.Americans were coming to me in India – India has a halo of spirituality. Who has ever heard of Oregon being a holy place? India is no longer spiritual – once it was, but the idea has become ingrained in people that if you want to find real spirituality, you have to go to India. Searching in India, sooner or later they ended up with me. The faraway thing seems to be appealing. Now I am here – not far away, just amid you – the challenge of the faraway is no longer there.And there were other things behind it. Americans were coming to me in India, remaining there for one month, two months, three months, and going back home. Their families never knew what they were doing in India. Now, it is a difficult thing to come here. Their families know that they are going to a dangerous place; perhaps they may not return. The families are worried so much, that many families have told their sannyasin sons and daughters, “If you don’t drop sannyas we will disinherit you.”I know exactly about one of my sannyasins, one of the oldest. For fifteen years she was coming to see me in India at least two or three times every year. When she came to India, she would be in red clothes, and when she left India she would also leave those clothes behind.Her father was ninety years old, but he was threatening her that if she got involved in India he was going to disinherit her. And he was a billionaire. So she was waiting – once he dies, she can become a sannyasin totally, without any fear.But meanwhile, I have come here. The father is now dead, but the whole family – the mother, the uncles – now she is afraid of them. I have been here for four years; she has not come even once. In India, three times a year for fifteen years she was coming. I am here for four years, she has not come once.On the contrary – certainly under some pressure because she is a billionaire – she has written a letter to Sheela saying, “I am no longer connected with the sannyas movement of Osho, I am no longer a sannyasin; and a note of this fact should be taken.”In America or in any other country, wherever I am there is going to be conflict with the people of that country. They are bound to be hostile, just because we are new, just because we are teaching a new way of living. And their investment with the old life is so much, that it is better to stay away from us. So only a few Americans who have guts are here.The same was the situation in India. People from all over the world were coming, but Indians were not coming. In India they have their vested interests; they are afraid of the society, they are afraid of their religion. They are afraid of to whom they are going to marry their girl. Who will accept her? – because they have dropped out of the society.But you will be surprised. India is so poor; still, at this festival there were two hundred and fifty Indians. There would have been five hundred, but two hundred and fifty were rejected, not given permission to come. Those two hundred and fifty people who came from that faraway place – thousands of miles – they were not coming to me in Pune. It is strange, but understandable. Coming here, nobody knows. Going back, nobody knows. Their society, their family – everything is safe. But coming to me in India would have been difficult.I used to live in Bombay. Just above my apartment, there lived a family…Once in a while we passed each other, either in the elevator, or on the steps, or in the garden, but they never came to see me. And every day at my place, in my apartment, a group of two hundred sannyasins was meeting. And I was talking on a tremendously significant subject, which is published in The Book Of The Secrets – one hundred and twelve methods of meditation. But they could not gather courage.Then I left Bombay, and to my surprise, the next day they reached Pune and wanted to become sannyasins. But I said, “You have never heard me, you have never even waved to me!”They said, “In Bombay, we were living with our parents’ joint family. It was risky and we did not want to create any problem. Now, you give us sannyas – we are going to live in Pune.” It was a real surprise. The man who had been living with his wife the floor above me – both had come to be initiated, and they turned out to be beautiful people.Americans can go to the Himalayas…. I have heard about one American who got fed up with all the money he had, all the luxuries he had – and death was coming near. So he went in search of someone to assure him that death is illusory and you are eternal. Of course, he could not believe Americans, he knew them perfectly well. He could not believe the bishop, he knew the bishop perfectly well.He was searching, and people told him, “If you really want the taste of reality, you will have to walk hundreds of miles into the Himalayas. And there lives a grand old man. Nobody knows how old he is, but just to touch his feet is enough. He is showering bliss.”The man – tired, tattered, because he had never walked hundreds of miles – reached the old man, touched his feet and said, “I have come in search of truth.”The old man said, “We can talk about truth later on. There is no hurry, the whole eternity is available to talk about truth. First things first: have you got an American cigarette on you? – because I have been waiting for an American, and you are the only one who has come.”The man was shocked. What kind of spirituality…? But he gave the cigarette – perhaps this was some device – and gave his golden lighter. The old man smoked joyously, and put the lighter in his pocket. The American said, “Any message for me?”The old man said, “Whenever you come, bring a big lot of American cigars. Just one cigarette won’t do. Go back home, and whenever the urge, the itching arises in you for spiritual search, you can come to me. But remember what I have said.”I have been in India for fifty years; I have not found a single man who has arrived. But millions of people from all over the world go on pouring into India in search of truth.Indians have been coming to me, but their search is different. Somebody came to me to ask if I could arrange employment for his son, because the minister knows me. If just a hint is given, his son will get a good job. Somebody came and said, “I am going bankrupt. I do not need much, just fifty thousand rupees. And you can tell any of your disciples; it will not be difficult for them to help me.”But not a single Indian was coming for truth, for spirituality. I don’t think there is any country which is more materialistic than India, but it has a long past and the fame of being spiritual.I have chosen Oregon, because this is the last place where any prophet, messiah, incarnation of God would ever try to appear. I thought it would be good here, we would be left alone. Nobody will be coming in search of truth, or in search of a bigger salary, better business, a better political post; and nobody is going to bother us.I have got my people. The remaining time of my life I want to devote to my people, who are neither Americans, nor Indians, nor French, nor Italians; they are simply my people. The day you become a sannyasin you drop your nations, you drop your religions, you forget all your programs. You become again an innocent child.It will be difficult for Americans to come here, just because I am here. But if you can create…and you are already doing it: creating an oasis in the desert, against all the hostility, illegality of the government.One simply wonders…. The state government of Oregon is against us because of land use laws. None of them have come here and seen that we have transformed the land. It was a desert; we have made it a beautiful oasis full of laughter.This one hundred and twenty-six square mile area, when I first came there was not a single bird, no greenery. We have made it green and we will be making it more and more green. We have made it full of dance and laughter and song, and we have changed the desert to produce enough for our commune. We are self-sufficient – vegetables, fruits…. In need of water we have made dams; we have enough water. We have made roads.When I came here there was only one house. Now there are houses for five thousand sannyasins – all centrally air-conditioned. We have hundreds of vehicles, buses, airplanes. I don’t think there is any city in the world with a population of five thousand which has ninety Rolls Royces. And that is only a beginning! We will put a full stop only when there are three hundred and sixty-five Rolls Royces.Our way of living – our freedom about love, about everything, our great respect for the individual – also prevents Americans from coming here. They believe that saints should be dull, almost dead, living in poverty, renunciation, living against nature in celibacy, never looking at a woman even in their dreams – although their dreams are full of women.A saint can avoid looking at women in the day, but he has no control over his unconscious in the night. That’s why all the saints of all religions have been afraid of sleep. They go on cutting their sleep: four hours, three hours – the less you sleep, the greater spiritual quality you have.But the basic reason for cutting sleep was that that sleep was full of Arabian Nights. The whole day they were fighting against the woman or the man, and in the night the reward was millionfold – so many women, so many men, so beautiful.A dream girl after all is a dream girl. You cannot find a woman on the earth comparable, as beautiful as your girl in the dream. It is your creation. It does not perspire, it does not need to use deodorants, it has no menstrual period. Nobody has ever heard that a girl in a dream was having her period. The girl in your dream never says, “Not today, I am suffering from a headache.” She is always willing, more than willing. The saints have been afraid of sleep.I am bringing to the world a totally new perspective of spirituality.Americans still think in terms of old ascetics. They cannot believe that sannyasins are not celibate; a monk has to be celibate. But celibacy is impossible, biologically impossible. Unless a man happens to be impotent, celibacy is not possible. If you enforce celibacy on people, their sex energy will become perverted.I want you to be natural, absolutely natural.I want you to follow existence – not me, not any bible, not any messiah.And if you can follow your own existential feelings, you will find the truth.It is not outside you; it is within you.When you are absolutely natural, a great silence descends on you, a great serenity blossoms within you, and you find that which you have been seeking for many lives. But you were looking in wrong directions, and looking with wrong techniques, wrong methodology.All the religions have preached that you have to be against this world, this body; only then can you enter into the kingdom of God. Nobody has asked these idiots, “If this world, this body are such great barriers in reaching the kingdom of God, why in the first place did God create them? Is he your friend or your enemy?”He has given you a body. He has given you your capacity to love and be loved. He has given you all that you have. But all the priests are against their own God! God goes on creating people who are not celibate, and priests go on imposing celibacy on people. Can you see that these priests must be in the service of the devil? The pope must be the representative of Satan.To be natural is relaxing.And to be utterly relaxed with yourself is all that is needed to find the truth.But all the religions make you tense, full of anxiety, anguish, fear. Then naturally, you are going to miss.Here, we are creating an authentic spirituality.The plastic Americans will go on searching in Kabul, Kathmandu, Goa. Let those fools search there. Finally, they have to end up here in Oregon. But first let them go.I will tell you one Sufi story. A man was going in search of truth. As he left his village, he saw an old man sitting under a tree. The old man asked, “My boy, where are you going?”The young man explained, “I am in search of truth. I will go around the earth, but I have to find it.”The old man said, “You will find it, and you will have to go around the earth. Some advice I would like to give you, that if you find such-and-such a man under such-and-such a tree” – he was describing the tree he was sitting under, and he was describing himself – “if you come across such a man sitting under such a tree, you have reached your master.”The young man thanked the old man and rushed fast in search of the tree and the man, the master – and certainly he had to go around the earth. By the time he came back to the tree, he himself was old, and that old man was almost ancient.He fell at the old man’s feet and said, “You are something. Why didn’t you say that you are the man? Now I recognize the tree and I recognize you!”The old man said, “I was waiting for you; otherwise there was no reason for me to live. Because I had given the advice, I could not die! And it was not possible for you to recognize me at that time, you were not mature enough.”One has to knock on one thousand doors, then one finds the door that leads to reality. Perhaps it is the first door, but at that time you are not mature, you are not centered. You don’t have the intelligence. You have to fall many times, you have to get caught by all kinds of religious traps, pretensions.All this is a necessary training, nothing is wrong in it. That’s how one becomes mature, that’s how one starts knowing what is false. The day you know exactly what is false, the real is not far away.To know the false as false, is to know the real as the real.So don’t be worried about Americans or Russians or Chinese. You simply create this buddhafield, this dance, with such joy that it becomes a gravitational force in itself, so those who are on the verge of finding will start moving toward this place.Rajneeshpuram is the world capital of all sannyasins, seekers, lovers of truth.You have to create it, because our world capital will not be of skyscrapers – it will be higher than that. Your joy, your rejoicings, your love, your compassion, your meditation – these will create this world capital.Already we have one million sannyasins around the world. As the politicians are piling up nuclear weapons, and religious leaders are helping to destroy humanity by creating the disease AIDS…. You should remember it: AIDS is a religious disease. It started in the monasteries where monks were put together and no woman was allowed. It is the ultimate result of homosexuality, it is a by-product of homosexuality.On the one hand political leaders are collecting nuclear weapons to destroy this earth. They have so much already that it seems to be absolutely foolish to waste a single cent more on it. They can destroy the earth seven hundred times already. AIDS is spreading fast – like a wildfire. These two death forces are going to push thousands of people who love life into becoming sannyasins.A really bumper crop of sannyasins is ahead of you!Osho,I'm confused. There is fear and wanting in me. There are moments of silence and moments of suppressing my body, my feelings. Why don't I let go totally? Am I still greedy? Is the falling back into old patterns an expression of cowardliness? I have never really been a coward, but always half-hearted. In the last weeks I have become so much in love with you, my trust has grown. The more I could say, “You are not serious,” or “I don't agree,” the more my feelings got in contact with you. Can you say something?First, confusion is far more significant than certainty which comes out of belief, faith, blindness. Confusion is a good beginning. Confusion will be leading you to become one day Confucius! Just go on. Don’t be worried about confusion.Confusion simply means you have started thinking, you have started being an individual on your own. Confusion means: your Christianity is dropping, your Judaism is falling apart, your Mohammedanism is no longer capable of keeping you faithful. Confusion is not a bad state at all. Every seeker has to start with confusion.You say you have never been a coward. If it is true, then this is the moment to prove it. But you know you are a coward; otherwise, who was asking you to say that you have never been a coward?You say, “But I have been always half-hearted in everything.” That’s what cowardice is. One foot wants to go ahead, the other foot wants to go backward. Half of your being is ready to take the jump, the other half holds back. The other half seems to be not just fifty, it seems to be fifty-one/forty-nine. Because you are always being held by it, it cannot be of equal force. It has more force than your desire to go ahead.It is good that once in a while you have started saying, “Osho, You can’t be serious.”I am never serious. There is no need to say it. Once and for all, categorically: I am never serious! I cannot be. Seriousness belongs to the dead. The living is playful, nonserious, joyous. The serious is somber, long-faced, British.A woman had come to a station to meet her husband. He came down from the train, almost staggering, looking sick, very tired. The woman said, “What has happened? The journey was not that long, only six hours, and you are looking so pale, you cannot even walk.”The man said, “The trouble is that I cannot sit on a seat when the train is moving in one direction and I am facing the opposite direction. I cannot sit in that way, it makes me feel sick.”The woman said, “Then why didn’t you ask the other gentleman in the compartment, ‘It makes me sick – perhaps it does not affect you. Can you take my seat?’”He said, “I thought of it thousands of times, but nobody had introduced us. And without an introduction….” These are serious people.I don’t want you to be serious. So if you have started feeling sometimes, “Osho cannot be serious,” drop it. There is no need to say it, I am never serious.Secondly, you find many times that you cannot agree with me. What the hell am I doing here? Persuading you every day that you should not agree with anyone! You should be yourself. You were agreeing with Jesus, you were agreeing with Moses, and now you have started agreeing with me. But you remain the same – the agreeing fool. Your subjects change, but you don’t change!I am talking to you in such a way that if you have a little intelligence you cannot agree with me. Every day I go on contradicting myself. How long are you going to put up with me? Sooner or later you will say, “I cannot agree with all these contradictions.” And that’s exactly what I want.I want you to agree with yourself – a great agreement with whatever you are.And certainly something of that kind is happening. That’s why you feel more love toward me, more trust toward me. You are puzzled because you are disagreeing, you are thinking me nonserious – and love is growing, your heart is opening toward me. There is nothing contradictory in it.The more you are an individual, the more capable you are of loving. The more you are free of any kind of psychological slavery…. Agreeing with someone else is a psychological slavery. When you are totally free from all the slaveries, your heart is bound to open toward me with gratitude, with love. And this love and gratitude will have a totally different quality.You will love me because I have loved you so much that I don’t want even myself to become a fetter to you. Your heart will open toward me without any resistance, without any reluctance, because you know that here is a man who is not going to exploit you, who is not going to put you into another prison.You cannot open to the pope. You cannot open to Ayatollah Khomeini. They force you to believe, because unbelievers go to hell. They force you to have faith, because the faithful will be rewarded in paradise. They are playing on your fear and greed.I have nothing to promise you: no heaven for those who agree with me, and no hell for those who disagree with me. What does agreeing with me have to do with heaven and hell? It is a subtle psychological strategy to make you more and more a slave. The whole humanity is living in slavery. Every faith is slavery; every religion, every church, every synagogue, every temple is nothing but a prison with open doors.Doors are kept open to delude you that you are not in a prison. And doors are kept open because they have caught your very being, now there is no need to be worried about your body. They have programmed your mind so totally that even if you want to go out, you will not. Going out is dangerous. Remain in the fold.Have you ever thought about the words used by Jesus for you? He calls himself the shepherd, and you? – his sheep. Reducing humanity to sheep. Now the sheep is the most cowardly animal in the whole world. Sheep move in herds, in crowds; a sheep cannot stand being alone. She needs six hundred million Catholics all around, then she feels everything is okay. “I am not alone, there are six hundred million Catholics with the special representative of Jesus, Polack the Pope.” Now there is no fear.I want you to get out of this sheepskin, and declare your individuality.I am not your shepherd, because I am not your enemy. I am not holier-than-thou, I am not higher-than-thou. I am just one of you who has thrown all the programs, who has come out of the sheepskin. And because, coming out of all these bounds, all these imprisonments, I have found the eternal source of bliss, I would like you to do the same.But it is not a question of agreeing with me. It is a question of experimenting with what I am saying. Don’t make a belief of what I am saying; otherwise you will never forgive me. What I am saying is only hypothetical. Who knows? – I may be lying. How can you be certain? There is no need to believe. There is no need to have faith, no need to take me seriously.To me all this is beautiful fun!I love talking – that is fun.You love listening – that is fun.If in this fun and playfulness something transpires and revolutionizes your life, that is just a by-product. We are not serious about it.If you become enlightened, so what?If you become enlightened, I will start saying, “Drop it! Forget all about it, don’t be caught by it. You have far to go. There are far stars to go to.”Enlightenment? Just a little piece of experience and you are finished. You have to conquer the whole existence.A beautiful story is told about Gautam Buddha. When he reached the doors of nirvana – that is the Buddhist paradise – the doors were opened, there was a red-carpet welcome, with angels playing on their harps. But Buddha turned his back toward the door and stood outside. The angels could not believe what he was doing: “We are welcoming him in, and he is showing his back to us.” One of the angels asked, “What are you doing?”Buddha said, “Unless everybody who is groping in the dark enters the gate of heaven, I am not going to enter. I will stand here. I am going to be the very last!”He is kicking the whole nirvana aside. This is love, this is compassion. He wants every human being to enter into this blissful state first, and he is going to be the last.He said to the angels, “You go away, because it will take eternity. And don’t be worried about the door; when I come in last, I will close it. And in fact, there will be no need even to close it, because there will be nobody outside who has to come, everybody will be in.”Buddhists have always wondered what kind of story this is. Nirvana denied? Enlightenment? And Buddha is not ready to enter unless everybody else becomes enlightened?But I can see the compassion of the man. The story is just a story, not a historical fact. But if you go on being more and more individual, independent from the past, from the future, from everything; just listening to your own still small voice, and following it wherever it leads – you will know what a beauty life is, what tremendous joy, what a blessing…so much so that if you have blessed the whole world, still you have an inexhaustible source of blessings.It is good you are confused. That means you are no longer certain about your beliefs and faith. You have moved. It is good that once in a while you don’t agree with me. I suggest, never agree with me! It is good once in a while you think I am not serious. Please remember, I am never serious because I am alive.Have you seen any dead man smile? He is always serious. I am full of life – how can I be serious? I am absolutely nonserious, and I take life just as a beautiful play, a beautiful drama, a beautiful poetry, a beautiful music, a beautiful dance.Your heart is opening, your love is growing. Confusion, perplexity will be there for a while, because you have been told for centuries that if you have faith, only then will your heart open. That is wrong!Faith means you have closed all possibility of your heart ever opening. You have been told, “Believe, and believe totally, with no doubt; only then will you arrive at truth.” That is absolutely wrong.I am not saying, “Disbelieve,” because belief or disbelief are the same. One is positive, one is negative, but there is no basic difference between the two.Why not be free from belief and disbelief and just live your life moment to moment, responding to reality according to your consciousness? And the more you respond to reality according to your own consciousness – not according to some dogma, some catechism, some holy scripture, but just according to you – you will be surprised how much you have missed up to now. But it is never too late.In India we have a proverb: If a man gets lost in the morning and arrives back home in the evening, he should not be called lost. In the end he has arrived!So whenever you arrive, it is perfectly the right time. You are in a good space. Just allow it to grow, expand, and you will be blessed by the whole existence.Osho,Each morning at discourse, as soon as I hear your voice, I begin to feel a sense of deep relaxation. I start to feel drowsy and find it difficult to stay awake. Could you explain?That’s great, because the same happens to me! The moment I start speaking I go to sleep. And by and by I have become so expert that you don’t detect that I am talking in my sleep.That’s perfectly good; relaxation is beautiful. And what I am saying today, tomorrow I will contradict, so no need to be bothered. Relax and go to sleep; you need it.And as far as hearing me is concerned, it is nonserious. It is not a sermon; I am not giving you a doctrine, I am not giving your principles.I am just speaking in my sleep. If you all also go to sleep and listen to me in your sleep, that will be really groovy!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,During your recent interview with Der Spiegel, you made a statement about Hitler, saying you love the man because he's crazy, and also that he lived a life of a discipline just as a saint lives in a monastery. You also compared him with Mahatma Gandhi and called him as moral as Mahatma Gandhi. This has caused a great deal of concern and confusion in Germany, Holland, and other European countries.My question is: is this an accurate reflection of your feelings about Hitler?It is very easy to misunderstand me.I did compare Adolf Hitler with Mahatma Gandhi. Obviously, it is difficult to understand because they seem to be totally opposite to each other; but that opposition is only seemingly so.Adolf Hitler created the greatest violence in the world up to now. He killed one million Jews in gas chambers, in concentration camps, and for five years continuously invaded countries, butchered people – children, old men, women, who had nothing to do with the military. They were simple citizens.To compare Adolf Hitler with Mahatma Gandhi seems to be absurd, but it is not. Mahatma Gandhi preached nonviolence, but Mahatma Gandhi was not a nonviolent man. Preaching is one thing, to live it is totally different. I will give you a few examples which can show you what I mean.Gandhi used to have an ashram in South Africa, called Phoenix. His wife was continuously tortured by him for the simple reason that she was not willing to clean the toilets of other people of the ashram.In India it is accepted that only a certain caste – the lowest, the untouchables – do that work. The higher caste people never do that kind of work. Kasturba, Gandhi’s wife, was a simple, traditional woman. It was hard for her. Because she refused – she was pregnant – in the middle of the night Gandhi threw her out of the house and told her that unless she feels that she has committed a sin, he will not allow her in the house.A cold night, a pregnant woman in a country where she does not know any language to communicate with people – do you think of this act as nonviolence? I cannot see it as nonviolent. It is pure violence. In the first place, if Gandhi feels it right to clean toilets, he can do it. But to force it on the wife is trespassing on the freedom of the individual – which also is violence.Gandhi had five sons. The eldest, Haridas, escaped from home because Gandhi would not allow him to go to any school. Gandhi was against modern education; he thought modern education – particularly science – had destroyed people’s religion, innocence, faith, so he was not going to educate his children.Haridas was very interested in knowing more and more things. Naturally he wanted to be educated; and I don’t see that he was wrong. In fact, whatever Gandhi knew was through education, and Gandhi was educated in England. If British education could not destroy him, could not destroy his religiousness, why should he be afraid that his son would be destroyed?But he was so much against it, that it came to a climax point. He told Haridas, “Either you stop asking to be educated, or just get lost. Then this is not your home.”Haridas must have been a courageous child: he left home.Do you think of this as nonviolence? Violence is not only killing people. Violence is an attitude, an approach.Gandhi was trying to impose his ideology on his son. This is not nonviolence at all. And to tell the small child either to accept his ideology or leave the house and never come back again – this seems to be hard, harsh, ugly.Haridas left the house and stayed with one of his distant relatives who could understand that his demand was not wrong. He educated him. And because Haridas became educated, Gandhi wouldn’t accept him in the house; not only that, he disinherited Haridas, and told him he was no longer his son.This is an extremely violent, revengeful attitude.And in fact, Haridas proved that Gandhi was wrong. He became educated; no religion was lost, no innocence was lost, no faith was lost. If Gandhi was really a nonviolent person he should have apologized to Haridas, and welcomed him home, because he had existentially proved that “You are wrong.” But on the contrary, he was so resentful, so revengeful that he disinherited him.Gandhi used to say that Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, are all the same. All the religions of the world teach the same doctrine, the same God. Their languages may be different, but their essentials are not different. Anyone reading Mahatma Gandhi will think him a great synthesizer of all the religions, but that is not true. It was not a philosophical understanding, but a political strategy.In India the majority religion is Hindu, the second major religion is Mohammedan, the third is Christianity. Gandhi wanted all these three religions to follow his fight against the British rule. And it was possible only if all these three were not religiously antagonistic to each other. So it was a political strategy, and Haridas proved it perfectly.When he was abandoned by Gandhi, disinherited, Haridas became converted to Mohammedanism. The word haridas means “servant of God.” He told the Mohammedan priest who was converting him, “Please keep my name – of course in the Arabic translation, but with the same meaning.” So the name given to him was Abdullah Gandhi. “Abduullah” means the same as Haridas – “servant of God.”Gandhi was furious. Now, in the first place, you have disinherited him, he is no longer your son – why should you be furious? And it is everybody’s freedom to choose any path.This is absolutely violent. He said to his wife, “I am not going to see his face again in my life. And remember….” The custom in India is that when the father dies, the eldest son sets fire to his funeral pyre. So Gandhi made it clear to all his sons, wife, friends, followers, that in no case should Haridas be allowed to start the fire at the funeral. He even managed to dominate after death! Certainly his mind must have been really full of hate.It happened only once…. Where I used to live in Jabalpur, there is a junction railway station, Katni, a hundred miles away, where – just by chance – Gandhi was traveling in one train and Haridas was traveling in another train from another direction. Both trains had to wait at Katni for another train from a third direction to arrive.Haridas, seeing that his father, his mother, were in the train, rushed just to have a look at the old man – he was never revengeful – and to see his mother. As Haridas came close, Gandhi closed the door, closed the windows, and told Kasturba, Haridas’ mother – who was really crying, because she wanted to see Haridas, just to see him! – told her, “If you want to see him, then go with him. Just as I have abandoned him, you are also abandoned.”Haridas is standing outside the compartment – windows closed, door closed – Kasturba is crying, and Gandhi will not allow her even to see her son’s face.Do you think this is nonviolence, compassion, love?Gandhi had said to an American journalist, Louis Fisher…because Fisher had asked him, “You are against violence. If India becomes independent, what will happen to the biggest army in the world?” – which was in India. “What will happen to your air force, your navy and all your war weapons?” – a relevant question.Gandhi said, “I will dissolve all armies, send them to the farms to work there, and I will drown all the weapons in the ocean. My country is going to be absolutely nonviolent.” India became independent. The army was not dissolved; the question was not even raised. On the contrary, India and Pakistan started a war. The three war planes – the first to go over the Pakistan borders to bomb citizens – were blessed by Gandhi. This is a strange kind of nonviolence.When India was under British rule, nonviolence was a good policy because India could not have managed any armed revolution against the British – that was impossible. The only way was what Gandhi did: “Fill the prisons. Go and declare to the prison authorities, ‘We are for independence. If you want to imprison us, imprison us.’”Now, India is a vast country. Today its population is eight hundred million. Where can you find so many prisons?And Gandhi insisted that no freedom fighter do anything which could provoke and give an excuse to the British government to be violent. “Don’t throw a stone at a police station. Don’t burn a train, don’t dynamite a bridge, because anything done by you will be enough excuse for the British government to kill thousands of people. And we will not be able to stand before the world to say that we are nonviolent and nonviolent people are being killed who have not done any harm. Then we will not be able to gain the sympathy of the whole world.”This is simple strategy, and Gandhi succeeded in his strategy; he really confused the British government. What to do with this man? He would not do any violence, nor would he allow his followers to do any violence, and if people are not doing anything, how can you start shooting them? On what grounds?Finally Britain decided to leave India – not because of Gandhi’s movement; his movement happened in 1942, and the British government left India in 1947. Revolution brings immediate effect. Cause and effect are joined, not five years apart. The revolution that happened in 1942 in India was crushed within nine days. Never in history has there been such an impotent revolution, ever. Nine days, and the whole revolution had disappeared.There was no reason for the British government to be afraid of such a revolution and let India be free. India was almost half the empire of Britain. The reason why they left was totally different. The reason was that they had exploited India enough; now there was no more possibility to exploit it. On the contrary, it was becoming an economic burden on Britain. They were the rulers, obviously they were responsible for the people, and the responsibility was growing every day as India’s population was growing.It is simple arithmetic that if an empire becomes an economic burden on you, then the best way out is to make it free. Let them have their own responsibility. And moreover, it was beautiful to give India freedom while there was no revolution, so you could keep a friendship with the country. You have not been thrown out, but by your own will you have made the country free. You have obliged the country.So as far as Gandhi’s nonviolence goes, the moment Britain left India, nonviolence also disappeared. And a strange coincidence is, that Gandhi had been for forty years continuously forcing people not to be violent. He had no discipline, no method of meditation that could recreate a man’s energy, could transform his being and make him nonviolent. He had only this ideology: don’t be violent.And violence is within you. It is man’s inheritance of millions of years, it needs tremendous work to change it. Gandhi had not given any idea how it had to be changed. But “Don’t be violent” meant repress it, go on repressing. For forty years he managed to force Indians to repress their violence. And his logic was appealing: “If you are violent, Britain is never going to leave India. If you are nonviolent, then sooner or later they will be ashamed of keeping an innocent, nonviolent country in slavery.”So people remained nonviolent for forty years, and as Britain left India, a tremendous violence exploded in India. And the coincidence is, just one million people were killed in that violence; riots between Hindus and Mohammedans killed one million people – exactly the same number as Adolf Hitler killed in Germany!Of course, they arrived from different directions, but both came to the same conclusion.Who is responsible for one million people killed in India after independence? Gandhi has to accept that he was responsible for forty years’ repression, and when the pressure was gone – Britain had moved with her armies out of the country – it erupted like a volcano.In fact, Adolf Hitler’s violence with the Jews was far more peaceful, because he killed people in the most up-to-date gas chambers, where you don’t take much time. Thousands of people can be put in a gas chamber, and just a switch is pressed. Within a second you will not know when you were alive and when you died. Within a second, you evaporate. The chimneys of the factory start taking you, the smoke – you can call it the holy smoke – and this seems to be a direct way toward God. The smoke simply goes upward.But the violence that happened in India was really cruel, ugly, barbarous. Children were mutilated, killed; old men were mutilated, killed. Trains were burned, buses were burned, houses were burned. All over India there was freedom to kill. There was no rule, no government; nobody could prevent it.But psychologists have not looked into why it happened, who is responsible for it. I make Mahatma Gandhi responsible for it. That’s why I had compared Mahatma Gandhi with Adolf Hitler. If you look just at the sentences where I compare them, you may be confused. But if you go into all the details of why I did it, you will not be surprised.I had compared Adolf Hitler also with so-called saints living in the monasteries. That was not to praise Adolf Hitler – but you know the German mind, they could not get the point. They have never been able to get the point. It was said to condemn the saints in the monasteries.Adolf Hitler really lived like a monk. He used to get up very early in the morning, the way monks are supposed to get up. He used to go early to bed, at exactly the time that every monastery follows. He was a vegetarian. To be a vegetarian in India is simple – everybody is, but in Germany to be vegetarian…. He never ate any meat, any fish, he was absolutely a vegetarian.He lived his life almost entirely in an underground cell; just the way monks live in their cells in the monastery, he lived in an underground cell. He was a bachelor almost his whole life, except for the last three hours when he got married.Hitler never allowed any woman to sleep in his room. His reasons were different: the monks are afraid that they may get interested in the woman; Hitler was also afraid, but his fear was different: his fear was that the woman might kill him when he was asleep. Who knows if she is a spy? He never allowed anybody – man or woman. He would lock the door from the inside, because in sleep anything can be done to you.He never trusted anybody, he had no friends. He lived a very structured life. That’s why I said he lived like a saint in the monasteries. Why do you praise the saints in the monasteries? – because of their disciplined, structured life, ascetic life. But Adolf Hitler fulfills all these conditions.He never tasted wine. On that point he scores better than your saints, particularly the Christian saints. They are not prohibited from drinking wine. In fact, you may be surprised that the best wineries were Christian monasteries. The best wine has come out of the monasteries. The monks were not only drinking, but making alcohol too. Great religious job!I was condemning the monks when I compared them with Adolf Hitler. I was condemning Mahatma Gandhi when I compared him with Adolf Hitler. I was not praising Adolf Hitler. I was using him as a comparison. The reasons that you respect a saint – he fulfills them perfectly. The reasons Mahatma Gandhi is thought to be a great soul – Adolf Hitler fulfills perfectly. And yet the man turned out to be the biggest monster in the whole history of humanity.You can now see my standpoint. Neither vegetarianism, nor a structured life, nor celibacy, bachelorhood, is going to transform you. These things could not transform Adolf Hitler. How could these things transform Mahatma Gandhi? How could these things transform the thousands of saints and monks living in the monasteries? These things have no relevance as far as the transformation of man is concerned.The Christian saints have been responsible for immense violence throughout two thousand years of Christian history. They have killed Jews, they have killed Mohammedans. They have burned people alive – particularly they have burned millions of women alive. And if Adolf Hitler burned one million Jews in a very scientific, peaceful way – nobody was tortured – what is the difference between these people?Gandhi managed to repress violence – which was bound to explode one day, and it did explode. And in that explosion he himself was assassinated. Strange, a man who has been teaching nonviolence his whole life is assassinated.Not much difference…. Hitler committed suicide, Gandhi was assassinated, but both died in an unnatural way.In fact, before Gandhi was assassinated, in his diary, he mentions many times, “Now I would like God to take me away from life.” When he was young he had written in his autobiography, “I would like to live one hundred and twenty-five years.” And he repeated it again and again until India became independent.When India became independent, his followers…they were not really his followers, because none of them was listening to what he was saying.He was against smoking, but almost all his political followers, the leaders, were smokers; they were all drinkers. His successor, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was a meat-eater; Indira too, was a meat-eater. Strange, a country of nonviolent people, a country of vegetarians has been for the last forty years almost continuously ruled by a single family who are not vegetarians. Now again, Indira’s son is there on the throne, and he is not a vegetarian either.So those disciples were not listening to him, but they still kept him high in the sky because he had immense influence over the Indian masses. The Indian masses were not interested in his politics, they were interested in his mahatmahood, his saintliness.His followers were not interested in his mahatmahood. They all laughed behind his back, they thought that he was a crackpot. But they were interested in political power, and that man had the whole country in his hands. So until these political leaders came into power, they went on listening to Gandhi. The moment they were in power, nobody bothered about Gandhi.Gandhi said, “I have become absolutely useless. Nobody listens to me, nobody is ready to follow my advice. It would be good if God took me away from life. Now I do not want to live for one hundred and twenty-five years.”Asking God to release you from your body is a religious way of being suicidal. He could not commit suicide, because that would go against his whole philosophy. But he was waiting for somebody else to do the dirty job. And one man, Nathuram Godse, did it.The last words of Gandhi when he was assassinated were, “Ah, God!” My feeling is that he felt immensely relieved. He was in a constant torture after the freedom. First the explosion of violence all over the country – one million people dead, many more crippled, blinded, their hands cut, their legs cut; many more made beggars because their houses were burned….And this man was thinking that after independence there would be an era of nonviolence, peace. His intentions were good, but his understanding was poor. His intentions were good, but how to implement those intentions in reality, he was absolutely unaware.He was not a meditator. He used to pray every day, but prayer is not meditation. Prayer is faith, belief in God. You start with a lie! You don’t know whether God exists or not; or even if he exists, whether he bothers about prayers or not.Gandhi’s religion is just the religion of the mediocre masses, it is not the religion of an enlightened man. So he was praying every day, his followers were praying every day, and all their prayers resulted in a chaos. That was the answer from God. Forty years of prayer, discipline, celibacy….And about small things Gandhi was really nasty. He wouldn’t allow anybody to drink tea. In his ashram tea was prohibited, coffee was impossible to bring in. The question of alcohol did not arise.For forty years the people followed all kinds of ascetic disciplines, prayed morning and evening – and the answer was millions of people either murdered or half-murdered; and Gandhi himself assassinated. If this is the result of practicing nonviolence, then I don’t think there is any difference practicing violence.Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi both ended the same way. They both landed their countries in the same mess.I have said I have a certain love for Adolf Hitler, for the simple reason that at least he was straightforward; Gandhi was not. Adolf Hitler was not cunning. Whatever he wanted to do he did. He was a little crazy, but a crazy man managed to be the world’s greatest conqueror. He had some integrity, some insight. Germany is a small country, but he managed to threaten the whole world. And he was not a hypocrite. That’s why I have said I love the man.I cannot love Mahatma Gandhi; he was a hypocrite, he was a cunning politician. Adolf Hitler was simply what he was, with no mask. Mahatma Gandhi had a mask, and I hate people who have masks, because they are deceiving everybody, including themselves.When you have a mask, slowly, slowly as many people start believing in your mask, you also start believing in your mask. And obviously, if you stand with a mask before a mirror, the mirror can only show your mask, not your real face. Adolf Hitler had no mask. Mahatma Gandhi had a very thick mask.In the history books, Adolf Hitler will be condemned, Mahatma Gandhi will be praised. But I want it to be on record that Adolf Hitler was more sincere a man than Mahatma Gandhi.Mahatma Gandhi used to say, “I love all of my disciples equally.”Each year there was an election of the Indian national congress of which he was the uncrowned king, and whomsoever he wanted to be the president was chosen. But one man, Subhash Chandra Bose, who was not a believer in nonviolence although he was a member of the Indian national congress, stood for the presidentship in 1939.I was very small, but that is the only convention that I have attended – because it was very close to my home. It was just thirteen miles from Jabalpur where Subhash Chandra presided over the congress. Without Gandhi’s blessings, without even asking him, he stood for that position. Gandhi was very angry. His followers suggested that Jawaharlal Nehru could be put to oppose him, but Gandhi had really a political mind – perhaps better than Machiavelli.He said, “That is not a good idea. Jawaharlal is my most precious disciple. If he wins, nothing is gained; people will say he had Gandhi’s blessings. But Subhash has also the same charismatic personality, perhaps more charismatic than Jawaharlal, and there is every possibility that Subhash may win. Then it will be a double defeat: the man who has my blessings is defeated, and Jawaharlal’s whole future will be dark. That defeat will put him into the back rows.”So Gandhi managed to persuade a man who was not known in the country at all, was not of the caliber of Subhash Chandra or Jawaharlal – Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Nobody had even heard his name.The strategy was that with Gandhi’s blessings, even a person who was not known in the country at all could win the election. “If he wins, then that will be a great victory. If he loses, we can say that it was clear that he would lose, because Subhash is a world-famous name, and Pattabhi Sitaramayya is not even a provincial name.” And Gandhi forgot all about the fact that he loves his disciples equally.Of course, Subhash was victorious, even with the declaration of Gandhi that “Pattabhi Sitaramayya’s defeat will be my defeat.” That was blackmail, blackmailing the masses, that “If you vote against Pattabhi Sitaramayya you are voting against me; he is simply my representative.” Still Subhash won the elections, became the president. And Gandhi, after Subhash’s big victory, did not even congratulate him.He repeated again, Pattabhi Sitaramayya’s defeat is my defeat.” And just to avoid being present in the convention, the annual convention of the congress – because Subhash would be the president there – Gandhi pretended to fall sick in Rajkot so that he need not go.It was so clear, that Subhash resigned from the presidentship. He said, “If this is the way that Mahatma Gandhi behaves – in whom we all have always had immense trust – if he cannot come to the convention just because somebody is victorious who had not taken his blessings, then it is not worthwhile. Against him I am not going to remain the president of the congress.” He resigned.Gandhi’s whole life has to be studied – not by historians, but by psychologists, psychoanalysts, who can figure out this man, his cunningness, strategies, his lies, his political games. In comparison to this, Adolf Hitler is straightforward.I am not saying that Adolf Hitlers are needed in the world. I am not saying that Adolf Hitler should be worshipped as a messiah. I am simply saying that we are living in a strange world where a man like Mahatma Gandhi, who has done everything undercover, is worshipped, and Adolf Hitler is condemned because he has done everything in the sunlight. Both have to be condemned.And when I said I have some love for Adolf Hitler, I meant I have love for sincerity, integrity, courage, straightforwardness. And these qualities were in that man. He misused them. I condemn the way he used his qualities, but I cannot condemn the qualities themselves. Every individual needs those qualities.But of course, in Germany they must have misunderstood, because Germany has suffered so much because of Adolf Hitler. The wound is still there. Even the name of Adolf Hitler makes the German mind angry. And when I compared him with the Christian saints in the monasteries, of course they were more offended. But what can I do? He lived like a monk.He did tremendous harm to humanity; but that is another side of his personality. And for that too – I have looked deeply into Adolf Hitler’s life – he alone is not responsible.He wanted to be an artist, but no art school in Germany accepted him. Just the entrance examination – and he was failed. He was not a great artist, but his intention was to become an artist, a creator. When he failed in art schools, he decided to become an architect; he wanted to make new kinds of buildings, new structures. But no school of architecture accepted him.He was in love with a woman who simply rejected him because he was unemployed, uneducated. And of course you know his picture; nobody can say it is beautiful – particularly with that small mustache. He looks worse than Charlie Chaplin. And if any woman just got rid of him, we cannot blame the woman. But one thing is certain, he was rejected in every possible way by the society.No love was given to him. His father was a very strict disciplinarian, continuously condemning him, continuously letting him down. It was his practice to call in the neighbors, and before the neighbors, condemn Adolf Hitler.This man, finding, “This world does not accept me in any way, I am just unworthy,” started feeling a deep inferiority complex. It is natural: rejection from all sides will make anybody feel an inferiority complex. And the inferiority complex is the cause of what Adolf Hitler became in his life.He entered the army – that was the only place where he was acceptable, because in the army your face is not considered, whether it is beautiful or ugly. Ugly is better; in the army we don’t need film actors, we need monsters. And in the army he proved very successful – he won awards. And he found out one thing: that as a killer he could prove his superiority in the world; there was no other way.That’s how he entered into politics, and that’s how he became the chancellor of the country. He used army tactics.When he made his party for the first time, the National Socialist Party, there were only nineteen members – all unemployed, because in the first world war Germany was defeated, and many army people were retired before the usual age. Hitler was also retired, and he was young. These nineteen people were all army people who had been thrown into unemployment; they made this party. And it is a miracle of history that nineteen men managed to come into power within ten years’ time.Their way of working was strange, one which no political party has ever known. This was their strategy. First, they were only nineteen people. They would go to all other parties’ meetings and disturb them. For that, nineteen people were enough. Those nineteen people would be sitting separately in the crowd, and suddenly they would start beating people.Naturally, if nineteen people start beating, others will stand up, others will get involved in saving or beating – but the meeting is finished. And by the time the people reach home, they are all hurt. Somebody has broken his leg, somebody has a fracture, somebody’s head is bleeding.The biggest party in those days was the communist party. Slowly it became clear that it was dangerous to go to any party meeting. So communist party leaders would call the meeting, advertise the meeting, put the posters all over the city – and nobody would turn up to listen to the leaders.Then Adolf Hitler started having his meetings. And on his posters it was written, “Don’t be worried – in this meeting there is not going to be any disturbance. And we will see that if anybody does any harm, he is finished.” Of course, those nineteen people were standing on the gates. Soon it became clear in Germany that only Adolf Hitler’s meeting is safe.People are political animals. They could not go to other parties, but they would like to know what is going on. They all started gathering at Adolf Hitler’s meetings. It was a miracle the way he managed.Thousands and thousands of people would come and spread the news that in Adolf Hitler’s meeting there was no problem; nobody was hurt, no chaos, no beating. This is the party! And people started joining it, because this was the only leader they were listening to. Within ten years’ time Hitler was the head of the government. And then he used all his qualities in a wrong way.He had tremendous capacity to arouse people’s feelings, emotions, and he used it in a very scientific way to influence people.He used to have big rallies. For example, if a rally was happening in Munich, then all his followers from other cities would go there. But the people of Munich would feel that Munich had so many followers of Adolf Hitler! The rallies were arranged in the night with burning torches in everyone’s hands. Thousands of people with burning torches in their hands in the dark night left a tremendous mark on people’s minds.When it was in Berlin, then the Munich people and other people would be in Berlin. Slowly, slowly he convinced the whole country that “The whole country is in my hands.” It was not true, but the way he worked it out proved perfectly successful.This man would not have been there if he had been accepted by an art school, or an architecture school, or by a woman. This man would not have been the head of the government. There would not have been a second world war.What I want to say to you is: never reject a man.Even if you have to for certain reasons, make it as polite and nice as possible. Rather than making him feel unworthy of you, it is better to let him feel that you are unworthy of him. Then we can stop Adolf Hitlers in the world; otherwise it is impossible, they will be coming.The parents have to learn that the child should not be insulted, humiliated, condemned. If you want to help him, love him more. Appreciate what is good in him rather than emphasizing what is bad. Talk about his goodness. Let the whole neighborhood know how nice and beautiful a boy he is. You may be able to shift his energy from the bad side to the good side, from the dark side to the lighted side, because you will make him aware that this is the way to get respect, this is the way to be honored. And you will prevent him from doing anything that makes him fall down in people’s eyes.But parents go on doing the same as Adolf Hitler’s parents were doing. Teachers go on doing the same. Priests go on doing the same: calling people sinners, condemning them for everything.The natural outcome is, everybody is carrying an inferiority complex in him. And that is the most dangerous thing to carry within you. It hurts, and one wants to get rid of it. And the only way to get rid of it is to prove to the whole world that you are not inferior. Only when the whole world accepts that you are not inferior, will you be able to feel that that inferiority complex was wrong.The inferiority complex leads people into politics, makes people presidents, prime ministers. The inferiority complex leads people into all kinds of ambitions, crimes.Unless humanity is completely freed from this complex, we cannot have a peaceful world. And we need it very urgently, because if we cannot manage to have people who are contented with themselves, happy with themselves, relaxed with themselves – with no grudge, no complaint against the world – then the third world war is just on the horizon. Any stupid politician, to prove himself the biggest one, the one who started the third world war, is going to do it.The trouble is increasing more. If nuclear weapons were only confined to the hands of America and the Soviet Union, there would not be much danger, because both powers are equally balanced, and both know that nobody is going to win and everybody is going to be finished. The whole of life will be destroyed.But other countries are trying now to make nuclear weapons – smaller countries which have no place in the world of powerful people. But they have riches. For example, in the Middle East, the oil countries have all the riches that you need to make nuclear weapons. Now who is going to prevent them? They can start a nuclear war. And once it is started it will pull all the nuclear powers into it, because a nuclear weapon can be faced only by another nuclear weapon.Now poor countries like India are trying to make nuclear weapons. Half the country is dying, without food, and India is exporting wheat to other countries because it needs money for the nuclear plant.It is becoming more and more urgent that we create people who have no inferiority complex, people who have a certain serenity, silence, people who have a deep contentment within themselves, people who are no longer ambitious. We need a non-ambitious humanity; only then can the cloud of death that is looming on the horizon be avoided.My people can do it! There is nobody else to whom this great responsibility can be given.My people have no ambitions. They rejoice without any reason. They dance and sing – they don’t need any cause for dancing and singing, dance in itself is cause enough.We have to spread this red belt of energy around the earth. This is the only protection for humanity and life on the earth.Osho,I heard you say sometime ago that science is of the head and religion is of the heart. I understand that these qualities, being of a polarity, are mutually dependent. One cannot exist without the other, just as man cannot exist without both head and heart. Would not then a world scientific community bring with it, as a necessary by-product, a world religious community? Is not the vision of a world science and a world religion synthesized in your vision of the new man?Man is not only head and heart. There is something more than both in him – his being.So you have to understand three things: the head, the heart and the being.I have said religion is of the heart, because religion is the bridge between head and being. The head cannot jump to the being directly unless it goes through the heart.Science is confined to the head, reason, logic. The heart is confined to feelings, emotions, sensitivities. But the being is beyond both. It is pure silence – no thinking, no feeling. And only the man who knows his being is authentically religious. The heart is only a stopover.But you have to understand my difficulty. You are in the head. I cannot talk about the being because the head will not be able to communicate with the being. For the head there is no being; that’s why scientists go on denying the soul. So I have to talk to you about the heart, which is midway.It is possible for head to understand a little bit of heart, because even the greatest scientist falls in love. His head cannot conceive what is happening – falling in love? He cannot prove it rationally, he cannot find why it happened with a particular man or with a particular woman, what the chemistry is behind it, what the physics is behind it; it seems to be something out of nowhere. But he cannot deny it either; it is there, and it is possessing his whole life.That’s why I say religion is of the heart. That is only a temporary statement.Once I can persuade you from thinking into feeling, then I can tell you that religion is of the being. Religion is neither thinking nor feeling, it is neither logic nor emotion. It is just pure silence: in one sense utterly empty, because there is no feeling, no thinking, and in another sense overflowing with bliss, with benediction.Meditation is the way from the head to the heart, from the heart to the being.I would like all the scientists to listen to the heart. That will change the very character of science. It won’t be in the service of death, it won’t create more and more destructive weapons. It will be in the service of life. It will create better roses, more fragrant roses; it will create better plants, better animals, better birds, better human beings.But the ultimate goal is to move from feeling to being. And if a scientist is capable of using his head as far as the objective world is concerned, using his heart as far as the interpersonal world is concerned, and using his being as far as existence itself is concerned, then he is a perfect man.My vision of the new man is of a perfect man: perfect in the sense that all his three dimensions are functioning without contradicting each other, but on the contrary, complementing each other.The perfect man will create a perfect world. The perfect man will create a world of scientists, a world of poets, a world of meditators.My approach is that all these three centers should be functioning in every person, because even a single individual is a world unto himself. And these centers are in the individual, not in the society; hence, my focus is on the individual. If I can change the individual, sooner or later the world is to follow. It will have to follow, because it will see the beauty of the new man.The new man is not only clever in arithmetic, he can also enjoy and compose music. He can dance, he can play the guitar – which is a tremendous relaxation for his head, because the head is no longer functioning.And the new man is not only of the heart; there are moments when he drops even deeper and simply is.That source of your is-ness is the very center of your life. To touch it, to be there is to be rejuvenated. All the energies of your heart, of your head, will be tremendously multiplied, because you will be getting newer energy every day, every moment.Right now, even a great scientist like Albert Einstein uses only fifteen percent of his potential. What to say about ordinary people? They never go beyond five to seven percent.If all the three centers are functioning together, man will be able to function totally, one hundred percent. We can really create a paradise here, on this earth.It is within our hands. Just a little effort, a little courage, and nothing more is needed.The world has to be scientific for all the technologies, for all the comforts. The world has to be poetic; otherwise man becomes just a robot. The head is a computer. Without poetry and music and dance and song, what your head does can be done by a computer far more efficiently and infallibly. Popes have been declaring they are infallible. They are not. But if they want to be infallible, their brains can be replaced by a computer; then they will be infallible.The heart is a totally different dimension of experiencing beauty, love, and expressing it. But that is not all. Unless you reach to your very center, you will remain discontented. And a discontented man is dangerous, because he will do anything to get rid of his discontentment.The person who knows himself and his center is the richest.In fact, that’s where the kingdom of God is.It is your kingdom, there you are a god. Deep down, centered in your being, you become an emperor.Therefore, I say to the whole world that my red empire consists only of emperors. And we have to expand the red empire as quickly and as fast as possible, because the forces of death are coming closer every moment. But I have every hope and certainty that life cannot be defeated by death.My people are the first people in the whole of history who are life-affirmative. All other religions are life-negative. Their function is finished, they are no longer of any use. Life-affirmative people are needed. And if you are overflowing with life, it is contagious, it starts infecting other people.So wherever you are, rejoice, celebrate. Help your love, your life, your laughter to spread all over the world.It is possible. It has to be made possible.We can do it! And there is nobody else to take the responsibility.We are the only alternative.We are the answer to the questions that are surrounding humanity.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The president of India said in a speech recently, “There is so much evil around here, and Osho went to America. Why?” I find it disappointing that the president of India should miss your presence in that country now, but would not listen to your advice when you were sharing your vision for thirty years before coming to America. And even now it is not too late. Please comment.Man is a strange animal.It worships the dead. It misses the past.It feels absence, it does not feel presence, because it does not live in the present. “Now” is only a word for man, it is not an experience. Past has experience, future exists – but the present man goes on passing through it almost asleep.The past has been, the future will be; both are no more. One is dead, another is not born yet. And this is the strange quality of human beings: that that which is, they don’t take any note of. The present, which is the only existential moment, is nonexistent for the human mind.You have to see. Mind is divided in two parts: one is the past, which is no more, and the other is the future, which is not yet. This is your whole mind. Mind knows nothing of the present. And the strangeness becomes more mysterious because existence only knows the present. That which is gone is gone forever, without any trace. And that which has not come yet, for existence means nothing.All our philosophers have been dividing time into three tenses: past, present, future. That division is wrong. Past and future are divisions of the mind, and present is the only time there is.Time is always present. Mind is never present. That’s why the basic necessity for anybody to be transformed is to shift himself from mind to time. As the past disappears, as the future is no longer important, what is left? This moment.But in all the languages of the world, throughout history, these three tenses have been thought to be part of time. This is a great confusion. Two belong to mind – both are nonexistential – and one belongs to reality. But about the real there are difficulties which have to be understood.First, the real, the existential, is a very atomic, small moment. Unless you are alert, very alert, you are going to miss it. You have to be absolutely herenow, focusing yourself; then only will you be able to see the atomic present. Once you have become aware of the present, then you have the golden key which opens the doors of eternity.Because we miss the present, that’s why we miss our contemporaries.The dead are worshipped, the living are crucified.The living are never accepted as saints. The first qualification to be a saint is to be dead. Once you are dead you are no longer a problem to people, a trouble to people. You are no longer a competitor. And that’s why all over the world, nobody says anything bad about the dead. Not that they were all saints, but to speak badly of the dead seems simply meaningless.I have heard that once in a town there were five brothers; each was worse than the other. The eldest brother died. The whole town had a great sense of relief; everybody was happy that one troublemaker was gone. But the tradition of the town was that when somebody dies, before you put him on the funeral pyre, somebody has to speak a few words in his honor. Now everybody was at a loss because they could not find any word in his honor.Finally an old man stood up, and he said, “Compared to his four brothers he was a saint.”I was in India, and I spoke on every problem that that country is facing – and more or less every country is facing. But no politician was ready to listen, for the simple reason that whatever I was saying was against their vested interest. No religious leader was ready to listen. It went against their profession, their business.In India, attempts on my life were made. The last attempt on my life was made when ten thousand sannyasins were present – just in a morning discourse. The police got somewhere, from someone, a message that a few people had gone to the meeting and they were going to throw a knife at Osho. So twenty police officers arrived in time.The knife was thrown at me. Twenty police officers were eyewitnesses. It is very rare that twenty high-ranking police officers are eyewitnesses, and ten thousand sannyasins are eyewitnesses. Still, the man was released by the court.The magistrate privately apologized to me. The said, “The political and the religious pressure is so much – that man belongs to a fanatic Hindu religious party, and to punish him will create chaos in the country. And the political pressure is there, because that man has immense power over many voters. If he is punished, then the politician who is being elected by his constituency will not have a chance.” And the magistrate said, “I am an ordinary man, and they are threatening me that if I do something, then my future is finished, then there is no promotion for me.”Now the president can say that the country is full of evil, and why have I left the country? Now he can condemn me, because I have left the country.The country was full of evil when I was there. No politician had the guts even to have contact with me, because if the public knew that the prime minister or the president had some connection with me, it would have been dangerous to his political future.They knew what I was saying was true, and if they had listened to me, the country would not have been facing all the kinds of evil that it is facing today.What are the problems in India in particular? They are the problems of the whole world in general.Fifty percent of India’s population is just starving. Soon India will be a bigger Ethiopia – Ethiopia is a small country. Fifty percent of Indians means four hundred million people. And if fifty percent of the country is dying, the remaining fifty percent cannot live in the country of the dead. There is every possibility they will revolt, every possibility they will turn communist – every possibility.When a person has nothing to lose, he can do anything, commit any crime. And when fifty percent of the country is dying, it will not leave others to live in peace, in comfort.For thirty years I have been saying that abortions should be legal. But it was against religions, so every religious person was against me, saying I am teaching things which go against religions.Now they should ask their religions to provide food, shelter, clothes, employment, for fifty percent of the people of the country. They should catch hold of their religious leaders!I was continuously telling people to use birth control methods. But the politicians and the religious leaders were both condemning me, saying that I was trying to destroy the morality of the country, that if people start using the pill, the morality of the country will be destroyed, because India is a very strictly monogamous country.If your wife uses the pill and makes love to somebody else, you will not have any way of knowing. If there is no birth control available, then the child that is born to your wife is yours, you can be certain about it. And if the pill is available, what about those people who are not married? They will start making love, and there will be no way to find whether a girl is a virgin.In India they are too much concerned about virginity. So much so, that in the past they married small children so there would be no doubt, no suspicion.My mother was married when she was only nine years old. And the whole village was celebrating; the marriage party was coming and there were bands from the big city. And my mother was only nine years old – of course she could not understand why she was not allowed to get out of the house when everybody in the village was out of the house celebrating. What had she done wrong?They kept her bound in the house because she was trying to escape and see what was happening outside – fireworks, bands, and so many people. And she was the only one who was denied. She had no idea that she was going to be married.But nine years was really not the common age when people were married – four years, three years, and there are millions of cases when people were married when they were not born yet! Two persons would make a contract, that if a girl and a boy are born to them, they will be married. The ceremony of the marriage is happening even before they know that who is going to be born. That was an absolute guarantee that the girl is virgin. And Hindus don’t believe in the Holy Ghost….Christians may not be certain, because the Holy Ghost can do any stupid thing; he can make a girl who is in her mother’s womb pregnant. For the Holy Ghost nothing is impossible!I was talking about the greatest revolution in history – the pill, because it frees women from the bondage of men, it frees a woman from slavery and gives her an individuality of her own; now she can get educated, employed. She can be creative; she can be a painter or a musician, a scientist or a poet. Otherwise, the woman was simply doing one thing: getting pregnant again and again. One dozen children, in India, has been the common rule.I used to tease my father, because he had only eleven children. I said, “You are strange – at least you could have completed one dozen.”There are still people in India today who have sixteen children, eighteen children. From the very moment the girl becomes capable of being pregnant – her whole life until menopause – she goes on reproducing. She is just a productive machine. Naturally, she cannot have any individuality of her own. Her whole time is taken up either by pregnancy or by bringing up children. And before one child is even six month old, she is again pregnant. Women have been treated like cattle.These are simple facts, not much intelligence is needed to understand. But nobody was ready to listen; they were more interested in their morality.And what morality is there in a virgin girl? What great spirituality is there? I don’t see the point. If somebody shakes hands with me, it does not make me immoral or him immoral. And what is sex except shaking hands? And if you are too fanatic and clinical, then you can have a good douche, clean yourself and forget all about it. Your virginity cannot be destroyed. Even if a woman gives birth to a child, she is again virgin. Even the child cannot destroy her virginity. But stupid ideas – that a woman has to be virgin, then she has to be devoted totally to her husband….Of course whatever I was saying was going against them. But if they had heard me, the country would not have been in such a state, because when I started speaking the population of the country was half what it is now. And still they are continuously producing children.And it seems my going out of India has caused all the evil there. The president of India never told me, “What you are saying and doing is right;” it should be a strict policy of the government to prohibit the population from growing.”They were all against me. You will be surprised – the politicians were telling people that I was too young, I didn’t understand the complexities of morality, religion, spirituality. One of the topmost political leaders was Kaka Kalelkar – he was ninety years old. He condemned me because I was too young.I asked him in a public meeting, and gave him an open challenge: “I am ready to discuss the problems before the masses, from the same platform, and if my being young makes my argument wrong, then your being senile makes your argument wrong. But arguments are not to be decided by the age of the person. Arguments have to be decided by the counter-arguments. I am saying that the country is growing so fast that soon you will all be beggars. You give the alternative!”In fact, I told him that if he had any sense of dignity, now was the time he should commit suicide – “Because what is the need? And what are you doing? Unnecessarily, a ninety-year-old man….” All his colleagues were dead, all his contemporaries were dead, his children were old – the eldest was seventy. “So what are you doing here except becoming an unnecessary burden, continuously sick, continuously in bed? And still you won’t leave, you won’t create some space for a new person to take over.”That was even more shocking to these presidents and prime ministers of India. I was saying two things: birth control – but that is only half the story. The second is death control – which nobody in the whole world has been talking about – because that is the logical end. If you stop people from being born, that is one part of reducing the population. The second part should be that those who are too old, a burden to themselves, a burden to others, and who are simply suffering – relieve them. And there is no need for them to jump into the ocean, or to hang themselves from a tree.The government should provide facilities in every hospital so that these people can come and you can give them a peaceful death – just an injection which takes them into deeper and deeper sleep, into eternity.And make at least their death beautiful – you could not make their life beautiful. Life is a long affair; to make a person’s life for ninety years a beautiful phenomenon is difficult. But death comes within seconds.So at least for twenty-four hours, let him do whatever he always wanted to do. Let him enjoy everything that he wanted to enjoy. And for twenty-four hours before his death let him learn how to be silent, how to relax, so that death does not come only as death, but also comes as a deep meditation.So not only will we be helping the population to be reduced, we will be helping old people to die with dignity, with smiles on their faces, and with a deep serenity within them which will change their whole future course of consciousness.But naturally they all were against me, saying that I am preaching suicide, that I am talking against the law.The medical profession was against me, because the doctors have been given an idea hundreds of years old. Hippocrates has created the oath for the doctor. And every doctor – even today, when he passes the examination – has to take the oath that he will always serve life, that he will try in every way to prevent a person dying. That oath is now stupid. But Hippocrates is far more important to them than the whole humanity on the verge of death. The oath should be that a doctor should help the person to live beautifully, and to die beautifully.Life and death should not be separated as enemies; they are one phenomenon. The oath is half. The full oath should be that a physician should serve the man in life and death both. The best he can do for life he will do. The best he can do for death he will do.But no doctor – I was speaking in medical clubs, medical colleges, universities – no doctor was ready to accept the idea because of the fear that some doctor may take advantage of it and may kill someone.I said to those people that if somebody wants to take advantage, do you think Hippocrates can prevent him? His oath can prevent him? He can still take advantage. The patient knows nothing of what is being done to him, what medicine is being given to him, what injections are being given to him. If the doctor wants to take advantage, he can take it now; nobody can prevent him. In fact, the oath protects him.But if you understand the whole situation, he cannot kill a young man; otherwise he will be behind bars. He can help a man to die only when the man has given him his authority and the man’s family has made its farewell to the man. Taking advantage will be impossible.But people are addicted to the past.India has been becoming poorer and poorer and poorer; and poverty is the source of all evil. And now, four years after my leaving India, the president has become aware – why, when the country is full of evil, have I left the country? That’s why – I don’t want to live in an evil country.And whatever I could do…. I had no power, I could only persuade people, convince people. But the people are so conditioned – they hear, but they don’t listen. Seeing the situation I simply dropped the idea of transforming the Indian mind. Not when I left the country – seven years before I left India I had dropped the idea of changing the Indian mind. It is stubborn, dull, mediocre. It lost its intelligence at least twenty-five centuries ago.After Buddha, India has not produced a single man comparable to him. And for two thousand years India has been a slave – to one country, then another country; then one race, then another race. A country which can remain for two thousand years under slavery, a country which is a continent in itself yet is ruled by small groups of people, has lost its soul. It is a country of dead people. Yes, they still breathe, they still walk, they still do things; but that is not enough to prove that they are alive.Trees breathe. There are even trees in Africa which walk miles in search of water. There are trees in Africa which are cannibals. If a man comes near them, they will spread their branches around him and get hold of him. You cannot escape from their hold. They will suck your blood. Intelligent….They open the petals of their flowers with beautiful fragrance, so that birds become attracted – immediately, magnetically the birds come because there is so much juice. The moment the bird sits on the flower it closes. The bird is gone forever, and he had come in search of juice!So I don’t consider a man alive because he is breathing, eating, reproducing children; this is not enough to be alive. This is vegetating. And when I said this to Indian leaders – religious, political, social, educational – they were all angry. I was calling their country a country of dead people, and saying it has been dead for at least twenty-five centuries, it is a ghost land.Nobody is ready to change, so the president, now blaming me, is showing how politicians are cunning. When I was there, they wouldn’t listen to me.Now that I am not there, they can dump the responsibility on me – that the country is full of evil, and I have left the country. So what do you want: that I should join in creating more evil there?Thirty years is not a small time – almost half my life I wasted with idiots. And this president is a perfect idiot. It is very difficult to find perfect people – some imperfection or other is bound to be there – but this president, Zail Singh, is a perfect idiot. His statement shows his stupidity.All these politicians in India are Gandhians, they follow Mahatma Gandhi. I was criticizing Mahatma Gandhi for thirty years continuously, single-handedly. There was nobody who would join with me in criticizing Mahatma Gandhi.Even prominent political leaders tried to persuade me, “Why are you after Mahatma Gandhi? The whole country respects him.”I said, “That’s why I am against him – because that man has given such a rotten ideology to the country, that if he is respected, his ideology is going to influence people.”For Mahatma Gandhi all human progress stopped when the spinning wheel was invented. After that no science, no technology – the spinning wheel is the last invention, the last discovery. He wanted all the mills to be closed, all the factories to be closed. And everybody should create his own cloth.I have worked it out. If a man wants cloth for himself only, he will need a bed, bed sheets, towels, clothes to wear – at the minimum. For this he has to spend eight hours a day, continuously spinning for the whole year. Then he will be able to provide for himself – and that is himself, not his wife, not his children, not his old parents, not his sick mother. They will all be naked!And if he is going to create clothes for himself, working eight hours on that stupid spinning wheel, then when is he going to earn his bread? When is he going to earn enough to send his children to the school, to the college? There are a thousand and one things in life – not just having enough clothes. How is he going to create a house, or purchase a house, or make a house? There is no time.Mahatma Gandhi was against such simple and absolutely necessary things like telegraph, electricity, railway trains – all these should disappear. Do you think such a man should be left outside into the masses, freely spreading all this poison? And his ideology is not going to solve anything – it is going to create more trouble. But he was a religious man…. I don’t see anything religious in him.But every country, every race, has its definitions of who is religious. Mahatma Gandhi was religious because he was vegetarian; that means all non-vegetarians around the world are irreligious – yes, Pope the Polack included. All the religions of the world are irreligious. Gandhi was not in favor of drinking tea or coffee; those are irreligious things. Now this is going too far. Smoking is out of the question, alcohol you cannot even mention.If people cannot smoke, cannot drink tea, cannot enjoy coffee, what substitutes are you giving them? Their life is already boring. It will become even more boring because there will be no coffee breaks, no tea breaks. People are continuously afraid and nervous. When they start smoking, it helps their nervousness. If you are a smoker, you know perfectly well – whenever you are nervous, you start smoking. It makes you busy, you forget about your nervousness.I have heard that one day, early one Sunday morning, a hippie-type fellow entered the biggest church of New York. The bishop asked him, “What are you doing here?” The hippie laughed, he said, “You are asking me what I am doing here? I am Jesus Christ. I ask you, what are you doing here?”He looked like Jesus Christ – Jesus Christ must have looked like a pioneer hippie. The bishop became afraid. He immediately made a long phone call to the Vatican to ask the pope, “What am I supposed to do? Jesus Christ has come here. I think he is a hippie, but who knows?”Jesus Christ also looked like that man – and what is the criterion to decide? Even when Jesus was there, there was no criterion. Jews crucified him as a criminal! There was no criterion to prove that he was the only begotten son of God. Even then, there was no criterion. What criterion is there now?The pope was silent for a moment – could not figure out what to say. And the bishop said, “You must remember that Jesus Christ has promised that he will come again. Perhaps he has come again. But now what should I do?”The pope said, “You should not do anything. You just look busy so that you can overcome your nervousness – and I am going to do the same. Just look busy, and meanwhile inform the police.”When you start feeling nervous, your cigarette, your cigar, gives you a certain relief. You start becoming busy without business. But Gandhi was against smoking.In India, for the farmers – which are eighty percent of the country – smoking is a necessity. Otherwise they cannot work so hard in the hot sun. Nicotine is needed, their physiology needs it. And cigarettes, or tea, or coffee – they all help the poor people to work twelve hours. Their work starts early in the morning, four o’clock. If you take away all these things from them, the whole country will fall flat. People will not have enough energy.I am not against anything that helps you to live a little more joyously, more intensely. Yes, I would like you to have enough food to satisfy your needs, so that you don’t need any nicotine, you don’t need any coffee, you don’t need any tea. That is a totally different matter. But the basic point is that you should be provided with rich food. The food is missing.In India almost ninety percent of the people are living below the survival level. And you stop them even from small, silly things like smoking! And I can’t think how smoking can be against spirituality. I have tried hard – how can it be against spirituality? How can it be against religion? In what way is it going to degrade you?But Gandhi is their political philosophy, ideology. President Zail Singh should try to look at what Gandhi has been teaching to people. He has made the country poor, he has made the people poor, he has made the people feel guilty about unnecessary things. And if you follow him, then at the spinning wheel – which must have been invented some ten thousand years ago – humanity has to come to a full stop there.The spinning wheel cannot take you to the moon, however hard you spin. It is not going to help create more food; it is not going to help you have more health. But still they are preaching Gandhian ideology to the country. Gandhi was against birth control, Gandhi was against the pill; certainly he was against abortion.And he never came to know my idea: that if old men want to die, it is their birthright.I cannot conceive…if I want to die, whose responsibility is it to prevent me? But all over the world, all the laws are against committing suicide. And you can see the insanity of it: if you are caught red-handed committing suicide, then the court will give you a death sentence. Great!In the first place, if the man really wanted to commit suicide, I don’t think anybody could prevent him. If he was caught red-handed, that means he was fifty-fifty, wavering. Standing on the hill, looking down into the lake, having another thought – to do or not to do, to be or not to be. That’s how he was caught red-handed. He was only fifty percent for death – now the court sends him to one hundred percent death. Great punishment!Man is not asked by anybody whether he wants to be born or not in the first place. That is something imposed upon you. You have never been asked, your permission was not needed. You have just been thrown into life. That chance you have already missed, of saying no. But now, if you want to say no – I don’t think any law is legal which prevents you.And I was not saying that young children should commit suicide, that young people who have responsibilities to fulfill, work to do, should commit suicide. I was saying that a man who has passed at least seventy years, has done everything that he wanted to do, and now there is nothing – he is a spent cartridge – now why should he be forced to live?In America, there are thousands of people in the hospitals, hanging in strange situations – somebody’s legs are up, somebody’s hands are up, somebody’s bed is in a position that nobody would like to live in. A few are unconscious; a few are in coma for years, and doctors say that there is not any possibility for these people to be conscious again. But tremendous effort is being made to keep them alive – because of the Hippocratic oath.The Hippocratic oath should be thrown out of all medical colleges. That man has done enough wrong. All these people are suffering because of his idea.Now, a person who is in coma and is not going to be conscious again – what do you think? Is he a man or a cabbage? If he is poor, he is a cabbage. If he is rich, he is a cauliflower. A cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education.But what are you doing with these cabbages and cauliflowers, when people are hungry and dying on the streets? Thirty million people in America are dying in the streets, living in the streets. And you are taking care of these people who are not going to come back again.But the law…the doctor cannot stop the artificial breathing that is being given to the man. He cannot breathe by himself, now artificial breathing is being given. That cabbage is keeping at least several people engaged: a nurse there twenty-four hours a day, a doctor coming in the morning, then in the evening; then medicines, then breathing. He is occupying a beautiful room – and people are dying on the streets, hungry. And he is being forced, by injections; because he cannot eat, so all necessary things have to be directly injected into him.That’s why I say man is a very strange animal.I was teaching birth control – and I was teaching death control. And I was teaching that the country should become more scientific, more technological. It should stop all this spinning. Enough! You have done spinning! Now do something else.But their problem is their prejudice. In India they have seen their days of glory in the past. India is an old country.And you have to understand a simple law: the child has no past. He looks ahead because only in the future is there space. He projects, imagines, hopes, desires: they are all in the future.For the old man who has one foot already in the grave, what future is there? Only the second foot, that’s all there is left. He looks backward. He remembers all those beautiful days that he never lived.You are young. Are you living something that will be worth remembering when you are old?You were a child. Is there something worth remembering from when you were a child?Every child wants to grow up as fast and as quickly as possible because he can see young people are enjoying everything. Ask the young people, “What are you enjoying?” They are passing time by playing cards. In old age they will look backward and create a hallucination that they have lived a beautiful life. All that is old immediately becomes gold.The same happens with countries. India is a very ancient country – perhaps the most ancient country. In the future there is only darkness, death, poverty. The past, you can manage – nobody is going to prevent you from dreaming that in the past you had everything. And that is what Gandhi exploited. He told India, “Go back to nature, back to the past,” without understanding a simple thing – nobody can go backward; otherwise nature would have given you four eyes – two to look backward.Man has no reverse gear. When Ford created his first car, it also had no reverse gear – naturally, because nobody had thought that things can go backward. But Ford found that this is a very strange thing…if you want to come back to your home, you have to go all around the town, and just by going back a few feet you would have reached your garage. This is strange! Henry Ford proved more intelligent than your God the father who is in heaven – he has still not given you a reverse gear!Man cannot go backward. Man can only go forward.Yes, you can delude people. You can give them great pride that they had a golden past. You can become a great saint in their eyes because you have fulfilled their egos. Now, in return, they fulfill your ego. It is a mutual arrangement.I was not fulfilling anybody’s ego. Naturally, they were against me. In fact, I was trying to destroy the ego that Mahatma Gandhi and people like him had created in them.They were seeing a beautiful dream of the past, going back to nature when everything was abundant – but how can you go back to nature?In Gautam Buddha’s time, India’s population was only twenty million. Now it is eight hundred million. And in this population Pakistan is not included, Bangladesh is not included. If you include those two also, then India has already made the century. It has passed one billion. From twenty million to one billion – how are you going to go backward? Eighty million people will have to be killed.And Gandhi was not for violence. But his whole ideology needs great violence – floods, war – so the population can be cut. But why wait for nature to do these things, when we can do it very easily?Just for twenty years, absolute birth control. And within twenty years you will be able to come to one-fourth of your population. Then you can allow every couple to have two children – so the population never goes again to the same proportions.President Zail Singh wants to dump the responsibility on me? I can come back to India – but for that, Zail Singh will have to come here to invite me and accept what I am saying. No politician has guts, because by coming to me he will lose his presidentship. And if he tries to have my ideas implemented in India, he will be assassinated.The Indian mind is so ancient, so full of nonsensical ideas, like every child is God’s gift. Strange – nobody has seen God, but gifts go on coming. And if it is God’s gift, we have every right to return it. What is wrong in it? You cannot impose a gift on me; I can return it with thanks. That’s what the pill is doing.And God has such a big universe – he can send these gifts somewhere else. Why to this poor earth? And can’t he send something else as gifts? Only children? If he is sending children, then send a few acres of land with them, an electricity generator, a car, some vehicle – it is his duty. Just going on sending children without anything else, not even clothes….Even if you send a gift to somebody, you package it, you put a beautiful ribbon around it. And these children go on coming without any package, without any ribbon. These are not God’s gifts, these are just accidents – and accidents should be prevented.But in India they have been preaching that the poor are poor because they have committed bad, evil acts in their past lives. That’s why they are poor. And the rich are rich because in their past lives they have done good deeds. But it is very strange: you put your hand into fire – and it will be burned in your next life? Cause and effect are connected; why this much distance? A man murders somebody; in his future life he will be punished. Why? Why this distance?But the distance is needed to deceive people, because those poor people have not done anything wrong in this life. So you cannot say, “Because you are doing wrong things, that’s why you are poor.” In fact, just vice versa is the case: because they are not doing wrong things, they are poor. Those who are doing wrong things are already rich. That is the reality.But Indian religions have created a beautiful camouflage.Unless India becomes totally free of its religious superstitions, unless India enters into the contemporary world, it is going to die. And it is going to die a very ugly death.It is already happening in Ethiopia – one thousand people are dying every day. When it happens in India it will not be one thousand people every day, it will be fifty thousand people every day. There will be nobody to create funeral pyres for them. From where are you going to get that much wood?India has destroyed all its forests – so much so that Bangladesh is suffering in poverty, because India has cut all the trees in the Himalayas. Those trees were preventing too much water from flowing into the rivers, so the water was going slowly. Now there are no trees, so all the Himalayan rivers pour their waters into Bangladesh so fast that the ocean cannot absorb it. It starts flowing backward and Bangladesh is dying from floods. And who is responsible for that? India will not have enough wood for funeral pyres.And this is not in their minds at all, what they are doing. Fifty percent of the people are ready to die any moment and India is selling its wheat, exporting it. Why? – because the Indian government wants nuclear weapons. For that, money is needed. Half the country is ready to die, and you are selling their food to create nuclear weapons!And what are you going to do with nuclear weapons? You cannot make India a nuclear power. It will take three hundred years for India to become equal to the Soviet Union or America. But in three hundred years the whole of India will be dead. And in those three hundred years America and the Soviet Union are not going to wait for you; they will have gone three thousand years further ahead.India’s problem is very simple: just drop the old religious superstitions. Just forget all about Mahatma Gandhi and his idiotic ideology, and do whatsoever is necessary without any fear of God.Within ten years I can change that whole country.There is no problem – not much. In ten years we can solve all the problems of the whole world; you just have to be more scientific, more logical, more reasonable.But no, the same is the case everywhere.Just now Pope the Polack is in South Africa. And in South Africa he is teaching against birth control, against abortion. And South Africans are very efficient in creating children – perhaps more efficient than anybody else in the world. They are already starving. They should catch hold of this pope and give him to the cannibals – because there are still a few cannibals. They can have a good breakfast, and a little taste of Christianity too!What business does this man have to go there? They are dying, and you are teaching them, “Bring more children.”But these people are not interested in humanity, its life, its joy, its comfort – no. Their interests are very different. When they say these things, they give you different excuses, for example, “These are God’s gifts.” The reality is that the pope wants more Catholics in the world, and the only way is to produce more children.One of the Christian priests has written a letter to me: “In four years in your commune, not a single child has been born. Then how are you going to survive in the future?”I said, “You are talking about the future?” He was telling me that children should be born; otherwise soon there will be no sannyasins. He does not know me! We pick up ready-made sannyasins. Why bother giving birth to a child and then raising it up? We catch them from all over the world. There are so many young people Catholics have prepared, Protestants have prepared. We believe in ready-made things.Sannyasins are not going to disappear.Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists are going to disappear, and they will disappear because they are creating so many children. We cannot disappear because we are not creating any troubles for ourselves. And we will take ready-made people only if we have facilities for them. They will not be gifts from God. It will be our choice, whether to take them in or not.Already there are six hundred million Catholics in the world, but nothing satisfies people. More Catholics…. In India Mother Teresa continuously preaches against birth control, abortion, because if there is birth control, and there is abortion, and children are no longer born, then from where is she going to get all her supply of orphans? And without orphans, who is Mother Teresa? Who is going to give her a Nobel Prize?And you should understand it, that those orphans come from Hindu families, Mohammedan families, but once they enter into Mother Teresa’s orphanages they all become Catholic.The pope calls Mother Teresa to the Vatican, gives her titles. The Nobel Prize is given to her. All over the world, from every country, Catholic universities are giving her titles and degrees. For what? Destroying India with more population? But the reason is not the orphan, it is not in the service of humanity, of the poor. It is in the service of the church. And why?Why did Ronald Reagan go to the Vatican? He should have come here!The Vatican is dead. What advice can the pope give him? And that too, a polack pope. Have you ever heard that Polacks have produced any wisdom? – or have written any beautiful literature, poetry, music, sculpture? Do you remember anybody becoming enlightened in Poland?But Ronald Reagan goes for different reasons. America is continuously losing ground to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has a certain ideology of communism; America has no ideology. America also wants to have a certain ideology against communism; without it, just nuclear weapons won’t help.Ronald Reagan is trying to enforce Christianity on America more and more. First he wanted prayers to be made compulsory in all educational institutions from the kindergarten to the university. But the Supreme Court ruled against it unanimously. They said, “This is bringing religion into politics, creating a mixture of religion with the state.”Then he started another thing – that all Christian educational institutions should receive the same grants that public educational institutions receive. The Supreme Court has again decided against it, because this is against the constitution of America, to give support to a religious institution.But why is Reagan so interested? And now, see how politicians work. Now he has found a way roundabout. The Supreme Court has decided that no religious institution – and in America, most of the religious institutions are Catholic or Protestant – should receive any state support. So what is he doing? Now he is proposing, “We will give grants to the parents, not to the institution. And then the parents are free to send their children wherever they want.”The Supreme Court ruling has been canceled in a very cunning way. “Don’t give to the institution, but give to the parent whose child is in a Catholic school.” Now it is the parents’ freedom to send their children wherever they want.Reagan is afraid that America has no ideology to present before the world, as the Soviet Union has. But Christianity is not going to give any counter-argument to communism.Communism says, “There is no God.”Christianity has not been able to prove in two thousand years that there is.Communism says, “There is no heaven and no hell.”Christianity has not been able to prove…in two thousand years of continuous theological and philosophical argumentation, no proof has been found for heaven and hell.Communism does not believe in the independence of soul. Christianity has no answer for it.Christianity will be a poor ideology against communism. If anything can stand against communism, we are the alternative.I have been in India, continuously arguing with communists, and they were at a loss. Because I say there is no God, they cannot fight on that ground; there is no heaven and hell, so they cannot fight on that ground.The only thing that remains is consciousness. And I have been asking them, “How much meditation have you done? What right have you to say anything about consciousness? You have not entered into your own consciousness. How can you say that the consciousness that is within you is going to die with the body? While it is alive, you have not made any effort to understand it. So the first thing you have to do is to come to my school of meditation and learn meditation.”And anybody in the whole history of man, who has who has been able to meditate cannot deny consciousness.It is such a tremendous experience!It is not a question of logic, it is a question of living it.It is not a mere argument, it is the answer!So if Ronald Reagan really wants an ideology which can stand against communism, we have it here.I have chosen the red color not without consideration. I have taken it away from the communists already; now the red has become associated with me. Communists have only a red flag. I have colored the whole personality red. My flags are moving all around the world.Ronald Reagan should understand: it is better to be red than dead! Your nuclear weapons will create only death.And if he had asked that every institution – educational, academic – should have a few moments of meditation, then perhaps the Supreme Court would not have denied him, because meditation has nothing to do with any religion.Meditation is a pure, scientific method. In science you call it observation, observation of the objects. When you move inward it is the same observation just taking a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and looking in. That’s what we call meditation. No God is needed, no bible is needed. You need not have a belief system as a prerequisite.An atheist can meditate, just as anybody else can, because meditation is only a method of turning inward. Nobody denies that you have an inwardness – that you are there, that something is inside. Even the communist cannot deny it.When I said this to the president of the communist party in India, he said, “Why can’t I deny it?”I said, “Your very denial will be the proof that you are there. Who is denying? A corpse cannot deny, a stone cannot deny. Your very denial will be the proof that you are there. And all that I am asking is, try to find out who is denying, or who is affirming.”I could have fought for Ronald Reagan with the Supreme Court, for the simple reason that meditation has nothing to do with any religion. Meditation is a simple scientific method of observing your own subjectivity. And education is incomplete – very incomplete, if you know nothing about yourself. You know everything about thousands of things, and you don’t know anything about yourself?I was talking to a Nobel Prize-winning scientist in India. He was the head of the atomic plant in India. I asked him, “You know everything about atomic energy; for that you have been given a Nobel Prize. But have you ever wondered who you are? Who is it who has discovered? Who has made this atomic plant? Who is it?”He said, “You always raise strange questions. I have never thought about it, I don’t have time.”I said, “You don’t have time to know about yourself, and you have time to know about atoms which will only create more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis?”Meditation cannot be denied by any court in any country, because it has nothing to do with Christianity, nothing to do with Hinduism, nothing to do with Buddhism.Meditation is the only thing that can transform a man into a spiritual being, without making him Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan.Meditation can release all his potential and intelligence.Therefore I say, I am the answer!Forget the Vatican. You are going to a graveyard. Come to the living people who are enjoying, rejoicing, dancing, singing – who are alive. And aliveness is contagious. If Ronald Reagan comes here and you are dancing and singing, he will start dancing and singing with you. And anyway, he is an old cowboy film actor…..But the West is unaware of meditation, it knows only prayer. Prayer demands belief in a God which you cannot prove.Meditation demands no belief. It needs only an inquiring, exploring, adventurous spirit. And that you have – everybody is born with it, a curiosity to know.We don’t say to anybody, “Believe in this, believe in that.” We simply say, “Doubt everything in which you have believed, because doubt is the right method for both science and spirituality.”In three hundred years science has progressed so much – and nobody gives the credit to doubt. It is because of doubt that science has given us so much in three hundred years. In ten thousand years, religions have not given anything except bloodshed, wars, burning living people – millions of people. That is the only contribution of your religions.Prayer is stupid.Meditation is intelligence.I stopped moving around in India seven years before I came here. And in those seven years, by and by Indians disappeared from my vision. People from all over the world started coming. We had become, in India, an island where you could find Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Americans, Germans, Italians, French, English, Swiss, Dutch; even people from Soviet Russia – even they are here.But Indians simply disappeared, for the simple reason that I was not consolidating their beliefs. I was destroying their beliefs, and I was creating a totally new vision of meditation which needs no belief system as a support.That’s why people from all over the world who had an inquiring mind, who were fed up with their religions, with their priests, with their churches, synagogues – they started coming there. They were ready – because there was no question of believing anything – just experimenting. And the more they experimented, by and by they started feeling a new energy arising in them. Who bothers about God? And who bothers about paradise? We can create paradise here. And when you are in deep silence and meditation, you are a god, not a bit less – a little more, because God is just a fiction and you are a reality.But I could see that India had come to a point where perhaps it could not accept any living truth.Just as people are young, become old and then die, civilizations also are in their childhood…. For example, America is in its childhood. Its whole history is three hundred years. India has a history of almost ninety thousand years. Compared to India’s old age, what are three hundred years? Europe is middle-aged. Perhaps India has to die – except that, there is no way out. And there is no harm; just as people die, civilizations die.For thirty years continuously touring all over India, talking to people day in, day out, the only thing I realized was, that I was talking to dead people. The civilization is ready to die any moment. I had come to America – President Zail Singh must know it – for my own health, which India has destroyed. Thirty years’ journeying in India, continuously on the train, on the plane – even on the camels….That reminds me about a card a friend has sent from Santa Fe, showing that in Santa Fe there is a rock formation which looks like a camel. It is a printed card, so that means Santa Fe must be promoting the camel. This is strange! My camels have also gone there.I had come here because my health was deteriorating and I was continuously talking to walls. I thought it would be good to be here for my health. But since I have been here, I have felt that there are even more important things than my health. And the most important thing is that America is still a child, is capable of learning, is capable of changing, is capable of becoming really the new brave world.I am going to be here!And I am going to spread my red people all over America, because this is the place where the new man will be born.In a disguised form, he has already arrived.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I see you my heart explodes, when you dance I feel so joyous, when you speak I enjoy it immensely. So often these days, with all the blessings you shower upon us, I feel so overcome. Who needs to be enlightened, with such an exquisite, outrageous master like you around? I'm enjoying life more than ever before, and I don't care about enlightenment. Am I being irresponsible or dependent on you by not wanting enlightenment? Or should I just keep enjoying your beauty, your grace, and the immensity of your love?The first thing to be understood: you cannot want enlightenment. If you want it, you are not going to get it. Wanting is the greatest barrier, because wanting is of the mind – and enlightenment is the experience beyond mind.So it is good that you don’t care about enlightenment. Do you think I care? As far as I am concerned, you are enlightened, you are just not aware of it.Enlightenment is not something far away, a goal that you have to achieve; it is not that you have to compete with others, that you have to be fast and speedy.Enlightenment is your very being.You are born with it, it is your inner luminosity.So the question of wanting takes you away from your being. Wanting means desiring.You can desire everything in the world, but you cannot desire enlightenment; because everything else is there outside you, but enlightenment is your very center of being. It is just that you are looking outward, so your own being is not in your consciousness.The whole art of meditation is just to turn your consciousness inward, so that you can become acquainted with yourself. You are not yet introduced to yourself. You know what your name is – but you did not come with that name; that label has been put by others. You know you are a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew – but you were not born as a Hindu, as a Mohammedan, as a Christian.You were born as a deep and tremendous luminosity, innocence. You were born enlightened – but before you could become aware of it, people started putting all kinds of garbage on you. Before you could have a look inside, they turned your eyes outside and focused them on other things: “You have to become the greatest scientist in the world, you have to become the richest man in the world, you have to become the president.”They managed one thing: they took your attention from being and focused it on becoming. Becoming is going away from being. The more you attain your desires, the farther away you are from yourself. And there is no end to becoming. Always there is a horizon calling you forth. Becoming is unending, so people go on running after shadows for their whole life. And where do they end up? In a graveyard – presidents and all. The ultimate attainment of all their efforts is the grave. And the grave of a president and the grave of a beggar are not different.In the East it has been a beautiful tradition that whenever anybody dies, he is burned. The grave is not made, he is not put in a grave but on a funeral pyre. It signifies that this man burned his whole life, this is the ultimate result.Becoming is burning. The funeral pyre is the goal that he has achieved – all his life burning for this thing, burning for that thing. He had not rested a single moment, he had not relaxed a single moment. The funeral pyre is very significant.The grave does not give that sense. In the West you make the grave as beautiful as possible, with marble, with beautiful inscriptions on it. You carry the body in beautiful, costly caskets.Just the other day I saw a book published by the Rolls Royce Company. Of course, we are first in the whole world, but there is a company in Scotland which has two hundred and sixty Rolls Royces; it is a professional company. And in those Rolls Royces a person travels only one way, he never comes back, he has no return ticket. That company carries people to their grave. Of course those who are rich can afford many Rolls Royces to follow the corpse. That’s why they have two hundred and sixty. Up to now, the biggest number used by one man was thirty-three Rolls Royces.But every day people are dying. They could not use a Rolls Royce in their life, at least give them the joy – not only of riding in a Rolls-Royce, but of being followed by dozens of Rolls Royces.But that company is not a competitor to us. Our Rolls Royces are for the living. Their Rolls Royces are for the dead. And of course, they have to keep two hundred and sixty, because in one day they may have a few orders. Sometimes all their Rolls Royces are engaged. Death comes without giving you any warning.But whether you go in a Rolls Royce or in a municipal corporation truck, it makes no difference to the corpse. It knows nothing; there is nobody there! You are only carrying bones; how you carry them makes no difference at all. The emperor dead and the beggar dead for the first time become communists – equal. Only in graveyards does communism exist in its authenticity: no hierarchy, nobody above you, nobody below you. There is nobody, in fact. And this is the whole story of becoming.It is good that you don’t care about enlightenment, because your caring about it will destroy the whole thing. That will create a desire, that will create a longing. And enlightenment cannot be an object of your longing and desire.The basic fundamental of enlightenment is desirelessness.Here you are enjoying, rejoicing, dancing, singing. Don’t be worried about enlightenment. Suddenly one day dancing or singing or listening to me, or just sitting in silence, you will become aware – “My God! I have always been enlightened!”That’s how it has always happened. That’s why down the centuries the first similarity enlightened people have shared, is: they have laughed loudly when they became enlightened. On other points they may differ, their philosophies may be different – someone may have one kind of theology, someone another kind – but as far as laughter is concerned, nobody in the whole history of humanity has become enlightened and not laughed!Life is really so hilarious: you go on trying to find something which you have already – in fact, even if you want to become unenlightened, there is no way.So don’t think that you are being irresponsible. This is just the opposite; you are being, for the first time, responsible. You have dropped the idea of enlightenment. You are no longer interested in enlightenment. That’s a great step.And don’t be worried that you are perhaps becoming dependent on me, that without my help you cannot do it. I go on destroying every possibility of your becoming dependent on me. There were people who became dependent on my words. I stopped speaking for three-and-a half years just to get rid of those camels. They have moved, they are all in Santa Fe.But there are thousands of ways you can become dependent. And that’s the function of the master: not to make you dependent. He wants you to be totally free, independent individuals, having immense respect for your own integrity. And it comes by being joyous for no reason – dancing for dancing’s sake; singing as an intrinsic value, not singing in a competition to win the award; singing to enjoy, just the way birds sing in the morning.You cannot ask those birds, “Why are you singing? Have you got the Nobel Prize? Or have you become the president of America? Have you found a treasure?” Nothing. Just the morning sun, the beginning of a new day, the fragrance of fresh flowers, the darkness disappearing and the whole sky becoming available again – suddenly the song bursts forth for no particular reason.In fact, it is not right to say that the birds are singing. It will be better to say that singing is happening to the birds. It is simply coming out without any effort, it is not a doing. They are not rehearsing for it. They are not going to a music institute, nobody has ever taught them how to sing. They don’t bother whether their singing has any meaning in it. Sheer joy!And if you feel around me sheer joy – dancing, singing, rejoicing – that’s enough. Don’t be worried: your singing, your dancing, your joy will never become dependent on me. They are yours.Perhaps in the beginning you will think that it is because of me that you are rejoicing, but that fallacy will not last long. One day, suddenly, sitting in your own room, you may start dancing. In fact everybody does it in his bathroom already. In the room he is a little bit afraid what the neighbors will think. Sitting before the bathroom mirror, have you not made faces? You are again a child.Soon you will discover my presence is only an excuse, because you cannot laugh without an excuse. That’s why. You need some excuse. The master is here – that is enough to rejoice. But just a little intelligence is needed. Rejoicing in itself is enough, it needs no reason. Soon sannyasins start finding that they can dance, they can sing, they can rejoice under the sky, under the stars, by the side of the river, on the mountain.The function of the master is, in the beginning, to give you an excuse, a reason, so that you don’t feel embarrassed. Otherwise, if suddenly in the outside world, walking on the street you start dancing, soon you will be in the hands of the police. You will be presented in a court: “This man has been dancing on the road, disturbing the traffic, and he does not say why he was dancing! Either he is mad, or some other reason has to be found.”You cannot do it in the outside world; that’s why I insist that all my sannyasins should start moving toward communes where nobody is going to ask why you are dancing. Perhaps, seeing you dance, they may start dancing themselves. Nobody is going to ask you, “Why do you have this Jimmy Carter smile? Have you become the president of America?”Since Jimmy Carter has stopped being the president of America, that smile has disappeared. I have been looking at his pictures after he was out of the White House. Suddenly that big smile, perhaps the biggest in the whole world – you could have counted his teeth without any trouble – has disappeared.It had a reason: it was not authentic, it was not true. It was not his happiness, his joy. It had a cause. The cause is no longer there – the smile has died. When he was president, the smile was there all the time. It must have been arduous for the poor man to keep his lips in that position for the whole day.I heard that by and by those lips became fixed in that posture, and every night Mrs. Carter had to close his mouth. I don’t know how far it is true, but Mrs. Carter is very afraid of rats, and if Jimmy is sleeping with that open mouth, any rat might enter in.And then there are troubles after troubles. To bring the rat out, you have to send a cat inside! Then there is no end to troubles. It is better to force his mouth and close it, and cover him completely in a blanket, because who knows? – when she goes to sleep he may start doing his exercise again. But since he has not been the president, his face looks like Jesus Christ crucified.I said to you that what all the enlightened people of the world have experienced first was a great laugh. Buddha used to call it “the lion’s roar” because the laughter was so loud. It has to be, because for thousands of lives you have been searching for it and you never became aware who was searching for it!The searcher is the sought.The seeker is the goal.So don’t feel at all that you will become dependent on me. I won’t allow it. I go on saying things, doing things which disturb your dependence. You would like me to do certain things so that you can think I am a great master and you are a great follower. Then there is dependence. Now, who wants to depend on an ordinary man like me? To be a follower of an ordinary man makes you an ordinary follower! Could not you get a little better master?The masters who have helped people to depend on them were not real masters, they were pseudo. They knew the simple strategy, that if they pretend to be great, then they are going to attract many idiots who want to be great without any effort, just by becoming a follower. “Believe in Jesus Christ and you are saved” – so cheap! Just go on Sunday and listen to a boring sermon in a church, and for six days you can do anything you want to do, but you are saved. Christianity is a Sunday religion. And in that one hour most of the people are asleep.I have heard that one man was creating great disturbance in the priest’s mind, because he was not only asleep, he was snoring. The priest pulled the man aside after the sermon and told him that “There is no objection against sleeping; it is not against spirituality or Christianity. There is not a single sentence in the whole Bible against sleep, so there is no problem. But snoring is too much.“And the problem is that your snoring disturbs other people’s sleep. So many complaints have come to me, ‘Somehow this man’s snoring has to be stopped.’ Not that they are interested in the sermon, but their sleep – just a beautiful morning sleep….“So you please either stop snoring or stop coming to the sermon, and let people sleep. That gives me also the opportunity to go on repeating the same sermon every Sunday. I need not prepare it again and again, because what is the point? – people are asleep, nobody is listening. But you are creating double problems: you are disturbing people’s sleep and you are forcing me to prepare a new sermon every Sunday. How can I do that?”It is good that the idea of enlightenment as a desired object is disappearing from you.Don’t be worried, this is not irresponsible. And don’t be worried either that you will become dependent on me. You cannot, because I have not been here for thirty-two years! The day I realized my enlightenment – since then I have been absent.I laughed, and that was the last act.You cannot depend on me. I can manage to disturb your dependence in every possible way. Any day you can find me drunk on the streets near your disco. Anyway, I cannot walk straight. Wobbling is my way of walking – drunk or not drunk.But I can do anything for you! I can smoke Havana cigars. Sheela has kept a good stock – because any day I can ask. She has Havana cigars, Mexican cigars, and all kinds of beautiful things. I can do anything to destroy your dependence so don’t be worried, that is my responsibility.You simply rejoice. You enjoy each moment. One day – that day cannot be predicted, because it is going to be different for everybody – whenever you are in a state of utter relaxation; after dancing, after singing, after listening to me, it can happen. It has happened in all kinds of strange situations.Jainas – that is one of the oldest religions in India – have been very angry with me. In fact, everybody is angry with me. They were angry because in one of their annual conferences I raised a very embarrassing question. Their greatest master was Mahavira, a contemporary of Gautam Buddha. Their scriptures say that he became enlightened in a certain posture, which is called gau dohan.In India, people sit to milk the cows. Gau dohan means milking the cow. Now that is a very strange posture. Mahavira had no cow, so either he was stealing the milk from somebody else cow – which does not seem right for a great master….And I asked the Jainas, “This question has been bothering me very much, What was he doing?” Most probably he was pissing, because in India that is the way people piss all around the country. The whole of India is a big toilet. People defecate, people piss, but the posture is the same – gau dohan.I said, “I cannot think that he was stealing milk from somebody’s cow. Then there are only two other possibilities: either he was pissing or defecating. And if you have any other suggestion, I am ready to accept it.”It can happen in any moment. Perhaps his bladder was too full, and he had been repressing it – perhaps he was passing through a village – and when he urinated there was great relaxation, and he became enlightened.You can give it a try. Go on and on repressing till you know: now it is going to happen! And then you will know real relaxation – all worries disappeared, all tension gone…. And it is possible. If it has happened to Mahavira, why can’t it happen to you?Enlightenment has happened in all conditions, all situations, strange…but one thing, laughter, is certain. Jainas are naturally angry that I said Mahavira must have laughed.The whole thing is worth laughing a great laughter: he was meditating, and he was fasting, and he was reading the scriptures, and doing all kinds of things for forty years – and then when he was pissing, enlightenment happened! No scripture prescribes it. But you can expect anything from me: I prescribe it.Don’t be worried, I will not allow anybody to be dependent on me.And a person who is rejoicing, dancing, singing, automatically becomes independent. There is no need for him to make an effort to become independent because soon he finds that the master was only providing excuses. Of course, for that he remains grateful because without those excuses perhaps he would never have known what he had been carrying within himself.My sannyasins will never be dependent on me, but gratefulness is not dependence. In fact, gratefulness is part of your independence. The master did all kinds of things, said all kinds of things, just to push you into a corner where you have to face yourself.It is because of this I don’t consider Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammed to be enlightened. None of them knew what laughter is.Why did Jesus choose Judea to be born in? Britain was the right place. Long faces, carrying the whole burden of the world – the white man’s burden.Why did Jesus have more followers in the world than anybody else? Because somehow he fits with your misery, your suffering. You have a certain synchronicity with Jesus. He fits with you because you are also carrying a cross on your shoulder. Your life is nothing but a cross.Looking at Jesus – if this is what is going to happen after enlightenment, then it is better to remain unenlightened. I don’t think he ever smiled – not a single picture, not a single statue…. He’s so goddamned serious! And that is the reason why he has found so many followers in the world.It is very difficult for me to find so many followers because people are in misery, people are in suffering, people are in pain, people are in anguish. And my people are dancing, enjoying, relishing every moment of life. Naturally a great hostility arises in people.First, they cannot believe what you are doing. They think perhaps you are pretending – but for whom? We are living isolated, for twenty miles around there is nobody, no neighbor. For whom are we pretending?Or they think that you all have been hypnotized. If hypnosis make people laugh, enjoy, relish, then what is wrong in hypnosis? They should get hypnotized rather than suffering their whole life. I think hypnosis is not bad…but nobody is hypnotized. Otherwise great hypnotists themselves would have transcended sadness, but Sigmund Freud is as serious as Jesus.Both are Jews. Jews have given to the world three great men: Jesus, Freud, Karl Marx – and all these three people are immensely serious. Nobody has seen Freud or Marx…. Jesus, of course, lived two thousand year ago, we cannot be certain – but about Marx, about Freud….Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, wrote a letter to me. They were very close. I inquired of Anna Freud, “Do you remember any moment when Freud was not serious?” She said, “Freud – not serious? He was serious even in his sleep.” He was so serious that if you brought him a joke he would not laugh, he would start analyzing the psychology of the joke.He has written a book, Analyzing Jokes And Their Psychology. The joke cannot make him laugh. It only creates a great effort to analyze it, give it a psychological color, sometimes far-fetched. Jokes are simple. They are not created by great philosophers – just ordinary people in ordinary life. They don’t know that they are creating a great psychological thing.But Freud was unable to laugh. Not only that, it was an undeclared rule among his disciples that when he was present nobody could laugh.I was also a teacher in the university. And every day complaints were coming from other professors whose classrooms were next to mine: “What is going on? We hear so much laughter. Our classes are disturbed, we are disturbed. And what kind of things are you teaching to these people that they go on laughing?”It was understood between me and my students that if you start being a little less serious – the whole of life is so ridiculous – everything is a joke. Laughter is the only reality!Jesus says, “Everybody has to carry his cross on his shoulders.”I say, “Everybody has to carry his joke book on his shoulders.” It is light. It is enlightening.Just look at people carrying crosses on their shoulders all around. What kind of a world will that be?Even Christians, even the pope, who represents Jesus, they don’t carry the cross on their shoulders. They have golden crosses hanging around their necks. Jesus never said to make golden crosses and hang beautiful golden chains around your neck. These people are deceiving their own master. Crosses are not made of gold.The cross on which Jesus was crucified was so heavy that he fell three times on the road. He was a young man, thirty-three, and he was a carpenter’s son, who was accustomed to carry logs, wood, from the forest to his father’s carpentry shop. If that man fell three times, what about me? – I have never entered any carpenter’s shop, and I have never carried anything, what to say about a cross?But these so-called Christians, if they are really Christians, should make great, heavy crosses, so when they are going from the house to the office, at least three times they should fall. And rather than reaching the office, they would be carried in an ambulance to the hospital. Then they would be real Christians.Jesus never laughed, never smiled; he was utterly serious – obviously, because he was the savior and he had come to save the whole world. But he could not save himself.My approach is totally different. I cannot consider Jesus a man of enlightenment because the first proof of enlightenment – the laughter – is missing. He is a miserable creature. In fact, masochistic, torturing himself and teaching others to torture themselves. Moses is not enlightened. They are all serious people and these people have made the whole world serious. Can you laugh before Moses, who has seen God face to face? Even as far as I know, looking at Moses, God also could not laugh.In the East we know thousands of enlightened people, but one thing is absolutely characteristic of enlightened people, and that is their joyousness, their laughter, their dance, their singing.Krishna’s flute is far more spiritual than Jesus’ cross. Krishna is dancing. Can you conceive Jesus dancing? With the cross it will be difficult.Krishna is dancing and playing on his flute, and all the beautiful girls run toward the place where he is playing on his flute. And those girls start dancing around him. Can you imagine Jesus, with his cross, dancing, and beautiful girls running toward him?Only those twelve fools, who Christians think are apostles – they will be there. And none of them is capable of dancing. Somebody is a fisherman, somebody is a woodcutter – all uneducated, illiterate. And of course, Jesus moved with this gay company his whole life. Somehow he seems to be the founder of the gay people. What the hell was he doing with these twelve stupid boys! No, I cannot believe that this man is enlightened.No enlightened person has said that he can save another person, because in saving somebody, you are making him dependent on you. And if I can save somebody, I can throw him back into his miserable world. It was my work….It happened…I was sitting on the bank in Allahabad, where the Ganges is really beautiful and vast like an ocean. I saw a man jump. I thought he was enjoying a swim, but then he started shouting, “Save me!”I was a little puzzled, but there was no time to think it over, so I jumped in and carried him out.The man said, “What have you done? I was trying to commit suicide.”I said, “This is strange. Then why did you call, ‘Save me!’?”He said, “Because of the fear.”So you know what I did? I pushed him back! I said, “Now go on your way. Even if you shout ‘Save me!’ I am not going to come. And we are the only two here.”If somebody can save you, he can throw you back in the river.In the East, enlightened people have always emphasized one thing: that you can save yourself; nobody else can do it for you.There are things one has to do for oneself. In one of the existentialist novels there is a story, which I don’t think is ever going to happen, but – looking at the stupidity of human beings, sometimes I become doubtful – perhaps it can happen. A rich man sends his servant to kiss his girlfriend. Now, would you like a servant to go and kiss your wife on your behalf? Or your girlfriend? There are things you have to do. You cannot rely on servants.And this is the greatest thing in life: to know oneself. You cannot depend on somebody else.Nobody can enter in the very center of your being, except you. This is the dignity of consciousness, that there is no way to trespass it.And that’s what Jesus is trying to say, that he is going to trespass everybody’s consciousness. He is going to save the whole humanity.I am not your savior. I am at the most your friend. It is just your kindness to call me your master.As far as I am concerned, I am not anybody’s master. That word is connected with the slave, with the servant, with dependence. I am just a fellow traveler. Just a little bit of difference, of course – that you go on walking with closed eyes and I go on walking with open eyes. Any moment you can open your eyes, nobody is preventing you. It is your decision to keep them shut. It is going to be your decision to open them.All that I can do is go on gossiping to you. Mind the word gossiping – I don’t use the word gospel. That I leave for Moses and Jesus and Mohammed. I go on gossiping to you about the beauty of the world, of the stars, of the sun, of the moon. Perhaps, listening continuously to my gossips about beauty, you may open your eyes, saying “Let me see….” Perhaps there are no stars, no sun, nothing, but your eyes will be open. You will be grateful to me, but not dependent on me.Just two days ago, one beautiful person, a journalist, was asking me, “People in the outside world think that you are not truthful, that you are not honest, that you are deceptive, that you cheat.” He was thinking I would be offended.I said, “They are saying exactly the right things. I cheat people into enlightenment.”I am not honest, because if I am honest you are going to sleep forever. I am deceiving you. I am talking about glories, and blissfulness, and blessedness.Sooner or later you are bound at least to open one eye and see, just out of the corner, whether these things are there or not. My work is done!You may not find the things that I have been talking to you about, but you will find far more glorious, far more blissful experiences.And I am not truthful because truth cannot be expressed in words. What can I do about it? At the most, I can use lies which will make your eyes open. One thing I am certain of: once your eyes are open, you will know why I was lying. You will be grateful that I lied to you, that I was not truthful, because you will know that truth cannot be expressed in words….The journalist looked at me: he could not believe that I would accept all these condemnations. But they are not condemnations – they are simply descriptions of a real master.Osho,After listening to you talk about thinking, feeling, and being, and having to let go of the one in order to reach the next, the question arose in me, “Does this mean I will have to let go of love too?” Is love a feeling of the being that will always be there? Can you please say something about feeling, love, and being?I can say much, but first I want to ask you, “Do you know what love is, that you are afraid that love will be lost?”People go on imagining things…. In a court there was a case. Two friends, old friends, had beaten each other very badly. They were brought into the court. The magistrate could not believe it. It was a small place – everybody knew that those two persons were always together and they were great friends. He asked, “What happened? What caused the fight?”One said to the other, “You tell it.” The other said, “No, you tell it.”The magistrate said, “Anybody can tell it. There is no question of etiquette, of who should tell it first. But let me know.”But both were silent. The magistrate had to be hard. He said, “Speak or I will throw you into jail.”Then one said, “It is so embarrassing. In fact we both were sitting on the sands by the side of the river, and my friend said that he is going to purchase a buffalo.“I said, ‘You drop that idea, because your buffalo can enter into my farm and that will be the end of our friendship. I will kill the buffalo.’“My friend said, ‘You have some nerve! I am perfectly free to purchase one buffalo or ten buffaloes. And buffaloes are buffaloes – sometimes they may enter into your field. And I will see what you do: if you can kill my buffalo, I can burn your whole crop.’”One thing led to another. Finally, the man who had the farm drew a picture of the farm on the sand with his finger and said, “This is my farm. Let your buffalo enter into it and I will show you.”And he said, “Your honor, this man, with his fingers, brought five buffaloes into my field, and said to me, ‘Now do what you want to do.’“Then we started beating each other – because there was no buffalo, there was no farm; so I could not beat his buffaloes, he could not burn my farm. We are very embarrassed, that’s why we were insisting, ‘You tell.’”The magistrate said, “This is sheer stupidity! He has not purchased the buffalo yet; your farm is empty, you have not sown the seed yet – and you both have fractures.”You ask me, “When the mind is transcended, when emotions, sentiments, feelings, are transcended, will I have to lose my love too?”Do you have it? First purchase the buffalo!I know you don’t have it, because if you had it, the question would not have arisen. That’s why I am saying with such certainty that you don’t have it.Your question is still significant.There are three layers of the human individual: his physiology, the body; his psychology, the mind; and his being, his eternal self.Love can exist on all the three planes, but its qualities will be different. On the plane of physiology, body, it is simply sexuality. You can call it love, because the word love seems to be poetic, beautiful. But ninety-nine percent of people are calling their sex, love. Sex is biological, physiological. Your chemistry, your hormones – everything material is involved in it.You fall in love with a woman or a man. Can you exactly describe why this woman attracted you? Certainly you cannot see her self, you have not seen your own self yet. You cannot see her psychology either, because to read somebody’s mind is not an easy job. So what have you found in the woman? Something in your physiology, in your chemistry, in your hormones, is attracted to the woman’s hormones, her physiology, her chemistry. This is not a love affair; this is a chemical affair.Just think: the woman you have fallen in love with goes to our doctor, Leeladhar, gets her sex changed, starts growing a beard and mustache. Will you be still loving her? Nothing has changed, only chemistry, hormones. Where has your love gone?Only one percent of people know a little bit deeper. Poets, painters, musicians, dancers, singers have a sensitivity that they can feel beyond the body. They can feel the beauties of the mind, the sensitivities of the heart, because they live on that plane themselves.Remember it as a ground rule: Wherever you live, you cannot see beyond that. If you live in your body, if you think you are only your body, you can be attracted only to somebody’s body. This is the physiological stage of love.But a musician, a painter, a poet, lives on a different plane. He does not think, he feels. And because he lives in his heart, he can feel the other person’s heart. That is ordinarily called love. It is rare. I am saying only one percent perhaps, once in a while.Why are many people not moving to the second plane because it is tremendously beautiful? But there is a problem: anything very beautiful is also very delicate. It is not hardware, it is made of very fragile glass. And once a mirror has fallen and broken, then there is no way to put it together.People are afraid to get so much involved that they reach to the delicate layers of love, because at that stage love is tremendously beautiful but also tremendously changing. Sentiments are not stones, they are like roseflowers.It is better to have a plastic roseflower, because it will be there always, and every day you can give it a shower and it will be fresh. You can put some French perfume on it. If its color fades you can paint it again. Plastic is one of the most indestructible things in the world. It is stable, permanent; hence people stop at the physiological. It is superficial, but it is stable.Poets are known, artists are known to fall in love almost every day. Their love is like a roseflower. While it is there it is so fragrant, so alive, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, asserting its beauty. But by the evening it may be gone, and you cannot do anything to prevent it.The deeper love of the heart is just like a breeze that comes into your room, brings its freshness, coolness, and then it is gone. You cannot catch hold of the wind in your fist. Very few people are so courageous as to live with a moment-to-moment, changing life. Hence, they have decided to fall into a love on which they can depend.I don’t know which kind of love you know – most probably the first kind, perhaps, the second kind. And you are afraid that if you reach your being, what will happen to your love?Certainly it will be gone – but you will not be a loser. A new kind of love will arise which arises only perhaps to one person in millions. That love can only be called lovingness.The first love should be called sex. The second love should be called love. The third should be called lovingness – a quality, unaddressed – not possessive and not allowing anybody else to possess you. That loving quality is such a radical revolution that even to conceive it is very difficult.Journalists have been asking me, “Why are there so many women here?” Obviously, the question is relevant, and they are shocked when I answer them. They were not expecting the answer.I have said to them, “I am a man.” They looked at me, unbelieving. I said, “It is natural that many more women will be here, for the simple reason that whatsoever they have known in their life before was either sex, or in rare cases, perhaps a few moments of love. But they have never come to know the taste of lovingness.” I have told these journalists, “Even the men you see here have grown many feminine qualities in them which have been repressed in the outside society.”From the very beginning a boy is told, “You are a boy, not a girl. Behave like a boy! Tears are okay for a girl, but not for you. Be manly.” So every boy goes on cutting his feminine qualities. And all that is beautiful is feminine. So finally what is left is just a barbarous animal. His whole function is to reproduce children.The girl is not allowed to have anything with manly qualities. If she wants to climb a tree she will be stopped immediately, “This is for boys, not for girls!” Strange! If the girl has the desire to climb the tree, that is enough proof that she should be allowed.All old societies have created different clothes for men and for women. This is not right; because each man is also a woman. He has come from two sources: his father and his mother. Both have contributed to his being. And each woman is also a man.We have destroyed both. The woman has lost all courage, adventure, reasoning, logic, because those are thought to be the qualities of a man. And the man has lost grace, sensitivity, compassion, kindness. Both have become half.This is one of the greatest problems we have to solve – at least for our people. My sannyasins have to be both: half man, half woman. That will make them richer. They will have all the qualities that are available to human beings, not only half.At the point of being, you simply have a fragrance of lovingness.The journalists have asked me, “Do you love Sheela?”I said, “Of course. But I love so many women that I don’t know even their names. And not only women – I love so many men, because they are also half woman.”In one million sannyasins around the world, I cannot point to a single person and say, “This is the person I love.”I can simply say, “I love.”Whoever is ready to receive my love…it is available.So don’t be afraid. Your fear is right: what you think of as love will be gone, but what will come in its place is immense, infinite. You will be able to love without being attached. You will be able to love many people because to love one person is to keep yourself poor. That one person can give a certain experience of love, but to love many people…. You will be amazed that every person gives you a new feeling, a new song, a new ecstasy. Hence, I am against marriage.In my vision, marriages in the commune should be dissolved. People can live together their whole life if they want, but that is not a legal necessity. People should be moving, having as many experiences of love as possible. They should not be possessive. Possessiveness destroys love. And they should not be possessed, because that again destroys your love.All human beings are worthy of being loved. There is no need to be tethered to one person for your whole life. That is one of the reasons why all the people around the world look so bored. Why can’t they laugh like you? Why can’t they dance like you? They are chained with invisible chains: marriage, family, husband, wife, children. They are burdened with all kinds of duties, responsibilities, sacrifices. And you want them to smile and laugh and dance and rejoice? You are asking the impossible.Make people’s love free, make people non-possessive. But this can happen only if in your meditation you discover your being. It is nothing to practice. I am not saying to you, “Tonight you go to some other woman just as a practice.” You will not get anything, and you may lose your wife. And in the morning you will look silly. It is not a question of practicing, it is a question of discovering your being.With the discovery of being follows the quality of impersonal lovingness. Then you simply love.And it goes on spreading. First, it is human beings, then soon animals, birds, trees, mountains, stars.A day comes when this whole existence is your beloved.That is our potential. And anybody who is not achieving it is wasting his life.Yes, you will have to lose a few things, but they are worthless. You will be gaining so much that you will never think again of what you have lost.A pure impersonal lovingness which can penetrate into anybody’s being – that is the outcome of meditativeness, of silence, of diving deep within your own being.I am simply trying to persuade you. Don’t be afraid of losing what you have.I am reminded of a story. A woodcutter used to go into the woods every day. Sometimes he had to remain hungry because it was raining; sometimes it was too hot, sometimes it was too cold.A mystic lived in the woods. He watched the woodcutter growing old, sick, hungry, working hard the whole day. He said, “Listen, why don’t you go a little further?”The woodcutter said “What am I going to get a little further? More wood? Unnecessarily carrying that wood for miles?”The mystic said, “No. If you go a little further, you will find a copper mine. You can take the copper into the city, and that will be enough for seven days. You need not come every day to cut the wood.”The man thought, “Why not give it a try?”He went in and found the mine. And he was so happy…he came back and fell at the feet of the mystic.The mystic said, “Don’t rejoice too much right now. You have to go a little deeper into the woods.”“But,” he said, “what is the point? Now I have got seven days’ food.”The mystic said, “Still….”But the man said, “I will lose the copper mine if I go further.”He said, “You go. You certainly will lose the copper mine, but there is a silver mine. And whatsoever you can bring will be enough for three months.”“The mystic has proved right about the copper mine,” the woodcutter thought. “Perhaps he is also right about the silver mine.” And he went in and found the silver mine.And he came dancing, and he said, “How can I pay you? My gratitude knows no bounds.”The mystic said, “Don’t be in a hurry. Go a little deeper.”He said, “No! I cannot. I will lose the silver mine.”The mystic said, “But there is a gold mine just few steps deeper.”The woodcutter was hesitant. In fact, he was such a poor man, that having a silver mine – he had never dreamed of it.But if the mystic is saying it, who knows? – he may still be right. And he found the gold mine. Now it was enough to come once a year.But the mystic said, “It will be a long time – one year from now you will be coming here. I am getting old – I may not be here, I may be gone. So I have to tell you, don’t stop at the gold mine. Just a little more….”But the man said, “Why? What is the point? You show me one thing, and the moment I get it, you immediately tell me to drop that and go ahead! Now I have found the gold mine!”The mystic said, “But there is a diamond mine just a few feet deeper in the forest.”The woodcutter went that very day, and he found it. He brought many diamonds, and he said, “This will be enough for my whole life.”The mystic said, “Now perhaps we may not meet again, so my last message is: now that you have enough for your whole life, go in! Forget the forest, the copper mine, the silver mine, the gold mine, the diamond mine. Now I give you the ultimate secret, the ultimate treasure that is within you. Your outer needs are fulfilled. Sit the way I am sitting here.”The poor man said, “Yes, I was wondering…you know all these things – why do you go on sitting here? The question has arisen again and again. And I was just going to ask, ‘Why don’t you get all those diamonds lying there? Only you know about them. All that gold! Why do you go on sitting under this tree?’”The mystic said, “After finding the diamonds, my master told me, ‘Now sit under this tree and go in.’”The man dropped all the diamonds there, and he said, “Perhaps we may not meet again. I don’t want to go home – I am going to sit here by your side. Please teach me how to go in, because I am a woodcutter. I know how to go deeper into the woods, but I don’t know how to go in.”The mystic said, “But all your diamonds, gold, copper, silver – all that will be lost, because all these things are valueless for one who goes in.”The woodcutter said, “Don’t be bothered about that. You have been right up to now. I trust you, that you will be right in this last stage too.”The function of the master is basically to persuade you by and by to move from the physiology to the psychology – move from the mind to the heart: then move from the heart to the being.From the being opens the door of the ultimate being of existence. It is impossible to describe it; it can only be pointed at – the finger pointing to the moon.But don’t be worried: you will be losing only your poverty, your misery. You will not be losing anything that is valuable, and you will be gaining the whole kingdom of the universe.Just a little courage, a little trust…. I am not using the word belief, not using the word faith. I am not saying that you should believe in me. I am not saying, that you have to have faith in what I am saying.Belief is about theories, theologies, dogmas.Trust is nothing but pure love.It is purified love, just pure fragrance. The flower is not there anymore. The petals of the flower have fallen – dust unto dust. Only the fragrance.If you can feel my fragrance – and you must be feeling it; otherwise there is no need to be here. Trust is because of that fragrance.If you can see in my eyes that I have known something which you do not know, that I have experienced something which you are also capable of experiencing….Trust is just a little courage to move toward the source of the fragrance. And you will be amazed: the closer you come to the master, the closer you are to yourself. Finally, the master and the disciple disappear. There is only fragrance left. That’s what I call paradise – when all separations, all walls have fallen, and you have found the oceanic vastness.Up to now you were just a dewdrop on the petals of a lotus. Beautiful – in the early sun it shines like a pearl, but soon it will be gone. As the sun becomes hot, it will evaporate.Our ordinary lives are just dewdrops.Before death destroys your dewdrop, have courage.Slip down from the lotus into the ocean.Certainly it is risky. The lotus is so beautiful, the place is so velvety; the sun is so warm, the wind is so beautiful. And I am telling you, “Take a jump – fall into the ocean!”You will say, “The lotus will be lost, the warmth of the sun will be lost. My boundaries will be lost.”Yes, you will be lost, but it is not a loss:You will become the ocean.The dewdrop will not be found again, but it will remain spread all over the ocean forever and ever.So don’t be afraid. With me, just have a little guts and go on moving. Everything that you think is precious will be lost, but you will find something more precious. And ultimately you will find that all that you have been thinking precious was nothing.That is enlightenment. You don’t seek it, you are doing something else: trying to find your innermost core. The moment you touch your innermost center, enlightenment follows automatically. It is not an object of desire, it is your very subjectivity.Enlightenment is you; it is your very being.And whatever I am saying to you, I am not saying according to any scripture. I am not saying something that I have not experienced. Yes, it is true that what I have experienced is beyond words, although I try to bring words as close as possible to the experience. But the moment you experience it, you will say that I was lying. But you will be immensely grateful that a man was ready to lie, to deceive you, to cheat you.Get ready to be cheated, deceived!The relationship between a master and a disciple is a very strange phenomenon. The disciple wonders whether to believe or not, whether to trust or not. The master’s problem is how to create in language that which is found beyond words. But once you have known it, it becomes impossible for you not to give it expression! The experience starts expressing itself, although no word can contain it. But words can point toward it, they can become fingers.Don’t cling to the finger, because the finger is not the moon.Forget the finger and look where the finger is pointing.That’s where all the religions have missed. Somebody is carrying the Bible, somebody is carrying the Koran, somebody is carrying the Gita, and these are only fingers – and dead too! And they have all forgotten about the moon.With me, the finger is alive, and I am not going to allow you to cling to the finger.I am going to push you again and again to look at the moon.And once you have looked at the moon, my work is finished.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why don't you address your audience?There is a certain basic foundation for it. There is no audience to be addressed. As far as I am concerned, we are not separate. To you, I am separate from you; hence the question. But to me, you are just part of a vast continent of consciousness – in the same way that I am part of it. Who is going to address whom?There is a famous story of a Zen master. Every day, waking up in the morning, he would shout his own name. His disciples were very much puzzled. Finally they gathered courage and asked him.The master said, “Because only I am, there is nobody else to be called for. So I declare as I wake up, ‘Aha! So I am here again!’”I cannot address you because I am part and parcel of you – and not a mechanical part. The commune is an organic unity.The right hand never calls for help from the left hand; it comes of its own accord. The body is an organic whole. There is no need for any part of the body to address any other part of the body. The body functions in a tremendous unity. A commune is an organic body; hence, forgive me, I cannot address you.And what is there to use as an address? People address the audience as “Ladies and Gentlemen.” Both words are bogus. The gentleman has not yet arrived. Civilization is still a dream. If you scratch the so-called gentleman a little bit, you will find the animal there – not even a human being.And gentle, certainly man is not; otherwise, who has been fighting all these wars? Who has been killing millions of people? Who has been torturing the whole humanity and pushing it toward the ultimate global suicide? You call these people gentlemen? Then what will be the definition of a barbarous man?And have you ever met a lady? – full of jealousies, full of ego. What is there? Just look inside a man or a woman and you will find only two biological animals. Do you want me to address you, “Dear Biological Animals”? – because that will be the truth.I am reminded that the first Hindu sannyasin to come to America was Swami Vivekananda. He was the disciple of Paramahansa Ramakrishna. He had come here to participate in a world religious conference. Christian priests spoke, Jewish rabbis spoke, Mohammedan imams spoke – and they all addressed the people, “Ladies and Gentlemen.”Vivekananda was very young, so his turn came last. And do you know what happened? He addressed them as, “My brothers and sisters of America.”The whole audience stood up. For two minutes there was tremendous clapping. He had not even started saying anything; he had only addressed them. It was miraculous. People immediately felt that “Ladies and Gentlemen” is not the truth. And there comes a man who calls you, “My brothers, my sisters of America.” Immediately there is a tremendous connection with the man. Something transpires immediately, and thousands of people are aflame. It was difficult for the chairman to persuade people to stop clapping and sit down and listen to the man; this was only the beginning.But I cannot even call you my brothers and my sisters. To call any woman sister is humiliating her. She could be my beloved; the moment I call her sister, I have created a wall between her and me. Just think, visualize a woman who is addressed by everybody as sister. She will commit suicide.This commune is not for brothers and sisters. It is not a family, it is a freedom. Here, people are lovers. And who knows? – the woman you are addressing as sister today, tomorrow will be making love to you. Then there will be great guilt inside.And why should you be addressed as brothers? It has deep implications you may not be aware of. Men are called brothers because god is the father – naturally all men are brothers. I don’t have any god to offer to you; the father is a fiction. And when the father disappears you cannot be brothers, you can only be lovers. You can be friends but not brothers.And to me, friendship, friendliness, is the highest fragrance of love. That’s why I don’t address you.Moreover I am not a messiah, not a prophet. You are not to think of yourselves as my followers – because I am nobody’s leader. We are all fellow travelers, seeking, searching, inquiring. Nobody is higher and nobody is lower.I start my talks without addressing you because these are not gospels, or sermons, or lectures. I simply love to gossip, and in gossips you don’t address anyone. I enjoy talking to you, you enjoy listening to me. There is a synchronicity.Without you, who am I?Without me, who are you?There is no separation. We cannot exist separately, we are an organic whole.And my talks are just friendly talks, the way you talk with your friends. Do you address them first, “Ladies and Gentlemen”? There is no need. That creates a distance, a formality. You simply talk. You open your heart. And remember, the talker is not higher than the listener. They are two polarities of one phenomenon. They are absolutely equal, because neither of them can exist separate from the other. So if I address anyone, I will be addressing myself. That looks a little silly.And one point more: I don’t like the word gentleman and the word lady. These are plastic. There are men and there are women – and I want my people to be just that, your natural selves.The raw woman has a beauty. The raw man has a strength. The moment you make him a gentleman, you have taken all his strength, all his power, all his potential for growth. You have encased him in a certain word. You have made him dependent on you because now he will hanker for respectability, and he will try in every way to fulfill your expectations of his being a gentleman.I don’t have any expectations of you.I want you just to be yourself.The word lady is even more ugly. It is an invention of man. And he has certain qualities in mind which the lady has to pretend to have.For example, while he is making love, the lady has to lie down almost like a corpse. She is not supposed to be active; only prostitutes are active – ladies simply lie down silently.Why did man create ladies? There is a biological reason. A woman has the capacity for multiple orgasms. Man is very poor; he can have – God willing – only one orgasm. No man can satisfy a woman. In fact, the woman has a chain of orgasms. So it was a very cunning strategy that the woman should not be active; she should behave corpse-like, so that her orgasm is not triggered.Millions of women have died without knowing a single orgasm. Even today, in a country like India, I have not found a single woman who knows what orgasm is. In Indian languages there is no word for orgasm. In the West, only within these fifty years have women started liberating themselves, asking for their birthright. And if a woman has many orgasms, then the man will feel very impotent after only one orgasm.In a more scientific society, a woman will need at least four, five men. A husband has to invite all his friends, so when he is finished the second begins; when the second is finished, the third begins – until the woman starts screaming with joy, shouting meaningless words, and is aglow from head to toe. But man’s jealousy has prevented it. And my suggesting anything like this makes me condemned as an immoral person.In fact, all the religions have been immoral. And all those people who have created monogamy, marriage, fidelity, are criminals. It is time that they should be exposed.It is not my fault that the woman has the capacity for multiple orgasms. It is a gift of nature. But she can have an orgasmic experience only if she is active, if her energy is also moving. If your wife suddenly jumps on top of you, you will think, “My God! Is she my wife or a prostitute?” She is not behaving like a lady. If she starts biting your earlobes, starts scratching with her nails, you will forget all about orgasm and will immediately phone to the hospital to send the ambulance. “My wife has gone mad!”Vatsyayana, the first sexologist of the world, wrote five thousand years ago everything that I am saying: that a woman is dangerous when she comes to the peak.To avoid this danger, the male chauvinists all over the world – to pretend they are the real powerful people, not women – say the woman is “the fair sex.” My foot! In sex, man is “the fair sex.” The woman is tremendously powerful.And out of fear, for centuries the man has made love to a woman as quickly as possible. The reason is that if he delays, if he makes love a little longer, perhaps he may trigger the woman. And then he will prove simply impotent. Because of this fact, for thousands of years women have been denied their birthright, the most precious experience.Hence, I hate the word lady! It means “a good lay.” But that is not the raw, natural, authentic woman.The world has to drop all these hypocrisies. Man has to accept the truth that he can have only one orgasm. And in fact, by denying women their multiple orgasms, he has also sacrificed his own orgasm. Ejaculation is not orgasm. Ejaculation is good as a sleeping pill. Ejaculation is good – you will not die of a heart attack. But ejaculation is not the real thing. You have simply thrown your energy without gaining any experience out of it. It is sheer wastage.Even if you don’t die of a heart attack, you are not going to live eternally; some other attack will kill you. Perhaps you may live two, three years more than others, but what is the point of living?Orgasm is one of the most significant facts, not only sexually, but spiritually too, because a man or a woman who knows the orgasmic experience has taken the first step toward spiritual revolution.If bodies can give so much, what about the meeting of beings?But the past and its religions have all been against sex. Their theologies are different, their philosophies are different, but on one point they all agree: they have been against sex. Why? It is simple logic: If sex does not satisfy you – and it cannot satisfy you unless it becomes orgasmic – then in frustration, misery, suffering, dragging your life somehow toward the grave, you will need the priest, you will need God, you will need the church, the synagogue, the temple.You are in such a misery, you need consolation. But consolation is not the goal of existence. Existence wants you to know the ultimate blissfulness. And the first step is becoming orgasmic.You will be surprised to know that in India the sexual posture of the woman underneath a heavy and barbarous animal is known as the “missionary posture,” because India became aware of this when Christian missionaries entered India. Otherwise, the woman is fragile: it is simple courtesy that she should be on top of you. It needs no argumentation.You are muscular, taller, stronger – at least in your bones. Let the woman be on top of you. Please, try being a lady! Allow the woman freedom to act, and you lie down like a corpse. Then you will know what you have done for centuries, for millennia.The woman is erotic all over her body. Man’s eros is local, just confined to his genitals. Man is very poor. If you really want to have an orgasmic experience, you have to play with the woman’s body – foreplay – so that you can make her body throb with joy, with excitement, with the expectation of what is going to come now.Until you have made your woman’s whole body thrilled, don’t start making love. Because your – I mean men’s – eros is confined to the genitals, he is finished within seconds. Foreplay is a necessity so that you can both come at the same moment to an orgasmic unity.And after the orgasm, I cannot believe that the husband will turn his back and go to sleep and start snoring. With such a beautiful experience – something otherworldly – he will feel grateful. It is ugly not to have afterplay. The woman has given you so much that she deserves afterplay.But I know husbands make love and that is nothing but a sexual sneeze. Yes, a kind of relief – when you sneeze it feels good. The tension that was making you uncomfortable in the nose is gone.The same is the case with your lovemaking. Some tension in your genitalia was hankering to sneeze. Once the sneeze is finished, you go to sleep and start snoring. And nobody looks at the woman, who is crying by your side because she has not attained anything. She has not gained anything. She has been used!And to use any human being is the worst crime one can commit; to use a human being as a means…. Then why bother about a real woman? – just a plastic woman will do. It will give you a good sneeze – and no trouble: no nagging, no fighting, no pillow throwing, no problem.But if you want a real woman, allow her to slip out of the hypocrisy of being a lady. She is a woman, alive. You both have to be active together. Then only can you come to a point where suddenly time stops, thoughts stop. A moment of such luminosity – that is the beginning of spirituality.My own understanding is that man started being spiritual only because of sexual orgasm – that is the original source. Once he has known such a beautiful experience, he wants more, he wants to go higher. But the poor people of the earth who don’t know what orgasm is, are praying in the churches, in the mosques, in the synagogues, asking God that what they are missing here be given to them in paradise.There is no paradise anywhere else.You have to be natural. And if it is natural for a woman to have multiple orgasms, then what is wrong in sharing your woman with your friends? And they will be sharing their women with you. It should be simply understood as a human, compassionate action. It is not immorality. What is happening is immoral: depriving millions of women of their natural right. But remember, when you deprive somebody you are also depriving yourself.Men and women will never to go the churches. Sunday morning will be the orgasmic morning. Who bothers to go to the church to listen to a stupid priest who knows nothing? In my vision, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, gurudwaras, should become places of love where people can go and have orgasmic experiences. That is the first step, and it is sacred.Sermons are not needed. Orgasms are needed.And a man or a woman who has a simple, natural feel of orgasmic experience will be a totally new man, a new woman. All boredom will disappear. The world will be full of rejoicings, laughter, dances, songs, music. And the experience of orgasm makes everybody creative, because you have experienced so much that you would like to sing a song, compose poetry, play on your guitar, or just dance – existence has been such a benediction.And sexual orgasm is the lowest experience – but you are denied even that. The first rung of the ladder is denied to you; how can you reach to the top – what we call meditation, samadhi, ecstasy?So there are reasons why I don’t address you as ladies and gentlemen. Those are dirty words. I cannot call you brothers and sisters, because that will create guilt in you. In fact, you call a woman “sister” only when she is so homely that you want to get rid of her.When I was a lecturer in the university…. For some unknown reason, people have always been asking my advice. I have never been a friend to anybody – they won’t allow! – I have always been some wise guy. They would come to me only when they had a problem, and they trusted that I would keep their problem secret.A professor approached me one day, and he said, “I cannot say it to anyone, but any woman I meet starts calling me ‘brother.’”I said, “You are simply stupid. There is no reason to come to me. Just stand before a mirror and you will know why they are calling you brother. Your face is so ugly, that making love to you will be a tremendous exercise in torturing oneself. You simply forget it!”And you must be approaching the most beautiful women in the university. You find a woman who is addressed by everybody as sister; perhaps she will not call you brother. That is the only possibility. More than that, I cannot help you. But if I come across a woman – which is very possible – who is being called sister by everybody, I will inform you.”I cannot address you as brothers and sisters. This is not a family. The very words brother and sister have become so much associated with anti-sexuality that I would not like to use them. Thousands of years of conditioning….Why, in the hospitals, are nurses called sisters? It is a simple technique to prevent the patient…because nurses are beautiful people, and this creates a psychological barrier in the patient’s mind that she is a sister. He will not dare to approach her. He will keep himself – reluctantly – away from her. The word sister is an iron wall.Why is Teresa the Terrible called “mother”? She has not given birth to a single child, how has she become mother? The same strategy.Why are your priests called “father”? The same strategy. It works both ways. You call the priest father, and the taboo arises immediately between you and him. And the moment you have called him father, now you have prevented him also…. Otherwise all those fathers are celibates, they would like some contact.Of course they cannot have contact with women, they are not allowed. Buddhist monks are not allowed even to see a woman. They have to keep their eyes four feet ahead so that even if a woman passes by, they can only see her feet. But these fathers, these monks, are full of sexual energy.Homosexuality is a religious phenomenon. It was born in monasteries where women were prevented from entering, only men…and man is not that stupid, he will find some other way, perverted, unnatural. And when one looks around the world….Just the other day one beautiful journalist was asking me, “Some Christian religious leader has stated that AIDS is the punishment from God for homosexuality.” Great! Most of the homosexuals are in the monasteries.And the Christian God himself is gay. In the Christian trinity there is not any space for a woman, so God is hanging out with two gay fellows. And in such an eternity, do you think he will not like once in a while to sneeze?This homosexual God is punishing homosexuals on the earth for their homosexuality. In fact, he should be punished. The pope should be punished, the Catholic priests should be punished. The monks of all the religions should be punished: they have created homosexuality.In the wild, animals never become homosexual. But in a zoo they have to. If the female is not available, then those poor animals – what can they do? You may be surprised that in the wild, no animal masturbates, but in a zoo they start masturbating. They become homosexuals.I am sometimes surprised – have we turned this whole earth into a zoo?Come back to nature.Your religions have corrupted you, your so-called cultures have destroyed your natural potential. Your civilizations have given you masks to wear and you have forgotten your real, original face.So I am not going to address you as brothers and sisters, no. And there is no need to address. The people who are lecturing have a need, because that gives a good start. The greatest problem for speakers is from where to start and where to end. I am not a speaker, I am not an orator – I just love talking. So in the middle I start, in the middle I end. In fact, that’s how it should be, because in life everything is in the middle.You don’t know the beginning, although idiotic theologians have been trying to figure out when the world began. Something is itching in them. They cannot conceive a world without a beginning. It is as if you are reading a novel and the beginning pages are missing. You will find the itching…”How did the story begin?”Christians say God created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ was born. Certainly it must have been the first of January, Monday – I just presume. Most probably it was the first of April, because such a foolish world…! And what was the need to create it? For eternity he had not been creating, so why suddenly six thousand years ago did this great urge arise in him?God has nothing to do with it – there is no God. This is the theologians’ problem: the story must have a beginning! And then it must have an end: the last judgment day – that is the end. When I think about our projections, our psychological needs, I can understand that you feel satisfied with a beginning, you feel satisfied with an end – but both are fictitious.Just think of the last judgment day. A day consists – if we include the night also in it – of twenty-four hours. In twenty-four hours millions and millions of people who have lived will be standing before God, and half of them will be women. There will be so much yakketty-yak, yakketty-yak! – I don’t think that any judgment is going to happen.And there will be so much trouble, because you find a woman who has been your wife in one life, and now she is somebody else’s wife. And she will be puzzled, because in thousands of lives she had thousands of husbands. With whom is she going to stand, with the first or with the last? Or she is going to follow the middle course?But theologians are exactly Don Quixote-type people. There is no beginning – existence has always been here. And there will be no end – existence will always be here. And we are always in the middle.I follow the existential path.I don’t start my speech by addressing you. That’s why the question has arisen. I suddenly start, I suddenly end. But that’s how life is; to be true and authentic to life, I have to be the same way.So my talks with you start in the middle and end in the middle. They are closer to existence. They are real, they are not fictions. I am saying to you only that which is my own experience.Osho,Is there any existential question in existence? Are all existential questions man-made?Existence knows no questions. All questions are man-made. And not only questions, but all answers also are man-made.It is a very stupid game. First you create the question, then you have to create the answer; otherwise the question tortures you. It goes on knocking in your head, “Find the answer!” So you look in the holy scriptures, in the philosophical treatises. You go to your so-called wise people – whom I call “otherwise.” And they supply you with answers – with a condition: you have to believe them.All the religions are called faiths. Why? Science is not called a faith. But why are religions called faiths? – because the answers are man-made. And if you are not repressed in the very beginning, there is no end to the questions.You bring one question, you ask, “Who created the world?” The priest says, “God the father who lives in heaven, he created the world. Believe it. Doubt is a sin!” Why is he insisting on belief? – because he knows soon you will come and ask, “Who created God?”…the same question.And the priest does not have the guts to say that God needs no creator. If he says that, then what is the need of God? Existence can exist without any creator. If God can exist without being created, then where is the problem? Why bring God in? Their answers are all invented. And to prevent you asking more and more, their insistence is that doubt is sin, and belief is virtue.Just the opposite is the reality: belief is the sin, and doubt is the virtue.In three hundred years, science has progressed so much because it accepted doubt as its method. In thousands of years, religions have not contributed anything to the world, because their very foundation is fictitious. From belief you can never reach to the truth. In fact the moment you believe in something, your inquiry dies; now there is no need, you already know the answer. This is killing man’s inquiry, the adventure of becoming acquainted with life’s mysteries.All the religions have been doing one thing: they are de-mystifying existence by forcing belief on you, playing on your greed and fear that if you don’t believe you will fall into eternal hell. If you believe, you will have an eternal life of rejoicings. In paradise there is no work except playing on your harp, “Alleluia, alleluia.” That’s the only work, all seven days are holidays.I am sometimes surprised that all your saints, mahatmas, the great souls, have been doing this stupid thing continuously for eternity now: playing on the harp, “Alleluia, alleluia.” They must be bored to death! In fact, hell seems to be more exciting. At least there is much to be done. And you will find all the colorful people in hell.In heaven, you will find only long faces, carrying their crosses on their shoulders. You will not find a Picasso, a Van Gogh, a Byron, a Mozart. All the beautiful people you will find in hell, because they never believed. They lived their life spontaneously, without ordering it according to a certain religion or dogma.If there is a heaven and hell – just for argument’s sake I am saying that; there is no heaven, no hell. But if there is heaven and hell, please choose hell! All the great painters, all the great poets, all the great artists, all the great sculptors you will find there.Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Kalidas, Rabindranath, Albert Einstein…. What a great joy to say, “Hi, Socrates! Here comes Plato!” They are bound to be there, because both were homosexual.In heaven you cannot even say “Hi” to Saint Francis. That will look profane. You cannot say, “Hello, Mahatma Gandhi!” That is not acceptable. You have to fall at their feet and kiss their feet.So if by chance I am wrong and heaven is there, before going there please catch the disease, AIDS. Touch the feet, kiss the feet of all the sages. Don’t leave anybody out, because through kissing AIDS is transferred. There is no need to have any sexual intercourse with those saints.Existence has no question.It is man’s monkey mind. Monkeys cannot sit silently. They go on jumping from one tree to another for no reason. Man’s mind has come from the monkeys. Now it cannot jump from one tree to another tree, but it can jump from one thought to another thought, from one question to another question.D.H. Lawrence, one of the most beautiful men of this century, was having a morning walk with a neighbor’s little boy. They had become very friendly. The boy asked Lawrence, “Why are the trees green?” Now this is how the monkey-mind starts. Now what business is it of yours why the trees are green? Let them be, it is none of your concern. But the little boy asked why the trees are green.Fortunately, there was no pope the polack; otherwise he would have said, “Because God made them green – and believe in it. You cannot question God, why he made them green; that will be sacrilegious.”But Lawrence was a beautiful man, very authentic. He looked at the trees and he said to the boy, “The trees are green because they are green.”The boy said, “Aha! Trying to cheat me? Is this an answer: The trees are green because they are green? I also know that – I am asking why!”Lawrence said, “I don’t know. I have always seen they are green. You can ask the trees.”Now Lawrence is ready to accept his ignorance; and that is one of the most significant things about a wise man. He said, “I don’t know. All that I know is that they are green.”But philosophers, religious preachers, thinkers-they cannot accept Lawrence’s statement. They have to find why they are green. No tree is bothering. No tree is asking the question, “Why am I green?”In existence there is no question. It is whatever it is. The question comes from the monkey-mind. Monkeys are very curious and very imitative. These two things you should remember, because these two things are deep-rooted in your mind too.Monkeys are very curious – always looking all around. Never for a moment sitting in silence, doing nothing and letting the grass grow by itself, no. And they are very imitative. If you laugh at them, they will laugh at you. If you show an angry face to them, they will show an angry face to you.I have heard…. An old man used to sell Gandhi caps in India; and particularly at election time, there is great demand for Gandhi caps, because unless you are a follower of Gandhi, nobody is going to give you their vote.The elections were coming near, but the old man was sick and he told his son, “I will not be able to go and sell the caps. You will have to go this time.”The boy said, “I will go. Any instructions to be followed?”The old man said, “There is nothing. The price is written on the caps. If you can sell them at a higher price, good, but don’t sell them at a lower price. The price is written in a code language so nobody will understand except you.”The boy went. It was a hot day, he was feeling tired. He found a big bo tree with great shadow, coolness, underneath it. He thought, it will be good to have a little afternoon nap. He put his bag of caps by the side and lay down on the roots of the bo tree, using them as the pillow. He was not aware that the bo tree had hundreds of monkeys in it, and he was so tired that he fell asleep immediately.Now, the monkeys saw the man wearing a white Gandhi cap. They also saw that in the bag there were hundreds of caps exactly like that. Slowly, slowly the monkeys came down, took a cap, one by one, put it on his head and went back up. By the time the young man woke up the bag was empty. He could not believe – where had all the caps gone? At that moment he heard great laughter. He looked up: hundreds of monkeys were wearing his caps!He said, “My God! Now what am I going to do? How am I going to explain this to my father? And it is impossible to get the caps from these monkeys. They don’t understand my language, I don’t understand their language. They don’t have any money to pay.” He was in a real fix.He ran back to his home and asked his father, “What has to be done, because I had never expected such an experience?”The father said, “Don’t be worried, I have also experienced it. But it is very simple. You just go back, sit under the tree and throw your cap!”The boy said, “What is that going to do? Only one cap is left and you are saying throw it?”His father said, “You simply go and do what I am saying.” The boy threw his cap, and all the monkeys threw their caps. They are imitative.All these religions are teaching you to imitate. Imitate Jesus Christ, imitate Gautam Buddha, imitate this, imitate that. By imitation you will become a saint, a holy man.I would like to say to you, “You will only become a monkey again.” All your saints and all your holy men have fallen backward in the Darwinian evolution. Darwin says monkeys became man, but he was not aware that all the religions are trying to make monkeys out of man. They have succeeded! “Just imitate. Believe without doubt and follow.”My work is just the opposite. Doubt is the most precious thing you have got. Don’t lose it. No belief is worth anything.Doubt everything with your totality, and doubt will take you to the point where you discover the indubitable, that which even if you want to doubt, you cannot doubt: it is there!And then of course the question of belief does not arise – neither before nor afterward. Before, it was dangerous; it will kill your doubting capacity. Afterward, it is futile; you know, there is no need to believe.Do you believe in the sun? Do you believe in the moon? Do you believe that I am here? You know it – there is no question of belief. You believe only in fictions. So whenever somebody says, “Believe it,” he is keeping you retarded, he is destroying your intelligence.Doubt, and doubt with intensity and totality.It is everybody’s right to discover the truth.Existence has the answer. It has no questions.The mind has only questions. It has no answer.To summarize: put the mind aside so all questions are put aside, and encounter the reality – and you will know the answer. Not that somebody will give you a statement about the answer. It will be not explained to you, it will not come as a linguistic statement. It will come as love comes to you. You will feel it, your heart will start dancing with it. You will be able to see the luminosity of it. And all monkey questions, the monkey-mind, you will have transcended.Darwin says a few monkeys became man. Certainly there are still millions of monkeys, only a few monkeys became man. They dared, they tried to walk on two feet. All the monkeys must have laughed, must have thought these monkeys have gone mad. And those monkeys gave birth to the whole of humanity.But the mind of the monkey is still there. If you can drop that too, then you reach to the ultimate flowering of your being.I call it enlightenment. It is simple – just a little courage….

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What effect on science would be felt if people stopped believing in the old religions?The fact of believing is the greatest barrier in the progress of science. In three hundred years science has done much in spite of all the religions, their superstitions, their beliefs. In these three hundred years, there would have been at least a hundred times more progress if religions had not come in the way at each step. Science has been struggling inch by inch.If people stop believing in the old religions there will be a tremendous explosion of wisdom, creativity, affluence. All the things that religions have been promising people in paradise are now possible here on this earth.We have the know-how, we have high technology to do it – but there are two barriers. One is our religious beliefs; the second is our political divisions.Religions and nations: these are the two barriers.It has to be understood that politics gives direction to scientific research to be more destructive. The politician is in the service of death. He does not want this earth to become a paradise, for the simple reason that if people are utterly contented, fulfilled, blessed, then who is going to bother about wars, nations, ideologies? These are things you think about when you are miserable, suffering.The second great barrier, far bigger even, is our attachment to the dead past and its religions.I am reminded of Galileo. He was almost on his deathbed – old, tired, spent. He was dragged to the court of the Christian pope because in his book, which he was completing, he had written that the sun does not go around the earth, but the earth goes around the sun.This is against biblical faith. The Bible says just what you see – you see the sunrise in the morning, sunset in the evening, and again next day. To our perception the sun is going around the earth, but this is not the fact. The Bible simply states the common layman’s viewpoint. It is not science.Galileo was told that he had to change the statement because it goes against the Bible. He said, “There is no problem. I am a dying man, and if I don’t change it, you are going to burn it, ban it. I will change it, but one thing you must remember: that my changing the statement does not change the fact. The earth will still go around the sun. My statement has nothing to do with the earth going around the sun or the sun going around the earth. I am simply stating a fact.”But the pope said, “You will have to change it. Don’t you worry about the sun and the earth – God takes care of it.”Galileo finally asked, “I have a question. Why is a single statement creating so much disturbance in you, hostility in you?”And what the pope said is significant. He said, “The question is not your one statement. The question is, if the Bible is wrong about one thing, then what is the guarantee about other things?”The Bible has to be true as a whole. A single statement going against the Bible will destroy people’s belief. And if the belief is gone, the religion is gone.Religion – whether Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist – any religion is based on your ignorance, is a cover-up. You don’t know, but the belief gives you a certain knowledge which helps you to feel knowledgeable. It does not make you wiser; on the contrary, it keeps you stupid, unintelligent.Ignorance has to be accepted, not covered. You have a wound – it has to be accepted, its cause has to be found. The medicine has to be searched for, to remove the cause; only then will the wound heal. But that is a long process which needs intelligence.The simple way is just to cover up the wound and believe that there is no wound at all. But doing such a thing means you will remain retarded, and the wound will go on growing bigger and bigger. And as the wound goes on getting bigger and bigger, you will have to stretch your belief bigger and bigger, to the point where it becomes absolutely absurd.All the religions of the world have kept humanity in ignorance. Only an ignorant person can believe.Nobody asks you, “Do you believe in the sun, in the moon? Do you believe that you have eyes, that you are alive?” Nobody asks these questions because you know. You are alive; you cannot deny it. Even the denial will prove your existence: who is denying it?There is a story in Mulla Nasruddin’s life. He was sitting in the coffeehouse with his friends, bragging about his generosity. But the friends said, “You talk always about great things – generosity, humbleness, hospitality – but you have never even asked us to come to your home for a cup of tea.”Mulla got agitated and he said, “You are all invited for dinner. Come with me!”In his excitement he forgot that his wife was there in the house. As they started coming closer to the house he started becoming worried, because in the morning his wife had sent him to purchase some vegetables, other foods. And the whole day he had wasted, playing cards, drinking coffee, meeting friends…. He had completely forgotten all about why he had gone to the city.But now he was in a dilemma: twenty friends with him, one wife – and one wife is far stronger than twenty friends! He started trembling. The friends asked, “What is the matter? Have you got a fever?”He said, “You don’t understand; this is a far bigger disease. If you are really my friends, do a small, kind act.”They said, “We are always ready. What is the problem?”He said, “I have not informed my wife that I am bringing twenty friends for dinner. Seeing you all, she may get mad. You just remain outside. First I will go and persuade her, and then I will call you in.”He went in the house, closed the door, and told his wife, “Twenty idiots are following me, because by mistake I used the word generosity. And you know me, that I am a bragging type of man. So they have come for dinner. Now only you can save me!”The wife said, “What can I do? – because there is no food in the house. You had gone to purchase vegetables…the whole day I have been waiting. And now you turn up – without vegetables – with twenty friends for dinner?”“No,” Mulla said, “that is not a problem. You simply go, open the door, and ask the people, ‘Why are you standing here?’ And they will say, ‘Mulla has invited us for dinner.’ You simply say, ‘Mulla is not in the house. I have not seen his face since this morning.’”The wife said, “But this seems to be very illogical. You have brought them; you have left them in front of the house, you have entered the house in front of them. And now you are trying to dump the whole problem on me.”Mulla said, “Don’t be worried, I will manage. You just do what I say.”The wife had to concede because there was no other way. She went; she asked, “What is the matter? What are you doing here?”The friends said, “Your husband has asked us to come to your house for dinner.”The woman said, “But I have not seen him since this morning. He is not in the house.”Those twenty friends laughed. They said, “This is too much! He has brought us here, and we know that he is in the house because he has entered the house before our eyes – twenty eyewitnesses.” And they started arguing, “If he is not in the house, let us come in, and we will find him. He must be hiding.”The wife said, “He is not there.”They started arguing. Mulla opened a window and said to the people, “You seem to be just barbarous! You are arguing with my wife? Twenty men arguing with one simple woman! Can’t you understand a simple thing? Mulla may have come with you, but he has gone from the back door. So now get lost!”Those twenty people could not believe this, that Mulla himself was saying that he must have gone out from the back door!You cannot deny yourself.Your very denial will be the proof. You cannot say, “I have gone out from the back door” – because then who are you? Who is making this statement?All the religions have been befooling humanity.One thing they all know: man is born innocent, knowing nothing. Soon he is going to question. That’s an intrinsic quality of human intelligence. No animal questions anything. No tree questions or believes. No mountain has a philosophy, an explanation of the world.It is man’s prerogative, his privilege. The question mark is your dignity. You are the only one on the earth who can ask a question.The parents are afraid. The priests are afraid. The politicians are afraid. All the vested interests are afraid because they don’t know the answer either.But the parents have to pretend before the child. It is against their ego…they cannot say, “We do not know. You will have to inquire. We have been inquiring, we have not found any answer yet. If, by the way, you can find the answer first, please inform us. Or if we find it first, we will inform you. But right now, we are both in the same boat.”But no parent has proved so loving, so compassionate. The child asks, “Who has created the world?” Nobody knows, but the parents cannot accept ignorance. That will be a kind of humiliation. They say with certainty, “God created the world.” They even give the date, the time, the year, when God created the world, how he created the world.The child is innocent, a tabula rasa, a slate; you can write anything on him. And he trusts you, he loves you. Love cannot distrust.These are the complexities of life. Love cannot distrust, and you are the most intimate, the most close. You are bringing up the child. He depends on you. The human child is the most helpless child in the whole of existence. You should understand that.In my garden…I used to think there were one hundred peacocks. Now Mukta has informed me, “You are continuously making a wrong statement. There are three hundred peacocks.”Six small kids have lost track of their mothers. And, of course, in peacocks you cannot find a Mother Teresa. Peacocks don’t care about Nobel Prizes. So those six orphans hang out with each other. And they are growing! They have not bothered about the fact that the mother is lost, although it would have been easier for them to grow in the protection of the mother.But the human child is so helpless, so weak, he cannot survive without the mother and the father. This helplessness has been exploited. It hurts that parents are doing it to their own children. Perhaps they don’t know what they are doing. Their intentions are not suspect, but their actions are stupid.They think they are giving the child the right answer. And by the time the child is grown up enough, he is full of garbage: the Bible, the Koran, the Gita, Krishna, Buddha, Christ. And for a long time he has been conditioned and programmed. This is the ugliest crime against an innocent, helpless child. You have killed him. You have destroyed his curiosity, you have murdered his inquiry. Now he will live with all this garbage his whole life. And he will believe that this is knowledge.Religion is based on belief. Belief is a dirty word – four-letter or not, it is a dirty word. Belief simply means your ignorance has been covered – but that which has been covered is still there, it has not been removed.It is like a doctor who covers your cancer and tells you, “You are perfectly healthy – no need to worry about the cancer. There is no cancer.” The cancer is not listening to the doctor. The cancer cells will go on multiplying, and you will remain ignorant of your own death that is growing within you. The doctor was not a friend. In fact, he was more dangerous than the cancer that you have. There is a cure for your cancer, but there is no cure for that doctor.Every child is born innocent and every child is being exploited. The parents do exactly the same to the child as was done to them by their parents.Your parents are not to be condemned – the same has happened to them. You can go as far back as possible – to Adam and Eve, the original human beings on the earth – and in their story you will find the same story that is yours. God, the father in that story, tells Adam and Eve, his children, that they are not to eat from two trees: one is the tree of knowledge and the other is the tree of eternal life.This story is not history, but it is certainly psychology. It is about every father. It is the very essence of all that has happened to humanity. I think of this story as being of tremendous importance.Can a father prevent his child from becoming wise? Can a father prevent his child knowing the eternal flame of life? And if a father can do this, then what is left to destroy in the child. He has destroyed everything.And still you go on saying, “God the father.” He should be hanged! If you can get hold of him, kill him immediately! He is the worst criminal. But your priest will say just the opposite. They say it was the serpent – who was nothing but the devil taking the form of a serpent – who persuaded Eve to disobey God.This story has many implications. Why did he try first on the woman and not on the man? That can explain why there are so many women and so few men here. The man is argumentative; he functions through his head. The woman has a loving heart; she functions from there.Eve accepted the advice of the serpent. It was absolutely clear: “Why should you live in ignorance? Eat the fruit of the tree and be wise. Wisdom is not sin.” But that’s what your religions are telling you: wisdom is sin. Then to be an idiot is virtue. And in your churches, in your synagogues, in your temples you will find all the idiots. You cannot find a single wise man there.To me, the serpent is the first rebel, the first assertion of human intelligence. God was simply behaving in a dictatorial way, preventing Adam and Eve from knowing.The word science means knowing. If the Bible has to be written in contemporary languages, the tree was the tree of science. And the second tree was the tree of eternal life. Knowing opens the door for eternal life, for the second step.Adam and Eve could not reach the second tree, because God became afraid. They had already eaten from the tree of knowledge; now it was only a question of a little time and they would reach the other tree. He drove them out of the Garden of Eden, closed the doors, and condemned them as sinners because they had disobeyed the father.This God seems to be even less intelligent than Sigmund Freud. It is simple psychology that if you prohibit somebody from something, you are creating an urge, a desire to get exactly that same thing.In my childhood it was an everyday problem. I saw somebody smoking, I loved the way he was making rings of the smoke. I went to my father and I said, “I need some money to purchase cigarettes.”He said, “I know children sometimes smoke, but not like you – asking your own father. They hide, they lie – and you are asking me for money!”I said, “Certainly, because I don’t want to hide anything, and I don’t want to feel guilty. And the desire has arisen; it is better to have a taste. If it is not worthwhile, it is finished forever. And if it is worthwhile, then you have to supply me.” He knew me perfectly well….I said, “You remember, that if you don’t give me the money, I will steal, and for that stealing you will be responsible. I could have stolen money, there was no problem. I have not done that. I always go through the proper channels.”He looked at me, and he said, “Okay.” He sent a servant to bring a packet of cigarettes, and he said, “You smoke.”Certainly the experience was not worthwhile. I started coughing. And it looked silly – taking the smoke in and out when you can have fresh air, dirtying, polluting the air with the smoke. And for that you have to pay money too!I said to my father, “Now, you rest assured; this is my first and last cigarette. But if you had prohibited me, things would have been different. Your prohibition would have given me a challenge; I would have stolen money. You would be responsible for my being a thief. I would be smoking, hiding behind the house. For that kind of secrecy you would have been responsible.“I want to remain an open book. I don’t want anything secretive, it is always a burden. And you would have made me guilty because I have disobeyed you. I love you and I trust you, I don’t want to disobey you. So you would have been responsible for all that.“And one thing more: when one takes a challenge, then it is very difficult to get out of it. Your prohibition would be there; I would have argued with myself, ‘Perhaps one has to learn how to smoke, perhaps one has to learn the taste of the tobacco. Perhaps it will take a little time for me to get accustomed.’ And if I had turned into a smoker, the whole responsibility would have been yours. You did well – I am grateful to you.”He used to go to the temple, and he would ask me to come. I said, “The day I feel like coming, I will ask you to take me with you. But I don’t see anything in that temple. In fact, the statue in that temple is neither a work of art nor what you believe it is – God’s statue. And you go on touching the feet of the statue and praying to God to help you, and I know he cannot.”He said, “How do you know that he cannot?”I said, “He cannot help himself. I have seen a mouse pissing on the statue, and he could not do anything. I cannot believe that he can do anything for you. At least he would have thrown the mouse out! But he remained sitting there, and the mouse enjoyed sitting on his head. I cannot touch the feet of this statue. The mouse seems to be more powerful.“And I feel ashamed that you go on praying to a dead stone. I am finished,” I told him. “The moment I saw what the mouse was doing to your god, the doors of your temple were closed for me. I really like the mouse – he has much more courage than you! At least he was not praying, he was pissing, he gave a good bath to your god.”Every child feels that what you are saying does not seem to be right, because you have not seen God. Somebody has told you – and that somebody has not seen God, somebody else has told him.I used to ask my father, “Please find out the first man who saw God.” There is nobody in the whole history of humanity who has seen God. And almost the whole humanity believes in God. There must be some psychological reason in it.The reason is: if there is no god, existence becomes a mystery. Life becomes meaningless. You become an accident. God has not created the world, he has not created man in his own image. In my birthplace there was a small church, because there were not many Christians – only two, three families – but I used to go every Sunday to create trouble for the priest. He was a nice man.I used to ask him, “Have you seen your face in the mirror?”He said, “Why? Why are you asking that question?”I said, “Come with me and look at your face in the mirror.”He said, “Okay, if you want, I will come. But what is the point?”I said, “The point will be soon clear to you. This morning in the sermon you said God created man in his own image. Just look at your face – so this is God?” And he was not a man you could call handsome, no. He was really ugly.Standing before the mirror he said, “I have argued about the point with many people, but with you there is no question of argument. It is certain at least God did not create me in his own image! About others I cannot say.”I said to him, “Just the opposite is the case: man has created God in his own image. And the proof is everywhere available.”The Chinese god does not have the face of an Indian god, the Chinese god has the Chinese face. The Chinese god has the Chinese beard – just a few hairs, you can count them. He cannot have a beard like me. He has high cheekbones – in China that is thought to be beautiful. Nowhere else in the world are those bones thought to be beautiful.The Indian god has the shape of the Indians, even the color. Krishna is not black nor white, but in between. Indians cannot make their god white. They cannot make their god a Negro – they cannot make their god’s hair like the hair of a Negro!Around the world there are thousands of images of God. That simply shows that everywhere man has created God in his own image.But from the very childhood, you go on reinforcing again and again continuously for years…they call it religious education. They are making you civilized, cultured. All that they are doing is crippling you, crippling your intelligence, destroying your immense capacity to inquire. And by all this, they are preventing you from knowing the truth!If all these religions disappear from the earth you all will become inquirers. And there is so much to inquire – life is such a deep mystery, almost fathomless. And to enter into that exploration will make you for the first time a human being. It is a tremendous journey, the real pilgrimage, but it has to start with doubt.These two words have to be remembered: belief and doubt.All the religions are against doubt, obviously, because if they accept doubt all their beliefs will be found to be man-made. All the religions say that those who doubt will fall into hell; believe and you are saved. The helpless child does not want to fall into eternal darkness. He chooses to believe.Science starts with doubt. It is just the polar opposite of religions – by religions I mean those that have existed up to now. Science starts with doubt. The most fundamental thing in the scientific approach is: doubt everything unless you come to a point which is indubitable, which cannot be doubted. Even if you want to doubt, you cannot doubt it, it is there.Science is true religion because it leads you to truth.Your religions are nothing but superstitions. They prevent you from reaching toward the truth, they don’t allow you to inquire on your own. They fill your mind exactly the same way as a computer is filled – with information, scriptures, theologies. They don’t leave even a small space. They are so afraid that if even a small space is left in you, your natural potentiality will assert itself as a question, as a doubt.Let me say to you that beliefs are given to you by others; doubt is your nature. Nobody gives you doubt; you come with it, you are born with it. You can see every child asking embarrassing questions – embarrassing because you don’t know the answer, embarrassing because you cannot say, “I don’t know the answer.”By and by, the child also starts believing. He loves his mother, he loves his father, he respects his teacher; and because all these respect the priest, he starts believing in the priest. And fear is there: “If you don’t believe, you will suffer, and suffer badly.” And just for believing, you will get the eternal joys of paradise – just for believing. Paradise is sold so cheap, who would not like to buy it?So out of fear everybody has stopped asking, and out of greed everybody has started believing. The whole world is full of believers, but what is their contribution to human life? Religions have existed for at least ten thousand years – that is the minimum, perhaps they have existed longer than that. In ten thousand years what have religions given to you?In three hundred years science has given you everything that you have. Just try to figure it out. Your clothes, your medicines, your glasses, your watches, your trains, your planes – all are contributions of science. And within three hundred years! And that too, fighting against traditions thousands of years old. If there had been no fight, in three hundred years we would have created paradise. And now we can do it very easily.But religions don’t want this earth to become a paradise; it is against their vested interest. They want this earth to remain poor, suffering, hungry, because only those people who are hungry, suffering, miserable, are their clients.They cannot make me a client. They cannot make anybody who has a little intelligence their customer. It is a question of business….When the first train in London moved, all the churches of London called their congregations and told them, “Don’t sit in that railway train.” The journey was not long, it was the first experiment – only eight miles. And the railway company was going to give free tickets, good food on the way.Churches were telling their congregations, “Don’t enter that train, because in the Bible there is no mention that God ever made a train. If God has not made the train, that simply means it is the devil’s work. And we want you to be aware that the devil is very cunning: once you are in the train it is never going to stop!”You will be surprised…there were thousands of people on the platform but nobody was ready to sit in the train. The Bible has to prove that God created trains.If everything had to be found in the Bible, you would be still monkeys in the trees with your Bible of course.You are a human being, and the whole dignity that you have attained is because of scientific inquiry.You have asked, “If all these religions with all their nonsense disappear, what will be the state of science?”There will be a tremendous explosion of joy, celebration, of health, longer life. You can imagine anything; all dreams can be fulfilled.There are hundreds of discoveries which are not being used, because they go against established businesses. For example, if a scientist discovers that cars can move without petrol, just by atomic batteries-which is possible and very simple. If your watches can move with a small battery for the whole year, it is simple arithmetic that batteries with atomic energy can be created, and your car can move for one year continuously without bothering about petrol.But the problem is, there are thousands of cars, factories, investments: what will happen to them? They will go bankrupt. What will happen to the oil kings in Texas, in Saudi Arabia? Their petrol will be worthless. No, this kind of battery cannot be allowed to be made.The politicians will force the scientist not to do such a thing. They are engaging the scientists, on the contrary, to make nuclear weapons. Strange world – millions of people are engaged around the earth in creating weapons to destroy humanity, life, everything. If all these people are allowed to serve life, not death….If there is any heaven and if all your saints are there, they will start hankering to come back to the earth – because what can you get in heaven?. Not even the morning newspaper!I don’t think laughter is ever heard in heaven. Saints cannot laugh, of course. They have to keep their faces as British as possible. All saints are British – it does not matter where they are born – long faces with no smiles. And what are these saints doing there? – because they have to be there for eternity. They have to do something; otherwise it will be utter boredom. Even death is no solace, because in heaven nobody dies. You cannot commit suicide there, remember. Before you enter heaven, remember, you cannot get out!Jean-Paul Sartre has written a small book, No Exit; it is about hell. But I say to you, it is about heaven. In hell, if there is no exit, the people who are there will make one because you will find there all the scientists who have doubted. Albert Einstein will be there, Galileo will be there, Copernicus will be there, Columbus will be there. Great mathematicians like Godel, Whitehead, Russell – they will be there. Over millions of years…all people of genius will be in hell. Do you think they cannot create an exit?Jean-Paul Sartre’s title is right, but whatever he is writing in the book is about heaven, not about hell. In heaven you will find all the idiots of the world, because a believer is an idiot. They will be sitting there almost dead, because there is no entertainment available. You cannot go to the movie, no such thing exists in heaven – at least, it is not mentioned in the Bible. You cannot go to a football match, because who will play football? Saints? Saint Augustine? Jesus Christ functioning as the referee? Who is going to play football there? And who is going to see it? The whole stadium will be empty. Olympics don’t happen there, they are not mentioned in the Bible.What happens there? Nothing! So what is the difference between life and death? A dead saint and a living saint – how are you going to differentiate? No love affair, no sickness, no hospitals…no roads, because you are not supposed to go anywhere else, you have reached the full stop. Now remain glued to the full stop forever and ever.I don’t think any intelligent man would like to go to heaven. At least, I am not going.If there is a hell, then that is the place where I am going. It is going to be really juicy there! All the film actors, all the film actresses…. Everything that you wanted here will be available there – all the people who have some color, colorful people: dancers, singers, poets, painters, lovers. You will find hell full of genius.But fortunately there is no heaven and no hell. All that we have got is this moment.Religion promises, but never supplies the goods.Science never promises, but always supplies the goods. Science cannot promise because it is an inquiry.Science had never promised that there would be electricity. The man who created the first electric bulb was Thomas Alva Edison. Three years he was working to create an electric bulb. All his colleagues by and by left, thinking that he was a crackpot – nobody had ever heard of such a thing! A few young students remained with him. But by and by, they were also getting bored, because every day the same experiment starts and every evening they find it has failed.Finally they were also ready to leave. Before leaving, just out of gratitude to the old man, they said to Edison, “Forgive us. We cannot be so patient as you are in your old age, when death can happen any moment. You come every morning so excited: ‘it is going to happen today!’ Sometimes we think either we are mad, or you are mad.”The answer Edison gave is worth remembering. He said, “For three years we have experimented in hundreds of ways. To me, it means that we are coming every moment closer and closer to the right method, because wrong methods are being eliminated. We have knocked on hundreds of doors: yes, we have not found anything, but the number of doors is less every day. One day we are going to knock on the right door. When everything is eliminated, what is left is truth. Doubt is the method of eliminating.”The night he discovered the first bulb, he was so enchanted…. It is understandable. An old man – his eyes becoming weak, death could take him before the experiment is over – ultimately found…at three o’clock in the morning, because he had been working the whole night.Now even the students had left, so there was no need to close the lab at a certain time. Now he was alone, and he was so absorbed at three o’clock he saw the first bulb radiating with light.His wife was getting upset and bored and angry, and she shouted from the other room, “Are you going to sleep tonight or not? Put that light off!”Edison said, “This is not the old light! You just come in and see! Doubt has succeeded.” The wife could not believe her eyes: a new light, with a new source of energy!But religions go on insisting, telling people not to doubt.Every scientist has to doubt his predecessors. You should see the difference: every religious man has to believe in the predecessor. The more ancient the book is, the more true – that is the religious attitude. So every religion tries to prove that their holy book is the most ancient.When Christian missionaries reached India for the first time, they were very puzzled, because there they came across the Hindu scriptures, which – according to Hindus and with enough rationality to prove it – are ninety thousand years old. The Rig Veda, the Hindu holy scripture, is ninety thousand years old.The difficulty for the missionaries was that in Rig Veda there is a description of a certain constellation of stars which happened, according to astronomers, exactly ninety thousand years ago. Since then that constellation has not happened. So one thing is certain: whoever was writing it was an astronomer, and what he was writing was present to him – the constellation, a certain state of stars which has not happened again.The missionaries were in difficulty, because according to them, God created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ, so only six thousand years ago…. Now what to do with the Rig Veda? Then cities were discovered – Harappa, Mohanjo Daro, which are now in Pakistan – which have enough proof, solid proof according to science that those cities existed at least seven thousand years ago.I have been to Harappa and Mohanjo Daro, both the places. And it is an experience to see those places, because in Harappa the roads are as big as in New York. They had a running water system, they had attached bathrooms. You will be surprised…. Just let me drift a little bit.Just one hundred years ago in America there was a great controversy, because to have the toilet attached seemed very dirty. The toilet used to be an outhouse, far away from the house – a dirty place. And you are putting it inside the house!In Harappa there were attached toilets, swimming pools. So that city was not only seven thousand years old; it must have been far older, because to attain to such civilization that even in the twentieth century…. In India an attached toilet is a luxury. Ninety percent of the houses don’t have any toilet – attached or unattached. In the most holy Hindu place, Varanasi, the roads are so small that cars cannot be used.The people who lived in Harappa and Mohanjo Daro were not just primitives: they must have attained to a high civilization – and to attain to that civilization needs time. Seven thousand years is a very orthodox estimate; perhaps those cities existed fifteen thousand or twenty thousand years before. To have roads that big means they must have had vehicles; to have running water, they must have found some kind of plumbing system.And you will be surprised…the missionaries became very puzzled, but they came up with a solution. The solution was that God created the world exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ – as it is written in the Old Testament. But how to account for the Rig Veda? How to account for Harappa and Mohanjo Daro? Those missionaries came up with an amazing solution. They said, “God made the world” – and for God everything is possible if he can make the world. “He made the ruins of Harappa and Mohanjo Daro also. He made the Rig Veda also and described in it a constellation of stars which should have happened.”But why should God take such trouble? The missionaries still say that he took all this trouble to test your faith. Can you see the cunningness? He creates Harappa and Mohanjo Daro – their ruins, with all the facilities that are available in the twentieth century – to test your faith.These people have dominated the whole world up to now with all kinds of stupid arguments. They are hindering in every way, millions of things that can become available to you immediately.There is no need for any Ethiopia, one thousand people dying every day of hunger, thirst. Fifty percent of India is ready to become Ethiopia any day. And all this is because of your priests and your politicians. They are in a deep conspiracy against humanity.The politicians don’t want nations to disappear, because with the nations disappearing, politicians will disappear too. The world is one, the earth is one; it is divided nowhere. But America would like to remain America, and Russia would like to remain Russia at any cost – even if the whole earth is destroyed! Because if the boundaries of the nations – which exist only in the maps – disappear, there is no reason for war.Seventy-five percent of the income of all the countries goes into creating destructive weapons, atomic plants, nuclear weapons. Seventy-five percent of human energy just to destroy! This seventy-five percent energy can be changed into the direction of creativity.The same atomic energy can supply you light, can supply you fuel, can supply you all that is needed.And all the scientists are employed by the governments, because science has come to a point where no scientist can work alone. It is such a big investment that only governments can manage. So it is really a great problem.Three hundred years ago, every scientist had his own lab; Edison could work on the electric bulb in his own house. But you cannot make atomic energy in your own house. So much money is needed that no individual can afford it – only governments. Naturally, all the scientists have become slaves of certain political systems.You must have heard about the Russian scientist, Sakharov. He was the director of the Academy of Sciences – the highest scientific post in the Soviet Union – and he is thought today to be the world’s best physicist. But he accepted the Nobel Prize, and the Soviet government was against it; not bothering about the Soviet government, he accepted the Nobel Prize.He was immediately removed from his directorship, and now that best mind in the world is rotting in Siberia. What a wastage! And he is not the only scientist there in Siberia, wasting. There are three other Nobel Prize winners; the same had happened with them.So now scientists are almost in the hands of the politicians. Whatever the politicians want, they have to create. And whatever politicians don’t want, of course, they cannot create because they don’t have any means. Politicians are preventing them from being creative.Just look at the stupidity of going to the moon, how much money is wasted. For what? The first man who stood there must have felt silly, because there is nothing – no water, no trees, no life. It is a dead planet. But a political race between the Soviet Union and America…. Both were wasting their energy, their scientists, their money to reach to the moon – nobody bothering to ask, “What are you going to do there? What is the point?”We already know from here that there is no life and no possibility of life. Even if we want to make a colony there of human beings, it is an impossible job. Everybody will have to carry large equipment around their bodies to supply oxygen, to supply this, to supply that, because on the moon these things are not available. How much water do you have to carry every day with yourself? And everything has to be sent from the earth. What is the point?You cannot grow anything there. You cannot even come out of your space suit. Even if you want to hug your wife, two space suit will be touching each other! Human touch is impossible. You cannot take your hand out of the spacesuit, because the hand also needs oxygen, it breathes. Your whole body breathes.But they did that nonsense, and now they are doing another nonsense: piling up nuclear weapons.Just the other day I saw the petition of fifty American scientists – the topmost – who are involved in making nuclear weapons. They have made a petition to the president: “Please stop.” They are the founders of nuclear energy, and they are begging, “Please stop, because we have already seven hundred times more energy then is needed to destroy humanity. What is the point now?”But the politician is in a political race with the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union cannot stop because America will go ahead. They are now completely balanced, and both are trying to be a little ahead of the other. But even if you are a little ahead, a nuclear war will be destructive of all – Americans, Russians, all the trees, all the birds, all the animals.You want this earth to become a dead planet?This earth is unique. In the whole solar system, this is the only place which is alive!Not only alive, but this is the only place where man has reached to consciousness.Not only that, a few men have reached to the ultimate peak of consciousness – which I call enlightenment.If religions are removed and politicians can be persuaded…and if the scientists rather than being slaves of the politicians, make a world academy of sciences…I offer them our commune. We have enough land – one hundred and twenty-six square miles. They can have a world academy of scientists here. And if all the scientists of the world, the intelligent people of the world – artists, painters, poets, singers, dancers, actors – if they all support it, there is no need for any government support.Science can make this earth perhaps the best place in the whole universe.It is calculated by scientists that at least on fifty thousand planets some kind of life exists. They are far away, there is no possibility right now to reach to other solar systems.In the night when you see the stars, they are not stars, they are suns. But they are so far away that they look to be small stars, twinkling stars. Your sun is a very mediocre person. It is very big in comparison to the earth – sixty thousand times bigger. But in comparison to other solar systems, other suns – and up to now they have discovered at least two million solar systems – this sun, our sun, the only begotten sun, is just mediocre. They are millions of times bigger than this sun, and they have their planets.But no scientist has been able to work out whether consciousness exists anywhere in the whole universe. Life certainly – perhaps there are trees, perhaps some kind of animals, but there is no indication that consciousness exists. And certainly there is no indication that people like Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Bodhidharma exist – people who have attained to their self, who have realized their truth. Without consciousness this is not possible.This earth is the richest in the whole universe, and the universe is not small, it is infinite. There is no boundary to it. Life has only come to such a beautiful space here, where there is consciousness. And consciousness has discovered methods to reach to the peak, to the Everest of consciousness.And these fools – popes and politicians and shankaracharyas and the Ayatollah Khomeiniacs – these people are bent upon destroying the only place in the whole universe which has something of immense value.This conspiracy between the politicians and the priests has to be stopped.And I would like my sannyasins to wake people up, wherever you are.Make people aware what religions have done and are doing, and what the politicians have done in the past and are still preparing to do.Things have come to such a point that it is possible to awaken the whole humanity. And if people stop going to the churches, stop going to the synagogues, stop calling themselves Americans, Russians, Indians, burn their passports, visas, green cards – all over the world…. If they declare that the whole earth is one, and that the whole earth is going to provide the scientists with means to work for creating better life, more life, better consciousness, more consciousness, we can fill the whole world with such enlightened people that even flowers will not be so fragrant.Man is capable of doing it, somebody just has to shake people, throw cold water in their eyes and tell them, “It is time to wake up, you have slept enough!”And that is the work of my sannyasins.I am giving you a tremendous challenge. Wherever you go, wherever you are, make every effort that the earth is one and that science should be given absolute freedom from politics.No scientist is interested in destruction. A scientist is as much a creator as the poet, as the musician, as the dancer.It has been estimated by biologists that man can very easily live three hundred years without becoming old. Just a little work of changing the program in his cells is needed. And the basic principles are available, but scientists are engaged in destroying life rather than prolonging it.There are a few scientists who believe that death is an accident. It need not be, because man’s body has a certain system of rejuvenating itself continuously. If it can rejuvenate itself for seventy years, why not seven hundred years? Why not seven million years? Death will be only if somebody wants to die. This is possible.Your question is significant.Science can create the paradise, but the priests will be of no value anymore. The politician will not be able to exploit.The world has to be one, and it has to be governed by creative people, not by politicians. We have such beautiful musicians, such beautiful dancers, such beautiful scientists, who have contributed to making life more joyous. They should be the people to govern. They should be the people to manage the world.Politics is the only profession in the world where no qualification is needed. Even if you want to become a clerk, they ask for qualifications. But if you want to become the president of America, no qualification is needed. You have to be just cunning enough – that is the only qualification – more cunning than other politicians, more stubborn than other politicians, more capable of cheating people than other politicians, more capable of promising things which you cannot manage.Politicians should be part of history, a nightmare that we have suffered too long. And it has to be done fast, because we don’t have much time – not more than fourteen or fifteen years. By the end of this century it is going to be decided this way or that. Either the earth will be freed from the priests and the politicians, or there will be no earth, no life.It is up to you, up to everybody else who is living on the earth, to decide.And I don’t think anybody is going to decide for a global suicide.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The scientific vision of objective reality and the subjective experience of existence seem to be two completely separate and unbridgeable dimensions. Is this because of the nature of things, or is it only an illusion of our mind?The scientific approach to existence and the religious approach have been in the past separate and unbridgeable. The reason was the insistence of old religions on superstitions, belief systems, denial of inquiry and doubt. In fact, there is nothing unbridgeable between science and religion, and there is no separation either. But religion insisted on belief – science cannot accept that.Belief is covering up your ignorance. It never reveals to you the truth; it only gives you certain dogmas, creeds, and you can create an illusion of knowledge through them. But that knowledge is nothing but a delusion.Anything based on belief is bogus.Because religions insisted continuously on belief, and the basic method of science is doubt, the separation happened. And it became unbridgeable. It is unbridgeable if religion does not arise and face the challenge of doubt.The whole responsibility of the religions has been to keep these two as two.In my vision, there is only science, with two dimensions. One dimension approaches the outside reality, the other dimension approaches the interior reality. One is objective, the other is subjective. Their methods are not different, their conclusions are not different. Both start from doubt.Doubt has been condemned so much that you have forgotten the beauty of it, you have forgotten the richness of it.The child is born not with any belief, but he is born with a very curious, doubting, skeptical consciousness. Doubt is natural, belief is unnatural.Belief is imposed by the parents, society, the educational systems, religions. All these people are in the service of ignorance, and they have served ignorance for thousands of years. They have kept humanity in darkness, and there was a reason for it: if humanity is in darkness, knows nothing of reality, then it can be exploited easily, enslaved easily, deceived easily, kept poor, dependent. All these things were involved.The old religions were not concerned with truth. They talked about it, but their concern was how to keep people away from truth. And up to now they have succeeded. But now those religions are all on their deathbed and the sooner they die the better.Why do you need a belief in the first place? You don’t believe in a roseflower. Nobody asks you, “Do you believe in a roseflower?” You will simply laugh, you will say, “The question of belief does not arise; I know the roseflower.”Knowledge needs no belief.But the blind man believes in light, has to; he has no eyes. You will be surprised that the blind man not only believes in light, he also believes in darkness. Ordinarily, people think that a blind man must be living in darkness. That is not true, because to see darkness you need eyes. Without eyes you can neither see light nor can you see darkness. Darkness and light are not two things, but two poles of one reality.You can define darkness as less light, you can define light as less darkness; the difference is of degree. Our eyes have a certain capacity – very limited. All our senses are very limited. Below that limit you cannot see, above that limit you cannot see. For example, right now thousands of radio waves are passing, but you cannot hear them. You have to use a radio; a mechanism which is more sensitive than your ear can catch those sounds which you cannot catch. The same is true about all the senses.The blind man is forced to believe in light, is forced to believe in darkness. And his belief keeps him blind. If he was not given the belief, and if he was told that he is blind and needs his eyes to be cured, that he does not need a philosophy, he needs a physician – perhaps he would be able to see. And the moment he sees light, the question of belief does not arise: he knows it.Any belief indicates your ignorance, your blindness, but gives you a false sense – as if you know.Just a few days ago the American Scouts leaders rejected one of their best scouts – a fourteen-year-old child, the topmost among all other scouts, winner of many prizes. They were promoting him to a higher post, and he had to fill in a form.This is one of the basic beliefs of the Scouts: God exists. The boy refused. He said, “I don’t know. And unless I know, how can I say God exists? You are forcing me to lie.”In the twentieth century in America, the boy is thrown out of the Scouts because he does not believe in God! I don’t see the point. What does God have to do with the Scouts? And why should this be a fundamental for every scout?I hope that the parents of the child take the case to the court. And if they cannot, then we are ready to take the case to the court for the child, because it is simply inhuman. He was the best cadet, and just a stupid thing…. And on that ground also he is more right than all the leaders of the Scouts who have determined their constitution.All that he said was, “I don’t know. How can I can say God exists or not? First I have to know.”Knowledge is punished.Inquiry is punished.Darkness, blindness, obedience, are rewarded.The case must be decided by the Supreme Court of America in the favor of that little boy who has asserted the very birthright of man: to inquire and to find.And the clause about God, should be removed from the Scouts’ principles.In the first place God has nothing to do with the Scouts. The Scouts have nothing to do with God. This is an unnecessary hypothesis imposed on children. But behind this whole facade are your politicians, your religious leaders. In a very roundabout way they are forcing on small children the idea of God.They are afraid, they are very much frightened of inquiry. Why one should be afraid of inquiry? – the answer is clear. He knows perfectly well that it is only a belief. If you inquire deeply, you are not going to find God. If God is a reality, then all the religions should insist on inquiry.I insist: inquire, meditate, go deeper into yourself. You will find a tremendous reality, but not God. You will find consciousness in its ultimate flowering, eternal. But you will not find an old man with a long beard – and the beard must be by this time really long, miles long; for centuries he has been sitting there. You will not find God.All religions are frightened of inquiry – that’s why the separation happened. And all the religions have been against science, because sooner or later science is going to prove – it has proved already-that its method of doubt brings you closer to reality. It opens secrets of life; it makes you really intelligent, alert, knowing what the truth is.But science up to now has remained concerned only with the objective world that surrounds you.I condemn the religions because they have kept humanity in darkness.And I condemn the scientists because they are doing such a stupid thing: they are aware of everything, and inquiring about everything in the world except themselves.The scientist in his lab is the only person who is left out of inquiry. Everything else he inquires about and inquires deeply, without any prejudice. But he forgets who the inquirer is. And is there any inquiry possible without an inquirer? Is there any possibility of observing objective reality without an observer? And that’s what science has been doing for three hundred years.The religions are criminal, but science has also to take the burden of that crime – not that big, because science is only three hundred years old. But science cannot say anything about the subjective world for or against, because it has not inquired.Religions have to disappear completely – they are a kind of cancer on the human soul – and science has to extend its inquiry, make it complete. It is only half. You are just looking at the object and forgetting the person who is looking at it.Science has to grow a new dimension that goes inward. Doubt will be the method for both, so there is no question of bridging. Doubt is the center. From that center you can move into objective reality – that’s what science has been doing up to now. You can move from the same doubt into your interiority, which science has not done up to now. It is guilty of that. And because science was not doing it, it left the subjective world in the hands of religions.Religions pretend to inquire into the subjective world, the world of consciousness; but it is a pretension, because it starts with a belief. Once you believe in a thing your inquiry is finished. You have already destroyed the question, you have killed the quest. From belief you cannot move into investigation.Every inquiry, either objective or subjective, needs an open mind – and doubt gives you that tremendous quality of an open mind. Remember – because there is a possibility to be confused – doubt does not mean disbelief, because disbelief is again belief standing on its head.Karl Marx and his followers, the communists, say there is no God. This is their belief. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin nor any other communist has ever bothered to inquire whether God really does not exist. They have accepted it in the same way as Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans and Jews have accepted that there is a God.I don’t make any distinction between the atheist and the theist; they are traveling in the same boat. I don’t make any distinction between a Christian, a Hindu, and a communist.On the surface there seems to be a great distinction. The communist does not believe in God; religions believe in God. That is very superficial; if you look just a little bit deeper, scratch just a little bit, you will be surprised: belief is as ignorant as disbelief. Both have accepted without any inquiry. Hence I say communism is an atheist religion.Mohammedans have their Mecca, Jews have their Jerusalem, communists have their Kremlin. And it is very amusing to see a picture of the Kremlin – it looks like a church! Perhaps it was a church before the revolution. It is not made by communists, certainly. It may have been the biggest church in Soviet Russia. They have captured it and they have made it their central office. But the architecture shows simply that it is a church.Not only the architecture of the Kremlin but the minds of people who are dominating from the Kremlin are exactly the same as the popes, as Ayatollah Khomeinis, as the shankaracharyas – no difference! On the fundamentals they agree. Communists believe in Das Kapital, Christians believe in the Bible, but where is the difference? Those books are different, but the person who believes, the mind who believes, is the same.Because science has denied – strangely – the very existence of the scientist, it goes on playing games with white rats, experimenting. Strange…why not black rats? There too, the color difference. The Negro rat is bound to be stupid – that is their idea – and the white rat is very intelligent.I have been to many universities in India, lecturing to the students, to the professors, and I have visited many scientific labs in India. I have always asked them, “Why? At least in India you should not experiment with white rats. Let them experiment in England, in America, but in India…!” And the scientists had no answer to why they are experimenting on the white rat. Just imitators. Strangely, they work on rats, they work on monkeys…from India thousands of monkeys are exported every day to all parts of the world for scientific experimentation.Hindus are very angry in India, because to them the monkey is a god, and to export their god for scientific experimentation is certainly unacceptable. But India is poor; the government consists of Hindus – they are against exporting the monkeys, but they get such a good price. And they don’t have much to export; they cannot fulfill their own needs.Monkeys are there in millions, and they serve no purpose. On the contrary, they destroy crops, they destroy fruits, vegetables. Of course, they have to eat too. But there is a movement in India by fanatic Hindus that this export should be stopped.The scientist goes on working on rats, on monkeys, on everything in the world. He has reached to the molecules, to the atoms, to the electrons. But in all this search, he has forgotten one thing: that he exists too. Without him, the lab is meaningless.Who is experimenting? Certainly there is a consciousness, a certain awareness, a certain entity with the capacity to observe. This is such a simple fact; but for three hundred years science has not accepted this simple fact.I find them guilty because, if they had accepted this fact and made it a scientific inquiry, religions would have died long ago. If religions are still in existence science has to accept the responsibility.To me the very word science explains my approach. Science means knowing. Any knowledge, any knowing, needs three things: an object to know, a subject to know it, and between the subject and the object arises knowing.If man is not on the earth, trees will be there, rose bushes will be there, but they will not know that they are rose bushes. The clouds will come, but nobody will know that this is the rainy season. The sun will rise, but there will be no sunrise because there will be nobody to describe it.A knower is the most valuable phenomenon in existence and, because science denied it, religion had absolute freedom to go on insisting on all the old beliefs.My work is to help all the religions die peacefully.The area that they have been occupying should be occupied by science. We can keep two names: science for objective reality and religion for subjective reality. But there is no need for two names. It is better to have one name – science – with two dimensions: one moving outward, one moving inward.Scientific method starts with doubt. It goes on doubting till it comes to a point where doubt is impossible. When it faces reality, doubt falls.Religions have been repressing doubt. I have not come across a single religious leader who does not have, deep down in him, doubt still alive. All his beliefs may have repressed it, but they cannot destroy it.You can look into your own mind. You believe in God, but don’t you have a doubt about it? In fact, if you don’t have a doubt, why should you believe? You don’t have the disease, then why are you carrying the whole load of medicines? The belief proves the existence of doubt; and the belief remains only on the surface; it pushes, forces the doubt deeper into your unconscious. But it cannot destroy doubt.Belief has no power, it is impotent.Doubt is immense energy.Belief is already something dead, a corpse. You can carry the corpse as long as you want, but remember, the corpse is an unnecessary burden on you. Soon you will start stinking just like the corpse. And finally the corpse is going to make you also a corpse. It is not good to keep company with the dead. It is dangerous.Belief has to disappear from all languages. Doubt should be enthroned. Belief should be dethroned.Doubt immediately bridges the objective and the subjective. They are two poles of the same reality, and doubt is the bridge.Why do I praise doubt so much? – because it leads you into inquiry, it raises questions, it takes you into new adventures. It never allows you to remain ignorant. It goes on and on moving till you have found the light.People have asked me again and again, “Do you believe in this? Do you believe in that?” And I have been telling them that this is a nonsense question.Either I know something or I don’t know.Belief has no place in my being anywhere.If I don’t know, then I will try to know – that’s what doubt is, that’s what inquiry is. And if I know, then there is no need to believe; I know it on my own authority. Why should I believe in Jesus Christ or Gautam Buddha? There is no need.But the strange thing is, Jesus Christ goes on believing in the old prophets. He has no experience of his own. God is his faith, it is not his experience. Mohammed believes in God.I am simply surprised that these people never thought that belief simply proves you are ignorant, you don’t know. You are simply carrying borrowed knowledge from others. Perhaps they were also carrying borrowed knowledge from somebody else. You cannot find the original source from where the belief arose. It arose, certainly, because it exists all over the world. There must be something in human psychology that has given birth to it.First, man’s ego does not want to accept ignorance. It wants to pretend to know; and it is very easy too to believe and become a knower.There is a story in the Upanishads, which contains a few very beautiful existential statements about life.There was an old seeker of truth; his name was Uddalak. His son was Shvetketu. He sent his son to well-known masters in the country to learn everything that is possible to learn.The son was learning with one master, then another master. And when he acquired all that was available, with great pride he came back home to say to his father, “I have fulfilled the task.”Uddalak looked from his window and saw that his son was coming with many scriptures. And he could also see the proud look, the proud walk.Shvetketu came in and told his father, “I have done it!”Uddalak must have been a man like me. He asked him, “Have you known yourself?”Shvetketu said, “But nowhere in all the schools I have been was this part of the syllabus. No – I know everything about medicine, I know everything about language, grammar; I know everything that is taught there. But to know oneself? Even the question is not raised.”Uddalak said, “Burn those scriptures and go back. Find out who you are, because if you don’t know yourself, what is the value of all the knowledge that you are burdened with? You have missed the central point.”Shvetketu was very much hurt and shocked, because he had come with so much pride, thinking that his father was going to reward him. Instead, he is condemned, utterly condemned: “You wasted so many of your years. Go back!” Uddalak did not allow him even to rest.Shvetketu went to the greatest master that he had come across in his search for learning, and told him, “My father has demolished me completely! And he has sent me back for a single thing. He says unless you know yourself, all your knowledge is useless.”When your own house is in darkness, what is the point of knowing that the whole world is full of stars and light? The light is needed first in your own house.That master said, “I was afraid of this, because I know your father; in our youth we have been disciples of the same master. I was afraid that this was going to happen. You were going with so much pride, and I know your father – he is not interested in borrowed knowledge. He wants to know himself. He is not interested in beliefs. His only effort all his life has been to come to a certainty, to an experience which is not borrowed, which is his own, authentically his own. I was afraid that this was going to happen to you.”Shvetketu asked, “Then what am I supposed to do?”The master said, “All that I knew, I have taught you. As far as knowing oneself, I am as ignorant as you are.“But I can suggest one thing. I have got one hundred cows in the ashram. You take these cows into the hills, and when they have become one thousand, giving birth to calves…. You remain in the mountains, you forget all knowledge that you have learned. In fact you will not need it there; the cows are not interested in any kind of knowledge. You will not even encounter another human being. Language will not be needed. Grammar and all the subtleties of grammar will be useless.”Shvetketu asked, “But how is this going to help me to know myself?”The master said, “You simply go. Help the cows to grow. Take them to fresher fields deeper into the mountains, and wait till they are one thousand. Then you can come. And everything else we will discuss afterward.”Masters have their own devices. As far as I understand this story, I know the man knew – but it could not be told. He created a situation, a device.Shvetketu went to the mountains. For a few days the mind went on with all the knowledge that it had gathered, but what use was it? The cows were just munching grass, and Shvetketu was sitting among those one hundred cows waiting for the time when they will become one thousand…. Days passed, months passed. And the story is really beautiful, because Shvetketu forgot everything: knowledge, language, arithmetic. There was no need…by and by everything became useless.He almost became as innocent as a cow. What else to do? A man is known by his company. Now, if you live for years among cows, just listening to their munching the grass…. He was sitting under the tree taking care of them. They became one thousand.And here is a beautiful point: one cow spoke to Shvetketu and said, “We have become one thousand, now it is time to get back home. It seems you have forgotten counting too!” And really he had forgotten.He brought those cows back to the master’s house. Other disciples were also amazed with this experiment. It looked so strange – that to know oneself one has to take one hundred cows into the mountains and wait and wait till they become one thousand!The disciples looked: the cows were coming. They rushed to the master in the house, and they said, “One thousand cows are coming.”The master said, “No, one thousand and one.”The disciple said, “But you had asked for one thousand.”He said, “Yes, I had, but what about Shvetketu?” He was coming just in the middle of the cows, so innocent, so utterly childlike.The disciples of the master were very excited, because the master had promised, “When Shvetketu comes, then everything will be discussed. For the time being you do this, and ask the question later.”Shvetketu came, handed over the cows to the master, and said, “Now can I go? My father must be getting very old, and I don’t want him to die disappointed in me.”The master said, “But what about those other things we were going to discuss afterward?”Shvetketu laughed. He said, “Forget all about it! Living with cows, slowly, slowly…there was no other excitement, entertainment. Waiting under trees, sitting under trees doing nothing, slowly, slowly a silence started happening on its own accord. I was not meditating, but meditation was happening to me. And a moment came when all my thoughts disappeared, all my feelings disappeared – just a pure is-ness remained.“I could not even say, ‘I am,’ because there was no I. Then I knew that the whole grammar was wrong. I does not exist. All that I can express is that I felt and experienced a certain am-ness; not “I am,” but am-ness, a deep existential experience. Now I know what my father wanted me to know, and there is nothing to discuss.”The master said, “I knew it. If you had come and started asking the same question again, that would mean the device had failed. With my blessings you can go to your father.”He came back home. The father was really very old; he was waiting for the son. He could see again from the window, and this is what he was expecting – Shvetketu, so humble, so simple; no scriptures, just coming like a cool breeze.He came into the house. You could expect that he would have declared, “Now I have fulfilled your desire.” No, he simply touched his father’s feet, kissed his father’s feet, tears flowing from his eyes.The father said, “So, it has happened. Now I can die peacefully. I have fulfilled my duty; I am not leaving behind me an ignorant man full of rubbish knowledge. I am leaving behind me a pure space, a being, alert, aware, knowing himself – which is the greatest knowing in the world.”Science should open the doors of devices which religions have been keeping closed.There is a vast universe outside you – infinite. You can go on and on exploring it, there is no end. But there is a bigger universe within you, and so close – just within you! And you can go on exploring it. You will come to know who you are, but that is not the end: that experience goes on deepening infinitely.A man can be both, and that will be the total man. I have defined the new man in many ways, from different angles.Let this also be included in the definition of the new man: he will be complete, entire, acquainted with the outside world, acquainted with the inside world.And the moment you know both, you know they are not two; it is the same energy extending into two polarities. One becomes the object, the other becomes the subject. I would like to call it the science of the inner. And whatever is known as science today, I will call the science of the outer.But the inner and the outer are two sides of the same coin. The outer cannot exist without the inner, the inner cannot exist without the outer. So there is no separation and there is no question of bridging.The question has arisen in you because you are thinking of a science which is half and you are thinking of bogus religions, which depend on belief and not on inquiry.My sannyasins have to be inquirers.And it should be your only responsibility: to know yourself.You have been taught so many responsibilities, but not this one. You have been told to be responsible to your parents, to your wife, to your husband, to your children, to the nation, to the church, to humanity, to God. The list is almost endless. But the most fundamental responsibility is not in that list.I would like to burn that whole list!You are not responsible to any nation, to any church, to any God.You are responsible only for one thing, and that is self-knowledge.And the miracle is, if you can fulfill this responsibility, you will be able to fulfill many responsibilities without any effort.A man who knows himself will be really loving to his children, to his wife, to his friends. His love will have a totally different flavor. It will not be a mixture of hate, anger, jealousy, lust, love.If you look at your love you will find it is so many things. And in those so many things your love is polluted, because many of them are against love. Jealousy cannot be part of love. Hate, anger, possessiveness, cannot be part of love.Love knows no jealousy.Love knows no possessiveness; on the contrary, love gives freedom.It is so simple. If I love a person, I will give him absolute freedom. If love cannot give absolute freedom, then who is going to give it? If I see the person whom I love being happy with somebody else, I will be happy in his happiness. Love cannot be jealous, it can only be happy. It knows only one taste, the taste of happiness.In fulfilling this one responsibility, you will not be resentful of your father, of your mother. Everybody is, because every child has been disciplined against his will, has been forced to go to the school….When I was in my primary school, my house was very close to the school. So when the school bell would ring, that was the time for me to go into the bathroom. My whole family would be knocking on the door, and I would remain silent, not answering anything.It was a daily routine that the headmaster used to come to pick me up, because I was not going on my own. He would come, and my father would say, “What to do? Stop ringing the school bell, because the moment you ring it he immediately goes into the bathroom and closes the door. And then it is absolutely pointless because whatever you say he does not answer.”Finally, the school decided not to ring the bell. The headmaster used to come first to catch hold of me – and then the bell was rung for all the other children.Every child has to be forced to do many things for his own sake. I am grateful to the headmaster. He was really generous – just for a single student he changed the whole routine of the school.I am grateful to my parents, their patience with me: the whole family standing before the bathroom and persuading me, “Come out! If you don’t want to go to school, there is no need. We will ask the headmaster to give you leave for today.” But I remained silent.And I am also grateful because those moments of silence have given me so much. Everybody was shouting and running around – amid that cyclone I was the center, just simply sitting under the shower and enjoying it.Every child is bound to have some resentment, some repressed anger. But the moment you know yourself, all resentment melts away, all anger disappears, because for the first time you have eyes to see things that you were not able to see before. Now you can see that if your father was dragging you to school he was not against you, he was not your enemy. If he was asking you to come back home, not to go on wandering in the middle of the night, he was not against you; he was taking every care.In the village where I was born there was a colony of potters, and the potters in India carry their pots on donkeys. That is the only thing in India donkeys are used for. The colony was just near my house and there were so many beautiful donkeys, but they were engaged in carrying things the whole day. They only were free in the night and I was also free, so I would catch hold of a donkey.Nobody rides on a donkey in India because donkeys are thought to be something untouchable. Riding on a donkey… My whole family was embarrassed because neighbors were telling them, “We have seen your son sitting on a donkey going toward the market. Don’t let him in till he goes to the river and takes a bath.”My father used to persuade me, “We can arrange to buy a horse for you if you are so interested in riding.”I said, “I am not interested in horses at all, my interest is in donkeys. They are very philosophical people, unpredictable. A donkey may stop at any point, and whatever you do he will not move. You cannot figure out why he has stopped. And against the common knowledge that donkeys are idiots, my experience is that they are very cunning, clever politicians.”My father said, “Do you want to write a thesis on donkeys, or what?”I said, “I can write one, because my experience with donkeys is perhaps more than anybody else’s.”Riding on a donkey is a difficult job – riding on a horse is not. Donkeys are so cunning they will never go in the middle of the road. They will always go left or right, rubbing your leg against the side of a wall. Naturally, you will jump off. It was so difficult to keep them in the middle of the road – either left or right, but they will never be in the middle.So I told my father, “Donkeys are rightists, leftists, but they are not Buddhist.” Buddha used to teach his disciples, “Follow the middle way.” Donkeys are the only people Buddha has not been able to convince.And I don’t think that they are stupid people, because when nobody is riding them, they walk in the middle. They are clever, and on a hot day you can see them standing under a tree. The very face of a donkey is philosophic, as if they are brooding upon great things. Just look at the face of a donkey, and you will always feel that he is thinking too much.Finally, my family decided that I should not be allowed to enter the kitchen, “Because we don’t know exactly whether you have been riding on a donkey or not.” So I was always sitting outside the kitchen; I was not allowed to enter the kitchen, particularly my grandmother would not… I was an outcast.Naturally one feels against these people; they are disturbing all your joys. Things in which you are interested, they are not interested; and things in which they are interested, you don’t see any point.For example, I asked my father, “Why should I read history? Why should I read geography? What is the point of knowing that Ashoka ruled India at a certain time? I don’t see the point. I am not going to rule India, I am not going back to meet Ashoka. He never bothered about me, and I have to read about him!“And geography – what have I to do with Constantinople? Timbuktu? I am never going there! This is my promise,” I told my father. “I am never going to Constantinople or Timbuktu, so why should I bother about their geography, where they are?”He said, “Don’t you argue, you simply do what every other child is doing.”I said, “I will do it, because you are forcing me. But remember that you are creating anger in me, resentfulness. I am helpless, I am weak, I am small. You can do anything, but remember: one day you will be old and I will be young; you will be weak and I will be strong. That day we will settle – and you know my memory is not bad.”He used to hit his head and say, “What to do with you?! You are a trouble, a continuous pain in the neck. But still, I respect your honesty. No child will say this to his father, ‘In your old age we will settle the account!’ You are honest.”It is bound to happen. The child wants to eat only ice cream, but the parents know that you will get sick. They have to force you to eat things which nourish you. Now, ice cream is just junk! It tastes good, but taste is not the point.The moment you come to your own being, a revolution happens in your vision.Your resentment becomes gratitude.You even start feeling grateful to your enemies, because whatsoever you are they have also contributed to it. Without them, you would have been somebody else.Your whole outlook about life goes through a radical change. You start feeling new responsibilities – not as something to be done, not as duty to be fulfilled, but as a joy to do.My grandfather loved me so much, but about one thing we never agreed. That was that he would do everything for me, but in the night when he would be going to sleep, he wanted me to massage his feet. And that….I said, “Everything you do for me you can stop, but this massaging your feet I am not going to do. I have never massaged anybody, and I have never allowed anybody to massage me. I am simply against it.”He would say, “I do everything for you: I protect you from your father, I protect you from your mother, I protect you from your teachers, I protect you from the neighbors – otherwise you would be continuously beaten. And still you cannot do a small thing for me?”I said, “That is not a small thing. It is a question of principle.”But after my enlightenment, the first thing I did was massage his feet. He said, “What are you doing?”I said, “Just please forgive me – I never knew how old you are, how hard you work. Your feet must be hurting. Perhaps you cannot sleep unless somebody gives them a massage.”“But,” he said, “it was against your principle.”I said, “That is true, but the man whose principle it was against is no longer alive. He has died with all his principles, with all his ideas. Now you are facing a totally new man. And don’t think that I am doing it as a duty, I simply want to do it out of my happiness.”And it became such a problem for him. He said, “You will always remain a problem – old or new. Before, you were against massage; now you don’t let me sleep! You go on massaging, and I am saying ‘Stop!’ Now I am falling asleep and you go on massaging. That keeps me awake!”I said, “That is your problem, but all those twenty-one years that I have refused, I have to compensate for. And you are getting old, any day you may kick the bucket; I don’t want to remain in any kind of debt. So whether you can sleep or not, that is your problem. Learn to sleep! And I am going to compensate completely for twenty-one years of denial.”He would call my father and say, “Take your son away from here! Now he says he is enlightened – perhaps he is enlightened, but his creating troubles for others continues.”I said, “Yes, in an enlightened way I will continue. I cannot drop things I have loved. I will do them, but in an enlightened way.”Since then, I have never done anything out of a sense of duty, out of feeling a responsibility, that it is expected from me. But I have done everything out of my happiness. I have done everything that I felt was coming out of my own sense of love, compassion.Why am I talking to you? Why have I created a whole worldwide movement of sannyas?I could have lived silently and peacefully without any trouble from Wasco County, without being in this Big Muddy Ranch. I could have lived somewhere in Kashmir, in the Himalayas, without any trouble.I have taken on so many troubles unnecessarily.I have never been in Germany, but there are cases pending in the courts against me. Strange world! I have only flown over Germany. I cannot conceive how, flying over Germany, thousands of feet above, I may have done some wrong so that arrest warrants are waiting for me.I have never had any bank account, because I always spend the money before I get it. I am very optimistic about it: it will be coming, spend it! So there was no question of having a bank account. But just now, I have been informed that some government agency from America has opened a bank account in Switzerland in my name with my signature – just to put a case against me.Now, my signature is public. Anybody who knows a little art can copy my signature, it is not private property. I have signed one million names for sannyasins – you can get my signature anywhere, and it is very easy to open an account in my name.This is a strange world. I was thinking I am the poorest man, but now I have a Swiss bank account! I hope they put a few billion dollars in it, because when you are so generous, then be really generous!I have lived for these three decades just out of pure love. I have suffered, but without any complaint. Attempts on my life have been made, but I don’t have any grudge against those people who wanted to kill me. I can understand – I have the right vision, I can see. Those people were feeling offended because I was continuously destroying their belief systems, destroying their traditions, their conventions.I was doing that out of love.I wanted them to be free from all kinds of garbage that centuries have poured into their being. But they did not think it was garbage, they thought it was treasure. Naturally they were offended and they wanted to kill me, because if this man remains alive, he is going to destroy many people’s treasures. I can understand.Religions teach you to forgive. I say that is not the right thing to do. To forgive means first you have be offended; otherwise, why are you forgiving?I have never forgiven anybody, for the simple reason that I have never been offended by anybody. I understand their situation, their problem. I can see deep down in them. They are not doing harm for harm’s sake; they are doing it to save their religion, their culture, their civilization. And of course everybody has a right to save his religion, culture, civilization.Out of self-realization a great understanding arises. There is no need to forgive. There is no need to make an effort to love your enemy.I don’t agree with Jesus. He says, “Love your enemy,” but to love your enemy, first you have to accept him as your enemy. My understanding makes the enemy disappear. Whom am I supposed to love now? – the enemy is not there.Jesus says, “Love your neighbor.” I find myself absolutely alone in this whole crowded world. Nobody is my neighbor, because nobody can trespass my being, nor can I trespass anybody’s being. Every man is an island in himself. I cannot accept the idea that you have to love your neighbor.And why does Jesus say that? – because nobody loves their neighbors; neighbors are really the worst enemies. Everybody hates the neighbors, is jealous of the neighbors – thinks they are enjoying, are rich, have this, have that – and feels miserable comparing himself with them, feels competitive. And how can you love someone you feel competitive with?It is a cutthroat, competitive world. Everybody is trying to cut your throat. You may be trying to take the money from somebody else’s pocket, forgetting that somebody else is taking your money from your pocket.Once George Bernard Shaw was asked, “Can a man just live relaxed, with both of his hands in his pockets?”Bernard Shaw said, “Yes, but the pockets must be of others. The hands, of course, will be mine, but the pockets must be of others. And then one can live relaxed – there is no problem.”I love you.And it is not that I am obliging you.You need not be even thankful for my love, because my love is its own reward. Instead of you being obliged, I am obliged that you accepted my love and did not reject it. You could have rejected it, you have the right.Once I knew myself, I knew a totally different meaning of responsibility. It is not a question of duty: it is a question of sharing. You have so much love and so much bliss, you would like to share it.So I teach only one responsibility, and that is toward yourself. Everything else will follow on its own accord without any effort on your part. And when things happen effortlessly, they have a tremendous beauty to them.When you love somebody because she is beautiful, your love is not much. Tomorrow the woman will become old, tomorrow she may fall sick, tomorrow she may become ugly. Perhaps an operation has to be done on her nose – what will happen to your love? It was her beautiful nose that had provoked your love. Now that nose is gone, your love will disappear. The woman will become a burden to you.No, when out of your self-realization love comes, it is not dependent on the object of love. It has nothing to do with the person’s beauty or intelligence or any other talent. You are full of love and you want to share it. And whoever is ready to receive it, you are thankful to the person. It is a gift, and it has no cause in the person to whom you are giving it. You are giving it out of your fullness; you are overflowing.When your responsibilities are just an overflow of your experience of your being, of your center, of your eternal life, then they have a totally different quality.I repeat again: I teach you only one responsibility. I have been condemned for that all over the world; they say that I am teaching people selfishness. In a way it is right, but not in the sense they are using the word selfishness. But I am certainly teaching you responsibility toward yourself – if that is selfishness, I accept it as selfishness. But it is not against altruism.The moment you know your self in its totality, for the first time you will be able to be altruistic, compassionate, loving, kind, helpful. Not that service is your motto….I used to go to Rotary Clubs to give talks to them, and they had on the table: “Service is our motto.” The first thing I used to do was to throw that off the table. When I did it for the first time, a very beautiful man who was the president of the Rotary Club…. He was a friend of mine and also my doctor, the best doctor in the city. He had invited me, and when I threw that board from the table, he could not believe it.He said, “What are you doing?”I said to him, “I am making a place to sit, because I will speak sitting on the table, not standing; that is not my way” – before I started using a chair, I was sitting on tables. “So don’t be worried, I am making space for myself to sit.” And then while I was talking, I made it clear that I am not only making a place for myself to sit, I am making a place for myself to be responsible to myself.Service should not be a motto. Service should be a sharing, a rejoicing.You will not serve anybody for any motive – not that by service you will reach heaven, not that by service you will become a saint. If your service is a means to some end, it is simply business, it is not service. And what a bargain! – just serving a few sick people, you will enjoy paradise for eternity. It is almost a lottery!No, my vision is you share your joy, you share your love, you share your blissfulness. If in that sharing somebody is served, helped – it is not an end, there was no motive. You have enjoyed it already.When your actions become rewards in themselves, you are really a man alive, awakened.Science has to accept that it has been neglecting the most important part of existence: human consciousness. And once science starts moving into man’s interiority, religions will start disappearing on their own accord. They will become meaningless.When knowledge is available, who is going to believe?When experience is available, who is going to read it in a Bible, in a Koran?When you have food available to eat, I don’t think you will choose a book on cookery and read it. That you can do later on, or perhaps you may not need to do it.You have within you the secret key, and now it is science’s responsibility to help you to find the key.My religion is scientific. That’s why we don’t have any belief system. We have methods, just as science has methods. They explore objects by their methods; we explore our consciousness by our methods.Our methods are called meditations.They are absolutely scientific.No prayer is scientific, because first you have to believe in a God. And only then can you pray, because a prayer has to be addressed.Meditation is not to be addressed to anybody; it is just a method of digging within yourself.And you are there! – there is no need to believe that you are. In fact, even if you want to deny, you cannot deny yourself. The very denial will prove your existence.This is the only thing which is undeniable. Everything else can be denied. Perhaps it is a mirage in the desert, perhaps it is a dream, perhaps you are hallucinating, perhaps you are hypnotized and you are seeing things which are not there.Everything in the world can be denied, except you.You are the most fundamental reality – undeniable, indubitable.And finding it is a scientific experience.In the coming world, the new humanity, the new man will not have to bother about how to bridge religion and science, how to bring them closer, how to stop them fighting and destroying each other-there is no need.We are creating a science with the same methodology as all other sciences are created. Once we have established meditation as a scientific method – which is not difficult, everybody can do it…. It does not need a big lab – you are the lab! And nothing else is needed: no tubes and no stoves and no chemicals – nothing is needed.Everything that you need to know yourself is provided for from your very birth. Just a little one hundred and eighty degree turn….

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Can science itself be religious?It has been one of the greatest misfortunes that science is not religious. It can be religious and it should be religious.Science is only a method. It has no direction, no values; it is just a method. It can be used for destruction, it can be used for creativity, because in itself it is only a neutral methodology.Science has not been religious up to now because religions will not allow it to be religious. It is a question of a large vested interest.No religion would like science to be religious.It will mean religions will have to commit suicide. They cannot go on exploiting people, giving them superstitions, beliefs – all that will have to stop, because science has no belief system, it does not create superstitions. If science knows something, it is knowledge. If it does not know something, it accepts the ignorance but takes the challenge, that “One day we will know it.”Science is very humble in comparison to your religions. They are arrogant. They are claiming things they don’t know. They are fighting for things which nobody has ever seen – Mohammedans fighting Christians, Hindus fighting Mohammedans, about the attributes of God. Nobody has seen God ever, and they are fighting and killing thousands of people in such stupid inquiries: What are the attributes of God?Theology is a contradiction in terms. Theo means God and logy means logic – logic about God. There is no logic about God and if there is logic there is no God. They both can’t exist together.But the priest was having a good time. He was selling invisible commodities. They need not be produced, no work is involved, they don’t exist at all; but he has proved himself to be the best salesman.I have heard about a store which announced at Christmas time that they have finally invented invisible clips to keep your hair in place so nobody will see the clips and you can make any kind of hairdo. Immediately there was a great line and a queue of women, and they were selling invisible clips. Women were looking in the boxes; of course the clips were invisible, so there was no question of seeing them.One woman, who had been waiting at then end of the queue, could not refrain from saying, “I don’t see the invisible clips. I know because they are invisible I cannot see them, but at least I should be able to touch them. But I don’t see them – the box is empty. I move it, but there is no noise.”The salesman laughed and he said, “Lady, we have been out of stock for three weeks! But because it is an invisible commodity we thought there is no problem. Even I cannot tell any difference between the empty box and the box full of invisible clips.”God, heaven, hell, angels – all the religions depend on these commodities. And they have immense power; for centuries they have been exploiting people. And from the side of the people it was almost inevitable to be exploited.Each child is born in a family, and when he is small he thinks his father knows all, naturally. The father is so strong, can do so many things, and he is so small and cannot do anything. A psychology is created in him, a father figure is created in him, and because the society…most of the societies of the world are man-made, man is superior, the woman is inferior.In China for centuries it has been thought that the woman has no soul. So if a husband kills his wife it is not a crime. It is just as if you want to destroy your chair, it is nobody else’s business. The woman is a thing. Nobody in the whole history of China – which is the biggest nation in the world, one fourth the population of the world – never has a man been even punished for murdering his wife.So naturally, societies which are ruled by man cannot accept God as a “she.” He cannot be so inferior as to be a woman.In the biblical story God created man first, which looks not very reasonable because man in himself cannot give birth. It would have been far more reasonable to create the woman first because she is capable of creating. She has the womb, she is going to be the mother. Man is secondary. His function in creation is nothing more than that of a syringe which is used for injections.Man is a syringe!Strange, God created the syringe first – but it is a story written by a man – and then he created the woman because man was feeling alone. The woman is just an entertainment to help the man not feel bored, not feel alone. That is her function.God created man in a different way than he created the woman. He created the woman by taking a rib out of man’s body. This is insulting, humiliating; the woman is nothing but a rib. Man is really the master – ribs cannot be masters.In all the religions the woman is humiliated in different ways. In Jainism, no woman can attain to enlightenment. All that she can do is – if she is virtuous, disciplined, follows the creed, the ritual – all that she can attain is birth as a man in the next life. More than that she cannot achieve as a woman. Yes, when she becomes a man, then she can attain to enlightenment.Now poor Mahavira was not aware that soon there was going to be plastic surgery. A woman need not wait for another birth; she can become a man right now. And Jainism believes that Mahavira is omniscient – he knows everything, past, present, future – but he does not know about plastic surgery.He is omnipresent – but for twenty-five centuries he has not been seen anywhere. He is omnipotent, he can do anything. All the qualities of God are attributed to Mahavira because Jainism does not believe in God.It makes one thing clear: that there is some inner psychological need – if you remove God, then all the qualities of God are deputed to somebody else. And the reason is that man is born in a family where the father is the master.Just the other night I was telling a journalist from Sweden that God is man’s creation. All the religions say God created man in his own image. It is a lie! The truth is, man has created God in his own image. Of course, he could not make God a woman.But there are a few small, primitive societies around the world where God is not he, God is a she. And that seems to be more logical because “she” includes “he,” but “he” does not include “she.” “She” is vaster, bigger; it has a womb.Those small primitive societies where God is thought of as a woman have not been able to achieve weapons, destructive methods. They have not been fighting; there have been no wars in a matriarchal society. The fact has to be considered. The man-made society has been doing only one thing, continuously fighting.In those societies where God is a mother, the psychology is the same. It seems the child, because he is brought up by a mother and a father…whoever is more powerful becomes his idea of God. In matriarchal societies the woman is powerful. She works, she creates, she goes to the farm, she goes to the garden. She does everything that you have been told the woman cannot do because she is weak, she is “the fair sex,” she is delicate.But in matriarchal societies just the opposite is the case. The man looks after the children and for centuries that has been his work, baby-sitting. Naturally he is smaller than the woman, his height is not that of the woman.You will be surprised, in those matriarchal societies…. I have visited two. In India there are a few, just small tribes living in the deep forest. The woman has muscles, not the man. Muscles are not something natural and the birthright of somebody. Whoever works is bound to create muscles. A man like me, who is bone lazy, cannot have muscles!And for centuries, if man has been just looking after children, cooking food…The woman has grown taller, stronger, because she is cutting wood, she is sowing the seeds, reaping the crop, doing everything that man is doing in our societies. Naturally, the child creates a mother figure.One of the ancient scriptures in India Manusmriti has dominated Indians for five thousand years. And by the way, you will be surprised that in the modern world only two men outside India were immensely impressed with Manu’s ideas: one was Friedrich Nietzsche and the other was Adolf Hitler. Both are male chauvinists. They both praised Manu because Manu has given the whole moral code to Hindu society. He is still followed.He must have been really macho, because he says every husband has a duty once in a while to beat the wife. Find any excuse and beat her to keep her in her place, to prove to the children that she is weaker and the father is the strong man. Five thousand years ago, Manu was creating a father figure in the child.When the child grows up he starts suspecting and doubting that his father knows all. And he is right. He starts finding that his father is not infallible, that he commits mistakes, that he is not the strongest person because there are many people that are far stronger than him.Up to now he has trusted in the father and he was at ease. Now a great dis-ease arises in him. He has become dependent on a father figure for protection. He needs a father who is all-powerful, present everywhere, who knows everything.This is the root cause of the projection of God – whether as man or woman doesn’t matter; whoever is powerful here the child will project one day. And the priest has been exploiting this situation. He becomes a mediator. He says God is far away, and to know God needs tremendous discipline, hard effort, continuous prayer, so only a very few people who can go through all those austerities come close to God. They have a direct communication line to God.You will be surprised that here in America, in the twentieth century, there is a sect of Christians, the Mormons…. They believe – and they are educated, very efficient in every way, but they believe that their leader has a direct telephone line. God gives the message to the leader and the leader gives the message to the people; it cannot be disobeyed. And it is believed!In Wasco county there were three judges who decided the legality and the incorporation of Rajneeshpuram as a city. Two were in favor, one was not in favor, but he was a minority; hence Rajneeshpuram became an incorporated city – legally, constitutionally.But of those two judges one was a Mormon. As Rajneeshpuram became a legal city the leader of the Mormons received an immediate urgent call from God that this judge has to resign and go to Nigeria to spread the message of Christianity.And you won’t believe it – the man resigned! He is a judge, but if God orders and sends him to Nigeria – which is the worst place in the world to go…In Nigeria there are still cannibals. This poor fellow is sent to Nigeria to convert people to Christianity.This is not God’s message! And out of all the Mormons in America, this poor fellow is chosen. It is a message from the White House, not from God. It is politics, not religion.But religions can exploit in this way because man has a weakness: dependence. As he becomes a young man, he finds that the people he was dependent upon are just as weak, as unintelligent, as anyone else. Now he feels a vacuum and that vacuum, frightens him. Up to now he was confident, he had a certain strength. Now all strength disappears, all confidence disappears. He is almost on the point of a nervous breakdown!When he sees his father does not know everything, that his father is not all-powerful, when he sees that a neighbor has beaten him and he could not do anything…when he sees that not only the neighbor, but his mother in fact dominates the man – by throwing tantrums, throwing things, screaming, crying….The child is very observant. He can see that the mother is wrong, but the father is asking to be forgiven, he is saying that he is sorry. The child can see that the mother is wrong, but she has created such insanity in the house that the father has to cool her down, even if he has to apologize. He knows perfectly well that he is right, but without an apology neither he can sleep nor can the neighbors sleep; and everybody will come to know what is happening. He just wants things to cool down.The child is watching: this father is not dependable; he is not so strong as he had supposed. He is not fulfilling his expectations. As he grows, he comes to know more and more – and a deep emptiness arises inside. The priest has exploited that emptiness. He has projected a father figure.It is not a coincidence that you call God the father. You call the priest also father. Why?In India, I have heard…. two children were playing on the street. One was a Hindu, another was a Christian. The Christian priest was on his daily round, going to Christian families, and the Christian boy saluted him and addressed him as “father.”The Hindu boy simply laughed when the father had left. He said, “This is strange – this man is celibate, he has no wife. In what way has he become a father?” Hindus cannot understand that this man is “father.”And the same is the situation of the Christian trinity – the father, the Holy Ghost, the son. Not a single woman is included in the trinity. Strange! How is God the father and how is Jesus Christ his son? Where is the mother? And what was the need of this Holy Ghost? A woman would have been perfectly logical, but the Holy Ghost is absolutely absurd!He is also male, because the Holy Ghost made Jesus’ mother, Mariam, pregnant. Strange – Holy Ghost? Then what do you mean when you say unholy ghost? If this is the Holy Ghost, making virgin girls pregnant, then what will the unholy ghost do? This trinity is a gay group.But the woman was not to be accepted because all the priests were men, all the founders of religion were men…. Even a man like Gautam Buddha, who is certainly the most compassionate out of all the founders of religion, was not willing to initiate women into his commune.For ten years continuously he denied thousands of women who had come to be initiated and wanted to be his disciples; he said no. All his compassion simply evaporated. It was only for men, not for women.And what was the fear? The fear was that once the woman enters the commune, he could not trust his disciples to remain celibate. That was his fear. On the one hand he does not trust his disciples; on the other hand, deep down he knows celibacy is unnatural. If a woman is there, sooner or later the unnatural will be dropped. But a man of his intelligence could not see that his disciples could turn to homosexuality – they did.Homosexuality is a religious disease – a sacred disease, I should say.It started in the monasteries, in the ashrams, where no woman was allowed in. Man is intelligent enough – there is a limit to repression, then it becomes too heavy. His whole mind becomes a sexual orgy. The burden is too much – he would like to be relieved of it.Just the other day, Sheela brought me a news item that a few scientists have found three monkeys in South Africa having the disease AIDS. And these scientists are propagating the idea that the disease AIDS has come from the monkeys. Man is very clever at dumping things, and the poor monkeys will not protest.But I told Sheela that it is such a simple thing – and she was amazed because she had accepted the story. If scientists say that it is a disease created by the monkeys and transferred to man…. And it can be transferred without sexual contact – through the saliva of the monkey, through any infected liquid coming out of the body of the monkey. If somebody comes in contact with it, he will get the disease.I told Sheela, “You have fallen into the same trap as all women have been falling into for centuries.” As far as I am concerned, those three monkeys must have been given AIDS by men. It is a known fact that in lonely forests, mountains, man has been known to make love to animals – and the monkey comes very close, he is a cousin. This seems to be a simple explanation, that a few men suffering from AIDS have made love to the monkeys.And sodomy, making love to the animals, is not a new thing. It is as ancient as the Old Testament. In the Old Testament there were two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. “Sodomy” comes from the name of the city, Sodom, because in Sodom people were making love to animals. God became so angry that he destroyed Sodom, and he destroyed Gomorrah, because Gomorrah was turning gay.Now Christian priests are saying that AIDS is a punishment from God for those people who have not listened to religious teachers, doctrines – and people go on believing. In fact, God and his priests are responsible for homosexuality. They separated man and woman, with no possibility of contact; naturally the nuns became lesbians, the monks became homosexuals.One journalist was saying to me that a very famous preacher of America who has a tremendous hold over American Christians, therefore has a great hold on the American parliament, because he controls a large number of voters. Even the president has to listen to him. That man is saying – his name is Falwell…it seems to be meaningful. He is saying it is God’s punishment.I asked the journalist, “If that is true, then what about lesbians? – because no lesbian suffers from AIDS. Is God in favor of lesbianism? You go and ask Mr. Falwell.” Homosexuals are punished, but what is the difference between homosexuality and lesbianism? Lesbians should also be punished in the same way, but no lesbian has been found to have AIDS.In fact, sometimes I think that if we want to save humanity, all women should turn into lesbians and leave the men and their God and their priests to die with AIDS! Now it is very dangerous to love a man, it is risky. He can be a carrier of ultimate death from a disease which knows no cure.If the women are intelligent, this will be the step they should take. They should simply say, “We are finished with you!”Yes, there are men who are not suffering from AIDS; their semen can be collected in banks, so when a woman wants to give birth to a child she can be injected. But the old-fashioned injection, the man, is out of date. That syringe is dangerous!The religions have been exploiting man’s psychology in every possible way. Man of course is weak, unprotected. In a vast world he is so tiny. Life is so short, diseases are millions, and even if he somehow manages to dodge cancer and tuberculosis and all the diseases, he cannot dodge death; that is going to come anyway.Death, disease, weakness, the unknown universe create so much fear – and nobody to protect…. It was a simple step to give God the father as the protector. And man’s inner space was in such a need, he accepted it. He was not capable of doubting it, because to doubt means to live almost on the verge of a nervous breakdown.And with God comes the priest; he becomes the mediator. He becomes more powerful than politicians. In religious countries like India, politicians go and touch the feet of Hindu priests – of course, only before election time. Then for five years they don’t bother about the priest, about the temples. But as the election comes near they start going on religious pilgrimages to temples far away in the Himalayas, touching the feet of any stupid priest, asking for blessings.The priest holds more power; the politician’s power is mundane. The priest’s power has entered in the very spirit of man.That’s why religions did not allow science to move into their territory. First they did not allow science even to move into the objective world – the subjective world was out of the question. They did not want them even to explore the objective world, the material world.Strange, because religions are not concerned with matter, and if somebody is exploring matter, why should they be disturbed? There was a reason: if the scientist succeeds in discovering the mysteries and the secrets of matter, his second step is bound to be to explore the subjectivity of man. It is better to cut it from the very roots, rather than to wait.So for three hundred years religion has been fighting continuously against every invention, every discovery. But because science is based not on belief, but on doubt – it accepts something only when there is no doubt possible about it. And then too it accepts it only hypothetically. That has to be understood. That shows the humbleness of scientific effort.Hypothetical acceptance means: “Tomorrow new facts may be discovered, and we may have to change the theory. So for the time being we accept. Remember, for the time being – not forever. All that we know up to now is in agreement with the discovery, but who knows about tomorrow? People may invent more subtle instruments, and tomorrow new facts may arise and the theory will not be able to stand those new facts. Hence, it is only hypothetical, for the time being.”This is true humbleness. They are not arrogant about things which are absolutely proved! Still they will not say that this is absolutely proved, because infinity is waiting.So all scientific statements are relative, never absolute.Religious statements are always absolute. It does not say, “Perhaps God exists.”Science, making every discovery, says, “It is hypothetical, perhaps tomorrow we will have to change it.” And in three hundred years we had to change many times – that is enough proof.What Newton has found, Albert Einstein has to discard, because he penetrated deeper. Naturally, he is grateful to Newton. Without Newton, Einstein would not have been able to penetrate deeper. He is standing on the shoulders of Newton; that’s why he can see a little far away, which Newton could not. But he is aware somebody someday will be standing on his shoulders and he will be able to look even farther. That’s why he called his theory, the theory of relativity.Now in science there will be no absolute statement. Everything will be relative to the knowledge, to the time, and we will remain open to change it if reality reveals new secrets, new facts.Religion was afraid of two things: one, the basic method of science – doubt. Religion is against doubt, it is all for faith. And if doubt succeeds in revealing objective reality, then the day is not far away when somebody will start using the same methodology to explore consciousness. That’s what we are doing here. Using the same methods which have proved solid in the objective world…now we have to take those methods to the subjective reality.Religion tried in every possible way, but could not succeed – nobody can succeed against truth. The religions had the whole world with them; the scientists were individuals, they had no power. But truth gave them such immense power that millions of people who were in favor of religion could not prevent their truth. They could not prove that it was not true, they had to accept it – reluctantly, unwillingly.Now a greater step has to be taken, which will be fought by all religions everywhere. If they fought about objective reality which is not their concern…. I am trying to enter their territory, challenging their territorial imperative.I am trying to introduce scientific methods where religion has ruled for millennia.I have been challenging religious leaders to open discussion. In the beginning, a few accepted because they had no idea what kind of man I am. But now nobody accepts my challenge. They cannot prove anything, because all that they think is true is only a belief, and I can expose the belief very easily. They cannot disprove me, because whatever I am saying is my experience. And I am not teaching a doctrine, a philosophy which can be argued about. I am teaching only a method. Meditation is only a method.And not a single man in the whole history has been able to prove that meditation does not lead you to the ultimate truth of your being.Without exception, whoever has meditated has arrived at the same experience.Science has to be religious. It will be a curse on the scientists if they don’t invade the territory of religions. Enough exploitation has happened. It has to be stopped completely.You will be surprised to know that trees, birds, animals – science has improved upon God very much. There are so many beautiful dogs which God had not created in those six days. They have come through scientific breeding, crossbreeding.In Soviet Russia there are fruits which were not available in the Garden of Eden, because Soviet scientists are continuously crossbreeding trees. When you crossbreed a mango with an apple, naturally something absolutely new is born which has never been there. It has more richness than both the mango and the apple. It has a new taste – something of the mango, something of the apple, and something absolutely new because of the mixture. In the Soviet Union, there are many fruits available which were not created by God.In animals we know crossbreeding has brought stronger, better generations. For example, in India the bulls are imported from outside. I told Indira Gandhi, “This is strange. You can import bulls because Spanish bulls are of course the best. And to those bulls are given your cows, which you have worshipped for centuries as mothers. Have you ever thought,” I asked her, “what is going on? A Spanish bull making your mother pregnant!”She said, “You always come with strange ideas, but you are right!”I said, “If Spanish bulls can create better cows, better bulls, then why not do the same with man? Why not find better men, better women to produce children? And it is a well-known, established fact that if a man and woman belong to very different races, their child is going to be healthier, will live longer, will be more resistant to diseases, will be more intelligent.”It is because of this fact that all the religions have prohibited marriage to your own sister, because that is the closest relationship. In fact, your sister would have been far more caring toward you, less of a pain in the neck. You have grown up together, you have already loved, played, been friends together. This should be the logical step, that you should marry your sister.But it was felt – thousands of years ago – that if you marry your sister your children will be weak, will not have stamina, will not be intelligent. Most probably they will be crippled, blind. The closer the woman to the man, the poorer the child.This will be perfectly good, to import men from faraway countries, women from faraway countries.You can see the fact in European royal families. They create only idiots. Have you seen a picture of the prince of Wales? He looks so retarded. Have you ever thought about the queen of England? We have hundreds of women better than the Queen of England. She is just an ugly duckling.But the reason is because those royalties go on marrying among themselves. They don’t allow anyone to move out of the royal families. Now royal families are limited – in the whole of Europe, there are perhaps twenty royal families. So they go on rotating, and they produce the prince of Wales, the queen of England. This is bound to happen, it is absolutely certain to happen.The science of human engineering should come into existence. Up to now, man has been just accidental. If somebody is beautiful, it is just accidental. If somebody is intelligent, it is just accidental. That’s why millions of people are below the mental age of fourteen. Their physical age may be eighty, but their mental age is somewhere between thirteen and fourteen.It is a very strange situation. Your mind stopped when you became sexually mature, because biology needs no more intelligence. Biology needs you to reproduce children. Now you are capable – at fourteen years you are capable of producing children. Now what is the need of intelligence? Just find a woman and start reproducing. Intelligence is just superfluous, luxurious, unnecessary.We can manage if we drop all stupid ideas about morality, sin…old ideologies. If we can create better cows, we can create better human beings.The Indian cow does not give enough milk, even enough to purchase grass for her. The Indian cow is just a burden. The Jersey cow can feed many families, the whole neighborhood. It is such a simple fact, it needs no argumentation, that if we have succeeded in fruits, in animals, proving ourselves better than your God…and in fact, the poor God – just in six days, how much could he do? Whatever he did in six days is really too much.I had a Christian tailor who used to make my clothes. I was going on a journey, and I told him, “You have to make my clothes just in one week’s time.”He looked at me and he said, “I can do that, but then don’t complain.”I said, “What do you mean?”He said, “You can look at the world God created in six days: it is all in a mess! Your clothes will be all in a mess. I need time. Six days are not enough even to create a dress, and God created the whole universe.”Everything needs improvement, and everything can be improved. But religions come in the way, because if more intelligent people are born, people who never fall sick, people who are creative of wealth, art, who is going to the poor priest? His whole business will go bankrupt.They are against me for the simple reason that I am making every effort that they should go bankrupt. They will have to go bankrupt, it is only a question of time. They cannot postpone their bankruptcy for long, because man – howsoever unintelligent – can see simple facts.Science has to become religious. And the scientists should start moving into the world of religion.Don’t bother about the churches and the synagogues – they will disappear on their own accord. You just do something better! And that which is not able to compete with you will have to disappear. And don’t care about popes and Ayatollah Khomeiniacs. The days of these people are finished; they are living posthumous lives. But it is natural to cling to your vested interests as long as possible.I am all for science.The world needs a religion which is scientific, and we are creating it.Nobody can have any dispute with my religion, for the simple reason that I don’t give him any grounds to dispute.There is no God, so we don’t have to be worried about proving the existence of God. Nobody has been able to prove it. Thousands of theologians and philosophers wasted their life in proving the existence of God. Strange – even his existence is not proved, and you are searching for somebody whose existence has not been proved in thousands of years. You are praying to somebody who is not even a hypothesis.We don’t have any God. We don’t have any heaven and hell. We don’t have our sannyasins walking on water and…. So there is no way to have a dispute with us. We are simply inquirers going deeper into our silence, into our joy, into our blessings – which are our birthright.Now, joy needs no proof. Or do you think it needs any proof? Your peacefulness needs no proof. This silence, here…as if there is nobody…is a proof unto itself. It does not need any proof from outside.I have condensed the whole religion into a single word: meditation.And anybody who wants to dispute will have to go into meditation, because that is our religion. If he does not succeed, that is his failure. If he succeeds, we succeed. Both the sides are ours. If he succeeds in reaching to his innermost core, he will find that what we were saying is true. And I don’t think that a man of meditation will lie. It is impossible.Just the other day, Sheela brought a newspaper cutting from India….I have never said anything about a certain man, Goenka, who teaches the ancient Buddhist meditation method of Vipassana. I am absolutely certain about the method, its rightness. Many of my sannyasins have practiced Vipassana. I have practiced Vipassana. It leads to the ultimate core of your being.Goenka has been teaching Vipassana. I have never criticized him, I have never even mentioned anything about him. Even a few of my sannyasins asked me if they could go and have a seven-day or twenty-one-day session with Goenka.I said, “Just go, because Vipassana is a perfect method. There are one hundred and twelve methods, Vipassana is one of them. You go. And it does not matter who gives you the method.”Many of his disciples have become my sannyasins, because Vipassana is just one method. It is enough, but my attitude toward life is of abundance – if one method can give you so much, try some other method too, because they all move from different angles, pass through different sceneries, reach into different qualities.Ultimately they reach to the center in the same way, but sometimes the way is even more beautiful than the goal. You can go through a desert; somebody else can go through beautiful gardens and reach the same spot. These one hundred and twelve methods are moving toward the same center, but they all have their beauties, their joys, their rejoicings.So when people from Goenka came to me, they became aware that there are one hundred and twelve methods, so why be poor and just have one method? Why not be rich? I am all for richness in every dimension of life. Those sannyasins are still here.In a newspaper Goenka has given an interview in which he talks about me, and says that I had gone to him to learn Vipassana. I have not even seen his picture – and he says in the interview that he has taught me Vipassana!He must have thought that now that I have gone out of India, this small third-class weekly in which he is giving his interview is not going to reach me. Everything that is concerned with me is bound to reach me from all the countries, because everywhere my people are there, alert.Now I feel sad that I allowed my sannyasins to go to this man. Perhaps he knows the method; he has been in Burma as a businessman, and in Burma Vipassana is practiced just as in other religions people do prayer. It is a common thing, and the method is very simple. You need not do it, but you can be acquainted with the method.Now it is absolutely clear that this man has never done what he has been teaching. A man who knows meditation will not lie so blatantly. I have never met him! In fact, before he came to India I was teaching meditation to people. My first book was published in 1960 when he was still in Burma, and nobody knew about him. And my first book is about Vipassana!I have not used the name Vipassana because Vipassana is a word from a dead language, Pali. Nobody speaks it. It was used in Buddha’s time, and when Buddhism disappeared from India, Pali – the language of the Buddhists – also disappeared.Vipassana simply means witnessing. And that has been my whole life’s effort: to teach you awareness, witnessing, alertness, consciousness. I am using contemporary words.And now this man says that he is my master, he taught me Vipassana. One thing is absolutely certain: this man knows only the method, but he has never practiced it. And I feel sad that I allowed my people to go to him. But sometimes it is possible…the man may not have gone into meditation himself, but if he knows the method accurately, you may enter into meditation. The disciple may arrive when the master has not even started the journey.But it is absolutely impossible to lie! That’s why I say when a person goes deep into meditation – and that’s what I will tell pope the polack if he accepts my challenge….We will give him every facility, we will make him as comfortable as he has never been. We will surround him with as many beautiful women as he may have been dreaming to have in paradise. But he will have to go into meditation, and only then can he be in an argument with me.If he does not succeed, then he is not qualified to argue with me. If he succeeds, I am already victorious because he will have to say humbly, “I was living in fictions,” and he will be grateful for his whole life for the taste of reality.Scientists perhaps may not dare to enter into the religious field, because there will be political pressure on them. All the scientists are employed by governments now, and all the governments depend on religious support – it is a very complicated game.Now, the Indian government will not allow any scientist to trespass into the area which has always been that of priests, prophets, messiahs. And scientists are all government servants. Science has become so complex and so costly that no individual can afford to have a lab of his own. He needs immense support from governments: he is just a slave.The politician is going to prevent him from entering into the arena of religion because the priest is there, and if the priest is not listened to by the politician, then in the next election the politician will be gone. So I don’t expect that scientists will have guts enough now.But we can do it; we are nobody’s servants.We are not interested in anybody’s votes. We are not ambitious to become presidents or prime ministers.We are so contented in ourselves, so utterly happy with ourselves that nobody can pressure us or dominate us. We can do anything that we want to do.And the scientific methodology is simple. For objective exploration science needs billions of dollars, but for inner exploration you don’t need even a single dollar. So there is no problem at all. Meditation is individual, and does not depend on anybody’s support.Doubt all the dogmas, because doubt is just like a sharp sword. Cut all the ideologies from the very roots. Use doubt for clearing the ground, and then use any method of meditation. You can choose from one hundred and twelve methods.This is for the first time that anybody is making one hundred and twelve methods available to his disciples. Buddha had one method, Mahavira had one method, Lao Tzu had one method, Patanjali had one method.I am not a man who is linear; I am multidimensional.Those single methods were enough for self-realization, but if you move through different methods, you will come across different spaces, different wonders, different experiences, different flavors, fragrances.But perhaps you may not be able to do all the methods. Then look into the methods and choose ones that you feel have a certain attraction for you. Even if you can manage ten methods, you will be ten times richer than Gautam Buddha!I have tried all one hundred and twelve methods. Hence I can say I am both the poorest man on the earth, with not a single cent, and the richest man who has ever existed – because I have seen myself from every possible path. And each path had its own richness, its own music, its own poetry, its own colors.I would like you to try as many methods as possible. But whenever you do a method, go to the very end. Don’t start changing from one method to another unless you have reached to the very end.And it is something to be remembered, that if you can manage to reach your inner self through one method, the other one hundred and eleven methods will become very easy to you, because now you know exactly where you are going. And now you can go with a deep trust – which was missing in the first method. Now you can avoid all the mistakes that you made in the first method. You can avoid all the pitfalls which prevented you, delayed you in reaching your own self.Once you have done at least three methods, then you can move easily in all the remaining methods. You will be surprised – no mistake, no pitfall, no disturbance, just…(He snaps his fingers) like a click! Any method you start and you are at the end. You have passed through the whole scene with jet-speed.Yes, science has to be religious.If it is not going to be religious, then it is going to be in the service of politics, in the service of war, in the service of death.If science becomes religious, then it will be in the service of life, in the service of love, in the service of rejoicings.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,William James says, “The most important thing in life is to live your life for something more important than your life.” Can you comment?What William James is saying has been said for thousands of years, by almost all the politicians, all the priests – and you can see the result of such a teaching.What does it mean, that you should live for something higher than life? Is there anything higher than life?Some religions say God is higher than life. Other religions say liberation, salvation is higher than life. Politicians say the nation is higher than life – ideologies, like communism, are higher than life. All these people are agreed on one point, that you have to sacrifice your life for something. It looks like a beautiful statement, but it hides a very ugly reality.In thousands of ways the same thing is repeated. The child is told he should live for the parents…. Nobody seems to realize a simple fact, that there is nothing higher than life, cannot be. And if there is anything higher than life it is bound to be dead; otherwise, how can it be higher than life?But man has been manipulated to sacrifice himself, either for ideas or for ideals. And to sacrifice your life for something else means you stop living, you start committing suicide. You start murdering yourself so slowly that you don’t become aware of it. But every man who has sacrificed his life for any goal, realizes at the moment of death that he missed the train, that he has been a fool.“Always sacrifice. Don’t live, don’t enjoy. Today has to be sacrificed for tomorrow.” And tomorrow never comes, it is always today. And every today has to be sacrificed for tomorrow, which is not going to come – has never come.No, I cannot agree with William James. He is talking junk. He is simply paraphrasing all vested interests, because they don’t want you to live, they want to use you.Nations want to use you for war. Naturally, the politicians are bound to say, “The nation is far bigger than you, and you should not be selfish. You should be ready to sacrifice your life for the nation” – not only for the nation, but a piece of cloth they call the flag. You have to die for it!Intelligent people have been conditioned for such a foolish thing, and they have been doing it for thousands of years. What is the attainment? What have we achieved by sacrificing?The other day a journalist was asking me, “You say to your people, ‘Live in the moment.’ But then what about the future? – future generations?”I asked him, “Your father was thinking about you, you were his future generation. His father was thinking about your father, he was his future generation. And what has happened? Where are you?”A very cunning strategy not to allow you to live…. But it cannot be said directly, because then you will not follow it. It has to be made sweet-sounding, tasteful. Thinking of the future – when you will not be here, sacrificing for things which never materialize…The people who took part in the revolution in Russia in 1917 had sacrificed everything for the revolution because it was to bring a classless society, a society where nobody would be higher than anybody else, a society of freedom. Those poor people are in their graves. All their sacrifice has turned their country into a vast concentration camp! Every Russian is imprisoned – no freedom of any sort. Before the revolution at least he was free to rebel; now even that is not possible.He is being given information only by the government. No other publications, newspapers, magazines, exist in Russia. So the government goes on saying whatever it wants to say. There is no question of right and wrong. There is no way for the Russians to decide whether this is true or not.We used to think of the Dark Ages – they have not passed, they still exist around the earth.But the people who had sacrificed were not intentionally creating a country of slaves; they were thinking riches would be distributed. But before distributing riches you have to have them. Russia was a poor country. In a poor country if one percent of the people are rich, you can distribute their wealth but nobody will become richer by that. So in fact what has happened is, poverty has been equally distributed. Yes, it gives a certain consolation that nobody is richer than you, everybody is just like you.And Russia is very afraid to send Russians outside Russia for any purpose, because there they can see a totally different world.But the people who had sacrificed could not live their life. And the ideals for which they had sacrificed have not materialized.In India, I have seen that happen with my own eyes. My whole family – except me – was involved in the freedom movement. And they were all angry with me; they asked me, “Don’t you value freedom?”I said, “I value freedom, but not in a stupid way. What you are doing will not bring freedom to the country, it will only change masters. Slaves will remain slaves.” And in forty years I have proved that what I had said is true.Just a few months ago my uncle was here. He was a great freedom fighter, went to jail and suffered much. And I asked him, “Now just look backward: has any of your dream been fulfilled?”He had tears in his eyes, and he said, “You were so young, but you were right and we were wrong. Freedom has not come; on the contrary, the country has become more and more poor.”I had been telling them, “India as one country has never existed in history. You should be thankful to the British government that they forced India and consolidated her into one country. India has been one country only under British rule. In Gautam Buddha’s time there were two thousand independent kingdoms in India!”And I had told my family, “Your freedom will certainly remove the British from power, but remember, the country will start falling into the old patterns” – and that has happened.Now Pakistan is separate from India, Bangladesh is separate from India, Punjab is asking for independence; Assam is asking for independence, and fighting. Soon all those two thousand kingdoms will be there. India will simply evaporate.And millions of people suffered, went to jail, were sentenced to death. They were romantic people, not realistic.No ideal in the whole history of man has been achieved. And how many million people have been deprived of living their life!The journalist asked me, “Then you don’t want to do anything for the future?”I said, “I don’t want to do anything for the future. I want to live my present as totally, as intensely as possible, because one thing is certain, the future will be born out of this moment. The future does not come from nowhere, it follows this moment. And if this moment is rich, the next moment can be richer. So I teach clearly to live without sacrificing anything. The method of sacrifice has been tried and it has failed – just give me a try.”Live your today as fully as possible.From where is your tomorrow going to be born? It is in the womb of today.It is going to come from your life that you have lived today. There is no need to worry about it, it will be taken care of.By your living in the present without sacrificing a single moment for any ideal, I can guarantee you all the ideals that have haunted human imagination can be fulfilled – not by sacrifice, but by living as deeply, as fully as possible.If all people on the earth live joyously today – singing, dancing, praising the beauty of life and being grateful to existence – can tomorrow be different? It will be better. You will have become more alert to the beauty of living in the present. Perhaps today you were a little reluctant, you went a few steps, but tomorrow you will have more confidence to go farther and farther.Ideals are not waiting somewhere in the future; you have to go on creating them every day, every moment. Freedom is not a commodity, that you have just to travel to the place where you get it.Freedom is an experience.If you want freedom in the future, for future generations, you be free! You live in freedom!Naturally, you cannot impose slavery on your children. A free man knows the beauty of freedom. He would like his children also to be free, more free than he is.The future is always born out of the present. So my insistence is: drop the word sacrifice. There is nothing higher than life.What can be higher than life? Freedom? But if there is no life? All the dead people in their graves are enjoying absolute freedom. Is that your goal? or richness? affluence? peace?Once Confucius was asked by one of his disciples, “Master, how can I be peaceful, silent, blissful, after my death?”Confucius said, “You idiot! Why are you bothering about the time after death? If you want to be peaceful, be peaceful here, now. Be more loving and more enjoying now. All dance has to happen now. And as far as your peace is concerned, in the grave you will be peaceful, completely peaceful, no disturbance. Leave it for the grave.And I am not interested beyond the grave, because nobody has ever returned and said that there is something beyond the grave. Everything is on this side! And you want to sacrifice this side for everything that is only in imagination on the other side. But there is no proof for it, no evidence for it.”Christians, Hindus, Buddhists – they are all saying, “Renounce this life so that you can have a better life in paradise.” It is simply so silly and stupid. If you are not living life here, you will forget completely how to live when you reach paradise. This life is the school for all learning. Do everything that you want to do now, because the next moment is not certain.Paradise is not certain, but there is no need to worry about it. If you have lived life here and know all the nuances, all the colors and all the beauties of life, then if there is a paradise, it will be proud to receive you – a man who has lived so richly.I tell you, Zorbas will be received in paradise with great rejoicing – not your saints. Your saints are simply sick. They have cut every joy from their life, they are simply vegetating. These vegetables – cabbages and cauliflowers – will be entering paradise? I don’t see any hope for these people.Zorbas will enter paradise – if there is any paradise – because they know how to live, they know how to love. They will break down all the doors of paradise and invade it! They are not the people to be returned from the door, told that “you are not meant for paradise.” They will do the same there that they have been doing here – of course, on a bigger, vaster scale.The poor Zorba here has only one woman to love – Bubbalina. In paradise he is not going to be satisfied with an old, ugly Bubbalina. He will find all the fairies, and he is not going to cling to one either.Live totally with one person and then move on, because there are other beautiful people with different tastes, with different beauties, with different dimensions opening.A man who has known only one wife, a woman who has known only one man, they have to console themselves with statements of Jesus Christ: “Blessed are the poor.” They have to repeat the Bible every day, because it is so illogical that unless you repeat it every day you are bound to forget it.Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn, because they shall be consoled.” Great idea! And I am worried about my people who are already rejoicing. What will be in the future for them? They don’t need any consolation – they have never mourned. Wherever they are – it does not matter, they will rejoice. And as they become more and more disciplined in rejoicing, if they reach paradise by mistake, they will seduce all the saints, will bring some life to those dead people.Or – which is more probable – if they end up in hell, they will make hell one of my communes! Who is going to prevent them? No saints, no priests, no mahatmas, no pope; you will be totally free – no Bibles, no Gitas, no Korans. You will find all the playboys and all the playgirls. Hell will be paradise immediately. Even the people from paradise will start moving toward hell – “Just once I have to get there!”I am against any sacrifice. That is cunning exploitation.You have such a small life, and everybody is asking you to sacrifice it! They use big words, but don’t be deceived by these people.Rejoice now, because if there is a tomorrow you will be able to rejoice more deeply.If there is no tomorrow, who cares? We have rejoiced already!Either way, I am making you victorious, you cannot be defeated. You rejoice before death, and if there is something after death, you will be able – you will know all ways of rejoicing, you will rejoice there. And if there is nothing after death, there is no problem. You have lived your life so intensely, so rejoicingly, so blissfully, there is no need for any more time.A man of understanding can live the whole eternity in a single moment!And the fools may live an eternal life, sacrificing for the tomorrow, for the nation, for the religion, for God, for this, for that – and the whole eternity will be lost.Don’t be deceived. William James is simply saying what has been told, preached all down the centuries. And you can see the result. This mad world is the outcome of millions of people’s lives of sacrifice. They destroyed themselves. They destroyed you too, because if your father is sacrificing for you, he will hate you deep down, because it was for you.The wife of one of my friends died. This friend had three children, and he was afraid to marry again because stepmothers are not motherly, and what would happen to the three children? That was the argument he was telling everybody, and because he was young, everybody said, “You will be living forty years, perhaps more. Why are you unnecessarily insisting that you don’t want to get married?”But he would not budge. He said, “I will sacrifice everything for my children’s sake.”Somebody told me, “He is very stubborn, miserable. He is missing his wife, but goes on insisting that he has to sacrifice for the future of his children.”I said, “Bring him to me.”I took him inside and left his other friends outside. I said, “I want to talk to him in privacy because in front of you he will continue to repeat the same nonsense.”Inside the room, I locked it. He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I am making you comfortable. And you can rely on me, I will never tell anybody – but be truthful. One thing: are you missing your wife?”He said, “Yes, I am missing her. She was such a joy in my life. She was my life. These three years that I have lived without her are almost dead.”I said, “Do you think she was the only woman on the earth?”He said, “No, there are millions of women.”I asked him, “Do you think you cannot find a better woman? Your wife has been very compassionate in dying. You can find another woman, you can have another experience.”The man said, “You are strange – you are saying my wife was compassionate?”I said, “Certainly, because wives are clinging. She made you free; be grateful to her. But you are not using the opportunity that she has given to you. You are being ungrateful.”He said, “Strange logic! In three years, I have met so many people – everybody was trying to convince me to get married.”I said, “I am not trying to convince you. I am simply asking questions so that you become alert to what you are doing. My second question is: you continuously say you are sacrificing for your children, but be sincere – do you really love your children? Or is there deep down hate and anger, that because of these three kids you are not able to marry another beautiful woman?“You will never forgive these kids, remember, because you are destroying your life for these kids. If they were not there, wouldn’t you have married?”He said, “Yes, if they were not there.”“Then their existence is a burden on you. They are crippling your life.”He said, “Perhaps you are right, because many times the idea has arisen in me – I have never told it to anybody – I hate those kids! Because of those kids, my whole life is destroyed.”But to everybody he was saying he was sacrificing. Remember one thing: whomsoever you sacrifice for, you will hate.And I asked him the third question…I said, “This is my third question. Then I will open the door and you get lost. My third question is: if you hate your children and you continuously brag that you are sacrificing your life for them, then when they are grown up, are they going to forgive you? Your hate – you may not say it, but it will be expressed in many ways. Your anger – you may not say to others, but your children will catch it just through your vibe.“And hearing continuously that somebody is sacrificing for you – sacrificing his love, sacrificing his youth, sacrificing his future – those children, when they are older, will never be able to forgive you.”In fact no child, unless he becomes enlightened, can forgive the parents. Impossible. And no parent, unless he becomes enlightened, can be satisfied with his children’s life when they become young.I have not come across any parent who is contented with his children, because he has sacrificed his own life for dreams – that the child will become a great leader of humanity, a hero in history…and the child has become just a hippie! Now how can the father forgive this boy? He sacrificed his life to make him a hero.I said, “This is nonsense. If you had some desire, some dream, you should have become a hero. Why postpone it for somebody else, who will have his own desires, his own dreams? You have given birth to him, but you cannot give birth to your dreams in him, your ideas in him. You have given him his body, but you cannot give him his soul.”That’s why no parent is ever satisfied – because he sacrificed so much and the result is nil. Neither he can forgive the children nor can he forgive himself. He will live in tremendous anguish.Just the other day I received a letter from a sannyasin. She wrote, “My father has started hating me since I became a sannyasin” – because he wanted her to become a Catholic nun. Now a Catholic nun and my sannyasin are poles apart. There is no meeting ground, the distance is infinite.Naturally he was asking, “Are you celibate?” She said, “My master teaches that celibacy is unnatural, it is sick.”“What discipline are you following? What prayer are you doing? What austerities are you going through?”She said, “You don’t know my master. Anybody who goes through austerities he calls a masochist, and says he needs psychiatric treatment – not the respect given to a saint, but the pity of all those who are living naturally.”Her father’s dying words to her were, “I used to love you before you were a sannyasin; after that I have simply hated you.”Now, the poor girl is worried: her father is dead and these were his last words to her. How can she do something so that his soul attains peace? – because he died in tremendous hatred, anger, disgust. Now this woman is asking me again the same wrong question.You are not responsible for his disgust, his hatred, his anger, his anxiety. He himself was responsible for it. Who was he to decide that you should be a Catholic nun and not my sannyasin!Children are born out of parents, but they are not things, they are living beings. They will find their own way, they will live their own life. They have to live their own life!If they somehow manage to live the ideals of the parents because they sacrificed, then certainly they are never going to forgive those parents and their dreams and ideals. And they are not going to forgive themselves either, because they were cowards. They could not rebel, they could not disobey. They could not follow their own natural course, their own potentiality.Now this woman sannyasin has done exactly what she wanted to do. She is not a possession of anybody. And if the father dies with anguish that is his own creation.And don’t be worried – he was a Catholic and he must have read, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be consoled.” Don’t be worried. God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost all will be consoling your father, because he has mourned enough.But you remember one thing: you will never be consoled by anybody. You will find everybody jealous of you, everybody against you, everybody hostile to you. Strange: Blessed are those who mourn and not blessed are those who rejoice. What kind of religions have we created?The man who is capable of rejoicing should be respected as a saint because he is creating the vibration of joy around him. He is creating the fragrance which is available to anybody who is ready to receive it.But religious, political, social, educational – all kinds of systems have been telling you to sacrifice your life for something that is higher than life.There is nothing higher than life.To live it is to be religious.To live it totally, to squeeze the whole juice of it, is what will make you the holy man.Be a zorba and the buddha will follow automatically.These people are saying, “Sacrifice zorba so that you can become the buddha.”I am telling you, “Live the zorba so completely that the buddha has to follow.”I have heard a beautiful story. In a restaurant in paradise Gautam Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu – they were all contemporaries – were just sitting and chitchatting. What else can you do in heaven? Everybody is wise; you cannot teach. You can only chitchat – small gossip, small talk. And as they were chitchatting, a beautiful naked woman, with a beautiful flask full of wine, came to their side and said, “This is the juice of life; would you like to have some?”Buddha immediately closed his eyes. First, a naked woman…. He has not allowed his disciples to see even a woman who is perfectly clothed – and in India a woman is perfectly clothed. You cannot imagine what figure is hidden behind the sari – impossible! In a way it is good, you can only see the face. Everything else may be ugly, but the sari is a great protection; the body may not be proportionate.A naked woman, so beautiful…with the exact proportions to be chosen the universal queen, a beauty queen. Naturally Buddha closed his eyes. He had to keep them closed tightly because they wanted to open.And then she was carrying the juice of life; and he was teaching his disciples to renounce life, and he has renounced life himself. A great stir in him – perhaps it is worth tasting? But to go against his own philosophy, and that too before Confucius and Lao Tzu. No, it was against his ego. He is the suprememost Buddha and he cannot fall just because of a naked woman with a flask containing the juice of life.Confucius was a very practical man. He looked at the woman from up to down, from down to up, and he said, “Perfect proportions.” He was a very practical man, perhaps the only practical master in the whole of history, very pragmatic.And he said, “Bring the flask. I cannot drink it completely because I don’t know what the taste of life is. I sacrificed my life for my disciples and for future generations, so I have never tasted it. I will just take a sip, just to experience what I have missed, whether I have missed anything or not.”He sipped from the flask and returned the flask. He said, “It is bitter.” It has to be bitter for a man who his whole life poured condemnation on life, poisoned millions of people, convinced them not to live. The bitterness is not in the juice, it is in the tongue of Confucius. His tongue has become bitter through all that condemnation, hatred….Lao Tzu was a totally different man. He stood up, touched the woman, went through her geography, said, “Really groovy! Now give me the flask” – and he drank the whole flask.And he said to Confucius, “To know the sweetness of the juice of life you have to clean your tongue.”To Buddha he said, “Now you can open your eyes. The woman is gone and the juice of life is also gone. I have drunk it completely.”Now this is the man I want to be.Whatever is available to you, live totally.You may not get a woman of such proportions as Lao Tzu got. It does not matter, just put the light off – and then drink as much as you can.But dying, you should be grateful to the life which gave you so many opportunities. And you can be grateful only if you have not missed anything; otherwise there will be repentance.I am against sacrifice.Sacrifice is a strategy to exploit people.I want you to live each moment not sacrificing anything, so when you die you can die with a song on your lips, with a great thankfulness in your eyes. This is the way a religious man should die. But to achieve such a beautiful death, first you have to live a beautiful life.And who are you to bother about the future? The people who will be coming in the future will take care of themselves. Why are you burdening yourself? The old generations burdened themselves for you – what have you gained out of it? Leave the future free. In fact, trying to sacrifice for the future is a way of dominating the future even when you are dead – because you sacrificed your life and you planned the future without ever knowing who the future people are going to be.They will not think the same way, that much is certain. They will not look at things in the same way, that is certain. You think you are creating a beautiful palace; they may think, “This is a prison.” Every generation has made prisons for the future generation.Please, be compassionate to the future:Leave it free.Let them do their thing, you do your thing.This is human. Sacrifice, the very idea of sacrifice, is inhuman.Osho,You said that your sannyasins are not jealous, but now I am experiencing just the opposite. It almost makes me laugh. And most of all I am jealous and possessive about you. What to do?There is nothing to be done. You can be jealous and possessive of me as much as you want…because I am not here!You can hug the empty chair, kiss the empty chair, do whatever you want. There is no need to be worried. I died thirty-three years ago, the day I became enlightened. Since then I am absent. How can you possess somebody who is absent? How can you be jealous of somebody who is not here?In fact your jealousy about me and your possessiveness about me will be helpful.Why are you jealous of me? – because you see something in me that is missing in you. And that is what I am doing every day, trying to wake you up to the fact that you are missing something. I was also missing it once, but now I don’t want you to miss it.It is perfectly good to be jealous of an enlightened man, because that means you have fallen in love with enlightenment.And be possessive, there is no problem. If you possess the whole sky – what is the problem? Just don’t possess small things. Possessing the whole sky, you will think you are possessing it – in fact the reality is just the opposite. The sky is possessing you from every side, and there is no way to escape from the sky’s possession.I possess you. And you cannot escape!Even if you go to Santa Fe, I am there.One of my sannyasins, Niranjana, was in Santa Fe. She had made a beautiful house. That was her whole life’s dream, to make a house according to her own ideas. She is rich enough, and just now her father has died so she has become even richer. She has inherited immense businesses, corporations…. She made a really beautiful house. But she was the only sannyasin there.A few camels have also reached – they are ex-sannyasins. Naturally, Niranjana was meeting with those people and they were meeting with her. Once you are a sannyasin, you can never be an ex-sannyasin. Only in language can you be. But she got fed up with those ex-sannyasins, dropped her beautiful house, and is living in New York now. And she has informed me, “You are more present in Santa Fe than in Rajneeshpuram, because all those camels who have left continuously talk about you.”Perhaps they talk against me; that does not matter. Whether you talk for me or against me, just keep talking about me – and you are in my possession!There is no place on this earth – or on any other planet – where you can escape from me. The day I disappeared I have become the whole sky.So baby, don’t be worried!Osho,Can you talk about money? What are all these feelings which are around money? What makes it so powerful that people sacrifice their lives for it?This is a very significant question.All the religions have been against wealth because wealth can give you all that can be purchased in life. And almost everything can be purchased except those spiritual values – love, compassion, enlightenment, freedom. But these few things are exceptions, and exceptions always prove the rule. Everything else you can purchase with money. Because all the religions have been against life, they were bound to be against money. That is a natural corollary. Life needs money because life needs comforts, life needs good food, life needs good clothes, good houses. Life needs beautiful literature, music, art, poetry. Life is vast!And a man who cannot understand classical music is poor. He is deaf. He may hear – his eyes, his ears, his nose, all his senses will be perfectly right medically – but metaphysically….Can you see the beauty of great literature, like The Book Of Mirdad? If you cannot see it, you are blind.I have come across people who have not even heard the name of The Book Of Mirdad. If I am to make a list of the great books, that will be the first. But to see the beauty of it you will need a tremendous discipline.To understand classical music is possible only if you learn – and it is a long learning. It is not like jazz music, for which no learning is needed. Even monkeys can understand jazz – in fact, only monkeys understand it. It is not music, just a few crackpots making all kinds of noises, and you think it is music.You will find better music in a waterfall, or when the wind blows through the pine trees, or simply when you walk in the forest in autumn on dry leaves, and sounds are created. But to understand that, you will need to be free from hunger, free from poverty, free from all kinds of prejudices.For example, Mohammedans have prohibited music; now they have deprived man of a tremendous experience.It happened in New Delhi…one of the most powerful Mohammedan emperors, Aurangzeb, was on the throne. And he was not only powerful, he was really terrible.Up to his time Mohammedan emperors were saying only that music was against Islam, but that was all; Delhi was full of musicians. But Aurangzeb was not a gentleman, he was really a Mohammedan. He declared that if any music was heard in Delhi, the musician would be immediately beheaded. And Delhi was the center, naturally, because it was the capital for thousands of years. So it was the place where all kinds of geniuses were living.When this declaration was made, all the musicians gathered together, and they said, “Something has to be done, this is too much! They used to say it is against Islam – that was okay. But this man is dangerous, he will start killing.” So as a protest, all the musicians – of which there were thousands – went to Aurangzeb’s palace.He came on the balcony and asked the people, “Who has died?” – because what they had done…they were carrying a corpse the way it is carried in India. There was no corpse inside, just pillows, but they had managed to make it look like a corpse. Aurangzeb asked, “Who has died?”And they answered, “Music. And you are the murderer of it.”Aurangzeb said, “Good that it has died. Now please be kind enough to me – dig as deep a grave as possible, so that it can never come out from the grave again.” Those thousands of musicians and their tears had no effect on Aurangzeb: he was doing something “sacred.”Music is denied by Mohammedans. Why? – because music was basically played in the East by beautiful women. In the East and in the West the meaning of the word prostitute differs. In the West the prostitute is selling her body. In the East, in the past, the prostitute was not selling her body; she was selling her genius, her dance, her music, her art.You will be surprised that every Indian king used to send his sons who were going to become his successors to live with great prostitutes for a few years, to learn etiquette, to learn gentleness, to learn music, to learn the delicacies of dance – because a king should be really rich about everything. He should understand beauty, he should understand logic, he should understand manners. That has been the old Indian tradition.Mohammedans disrupted it. Music was against their religion. Why? – because to learn music you had to enter a prostitute’s house. Mohammedans are very much against any rejoicing, and the house of the prostitute was full of laughter, songs, music, dance. They simply prohibited it: no Mohammedan can enter a place of music; to hear music is a sin.And the same has been done by different religions – for different reasons, but they have all been cutting man’s richness. And the most basic teaching is that you should renounce money.You can see the logic. If you don’t have money, you can’t have anything else. Rather than cutting branches, they were cutting the very roots. A man without money is hungry, is a beggar, has no clothes. You cannot expect him to understand Dostoevsky, Nijinsky, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, no; that is impossible.All the religions together have made man as poor as possible. They have condemned money so much, and praised poverty so much that as far as I am concerned, they are the greatest criminals the world has known.Look what Jesus says: A camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but a rich man cannot pass through the gates of heaven.Do you think this man is sane? He is ready to allow a camel to pass through the eye of a needle – which is absolutely impossible, but even that impossibility he accepts may be made possible. But a rich man entering into paradise? That is a far bigger impossibility; there is no way to make it possible.Wealth is condemned. Richness is condemned. Money is condemned. The world is left in two camps. Ninety-eight percent of the people live in poverty, but with a great consolation, that where rich people will not be able to enter, they will be received with angels playing on their harps, “Alleluia…Welcome!” And the two percent who are rich are living with tremendous guilt that they are rich.They cannot enjoy their richness because of the guilt. And they are deep down afraid: perhaps they may not be allowed to enter into paradise. So they are in a dilemma. Riches are creating guilt in them – they will not be consoled because they are not mourning: they will not be allowed in paradise because they are having so many things on the earth. They will be thrown into hell.Because of this situation, the rich man lives in a very fearful state. Even if he enjoys, or tries to enjoy things, his guilt poisons it. He may be making love to a beautiful woman, but it is only the body that is making love. He is thinking of paradise where camels are entering, and he is standing outside and there is no way to go in. Now can this man make love? He may be eating the best food possible, but he cannot enjoy it. He knows this life is short, and after that is just darkness and hellfire. He lives in a paranoia.The poor man is already living in hell, but he lives with a consolation. You will be surprised to know that in poor countries people are more contented than in rich countries.I have seen the poorest people in India with no dissatisfaction at all. And Americans are going around the world to find some spiritual guidance – naturally, because they don’t want to be defeated by camels; they want to enter into the gates of heaven. They want to find some way, some yoga, some exercises, as a compensation.This whole world has been turned against itself.Perhaps I am the first person who is respectful of money, of wealth, because it can make you multidimensionally rich.A poor man cannot understand Mozart. A hungry man cannot understand Michelangelo. A beggar will not even look at the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. And these people who are suffering from hunger don’t have enough energy to make them intelligent. Intelligence comes only when you have superfluous energy in you. They are exhausted just in earning bread and butter. They don’t have intelligence. They cannot understand The Brothers Karamazov, they can only listen to some stupid priest in a church.Neither the priest understands what he is talking about, nor the audience. Most of them are fast asleep, tired after six days of work. And the priest finds it more comfortable that everybody is asleep, so he need not prepare a new sermon. He can go on using the old sermon. Everybody is asleep, nobody will figure out that he is just cheating them.Wealth is as significant as beautiful music, as great literature, as masterpieces of art.There are people who have a born capacity to be a musician. Mozart started playing beautiful music at the age of eight. When he was eight, other great masters of music were not anywhere near him. Now, this man is born with that creativity.Vincent van Gogh was born of a poor father who worked in a coal mine. He never got educated, he never knew any art school, but he became one of the greatest painters of the world. But in his whole life he could not sell a single painting. Now each painting…There are only two hundred of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings available; he painted thousands but he gave them away just for a packet of cigarettes, or a meal, or a cup of tea. Now each of his paintings is worth a million dollars or more.What happened? Why couldn’t people understand his paintings? His paintings need tremendous intelligence to be understood.Just a few days ago I saw a picture of one of his paintings. For that painting he was laughed at by all painters, what to say about others? – because he had painted stars in a way nobody had seen stars: like nebulae, every star in movement, like a wheel turning continuously. Who had seen stars like that?Even other painters said, “You are going mad – these are not stars!” And moreover, the trees that he painted underneath the stars are going higher than the stars. Stars are left far behind, trees have reached far ahead. Now who has seen such trees? This is just madness!But a few days ago I saw a picture of this type. Physicists have now discovered that van Gogh is right: stars are not as they look, they are exactly the way van Gogh has painted them. Poor van Gogh! What eyes that man must have had, to see what physicists took one hundred years to find out, with all their big labs and big technology. And Vincent van Gogh, strangely enough, just with bare eyes figured out the exact shape of the stars. They are whirling, they are whirling dervishes; they are not static the way you see them.And when he was asked about his trees, that “Where have you found these trees which go above the stars?” he said, “These are the trees I have found, sitting by their side listening to their ambitions. I have heard the trees say to me that they are the ambitions of the earth to reach to the stars.”Perhaps a few more centuries may be needed for scientists to discover that certainly the trees are the ambitions of the earth. One thing is certain, that trees are moving against gravitation. The earth is allowing them to move against gravitation – supporting, helping them. Perhaps the earth wants some communication with the stars. The earth is alive, and life always wants to go higher and higher and higher. There is no limit to its aspirations.How are the poor people going to understand? They don’t have the intelligence.Just as there are born poets, born painters, I would like you to remember there are born wealth-creators. They have never been appreciated. Everybody is not a Henry Ford, and cannot be.Henry Ford was born poor, and became the richest man in the world. He must have had some talent, some genius for creating money, for creating wealth. And that is far more difficult than to create a painting, or music, or poetry. To create wealth is not an easy job. Henry Ford should be praised just as any master musician, novelist, poet. In fact, he should be praised more, because with his money all the poetry and all the music and all the sculptures of the world can be purchased.I respect money. Money is one of the greatest inventions of man. It is just a means. Only idiots have been condemning it; perhaps they were jealous that others have money and they don’t. Their jealousy became their condemnation.Money is nothing but a scientific way of exchanging things. Before there was money, people were in real difficulty. All over the world there was a barter system. You have a cow and you want to purchase a horse. Now it is going to be your whole lifelong task…. You have to find a man who wants to sell a horse and wants to purchase a cow. It is so difficult a job! You may find people who have horses but they are not interested in buying cows. You may find people who are interested in buying cows but they don’t have horses.That was the situation before money came into existence. Naturally, people were bound to be poor: they could not sell things, they could not buy things. It was such a difficult job. Money made it so simple. The man who wants to sell the cow need not search for the man who wants to sell his horse. He can simply sell the cow, take the money and find the man who wants to sell the horse, but is not interested in a cow.Money became the medium of exchange; the barter system disappeared from the world. Money did a great service to humanity. And because people became capable of purchasing, selling, naturally they became more and more rich.This has to be understood. The more money moves, the more money you have. For example, if I have one dollar with me…. It is just for example, I don’t have one; I don’t have even a cent with me. I don’t even have pockets! Sometimes I get worried that if I get a dollar, where am I going to keep it?For example, if I have a dollar and I go on keeping it to myself, then in this mandir there is only one dollar. But if I purchase something and the dollar moves to somebody else, I get the worth of the dollar – which I will enjoy. You cannot eat the dollar. How can you enjoy it just by keeping it? You can enjoy it only by spending it. I enjoy; the dollar reaches to somebody else, Now if he keeps it, then there are only two dollars – one I have enjoyed already, and one is with that miser who is keeping it.But if nobody is a clinger, and everybody is moving the dollar as fast as possible – if there are three thousand people, three thousand dollars have been used, enjoyed. That is one single round. Just give more rounds and there will be more dollars. Nothing is coming in; there is, in fact, only one dollar, but by movement it goes on multiplying itself.That’s why money is called currency. It should be a current. That’s my meaning. I don’t know about others’ meanings. One should not keep it. The moment you get it, spend it. Don’t waste time, because that much time you are preventing the dollar from growing, from becoming more and more.Money is a tremendous invention.It makes people richer, it makes people capable of having things that they don’t have. But all the religions have been against it. They don’t want humanity to be rich, and they don’t want humanity to be intelligent, because if people are intelligent, who is going to read the Bible?Just the other day, I received the information that one atheist group in America has published a Bible with pictures. That Bible will be condemned by all the Christians, by the government, because it is pornographic. It is more pornographic than anything else, because in the Bible there is so much pornography….Just by reading it you are not aware. Now, when I was talking to you about Sodom…in this new Bible they have made pictures of men making love to animals, women making love to animals. There is adultery, there is homosexuality, there is sodomy, there is rape. You name it and it is in the Bible!I have said that we should immediately order it. My people should start reading the real Bible! And order it immediately, because there is every possibility it will be prohibited. Never in the world has any book been so pornographic as this Bible.And they are not doing anything which is not in the Bible – they are just making pictures of it. You can understand pictures better. Just reading the word rape is nothing, but when you see a series of rapes pictured, then you become suddenly aware – this is a holy Bible.Religions never wanted man to be intelligent, never wanted man to be rich, never wanted man to rejoice, because people who are in suffering, poor, unintelligent – they are the clients of churches, synagogues, temples, mosques.I have never gone to any religious place. Why should I go? If the religious place wants to have some taste of religion it should come to me. I am not going to Mecca, Mecca has to come to me! Otherwise I don’t care. I am not going to Jerusalem, I am not mad – just a little bit crazy, but not mad. And when we can create a place of joy and laughter and love here, what is there in Israel? We have created the new Israel.Drop all ideas that have been imposed upon you about money.Be respectful to it.Create wealth, because only after creating wealth do many other dimensions open for you.For the poor man all doors are closed.I want my sannyasins to be as rich as possible, as comfortable as possible. This is the first commune in the whole history of man where every house is centrally air-conditioned. Never before has any commune happened with air-conditioning.This is the only commune where, while I am talking to you, you can laugh, you can enjoy, you can dance, you can do anything – because your laughter connects you to me more than your sitting there sad, with a long face.You cannot laugh in a church the way you are doing here. Just looking at Jesus Christ hanging on the cross all laughter will die.In fact, for the first time we are giving religion its true color, its music, its dance, its love, its laughter.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Please explain what you mean by freedom. When I talk about freedom, I mean freedom from something or freedom to do something; it implies more freedom of choice. But my impression is that choiceless awareness precedes the freedom you talk about. What kind of freedom does not involve choice? Can it be defined, or is it one of those qualities like love which must be experienced to be understood?The freedom from something is not true freedom.The freedom to do anything you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about.My vision of freedom is to be yourself.It is not a question of getting freedom from something. That freedom will not be freedom, because it is still given to you; there is a cause to it. The thing that you were feeling dependent on is still there in your freedom. You are obliged to it. Without it you would not have been free.The freedom to do anything you want is not freedom either, because wanting, desiring to do something, arises out of the mind – and mind is your bondage.The true freedom certainly comes after choiceless awareness, but after choiceless awareness the freedom is neither dependent on things nor dependent on doing something. The freedom that follows choiceless awareness is the freedom just to be yourself. And you are yourself already, you are born with it; hence it is not dependent on anything else. Nobody can give it to you and nobody can take it from you. A sword can cut your head but it cannot cut your freedom, your being.It is another way of saying that you are centered, rooted in your natural, existential self. It has nothing to do with outside.Freedom from things is dependent on the outside. Freedom to do something is also dependent on the outside. Freedom to be ultimately pure has not to be dependent on anything outside you.You are born as freedom.It is just that you have been conditioned to forget it.Layers upon layers of conditionings have made you a puppet. The strings are in somebody else’s hands.If you are a Christian, you are a puppet. Your strings are in the hand of a God which does not exist, so just to give you the sense that God exists there are prophets, messiahs, representing God. They represent nobody. They are just egoistic people – and even ego wants to reduce you to a puppet.They tell you what to do, they give you the Ten Commandments. They give you your personality – that you are a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. They give you your so-called knowledge. And naturally, under the great burden which they start giving you from the very beginning of your childhood, the Himalayan load you are carrying – underneath it, hidden, repressed, is your natural self.If you can get rid of all conditionings, if you can think that you are neither a communist nor a fascist, that you are neither a Christian nor a Mohammedan…. You were not born a Christian or Mohammedan; you were born just pure, innocent consciousness.To be again in that purity, in that innocence, in that consciousness, is what I mean be freedom.Freedom is the ultimate experience of life.There is nothing higher than that.And out of freedom many flowers blossom in you.Love is the flowering of your freedom.Compassion, another flowering of your freedom.All that is valuable in life flowers in the innocent, natural state of your being.So don’t connect freedom with independence. Independence is naturally from something, from somebody. Don’t connect freedom with doing things that you want to do, because that is your mind, not you. Wanting to do something, desiring to do something, you are in the bondage of your wanting and your desiring.But the freedom I have been talking about you simply are – in utter silence, serenity, beauty, bliss.Osho,What is the goal of life and how can it be achieved?The camels are very difficult people! Whatever you do to them, somehow or other they will express their camelhood.My whole life I have been telling you there is no goal!Life is its own goal.There is nothing outside life that you have to achieve.All achievement is the projection of the ego.The very idea of achievement is ambition.What you achieve does not matter – money, power, knowledge; these are not in any way going to give you life. In fact, in achieving power, in achieving money, in achieving prestige, in achieving any other ambition, you are losing your life, you are sacrificing your life.You are involved in stupid things, and by the side life goes on slipping out of your hands. You will realize it only at the time of death, with a shock: “I have been trying to achieve the goal of life and I forgot life itself.”The goal is always in the future, and life is always here. The goal is always far away, and life is in this very moment.Trying to achieve it, you will miss it. You don’t need to try to achieve life: you are alive.Only dead people can have goals.Living people live.If you want goals to achieve, the grave is the right place for you. Just lie down in the grave. Of course a very big grave will have to be made for you – you are a camel still. Rest in death.I have heard: a husband – naturally, a henpecked husband, because I don’t know another kind…. Everybody understands it: you want to be a husband, soon you will be a henpecked husband – that is a natural growth.This henpecked husband died. The wife ordered a beautiful marble grave for him, and ordered that his name should be written in golden letters with the words: “Rest in peace.” But when the will of the husband was opened…he had given all his money, land, house – everything – to charitable institutions. Nothing for the wife! That was his revenge – because a husband can take revenge only when he is dead. His whole life the woman had tortured him; now was his time!Listening to the will, she rushed to the craftsman who was making the marble grave, and she said to him, “You have to add a few words more.”He said, “But this is enough!”She said, “No. It was enough before I came to know his will. Now write: Rest in Peace – till I come!”You have a little time to rest in the grave! There you can imagine all kinds of goals because you will not be losing anything; you are already dead. But while living be a little more kind to yourself. While living, live. And live intensely and totally!In India, I used to go to Ahmedabad, where I had the greatest number of sannyasins. In Ahmedabad I used to like only one place, and that was the place where Jayantibhai, who used to be my driver, would speed beyond the limit permitted. And I would say, “Why do you do it? I like this place!”He would say, “That’s why I speed here: I don’t want you to remember Ahmedabad because of this thing!”And what was the thing? There was a board on the bridge saying: “Livva little hot – Sippa Gold Spot!” And certainly I have forgotten everything about Ahmedabad, but this “Livva little hot…” I cannot forget. This is the very essence of my religion: Livva little hot!Forget about Gold Spot! There is no gold anywhere.Existence is not moving to some target.And it is good that it is not moving toward some goal, because if the goal is there, sooner or later it will be achieved. Then what? Existence is more intelligent than camels think. It has no goal, so it goes on and on – an unending, infinite process.So drop the idea of goal from your mind completely, it is very destructive. It is the cancer of your soul. Live the moment that is available to you. And you never get two moments together, remember. Existence wants you to be so intelligent and sharp and quick that it gives you only one moment at a time. Just a little thought, a little goal, a little desire – and it is gone, you have missed it.To live in the moment needs a thoughtless awareness, because even a small thought is bigger than the smallest atom of time – the moment. Hence my insistence on meditation. It is nothing but a method to drop thoughts and to be available to the present moment.Live it as deeply as possible. The next moment will be born out of this moment. If you have lived this moment totally, intensely, your next moment is going to be still more golden. And that’s how life goes on growing – otherwise people only grow old.If you have a goal you will grow old.If you don’t have a goal you will grow up.And these are two different processes.Growing old you reach to death; that is the goal.Growing up you transcend death, because a man who has been alert, aware, in each moment, he will be capable of being aware even while he is leaving the body. He has lived life, he is not going to miss death either; he will live death too. And death for the man of awareness is the ultimate peak of life. It is not the end but the very climax.To the goal-oriented man life comes to an end in death – naturally, because now he cannot have any goal. A goal needs the future. The future is finished, death has come, and he has wasted his whole life for some goal. But the tomorrow never comes. And naturally he is shocked that he has wasted his whole life, and this is the goal he has achieved: dying.The shock of death makes him even more unconscious than he has ever been. Almost everybody before death goes into a coma, becomes unconscious. He has missed life; he cannot experience the climax of life – which is death.Only a man of awareness realizes a tremendous phenomenon: death comes to him as the ultimate orgasm.In his awareness he passes death without dying.He becomes aware of eternity.Now he knows he has always been here, and he will always be here.He is part of an eternal existence.But the goal-oriented people are the most idiotic ones.Osho,It is stated that man becomes unconscious at the time of death. Why is this so? Is it due to the terror of death or the process of death?Neither terror of death nor the process of death make man unconscious. He has been learning unconsciousness his whole life. Death simply gives him the final certificate: “Your learning of unconsciousness is completed; you are falling into a coma.”But this is not so for the man of awareness.His learning is totally different.He is learning the discipline of being conscious.He will also die – but only superficially. Deep inside him the light of life will be still burning. He will leave the body, but the flame of life will go on moving into different forms till he comes to experience total enlightenment. Then this death is the last: he will not be born again. Now he is given the opportunity to become one with the whole…the dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean. He is not losing himself, he is gaining the whole ocean; he is becoming oceanic.Man has to pass through many deaths because of his unconsciousness. And if your awareness is also just wishy-washy it is not going to help.Life is a school to learn the eternal truth of existence. But that is possible only if you are conscious. You are not even conscious when you appear to be conscious. Walking in the street, talking to people, shopping in the Mall, going to the disco, it looks as if you are conscious; it is not so.Just watch yourself. Watch; are you aware while you are walking, or is walking just a mechanical process, just like a robot? And you will be surprised to know the difference. Just try to walk a few steps consciously and you will see the difference – and the beauty and the joy and the relaxation of walking consciously. Your whole body is in tune with existence.Consciousness bridges you with existence.Unconsciousness closes you into yourself.In unconsciousness you don’t have any connection with existence.In consciousness you are related to the whole – from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest star millions of light-years away.A conscious man is just like you, but inside there is light; and inside you there is darkness.You go on doing things but without knowing who you are…shopping for everything except yourself! While you are talking, be alert and you will be surprised, just by your unconscious talking, how many troubles you have created, how many quarrels, fights you have created – just by talking. Just think: if you were not talking and you were just a silent man, ninety-nine percent of your troubles would be dropped. They come out of your talking!You say something, and your wife is bound to misunderstand it. And there is no way to explain to her because whatever you explain, she has her own way of interpreting it. Slowly, slowly husbands and wives stop talking because they both have understood that this leads to quarreling, and finally to crying and weeping and throwing things.What a strange world! – a conversation leading to throwing things and screaming and tears and pillow fights. But the reason is not talking, the reason is talking unconsciously. And the same is true about all your activities. They bring more and more misery to you, more and more suffering to you, but you go on doing the same things again and again. An unconscious man is bound to fall in the same pit again and again.A conscious man also commits mistakes, but one mistake one time. A conscious man learns even from mistakes. He has learned something of tremendous value – that this is a mistake, and now it is not going to be repeated again. Slowly, slowly all mistakes are dropped; his life becomes a silent, joyous dance.It is not the terror of death. You don’t know death, how can you have a terror of death? It is not the process of death, because people have died fully aware….The day Gautam Buddha died, in the morning he gathered his people, the way you are here; perhaps it was just the same kind of morning. Buddha every day talked to his disciples, but that was a special day because he said, “Today I am going to die. I have been hearing the steps of death for a few days; now they have reached very close and it is only a question of a few hours. So if you have any question to ask, ask, because I am not going to come again – this is my last death. The wheel of life and death is going to stop for me.“So don’t feel embarrassed even if your question is stupid; otherwise later on you will always feel sad that Buddha was available, a man of total awareness, and still you could not gather courage to ask the question.”It is not that there were not questions in peoples’ minds – they are always there. Just as leaves grow on trees, questions grow in the mind. But at the moment when the master is going to die, nobody was going to harass him. For forty-two years he has been answering their questions, and if in forty-two years your questions are not solved, what is the point of torturing the old man who is going to die? Nobody asked.His closest companion and caretaker, Ananda, said, “Bante” – bante is Pali for Bhagwan – “we don’t have any questions. You have answered all our questions thousands of times, and we go on asking the same questions, phrasing them differently…. At this moment we would like to just sit silently with you.”Buddha said, “That’s good, because death has reached very close. So you allow me to die.”There were tears, people were sobbing…. They have loved this man their whole life, and it is very rare – once in thousands of years such a man comes into the world and rises to such heights of consciousness, love, blissfulness. And they were also crying and weeping that tomorrow morning all that they had – a master – would not be there. And they have been stupid, they have not learned anything.Buddha said, “I will be dying in four stages. First I will close my eyes and remove myself from the body. In the second step I will remove myself from the mechanism of the mind. In the third step I will remove myself from the world of feelings, the heart. And in the fourth step, the dewdrop will fall into the ocean.”A man of awareness does not die in a coma. He can even give you a description of how the death is going to happen.Buddha closed his eyes. At that very moment a man came running from the town nearby, and he said, “I have just heard that Buddha is dying – and I have a question. I know I am an idiot. For forty-two years he has been passing through my village, but there was always something holding me back. A customer would come to the shop and I would say, ‘Buddha is always available – tomorrow I can go to see him. But this customer may not come tomorrow. He needs things now. He will go to another shop – and nobody wants to lose customers.’“Sometimes there were friends and we had met after years, and I would say, ‘I can go to Buddha anytime, but these friends have come to see me after many years; it does not look right to leave them and go to Buddha.’ And so on and so forth. Sometimes it was a marriage, sometimes it was a party…. But this morning I heard that Buddha is going to die – I had to close the shop.“My wife was shouting, my children were asking, ‘What is the point? – you had just opened, and you are closing!’ I did not hear anybody, there was no time left, there was no time to answer all their questions. I said, ‘When I come back I will explain. Just right now get out of the way and let me go!’ So I have come with the question.”Ananda said, “But you are a little late. We have given our permission that the master can disappear into the whole, and he has already entered the first stage. So please forgive us, it is not our fault. Forty-two years you have postponed; now wait a few thousand years more. When another buddha appears, another enlightened man, then don’t be so foolish.”But Buddha opened his eyes. He said, “Ananda, this will be a condemnation for me – that a man had come thirsty, and I was still alive and I could not quench his thirst. I can delay death a little bit, but his question has to be answered; otherwise the poor fellow will feel guilty his whole life.”A conscious man dies in a totally conscious way, step by step. And if he wants to return before he has taken the fourth step, he can come back. His death is simply dropping the body, the mind, the heart, and finally, the individual center, into the universal whole. Each thing is perfectly done in alertness.So it is not the process of death that makes one unconscious. And it is not the terror – because you have never seen death, so how can you be afraid of it? You don’t know what death is. You don’t know even what life is. You are alive, and unaware of life. You are unconscious in life; that’s why at the ultimate peak of life you become totally unconscious.A man of awareness is conscious in his life; that’s why at the moment of death he becomes fully conscious.Your death says everything about your life.Your death is the ultimate declaration of your existence, how you have lived. If you fall in a coma, that means you lived in unconsciousness, you have not lived at all. You have been postponing: tomorrow, always tomorrow….It depends on you, not on the process of death. It depends on you to prepare. Death is a great celebration if you prepare. But unprepared, you have to become unconscious. And it is good of existence that it makes you unconscious, completely unconscious before death, because death is a great surgery. Your being is taken away from the body, from the mind, from the heart, and finally from that individual self. This is the greatest surgery. Anesthesia is needed; existence provides it.It happened in 1915, the king of Varanasi had to be operated on to remove his appendix, but the king refused to take any anesthesia, local or otherwise. And he was a man of tremendous power, not only the king. The best doctors of the world were attending him, but he said, “You have to do the surgery without anesthesia. Don’t be worried – you need not put me in unconsciousness just for a small removal. I can die consciously, which is the ultimate in surgery; your surgery is just a small game.” There was trouble. Doctors could not do the operation, it was against their training. But they knew the man; he will not change his mind, he has never done that in his whole life. And the appendix is such a thing…it was in its last stage, it could explode any moment; and then there would be no possibility of saving the king – and the man was worth saving.There was not time enough for doctors to decide what to do. There was no question either, because that man is not going to take anything that makes him unconscious. So finally, reluctantly, unwillingly, they operated on the man. Great surgeons were there; their hands were shaking for the first time. They had done much surgery but they had never done surgery on a man who was lying there fully conscious, with open eyes, looking at the doctors and once in a while looking at his stomach, which was being cut. This was a strange experience!The surgery was done, the appendix was removed, and there was no trouble from the king’s side. Not even a sign of pain showed on his face or in his eyes. This is the only surgery in the whole of history which has been done without any unconsciousness. The doctors were certainly amazed. After the surgery was over they asked the king, “What is the secret? – because this has never happened before and we don’t think it is going to happen again.”He said, “There is no secret. I have lived my life consciously – so consciously that there is no problem. I can die, too, consciously. And this was a small thing, trivial.”So remember, it is not the terror of death, it is not the process of death. Don’t dump your responsibility on death! Accept the phenomenon that one becomes unconscious because one has lived unconsciously, and that is the ultimate outcome of one’s whole life.If you want a conscious death, then start from this moment being conscious, because – who knows? – the moment may be death. And a man of consciousness starts almost six months before death comes – he starts feeling the steps, hearing the sound of the steps of death coming closer.There is a very simple method – even camels can do it. Before a person dies, six months ahead, nature gives indications, but you are unconscious so you don’t understand those indications. But a very simple indication I give to you, which I don’t think you can misunderstand. Before death comes, six months before, you stop seeing the tip of your nose. Your eyes start turning upward; it takes six months for them to turn completely upward.That’s why whenever a man dies people immediately close his eyes. For what reason, all around the world, do his eyelids have to be closed? Just so that nobody becomes aware that his eyes have moved upward and there is only white left to be seen. That may make many freak out, that may give them nightmares. It is to be hidden from them.But it takes six months for eyes slowly, slowly to turn upward; and when eyes start turning upward you cannot see the tip of your nose. This can be done by any camel.But this will not help. You may become more frantic; the camel may go crazy, running here and there because now there is no time – how is his goal to be fulfilled?And there are other indications which are more subtle, which can be understood only if you live meditatively, consciously, with awareness….Osho,Why is man afraid to leave his body and his possessions?Because you don’t have anything else – just your body, your possessions. And what are your possessions? Extensions of your body.For example, no animal has created weapons, for the simple reason that animals are capable, strong; their teeth, their nails, are enough to destroy a man. Man is the most helpless, the weakest animal on the earth. Even if an Alsatian dog follows you, you have to start running, shouting for the police! You cannot fight even with a dog. What to say of a dog, even a cat is enough!That’s the reason man invented weapons – extensions of the body which are not given to him naturally. He developed bows and arrows because he is afraid even with weapons to come close to a lion. In fact you may have a gun, but if you suddenly come across a beautiful, strong lion, you will be frozen; your fingers will not function to trigger your gun. Most probably your gun will slip from your hand when you see the lion standing in front of you!Man is so weak – but his weakness has proved a blessing in disguise. He had to invent bows and arrows so he could kill from a distance. He had to invent guns, machine guns, and even then….I know many famous hunters in India. The king of Bhavanagar in his palace has hundreds of lions’ heads hanging all around the walls. I have been with him when he went hunting. He said, “But why are you interested? You are not for violence, you are against hunting.”I said, “I simply want to see how, with your powerful automatic rifle, you face a lion who has no weapons.” And it was significant that I went because there I saw that even with guns man is so powerless.First a stage was made up high in the trees – and you have the gun! A stage is made for the king and for the friends who had come with him, far away. The lion cannot climb up the tree that far. Then all the branches of the tree below the platform were cut, so even if some crazy lion tries, he has no support anywhere. Then a cow was tied underneath the tree.I was seeing the whole scene; silently I watched the whole scene. Of course when the lion smells that a cow is nearby, he comes; that cow is an invitation card. And the poor lion cannot see that far above in the darkness there is platform, and his death.But they don’t shoot the lion before he jumps on the cow and starts eating her. They wait, because when a lion is eating he does not want to be disturbed by anything, he is total in his act. The cow could have been saved. I said to the king, “The cow could have been saved. When the lion was coming closer, you could have used your rifle.”He said, “You don’t know hunting. Even sitting on this platform I am shivering with fear, although I have killed hundreds of lions. Just to see the lion is enough to freeze you!”And lions are very agile people. If you hit the lion – and you can miss, then you lose the game – the lion will jump into a bush, into a trench. He has to start eating the cow, because that is the habit of lions: while they are eating they don’t want to be disturbed. And they become so absorbed in eating that it is easier for you to kill them.I asked the king on the way, “If this is how you have collected those hundreds of heads of lions, please remove them – they are all proofs of your cowardliness. Have you ever thought,” I asked him, “that you call hunting a game, when the other party has no weapons and is not even aware of you, that you are hiding above in the trees? You call it a game? Is it fair?“You should be on the ground; you should be without a gun, because the lions cannot use guns. Then even a single head would have been enough to prove that you are a brave man. These hundreds of heads, they don’t prove anything except cowardice. If this is the way you have collected them – that’s why I wanted to come with you to see….”And if man kills in such situations, where he has the upper hand – no fear, no danger – it is a game; and if a lion kills a man, that’s a tragedy. Strange! The lion was also playing a game, and he was playing fairly without any weapons, naked, open.Man is afraid of losing his body and his possessions. Possessions are extensions of your body. Your house, your bank balance, your furniture, your paintings – everything that you have collected is somehow connected with your body. And you know only that you are a body, so when death faces you, you are afraid of losing your body and your possessions – naturally, because you don’t know anything which is beyond death.If you had known something of your consciousness, something of your being, you would not be afraid of losing your possessions, you would not be afraid of losing your body – because that too is a possession, given by nature. You would not be afraid to lose your mind or your heart. You would not be afraid at all, for the simple reason that death cannot reach to your real being; it is beyond death.Your individual self is killed only through enlightenment. That’s why I call enlightenment the great death. All other deaths only take your possessions; you go on living in different houses, in different bodies, with different possessions – but you continue.Enlightenment is the great death, because after that you will not have the body, you will not have the mind, you will not have the heart, you will not have all your possessions.You don’t need them – because the whole universe is you.Osho,Your enlightenment was hard effort, but when you express your experience, it feels so easy – just here, on the tip of the nose. But when I look at myself it feels easy and near impossible, simultaneously. Please comment.Enlightenment is both – the easiest thing in the world, and the most impossible thing.Before enlightenment it looks like the most impossible thing, obviously, because you don’t have any idea, and you cannot have any idea; you can have only the experience. You are afraid too, because everybody is afraid of the unknown, the strange – and there is not a more strange phenomenon than enlightenment. And effort to become conscious is needed; great effort is needed.You are so fast asleep and snoring that there is every possibility – many camels dream in their sleep that they have become enlightened! That is the greatest trick your unconscious can play on you.I know a German sannyasin who used to become enlightened once in a while. Whenever he was in Germany he would become enlightened, and he would start writing letters to me, “I have become enlightened, and I am grateful to you.” He wanted me to confirm it; all those letters were just ways…. I never answered him, because any answer would be dangerous. I simply informed him, “If you have become enlightened, come here.” And the moment he would come to see me and sit before me, I would say, “Gunakar, don’t be stupid!”And he would say, “Osho, what to do? Whenever I go back to Germany, it starts feeling that I have become enlightened. The moment I start coming to India that enlightenment disappears! Before you I know perfectly well I am not enlightened.”This happened at least four, five times. It has stopped happening because he has stopped coming. Now he is enlightened. He understood that coming to this man is costly: you lose your enlightenment! It is better – he has a beautiful castle, he is rich enough – it is good to be in Germany and remain enlightened. Why go, waste money, and become unenlightened?And of course among Germans, anybody can be enlightened. If Adolf Hitler can be accepted as the reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet, Elijah, then in Germany, anything can be accepted!I received a letter – I had never imagined that in America also there is a Nazi party. And the president of the Nazi party wrote the letter to me saying, “You again and again speak against Adolf Hitler. This hurts our religious feelings.”Great! Underline the religious feelings – about Adolf Hitler! If Adolf Hitler is a religious prophet then Gunakar is far better: he can remain enlightened there. He has not turned up here, but sooner or later he will have to come. He is taking his time so he becomes consolidated in his enlightenment, so when he comes here he does not fall apart. But he will come because he wants me to confirm that he is enlightened, and he knows that without my confirmation – he is my sannyasin – even if the whole of Germany accepts him as enlightened, he will not be satisfied.So one day he will come. But whatsoever he does, the moment he comes in front of me he will be unenlightened immediately, because his enlightenment is only a dream. He has not made any effort to be conscious. Five times becoming enlightened has never happened in the whole of history, and is not going to happen again. Except perhaps in Germany it may happen!Once is more than enough. And you cannot become unenlightened once you are enlightened. Even if you try hard, there is no way to go back.Your question is significant. When you listen to me, you forget yourself. When you listen to me you start feeling, “My God! It is so easy.” I also know it is easy – but only after enlightenment is it easy! Before enlightenment it is an impossible task.You can ask me then why I go on insisting that it is easy. Just so that you go on hanging around! If I say it is impossible then you will think, “What the hell am I doing here?” But when I say it is easy, I am not saying anything wrong. It is easy…but only after enlightenment!So I will go on saying to you it is easy, just…(he snaps his fingers)…and it is there!If you can manage to hang around this buddhafield, perhaps one day you will also say it is easy. But before that you have to make every effort to be conscious. And this is the most difficult thing in life – to be conscious about all that you do, all that you think, all that you feel. These are the three layers: doing is concerned with the body; thinking, with the mind; feeling, with the heart. If you become aware of all these three layers, then suddenly you are there, at your very being.That is enlightenment – to know oneself.Osho,Are you from outer space?Of course!Osho,Today you said that the new man is here – but in disguise. What did you mean by that?My God! I am here – and without any disguise! Okay?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Can you say something about doubt and negativity? What is the difference?The difference between doubt and negativity is great.They look alike; on the surface they have the same color, but deep down the difference is unbridgeable.First, doubt is not negativity; neither is it positivity.Doubt is an open mind, without any prejudice.It is an inquiring approach.Doubt is not saying anything, it is simply raising a question. That question is to know, to find what the truth is.Doubt is a pilgrimage.It is one of the most sacred values of human beings.Doubt does not mean no. It simply says, “I do not know, and I am prepared to know. I am ready to go as far as possible, but unless I myself come to know, how can I say yes?”Negativity has already said no. It is not inquiry. It has come to a conclusion, the same way somebody has come to the conclusion to say yes. One man says God is; his statement is positive. The other says there is no God; his statement is negative. But both are sailing in the same boat, they are not different people. They have not inquired. Neither the theist has doubted nor the atheist has doubted; both have accepted borrowed knowledge.Doubt says that, “I myself would like to know, and unless I know for myself, it is not knowledge. Only my experience is going to be decisive.” He is not arrogant, he is not denying anything. He is just open for inquiry.Doubt is not disbelief – that’s how religions have been confusing people. They confuse doubt with disbelief. In fact disbelief and belief are exactly the same. Both accept knowledge from others, from books, from masters. And remember, anything that you do not know, yet you have started believing or disbelieving in it…you have missed a great opportunity for inquiry. You have closed the doors already, by yes or by no. You have not traveled.It is easier to say yes, it is easier to say no, because there is nothing you have to do.But to doubt needs guts.To doubt needs courage to remain in the state of not-knowing, and go on questioning everything till the moment you yourself arrive at the reality. When you come to the reality there is no negativity, no positivity. You simply know – it is your experience. I will not say it is positivity because positivity always has the other pole of negativity. An experience goes beyond both; the whole world of polarities is transcended. That is true wisdom.Doubt is the way to truth.No or yes are not ways, they prevent you.It will look very strange, that yes does the same thing as no. In dictionaries they are opposites, but in reality they are not. They look opposite only, but both have not asked the question. Both have not tried to find out what the case is.The communist believes, exactly as the catholic believes. The communist believes that there is no God. You can call it disbelief, but it is his belief. He has not inquired, he has not meditated; he has done nothing to find out that there is no God. The theist says there is God. He has also done nothing. Both have chosen without moving an inch toward truth. That’s why a very strange thing happens: the person who is a theist, a believer, can become a disbeliever, an atheist, in a single moment; and vice versa.Before the revolution in Russia, Russia was one of the most theistic, religious countries of the world. Millions of people in Russia could have sacrificed their life for God. After the revolution, when the authority changed, when the priest changed, when The Holy Bible was replaced by the holy Das Kapital, within ten years the whole country became atheist.It was amazing! People who had believed their whole life that there is God started disbelieving. Even communists could not understand that these people are the same people who could have died for God – and now they are ready to die for no-God.Nobody has analyzed the situation up to now, what happened there. This is the analysis of the fact: negativity and positivity are both belief systems.Doubt is against both. Doubt is the insistence of the individual that he wants to taste, to experience the truth. He is not ready to accept it from anybody else, this way or that.They are very, very rare people who doubt.But let me say to you: Blessed are those who doubt, because they shall inherit the kingdom of truth.It is arduous to doubt, it is risky, it is dangerous.One is going into the unknown, with no preparation, with no prejudice. He is entering into the dark hole, not even believing that there will be the other end of the tunnel, and he will again come out of darkness.There is no belief; he simply takes the challenge.There is only a quest, a question.He himself becomes a question.It is very consoling to have the answer, and if it is freely available, as it is…. Jesus says, “Just believe in me and you need not bother: I will take care. I will choose you at the day of judgment. I will recommend you to God: ‘These are my people – they should be allowed in paradise.’ All that you have to do is believe.”A real shortcut – simple belief. That’s why thousands of people around the world have believed, and thousands of others have disbelieved. Their sources are different but the basic approach is the same.In India there has been a very ancient philosophy, charvaka. That philosophy says there is no God, no heaven, no hell, no punishment for your bad actions and no reward for your good actions. And thousands have believed in it. It is negative, absolutely negative, but very comfortable. You can steal, you can murder, you can do anything you like; after death nothing survives.In many ways the West has lagged behind the East, particularly as far as religion, philosophy, culture, are concerned. Charvaka is a five-thousand-year-old ideology; Karl Marx just in the last stage of the previous century said there is no God. He was not aware of charvaka, he thought he had come to a great discovery. For five thousand years charvakas have already been saying that; but they had not inquired.The man who created the philosophy was Brihaspati – must have been a man of charismatic personality. He convinced people that you can do anything you want to because the thief, the murderer, the saint, all fall: dust unto dust. And after death nothing is left; the saint disappears, the sinner disappears. So don’t bother at all about afterlife, there is none.This is not inquiry, because charvakas and their master Brihaspati have never gone beyond death. According to their philosophy, if they had gone they would have not come back – so on what grounds do they say that there is nothing left? Nobody has visited the land. But it is very easy to believe. His famous statement is worth quoting.Brihaspati says, Rinam kritva ghritam pivet: “Even if you have to borrow money, borrow it, but drink ghee as much as you can” – because after death you are not going to be questioned, punished. The person who had given you money cannot drag you into the court of God; there are no such things. His whole philosophy is simply, “Eat, drink and be merry.” You can believe in it – the theists will call it disbelief.And that’s what Karl Marx did for the communists, he said that there is no soul, no consciousness. It is a by-product of matter, so when the body falls apart, nothing is left. This became a very dangerous attitude, because communists could kill people without thinking twice.Their belief is that by killing you are not committing any sin. There is nobody inside a person; there is no inside. A man is chemistry, biology, physiology – but there is no soul. Joseph Stalin could kill almost one million people after the revolution without feeling even a slight doubt about what he was doing.In Soviet Russia man has been reduced to a mechanism. You can kill – nothing is killed, because there was nobody in the first place. It is just like a clock functioning. It moves, it shows you the time; that does not mean that there is somebody inside. You can take the clock apart and you will not find anything.I have heard…. Once Mulla Nasruddin’s clock stopped. It was an old clock, and some day everything has to stop. He opened the clock and found there a fly, dead. He said, “Now I know the clock is dead – this is the clock’s soul!” He was just going to bury the clock in the garden when his wife caught hold of him.She said, “What are you doing? Have you gone mad? Clocks are not buried, graves are not made for them!”Nasruddin said, “Those people have never known what I have come to know. The clock stopped; certainly I thought it was dead. I looked at it, opened it, and found its soul dead. This is the soul” – he was holding the fly in his hand; he said, “This is the soul.”The wife said, “You are simply an idiot, and you will always remain an idiot! Bring that clock out. Perhaps it needs oiling, some repair work – it is an old clock. And clocks don’t die, because to die first one has to live: clocks don’t live!”But that’s what Karl Marx has preached to the communists, that man is also just like a clock. And now almost half the world believes in Karl Marx. Strange – these same people had believed in God. Russians, Chinese, Indians, Mohammedans – all kinds of people change their yes to no. To change yes into no is so easy because they are not different. Basically they give you a consolation without the arduous journey to truth.I have asked many communists, very old communists…. In India, S.A.Dange was a member of the international communist party along with Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. He was an eyewitness of the Russian revolution. I asked him, “Have you ever meditated?”He said, “Meditated – for what? Why should I meditate?”I said, “If you have never meditated, then you don’t have the authority to say that there is no soul, no God, no consciousness. Without going inside yourself, how can you say that there is nobody? And see the absurdity of it: who is saying that there is nobody? Even to deny you will have to accept that there is somebody. Even to say that there is nobody, somebody has to be assumed.”The same is the situation of religions.Nobody has encountered God – no Christian, no Hindu, no Mohammedan – but they have all said yes because the crowd in which they were born was the crowd of theists. To say no among that crowd would have created difficulties for them. Yes was simply the accepted rule of the game. They have worshipped, they have prayed, not knowing why they were doing it. But everybody else is doing it so it must be right.When the crowd changed – for example in Russia, the same people who were so certain of God became uncertain. It took ten years to change from one certainty to another certainty…an interval of uncertainty, but uncertainty is not doubt.Doubt is simply a question, and doubt says, “I want to know.”It has no ideology.Doubt is absolutely pure quest.You have asked, “What is the difference between doubt and negativity?”Negativity and positivity are both the same.Doubt is different from both.It does not make you a theist, it does not make you an atheist.Positivity makes you a religious believer, a theist; negativity makes you an unbeliever, irreligious, an atheist.Doubt does not make you anything.It simply makes you an inquirer.And that is the dignity of man.I teach you doubt because I know if you can doubt to the very end you will realize the truth of your own being, and simultaneously the truth of the whole existence. And that will be liberation, that will be freedom.Doubt is neither Christian nor Hindu, nor American nor German. Yes may be Hindu, yes may be Mohammedan, yes may be Christian; no may be communist, no may be fascist – but doubt is simply a quest, an individual quest.Yes and no both belong to the crowd.Doubt makes you assert your individuality.You start finding your path on your own. You don’t accept the maps given you by others.In India I have seen in Jaina temples, maps hanging which show seven hells, seven heavens, and the ultimate, moksha. Between seven hells and seven heavens is the earth. They show you exactly who goes where, what route he follows, what sufferings he comes across.Even in my childhood I used to ask the priest, “Do you know where Constantinople is?”He said, “Constantinople? That has nothing to do with religion.”I said, “That has nothing to do with religion, but it has something to do with maps. You don’t know Constantinople and you know seven heavens, seven hells? Just be kind enough to tell me, how many have you visited? Who has made this map?” And for thousands of years Jainas have believed in this map.People who had no idea that the earth is round were able to know how many hells there are, how many heavens there are; and each according to his action goes to a certain space, certain place. They had no idea of the earth they were living on but they had ideas about things which are just fictions.Now slowly, slowly those maps are disappearing from the temples, because even followers have started asking embarrassing questions. But it continues. One small sect in India is that of Radhaswamis. They divide the whole existence into fifteen parts; the earth is the lowest.I have been to their temple in Agra. They are very egoistic people; they have been trying for almost one hundred years to make the temple better than the Taj Mahal. They have poured immense amounts of money into it, but only one story is complete. They have done tremendous work. Certainly if they succeed in making all the three proposed stories, the Taj Mahal will look very pygmy before that temple.The Taj Mahal is also in Agra, and Radhaswamis originated in Agra; their founder was there. And from all over the world tourists come to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Radhaswamis wanted to make something so that the Taj Mahal becomes secondary. And seeing what they have done – it is only one-third complete in one hundred years, but even that much is enough to show you they have transcended the Taj Mahal already.In their temple, this half-built temple, they have engraved in golden letters the fifteen levels of existence. And they have marked – for example, Jesus Christ has only reached up to the sixth. A long journey is still ahead for that poor carpenter carrying his cross. How many times he will be crucified, nobody knows.Mohammed is still on the fourth, Moses on the fifth, Mahavira on the seventh, Buddha on the ninth. And their own master is on the fifteenth.When I had gone to visit their temple, their priest welcomed me, he showed me everything. He showed this description of fifteen stages and he said, “What do you think about it?”I said, “There is no question of thinking, I know your master is on the fifteenth.”He said, “How do you know?”I said, “Because I am on the sixteenth – and he is trying hard, but I go on pushing him back. I won’t allow anybody else to be on the sixteenth.”He was very much shocked, but I said, “If you can just imagine fifteen, what is the trouble? On what authority do you put Buddha under your master? On what authority do you put Jesus…what grounds have you got?”They said, “Our master said it.”So I said, “I am a master, and I say to you, make a place also for me on the sixteenth. And of course your master could only talk about the fifteenth because he has never entered the sixteenth. I will not allow him to enter! I am alone there.”These are your theists who simply believe.It is cheap to believe, it is cheap to disbelieve.But it is really a dangerous journey to know.I would like my sannyasins neither to be negative nor to be positive, but open, available, with a quest, a question mark, and to go on searching.Many times your mind will say it is good to believe – because the journey is arduous, and one never knows where one is going, whether one is going to find anything or not. But don’t listen to the mind.Mind has created all these “yes” philosophies, “no” philosophies.Doubt has never created any philosophy; doubt has created science.And doubt is going to create religion.They are exactly the same – the same application of doubt in different fields. About objects, the outside world that spreads to millions of stars, doubt has given tremendous insight just within three hundred years. You are carrying another world within yourself, which is in no way smaller than the world you see outside; perhaps it is bigger.Why do I say that perhaps it is bigger? I am including the word perhaps so that you should not believe. I know it is bigger, for the simple reason that you know the stars, you know the sun, you know the moon – but the moon does not know you, the sun does not know you. The stars are great, the universe is vast, but you are the only knower. You have something more than the whole universe.That’s why I say inside you are carrying something bigger than the universe, more than the universe. Just inquire.One of the most beautiful men of this century was Maharishi Raman. He was a simple man, uneducated, but he did not accept the ideology, the religion in which he was born. When he was only seventeen years of age he left his home in search of truth. He meditated for many years in the hills of Arunachal in south India, and finally realized himself.After that his whole teaching consisted only of three words, because those three words had revealed to him the whole mystery of existence. His philosophy is the shortest. What are those three words? Whoever came to him – because as he became slowly, slowly known, people started coming to him from all over the world – his whole teaching was to sit silently and ask only one question: “Who am I?” and go on asking that question.One day the question will disappear, and only you will be there. That is the answer.Not that you will find the answer written somewhere; you will find yourself. You just go on digging with this question – this question is like digging – but do you see the question? It is a doubt: Who am I? It does not accept the spiritualist who says you are a soul. It does not accept the materialist who says there is nobody, don’t waste time; eat, drink and be merry. He doubts. Those three words are followed by a question mark: Who am I?And he says this is enough. If you can go on and on and on patiently, one day the question suddenly disappears and what is left is your reality. That is the answer.And the moment you know yourself you have known everything that is worth knowing.Osho,For me it's either high-energy excitement where life is wonderful and a joy to be alone; or very often these days there's a quietness that's dull and boring. In the one there's juice but no awareness, and in the other there's awareness but no juice.Is there a knack in bringing these two together?It is a very simple thing. You say you have moments of great ecstasy, full of juice, but you become drowned in that juice; the ecstasy is so overwhelming you forget to be watchful. You become immersed in that ecstasy, the witness is not there. And then you say there are moments when you are sad, bored, but the witness is there.You just have to put things in their right place. Start from your boredom and sadness, because the witness is there and the witness is going to be the bridge. So when you are sad and bored, just watch it, as if it is something outside of you – it is. You are always a witness – now you are witnessing sadness and boredom.It is easy to witness sadness and boredom, because who wants to get immersed in boredom? But this is of tremendous importance because you can learn the whole art while you are bored. Just watch it, and as your witnessing grows you will see there is a distance between you and the boredom, the sadness, the misery, the pain, the anguish. You are not part of all that experience; you are standing high above on the hills, a watcher on the hills, and everything else is moving down deep in the dark valley.You already have the secret, just practice it more and more. Just sit by the side of a donkey, sit by the side of a buffalo; go on looking at the buffalo and you will be bored! All around you can find objects which will be immensely helpful for you. You need not wait for moments to come, because who knows when the buffalo will come to you? Why not go to the buffalo?You can just go to our cattle, sit among them, and you will be bored. Those cattle will go on munching the grass – do you think you will start munching the grass? You will not get involved in that. Sitting among the cattle, among the buffaloes, you will find yourself just a witness.Don’t become sad, don’t become bored. Let the boredom be there, let the sadness be there; you remain just a witness. And it is easier in such situations.Once you have strengthened your witness, then let those moments of ecstasy, heights…try your witnessing then. It will be a little difficult there; one wants to jump into that groovy space. Who wants to sit on the bank and watch? – because one is afraid one may be simply watching and the moment will go.Don’t be worried. If you witness, the moment will remain there and will grow deeper, bigger, more colorful. But not at any point have you to become identified with it. Remain detached, just a spectator.The art is the same; whether it is boredom or ecstasy does not matter. What matters is that you are not involved, you remain aloof, you remain standing there.There is a Zen story I have loved very much. Three friends had gone for a morning walk, and then they suddenly saw on the hill a Zen monk standing.One of the friends said, “I think he must have come with his friends; they must have been left behind and he is waiting for them.”The other said, “I cannot agree with you, because seeing that man I can say one thing is certain; he is not waiting for somebody who has been left behind, because he never looks back. He is just standing like a statue. Anybody who is waiting for somebody who is left behind will once in a while look, to see whether the fellow has come or not. But he is unmoving.“He is not waiting for any friend. I think…I know this monk; he has a cow and the cow must have been lost in the thick forest. And that is the highest place from where he can look all over the forest and find the cow.”The third man said, “You have forgotten your own argument. If he was looking for the cow then he would be looking all around. He would not just stand there like a statue, focused in one direction; that is not the way of looking for a lost cow.” He said, “As far as I can tell, he is doing his morning meditation.”But the other two said that the basic philosophy of Zen is that you can meditate anywhere, you can meditate doing anything. What was the need to go to that hill in the early morning, in the cold, and stand there to meditate? “He could have meditated in his cozy monastery where they have a special meditation temple. He could have been there – what was the need to go? No, we cannot agree.”They argued; finally they said, “It is better we go to the hill. It will be a waste of time but there is no other way to settle what he is doing.” Such is the curiosity of the human mind – very monkeyish. Now why trouble yourself? Let him do whatever he is doing. If he is searching for his cow it is his business; if he is waiting for his friend, it is his friend; if he is meditating it is his business – why should you poke your nose into it? But that’s how people are.They became so excited arguing with each other that they decided, “We have to go.” They forgot that they had come just for a small morning walk, and going to the hill will take hours, then coming down the hill…the sun will be almost directly overhead. But the question…they have to come to a conclusion. And in fact they want to prove that “I am right.” Each of them wants to prove that “I am right.” Now the only man who can decide is that monk.They reached – huffing, puffing. The monk was standing there with half-closed eyes. That is the Buddhist way – to keep the eyes half closed when you are meditating, because if you close your eyes completely you may doze into sleep; that is more possible than going into meditation. If you keep your eyes fully open you will get interested in thousands of things. A beautiful woman passes by, and meditation is lost, anything can disturb. So keep the eyes half closed so you don’t see exactly what is happening outside, and you have to keep your eyes half open so you don’t fall asleep.The first man asked, “Master, we have heard much about you but we never had any chance to come to your monastery. Fortunately we had come for a morning walk and we saw you. We have a question I want you to answer: Are you not waiting for somebody who has been left behind?”The monk with half-closed eyes said, “I have nobody, I am alone. I was born alone, I will die alone, and between these two alonenesses I am not trying to fool myself that somebody is with me. I am alone and I am not waiting for anybody.”The second man said happily, “Then certainly your cow has got lost in the thick forest and you must be looking for it.”The monk said, “It seems strange idiots have come here! I don’t possess a single thing. I don’t have any cow, the monastery has it; that is not my business. And why should I waste my time looking for a cow?”The third man was immensely happy. He said, “Now you cannot deny: you must be meditating. Is it not so? – you are doing your morning meditation!”The monk laughed; he said, “You are the worst idiot of the three! Meditation is not done, it is not a doing. You can be in meditation but you cannot do it. It is a state. So certainly I am not doing meditation. I am in meditation, but for that I need not come to this hill; anywhere I am in meditation. Meditation is my consciousness.“So you all get lost! And never disturb anybody who is standing with half-closed eyes, remember it.”But they all three said, “Forgive us – we are stupid, certainly we are stupid to walk miles and to ask you such…. We are feeling embarrassed. But now that we have come and now that we accept we are stupid, just one question from all of the three, not separate: Then what are you doing?”And the master said nothing.In that nothing is the witness.When you witness, you will be surprised that the boredom, the sadness, the blissfulness, the ecstasy – whatever it is – starts moving away from you. As your witnessing goes deeper, stronger, becomes more crystallized, any experience – good or bad, beautiful or ugly – disappears. There is pure nothingness all around you.Witnessing is the only thing that can make you aware of an immense nothingness surrounding you. And in that immense nothingness…. It is not empty, remember. In English there is no word to translate the Buddhist word shunyata. In that nothingness…it is not empty, it is full of your witness, full of your witnessing, full of the light of your witness.You become almost a sun, and rays from the sun are moving into the nothingness to infinity.One of the Indian mystics, Kabir, has said, “My first experience was that of a sun, and as my experience went on growing…the outer sun is nothing; the inner sun is infinite. Its light fills the whole infinity of existence. And in that moment I am only a witness; I am there.”So start witnessing your boredom, sadness, because the question is not the object, the question is the art of witnessing. So use any object – anger, hate, love, jealousy – anything will do. If you cannot find anything just put up a mirror and look at your face and witness it. And you will be surprised, immensely surprised; when you are in a complete state of witnessing the mirror becomes empty, you are not there.In total witnessing the object disappears.You will be able for the first time to see the mirror just as nothingness.Start from things which are easier, and then go on moving to things which are groovier. The bridge is simple.Osho,I notice that when women are in bitchy moods, men say, “All she needs is a good lay.” Could it be that wives have been tagged as nags not because women by their nature are nags, but because for thousands of years they haven't been getting it?That’s true! Women are not by nature nags, but man has forced them to become that. Whoever said that is a wise man!Whenever a woman is bitchy she really needs it! So rather than getting worried about her bitchiness, do something!And for thousands of years they have not been having it; it has become heavy. I know in India at least ninety-eight percent of women have never experienced any orgasm. They don’t know that there is such a thing. In the West too, only within thirty years have women become aware that for millions of years they have been missing something.The orgasmic experience in lovemaking is tremendously relaxing, fulfilling. If a woman gets it – which is really a little difficult, difficult for the poor man because nature is not very scientific. There are many corrections needed. Nature has given man only single-orgasm capacity, and to women, multiple orgasms. And if the woman gets her first orgasm that is dangerous, because then she wants the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth…And the poor man cannot manage it.So what man did, he found a strategy: don’t give her the first orgasm. She will never know what is missing, and she will never ask for the second.But if a woman’s nature needs multiple orgasms to relax her and she is not getting it, she is bound to be bitchy. She is bound to be continuously in a fighting mood, angry. Those are not her natural qualities – they are gifts given by man.But what can man do? His trouble is that he is very poor sexually because he is a donor; his energy is spent in a single shot. The woman is a receiver. She is not giving any energy; in fact she is enjoying your shots. She is on the receiving end, as many shots…. But with one shot your gun is empty. It is hanging down! You cannot do anything about it. That has made women all around the world very bitchy. Either science has to make arrangements for a man, that he can give as many shots as needed, or science has to do some surgery on women, that only one shot is enough. But if this cannot be done then the only way is that when you make love to your wife, invite all your friends too, so that by the time she asks for the second, the second friend is ready.What else to do? I am simply suggesting a practical thing. If one gun goes empty in one shot, have many guns ready in line. And the woman will be so utterly satisfied with you. She will not nag you ever again! She will not be angry, she will not throw things. She will prepare the most delicious food for you – you have done so much for her.This seems to be simple. Scientists may be able to do it or not; but this is very simple, to invite your friends. And in return they will be inviting you, so why be so miserly? Share!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I've often heard you speak with love and admiration of Zorba. Yet Nikos Kazantzakis, the man who created him, led a tortured life – guilt-ridden, obsessed with religion, fearful of women, preoccupied with death. Are Zorba and Kazantzakis the two sides of all of us who are unenlightened?Please comment.The religions of the world have done so much harm to human beings that it is incalculable.The greatest wound they have created in the human spirit is schizophrenia. They have put man against himself. They have created a rift in you, a split.Their conditioning is that you have to fight with yourself, you have to be victorious over yourself. And nobody has said that it is simply madness. You are one! Who is going to be victorious, who is going to be defeated? But the division has been done very cunningly, very cleverly.Do you see these two hands, the right and the left? Religions have created such a division that right is always right – and left, of course, is wrong. And both the hands are so deeply together inside you. You may not have imagined it, but your left hand is connected with your right mind, and your right hand is connected with your left mind.Now, if the right hand is right, then your left mind is right – it is the extension of the left mind. But religions are condemning all leftist efforts. If your left hand is wrong, then your right mind is wrong; and all the religions are emphasizing the right mind. So the split is complicated – but anything is possible if it is repeated for thousands of years.Nikos Kazantzakis represents you – each human being. He was a rare man, but a victim of the whole past. He was a very sensitive man – that’s why the split became very clear; a very intelligent man, he could see he was divided. That created great inner torture for him.To be divided against yourself is hell, fighting with yourself is continuous torture. You want to do something – that is one part of you – and the second part says, “No, you cannot do it. It is sin.”How can you be at peace with yourself? And one who is not at peace with himself cannot be at peace with society, with culture, and finally with existence. The individual is the very brick of the whole existence.It is very significant to understand Nikos Kazantzakis. He was a Greek, and the Greeks have always been very much body-oriented. The whole history of Greece is full of love for your own body.Do you know that the woman in Greece was not thought to be beautiful? Just as everywhere else men managed and dominated societies, Greece was also male chauvinist, but with a difference. Women have been condemned everywhere, but not as much as in Greece. All Greek statues are of men. The whole sculpture is devoted to the beauty of the male body.You are bound to be surprised that this caused even people like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle – the highest you can conceive in intelligence – to become homosexuals. If a man loves his body, naturally he will love another man’s body. The woman is so condemned that she is almost treated as subhuman. In Athens perhaps democracy has flowered the best, but it was only for men; women had no votes.Nikos Kazantzakis represents both the things. One is his Greek mind, which is self-loving, materialist. In the West only Greece has produced materialistic philosophies, and Epicurus is the peak. So his Greek mind is Zorba – that’s why he calls his book Zorba The Greek.But Christianity contaminated the whole Greek mind. Jesus never knew the word Christ, never knew the word Christian. These are Greek words and Jesus was not acquainted with Greek, not even with Hebrew. He spoke the language of the common masses. Hebrew was the language of the priests, rabbis – the common people spoke Aramaic, which is an unrefined form of Hebrew. He used the word messiah which becomes Christ in Greek, and the followers become “Christians.”Jesus influenced the Greek mind tremendously, for the simple reason that they were leaning too much toward the material – they were not balanced people. They thought themselves only bodies; the soul was just an invention. But man is not only body.The Greeks had no religion, and Christianity filled the vacuum. The Greek personality became split.The Greek is materialistic, Epicurean – loves the body, loves good food, good wine, beautiful women, beautiful men – and is not concerned at all what happens after death. According to Epicurus you die with your death, nothing happens afterward. There is nothing after death, there is nothing before birth. You are an accident, without any planning – a small lifespan of seventy years. Don’t waste it, enjoy.Nikos is half Greek and half Christian. He cannot intelligently deny that there is something more to you than your physiology. He cannot deny his mind, he cannot deny even the witness of the mind – which are not physiological phenomena.That was his continuous torture. He was one of the most tortured artists of contemporary life – one of the best, but that is the curse. When you have the best intelligence, you want to become one organic whole. The idiots don’t get into self-torture – they don’t think at all. Torture needs thinking.Nikos is torn apart – his Greek heritage is materialist and his Christianity is anti-materialist. He cannot live as a materialist because his Christianity is continuously condemning him. He cannot live as a Christian because that is only an idea, his reality is his Greek heritage. He is pulled apart – that is his torture, continuously.And the man who goes through self-torture automatically becomes guilty.The greatest guilt Nikos feels is against his own life. Whatever he does is wrong. If he follow his materialist tendencies, the Christian is there to condemn him, to send him to hell. If he tries to be a Christian, his Greek heritage is against it. He cannot do anything, he is in a fix.A sensitive man, an intelligent man is bound to feel guilty, that he is wasting his life fighting with himself. The man of guilt is of course obsessed with death – because he is not living and death is coming closer and closer every moment. Perhaps he may not be able to live – and death will finish him.A man who is living totally never bothers about death.His life is so full, death cannot even touch him.Death will come only to the body, not to him.He knows his inner organic consciousness.That was impossible for Nikos to know. He was obsessed with death, continuously afraid of death. He has not lived yet and death can come any moment.And there is a logic, a logical corollary: self-torture, guilt, obsession with death, all three together create the ultimate obsession of man – religion. Somehow he has to keep himself together – he is falling apart. Religion gives him at least a certain kind of solace, religion gives him a certain integrity.But the man of intelligence cannot be religious either. His sensitivity is so clear that he cannot believe in a god whom he has not known. He cannot believe in heaven and hell, which are mere words. He cannot see in society that the people who are committing evil acts are punished, or the people who are simple, innocent, good are rewarded. How can he believe that his good actions are going to be rewarded after life – why not now?Why do the cause and effect have to be so separated? They cannot be separated. Any intellectual can see the point, that cause and effect are joined together – they are two sides of the same coin. There is no reason at all why, if you commit evil here, you will be punished after death.Religions had to invent this fiction because the question was significant. Everybody was asking, “If evil acts are punished…we don’t see that happening.”All kinds of criminals become presidents, prime ministers, world-famous people; and the simple and the innocent and the good live as if they are not there – no recognition. They die poor, they die in indignity, they die as if they had never been here. No account is going to be kept of them.You have your history about Genghis Khan, Nadirshah, Tamerlane, Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ayatollah Khomeiniac – these are your great people!The good, the silent, the people who have not done any harm to anybody, who have never interfered in anybody’s life, are simply forgotten. Nobody will ever know their names. Whether they existed or not makes no difference to your history.Any intelligent person can see the device of religions. Here we see that the people who are exploiting, sucking blood, are rich. And the people who are making beautiful skyscrapers are sleeping on the street.Not only that, you will be surprised…Shahjehan, one of India’s great emperors, made the Taj Mahal in the memory of his dead wife, Mumtaz Mahal. He brought craftsmen, artists, sculptors, from all over the known world. He paid them immensely. He wanted his wife’s memorial to be unique and to be the best in the whole world.He had many wives. Mumtaz was fortunate to die first. She was not the one and only one he loved; he had a whole harem, women like cattle. It was not really in memory of Mumtaz; it was his ego being projected through Mumtaz.It took almost twenty years to make the Taj Mahal. Ten thousand workers worked for twenty years continuously. Those who had come had died; their sons were working. There were even a few who were the third generation because the old man who had come to work died, his son died, and his son’s son was working.By the time the Taj Mahal was completed, what was the reward of all those poor people who had put all their energy, all their art into it? And certainly they had created the most unique memorial that exists on the earth. Their reward was: their hands were cut off. Ten thousand people get the reward, for creating a unique memorial, that their hands are cut off.Shahjehan’s reason was clear. He said, “These people can create another Taj Mahal better than this, and that I am not going to allow. The only way to prevent these people is to cut off their hands.”This is the world that you experience, where the good are suffering, where the bad are on the top. Religion had to find a device; otherwise religion cannot hold the idea that goodness is rewarded and evil is punished. This was the device: every reward and punishment is after death.All the religions agree on that point. They had to!…because anybody who has eyes can see that good is not rewarded. We have not yet been able to create a society where good is rewarded. We have not created a civilization yet where evil is necessarily punished.Nikos was a very troubled soul – whether to follow his materialist tendencies, which were natural to him, or to follow the ideology that Christianity preaches, which was just a superficial mind thing. He could not follow it; but he could not follow his natural instincts either. He was stuck. And death was approaching closer and closer. Naturally he became obsessed with religion. Religion became the shelter.Religion has been the shelter of the sick, it has been the shelter of the schizophrenic, it has been the shelter of the perverted – it has been the shelter for all those who are suffering because of it! This is a very strange thing.First religion makes you feel guilty. That is the basic ground. Once you feel guilty…and how will you feel guilty? If you are split you will feel guilty. Whatever you do does not matter; you will feel guilty. If you follow the mind your whole nature will condemn you. If you follow nature your mind will condemn you. Whatever you do, one thing is certain – you will feel guilty. If you don’t do anything then you will feel doubly guilty.And once guilt is created in your psychology, religion offers you solace: “Blessed are those who mourn, because they shall be comforted.” First create the mourning and then comfort.I have heard of two brothers who had a business. They were partners in it, but their work was different. One brother would go into a city in the night and throw coal tar on people’s doors, walls, glasses, windows; whatever he could manage, he would paint it with coal tar. And next day the other brother would come into the town, shouting loudly, “Does anybody want coal tar removed?” It was a good business! His partner had done the basic groundwork.Everybody would rush to the man, “Come to our house. All our windows, all our doors are destroyed. Who has done it we don’t know, but that is not the point. Clean it off.”While he was cleaning in one city, the other brother was doing the basic work in another city. They were partners – whatever the brother got who was cleaning was divided half and half – and they were doing great business.Religion first creates guilt.That is absolutely necessary for the existence of religion. A person who is not guilty takes no note of religion.A man like me has nothing to do with religion.It cannot offer me anything.I don’t have any guilt, I have never repented for doing anything.Whatsoever I have done I have done with my total being. I have not left a small corner in me which was condemning it while I was doing it, because that condemning part will become my guilt.Christianity has used this more than any other religion; naturally, Christianity is the biggest religion in the world. It has functioned very scientifically. It does not allow you even to keep your guilt to yourself – particularly the Catholics, who are the original Christians. You have to confess to the priest, you should not keep your guilt to yourself.Why this confession to the priest? The strategy is complex. They say if you confess it to the priest, you are relieved of it. Now it is the priest’s responsibility to persuade God to forgive you. You are forgiven – but the other side of this is all bogus. The priest knows no God, knows no way to persuade him. But he becomes aware of everybody’s crimes, sins – rape, theft, homosexuality, AIDS. He becomes aware of everything – that is his power over you. You cannot leave the Catholic religion.You can leave Hinduism very easily; there is no problem because the Hindu priest knows nothing about you. But the Catholic priest has a whole file against you, he can expose you. He can inform the government, he can inform the authorities, he can inform the medical board that “This man has AIDS.”They have used guilt really well. Create guilt – that makes man tremble, that he will suffer in hell. He is guilty, he is a sinner. In every sermon, in every church around the world, they are consistently condemning you, calling you sinners. You are born in sin. Whether you do any sin or not does not matter, because there are people who may not be doing sin and may not come to confess – and they may not feel guilty either, but they cannot be left alone. They are born in sin! It is not a question of your doing; Adam and Eve have already done for it you!Fictions upon fictions, lies following lies….Naturally Nikos was very much obsessed with religion.The question is how he managed to create one of the greatest art works, Zorba The Buddha…the greek. He could create it because it was one of his sides, which he had neglected, ignored, repressed.Zorba The Greek is Nikos repressed. He allows in the novel his repressed part to have full expression. And Zorba is so beautiful…. Expressiveness is always beautiful; repression is always ugly. Yes, Zorba is one of his basic parts. He had to give it a reality. He could not live it – but at least he could write it.This is a common factor…if you read beautiful poetry about love, remember one thing: this man who has written this love poetry has not known love. It is his neglected, repressed part.People who love don’t have time for poetry.Just the other day one beautiful woman was asking me, “How many girlfriends do you have?”I said, “It is a little bit difficult to count. I have girlfriends all around the world.”She was shocked, but she had to wait for a bigger shock. I said, “You can also be part. You can be my girlfriend – why bother about others?”And I know she loved it! She smiled, her eyes became wide – she enjoyed even the idea. I must have gone into her dream last night! I told her, “You will not be coming into my sleep because I have said what I had to say, I have not repressed it. Nobody else would have told you this.”She was taking my interview for a magazine. Now, when somebody is taking your interview you are not supposed to say such things. You have to hide them, you have to go round about.Politicians continuously answer something else, something that you have not asked. Or, if you are too persistent they say, “No comment.” Of course, an individual has the right not to comment on anything if he does not want to comment. And those are the points which should be searched well, where he says, “No comment.” That is his real personality.What the politician answers is not his reality. When he is answering, he is taking note of the audience, the readers, the people who will come to know about the statement – what they will think about him. He is not answering the question, he is promoting himself.But I told her, “One thing is certain, you cannot come into my dreams. I don’t dream, because whatever I want to do, I do it! I don’t care even if the whole world is against it. For example, you cannot find a single man in the whole world who is for my ninety Rolls Royces. Do you think you can find anyone? Nobody! But whatever I want to do, I will do. At least Rolls Royces don’t come into my dreams. That is the last thing!”Nikos suffered very much. He was a world-famous writer. He has written beautiful novels of tremendous importance, of great meaning. He was not confessing to a priest; he confessed in his own way. Nobody will think that Zorba The Greek is his confession. This is what he has been repressing, this is what has been continuously hammering him: “You have to do it.” He makes an individual, Zorba; he gives him reality, blood and flesh, and allows him to do everything that he has not allowed himself.Zorba the Greek is not a Christian. Zorba the Greek has nothing to do with churches. Zorba the Greek is a very practical, pragmatic, natural human being.He loves a woman, Bubbalina. She is not very beautiful, she is not very young, but Zorba and his master – that master is Nikos Kazantzakis, nobody else – they are working in a small village on some project. In that small village it is very difficult to find a beautiful woman available. His master – that is Nikos – asks him, “What do you see in this woman?”He said, “I close my eyes when I meet her; I put the light off. But that is the only woman available – what to do? I have to make the best of whatever is available. If one food is not available, you have to eat something else. You may not like it so much, but you cannot remain hungry.”Zorba dances, plays on his musical instrument. Nikos just looks from his cabin, and cannot believe it – what has this man got that he is so happy? A poor man, a servant to Nikos – but every night in the sands by the side of the river where they live, he is dancing alone, singing alone.Nikos asked him, “Zorba, what have you got that makes you dance and sing?” Nikos was not aware what the answer will be.Zorba said, “This is strange! Dance is an end in itself. You don’t have to have something else in order to dance. You don’t need something first, to sing or to play on your musical instrument. If I were waiting for some great thing to happen to me, that I will dance when I am in the White House….”In fact, I have not heard that any president in the White House has danced or played on the guitar and sang. Have you heard of any president, any prime minister dancing, anybody who is in some top post? No, he becomes serious – Jesus Christ crucified, crucified in the White House.Zorba says one very significant thing to his master, “Boss, only one thing is wrong in you. You take things too seriously! Life is a playfulness, and you are too serious.” And he drags the boss to the side of the river. And the boss is reluctant, he is saying, “What are you doing?” But Zorba is a strong man. The boss, self-tortured, feeling guilty – what to do, what not to do, to be or not to be – has no strength.Zorba drags him, and he says, “You just follow me.” He plays on his instrument, he starts dancing, and he says to the boss, “You start!”The boss says, “But I don’t know how to dance.”He says, “Dance has nothing to do with knowing. Can’t you jump up and down? Do whatever you feel. The dance will come on its own. You just come out of your seriousness!”In that night, in that aloneness, in that isolated spot Nikos follows Zorba and cannot believe that he is dancing, cannot believe that his dance is becoming more and more intense, cannot believe that so much dance is hidden in him. He starts singing!And Zorba says, “Look Boss, what have you got? Why are you dancing? Why are you singing? Life is to dance! Life is to sing! Life is to love! And all serious things you can do in your grave, because there will be no disturbance. You can think great thoughts: God, heaven, hell – whatever you want. But at least don’t miss life! You will be eternally in the grave with enough time!”Zorba is a fictitious character – but not absolutely fictitious. Nikos knew a man who gave him the idea of Zorba The Greek. And he presented his first copy to the man, who could recognize himself immediately. And he wrote to Nikos, “Your Zorba is nobody but me!”And this man died far away, somewhere in Poland. But he wrote a letter before he died: “I never knew myself. Your Zorba The Greek has made me aware of all that I am. I am immensely grateful.” So there was a real man too. But Nikos is projecting that real man on a fictitious character. That too is not fictitious, that is his own repressed part. It is a kind of psychoanalysis.What do you do in psychoanalysis? You lie down on the couch, and the psychologist is sitting behind you so you cannot see him – because if somebody is watching you, you may not open up, you may not reveal things. Resting on the couch, paying hundreds of dollars for one hour, naturally you think it is better to do something. And you start saying things which you have not even been aware are within you.Psychoanalysis helps people, it helps them to become aware of their repressed part. And awareness has a magical power: of anything you become aware of, its grip, its power over you is finished. You are no more in bondage to it.Nikos Kazantzakis is really doing a very psychological thing. He is writing Zorba The Buddha…the Greek…Forgive me, because to me, Zorba is always the Buddha.That is my state. In me Zorba is not Greek, in me Zorba is the Buddha. So please forgive me, because I go on saying Zorba The Buddha while I am supposed to say Zorba The Greek! But it is natural for me. Zorba the Greek is absolutely a stranger to me. Zorba the Buddha is my experience. But for Nikos, poor Nikos, Zorba The Greek was the reality.He has written books like Christ Recrucified: they are also his mind projections. He lived his whole life on a cross, because he did not allow the Zorba his nature. He was bound to be on the cross, suffering. He has projected that too in another novel.All his novels together are in some way or other a tremendous experiment in self-analysis. But the best part in him is Zorba – which he missed. Hence, he suffered. Hence, he felt guilty. Hence, he became obsessed with religion, obsessed with death.I hope this does not happen to you. It is happening to everybody all over the world. Almost every person is split – for such silly and stupid things you cannot believe.You will not allow a saint just a little bit of smoking? No, saints are not allowed to do that. But once in a while it is really playful, making rings of smoke. There is no sin involved in it.You will not allow your saints to have marijuana – just a little bit? He will lose his sainthood and he will be put into jail. But what is wrong in marijuana? I don’t see that he is harming anybody, and a little bit of marijuana may do some good to him. At least in those moments he will not be a hypocrite.This has been my experience in India, because in my childhood days in India no drug was prohibited, and particularly those in the same family as marijuana. In India it is called bhang, but it is the same family and the same drug. At each festival, on each festive occasion, in marriages bhang is used, and I have watched – people under the influence of bhang are so real, so authentic….I have seen one of my principals shouting four-letter words. We had never known that part of him, and when we told him later on, he said, “You must be joking! I cannot use such words.”But I said, “I have collected many eyewitnesses – I knew that you would say this to me. They are waiting outside.”He looked through the window, there were ten other people standing whom I had collected. He said, “Disperse them.! You are right; somehow a vague memory is still with me. I have used those words you are mentioning, but I have always been repressing them.”This was a good experience, to know some repressed part, to become aware of it. Through awareness it can be dropped.In Eastern religions, for thousands of years drugs have been used just to make you aware that you are not your personality that you go on projecting in the world, that you are much more. The personality is just the tip of the iceberg. Deeper down is your bigger reality – nine times more than your conscious mind.Drugs can certainly be used to make people psychologically healthy. They can be used to make people again one, to destroy their split. What psychoanalysis does in three, five, seven years with thousands of dollars wasted, thousands of hours wasted, drugs can do within hours. But religions are against them. Politicians are against them. Governments are against them.Why so much antagonism? I can understand there may be some bad side effects, but we have so much scientific knowledge today that all those elements which have bad side effects can be removed from the drugs. Rather than forcing millions of people into jails around the world, rather than wasting money on all these prisoners, the better and wiser way will be to give the money and the project to the scientists. LSD can be more purified, can be more ecstatic, without having any side effects. But nobody is ready to do it.Why are they not ready to do it? The governments are afraid that if people are not split, they will have so much energy that they will not be controllable. To enslave a split person is easy, because he is fighting with himself; he has no time to fight with anybody else.Politicians don’t want you to become one.Religions don’t want you to become one because if you become one, who is going to be guilty? Who is going to confess to the priest? Who is going to bother about God and church and all kinds of nonsense? No, they want you to remain psychologically split. They want you to remain in this sickness where only guilt arises. But guilt leads you to religion, to God, to prayer.To cut the roots of guilt is to destroy all hocus-pocus religions which are dominating man.Nikos Kazantzakis has made a tremendous contribution by revealing himself in many novels. From Zorba The Buddha…now I cannot even ask your forgiveness! So please, be kind…from Zorba The Greek to Christ Recrucified – between these two novels there are other novels – but these two are the polarities. He was continuously obsessed with Jesus, Christianity, God – and simultaneously afraid of death. The man never lived.He was here – and what a man, of tremendous potential. All that he needed was a meditative consciousness – that could make the split disappear. Yes, there would have been a loss; he would not have written Zorba The Greek, he would not have written Christ Recrucified. But I think it is worth risking – he would have lived!All these novels are from a person who has not lived. Perhaps if he had lived he would have created something…what I call Zorba the Buddha.That’s what I am writing! – in your hearts, because I don’t believe in writing in books. That’s what each of my sannyasins will be carrying in his heart. That is the right soil for Zorba the Buddha to grow; hence my insistence that you should not renounce Zorba.If you renounce Zorba you can never become the Buddha.It is your Zorba, accepted with respect, love, dignity, that is going to grow slowly, slowly into the Buddha.The Buddha is the peak.The Zorba is the foundation.They cannot exist separately; both are incomplete.Gautam the Buddha is incomplete. He has the whole upper structure without foundations. So it is not a coincidence that his religion died with him and everything disappeared within a few centuries.Just three hundred years after Buddha’s death Alexander reached India, but he could not find a man who could even come close to the idea of Buddha that he had heard resounding all over the world. Alexander also was Greek, by chance. He was seeking a buddha, but he could not find one. There were statues – thousands in number – but not a single man. What happened?Gautam Buddha is perhaps the most religious man in the whole history of man. But what happened? Why did everything fall apart the moment he was not there? The reason is, there was no foundation. The structure was without foundation, it was going to fall apart any moment.Buddha is incomplete. It hurts me to say that, but now I have decided to say everything, whether it hurts me, or hurts you, or hurts anybody – I don’t care. The truth has to be stated, naked.Zorba – you can find many around the world, but they are incomplete. They are just eating, drinking, merrying; but life is much more. The Zorba is like the foundation, but the palace has never been raised upon those foundations.I mentioned Shahjehan, who made the Taj Mahal in memory of one of his wives. He was also making another memorial for himself. On one side of the river Yamuna – a beautiful place – he had raised the Taj Mahal. But it took twenty years. Exactly on the other side – you can see from Taj Mahal to the other side – he was making another memorial, so that when he died the memorial would be ready. He knew that his sons would not be so interested in making the memorial, which was to be better than the Taj Mahal.The Taj Mahal had taken so much energy, so much money, that his successor was not going to bother about another memorial. So he was making it himself.The Taj Mahal is made of white marble; he was making his memorial with black marble. But he died; only the foundations are there. And he was right, his sons did not bother to make a memorial for their father. They buried him just within the foundations.Every Zorba is only the foundations. But foundations cannot have any meaning; their whole meaning is in the palace that is going to be raised upon them.Both types have existed in the world, but separately – that is the misery of the whole humanity.My effort is to make Zorba and Buddha meet together, be one. That is my vision of the new man – psychologically healthy with no split personality, with no garbage about guilt, sin, God.Zorba the Buddha will not go to any temple, to any mosque, to any gurudwara to worship, to pray.His whole life will be a worship. All his acts will be his prayer.Whatever he does will be his art, will be his painting, his poetry, will be his sculpture.Each movement of an integrated human being is going to have tremendous beauty and fragrance.Nikos Kazantzakis could have become Zorba the Buddha. I feel sorry for the man; he had the potential, but Christianity destroyed him.Christianity has destroyed thousands of people.Other religions are also doing the same on a smaller scale, but Christianity is committing crimes on a mass scale.Osho,In a recent lecture, Krishnamurti has said that wearing a mala, locket, robes and having a new name is a circus, unnecessary and nonsense. It seems that Krishnamurti is trying to convey that the moment one accepts someone as a guru, one ceases to be independent. Is this always the case?He is right. Although he is senile, still he is right.To accept a guru means now you will be only a shadow. You have lost your independence of inquiry.That’s why I insist continuously that you are not my followers; you are my friends, my fellow travelers.And Krishnamurti knows this, but still he goes on saying things. Now this whole reference is about sannyasins, but he does not understand that this is not the sannyas that he has been accustomed to know in India. Just the name is the same; otherwise, my sannyasins are absolutely opposite to all the sannyasins that have existed before or are still existing in other religions.Your robe, your mala, your locket, are all non-serious. There is no seriousness about it, it is just playful. Any day I can say to you, “Go to the river and throw all the malas and all the dresses; they have served their function.” Whenever I feel that now there is no need….You are not a sannyasin who has renounced the world. You are a sannyasin who is rejoicing in the world. Krishnamurti cannot make the distinction, which is so great. Renouncing existence, renouncing life, renouncing love; and rejoicing in existence, rejoicing in love, rejoicing in life, are polar opposites.You can ask me then, why I have chosen the name sannyas.I have chosen the name sannyas because the past history of sannyas can be destroyed only in this way.Now in India particularly, where other religions have their sannyasins in the same color, in the same robe, they are finding it difficult. My sannyasins are moving hand in hand with their girlfriends, and Indians are shocked. Sannyasins?One of my sannyasins who lives near Bombay and commutes every day to Bombay and back, took sannyas. After the second day or third day he came and told me, “You will have to give sannyas to my wife too.”I said, “Why?”He said, “Why? People will kill me! Yesterday they caught hold of me on the railway station and a crowd gathered. And they said, ‘Whose wife is this? This sannyasin seems to be escaping with somebody else’s wife’ – because sannyasins are not supposed to have wives. I tried hard to explain to them that this is not the old sannyas. They said, ‘There is only one sannyas, there are not many sannyases. Don’t try to deceive us. You have to come with us to the police station.’”He said, “I had to go to the police station. Fortunately the inspector knew me, and he said, ‘She is his wife, and this sannyas is absolutely non-serious. Don’t be bothered about it.’”So he said, “It would be good if you give her sannyas also so no problem arises, because anywhere we can be caught. It was good that I was caught at the station where I live, so the inspector knew me.”I gave sannyas to his wife. Two, three days afterward, he was again there with his wife. He said, “Now give sannyas to my son, because yesterday in the train it became a trouble.”It is a well-known fact in India, and a certainty, that many people go on stealing children from other people. Then they cripple them, blind them, and make them beggars, and whatsoever they earn comes to the man who is doing this business. Beggary in India is now a very strange phenomenon. The blind man to whom you are giving money will not get it – he will get only food enough to live. All the money will go to the boss who is running the whole factory where he creates crippled people.“So the crowd,” he said, “caught us both and they said, ‘They are stealing somebody’s child!’ We tried hard to convince them that it is our own child.“They said, ‘Your child? Sannyasins have to be celibate. We cannot believe it. In the first place, this is wrong, that you are moving with a woman sannyasin. Woman sannyasins have to move separately from man sannyasins. And not only are you moving with a woman, you are moving with a child. This child is not yours.’”He said, “It was so difficult. Just because the child was not too small he said, ‘They are my father and mother and they are not stealing anybody!’ Because he spoke we were saved. But please, give sannyas to him also, so there will be no problem left.”I wanted the old idea of seriousness, which has dominated sannyas for thousands of years, to be completely eradicated. And the meaning that has been given to sannyas has to be completely changed – from renouncing, it has to become rejoicing.Krishnamurti is aware of this but has not guts to say it – that this sannyas makes nobody dependent on me, that this sannyas simply makes you free from all kinds of seriousness that has been part of being religious.As far as the old sannyasins are concerned, he is perfectly right. But he is not saying those sentences to old sannyasins. That statement is made to my sannyasins; because I have told all the sannyasins belonging to the places where Krishnamurti visits, “Go and sit in front of him.”In India he goes to Delhi, Bombay and Madras. I have told my sannyasins there, “Don’t miss that opportunity. Wear the reddest clothes possible, with the mala perfectly visible to him, and sit in the front row.”And the poor old man cannot see the point – why in every place in India are sannyasins always sitting in the first row? And he becomes so annoyed – he is a very serious man and he is a very angry man too. Serious people are angry people. He gets annoyed very easily, irritated very easily. So seeing my sannyasins in the front row, he forgets what he was going to say; he starts condemning my sannyasins. And I have told my people, “Laugh as loudly as you can!”He has remained just one step away from enlightenment and now there seems to be no hope. Otherwise an enlightened person does not bother who is sitting in front, who is sitting at the back, who is wearing red, who is wearing blue; he says what he wants to say. He opens his heart.But Krishnamurti completely forgets what he had come there for, he starts condemning me and sannyasins. And if he is so interested in my sannyasins and in me, then he should come here and see. Have you seen sannyasins in a disco? Have you seen sannyasins playing cards, gambling? Have you seen sannyasins on the street hugging their girlfriends, boyfriends, so much absorbed in each other that even while I pass by the side they don’t know about me? Do you think I am their guru?I am nobody’s guru, and nobody is my follower. I hate the word follower! I hate the words leader, guru. All these are just hangups from the past, the rotten past. I am not your guru.So if you happen into a place where Krishnamurti is speaking, don’t forget: sit in the front row, find the reddest clothes possible, and enjoy his irritation, because the moment you enjoy, he becomes more irritated. Laugh and clap – when he condemns me clap and laugh. Make him confused…”What is the matter with these people? I am speaking against them and they laugh and they clap. I am speaking against their guru and they are enjoying.”And then in the end, stand up – because he has two parts to his speeches. First he speaks, then he asks people for questions. When he has spoken and he asks for questions, then stand up and tell him, “Whatever you are saying about sannyasins does not apply to us. And if you are so interested, then come to our place.“We respect you, we love you, we have named our lake ‘Krishnamurti Lake.’ And we feel sad and sorry also for you – because this is not the way of an enlightened man to behave in such a way, to be so irritated, so angry. You never laugh, you never smile. You seem to be hanging exactly like Jesus Christ on the cross.“And you completely forget that there are other people who have come to listen to you – you are speaking only to ten, twelve sannyasins. Come to our world capital, just visit our place and you will know that our red clothes mean nothing, that our malas are just to irritate people like you.”My secretary told me, “On television, what they do is, they cut your locket our of the picture.” When they are taking her interview they just go on cutting off the locket. They take her face, but don’t allow the locket to show.I said, “Don’t be worried. Start wearing a cap and put a locket on your head.”She said, “What about the other locket? Because – two lockets?”I said, “That is even better! Now let them cut whatever they want to cut. If they cut off the top one, the lower one will show. If they cut off the lower one, the top one will show.” And that’s what is happening now.Those lockets, those colored robes, are just to irritate people because that is the best way to let them think about what is happening here.So stand up when the question period comes and ask him, “What do you know about our sannyas?”Ask him, “You don’t wear the red robe, true, but how many girlfriends do you have? Our master says that he has so many he cannot give a record of them. How many hours do you sleep? Our master sleeps eleven hours. How many Rolls Royces do you have? How many discos have you opened, where people can dance and sing and love and enjoy? How many restaurants you have opened? How many communes exist where your people live together?”Not a single commune has he been able to create in his whole life. And he is such a serious man that he cannot of conceive discos, dances, of people easily changing their partners without any difficulty, without any trouble.Just tell him, “Come to our world capital and you will understand. Perhaps you may become a sannyasin! You are missing just by one step. And you cannot take that one step without becoming a sannyasin, because for ninety years you have been stuck there, glued. Somebody is needed to push you into the lake. And it will be the best thing that you are pushed into the lake which is known as ‘Krishnamurti Lake.’ Then the name will become absolutely significant, meaningful.”His whole life he has wasted, struggling with ghosts. He had gurus from his childhood up to his twenty-fifth year – and many gurus, not one. And he is against them because they sexually abused him. He was a beautiful boy and all those gurus were homosexuals. Gurus are bound to be homosexuals – you prevent them having girlfriends, you force celibacy on them. You are expecting something unnatural.His great guru was an Englishman, Leadbeater, who was a confirmed homosexual. And it is not that I am stating it – the case was brought to a court, a Madras court, because Krishnamurti’s father came to know that his boy, who was only nine years old, was being sexually abused. So he reported it to the court and he wanted the boy to be returned to him.But Leadbeater, Annie Besant, and all the other theosophical leaders were cunning enough – and moreover, because they were all white people, they managed to take Krishnamurti out of India, where the court’s judgment would not affect him. Before the court could give the judgment that the child should be returned to his father, they had taken the child out of India. Naturally, if a child has been sexually abused by his gurus he will be against all gurus. The association in his mind with the word guru is not good, it is not nice.And for twenty-five years, those gurus…. And they were many, because somebody was teaching him Sanskrit – he had to know ancient Sanskrit because they were preparing him to be the world master. Somebody was teaching him yoga, which is simply torturing your body, distorting your body, forcing your body into unnatural situations, standing on your head…. Somebody was teaching him English because he would be the world teacher, so he had to know English perfectly well.Somebody was not only teaching him but writing books in his name. He was twelve, thirteen years old, and his best book was written at that time: At The Feet Of The Master.The book was written by Leadbeater – because I have read all Leadbeater’s books and I can say with absolute certainty that this book is written by the same man – the same language, the same content. Of course it is far better than his other books because he was now an experienced writer.And they put the name of J. Krishnamurti on the book just to create the atmosphere in the world that a boy of thirteen years old who can write such a tremendously significant book must be a world teacher. The name of the book was, At The Feet Of The Master – at the feet of the guru.Now Krishnamurti renounces it, he says, “I don’t know anything about it. I have never written it.” But a thirteen-year-old child of the intelligence of J. Krishnamurti can at least remember who wrote it. He does not want to even mention Leadbeater’s name because he was the one who was homosexual and who was abusing J. Krishnamurti sexually. Perhaps others were doing the same.That anger, that irritation, still persists. That has become his barrier to enlightenment. Just one step more – and now he is too old, ninety years old. There is not much hope that in this life he will be able to take that step.He will have to die unenlightened – and remember the law, that if you die unenlightened you have to begin another life from the very scratch. If you die enlightened then there is no other life for you – you become universal.I feel sad and sorry for him. He wanted to meet me at a time when I was in Bombay, but he wanted me to go to his place. I said, “If he wants to meet me, he should come here. I don’t want to meet him, so why should I go? I am even giving an appointment to him to meet me – that is enough, more than that you cannot expect of me. Why should I go? I have nothing to learn.”The person who had come to me was a close friend of Krishnamurti. He said, “But he is old and it looks mannerly – you are young, you should go to him.”I said, “You go back and you ask him – does he believe in old age, young age? Does he believe that the young person should necessarily respect the older person? And tell him clearly that he wants to meet me, I don’t have any desire to meet him. So he should come.” But the ego…he never came, and since then he has been angry with me But I don’t understand: if you want to meet me, then you have to come.And what did he wanted to meet me for? If he goes on condemning the idea of accepting somebody as your master – then what did he want to meet me for? There cannot be any other reason than to learn something…or to teach something. And what has he been doing his whole life? Even at the age of ninety he is continuously traveling; sick, old, suffering from many diseases.For thirty years he has been suffering from headache. It is something unique. No enlightened person has suffered from headache. He may have suffered from everything else, but not from headache. His head is so relaxed, not a single thought moves there – no traffic. Krishnamurti’s headache shows that he is in the head, not in the heart.And all these years, what has he been doing? If he says that you should not learn from others because that makes you dependent, then he should stop speaking – because that is nothing but teaching people, that is giving them ideas.And remember, clothes can be easily thrown away. Ideas cannot be thrown away so easily. They go deep into your mind. You can drop the clothes instantly, but can you drop your ideas instantly? And that’s what he has been doing – giving people ideas.And I am telling my people that I am just one among you, as ordinary as you are. I am not holier than you, not higher than you. And I am not giving you a doctrine to believe in. I am simply exposing my heart, how I came to know myself. Perhaps in some way it may be of help to you.I am teaching you to doubt, not to believe – and still that old senile man goes on criticizing me.I am teaching you that this is not a faith, this is a scientific work. To become enlightened not through believing, but through doubt.Doubt everybody – me included.No guru has ever said that.No guru can ever say it.His whole gurudom is based on creating belief in you, faith in you.So next time, if some sannyasin happens to be in his discourses, don’t miss the opportunity. Stand up and make it clear to him that without understanding the man, without understanding his fellow travelers, without understanding the non-seriousness of the clothes and the mala, it is absolutely ungentlemanly to go on criticizing.Invite him here. Tell him, “Once you wanted to see that man, but just because of your ego, that you are older…. Now you are even older, and death is not far away. We have made a beautiful lake for you to jump in – perhaps that may make you enlightened. Otherwise in the next life you will have to start from the very scratch.“And who knows? – you may again get caught with some Leadbeater, because homosexuals are growing fast. So in your next life you will be born in a society with homosexuality, lesbianism, AIDS…. It is good to get enlightened in this life and be finished!”Give him the challenge. Tell him that I am ready to discuss openly here whatever he wants to discuss.It is not a criticism of me when he says that all these things are unimportant and nonsensical. This is a beautiful compliment to me because this is what I am saying. All these things are unimportant and nonsensical. He thinks he is criticizing me!I have worked in such a way that nobody can criticize me, because I have not exploited anybody, I have not enslaved anybody, I have not indoctrinated anybody, I have not converted anybody. I had started my journey alone. And people started coming and joining me and the caravan became bigger and bigger. Now it is all around the earth. And it is going to become bigger and bigger.But nobody is my follower. Nobody is going to be my successor. Each sannyasin is my representative. When I am dead, you all – individually – will have to represent me to the world. There is not going to be any pope. There is not going to be any shankaracharya. Each sannyasin, in his own capacity, has to represent me.This has never happened – but it is going to happen! You are all my successors.When I am dead, that simply means I have left this body and entered all the bodies of my people.I will be within you.I will be part of you.Osho,I am trembling from head to toe. My heart is throbbing and my belly burning. Osho, I am on fire! Wow, oh wow!Just great!But this is not a question. And I know who is asking it, because I have been seeing smoke arising, flames…. Just inform the fire department! It is none of my business. Either you go to the fire department, Maitri, or inform the fire department to come here and cool you down. Okay?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Aids confronts us with the immediacy of our death. Our seriousness seems to create more disease and paranoia. Instead of feeling like victims, how can we respond through celebration?Death is always there. You may be unaware of it, but it is always confronting you with immediacy. You cannot be certain of the next moment.But we go on living – and nobody believes that he is going to die; it is always the other who dies. You have seen people dying, many people of all kinds – children, young people, old people – but you have never seen yourself dying. So obviously somewhere in your mind the idea persists that it is always the other who dies. But remember, those who are dead also had the same idea; for them you are the other. And one day you will be dying, and the people who will take you to the graveyard will not feel at all the immediacy of death.It is always there – just like a shadow to you. From the very first moment of your birth you have been dying. It is a fallacy to think that death comes like an accident, suddenly when you are seventy, eighty, ninety. No. Death and life are together. The moment you are born you start dying.But man is very clever in deceiving himself.Each of your birthdays is an effort to forget that it is not your birthday, it is your death day; you have died one year more. But with flowers and candles and cakes, one forgets the immediacy of death. It is always with you.Birth is the beginning of death.So AIDS in fact should not make you serious; on the contrary it should make you more alert, more aware, because you are a rare person for whom death is a certainty, and you cannot deceive yourself anymore.Many who do not have AIDS will be dying before you, but their death will be coming without their knowing. And to know is always better than not to know. Something can be done when you know a fact is going to happen.The AIDS patient knows that within two years he is going to die. This immediacy of death should wake you up. Now there is no more time for you to fool around, no time for you to deceive yourself. Death is just there waiting for you, and you are fortunate that you know it.Knowing of your death can become a transformation.If you know you are going to die within two years, these two years can be devoted to meditation. Otherwise people are always postponing; they will meditate tomorrow – and tomorrow never comes. And there are so many other things to do, you don’t have time for meditation.But a man who is fully aware that now there is no way, that tomorrow is finished, all that you have in your hands is this moment…. This is the reality, AIDS or no AIDS, but AIDS makes it very profoundly felt, and that can become a blessing in disguise. The time for meditation has come. Now you can forget those small, stupid things in which you were involved.There are millions of people who are playing cards, watching football matches – not at all aware of what they are doing. And if you ask them, they say they are killing time. Great! Time is killing you, and you remain with the idea that you are killing time. How can you kill time? You have never even seen it. Your swords cannot cut it, even your nuclear weapons are unable to touch it. How are you going to kill time?But time is killing you every moment.AIDS should be understood as a great blessing. Now you can stop playing cards, you can stop fooling around. You can stop watching stupid football matches. Now all the time is yours, and the only thing left before death comes, is to know thyself. And the death is so close that you cannot afford to remain ignorant about your own being.The very closeness of death makes it possible for you to understand the deathless which is within you. That’s the whole art of meditation: to go within as deep as you can to the very center of your being. And you will be surprised, amazed that at the center of your being you are eternal. There is no death, there has never been any death. Nothing dies in reality, it only changes forms.AIDS can destroy your body – but it is going to be destroyed anyway, there is not much problem. It is better that it is being destroyed by AIDS, because you cannot hope to survive; with AIDS your hope has also died. Now there is no cure, you have to face the fact. No help from the outside is available, you have to depend on your inside. You are left alone.In fact everybody has always been alone.From birth to death, the whole journey is alone.You may be in the crowd, but your aloneness cannot be destroyed. It is there. You make every effort to camouflage your aloneness, but nobody has ever succeeded in it. A truth is a truth – you may postpone it a little bit….AIDS destroys all postponement.Whatever has to be done has to be done now!Yes, one thing is certain, that you are a victim – a victim of your religions, a victim of your so-called prophets, messiahs, incarnations of God, God himself. You are a victim. Don’t try to hide the fact, that will not help.AIDS is the ultimate outcome of homosexuality, and homosexuality is a religious disease. It was born in the monasteries where no woman was allowed. It was born because of the insistence of all the religions of the world on celibacy – which is simply stupid. You cannot be celibate unless you are impotent.And remember, the impotent people have not given anything to the world. They don’t have any creative energy. Your sexual energy is your creativity. The impotent person is a hollow bamboo, nothing inside. He somehow drags on, but he is not living. He cannot live, he has no energy for living. He is condemned from his very birth. Only these people can be monks, nuns authentically.If others who are full of life and energy become celibate, they will be destroyed fighting with themselves. They will destroy themselves fighting with their nature, and they can never be victorious. Nature is far bigger than you. You are just a tiny part, almost invisible. Nature is as big, as wide as the sky itself. You cannot fight with it.And it is very strange that nobody has said that celibacy should be illegal, that anybody trying to be celibate is mad! But all the religions insist that celibacy is something spiritual, something respectable, something divine.Strange, if there is a God, why does he go on giving you sexual energy? God gives you the sexual energy, and his representatives on the earth – the prophets, the messiahs, the popes, the imams – they are all against sex. To summarize: they are all against their God! And God has not listened to them even up to now. Each child comes fully equipped.Celibacy is the root cause of homosexuality, of all kinds of sexual perversions. But the priests have been reaping a good crop out of your perversions. The more perverted you are, the more you are in the hands of the priest, for the simple reason that you start feeling guilty. Going against nature makes you feel guilty, makes you feel disgusting, makes you feel unacceptable to yourself. You cannot have the dignity of a man if you are perverted. You lose all pride of being a man, the highest expression of evolution – consciousness. You hide your perversions.And remember, sex is not a problem, perversions are. Men have been making love to other men. Men have been making love to animals. Naturally, you will try to hide the fact that you are making love to animals. You have degraded yourself. You have reduced yourself to the state of animals.And it is strange that now Jerry Falwell-type idiots are telling people that AIDS is a punishment from God for homosexuality. That means all the people who have been the cause of creating it should be punished. Rather than punishing the popes, the imams, the shankaracharyas, the heads of other religions, he is punishing the poor victims. All shankaracharyas and all popes, and all imams, Ayatollah Khomeinis – these are the people who should suffer the punishment.But this man, Jerry Falwell, is only a mouthpiece for all these popes, Ayatollah Khomeinis, shankaracharyas. He is saying that it is punishment from God for homosexuality.But I would like to ask him a question. What has happened? God has suddenly changed his mind? – he has never been favorable to women up to now but lesbians are not punished by AIDS. Strange! God has always been a male chauvinist. For the first time he is punishing men. Lesbians are not suffering from AIDS, they are not being punished.And you should understand that the Christian trinity is a gay company – there is not a single woman. For the whole eternity, three male energies…what will they be doing? Your life is short – seventy years, eighty years, at the most ninety years. But this trinity, this triangle of homosexuals – what have they been doing all through eternity?If AIDS has to happen, your God should be the first victim. Rather than being a victim, he is punishing you. Perhaps there is a reason in it.Let me remind you about the story of Adam and Eve. God had forbidden his own creations to eat from the tree of knowledge and from the tree of life. These two trees were forbidden. It was the great revolutionary, the serpent – the first revolutionary in the world – who persuaded Eve, “This is strange – God is your father, and the father is preventing his children from being wise, is forcing his children to remain ignorant forever. God is your father and he is preventing you from becoming eternally alive, from having the taste of eternal life.”The serpent said, “Do you know why he is doing it? Because if you eat from these two trees, you yourselves will be gods – and he is jealous. He wants you to be slaves, not gods.”Perhaps that’s why he is punishing homosexuals. His company is homosexual, and you have some nerve to become homosexual – to try to be equal to God! Except that, I don’t see any reason that man should be punished.And you have not worshipped the serpent. You have condemned him as the devil. He gave you freedom, he gave you intelligence, he gave you inquiry. He made you human! Otherwise, you would still be in the Garden of Eden chewing grass, naked, unashamed of being naked chewing grass. But that was the original idea of your God, the father who lives far away in heaven.But the serpent could not do the full work. As God became aware that man had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he drove him out of the Garden of Eden. Man was expelled, because now the next step was certainly going to be the tree of eternal life.These two trees are very significant. The tree of knowledge you can call science, because science means knowledge. And the tree of eternal life you can call religion, because religion is an inquiry into the eternity of existence.God has forbidden you from both science and religion. And his priests, his prophets, his messiahs and saviors and messengers – they have been doing the same: condemning the serpent as the devil, praising God as the compassionate one. What kind of compassion is this? Can you call a father compassionate who prohibits his children from tasting the juice of eternal life? who prohibits them from becoming wise, aware, knowing?I cannot call God the compassionate one.He is the most cruel father who has ever been.And the serpent is not the devil. He has immense compassion. He could see the strategy of God, and he managed to persuade Eve. That too is significant to remember; he did not approach Adam. To persuade a man is a difficult job. He will argue, because he lives in the head. The woman does not argue, she tries to understand; she lives in the heart.Eve immediately understood the point that God is preventing them from becoming his equal. And on the part of the serpent, it was perfectly clever to persuade the woman – the husband is bound to follow the woman. There is no need to bother about the husband.Since Adam, every husband has been henpecked. He could have argued with the serpent, but who can argue with a woman? Impossible, they don’t understand each other’s language. You say something, the woman understands immediately something else that you never imagined! Conversation between a man and woman is an impossibility – particularly if they are husband and wife.The serpent is the first blessing to humanity. If you want to worship, worship the serpent. God is not worth anything. His priests are the cause of creating homosexuality.Even Gautam Buddha, the most intelligent man as far as the world of religion is concerned, was not ready to allow women into his commune. Why? What is the fear? The fear is, if women are in the commune, then the celibacy of his disciples is in danger. But celibacy is impossible, there is no question of danger. The woman will only make your disciples natural, otherwise, they will be making love to each other. And that’s what Buddhist monks have been doing down the ages, Christian monks have been doing down the ages.Nature has its own way of finding expression. If you repress the natural outlet, it will find something which is unnatural, which destroys you. AIDS is the culmination.And now whatsoever is being done by the priests and the politicians is simply stupid – still the priests go on preaching celibacy, its beauty, its spirituality.Sometimes I wonder why there has not been a religion which preaches control of urination. And you can be certain, if somebody were there to preach control of urination, there are enough retarded people on the earth who would start doing it. Of course, they cannot – they will be hypocrites. Celibacy has made all the religions hypocritical, and has perverted them into unnatural ways. And they are still teaching celibacy.Nobody looks at the cause of AIDS, at who is responsible for it. On the contrary, just the other day I came to know that in Texas they have made homosexuality illegal; and I was surprised that in Texas there are one million homosexuals. Now one million people have suddenly become criminals. Do you think your law against homosexuality is going to prevent homosexuality in those people?Has any law ever prevented anybody from doing anything? There are laws against murder; murder goes on growing. There are laws against suicide; suicide goes on growing. There are laws against stealing; you have to go on expanding your prisons, your courts, because the number of thieves goes on growing. There are laws against drugs. That simply makes things go underground. And anything which is underground has an immense attraction. Now in Texas, one million people will go underground.Homosexuality cannot be prevented by law. Law has never prevented anything! In fact, it makes the thing more attractive. These homosexuals going underground will cause the spread of AIDS more easily, because you will never know who is a homosexual. You will never know who has to be tested medically.This stupid law in Texas is going to be followed everywhere! The homosexuals appealed it, but the court of appeals has rejected their appeal. The Texan law remains a law.It is always good to bring things to the surface, then something can be done about them. Putting things underground is immensely dangerous. Now Texas will be spreading homosexuality, spreading AIDS, although those idiot politicians think that by making it illegal they have done some great job in preventing AIDS.In England it used to be – just a hundred years ago – that thieves were hanged naked in the public square and beaten to unconsciousness. That was the punishment for the thieves. Why in the public square? So that everybody can see what happens if you steal, and can learn a lesson.But soon they had to stop this practice of beating thieves, for the simple reason that a crowd gathered there to see a free show, and in the crowd there were pickpockets who were doing their job. People were focused on the criminal, they had forgotten their pockets. When it became known that even exactly on the spot where you are torturing a thief all the thieves are doing a great job….No law can prevent anything; it only makes it more attractive. It only drives things deeper into the unconscious, deeper into darkness where you cannot do anything.AIDS should be accepted.Priests should be condemned.Religions should be held responsible.Don’t be hard on the poor victims, help them. They are not going to live long.In my own commune, every sannyasin is passing through the tests, because even if he has AIDS he is not going to be condemned for it. On the contrary, he will be given more respect, more love. He is a victim.We have found only two persons who have AIDS. We have made for them the most beautiful house in the most scenic place. And we are giving them better treatment than any other sannyasin; they need it. They don’t feel guilty.And we have told them, “You read the literature that you always wanted to read, listen to the music that you always wanted to listen to but could not find the time, see the films…. Now you have enough time – two years! Nobody is so rich as to have a two-year period completely to himself! Meditate. Use these two years for deep meditation, so that when death comes, you die in silence, in peace, in joy, because you will be knowing the fruit of the other tree – eternal life. You can die dancing, singing.”Death is not a problem at all. What does it matter whether it comes from tuberculosis, or cancer, or AIDS? AIDS is the best, because there is no cure for it.But in the outside world, information is being repressed. No government wants to give the actual number of how many people are suffering from AIDS, because to give that information reveals that the country is homosexual, the country is perverted.I had never known that Texas had one million homosexuals! It is because of the law that the homosexuals started protesting, came out to fight in the courts, declared their number.You never know: if Texas has one million, how many million will California have? Perhaps everybody, except the lesbians.To be a lesbian, for the first time has gained respect, spirituality. God has never been so favorable to woman – perhaps he is learning something from me. He has always mistreated women. He made man in a certain way, and the woman he made by taking out a rib of the man. Strange…if he can make man, why can’t he also make the woman the same way? She has to be degraded, she is nothing but a bone.Jerry Falwell is saying that the Bible is historical, and every word in it is truth and nothing else. The Bible’s preaching for women is that you are a slave to man and your only function is to be a factory for reproduction. These are truths?And this priest, Falwell, is going to meet Ronald Nixon – they both belong to the same group of fundamentalist Christians. He wants the Bible to be accepted by the government as the only holy and truthful book. And the Bible, if you ask me, is the worst pornographic book in the world. Even the Supreme Court, if they are fair, will have to categorize it “X-rated.” It should be prohibited. Everything ugly is there.Ronald Nixon…I am not committing a mistake. Just the mask is of Reagan, behind the mask is Nixon. They are great friends. What Nixon could not do, he is now persuading Reagan to do. Reagan wants prayer to be introduced in all the schools, colleges, universities, academies – all kinds of educational institutions. What prayer? To whom?God is still an unproved hypothesis. And do you pray to a hypothesis? – and that too, unproved? Has any prayer been heard ever? Has the sky ever answered?It did not answer even Jesus Christ, who was simply nuts – calling himself the only begotten son of God. He was just a bastard. Every bastard can claim that he is the only begotten son of God, because the ordinary father is not his father. His father lives high above in the sky.Even Jesus Christ’s prayer on the cross was not answered. In deep frustration he shouted at the sky, “Have you forsaken me?” Still, no answer. If that is the situation of the only begotten son, what about other poor human beings who are just born out of their father and mother, mortals?This book is holy? Then magazines like Playboy, Playgirl should start calling themselves holy magazines – of course, in color…glossy.You say, “AIDS confronts us with the immediacy of death….” It is good that you become aware that death is there, absolutely certain. Now is the time to find something in you which is deathless, which is beyond death.You cannot find a better time for meditation, at least in my commune. And don’t feel serious, because death is natural; what causes it is meaningless. Don’t be in a paranoia. In fact, rejoice that you are the chosen few; everybody else is in darkness about his death, you are not. And the very fact that you know death is coming is bound to create space for you to know yourself.This will not happen in the outside world where they are declaring homosexuality illegal. This will not happen in the outside world, because even if a person is found with AIDS, he will bribe the physicians to keep the information secret. Your wife may have told you, “I will die for you,” but when she comes to know you have AIDS…. Your children, your parents, your friends – all will become your enemies. You will lose your job, you will lose your family, you will lose your dignity. You will be simply a condemned man.Before AIDS kills you in the outside world, you will have to commit suicide. That is the only way for you, nothing else, because you will not be acceptable in any restaurant, you will not be acceptable in any club, you will not be acceptable anywhere, because the spread of AIDS is not confined only to sexual intercourse. Just kissing somebody is enough, or even a tear of somebody…out of compassion you just wipe off the tear, and you may get AIDS. Any infected liquid coming out of the body may carry the virus.Hence I say to my people, stop kissing. Anyway, it is so unhygienic. Just think of the whole thing: mixing your saliva with somebody else, exploring somebody’s mouth with your tongue. Are you insane or something?And there are better ways to show love. In the oldest sexology book, which is five thousand years old, from India, Vatsyayana has given few a very significant ideas. For example, he says that the lobes of the ears are very erotic. They are. You play with your beloved’s earlobes, he plays with your earlobes. Perfectly hygienic, no stupidity involved, and a great adventure into new erotic spaces.Eskimos rub their noses, they don’t kiss. When they first saw Christian missionaries they could not believe it: “What are these idiots doing? And if this is what they are doing, what religion are they going to teach to us?”Noses are so clean, so cool. Enjoy rubbing noses, except when you suffer from a cold. That is simply determined, there is no problem about it, because any liquid flowing from the nose may carry the virus.Massage each other’s body – that will be healthy, relaxing. Lie down with each other and meditate together; hugging each other, meditating together. And you will be surprised that you can reach better orgasmic, blissful moments than by having intercourse – which is very momentary. Find out new ways, and in finding new ways there is celebration.Celebrate! Dance with your beloved, sing with your beloved, play on the guitar with your beloved. For the new age, for the new man, there are going to be new ways of love too. And it is more sophisticated, more cultured.Jesus says everybody has to carry his cross on his shoulders. I say to you, everybody has to carry his guitar. If you have to carry something, why not a guitar? Learn music, learn dancing. Your bedroom should become a temple. Right now it is a warfield.Every night before you make love you have to fight; you have to throw pillows, you have to throw things, you have to argue about everything in the world – with no conclusion. And after all this nastiness, you make love. You don’t understand at all that this love is nothing but a way somehow to go to sleep, somehow to finish this nightmare. This is not love.Burn incense in your bedroom. No electricity, just candles. The dimmer the light, the more beautiful the body of your beloved looks. In darkness, all women become Cleopatra, all men become Romeo. Such a small trick…and you have Cleopatra and Romeo in the bed.And there is no need to make love either. Be loving, hug each other. Go to sleep together hugging, silently, meditatively, with the incense filling the room, with the candlelight….If man can be taught the beauties of being loving, all homosexuality will disappear, all kinds of perversions will disappear. They cannot disappear by making laws. And strangely enough, the people who make laws – the senators and the members of the parliaments, assemblies – most of them are homosexuals. But they are in a position that they can go on keeping it a secret. Even your popes have been found to be homosexuals, and they are preaching sermons to the whole world to remain celibate.We have created such a hypocritical world. It is time to be finished with it! Be authentic, be sincere!Your question is significant.We have those two unique sannyasins who have AIDS. Be respectful to them, be loving to them. Do everything that the commune can do for them, because their death is certain. Help them to meditate. If before death they can manage to enter into their being, they will have tasted the fruit of the other tree which Adam and Eve missed.It is within you.And knowing your eternal being, knowing that you have been here always and you will be here always, is a tremendous revelation.In that revelation is celebration.Osho,Why is there an ego? It seems so absolutely meaningless, and not necessary at all – non-existent actually. Do you know?I do not know, because I don’t have any ego.To know it one has to have it.I have looked within myself, searched within myself; I have not found it anywhere.And your question is strange. You say, “The ego is non-existent.” Then why are you asking questions about things which don’t exist? No, it is not non-existent for you, hence the question. Don’t try to deceive yourself.You say, “It is meaningless, it serves no purpose.” That is not right. It serves great purpose. The purpose of the ego is to give you a false self – because the society, the religion, the country, the race in which you are born, does not want you to know your real self. That is dangerous, because the person who finds his real self is a rebel – and all the religions teach obedience.What was the fault of Adam and Eve? They disobeyed – such a small thing. Every child disobeys. In fact, only idiots never disobey, because to disobey a certain intelligence is needed. For obedience, no intelligence at all is needed. All machines are obedient, very spiritual. All machines will enter into paradise; they have never disobeyed.The societies don’t want you to know your reality because that will make you an individual, that will give you courage and guts. That will make you brave enough to say no to a thousand and one things which have been imposed upon you. Your individuality will certainly make you capable of saying yes too, but only when your intelligence is convinced. The yes will come from within yourself, it will not be imposed from the outside.That is the purpose of the ego. It is created by the societies, by the religions, by the politicians, by all the vested interests. And you are so foolish that you go on clinging to something which is arbitrary.This is the whole art of meditation: to take you to your real self. The moment you come to your real self, the arbitrary ego disappears – in the same way that darkness disappears when you come with a burning torch inside the house.The ego is the absence of your realization of your self. And it is there because your parents, your teachers, your priests, your leaders are all agreed that before you come to know who you are, you should be given a false substitute, a lollipop.In India I have observed…. Poor people cannot afford to have their women remain at home, they both have to work. The work is hard, the country is hot, and they can get only unskilled work because they have never been able to be educated. In fact they have been prohibited from education for thousands of years. So they go on making the road, or cutting stones, or cutting wood.The women also have to work, but what to do with the children? There may be a child so small…where to leave him? So they have found a method. They give a little dose of opium to the child. That is the common practice all over India. Then the child remains hungry but does not cry, he is hallucinating.In his world of imagination he may be drinking, sucking milk from his mother’s breast – and all that he has is his own thumb in his mouth. But under the impact of opium he remains silent, lying down under a tree; the mother can work, the father can work. Opium takes care of the child.Your ego is the opium that has been given to you; otherwise, you were bound to discover your real self. But once you accept the ego as your real self, all inquiry stops. It has a purpose, but that purpose does not serve you or your interests. It serves the vested interests.As far as you are concerned, your ego kills you, destroys your whole life. You are living in falsity, insincerity, inauthenticity – because everything you do is based on something which is not real!But your question is not your realization. Making statements that “Ego has no purpose, no meaning, it is non-existent” – if this is your realization, why are you asking? It is not your realization.Please, don’t be deluded. The society is very cunning, and it has made the ego really strong so that you never go beyond it. But there are methods and techniques to go beyond it; and only when you are beyond it does it become meaningless, purposeless, non-existent.That’s my whole work: to make you realize your real center, so that the unreal can disappear.Osho,Can you please talk about what it means to be total? Is it the same as not being split, or is there more to it?Not to be split, not to be schizophrenic, is only the beginning. And then there is the whole infinity, the whole eternity of ecstasy, blissfulness, understanding, awareness. There is much more to it. My insistence on being total in each of your acts is just to give you the first step.But the first step itself is so blissful, you would like to go a little more ahead, because the second step will be facing you…. There is no end, you simply go on and on and on, and everything goes on expanding. Even the sky is not the limit! You can spread yourself over the whole existence.But a split person dies without knowing anything of life. And to make you split is very simple. Every society – cultured, uncultured, primitive, contemporary – they all have used the same methods to split you. The split is: they give you certain commandments – Do this, don’t do that. And the strategy is, what they say to do is unnatural, and what they say not to do is natural. Now you are split.The child is helpless. He has to listen to the parents, to the teachers. He has to do things which he never wanted to do. He cannot do things which he has always been wanting to do. The split has happened.Now there are two persons in you: one, the unnatural, the conditioned; the other, the natural, that you have brought with yourself. And just as the method to split is easy, the method to drop the split is even more easy.Do whatever you want to do.Never do anything that goes against your nature.Whoever has said it – Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Confucius – whoever has said it does not matter.What matters is your natural self.Follow your nature, and drop all conditionings, programs that have been given to you by others.This makes you total.And this is only the first step of the pilgrimage toward eternity.Osho,Will the new woman have to suffer the indignities of “monthly blues?”Never!That is something which can be very easily changed. Man can reach to the moon – and he cannot stop poor women from suffering “the indignities of the monthly blues.” It is easy; science will find ways….I will suggest that you be on the pill continuously; the blues will disappear, and the indignities will disappear. And the pain and the suffering that are bound to come with the blues will disappear.The pill is the greatest revolution that has happened in the whole of history. And it is so cheap, so simple. But be on it continuously, don’t stop. Soon science will be able to find something, but before science finds it, try my unscientific idea. I am not a medical man, but I know it works. You give it a try.One thing you should also be made aware of: it is not only the woman who suffers the blues; man also suffers. But for centuries man has not been aware that he has a monthly course, for the simple reason that nothing comes out of his body, no blood – so he has been unaware.But you just keep a diary. Go on writing down your moods for three, four months, and you will be surprised that every month, after twenty-eight days, comes the period of suffering, sadness, depression. And it comes always exactly every month.Now it is a well-established fact that man also has his periods. But that I leave to men; when they ask, I will suggest something. Right now, my concern is the woman.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I want to concentrate my efforts. Be sincere with me. Is to be a witness of myself the only thing, or is there something else?I am not interested in intellectual questions.First, be a witness to yourself, then ask.You want me to be sincere with you; please just be sincere with yourself.It is all wanting – “I want to concentrate my efforts.” It is just wishing. Who is preventing you? What are you doing here?The only thing I am teaching is to be a witness of your actions, thoughts, feelings. Start with the actions because that is the easiest, then thoughts, and then feelings – which are the most subtle.But it seems people simply go on only thinking about things. “What is there after witnessing yourself? Is there something more?” Do you think witnessing is not more than enough?But the mind functions in this way, it always asks for more. It asks continuously – wherever you are it will ask for more. But in witnessing the mind disappears, hence the more and the desire for more disappears. Witnessing is all.But, please, do it – don’t just go on thinking. How long have you been thinking and wanting? If you had been a witness all this time, this question would not have arisen at all. That’s why I said I am not interested in any intellectual gymnastics.Do it. And one thing is certain: one who is a witness forgets all about more. It is so much! There is no possibility to imagine that there can be more.You are asking me to be sincere with you – great! And you are not sincere with yourself at all. This question shows your insincerity. My sincerity toward you will not help. You will have to be sincere, total, and do it! And start from this very moment; don’t postpone.This silence…just be a witness to it.Don’t think about it, don’t make any judgment about it.Just be a simple witness, a mirror which reflects and makes no judgment.This very moment you can become a witness.Witnessing is the only religion there is.Osho,In being responsible, one has to choose. How does it fit together with choicelessness?Again, the same stupidity.Have you ever tasted choicelessness?It is very easy to make questions which appear to be very relevant, but they only appear relevant to people who don’t know the real experience. You cannot deceive me.You are saying, “Being responsible means choosing.” Who has told you that? And then, of course, the mind says, “Then choicelessness cannot fit with being responsible.”The first thing is becoming choiceless.Live the life of a witness, without choosing, in a let-go.Let things happen to you.Do whatever spontaneously arises in you.The question of choice is intellectual: to do this or to do that, and what will be more profitable, more beneficial; what is moral and what is immoral.The question of choice is that of a blind man who is continuously groping with his stick to find where the door is, where the way is. But the man who has eyes, do you think he chooses? – “This is the wall, and this is the way, and I must choose the way because I want to get out”? You never think even – you simply get out! You have eyes. It is not a choice between the wall and the door.The situation of the person who lives in awareness is exactly the same – he has eyes.For thirty-three years I have not chosen a single thing. Whatever spontaneously arises, I go with it. And these thirty-three years have proved to me more than enough – that if you choose, you are bound to choose something wrong because choice means blindness.It is just an accident if the blind man stands up and, without any choice, moves out of the door. He has to choose, he has to inquire, he has to find. He has to depend on others.A man of awareness is independent. He does things because he feels like doing them. He enjoys doing them because it is coming out of his natural spontaneity.But the religions have confused people really badly. They have, rather than making you aware, given ten commandments. They have decided what you have to choose and what you have not to choose. They have given you responsibilities, they have given you duties.A man of awareness needs neither duties nor responsibilities nor choices. Yet only he is capable of doing the right thing in the right moment.I have heard a story of a small Christian school. The priest used to come once a week to pay a visit to the small children.The last time he had come he had told them that, “Make it a point that at least within a week’s time, you have to do something good.”One small boy asked, “But what is good? How are we going to know that this is good?”Just the way priests have always done, the priest answered, “For example, a blind man wants to cross the road; help him. This is good, helping people is good.”And when he came this time to visit, he asked, “Have you done, in the last week, anything good?” Three boys stood up. The priest said, “It is not great, but still something has started. Out of one hundred boys only three have done something good. They should be praised. One by one, please answer what good you have done?”He asked the first boy, who said, “I helped an old blind woman cross the road. That was the example that you had given about good.”The priest said, “It is very nice of you, you are a real Christian.”He asked the second boy, “What did you do?”He said, “The same. I helped a blind old woman cross the road.”The priest felt a little suspicious. In this small village, how could they manage to find two blind women? But it was possible, it was not impossible. He said, “You also have done a good job. You are also a good Christian. And what about the third?”The third said, “I have also done the same thing. I helped a blind old woman cross the road.”Now this was too much! The priest said, “I know the whole town. Where could you get three women – old, blind?”The three boys shouted simultaneously, “It was not three woman – it was one woman! And it was such a great struggle, because she never wanted to cross! But we all three…. She was screaming and beating – but to be a Christian one has to suffer. Finally we managed to get her across.”A blind man, a man who has no awareness, is bound to do something like that. They are doing it all over the world. It is not a story. It is a reality.People are dying in thousands every day and all religious leaders are teaching against birth control, against abortion. Strange, their arguments are the same: that by birth control you are rejecting a God-given child; this is not being religious. But strange – when God gives you cancer, when God gives you tuberculosis, when God gives you homosexuality, and when he gives the final Nobel Prize, AIDS, then why are you rejecting them?If everything is given by God, it should be accepted with gratitude, “Lord, you are great, you have given me cancer.” And don’t go to a hospital, don’t go to a cancer expert, because that is against religion, it is against God. God gives you cancer, and you go to a surgeon to be operated upon? You are behaving in a very anti-religious way. But nobody asks these people, “You accept….”In fact, religions run hospitals, and manage eye banks where blind people’s eyes can be operated upon. God has made someone blind, and you are serving God by making the man see again? No, these things don’t arise in their minds. The only thing they are against is birth control. Why?It has nothing to do with God. And even if God gives you a present, you have every right to return it, with thanks. What is wrong in it? If you don’t need it…. He has already given many presents before and you have accepted, and you are suffering because of those presents.Now you have to say to him, “Please stop sending such presents. I have got enough, more than enough, and your presents are dying, one thousand a day in Ethiopia alone.” Around the world the number will be far bigger.No, it has nothing to do with God. It has something to do with the priest. All religions are interested in increasing their membership. The bigger the membership, the more power is in their hands. Otherwise, this Polack pope – who is going to bother about him? If by a miracle all the Catholics disappear from the world, the Polack will go to Poland. What will he be doing?He needs more Catholics. Already there are six hundred million Catholics, but he is not satisfied with that number. If people start birth control, abortion, then Catholics will not find orphans, will not find poor people, will not find beggars to convert into Catholicism.Their vested interest is that there should be as many poor people in the world as possible, as many orphans as possible, as many suffering people as possible, because all this gives them their numbers. And every religion tries its own method.For example, Mohammedans are allowed to have four wives. If a woman is allowed four husbands, the population is not going to increase, because one husband or four husbands will not make any difference, she can have only one pregnancy. So no religion has allowed four husbands to one woman, which would have been far better – the population would have been balanced.But Mohammedanism allows four wives to every man. Now he can create four children every year. Mohammed himself, as an example, had nine wives.One Mohammedan king in India, the Nizam of Hyderabad, had five hundred wives – almost a factory to produce Mohammedans. Mohammedans are just lagging a little behind the Christians. They are the number two religion and they want to be number one.This is the politics of numbers. Don’t drag in a non-existent God.And they go on creating arguments, they say, “This is against life, anti-life – abortion or birth control.” But they don’t understand the biology of man. In each lovemaking more than one million living people are released by the husband. Only one, perhaps – because the woman is not going to become pregnant every time – once in a while, perhaps once in a while one male sperm reaches in time to the female egg.The time is very limited – only two hours – and the track that he has to run in proportion to his size, is two miles. A two mile track, running and jogging with no practice, no rehearsal, untrained, unskilled, not knowing at all what is happening – just seeing others are running, he also starts running.Where they are going they don’t know. Why they are going they don’t know. Only one thing is certain, that they have to go fast, because others are going fast.That’s why there are so many idiots in the world, because intelligent people avoid crowds. And intelligent people ask first, “Why?” They stand by the side of the road and think it over: “Why are we running, what for?” And anyway, intelligent people are lazy. Seeing this big traffic jam they relax by the side and wait until everybody has gone, then perhaps they will also see what the matter is.But life is only two hours for them; within two hours they will be dead. So in each lovemaking millions of people are dying. And a man, in his whole life – from fourteen till at least fifty – makes love so many times that a single man can fill the whole earth with its present population if all his living cells get a chance. But the trouble is the woman releases only one egg every month.The woman has been a tremendous blessing to humanity. If she was also releasing one million eggs per month, then there would have been no elbow room anywhere. You would be always in a crowd, even in your bedroom! Just releasing one egg per month has resulted in such a huge crowd that the earth is not able to support it.God is nowhere; otherwise, why this stupidity? If you count all stupidities, they will give you the idea that there is no God, because what is the point of releasing one million people in one lovemaking when perhaps only one is going to have the chance of being born? Why release one million, or more than one million, people?God seems to be either just stupid, not knowing arithmetic…. Rather than saying that, because that is condemnatory – to call him an idiot who does not know even the basic three R’s – it is far more compassionate to God to say that he does not exist. At least you relieve him of all kinds of stupidity, of all kinds of crime, of all kinds of murder, rape, suicide – because these are all his gifts.The priests are not interested in you. They are not interested in your awareness, because a man of awareness will certainly see the point, that the world is already overpopulated. There is no need to convince him about it – that to bring more children into the world is to make it more poor, more hungry, more starving, more illiterate.Is there a choice, for the man of awareness, to use birth control or not? There is no choice; his awareness is enough. He does what his awareness allows him to do.And the only responsibility that you have is not toward the nation – because that has been the cause of all the wars in the world. In three thousand years five thousand wars have happened on this earth. Who could manage so many wars, and how? – continuously killing, murdering, because of your responsibility to the nation. You have been taught that if the need arises you have to die for the nation and you will be a martyr and your name will be written in golden letters in the history books.I have never seen any name in any history book written in golden letters, particularly about those poor soldiers who have been killed. In fact, when they become ready to go to war their individuality is destroyed, their identity is destroyed. Their names become numbers!If a soldier dies or has not come back by the evening, on the notice board the next day there is a declaration that: “Number twenty-six is either dead or missing.” Reading it, number twenty-six does not create in you the idea that number twenty-six had an old father, a sick mother, a loving wife waiting for him, children that he has to raise. Number twenty-six doesn’t have any family.Do you see the strategy? If a name is written, then many will feel that the same can happen to them. Then who is going to take care of their families?They have been given numbers. In the army a man has no name, no identity except a number. And remember, numbers are replaceable; people are not. Soon somebody else will be number twenty-six. But the man who was number twenty-six in the first place was unique. There was nobody else who could have replaced him.Number twenty-six has no problem: no family, no children, no mother, no wife, no friends.Responsibility to the nation means you are preparing, getting ready to fight against other nations. And they also have the teaching: responsibility to their nation.But forget all those promises that your names will be written in golden letters. In fact, so many people die in a war that they cannot make so many graves, they make collective graves. And they certainly make a memorial, dedicated to the anonymous soldier who died for the country. Anonymous!No man of awareness can feel any responsibility toward the nations. In fact, he will be against any such attitude. That attitude has created wars, killings, unnecessary massacre.The whole earth is one!The man of awareness cannot see where the divisions are.Just the other day one beautiful young journalist was asking me – he was from Switzerland – “Do you love Swiss people?”He was shocked for a moment, because I said, “I hate…any divisions of humanity.” Then he relaxed. When he heard, “I hate…” I could see the change. He thought I was saying I hate the Swiss people. I waited a little, and his breathing must have stopped at that moment – what kind of statement was I going to make? He would never have conceived that I would say I hate the Swiss people.I don’t hate the Swiss people. I hate divisions.Why should there be Swiss people, and Swedish people, and German and Italian and Indian and American? Why?It is one humanity.The man of awareness will feel a responsibility toward the whole, not toward parts which are fighting against each other.There is no choice. He simply finds it absolutely clear.You have been taught responsibility to your family. But the family is a very small group. You have been made responsible to a very small group – which is not good.There was a fight between my father and one of my neighbors, because the land between our house and the neighbor’s house was in dispute as to whom it belongs. I told my father, “Remember, don’t go to court against that man, because I am going to say in court that the land belongs to the neighbor.”He said, “You are going to say that? I am your father, and you will be witnessing against me?”I said, “Yes – because I know perfectly well, and you know perfectly well that the land belongs to the neighbor. Of course, he has no documents – the documents belong to you, so you are going to win the case. But I am going to witness against the whole thing. I am going to say, ‘Those documents are not authentic. The land belongs to the neighbor. It has belonged to him for centuries, to his forefathers. They have always used it. I don’t know from where my father has got these documents. We have never used that land.’”He was very puzzled. He said, “This is strange. You don’t feel any responsibility to the family?”I said, “I feel responsibility, and this is my responsibility. And remember, I am small, perhaps my testimony will not carry weight, but I have convinced my grandfather too” – he was always a friend to me – “and he is also going to witness against you!“Now two generations – one which is older than you, the other which is younger than you – are going to witness against you that these documents are not true. And my grandfather knows that the land never belonged to us – neither to his father, nor to his grandfather. So you simply withdraw the case, forget all about that land.”He said, “But this is strange. I know that you have great friendship with my father, and he will listen to you rather than to me. And if that old man is going to be a witness against me, it is better to withdraw the case and burn the documents, and forget all about that land.” That land was significant for him. “But,” he said, “you don’t seem to have any responsibility to the family.”I said, “I only have responsibility. It is not addressed to the nation, to the family, to the religion, to the race.”Any responsibility addressed to something is no longer responsibility. Responsibility has to be choiceless. And your awareness can give you these two things together: choicelessness, responsibility.But your question is just garbage. You have no experience of responsibility, you have no experience of choicelessness, you have no experience of awareness – and you are creating a very relevant question! With me, be existential, not intellectual.That is the basic difference between me and all your old religions: I give you freedom, spontaneity, responsibility, choicelessness – but these things are not finite, addressed to small things, these things are infinite, unaddressed. Each moment you have to be aware, and you will find what your responsibility is. There will be no choice.When I passed my matriculation exams, my whole family was in a great turmoil, because they all wanted…somebody wanted me to be a doctor, somebody wanted me to be a scientist, somebody wanted me to be an engineer – because in India these are respectable jobs, paying jobs. You become rich, you become well-known, you are honored. But I said, “I am going to study philosophy.”They all said, “This is nonsense! No man of sense will go and study philosophy. What will you do after that? Six years wasted in the university studying things which are of no use. They don’t have any value, you will not even get a small service, a small job.”And they were right. In India, if you apply for the smallest job, like a clerk in the post office which needs only matriculation as qualification, and you have a master’s degree in philosophy, you top the university, you have a gold medal – you will be refused. Only because of these things! These are disqualifications, you are a difficult person! A clerk should not be a philosopher; otherwise there are bound to be difficulties.So they said, “You will suffer your whole life. Think it over.”I said, “I never think, you know that. I simply see. And there is no question of choice, I know what I am going to study. It is not a question of weighing which job will be more profitable. Even if I become a beggar, I am going to study philosophy.”They were at a loss. They all asked me, “But what is the reason that you want to study philosophy?”I said, “The reason is that my whole life I am going to fight against philosophers. I have to know everything about them.”They said, “My God! This is your idea? We have never imagined that a man should study philosophy because he is going to fight philosophers his whole life.” But they knew that I am crazy. They said, “Something like this was expected.” Still they persisted: “There is time, you can still think about it. The universities will be opening in one month; you can still think.”I said, “One month, one year, one life makes no difference, because I don’t have any choice. It is my choiceless responsibility.”One of my uncles, who was a graduate from the university, said, “It is absolutely impossible to talk with him – he uses words which don’t seem to carry any meaning. Choicelessness…responsibility…awareness – what do these things have to do with life? You will need money, you will need a house, you will need to support a family….”I said, “I am not going to have a family. I am not going to have a house and I am not going to support anybody!” And I have not supported anybody and I have not made any house. I am the poorest man in the world!They could not manage to force me to become a doctor, engineer, scientist, but they all were angry. And when I became a wandering teacher around the country, doing the job for which I had studied logic and philosophy because I wanted to be perfectly acquainted with the enemy, soon there was not a single man who was ready to accept my challenge. Then my family started feeling guilty, feeling that it was good that they were not able to make me a doctor, engineer, scientist. I had proved that they were wrong.They started asking me, “Forgive us.”I said, “There is no problem, because I never took all your advice seriously. I never bothered! Whatever I was going to do, I was going to do in spite of everything going against me! So don’t feel guilty. I have never taken your advice seriously; I was hearing you, but not listening. I had a decision in me, a decisiveness.”The process is very simple.Meditate, become more aware and then you will see: choices disappear, a choicelessness arises.And it is such a tremendous joy to have a choiceless spontaneity. It is such a freedom. Choice is such a burden.I had a friend who was utterly miserable. I asked him, “What is the reason for your misery? I don’t see any point – you are healthy, you are young, you are in a very well-paid position. Why should you be so miserable?”He said, “The misery is that I am caught in a choice.”I asked, “What kind of choice?”He said, “There are two women. One is beautiful but poor, the other is so ugly but tremendously rich. I have to decide to whom to get married. And this has been going on for two years. I have been postponing it, persuading them both, ‘Wait, soon….’ They are both waiting, and I have to show love to both.“I hate the poverty of the one, I hate the body of the other. I am almost caught in such a situation that I don’t see any way out.”I said to him, “Every choice brings misery. If you marry the beautiful woman, soon there will be trouble, because the woman wants to go on shopping – that is the only game the woman knows – and you don’t have money. You cannot afford that woman, I know her. She would like to have a beautiful house, a car, servants, cooks. Because she knows she is so beautiful, she can get anybody as her husband.“If you marry her, her beauty will be finished within three days. The same face – how long can you see it, how long can you think it is beautiful? And you will not be able to fulfill any of her demands, so it is going to be a constant conflict.“Then you will start feeling, ‘It would have been better if I had married the other woman. Within three days her ugliness would have disappeared the same way as the beauty has disappeared. And after three days there would have been just paradise.’” – the woman was immensely rich.“But if you marry her, then too you will be in trouble. Marrying an ugly woman – you hate even to see her face; you will be creating a hell for yourself.And the ugly woman is very possessive because she knows her husband will be flirting with other women. She is so ugly this will be a simple, logical conclusion, so she will be always on your neck. And you will have to be just a servant, because all the money that she has will reduce you to a slave.”So he said, “What am I supposed to do? Either way I am in difficulty.”I said, “My suggestion is, you start coming to my school of meditation” – I had a school there.He said, “Meditation? I am talking about marriage, not about meditation. You are strange! My problem is marriage.”I said, “I understand your problem. That’s why I am telling you to come to the meditation class, because only meditation can take you out of this catch, out of this fix, out of this misery.”He said, “Okay, I will try. There is no harm, I am not going to lose anything.”I said, “There is nothing to be lost, everything to be gained.”He was in such deep misery that he wanted to come out of the misery, so he put all his effort into meditation – really total. And one day I saw his face changing, and I asked him, “What is happening to you?”He laughed. He said, “I am finished with both! In fact, now I don’t want to get married at all.”I said, “From where have you got this idea?”He said, “It is not an idea. Becoming more silent and more silent and more silent, I have touched the space you call meditation. Now I am utterly content with myself. I don’t need anybody else to make me complete – I am complete.”And the man has remained the same. All these years I have been getting information about him, asking other friends whether he has got married or not. They said, “No, he simply meditates. He has left his job. He said, ‘I have earned enough money, I can live on the interest alone. I simply want to meditate. I simply want to go deeper into the mystery of life.’”And as you go deeper, all choices disappear. There is an immense freedom in choicelessness. And there is great illumination, light, in awareness.Meditation is the method to create more awareness, more consciousness, and a responsibility – unaddressed. Whenever, wherever you feel it, go totally into it.It happened I was traveling from Bombay to Calcutta. It was a long journey, but I enjoyed trains rather than airplanes because that was the only time I could rest. From Bombay to Calcutta it takes forty-eight hours by train, the fastest train. So I was hoping to just relax and enjoy for forty-eight hours, because once I entered Calcutta there would be at least five meetings a day, and there was not going to be any rest.As I entered my air-conditioned cabin, there was another man – it was a car for two persons. That man must have been watching through the window what was happening outside. Hundreds of people had come to give me a send-off – so many roses and garlands. He must have been looking through the window.In the air-conditioned class in India – I don’t know about America – you can see out from the glass, but you cannot see in; it is one-way. So I was not aware that somebody was watching. I was outside on the platform surrounded by the crowd. But so many people were touching my feet and putting garlands, that that man became certain that I was a great religious leader.As I entered the cabin, he fell on the ground, touched my feet, kissed my feet. And he said, “I have always been searching for a great teacher. Perhaps you are the man.”He was a brahmin. I told him, “Yes, I am the man, but there is a difficulty. I am a Mohammedan.”He said, “My God! And I have kissed your feet!”I told him, “You go to the bathroom and have a good gargle. And what can I do? – you never asked me, you simply fell on the ground and touched my feet and kissed my feet. I would have told you, but you never gave me any chance.”He rushed into the bathroom, took a shower, because a brahmin…! In India that is the highest Hindu caste, the caste of the priests. They don’t consider anybody even to be touchable.He came back. He was looking very miserable, even after the shower. And I said, “I was just joking! Can’t you see me? Can’t you understand? Have you forgotten all those Hindus outside?” – because in India you can recognize very well who is who. Mohammedans have different caps, different kind of clothes; Hindus have different caps, different kind of clothes. It is not difficult.I said, “You are just unnecessarily bothering.”He fell again. He kissed my feet this time really hard. He said, “I was suspecting while I was taking the shower…this man does not look like a Mohammedan. And I am relieved of a great difficulty; otherwise I would have repented my whole life.”I said, “You will have to repent. Can’t you see my beard?”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “Exactly what you understand. I am a Mohammedan.”The man rushed back to the bathroom and then he told the conductor, “Please change my room – that man may disturb my whole night; he keeps changing his idea of who he is.”The conductor said, “But what do you have to do with him? Let him change his idea. You have your seat, you have your place reserved. There is no problem.”I came out. I said, “There is no problem, but this man thinks I am a Mohammedan.”The conductor said, “You think he is a Mohammedan? I know him!”The man said, “Then there is no problem.”And I tortured him so much that finally he said, “Whoever you are, I am your disciple! I have dropped the idea of choosing between Hindu and Mohammedan. One thing is certain that you are something!”Just meditate, be aware.Choices will disappear.And a new kind of responsibility will arise which will not be imposed by the outside, which will be your own fragrance.Osho,How can enlightenment be catching?Just like a cold!It is catching.How does laughter catch? Why suddenly do you all start laughing together? Enlightenment happens just the same way.Just wait, it is going to happen to you too!Osho,What is spiritual bullshit?All bullshit is spiritual, and all spirituality is nothing but bullshit.Okay?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Recently, in a radio address, President Reagan urged parents to get involved in their children's education by insisting schools teach ethics, morality and values along with the three R's. He said, “To me, a value-free education is a contradiction in terms.” Addressing students, Reagan said, “You are not only studying for yourself, but for your family, your community, your country, and your God.”Osho, is this what education is all about? Would you kindly share with us your vision of education?Ronald Reagan is not aware of what he is talking about. Education, to be authentic, must be value-free. It should not give you a certain kind of morality, ethics. It should not give you a belief in God and other similar lies.Education’s whole purpose is in the very word “education.” The root meaning of the word “education” is: to draw out. Whatever is your potential, education is to help it come out of you, from the seed to the flowers. It is not the purpose of education to mold you into a certain pattern – that’s what Reagan is saying.These words are vague. Let us start with “God,” because everything else is dependent on the concept of God. If every educational system schools, colleges, universities teaches God, that means they don’t teach you to think, they don’t teach you to doubt, they don’t teach you to experience. They teach you to believe in something you do not know.If that is not hypocrisy, then what else can be hypocritical?Education cannot be concerned with God, because God is the biggest lie invented by the priests. Moreover, almost half of the world does not believe in God. Communists don’t believe in God, Atheists don’t believe in God, Buddhists don’t believe in God, Jainas don’t believe in God. It is almost half the population of the world. What are you going to do with these people?Are you going to deprive them of education, just the way the scout leaders have expelled their best scout because he refused to sign a paper in which he was to declare that he believes in God?He said, “I do not know. How can I believe?”Just a fourteen-year-old child has more sense than Ronald Reagan. What he says has sincerity, authenticity: “I do not know, so how can I believe? Give me experience and you will not need to ask me to believe.”Rather than respecting him, rather than respecting his independence and freedom of thought, he was expelled.Now, half of the world does not believe in God. What are you going to do with these people in your education system? Expel them? Then better be finished with all educational systems and just teach in your churches!Nobody has ever been able to prove the existence of God. For thousands of years hundreds of theologians have been trying to find some way to prove God, but no proof has been found.Education is the search for truth. I cannot start with any belief. Its basis has to be doubt.Doubt is a tremendously powerful instrument of your intelligence. Doubt everything until you come to a point where doubt is no longer possible. The moment you experience, doubt falls by itself. Before that, to start with belief is to remain retarded.Reagan is retarded, and he wants the whole humanity to remain retarded. I don’t think his mental age is more than thirteen. And if he has any suspicion, he can come here: our therapists and psychologists can give him an exact, accurate estimate of his mental age. Only a retarded person can talk in such a way.So the first thing is, education has to free from any belief.And what kind of belief are you going to give? There are so many gods: the Christian God, the Hindu God, the Mohammedan God-and there is no way to decide which one is the right God. In fact, they are all just imaginations.When science comes to a truth, then all over the world the truth is the same. If water evaporates at a hundred degrees centigrade, it does not matter who is boiling it – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian; in England, in Germany, or Italy: it will evaporate exactly at a hundred degrees. That is something true.But the Hindu God will look very strange to the Christians, the Christian God looks laughable to the Hindus, the Mohammedan God has his own uniqueness and the Jewish God is totally different. Which God are you going to teach?But Reagan’s whole effort is to change this country from freedom, democracy, and reduce it to a Christian country…against the communists, a Christian land. He is trying in every way to propagate Christianity, which is one of the most primitive religions. In comparison to Buddhism it stands nowhere: a third-class religion.And what values? Just the word “value” is meaningless. What values are you going to teach?The first of all the values is freedom, which you are denying. You are forcing students to believe in God. There is no value higher than freedom.What values are you going to teach them? Love? But how can a man who believes in a Christian God love the Jewish God, love the Jews who crucified Jesus? For two thousand years Christians have been destroying Jews in every possible way., And the Mohammedan God has no similarity to the Christian God….If you want to teach values, then teach freedom.Teach how to think, how to think clearly, and how to come to your own decisions. Those decisions should not be imposed on you.Reagan says, “A value-free education is almost a contradiction in terms. Education cannot be value-free.”Education itself is the ultimate value.There is no need for other values to be taught.To educate a person means to sharpen his intelligence, to make him more centered, to bring his potential to its flowering.Remember, his potential has to be brought into flowering not Ronald Reagan’s, not anybody else’s. Every individual is so unique that you cannot mold all the individuals alike, make them similar. That will be the greatest destruction – destruction of individuality.Education itself is the value – to give the person total freedom to inquire, to doubt; total freedom to grow according to his nature, not according to some pattern given by some prophet, messiah, savior.Education means making an individual so strong that he does not need any God, that he does not need any church, that he does not need any prayer; he can stand on his own feet and he can find his own way.Certainly education is devoted to the search for truth. And these are the real values: truth, freedom, authenticity, responsibility.But politicians and priests go on changing the meanings of words. Reagan is saying, “They should be taught responsibility for the family, for the community, for the nation, for God.” So that they are not to be responsible toward themselves; they have to be responsible toward everything else.A person who is not responsible toward himself, how can he be responsible to anything else? He knows no art, no taste, no experience of responsibility. And to be responsible for oneself may not be necessarily to be responsible to the family. The family may be wrong. The family may be believing in all kinds of lies.It does not mean necessarily to be responsible to the community, because the community is in a mess, almost insane.It does not mean, it cannot mean to be responsible to the nation. This idiotic idea of responsibility to the nation has been the cause of dividing humanity. And the basic root of all the murders, wars, massacres in the whole of history: responsibility to your nation.Responsibility has to be something bigger, not so small – family, community, nation. Responsibility has to be toward yourself, and then it spreads toward the whole humanity. Then it goes on spreading and growing toward all life. Then still it goes on spreading, toward the whole existence. But first the basic seed has to be there.They deny that. They don’t talk about responsibility toward yourself, because that is dangerous. If Americans were responsible toward themselves they would have refused to kill innocent people in Vietnam. But they killed poor innocent people. They had done no harm to you – but responsibility to your nation…!It is a very tricky game. Where is the nation? In the name of the nation, it is responsibility toward the politicians. So whatsoever the politicians say you have to follow it, you cannot question it. And who are your politicians?Adolf Hitler teaches Germans to be responsible to the nation. If all the Germans were responsible toward themselves there would have been no second world war. They would have simply refused to kill innocent people: “Why? Why invade, why destroy? – just for the glory of this madman, Adolf Hitler?” But they were never taught responsibility. They were taught, in the name of responsibility, something false: responsibility to the nation.And what is a nation? Just lines on the map. The earth remains undivided, humanity remains undivided. In fact the whole existence is an undivided, organic whole.The sun is far away. It takes eight and a half minutes for the rays of the sun to reach to the earth. Light travels with a tremendous speed, so don’t think eight and a half minutes is a small phenomenon. Light travels one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. Multiply it by sixty – that is one minute; Multiply it again by eight and a half, and you will know the distance.But if the sun does not rise one day we will all be dead. Without the sun, neither man nor animals nor trees – nothing can live. It is the sun that is the source of our life, warmth. We are not disconnected. And the sun makes no distinction, that he has to give more life to Christians and less life to the Jews.Existence knows no divisions. We are continuously joined in invisible ways.You are breathing – just for a few minutes don’t breathe, and you will know how difficult it is not to breathe. Breathing joins you with the atmosphere around you which is invisible. And breathing is needed by everybody – it does not depend on your religion, on your nation.In fact it depends on trees, because trees exhale oxygen and inhale carbon dioxide. You inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. That creates the balance. But foolish man has gone on cutting trees, not knowing that he is cutting his own life. Who is going to give him fresh oxygen? And who is going to take his carbon dioxide? – because if the air around you is filled with carbon dioxide, you will be dead.Everything is related to every other thing.A man who is alert, aware, intelligent, responsible toward himself, will find a tremendous responsibility toward the whole of life, toward the whole existence, because it is all contributing to you. Without it you are not going to live.But Reagan wants you to be responsible toward God who has not done anything. Even a tree is doing far more than your God.Hindus are better because they worship trees. At least the trees go on giving you oxygen – they deserve some respect from you – and they take carbon dioxide. That’s why when you burn a tree you get coal; that coal contains carbon dioxide.Hindus look far more responsible. They worship rivers, they worship trees, because without water you cannot exist, without air you cannot exist. The rivers and the trees are giving you more than any God. In fact nobody knows what His contribution is, what He has given to humanity. In fact He has always been against humanity – if He is anywhere.He prohibited Adam and Eve from having the two most important things: wisdom and eternal life.And this fellow, Ronald Reagan, is telling you to believe in this God who is not in favor of man becoming wise, who is not in favor of his coming to know the secrets of eternal life. Is this God your friend or your enemy?No, no true education system has anything to do with God.And what values? What responsibility? There is only one responsibility – that is toward ourselves. And out of that responsibility you will never act wrongly.If your family is going to do something wrong, you will not be part of the family. You will tell them, “This is wrong, and I am going to fight against you.” If your nation is going wrong, your responsibility will be that this should be stopped, immediately stopped.Just two days ago, in Texas, they made homosexuality illegal, a crime. One million people in Texas are homosexual. Suddenly, within a day, one million people have become criminals. That law is not going to stop them, or change them. Law has never done anything like that. It has not been able to change any thief. It has not been able to change any criminal.In fact, your jails are training grounds for criminals. When some amateur thief enters prison, there he finds master thieves, who ask him, “Why did you get caught?” He learns all the tricks, because the question is not of stealing, the question is of being caught. The crime is not that you stole, the crime is that you were caught. There are many thieves, many murderers free in the society, because they are clever and cunning enough not to be caught.One of my teachers used to be always the head examiner. He used to arrange the whole examination system in the school. He was the oldest, most experienced teacher, and certainly wise. He would come into the class and he would say, “Remember one thing: if you are copying from somebody else, or if you are hiding some book in your clothes, I have nothing against you – unless you are caught. Copying from others, copying from books, notes, is perfectly okay, but don’t be caught. So I’ll give you two minutes to think. Within two minutes – I will keep my eyes closed – you can bring all your notes that you are hiding in your clothes, put them on the table. After two minutes, if you are caught your life is ruined.”And he would close his eyes and people would start bringing their notes – “This man is strange, because he is saying it is not a crime to copy, the crime is to be caught. And he is warning you beforehand, because you cannot escape.”He said, “My whole life I have been the head examiner in this school, and I know every trick that you can manage – and I will find it out. Two minutes of total freedom for you: I will not say anything, just put everything on the table. And when you leave the examination hall you can take your notes back home. After two minutes you will be in danger, constant danger. Nobody has been able up to now to escape without being caught.”He was right. He was saying the truth about the whole world of criminals. Crime is not a problem; the problem is that you are an amateur, that you don’t know how to do a certain crime, you get caught.But in the prison there are experts who have been to prison many times, and each time they have learned more. There are master thieves who can teach you everything. The amateur, by the time he comes out of the prison, is no longer an amateur. Now he is perfectly educated and graduated from the jail, it will be difficult to catch him anymore.In fact, thieves and other criminals by and by start feeling at home in the prison, more at ease. They really want to be caught for a few months; otherwise they are busy continuously no rest period, no holidays, no weekends. They want once in a while to be caught, sent to jail for one year or eight months. There they can rest, there they can refresh their education. It is a refresher course, they can meet masters.I have heard: A man entered a prison cell in the darkness. He saw another figure sitting in the far corner. The man in the cell asked him, “How many years?”He said, “They have really been tough with me. I have been imprisoned for twelve years.”That man from the corner said, “Then you keep your bed near the door, because I am here for my whole life. You will be going earlier than me, so why bother coming deep into the room? You just keep your bed by the door. Twelve years? I have been here for twenty years already! And you think they have been tough with you – you are foolish. Rest for twelve years, learn more techniques. And I am here, I can tell you everything that is needed for a thief not to be caught.”What values are you going to give to your children in the schools? Are you going to make them murderers in the name of responsibility for the nation? Are you going to make them murderers as part of their duty toward their religion? No, these are not values to be taught. And politicians should not poke their noses in the educational system. Education has to be completely free from the state, from the government.Education has to be devoted to freedom, to individuality.Education is the time when a person should learn silence, serenity, peace. These are the values. These are his responsibilities: he should learn sensitivity, aesthetics, the beauty of the sunrise and the sunset and the stars, the flowers, the people. He should learn how to be natural and not be diverted by any vested interest, from his nature – that is his responsibility.No priest should be allowed inside any educational institution, because whatever the priest says is going to be against you.He will tell you that celibacy is great, that unless you are celibate you will not enter into the kingdom of God. And celibacy is absolutely unnatural. Through celibacy, they have turned the whole humanity into a perverted crowd.If one million homosexuals are confirmed in a very, very orthodox and traditional state, Texas, what about the advanced states, more educated, more progressive, more contemporary?Now, who are the politicians to decide? And this is a dangerous step, because the homosexuals will remain homosexuals, it is just that they will go underground. And whenever anything goes underground, it goes beyond your control. Then those homosexuals are not going to be tested as to whether they have AIDS or not, and they will go on spreading AIDS.But the politicians think they are fulfilling their duty and responsibility toward the country. This is not responsibility; it is an absolutely irresponsible act on the part of the politicians, the courts, the appeal courts. Whatever they have done in Texas is an indication of what is going to happen in every state. And that will endanger everybody’s life.You will never know who is a homosexual because nobody will admit that he is a homosexual. You will never know who is carrying AIDS – and AIDS can be spread so easily: by kissing, by tears…perhaps they will discover even by perspiration. Any infected liquid flowing out of the body can carry the virus of AIDS.This is not responsibility. This idea of making homosexuality illegal is a great irresponsible act.And the most strange thing is that all this homosexuality is produced by Christians and other religions themselves.Just the other day I was informed that one very well-known bishop is going to be arrested because so many parents have reported that he has been having sexual relationships with small children. In fact it is very difficult for poor bishops, popes, not to be homosexual. You don’t allow them to come closer to women.And sending these priests to teach about God, about responsibilities toward religion, nation, family, is dangerous. These people may be carrying AIDS. All your priests have to be very carefully tested because most probably they are all homosexuals – they have no other way. They should be kept away from children as much as possible. But parents are taking their children to the priests, priests are going to the schools to teach religion; and these are dangerous people.My idea of education is that it should help you get rid of all beliefs, because all beliefs are hindrances in your journey toward truth. You should be freed from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. By the time you come out of the university you should be simply a human being, responsible to yourself and to the whole universe.But Ronald Reagan would not like that, that you are responsible toward the whole universe, because the universe includes the Soviet Union too. The universe includes Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans.No, to him the fundamentalist Christians are the only people who know the truth; everybody else is wrong. So when he talks about values, hidden behind the beautiful word values he wants every educational system to teach you the values that fundamentalist Christians think are right.Certainly I don’t think Ronald Reagan will teach vegetarianism. In his values, vegetarianism cannot be included. I don’t think he will teach everybody that the cow is your mother and of course, the bull is your father. But if a Hindu priest teaches values, the cow is the mother. Then he will teach totally different things – that cow dung is holy…. That’s why I said yesterday, “All bullshit is spiritual.” If cow dung is holy, then what about your father, the bull? Bullshit is holier. He is not going to teach the values that Mohammedans think are values. Mohammedans say that each man has the right to have four wives. And the duty of the wife and the responsibility for the woman is simple: to go on producing children and keep your husband happy, satisfied sexually.That is the whole religion for the woman…in a way simple. No other discipline, no other ritual – just keep your husband sexually fulfilled and go on producing children, because God wants the whole world to become Mohammedan. And obviously a man with four wives will create more children than a man with only one wife. Mohammedans say that she can do these two things, then the woman automatically enters into paradise; nothing else has to be bothered about. But your husband is your master and you are a slave – this is a Mohammedan value.So what values is Ronald Reagan going to teach? – because in America there are Mohammedans, there are Hindus, there are Jews, there are Christians, there are Buddhists. And there are my red people who don’t believe in any religion, who don’t believe in any God, who don’t believe in any responsibility to any nation – the Soviet Union included. Toward whom are they going to be responsible?No, all these responsibilities are arbitrary. The only authentic responsibility is toward your own potential, your own intelligence and awareness – and to act accordingly.Values have not to be imposed on you.They should grow with your awareness, in you.Education at least should be kept free from all kinds of criminals. And politicians are the worst criminals in the world. A man murders somebody, he is a criminal. And Adolf Hitler kills almost ten million people and he is not a criminal. Alexander – nobody knows how many people he killed, but he is “Alexander the Great.” He is not a criminal.Your whole history is the history of great criminals! Small criminals – somebody stealing a few dollars, somebody stealing your clothes, somebody stealing your car – these are criminals. They will suffer indignities in the court, by the police, then in the jail. And your greatest criminals? – their names will be remembered in history as great men.My people cannot be responsible to any nation. We claim the whole earth as ours! And we claim nature as part of us, and we are part of nature. Our responsibility is to remain organically whole with nature.And what are our values? Freedom is a value; doubt is a value; skepticism is a value; agnosticism is a value. I don’t think Reagan will agree with any of these values. Who is going to decide the values?To me there is nothing greater than doubt, because it can lead you to everything that is true. There is nothing more criminal than belief, because it is going to lead you into more and more lies. It will make you blind. All beliefs are blind. And to make people blind cannot be called a value; cannot be called education.Education is tremendously valuable. It has to teach you respect for yourself – which all the religions have destroyed. It has to teach you acceptance of yourself – which all the religions have denied. It has to teach you love for yourself – because a man who cannot love himself cannot love anybody else in the world. You have to start with yourself. If you are full of love for yourself, you can share it.But all the religions are against self-love; they call it selfishness. They want you to love everybody else except yourself. To me, just the opposite is a value, because I know that a man who is not full of light within himself cannot share his light with others. He has none to share. This is the problem around the world.Every partner in a couple is expecting the other to love him. The husband wants the wife to love him; the wife wants the husband to love her – and both are unaware that they don’t know the art of love, because they never loved themselves. They are going to quarrel, fight and destroy each other’s life. I teach you clearly to be selfish.It is natural to be selfish. And the miracle is, if you are really selfish, out of your selfishness there will be so much abundance of intelligence, love, respect, that you are bound to share it with others. Because the economics of the inner world is: the more you share, the more you have. Naturally, you want to share it more and more. Why only to Americans? Why not to the Canadians? Why not to the Brazilians? Why not to the whole world?A small human heart is capable of filling the whole universe with love. But first it has to learn the art; and you have to begin with yourself.Ronald Reagan is trying, in every way, somehow to impose Christianity on America. First, he wanted prayers to be introduced in the schools. The Supreme Court refused ; they ruled that prayer cannot be introduced because there are Jews, there are Mohammedans, there are different sects of Christians. What prayer? And on what grounds?In fact, the Supreme Court itself is committing a crime by keeping the Bible inside the court for people to take the oath. And the Bible is so ugly and so pornographic and so full of lies, that to take the oath on the Bible…. Then what is wrong with taking an oath on the magazine Playboy? At least it is colorful, more sensitive to beauty. Before taking the oath you can at least look into it, and whatever is there that is true, you can take the oath on it. To keep the Bible in the court is against democracy, against freedom, against truth.But even the Supreme Court could not manage to accept prayer for all educational institutions. Reagan was very much hoping that it would for the simple reason that a strange coincidence has happened…. The American Constitution functions in a different way than the constitution in any other country. In India, the Supreme Court judge reaches to the Supreme Court by seniority, by experience. From high courts to the Supreme Court, a very few people are able to reach. But in America, the constitution is such that the president appoints the Supreme Court judges.The idea in the mind of those people who made the constitution was that there are nine Supreme Court judges. Once in a while one person will retire and the president can appoint one new person. And the appointment is for his whole life, till he retires, nobody will be able to pressurize him – even the president cannot pressurize him. Once he is appointed, he is appointed. Until his resignation, retirement, nobody can put any pressure on him. This was a good idea, because in seniority there are possibilities of pressure.In the Indian constitution, the prime minister or the president is to choose, because sometimes a few people are equally senior. And they have also the power to choose someone who is not senior, but is more intelligent, more fair, more capable of being a Supreme Court judge. But that way you can pressurize people.To avoid pressure from politicians, the American idea was good. But they had never conceived that there would be a time when five judges would retire at the same time. This could happen now, Reagan might appoint five judges of his own choice. Out of nine, five could be his people. That’s why he was absolutely certain that whatever he wants now can be done; the Supreme Court will not disturb anything. But he forgot completely that those judges, once appointed, are no longer in any way indebted to him. And the Supreme Court proved its freedom; the Court rejected the president’s idea of prayer.Then he tried another thing – that all Christian schools, colleges, universities, should be given the same financial support as is given to public institutions. The Supreme Court refused that too. But politicians are very cunning. He has found a way to bypass the Supreme Court.The Supreme Court has decided that the government cannot give financial support to religious institutions, so now what is he doing? He is now proposing, “We will not give support to religious institutions, we will give money to the parents. And now it is their freedom to send their children to any school.” You see the cunningness? The parent gets the money and he is free to send his children to a Catholic school. Finally the money reaches the Catholic school.He has insulted the Supreme Court. He has found a way to do what he was not able to do directly; now he will do it indirectly. It is the duty of the Supreme Court to prevent this. Financial support has to be given to the institutions, not to the parents, because who knows what the parents are going to do with that financial support?There are so many Christian schools, colleges, universities…all the parents of those students will be getting support and the money will go to the religious institutions.The Supreme Court has to see the point, that the president has betrayed the law of the country, has betrayed the constitution of the country.And these people go on talking about God, values, responsibilities. They are the most irresponsible people. They are the most godless people – because just to believe in God does not make you divine, holy.I am reminded of a very beautiful statement of H.G. Wells. He was writing the history of the world, and during that writing he came upon Gautam Buddha, and he was in a difficulty. Gautam Buddha says there is no God. But H.G. Wells was a very sensitive, intelligent person; he could not call Gautam Buddha an atheist. So what did he say? He said, “Gautam Buddha is the most godless person, yet the most godly.” That is true. If any man on this earth can be said to be godly, then that man has to be Gautam Buddha. But he never believed in God. You can be divine, you can have the quality of godliness, without having any God. And you can believe in God and you can do everything that is supposed to be done by the devil.Politicians go on following the devil, and go on praying to God. Perhaps they need God to forgive them, because whatever they are doing is criminal. They need a God absolutely; otherwise, who is going to forgive them? They follow the devil, and they pray to God – a simple strategy.My idea of education is very clear. All institutions should be free from politics, from religion. And religion should be allowed to have educational institutions, because they are destroying people’s minds. Educational systems should be free from any pressure – either from politics or from religion. They should have an autonomous, independent existence. They should decide themselves what has to be done so that every child who enters the world of education blossoms to his full potential. He is not to be molded, he is not to be ordered. He has to be awakened.Prayer is not needed, but meditation is certainly needed. And meditation has nothing to do with religion. Meditation is simply a scientific method, exactly the same as science – their areas are just different.Science begins with doubt; meditation also begins with doubt. The method of science is observation of objects, the objective world; and the method of meditation is to observe the inside world. Science experiments with objects; meditation is the experience of your interiority, your subjectivity.In fact science has two wings: one, moving into the outside universe; the other, moving into the inside consciousness.Meditation should be absolutely necessary in every educational system, because meditation is not Hindu, not Christian, not Buddhist. Meditation has nothing to do with any religion. It has nothing to do with any belief. Meditation does not require you to believe in God first, heaven and hell, Jesus Christ as the only begotten son. It needs no belief of any kind.Meditation is an inquiry, a search, a pilgrimage toward your own center. And the person who knows himself cannot do anything wrong. That is an impossibility. The person who realizes himself needs no morality. Morality is needed by blind people.Meditation gives you eyes to see. With your eyes, you cannot do anything immoral. It is just impossible. There is no question of choice – to be moral or to be immoral. There is no question of choice.My definition of morality is different than any definition that has ever been given. Christians have a certain morality which may not be acceptable to Buddhists. In Christian morality alcohol is not prohibited. In fact particularly on Christian holy days, you have to drink alcohol – even Jesus Christ was doing that. Not only that, he was committing such a crime by turning water into alcohol. And you call it a miracle!If somebody turns water into marijuana , will it be a miracle? And alcohol is far worse than any LSD or marijuana. I would have called it a miracle if Jesus had turned alcohol into water. That would be something moral. But he was drinking, his people were drinking. No Buddhist can accept alcohol as moral.Jainas cannot eat in the night – that is immoral. The whole world is immoral according to them. The most orthodox Jainas do not even drink water in the night. In a hot country like India, in the long nights of summer, it is torture: you feel so thirsty, but you have to wait for sunrise. What is morality? And who is going to decide it?Jainas, Buddhists, brahmins – all are vegetarian. To be a non-vegetarian is the worst crime that one can commit. You are eating meat, destroying life?Who is going to decide morality? No, these definitions have not in any way come to a conclusion. But my definition is totally different.My definition is: whatever you do out of your meditation is moral. And whatever you do in your spiritual sleep, unaware, is immoral. It may look moral to other people. You may be donating to a church, to a synagogue, and everybody will say it is moral. But I will not say it is moral unless your action comes out of awareness – and awareness is a by-product of meditation.Every student coming out of the university should be able to meditate. And that’s enough; he needs no commandments, he needs no moralities. He will be free to act, and he will always act rightly. It is impossible for a meditative person to act wrongly.It is as impossible as a man with eyes trying to get out through the wall. A man with eyes will get out through the door. And it is not even a question that he will stand and think, “Should I go through the door or through the wall?” But a man without eyes may try to go through the wall. And he is not committing a crime, he is simply blind. He need not be punished, he needs compassion.Teach meditation to every student; teach meditation to every prisoner; teach meditation to every senator.Make it a point that unless a man is fully aware, you are not going to choose him as your president or your prime minister. That should be his qualification. Only then can this world become a beautiful garden of human values, can it become full of the fragrance of life. And to me, that is godliness.Osho,My mother compares you to a rock star, and also wants to know what is the difference between you raising your hands and all of us going bananas, and the polack pope raising his hands and millions of Catholics responding in similar fashion.This is really great!I am a poor, ordinary man, and you are calling me a rock star. Thank you for the compliment!As far as Catholics are concerned and the polack pope, the Catholics don’t go bananas, because they are already. They are born bananas.Yes, my people go bananas. They can, because they are not bananas. And once in a while to go bananas is beautiful, relaxing, rejoicing.Nothing is wrong in going bananas, but to be born a banana – that is ugly. Then you don’t have even the freedom once in a while to go bananas; you are just a slave.So please remember, when the polack pope raises his hands, those bananas are not going bananas: they are bananas!When I raise my hands, my people go bananas. And until they go bananas I don’t leave the stage!Okay?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 29 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The scientists went into space and reached different planets, but they are not yet able to locate heaven and hell. Could you tell me, where is heaven and where is hell?They will never locate heaven and hell anywhere. They are fictions, lies told to humanity to keep it enslaved, to console it in its suffering and torture, to prevent it from any revolution that could change the whole scene on the earth.But in a certain sense, those words are significant. They are usable but only for your psychology, not for your geography.And you know perfectly well where they are.Everybody knows moments when he is in hell and moments when he is in heaven. These are states of the mind. Most of the time you are in hell. Once in a while, on the weekend, perhaps you have a little bit of heaven too.That little bit of heaven is dangerous. It keeps you in hell, hoping for that little bit of heaven: “Tomorrow it will be coming. So it is only a question of somehow passing today, and just waiting patiently for tomorrow.”Hell is the state of the mind in turmoil, in neurosis, in psychosis – split, in schizophrenia; a chaos, feeling no meaning, no purpose, and darkness all around. There are moments – you are perfectly acquainted with them: those moments are hell. It is not a reality outside you, it is what you create inside you.And in the same way, sometimes just tired of the hell – continuous suffering, torture, you cannot take it anymore – you relax for a moment. And a little breeze, a little coolness – you have a glimpse of heaven: in your love, in your friendship, in watching a sunrise, a sunset, or in just looking at the immensity of the universe, the stars. If you can see beauty, if you can be sensitive to the delicate music of existence, you will have a few moments here and there, scattered, which you can call heaven.But this is not what the religions have been telling you. They say there is heaven above your heads, far away in the clouds, and a hell below you, far below.There is a problem…. In India, the hell used to be here in Oregon, deep down. If you go on digging a hole from India, it is going to end up in Oregon – that’s how I ended up here. Just trying to dig a hole, suddenly I found myself in this desert. And for the Oregonians India is hell, because it is below them.The earth is round! What is above your head? Heaven, if it existed, or hell, if it existed, would be in constant trouble, because your head is continuously moving with the earth. They would go crazy! Hell would be trying to remain below your feet; heaven would be trying to remain above your head. And the earth is revolving on its own center; not only that, it is also going around the sun.No such heaven, no such hell exist.Yuri Gagarin, the first man who went closest to the moon, who had the first close look and circled around the moon, the first question he was asked in Soviet Russia was, “Did you see God there?”He said, “I did not see anybody.” So in Moscow they have a planetarium. In golden letters on the gate of the planetarium is written, “There is no God. Yuri Gagarin has looked and He has not been found.”You can go to the farthest stars – one day man will go, but he will not find God. And you will not find anywhere heaven and hell; they have never been there.Religions have been playing upon your greed, your fear, your tremendous need for protection.Man is in a very precarious condition. All kinds of fear – and particularly the fear of death, sickness, disease, old age – and they go on increasing. It is not only man that is evolving; diseases go on evolving side by side. The fear of poverty, the fear of dying hungry in a street, the fear that perhaps nobody needs you – that you are just accidental, that if you are gone nobody will ever miss you…. There are layers and layers of fear in your psychology.The priests became aware of your fear very early, in the very beginning times of humanity. They were the first psychoanalysts. And your fear can be exploited, you just have to be convinced that if you do certain things you need not fear. If you do certain other things, then certainly you will fall into even deeper and darker spaces, into hellfire.The earth is only a place where you have to prove whether you are worthy of enjoying heaven, or you deserve hell.They exploited your greed. Who does not want to enjoy? Who does not want to live forever? Who does not want no sickness, no old age, to be always young, fresh? They created a heaven for your greed; it is the projection of your greed. And hell is the projection of your fear.Naturally, someone has to be in the seat of judgment; otherwise, who is going to decide where to send you? Without a judge there will be difficulties: the stronger people, although they have committed every kind of crime, may enter into heaven; simple people who have never committed any crime will have to go to hell. No, somebody has to be there with omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent powers; somebody who can see all, who can be present everywhere, who knows all, who can do everything. An absolutely powerful God is needed to decide.And it seems to be logical. If there is going to be something like a hell and a heaven, then somebody has to be decisive, and somebody has to force you to go to the right place. So they created God. Out of your fear and greed you accepted heaven and hell, and then you had to accept God.In every culture, in every society, in every civilization, it is not the same God – obviously, because their psychologies differ. Their minds are conditioned differently, so their projections differ. There is a question here about the Mormons: they believe in a material God, and they also believe that God created the world out of preexisting material. Who created that material?When you create a fiction you create many problems. If nobody asks any questions it is okay, but if somebody starts asking questions, your fiction is going to be exposed. So there are religions who believe that before God nothing existed, God created everything. Now the question arises, from where? Just out of nothing?And if he could create out of nothing this whole universe, why did he wait so long? Christians say only four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ he created the world. So what was that dodo doing all the time for eternity? Just sitting in his rocking chair? But there is no mention of a rocking chair in any holy scripture. He must have been doing something.Any fiction will create problems. To avoid that, Mormons say God created the world from preexisting material so he is not producing the world out of nothing. But they forget that you can patch up your fiction from one side; the hole will appear on another side. From where did this preexisting matter come? Who created it? There must be another God, bigger. But it will lead you into an infinite regress. That bigger God will also create the world and your first God out of preexisting material. Who created that? Now you will be simply going into stupidity.The Mormons are strange people – nice, intelligent, and still believing in such stupid things! The leader of the Mormons had seven or eight wives. If God is the creator of this whole world, at least the leader of the Mormons can create a little world out of eight wives – a big family. And that was their idea, that if all the Mormons marry many women, then sooner or later Mormons will be ruling over the world: just go on creating children.But a strange idea, that God is a material thing…. This does not solve anything, it creates more problems. Other religions have the problem that God is a spiritual being and he creates the world – but the problem is: a spiritual being, from where does he get all this matter?He is spiritual, just pure spirit. He cannot take out from himself any matter, but he cannot take it out from anywhere else, because that will mean the matter was already in existence. To avoid the difficulty Mormons believe God is a material thing, and now they fall into a bigger ditch: a material thing can create other material things?Matter cannot create matter. And matter cannot be worshipped either. Matter cannot be prayed to. What is the difference between the matter you walk upon and the matter that God is? To avoid one difficulty, they fell into another difficulty.The other religions who think God is a spiritual being and the world is material have created a split in existence; it is not one, it is two. And that split is the cause of all human schizophrenia and suffering. Because they believed God is separate and the world is separate, naturally that separation goes down, back to your life.Your body is separate, your soul is separate; and you have to fight the body, destroy the body, torture the body, so that you can become a saint. The soul has to be freed from the body and bodily desires, bodily instincts.It you look at the history of all the religions you will simply think, “Is this a history of religions, or mad people?”There has been a Christian sect – it still exists – whose basic prayer is to beat themselves early in the morning as much as they can, till the blood starts coming out of their body – because the body is the enemy. It is the matter that is preventing them from becoming totally spiritual.It is the body who asks for food, asks for sex, asks for a thousand and one things; and because of these desires they cannot reach desirelessness. This body has to be beaten and put right. Anybody who beats himself better than others becomes a saint, obviously – he is better in beating his body, he has more soul. He is becoming victorious over the body.In Russia before the revolution, there was a Christian sect which used to cut off their genitals, because these are the troublemakers. But they could not see a single, simple point – that by cutting off the genitals you will not be able to get rid of your sexual mind. The real sex center exists in the mind; the genitals are only extensions of that center. Even without genitals, you will go on thinking about sex – perhaps more than ever.But by cutting off their genitals, they became spiritual! Of course the women were not going to be left behind; they started cutting off their tits. These people were thought to be very great religious people – they were worshipped. They should be put into mental asylums. But the whole idea arises from the division of God and the world.There is no God, so don’t be afraid of the judgment day. There is never going to be any judgment day. And anyway, in twenty-four hours, just think – even if your God is absolutely powerful – how many millions of people who have lived for millennia will be gathered on one judgment day in one court? And half of them will be women, who don’t care about the court or anything; they will go yakketty-yak, yakketty-yak…. An immeasurable crowd shouting for judgment!I don’t think it is manageable just in twenty-four hours to decide who is going where. Judgment day – the very idea is stupid. There will be so many files on everybody that it will take eternity for God to sort out the files. According to many religions you don’t have only one life, you have millions of lives – transmigration of life. And each life – even if you think moderately it is seventy years – will have loads of files about your actions, because even the smallest action has to be counted.According to Jainism, if you kill an ant it is recorded. Jaina monks use a mask on their nose, like the doctors do in the hospitals, because from the nose comes hot air and that hot air kills very small living beings in the air. With each breath you are killing almost one million living beings. Everything has to be counted. Even while sleeping you are committing sins.And Jainism goes to the very logical end. It says whether you commit a sin really or you only dream about it, it makes no difference. As far as your record is concerned, it will be recorded.Thoughts are the origin of things. If you have an idea of murder, you may not get the opportunity to materialize it, but the very idea of murder in your dream shows your mind. You are a murderer. Now, making love in your dream with somebody else’s wife, which almost everybody is doing…. You don’t allow it in the daytime, so the poor human mind has found a substitute. In the daytime the neighbor is sitting there with his gun, but in the night you have absolute freedom to make love to Cleopatra or anybody, even the queen of England. Even God cannot save her! In your dream, nobody can save her.In Egypt there was one king who commanded his people, “Anybody coming into my dream will be immediately beheaded. I want silent sleep and I don’t want to be disturbed.” You cannot go even into his dream – and you are not going! You have nothing to do with him, it is his dream!But many people were beheaded because once in a while somebody would show up. Most of them were women – neighbors’ women. Most of them were his own court people, because you see in your dream people with whom you are in some way acquainted. Some work is incomplete; the dream completes it.The dream is a tremendous help to you. For example, your bladder is full in the night and you are asleep. Now if you become aware of the bladder, you will have to go to the bathroom and your sleep will be disturbed. The dream is very protective – you start dreaming that you are going to the bathroom. There is no need to go anywhere, there is no need to disturb the sleep. You simply dream you are going into the bathroom and you are relaxed. The dream saved you. The disturbance in the sleep is not allowed; the dream has created a buffer.Every dream is your dream – nobody else is responsible for it. But there are idiots of all kinds. That king killed many people. And people were at a loss – what to do? Everybody was afraid, because if somehow he appears in the king’s dream, his life is finished. People stopped going any place where he could see their face, because perhaps he may remember the face in his dream and that is the end of their life.Man has been in many ways repressed.The body has to be repressed…in fact that’s why you have dreams, because you are repressing so many desires which pop up in your dreams. If you were living your life totally and fully, without any repression, you wouldn’t have any dreams. One beautiful woman journalist was just asking me, “I have heard you don’t have dreams.”I said, “Certainly, I don’t have dreams. For example, I love you. You can be my girlfriend.”She was shocked! She could not believe it! She enjoyed it too. She said, “But why are you saying it?”I said, “That’s why I don’t have any dreams. It came to me to say it, so I said it; it is finished. You need not trouble yourself to come into my dream. But if I don’t say it to you now, then you would have to come into my dream, and then I would say it to you.“It is simply finished. I have said it, you have heard, you have enjoyed. You have giggled. You will never have such an interview again in your whole life! I just do the thing that I want to do, without thinking of any consequences. That’s why I don’t have dreams. Do you want to question me more about it?”She said, “No!” – because this man seems to be crazy. He may start making love to me, right now, here, before the television camera! If he can say it, he can do it too! It is better to change the subject.If you are living your life consciously, alertly, not repressing, not being against your body, you will have a tremendous silence. In your night there will be no disturbance – no dreams, just silent sleep. And in your day you will have a very cool feeling surrounding you – no thoughts, no traffic of thoughts which keeps your head hot the whole day.Somebody was asking me, “In India you never used to have a cap. Why have you started wearing strange caps here?”I said to him the reason was that in India I had to keep my head open so thoughts could go out. Now I don’t have any thoughts! I have to prevent other people’s thoughts entering me, because they are all throwing their thoughts. I don’t see anybody having a cap here! It is dangerous among so many people throwing thoughts at you. I need a shelter, and the shelter has to be thick!Thoughts are very cunning – just a small loophole and they will enter. With much difficulty I have been able to throw my thoughts; now I don’t want anybody’s burden, anybody’s rubbish thrown on my head.The religions have not been beneficial to humanity. They have been committing very basic crimes, and this is one of the basic roles: to make man feel split, to make him feel his body is wrong and his soul is right.The division is false – you are one.Your body, your consciousness, are different only in words, in dictionaries – but not in existence. Neither can your soul live without your body, nor can your body live without your soul. They are one, interwoven.And from there you can understand that there is no God as a creator separate from creation. Creativity itself is divine. Creativity itself is godliness. Once you remove God, you remove all split, all schizophrenia. And strangely enough, if you are not split you will not suffer hell. Fighting with yourself, you are destroying your life, hence you are miserable. Not fighting with your life but enjoying it, relishing it, you will be in heaven.First, send God into nothingness forever.He is not needed at all.He has done enough harm. And it is only a word, it does not mean anything. And with God disappear heaven and hell; and you start living a natural, beautiful, authentic, sincere life. No religion is needed.Medicine is needed if you are sick. The doctors will die from starvation if nobody falls sick. The doctor’s profession is a very contradictory profession. He helps people to come out of sickness, knowing perfectly well he is destroying his own business. That’s why poor people get healthy quickly; they are not much of a business. Rich people…the doctor helps the process linger on.I have heard about a doctor who sent his son to medical college. The son came back, and the old man said, “Now that you are a doctor, I can retire. I am really tired” – because the doctor’s profession is such; in the middle of the night he may be called, in the cold night with snow falling, he will be called, and he has to go. Day and night, twenty-four hours he is on duty.“So I am really tired. You have come, now you take charge of the clinic.”The boy was very happy. After three, four days the father asked him, “How are things going?”He said, “Really great. The woman that you could not cure for thirty years, I have cured in three days.”The father said, “My God, that was our basic income! That woman I have been keeping sick for thirty years. She has so much money, she can afford to remain sick for three hundred years. You idiot – you cured her! All your education has come from her sickness. Who do you think was sending you money to study in a medical college? It was that woman. If this is the way you are going to behave with my patients, perhaps you should retire; I will do my work. You will destroy the whole business.”The boy can be forgiven – he was not yet aware of the profession. He had just acquired the medical knowledge, but he was not aware that there is a business side to it. He said, “I can understand. Now I know why you were sending me so much money.”His father said, “It was all coming from that woman, and that woman could afford it, there was no problem – I just had to keep her sick.”The religious priests depend on your fear, on your greed. They create hell and heaven; they create a god and they become the mediators. Anything you want to send to God, you cannot send directly. You don’t even know the address, or the phone number.The Mormons believe that their president has a direct phone connection with God and whatever he says is God’s order.I came to know about this when this city was incorporated legally by a panel of three judges in Wasco County. Two judges were favorable. They were the majority; naturally the city was incorporated. Out of the two, one was a very nice old man – but he was a Mormon. And God immediately informed the president of the Mormons that this fellow has to be sent to Nigeria to spread the message of the Mormons.Certainly this message was from the White House. What does God have to do with this poor man in Wasco County, and how will he know?…In this big world he chooses immediately this Mormon! Strange choice, at a strange time….Because the politicians should not pressurize him – he is a sincere man – they sent him for one year to Nigeria. And of course they appointed another judge, who was appointed only because he is against me and my people. Now the majority is against us, so for two years the city remained legal – and suddenly after two years it became illegal.We have not committed any illegal act. In fact, this is the only place where no illegal acts are being committed: no rape, no prostitution, no stealing, no murder, no suicide. And this is our fault, that we are not committing any illegalities. And in New York, every moment a crime is committed. But New York is a legal city; we are illegal.In four years not a single illegal act – this is a record. No other city in the whole world can say that in four years not a single illegal act has happened there.We don’t have a prison. The police, which belong to the Oregon state – we call it the peace force, because to us the word “police” seems to be dirty – they are getting tired, holding their guns the whole day. Nothing happens. And I am afraid if someday something happens, by that time they may have forgotten how to use their guns!This man is educated, a gentleman in every way, but the religious stupidity is still there inside. He went to Nigeria.I sent him a message, “This is very strange, that you have been chosen especially, so suddenly. God has never shown any interest in you before, and there are so many Mormons. You are not a priest, you are not an orator either. What word are you going to spread there? Some priest should be sent, somebody who can speak should be sent. And why Nigeria? In this whole world, only Nigeria needs the word of Mormons to be spread?”Perhaps the White House was hoping – because Nigeria is the only country that has cannibals…. It was an absolutely considered phenomenon to send him to Nigeria. Why not India? The whole world is there…but he is sent particularly to Nigeria where he will be facing…. Poor man, he is not very strong, old – those cannibals may finish him!That must have been the idea, so that he does not come back again, because he has a respectability in the country; if he stands again for judge, he will be chosen. But somehow he has managed not to go near the cannibals.They have their camp – nobody goes there. Once in a while a Christian priest is caught. When one Christian priest was caught and they tied him to a tree and started making a big fire, he said, “What are you doing?”They said, “We are going to cook you.”He was at a loss – what to do now? – he has come to spread the message. Still, he said, “Whatsoever time is left…while they prepare the fire, and bring big pots and oil, I should do my work. I should spread the word as much as I can in this small time.”He asked the cannibals, “Have you ever tasted religion? Christianity?”They said, “No, you are going to be our first taste. We will taste Christianity within one hour, don’t be worried!”This poor judge somehow remained hanging around the cities where there are no cannibals. Cannibals are decreasing in number because they go on eating their own people. If they don’t find anybody else, what else to do? At the beginning of this century there were two thousand cannibals in Nigeria. Now there are only three hundred, and every day their number goes on decreasing.Religion has exploited people tremendously. Man has to free himself from all this exploitation. But that is possible only if you destroy the fiction of God, heaven and hell.Life is enough, more than enough. This universe is autonomous, it needs no creation. And this universe is totally one, it needs no division. And you have to live an undivided life; then you will know what paradise is.OshoMy father is here to visit, and he is enjoying the commune very much. However, he feels that we are totally dependent on you, and that you are dependent on us. Please comment.Your father is really enjoying, it seems, because whatever he is saying is absolutely right. He just has to learn a little bit of my language.Dependence, independence – both are fictions.Interdependence is the reality.And it is not only that you and I are interdependent, the whole existence is interdependent. If you don’t breathe for a few minutes you are gone. That means you were somehow connected with the atmosphere around you, the air. If you don’t eat food, how long can you stay alive? If you don’t drink water…. But will your father say that he is dependent on water, he is dependent on air, oxygen, he is dependent on the sun, the sunrise?And the other way is also the same. It is difficult to prove because science has not yet been able to discover the proof but it is assumed that if the sun gives energy to us, it must be getting some energy from us. Otherwise, this business cannot go on forever. There must be some mutual transfer of energy.And we know it about trees – there is a continuous transfer of energy. They give you oxygen, you give them carbon dioxide. But will your father say he is dependent on trees and trees are dependent on him? The word “dependent” seems to be not right, because there is nothing which is independent – not for a single moment!Existence is an organic unity. So either call it interdependent…. But if you would like me to give you a word, I will call it organic unity, because that word “interdependence” somehow carries the word “dependence” and all the wrong associations with it. It is an organic unity.Certainly my commune is an organic unity. We are all one, so the question of dependence or independence does not arise at all. But if he is attached so much to those words, he can call it interdependence.But he should remember that God is also dependent on the world, because without creation how will he be the creator? And the pope is dependent on Catholics – without the Catholics he will have to go back to Poland and be what actually he is!Can you give me a single example of anybody, anything, which is independent? It is not possible. We are all one life, different expressions of one life – just like sea waves. They all look different – some are higher, tidal waves; some are slower, smaller – but they are all one in the ocean. Their expressions, their personalities may be different, but their being is part of the whole.So I support your father, he is perfectly right. But he should remember this truth does not apply only to this commune, this truth applies to the whole existence. And we are an existential commune.Certainly I cannot be here without you, because then I will think, “What the hell am I doing here?” And the same is true about you. Without me, the same question will arise in you.In fact your father is also dependent. What the hell is he doing here? – dependent on his son! And because his son is in the commune, he has to come to the commune. And now he is enjoying the commune. If he is really enjoying, and if he is sincere…then be part of the commune, show it! Otherwise the commune will drive you nuts in your dreams.His understanding is correct. And a man of such a correct understanding need not be an outsider here. So, help your father so he can be part of this beautiful phenomenon. Then he need not come to visit you, he can be here. And then he will find that not only his son is worth visiting, every sannyasin is worth visiting, because every sannyasin has some unique expression.Why remain attached to small things – “my son,” “my father”? In this commune we have lost all small attachments. It may be difficult for you because your wife may be at home, and you may be afraid of her; she must be preparing hell for you. Don’t go!You have come to the right place accidentally. But you are a man of understanding, so it is perfectly good to get lost in the orange people. Just become red, then even your wife will not be able to find you out.It is better to be red than to be dead!I mean: d-a-d, dad!Osho,A well-known story told in the Vatican says that if Jesus came back he would not be crucified again, but, at the maximum, be put in jail for his whole life. According to the cardinals this is proof that humanity is no longer barbarian. Can this new fact open your vision on humanity and its evolution?In the first place, Jesus will be by this time so old that I don’t think it is possible for him to have another coming. Even the first coming will be difficult! Second time coming…? Impossible!The story that is around there in the Vatican is in a way true. And that’s why he had promised his disciples, “I will be coming soon.” Now, you cannot stretch the word “soon” for two thousand years. Maybe one hour, two hours, one day, one week – but you cannot stretch it for two thousand years. What happened to his promise?As far as I can see, although he was not very learned – he was illiterate – he was a man of a certain intelligence. Why should he come here?What did you do to him when he had come for the first time? You crucified him. That was the reward. It is enough. And now you are saying that if he comes this time – which is absolutely improbable – you will put him in jail for his whole life, to prove to him that humanity is no longer barbarian.But being crucified finishes within a few hours. Keeping him his whole life in prison will prove you more barbarous. That is a long torture.My suggestion is use an electric chair. That will really prove you are no longer barbarian, you are no longer primitive; you are scientific, technological, in every way evolved. Use an electric chair, comfortable – and within a second, not even knowing when he is gone, he will be gone.But this will not prove that you are civilized. What method you use in killing him does not matter, that only proves methods of killing have improved; but the killer is the same.Two thousand years ago, rabbis had killed him; now cardinals and popes will kill him – they are the same people, just the name is different. The rabbi and the cardinal are not different people – they are both priests!In Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, Brothers Karamazov, he has a beautiful story about Jesus coming back to the earth one day. Of course he had chosen Sunday, because on the other six days who will take care of him? Who will bother about him? Sunday…and he had chosen the right place – in the center of the town, before the church.People were coming out of the church after the sermon in the morning, and Jesus was standing there on a platform under a tree, waiting to see whether they recognize him or not. The crowd gathered. They said, “He looks like Jesus Christ. What a strange coincidence! Certainly he is a hippie, but he looks exactly like Jesus Christ.”Listening to this, that they are thinking he is a hippie, Jesus said, “No, I am not a hippie. You are my people. You worship me in the church, you have my statue on the cross. You can’t recognize me?”The people were in shock, looking at each other. What to do? They said, “As far as we are concerned, it does not matter whether you are a hippie or Jesus Christ. One thing you should do quickly – because the bishop is coming out; if he sees you, you will be in trouble – you escape as fast as you can!”Jesus could not believe it! He said, “Wait! You are ignorant people, you don’t understand. You don’t recognize me, but my bishop – who has been teaching my teachings his whole life, kneeling down before my statue, praying to me every day – certainly he will recognize me.”The bishop came, the crowd gave way. The bishop came near, looked from up to down, from down to up, and thought, “Looks exactly like Jesus Christ. A great actor!” And he said, “You get down from the platform! You get down immediately!”Jesus said, “Don’t you recognize me?”He said, “I have recognized you. You get down!” And he told a few people in the crowd, “Catch hold of him and take him inside the church, and lock him up there.”Jesus said, “What are you doing? You must be joking! The people who crucified me of course were not my people. The rabbis of course were not my followers, but you are my follower….”He said, “You keep quiet! You simply do what you are being told to do.”And Jesus was locked in a small cabin, dark, dismal. He could not believe what was happening. “These people go on praying, ‘When are you coming?’ Now I have come – and this is the treatment you give to the founder of your religion?”The whole day, hungry, thirsty, he waited. In the middle of the night somebody opened the door. The bishop entered, put a candle on the windowsill, fell at the feet of Jesus Christ and said, “I had recognized you, but I cannot recognize you in front of people. You will destroy our whole business. With great difficulty we have established the firm! It took us tremendous labor, fights, bloodshed, wars; finally, somehow we have managed the church. And you should be proud of us, that we are the biggest religion in the whole world. The largest number of people belong to your religion.“But I cannot accept you, recognize you, in front of the crowd for the simple reason that people of your type are always rebellious, dangerous. It is good when you are dead, but it is not good when you are alive! You will disrupt everything, you will destroy everything!“You were saying to the people, ‘Blessed are the poor.’ Now the Vatican is the richest place in the whole world. The pope rules over the greatest kingdom anybody can rule – immense power, immense riches. You will disturb things; we cannot allow it to happen.“You need not come, we are taking care of your business perfectly well. So you have to decide: either you get out and get lost – with due respect – or we will have to crucify you again tomorrow morning, because there is no other way to deal with you. When you are dead, we worship you; when you are alive, we crucify you.”I can understand. That’s what they have been doing with me. Many attempts have been made on my life; twice I have been poisoned. The last attempt was made before ten thousand sannyasins. Just like this morning, it was a beautiful morning, ten thousand sannyasins listening in utter silence.The police got the message from some anonymous source that somebody is going to assault me, so the police officers reached in time. Twenty topmost police officers were present, ten thousand eyewitnesses, and the man threw the knife at me. The police caught him.We did not get involved in it at all because it was a police case. The police themselves had caught him red-handed, making an effort to kill me. Still, the man was freed – respectfully. The court said, “There has been no such thing….”Ten thousand eyewitnesses can be disbelieved because they are my people, but twenty topmost police officers? They had caught the man, we had nothing to do with it. They all told the court that this man had made an attempt on my life, but the court dismissed the case.The magistrate must have felt guilty, seeing the whole thing. It was absolutely certain – his own police officers were saying it, and ten thousand witnesses were there. The knife was there that the man had thrown. On the knife you could have found his fingerprints – but nothing was done. No witness was called. The case was dismissed.The magistrate must have felt guilty.Through a common friend he informed me, “Please forgive me. There is so much political pressure and so much religious pressure on me, because that man belongs to a fanatic Hindu group and he has immense political power.“I am a poor man, and my promotion is due. If I do anything against him my promotion will be postponed forever. And they will send me to the ugliest, dirtiest place they can possibly find.”In India you can find everything. There is a place, Cherapunji, where it rains five hundred inches in a year. You cannot get out of the house-it is always raining!Five hundred inches – that is the record in the whole world! Nowhere else does it rain so much. It simply rains the whole year! Nothing can be done. And whenever they want to punish somebody, they send him to Cherapunji.So he asked my forgiveness. I told the intermediary, “Tell him, don’t feel guilty. I can understand – even without his saying – that the man who has tried to kill me has the support of the politicians, of the religious leaders. And don’t lose your promotion – I have not lost my life! Don’t be worried, you just get your promotion, get a better salary.“And as far as I am concerned, it does not matter whether I am killed or not. I have lived my live. I have enjoyed each moment of it, I have relished everything. I have never repressed any desire. What more can tomorrow bring me? There is no promotion for me.“I have experienced the ultimate; now, nothing more can happen. So life or death, both have become the same. And one day anyway I will have to die. This is far better.”Ninety-nine percent of people die on their beds. That is the most dangerous place – just looked at mathematically, a simple calculation. Never sleep on the bed! Sleep on the ground. Ninety-nine percent of people have died on the bed – don’t take the risk. But wherever you sleep, you will die – death is certain from the very moment one is born.And in fact, I am a nonserious man. I would love the drama – somebody killing me.So I will say to the pope and the cardinals, don’t be worried. Give Jesus a good, beautiful electric chair. Last time it was a little hard: he had to carry his own cross.And the cross must have been very heavy…because he was a carpenter’s son, his whole life he had been carrying big logs to his father’s shop; and he was a young man – thirty-three years old, in the prime of life. The cross must have been really heavy, because he fell three times on the ground before he reached the place where he was going to be crucified. The weight forced him to fall down on the ground three times. Now, don’t be so cruel to him.In the first place, that experience is enough! He is not going to come. But in old age people become senile. Two thousand years old, he may have become senile and forgotten what has happened two thousand years before, and may come again. This time, give him a little more comfortable a death.You will give him death, that much is certain, because either he can live or you can live – both cannot live together.You may be reading the Bible, but everything you have been doing is against the Bible! And he will not tolerate it. He is not a very peaceful man; he is very angry, arrogant, easily excited.He has done everything the last time he was here. He had thrown – when he was only thirteen years of age – all money changers out of the temple of Jerusalem; overturned their tables, their monies, and threw them out. And he was only thirteen!He said to them, “I have come here to clean the house of my father.” The rabbis could not prevent him, they were standing there in shock: what was he doing? But whatever he was doing was according to the scripture.The rabbis could not forgive this man. Whatever he was doing was according to scripture, and sooner or later people would start asking them questions. And he was going to destroy the whole temple, because the whole temple depended on the money that came to it from poor people. He had to be finished.Jesus was not a pacifist; otherwise he could not do such a thing. And he used to get angry very easily. He cursed a fig tree! Even the angriest man, even a madman like Adolf Hitler would not do such a stupid thing – cursing a fig tree because he and his disciples are hungry and the fig tree has not offered figs to them. And you have to know one thing more: it was not the season for figs. It was no fault of the poor tree.So if Jesus comes, help him. Give him good champagne, which he loved. And let him sit on an electric chair so that he knows how much, technologically, man has evolved.As far as man is concerned, there has been no evolution for thousands of years. We are stuck. And the people who are stopping the evolution of man are the priests and the politicians and the educationists.My effort here is to free you from this triangle: the priest, the politician, the professor – these three P’s.Finish them before they finish you.Finish them before they finish the whole humanity.If we can get rid of these three P’s, humanity can create a paradise without any difficulty.We have already created in this desert an oasis. We are living joyously – no fights, no anger, no jealousy. And my people, of course, are giving me beautiful chairs – but not electric chairs!Osho,What is a blessing?I am! Okay?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I ask you a question because I want your attention. And the only question that occurs to me in the two years I have been here is about the dark night of the soul. You said sometimes that we have to dance and celebrate so that we can go through it easily. In the back of my mind there is a question: what is that dark night of the soul? Am I missing something?You are not missing anything, not even the dark night of the soul: You are already in it!To be unconscious of your actions, your thoughts, your feelings creates your dark night of the soul. The moment you are aware of all these three layers of your being…. Thought is the most superficial, feeling, a little deeper, and then being – the last thing that you have to lose into the ultimate.The process is simple, the process is the same.Watch, witness, observe your thoughts – without any judgment, without any condemnation or evaluation…. Because the moment you make any judgment for or against, you are no longer a witness; you have already become part of the thought process. Remain silent, and just see whatsoever is passing on the screen of your mind, the way you see a film. Just remember that you are only a seer.And the same process when you have succeeded on the first layer will make you capable of seeing your feelings which are more subtle. But the person who can see thoughts and remains silently a witness automatically becomes capable of the second step. Soon you will be able to see your feelings, sentiments, moods, emotions.Once you are beyond the second, then the third…it is the deepest in you, the feeling of “I,” the separation of you from the universe. Actually you are not separated for a single moment, you cannot exist in separation. You are in tune in every possible way. There are thousands of bridges between you and the existence around you.Now watch this silence, this is-ness, this feeling of am-ness; simply watch. There is nothing else to watch, just a small boundary around you.As you watch thoughts, thoughts disappear.As you watch feelings, feelings disappear.As you watch being, you are no longer separate.Only the witness remains, which is your eternal reality. And it has nothing to do with you; it is universal.Your witness and my witness are not separate.Wherever witnessing happens, it is the same.It knows no distance in space and no distance in time. For the witness there is no space and no time; it has no limits.Before you arrive at this point, all else is the dark night of the soul.Your arrival at this witnessing starts the beautiful day of the soul.It is a sunrise which never sets.But just listening to me will not help. You will have to practice this as much as possible. And it needs no separate time – that you have to sit for one hour, or twenty minutes, and witness. If you have time you can sit silently and witness, but there is no necessity. You can go on doing your work and still be witnessing.The whole thing is how to make your witness stronger and stronger, so that it is capable of losing all identities. Only a strong person can lose all identities.And to be in utter silence…there is light, a light that never began and never ends. And it is yours just to claim. And the effort is not so difficult as religions have been telling you.Walking on the road, what is the problem? Why can’t you simply watch your walking? The question is not of the object that you witness, the question is that you witness. Anything helps to strengthen your witnessing energies.Looking at a beautiful sunset, don’t just get lost, don’t forget yourself. Remember that you are only a seer. It can go on twenty-four hours a day without anybody knowing that you are doing something. Religion is not something that the world has to know about. It is something that you have to do within yourselves.Start from this very moment.This immense silence – thousands of people, but it is as if there is no one…just witness. The faraway sound of an airplane…You remain only a witness.And then go on practicing the same thing whatever you are doing – eating, taking a shower, doing some work in the garden, in the field. It does not matter what you do, what matters is that your witness is always present.In the beginning you will forget many times, because for many lives you have never been a witness, you have always been a doer. So it is just an old habit. Old habits die hard, but they certainly die.And it all depends on you. The more you make it a process almost like breathing…. You go on doing everything, still you are breathing. You don’t stop your breathing because you are digging a hole in the earth.Witnessing has to become just like breathing.It in fact is the breathing of the universal soul in you.And once you have tasted just a moment of being universal, the morning has come. The dark night of the soul is over.Osho,You can master all impossible contradictions into harmony. Can you make a song out of these: what is the link between universal laws and freedom? Sometimes I feel imprisoned by the laws of nature.You ask me, “Can I make a song out of all contradictions?”I am surprised – what else am I doing here?Your problem is very logical, relevant: there are laws of nature, and I teach you freedom. It appears, it is apparent that there is a contradiction.The law of nature has to be followed, and also you have to keep your freedom intact. And everywhere laws of nature feel like bondages, imprisonments. The reason is not that there is any contradiction between freedom and laws of nature; the reason is because of your ego.When you say “nature,” are you separate from it? If you are separate from it, then certainly you will feel many chains. Wherever you go, you will find nature is going somewhere else. If you choose freedom you go against the laws of nature. And if you go with the laws then you are choosing against freedom.Can you see the problem? The problem is you are thinking of yourself as separate from nature.You are simply part of nature. When I say you are simply part of nature it means, be in a let-go. You do not exist separately as an identity; who can be in prison? Nature cannot imprison itself.Natural laws are the laws of freedom.You just have to drop that stupid ego that everybody is carrying within himself, which comes up against everything. It is going to be evening and you want it still to be the morning. Naturally, nature is going against you!Nature is not going against you or against anyone. Nature is just being itself. You have simply fallen apart from nature in your imagination.When it is morning, it is morning. When it is evening, it is evening. There is no question of choice. Drop the choice and you are free everywhere. Freedom can be only choicelessness. So when you are young, it is beautiful; when you are a child, it is beautiful; when you are old, it is beautiful; when you are dying, it is beautiful – because you are never separate from the total, you are just a wave in the ocean.The wave in the ocean can start thinking of itself as an individual; then there will be trouble. The wave in the ocean never thinks of itself as separate, so wherever the ocean is taking her, she is willingly, joyously, dancingly moving in that direction.A cloud in the sky goes on moving with the winds. If the winds suddenly change – they were going south and they start going north – the cloud does not say, “This is contradictory. We were going north, and without any notice, without any argument to prove that ‘now we have to change our course, our path, and we have to go north,’ the wind has started going to the north.” No, the cloud has no difficulty. It does not feel it is chained. It is part of the whole, one organic unity.Can your left hand go against your right hand? Yes, you can make an effort, but still it cannot go against it. You know it is pretension. Can your eyes go against your mind? Can your legs go where you do not want to go? You are a small, organic unity. The universe is a bigger organic unity: clouds are part of it, oceans are part of it, everything is part of it.But the ego creates a demarcation line: “I am separate, I am special. I am Hindu, I am Christian. I am American, I am Chinese.” You are none of these things. These are just your conditionings. Others have given you these ideas and you have accepted them. Now it becomes a problem. By and by, as you grow up, your ego grows up. It goes on accumulating more and more demarcation lines.And the ego is very clever. Once it is there, it is very imperialistic. It wants its empire to be as big as possible. Your house becomes part of your ego, your garden becomes part of your ego, your children become part of your ego, your husband, your wife become part of your ego. You make a very imaginary empire, and this empire is bound to bring you in conflict with nature. But you are at fault, not nature.I have heard about a professor of philosophy, head of the department of philosophy in the university of Paris. He was a little eccentric, as philosophers are bound to be.His students had become accustomed to his eccentricities, but one day he surpassed himself. He came into the class and said, “I want to make a declaration; if anyone is against it he can stand up. My statement is, that I am the greatest man in the whole world! Has anybody any objection?”The students said, “This is too much! We have been tolerating this fellow, anything he says, but now…!”One student said, “We are all wanting to know…what is your evidence that you are the greatest man in the world?”The professor laughed, he said, “That is very simple. Just answer a few questions. One: which country is the best in the world?”The students could not suspect that they were getting caught in the professor’s net. Naturally – they were all French – they said, “Of course, France! There is no question about it.”The professor said, “Much is settled. So only France is left. I have to prove myself the greatest man in France, and that will prove me to be the greatest man in the world.”The student said, “That is true.”Then he said, “In France, which is the biggest city?”Now the students became suspicious that he was coming closer, but there was no way of going back. “Paris, of course, is the best city in France.” He said, “Much is settled. Now I want to know which institution in the city of Paris is the greatest, the highest?” Obviously, it was the university.And he said, “Now, things are very simple. Which department in the university is the highest and the greatest?” The students looked at each other. They had to accept that it is the department of philosophy. How can any other department be higher than the department of philosophy?The old man sat in his chair, and he said, “Now, I am the head of the department of philosophy in the greatest city, Paris, in the greatest country, France. Do you have any objection to my statement that I am the greatest man in the whole world?”They had objections, but no logic. The professor had brought them to a point where they had to accept, unwillingly, that he is the greatest man in the world.This is the work of the ego that is going on in everybody. Everybody somehow is trying to feel, to convince himself, that he is the greatest man in the world: somebody because he has more muscular strength; somebody because he has more intellectual, argumentative rationality; somebody because she is more beautiful than anybody else.And you can always find something that will be supportive to you – but it is not really nourishing to you. It is cutting you off from existence. And then on every step there is going to be trouble; you will find that you are chained.But why did you create yourself?You want freedom? Then the only thing that has to be one is, be free of yourself. Be free of the ego and you will never find any bondage in nature. Then everything is beneficial. Nature gives you infinite freedom – but it is not against nature, it is according to its laws.The freedom was there before too, but you were stubborn. You were trying to go upstream, and then you say, “The stream is pushing me back – it does not allow me to go upstream. What about my freedom?”The stream has no awareness of one stupid fellow trying to go upstream. The river is going according to the cosmic laws of nature; if you want to be really free, relax and go with the stream. Don’t keep any distance between you and the stream. Then wherever the river leads is the goal, wherever it takes you is what you always wanted, because there is no separate entity.With your separate entity every problem has arisen. You are miserable, you are in suffering, you are in tremendous anguish – and you are the cause of it all.For example, I have never felt in thirty-three years, for a single moment, that anything goes against me – even those things which look to others as apparently going against me, I have not felt that at all.If somebody comes and assassinates me, I will not for a single moment think that anything is going against me. I will relax and let the man assassinate me. I am not going to swim upstream. If this is what nature wants, I am absolutely willing to go with it.Your absolute willingness to go with nature will give you the ultimate freedom. Of course, you will not be there, but freedom will be there. You cannot exist together – you and freedom.Choice is yours. You can choose your ego and remain in bondage. You can choose freedom, freedom from the ego – and then all kinds of freedom are available to you.Osho,Last night after dancing with you, my feeling was that I have missed my whole life up to now in hesitation, and that I should do something. But what to do?Please, don’t do anything.You are saying that last night dancing with me you experienced something which made you aware that you have missed your whole life in hesitation.Just have a look over the whole situation. Dancing with me, you did not hesitate. Dancing with me, you dropped your ego for a moment – just for a moment. Between me and you there was no barrier. Suddenly you realized you have wasted your whole life, you have not lived. You have been always hesitating, and while you are hesitating, life is flowing out of your hands.Remember, then death will be the only thing about which you cannot hesitate, because it does not give any notice: “I am coming this evening, at such and such a time – be ready!” Otherwise, you will start hesitating – to be ready or not to be ready?It happened in an Arabic story that a king dreamed in the night that somebody – a very dark shadow – was standing behind him. Naturally, he became afraid. He turned back and asked the shadow, “Who are you? And what are you doing here?”The shadow said, “I am your death. But you are no ordinary human being, you are a great emperor; I thought it proper to inform you beforehand. If you have to finish any work, finish it. And get ready and meet me at the right place: Tomorrow evening, at the time when the sunsets!”The answer was so shocking that the king found himself trembling with fear, and awoke. The dream disappeared. He tried many times to close his eyes and to see the shadow again, because he had forgotten to ask what he means – rightly dressed, at the right place.“If I had asked about these two things, I would not do these two things particularly. The right place I would avoid, the right preparation I would avoid, and that way death could not destroy me.” But it was too late. Howsoever hard he tried by closing his eyes, the shadow never appeared. He became more and more afraid.As the sun was rising, he told his old servant, who was almost like a father to him, about the dream. The king said, “I don’t understand what to do; and the time is not much, only twelve hours. The sun has already come upon the horizon; soon it will be evening.”One of his ministers suggested to him, “Call all the astrologers and all the wise men, saints, holy men, and inquire – perhaps somebody may give you the right advice.”So people were brought from the whole capital. They came with their big scriptures, and there was much argumentation among them. One astrologer was saying one thing, another was saying another. One wise man was for one thing, another wise man was for something else. The king became even more puzzled. And it was getting to be almost midday; half the day they have been just consulting their scriptures and arguing.He told the old man, his servant, “Their argumentation will not end ever, it seems. They are quarreling and I don’t think they can come to a conclusion.”The old man said, “I knew it before, but because your minister had suggested it and I am a poor servant, I remained silent. These people have been arguing for centuries.“These philosophers, wise men, astrologers – they have been arguing for centuries and they have not come to a single conclusion. I do not hope, I cannot hope that within the remaining small period of time they will come to any conclusion.“My suggestion is, take your fastest horse and escape from this place at least, because death appeared in this palace, in this capital of yours. Go any direction. There is a possibility you may miss the right place.”The old man’s arguments appeared relevant. The king took his fastest horse and just started running away from the palace, from the capital, as fast as he could. He did not even stop to drink water on the way or to eat food.When death is so close, who feels hungry? Who feels thirsty? The question was to get as far away as he could reach by sunset – the further the better. And by sunset he had ridden hundreds of miles away. As the sun was setting, he tied his horse to a tree in a garden outside some unknown city, and he patted his horse and said, “You are really great! You ran so fast – I have never seen you running so fast. I am immensely grateful to you.”Just at that moment the black shadow appeared behind him. The king looked back; the shadow laughed and said, “Your horse is really fast. I was worried whether he was going to reach the right place or not, but he managed! This is the tree, and this is the time. The sun is setting and I am immensely grateful, just as you are grateful-more than you are. I am grateful to your horse; he has brought you to the right place.“In fact I never give notices to people I had to give you the notice because this is Damishk – it is hundreds of miles away from your capital, and I was worried how you would manage to reach Damishk, under a certain tree where at sunset your death has to happen. That’s why I gave you the notice.”Wherever you run, whatever you do, whatever your speed of running, one thing is certain about which you will not have to hesitate, and that is death. But at that moment when death occurs, you will go crying, weeping because you missed your whole life in hesitating.And there are always a thousand and one things! – which one to do? And anything that you do will make you remember all the other things that you have sacrificed.In that moment, dancing with me, your thoughts stopped; you fell in tune with me. For the first time you have done something without hesitation, without choosing. You have allowed something to happen. That moment can prove of tremendous value to you. It can transform your whole life.These were the things that happened: You did not hesitate – there was no time. You did not keep the distance, the separation; the ego, for a moment, you put aside. For a moment you allowed the dance to happen. Because of this experience you became aware that you have wasted your whole life in hesitating.Now you know the secret. Forget the past, what is gone is gone. But even now it is not too late, it is never too late. Even if a person can live for a single moment before death, totally, that single moment becomes eternity.So from this moment try the same that has happened in the dance without your knowing. Whatever you want to do, do it totally; there is no need to hesitate.Life is short and fleeting.Be quick and do it, and enjoy it to its fullest.Be overwhelmed by it.If you are total in it, completely overtaken by it, overwhelmed by the experience, who is going to think about other things that you have not done? This experience has been so beautiful that you will never think about other things.You think of other things only because you are never total, always partial. A part of you remains out of the experience; that is the part that starts thinking of other things.For example, you fall in love with one woman, one man. If it is a total act then you don’t think that there were a few other men also, possible candidates. You don’t have time, you don’t have energy. This man, this love has filled you totally: there is no part in you to remain separate and out of the experience, everything is colored by the experience. You will never think of the past. You will never think again that perhaps you have chosen the wrong man.It is not a question of choosing the wrong man or the right man. The question is of being total or not total. Even with a wrong man if you are total, you will be satisfied, utterly satisfied. And even with a right man, if you are not total you will be unsatisfied – because the satisfaction does not come from the wrongness of the man or the rightness of the man.Xanthippe, Socrates’ wife, was so frustrated with Socrates. Now, can you find a more right man? Can you find a more wise man? Socrates stands like an Everest of intelligence, wiseness. There is no comparison in the whole history of man. But Xanthippe was utterly frustrated with this man. So it is not a question of being with the right man, right woman. The question is of being total or partial. Xanthippe could not be total with Socrates.And you will be surprised that Socrates had no complaint against Xanthippe – who was beating him, who threw a whole kettle of hot water, which was for the morning tea, over his head. She burned half his face. But he did not complain, he did not even say, “What are you doing?”One of his students said, “This is too much!”He said, “Nothing to be worried about. At least half of my face is still perfectly okay. And what is the point, whether half the face is burned or not? At the most, for a few days I may not look in the mirror. But if she feels satisfied by doing it, if some of her anger, frustration, is released, it is good.”He said, “I think at least for a few days there is going to be silence – the silence after the storm. And I am not going to miss that silence just because she has burned half my face.”She did everything ugly. She insulted him before his own students, and he would sit silently and listen. His students would ask later on, “At least she should not insult you before your own students!”He said, “She is such a great master as far as I am concerned; she goes on teaching me a thousand and one things. This was the right time for her to insult me. I was not bothering about her insulting me in front of students; I was looking within, to see whether my ego hurts – that before my own students she is insulting me. It did not hurt, and I was immensely joyful. Now she can insult me anywhere: I am beyond her insult.”Now this man is completely satisfied with Xanthippe. You cannot find a more dangerous woman, more inhuman! But Socrates never uttered a single word as a complaint. He always praised her, he said, “She is my master. She teaches me – her methods are a little crude, but perhaps I deserve it; perhaps I may not learn unless she is so crude.”Many times his friends suggested, “Get divorced!”He said, “That I can never do. And from Xanthippe, to whom I owe so much?”So remember, it is not a question of whether you get the right man or the right woman, the right work or the wrong work.Vincent van Gogh was painting on the sea beach. One man was watching him painting, but could not figure out what it was. Finally he approached him and asked. Van Gogh said, “I have not yet thought about it. I was so absorbed in painting I have not thought about it. You think about it and meditate over it. Perhaps you can find what it is, and you can save me the trouble of finding what it is. But whatever it is, I am rejoicing tremendously and totally. And when I paint, I disappear in my painting.”That’s why I say your saints are mostly phony. Your real religion should come from the painters, from the musicians, from the poets, from the dancers – people who know how to be absorbed in a certain activity so totally….One great dancer, Nijinsky, used to take such high jumps while dancing that it was against gravitation; it was not possible! The physicists could not believe what was happening. First, he jumps so high – that is not allowed by gravitation. Secondly, when he comes down he does not come fast with a thump on the ground, breaking a few of his bones, having a few fractures. That would be the natural thing, because gravitation pulls anything forcibly.When he came down, he came like a feather – slowly, no hurry. That was even more miraculous. What was the secret of this man? He was asked again and again.He said, “If you want to know the truth, I have tried many times in my home to jump that high – I could not. I have tried to fall like a feather – I could not. I have tried to fall like a feather – I came down with a thump on the ground. I have bruised my body, broken one of my legs! Please don’t ask that question.“And it does not happen every day. It happens only when I forget myself completely. When the dancer disappears in the dance then I don’t know what happens because I am not there. When the dancer is no longer there, then something miraculous happens. It is a mystery to me too. I cannot explain why and how – why I don’t fall with speed, why I come slowly, leisurely, what happens to gravitation.”Perhaps a man without ego has a certain attunement with nature. Now he is not jumping, but the earth is helping him to jump. Now he is not falling, but the earth is taking care of him so that he does not fall fast and have a few fractures.Nijinsky said, “It happens only when I am not. So please, don’t ask me. Whenever I am, and trying to make an effort, it does not happen.”These are the people who should give you the secrets of religion. But a great calamity has happened on the earth. Idiots who don’t have any other quality except that they can fast, except that they can torture themselves – they became great saints. These are qualities? What has religion to do with fasting? What has religion to do with torturing yourself? – lying down on a bed of nails, making thousands of wounds in the body?In a hot country like India, where the sun is almost showering fire on you, you will find saints sitting surrounded with fire. Much wood which is on fire is surrounding them, and they are sitting in the middle; the sun is not enough. They are worshipped! But what is the quality that you are thinking is religious in it?Perhaps that man was good for a circus, but here he has become a saint. He is worshipped, and he will be worshipped after his death.I have been to so many of this type of people, and strangely enough only one thing have I found common in them: they are all idiots. Their eyes don’t show any sharpness of intelligence. If you ask them anything, they don’t have any answer. But they have thousands of followers.Somebody is standing on his head for days together; he becomes a saint. Strange – because a man standing on his head for many days will destroy all his intelligence. The brain cells are so small – in your small head there are millions of brain cells, so tiny, that when blood rushes toward the head they are all finished. They immediately die, that much flood they cannot survive. They need only a very small quantity of blood.That’s why man has been able to become intelligent as no other animal has, because the heads of all other animals are horizontal to the earth. They are getting too much blood, they cannot grow intelligence.But these people are going even farther. They are not even horizontal, they are standing on their heads, so all the blood of the body moves toward the head. And soon their heads are as intelligent as your feet.I don’t see what transformation they have managed, what they have contributed to the world, what beauty, what joy. Their contribution is nil. No religious saints have been able to make this earth more beautiful, more enjoyable, more lovable, more livable.On the contrary, they have been teaching you things that make life split, that make your life a misery. They have been teaching you not to allow yourself to become completely absorbed in anything.Your experience was significant. Now let that experience guide you. And it need not be that you have to dance with me. You can just clean the floor or cook the food. The question is not the activity, the question is your state of consciousness.Be absorbed. Be totally in it, and you will be immensely surprised: your whole life becomes a journey of a growing paradise. And the paradise grows within you. It is not somewhere in geography, it is somewhere in your innermost core.Osho,For two and a half years I have been a sannyasin. Sometimes I think I have learned so much; then I find myself as stupid as before. Please comment.It simply shows you have certainly learned much. Only a man of learning can find himself stupid.Stupid people never find themselves stupid.So please, go on doing the same. A moment will come when you have learned everything, and you will find, “I am just an idiot.” So you have come to the full stop.In other words…. Socrates when he was young used to say, “I am the wisest man in the world,” and used to challenge other philosophers, sophists, theologians, and defeat them. He had, certainly, a great intellectual acumen, a logical penetration. So what he said was not wrong. But when he became a little older, a little wiser, he dropped that statement that “I am the most wise man in the world.” He said, “There are a few things that I know, but there is so much to know that my wisdom is small and my ignorance big.” He has learned more. He has become humble.In his old age, he declared, “I do not know anything.” And at that time, a story is told….There was a temple in Greece in Delphi, which was the most famous temple in Greece. It was thought that the goddess of the temple would predict, and her predictions always came true. Of course a statue cannot speak; the priest spoke on her behalf: “She has told me this.”A group of people from Athens was visiting Delphi, and the priest said, “The goddess has told me…because you all come from Athens, go back and tell Socrates that the goddess of Delphi declares him to be the wisest man in the world.”They were happy. At least one man from their city has been declared to be the wisest man in the world. They rushed back to Athens, went to Socrates. He was sitting on the steps of his school where he used to teach. They were so excited, he said, “What is the problem? Why are you so excited?”They said, “Once you listen, you will also be excited. The goddess of Delphi has declared you the wisest man in the world.”Wisdom brings innocence. Wisdom does not bring knowledgeability; on the contrary, wisdom brings a certain luminous kind of ignorance.Socrates himself has said that there are two types of people in the world. There are knowledgeable people – but their knowledge is nothing but ignorance. They know, but their knowledge is borrowed, it is not their inner growth.And there is a second type which is very rare: the ignorant people. The ignorant people know; they are not knowledgeable, but their knowing has grown within themselves, it is their inner growth. And as their knowing grows inside, they become aware of this immense, mysterious universe. How can they say, “We are wise”?So Socrates says that there is a knowledge which does not know, and there is an ignorance which knows.You say you have been here for a few years and you have learned much, but once in a while you find yourself stupid again. Not once in a while – you will have to find that you are a permanent idiot! That day I will declare you to be the wisest man in the commune.Okay?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 31 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,All over the world people are being tortured. At the present time – especially in third world countries – reports are surfacing every day of unbelievable atrocities committed by man against man. From where does this desire to torture others arise? Do such perverted acts stem from a deep sense of frustration and the need to take revenge against society? Please comment.Man’s whole history is a history of torture, murder, rape. But in the past it was not possible to know about the whole world, what was happening; people knew only about local things. Now the earth has become so small that within minutes, wherever anything happens, it spreads all over the world. The media has made people aware of man’s reality. In the past it remained hidden. Now it has surfaced.There are reasons why man is so inhuman. The reasons are many, but the few most important ones should be understood.One, all the religions of the world have been teaching unnatural things to humanity – celibacy, renouncing the pleasures and comforts of life, living in poverty. For centuries they have been telling these things to people, and they have kept the people uneducated, illiterate.But an explosion in the contemporary world of education has created a tremendous problem. Now people know that what has been told to them was not right – it was not according to nature, it was against nature. They are full of rage against the whole past.The religions have corrupted their minds, have led them to perverted sexual practices. The religions have put one man against another. There are three hundred religions on the earth, and each claims that it is the only ultimate truth, all others are false.Now, anybody who has a little intelligence can see the point that there can be only one kind of religiousness, unnamed – just like science. You don’t call it Jewish science, Mohammedan science, Hindu science, Christian science. Just to call it science is enough; its rules are universal.Religion is the science of the inner world. Its rules also are universal.But these three hundred religions have been teaching you just the opposite. They have been teaching you rituals which don’t lead you inside. They have been teaching you about a God who lives above the clouds; nobody has seen him. They have been teaching you commandments written three thousand years ago, written five thousand years ago – written, and you have to live according to them.They have encaged you.In every possible way you are chained – not only your body, but your spirit.Hence, everywhere atrocities are surfacing. They have been surfacing down the ages, but the media to inform you about the reality that is happening all around the earth was missing. Education was missing. Now you are educated, whether you are a Jew or a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist, in the same way, in the same science, the same laws.In every way science has made the whole humanity one. But religions go on carrying the hangover of the past, dividing man against man.The violence that they have repressed for centuries has come to a climax. The people want to take revenge, because they have been mistreated, they have been deceived by the people they have trusted – by their prophets, their messiahs, their incarnations of God.These people have been the greatest criminals.They divided humanity.They divided you, split you into body and soul: you have to torture your body if you want to know the soul. So for thousands of years people have been torturing their bodies; that was the only way to become saintly. But now it is difficult to convince people that by torturing their bodies they will become holy. There seems to be no sense in it.Man has been divided into man and woman. Half of humanity consists of women, and they have lived a life of slavery, torture, indignity. They are rebelling.Man is rebelling against the past unconsciously. He is enraged by the whole human history. And he is so full of anger, violence, that any small thing brings it up, and it starts spreading like a wildfire.Secondly, man is tremendously frustrated because the leaders of mankind in the past have been giving him hope, hope of a paradise beyond death. Not a single person has returned after death and given his eyewitness evidence that there is a paradise, that there is a God, that your acts will be judged – you will be thrown into eternal hell or into the eternal blissfulness of paradise.Nobody has ever returned. Nobody knows anything about life after death, and people have been sacrificing their present for an unknown future. Now they cannot do it anymore, they have done enough. They want paradise here and now. The leaders cannot supply the goods that they have been promising them. Beyond death, of course, they are ready to give you anything you want, but people want it now. That creates a great hopelessness, frustration, meaninglessness.People have not been taught the art of living beautifully, the art of being graceful, the art of being silent, meditative. Instead of teaching these authentic realities which can be done right now, their minds were taken away from the present to some unknown future – nobody knows whether it exists or not.Now, because people become literate, educated, they can see the great deceit. They have been cheated, and a great anger is there. Not only their life but millions of lives for centuries have been exploited by these cheaters.Religious priests have parasites sucking your blood. Now it is absolutely impossible for those religions to exist anymore. They should disappear gracefully, and allow a new way of life which is centered in the present, so that something can be done to the human psychology.Man has immense capacity to love.If his love is given freedom, he will never commit anything that goes against love.Man has immense capacity to be compassionate.He will not commit violence on any slight excuse.But he has to be awakened!The religions have been giving him opium, and for thousands of years they have made him completely unconscious. It was good for them – they could exploit people easily.All the vested interests were together: the politician, the priest, the pedagogue, all were together, because if man becomes awake then there is no need for politicians; he will see them as criminals. There is no need for priests; he will see them as the greatest cheats that have existed ever.These priests have been telling people, “Blessed are the poor.” They themselves are not poor – pope the Polack is the richest man in the world. But nobody asks him the question, “Blessed are the poor – so what the hell are you doing in the Vatican? Go to Calcutta and start begging on the streets! – because if you remain the pope you will be the last to enter into paradise, and perhaps you will be thrown into hell.”The pope goes on quoting Jesus Christ, and for centuries you have listened to, “Blessed are the poor.” The rich are cursed, because even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but the rich man cannot pass through the gates of paradise.And why are people poor? Every religion has given some explanation, has to give one. The Christians are poor because God is very loving to you. You are the blessed; he is preparing you for paradise. This is a test of your trust.In India, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism have been telling people, “You are poor because in your past life you committed some grave sins, some evil acts, and this is the punishment. Don’t do anything wrong in this life. Patiently suffer, gracefully accept the punishment – in the next life you will be rich.”Now this is distracting people from the reality. The reality is that they are being exploited in this life, right now.And the explanation is really far-fetched. In a past life you put your hand on a candle flame – you did not burn yourself then, but you have a burned hand! Nobody knows about the past life; and cause and effect cannot be so distant. You do something, you hit your head against the wall and you will suffer now. You put your hand in the fire and you will be burned now. There is no explanation why the result comes in the next life.So either past lives have been taken as an explanation to the poor, to give them consolation that they deserve this poverty; or God has to be brought in, that he is testing your trust. Strangely enough…why is he not testing the rich people? Why is he against the rich people?And in Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, there is only one life. So the rich person is born without any past life in which he would have committed some evil acts; that’s why God has not given him the test of trust and has taken away the opportunity of entering into paradise.A strange God! He makes people rich, comfortable, luxurious, because he is against them. But why is he against them? They have not done anything. This is their only life! Why has he chosen a few people to be rich, and many people to be poor?All these explanations are bogus; and the contemporary mind is becoming clear about all these explanations, that they were strategies to keep the poor, poor, and to make the rich, richer.In a country like India no revolution has ever happened, although the whole country is poor. In the hands of only a few families all the riches of the country have gathered. The whole country is starving, hungry, but they have accepted it patiently up to now.There is a limit to everything. Now they are burning. They know they have been cheated, badly cheated. So there are going to be riots, there are going to be killings. And the responsibility goes to your prophets, your messiahs, your messengers of God – and finally, to God. If God exists anywhere, he is the greatest criminal. To create a world with so much hatred, anger, rage, violence….This is something strange. You make something wrong, and if it behaves wrongly then you punish it. Who has made you a sexual being? If God wanted celibacy, there was no problem for him. If he can create the whole world within six days, can’t he manage that man is born without sex, without greed, without jealousy, without anger, without hate? No, He has made a man full of all these things. And anger, hate, jealousy you need not learn; they are instinctive, they are God-given.Meditation you will have to learn – God has not given that to you. This God must be nuts! He has not given you the most precious thing: the art of knowing yourself. In fact, he was against all knowledge. He prevented Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge and from eating from the tree of eternal life.Can you think of this God as divine, who is preventing his children from wisdom and from the taste of eternal life? These are the two things that he should have insisted on: “First taste these two trees, and then the whole Garden of Eden is yours.”But this God is the invention of the vested interests. The priests never wanted people to be educated, they never wanted the people to become intelligent, because there was danger. In their education, in their intelligence the people will start asking questions. And the priests don’t have any authentic answers, because all that the priests have created in the name of religion is fiction – and ugly fiction.Now the new generation is becoming aware everywhere that this God has to be dropped. Nietzsche said, “God is dead and man is free.” But the younger generation wants God not to be dead, they want to murder him. Just an easy death does not appeal; they want to murder him. And you will see your temples, your synagogues, your churches on fire soon! Your Bible, your holy Koran, your holy Gita – you will soon see in bonfires.Man has come of age, he is mature.He can see how he has been deceived, and he has to destroy everything that has deceived him.But the priests are very cunning; cunningness is their profession. They are professional exploiters, parasites, because for centuries they have done nothing else; they have become very skillful. So rather than allowing you to burn the Bible, to burn the Vatican, to kill God, they go on diverting you – Christians against Mohammedans, Mohammedans against Hindus, Hindus against Buddhists. And you are so full of rage that you have lost all reason, you simply want to destroy. And the priests are using this situation. If they don’t use it, you will destroy them!So all over the world religions are fighting, nations are fighting, races are fighting. Who is creating all this? The people who have dominated you for centuries know perfectly well that your anger, your hatred has to be diverted; otherwise, they will be the targets.They are all against me for a single reason – that I want your rage to go in the right direction. I don’t want to divert it. I want you to meditate and in silence see what has been done to man in the whole history. And out of your silence and peace, if you feel that something has to be destroyed because it has been hindering the growth of man, his consciousness, that destruction will be totally different.It will not be of people. If will be of your holy books, it will be of your holy places, it will be of your synagogues, churches, mosques. It will not be directed to other human beings who belong to other groups. It will not be between Americans and Soviet people – they both have been exploited by different kinds of priests.Communism is the latest religion.It has its own priests, it has its own holy Das Kapital. It has its own holy place of pilgrimage – the Kremlin. It has its own trinity – Marx, Engels, Lenin. It has replaced the old religion.There is no need for Americans to destroy Russians, or Russians to destroy Americans. If we are intelligent, all the politicians – Russians and Americans – should be imprisoned immediately. And the masses can do it! They just have to be awakened as to who is the real enemy.Boundaries of the countries should be dissolved. They don’t exist on the earth, only on the map. The whole humanity is one, and the whole humanity should pool all its energies. And we can make this earth a paradise….You can see this small commune – only five thousand people are living here, and within four years we have changed the desert into an oasis. We are growing our food, our vegetables, our milk products; we are self-sufficient. And in four years not a single crime has happened. Nobody has been beaten, nobody has been raped, nobody has committed suicide, nobody has been murdered.Five thousand people living together have pooled their energies. One kitchen is enough for five thousand people. Naturally, it saves immensely in money, in human power. Otherwise, there would have been at least one thousand kitchens, one thousand women would have been doing just one thing. Now only a few women manage; and far better food is provided to the commune than you can get from a nagging wife.We are living comfortably, we are enjoying everything that is beautiful. We are rejoicing, dancing, singing – you will not see long faces here. And nobody is bothered about God – strange! Nobody is bothered about heaven and hell. Those are stupid questions. Why waste your intelligence on stupid questions?People are concerned with how to be more creative, how to produce more, how to make the commune absolutely self-sufficient so that even if the whole world suddenly disappears leaving this commune alone, there will be no problem.You say, “Everywhere atrocities are surfacing” – please, exclude my commune! There are no atrocities here.People are so loving, so compassionate – they just need to be made aware of their great potential. People are intelligent – they just have to be given a chance to sharpen their intelligence.The whole world has been fed with the idea of belief. All the religions want you to believe, have faith. That destroys your intelligence. That’s their way of destroying your intelligence, keeping you retarded.In my commune, belief is non-existent.We trust in doubt, because doubt sharpens intelligence, it creates questions for which you have to find answers. This is the way your intelligence becomes sharp. We teach doubt, we teach skepticism, we teach agnosticism. Agnosticism means, be sincere about one thing – what you know and what you don’t know. And if you don’t know something, accept it, that “I don’t know.”This will be punished in the outside world. The outside world respects hypocrites. Whether you know or not, you have to pretend that you know.The American scouts have just rejected and expelled one brilliant young man – just fourteen years of age. He was their best cadet, he was always first in everything. Why did he have to be expelled? – for a single reason, because he was an intelligent boy…. They were filling in the form for higher promotion, in which it is asked, “Do you believe in God?” He simply said, “I don’t know. I don’t know God, how can I believe or disbelieve?”Do you see how people’s intelligence is killed? A boy is being agnostic, and absolutely correct: he says, “I don’t know. And without knowing you ask me to believe?” Rather than answering him, they expelled him. Belief in God is absolutely necessary for every cadet.Tricky ways of keeping people retarded!In the first world war, for the first time, psychologists suggested that when soldiers were recruited their mental age should be checked. And they were all shocked, because the average mental age of all their soldiers was only thirteen years!Things have not changed. You may be eighty years old with a thirteen-year-old mind. Naturally you will find anguish, tension, worries. You will find yourself in a very confused situation. Your body is allowed to grow, your mind is stopped.From the very childhood you have to believe in some religion, in some absolutely fictitious ideas, ultimate lies. And once a child starts believing in ultimate lies, his intelligence stops growing.In this commune and my other communes in the world, we don’t have a belief system, we don’t have any faith in which you have to be indoctrinated. We are allowing our people to be as deeply agnostic as possible.And why fear? If God is there and you inquire, question, you will find him. The fear is that if you doubt and inquire you will not find him. That’s why doubt has to be from the very beginning completely erased from your mind.Doubt is the method of science. Scientists are not afraid; they go on doubting and questioning every hypothesis, experimenting. And only if they come to some conclusion which is supported by evidence, supported by experiments, supported by intelligence, and you cannot doubt it, is it accepted.And then too, it is accepted only hypothetically, because perhaps tomorrow you may have better instruments, better minds, better people, and they may find some loopholes in it. They may find that something else is more accurate, more right.So in science there is no belief, ever. Doubt brings you to a hypothesis. A hypothesis means, for the time being you believe in it – but only for the time being. If tomorrow somebody goes ahead and declares that we can move on, the old hypothesis is dissolved; then the new hypothesis takes its place until you come to something which is indubitable. But it is a great surprise. The moment you find the indubitable, you don’t believe in it, there is no need. It is your own experience.Truth needs no belief. Only lies need beliefs.The whole young generation around the world is certainly at a great angry stage. But we have to make the young people aware…because if your leaders who have exploited you are still your leaders, they will exploit your anger too, they will direct it in wrong directions. And that is what is happening.In India, my experience was that it was so easy to create a riot. For example, Mohammedans believe that music is something evil, so before their mosque you cannot go on playing music – a flute, or a band. You have to stop playing it, move silently before the mosque, and then you can start again. Even in marriages….In India, the marriage procession is something beautiful to see – music, dance…. But if the marriage party comes in front of a mosque and continues its music and dance, immediately there will be a riot. Soon Hindus will be killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans will be killing Hindus.If you want to start a riot, then just hang a dead cow in front of a Hindu temple – the cow may have died by herself, that does not matter – and immediately you have put the whole city on fire.Anybody can do it! Politicians are continuously doing it. Religious leaders are continuously doing it. Whenever they see that the anger is turning toward them, they immediately do some small thing: the anger moves, and people destroy themselves.The other thing to understand very deeply is, scientists have discovered that every animal has a territorial imperative. He has a certain territory; for example, around him for thirty yards nobody should enter. If you remain out of his territory, he will not in any way be upset by you, you can remain there. But the moment you trespass the boundary line, immediately the animal becomes dangerous.Every animal has a territorial imperative. Man comes from animals. You all feel once in a while to be left alone. Always in the crowd…what happened to your territory? Why do you feel at ease in your home? Why do you feel beautiful in a vast forest or sitting on the beach seeing the immense ocean? It gives you a vast area around you, which is something very essential.But the world is overcrowded. Wherever you are, you are in a crowd. And the world goes on becoming more and more overcrowded. This overcrowding is one of the psychological reasons why people are so on edge. Any moment, anything, and they are ready to fight – in three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars.Everybody is encroached upon; and the pope, the Hindu Shankaracharya, the Mohammedan, Ayatollah Khomeini – they all go on preaching against birth control, against abortion, against the pill. They want the world to be so crowded – and it will be so crowded – that there is not going to be any elbow room. There will not be any need to go to any meeting; wherever you are, you will be in a meeting. But these idiots keep saying around the world….India is fifty percent ready to become another Ethiopia. In Ethiopia one thousand people have been dying every day for the whole year. Now it is no longer news at all, nobody bothers. It has been accepted that Ethiopians die, one thousand every day.The same will soon be the case in India. The same will be the case in other Third World countries, because they are all growing so fast. And nobody is ready to tell these people that they are teaching simple nonsense.The pope is in South Africa, where the birthrate is the highest in the world. People are utterly poor, and he is teaching them that they should not use any birth control methods; it is against God!But there is not much difference between Ethiopia and America, because here also Reverend Falwell is teaching against abortion, against birth control. And what is the reason? – because God is sending people children and you prevent him. This is against God.But I cannot understand that a small pill – God cannot remove it? He managed to part the ocean for Moses and his whole company to pass. He went against the law of nature, he managed to give birth to Jesus Christ without a father. He seems to be a skillful man. He can remove the pill! He can change the nature of the pill so that the woman who takes the pill gives birth to two children instead of none. Naturally, people will stop taking the pill, because this is dangerous! you cannot go against God. If God wants people, he can create them.There are so many millions of planets around, so many solar systems, but only this earth is evolved to the point of human consciousness, only on this earth have there been a few people who have reached to the ultimate in consciousness – enlightenment.Why destroy this earth? It has enriched the whole existence, and the rest of existence is empty. God can manage to send people to any other planet, any other place.But no, Reverend Falwell wants God to go on sending more people here. Mother Teresa wants more people here. The pope wants more people here, because these poor people are vulnerable, ready to become Christians, Catholics. These poor people and their children will be on the streets, and Mother Teresa can gather the orphans and make the Catholics.These people go on distracting you from the real problems. Now, the pope in South Africa…. The real problem in South Africa is that fifteen percent of the population, the white people – who are all foreigners – are dominating the country. Eighty-five percent of the people are slaves, and the country belongs to them! They don’t have even the voting rights. Naturally, the fifteen percent, the white people, cannot stay a single moment more if those eighty-five percent of the people have voting power.The fifteen percent who are white have all the riches of the country. South Africa is one of the richest places, with gold minds, silver mines, diamond mines. But all those mines are under the control of the white people. The people to whom the country belongs are so poor, and the pope is preaching to those poor to become more poor, because from there he recruits his Catholics.Poor people are needed because the religions cannot convert rich people. The uneducated are needed, the orphans are needed because Christians cannot get hold of the educated people. Their own educated young people are getting out of hand. Their churches are empty, the young generation does not go there anymore. They need to fill their churches, their congregations, and their numbers must come from poor countries.And the poor people cannot argue against what they are saying, that God sends people. It has been accepted for centuries that God sends people.Nobody knows about God, and if he is omnipotent, all-powerful, then whatever you do – any birth control method, anything, abortion, he is all-powerful – can’t he do something so that you cannot prevent him from sending people?God cannot do anything because he does not exist!These reverends and popes and bishops, these are the people who want the world to become as poor as possible – because the poor man is ready to pray, he is ready to go to the church. The poor man is always ready for paradise, heaven, hell. He has no guts, no intelligence to deny anything.Already he is so much in suffering, how can he deny the existence of paradise? That is his only hope, that after death…. It is only a question of a few years more of suffering, and then there is an eternity of pleasures – all the pleasures that religions deny here, renounce here! Strange argument…strange logic.Mohammedans are not allowed to drink alcoholic beverages here on the earth, but in their heaven there are rivers of wine, champagne, and all kinds of alcoholic beverages which you can choose. Rivers flowing, not bottles! You can drink, you can jump in, you can swim, you can drown – you can do anything!Here, alcohol is a sin. Can’t you see the stupidity of the logic? Here it is sin. Those who don’t drink will become virtuous, they will enter paradise. And there, these saints will be rewarded with beautiful women who always remain young, who do not perspire, who do not need any deodorant; they are always fresh and always virgin. Their virginity is unspoilable; all the saints can make love to them, they are still virgin.Your saints who renounced here on the earth the woman, the home, the family and all comforts, and lived in poverty – you reward them with these things?As far as I can see, these saints will be simply shocked when they enter paradise, that other popes are making love under the trees. They will not be able to believe it.I have heard about one thing…. An old saint died. His whole teaching was celibacy. And after a few days one of his chief disciples died. The disciple was very excited that he would be meeting his master again. He inquired about him. People showed him: “You will find him under that tree near the river. Perhaps he may recognize you, or he may not recognize you because he is so drunk. Somehow we have pulled him out of the river.”One thing is good: you cannot die in heaven, there is no death; so you can drown but you will live. There is no way to commit suicide in heaven. “We have just pulled him out. He is lying there under the tree.”The disciple rushed there – he could not believe his eyes. He closed his eyes, because his old master, naked, had a beautiful woman in his lap, holding her and playing with her, swaying with her. He could not believe it. But then he thought, “Perhaps this is the reward for my master’s great celibacy, renunciation, living in poverty, torture. This must be…” because such a beautiful woman he had never seen.He just fell down at the feet of the master, and said, “Master, you are well rewarded.”Before the master could speak, the woman said, “You idiot, you don’t understand anything! He is not being rewarded, I am being punished!”But the poor people have always hoped for heaven. That hope keeps them suffering patiently; otherwise, there is no reason for them to suffer. Just a little understanding….The population has to go down; and immediately, with the population going down, all these atrocities will stop.People need space. Everybody needs a certain space; that space gives him a certain spiritual freedom. Everybody wants to live comfortably, luxuriously – that is natural. But this small earth cannot support so many people.Popes, Ayatollah Khomeini, shankaracharyas, Reverend Falwell – all these people should be behind bars, sentenced for their whole life. These people are wild animals let loose in the world! They should be first tamed, and if they are tamed they can enter a circus – but not the world again.The world’s population has to be one fourth of what it is. Then everybody will have space, everybody will have enough – more than enough; everybody will be satisfied, contented, nourished.And the world needs only one thing – not great scriptures, just a simple method of becoming silent, of becoming yourself, of coming to your innermost center. That center is the temple, the synagogue, the church. There is no other church, no other synagogue.Don’t go anywhere.Go inside, inward.And there is your paradise, your wisdom, your eternal life.A man who knows his wisdom and his eternal life cannot behave the way people are behaving all around the world.Every politician should be forced to participate in some school of meditation, and unless he graduates from there he cannot stand for any political post. All politicians, unless they are meditative, are disqualified. If they have any sense of dignity they should renounce, they should immediately resign from their posts. They don’t know themselves, what are they doing there? They don’t know themselves and they are controlling millions of people and their lives.My religion consists only of one word: meditativeness. It has no prayer, because there is nobody to whom you can pray. You are here, a reality. Why not go in and find out from where your life comes, the source of your life? the source of your intelligence? the source of your love?Go deep inside, and you will be surprised that hate, anger, jealousy all exist only on the periphery. In the innermost center of your being there is only love and love and love. And it blossoms the moment you reach there, and spreads all over your periphery.And just as when you bring light in a dark room, darkness disappears, the moment you bring your silence, your peace, your love to your periphery, all the darkness that consisted of jealousy, violence, hatred, anger, competitiveness, disappears. You have not to do anything about it, you have not to control it: it is not there at all.You cannot control darkness. Either it is there, or you bring a candle in, or light a candle which is already there. And after the light you never ask, “What to do about the darkness now?” It simply is not found.Humanity has only one saving device available, and that is meditation.Everything else has failed:Give a try to meditation.I told you, in four years’ time there has not been any illegal act here. The reason is, people are meditating. There is no competition, no stealing, no hurting anybody. Nobody feels himself higher than the other. And we are not teaching equality, we are not communists. Communism is outdated.We are teaching meditativeness, and the feeling of equality arises of its own accord. You need not have a dictatorship of the proletariat to enforce equality on people. Any enforced thing is not going to last long, because deep down whatever you have repressed is there. And it is gathering more and more energy, it is becoming a cancer. Equality cannot be imposed.But a loving person does not feel himself superior to anybody or inferior to anybody. These two complexes, inferiority complex and superiority complex, simply disappear from his being. He is just like a tree or a cloud or a mountain, enjoying his being.And the moment you start enjoying your being, rejoicing in your being, you cannot hurt anybody. It is impossible. You can hurt somebody only if you are yourself hurting, if you are carrying wounds within you. When you are healed and whole, your vision about everybody else simply changes. You cannot condemn, you cannot humiliate anybody. Your love will not allow you to do that.Through meditation we have to create communes around the world – we have many already. We have to create them in every country.In countries like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany, China, where creating a commune will be almost impossible, we are creating underground communes. There are sannyasins in every communist country. They meditate in basements, they read books, they listen to the tapes – and they are immensely excited because for sixty years they have been repressed.Communist Russia is the only country where revolution is almost impossible. Strange fate of a revolutionary country where the greatest revolution happened in 1917! But after that, they say “Revolution has happened, now there is no need for any complaint.”And the moment they suspect anybody, that he can sabotage the society, the man simply disappears. He is killed, imprisoned, poisoned, sent to a madhouse where they go on injecting chemicals into him which make him mad; or he is sent to Siberia where there are eternal snows and he cannot escape, there is no need even to chain him.But the youth…. Wherever there is youth there is always a romance with revolution, with change. Russian youth for seventy years has not tasted youthfulness. It has been missing one of the most beautiful experiences – of being in love with a revolutionary idea. You will be surprised to know that meditation is for them a revolutionary idea. In other communist countries the same is the case.In other countries which are not communist, we are creating our communes. And we want our communes to be models for others to see that people can live without crime, without murder, without suicide, without frustration. People can be creative, people can be loving and friendly. And people can rejoice for no reason at all – just for the sake of rejoicing.If we can make these existential experiments available to the whole humanity, there is a hope that we can free them from the long, long bondage of politicians and priests. In the future, if humanity is to exist, then politicians and priests are not to exist. We have to make a clear choice.On one side is the whole humanity of innocent people, and on the other side is the company of all the criminals and conspirators against humanity: the politicians, the priests.And the time has come. We have come to an ultimate crisis where decision is possible.Politicians gone, nations are gone.Priests gone, there is only one humanity.And then every university can become a place, not only to teach you geography – which is stupid – history – which is just rubbish; but to teach you something very essential: meditation, love, the art of living, the art of being human.Each university should become a temple of wisdom; it is not yet. It is called a university but it is not a university, because it is not universal – just a name. Inside…. I cannot believe it: there are Catholic universities, Mohammedan universities, Hindu universities! It seems man has gone mad.The universe is not Mohammedan, not Hindu nor Catholic. The universities should be completely free of all politics, all religions, but they should teach you the basic arts of being human – which has not been done up to now. That’s why there are so many atrocities, so many inhuman acts against human beings.What man has done to man is inconceivable. Just Adolf Hitler alone is responsible for killing at least ten million people. Joseph Stalin is not far behind. In the twentieth century, are you going to allow all this to go on?No, we are not going to allow it anymore.Our ways of changing this world are certainly different. We are not going to create nuclear weapons to conquer the world and change it, no.We have already the greatest weapon in our hands: meditation.Spread it far and wide to everyone you love, to everyone you know.Don’t tell anybody that it is something to be believed in. Just say, “I experimented, and it is something not to be missed. You experiment. There is nothing to lose. If you don’t get anything out of it, you have not lost anything. And it is such a simple thing that everybody, even a small child, can start doing it. And it can be done even by the dying man in the last moment of his life.”And if a dying man can do it, can reach his center, he will know that death is happening only to the house in which he used to live, but he is not going to die. He will know his eternity, his immortality. And that knowledge, that wisdom is the greatest richness that one can achieve.Osho,I have been a sannyasin for eleven years. Never in my life have I been as happy as now. But when I listen to you lately, I feel that I have never really gone inside. Is this possible?Not only possible, it is absolutely certain.Just being happy is nothing. It is dangerous too, because somebody who is unhappy at least tries to find some way to get out of it.You have been a sannyasin for eleven years. Naturally – my people are immensely happy people, and happiness is catching – you are caught by the happiness of everybody. And there is no reason to be sad here, there is no reason to be frustrated here, there is no reason to be disappointed here. But this happiness is not what I call blissfulness. This happiness is good, but just good is not enough.You will have to enter into yourself.And remember, in entering into yourself you are not going to lose your happiness. You are fortunate, because the person who starts from unhappiness will have to lose unhappiness.You are not going to lose anything.You will find more and more happiness.And you will find the happiness turning, changing into blissfulness, and finally into enlightenment.You are on the right track, but you are not moving!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 32 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You say that there is only one sin, and that is unawareness. I tried for years to look for the good in every situation, however painful it seemed, but I still have not come to understand how there is no wrong. To me, things like the abuse of a child – either physically or psychologically – and the rape of a woman are wrong. How can they be called good?Can you tell me anything to help my understanding of these things?I have said that awareness is the only virtue, and unawareness is the only sin.Now I am in a difficulty. Who has told you to look for good in everything? How did you translate my statement about awareness to mean that you have to see the good in everything? And you say you have tried long to see good in everything, but there are children abused psychologically, sexually; woman are raped – how can these things be good?But you seem to be just stupid. Being aware means not to make any judgment. And all this time you have been making judgments about what is good and what is not good. Then you are bound to be confused. And awareness will not arise out of this discrimination.Awareness simply means witnessing anything just like a mirror, giving no judgment about it. And as your awareness grows, things that looked sinful to you will look only pathological. People are sick. And they are sick as victims of thousands of years of teaching them what is good and what is not good.With awareness there is no decision about any act. Awareness simply sees it whether it is good or not; it has no criterion. But the first thing is to attain to awareness. And then the same things may not look the same.For example, the rape of a woman is certainly ugly. But who is responsible for it? The society, the culture, the religion – they have been trying to keep men and women apart. Your biology knows nothing of it, and when you see a beautiful woman on a dark night, alone, your biology takes over your so-called morality and religion.But then too, it is not certain that raping the woman is certainly bad. Perhaps she was also waiting for it. Perhaps she was getting frustrated that nobody is raping her. There is a deep desire in every woman to be longed for, and the more drastically you long for her the more satisfied she feels. And rape is the ultimate in longing for a woman. You are ready to commit a crime just to have her. You may be imprisoned for years in a jail, you don’t care.In most of the cases you and the woman are both brought up by the same idiotic society. They have told the woman to remain away from men, they have given her a certain psychology to avoid men. Even if somebody is attractive to her, she has to say no.In all the languages the poets have been saying for centuries that when a woman says no she means yes. But this is not true in Rajneeshpuram. Here when a woman says no she means no, and when she says yes she means yes. You are fortunate if she says no! But there is no confusion about the meanings of the words.No woman has been raped in four years’ time in the commune here – but a few swamis have been raped! This is something new that is happening. The swamis are in such a fear, and wherever they turn there is somebody ready to rape them! We are writing human history from the very beginning again.But you cannot decide these things superficially. All psychologists agree that a woman is raped because deep down she desires it. It gives her a great ego, that she is so beautiful, so lovable, that people are ready even to commit suicide – there are countries where for rape you will be sentenced for your whole life or you may be crucified; still the man wanted her. There is a great satisfaction – he risked his whole life!So don’t take things superficially. But an unaware man is bound to take things superficially. My emphasis is not to determine which act is wrong and which act is right. In one situation the same act may be wrong; in other situations, right.Just a few days ago, one sannyasin wrote me a letter saying, “Osho, You have created a trouble” – because I had said some time ago that many people, almost the majority of people in the world, men and women both, are untrained lovers. No training has been given to them. In fact everything has been kept from them, they have been kept ignorant. What does a virgin mean? Someone who has been kept absolutely ignorant.So I had said that the best way to introduce your children to love will be that, while you are making love, children should be playing around. Let them be there. And in fact it is one of the most significant things because every child sooner or later discovers what you are doing to his mother. First he thinks that this father seems to be a barbarian, doing pushups on the poor woman. He wants to kill this man, but the child is so small…so he represses the desire, and he is not even allowed to admit that he has seen it.And the child will never be able to forgive you, that you were secretive about things. You were not open, even with him. You talked about love, but love means many things: openness, honesty, sincerity. And about one of the most basic things in life you kept the child absolutely unaware.Children are very intelligent, every child is born with a tremendous energy of intelligence. It is the society and the education and the religion-they start destroying his intelligence, so by the time he is a young man, he is just a fool. But the small children are very perceptive, you cannot deceive them. So I had said that it is perfectly good – because the child has to learn and it is better he learns from the very beginning.Now this woman wrote to me, “A problem has arisen: we allowed our child to be present while we were making love; now the child wants to make love to me. He says, ‘If father can do it, why can’t I do it?’ Now we cannot say that this is sin, because if it is sin, then why is his father doing it, and why is he being allowed to commit sin?”In a really human society there will be no sexual abuse of children. Such abuse exists only because children are kept in the dark; and they are curious, very curious, “What is it all about?” Then they get caught in somebody’s net.But children are very understanding too. The mother, the father, both should make him understand, “This is your training to see how love is made. The time will come when you will be a young man and you will be making love – then don’t make the same mistakes that we have made.”Make your lovemaking a deep understanding for the child. Make him also aware that he is not your age. Make the place of your lovemaking a temple, so that the child from the very beginning starts feeling love is something sacred. And if he knows everything about it nobody can abuse him.Now the question arises: who is responsible for sexual abuse of the child? You are responsible. You are keeping your children in darkness, and they are feeling that there is something that is being kept secret. They become curious; the more you hide it, the more curious they are.If it is open and is made available so the child can understand it – yes, there will be a few problems, like the child wanting to make love to the mother. The mother can hug the child, the mother can help the child to understand: “Just look at my size and your size. Just grow up and you will find a beautiful woman, far more beautiful than me.”But every mother wants the child to feel that she is the greatest and the most beautiful woman in the world, not knowing that she is creating a tragedy for the child for his whole life because now he will be looking for her all around the world and he will not find her. No woman will come up to the standard of his mother. No woman is going to give him satisfaction.The same is true about small girls. They should be made absolutely aware – not just verbally in a classroom. That does not help, they become even more curious.Make it very honest. And when the experiment is happening every day in the house, where is the problem? Let your girl, your boy, be present. Let them see the beauty of it. Make the whole phenomenon as sacred as possible. And these children will always respect you because you were so honest with them, so sincere with them; you never kept anything secret from them.And any problems like this – boys asking to make love to their mother – can be explained to them, that they are not yet ripe. One day they will be ripe; for that day we are preparing them. And children are very receptive, very understanding.There is sexual abuse of children because they are kept in darkness by their parents, by their teachers. Love is something like a sin which has to be done in darkness, and nobody is to know about it. You are doing something ugly. In your own mind it is something ugly, something that should not be done. You are not rejoicing in it.Rejoice! Make love a festive moment.And of course, your children have to take part in it.They can at least dance around you while you are making love, sing beautiful songs around you, play on their small guitars, drums.They can make it really festive!And they will understand that they are children and they are not of age, and soon they will get their own lovers. And if this experience has been part of their growing up, their love life will have a totally different flavor.So in child abuse, the person who has abused the child is only a victim of a very neurotic society.Why should there be rapes? I do not understand, because there are as many women as there are men, equal in numbers. Why should there be rapes?And while you are raping a woman against her will, it cannot be a joyful experience. It is more like a fight, it is not like love. But people are doing that for the simple reason that the society has completely destroyed any possibility for them to have any love relationship. And society can keep you in such darkness that it is unbelievable.In the Middle Ages it was thought that the queen of England did not have her legs separate, they were joined – because the way of dressing was such you could not figure out whether the legs were joined or separate. It was all over England an accepted fact that queens are different and unique. And no queen or king had the guts to say this is nonsense.Now nobody will fall into such a stupid belief, because the skirts are becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, and soon they are going to disappear. You can see the legs of the queen, and you will be really shocked that they are separate. They are just like your legs, everybody’s legs. But this was not told to people. Joined legs gave queens uniqueness, a specialty: they are royal, you are common people.The same is being done in many things, on many levels all around the world. You don’t want your children to know that you make love.You will be surprised: in India, the father cannot play with his small boy or girl in front of the elders, that is thought to be very unmannerly. No husband can talk to his wife in the day…because in India there are joint families. There are so many people in one family – fifty, sixty – and houses are small and overcrowded.The husband and wife sometimes have to wait for years to see each other’s faces, because they meet only in the darkness of the night without whispering a word, because all others are sleeping. The house is small and overcrowded; in the same room other people are sleeping.It is no wonder that in India divorce is a very late development, and that too happens only in a few well-educated, rich cities like Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta. But ninety-nine percent of India cannot think of divorce, for the simple reason that at least you have to see your wife before you can divorce her! You have to talk to her before you know what a bitch she is! She has to talk with you to know, “My God! What a macho fellow I have got!”But these things don’t happen. Husbands and wives have no time, no space, no secrecy, no privacy. They meet deep in the darkness of the night when everybody has fallen asleep. And they make love as quickly as possible, because somebody may wake up.When my uncle got married…I used to sleep in the same room, and I wouldn’t let him make love to his wife. Whenever he would get up from his bed and move toward his wife, I would start coughing. He would go back to his bed.After a few days he told me, “This seems to be strange, that the moment I get out of bed – the whole night you don’t cough, only exactly at that time. What happens? Why do you start coughing?”I said, “I don’t know. I was also thinking that there must be some connection – your getting out of bed and my coughing. I have been thinking, ‘What connection can there be?’”But finally he had to open his heart. He said, “I know you. We have been married for five months and I have not even touched my wife’s body. And we cannot say that you should be removed from the room to some other room, because no other room is ready to receive you. And they will ask me why, and I cannot tell the true story, that for five months this boy has been torturing me!”I said, “I have been doing that simply to make you aware – why make it such a secrecy? Why make it something ugly that you have to hide behind darkness? I have never stopped you, you can make love to your wife; I will be there just to see that everything is going right! And someday I am going to be married, then…? Who is going to teach me? You be my teachers, you both be my teachers.”He said, “You are impossible. If you see us making love, you will spread the rumor all over the city. And the truth is I myself don’t know much about love, because it is never talked about, never taught. You simply get married – an arranged marriage, you have not seen the girl.”In India, for ninety-nine percent of the people, marriage is still just fate; the astrologer decides it. They don’t even see the other’s photograph, they don’t know whom they are going to live their whole life with.This kind of state causes many problems. Sexual abuse of children will be there; rapes will be there – because there are women who have not been able to find a husband, perhaps they have lost all hope of finding a husband. There are men who cannot afford to be married, who are somehow managing to survive, but what to do with the biology? They cannot even go to a prostitute, they don’t have the money. So rape remains the only possible outlet for their biological instinct.Don’t be hard on the rapist. And don’t be hard on the woman who has been raped. These are problems created by the society. Be hard on it!In my commune it is absolutely impossible that anybody should rape. I receive letters every day from my women sannyasins: “What is happening to the swamis? They don’t seem to be interested in us at all. They avoid, they escape, they make an appointment and never turn up. Is there something wrong?”There is nothing wrong. This small section of humanity has made love, for the first time, a simple thing. And there is a saturation point. Now a male sannyasin has made love to many women; he feels simply tired. He wants to be left alone, he wants to meditate. Who is going to rape? Impossible!In the outside world, men have been chasing women for thousands of years and it was thought that it is natural. It is not. In my commune, women are chasing men and men are escaping and hiding, finding excuses. This commune has proved your thousands of years were simply managed. It was not true, because man is sexually the weaker person; the woman is very strong sexually.That’s why for centuries there have been only female prostitutes. Only just now, in very sophisticated areas like London, Tokyo, have there appeared a few male prostitutes. But a male prostitute is finished in one love affair; then the whole night there is no business!The woman can do business the whole night. She can finish many men very easily. Strange, that man was chasing her; it was absolutely against the reality. But man is an egoist – macho. He becomes interested only in things which are difficult, when things are a challenge.The woman has understood it from the very beginning – that the man is interested only if she keeps herself far away and becomes a challenge to him, becomes a problem to his ego. But always remember, the woman was very clever: she kept away, but not too far away. Because if you are too far away, the man may lose interest, may start moving in some other direction. She has to be within reach, and yet beyond. It is a delicate territory.So the woman has been playing with the man. Sometimes she will come closer and the man will feel, “Now, the moment is coming!” – and she will start moving away. This way man has been chasing woman. Otherwise, if we accept our realities and our nature, the woman will be the chaser and the man will be the chased.Just the other day somebody sent me a question. A woman sannyasin asked me, “When I surrender to my man, something happens. I do not find him there, he is somewhere else in his mind.” No, man does not like the woman to surrender. You are doing wrong, you are going against the male psychology. He wants to force you to surrender; that gives him great egoistic joy. But you simply surrender….I am reminded of my school days…. There used to be every year a wrestling competition. Somehow we persuaded a very strong boy in our class that he should enter the competition, and we would make every arrangement that he should win.He was very reluctant, but we praised him, his muscles and his body and his exercises. And we said, “This is the time! When are you going to use all your muscles that you have developed in the gym? – this is the time. And everybody in the class is agreed that you will come out on top.”But what happened on the wrestling ground was amazing and something really remarkable…. He had come into the semifinals, now he was facing students from other schools. The other school had hired a professional wrestler, and they pretended that he was a student, that “His age is a little more because he goes on failing.” And everybody could understand – wrestlers are not great intellectuals.But we were afraid for the boy that we had put forward. He looked a pygmy in front of that giant. But he did something immensely beautiful: As the drum started beating and the wrestling was to start, the boy that we had put there lay down on the ground, flat. That’s the way Indian wrestling is: one party has to sit on the chest of the other party, and the other party’s whole body has to touch the ground, his back has to touch the ground.He lay down. The wrestler stood there; he could not figure out what was happening. And the student said, “Sit on my chest!”The wrestler could not get the idea. He was still standing there looking very silly, and the whole crowd was clapping: this kind of wrestling nobody has seen!Our principal called the boy in and asked, “Why did you do that?”He said, “What else to do? To be beaten unnecessarily…that man is a professional wrestler. I came to know just before the match that the other school is deceiving, so I thought the best way is not to give him a chance to be victorious. On my own I surrendered.” But the other man could not gather courage to sit on his chest. What is the point? – the man is lying down already. You sit on his chest and you are declared victorious? What kind of victory is this?Never surrender. Pretend that you are not going to surrender, and that creates challenge. For the time being, please stop chasing men in the commune. Just forget all about them, let them meditate a little, and soon they will be after you.Then remember that the old strategy, which has worked for thousands of years, is still in the psychology of everybody. Remain a challenge, and then the man becomes interested. He is not so much interested in the woman, he is much more interested in the challenge. And you will not find only one swami chasing you, you will find many swamis chasing you – if you create the challenge. That is the whole secret of it.But all this stupidity should stop. People should accept the reality, that the man is sexually not so strong as the woman. Although he has been calling her the fair sex, the fact is just the opposite: he is the fair sex. The woman is very strong.But once things are accepted in their reality, and when no means no and yes means yes, you have sorted out a puzzle that has been going on for centuries. For centuries, poets have been singing songs that the woman is mysterious; even if you live with her your whole life, her mystery remains intact.Somebody wrote a letter to me: “I also feel that the woman is very mysterious. I have lived with a woman for five years, but she is still unpredictable. When she will start fighting, and when she will start throwing things, and when she will be very loving, there is no way to know.”I said, “Now, there is no difficulty. Just go to our plastic surgeon, Leeladhar, and he will make you a woman. So you will know the mystery – both the male mystery and the female mystery.”It is so easy now for a man to become a woman, for a woman to become a man, that both can know each other’s difficulties and each other’s mysteries. And all those poets will be discarded, all those mysteries will be forgotten.There is no mystery. That’s why you cannot find it – because it does not exist! It is simply your polar opposite. Man and woman are polar opposites, that’s why they attract each other. And only through polar opposition is creation possible. Only through polar opposition does life happen.Homosexuality has ended in AIDS. It could have been predicted very easily, because similar energies meeting cannot create life, they can only create death. That’s what AIDS is.It has not happened to lesbians, for the simple reason that there is no transfer between negative polarities. Both are negative, both are receptive; neither of them is a donor. So lesbians are the safest in the world now. And if women are intelligent they will turn more and more to lesbianism. The man is gone, he is finished.AIDS has come out of homosexuality. AIDS is nothing but death. So learn a simple principle: similar energies create death, opposite energies have the tension to create life. That’s why I say homosexuality is unnatural – unless you want to commit a slow suicide, then it is perfectly good.Lesbians will not create death because no transfer of energy happens between them. But they will not have the joy, the orgasmic experience which is possible only with the opposite pole.From the very childhood every child has to be made aware of all possibilities of love, sex, and all deviations, perversions. Then there will be no sexual abuse of children.And if everybody is aware of the reality, I don’t think there is going to be any rape. There is no need, the man can simply ask the woman. It is far more cultured and human. If the woman has the desire, no rape is happening. And if the woman hasn’t, then it is just human to leave her. Let her find her man, you start finding your woman.There are so many women and so many men that it is a very rare possibility you will not get a woman. So why commit something like rape? You are not going to gain anything from it. In fact, you will feel guilty, you have done something inhuman. You have trespassed somebody’s territory.I don’t say that rape is good, I don’t say that child abuse is good. How did you manage to translate my statement about awareness and start looking into everything, making a hard effort to see good in it? You seem to be a strange fellow.I had said, “Be aware without judgment,” and what you are doing is just the opposite. You are trying to judge a situation. Of course you want to judge it as good – it is not possible.There are bad things, there are good things; there is no need to force yourself to accept a bad thing as good. But the man of awareness has a different perception. Perhaps something that you think in your unawareness is bad may turn out to be good, or vice versa.But the man of awareness is not in search of judgments, condemnation, appraisal. He is simply witnessing, with clarity. His clarity tells him what is right, without any effort – your hard effort is not needed. It is the easiest thing for the man of awareness to know what is right and what is wrong. And also he will be able to see why something wrong goes on happening.There must be roots somewhere in the culture, in the society, in the world, that poisonous flowers go on flowering. And somebody must be taking care of those plants, watering them.Your priests are doing it, your politicians are doing it, your psychoanalysts are doing it, your professors are doing it – because these people live on your misery. They live on your being somewhere wrong. If you are perfectly right, they are useless.Just the other night, one of my topmost therapists, Veeresh from Holland, asked me, “What is the future of our therapeutic efforts?”I said to him, “Our therapy is just to destroy all that has made man miserable, split, schizophrenic, insane, sick. But once our therapy has destroyed all this poison in the world, then there is no future for our therapy. It has done its work and there is no need for it to exist anymore.“That has to be understood very clearly, because once you start doing something, it becomes your vested interest. Then on the one hand you go on doing what you are supposed to do, destroying sickness – and on the other hand you go on creating it, because without it you will be nobody.”So my therapists have to understand from the very beginning that what they are doing is not something that is to be permanently there. It is only in the transitory period of humanity that therapy is needed. Therapy is needed because people have been made sick. Their sickness is not real, that’s why it can be cured very easily, very simply.But remember always that you are not to become a permanent phenomenon, because that means you will have to create sickness. You will have to create the same old game – perhaps under a new name. You have to be courageous enough, when the work is done, to retire from the work.Become a gardener, become a farmer, a plumber or anything you can manage to do. But therapy should not be your profession. These are ugly professions. We have to have them because in the past man has suffered so many wounds, they have to be healed. But just heal them, and once they are healed you move to some creative work.It was compassionate of you to help human beings to be psychologically healthy. And this will be even more compassionate, not to become a permanent source of dependence for all those people you have helped to be healthy. You have to know when the time is ripe for you to become farmers, gardeners – anything that you love, but be creative.Therapy is not creative, therapy is destructive.It is destroying sickness which has been imposed on humanity.A better human world will simply accept realities and will not ask for fictions.I have heard that a newly married couple came to a holiday resort to have their honeymoon, but both were looking a little afraid of each other. Both were sitting and talking and the night had almost half passed. The woman finally said, “We have come here for a honeymoon, not to talk about the weather; that we can do anywhere.”The man said, “That is true. But the problem is that I have a deep-rooted, lifelong habit: I undress only in darkness. So first you put the lights off so I can undress and go to bed.”The woman said, “This is a very strange idea. You could have said it before.”He said, “I knew that I would have to say it sometime. And I have to say one thing more – better to be finished with it. One of my legs is false, artificial; that’s why I cannot undress in the light – you will see my leg.”The woman giggled. She said, “It is perfectly good, because my breasts are false, one of my eyes is false, my teeth are false. You opened the door, now everything is honest. We can undress in the light or darkness, whatever you prefer; it will not make any difference. I was also waiting…thinking, how to start, from where to start? This way the whole night will be lost, and this is supposed to be our greatest night, our honeymoon night.”This is the situation. Everybody is hiding something from everybody else – a false leg, a false breast, false teeth, a glass eye – everybody is trying to hide something. It is better to be honest and sincere.If humanity decides to be honest and sincere, life can be a rejoicing. Life can be all that you need. Life has given you the opportunity to live it totally, and you are getting caught in stupid things and wasting the opportunity. And life is going by continuously, it is not going to wait for you.Now what business is this of yours, to find good in everything? Who told you to? Now, how are you going to find good in the false breasts? What good? Just a beautiful flat chest? What good are you going to find in false teeth? Naturally, you will be in trouble – making hard effort to believe that there must be something good in it.Don’t waste your time in unnecessary inquiries.Life is short – rejoice in it, dance it, sing it.My statement was totally different. That’s why I say to you continually, don’t just hear me, listen to me. You heard a certain statement and translated it in your mind, that you have to see good in everything.Even I was puzzled – the translation seems to be so far away, absolutely unconnected. But I have the feeling that because I said, “Awareness is good, unawareness is bad,” that created the trouble for you.I have said awareness is good – so rather than being aware, you started being good and seeing good. It does not happen that way. Awareness has to be there first, only then can you be good. Awareness has to happen first, then everything else follows. And being aware does not mean that everything becomes good. If everything becomes good, the very word good will become meaningless.Awareness will make you aware of what is good and what is not good. And awareness will give you the direction to move toward the good and not toward the bad.Osho,Recently you have said that only those people from the sharing-a-home program who were able to understand you remained. I am not sure that I have ever understood you, but I have stayed because I found something within myself – an energy that seems to be from my very center – and because in your presence an opening happens where I feel you deeply connected to this same energy. Is this feeling the understanding? – Because intellectually I only become confused when I try to understand you. Could you please comment?Don’t bother about anything intellectually.You are right on both the points. Your feeling of energy, silence, your feeling your own centeredness in my presence – exactly that is understanding.And your second statement is also true – not only about you. Because you are not literate, you are not educated, you got the point sooner: that when you start intellectually making an effort to understand me, you get puzzled. Everybody will get puzzled. That’s the whole work of my talking: to puzzle your heads so much that one day you simply drop the head and start functioning from the heart.Your head is your master right now. It was not meant to be the master because it is only a mechanical thing, a biocomputer. Your heart has to be the master. And the head is dangerous when it is master; it is the worst master you can find. But when the head serves your heart it is the most beautiful servant that you can find. Things just have to be put into their right places.It is good that you are not so full of rubbish in your head. You have not been to schools, colleges, universities. Feel fortunate that you have been on the streets. Your head will not create much trouble for you. Heads don’t grow on the streets; they need the tremendous effort of thousands of teachers, professors, educationalists.Don’t be bothered intellectually with me. I am not interested in convincing you of any dogma, creed, theology, religion, philosophy – no. My effort is to help your heart beat a little faster, because it is from the heart that you live. Your life is from the heart. That is why people die of heart attack; nobody dies of head attack.You simply forget the head. What is happening to you is exactly what I mean by understanding.Osho,Why are all your disciples vegetarian?I do not believe in vegetarianism, because I do not believe in anything.My disciples are vegetarian not as a cult, not as a creed. They are vegetarians because their meditations make them more human, more of the heart, and they can see the whole stupidity of people killing living beings for their food. It is their sensitivity, their aesthetic awareness that makes them vegetarians.I don’t teach vegetarianism; it is a by-product of meditation. Wherever meditation has happened, people have become vegetarian, always, for thousands of years.The oldest religion in the world is Jainism. It is a small religion, that’s why not much is known to the outside world; it exists only in India. Jainism has no God; hence, there is no possibility of prayer.When God and prayer are discarded, then what is left for a religion? God is somewhere outside, your prayer is addressed to someone outside. Discarding God and prayer you are really saying, “I would like now to go inward.” And meditation is a way of going inward.For thousands of years Jainas have been vegetarians. You have to know this fact, that all their twenty-four teachers – they call them tirthankaras, their messiahs – came from the warrior caste. They were all meat-eaters. They were professional warriors. What happened to these people?Meditation transformed their whole vision. Not only did their swords fall from their hands, their warriorhood disappeared, but a new phenomenon started happening: a tremendous feeling of love toward existence. They became absolutely one with the whole. Vegetarianism is just a small part of that great revolution.The same happened in Buddhism. Buddha did not believe in God, did not believe in prayer.I want you to understand it: the moment God and prayer are discarded, the only thing that is left is to go in.Buddha also was from the warrior caste, son of a king, trained to kill. He was not a vegetarian. But when meditation started blossoming in him, just as a by-product the vegetarian idea came into his being: you cannot kill animals for eating, you cannot destroy life. While every kind of delicious food is available, what is the need to kill living beings?This is nothing to do with religion. This is simply to do with your sensitiveness, your aesthetic understanding.Jainism and Buddhism are the only religions without God and without prayer, and both automatically became vegetarian. The same is happening to sannyasins.Christianity is not vegetarian, Mohammedanism is not vegetarian, Judaism is not vegetarian – for the simple reason that these religions never came across the revolution that meditation brings. They never became aware of meditation.They went on praying to a fictitious God – which brings no transformation in life, because he does not exist. Your prayers are just addressed to the empty sky. They never reach anywhere, they are never heard by anyone, they are never going to be answered. There is nobody to answer them. All the religions that have remained hooked with the idea of God have remained meat-eaters. So this is a simple phenomenon to understand.Why are my sannyasins vegetarians? We don’t enforce vegetarianism, we are not concerned with it. My sannyasins are not like George Bernard Shaw and his Fabian Society, where vegetarianism was a religion. Neither George Bernard Shaw knows anything about meditation, nor does his Fabian Society. They are just eccentric people who want to do something different from everybody else so they look better, they look higher, they look holier. Vegetarianism is their philosophy.It is not my philosophy, it is simply a by-product. I don’t insist upon it. I insist upon meditation. Be more alert, more silent, more joyful, more ecstatic, and find your innermost center. Many things will follow of their own accord; and when they come of their own accord, there is no repression, there is no fight, no hardship, no torture.But if you live vegetarianism as a religion or a philosophy, you will be continually hankering for meat, continually thinking, dreaming of meat, and your vegetarianism will be just a decoration for your ego.With me, meditation is the only essential religion.And everything that follows it is virtue, because it comes of its own accord. You don’t have to drag it, you don’t have to discipline yourself for it. I have nothing to do with vegetarianism, but I know that if you meditate you are going to grow new perceptivity, new sensitivity, and you cannot kill animals.Have you observed one fact? – that the vegetarian societies have the most delicious kinds of foods. The Buddhists, the Jainas – they have the best dishes in the world, for the simple reason that through their meditations they had to drop meat-eating. They became more inquiring into delicious food so they didn’t miss meat, on which they had been brought up from their childhood – it had become almost their second nature.There are millions of people who have never thought of vegetarianism. From the very childhood they have been killing living animals. It is not different from cannibalism. And since Charles Darwin it is absolutely a scientific fact that man has come, evolved, from the animals – so you are killing your own forefathers and eating them joyously. Don’t do such a nasty thing!And the earth is capable, man is capable of creating enough vegetarian food – vegetables, fruits, new fruits which have never existed before. Just crossbreeding is needed, and we can have the best kind of food available for everybody.Your sensitivity and perceptivity, your aesthetic understanding is immediately understood by the animals. Here you can find so many deer – they have come because this is the only place in the whole of America where they are absolutely safe. Nobody is going to hunt them.In Oregon, for ten days per year, the government allows people to hunt deer. The deer are such beautiful animals, so agile, so lovely…. We stopped hunting on our own ground, so from other ranches deer have moved to our place. And now they must be the best-fed deer in the whole world, because we are taking care of them. We are growing grass that they like, specially for them.They would never have thought that people would be so considerate. They like a certain grass called alfalfa, and I have told my people, “Grow as much alfalfa as possible, so all the deer of the whole of Oregon by and by start moving to our commune. And they will be respected as members of the commune.”And they already understand it. They stand on the road – you go on honking your horn, they don’t care; they are meditating in the middle of the road. And they understand one thing: that you are not going to do harm, so there is no need to be in a hurry.In my garden I have three hundred peacocks. The moment they see my car, they all start moving in front of it. They know that they cannot be hurt, that nobody is going to run over them. They will not move; sometimes Vivek has to get out and push them. They are enjoying!There are a few really crazy ones – the moment they see my car they come running from far away, just to stand in front of my car. I will move slowly, and they will move slowly backward, but they will not move away from the road. They understand something, their hearts have felt something, that “these people are not enemies; these people are part of us, friends.”And the whole animal kingdom is part of us, even the trees. Now the scientists have come to an established conclusion that trees are living beings. Not only that, they have a very fine sensitivity, far more sensitive than you have.They have placed machines around trees, plugged wires into the trees – machines like a cardiograph which shows your heartbeat. It shows the heartbeat of the tree, and if somebody is coming to chop the tree, immediately the graph on the cardiogram goes crazy. The tree is feeling really afraid and trembling.Not only that, other trees around also go crazy, although they are not going to be cut. But someone, some friend is going to be cut and they have a great feeling for it.And the most strange thing that has come to the knowledge of the scientists is that if the person who is coming with an ax is just pretending – he is not really going to cut the tree – the graph remains harmonious. This is something unbelievable, that the tree knows whether the man intends to cut it or is just pretending.They are more sensitive than you. You will not be able to figure it out: if somebody comes with a sword at you, you will not be able to figure out whether he is really going to hit you or is just pretending, acting. You will not be able to find out through your sensitivity. The reason is, man has lived for millions of years so insensitively that he has lost one of the greatest qualities of his being.Meditation slowly, slowly gives you back your sensitivity; and a man who has reached to the ultimate ecstasy of meditation is as sensitive as any tree, any animal, anything in the whole existence.This sensitivity makes my people vegetarians. And it is a gain, not a loss. It will make you simultaneously more loving, more compassionate, more feeling, more understanding of beauty.It will make you aware of great music, even the music that happens when the wind blows through the pine trees, or the sound of the running water-even the music that happens, that is happening, in this gap, in this silence.Silence is the highest music.It is soundless, but it can be felt.Can’t you feel the silence here?Can’t you feel that the people who are here are all one, pulsating in the same rhythm, their hearts beating in the same rhythm?Vegetarianism is a small thing. We have to create a world of really sensitive people, who can understand music, poetry, paintings, who can understand nature, who can understand human beauty, who can understand the world that surrounds them: the stars, the moon, the sun.Just a bird on the wing can fill you with immense rejoicing. The freedom of the small bird, the song of the small bird, may make you dance, sing.Humanity has lost its heart, and we have to give it back to everyone who is willing.That’s the meaning of my sannyas.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 33 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have always been an inspiration to me. You give me the courage to continue to do my thing and not compromise in my work, even though I feel like an outcast almost everywhere I go. I need you to say it is okay for me to keep on being a misfit.It must be Veeresh.Veeresh, you are not only okay, you are just perfect!The people who have gathered around me are all misfits in the rotten society. Any intelligent person is bound to be a misfit in a society which is dead, out of date, superstitious, based on belief systems. Only retarded people can be the fit ones. It is fortunate that you are not retarded.Anybody who fits with me is bound to be a misfit everywhere else.I have been a misfit my whole life – in my family, in my religion, in my country – and I have enjoyed it all the way, because to be a misfit is to be an individual.To fit with the existing established order is to lose your individuality.And that’s your whole world.The moment you compromise and lose your individuality, you have lost everything. You have committed suicide. The people who are fit in the world are people who have destroyed themselves.Certainly it needs courage, a tremendously strong sense for freedom; otherwise, you cannot stand alone against the whole world. But to stand against the whole world is the beginning of such a great joy, rejoicing and blessing that those who have never been misfits cannot understand it.All the great names in the history of man were just misfits in their society. All the people who have contributed to the happiness of man and the beauty of the earth have been misfits. To be a misfit is a tremendously valuable quality.Never compromise on any point.The very compromise is the beginning of your destruction.I do not mean that you have to be stubborn; if you see something is right, go along with it. But the moment you realize that something is not right, then even if the whole world feels it is right, it is not right for you. And then stick to your position – that will give you stamina, strength, a certain integrity.My sannyasins are all misfits in the world.That’s why a great problem has arisen for those sannyasins – very few – who have left the commune for their own reasons. I have nothing to say against their leaving the commune; I don’t want anybody to be here against his will. Here there is no society, only a communion of individuals with all their freedom intact. The freedom to leave the commune is one of the basic rights of every sannyasin.But now those few sannyasins, just a dozen, are in a dilemma. They cannot fit with the society They could not fit in the society, that’s why they had come here. Now it is even more difficult for them to fit with the society, so they are in a limbo. They cannot fit with the society, and the milieu where they were acceptable as they were – nobody was trying to change them – they have left.In Santa Fe those twelve are known as “the dirty dozen.” Now they are hankering to come back. They are writing letters to sannyasins that they are dreaming of the commune, they are missing the commune. But they don’t have guts enough to say, “We would like to come back.”Writing these letters they are trying – perhaps we will invite them back. We never prevented them from going, that would have been an infringement on their freedom. We will not invite them, for the same reason. Just as out of freedom they have gone, out of freedom they can come.And everybody is welcome. We don’t bother about the past, we have not inquired about the past of anyone. Our concern is to drop the past and to be in the present, and be available and open for the unknown future.Now it is their past – that they have once been sannyasins, then they left it. They can come back as clean, pure…they can drop their past. Nobody is even going to ask them, “Why had you left, and why are you coming back?”When they left, they left in the darkness of the night, ashamed, because they had no real reasons to leave. The only reason for their leaving was their ego. Certainly in this commune nobody can nourish his ego.And to be a misfit does not mean to be an egoist. If you are an egoist, sooner or later you will compromise. When you find any group of people, any society, any country, which helps you to be more egoistic, you will immediately fit with that society.The real misfit is a humble man.That’s why nobody can absorb him.He is free because he is free of the ego.Now these “dirty dozen”…. And Santa Fe seems to be something special. Nobody had heard about it before. Why have these camels reached Santa Fe? Just because they are camels. Santa Fe at its entrance has a rock formation of a camel. They print postcards of that camel – somebody sent me one. Then I came to know why these camels are going to Santa Fe – Santa Fe is meant for camels.But they don’t know…now that they have been with me for four years, five years, seven years, they cannot fit even with camels! So much has happened in those five years without their knowing. They have lost their humps! Now the other camels are not going to accept them; they are unfit camels there. And their letters show that they are waiting to receive the message to come.I have never called anybody, but I have never prevented anybody. It is your freedom to be here or not to be here. If you are feeling in difficulty…you are enriched in your understanding that this is the only place where you can be accepted with respect, without anybody cutting you, tailoring you, making you into a certain shape, giving you a mold.We accept all kinds of camels – even those who have lost their humps. But they will have to come. And if they can travel to Santa Fe, what is the problem? They know the way, they just have to turn their face.And we will be really rejoiced. And this time their coming will be of immense value to them too, because now the desire to leave the commune will be finished. Now they have understood: wherever they are, they will be outcasts.And here? This is the caste of outcasts!Anybody rejected anywhere is welcome here…because my understanding is that only people of intelligence, individuality, are rejected.The people who are obedient, who have no individuality, no freedom of expression, never say no to anything, are always ready to say yes, even against their wills – these are the people who gain much respectability in the world. They become presidents, they become prime ministers, they are honored in every possible way, for the simple reason that they committed suicide. They are no longer living, they are simply fossilized.Here, people are alive. How can you fit living people into a certain pattern? Every individual is unique.And why should he fit into another’s mold?The whole misery of the world can be explained very simply: everybody has been cut, molded, arranged by others without their even bothering to find out what he was supposed to be by nature. They don’t give a chance to existence.From the very moment the child is born, they start spoiling him – with all good intentions, of course. No parent does it consciously, but he was conditioned in the same way. He repeats the same with his children; he knows nothing else.The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything – literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient.Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most significant persons of this century, refused to accept the Nobel prize. And when he was asked why, he said, “To accept the Nobel prize is in some way to compromise, is in some way to receive respectability from a society with which I am not in agreement. Perhaps the Nobel prize will weaken me.“They are so respectful to me – how can I go on fighting against everything they believe in: against their God, against their morality, against their politics?” He said, “Accepting the Nobel prize will be selling myself – that I cannot do.” And he was perfectly right.So remember never to compromise, whatsoever the cost.Even at the cost of losing your life, don’t compromise.A compromised man is a castrated man.A man who dies for his individuality and freedom dies with joy, and all the blessings of existence are his.I have lived continuously as a misfit everywhere, and I have enjoyed it, every inch of it, every drop of it. It is such a beautiful journey, to be just yourself. You go on discovering your being, your potential, and one day this discovery leads you to the ultimate flowering of your being. That ultimate flowering I have called enlightenment. You become luminous.Why have very few people become enlightened in the world? The question has been asked of me again and again. The reason is very simple: they did not dare to remain misfits, condemned, dishonored, rejected their whole life. That’s why very few people have been individuals, and very few people have reached to the ultimate explosion of their being. There are people who start, but sooner or later they compromise, seeing the dangers of being just yourself.When I was a small child I had made it clear to my parents and to my family, “If you want me to do something, please don’t say it. I am aware enough, I will see what is the need, and if I feel to, I will do it. But once you have told me to do it, then even if you kill me, I am not going to do it.“I can see that my mother is sitting there and she has no vegetables. I can go to the market which is just a few yards away, I can fetch vegetables for her, but it will be my decision. Nobody can tell me, ‘You go and fetch vegetables.’ Then it is impossible for me to go – because this is my religion and my life and my way of thinking, that I am to remain myself at every cost.”And soon they understood it, because they found that this is absolutely a difficult task: whatever they say, I do just the opposite of it. It is better to be silent; at least I will not do the opposite.Slowly, slowly when they were not telling me to do anything, I became almost absent for them, because my presence was of no use to them. And I was surprised to see that sometimes my father would ask, “Have you seen anybody in the house?” – I was sitting there – “because I want to send him to do some work.”I would say, “I have not seen anybody; and now, because you have said it, even if I do see anybody, I will close my eyes.”My mother would say, “You have been here – have you seen somebody else in the house? – because I want something from the market.”And I would say, “I have not seen anybody, the house is empty; only you are here.” It became slowly accepted that I could not be relied on for anything. On the contrary, if they tried to command me, to order me, then it was absolutely impossible.But there were a few moments when they had to say something…. One of my relatives was a little crazy – not much, just a little crazy. He was going to be married: they had arranged a beautiful girl for him, a good house, a good family. Now this was the time they had to tell me, “You remember, don’t create any trouble. Don’t let it be exposed that he is a little off center. Nobody will be able to figure it out; it will take years to figure it out, that he is off center.”I said, “I don’t interfere in anybody’s work, nor do I want anybody else to interfere in my work. Whatever I am going to do, I will do.”They were afraid. They kept the relative away from me, but I found him one day at the riverside, where he used to go to have a bath. I went there and told him, “Are you aware what these people are planning for you?”He said, “What? They are arranging my marriage.”I said, “Marriage is okay, but before the marriage they will force you to sit upon a horse. And do you know horse-riding?”He said, “I don’t.”I said, “Simply refuse to sit on the horse – whatever happens.”He said, “I am not going to sit on any horse. He may throw me off his back, give me a few fractures – and after all those fractures, what am I going to do with the marriage? Forget all about it.”I said, “No, don’t drop the idea of marriage, but don’t sit on the horse.” Now in India it is very difficult to get married without sitting on a horse. The boy has to sit on the horse, and that’s how the procession goes to the girl’s house.But he simply refused! They persuaded, they tried hard, they said, “The time is passing.” And everything has to be done in India through astrology. The astrologer decides when the marriage procession should start, when they should reach the house, by what time exactly, minute to minute, the marriage should be performed.He said, “You have all been befooling me. You have been telling me about marriage, but nobody told me that you will force me to sit on a horse. If you had told me this before, I would have refused to marry.”They inquired, “But who has told you?”He said, “Everybody knows, in this house there is only one person who takes care about everybody’s freedom. He has informed me, ‘You will be forced; don’t compromise.’” It was such a struggle! And they were all looking for me, but I had disappeared because there was going to be trouble for me.They had to force him, physically – four persons forced him on a horse – and I was sitting by the way. And when the procession came there and he saw me, he jumped off the horse.He said, “Enough is enough! Now the procession cannot go anymore, because the person is here whom I have promised I would not sit on the horse. You somehow persuaded me, forced me….”They all came to me and said, “Somehow persuade him; only you can do it. Half the journey is complete; just a little more, just fifteen minutes more he has to be on the horse, and then in his whole life, nobody is going to force him.”I said, “I would not have interfered in the matter, because I never interfere in anybody’s business, but you asked me, emphatically, not to create any trouble, ‘because he is a little eccentric, and you can manage to have him do something that will expose him.’”Now this horse thing was exposing him. It had already reached the girl’s family: “The boy is a little strange. He has been forced to sit on the horse and he was running away and screaming and saying, ‘I don’t want to sit on the horse, I have been warned against it. I have never sat on a horse, why should I? And what has marriage to do with sitting on a horse?’ Something is wrong with the boy.”And while they were in the middle of the road, stuck, the family of the girl sent a message, “Don’t force him. Take him back, because we are not willing to give our daughter in marriage to this man. What kind of man is he? He is crazy! And it is good that it is known in time: just fifteen minutes more and they would have been married!”And in India, in ninety-nine percent of India, divorce does not happen. Once you are married you are married. That relative had to remain unmarried for three more years. And when they arranged it again, my father said, “We are not saying anything to you. If you want to create trouble you can.”I said, “Then I will not create any trouble. Just remain alert: Don’t say anything to me that you want me to do, because then I will not do it.”It helped me immensely. It was troublesome – everybody was against me, everybody was condemning me – but it gave me a tremendous courage to be alone. And I never compromised on anything. Whatever I had to suffer, I went through that suffering without any complaint; I had chosen it myself. But all that fire purified my being more and more.So don’t compromise at any point, because the point of compromise makes you weak: you lose your individuality. But don’t be egoistic. Be humble. If you want to be an egoist, then sooner or later you will have to compromise.When I was being sent to the university, they were all persuading me either to go to the medical college and become a doctor, or to the engineering college and become an engineer. But I should become somebody who earns money, who has respectability in the society.And I said to them, “You know me perfectly well: I may want to become a beggar just because I don’t want to be respectable. What is the meaning of getting respect from all these retarded people? Even if all these idiots make me emperor, it is worthless, because they are idiots! I would like a communion with an intelligent person, but not respectability from the mob. I am going to study philosophy.”Now in India, philosophy departments in the universities are almost empty. For years no student turns up – because what can philosophy give you? The only profession available is to become a professor. But how many people can become professors of philosophy while there are no students? Many universities don’t have a philosophy department, they have closed it. There is no point in keeping professors and staff and space for the students when nobody ever turns up.So they said, “You are taking an unnecessary risk.”I said, “I have to take it. I have to pass through this fire too. And don’t be worried about the future. Even as a beggar I will have the satisfaction that I have not compromised on any point.”And my father, before he died, told me, “Please forgive all of us – we were trying to make you part of the society. If you had not resisted so strongly we would have succeeded. But you were so strong in your struggle that we failed. But now I can say with great joy that our failure was good. Our failure gave you your individuality.”He died as a sannyasin, enlightened. In the whole history, it has rarely happened that a father has become a disciple of his own son. And the moment he became a sannyasin he behaved like a sannyasin – not like a father.My mother is a sannyasin – she is here – but she has dropped completely the idea of being a mother. She is here just like anybody else. And they are all happy: my uncles are also sannyasins-they too are happy that I did not compromise. But it took a little time for them to realize that it was a question of life or death to me.They thought that I was simply mischievous, but soon they realized that it was not mischief. I was simply trying to keep myself completely free, unfettered, unburdened. And it has given me all that a man can dream of.So no compromise, whatever the consequence. Even if death comes as a result, you will be able to receive death dancingly. Only individuals can receive death dancingly, because only individuals know that there is no death, that it is only a transformation from one form into another form.The old house has become dilapidated and you enter into a new house. Of course, the old house may think you have died, because you have disappeared. Here you die; and there, immediately, you find a new house, a new form.Individuals slowly, slowly become aware that there is no death. And if they blossom totally, become enlightened, they know it absolutely, with a tremendous relaxation: that they are eternal beings, they are immortal. The whole universe is theirs. They have been here always; they are here now, and they will be here forever. They are an intrinsic part of existence, there is no question of death.And this is exactly where life should lead you:To the experience of deathlessness.Osho,Is the small family the main cause of neurosis in this society? Is the total dependence of the child on the parents, and vice versa, the cause of hypocrisy, fixations and all kinds of neurosis, fear and anxiety?The family is certainly the cause of all kinds of neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia. The whole sickness of man’s mind is created by the family.The family is the basic unit of the old society; unless the family disappears the old society will continue, because its basic unit is intact.In my own way, without my saying anything, my communes are helping make the family disappear. A commune means the disappearance of family ties. You may be here, your wife may be here, your child may be here, but you are no longer a separate unit competing against every other separate unit. In a commune you are not competing, but on the contrary, you are pooling all your energies together. The child will not get fixated – which is one of the most significant things to be understood.Scientists have discovered in animals a certain fact – the first impression…and very strange conclusions they have come to. When the egg opens and the bird comes out of it, whatever the bird sees first – his first impression – becomes his lifelong thing. That will almost decide his whole life. And it is a very crazy thing…. Ordinarily the bird comes out of the egg and finds his mother or father close by, but once in a while…It happened when a scientist was working on this fact of the first impression. He was moving around while one egg opened, and a bird came out. His first impression was of the shoe of the scientist, that was the first thing the bird saw. And you cannot think what pathology that created.He would not take any note of his mother or father, but the moment he would see the shoe…. He would play with the shoe, go inside it and have much fun. But how long can you have much fun with a shoe? You will be surprised: when the bird became young, sexually mature, he started making love to the shoe! He was not interested in females of his species, not at all; his love object was the shoe.Now it is an established fact that the early impressions go on forever in your unconscious. The early impressions should be wider, richer. For example, a boy is born. While he is coming out of his mother’s womb, many women should be there, rejoicing, singing, dancing. He should know not only his mother as the woman, he should know many women just as he knows his mother. He will get a very vague idea what a woman is, not a very accurate picture from the mother.Psychologists have become aware that no couple in the world is happy, for the simple reason that the woman is searching for her father in the husband. This is something unconscious that she does not know. Now, the husband has not married her to become her father. He has no idea at all that that is what is expected of him. And if he does not behave like her father, then the woman is frustrated.And vice versa: he himself is looking for his mother. And you cannot find your mother again. Existence never creates similar people; its creativity is original. You will find millions of women, but you will not find your mother anywhere. Perhaps a few things may be similar: the color of the hair, the color of the eyes, the way the woman walks, the way she laughs, the sound of her voice-something similar, and you will fall in love.But this is only a part of the woman. After marriage you will have come to know one hundred percent of the woman; and what you had fallen in love with may have been only five percent. And the same is true from the side of the woman: five percent of you is somehow similar to her father, and ninety-five percent is a stranger.Now, there is no possibility of these two people living peacefully, lovingly – almost impossible. Five percent against ninety-five percent from both sides? There is bound to be continuous quarreling, fighting, arguing; never a moment of peace.I have heard about a clerk who used to sit in the office after everybody had left, at the time to close the office. The peon who used to close the office also used to sit long. The clerk thought, “Perhaps he sits for me. Unless I leave, how can he close the office?” So he inquired of the peon, “Please forgive me. I am unnecessarily preventing you from going home.”The peon said, “I am not sitting here for you.”The clerk said, “Then why are you sitting here?”The peon said, “I am sitting here to avoid my wife. As long as I can sit here, I sit. And don’t feel guilty that I am sitting for you; in fact, I feel happy that there is some excuse for me to tell the boss, ‘Because one clerk was working overtime, I had to sit.’“But,” the peon asked, “why do you go on sitting? I don’t see you working, there is no overtime.”The clerk said, “Because I am a bachelor. I don’t have a wife, so what is the point of going home? I am killing time.”One is killing time because he has no wife, so what is the point of going home? – nobody is waiting there. The other is sitting there because he has a wife who is really waiting just in front of the house on the steps, to grab him and to put him right into his place.Strange world! But the cause is the small family unit – for many reasons. It destroys your whole life as far as the relationships between men and women are concerned.Every girl should have the impressions of many men – loving, friendly. Every boy should have the impressions of many women – loving, friendly. It is possible only in a commune.Here, there are five thousand people. Every child has thousands of uncles and thousands of aunts. And he gets loving care from all these people. He will not have a certain fixed idea of a woman. He will have a vague, very vague, cloudy idea of what womanhood consists of. This cloud is capable of helping to create a communion with any woman, because this cloud carries the impressions of thousands of women. So thousands of women are capable of becoming beautiful partners in life. And the girl also carries…in the same way the girl carries the impression of thousands of men. It is difficult for her to draw a picture of the man she would like. She knows only vaguely, and only qualities, not personalities. And she has learned that every man has unique qualities, and all these qualities don’t create the impression of a shoe.There is a possibility that people will be more in love with their life partners. The words intimate enemies will disappear, but intimate friends will take their place.And there are other dimensions in which the family creates neurotic trends. For example, you are born in a Christian family; then the whole of Christianity will be loaded upon you. You will not be given freedom to choose your path, your inquiry. Before you have even asked any questions about God, the answers have already been imprinted on you. So there are Hindus, there are Mohammedans, there are Christians. In fact, this is one of the greatest crimes that have been perpetually committed against man.A child should be just an inquirer.That is not possible with the small family unit, because the family is Christian, is Jewish; the family goes to the synagogue or to the church. And children are imitative, even if you don’t say anything, they would like to come where you are going.It is impossible for a child to grow in a religious family and not be impressed by the beliefs, superstitions. And by the time he is able to inquire he already has the answers – but they are all borrowed.In a commune it is possible, because a commune has no religion – everybody is an inquirer. Nobody is interested in imposing his ideas on the child, because he himself is finished with the ideas of others and is trying to find his own way. He will help the child to become an individual and inquire on his own, because truth is discovered by individual inquiry; it is not to be acquired by communal knowledge.The child is going to gain immensely if the family dissolves into a commune. And the family is also going to be benefited immensely because they are no longer burdened with the child; the commune will take care of him.There are children here; the commune takes care of their education, and in that education we make them more and more alert, more and more centered. We don’t make them Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans. We don’t give them a holy book. We don’t teach them about God and the belief in God and his prophets.Our children are absolutely free of the idea of God, heaven and hell, and they are immensely joyous. And even observers from the outside have noticed the fact that they are far more intelligent than the children in the world. They have to be, because they are coming in contact with so many people.Their experiences are rich. Nobody is trying to mold them, their freedom is infinite. Everybody is pouring his love on them.Somebody may be Italian, somebody may be German, somebody may be American, somebody may be Indian – they are all pouring their love on a child who may be Brazilian. Now this child will not carry the old ideas of nations and nationalities and responsibilities. Now this child will not become part of Italy or Germany or America or Brazil. This child will know that all are equally human beings, and all are beautiful, and all are loving.Why create this nonsense of nations?Why create this nonsense of races, of black and white…?In this commune there is no question – nobody takes note whether you are white or black, whether you are Chinese or Russian or Japanese. Your old boundaries start disappearing. But for the new child there will be no boundaries at all. He will belong to the whole earth.And the responsibility of parents in a family – it is a burden. They are continuously in anxiety: What is the child going to become? How to raise the child rightly so nothing goes wrong?But everything seems to be going wrong. And there are hundreds of books which teach you how to raise a child, how to be a mother, how to be a father. In fact, there should be books on how to give birth to a child and not be a mother! – because that is one of the most hated words in everybody’s unconscious.It is not only Jews who are against moms.Everybody is!In a communal setting things are totally different. More than father and mother, uncles and aunts become important. And you will be surprised to know that as far as language is concerned, aunt and uncle are older words; mother and father are later additions, because there was a time when there was no family. There were tribes, an ancient form of the commune.In the tribe nobody knew who his father was, because there was no question of marriage. People were producing children, people were making love, but there was no question of family. It was a tribe, all were living together. The child grew in a tribal atmosphere. That is the most natural atmosphere for the child to grow up in.A commune is the most up-dated tribe. With all the facilities that science has made available, something tremendously revolutionary has become possible.For example, there is no need that your child should have something to do with your wife’s egg or with your semen. This is something very stupid. You should think of the child, not of the semen and not of the egg. And how do you know which egg is your wife’s egg?In a commune, the family is dispersed. The doctors, the medical board, can decide which egg is to meet with which sperm, so that we can create a more healthy, more intelligent child – a child who will not suffer with polio, a child who will not suffer with blindness, a child who will not suffer with cancer, a child who will not suffer from old age even. And we can give him as long a life as we feel is suitable. For the first time man is capable of human engineering.Up to now it was all accident. You don’t know to which kind of child you are going to give birth. It may turn out to be an Adolf Hitler, and you cannot say, “I am not responsible.” You are responsible. Why did you take the chance?Adolf Hitlers, Joseph Stalins, Benito Mussolinis can be simply dropped out of existence. There is no need for them. Only a certain sperm and a certain egg can create them; we can avoid that possibility.And we can create more Gautam Buddhas. We can create more Van Goghs. We can create more Yehudi Menuhins, painters, musicians, poets. And these people will be far superior to our Shakespeares and Miltons and Dantes, because they were just accidental, by chance. But there is no need now to take chances.But before we can start human engineering, the family has to become loose; it is too tight. The family want their child because he will inherit their property.In a commune, whatever you have is the commune’s, and whatever you will leave behind will be the commune’s. There is no question of inheritance, so you need not be worried that somebody else’s child will inherit your property. In a commune, the property is the commune’s.And you need not be worried that if you die or something happens to you, who is going to take care of your child? In a commune the child will not miss you. He will have so many women, more loving and more compassionate because he has lost his mother.The family is out-dated.The future belongs to the communes.And we are creating these models so that the outside people can start learning something. We are going to do everything that science has made available.Just as we are victorious over the stupid politicians – and we are going to be victorious, because we are in favor of the American constitution, and they are against it. A very puzzling situation!We have to fight for the American constitution because Americans are prostituting it. The constitution is absolutely favorable to us. It is democratic, it respects the individual. It wants freedom of expression. It accepts all the birthrights.The American constitution is perhaps the best democratic constitution which has ever been made. But the politicians continuously go on doing something which is not constitutional. And they have been able to do it for three hundred years because we were not here.Now it is not going to be so. Once our commune and the city are settled, we are going to fight them on bigger issues. We will not let them rest. And we are going to expose them to the whole world – that their politicians are hypocrites, and they are going against their own constitution, destroying people’s freedom in every way, destroying individuality in every way.We are spreading these communes all over the world to become models where we will be experimenting with the latest biological, psychological and all other developments. And we will show to the world that we can create a better human being in every way. He will not be a criminal, he will not be a rapist, he will not be a thief.All these things can be managed from the very beginning, because the first meeting of the egg and the male contribution to your life decides everything – whether the person is going to be a murderer or not. And it can be read! Even before you are born, it can be read. Your whole biography in detail can be written: that you will become a murderer or you will become suicidal or you will become a criminal or you will become a politician or you will become a mystic.We need the world to have more mystics.And if murderers and politicians and criminals can be dropped, simply dropped, we can have a beautiful world.A few old ties have to be loosened. And they are automatically loosened the moment you enter the commune.Many people have written to me, “I want to join the commune, but I am a little bit afraid: perhaps I may lose my wife there.”I said, “Your fear is right. There is every possibility she may find a better man, you may find a better woman. Nobody is going to be a loser. There is profit in every possible way for both the parties.”The small family is the cause of many troubles to humanity; it has to die, it has to disappear, and it has to be replaced by a bigger commune where marriage is a game you can play if you want. And you can marry today and tomorrow you can divorce. Or in the morning you can marry, and in the evening you can divorce. It is just your decision.There is no need to promise for the future, because the future has to be left open. Only then do people grow. If you promise for the future you have already blocked and destroyed it. No intelligent man can promise for the future.Who knows what tomorrow is going to bring? You may meet a beautiful woman and suddenly your whole attention shifts from the wife to the new woman. There is no need for jealousy. You have to say to your wife that this has happened. “I am grateful to you for all those beautiful moments that you have given to me. Perhaps the time has come that we part, and I hope that you will find a better man than me.”Naturally, if you have experienced a few people you always find better ones, because your understanding, your experience becomes bigger and bigger. You know whom to avoid – your old husbands!It is beautiful to fall in a new ditch; at least it is new, fresh – rather than falling in the old ditch again and again and again. That becomes mechanical, it loses adventure. I am not against falling in ditches, just don’t fall in the same ditch again! Find some other ditch! There are so many ditches all around – why remain poor in your experience? And why keep somebody else remaining poor in her experience?In a small family the child is the problem. In a commune the child is not a problem. The father and mother go on changing partners – that does not matter to the child. The child is being taken care of by the commune. He can go to his old father to see him, to meet him; he can go to his mother. It does not matter that they no longer live together.In fact, it is enriching, because he will be meeting a new father, a new mother. When he goes to meet his father, he will introduce him to his new mother. When he goes to meet his mother, she will introduce him to his new father. And this is going to happen so many times that he becomes introduced to the whole commune.This is more human. And he is no longer tied to a very small thing, he is flowing in a vast sea of human beings.Once we have settled our communes in the world, these are going to be the predecessors, the pioneers for the whole humanity in the future. There is no other way. The old family is finished; it is just dragging on somehow because people can’t see any alternative.We are the alternative.Osho,Could you please explain the relationship between spontaneous living with awareness, and the conditioning of mind? How can one be certain that something is one's nature and not conditioning?If you are in doubt, it is conditioning.If there is no doubt, it is awareness.It is a very simple criterion!Osho,The way you dance is absolutely unique and outrageous. What is the secret behind the Osho Shake?I have never thought in my life that there is going to be someday the Osho Shake!I don’t know dancing, so it is going to be outrageous.And the secret is very simple:It is your love.I don’t think any man in the whole history has been loved so much by so many intelligent people.Your love makes me dance.The secret is with you.I cannot believe it, because I don’t deserve any love even from a single human being. But one million sannyasins around the earth – it surprises me!And you are showering so much love that what else can I do? I can do a little Osho Shake!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 34 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,At the gates of universities in India, it is written, “Education is that which liberates.” Today in India everyone agrees that the education system is a mess, but no one tries to change it. What are the defects of the education system in India? What kind of education can be helpful for the inner and outer growth of the individual so that the new man and the new society can be born? What subjects are needed for the right type of education?Education is certainly the process of liberation, but it has not been actualized anywhere in the world.Liberation means liberating the mind from the past, liberating the mind from theologies, liberating the mind from political ideologies; liberating the mind in such a way that when a student comes out of education he is just a clean pure seeker with no prejudice.That beautiful sentence at the gates of the universities in India, simply shows how man can be unaware and a hypocrite.In India, there are Mohammedan universities, Hindu universities. The first step should be that there should be no Mohammedan university. How can it liberate people? – it is going to program people into Mohammedanism. There should be no Hindu university. This is simply ugly. Now Jainas have been trying to create a new university, a Jaina university. In the West there are Catholic universities.Liberation becomes impossible by the very fact that the university itself has a certain prejudice, a certain program to put into the minds of the students.So my suggestion is: first dissolve Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Catholic – these names, from the universities.Secondly: India is a poor country yet it has more than one hundred universities, which is simply futile, meaningless. At the most, each state in India can have one university. Right now each state has almost five, six, seven universities. There are thirty states and there is a competition to have more and more universities. The ultimate result is that the standard of their education goes on falling.Consolidate universities so that each state has one university, all other universities become colleges affiliated to that university. There is no need for so many universities. It is a wastage of money; and when you have so many universities you cannot get the best geniuses as professors.To do that, India has many services, for example, the Indian Administrative Service – IAS. It should have an Indian Educational Service – IES.Just because somebody has a university degree does not mean that he becomes automatically capable of teaching. Teaching is a totally different art. Passing an examination is one thing; teaching is totally different. It needs articulateness, it needs a vast range of knowledge – not only the textbooks that you have read in the university – it needs you to be constantly in touch with the growing knowledge.In India, this has been my experience. Thirty years ago somebody passed his master’s degree or became a PhD, became a professor; and for thirty years he has not bothered about what has happened in his subject. In thirty years human knowledge has increased more than has been possible in the past even three thousand years. In thirty years we have discovered, known more, than in three thousand years.Now a professor who is unaware of these thirty years of development is absolutely incapable. He should not be a professor in the university because he will be teaching his students something which is already out of date, already proved wrong. Something else has taken its place.I was expelled from many colleges and universities – not that I had done anything wrong, but for a simple reason: the professors could not cope with me. I was fully aware of the thirty years’ development, and in front of the class they felt embarrassed.The professor of logic knew about Aristotle, but he had no knowledge of Ludwig Wittgenstein. And Ludwig Wittgenstein has completely transcended Aristotelian logic, Albert Einstein has completely destroyed the very roots of Aristotelian logic.In Aristotle, either something is right or something is wrong. It is either-or logic, simple. But the findings of Albert Einstein in physics proved that reality is not so simple. Between yes and no there are many grades. There are points when you cannot say yes and you cannot say no – just in the middle – and they too are real.One logician had to find a word for it, because if somebody asks you a question, either you say yes or you say no; but the reality may be exactly in the middle. In human languages there is no word for that middle position. One logician has invented a word po: neither yes nor no. po means exactly in the middle of both.So when I introduced the word po, my professor looked at me. He said, “You are crazy or something? No dictionary mentions this word. From where have you got this word po? What kind of answer is this? And what am I to make out of it? I am asking a simple question, whether this line is straight or not, and you say ‘po.’ Either the line is straight or the line is not straight.”I said, “You are thirty years behind in geometry, logic, physics, because physics has proved that there are no straight lines. There is no possibility of drawing a straight line. Euclid’s definition is no longer applicable.”The definition that has prevailed for thousands of years is: The shortest distance between two points is the straight line. But Albert Einstein found that the straight line is illusory. If you go on drawing the line bigger and bigger and bigger, you will find it becomes a curve, because the earth is round. If you draw it to its extreme conclusion, it will become a circle. Now any part of a circle cannot be straight, it is only an arc.So I told the professor, “The straight line is just an appearance. Because you cannot see the whole big circle, the small part of the circle looks like a straight line. But what to say? You cannot say it is a straight line, because that goes against Albert Einstein, and he is certainly right. You cannot say no, because it goes against our eyes, our vision. In front of us the straight line certainly is straight. Neither yes nor no. For that the word is po.My professor left the room. He said, “Either you will be in this college or I will be in this college, because if you bring such things as po – I don’t know anything about them.”I said, “That is your fault. For the thirty years since you became a professor, do you think the growth of knowledge has stopped?”The vice-chancellor had tears in his eyes when he expelled me. He called me; he said, “I know you are right – and this is the first time I am expelling someone who is not wrong. Whatever you have said you have explained clearly, but our professor is old, nationally famous, and we cannot lose him. And he has given this resignation to me, ‘Either within three days you expel the student – and for three days I am not going to come to the college – or accept my resignation.’”The vice-chancellor said to me, “What do you suggest?”I said, “po. What can I suggest? The situation requires the word po. And that is the problem. The whole problem is po.”With tears, he also started laughing. He said, “That’s true, the situation is such…. But help me.”I said, “You can expel me, because all expulsions from all the colleges, universities, are my qualifications. And I am being expelled because I know more than the professor. So expulsion is a compliment, it is not anything derogatory.”The Indian universities are suffering from lack of up-to-dateness. So create a central system, IES, which chooses the professors not just because they have a PhD or a first-class master’s degree; their degrees don’t mean anything. IES will examine them again to know whether they are up to date or not.Consolidate the universities, so there are not one hundred of them. The very meaning of university in India has been lost. It has become a political thing; every state wants more universities than the other state.What is the reason? The reason is that politicians are becoming vice-chancellors. Retired politicians, politicians who have been defeated in the elections, who are no longer chief ministers, cabinet ministers – they need some place of respect. The vice-chancellorship has become a refuge.So make it an absolute law that no politician can become a vice-chancellor, because what does a politician know about vice-chancellorship? What does he know about education? He will pollute the whole university with politics – that is his profession. His whole life he has been in a wrong place, absolutely against the world of education, and suddenly he becomes the vice-chancellor.And of course because vice-chancellors are chosen, elected by the professors of the universities; those professors can be pressurized. Their promotions…somebody is going to become dean, somebody is going to become the reader, somebody is going to become the professor – their own ambitions can be used.When I was a student, one defeated chief minister of the state was fighting for the vice-chancellorship against a professor who was in every way capable of being a vice-chancellor but had no influence, no pull: out of three hundred votes he got only twenty-five.I was in his favor just because he was not a politician; he was purely an educationist and a profound thinker. I went to every professor who was going to vote and told them, “This is a question of deciding between politics and education.”They said, “We understand, but we are sorry because our promotions are due, and there is so much political pressure from the present chief minister.” He has promised this minister who is fighting for election as the vice-chancellor that if he does not fight for chief ministership again, he can have a very respected place in the university. And seeing the situation, his old age – he is becoming senile – he thought this is better. After all the troubles of politics, now in the end of his life he can live peacefully in a university.”I said, “Don’t vote for him. If you vote for him, that means this university is dead.”But two hundred and seventy-five professors voted for him. And I had met each single professor and they all said, “You are right, but we have to look after our own position.”So make it a rule that no politician can be a vice-chancellor. Keep education pure, without politics; politics is poison.The universities should be teaching, as far as possible, the latest discoveries, the latest literature, the latest poetry, the latest in everything. What they are doing is thirty years, forty years old. It takes time for people to become well known, but the universities should be sensitive enough: each year there are new novels, new music, new dances, that should become part of the curriculum. Universities have to remain always up to date, not lagging behind the world.My feeling is they are lagging behind in everything, and the reason is that the professors were taught thirty years before – and whatever they have been taught is what they are teaching. That’s why India is unable to produce great scientists, great mathematicians, great philosophers. Greatness has disappeared from that country. Where the greatest geniuses have been born, suddenly there are no great people. The reason is the whole education system is lagging behind, far behind.So only one university in one state, and choose the best. And there should be a special examination for the professors – just the ordinary educational degree is not enough, because they are going to do something for which they are not prepared.I have seen professors lecturing – nervous, perspiring; they have never spoken in their life. They may have been good at the examinations but that is a totally different matter. They are so afraid facing a class…and if there is somebody who knows more than them, then they are so embarrassed.I have seen them, in the cold season, perspiring because I had raised a question and they didn’t know the answer. And they didn’t even have the guts to say, “I don’t know the answer.” They pretend that they know everything.So there should be a special examination for a professor – that means, whether he is articulate, whether he can speak well, whether he can express himself adequately.And secondly, the Indian Educational Service should have every year at least a one-month refresher course for every professor of the country, so that they are made up-to-date. Knowledge is exploding so fast and to remain up to date is an absolute necessity, at least for the professors; otherwise the whole country will remain backward.Refresher courses are needed. Or, if it is felt necessary, then before entering the examination of the educational services there should be a certain training of three months, six months, where they are taught how to teach.This is strange: school teachers need training for teaching; they have to have a Bachelor’s degree in teaching. Strange: primary school teachers have training – and university professors have no training. They are untrained people – and almost always the wrong people, because the people who top the universities are not articulate people. They are involved so much in reading their textbooks, preparing for the examination, that they don’t have any time.Speaking is an art, and a professor should be an artist. His words should not be simply words; they should carry some poetry in them, some music in them.As far as subjects for teaching are concerned, in India there is a problem: there are thirty national languages, and every state wants its language to be used as a medium of expression. This is impossible. The whole country would become divided into thirty segments which have no way of communicating with each other. So a very clear-cut decision is needed.The people are not willing to accept any Indian language as the national language. Hindi is spoken by half of India; still they are not ready, the other half is not ready to accept it as a national language.And I can understand their difficulty. If Hindi becomes the national language, then all other languages – Bengalese, Assamese, Gujarati, Marathi, Malayanam, Telegu – they will all be losers, because in every national competition the person whose mother tongue is Hindi is bound to be superior.The only way is that English, which is foreign to everybody, should be the national language. So each state should have two languages from the very lowest school to the college, to the university: English as the national language and the local state language as the state language.But a certain language is needed which makes communication possible. English is spoken and understood by only two percent of the people and Hindi by fifty percent of the people, but the percentage is not the question. The point is, English is acceptable to everybody because nobody is going to be benefited, it is nobody’s mother tongue; everybody has to work hard to learn it.And in another way also it is good to make English the national language, because it automatically has become the international language. Any country knowing English perfectly well becomes contemporary, a part of the whole world, although English is still not the language spoken by the largest number of people. That credit goes to the Chinese.But who is going to use Chinese as an international language? It needs at least thirty years to learn Chinese. If it is not your mother tongue, it is the most difficult language, because it has no alphabet. It is a non-alphabetical language; it has only pictures, symbols. Now, for one million things you have one million pictures….The alphabet has made language very simple; just twenty-six letters can manage everything. But to have some understanding of Chinese, you have to know at least one hundred thousand words, their figures, symbols. It is really difficult to remember unless you are born Chinese and from the very beginning you have imbibed the language.But Chinese is spoken by the largest number of people, for the simple reason that they are the largest number of people.I have heard…. A man was going to have his fourth child. He said to the doctor, “I don’t want this fourth child. You have to do an abortion.”The doctor said, “But you are rich and you can afford a fourth child.”He said, “I can afford a fourth child, but I have read somewhere that one in every four persons is Chinese. I cannot afford a Chinese! You will have to do the abortion. Three are okay; this one Chinese will be a disturbance, my whole family will fall apart!”One-fourth of the world is Chinese. Of course their language comes first as far as the number of people who speak it is concerned. But that number of people is confined to one country. English comes third in numbers; Spanish comes second, but that too is confined to a few countries – most of them poor, uneducated, belonging to the third world.English is the language of the intelligentsia, of science, of all the developments that are happening; so numbers don’t count. One language is certainly needed by the whole world, and I don’t think there is any other competitor to English.So it will be good for India in both ways: Indians are ready to accept English so it becomes the national language, and automatically India becomes part of the international communication system.All these universities should be under the federal government, the central government, so their standard remains the same. They should not be under the local politicians of each state. It should be a completely separate section, just like justice is. Your courts have a separate world, uninfluenced by your political system. Education should also be a separate world. It is far more important that it should not be pressurized by politicians: your future is being developed in the universities.So reduce the number of universities and make a separate section of administration for education. Keep it up-to-date.And one of my suggestions is that each professor and each student should learn a simple meditation method. He can choose one. There are one hundred and twelve meditation methods; the simplest is Vipassana. Through Vipassana Gautam Buddha became enlightened. It is the most simple, without any complication. Make Vipassana absolutely compulsory – and unless a person passes in Vipassana he cannot get his degree.Then it will be real education. Then it will be a liberating factor, because Vipassana will liberate you totally from your religions, from your races, from your countries. It will make you an individual. You will not be anymore a member of a mob. You will have your own integrity, your own centeredness, your own roots.And if Vipassana is made absolutely compulsory for professors too…before they become professor, they should pass through a Vipassana training.And every university should have a meditation place. It will beautify the university to have a beautiful Zen garden, ponds, rocks, ancient moss on the rocks, a silent, peaceful atmosphere, small cottages for people to meditate in….Meditation is an absolute necessity for humanity to survive. All other subjects should be taught, but no other subject is so important as meditation. But no university is teaching it. If all the graduates from the university come out with a meditative mind, they will change the whole structure and fabric of the society.These are my simple suggestions, absolutely practical; there is nothing utopian about them. The prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, has just to understand it. He has an intelligent mind, and a certain respect for me.Osho,What are the causes of poverty in India, and the downfall of the economic condition? How can India come out of this mess and create richness?The question is a little bit complicated – complicated because the people who are being worshipped in India are the cause of its poverty, its fall, its slavery.India had seen a golden age in the past. Twenty-five centuries back, at the time of Gautam Buddha, India was known around the world as a golden bird. And it was so. People were happy, people were meditative, people were interested in seeking the truth. They were not hungry, they were not starving. But Gautam Buddha and Mahavira – they were contemporaries – created two religions. The strange thing is, both are responsible for India’s poverty, slavery.It hurts me to say anything against Gautam Buddha. I have tremendous love for the man – his individuality, his rebellion. But whatever he did cannot be ignored. He was not conscious of what he was teaching.Both these men were teaching poverty. It was good for them, I can understand: they both had come from royal families. Both were going to become kings, there was no doubt about it. Gautam Buddha was the only son, and Mahavira was the eldest son of his father; both had their kingdoms. They had lived luxuriously, they had enjoyed everything that was possible in those days. In fact, they had so much luxury they got fed up with it.Howsoever delicious a plate is, sooner or later you will get fed up with it. A certain change is an absolute need of the human mind.Gautam Buddha and Mahavira both knew perfectly well that there was nothing more; all that was possible was available. There was nothing else for which they could have any ambition.They got so fed up with richness, luxury, that they followed the mind’s natural tendency to go to its opposite; they both became beggars. If it is not available – the peace of mind, the silence of being, the experience of ecstasy – if it is not possible in the palaces with all the riches, then perhaps it is possible at the other end, the opposite end. They both became beggars.Of course by becoming beggars they were very much respected, more than if they had become, and remained, kings. So their psychology has to be understood. They didn’t lose any of their ego – in fact, they got more of it.As kings they were nothing special. In India there were two thousand kings in their time. It was an ordinary thing, nothing special. Among two thousand kings you were also a king – so what? But a king renouncing his palace, his beautiful wife, his luxuries, everything…. The people respected them immensely, thinking that they have done something superb in renouncing the world.Renunciation of the world became associated with being religious.This is the root cause of India’s poverty. The Indian poor do not think that their poverty is anything ugly. They think that their poverty is a blessing in disguise. If even kings have to become beggars to know themselves, God is very kind to them. He was made them beggars already!The complexity is, when a king renounces the kingdom and becomes a beggar, his state of being a beggar is totally different from the one who is born a beggar. They both look alike, but the man who has renounced the world has a certain richness in him. His renunciation was not out of compulsion, it was voluntary, considered.And he feels a certain freedom in being a beggar, no anxiety – because with a crown you cannot sleep well. There are so many problems, so many troubles every day. So the man who renounces his kingdom automatically comes out of all the anxieties, anguishes. He feels his beggar state as freedom. Now he is for the first time without any anxiety, without any trouble; he is no longer responsible for anything. For the first time he can sleep well.India was not poor, and particularly for people like Buddha and Mahavira. They were still served with the best that was possible. People loved them, respected them: they have done something totally new. The Hindu religious leaders were not beggars – they were living in richness, accumulating more and more money. They were just ordinary.Gautam Buddha and Mahavira created a problem for Hindu monks, because the monks were no longer respected by the people. They could not be compared with Buddha and Mahavira; they were still greedy, they were just ordinary materialists like everybody else. The only difference was that they talked about religion; but they lived just like everybody else.These two people were not talking, they were living what they said. This created such a deep impression on the Indian soul that poverty became something spiritual.The poorest in India are called untouchables, because if you touch them you will have to take a bath to purify yourself. And they are almost one-fourth of the whole Indian continent.Mahatma Gandhi started calling them harijans – men of God – and that gave them great consolation. They are the chosen people of God. This poverty is just a test of their trust; and it is a passing phase. So in India, poverty started having a certain glamour of spirituality. And when this happens, a calamity has happened.Unwillingly, I have to say that Buddha and Mahavira are both the root cause of India’s poverty. And you can see – not only of poverty but of slavery, because they both taught nonviolence, and the whole country was impressed by these two people.Just after Buddha’s death, invaders started coming, knowing that the country was nonviolent, they were not going to fight back. Alexander the Great was the first. He was not given any resistance; people were not ready to kill.But remember one thing: psychologically the other side of it is, a person who is not ready to kill slowly, slowly becomes unwilling to be killed. It is not nonviolence, he also becomes a coward. He avoids situations where you may have to fight, you may have to kill – and more than that, where the fear is you may be killed yourself.After Alexander the Great, for twenty-three centuries invaders went on coming, exploiting the country, taking all the riches of the country – almost without any resistance. The country that was known as the golden bird lost all its gold, lost all its material wealth. For twenty-three centuries the country remained continuously under invaders whose only purpose was to exploit.So those two persons were responsible in the past. And in the present Mahatma Gandhi is responsible, because he was again talking about the same nonsense: nonviolence. In a violent world, if you are nonviolent you are going to be exploited, destroyed. You cannot resist and there is no other way to prevent it.India is in a way a very simple country. Once it accepts some ideology it tries to act upon it. It is not hypocritical, whatever the consequences – and the consequences have been bad.Twenty-three centuries of slavery, but there has been no resistance, no fight, no revolution, no anger, because the qualities that have been taught by its religious masters were patience, no anger, no hate, no violence, no greed, no attachment. If these qualities are part of you, then naturally if somebody takes away your things you have to show your non-greediness, non-attachment; these are all just material things.Although India has become independent now, it is not liberated from its wrong past.I don’t teach violence, but I don’t teach nonviolence either. Never be aggressive, but never allow anybody else to be aggressive toward you – because in both cases you are supporting aggression. If you are aggressive, to me that is violence; and if you are not stopping somebody else being aggressive toward you, that too is supporting aggressiveness. That too is violent.Don’t harm anybody, but don’t let anybody harm you. Then only can a nonviolent person survive in the world, and not become a coward.Jesus says, “If somebody hits one of your cheeks, give him the other cheek too.” Christians are hypocrites, they have never followed it. They have been killing, they have been murdering, they have been burning living people. They have been doing everything which goes against Jesus – and still they go on preaching Jesus in the churches. And no Christian raises the question: “Our lifestyle for two thousand years is absolutely against the teachings of Jesus.”The West has made an arrangement: a teaching is a teaching; it is good, pay respect to it. The Bible is holy – but your religion is Sunday religion, only on a holiday. You go to the church and that’s all. Six days do everything wrong that you can do; on the seventh day go to the priest and confess. And once you have confessed you are forgiven. Great idea! Religion becomes so cheap.India has taken its religious leaders very seriously. It has tried to follow in their footsteps. If the West had also followed the idea of giving the other cheek, there would have been as much poverty, as much ignorance, as much slavery as there was in India, as there is in India. But the West has never followed Jesus; in fact, Jesus himself never followed his ideas.He was an angry young man. He cannot be said to have been a peaceful man, or nonviolent. He was very aggressive, very arrogant. What can be more arrogant than to declare oneself the only begotten son of God? What can be more egoistic? Jesus said beautiful things but never followed them. There is not a single instance where he has given the other cheek.If he meets me, I am going to hit both his cheeks simultaneously just to see what he does then, because there is no third cheek that he can give me to hit.I have heard about a Christian saint…. Some rowdy person hit him on one of his cheeks. Naturally, the saint gave him the other cheek. But rowdy people are rowdy; you don’t expect them to be understanding. He hit the other cheek even harder.At that moment – he could not believe what was happening – the saint jumped, took his neck in his hands and started almost killing him.The man said, “What are you doing? Your teaching…?”He said, “My teaching is finished, because Jesus said to give the other cheek. I have given it – now I am free! Now I will show you exactly what I am! He has never talked about anything beyond the second cheek. Beyond the second cheek everybody is free.”But India really followed…. So these three people – two in the past, Buddha and Mahavira, and Mahatma Gandhi in the present – are responsible for its poverty.And Mahatma Gandhi is the worst criminal in the whole thing, because Buddha and Mahavira had simply renounced. Mahatma Gandhi’s teaching is such that India can never become rich. According to him the whole of human progress should have stopped at the spinning wheel. After that, anything that has been invented has to be discarded: railway trains – things which are absolutely essential – telegraph, telephones, which do no harm to anybody, and every kind of technology.The Indian government in these forty years has been following Mahatma Gandhi. If this man is followed, India’s future will become darker and darker. It is doomed.He says, “Spin your own cloth.” I have tried it, because I never say anything unless I try it. It takes eight hours per day for all your needs for one year. If you spin eight hours per day for the whole year, then you will have enough – not an abundance; just enough clothes, a bed sheet, a blanket and two or three dresses for yourself.What about your wife? What about your children? What about your old father and old mother? They all have to go naked. And if you are wasting eight hours just for your clothes, when are you going to earn money for your food? When are you going to earn money to make a shelter for yourself?You need a thousand and one things. The mother is sick, she needs medicine. The father dies, now some money is needed for his cremation; at least you will need wood to cremate him. Your children will grow up, their marriages will have to be arranged, you will need some money. From where is all this going to come? – your whole day is spent in spinning!Who is going to farm the lands? And who is going to create the vegetables, the fruits, and all kinds of necessities?If Gandhi is followed, India is going to commit suicide.I would like to say to Rajiv Gandhi: Be finished with Gandhism. That is poison for your country. Bring the country the latest technology, bring the country the most developed machinery. It is possible, just one thing has to be remembered: don’t bother about making atomic plants and nuclear weapons because then seventy-five percent of your energy, income, goes into nuclear weapons. Don’t bother about that.It is so simple…because you cannot become a power like America or the Soviet Union. In three hundred years, if you try hard, only in three hundred years will you be a great power. But by that time all the Indians will be dead. And America and the Soviet Union are not going to stay where they are. In three hundred years they will have moved so far ahead that you will need three thousand years to catch up. It is absolutely meaningless. With so much energy in the hands of two nations…now no other nation should bother about it. You cannot compete.You should use your whole energy to create more food, to create more clothes, to create more houses.Secondly, you have to be very strict about birth control. First put in jail people like the Shankaracharya and Mother Teresa, who are preaching against abortion, against birth control, against the pill. Make it a law that anybody who teaches against birth control is a criminal. It certainly is a great crime in a country like India.Just in thirty years’ time, India has doubled its population. By the end of this century it will have defeated China in population; because China is strictly controlling its population, but India is not doing anything.Birth control has to be done on a war scale; use your whole army to propagate the idea. And the people who resist should be imprisoned. And don’t be bothered that you will be told by the world, “This is not democratic.” This is democratic. Suicide is not democratic.The population goes on growing, and you go on becoming more and more poor. Soon you will be the second Ethiopia. Fifty percent of India is already on the verge of becoming an Ethiopia. Then the world will not praise you, tell you that you are a great democratic nation because you never forced people against their will. In fact they are not producing children because of any will; they are just doing it mechanically.And it is a very strange thing that poor people create more children than rich people. I was looking for the reason. What is the reason? What happens? Poor people go on creating dozens of children and the rich people, without any enforcement, are already under the birth control level – one child or two children, at the most three.The reason I found was that rich people have many more entertainments. They can go to the movie, they can visit a restaurant, they can go to a concert. They have many things to enjoy.The poor man has no other entertainment than sex, because it is free. So in the evening he is just sitting there – how long can he sit there? He is not a meditator. If he were a meditator he could sit silently without doing anything.And it is absolutely certain babies don’t grow on their own. Grass may be growing, but babies don’t grow on their own. You have to make some effort, do some gymnastics. But the poor man, the whole night, has nothing else.Impose strict measures. Give the pill free to the women, and make arrangements for a few entertainments for poor people. Just a television in the town may be enough for their interest.You take everything from them: they cannot drink alcohol…. I think that is far better, that somebody drinks alcohol, comes home and goes to sleep. In the long run that is better, more religious. But you don’t allow alcohol.There are no televisions, there are no radios, there are no movies. In eighty percent of India there is nothing, no games where they can put their energy. The whole day of work, tiring work, and then the night comes and sex is easily available without any cost. Naturally, they go on producing children. They have to be stopped.Strict population control, no desire for nuclear weapons – which is there. Already the Indian government is trying to make a nuclear plant, and to make that nuclear plant they are exporting wheat. Their people are dying and starving, and they are sending wheat to other countries! The people who have grown the wheat will not get it, they will get nuclear weapons. You cannot eat nuclear weapons. And it is of no use: a small awareness of the facts is enough to know that you cannot become a great nuclear power.By a strange coincidence only America and the Soviet Union have uranium. So any country who wants to become a nuclear power has to depend on America or the Soviet Union. And of course they give small quantities; they would not like you to become a great power like themselves. And even that small quantity costs too much for poor countries.Their scientists are engaged in making nuclear weapons. These scientists should be making better fertilizers, better artificial clothes, better houses – cheaper, with synthetic materials. But the scientists are engaged in something which is absolutely meaningless.Whom are you going to fight with your nuclear weapons? You are too far behind, and now there is no point in it. For you the race is over.And it is good, because those who have become great nuclear powers are burdened by their own accumulation of nuclear weapons, and worried about what to do – war seems to be impossible, for the simple reason that it can destroy the whole world. And the whole joy of war is to be victorious – but nobody will be victorious in the war, it will be sheer destruction of the whole planet. So a third world war is out of the question.Politicians will go on talking about it, because they want their people to remain frightened, they want their people so frightened that they think they need their leadership to keep control of the situation. In fact, the third world war is not possible anymore. War itself has come to a point where it has become total, and that makes it meaningless.So I would like to say to Rajiv, “Don’t be stupid, and don’t try to imitate. That is not going to be of any help – your small nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union or America! Put your whole energy….”It is a great relief that the world is not going to have a third world war, for the simple reason that it is totally destructive. Nobody will be there to be a victor or to be a defeated person. Nobody will be there even to write, “Ronald Reagan was a great president.” Nobody will be there to write a history. Not only man but trees and birds and animals – all will have disappeared.In my opinion, a third world war is absolutely out of the question. There is no need for a poor country like India to bother about these sophisticated weapons.If seventy-five percent of India’s income goes back to the poor, and the population grows no more, poverty can be solved.And don’t be bothered about whether it is democratic or not! When it is a question of life and death, then it does not matter. Life has to be saved, because only then can you be democratic. If life is finished, then who is going to be democratic? All these questions of democracy or other kinds of government, are secondary.So if it is needed, impose an emergency again on India, because I know the Indian mind perfectly well: unless they are forced they will not be able to control the population.I know it is not good to force anybody. I know it is not good to interfere in anybody’s life. But the point is that the person who is producing children is already interfering with the whole nation’s life. So you have to choose between the two. Certainly the whole nation’s life is more significant, and the person cannot be allowed to go on producing children and creating more poverty.Things are simple, only a clarity is needed. And I feel Rajiv has that clarity. Just a little courage…. Even if the whole world condemns you because you are not democratic, don’t bother. What does it matter?I have been condemned by everybody around the world. What does it matter? I have not thought even a single time, “I have been condemned so much, I should pay some attention to it.” I don’t care. I go on living my life – my life is my own! If they want to condemn that is their mind, their business, their problem! It is not my problem.Osho,Being near you, looking into your eyes, feeling you, I am losing my ground. And I feel what I am, what I am not. Osho, how can I find myself? There seems to be nothing to find.You have found it!Yes, nothing is there to be found.But to say it from the very beginning is to destroy the whole business. So religions go on saying to you, “You will find God, and you will find the soul, and you will find this and that.”The truth is: you will not find anything. And it is better that you don’t find anything, otherwise there is going to be trouble. Just think: if you find God sitting inside you, what are you going to do stuck with the fellow for eternity?Nothingness is beautiful.It implies freedom, infinity.The whole sky is yours.And you don’t find anyone, so there is no question of quarrel, no question of who is higher and who is lower; no question of how to coexist because to anybody who is there you will be a stranger – red people in Oregon! And that person will try to throw you out; it is his territory.I am not in the business of religion, I am really cutting the very roots of the whole business. This profession is one of the ugliest on the earth.So be clear: nothing, absolutely nothing is to be found there. And it is good, because nothingness is silent, peaceful, no trouble. You have found a space which is just yours.Buddha called it nirvana. Nirvana simply means nothingness. He is the only man who used the right word. If you are ready to be nothing, only then enter into meditation. If you want to be something, then you have to move outside.“Something” is always outside you. You can become the president, the prime minister or anything, but it will be outside. Something means outside you. That’s why religious people’s God is also outside, there above the roof.Once in a while I hear something, but later on I find it was an electrician! I was thinking perhaps God is moving on the roof. He has some interest in roofs; he never comes down from the roofs – always above. God has to be outside you. Heaven and hell have to be outside you.As far as I am concerned, we are going inward, and the world of inwardness is the world of nothingness. And nothingness has a beauty, a tremendous fragrance of its own.If you have experienced it you will not think of God and heaven and hell or anything – all that becomes nonsense. It is nonsense. It is all fiction.The truth is the center of the cyclone is inside you.The cyclone is very active, doing many things, being many things. But the center is absolutely silent, doing nothing, being nothing.You are it.Osho,Please speak about trust. What is trust in you? What is trust in your communes? Does trust mean that I have to accept everything?Somehow you have got a wrong idea about trust.Trust is not in someone, it is not a relationship.Trust is a quality in you.A man of trust…it does not mean in what he trusts, but he trusts; that is his innocence. Even if he is cheated because of his trust, that does not matter, because trust is more valuable than any small thing that he has been cheated of. You can take everything from him, but you cannot take his trust.Trust is your inner growth, your consciousness at its peak.Certainly your trust will come in contact with many people, but you will be trusting because trust in itself is such a joy, and distrust is such an agony, that you have chosen trust rather than distrust.People are miserable all over the world because they have chosen distrust. From their very childhood they have been told, “Don’t trust, because if you trust you will be cheated. The world is full of cunning people, so remain alert, don’t trust. Trust only when you have found someone, checked all the possibilities of the person and found that yes, he is trustworthy. Then trust.But to trust a trustworthy person has no meaning at all. It is not your quality it is his trustworthiness. But to trust a person who is not trustworthy…you know perfectly well that he is not trustworthy, still you trust, because trust in itself is such a great value that it cannot be lost because of this person’s unworthiness.A man who trusts simply trusts. And each time he is cheated because of his trust, his trust is not destroyed, it is strengthened.Trust is one of the great qualities of your being.So think of it as a quality of your being, and then you will not ask the question, “Does everything have to be accepted?” There is no question about it.The man of trust simply lives out of his trust; whatever happens does not matter.If he is being deceived continuously, then too, it does not matter. Nothing happens to his trust. His trust is something invincible, and that gives integrity.So don’t trust in me.Don’t trust in anybody in particular.Simply trust. Let it be your fragrance.Only one thing can I say to you: I have always trusted and I have never felt that it was wrong – although I have been cheated. But strangely enough, I went on trusting the person who was cheating me. And finally the man broke down; finally he came with tears, and he said, “Forgive me, I have been cheating you. And you know it! And it has not been one time, it has been many times. But why do you trust in me?”I said, “It is not a question of you, I simply enjoy trusting. That is your problem, that you deceive. If you enjoy deceiving, enjoy it. But I can see you don’t enjoy it, you are feeling guilty.”The greater your trust, the greater guilt the person who deceives you will have. And there is a chance that this guilt will change that person – he will have a change of heart.Trust is tremendously powerful.So there is no question of accepting anything or not. The question is of growing trust as a quality of your being.When the rose opens, its fragrance starts flowing all around. It is not addressed to anyone in particular. If the king passes by he will receive it; if a beggar passes by he will receive it. If a thief passes by he will receive it. If a murderer passes by he will receive it. For the rose it makes no difference who is receiving it.Trust is the fragrance of a silent, peaceful being.Let me remind you:Trust is the fragrance of nothingness.Osho,I recall you saying that when we relax the body, the mind, the heart, and the being, we will be home. It sounds easy, but when I succeed in getting the body relaxed, I promptly fall asleep. How to relax and stay awake?Don’t be worried. You are already one-third enlightened!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 35 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What are the defects of the present political system in India, and what is the remedy?What type of political system would be suitable?India is in a political mess. The reason lies in its past history.Before the British government, India was never one country. It was divided into hundreds of small kingdoms. There was no political system; the word of the king was the law. The credit goes to the British government that it put it together and made India a country.When India was struggling for freedom, my family has been continuously involved in the movement. Everybody had been to jail, everybody had been beaten, everybody had suffered. But I was not in favor of independence at that time. I said, “Independence needs a certain clear conception of what you are going to do after freedom. Freedom simply gives you the opportunity to do things, but you have no idea what you are going to do after freedom. And this will bring a tremendous turmoil in the whole continent.”The freedom fighters were involved so much in the fight, they could not conceive a certain political system that would work after freedom. On this point I am absolutely against the British kingdom, that it left India in chaos. It had found India in chaos. In two hundred years of effort the chaos has settled – under pressure – not because of any understanding.I used to say to my father, “The moment India becomes free there will be chaos again, because the pressure will be gone. This peace, and India living as one country without any inner conflict, is superficial. Once the pressure is gone, all their old rivalries – thousands of years old – will surface again.” They are surfacing.To understand India’s position clearly one has to conceive of India as almost a continent. It is not a small country. Switzerland, England, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Germany – countries like these are just the size of states in India, and there are thirty states there. It can become thirty countries any day; it has the population, it has the land, and the fight has started for that, because these thirty states speak different languages, have different civilizations, different culture. There is as much difference between them as between countries.The only hope is that the present prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, is not a politician. He is a non-political man, and that is the only hope. The politician functions for his own interest; he looks at everything through political eyes.In Rajiv Gandhi I see a great hope, because he is the prime minister but without any political ideology, without any political system in his mind. And that is one of the most necessary things in India. There is no need for it to have a particular system like America or Russia, because each country has its own problems and its own ways of dealing with them; it has its own history. India needs a new perspective for itself.If a communist is prime minister of India, then there is a system already in his mind that he is going to impose on the country. If a Gandhian is the prime minister, then he has his ideology to impose on the country. The country becomes secondary, the people become means to fulfill a certain end that the politician has decided.It is because of this that forty years of independence have gone in vain. India has fallen lower and lower, more chaos has erupted, because they were following two things. The British system, which was their inheritance, was not applicable to India. The British bureaucracy that was left behind in India was trained for a certain purpose, and the purpose was to keep the slave country a slave forever.Those same people are running the Indian government. Now India is independent, but those people have minds which are applicable only to slaves.So the first thing for Rajiv is to eliminate the whole British bureaucracy that has been left behind. It is against India’s future, India’s freedom. New blood should enter the government, and the new blood should be taught not to be bureaucratic. In an independent country the government is the servant of the people. In a slave country the government is the master of the people, and the people are just slaves.The change is so big that the old bureaucracy has to be eliminated. Otherwise, they will continue their old mind and their old strategies and they will not allow India to feel its freedom.So that is the first thing, that the British bureaucracy should be finished with. And it can be, there is no problem in it. Those people are old, near retirement. Give them retirement; even if it is not time for retirement, still they have to be retired.Clean the Indian bureaucracy completely of the British impact. Bring in new young people who have no idea of being the masters, but come into the government to serve the people. That should be their basic understanding: that they are servants and the people should be respected.The old bureaucracy has learned in the British Raj a strategy to go on postponing everything. There was no hurry.One of my friends – in age he was very old, but we had a certain communion of thoughts – has been fighting a case for almost forty years, and still there is no decision. All the judges who have tried the case died. All the advocates who have been involved died.The case was against four persons who had published a new history of India, because Britain was teaching lies to Indian students. They published a new history; so the publisher, the printer, the editor, the sub-editor – they were all charged.The book was banned and a case was started somewhere in 1915, and continued even after freedom came. The government changed; only one person – the writer, Pandit Sunderlal – remained, out of all the people who had been involved in some way in the case. I asked him – he was ninety – I asked him, “When is this case going to be finished?”He said, “Only when I die, because then there will be nobody left.”The bureaucracy goes on postponing. A file in India about anything moves so slowly…. That has to be changed. Mao did it in China, and has been immensely successful.Every case has to be finished within three days; in fact, even three days are more than enough. There is no need for advocates and legal experts. Then things can be finished soon; they are the people who make complications, raise complicated questions, argue, question. And this goes on for months. That is their business; the longer the case goes on, the better.India is so poor, it cannot afford this luxury of advocates, legal experts. Why not put the people directly in the court? Then the case can be finished in three days. That’s what Mao did.In the ordinary legal profession around the world, this dictum is followed: even if ninety-nine criminals are freed, one single innocent person should not be punished. That’s why it takes so long. Unless it is proved that you are criminal, you are innocent.This is good for rich countries, luxurious countries who have time, and who have money and who can go on…. One innocent person should not be punished, even if ninety-nine criminals are released.The idea is good, but not for a country like India. In India the dictum should be: even if ninety-nine innocent people have to be punished, it is okay, but not a single criminal should get out of the reaches of the law. He should be punished. Once it is clear, things will become simpler for Indian jurisprudence.Rajiv Gandhi has to introduce more and more non-political people into the central government and on the state level.You will be surprised that in India there have been education ministers who have never been to any school. They could not even sign their own name. Instead of a signature they had to put a fingerprint. And they were education ministers!Now India has thousands of geniuses, great professors, academicians, but they are not political. There was no way for them to enter politics.This is the duty of Rajiv, because he himself is not a politician, and this is a great opportunity to throw out politicians from the government and bring in non-politicians, but experts in their subject. An education minister should be a vice chancellor, a dean, a professor – somebody who knows about education.Up to now the situation has been just the reverse. Politicians who know nothing of education become vice-chancellors. And the same is true about everything.The government has an Information and Films Bureau that should be in the charge of some actor, dramatist, author-people who are concerned with literature. And the government should start weeding out politicians and bringing in geniuses who would not come to politics on their own; they have to be invited.That’s what Kennedy did in America. When he became president, that was one of his “crimes.” He brought all the geniuses of the country in some way or other into the government. He invited them, he supported them.The politicians of the country could not tolerate it, it was too much. Their whole profession was going into the hands of non-politicians. And certainly they prove better, because they know their subject, what they are doing.The assassination of President Kennedy was a political conspiracy, for the simple reason that he was weeding out the politicians, out of their power positions, and bringing in people who were never known to have any political aspirations.It will be dangerous for Rajiv, but the challenge has to be accepted because India is falling apart, becoming poorer every day.The politician always thinks of his future election. He says things which people want to hear, and he never opens his mind about what he is going to do.The politician is the hypocrite par excellence.Rajiv has to collect colleagues who are non-political, who will say only that which they are going to do and which they are capable of doing.You ask me what kind of political system India should have. In fact, no political system is perfect. The best way is to choose the best part from every political system. There are things which are beautiful in the Soviet system. There are things which are beautiful in the American system. There are things which are beautiful in the British system.India need not follow a particular system in its totality. The question is not the system, the question is how to provide people with the best.In forty years, India has been following – knowingly or unknowingly – the old British system. They should see that the British system is a dying system. Britain has no future. It has a beautiful past, it has seen the greatest heights of power, it has been the biggest empire in the whole history of man.It was said that the sun never set on the British empire, and it was true. Somewhere or other the sun was rising, and the British empire was around the world; wherever it was rising, it was rising on the British empire. Now the situation is totally different. The sun will never rise in Britain. It is going down the drain. That is a natural consequence of exploiting, torturing, murdering, killing people for three hundred years.Britain has forgotten how to be creative. It has lived for three hundred years just looting other people; it became a parasite. Now the consequence: Britain is always in the dumps, depressed, economically going down, is uncreative. And there is no hope of making another empire again. Empires are of the past; in the future, empires cannot exist.Britain has lost its nerve, but in India, the British political system is still continuing. This is dangerous, because that system has led Britain to its dark period. It has to be abandoned.Every country should have a system that is suitable to it. Communism is not suitable to India, for the simple reason that there are no riches to be distributed. They can only distribute poverty, that’s all they have.Yes, a few people are rich. But in a country of eight hundred million people, if ten families are super-rich, what does it matter if you distribute their wealth? You will make ten more poor people, that’s all. Communism is not suitable for India.India has to have a system chosen from the best of all the systems. It can create a policy of its own. There are a few problems that may be helped if something from the Soviet Union is chosen – for example, population growth. There is no democratic way to stop population growth. The population growth can be stopped only under a dictatorial regime: it has to be forced.If you try to persuade Indians it will take hundreds of years, and meanwhile they will be producing so many children that by the time you have convinced them about birth control, it will be of no use: they will have filled the whole country with so many people that it will have become impossible.So India has to be very strict about population growth. It has to support those people who use birth control methods. Birth control materials should be free. And secondly, anybody who is practicing birth control, and is not producing children, his income taxes should be less, and his other taxes should be less.Right now it is a very stupid situation. On the one hand the government goes on saying to the people that the population has to be stopped, birth control has to be used. And on the other hand, the more children you have, the less income tax you have to pay. This is a contradiction.It seems compassionate that the man who has more children should pay less taxes because he has to take care of the children. But who is responsible for those children? And you are giving an incentive to people to produce more children! All incentives for population growth should be stopped. A person who remains without children his whole life should be rewarded in every way.This is going to be something undemocratic, but it will create the situation for democracy one day. Democracy needs a certain situation to blossom, to flower.My suggestion to Rajiv is that if an emergency measure is needed, it should be imposed without your having any fear of being called dictatorial. It is better to be dictatorial than have the whole country dying, starving, in hunger.You will be surprised, what man has done to man in hungry and starving situations. In Bengal when there was so much poverty and the rains had not come for three, four years, people sold their children – just for a few rupees. Mothers ate their own children! Hunger is such a thing…When death is standing before you, who cares for democracy?Democracy is the luxury of a rich society. Become rich, and democracy will be yours.So India has to be eclectic in its political system. It should choose something from China, because Mao has been immensely successful in preventing population growth. It should learn something from America, because America has been able to produce more wealth than any other country, more technology, more industry.But it is possible only if India drops Gandhism and its idiotic ideas. It is possible for Rajiv to drop it. It was not possible for Jawaharlal or Indira to drop it, because they both had grown up under Mahatma Gandhi’s influence. It was Mahatma Gandhi who made Jawaharlal the prime minister of India.But Rajiv is completely out of the influence of Mahatma Gandhi. He is only forty years old; he must have been two years old when Gandhi was assassinated. The new generation has no inclination toward Mahatma Gandhi. The older generation is conditioned by Mahatma Gandhi and his eccentric ideas.Rajiv has to clean the government of Gandhism. That is poison, because it is against technology, against science, against industry, against mechanization, against everything.Then how are you going to survive? It will be impossible to survive. If Gandhi is followed word for word, India will be committing suicide. And if it happens, then Rajiv will be responsible for it. Now he has the power to eliminate Gandhism completely. There is no need of such a philosophy which teaches back-to-nature.I am also a lover of nature, but I say “Forward to nature,” not back to nature.Nature should not be destroyed by technology. On the contrary, technology should be in harmony with nature. It is in our hands what we do with technology. Technology can make nature blossom more. It can help nature come to its potential.And India has to be technical, industrial, scientific. In the Indian universities the emphasis should be more on science, technology, industry, the latest developments of agriculture. And all those stupid subjects which mean nothing…What are you going to do with the dates of, when Tamerlane came into power, when Nadirshah raped the whole continent? Don’t waste time on unnecessary things. Eliminate them.Now in India every child has to learn three languages. This is too much. One is his mother language, the second is the national language, Hindi. And third, he has to learn English, because Hindi will not help him to know much that is happening in the world in literature, in science, in technology. And Hindi will not help him to communicate with his own countrymen. There are thirty languages totally different from each other. Now, to force three languages on a child is wasting his mind, his energy.Reduce the number of these languages. One language is the best, but if it is difficult, then two languages at the most.Simple things have to be done. All efforts that go into war, and all money that goes into war have to be put into technological and scientific development.In this world where there are such big nuclear powers, you should not bother about war. And India should be…she has the opportunity to declare, “We dissolve our armies, we dissolve our war efforts; they have already become meaningless. We can be invaded by nuclear powers without any difficulty, so why give them even a little difficulty? If they want to invade us, let them!”Welcome them. There is no need to fight; welcome them and tell them, “You also can be part of the country. You be here. We are poor, you will have to be poor with us; we can share our poverty.”I am reminded of a story of a Mohammedan mystic. He used to live in a small cottage, just one room. One night when it was raining hard, somebody knocked on the door. The room was so small that just the mystic and his wife could sleep; there was no place for the third person.The wife said to her husband, “Keep quiet, because there is no space.”The mystic said, “There is. You open the door! A stranger…so much rain, a dark night, the city is far away…No, this is not human. Open the door.”His wife opened the door. She said, “But what are you going to do?”He said, “There is room enough for two to sleep. It is enough for three to sit, chitchat, talk.” So they all sat and started talking, asking the stranger about his experiences.At that moment there was another knock. The stranger was near the door, and the mystic said to him, “Open the door, somebody is in trouble.”The stranger said, “But there is no space!”The mystic said, “If I had listened to that argument, you would not have been here – that was the argument of my wife. There is space. It is enough for three to sit; it is enough for four to stand. You open the door!”The door was opened, another stranger came in. They stood up, they talked about things. Then there was another knock, and this time it was a strange knock.The mystic said, “Open the door.”But they said, “It is difficult.” The last comer was close to the door; he said, “It is absolutely impossible!”The mystic said, “Nothing is impossible. We are standing, we will just have to stand a little closer. But the stranger cannot go.”When they opened the door…it was a donkey. The strangers and the wife all said, “This is too much!”But the mystic said, “It does not matter who is the stranger. We never asked you, ‘Who are you?’ You were in difficulty; he is in difficulty.”They allowed the donkey in. Now they had to stand very close to each other. One of the strangers said to the mystic, “You follow a strange philosophy.”He said, “There is nothing strange. All that we have is our poverty; we will share it with anybody. All that you need is a heart which is willing to share. The rich man’s palace has many mansions in it, but you will not find entry. The space is there, but the heart is missing. This is a poor man’s hut; the space of course is very limited, but the heart is unlimited.”India can stop all its war efforts, and put all its army – which is one of the biggest in the world – to work in the fields, to work in the factories, to work in other fields of creativity.The whole army simply exists and waits for a war. It can be declared that India is not going to war with anyone. “If anybody wants to come here, we will be his host and we will share whatsoever we have. He can come. There is no need to come with weapons, he can simply come and say, ‘I also want to be here.’”Some country has to pioneer the greatest revolution in the world: a declaration of no war, no defense.Rajiv, being a non-politician, can understand what I am saying. I had said the same to his mother when she was the prime minister…she heard me. She was one of the most intelligent women I have come across. She said, “You are right, but I cannot do anything. Whatever you suggest is right, but you don’t know politics. We think about everything politically.“We appointed the education minister knowing that he is the worst person to be an education minister. But he has votes. He has money to purchase votes. He donates to the party millions of rupees. Without him we cannot manage – and he wants to be the education minister. That is simply a political bargain.”She told me, “If I even mention your name, my deputy prime minister, Morarji Desai, immediately freaks out. He says, ‘Don’t read that man’s books and don’t listen to him and his advice. And don’t meet him, because he is absolutely against politics and we are politicians.’“And none of my colleagues are ready…. Everybody understands what you are saying is right, but nobody is ready, because it will disrupt their constituency, it will disrupt their prestige with the voters. It will create troubles.” So they are looking only for their own power and how to continue in power. Nobody is interested in the country.I hope Rajiv will not fall into the same trap. And I trust that he has no desire to become a politician.While Indira was alive and the prime minister, I had suggested to Rajiv, “You start getting ready. Start being more in contact with your mother, because one day perhaps you will be the prime minister.”And he said, “No. I am not going to be in politics ever. I don’t like the whole game.” Being the son of a prime minister, grandson of another prime minister, he remained a pilot. He said, “I am perfectly happy being a pilot.”It was simply out of necessity; when his mother was assassinated he had to come into politics, unwillingly. He has no political ambitions, and that is a great hope.India has maintained a policy of neutrality for forty years-not being either in the Soviet camp or American camp, but remaining neutral to both. The idea was that if you are neutral to both, both will be friendly to you. But in reality, just the opposite happened. Both are suspicious of India. Because you are neutral, nobody knows: in a situation when your support is needed, which camp will you support?Drop that idea of neutrality.I am not saying become part of a camp. There is no need to become part of a camp. But drop the idea of being neutral; mix with both the camps and allow both the camps to help you. And both will compete in helping you. If you are neutral they both stand aloof.Now declare that you are part of the whole world, you are not neutral, you are friendly to everybody: “It makes no difference whether the other person is Russian or American; we are in positive friendship with the whole world.”Neutrality is a negative word. It shrinks you, it keeps you away. And if you are so far away, nobody is going to bother about you and nobody is going to trust you.Drop the idea of neutrality and create the idea of friendship. Do you see the difference between the two? “We are a friend to the whole world, we are not against anybody, and we don’t interfere in anybody’s area, territory. We are perfectly happy if Russians want to be communists, we are perfectly happy if America does not want to be communist. But as human beings, we are friends to all. Your ideologies are your problem. We connect with human beings, not with ideologies.”And being in a positive, friendly relationship with the whole world, you will be supported from every source; everybody will trust you, and you need the trust.Open the country to the whole world. In forty years, India has become almost a closed country – closed in the sense that no foreign industrialist will create industry in India, because the fear is that the country can go in for nationalization any moment. Make the world aware, “We are not going for nationalization.” Make it a guarantee that anybody who wants to invest in India is welcome.India has the cheapest labor in the world. The same commodity in America will cost eight times or ten times more. If it is produced in India, it will be cheap. Use the Indian labor. Indian labor is unemployed. And tell the whole world, “You can invest your money, your money is safe.” Make it a guarantee, a contract, “Your money will never be nationalized.” And there are millions of people in the world who have money, who want to invest it. And they cannot find cheaper labor than in India.India will get employment; the unemployed poor will no longer be poor. India will learn, through all these people, techniques, technology, new industry. And these countries will have cheaper commodities than they can produce in their own country.Certainly they will have to send their experts. They will be able to employ more experts, and India will be helped by the new experts coming from the rest of the world. You can learn from those experts.It has to open its door, welcome everybody who wants to come in, and create an atmosphere of friendship toward all.Ideologies don’t matter at all, you cannot live on ideologies alone. You need first, bread. Jesus says, “You cannot live on bread alone.” That is only a half statement. The other half has to be remembered: you may be able to live with only bread, but you cannot live without bread at all.India needs to be introduced to the new, contemporary world, and there is not much difficulty – just a non-political mind is needed. And I am happy that Rajiv has a non-political mind, is intelligent, very active, industrious, understanding. And if India misses Rajiv, there is simply darkness ahead, because in India there is no other national leader.There are people like Morarji Desai still alive, but he has passed ninety years of age. He has been senile for thirty years; now it is risky. These people should be in mental asylums, and they are moving freely around in the country, talking all kinds of nonsense.Morarji believes that if you drink your own urine that is a total medicine, a cure-all. He drinks his own urine the whole day, and he preaches it…. Now, such idiotic ideas…because urinating is really taking all the poisons out of the body. That’s its function. Anything in your food that is not good for your body should be taken by the urine out of the body as quickly as possible. Drinking it is something for which you need to be certainly thirty years senile – at least.OshoI come from a European commune, and feel that here everything is more intense and more relaxed. Is there a difference between this commune and all the others around the world? Can sannyasins become enlightened in other communes? If a sannyasin dies here within a twenty-four-mile radius of you, they get enlightened. Can that happen in the communes?There is no difference at all.Every sannyasin, wherever he is, has a heart-to-heart connection with me.That’s the whole meaning of sannyas.Sannyas is not an intellectual conviction; it is a kind of love affair. So where you are does not matter.The question is important. Certainly, I am here…it makes a little difference to the people of this commune. I go on hammering on them for intensive and total life, for joy, for dance, for song – morning and evening, five hours continuously.In the other communes I am not physically present, but what I am saying to you will reach within two days all over the world, in every commune. They will have the videos, the tapes. The distance makes no difference at all. They just have to understand that what I am saying is not only to the people of this commune, it is addressed to every sannyasin wherever he is.And we have made an exchange program, so that sannyasins will be coming here from other communes, and sannyasins from here will be going to other communes. So those in other communes can learn the intensity and totality here, and the people from this commune can teach the intensity and totality there.Soon we will make it a world-wide moving commune – people from one commune moving to another commune. My idea is to create a belt of sannyasins around the earth.So don’t be worried. You will pick up. There will be a few differences which are found here too. For example, the Italian sannyasins cannot be German sannyasins. They are spaghetti, what can you do? Slippery, greasy – beautiful, but Italians will be Italians. And I don’t have any complaint about it, it is perfectly good to be an Italian. But the Italian commune cannot be so intense, it is bound to be a little lazy, but there is no harm.In your laziness, be intense and total!Of course, the German sannyasin has a different approach. He will be hard-working; he will be serious, he cannot understand jokes. But slowly, slowly…Here he starts understanding jokes.But real Germans, like my Haridas who has been with me for fifteen years, still ask others “What is the meaning of this joke? Why were people laughing so much?” But there is no harm in it. If you don’t understand a joke, you don’t lose anything.So there will be differences between the communes in every country. In England they are bound to have long faces, very serious; the whole burden of the earth is over their head. They used to call it – when their empire was around the world – the white man’s burden. They are always complaining, grumpy. But this gives variety.We have all kinds of people, and I don’t want them to become all exactly alike. This gives richness; the variety makes sannyasins the richest people in the world. So these small differences will be there.Other communes are also picking up. Seeing this commune functioning in such a beautiful manner, they are also picking up in their own way.I am available to each of my sannyasins as much as I am available to people here, because my physical availability is not of any importance.Your feeling of love knows no distances of space and time.Wherever you are, your heart is turned toward me.Each of my sannyasins is connected to me directly.There is no pope in between.You have to understand the structure. Each sannyasin is connected to me directly. Because you all are connected to me directly, you have a certain love toward each other. But your connection remains individual.I don’t want to create a mob.My whole effort is to create unique individuals.And all types of people are accepted with respect. The lazy one has his own uniqueness, and we can use his laziness. Just a little intelligence and you can use everything…because the lazy man can be a good meditator. Sitting silently, doing nothing, and the spaghetti prepares itself!Italians are bound to be different from Indians or English or Germans. But as far as their sannyas is concerned, their love toward me is exactly the same.Just a few days ago one Italian journalist – a lovely and intelligent person, was taking my interview. I told him, “I recognize my people immediately.”He asked me, “What do you mean?”I said, “I have recognized you. You are going to be my sannyasin soon!”He looked all around, because he had perhaps never thought of sannyas. He has come to know the commune, the sannyasins, what is happening here. And just the other day, Savita informed me he has taken sannyas.Intelligence, wherever it is, is going to belong to me sooner or later.You ask if any man dying here within a twenty-five-mile radius will become enlightened: the same will start happening in other communes soon. I am preparing for it. I am consolidating small centers into bigger communes, because a certain quantity of energy is needed.So if a commune has at least five hundred sannyasins, it will start having a five-mile radius. It can have a twenty-five-mile radius too, but that needs at least one enlightened person to be in the commune. That too, is possible…because my whole understanding of enlightenment is a very simple one.Anybody who is ready to be a little courageous can become enlightened.Enlightenment is your potential.It is not something far away that you have to reach.You don’t have to go to Everest and sit there to find enlightenment.I have heard a story that when Edmund Hillary reached Everest, he could not believe his eyes: a Hindu monk was sitting there in a lotus posture, meditating! Before Edmund Hillary could open his mouth, the Indian monk said, “How much for the watch?” On Everest he is meditating, and asking the price of the watch! He should have been in a market. But the mind does not change, you can change places. You can change from a market and go to Everest, it does not matter to the mind.But enlightenment is everybody’s potential.Wherever you are you can become enlightened. You just have to drop all the crap that others have given to you.You have to be courageous enough to face nothingness, utter silence. And in that moment – a split moment – everything has changed.So soon my communes will be having enlightened people, a few of the communes already have. Then the radius will become twenty-five miles there too.There are enlightened sannyasins. It is just out of gratitude that they don’t want their names to be declared. While I am here, they don’t want themselves to be declared as enlightened. I would love to declare them, but I can understand their difficulties. People will start feeling jealous, people will start feeling competitive. People will start finding faults in them. Why create trouble for those people? But their energy will be used.Somebody has asked, “Osho, You say, ‘My people will be going there to the other communes.’ It hurts. Aren’t the people in other communes your people?”They are my people…but don’t be concerned too much with my language. And if I say “My people here will be going to my people there,” it will simply make the sentence unnecessarily complex. And “My people from there will be coming to my people here”…. Don’t feel hurt; all sannyasins are my people. And many more who are not sannyasins are also my people, on the way!And I have opened a new area of sannyasins, that is, underground sannyasins – a special concession for communist countries, Mohammedan countries, the Middle East. Because to me, wearing red clothes and a mala does not mean anything. To persuade you, I may give great explanations, esoteric, supernatural meanings of the color and everything. But in fact, it is just to give you an identity and the courage to stand in society alone.It will make you strong, because everybody will be hostile. And it will give you a chance also to spread my word, because people will start asking you, “What has happened to you? Have you gone crazy? nuts? or what? Why do you go on wearing red clothes and a mala and the picture of this madman?”They don’t mean anything, but they are useful instruments for shocking people outside. If somebody is shocked, that means that is the beginning of his sannyas! His heart has already received its first shock, now many more will be coming.But in communist countries they will simply imprison people, persecute them, kill them. In Mohammedan countries, they will simply kill them. Then it is pointless.There, my sannyasins are underground sannyasins. They don’t wear red, they don’t wear the mala. Still they are being persecuted, still the government is trying to find out who are the people in connection with me.People are being called by the KGB in Russia to be interviewed continuously every week, tortured with the same questions.I have received the message, “Should we say who we are?”I said, “There is no need to tell those idiots. It is enough that you know who you are.”But underground or overground, the moment your heart opens toward me, I am with you wherever you are.Osho,How can you be so certain that after an enlightened death one does not come back, but will be completely dissolved into the cosmos? Please explain.I am not only certain, I am absolutely certain. It is my experience, because in many lives I have worked with many people who were seekers of truth. And whosoever became enlightened never returned.I have seen enlightened people dying and unenlightened people dying. And both the deaths are so different…. The enlightened person, dying, becomes just a luminous light which spreads and goes on spreading all over existence. And the unenlightened does not become a luminosity, but just a dark spot which moves from this body and enters into a womb.I have not said anything about it, because I don’t want to give you anything that you have to accept as a belief. It is my experience, but to you it will remain a belief till you come to see the death of an enlightened man, and you are alert and aware enough to see the luminosity that does not go to another womb but simply becomes the whole.Just wait; when I die you will have existential experiential proof of what I am saying. If you are in a hurry, I can die now. You have just to say. I can give you the proof, but then I cannot come back. So think it over, and tomorrow write the question again. If I receive your question again, then tomorrow I die and you can see what happens here, just in my chair.As you become aware, you will become aware of many things which you cannot relate to others, because it is not their experience.I am not telling you everything that is my experience. Perhaps one day – because I am a man of the moment – I may decide one day to say everything, whether you can experience it now or later. But up to now, I have tried not to say anything that becomes a belief in you. I don’t want to clutter your mind with beliefs. I want your mind to be uncluttered so that everything that I say you can translate into experience immediately.For this question, remember, with anybody dying – enlightened or unenlightened – sit silently without any thoughts. Just watch and you will see one of two things. If the person is enlightened, a luminous light is released and goes on spreading like a cloud of light all over existence. And if the person is unenlightened, you will see just a dark spot jumping out of the body and almost immediately entering some womb somewhere.Try it. Otherwise, finally I will be there, and I will give you the existential proof of it.Osho,Is the fear that people have about science due to the fact that they have never really tried it?All fear is of the unknown. Anything that you do not know you feel afraid of, naturally. Who knows what it will turn out to be?But this is one of the essentials of sannyas, that wherever you feel something unknown and a fear arises in you, that is the place to enter in spite of your fear, because the unknown carries the mystery of life.From the known one has to move into the unknown.And only the person who has become accustomed to entering into the unknown without fear becomes aware of a new dimension, the unknowable.The unknowable is the ultimate experience.The unknown is just the bridge between the known and the unknowable.Osho,Why is doing nothing so difficult?Doing nothing is difficult because it has no challenge for your ego. Your ego lives on challenge. The more difficult a thing, the more your ego is nourished in doing it. Not doing anything, ego starves. And if you continue not doing anything the ego dies.Meditation is nothing but a preparation for the death of the ego.That’s why meditation means doing nothing – just being. Difficult, hard, but not impossible. And once you have tasted the simplicity of doing nothing, and the relaxation of it, it becomes easier and easier.To me, doing something is the problem. Many people have asked me why I go on keeping my left leg over my right leg the whole time. Just doing anything is difficult, even to move the legs! I leave them to meditate. And they know me, that nothing is going to change my approach. They go on sitting for hours the whole day.Somebody has asked, “Why, Osho, have you stopped leaving your shoe on the floor?”Just the same thing. First, taking your foot out of it, and then putting your foot in it again – too much doing! Okay?

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 36 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,To fall in love is so easy. Why is it so difficult to fall out of love? So many discussions, tears, fights, fears…. I don't want to hurt the person I've been with, because it's not that there is no feeling. I'm so confused. And the love for you is a different feeling altogether. Can you say something?Is there something to say? All is finished!Falling is always easy. You can fall in any ditch. Getting out is difficult. But you will have to get out. Once the love disappears the ditch becomes hell. Then there is quarreling, argument, nagging, and every kind of nastiness from both sides. Nobody wants to hurt; but because he is hurting, she is hurting, unknowingly they go on dumping their hurt feelings on the other.In the first place, when you start falling in love, when you are still not in the ditch, that is the time to ask me, because I have a totally different kind of love affair which is called rising in love. Then there is no problem. Rising in love is beautiful, and getting out of it is very easy, because that will be falling down. Falling down is easy, keep it for the next step; for the first step, always use rising. The easier step you have done, now you have to do the difficult one.And it will happen – all these tears and conflicts, but nothing can bring the love back.A simple thing has to be understood: love – the love that you are talking about – is not in your hands. You have fallen into it. It was not in your power not to fall, so when it comes, it takes you with it. But it is like a breeze, it comes and goes. And it is good that it comes and goes, because if it stays it becomes stale.A little understanding is needed on both sides, that the love is no longer there. There is no need to hate each other, because nobody has destroyed it – nobody has created it. It had come like a breeze, you enjoyed those moments; be thankful to each other and help each other to come out of the ditch. In a ditch, that is the only way. The man, to be really manly, should give his shoulders for the woman to rise up and get out of the ditch. And the man can find his own gymnastics, how to do it.But nobody asks me before falling. This is strange! For thirty-five years I have been waiting for somebody to ask me how to fall in love. Nobody asks that, because if you had asked that I would have suggested, “Never fall in love. Try to rise.” And rising in love is a totally different matter.Rising in love means a learning, a changing, a maturity. Rising in love ultimately helps you to become grown-up. And two grown-up persons don’t quarrel; they try to understand, they try to solve any problem.Anybody who rises in love never falls from it, because rising is your effort, and the love that is grown through your effort is within your hands. But falling in love is not your effort.Falling in love – that love is going to be disrupted somewhere, and the sooner it is understood that it is gone, the better; otherwise you become too entangled in a thousand and one things. Those are the things which make it difficult to separate.When you fall in love, no questions arise. You are clean, the other person is clean. But when you want to separate, the days, the nights, the years that you have lived together, loved together, experienced something which is one of the most beautiful gifts of nature – you go on becoming entangled.You go on giving promises to each other…and it is not that you are lying or deceiving; in those beautiful moments those promises seem to be absolutely coming from your heart. But when those moments are gone – and they will be gone, because it has been a fall, and nobody can remain in a fallen state for eternity. Someday he has to rise again. And the moment you start separating, all those entanglements, your promises, the other’s promises, create the complexity.Rising in love is something spiritual.Falling in love is something biological.Biology is blind, that’s why love is called blind. But the love I am talking about is the only insight that is easily available to everyone. Just a little effort….Love should come out of your silence, awareness, meditativeness. It is soft, it is unbinding – because how can love create fetters for the one who is loved? It is giving freedom to each other, more and more. As the love grows deeper, freedom becomes bigger. As the love grows deeper, you start accepting the person as he is. You stop trying to change the person.It is one of the miseries of the world that lovers are continuously trying to change the other person. They don’t know that if the person really changes, their love will disappear, because they had not fallen in love with this changed person in the first place. They had fallen in love with a person who was not touched by their ideas – “Change this and that.”Rising in love, you become aware that the other has his own territorial imperative, and you are not to encroach upon it.If love becomes freedom, then there is no need to separate. The idea of separation arises because you go on seeing that you are becoming more and more a slave, and nobody likes slavery.But you always ask me when you are in the ditch and cannot get out. One thing is certain: I am not coming into the ditch to take you out! You two have to manage it. If I come in the ditch to help you out, you both will be out and I will be in the ditch! And I don’t know anybody whom I can ask, “How to get out of here?”I have never asked a single question of anybody about my life. It is my life, and I have to live it, I have to solve its problems. I have never taken any advice, I have never accepted anybody’s advice which was not asked for in the first place. I have told those people, “You have to understand that advice is the only thing everybody gives free of charge and nobody takes.”Why bother? Advice given by a person whom you have not asked cannot be very wise.The wise man never imposes his idea on anyone.If somebody asks him, he simply gives his insight.It is not a commandment, that they have to do it; there is no “should” in it.I can say only one thing: you have given each other beautiful moments – be grateful, be thankful. The parting should not be ugly when the meeting was so beautiful.You owe it to existence that the parting should be made beautiful. Forget all your promises – they were right when they were given, but the time has changed, you have changed. You both are standing at a crossroads, ready to move in different directions; perhaps you may never meet again. Make it as graceful as possible. And once you understand that it has to happen, gracefully or ungracefully, then it is better to make it graceful.At least, your lover will live in your memory, you will live in the memory of the lover. In a certain way, those moments together will always enrich you. But part gracefully.And it is not difficult when you have understood love – which is a very difficult phenomenon. You fell without a second thought; you can understand that very easily love has disappeared. Accept the truth of it, and don’t blame each other, because nobody is responsible.Help each other gracefully; in deep friendship, part. Lovers when they separate become enemies. That is a strange kind of gratitude. They should become really friends. And if love can become friendship, there is no guilt, no grudge, no feeling that you have been cheated, exploited. Nobody has exploited anybody; it was just the biological energy which made you blind.I teach a different kind of love.It does not end in friendship but begins in friendship.It begins in silence, in awareness. It is a love which is your own creation, which is not blind.Such a love can last forever, can go on growing deeper and deeper.Such a love is immensely sensitive. In this kind of relationship one starts feeling the need of the other person even before the other person has spoken.I have known a few couples, very few couples – my acquaintance with couples is big, but I have come across only two, three couples who had not fallen in love, who have risen in love. And the most miraculous thing about them was that they started feeling each other without words.If the man was feeling thirsty, the woman would bring water. Nothing has been said just a synchronicity. If the loved one is feeling thirsty, she must start feeling thirsty herself. A transfer is happening continuously, words are not needed. Energies can relate directly without language.Such a love needs nothing from the other.It is grateful that the other receives something when he offers, or she offers.It never feels in any kind of bondage, because there is none.In such love, sex may happen sometimes, may not happen for months, and finally will disappear completely. In this context, sex is no longer sexual, but only a way of being together, going as deeply as possible into each other, an effort to reach the depths of the other. It has nothing to do with biological reproduction.And once they start understanding that whatsoever they do…. In sex only their bodies can meet, then sex slowly disappears. Then a different kind of meeting starts happening which is just a meeting of energies. Holding hands, sitting together looking at the stars, it is more than any sexual orgasm can give – two energies melting.Sexual orgasm is physical, is bound to be the lowest kind. Orgasm which is not physical has tremendous beauty, and leads finally to self-realization. And if love cannot give you enlightenment, don’t call it love. Love is such a beautiful word. When you say, “Falling in love,” you are using the word in an ugly way. Say “falling in sex”; be true. In love one always rises, never falls. But first you have to come out of the ditch. Help each other.Biology is not going to help. Just be human to each other, and understand the point that the love that was blinding you is no longer there. Your eyes are open. Don’t try to deceive the other that you still love, you still feel, but what to do? This kind of hypocrisy is not good. Simply say, “The feeling is no longer there. I am sad and sorry about it, I would have loved the feeling to be there, but it is not there. And I know it is not there in you either.”Once it is understood that the feeling is gone, now at least, just as human beings, help each other to get out of the ditch. If you help, there is no problem. But instead of helping, each wants to get it finished but doesn’t allow the other to get out of the ditch. They go on pulling each other down.Understand. The reason is fear; the old love is gone, the new has not yet arrived. It cannot arrive in your ditch, you will have to come out first. So the fear is of the unknown.The past was so beautiful you would like to repeat it, so you try to force it, the other tries to force it. But these things are not within your power to force. A forced love is not love.If you have to kiss somebody at the point of a sword – “Kiss!” – what kind of a kiss will that be? Looking at the sword, you may kiss, but it will not be a kiss at all.Any love enforced for any reasons, is not love. And you both know what love is, because you had been in those moments; so you can compare easily that it is not the same thing. Help each other to come out – and it is very easy if you help each other – and part in grace.Next time try not to fall, but try to rise.Don’t let biology dominate you.Your consciousness should be the master.Osho,To be disobedient and to surrender seem to me polar opposites. Please explain how the two can be lived.They are not polar opposites.Just a little awareness…. Be disobedient to your ego – that is the meaning of surrender. If you want to be disobedient to the person you are surrendering to, then they are opposite, polar opposites. Then why surrender?Surrender simply means you trust the person more than your ego, you trust the person more than your own mind. Surrender happens only in a situation where you have found someone whom you can trust more than you can trust yourself. Then disobey your ego.But people never think in that way. They never think of disobeying their ego, they are always disobeying others. And they don’t understand that disobeying others may be just obeying their own ego.This is what has happened with J. Krishnamurti. For his whole life he has been a teacher of thousands of people, telling them to disobey, to be rebellious, not to follow anyone. But he has forgotten one thing: these people will follow their egos, these people will not rebel against their egos, these people will not be disobedient to their egos.So a strange phenomenon I have experienced: the people who have been around Krishnamurti, all have become firm egoists. They cannot surrender; surrender is wrong. They cannot trust, they cannot become a disciple. The whole teaching has backfired. Krishnamurti completely forgot that what he is saying is satisfying to the ego of the people.What I am saying to you is absolutely against you!You have to disappear for your real being to appear and function.Surrender, trust, are just devices.If you can do it without those devices, they are not needed. If you can drop your ego…it is very simple; there is no reason to go to a master.The master is only a device.Because he is so humble, so wise, so insightful, it is easy to put your ego at his feet. The master is only a device.Sometimes it has happened that the master was not himself enlightened, but the disciple became enlightened – a very strange phenomenon. One cannot even conceive how an unenlightened master could help somebody to become enlightened; he has not been able to help himself. But the reason is that he cannot help anybody to be enlightened, or to remain unenlightened; he is only a device.The question is of totality on the part of the disciple.Let me tell you a story….Marpa, one of Tibet’s great mystics, went to a master who was well-known for his learning, his scholarship. Marpa was a very humble and simple person, very clear as to what he knows and what he does not know, never pretending, “I know it,” when he knew perfectly well that he did not know.He surrendered to the master. Seeing his great knowledge, learning, so many thousands of disciples, he surrendered totally.After a few days the disciples became upset with Marpa, because he was walking on water, flying in the air, jumping from the high peaks of Himalayan mountains into the valleys without any trouble. They reported to the master, “This man seems to be very strange. He must be a magician or perhaps the devil incarnate.” And they were all jealous of him.The master inquired of Marpa, “What is your secret? How do you walk on water?”Marpa said, “you are asking me? I just use your name; and I am surrendered to you, and you make me walk on water. Just your name is enough, and I can fly in the air. Your name is enough, and I can jump from the highest mountain peak!”The master was not an enlightened person, but certainly a great scholar. He thought to himself – which was logical – “If my name has so much magic in it, I should try it.”But the first step in the water – and he started to drown. He was shouting his name loudly, but nothing happened. His disciples saved him.And Marpa said, “This is strange. But now I understand what has happened: It is not the master; it is my surrender, it is my egolessness. The master was only a device. It does not matter to me whether he is enlightened or not – I am grateful to him. His name helped me. I suspect that now I cannot walk on the water with his name, and I am not going to do that anymore.“But perhaps now there is no need. I can walk without any name, because I know the secret. The secret is egolessness. The master was only a device that helped.”In life there are only two possibilities, and they are polar opposites, as you say: ego and egolessness.That’s why I don’t use the word surrender, because that brings the other person in, and you start thinking in polar opposites. Both the polar opposites are within you, so I talk about ego and egolessness. Then things become simple. Drop the ego and be egoless. No surrender is needed.In egolessness, you are surrendered to existence itself.And that is the greatest miracle that can happen to a man.Then nothing is impossible.Osho,You have recently said many startling and shocking things. I would like to hear more.One question I would like to ask is: Are past lives a fiction?But this is not going to be shocking.It is fiction to you; it is reality to me. It will remain a fiction to you unless you experience it. And I don’t want you to believe before you experience; and of course, after experiencing there is no need to believe.I don’t believe in past lives – I know.I remember my own past lives, so it is not a question of belief.When you become utterly silent and meditative, it is such an easy thing to look backward. Your unconscious carries all the memories – not only of this life, but of your past lives too.I was just joking with a German journalist. He became excited when I said this…. He was asking me, “Why is German youth attracted so much toward you?”I said to him, “In one of my past lives I was a German.”He said, “Really? Then give me some details!”I said, “I cannot give you more details, but Eva Renzi was my wife in that life. You can go and ask her.”He said, “Eva Renzi?”I said, “Of course, because she is still behaving like a wife to me. She may have forgotten the past life, but she is still a pain in the neck. That is enough proof!”He was just on his knees, asking “Just tell me a little more!” I said, “You go to Eva Renzi!”Just be silent, and you will be able to turn back…. Have you observed a simple fact? You are trying to remember a name you know you know, but it is not coming. You certainly know, there is no question about it, but it is lost somewhere in your memory. And the harder you try…. People say, “It is just on the tip of the tongue.” Then why don’t they speak? Let it fall from the tip of the tongue! They know they know, but it is not coming.It comes in rare moments. You are just cutting the grass of your lawn, or sitting in your easy chair and reading a newspaper, and suddenly it jumps up from nowhere. And you were trying so hard…. When you try hard your mind becomes very narrow, almost closed. When you are relaxed and you have forgotten all about it, it jumps up.In total relaxation, you will be surprised, the past lives come back – just like fiction, as if you have seen a movie.And to determine whether you are really dreaming or having a past-life experience, the criterion is simple. Try it again and again in the same silent space, and the movie remains the same. You cannot have the same dream twice, on order – impossible. You don’t have any control over your dreams, they go on changing. Very rarely does it happen that a person has a similar kind of dream again. If he has the same dream repeated again and again, then it is not a dream, it is something else. That dream is only symbolic.For example, Leo Tolstoy, one of Russia’s most creative writers – a thinker and a man who tried his best to live according to his thoughts – had a recurring dream almost every night.The dream was that he sees a vast, infinite desert, not a single tree anywhere, not a single bird anywhere; the desert just goes on and on. And he sees two gumboots walking, going on and on into the desert. They are his gumboots. The man is missing, he is not in his gumboots. Just the gumboots go on walking, step by step, accurately. And he could see it the whole night, because the desert was infinite. And he always woke up perspiring.Slowly he became concerned: What kind of dream is this?He talked to his friends, people who understood dream symbology, and they said, “This is your whole life. This is not a dream, this is only symbolic.”And it was true, his life was a tragedy. He belonged to the royal family; he was a count, he had immense properties. He was married to a countess, but the wife was a very difficult type.Tolstoy was a simple man, and he lived very simply, like a poor man. The wife could not stand him. She would not take him to any party, because people would think, “From where did you get this beggar?” And she lived very luxuriously. They had enough money, enough land; they belonged to the highest the super-rich class in Russia.She was continuously torturing him. Their life was nothing but a torture, unending torture. And he was such a simple and good-hearted man he could not even think of a divorce. It would be too hard for the children, it would be too hard for the poor woman – although she was immensely difficult. But he had more compassion than she had cruelty.So the dream analyst told him, “The dream is symbolic. You are not really living; just the boots are walking, you are not in them. And the desert is your life, where there is not a single tree, not a single flower, not a single bird, no signs of any life anywhere. And it is infinite; it goes on and on and on. And you are simply waiting for your death, not for divorce. Your dream is a reality. Your whole unconscious is telling you what you are doing with yourself.” And the moment he understood the symbology of the dream, the dream disappeared.So two things…. If you see your past life, and it does not change – that is the first criterion, it is always the same, exactly the same. The second criterion is, bring it to full consciousness. Try to analyze it. If you cannot analyze it, any psychoanalyst can analyze it. If after the analysis it disappears, then it was not your past life. It was just a dream projected by your unconscious to say something to you. The analysis has made it clear to you, now there is no need for it.But if even after the analysis and understanding of it, it goes on the same, again and again, then it is certainly your past life. And you can go farther, into more of the past, another life, another life – there is no end to it. You have been here forever.And I do not believe in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Once in a while I mention him, but that is simply a kind of joke and nothing else; I don’t believe in the theory of evolution. No monkey can become man, because thousands of years have passed and only a few monkeys became man. What are the other monkeys doing?In these thousands of years the other monkeys even seeing that their children have become great Ronald Reagans, presidents of countries, and they are still hanging in the trees…. They should have jumped on the ground and become man. All that they have to do is to lose their tails!No monkey has been known to turn into a man. At some point somebody must have seen a monkey turning into a man. And there must be a link between the two: while the monkey is becoming man there will be some place where he is half monkey, half man. That too has not happened.So when I mention Charles Darwin, it is always joking. I don’t believe that you have been anything other than human beings the whole of eternity. Monkeys have been monkeys in their past lives, and donkeys have been donkeys, and Yankees have been Yankees. Evolution has happened, but that evolution is the by-product of human consciousness. No other animal has evolved; they are the same.A twentieth-century monkey and a ten-thousand-year-old monkey will not have any difficulty in chitchatting, being friendly or falling in love. They will not feel the distance of time at all, because no evolution has happened.But if you meet a man from ten thousand years ago, neither will you be able to understand his language, nor will he be able to understand your language. Nor will his clothes be similar to yours – and of course his mind will be far behind. He will not even have a child’s mind; he will be more primitive; and there will be no possibility of communication. He will behave almost like an animal, though he is man.Only man has evolved. Evolution has happened, but it has happened only in human beings. And a few rare people have reached to the very Everest of consciousness.To me, that reaching to the Everest of consciousness is religion.Religion has nothing to do with Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism.Religion has something to do with your consciousness flowering totally, releasing its whole fragrance to existence.It is in your hands to evolve as much as you want. At each evolutionary step you will find yourself more blissful, more peaceful, more silent, more rejoicing – just bubbling with joy.At the ultimate peak you are nothing but pure bliss.It is within your reach.If you miss, only you are responsible for it.Here, we are not creating a theology, a dogma.We are creating an opportunity for the evolution of consciousness.And it is happening!My sannyasins are certainly more conscious than anybody else, more alert, more loving, more joyous than anybody else.And this is my argument – and my proof.In the past, theologians have been arguing about stupid things: how many angels can dance on the point of a safety pin? What is the point of it all? But throughout the whole Middle Ages they were discussing it. It was a great problem to be solved. It may be a problem for the safety pin, it may be a problem for the angels, but what has it to do with you? And nobody has seen the angels, nobody has seen any pin standing and angels dancing on it!But theologians have been discussing all kinds of stupid questions: whether Jesus Christ is born of a virgin mother…. But what does it matter whether he is born of a virgin mother or Joseph is really his father and not the Holy Ghost? It makes no difference. To us, Joseph and the Holy Ghost are the same – in fact, Joseph seems to be more real than the Holy Ghost.And anybody can see that to do such a thing and still call that guy “Holy Ghost” does not look right. He is an unholy ghost, a criminal. He raped Mary – she was not aware when he made love to her.But what is the point of it all? It does not matter. Religions have been wasting the whole humanity’s time unnecessarily. All that time should be given to the evolution of consciousness.And there have been people who have proved it, who have reached the peak. If it can happen to a single individual, that is enough proof it can happen to all human beings. And it should happen to all human beings; only then can we have a beautiful planet.Just to imagine that the whole humanity is conscious, meditative, aware…just to imagine it is so exhilarating, so ecstatic!But remember one thing. I will not say to you to believe in me, or in anyone else. To me, an infinite series of lives is a reality. It is my experience. So if you ask me, I say yes, it is a very fundamental truth. But for you, it is only a fiction. You can turn the fiction into a reality – but before turning it into reality, don’t believe.That’s why I don’t touch these subjects; I bypass them, because I will have to say something which is my experience, but for you it will be only a belief. And you love me, you trust me; you may start trusting my words.Love me, but don’t love my words.Trust me, my presence, but don’t trust my experiences.Trusting my presence will encourage you to realize all those things that I have been telling you. But if you trust those things already, you will stop inquiring.The trouble is, you wanted a shock – and your question is such that I am in a difficulty, how to shock you.Find another question!Osho,I am seeing that within the experience of pleasure there arises a deep longing to know something which is more total. Pleasure-pain, happiness-sadness, seem to be one, and I feel there must be something which transcends them. Is my longing for what you call bliss?Yes.Pleasure and pain are not two things; happiness and sadness – just two sides of the same coin. That’s why every happiness can turn into sadness, every pleasure can turn into pain.One Mohammedan emperor – who was a little bit crazy – loved a young woman and wanted her consent to marry him.In Mohammedan marriages the priest asks the woman three times, “Are you, of your own accord, without being forced, ready to marry this man?” And the woman has to say yes three times. If she does not say it, the marriage is not possible. So even the Mohammedan emperor could not force any woman to marry him. He was persuading this woman, but she was not willing.One day he went to see the woman and he found her in the arms of a young man. They were hugging each other with a great joy. I told you he was a little crazy…. He brought both of them to the court and ordered that they should be tied to a pole in a hugging position, and for twenty-four hours they had to hug each other.Now, hugging for a few minutes is okay but twenty-four hours of hugging – and that too, while tied to a pole, no way to get away…. The pleasure changed into pain, into such intense pain – because in twenty-four hours’ time they pissed over each other, defecated. It was stinking. And after twenty-four hours they were released, but it is said that the young man escaped from the city and never came to see the woman.The prime minister of the emperor said to him, “This is a strange kind of punishment, we have never heard of it.” The king said, “This is real punishment. Those two people are not going to see each other again. These twenty-four hours have been almost twenty-four lives for them!” Stinking and tied together, hugging was forgotten long ago. Now the only question was how to get free from the hands of this woman, and the woman was also thinking how to get free. But they were tied and they could not. Pleasure can be changed into pain.This story has always reminded me why all the couples – almost all the couples in the world are in pain, in misery. They are tied together by marriage, which is for a longer period than twenty-four hours, and soon they start being fed up with each other.How long can you look at the same nose, and how long can you praise it? Soon, very soon, all the beauty of the woman disappears, all the greatness of the man, the heroship disappears. And they suddenly find that now they are tied together and the society makes it impossible to be free again. Their pleasure has turned into a lifelong misery.So these opposites are not opposites.The vice versa also happens: the miserable man by and by starts having a certain pleasure in his misery.When I was a lecturer in the university, one woman was also a lecturer there, and her house was just in the middle between my house and the university campus. So I was forced to give her a lift every day. She was standing just at the door waiting for me.In just a fifteen-minute drive, she would talk all about her miseries, pain, diseases; it was a daily routine. And I was wondering – she must have some imaginative power! One could not have so many diseases and so many sicknesses – and every day new?Her husband was an advocate of the high court. One day I went to him and I asked, “Can you help me to understand your wife?”He said, “You are asking me? She is only with you for fifteen minutes, and I have to live with her twenty-four hours a day!“A small scratch and it is cancer…. And to argue with her….,” he said. “I am tired of arguing the whole day in the high court. But it is better in the high court: at least the other advocate is not going to scream and weep and make so much fuss that the whole neighborhood gathers. It is better to accept that it is cancer, knowing perfectly well that it is just that she has scratched her hand.”He said to me, “Don’t listen to any of her diseases. I have taken her, I have been forced to take her to all kinds of specialists, and they all say that she has no disease, nothing; she is perfectly healthy.“So I simply listen and accept whatsoever she says. And I know tomorrow she is going to change, so there is no hurry, no problem. I say to her, ‘Tomorrow we will go to the specialist; make the appointment.’ She just has to be postponed two, three days, and she will have another kind of disease.”In the university library I always found her in the medical section of the library, always looking there. I told her, “Your subject is to teach music. I don’t think that there is any connection between medicine and music. I never see you in the music section of the library, you are always in the medical section.”She said, “The reason is, I have to find the right names for my diseases.” She would find big Latin, Greek names of diseases, very impressive names. And if you did not believe her, she was very much hurt. If you believed her, supported her, you could see a smile on her face. Her misery, just imagined misery, had become a pleasure to her.Now this woman is really a mental case. I told her husband, “All her diseases are false, that is true, but one disease I tell you: she is a mental case. You take her to some psychiatrist.”He said, “You are right. We both will go, because living with her for twenty years I am also a psychiatric case. I suspect myself – have I gone mad, or what?”All polar opposites are parts of each other. They are complementary and can change into each other. So your feeling is perfectly right: there is something beyond the polarities. And that’s what I call enlightenment.Enlightenment has no polar opposite to it.Unenlightenment is not the polar opposite of enlightenment; it is only the absence of enlightenment.It is just like darkness and light. You ordinarily think they are opposites, but that is not true. Darkness simply does not exist, it is only the absence of light.If darkness has its own existence, then first you will have to bring the light in the room and then push the darkness out of the room; but it has no existence. The moment you bring the light in, the darkness is not found.Enlightenment is the light of your innermost core. Once you experience it, all darkness in your life disappears.Blissfulness also has no opposite to it.Truth also has no opposite to it.Anything that has not any opposite to it is part of the experience of enlightenment. It is beyond the polarities, far away from the polarities. You cannot change it into anything else. It is what it is.Now, just don’t go on longing for it, because just longing will not help. Start the first step toward it, and the first step automatically leads you to the second step, the third step, and you are home.I call these three steps the whole science of meditation.The first step is, become aware of your body.See it as if it is covering you like clothes. It is around you, but it is not you. That is the first step: to disidentify yourself with the body.The second step is to disidentify with your mind.Your thoughts are not you. There is a constant traffic. On the screen of the mind so many thoughts are moving, but you are not one of them. You are a witness, you are outside; you are seeing those thoughts moving.Anything that you can see is not you.That should be the criterion: anything you can witness is not you. You are the witness.And the third step is witnessing, watching your feelings, your moods.These three steps, and you are home.Then there is only the witness, and nothing to be witnessed.You are there in your total glory, luminosity, and all around you there is pure nothingness. This is the state of the awakened one, the enlightened one.So when you do your gachchhamis and you say, “I go to the feet of the awakened one, His commune, His truth,” it is not a prayer, it is simply a reminder to yourself. And you are not going to the feet of anyone else: you are going to your own awakened self.If your master is awakened, he simply represents you. He is just a mirror in which you can see yourself.But you are going toward the discovery of the awakened one within yourself. And when the disciple finds the master within himself, the journey is complete.Osho,The other day during discourse you helped us listen to the silence. During darshan, there were many moments of exquisite silence, almost tangible. On both days I felt as though my heart was bursting and I cried. Yet I also laughed, clapped, and celebrated as never before. Osho, please speak about the space between the laughter and the tears, the space where the pendulum stops.There is no space between…. The tears, when they come with the laughter, rejoicing, celebrating, those tears have a totally different quality. They are not tears of sadness, sorrow, misery. They are tears of joy – you are so over-full.You have felt something: your hands start clapping.You have felt something: you would love to dance.You have seen something: your eyes are showering tears of joy.There is no space between the laughter and the tears. To ordinary people you will look mad, crying and laughing together, because ordinarily it is thought that laughter and tears are poles apart: tears are for misery and laughter is for joy. But people have known only one quality of tears.Tears can join themselves with sadness. If it is too much, then it overflows through your tears.Tears help you to wash away the sadness.Tears always do something good to you.It is because of tears that men are more miserable than women, because from the very childhood they have been told, “Crying and weeping is for girls, not for you. Be manly.”You have stopped a source of immense significance. The man cannot openly – without feeling that he is doing something unmanly – allow tears to come from his eyes. He goes on repressing them. By repressing them he is repressing his sadness too, because the tears would have taken it away.The woman always looks fresher after she has wept, and more beautiful, healthier.Man unnecessarily has lost something given by nature.My sannyasins should understand it clearly, that if tears are only for women, then nature would not have given tear glands to men. It is such a simple fact. Why should men be given tear glands if they are not to be used?My sannyasins have to allow tears – in pain, in misery, in suffering – without feeling embarrassed. In fact, everybody around the person should help him to cry. The tears help take away the sadness, the darkness, and leave a more silent space behind.A greater problem is that, because you have repressed your tears of sadness, misery, pain – when you are joyful, rejoicing, then too your old repression continues; you go on holding your tears. You don’t allow your eyes to participate in your joy.And do you know, your eyes are eighty percent of your energy? Your other four senses only have twenty percent. Not allowing your eyes also to take part in the dance of joy is keeping eighty percent of your energy out of it; this is unfortunate. But you will have to start from sadness, sorrow, which are common experiences: cry heartfully, let the tears flow.It will unburden you, it will clean you, and it will break the repressive structure. Then you will be able, while laughter is there and dance is there and joy is there and love is there – tears will also participate. Eyes are of immense value; they are eighty percent energy. That’s why those who have attained to the ultimate truth, we call seers.Why have you chosen the word “seer”? Why have you chosen the eye to represent the ultimate experience? Why not the ears? Why not the nose? Because they are poor people; the nose, the ear, the mouth, they are poor people.The richest part of your being is your eyes. That’s why when you see a blind man you feel more compassion than when you see a deaf man or a man who cannot smell anything – you don’t feel any compassion at all for them. Perhaps you may feel even jealous, that it is good that he cannot smell anything; it is perfectly good in this stinking world.But a man without eyes immediately creates compassion in you. The reason is because without the eyes the man is only twenty percent alive, eighty percent dead. He does not know any color, he does not know the sunrise, he does not know the clouds. He cannot see a bird on the wing. He cannot see a beautiful face. All that is of immense importance, all that poetry – he is completely blind to it. He lives only twenty percent of life.So don’t prevent your tears.And there is no space. The idea of space has arisen because in your mind tears are associated with sadness; and laughter and joy? – they are just the polar opposites of sadness, so how come tears are flowing from your eyes? Allow them.You say your heart was bursting in those silent moments; tears started flowing from your eyes, and there was laughter too. So you must have got puzzled later on, thinking, Am I going mad or something? No, you have been mad; now you are coming back to sanity.Osho,I wonder why you are not available to people like me who come from as far as Puerto Rico and would like to meet you, even if it is only for five minutes. The main reason is to find out the kind of charisma that you have. Not even the greatest politicians have been able to accomplish what you have.I don’t see people for the simple reason that I don’t have any charisma! I keep you away so you don’t discover it. I keep myself closed in my room. I don’t have any charisma, so you need not take the trouble of coming for five minutes. You will not find anything.I am just as ordinary as you are.My only charisma is that I accept that I am ordinary and you do not accept it. Deep down you go on believing you are extraordinary, special – the only begotten son of God!Osho,Often you say that enforced celibacy makes people's sex energy perverted and that sex is for fun. When I heard you say, “If you are homosexual, become natural,” I cried for hours. I am accustomed to hearing that I am retarded, that homosexuality is a perversion, but this was too much. I cannot change from being a lesbian into a heterosexual woman just like that. Please tell me how to handle this.I had said the homosexuals have to become natural, I had not said anything about lesbians. They are perfectly okay – because whatever they are doing is really silly. Okay? Go on doing it!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 37 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I am a research scientist. For eleven years I have been involved in a medical research program to develop artificial organs, including hearts, skin, and blood. I enjoy my work, but I do not have a right sense about what I am doing, as natural organs are always better. I have a deep love and respect for nature, and there is much to do to keep the natural balance of which you speak; but I cannot find any institution or organization where research is done with respect or love. Please help me to find a way out or a better way in.I can understand your difficulty.There is no organization or institute on the whole planet earth where research is being done with respect and love toward nature. Just the contrary is the case. The research is being done to conquer nature. Even a man like Bertrand Russell has written about “the conquest of nature.”It is simply unbelievable that you are part of nature, a small part, a tiny part, trying to conquer the whole – as if one of my fingers is trying to take possession of my whole body.Man is nature too.So wherever you are, do not bother about the organization or the institution or their attitude; but you work with deep love, respect. You are not working against nature.And remember one thing: why have you been given intelligence? It is the natural growth. Nature is trying to improve upon itself through your intelligence. Right now it may be that natural organs are superior to artificial organs. But remember, the artificial organs can be superior to the natural organs, for the simple reason that nature works blindly.Through man nature is trying to have eyes.The natural heart can certainly be replaced by an artificial heart. The artificial heart will not have heart attacks. And the artificial heart will be easily removable, replaceable.Human blood is going to be a great need soon. You have to improve upon nature, because as the religious disease, AIDS, is spreading throughout the world, blood transfusion is becoming more and more dangerous. Through blood transfusion you can become a victim of AIDS.And AIDS is not the name of a disease; it is another name for death, because neither death has any cure, nor does AIDS have any cure. Unless something has a cure, to call it a disease is wrong. And scientists are agreed that AIDS will never be curable. So it is a slow suicide. It can infect in many ways: the greatest danger is from a blood transfusion.Artificial blood will be purer, because artificial blood is not going to be religious and homosexual; it is not going to be the source of your death. And what a death! – ugly; in your own eyes you fall down.So don’t feel that you are working against nature. Nobody can succeed against nature. All the successes of science are not conquests, the way they have been described. All that we have discovered is through the compassion of nature, allowing us its secrets. We are part of nature, the best part of it. And nature wants, through human consciousness, to reach newer heights.Science is not against nature, cannot be. It has to follow natural laws, it cannot go against the natural laws. So all discovery, all research is to find out how nature functions, what its laws are.And you have intelligence that is given by nature; nature is ready to reveal its secrets to that intelligence. Follow the laws of nature, and you will be able to improve upon nature itself. Intelligence is nature trying to improve upon itself; up to now it has worked blindly. In man’s intelligence there is a hope.So don’t be worried that you are doing something against nature. Do it with great love, respect, with great gratitude, meditativeness; and be certain that it is nature trying to improve upon itself through you. In the beginning, of course, your artificial organs will not be so good. But it is only the beginning: there is immense possibility of going on improving.Blood will be needed soon, and artificial blood will be better. Perhaps if things like AIDS become a wildfire, then the only alternative we have is to reproduce children in the test-tubes, where they can be protected; otherwise, they will bring AIDS from their very birth. Three children in Europe have been found with AIDS. What an ugly world we are creating for our children! – that AIDS has come through natural birth. “Natural birth” does not mean that we cannot improve upon it.I was not joking when I said to you yesterday that, at least, women should become lesbians – every woman and every man should be standing in a queue before hospitals to be tested. If he is declared a positive case of AIDS, then something has to be done for the poor man; something so that he does not need sex anymore, some biological change. Otherwise, he is going to live two years – what is he going to do with his biology, with his physiology, with his male sperm?Something has to be done, and that can be done only by scientific investigation into how to divert the old blind biological process of creating sperm in man. If for two years we can stop the production of sperm in the man, he can live without repression – he can enjoy these two years more than anybody else. Everybody is going to die. He is a rare person, because death is giving him notice.You may die tomorrow. Everything remains incomplete. Everybody has been dying on the earth, leaving things incomplete, because nobody knows when death will come and knock on your doors. But the man with AIDS, – if science can help him not to produce sexual energy, or can channel it into different directions of creativity because it is creative energy – perhaps for these two years he will be grateful.He will not feel bad about AIDS; he may even feel proud of it, because for these two years he will be able to paint, play music, write the novel he always wanted to but there were so many things to do…and now there is a clean two years of time.He can meditate. It is difficult in the ordinary world to find such a long stretch of time – two years – to sit silently, do nothing, and just be a witness. He can do that. Then AIDS becomes a blessing in disguise.The men whose sperm is found not to be carrying any AIDS or other diseases can donate their sperm to the hospital. Just like blood banks, there should be sperm banks. And all women will have gone lesbian. And if we want humanity to continue, and certainly we want to continue, then artificial insemination will be the only way to produce children – either in the test-tubes or, if the woman is happy and ready, then in her womb.And there are far better possibilities for the children. They will not carry diseases. We can choose the best sperm, one that creates an Albert Einstein, Lord Rutherford, Bertrand Russell, or a Jean-Paul Sartre. We can choose.So you are in the great service of humanity and nature. Go deeper into the research. Don’t just do it as a job, let it be your worship. These things are going to be needed.Nowadays if you have a fracture, then for six weeks you are carrying the cast – unnecessarily! If we can create artificial organs, limbs…if a leg has a fracture, it is better to replace it. Why bother with rotten old things? Just replace it with a new, brand-new leg, and that can be done very easily. And the artificial leg can be made as strong as we want; it can be absolute steel, with no fear of any fracture.It is perfectly in tune with nature. Just remember one criterion: whatever you do should not be in the service of destruction, it should be in the service of creativity.We are passing through a very strange period of time, so we will have to adjust to many new things.The other day the lady who had said that she is very much disturbed because I said homosexuality is unnatural…. She became worried because she thought I include lesbianism in homosexuality. And she is not a young girl. She has come here from Puerto Rico to meet her girlfriend who has come here to see her sannyasin son. So that lady must be at least sixty or more. A sixty-year-old lady…and lesbianism is absolutely okay as far as nature is concerned, because it is not creating AIDS, it is not creating any disease; it is just a silly joke. You can go on playing it. It is stupid, but harmless.And if something makes two people happy without any harm – it may be silly, but I am the last person to stop it. Now these two old women – do you want me to disturb them? And they are doing no harm to anybody, just doing silly things to each other. Even nature is not taking note of them.Reverend Jerry Falwell is saying that God has punished the homosexuals with the disease AIDS. It is strange God is not punishing women. It is something new – he has never been favorable to women.The Christian trinity consists of three males. It is a gay group. If the Christian God or the Jewish God was a little more intelligent, at least one woman would have been a joy to include in the trinity. It would have created some drama. Otherwise three stupid males, sitting for eternity, what will they be doing? They are bound to turn homosexual. And those homosexuals are punishing man only, woman is not being punished? Perhaps there is a reason….The serpent in the biblical story told Eve, “God does not want you to eat from the tree of knowledge and the tree of eternal life, because he is afraid: if you eat from these two trees you will become equal to gods.” Perhaps he is punishing men because they are becoming equal to gods by being homosexuals. I don’t see any other reason.The Puerto Rican lady asked me – it was the same lady who asked about lesbianism – she wanted also to see me for five minutes in private. My God, I became so much afraid – to see a lesbian in private. Nothing doing! And she is putting on the pressure, that she has come from so far away, from Puerto Rico. She may have come from the moon, it does not matter: to me a lesbian woman is senile, whatever the age. I don’t want to see her even for five seconds.It reminds me…somebody was asking, “Osho, have you ever heard of any Puerto Rican becoming enlightened?”I said, “No, I have not heard, but the reason is all Puerto Ricans are born enlightened. They don’t need to become enlightened.”Now this enlightened lady wants to meet an ordinary man to find out what charisma I have. How is she going to find it out? I myself don’t know how people find charisma. There is no criterion, and particularly in privacy. I have never heard of anybody finding charisma in privacy. You go on doing your work. I am a very simple and straightforward man.Women can become lesbians – what will happen to men? They will all become monks, and they will do all possible nasty things.Your research work is of immense value. You can provide men with plastic ladies – beautiful, there is no need to be ugly: every plastic lady a Cleopatra! You can make the lady such that, connected with the electric current, the lady moans and groans and moves better than your ladies.And you can make these ladies such that they can be portable. Just take the air out, fold the lady, and put her in your bag. There is no need to be bothered that sometime when you need her, the lady may not be available. Just pump the air, plug the lady back in and she is ready. That seems to be the most hygienic, most intelligent….I have heard…Two young men were going to Alaska; they had accepted a post there to guard on the boundaries. Now both were worried about girlfriends, what they are going to do there – in Alaska, on the boundaries, it will be difficult to come across a woman.Sitting in a restaurant they were discussing what will happen to them; life will become dull. A man heard it and he said, “Don’t be worried. You go to the shop across the street, because whoever goes to Alaska necessarily goes to that shop. They have everything you need.”They said, “We don’t think that he will be able to supply what we need, but there is no harm, let’s take a chance.” They went in – and the man had a plastic lady. They rejoiced! It was so beautiful, so velvety; the very touch was so silky. The only thing was to fill it with air, and the lady was ready.And it never said, “Tonight I have a headache.” No quarrel, no nagging…. What more can you expect of a woman? She was the perfect woman.They purchased it; but only one man had the money, so he paid. On the way he told the other man, “Remember, I have paid for the lady, so don’t fool around. I never like anybody playing around, fooling with my ladies!”The man said, “You are mad! That is a plastic lady.”He said, “It doesn’t matter, it is my lady!”After two years it was time for them to come back, but the shopkeeper was very much surprised: only one man was coming back. He asked, “What happened to the other man?”He said, “I had to shoot him.”“Why did you have to shoot him?”He said, “Whenever I used to go out, he was flirting with my lady. And there is a limit to everything! I was out, and he was playing with my lady. Slowly, slowly I tolerated it, thinking that that poor man also has needs. But that day it was too much. He chewed the lady’s nipple the air escaped and the lady flew out of the window! That was too much – I had to shoot that man!”Things like this may happen once in a while, but you need not be worried.AIDS spreading is bound to make immense changes in sexual relationships. So you go on creating artificial organs, and start planning for artificial ladies.For the women who can see the silliness of lesbianism and have no interest in it, they have already in the market – absolutely hygienic, with no fear of any disease – electric vibrators. They do a better job than any man can do – and whenever you want, and for however long you want.My feeling is that if every woman is supplied with a electric vibrator, there is not going to be any bitchiness around. They will be so satisfied, calm and quiet…. I am not joking! I am rarely serious, but this time I am.Those calm and quiet ladies may become meditators. I never forget my profession!Osho,When you looked at me I felt afraid and empty. I am confused. Please comment.Confusion is almost the natural state of humanity. Everybody is confused.When I looked into your eyes, you became aware suddenly of the confusion because there was a comparison. When I look into your eyes you can see a clarity, a cloudless sky. That gives you a comparison, that your eyes are full of dark clouds, hence the confusion.And whenever I look into anybody’s eyes…very few people remain for a few seconds looking into my eyes and allowing me to look into their eyes.Emptiness is bound to be felt. Emptiness is going to be there; it is there inside you, unless you become aware, more conscious, so conscious that your whole emptiness becomes filled with a light, becomes luminous.This very emptiness is going one day to become your enlightenment. It is just a space. You have never worked on it.There is a story…. A king wanted to choose his successor. Ordinarily it is not difficult, the eldest son becomes the successor. But he had three sons born simultaneously. Their age was the same, their courage was the same, their intelligence was the same – it can happen in twins, triplets – everything was the same. It was difficult even to find out who was who. Even the father and the mother got confused between these three brothers.The king was getting old; somebody has to be crowned, given the responsibility before he dies. But he could not figure out what to do, how to find out. They were all beautiful, they were all courageous, they were all intelligent. They were copies of one another.He went to a wise old man and asked, “How have I to find my successor?”The man said, “It is not such a difficult thing. Your three sons all have beautiful palaces, separate. You tell them…give some money to each, the same amount, and tell them, ‘You have to fill your house completely with something this money can buy.’”The money was so little…. They thought of many things – bringing roses and filling the whole house with roses – but the money was not enough.So the first one went to the municipal corporation of the city, because the cheapest thing he could purchase was the rubbish that the municipal trucks collect. He told them, “Rather than throwing it away, just dump it into my palace. Fill it completely, that is the condition.” And for that much money they were ready, there was no question. They were going to throw it out anyway, outside the city: “This will save time, and he is giving money too.” But they could not believe what he was going to do!He said, “You don’t bother about it. It is a very decisive thing in my life.The second son was very much in trouble – what to do? And he was even more puzzled, because the first had already filled his palace. Something cheap had to be found.He had to fill his house with mud. It was the rainy season and all over, mud was available; he just had to bring trucks to carry the mud and fill the house. The amount of money was enough to do that.They both were happy, and they both were looking at the third, what he was doing, because he was not doing anything at all.The evening came, and the king came to visit. He went to the first house. It was stinking, he could not enter it. But the son said, “The house is completely full, not a single inch has been left empty.”The king said, “I accept your word. I will not go in.”The second he could go in, but what did he see? A marble palace filled with mud!Both the sons and the father went to the third son, and they were surprised – the house was completely empty. The son had even removed the furniture and everything; it was absolutely empty.They could not believe what his idea was. They said to him, “The house is empty and you were given money to fill it completely.”He said, “Look a little more clearly.”They looked again: it was empty.They said, “Don’t fool us. It is completely empty. Even the furniture, the piano – the things that you used to love – all are taken out. It is more empty than ever!”The son said, “No. You just look at the candles which are filling it with light. It is empty, but full of light. And I thought, there can be nothing more significant than to fill it with light. And this is the remaining money I want to return to you, because candles were cheap and there was no need for so much money.”Of course he was chosen the successor.Your emptiness is not anything to be worried about. You just have to light a candle in it and it will be full of light, overfull with light. And then you will see the beauty of its being totally empty. There is nothing to hinder the light, there is nothing to make a shadow even.I can understand your question. It is a significant question. Looking into my eyes you felt empty, and then you felt confused – naturally. Looking into my eyes you must have thought you would find something significant, and you find only emptiness.But I tell you that is the most significant thing in life: to find your emptiness.My eyes only mirrored what was in you.And don’t feel confused about it. Let this be a beginning of the search for light, which is also there inside you, but you have never taken care of it. You have never sharpened it. You have never gone to your very center.Once you are there your whole energy centered in your being, creates a light which is eternal.That light transforms your being completely.Your actions will have a different quality, your words will have a different depth, your gestures will have a different grace. You will have come home. There is no need to be confused at all.Osho,Some time ago, before you started speaking again, there was a strong message coming from the higher-ups in the commune about being positive. We don't hear this so much anymore, and yet the commune seems more relaxed, positive and loving. Is this the commune maturing?The commune is certainly maturing.People are becoming more loving, more caring, feeling their own responsibility, fulfilling it to their best.While I was not speaking, I was standing apart from you. Hence, the people who are serving you – don’t call them higher-ups; there is no hierarchy here. Be grateful to those people who have been maintaining you, particularly when I was silent – I was almost absent to you. They managed to keep you together to work, and naturally they had to say to you again and again, “Be positive.”Since I have started speaking, I am again amid you, not standing outside. What they had to say to you is no longer needed. I am in the middle of you. My presence is enough to make you positive, loving, rejoicing. It has not to be told to you that work is worship; being with me, you yourself start feeling work is worship.So two things have happened…. You have matured. Four years you have struggled against every kind of hostility – just blind people all around. They cannot see a simple thing, that these are harmless people, we have not done any harm to anybody.In the four years’ time we have been here, we have done immense good to Oregon. This place we have turned into a beautiful oasis. And it is only the beginning. We are going to turn this whole desert into a paradise. It has to become a model to the whole world, and we are moving toward it with a very determined step and spirit.In four years there has not been a single child born in the commune. That shows intelligence. Nobody is telling you, nobody is forcing you, but you can understand that the world is so over-populated that soon people will be dying, starving, suffering from all kinds of diseases. Perhaps AIDS will kill two-thirds of humanity. It is already out of the hands of your so-called powerful governments.In New York, 96.5 percent of homosexuals who have been tested show positive AIDS results; 46 percent of prostitutes who have been tested in New York are suffering from AIDS, and spreading it every day to many more people. Only these two groups have been studied.I will suggest, first you should check your senators. They represent the people, they must represent AIDS too. I know a few senators are homosexuals. Members of parliament, the president, the vice president, all your ministers, secretaries, governors, members of the state assemblies – all the politicians should be given the test. That will show you how far it has gone. But perhaps they will never be tested; they are powerful people. Even if they are found to have AIDS, the information will not be released.No city wants to release the information. They are trying to repress it, for the simple reason that it will be a condemnation of the whole city.Hospitals are refusing AIDS patients. Now what kind of world are we living in? Doctors are freaking out. They don’t want to touch any AIDS patient. One can understand; they are human beings after all; they are worried they may catch it.All European countries are full of homosexuals. South Africa is full of homosexuals. Middle East Mohammedan countries are full of homosexuality. If in New York so many homosexuals are confirmed as AIDS patients, what will be the situation of the whole world?All these situations…and hostility toward a group who is neither interested in any politics, nor afraid of any challenge….We are the only community in the whole world who is being thoroughly tested. Out of five thousand people only two persons have been found to be suffering from AIDS. Four other persons have just arrived, because the moment it was known to their families that they have AIDS, friends became enemies, wives, who were promising them that they will be ready to die for them, don’t want to see their faces.Their own children shut the door of their homes in their faces. Their own parents condemn them, “Why did you not die when you were born? We have nothing to do with you.” Those four people have come here, hearing that in this commune nobody loses respect, human dignity. We have accepted them, because they are poor victims of your religions. If anybody is to be blamed, it is your religions which have brought about this situation.In this world which is almost coming to an end in some way or other – AIDS or nuclear weapons – a small commune is trying to change a desert into an oasis. With no crime in four years’ time, with no rape, with no prostitution, with no murder, with no suicide…. But people are blind. This may be the most legal place in the whole world, but they are declaring it an illegal city. Perhaps to be legal, crimes are needed.We have a judge sitting uselessly. We have the peace force, carrying their guns, looking silly, because I don’t think they will have a chance to use their guns. And perhaps by the time they have to use their guns they may have forgotten how to use them.An intelligent group of people, seeing the situation, has decided on its own, individually; we don’t believe in committees, we believe in the individual. Every individual has to make decisions for his life. Naturally, they have decided that this is not the world to bring a child into: overpopulated, almost on the verge of death.What heritage will you give to the child? Starvation? AIDS? Dying in a nuclear war?No mother, no father who has a little intelligence will be ready to give birth to a child in this ugly world and give the child a life of utter despair, and make the world more populated, create more misery.Our birthrate is zero. In the whole world, no community can claim a zero birthrate. Our crime rate is zero. And our creativity? Anybody who has eyes can come and see.For fifty years this whole land was lying here without being used. That was perfectly good for Oregonian politicians. “One Thousand Friends of Oregon” never raised a question that such a big land – perhaps the biggest ranch in the whole world, one hundred and twenty-six square miles – is lying dead. It had been for sale for fifty years, and nobody was ready to purchase it. That was perfectly lawful.We purchased it. We created an oasis. We created crops sufficient for our food. We create vegetables in our greenhouses, fruits. We have all dairy products of our own. And they are dragging us into courts because we have not followed land use laws.Then change your land use laws!For fifty years land use laws were followed, and nothing was done. We change the desert – and it goes against your land use laws.Laws are for man; man is not for laws!But those legal experts hadn’t the guts to come and see this place! We have invited the governor, the attorney general “First you come and see!” None of them has shown the courage, because they know what we have done is right. Their laws are dead, written hundreds of years ago. They should change them! We have not done anything wrong.The commune in four years has been the target of all kinds of condemnation, criticism, without any basis. And still nobody here is worried! You cannot find five thousand people living together with such joy, working so hard – twelve hours a day, sometimes fourteen hours a day – and still with a smile, with a song, with a dance.But people are blind. We have to open their eyes.I was silently watching you, how you can do on your own – and you have done perfectly well. Because I can be absent any day, it is better to watch while I am alive and to see you grow and mature, to see that nobody is going to destroy you. You will be able to fight against any force – because there is no force stronger than love, stronger than silence, stronger than meditativeness, stronger than joy.Your laughter is not only filling this valley.It is reaching to the farthest corners of the world.Seeing that you have survived the crucial, critical period, I started to speak again, to give you my vision of life, my truth, my experience.Three-and-a-half years of silence was for a certain purpose: I wanted to have a break, a discontinuity with my thirty years’ work in the past. I had spoken on Jesus, but only on chosen parts which I could appreciate. I have spoken on Krishna, but given my own interpretations. I have spoken on Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, but I was using their statements for my message. They all must be freaking out, wherever they are.This break has had tremendous significance. Now I am speaking exactly the truth.Before this silence I would never have said that Jesus was a crackpot. I knew, I always knew, but before I could say it I needed people who could hear it. Now I have got my own people, and I can be absolutely authentic with you. I can say now that all the religions have harmed humanity, human progress. And all the religions have given things like AIDS to humanity. It was difficult to say so before, because you would have run away immediately. Now you know that if I am saying Jesus was a crackpot, perhaps he was.I am talking to my own people. Now there is no need to camouflage things, to give interpretations. I can now directly communicate with you. This direct communication is bringing the positivity, the lovingness, the joy that you are feeling. And nobody is saying to you, “Be positive.”Be compassionate to those people who for four years told you continuously to be positive, not to be negative. Now there is no need, I am here. Just my being here among you, opening my heart, giving all that I have experienced, is going to make you positive without your knowing.The surgery is being done; and now you don’t need any anesthesia; you have proved strong, you have proved your mettle. Those three-and-a-half years of silence were of immense importance. Either you would have withered away, fallen into the blind crowds…. I wanted to see whether anybody is strong enough to remain with me, even if I am not speaking. And you proved it on a great and grand scale.Now you deserve my whole being and my whole heart, my whole experience, and I am going to say things which would have shocked you once. Now they will only create great laughter.

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 38 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is there any biological chance of an unconditioned, free and loving relationship between child and parent?Absolutely no. Biology is blind; hence there is no biological chance. But you can get over biology. You are conscious, intelligent human beings, so there is a possibility; but the possibility will be through meditation, not through biology.If the parents are meditative, if the child is born not only through biological sexual intercourse, but also through a deep meditative love….The meditative love means melting into each other’s beings, not just the bodies. It means putting your egos away, your religions away, your ideologies away – becoming simple and innocent. In that unconditioned state of the parents, if the child is conceived there is every certainty, not only possibility, that the child will not be conditioned at all.There are a few things which you have to understand. I cannot give any proofs for them, they are beyond proofs. Only your experience will give you the proof.For example, the biological organism is capable of transcending itself. It transcends in certain moments. Those are the moments most cherished in the human mind, because in those moments you have known freedom, an expanded self, an utter silence and peace; love without its counterpart, hate, following it.That moment we call orgasm. Biology gives you orgasm; that is the most precious gift from blind biology. You can use those moments of freedom, melting, disappearing, for meditation. There is no better space from which to jump into meditation than orgasm. Two lovers feeling one soul in two bodies…everything has stopped for the moment; even time has stopped. There are no thoughts, the mind has stopped. You are in your simple is-ness. Those are the little spaces from where you can get beyond biology.All that you have to know is that this is what meditation is: timelessness, egolessness, silence, blissfulness, an all-pervading joy, overwhelming ecstasy.This has happened through biology between two persons. Once you know that it can happen in your aloneness too, you just have to fulfill those conditions. My own understanding is that man came to know about meditation through sexual orgasm, because in life there is no other moment which comes so close to meditativeness.But all the religions are against sex. They are for meditation, but they are not for the beginning, the basic experience that will lead you to meditation. So they have created a poor humanity – not only materially poor, but spiritually poor too. They have conditioned your mind against sex so much that under biological pressure you go into it. But in that pressure you cannot experience the orgasmic freedom, the infinity that suddenly becomes available to you; the eternity in the moment, the depth, the abysmal depth of the experience.Because man has been deprived of orgasmic blissfulness, he has become incapable of knowing what meditation is. And that’s what all the religions want: that you never become meditative. Talk about it, read about it, do research on it, listen to lectures on it…. All that will create more frustration in you, because you understand everything about meditation intellectually, but you don’t have any existential base – not even a drop of the experience which can prove that if the drop is there, the ocean also must be somewhere.The drop is the existential proof of the ocean. Biology is far more compassionate than your churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. Although biology is blind, it is not so blind as your Moses, Krishna, Jesus, Mohammed.Biology is your nature.It has nothing but compassion for you.It has given you everything possible that is needed to go higher, to reach to a super-natural state.My whole life I have been fighting against idiots. They cannot answer me, my argument, which is simple: you talk about meditation but you will have to give some existential proof in human life; otherwise, people will understand only words. You will have to give them something that can make them aware of what is possible: love made without any guilt, without any hurry, without thinking that you are doing something wrong. You will be doing the best and the most right thing in the world.It is strange to see that people can kill without any guilt – not one but millions of people – but they cannot create a child without guilt.All the religions have been nothing but a calamity.Make love only when you are ready to be in a meditative space. And create a meditative atmosphere while you are making love. You should treat the place as sacred. Creating life…what can be more sacred? Do it as beautifully, as aesthetically, as joyously as possible. There should be no hurry. And if the two lovers meet in such an atmosphere outside, and such a silent space within, they will attract a soul, the highest available.You give birth to a child according to your state of love. If every parent is disappointed, he should think about it, that this is the child they deserved. They never created a possibility for a higher and more evolved soul to enter into the womb – because the male sperm and the female egg only create an opportunity for a soul to enter. They create the opportunity for a body, so some soul can become embodied. But you will attract only that kind of person which your sexual activity makes possible.If the world is full of idiots and mediocre people, you are responsible; I mean, parents are responsible. They never thought about it, their children are accidental. There cannot be a bigger crime than to create a life accidentally.Prepare for it. And the most essential thing is to understand the orgasmic moment: thoughtless, timeless, mindless, just a pure awareness. In that pure awareness you can attract a Gautam Buddha. The way you are making love, it is strange that more Adolf Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Nadirshahs, Tamerlanes, Genghis Khans, are not attracted. You attract only mediocre people. You don’t attract the lowest either, because for the lowest your love has to be almost a rape. For the highest, your love has to be a meditation.The child’s life begins from the moment the soul enters into the womb. If it has come into a meditative space, it is possible to have a child without conditioning him. In fact, a child who is born out of meditation cannot be conditioned; he will rebel against it. Only mediocre people can be conditioned.And a couple who is capable of meditativeness while making love is no ordinary couple. They will be respectful to the child. The child is a guest from the unknown, and you have to be respectful to the guest. Parents who are not respectful to their children are bound to destroy their lives. Your respect, your love, your gratitude that, “You have chosen us as your parents,” will be responded to with deeper respect, more gratitude, more love.And when you love a person, you cannot condition him. When you love a person, you give him freedom, you give him protection. When you love a person you would not like him to be just a carbon copy of yourself, you would like him to be a unique individual. And to make him unique you will arrange all the conditions, all the challenges which provoke his potential.You will not burden him with knowledgeability, because you would like him to know the truth himself. Any borrowed truth is a lie. Unless it is experienced by you, it is never the truth.You will help the child to experience more and more things. You will not tell him lies, that there is a God. It is a lie, because you have not seen God. Your parents lied to you, and you are repeating it in your turn to your child. Your parents conditioned you, and what is your life? – a long misery from cradle to grave. Do you want your child’s life also to be just a misery, full of suffering, anxiety, despair?There is only one statement in the whole Holy Bible which I am not against. The statement is, “God can forgive everything, but not despair.” Whoever wrote it must have been a man of immense understanding. God cannot forgive only one thing, and that is despair. But everybody is living in despair – God or no God, despair is a reality. It is self-destruction. If you love your child, you will make him rejoice, laugh, enjoy, dance. But just the opposite is being done.In my house in my childhood, it used to be that when some guest was coming they used to get rid of me by sending me somewhere. And the moment they started talking about sending me somewhere – that I have to go to see the doctor because I have had a cold for so many days, I would say, “Nothing doing. I know my cold and I know the doctor; I will choose my time to go. At least this time I cannot go – cold or cancer, it makes no difference.”They said, “But why?”I said, “I know somebody is coming to the house, and you are afraid.” And they were naturally afraid, because I made them feel embarrassed. The guest may be some important person, and I may do something that will spoil their whole relationship.Once, eating, suddenly I started laughing. The whole family knew that something was bound to happen, because there was a guest. But the guest was shocked. He said, “Why are you laughing?”I said, “Laughing needs no cause. In fact, I should ask you, ‘Why are you all sitting with long faces?’ Laughter has an intrinsic value; long faces don’t have any value at all. And since you have come, even people in my family are looking very sad, serious. I don’t understand what is wrong with you. Do you create this kind of atmosphere wherever you go?”I may suddenly start dancing. The conversation between the guest and my parents would stop suddenly, because I was dancing in the middle of them. They would say, “You can go out and play.”I said, “I know the exact spot where to dance. If you choose to go out, you can go and have your stupid conversation – which means nothing! Talking about the weather and the season…you all know, even I know. What is the point?”In polite conversation people never discuss subjects which are controversial because that may create some antagonism. They only discuss non-controversial subjects – the weather…. Naturally, there is no controversy about it. If it is cold, it is cold; if it is hot, it is hot.“And I am dancing here only to make you realize that you are wasting your time. Better join me in the dance!”A child who is not conditioned is in many ways embarrassing to the parents. But if they love, they will be ready to do anything. Even if it brings embarrassment, there is no harm. Their child is growing into a unique being. They will help him to remain free, to remain open, to remain available to the unknown future.They will make him a seeker, not a believer. They will not make him a Christian, or a Jew, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, because all these religions have done so much harm – it is more than enough.It is time for all the religions to disappear from the planet. Unconditioned children can make that miracle happen because tomorrow they will be young people, mature, and they will not be Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans. They will be just seekers; seeking will be their religion.That’s my definition of a sannyasin: searching, seeking, inquiring is his religion.Beliefs stop all inquiry.Give the child all your experiences. Make him aware that he was conceived in a very loving orgasmic moment, that love is a great gift of existence. And you have to make love the central point of your life, because only through love can you step beyond blind nature into the world of super-nature, where no blindness exists, where you become a seer.Yes, it is possible, but not possible through biology alone. It is possible if you are courageous enough to make your love your temple, your place of meditation. Then you will be attracting a soul already having the potential of uniqueness. And then give him every possibility for freedom, even if it goes against you. The freedom of your child is more valuable, because your child is the future of mankind.Your days are past. What does it matter if it goes against you? What have you gained by it? you are empty, you are beggars. Do you want your children also to be empty and beggars? That’s what every parent is trying to do – to reproduce copies, carbon copies. And remember, existence accepts only the originals. Carbon copies are not acceptable in existence.Let your child have his original face.It may create fear in you, it may create concern in you, but those are your problems. Don’t in any way inhibit the child. And a child who has been given freedom – even against his own parents – will respect you forever, will remain grateful to you forever.Right now, just the opposite is the case: every child is full of anger, rage, hatred for the parents, because what they have done to him is unforgivable.So by giving freedom, by allowing the child to be himself whatever that means, accepting him in his natural self wherever it leads, you are creating a child who will worship you. You have been not only ordinary fathers and mothers, you have been givers of life, freedom, uniqueness.He will carry the beautiful memory in his heart forever, and his gratitude toward you will make him absolutely certain that what has been done for him, he has to do for the future generations.If every generation behaves toward the children with love and respect, and gives them freedom to grow, all this nonsense of the generation gap will disappear. If you respect your children, if you are friends to your children, no generation gap is possible.Ordinarily what is happening around the world is, there is no communication between the children and the parents. They kiss each other, they shake hands, but it is all hypocrisy – done because it has to be done.My father was being told by his friends, “You are going too far, giving so much freedom to your boy. Not only that, you talk with him as if he is your age. It seems you are not father and son but friends. This is not good – the father has to be authoritative.” But my father was a simple man. He could not be authoritative.From my very childhood I remember him only as an older friend. Perhaps that created a situation. In my whole life I never had friends of my own age, always older people. I could not understand what the generation gap is, because I was always having friendships with people who were forty years older than me, fifty years older than me. One man, Pandit Sunderlal, was ninety years old – seventy years older than me, but we were great friends. Perhaps because of my father, the generation gap did not exist for me.And I could communicate only with these people. The people of my own age looked to me very childish, stupid. I was never interested in their football games and in their hockey matches, in their volleyball. I could see only silliness. Throwing a ball from this side of the net to the other side, then returning it – what is the point? You can have two balls and sit silently, meditate!And my colleagues – while I was a student or while I was a lecturer in the university – never felt that I belonged to their generation.In the university common room…it was just by chance, the first day I entered the common room a corner chair was empty. So I went to that chair. Strangely enough, I always found it empty. I inquired of the peon, “What is the matter?”He said, “Since you have sat on that chair, not only that chair is empty, but a few chairs on both sides are empty. Nobody wants to disturb you, nobody wants to discuss with you. There is a certain fear.”I said, “Strange, because I am absolutely harmless!”The old peon said, “You are harmless, but there is no common ground between you and the other professors in the university. They are professors but they are talking only about girls in their classes, gossips…. They are always talking about how to pull somebody’s leg. They are always interested in politics – university politics, inside politics. They cannot do that in front of you, they feel embarrassed.”Rarely did it happen that somebody would come and sit by my side, asking my permission, “Can I sit here?”I would say, “This is a common room. The seat is empty and I don’t own….”“No,” they would say, “somehow these three seats on this side and three seats on that side…you are occupying seven seats. People keep away. I also keep away,” the person would say, “but today all the seats are full. I am sorry to disturb you, but can I sit here?”I would say, “You can sit happily. And if you want to talk about all your gossips, all your love affairs, you can talk with me.”He would say, “No, I don’t want to talk about anything with you. I want just to sit silently here.”I said, “That’s great, because that is my teaching: Sit silently.”Just a single unconditioned person, and you create a center of the cyclone. Wherever he will be, he will have his uniqueness, and only a very few courageous people will be able to come close to him.You will not find my photo in any of the photos of the university, for the simple reason that when for the first time the philosophical association was going to have its annual photograph, the head of the department asked me to come.I said, “You are so old – and still interested in photographs!” Since then, nobody asked me. They understood it perfectly well, that it is a childish game. And the man was almost sixty years old – what are you doing with a photograph?Children can be raised unconditioned. You will have to be very alert, aware not to impose yourself on them. And it is possible only if your orgasm becomes one with your meditation.In fact, that is the intention of nature: to give you the orgasmic experience so that you start longing for more. But religions have prevented you even reaching the orgasmic state, so the question of longing for a meditative blissfulness, blessedness, does not arise.Osho,I find myself in a po position. More and more deeply I can see myself, but I still don't find the way through. Is the patience that grows out of trust all that is needed? Could you comment, please?You are certainly fortunate to find yourself in a position of po, because yes is binding, no is binding. Both are limited, but po is simply an opening. There are no boundaries to po.This is the place from where inquiry can start.If you say yes, inquiry has stopped there.If you say no, you have stopped inquiry again.Po is the position for a true seeker.Hence, I say you are fortunate. Don’t feel despair.Certainly there will be a turmoil. Yes gives a consolation that you have arrived. No also is an arrival, a settlement. You don’t have to seek any more. But po? That should be the most precious word invented. It is not a position, it is only a great question mark. From that question mark you have to move in search of the truth, in search of your own being.You ask me, “Is patience, trust in patience enough?”No that is falling from the position of po. That is coming to the position of yes. You want consolation, you want me to say to you, “Yes, just trust and be patient.”No, I am not going to give you such pleasure so easily. You will have to inquire, doubt, and go into the darkness.Don’t be afraid, because there is nothing to be afraid of. Man alone has intelligence, and nothing is higher in existence than intelligence. In your having such a quality, fear should simply disappear.And yes, trust will arise. You have not to accept it now. As you will move in your inquiries, in the darkness of the unknown, first there will be fear, but soon you will see the darkness is becoming thinner. You start seeing things – although they are still only dimly seen. But that will give you trust that you are moving in the right direction.And of course, once trust arises, patience follows it, because trust can wait for infinity but will not betray its inquiry. It wants to know; however long it takes does not matter.So first, start the inquiry. Then trust comes of its own accord and is followed by infinite patience. And the moment there is trust and patience, you have almost arrived.Perhaps one step more – and that is the most difficult step. When you have reached near the goal, you can start taking it for granted: “I have already arrived, now I can rest a little; there is no hurry.” The goal is there, just one step and you will be in.Never do that, because in existence everything is fast-moving, changing. If under a tree you start resting for a little while…. You are, of course, tired – it is a long inquiry, journey, there is doubt, skepticism – you are tired, but just for one step don’t rest.People have lost at the very last step because they thought that they had arrived at the goal. But existence is continuously moving; by the time you wake up the goal may be gone. Nothing is static. Perhaps it may take years for you to find the same situation again. And again you will be tired, more tired than before.Remember it, that the first step and the last step are the most difficult – the journey itself is not difficult. The first step is difficult because you are moving into the unknown – all kinds of fear and phobia…and the last step because you feel at rest: “I have arrived. Why not rest a little after such a long journey?” No, one step more, then there is restfulness and peace and relaxation forever.But don’t think of trust and patience right now; otherwise, the same things that will be of immense help on the way will become hindrances. This is one of the tragedies of human life: all beautiful and good things which could have led anybody to the ultimate truth have become hindrances, because rather than letting them come on their own, you have started believing in them from the very beginning.It is not the same trust that comes on its own. The imposed trust is an impostor. The practiced patience is nothing but impatience.Let them come on their own. And remain alert when you have reached – don’t think that it is time to rest. It is not the time to rest, it is the time to pull all your energy together and take the final jump.Before existence moves and things change, you have to merge yourself with the truth you have been seeking so long. And the miracle of miracles is that what you will find is your own being. It has always been at the innermost core of your existence, but sometimes it takes a very long, circuitous route to come back to your own home.When Ford made his cars, his first model had no reverse gear; nobody had thought about it. But a problem arose: if you had gone a few feet away from your house and you wanted to come back, you had to go around the whole city. This was too much; Ford invented the reverse gear.If there had been a God, by now he would have given you also a reverse gear. But because there is no God you have to live without a reverse gear. You have just to go on and on…even to reach to yourself you may have to travel the whole universe. But the journey too is immensely beautiful. It is good that you don’t have a reverse gear; otherwise you would have missed the glories, the beauties of the journey. Many people are missing them.When you go by airplane from one country to another you don’t know what you have missed. Going by plane is not a journey – it is a kangaroo jump.One of my friends, a very rich man, used to travel always in the third class, and always in the passenger trains; never in the express trains, faster trains, no – the slowest trains, which stop at every station. They never reach in time because to every express train they have to give right-of-way.I asked him, “What nonsense is this?” – because sometimes in India you can travel for seven days in a passenger train, only then will you reach the goal.He said, “It is so beautiful. The journey is so beautiful, passing through the country – the farms, the forest, the waterfalls, the rivers, the ocean.”And in third class – of course, in India third class is a great experience. I have traveled third class only once – under compulsion, because I missed the train, and the train I had to catch instead had no first class, no air-conditioned class. It is called “the people’s train”: all third-class compartments. So there was no other way, that was the only possibility for me to reach in time to where I was going. So I traveled in the train – it was really hilarious.Something was strange, that at stations the lights in the compartments would come on, and as the train left the station, the lights would go off. And when the lights went off….You don’t know Indian third class: if it is meant for forty people, there are at least eighty people in it. It is so crowded – just like the whole of India is crowded; it is representative.By my side was sitting a Hindu monk, a renowned sage, and just in front of him was sitting a very ferocious lady. Everything was so overcrowded, that when the light went off, nobody knew what was happening, you could only hear.I would hit the sage, and he would shout, “Somebody is beating me! this is not right!”And I would pull the leg of the woman, and she would jump upon the sage, and he would say, “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” And the whole compartment enjoyed…!People were sitting on their suitcases, on their luggage, on the upper seats. It was only for two hours, but it was really a psychedelic experience! The sage would look at me, but I was sitting silently and seriously, and I would show him all my respect, that this is not right: “Who is hitting you, and why don’t they hit you in the light?”The sage said, “This is strange! And this woman, do you think I would pull her leg? I don’t touch women at all.”Next time the woman said, “This is too much – he is now pulling my sari!”Then a few people around the sage started beating him, because this was too much: “Making a woman naked? This man is not respectable and not a sage at all. Let the next station come and we will take all his symbols of a Hindu monk. This is a dangerous fellow,” – and they took them away.I told them, “Don’t – he does not seem to be that type. And what does it matter if he had pulled the sari? – The woman is not naked.”But the woman was ferocious, because she said, “He was almost going to make me naked.”And people said, “For what were you trying to make her naked?”They took away his begging bowl and threw it out of the train. They took away his monk’s staff and threw it out of the train, and they told him, “If you do any mischief again, we will give you to the police at the next station.”I said to the sage, “You had better get down at this station. At the next station you will get caught by the police, because so many people are witnesses.”He said, “This is strange! I have not done anything. I have been beaten unnecessarily, continuously; my things have been thrown away – and this woman is sitting on my luggage.”And the woman simply refused to move, saying: “I will not move from here, because of what you have done to me; you deserve all this.”He said, “How can I get out?”I said, “It is up to you, because these people are really dangerous. They beat you in the darkness; now they have thrown away your symbols, and I am certain, before the next station, they may throw you! From a moving train….”The monk said, “Perhaps you are right, I should get out here and leave the luggage too, because that woman is really dangerous. I have not touched her feet, I have not touched her sari; I don’t know who is doing it.”I said, “I know, but you get down.”It was such a joy – in darkness, what people can do and what people can understand and how people can behave! All these people were touching the feet of the man when I had come into the compartment. And now he was almost denuded of his glory, respectability, sagehood.Traveling in trains I have felt how much people who are flying are missing: so much beauty all around, such scenic spots – virgin, because nobody will go there.Remember, perhaps that’s why nature has not given you a reverse gear. You will have to go around the whole existence. It is a great learning, brings great maturity, great understanding, great wisdom; and finally when you find your home, and come to know that this has always been within you, it is such an ecstasy. One feels like dancing, singing….If you see a saint who is not laughing, singing, dancing, know perfectly well he is just hocus-pocus.Osho,The other day when you were talking about being a misfit in society, I thought of the sannyasin discos and restaurants in Europe, in the middle of society. How can sannyasins be misfits there? Are we trying to fit into society?No, never! My sannyasins, wherever they are, are creating more misfits, and in the society there are many people who are ready to become misfits. Seeing a group of misfits enjoying life so terrifically, those other misfits go on joining.In fact, in Germany we have won a case just now, because the minister concerned had stopped the opening of one of our discos on the grounds that these discos are strategies to attract young people and then convert them into sannyasins.We went to the court – and it was absolutely absurd, we have never tried to convert anybody. But if people want to be converted, then to refuse is not gentlemanly either.So our discos, our restaurants, our centers, ashrams, communes, they are shelters for all rebels, unfits – because they are real people. People who are fitting with the dead, rotten society are themselves rotten and dead. Anyone who is alive is bound to be a misfit in this dying society. But feeling alone, it becomes more difficult to get out of this. Our places are giving them opportunities: “Don’t feel alone. We have an alternative society of unfits – everybody is an unfit. All that you need to fit into our society is to be an unfit.”We won the case. It was so simple – not a single piece of evidence that we have converted anybody. We are not missionaries; the word “missionary” is a four-letter word. We don’t interfere in anybody’s life, we don’t interfere in anybody’s freedom; but if somebody feels at home with us, he is welcome. He is coming on his own decision – and if he wants to leave, nobody prevents him.We won the case, and in The Osho Times German edition, our legal expert who had fought in the courts against the minister wrote about the case and called the minister a “supra-fascist,” a high-class fascist, so sophisticated that you would not be able to think that he is a fascist.The minister filed a case of defamation against Sadhu and The Osho Times but we proved that he is a “supra-fascist.” His fascism is sophisticated, subtle. We exposed him from his statements, speeches; we gathered all the material and just placed it before the court.The court must have been in a difficulty. It took six or eight months for them to make a decision, but they had to make it, because they know my people – that if they go against the truth, the case will move to the higher court. It must have been a shock to the minister that the court accepted that he is a “supra-fascist,” and that we have not defamed him, we have simply stated a factuality.Now, if that minister had any sense of shame, he would jump in the ocean and disappear forever. A court decision about him, and he is still clinging to his post, seems simply – the man is shameless!My people, anywhere, are not going to fit with the rotten, the dead, the graves, the graveyards, no.We will create our own oases where all unique individuals can live, with their uniqueness respected, with their differences respected.It has never happened in history; unfits have never gathered together. It is for the first time that one million unfits around the world have gathered together – dancing, and fighting with the dying society. And it is a simple job, because that society is dying by itself. Anybody who has any sense, intelligence, would escape that society and join a sannyasin commune.Just a few days ago, I was talking to a very intelligent and loving Swiss journalist. As I looked into his eyes, I told him, “Though I am not an astrologer or a prophet, about you I cannot resist the temptation of making a prophecy.”He said, “What prophecy?”I said, “You are so intelligent and so loving, you cannot remain long without becoming a sannyasin.”And the next day he became a sannyasin! He did not wait even for a few days.I recognize my people immediately – just a look into their eyes and I know they belong to me. And to belong to me does not mean to fit with me or with anything or anybody.To belong to me means to belong to freedom, to belong to your individuality, to belong to your purity, your naturalness….Please let me, allow me to drift a little bit. Just this word “naturalness” created trouble, because the other day I was telling you about plastic ladies, so I have received letters saying, “This is very unnatural.”Sitting in a car is not unnatural, traveling in a plane is not unnatural, listening to me through technological devices is not unnatural.As far as the plastic lady is concerned, we will make it as natural as you want. It is a very simple phenomenon: if you want her to nag you, she will nag you; she will throw clothes at you. She just has to carry a recording, a tape within herself, and she will call you all the dirty words that you are accustomed to. And while you are making love to her, she will shriek and say, “My Jesus!”

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 39 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I took sannyas two years ago, I felt an ecstasy and joy that I had never imagined possible for me. But lately I feel much negativity, fear, resistance and “no” to everything, and my life is a constant chaos. I cannot go back and I cannot go forward. Does that mean that the honeymoon is over now?Baby, the honeymoon has not even started!First, the honeymoon…and then I will discuss your question.I have heard a story…. A young man got married. He was known in the university as “a mama’s boy,” and he was. So he inquired of his mother, “I am going on my honeymoon – any advice?”The mother said, “Don’t miss a single moment, because the honeymoon comes only once in life.”The boy and his wife went to a resort place, rented the best room in the best hotel. They both were tremendously excited. The girl immediately threw off her clothes and jumped into the bed, but the boy went to the window, sat on the windowsill and looked out.Seconds passed, minutes passed, half the night passed, and the girl said, “What the hell are you doing there? It is supposed to be our honeymoon.”He said, “Don’t disturb me. My mother has said, ‘Don’t miss a single moment of it, the honeymoon happens only once in a lifetime.’ You can go to sleep, I will enjoy my honeymoon.” The full moon was in the sky, and he enjoyed the honeymoon!Our honeymoon was of the same type. Now what you are feeling is your reality.The day you took sannyas, two-and-a-half years ago, it was just excitement; something new was going to happen. Your heart was throbbing with a hallucinatory idea of sannyas.You had seen sannyasins dancing, enjoying, blissful, laughing, and you were also becoming part of their laughter, their joy; so you imagined. It was all illusory, it was not a honeymoon.After two-and-a-half years of hallucinating, waiting, naturally you have come to your reality. All hopes have disappeared. What was so positive has become negative. What was so beautiful is now just a negativity, a despair.You think the honeymoon is over? The true honeymoon is never over; it only begins and never ends. That which ends is simply hallucination. But still there is time.The blissfulness is not going to descend upon you from somewhere: you have to go through a transformation. Just taking sannyas does not mean that you are a new being. It simply means a commitment to yourself, a decision that, “I am going to transform myself.” Your red robes, your mala, will remind you continuously of the commitment that you have made to existence, the declaration of transformation, the decision.Rather than transforming yourself, you started hallucinating, which is very easy for women to do. Now get back to the ground and the reality.You are a negative person, just as everybody is before transformation. You are full of despair, just as everybody else is full of despair before the inner revolution that takes you from darkness to light and from death to eternal life, which frees you from all bondage and gives you wings and the whole sky. But you have not done anything; you have simply waited, expecting that it is going to happen. You have to prepare the ground, the house, for the guest who is coming.In a negative mind it is impossible. And I am not saying that you have to become positive, I am saying simply drop negativity. There is no need to be positive; that will be repression. Can’t you remain without being negative and without being positive? Just clean, hanging with nothing? Just pure, with no decision, with no conclusion, with no judgment? It is possible, and that is the way to enlightenment.But ordinarily your life has been divided into these two polar opposites: either be negative or be positive. Either be theist or be an atheist – as if there is no third alternative. So neither the atheist finds the truth nor does the theist find it.One is blocked by his belief, another is blocked by his disbelief. One is blocked because he has said a phony yes, and one is blocked because he has said a phony no. Without inquiring, to say no is below human dignity. That’s why I suggested to you a third word: po.Be in the state of po: no “yes,” no “no.” And you will feel a great silence – in the beginning a little fear, because your yes was giving you a certain consolation, your no was giving you a certain consolation.Your yes was saying to you, “God is there and He is taking care of us all.” With the no you were consoled, because there is no God and there is nothing to fear: with death everything ends.But with po, you don’t have any consolation, you have only an opening. You have to inquire what is really the case, on your own.Truth borrowed becomes a lie.You cannot purchase truth by your austerities, by your fasting, by standing on your head and all kinds of stupidities. You have to seek and search with an open mind. And the mind can be open only if there is no “yes” and no “no.” You are simply a tabula rasa, a clean sheet of paper; nothing is written on it.So it is good that you have come to realize your reality. Now work on this reality. You were hoping to get transmuted without any work. You hoped too much, you imagined too much. And now another stupid idea is arising in your mind: “Is the honeymoon over?”It was not a honeymoon. Sitting on the windowsill, looking at the moon – and your honey is lying naked in the bed. It was simply the moon, not the honeymoon.And if you had been with your honey, even without the moon, the honeymoon would have happened. Moon is not a necessity for a honeymoon, honey is necessary! From where has that moon entered into it?When I look at language, I cannot believe it…. Because of these words, so many people get onto wrong tracks. When you hear the word “honeymoon,” the moon seems to be very real. Honey becomes secondary, moon becomes primary – and the moon has nothing to do with it. Even on a dark night you can have a honeymoon; no moon in the sky and you can have a honeymoon. All that you need is your honey!I have heard about a Jew who was going to a hill station. A friend met him in the train. He asked, “Where are you going?”He said, “I am going to enjoy my honeymoon.”His friend said, “But I don’t see your wife.”He said, “She will go next year. Together it is too expensive. She will tend the business while I am away enjoying my honeymoon. And when she goes I will tend the business.”A perfect Jewish solution of not closing the business and still managing the honeymoon – without the honey!Drop that idea completely, that whatever you felt had any reality in it. You imagined it. Reality is hard. Imagination is in your hands; you can make anything out of it. Real work starts from your reality, whatsoever it is.Your negativity is yours; you have not trained yourself for it. Your despair is yours; you have not managed to imagine it. Who is going to imagine despair? Nobody has ever done it. People imagine beautiful things.They think, they dream of marrying some beautiful woman. They don’t imagine that they are going to marry a dragon. The dragon they are married to already. Just to avoid her – at least for a few moments – they imagine some beautiful woman. If they cannot imagine, they can at least look at the pornographic magazines like Playboy. They don’t exist without any reason, people need them. They fulfill a certain purpose: they help you to go on living with the dragon you are married to.I would not like you to start with imagination. Howsoever sad, howsoever terrible the reality is, if you want to get to the real truth you have to start from real despair.So you are now at the point from where the journey can begin. These two-and-a-half years you simply wasted. You should have at least asked me in these two-and-a-half years, “Is this a real honeymoon, or am I imagining it?” But when one is enjoying a honeymoon, one does not ask questions – somebody may create a doubt, somebody may disturb your imagination, your projection. Now it is perfectly good to ask the question.Despair is in the heart of every man.Despair simply means that one has not been able to achieve one’s potential.Despair means that the tree is there, but it is not flowering; there is no fragrance. The wind comes, but the tree cannot contribute to the beauty of the world, it cannot give color and fragrance. It is barren. That is despair.A man who has not attained to his real being is barren: a tree without leaves, without flowers, a tree on which even birds don’t make their nests, a tree where birds don’t sing their songs. And when the sun rises, it is not a beautiful experience for the tree. In fact, in the sunlight the despair becomes deeper. The tree wants to be lost in darkness where she can forget the leaves and the flowers and the fruits, and the birds and their songs, and the whole of life.Unless one becomes enlightened, somehow or other one is going to remain in despair.It is good that you have realized just in the small time of two-and-a-half years. There are people who have not realized in thousands of lives. But your conclusion is wrong. You are still believing that what has happened – the ecstasy and the joy – was real. If it was real it would have stayed.Reality never dies, only dreams know death.Reality is eternal.So it is good, in a way, that you are finished with your imagination. Now, start from scratch.Why should you be negative? Look deep into it. Why are you negative? What is the negativity? What is the cause?Life has given you so much. It has given you life, which cannot be purchased, which is invaluable. It has given you the capacity to love. It has given you the capacity to grow in consciousness. it has made available the whole opportunity to become enlightened one day. And you are full of negativity! Against whom? For what?You should be full of gratefulness.Have you ever thought, do you deserve life? What have you done to deserve it?Do you deserve love? What have you done to deserve it?Do you deserve enlightenment?You deserve nothing. It is all a gift from existence. Out of abundance existence goes on giving to you – and you are negative. Existence goes on giving things to you, but because of your negativity you don’t receive them. You are not available, you are closed.Just try to look at your negativity. Try to understand, see the foolishness of it.Don’t force yourself to be positive, that is not the right way; the negativity will remain repressed. Go deep into your negativity and find that there is no reason to be negative. And the moment you have found there is no reason to be negative, negativity disappears; and what remains is positivity.Positivity is not something to be imposed.Negativity has to be understood. In that understanding is its disappearance, its death. And when that corpse of negativity is no longer there occupying you, a silence, a deep yes – not for any belief, religion, but for the sheer joy existence makes available to you – arises. Not with any effort – you just see it arising in you.That is one of the most beautiful moments in life – when you see the yes arising in you. You cannot remain without dancing, without singing. You have to show your yes in some way. Language is too small. You have to say it with your whole being – that is the dance. You are saying yes with your whole being. Every pore of your being is involved in it. It is not a phony yes said by your mouth, which may not have any meaning at all.Go deep into your despair. What is making you so desperate? There are certain reasons for your despair. One is – the most basic – that you have not been true to your nature. You have listened to all kinds of nonsense from the priests, pedagogues, politicians, saints, and all kinds of people who are really parasites. They suck your blood.It does not matter whether the Catholic pope sucks your blood and you are a Catholic, or the Hindu Shankaracharya sucks your blood and you are a Hindu. The real thing is: Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jew – whoever you are, somebody is sucking your blood. And the way to suck your blood is to deprive you of your nature, to make you perverted, to divert your potentiality into directions where you will never reach the goal. That is despair.You go on and on, and it is just desert and desert; as far as you can see it is desert. All your yesterdays were a desert, your today is a desert, the future seems to be just the same. This is despair. You are not arriving at any oasis. You are thirsty, you are hungry….Who has done this immense criminal act?All the religions have been teaching people to be celibate. And they have been teaching for so many thousands of years that it has become almost an unquestioned truth. In ten thousand years, not a single man has asked, “Is celibacy possible?”It is impossible, for the simple reason that your mind has no control over your biology. Once you have eaten your food, you cannot do anything else. Below your throat it is beyond your reach; now biology has taken possession of it.And it is good that biology has not left essential things for you, because you would become a mess! You have become a mess without such tremendous responsibilities. If you were able to sort out all the proteins and vitamins, and to make blood and to make this and to make that, then perhaps you might be able to be celibate, you might not create sexual energy anymore.But can you see the strangeness? – that for thousands of years idiots have been talking about celibacy, and nobody has even asked how it is possible! Biology will function according to its laws. It will go on creating male sperm, it will go on giving the woman the monthly period.What is the monthly period? Each month the woman releases one egg. And if she does not become pregnant, then the blood that was going to make the child has to be thrown out of the body. Once the woman becomes pregnant, the menstrual period stops, because now that blood is being used in creating the child. But it is not in your hands! Nature has kept all the secret keys in its own hands.Jainism has not allowed women to be liberated directly from the female body. And you will be surprised, the reason is their menstrual period; they cannot control it, they cannot be celibate. Man can find ways to hide his reality and be a hypocrite, but the woman cannot do it. For six, seven days per month she will suffer pain, and blood will come out of her. How can she hide it?It is easy for man to become a homosexual, to make love to the animals, to masturbate. Or if he prevents himself from doing all these things, then too, in his sleep he will have erections, he will release the semen, because he has a small bag and it has to be emptied: new semen is being created continuously. But he can hide these things, that’s why man has pretended that he is celibate.Religions have turned humanity toward perversions. And you can satisfy your natural instincts, but you cannot satisfy perversions. If you are hungry you can eat; the hunger disappears and you are satisfied. But religions say fasting is spiritual. If fasting is spiritual, then why has the stomach been given to man by nature? Why is there hunger? Fasting is not spiritual, it is just unnatural.No religion has said, “Feasting is spiritual.”I say it. A fast is a crime; a feast is something of the beyond, because it is rejoicing, rejoicing in your nature.In India, Jainism is the most fast-oriented religion. The fast has become their central theme. The longer you fast, the bigger saint you become. And I have seen their saints, but I have not seen a single saint who has any intelligence. Fasting will kill intelligence, because your brain needs certain proteins. If they are not provided, the brain cells which are very delicate, die.I have particularly looked into Jaina monks. They are all simply idiots, and they have made themselves idiots – but they are respected immensely. Respect is the trick to make them go against nature. Now how can these people get away from despair? Hungry, they can manage because respectability is there. But respectability is not food. Respectability has no proteins, no vitamins, nothing that nourishes. It only enhances your ego, sharpens your ego.Jainism and the followers of Jainism have been very much against me because I said that fasting is equivalent to meat-eating. They had never heard that. Their religion is ten thousand years old, at least. They could not believe that I am in my senses. What am I saying – fasting, meat-eating?I said, “You can fast and go on weighing yourself every day. Two pounds disappear in twenty-four hours. Where have two pounds of your weight gone? – you have eaten it!”Man’s body, for emergency purposes, has a double system – just for survival. There may be times when you cannot get food, so if you just fast for three days, your inner mechanism moves to the emergency level and you start absorbing your own flesh, your own meat. Within thirty days you will be just a skeleton.Where has all the meat disappeared?Just to live you need energy, just to breathe you need energy. To walk, to talk, to do anything you need energy. Your meat is being converted into energy.Everybody has surplus. A healthy person can fast for three months – at the most, then he will have to die, because only bones remain. You cannot eat your bones, but everything else has disappeared. This is cannibalism. You may not be eating somebody else’s meat, but you are eating your own.This is not vegetarianism; and Jainism is proud of its vegetarianism. But fasting and vegetarianism don’t go together. Vegetarianism needs feasting. So I make feasting something spiritual. Eat well, drink well, dance, sing, enjoy! – and despair will disappear.Don’t do anything which is against your instincts.But all the religions condemned your instincts: they say the instinctive man is like an animal. But what is wrong in being an animal? Rather than being in despair, it is perfectly good to be a healthy animal. An animal simply means alive: anima means life. So there is nothing condemnatory in the word. Certainly, no animals become saints, but no animals suffer from despair either.So just watch where you are going against your nature.Change your course, be in tune with nature.Be truly animals.Man is the highest animal in existence. He has to be really a more authentic animal than anybody else.In your being natural, despair is not found. And the moment despair disappears, negativity disappears, that will be the moment when the honeymoon begins.It can begin – it is never too late.Osho,I have spent the last twenty years of my life impersonating human characters on stage as an actor. According to my experience, theater and literature live on polarization: beauty calls for ugliness, happiness calls for desperation. Will there be only dance in the future?Why in the future? Right now!Life is not theater, life is not literature.Life is something more solid, more real.Theater is just entertainment, and who needs entertainment? – the people who are in despair. For a few hours they can forget their despair and become identified with the theater.Who needs literature? A man who is really living, his life is poetry itself. A man who is really loving, his life is literature itself.You will be surprised to know that the people who have written poetry about love are the people who have never known love. Writing poetry about love is a substitute.But writing about food will not help a hungry person; and only hungry people think of food. When you are well-fed you don’t think of food. When you are thirsty you think of water, but when you are not thirsty it will be simply insane to go on thinking about water. It is impossible.The people who have created great literature lived in tremendous tragedy; for example, Dostoyevski, who is perhaps the best novelist the world has yet produced. But he himself was utterly sad, suicidal, always in misery, always in despair.This man could not live his life, but one has to do something; he projected everything in his literature which he had not been able to live. Listening to his literature, reading his literature you will think, “What a great man!” But if you happen to meet him, you will feel great pity for him.Kahlil Gibran must be recognized as one of the best writers of this age. Just read his books: The Prophet, The Garden Of The Prophet, Jesus The Son Of Man, and you will be thrilled, what kind of a man he is! He talks like the old prophets – the same language, the same sharpness, the same meaningfulness. But he himself lived just in an opposite way.In The Prophet he talks about love, and perhaps he has written the best lines about love, but in his own life there was no love, only anger. About anger he does not write; there is no need, he has enough of it. Love is missing; he writes about love.The people who have known Kahil Gibran were surprised – how did he manage to create such great books like The Prophet? The man was almost insane in many ways.He would throw things around, he would break things when he was angry; that was his daily practice. And after that he would write The Prophet. That was a substitute.Theater and literature are not life.But your question is important. Life itself depends on polar opposites. But it is better not to call them polar opposites, because really they are complementaries. They look like polar opposites: the night and the day, life and death – they look like polar opposites, but it is not true.There are animals who can see only in the night. They have better eyes than you have, and they don’t even need glasses. For them there is no darkness in the night. In fact, their darkness starts with the sunrise, because their eyes are so delicate that they can see only in darkness. As the sun rises they cannot open their eyes; the sun is too much. So for the owl, your day is his night, your night is his day.This can give you the idea of complementariness. Darkness simply means less light. And when you say less light, immediately the opposite polarity disappears. And light simply means less darkness. Light and darkness are one energy.It is just like cold and hot. They are not polar opposites. The same thermometer can show you, this is cold, how much cold; this is hot, how hot. The difference is of degrees, not of opposition. They are one phenomenon, absolutely joined together.For example, for you to exist in Alaska or Siberia is very difficult, because you are a warm-weather animal. But the walrus cannot exist anywhere else. The walrus is a cold-weather animal. Its body is made for the cold.So in Alaska or Siberia he is perfectly happy, in tune with nature. Bring the walrus into a hot area and he will die, just as you will die in the eternal cold of the Himalayas or Siberia or Alaska. You will need tremendous arrangements for yourself to keep warm. But the walrus has no woolen clothes, no electric blankets, not even hair. He does not need them; his body is made so that even if it is ice-cold, he does not feel any difficulty with the atmosphere.Coldness and hotness are just degrees of the same phenomenon.You are asking, “Is there something beyond the polar opposites?” There is only one thing, and that’s what I call enlightenment. Otherwise everything has its polar opposite.Enlightenment has no polar opposite.You may feel the question arising in you, “Then what about unenlightenment?” That is not a reality, it is only an absence of enlightenment. And anybody who can be unenlightened has the capacity to become enlightened. It is good that you can be unenlightened; otherwise, there would be no way to become enlightened.Unenlightenment is simply an absence.Your potential has not grown, has not blossomed, has not released its fragrance – that’s all. You have remained just a closed seed; your possibilities have remained possibilities. You never allowed them to become actualities, realizations.But there is no such thing as unenlightenment – only in language. Otherwise everybody has reached different degrees of enlightenment. Somebody may be just a seed; that is a degree, the lowest degree. Somebody may be a sprout, somebody may have grown into a big tree. Somebody may have come to flower, to fruition.But there is no polar opposite anywhere. From the seed to the flower, it is a single phenomenon unfolding itself. So degrees of unfoldment – but remember, the difference is only of degrees. That’s why I insist, when someday you become enlightened, don’t think yourself holier than others. They are just a few feet back.There is a beautiful story of Gautam Buddha. In his past life, when he was not enlightened, he went to see an awakened human being. He touched his feet, and as he was standing up, the awakened one touched his feet. Buddha could not believe it. He said, “What are you doing? You are enlightened, I am unenlightened.”The man said, “That’s true. One time I was also unenlightened – now I am enlightened. Today you are unenlightened – tomorrow you may become enlightened. The difference is only of timing. And I am paying my respects to you because this is my last life: when you become enlightened, I will not be there to pay my respects.“But you are certain to become enlightened – today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, it does not matter. Time is irrelevant.”If you want to transcend the polar opposites of life, first you have to understand that they are not polar opposites but complementaries.Second, you have to understand there is certainly something which is beyond duality. But to go beyond duality you have to become a witness of all that passes, moves, in your being: despair, ecstasy, a feeling of well-being or sickness, feeling love or hate.Simply be a witness, don’t get identified with anything that passes in your mind. Remember, everything passes, only the witness remains. So why unnecessarily get identified and in trouble?Today you were sad, but you could not keep yourself separate. You could have said, “It is perfectly good. Let sadness pass. It is a cloud; soon the cloud will pass and there will be sunlight.” But don’t get identified with the sunlight either, because there are clouds coming again.Life is constantly changing.Only one thing is unchanging: that is your witnessing capacity.You can see the anger flash by, you can see the compassion flash by; but the mirror before which they flash remains always unaffected – and that is your transcendence.And that’s what I call meditativeness.Meditate on every state of mind so you can achieve the witness. Meditation is the way of detaching your witness from moods which go on passing.There is a Sufi story…. A king told his court that he wants the whole of wisdom condensed into one sentence, and the sentence has to be as small as possible so that he can engrave it inside his diamond ring. And he will look at it only in a situation when there is no way out.It was a difficult task. But one of his ministers said – “I will prepare it. Give me the ring. But don’t look at it until every other possibility is finished and you are facing death – in the ultimate emergency, because only then will you understand it.” The king was curious, but he had to give his word that he would not look at it.Soon the day came when the country was invaded, the king was defeated; he escaped into the mountains to hide. He reached a point where there was the end of the mountain, and an abysmal depth facing him. There was no way to go further, and back he could not go. He could hear the enemy, the horses, approaching.He waited for a few minutes. When he heard the steps of the horses so close that it was only a question of a few seconds till he would be caught, he took off the diamond ring, looked – and laughed in that silent place. The whole valley was full of his laughter, because what was written was a very simple sentence. In his ring it was engraved: “This too will pass.”The whole wisdom he had asked for – and this is the essence of the whole of wisdom: This too will pass.And as it happened, the horses must have turned some other way, and he heard their steps going farther and farther away.He gathered his army again, won back his country, and there was great celebration all over the capital because they had become again independent. He was garlanded, his chariot was full of flowers, and people were throwing flowers in joy, and dancing and singing. At that moment he again took off his diamond ring and read the sentence: This too will pass. And this moment became his enlightenment.Sadness comes, joy comes, and everything passes by.What remains always is the witness.The witness is beyond all polarities.It is the transcendental element in existence.Osho,No matter what I am doing, after a while I become bored. How can I maintain excitement about my worship?Anybody who wants to maintain excitement is bound to get bored. Just remember: This too will pass!

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From Death to Deathlessness 01-40Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Death to Deathlessness 40 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Every time I am on my own, I feel separate, lonely, and miserable. I love myself only when I am with others. If I am alone, I feel ashamed and dislike myself. It seems as if I judge myself through the eyes of others.Can you say something?It is one of the basic problems. Every human being has to face it.It is not only you. The way children are brought up is the cause of this whole misery. No child is accepted as he is. He is rewarded if he follows the directions of the parents, the teachers, the elders. Those directions may go against his nature, because those directives were not made by him or for him. Somebody five thousand years before made those principles, and they are still being used in raising the children.Naturally, every child is displaced. He is not in his own self. He is not himself; he is somebody else. That somebody else is given to you by the society, by others.So when you are lonely, and there is nobody to dictate to you, you simply relax in your nature. There is no need to perform anything, because there is nobody who is seeing. And that relaxing into your own nature makes you feel guilty. You are going against your parents, against the priest, against the society; and they have told you that you, in yourself, are not right. And you have accepted it. It has become a conditioned thing in you.Whatever you do on your own is always condemned, and whatever you do following others is always praised.In your aloneness there is nobody else there. Naturally, you need not act; you need not be a hypocrite. You simply relax into what you are; but your mind is full of the garbage given by others.So when you are with others, the others are dictating to you; and when you are alone, the mind that has been created by the others, is making you feel ugly, guilty, unworthy.That’s why people don’t want to be alone. They want always to be with someone else, because with someone else they cannot relax into their nature. The presence of the other keeps them tense. The other is there, judging every moment, every action and gesture that you are going to make.So you simply perform a certain act that you have been told is right. And then your mind feels good: it is according to the conditioning. Your mind feels happy that you did well; you are great.People need crowds. This is the psychological reason why they always want to belong to Hinduism, to Christianity, to Mohammedanism, to this country, to that country, to this race, to that race. And even if that does not suffice, they create rotary clubs, lion clubs.They cannot be alone. They have to be surrounded by people continuously. Only then, they can keep the tension alive, the act alive. In the crowd, they cannot be themselves.Alone, why do you feel afraid? To be alone is one of the most beautiful experiences. You are no more bothered by others; you are no more forcing yourself to do something which is expected.Alone, you can do what you want to do. You can feel what you want to feel. All that you need is to become detached from your mind.Your mind is not your mind. Your mind is only an agent of the crowd you belong to. It is not in your service; it is in the service of the crowd. The crowd has put a detective in your mind who goes on forcing you, even if you are alone, to perform according to the rules.The whole secret is to witness the mind; allow your nature and say clearly to the mind, “You are not mine. I came into the world without you. You have been given to me later on by education, by example. You are something alien; you are not part of my nature. So at least when I am alone, leave me alone.”You have to learn to say, “Shut up!” to the mind, and allow your nature full freedom.You will be immensely surprised what beauties you have, what innocence, what perceptiveness. And once you have learned that the mind can be put aside, and you can be really alone – because with the mind you are not really alone; all those voices of your parents and teachers and priests and the politicians are recorded in the mind; the mind simply goes on repeating them.It is a very great strategy played by society against the individual.One psychologist, Delgado, has been working his whole life on a project – and he has succeeded in the project – which will give you some insight into yourself.In your brain there are seven hundred centers. All that you do is done through one of the seven hundred centers He has figured out – working for his whole life – which center controls what kind of activity in you; with anger, hate, murder for example – which center is active when somebody gets angry. And he has made very small electrodes. Of course, he is not allowed yet to experiment on human beings, but he has a great gift. The whole humanity can be changed by it, and he has worked on animals.For example, in Spain he showed this. He put the electrode in the brain of a bull, and was standing his ground as the bull was rushing toward him to kill him. Just one foot away from him, the bull suddenly stopped, frozen. What has happened? The people could not believe it. They have never seen such a scene.They were not aware that it was an experiment. He had a remote controller. He could stop any activity of the bull just by pressing a button in his hand. He allowed the bull to run so close – up to one foot; it could have killed him. But as the button was pressed, the activity completely stopped.Delgado’s experiment is of immense importance. If it gets into the hands of the politicians, it is going to be very dangerous to humanity, because as the child is born…For example, in Russia, no child can be born in your own house; every child has to be born in the hospital. Now that is the right moment to put any kind of electrode into the child’s brain – for example, any electrode that stops him from revolutionary activity against the government, any electrode that prevents him feeling miserable, full of suffering, tortured. And the central board of the communist party would have all the remote controls.They can have a system that if somebody is thinking in terms of anti-communism, on a board a light will show suddenly. And then they just have to push a button, and all his revolution, anti-communism will disappear.What Delgado has done and proved, has been done to you by society in a more primitive way. But it has been successful up to now. They don’t put an electrode in your mind – they had no idea of it – but what they do functions in the same way.They go on telling you what is right. And continuous repetition of what is right and what is wrong goes on making a spot in your mind without putting in an electrode. And by and by, you start thinking that it is your mind which is deciding what is right and what is wrong.It is not so. The society has conditioned you.And that you can see in different societies, because different societies have different conditionings. For example, the American flag has meaning for the American, because from his very childhood he has been told, “Even to sacrifice your life for the flag is something great.”And what is the flag? Just a piece of cloth. It has no intrinsic value. For an Indian, it means nothing; for an American, it means everything. The Indian flag means everything to the Indian; to the American it means nothing.So it is not your mind that is deciding. It is the mind of the society that has imposed upon you certain ideas.For example, in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram in India, to drink tea was a sin. Nobody was committing it, but once in a while, just because it was a sin, there was a great attraction to commit it too. But if somebody was caught drinking tea, red-handed, he was condemned by the whole ashram.And Mahatma Gandhi’s way of condemnation was very cruel. He will not say anything to the person. He will start a fast. He will say, “Something must be still wrong in my spirituality. That’s why my disciples go on doing such things. So I am purifying myself.”Now that man becomes doubly guilty. First, he drank tea, and now the old man is fasting – unto death! Now he is more condemned, not only by the ashram but by the whole country. Letters start coming, telegrams start coming. And he falls at Mahatma Gandhi’s feet to be forgiven, he will never do such a thing again, but, “Please come out of your fast.”Gandhi is not being cruel to him just on the surface. You would have said that he was cruel if he had slapped him. But I say that was nothing. But going on a fast to purify himself so that his disciples don’t commit sin…Now what sin is there in poor tea? And if there is any sin in tea, then all the Buddhists are committing sin every day, many times, because in Buddhism tea has been used for keeping yourself alert.In meditation one tends to fall asleep. It is good before you meditate to take a good hot cup of tea. That will help you not to fall asleep.So round the world for all the Buddhists, tea is a virtue, because it helps meditation. And anything that helps meditation cannot be sin.Once it happened, a Christian Quaker leader was my guest. I had no idea about the small things that Quakers do or are against doing. So in the morning I asked him, “Would you like tea, coffee, or just milk?”He looked in a way I could not believe; he was so shocked. He said, “Milk? Do you drink milk?”I said, “Is there something wrong?”He said, “There is. The Quakers don’t drink milk and don’t eat any milk product, because milk comes from animals’ bodies. It is just like blood. And moreover, the animal’s body has not created the milk for you to drink; it is for their own kids.“So you are committing crime on two accounts. One, you are depriving the kids of their birthright; second, you are drinking something which comes from an animal’s body. It does not matter whether it is blood or meat or milk, it is a non-vegetarian thing. No Quaker will be ready even to touch milk.”And in India, the Hindus think that milk is the only holy thing. If a man lives only on milk…I knew a saint who lived his whole life just on milk. That was his only contribution to the world; otherwise, he was just an idiot. But he was respected by millions of people, for the simple reason that he lived only on milk.Hindus cannot conceive that milk is sin; otherwise, what would have happened to that saint? He would have been the greatest sinner in the whole world. This whole life he has not eaten anything. He has not drunk anything – not even water, because milk has enough water, eighty to ninety percent water. The whole day he was taking milk.The point is that in whatever crowd you happen to be, the crowd gives its mind to you. And slowly, slowly you completely forget that this is not your real self.My sannyasins have to make a clear-cut distinction. The mind is part of society, not part of you. What is part of you is your awareness, your consciousness, your witnessing. Then you can be alone and immensely happy. In fact, you can be happy only when you are alone.One who knows how to be ecstatic being alone can be alone in the crowd. Who is going to find out that inside you are completely centered in your witnessing, and you are not at all bothered by the mind?It takes just a little time but as you go on disidentifying with the mind, the mind loses control over you, and finally it starts disappearing.That is the beginning of freedom, the birth of a new man, the birth of an authentic man. Now you will act out of your awareness not out of your mind. You will act moment-to-moment, seeing the situation clearly. There is no problem to worry about what is wrong and what is right.Your clarity will decide what is right, your clarity will take you toward the right. It may not coincide with the right of your society. That’s why society is afraid and wants to put a mind in you.The old method is a long process. Delgado’s method is simple, can be done within seconds, but it is more dangerous too. You can disidentify yourself with the mind that the society has given, but the electrode is a different matter.Even if you disidentify, the electrode will control your body. You may not like to do something, but the electrode will force you to do it. You are absolutely incapable.In a way, the discovery can be a blessing, because we can stop all that is ugly in man, all that is inhuman in man with such a simple methodology – just a small operation in your skull, and placing a small electrode.If you are too much of a man of anger, you can just go to the scientist and tell him that this is your basic trouble: small things make you angry. He can put an electrode at the exact point from where anger arises. And he can give you a remote controller to keep in your pocket. Whenever you don’t want to be angry, just push the button and anger will simply disappear.It is good in a way, but spiritually it is not something that I will support. For society it is good, but if you can manage just by a remote control all your emotions, feelings, actions, you will never think of being aware. You will never think of becoming meditative.And strangely enough, in those seven hundred points in your mind, there is not a single point which can create meditation in you. So it is something beyond the mind, above the mind.If a man is clear about the whole situation, he can use electrodes, but he should not forget meditation, because he is not only the body and the brain; he is also a luminous being. And that experience is possible only through meditation.So my suggestion to the questioner is: when you are alone, tell the mind, “Shut up! You are not part of me. Leave me alone!”There is a Sufi story.A young seeker came to a great Sufi master. As he entered his room and saluted the master with great respect, the master said, “Good. That’s perfectly good. What do you want?”He said, “I want to be initiated.”The master said, “I can initiate you, but what about the crowd that is following you?”He looked back; there was nobody. He said, “What crowd? I am alone.”The master said, “You are not. Just close your eyes and see the crowd.”The young man closed his eyes and he was surprised. There was the whole crowd that he had left behind: his mother weeping, his father telling him not to go, his wife in tears, his friends preventing him – every face, the whole crowd.And the master said, “Now open your eyes. Can you say that people are not following you?”He said, “I am sorry. You are right. The whole crowd I am carrying within myself.”So the master said, “Your first work is to get rid of the crowd. This is your problem. And once you are finished with the crowd, things are very simple. The day you are finished with the crowd I will initiate you, because I can only initiate you; I cannot initiate this crowd.”The story is meaningful. Even when you are alone you are not alone. And a man of meditation, even though in the crowd of thousands of people, is alone.When you are alone, nobody can see the crowd, because it is within you. And when a meditative man is in the crowd and yet alone, nobody can see his aloneness, because that too is within him.To know your aloneness is to be acquainted with existence, nature, your reality. And it gives such blissfulness that there is no comparison with any joy that you have felt in the past.You are saying that, when you are with people you are perfectly happy.It is not happiness, it is an hallucination of happiness, because your mind is in tune with the people. Alone they are also in the same trouble as you are. So together there is a certain harmony in the mind, and that harmony gives you the sense of happiness. But the sense is very superficial; it has no roots.Unless you can be blissful in your total aloneness, remember, anything that you think is happiness is only a deception.And once the thing is clear, it is not difficult to do it. Find time – even for a few minutes, once in a while – just to be alone.In the beginning you will be miserable, because nobody is there to say how beautiful you are. Nobody is there to say, “What a great artist you are!” There is nobody, just silence around you. But a little patience, and a little alertness not to get identified with the mind, will bring the great revolution which will make you really a sannyasin.Osho,What is the difference between music and the gymnastics of music? In the last couple of years my experience has been of frantic non-harmonious music. Instead of feeling silent and meditative, I am getting tendonitis in my arms from drumming.Can you comment?The difference is simple, just the difference between madness and sanity. Your music is not music; it is simply your madness.But to express it directly you will be in trouble. So to express it through music, the trouble is avoided and you will find fools to say, “What a great musician you are!”So on both accounts, your madness is released That helps you. And the appreciation of other mad people, gives you an egoistic satisfaction. But the reality is you are deceiving yourself.Real music is born out of a silent mind.Real music is meditation manifested.Your music is madness manifested.You must have a certain talent for music, but it is being used by madness. You can change; it can be used by your meditation.In the East, the music has a totally different quality. It can even cure people from diseases. It can cure even a madman. It is so silent, so subtle, so delicate. In the East, nobody will recognize your jazz and other kinds of music, as music.A musician works hard, because he has to bring something which is beyond words, but is not beyond music, which cannot be said but it can be played on a sitar. And it is tremendously relaxing, not only for the person who is playing – he completely forgets his ego; only then his music reaches to its ultimate height – but for those who hear it, they also forget their ego. They become simply a listening. There is no listener.I am reminded of a story that actually happened.In Lucknow, there was a crazy king, Wajid Ali Shah. He was crazy in many ways: the whole day he slept, and the whole night he enjoyed food, dance, music. He was a night man.He had gathered all the greatest musicians into his court, all the great dancers. His court was really rich, but he was always feeling a little sad that one musician who was perhaps the greatest in the country, had not come to his court. Again and again messengers were sent, but the musician said that it would create unnecessary trouble.Finally, Wajid Ali Shah said, “Whatever trouble it creates, I will take care of it, but you have to come.”The musician came. He said, “The trouble is the condition I make. When I play on my sitar, nobody in the audience must move his head with my music. That is a great disturbance and I don’t want it. So you will have to promise me that anybody who moves his head and sways with my music, should have his head cut off immediately.”Wazid Ali Shah was a crazy man. He said, “There is no difficulty.”In Lucknow it was announced that you have to come knowing perfectly well that the king has accepted this condition. So only those should come who are capable of sitting silently, frozen. If your head is found moving or you sway – Wazid Ali Shah has put one thousand soldiers with naked swords around the audience – immediately your head will be gone.Thousands of people wanted to come, because the man was so well-known all over the country, and his music was something like a miracle. But only a few came, because the condition was such that even though you were not swaying because of his music, just a fly sitting on your head and you…And that was enough. That Wajid Ali Shah is such an idiot, the head is gone. It is too dangerous.But still, a few hundred people came.Lucknow was, in those days, a capital of artists, musicians, poets, painters. Even Wajid Ali Shah was surprised. He was thinking that perhaps nobody would turn up.The musician started playing. Everybody was holding himself tight, so that not even accidentally would be allow the head to move. They were sitting like statues. And then a moment came, a few people started swaying.Wajid Ali Shah was immediately going to order those people’s heads to be cut . The musician said, “Wait, until after the music is finished; but keep note who the people are.”After the music was finished, Wajid Ali Shah had gathered almost one hundred people. And he asked the musician, “Now, what do you say?”He said, “Now these are the people who can understand me. I will play for them now. The others have no guts. These people – even though they tried hard to remain unmoving – when the real moment came, when the music reached its height, they forgot themselves, they forgot the condition, they forgot their life, they forgot everything. And the way they swayed was in tune with my music. These are the people.“Just to sort them out I have made the condition. So now let the others go, and for these hundred people I will play my best. There is still half the night. And there is no condition.“I can feel a kind of at-one-ment with these people. I can feel a certain synchronicity with these people. They know what the heights of music are, where ego disappears, mind stops, there is no thinking.” Music in the East has been used as a meditation. “And these people are capable of reaching to meditation through music.” And he played for them.In the morning, Wajid Ali could not believe what was happening. It was as if people had completely forgotten who they were – just trees in the wind, swaying, dancing. Their faces had a luminosity. The place was full of a new kind of liveliness that Wajid Ali had never experienced. There was dance, there was joy, and there was something which can only be called spiritual.You say, “You play drums madly.” That is not music. That is simply throwing up your madness. And of course the world is full of mad people. They will get identified with you; they will enjoy it.Who were the people who were enjoying the Beatles and other music groups that emerged among the younger generation? Who were the people?The Beatles were mad and their fans – thousands of young people – were mostly hippie. Nobody knew anything about music, but they became great heroes. To become a hero in a mad world, you need to be a great madman.If you listen to Eastern music, perhaps it will simply go above your head. First, the Eastern musician just prepares for half an hour or more. He is not yet going into depth; he is just preparing his instrument and himself. And you will be tired by that alone. He is just getting ready to take the quantum leap. Infinite patience is needed.I have heard about Mulla Nasruddin. He went to listen to a great musician, who was just beginning.In the beginning in Indian music, you do aalap. Aalap means he tries to refine all the basic sounds. So he goes on, “Ah-h-h, ah-h-h.” That is, he is refining the sound “ah.” Hence, it is called aalap. He will refine all the sounds; it takes time. And when he is satisfied that now he is ready, then the music begins. But it takes thirty or forty minutes for him.And as he started his aalap, “Ah-h-h, ah-h-h, ah-h,” Mulla Nasruddin started crying. Tears were in his eyes.His friend who had brought him said, “Nasruddin, I never thought that you were such a lover of music. It is just aalap and you are full of tears.”He said, “You don’t understand. This man is going to die. It is not aalap; this is what happened to my goat! ‘Ah-h-h, ah-h-h, ah-h-h.’ And she died in the middle of the night! You do something to prevent this man.”“If music brings death, it is better to prevent him. This is not music. I know perfectly well. It has happened in my own house. I have lost one of my best goats.” But when the musician comes and takes the jump into the world of sound and soundlessness…Music consists of both sound and soundlessness; the better the music, the more it will be full of soundlessness; the better the music, the more the sound simply leads you into silence. That is the criterion of authentic music, that it leads you into silence.Your music…Stop it, and start Dynamic Meditation. That is your music. Why unnecessarily beat the drum? The poor drum has done no harm, no harm to anybody.And do the Dynamic Meditation as madly as you can. In fact, the more madly you do it the better, because you will be throwing out all rubbish and you will come out of it clean, just as if you have come from a shower.And you feel that now there is nothing to throw out and your Dynamic Meditation has become silent – even if you want, nothing comes out – then take the drum again. That will be an existential experience. Then you can play the drum, and it will not be madness; it will be music.But first, be ready for music.Music does not come from the drum; music comes from you. The drum only reflects it. Music is just a mirror. If you are mad, the madman is reflected. If you are enlightened, then the enlightened man is reflected.It is good that you have an interest in music, but first please be sane. And don’t feel guilty that you are not sane. This whole world that we have created is insane, and they all are throwing their insanity in worse ways than you are doing.You are at least beating the drum, which is dead anyway. They are beating living people. They are raping living women. They are murdering, they are doing all kinds of crimes around the world. And in spite of all the police, all the courts, all the magistrates, all the laws, the crime goes on growing. It has become almost a way of life for millions of people.So don’t feel bad. In fact, beating a drum is far better than killing a man. But when music can come out of the drum…Just a little preparation is needed. And this is the place of meditation. Meditate a little more, and wait for the right moment when you feel that there is music inside you and you would like to share it with your friends.Osho,For four years I have been totally nourished by positivity in your commune, by your love and the love of your sannyasins and, surprisingly, by my own self. There is no language that exists for the gratitude. Now I am about to leave for ten days – the longest I've been away – to visit my family in New York, the city of the dead. I feel like a time traveler from the twenty-first century. My fear has to do with the bombardment of negativity, the air is absolutely filled with it there, and I am afraid of being sucked into it.Do you have something to say?No need to be afraid.The city of the dead, however big it is, is incapable even of making a dent in a living person. Let it be full of negativity. It does not matter.Your fear is as if a candle is afraid to go into a house which is full of darkness. The darkness is so much and so thick and so old, and the candle is so fragile and so new. Naturally, the fear will be there.But the fear is baseless. A fragile candle with a small flame is enough to destroy all the darkness in the house. The darkness has no power.It will be a good experience for you. You have been here. You have rejoiced here, danced here, loved here. You have been in the city of the living. Now it will be a good experience just to visit the graveyard in New York. These are big graveyards, but they cannot in any way harm you.Perhaps you may be able to help a few dead to breathe again, a few dead to stand up in their graves to greet you. Don’t be afraid of that. Even if the dead shake hands with you, don’t be afraid. Life is always ready to share itself with anybody.In these big cities of dead people, there are still people who are half-alive, sometimes three-fourths alive. And there is a possibility to touch their aliveness.So go with joy. A great adventure!They should be afraid of you; you need not be afraid of anybody. Life is always fearless.And if somebody is completely dead, it does not create a problem for you. Only the people who are not completely dead and who have been resisting, somehow to remain alive, may see a light in you. My sannyasins can turn on anybody – into life, into love, into dance, into celebration.You will come back after ten days immensely enriched. Whatever happens there will enrich you and, when you come back, you will be surprised that you have been living in this small paradise, but you had started taking it for granted.That gap of ten days will give you more perceptivity to see the commune, to see this oasis. Otherwise, you love, you laugh, you dance, but slowly, slowly you become accustomed to it. You think this is what life is. Once in a while, to go out into the world and to see that life is not the same…Outside it is simply crime, ugliness.In these four years, we have lived as one single organic unity.Anybody who comes from the outside is immediately impressed by one thing: the cleanliness of the commune, the healthiness of the people, the continuous laughter, joy – and that too after twelve hours of hard work, which is enough to kill anybody!And these sannyasins, after twelve hours of hard work, still have energy to dance in the disco, still have energy to hug each other, to share their love.Outside they cannot believe it, because they do not know the secret that that hard work for twelve hours is being done with great love. Nobody is doing it for anybody else; he is doing it for himself.It is his commune.It is his world.And when you work totally, intensely, it is not tiring; it is nourishing; it makes you stronger.What makes people weak is not the work, it is the boredom that sucks their blood. But if you are working with joy and song and dance, and if your work has become worship, it is not going to tire you. It is going to make you stronger. It is going to give you more energy to share and more love to share.So these ten days will be good. You will find a few people there half-dead, three-fourths dead, ninety percent dead. And they will be immensely happy.And those who are a hundred percent dead, there is no question of being bothered about them. They are gone forever; they cannot do any harm to you.And when you come back, you will come more enriched; and you will have a better perspective of your own commune – a bird’s eye view.Living in the commune for many years, you start taking it for granted. And perhaps you start thinking the whole earth is living in this way.We would like the whole earth to live in this way.So our sannyasins, once in a while, have to go into the world, just to shock them, that there are people who are more alive, more juicy, and living a life on a totally different basis.They don’t have God, they don’t have any dogma, they don’t have any heaven and hell. And because they are free of all this nonsense, their whole energy is concentrated on creating the paradise herenow. Okay.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why is humanity today becoming more and more miserable?The cause is very simple, perhaps too simple. It is very close, very obvious, and this is the reason why most people go on not seeing it. When something is very obvious you start taking it for granted. When something is too close to your eyes you cannot see it. For seeing, some distance is needed.So the first thing I would like you to remember is that it is not only today that humanity is miserable. It has always been miserable. Misery has almost become our second nature. We have lived in it for thousands of years. That closeness does not allow us to see it; otherwise it is so obvious.But to see the obvious you need a child’s vision, and we are all carrying thousands of years in our eyes. Our eyes are old; they cannot see afresh. They have already accepted things, and forgotten that those things are the very cause of misery.The religious prophets, the political leaders, the moral lawgivers – you have respected them, not even suspecting that they are the cause of your misery. How can you suspect them? Those people have served humanity, sacrificed themselves for humanity. You worship them; you cannot relate them to your misery.The causes of misery are camouflaged behind beautiful words, holy scriptures, spiritual sermons.It happened when I was a student, the first prime minister of India came to visit the city. In Jabalpur, all the dirt of the city flows just in the middle of the city. The city is very big – ten times bigger than Portland – and just in the middle of the city, all the dirt flows like a river. There is a bridge over it, and to pass that bridge is to know something about hell. I have never seen any place so stinking.The day Jawaharlal, the prime minister, came to visit the city the bridge was one of the greatest problems. He had to cross it – that was the only way to get to the other part of the city. So they covered the bridge with mogra flowers. It was summertime, and the mogra is so fragrant a flower. The whole bridge on both sides had garlands of mogra hanging. You could pass across the bridge and you would not be at all aware that just behind those mogras, the wall of flowers, was the dirtiest place possible.I was just going to the university. Seeing people decorating the Naudra Bridge – that was the name of the bridge; it was called Naudra because it had nine pillars, nine doors through which the dirt used to flow – seeing the people putting those flowers up, I stopped there. I started working with those people who were decorating, and nobody made any objection; they thought I must be part of the crew. Many people were working, and it had to be done quickly – soon Jawaharlal was going to pass. So I got mixed in with the workers, the volunteers.When Jawaharlal’s procession came and he was standing in an open jeep, I stood in front of the jeep and stopped it. It would not have been possible in any other place because everywhere there were military police, guards, security. On Naudra Bridge the volunteers were on both sides; there was no crowd from the city because nobody wanted to stand there. The crowd was not aware of what had happened: that these mogra flowers had completely covered the smell. The place smelled of paradise! The people were not aware of it because nobody was near there.I told Jawaharlal, “Please get down from the jeep. You have to look behind these flowers – that is the reality of this city. You are being fooled; these flowers are not decorations for your welcome, they are put here to deceive you.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “Get down, and just come close to the flowers and look beyond them.” He was a very sensitive and intelligent man. Others tried to prevent him: the local leaders.I said, “Don’t listen to these fools. They are the people who have arranged these flowers here. Have you seen in the city, anywhere else, thousands of flowers arranged for your welcome? And here you don’t see any crowd. The arithmetic is simple. Just come down.”He got down and went with me to look beyond the flowers; he could not believe it. He told the people, the local leaders, the mayor, the members of the corporation and the president of the congress, “If this young man had not been so stubborn, I would have missed seeing the reality of your city. Is this what you have been doing here?”He said to me, “If you come to New Delhi sometime, come and visit me.”I said, “Not sometime – I will come just to visit you. But you will have to tell the idiots surrounding you that I am allowed in.”He said to his secretary, “You have to take care that nobody prevents him.” That’s how his secretary became one of my disciples. And whenever I needed, he was immediately ready to arrange it; the doors of Jawaharlal’s house were open to me.I have remembered this incident because that’s what has happened with the whole of humanity. You see the misery, but you don’t see the cause. The cause is covered with flowers. You see the flowers, and because flowers cannot cause the misery you turn back.The second thing to remember is that it is not only now that humanity is miserable; it has always been so.Yes, one thing new has happened – it is a little difference, but a difference that really makes a difference – and that is: a certain percentage of humanity has now become more aware than it has ever been before.Misery has always been there; but to be aware of the misery is a new factor. And that is the beginning of transformation. If you become aware of something, then there is a possibility that something can be done to change it.People have lived in misery, accepting it as part of life, as their destiny. Nobody has questioned it. Nobody has asked why. And before anybody could ask why, the religious prophets, messiahs and priests were ready with the answer. Christianity is ready with the answer: “It is because Adam and Eve committed the original sin; hence you are suffering.”Now, can you see any connection?According to Christianity the world was created 4004 years before Jesus’ birth – which is not at all accurate, which is absolutely stupid. The world is millions of years old – and by “world,” I mean only our world, this earth; I don’t mean the sun, the solar system, because that is far more ancient. And I don’t mean the world of the stars, because they are not as small as they look. They are bigger than your sun – they are all suns and they all have their own solar systems. They are far more ancient than our solar system.In fact, when you come to calculate existence, years cannot be used as a measurement, they are too small. A million years does not mean anything; when you start thinking about how vast the solar system is, you have to use a new measurement that is not used ordinarily because we never come across such a big thing. And that new measurement was invented by physics: the light year.You have to understand what a light year means, because our galaxy is millions of light years old. Light travels at a tremendous speed, the greatest speed there is. Anything traveling at that speed will turn into light. The heat of that speed is such that anything at that speed will become light, so there can be no speed greater than the speed of light. We cannot invent any rocket that moves faster than light, because then it will turn into light itself, as soon as it reaches the speed of light.The speed of light is 186,000 per second – 186,000 miles. In one minute, light travels sixty times further; in one hour, again sixty times more; in one day, again twenty-four times more; in one month, again thirty times more; in one year, again twelve times more – that is the meaning of one light year.Even if the Christians are right, Adam must still have committed the original sin at least five thousand years ago. Somebody committing a sin five thousand years ago – how many generations have passed since then? And you are still miserable because of his sin? That seems to be absolutely unjust. If he did commit the sin, God made him suffer. Why should you be suffering? You were never a part of it. If anybody has to suffer, it should be God himself, because in the first place what was the need of creating those two trees? If man was not allowed to eat from them, it was so simple: God should not have created those two trees. He was committing the original sin – if anybody was.Then, even if he had created them, what was the need to tell Adam not to eat from those two trees? I don’t think that Adam, on his own, even by now would have found those two trees. Among the millions of trees, it would have been just a coincidence if Adam had found them. But God showed him the trees, saying, “These are the two trees, and you are not to eat from them.”And this God is Jewish. Sigmund Freud understands it better – he is also Jewish, born out of the original sin – he understands far better than this Jewish God. To tell somebody not to do something is to provoke them, is to give them a challenge, is to make the person fascinated. It is not the snake who really persuades Adam and Eve. It is God’s “don’t” that hits hard, and they become curious as to why.And the trees are not poisonous. One is the tree of wisdom. There seems to be no logic in why the tree of wisdom should be prohibited to man. And the other tree is of eternal life. Both trees are the best in the whole Garden of Eden! God should have told him, “Don’t miss these two trees! Anything else you can miss, but these two trees you should not miss.” On the contrary, he says to Adam and Eve, “Don’t do this.” That “don’t” is the real cause of their disobeying; the serpent is just an excuse.But even if they did commit the sin, whether through God or through the serpent, it is absolutely certain that you are not part of it – in no way. You were not there to support them. The Christians have been befooling the whole world, the Jews have been befooling the whole world, saying that it is because of the original sin that man is suffering, he is in misery. He has to turn back, he has to undo what Adam and Eve did. They disobeyed; you have to obey God. Just as they disobeyed and were thrown out of heaven, if you obey totally, without any doubt, without any questioning, you will be allowed back into the world of bliss, paradise.Misery exists because of the original sin, according to the Judaic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism. These three religions have come from the same source; they all believe in the same original sin, and that we are suffering because we are the progeny of those people who committed it.Even human justice cannot punish a criminal’s son because he is a criminal’s son. His father may have murdered somebody, a major crime, but then you cannot punish the son too. The son has nothing to do with it. And Adam and Eve did not commit any major crime – they just had a little curiosity. I think anybody who had any sense would have done the same. It was absolutely certain to happen, because there is a deep need in man to know. It is intrinsic, it is not sin. It is in the very nature of man to know, and God is prohibiting him. He is saying, “Remain ignorant.”There is, in the same way, an intrinsic, intense desire for eternal life. Nobody wants to die. Even the person who commits suicide is not against life. Perhaps he is hoping the next life will be better. He is so tired of all this suffering and anguish that he thinks, “In this life there is no chance, so why not take a chance? This life is not giving you anything and is not going to give you anything – take the chance. If you survive and enter into another life, perhaps…” That perhaps, that lingering desire, is still in the man who is committing suicide. He may be committing suicide against something, but he is not committing suicide against life itself.These two are the most basic and deep-rooted desires in man, and yet he is prohibited from fulfilling his own nature and his nature is condemned as criminal, as a nature which is rooted in sin. If he fulfills it he feels guilty; if he does not fulfill it he will remain miserable. These people have created the background of your misery.Let me summarize it: if you are natural you will feel guilty. Then that will be your misery, your anxiety, your anguish: what punishment is going to be there for you? You are disobeying God, because all your scriptures and their commandments are against your nature. So if you fulfill your nature there is misery. If you don’t fulfill your nature, there is also bound to be misery because then you will be empty, unfulfilled, discontented; you will feel futile, utterly meaningless.So there are two types of miserable people in the world: one who follows the religious prophets and one who does not follow them. And it is very difficult to find a third category: a man like me, who does not care one bit. I neither follow them nor am I against them. I do not even hate them – there is no question of loving them. To me they are absolutely absurd and meaningless, irrelevant to our existence.Take either side and you will be in trouble. Don’t take sides, either for or against; just tell those guys, “Go to hell! And take all your scriptures with you.” Only then can you be free of misery.In the East they have a different explanation – explanations can be different, but the purpose is the same. In the East, the three religions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, all teach that your misery is because of bad actions in past lives. And you have lived millions of past lives, in different shapes, different bodies, animals, birds… In that way Hindus have a vast perspective. 840,000,000 species of life exist. At least their perspective is vast, not small like the Christian: only 6,000 years.Their perspective is certainly great: 840,000,000 species, and you have passed through them all; then you have become man. In all those long years – you will have to use the term “light years” with Hindus and Jainas and Buddhists – you have committed so many things, good and bad, and everything is recorded about you. If you are suffering, that simply means your bad actions are heavy on you. You have to suffer, that is the only way to get rid of them. You have to pay for your actions. Who else is going to pay? You murdered somebody in your last life, now who is going to pay?Their explanation seems more mathematical, more logical, than Adam committing sin and you suffering six thousand years later. So many generations have passed, and still the sin is fresh. So many generations have suffered and been punished for it, and you are still being punished for it. Can you punish so many people for one man’s sin? And this is going to go on forever and forever. At least the Eastern vision seems to be more logical: that in your past life you have committed some bad actions and of course you have to suffer for them. I say it looks more logical, but it is not existentially true.What do I mean when I say it is not existentially true? I mean that whenever you act, the result of the act is intrinsic in the act itself, it does not wait for the next life. Why should it wait? If you drink poison now, will you die in the next life? I have been arguing with Hindu shankaracharyas, Jaina monks, Buddhist bhikkus, saying: “Tell me, if somebody hits his hand with a hammer, will he suffer in the next life or here, right now?” Action brings its reaction immediately. It does not wait. Why should it wait, and why particularly for the next life?They have been befooling people, of course more logically than Christians and Jews and Mohammedans. Hence no sophisticated Hindu can be converted to Mohammedanism, Judaism or Christianity – impossible, because all your ideas look very childish. He has far more logical explanations. But those logical explanations are only significant on the surface; deep down there is nothing much in them.I have argued with all these people. Not a single one has been able to answer my question. If you put your arm in the fire, will you be burned in the next life? The action is here; the reaction has to be here. They are joined together, they cannot be separated. The moment you love, you are happy. It is not that in this moment you love and you are in deep misery now, and in the next life whether there you love or not, suddenly one day you will feel happy – the good karma of your last life.You are disconnecting things which are not, in the nature of things, in any way possible to disconnect. You hate somebody and in that very hatred you are burning in fire. You are angry and in that very anger, not out of it, you suffer. My approach is that each moment, whatsoever you are doing you are getting the immediate reaction.These people are befooling you because they cannot say many things which go against the vested interest. They cannot say that you are poor because the rich are exploiting you – because they are hired by the rich people. Now, for example, a Jaina monk, Acharya Tulsi… Jaina monks don’t travel in the rainy season. And in India, it is not like here; the seasons are well divided. The rainy season is four months, the summer season is four months, the winter is four months. Lately the seasons have been disturbed because of atomic experiments going on everywhere; otherwise, exactly on the expected date and day, the rains will begin, and exactly on the expected date and day the rains will stop.The Jaina monk does not travel for the four months of the rainy season. He travels for eight months, and for four months he does not travel because the earth is wet, the grass has grown and many small insects, ants, are there in the grass. He cannot walk on the grass because the grass is alive. And he cannot walk on the wet ground because there may be some insects which the wetness encourages. He has to walk only on dry ground where he is absolutely certain that no life can be killed by his walking. So the rainy season is out of the question. He cannot even carry an umbrella because that will be a possession. So in the rainy season it will be most difficult. He does not have more than three items of clothing – and all three items will become wet, so he will not even have clothes to change into.This Jaina monk, Acharya Tulsi stays in one place. He has seven hundred monks, and for eight months those monks move around the country, and for four months they come to live with the master in one place. But it is a very difficult problem: only very rich people can invite Acharya Tulsi to spend the rainy season in their city, because those seven hundred monks will also come. And that is nothing – when the seven hundred monks are there, and the head of the monks, Acharya Tulsi, who is like a pope in that sect, is there, then thousands of followers will come to listen. Because in the rainy season in India everything is closed, you cannot do anything. The shops are empty; people start playing cards and chess. All kinds of festivals happen in the rainy season because everybody is free. People visit their relatives, because there is nothing in their business that is at risk.People visit their religious leaders. And it is a tradition that whosoever comes to see the head of a religious order is a guest of the city, just as the head is a guest of the city. So to invite Acharya Tulsi means spending millions of rupees, and only very rich people can afford it. If they can afford it, they must be businessmen. A businessman is never a loser. He is not a gambler. He counts everything, with interest. If he is going to invest – and that’s the right word – millions of rupees in Acharya Tulsi, then he is going to take as much juice out of Acharya Tulsi as possible, with interest, and he will not leave without it. Both the parties understand it – it is understood, not said. Acharya Tulsi has to protect the rich person because it is the rich person who protects Acharya Tulsi and his monks. It is a simple arrangement.The same is true about other religions in India. It is a very costly phenomenon. For example, another Jaina sect whose monks live naked cannot stay in any household or family, because to be so close to a family may create attachment. Some trouble may arise, they may be distracted. They can only stay in a temple. And Jaina temples are the costliest and the best temples in India. It is now difficult to build that kind of temple. At Mount Abu – a few of you may have seen the Jaina temples, because I used to have my meditation camps there – they are such masterpieces of art. So much money has been poured into those temples; they are all marble and a single temple may take hundreds of years to build. The grandfather may start, and the third or fourth or fifth generation may inaugurate the temple when it is complete. Thousands of workers will be working on it: artists, craftsmen.To invite a naked Jaina monk – because the naked Jaina monk is thought to be of the highest order of monks… Acharya Tulsi is not a naked Jaina monk. He is thought to be of a lower degree. Yes, he is a Jaina, but if you ask the followers of the naked monks, they will say, “There is not much difference between us and Acharya Tulsi. Perhaps he keeps three items of clothing and we keep six: that is all the difference there is. The real difference is between our monks.” And certainly the naked Jaina monk tortures himself more than any other in the whole world. Nobody can compete with him; he is the best masochist possible.To invite a naked Jaina monk means you need a temple that can do justice to his prestige, otherwise you are insulting him. So every big town, big city, goes on wasting money in raising temples because the naked monk can stay only in a temple. The Jainas are not many but they have so many temples all over the country that you will be surprised. Even in places where not a single Jaina family lives you will find Jaina temples, because the Jaina monks pass by there and they need some place to stay.You will be surprised – it looks very funny to see the whole thing – a Jaina monk is not supposed to beg from anybody other than a Jaina. Now, Jainas are very few, only three hundred thousand all over India – just like a teaspoon full of salt in the ocean. There are thousands of towns and villages where there is not a single Jaina. But the Jaina monk has to move for eight months continually; he has to pass through villages where no Jaina lives.So what do Jainas do? A procession of twenty families – twenty buses, fifty buses – will follow the monk. But why fifty buses? Just one bus or one car would be enough if just one Jaina family were needed. No, the Jaina monk has to go begging and he is not allowed to beg from just one family. That is against his scripture. And when the scripture was made, it was quite right because there were so many monks, they were becoming a burden on society. So if a monk comes to one family, finds good food and starts going there every day, he will become a torture to the family. And if other monks come to know about it, they will also start going to the same family.So the rule was made that no monk begs from just one family – not even a single whole meal. Even for a single whole meal, he has to beg from different families: little pieces from here, little pieces from there. And he is not supposed to beg from the same people again tomorrow. No monk is supposed to beg from the same place where some other monk has already begged. Now this creates trouble; each monk has to beg from many families.So fifty families, sixty families, follow those travelling monks with all kinds of food. And of course everything is also needed for themselves, they have to carry tents and everything. And there are only twenty-two naked Jaina monks left because the whole thing is so arduous that when one naked monk dies, he is not replaced. It is very difficult. So fifty, sixty buses, a whole procession… Then the tents, and a whole city will be put together in the night because in the morning the monk will come. And they have to make temples in places where they cannot even find a Jaina worshipper. They have to hire a brahmin to worship in the temple.Now, brahmins and Jainas are enemies – Jainism is a revolt against Brahminism – but brahmins are the only people who know how to worship, so they will be paid to do it. They are not really worshipping; you can see, how can they worship the enemy? This man Mahavira, whose statue is there in the Jaina temple, has been continually criticizing brahmins. Now, the brahmin worships for a salary. Perhaps deep inside he is cursing, but on the surface he is praising and showering flowers and doing whatsoever Jainism prescribes for use in worship.Then the whole city will be ready by the morning. The monk comes, and the monk knows about all these buses and that this whole city of tents has been raised in the night. When he came the previous day there was not a single tent at all. And all these people he knows, because they have been following him for four months. Now, these people have to be rich to drop all their businesses, to take their whole family around. And the season is really difficult. In some places there are two hundred inches of rain, and in some places, perhaps the worst, five hundred inches of rain – and they have to follow the monk even to the mountains, because Jainas make their sacred places on the mountains.Hindus make their sacred places by the side of rivers. Because Hindus had already monopolized the rivers, Jainas had to do something to defeat them – the same competitive mind is everywhere. So they thought that the best thing would be to choose the highest peaks of the mountains and show these fools that the rivers are dirty. People in India even throw dead bodies, half-burned bodies, dead animals into the rivers, and these are your sacred places? So the Jainas made their sacred places on high mountains.Those buses follow them, and tent cities will arise on those mountains, just there in the night when the monk is sleeping, but not before his eyes. I have asked these naked monks, “Do you really not know that these people are following you – the same faces, the same tents, the same buses – for four months? They are befooling themselves, but whom are you befooling? And what is the purpose of all this circus?”In private they would say to me, “You are right, but what can we say about it? You always hit wherever it hurts most. You have a knack,” they would say to me, “of hitting people at their weakest point. Now this is clear, four months… I know, but I cannot say it in public, because then how would I survive?” He depends on these people. These people are businessmen, they are investing money. They want him to say to the poor, “You are suffering from your past bad karmas, and these rich people are enjoying their good karmas from a past life. If you want to enjoy yourself then do good karmas, obey the scriptures, follow the principles handed down by the great masters, and in your next life you will be rich.”I was trying to explain why the priests have to bring in the next life: because about this life they cannot do anything. And about the next life, one thing is good: that nobody knows what will happen – whether anything will happen or not, whether anybody will survive or not. This strategy was invented so that the explanation would remain rational. Otherwise, there are people who are doing all that the scriptures say, and yet they are suffering, they are poor, they are sick. They ask, “We are doing everything that you say – then why are we suffering?” Leaving them aside, even these Jaina monks… One dies with cancer, now what is he suffering for? In his whole life he never did a single thing that can be said to be wrong. You have to find the explanation somewhere in his past lives.Man is in misery because religions have not helped him to destroy the causes of misery. On the contrary, they have consoled him so that he remains as he is.Revolt, revolution are of the same order as disobedience, disorder, creating chaos: you will suffer tremendously in the coming life. You are suffering now, and you are preparing the ground for more suffering. So they created this gap between this life and the coming life, the past life and this life. And it is a beautiful strategy, because neither have you any evidence of your past life – that you committed any bad actions or good actions – nor have you any way to know what is going to happen to you in the next life, the coming life.They have given beautiful explanations and camouflaged the whole stinking reality behind beautiful flowers, so that you smell the flower and you forget the stinking river flowing just underneath as an undercurrent. Throw away these flowers and immediately you will be able to see why humanity is in so much suffering.The new thing that has happened is, as I said before, that one percent of humanity has come to a point where it can become a little alert, awake. And that one percent of humanity, becoming aware of the misery, seeing the whole of humanity already in hell, is asking: “What hell are you talking about? There cannot be anything worse than what is happening on the earth.” This one percent of humanity has created such questions. Those questions have also reached those people who are not so alert, but the questions have reached them anyway. They have also heard and started feeling some little stirring of consciousness: “Yes, there is misery, and immense misery.”Politicians have been deceiving you. They say, “If there is democracy, there will be no suffering. If there is independence, there will be no suffering. If there is socialism there will be no suffering. If there is communism suffering disappears.” But there is democracy, and suffering goes on growing, accumulating. Countries are independent – not all countries are in slavery – but even in the countries that are independent, the misery is not less. Perhaps it is even more, because now they cannot dump their misery on anybody else – they are independent. A slave country at least has a consolation. That is my experience.Before India became independent there was such a feeling all over India. My house was a place of conspiracy. My two uncles had been in jail many times, and every week they had to go to the police station to report that they were not doing anything against the government, and that they were still living in the same place. They were not allowed to move out of the town – but people were coming to them, and they all had so much hope.I was a small child but I always wondered, “These people are saying that just by becoming independent, all misery will disappear. How can that happen? I don’t see any connection.” But there was hope. There was the promised land very close by; just a little struggle and you would reach it. There was suffering but you were not responsible for it, the Britishers were responsible. It was a great consolation to dump everything on the Britishers.In fact, I used to question these revolutionaries who would secretly visit my house, or sometimes stay in my house for months. One of them, a very famous revolutionary, Bhavani Prasad Tiwari, was the national leader of the socialist party. Whenever he had to go underground he used to come to my village and just live in my house, hidden. For the whole day he would not come out – and nobody knew him in the village anyway. But I was after him. He told me again and again, “You bring such inconvenient questions that sometimes I think it would be better to be in a British jail than in your house. At least there I would get first class treatment.”He was a famous leader so he would have received first class treatment – political prisoners’ special class – with all the facilities, good food, a good library. And at least he would have some freedom, because first class prisoners were not forced to do any labor. They would write their autobiographies and other books: all the books these great Indian leaders have written were written in jails. And they would go for walks. They were put in beautiful places that were not even jails; they were created especially for them.For example in Pune there was a palace just opposite us, on the other side of the river: the Aga Khan palace. It was a palace. Gandhi was kept prisoner there and his wife too. His wife died there, her grave is still there in the Aga Khan’s palace. You might have seen it in Pune – when you pass the bridge, just on top of the hill above there is a beautiful house.I had asked the owner, because the owner lived in Mumbai and used to come to me, “Whatsoever you want you can take, but give that house to me before I move to Pune. I want that house.” – because in the whole of Pune, that was the highest point from where you could see the whole city, and it was really a beautiful palace.He said, “It is difficult because it belongs to my mother. She is the owner of the house and she will not sell it because Gandhi was kept prisoner there, and she is a follower of Gandhi. She wants to make it a national museum in the memory of Gandhi. It is impossible to persuade her – and particularly for you. Even your name is unmentionable in my family. When I come here I have to say I am going somewhere else. Your name is unmentionable.” Gandhians will not mention my name because I have been speaking against Gandhi continually.So these special palaces were turned into prisons. They had acres of greenery, beautiful views. So Bhavani Prasad Tiwari used to say to me, “It would be better if I stop going underground, because you ask inconvenient questions.”I said, “If you cannot answer them, what is going to happen to the country when the country becomes independent? They will be the questions which you will have to solve. You cannot even answer them verbally, and then you will actually have to solve them. I asked him, “Just by the Britishers leaving the country” – and there were not many Britishers – “how is poverty going to disappear? And do you want me to believe that before the Britishers came to India, India was not poor?”It was as poor as it is now, perhaps even poorer, because the Britishers brought industry and technology that helped the country to become a little better. They brought education, schools, colleges, universities. Before that, there was no way to be educated: the only educated people were the brahmins, because the father would teach the son. They kept everybody else uneducated because that was the best way to keep them enslaved. Education can be dangerous.“How are you going to destroy poverty? How are you going to destroy the hundreds of kinds of anxieties and miseries which have nothing to do with the British? Now, a husband is suffering because of his wife – how is it going to help? The Britishers have gone, okay; but the wife will still be there, the husband will still be there – how is it going to change anything?”He said, “I know it is very difficult, but let us first get independence.”I said, “I know that after independence the problems will be the same, perhaps worse.”They are worse. In three hundred years not a single British governor general was assassinated. Now you can assassinate the prime minister. Your independence has given you great intelligence! In three hundred years the Punjabi Sikhs never said that they want a separate nation. Now they want a separate nation. This is what independence has given to people.But the real question is about the Hindu minority who live in the Punjab. They will all be killed. Either they will have to become Sikhs, or they will have to be slaughtered. So it is not only a question of giving independence to a particular state. But the problem is of the Hindu minority. Where to take them? They will all be killed.That’s what happened in Pakistan. When Pakistan was created, all the Hindus who tried to remain in Pakistan were slaughtered. And Pakistan was not enriched by it. These are not the ways to become rich. Pakistan is now far poorer than India. The poverty has become greater because the population has grown. Now, the Britishers are not responsible for the growing population. You go on producing children.Political leaders have kept humanity hoping – always somewhere far away, the great hope. For the classless society Russia suffered everything for more than sixty years: “The classless society is going to happen soon!” When will those days of waiting be finished? This is an old strategy. Jesus used to say to his followers, “Very soon you will be with me in the Kingdom of God. Very soon you will see that those who follow me are saved, and those who don’t follow me fall into eternal hell.” It has not happened yet, and we don’t even know whether Jesus is with God or not.He even promised that he would be coming back. I think he must have lost courage – once crucified is enough! Now again he will be crucified, this time in the Vatican, because this time he will be coming as a Christian. And the pope will be the person who will decide: “This man has to be crucified – he is a pretender, an anti-Christ. He is not our lord, because when our lord comes he will come with glory, sitting on a cloud. That’s how the lord has to come. And this man is born out of a woman, and not even out of a virgin.” They are looking for the cloud the lord will be coming on, and the lord has escaped!But the hope… Politicians go on giving hope and nothing materializes. One thing has to be understood clearly: no hope is going to help; no false explanation is going to help. You have to put aside all this crap and see into reality as it is. The reality is that this earth cannot tolerate so great a population; the population has to become almost half the size that it is now. But the way it is moving, it will be doubled by the end of this century. Misery will also be doubled.I would like the population to be half of what it is – but for that you need intelligence, understanding. You have to understand that children are not sent by God. There is no God who is sending children.In fact, a single man has enough seeds, in his forty or fifty years’ lifetime, while he is capable of producing children, to produce the whole population of the earth – a single man! In each sexual orgasm, millions of potential human beings are lost. This is not something that God is doing, otherwise he is a very stupid God. What is the point of giving so many seeds to a man when the woman normally can only have one egg fertilized in a year? This is what created the trouble: man started having many wives. But a woman cannot start having many husbands – because a man can make many women pregnant, but if a woman has many husbands, what will they be doing? One woman, one man makes her pregnant, so the remaining ones go to Oregon – where else?This has nothing to do with God, this is simple biology. People have to be told to understand biology and to use all the methods which are available to reduce the population completely to half of what it is.Stop bothering to go to the synagogue, to the temple, to the church, because they have befooled you enough. Stop asking these people – the rabbis, the monks, the priests – because all that they know they have been giving as consolation for thousands of years and all their consolations have proved impotent.You have to turn from politicians, from religious people, to the scientist. The whole of humanity has to focus on science if it wants to get rid of misery.And my religion I call the science of the inner soul. It is not religion; it is an exact science. Just as science functions in the objective world, this science functions in the subjective world.Remember, the outer science can help immensely to reduce your suffering and misery by almost ninety percent. And once you remove ninety percent of your suffering and miseries, which are physical, biological – science can very easily remove them – then the remaining ten percent of misery will be for the first time clear to you. Right now it is lost in the mess of this ninety percent of misery.Then you will be able to see that all that misery was nothing compared to this ten percent; this ten percent is the real anguish. And that can be transformed only through inward movement: call it meditation, awareness, watchfulness.But that ten percent misery is of tremendous weight. The ninety percent is nothing, it is just hunger – you need food, you need shelter, you need employment, and all these things can be tackled by science.Remove the priest completely. He has no function for the future. He has already done enough mischief. Focus on science, and then immediately you will see a new dimension arising in you, of which you were not aware.It was there – but a hungry man, how can he think whether life has meaning or not? A hungry man cannot think whether the flower is beautiful or not; he is hungry. You cannot talk to him about music and poetry and painting. That will be humiliating him; it will just be an insult, an outright insult. But once these problems disappear then he will start, for the first time, to inquire about real existential questions which can be answered only by a subjective science.So there is no future for religion. There is a future for an objective science to deal with objective matters, and a subjective science to deal with your inward matters. One will take care of your physiology, biology. The other will take care of your psychology and your ultimate center: the soul.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What do you think about the philosophy of nonviolence, and particularly about the Christian idea of turning the other cheek?I am not a philosopher. The philosopher thinks about things. It is a mind approach. My approach is a no-mind approach. It is just the very opposite of philosophizing. It is not thinking about things, ideas, but seeing with a clarity that comes when you put your mind aside, when you see through silence, not through logic. Seeing is not thinking.The sun rises: if you think about it you miss it, because while you are thinking about it, you are going away from it. In thinking you can move miles away, and thoughts go faster than anything possible.If you are seeing the sunrise then one thing has to be certain, that you are not thinking about it. Only then can you see it. Thinking becomes a veil on the eyes. It gives its own color, its own idea to the reality. It does not allow reality to reach you, it imposes itself upon reality; it is a deviation from reality.Hence no philosopher has ever been able to know the truth. All the philosophers have been thinking about the truth. But thinking about the truth is an impossibility. Either you know it, or you don’t. If you know it, there is no need to think about it. If you don’t know it, how can you think about it? A philosopher thinking about truth is just like a blind man thinking about light. If you have eyes, you don’t think about light, you see it.Seeing is a totally different process; it is a byproduct of meditation.Hence I would not like my way of life ever to be called a philosophy, because it has nothing to do with philosophy. You can call it philosia. The word philo means love; sophy means wisdom, knowledge – love for knowledge. In philosia, philo means the same love, and sia means seeing: love, not for knowledge but for being – not for wisdom, but for experiencing.So that is the first thing to be remembered. Nonviolence is a philosophy to Mahatma Gandhi; it is not a philosophy to me, it is a philosia. That’s where I have been constantly struggling with Gandhian philosophers, thinkers.Gandhi wrote his autobiography entitled Experiments with Truth. Now that is utter absurdity; you cannot experiment with truth. When you are silent, truth is there in its fullness, in its absolute glory. And when you are not silent, truth is absent. When you are silent, truth does not appear like an object before you. When you are silent, suddenly you recognize you are the truth. There is nothing to see. The seer is the seen, the observer is the observed; that duality no longer exists. And there is no question of thinking. There is no doubt, there is no belief; there is no idea.Gandhi was trying to experiment with truth. The simple implication is: you know what truth is; otherwise how are you going to experiment with it? And for a man who knows truth, what is the need to experiment? He lives it; for him there is no alternative. To Gandhi everything is philosophy; to me everything is philosia. Gandhi is a thinker, I am not a thinker. My approach is existential, not mental. Nonviolence – the very word is not appealing to me, it is not my taste, because it is negative. Violence is positive; nonviolence is negative. Nobody has paid any attention to the simple fact that you are making violence positive, solid; and nonviolence is simply negating it.I call it reverence for life; I don’t use the word nonviolence. Reverence for life – it is positive; then nonviolence happens just of its own accord. If you feel reverence for life, how can you be violent? But it is possible you can be nonviolent and still you may not have any reverence for life.I know these so-called nonviolent people. You will be amazed to know that in Kolkata, Jainas have a very important place. In all the big cities – Mumbai, Kolkata – the Jainas are the super-rich people. In Kolkata I came to know of a strange phenomenon; when I saw it for the first time I could not believe my eyes. I used to stay in the house of a very unique man, Sohanlal Dugar. He was unique in many ways. I loved the man – he was very colorful. He was old – he died seven years ago. When he met me first, at that time he was seventy years old, but he lived to ninety.He met me in Jaipur, that was his home town, and he invited me to Kolkata because that was his business place. From there he controlled the whole silver market, not only of India but of the whole of Asia. He was called the Silver King. I had heard about him, but I had no idea who the person was. When he came to me for the first time in Jaipur, he touched my feet – an old man dressed in the Rajasthani way with a yellow turban, very ancient-looking in every way – and took out bundles of notes from the pockets of his coat and wanted to give them to me.I said, “But right now I don’t need them. You just give me your address; whenever I need I will inquire and if you are still in possession of wealth and in the mood to give, you can give. But right now I don’t have any need, so why unnecessarily give me trouble? I am going now to travel for thirty-six hours, and I will have to take care of these notes. I will not even be able to sleep because anybody might take them. So please keep them.” He just started crying, tears pouring from his eyes. I said, “But I have not said anything that would hurt you so much.”He said, “Nothing else hurts me more. I am a poor man because I have only money and nothing else. I want to do something for you – I feel so much for you – but I am a poor man: except money, I have nothing. And if you refuse my money, you refuse me, because I don’t have anything else. So take this money. If you want to burn it, burn it here right now. If you want to throw it away, throw it away right now – that is your business. But remember, never again refuse money from me, because that means you are refusing me. I have nothing else to offer.” His tears were so sincere and authentic, and what he said was so meaningful, that I said, “Okay. Give me this money, and take out the rest too You have more in your pockets.”He said, “That’s right. That’s the man I have been in search of,” and he took it all out. He showed me his pockets, inside out, and said, “Now, right now, I don’t have anything else, but this is the man I have been in search of.” And he invited me to Kolkata.Where he lived was a Jaina colony. Jainas tend to live together in one place because they don’t want to associate with “lower human beings.” They think they are the highest, the purest, the most religious. There, he told me, “I will show you something which will surprise you.” He took me to one of his rooms, opened the window, and said, “Look outside.”Outside I saw… I could not figure out what it was. There were at least one hundred cots, without any mattresses on them, and one hundred people on those naked cots trying to sleep. I said, “But what is the matter? Why are the mattresses missing, and why don’t they have any pillows? They are certainly in discomfort; you can see they are tossing and turning.”He said, “You don’t know the reality of what you are seeing. There is something more to it: these people are hired by Jainas.”I said, “Hired? For what?”He said, “To sleep on these cots.”I said, “But what is the purpose of it all?”He explained. In India, in hot countries, insects of all kinds grow very easily. A certain insect that you call in English a bedbug lives in the cots.Jainas cannot kill them because of their philosophy of nonviolence. They cannot kill them, but if nobody sleeps on those cots, the bedbugs will die – so they hire people. They will give you five rupees per night: you sleep in a cot full of bedbugs and they will suck your blood the whole night.Nonviolent people are not necessarily life-reverent. Now what kind of business is going on? They are saving the bedbugs – but what about these poor men? But the Jainas don’t think about that. They are paying them so there is no problem with it. The people have agreed to sleep on the cots; and they are paying them.But just to think of the idea, that you will put a man in such a situation. And the man must be in trouble because why should he be ready, for five rupees, to destroy his whole life? Maybe his mother is dying, maybe his wife is in hospital, maybe his father had an accident and those five rupees are essential for medicine, for food, for something. And every day there is a line: not all the people get in. There are only a hundred cots; those who get in are fortunate. And these people who are paying them are earning virtue. Their bank balance in the other world is growing – they have saved so many bedbugs from dying. A strange love affair with bedbugs! And they don’t think about this man, the whole night being tortured. No, they have paid him, so there is no guilt about that.I want you to remember: a man believing in nonviolence need not be necessarily life-reverent. But one who reveres life is bound to be nonviolent – that is its necessary corollary. But his nonviolence will have a totally different flavor. It will not be Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolence.For example: Gandhi is continually trying to teach nonviolence to his disciples, and following it himself. He is not a fraud; whatsoever he believes may be wrong, but he does it with his totality. His intention is always sincere, you cannot doubt his sincerity, but his intelligence is not so indubitable. And a man with strong intentions, but not a high quality of intelligence, is more dangerous than anybody, because the intention is blind. Gandhi thought that he was teaching nonviolence, but in fact he was teaching people to be violent to themselves.This cannot happen to my way of life. Reverence for life does not exclude me. If I am full of reverence for life all around, how can I be irreverent toward my own life?In deep silence there is no mine and no thine. Life is simply life; it is one flow. We are joined together by invisible threads. If I hurt you, I hurt myself. If I hurt myself, I am hurting you all.I want the distinction to be clear. It is delicate. The man who believes in nonviolence will be very careful not to be violent to anybody – too careful! But because he has not experienced reverence for life, it is only an ideology. Rationally he has concluded that this is good, that this is the right path, and he is going to be very violent to himself. In fact his violence toward others will turn upon himself but the proportion will remain the same.I have experienced it in people, for example hunters, who are violent people, killers. Just near my university, two hundred miles away, was a forest reserve – one of the most beautiful forests in India, Kanha Keshali. For hundreds of miles, all kinds of wild life – you could find every kind possible, imaginable. Hunting was prohibited except for special guests of the viceroy, of the governor, and later on, of the prime minister, the president, and the chief minister. For special guests hunting was allowed, otherwise it was completely prohibited.Whenever I had time I used to drive to Kanha Keshali. The rest house in Kanha Keshali was in such a beautiful place, on a vast lake, surrounded by greenery as far as you could see. And for days you would not come across or see a man, but you would see thousands of deer passing in the night. And in the night the deer’s eyes become almost flames. A thousand or two thousand deer passing in the night, if it was a full-moon night you could see thousands of small lights moving in line. And they had to come to the lake in the night to drink water. All the animals would come in the night; you only had to sit in the rest house and you would be able to see lions and tigers.Once in a while I would meet a group of hunters, special people. I was surprised to know one thing, that these hunters were violent people, but very loving, very friendly. I have lived with nonviolent people who are never loving, never friendly. The contrast was such that I started to look deeper into it: what was the matter? I made friends with great hunters of India, kings, princes – and in India there were so many maharajas and so many princes, and they were all hunters. If you go into a maharaja’s palace you will find out how many lions he has killed; they are all on exhibition. The whole house is full of dead animals, preserved, stuffed. And that is their pride.I started making friends with these people and what I found was that they were all very nice, very loving, very simple and very innocent people. The man may have killed one hundred lions, but he himself is very childlike. He has not that arrogant, egoistic attitude of a nonviolent Jaina or a nonviolent Gandhian. He is a simple man, a simple human being. He knows he is not a saint. But these people who believe in nonviolence automatically start believing they are saints, superior beings, higher than everybody else. In their egoistic attitude there is more violence than there may be in the whole life of a hunter who has killed many animals.The nonviolent believer does no violence to you physically, but psychologically he is very violent. Psychologically he will try to prove his superiority in every possible way. And one thing more: whatsoever violence he has prevented reaching others has not simply disappeared; things don’t disappear like that. The violent mind is inside. If you don’t allow it to express its violence on others, it is going to turn upon itself.So, nonviolent people have been torturing themselves in every possible way. They are very inventive in finding new methods of torturing themselves. The violence has not disappeared; it has only taken a roundabout turn. Gandhi was very violent to himself – just any excuse and he would go on a fast. Fasting is violence. If you keep somebody else starving it is violence. And if you keep yourself starving, isn’t it violence? Do you have double standards?Whether I keep you starving or I keep myself starving, it is the same; the same principle and the same standard should be applied: I am a violent man, if not to your body, then to my own body. And in being violent with you, there was a possibility that you may have retaliated – you may have stopped me being violent to you. But to be violent with your own body is the easiest thing in the world. What can your body do? It cannot retaliate, it cannot prevent you. It has no defense against you. So the person who is violent to others, at least is violent to someone who has the right to defend himself and can be violent in return. But the person who is violent with himself is really cunning, very cunning. He has found the most innocent victim in the world, defenseless. You can do anything you want to your own body.There have been monks who have been beating their body every morning, till the blood starts oozing all over the body. And they were thought to be great saints! There was one Christian saint in Alexandria who remained on a sixty-foot-high pillar – on top of it there was space enough just to sit. For thirty years he remained sitting on that pillar. He was sleeping there; people were sending food and he was pulling the food up on ropes. He was defecating, urinating from the pillar…but this was thought to be great austerity. And from hundreds of miles people would come to pay respect to this madman. He had no other quality, but even kings came to pay him respect. What was he doing? – just torturing himself.I have seen in India so many people torturing themselves in so many ways that it became absolutely clear to me that all the religions up to now have been dominated by sado-masochists. There is no question about it. These religions give enough evidence that the people who founded the religions and the people who followed the religions were sado-masochists.I came across a man who was standing for many years. Now, you cannot stand very long; he was standing for many years. All his body had shrunk. His whole weight had gone into the legs; the legs had become elephant legs. Now even if he wanted to sit, it was impossible. He had to sleep standing. Just in front of him there was a wooden support hanging from the ceiling. He would put his hands on the support and sleep that way, and the whole day also he was standing. And thousands of people were worshipping him.I asked them, “What quality is there that you are worshipping? Is it just because he is standing, just because he is an idiot? What has he gained by standing? Just look at his face. Has he ever said a single thing which has any meaning?” He was a very ordinary man. But he managed, just by standing, to become a great sage. Now, this man is nonviolent to everybody but himself; this is sheer violence. And I cannot conceive, if you have reverence for life, how you can destroy your own life in this way.Jainism is the only religion which allows a monk, if he wills it, to fast unto death. They don’t call it suicide, they have a very beautiful name for it: santhara. Santhara means one who has dropped the lust for life, who has gone beyond the lust for living. Many Jaina monks die every year by santhara. The government cannot do anything because it is their religious practice. The secular government is not supposed to interfere in anybody’s religion. And they don’t commit suicide by taking poison or killing themselves with a sword – no, they have a very torturous method. An electric chair would be far more nonviolent – you just sit on it and you are gone, you may not even feel it. Or you can be put under chloroform, so you don’t even feel when you are and when you are not.But the Jaina monk will fast for two months, three months. There have been cases which have lasted up to ninety days: three months of not eating. He goes on becoming a skeleton; as more and more days pass, more crowds go on coming and he cannot even open his eyes. People are singing and chanting in his praise, and I don’t think he can hear anything – for two months he has been on the fast; he is just bones. You can say he is alive because he is still breathing, but except for the breathing and the pulse and the heartbeat, there is no sign of life. For three months he may hang on in this limbo, between death and life. And these people are nonviolent people!Gandhi learned his nonviolence from these idiots. He recognized as one of his gurus, his masters, a Jaina monk, Shrimad Rajchandra, who tortured himself and taught people the same – because what else are you going to teach people? Whatever you are doing, you are going to teach people the same. Hence I call them sado-masochists; these people are both. Ordinarily, in psychiatric hospitals you will find somebody is a sadist, somebody is a masochist; it is very rarely you find one man having both diseases, the sado-masochist.The sadist enjoys torturing others. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Tamerlane, Nadirshar, Alexander, Napoleon – these are the people who are sadists, who enjoy others being tortured. And there are masochists who enjoy torturing themselves. The masochists offer themselves to be tortured. They are in search of a sadist.Somebody was asking me what kind of a man and woman would be the best couple. I said, “One should be a sadist and one should be a masochist. That will be the best-fitting couple in the world. They are never going to divorce. One enjoys torturing; the other enjoys being tortured. They are immensely fulfilled.” And there are couples who you may think are ideal couples, for the simple reason that one is a sadist and the other is a masochist. They fit.The masochist finds strange ways, philosophies, rationalizations. A sannyasin, Veena, is here… When she first came to see me, fifteen years ago, she brought a young man; she had come with that young man. The young man was in search of a master who could teach him to live only on water. Veena had brought that masochist. But he did not think he was a masochist. He thought he was in search of the most natural way of living. Of course he could not stay with me. Veena had brought him; he escaped. Veena was left with me. That kind of man you will find in many places. Somebody becomes a naturalist, and he lives according to the ideals naturopathy gives him.One of my aunts was a naturopathy freak. I told her many times, “You will simply kill yourself doing these stupid things.” And that’s what happened. She was perfectly okay, but the naturopath goes on finding something wrong. And if you search you will find; the body is a complex phenomenon. Just a slight headache, and that’s enough to go on a fast; you are just feeling tired, that’s enough to take an enema. Anything…and you know what to do because you go on reading. Books are available with simple treatments, and there are not many of them, so every patient becomes a doctor in naturopathy. Just any small book you can read, and that’s all, it is not much.I told her again and again… I was living with her for four years, and I was preventing her in every possible way. I would throw out her enemas, and throw away her bath tub – she had many sizes of sitz baths, and I don’t know what. She had such a collection of strange instruments, and I would simply throw them out. The moment I found anything I would throw it away. And she was continually putting mud packs on her stomach, on her head, on her back. I said, “What is going on? Continually – twenty-four hours a day? Millions of people are moving around but nobody is doing these things that you go on doing.” So while I was in the house I would take away her mud packs, ice packs, hot packs – but the moment I would leave the house, because I had to go to the university, she would immediately try to do her thing.For two years I had to go out of Jabalpur for my MA degree. In those two years she killed herself – not even two years, it took just one year. I had not even completed my course there; after just nine or ten months I went to see her; she could not even recognize me. And it was her own doing. I told her husband, “You see now? You were supporting her doing these things. And you were all against me, saying: ‘You are taking her instruments and things and then she has to try and find them in different places.’” She had different kinds of mud from different mines. She would go miles to find a special kind of mud. “And you were telling me: ‘It is not good that you threw them all away.’ Now I was away for just nine months and she went mad…” The doctors said that she couldn’t survive; she had destroyed her whole system.In India naturopathy became associated with Yoga, naturally, because that is a traditional thing. So to clean yourself… Now what uncleanliness is there? And if you are really going to clean yourself, you are going to die because everything is unclean. Inside there is blood and mucus and meat, flesh, this and that; everything is unclean – so clean yourself!She was continually cleaning herself. You can clean your lower intestines with an enema, but you cannot clean the upper part with an enema. Yoga has a method for it: you swallow a thirty-foot-long cloth just like a thin rope. You go on swallowing it so it goes inside you – it is thirty foot long so it is going to go right inside – and then leave it as long as you can. Then take it out so it brings all the mucus and anything that is impure from inside. I was preventing her from doing this, but once I was gone she was completely free, so she cleaned herself – and died. Then I told her husband, “Now you clean yourself and follow her.”Other people just eat rice; they say that rice is the only right thing. These people are basically finding some way they can convince themselves that they are not torturing themselves but are doing something good to themselves.So, people like Adolf Hitler are sadists. Then there are masochists. Masochists don’t do much harm, they only do harm to themselves. Sadists do tremendous harm because their joy is in torturing others. But the greatest harm is done by sado-masochists.Mahatma Gandhi is a sado-masochist. First he tortures himself; that self-torture gives him the authority to torture you. He knows the path, he knows the way; he has done it all. He was also a faddist about naturopathy, mud packs and enemas, and only eating this and not eating that. And this had to be followed by everybody. Of course he was far ahead of the disciples, so he had the authority. The disciples knew that they had limitations, but they would do the best they could. The master of course is the master.I have no philosophy of nonviolence, but I have a way of life, which you can call reverence for life. And this is a totally different perspective.Nonviolence simply says don’t kill others. Do you think that is enough? It is only a negative statement: don’t kill others, don’t harm others. Is that enough? Reverence for life says share, give your joy, your love, your peace, your bliss. Whatsoever you can share, share.If you are reverent toward life then it becomes worship.Then everywhere you feel existence alive. Then watering a tree becomes worship. Then feeding a guest becomes worship. And you are not obliging anybody, you are not doing a service; you are simply enjoying yourself. The same way those people are enjoying torturing, you are enjoying sharing.So I want it to be remembered by you once and for all that reverence for life is my approach. Then nonviolence comes automatically, there is no need to bother about it. And when it comes of its own accord it is never ugly.And you ask me: What do I say about the Christian philosophy, the Christian attitude of turning the other cheek? Jesus learned that idea from India. There was no other way for him to learn it, because Jewish scriptures have no ideas about nonviolence. Even the Jewish God is not nonviolent. He clearly declares, “I am an angry god. And those who are not with me are against me. I am not nice,” he says, “I am not your uncle.”Certainly he is your father, not your uncle. With an uncle you can have some nice relationship, friendship. Mostly uncles are nice. But your father… So he makes it clear: “Don’t try to make me your uncle. I am not your uncle.” Actually declaring this: “I am not your uncle, remember it, and I am not nice; I am a very angry and jealous god.” When Adolf Hitler said, “Those who are not with me are against me,” perhaps he was not aware that he was being very Jewish! That is the attitude of the Jewish God.From where did Jesus get the idea of nonviolence? It had never existed anywhere except in India. And particularly at the time when Jesus moved from Egypt to India, it was very much in the air because Mahavira had passed away just five hundred years before, Buddha had passed away just five hundred years before. Sanjay Viletthiputta who was a very significant master, Ajit Keshkambal who was also a very charismatic figure, Makhkhali Gosal – all these people had turned the whole climate of India toward nonviolence. Everybody was talking about nonviolence.Brahmins became ashamed of their scriptures; they started changing the commentaries on their scriptures. They started changing their rituals. You will be surprised: now if you go into a Hindu temple, you are supposed to offer a coconut. This coconut was originally not a coconut but the head of a man. But a coconut resembles the head of a man: it has two eyes, beard, and a skull. They started interpreting their scriptures to say that it was not actually a man’s head; it was only a coconut you had to offer. You will see in India the statues of Hanumana covered with a red color. Once it was blood, but they had to change it, otherwise they would look very foolish.The whole country was impressed by these great teachers; they were all of tremendous importance, and they were logically mostly on solid ground. They stopped all kinds of sacrifices. But what will you do without blood? Some red color substitute will do. A few very orthodox places continued in their old ways. For example in Kolkata, in the temple of Kali, animals are still killed every year and the blood is poured over Kali. In very orthodox places it remained; otherwise it disappeared and substitutes came in.When Jesus reached India, he must have reached at the time when the whole country was agog with the philosophy of nonviolence. He got the idea from India, and that is one of the reasons why Jews could not accept him. He got many ideas from India and from Egypt. When he came back he was thirty: from thirteen to thirty – seventeen years – are completely missing from all Christian accounts. Those seventeen years he spent in Egypt, in India, in Kashmir, in Ladakh, and perhaps Tibet too. The vibe of Buddha and Mahavira was still very alive, so it was not his own vision.But he became tremendously impressed by the idea of nonviolence.And the idea was rational: to harm somebody must be against God, because it is God’s creation – you should not be destructive. But the question was, if others harm you, then…? That’s where turning the other cheek comes in; that was his invention. It is mentioned nowhere in Indian scriptures that you turn the other cheek. The question was not raised, it seems. Nonviolence was preached so rationally that nobody asked, “If somebody harms you, then what?”Mahavira and Buddha would be perfectly ready: “Let him harm you, he will be punished by his karmas. Do not bother about it; go on your way.”Yes, once Buddha was asked, “If somebody hits me,” a bhikku, a monk asked him, “what am I supposed to do?”Buddha said, “You are walking and a branch of a tree falls on you, hits you. What are you going to do?”The man said, “What can I do? It was just an accident, a mere coincidence that I was under the tree and the branch fell down.”Buddha said, “So do the same. Somebody was crazy, mad, angry; he hit you. It is just like a branch falling on you. Don’t be disturbed by this, don’t be distracted by this. Just go on your way as if nothing has happened.”But when Jesus came back to Jerusalem and started saying this – people must have been asking him again and again because it was so new to the Jewish tradition. It was bringing in a very foreign idea which did not fit with the Jewish structure at all.Jesus said that if somebody hits you on one cheek, turn the other cheek. You are asking me what I have to say about it. This will be the attitude of a man who believes in the idea of nonviolence, the philosopher of nonviolence. But when you are hit by somebody and you give him the other cheek, you are encouraging violence in the world. It is not nonviolence.And you are assuming something which is absolutely your imagination. If somebody hits me, according to Jesus I have to give him my other cheek. But his tastes may be different. He may have enjoyed the first hit, he may enjoy the second even more: he may be a sadist. Then you are encouraging a sadist to torture people; you are encouraging violence. Even to allow your own body to be tortured by somebody is to encourage violence.No, this stupid ideology has been the downfall of the whole of India. After Buddha and Mahavira, India never again became the same golden bird it was. After Buddha and Mahavira the downfall began. Buddha and Mahavira are absolutely responsible for twenty-five centuries of slavery in India, because they taught people to be nonviolent. They completely forgot that the other people surrounding the country are not nonviolent. You are encouraging those people, inviting them: “Come and be violent to us.”That’s actually what has happened in Indian history for twenty-five centuries. Anybody who wanted riches, women, slaves, invaded India. There was no trouble; India was nonviolent. Most probably they would pass through kingdoms and there would be no fight at all, no resistance even.If you look at your nonviolence and it has provoked violence, then what kind of nonviolence is it? It has brought more violence in the world than there was before. Before Buddha and Mahavira, India was never invaded. There had never been any violence because people knew that to invade India was to just invite your death. But after Buddha and Mahavira’s teachings people became just like butter – you just cut into them with your knife, and there would be no noise at all. And millions of people were killed, burned, without any resistance because resistance would be violence.But you go on missing the point that you are provoking the violence in the other person. Who is responsible for it? Now turning the other cheek means you are telling the other person, “Please hit me a little more, it is not enough; I am not satisfied. Hit me a little more so that I can become a little more saintly.” And you have only two cheeks. What are you going to do when he has hit you on your second cheek? What Jesus is saying looks like a beautiful statement but it is not at all practical, pragmatic or scientific.Reverence for life approaches the whole problem from a different angle. I will say respect life, yours included. In fact, you have to be respectful toward yourself first, only then can you be respectful toward anybody else. Be loving toward yourself, then you will be able to love others too.Reverence for life will not allow any provocation to violence. It will not start violence, but if anybody starts it, it will stop it immediately.Jesus says, “If somebody hits you on one of your cheeks, turn the other cheek.” I say, “Okay, turn his other cheek – and hit him harder! Teach him a lesson. Make it clear to him that it is not so easy to hit somebody on the cheek; it comes back, and comes back harder. And if you are capable, hit both his cheeks at the same time. Why give him the chance to turn the other cheek and become a saint? Hit him and tell him simultaneously, ‘I do not believe in violence, hence I have to stop it at the first chance. And remember that you cannot just be violent without being prevented.’”You have to prevent violence if you respect life.And in another way too, it is respectful to hit the man, not to give him your other cheek, because that is very disrespectful. This may seem a little difficult for you: you hit me, and I don’t hit you, but show my other cheek to you, and say, “Please be kind enough to hit me.” I am trying to be superhuman and reduce you below humanity. I am humiliating you far more than I can humiliate you by hitting you. By hitting you I simply declare you are human, I am human, and I speak the same language that you speak. We are both on the same ground.This is more respectful because you are not raising yourself higher; you are keeping yourself on the same level as the other man. You are telling him, “You are my brother; if you hit me you are going to get a bigger hit. Be watchful and be careful, because somewhere you may get into real trouble.”I am not in favor of your being superior to the other man. That’s what Jesus is saying: “Be meek, be humble, turn the other cheek, because then you will inherit the Kingdom of God.”I am not promising you any Kingdom of God. You are not going to inherit anything. You have already inherited it – that is your life. Be loving and respectful to it. Be loving and respectful to others. But don’t try to be superior and higher and above others. Don’t put the other man down.You don’t find it in that sentence of Jesus, but it is there: that you are humiliating the other. You are creating guilt in the other. He will think it over at home: “What did I do? What kind of man was he? I hit him, and he gave me the other cheek. How cruel and how animal I am that I again hit him on the other cheek.” The man will not be able to sleep the whole night. He will come back tomorrow. The first thing he will want is to be forgiven. But to forgive him is again to put him down. No, I will say if he hits you, just be a sportsman. Don’t try to be a superman, just a sportsman. Hit him really hard and tell him, “Whenever you need a good hit, you can always depend on me.”Never do any harm to anybody, but never allow anybody to do any harm to you either; only then can we create a human world. We have tried the other way in India, and the experiment has completely failed. Twenty-five centuries of slavery, slaughter, rape, and still nobody raises a finger to say that Buddha and Mahavira are responsible for it. They created this impotence in the whole country, this weakness in the whole country. No, I am not in favor of creating impotence, slavery, and provoking people to do violence to you.Never do violence of your own accord, but never allow anybody else to do it to you either. Only then is there a possibility of creating a human world.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,An Oregon Senator has quoted you as saying that all Oregonians are idiots. Please comment.I am not disappointed. He has proved my point. I have never said what he is telling people that I have said. What I have said is so clear that even an idiot would be able to understand it, but the poor guy has missed even that.I had said, “I have seen all kinds of idiots, and I was thinking that this was it: there are no other kinds of idiots. But after coming to Oregon I came to know that I was mistaken. The Oregonian idiot is a class unto itself”In this statement, where am I saying that all the Oregonians are idiots? I am only talking about the Oregonian idiot as a special class. I am a generous man, but not that generous. I cannot make the whole of Oregon so special in the world. It will become a unique place if all the Oregonians are idiots. Then there will be no other place comparable to it, it will be simply extraordinary.The senator has simply proved my point. I was waiting… Somebody was going to prove my point and now he is the first of that special class of idiots in Oregon. He should be happy that he tops them all! Now anybody else will come second. He has won the Nobel Prize. He has also said that we should not be allowed to remain here. We have not committed any crime. We have not been in any way harmful to anybody. We are minding our own business. But why are these politicians so shaken, worried? And just one and a half years back the same man had said, “These people are absolutely legal and I have nothing to say against them.” Now, within one and a half years everything has changed.We are the same people; but his political situation has changed, and now anybody who wants to make his political status solid can cash in on us. All the politicians are doing it. We are doing them such a great favor; they should be obliged to us for it. Any politician wanting to win an election has only to do one thing: he has to talk nonsense against us – that’s enough, and he is going to win. All the politicians are doing it.Now his political situation is not so solid, it is shaky. We can help him; there is no problem in it. He can condemn us, he can make the threat that we should be thrown out; he can do anything if it will make his position solid. We will be happy: we supported one drowning man, we saved his status. He may not be thankful to us, but we don’t wait for anybody’s thankfulness, we simply do anything that seems to be humanitarian.Just now we have been collecting the street people. These senators can become street people any day. Politicians are either in power or on the streets; there is no midway point. Even a powerful politician like Indira Gandhi once sent me a message: “I am persuading Rajiv to come to you because he is not willing to leave, to resign from his service as a pilot in the Indian airlines.”And Rajiv’s argument was solid. He said to her, “The day you are not in power, then how are we going to support the family? We don’t have our own house to live in. I am the only member of the family earning money – and in your old age, have I to see you on the streets?” She could not persuade him to resign. And his argument was absolutely clear, “Where will you be?” In the three years when she was not in power and Morarji Desai became the prime minister, it was Rajiv who pulled her through. At least she did not have to beg.Politics is a strange career. A few things are worth understanding about it, because they will throw light on the human mind. First: only a certain type of man becomes attracted toward politics, just as a certain kind of man becomes attracted toward science, poetry, painting, music, dance. You cannot think of Winston Churchill dancing; that would be simply unimaginable. Nor can you think of Nijinsky as a prime minister. Nijinsky was a dancer, and perhaps the best dancer the world has ever known; his dance was almost magic. He was born to dance.It was not a talent that he learned; it was some instinct in him, a born quality. The magic was such that no other dancer has been able to imitate it. Once in a while, dancing, he would jump so high that it was against the law of gravitation. Physics cannot explain it. It is not possible with that weight to jump that high. And the most miraculous thing was his coming down: he came so slowly, just like a dry leaf falling in the fall, slowly, with no hurry to reach the ground. That is absolutely against the law of gravitation.Gravitation is such a pull, it is a magnet. It simply pulls you forcibly; you are not able to manage, or do anything about it. It is not in your hands to come down slowly or to come down fast. Everything falling toward the earth is absolutely helpless – the earth’s gravitation will decide its rate of fall. And the earth is so vast, its power of gravitation is so vast, and we are not even light like a leaf. Even Nijinsky was surprised, always surprised. He could see himself coming down slowly, not falling – as if gliding.People asked him again and again, “What is the technique, the strategy, the method?”He said, “I am as surprised as you are. I don’t know. And whenever I try to do it, it never happens. It happens only once in a while, when I have completely forgotten about it. When the dancer disappears, when there is no Nijinsky, it happens. I am just a watcher, just as you are a watcher. I see my body falling down. I have tried it in private, tried it in every possible way. Neither can I jump that high, nor can I fall that slow. I have tried in front of friends, my lovers, but whenever I have tried, it has simply escaped from my hands.“So I have learned one thing: there are things which you cannot try. There are things which are not possible through any method, any technique, any strategy. There are things which happen; you only have to allow them to happen. And the way to allow them is not to interfere – so much so that you are not even present, because your presence will also be an interference.”You know it. Now physics has come to discover a strange fact. We have known it about human beings. You are in your bathroom making faces in the mirror, knowing perfectly well that there is nobody watching you. But suddenly you become aware that somebody is watching through the keyhole. Everything changes. You stop making faces, you start arranging things and start doing something relevant, rational. You have been caught red-handed. You start looking busy – and just a moment before you were not busy at all.Modern physics has come to discover that it is very difficult in the first place to observe the behavior of electrons, how they behave. But now we have instruments through which you can observe the behavior of the electron. But the trouble is, the moment you watch, the behavior changes – exactly the same keyhole story. The electron starts behaving in a different way. Just now when you were not observing, it was behaving differently. Physics has not come to any conclusion – what to conclude about it? But the fact is so clear that the electron is as conscious as you are conscious. There is no other way; otherwise, how can the electron become aware of your being aware of it?Nijinsky said, “The moment I am not, not present at all, suddenly it happens. And while it is happening I am only a watcher. At that moment if I even start looking around to see how it is happening, things get disturbed. I have fallen in the middle of a jump so fast that I have broken my legs. Because I came in, the happening disappeared, and the gravitational pull was so much that I fell with a thump on the ground.” Otherwise he used to come down like a feather. He would not even make a sound when he came to the ground.There are born poets, there are born dancers. In fact, everybody is born to be something. Those who somehow happen to find what they are born to are the most blissful people on the earth. Those who start moving into directions which are not for them, they are the most miserable.The politician is a certain type. It is the same type as the criminal. The criminal is one who could not succeed in being a politician. Both are power-seekers, both are dominated by the will-to-power. The politician moves legally, constitutionally toward power, and once he has the power in his hands, then he can manipulate the law, the constitution and everything, in a thousand and one ways. He can corrupt and prostitute everything once he has power. But until he has power he moves very legally, constitutionally, morally.The criminal is also after power, but he does not know how to move legally, constitutionally, morally. He is wilder, not so tamed as the politician. He is less cultured, not so cultured as the politician who uses culture as a stepping-stone. He is not as articulate as the politician. The politician’s basic art is to be articulate, to be able to express your hopes, transforming them into his promises. He is so articulate that he goes on finding your conscious and your unconscious dreams and hopes, and translates them into promises for the future: that if you give him power, he is going to fulfill all these things. It is a bargain: you give him power, and he will give you the promised land.Once you have given him power, who cares about you? The man who had promised you was powerless. This is a totally different man; he is powerful. Lord Acton’s saying I have been quoting again and again in my life: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And Lord Acton is saying it through his own experience; he is not just philosophizing. He has known power, he has known its corruption, and because of its corrupting influence he dropped out of it.Once you have power, then all the corrupting forces that have been hidden in your unconscious start raising their heads. Who cares about others? Those promises were not given with an honest mind, they were given by you knowing perfectly well that they are not going to be fulfilled. It was just a policy to gain power, and you have gained power. Now you have your own unconscious desires to be fulfilled.The politician can turn at any time into a criminal. We see it happening throughout history, and still we don’t become aware. Joseph Stalin, before he came to power, was not a criminal. He had not killed a single human being, he was not a murderer. But what happened when he came to power? The first thing he did was to destroy the whole twelve-member committee, the communist presidium, which ruled over the whole communist party, the topmost leaders. He started killing them one by one.He killed Kamenev, then he killed Zinovyev, then he killed Trotsky. He went on killing them one by one, and while he was killing one, he took the support of all the others. And they all were happy that there was one less; the power was coming into fewer and fewer hands, and that was better. From twelve, there were only nine people; then there were only six people. He poisoned Lenin who was the topmost man of the revolution. The second man was Trotsky. Once he succeeded in killing Trotsky – Trotsky was killed here in America, in Mexico, because he had escaped. Seeing Zinovyev and Kamenev being killed, he escaped.You will not believe that when he escaped in disguise – he had to escape in disguise – and in such a hurry because Stalin was just getting ready to finish him… It was a question of two or three days, not more than that. And he was a minister, the defense minister of Russia. All the military, all the forces were under him. The moment he became aware of it, that same night he escaped. And he could not bring his dog, which he loved very much. Stalin even killed the dog – it was Trotsky’s dog. Such criminal minds! He sent a hired murderer to kill Trotsky in Mexico.Trotsky was writing Joseph Stalin’s biography, which is one of the most profound biographies ever written because he knew Stalin as nobody else knew him: Trotsky was the second most important man in the revolution. Stalin was nowhere; he was somewhere around eleventh or twelfth. But Trotsky was alert that this man was dangerous – because he never spoke; he was always keeping quiet, everything about him was secret. His friends – who are his friends? His enemies – who are his enemies? Nothing was ever revealed. Trotsky was concerned about this man – he seemed to be a dangerous type. So he started collecting facts about him.And when Stalin started murdering, the procedure that was adopted was a beautiful conspiracy: Lenin was given daily poison in the name of medicine. The doctor was a hired man of Stalin. The poison was to be given in such small doses that it would kill him over a long period of time. While he remains alive, he remains the leader because the masses still know him. He should not die right now, because if he dies right now Trotsky will be the man to control the country. Before Lenin dies Stalin should make his base solid, and all others should be removed, so after Lenin, Stalin will be the second man. So he had to be kept alive but almost in a coma. He became paralyzed and slowly, slowly was dying. He was confined to his bed; his eyesight was disappearing, and whatsoever Stalin was bringing him, he was signing it – he could not read it. Stalin killed everybody necessary to his cause, and then he killed Lenin: the last dose was given to Lenin.The time that Trotsky remained in Mexico he devoted to writing the biography of Stalin. It is a rare book because never has an enemy written a biography with such great insight, with such profundity, with no hatred – just factual, no fiction. He was killed when he was completing the last page. It remains incomplete – the last page. It is a big biography, nearabout twelve hundred pages. He was writing the last page when he was killed with a ice pick from behind. The ice pick hit his head many times. His head fell on the book and splashed his blood onto the last page. In a way, that made the book an absolutely authoritative biography of what he had been saying all along about how people had been killed. He was killed on the last page; he died on the book, and the first edition was printed with the blood marks.Stalin had never killed a single man before; he had never committed a single crime. In fact, his education had happened in a Catholic monastery – he was a Christian – and the monks had raised him. He lived in the monastery because his village was far away in the Caucasus, and the monastery was the only place where education was possible, so his father – he was a poor man – had left him there. The monks at the monastery, out of compassion, accepted the boy, trained him, educated him – and this is what he turned out to be. After gaining power he must have killed millions of people. There is no way to count them; he simply went on killing. Anybody, who was not for him, had to be killed. There was no other punishment. He made it very simple: “Either you are for me, or you are no longer.”The politician is basically a criminal. He is trying to find power through legal methods; that is the difference. The criminal does not bother about the legal methods, and gets caught. The politician never gets caught – or once in a while, like Nixon got caught in Watergate. And do you know what Mao Zedong said when Nixon was caught? “What is this? So much fuss about nothing. Every politician is doing it!” In fact every politician is doing it. Watergate was not something exceptional that Nixon was doing. All over the world, all the politicians who are in power are doing the same kinds of things; they are just not getting caught. It was a misfortune that he got caught, and couldn’t manage…In fact I have a certain respect for Nixon. A man like Stalin in Nixon’s place, or Mao Zedong, or Adolf Hitler, or Mussolini in Nixon’s place would have done something that you cannot imagine – and the idea must have crossed Nixon’s mind too. That is a simple method: when things were getting so hot, the best way would have been to drag the world into a war. Watergate would have gone down the drain; then who would have cared about Watergate? All that would have been needed was to divert people’s attention. That’s what those leaders would have done – immediately started a world war. Nixon would have remained the president and would have become the greatest president of America. If he had passed through the war and proved himself victorious, he would have proved himself the greatest man in the whole of history.I have a certain respect for the man: that he avoided the criminal idea that was bound to have come into his mind. I can guarantee it; it is so simple. I don’t know much politics; although I have been a student of politics I know nothing about active politics. But just being a student of politics, I know with absolute certainty that this idea was bound to have crossed his mind: just put the world into such chaos that Watergate becomes a small thing compared to the chaos that arises out of a world war. Then everybody would have forgotten about it.But the man seems to be much more moral than people have thought him to be. That’s why I say I have a certain respect for him. He decided rather to go down as the first president in American history to come out of the White House with such condemnation. But he accepted the condemnation, the worldwide notoriety, and did not drag the world into a war. He proved more a man than a politician, more human than any other politician would have proved.The criminal mind wants power because without power you cannot do anything. Just as the painter needs paints, and the poet needs a great vocabulary, language, the feel of different words and their nuances, the subtle undercurrents that run through words, so the politician knows perfectly well, deep inside, why he is after power. If you are not going to paint and you go on collecting paints, then you are crazy. If you are not going to play music and you go on collecting all kinds of musical instruments, you are mad.Why power? Just the other day I told you that Jawaharlal had invited me to come to se him, and I went. He listened to me. I was very young, and he was a great statesman, but he listened to me as silently, as intensly as if I knew much about politics and what had to be done in the country. He told me, “Why don’t you come into politics? Whatsoever you are saying, if you really want to do these things, then you will have to come into politics. Nobody else is going to do it for you, only you can do it. I can understand your ideas, but who is going to implement them? Join!”I said, “No, because I don’t have any interest in gaining power. Whatever I have said to you was just exposing my heart because you have the capacity, the power to do things, the understanding to do things. I simply exposed my heart. I have finished. I am not going to run after power. And I am not asking anybody else, I am asking you. If you feel I am right, then prove it by doing something.”He said, “You are right, but I cannot do these things, because the people through whose support I am standing will not support any of the ideas which you are giving to me. If they come to know that I am going to implement these ideas, I will simply be thrown out. Politics is a pyramid. It goes on becoming thinner and thinner: at the top there is one man. So, you see that one man at the top, but underneath him are three men; those three men have nine men underneath them; those nine men have ninety… And they are all depending on those who are lower than them. They are standing on their shoulders; they can be thrown off at any moment.”And in politics, once you have the power which you have got from so many people’s support you have to fulfill all those people’s desires. Somebody has supported you in order to get licenses, somebody has supported you to have an industry started; somebody has supported you for something else. Now you have to fulfill their desires. Otherwise, while you are standing on their shoulders, they can move away. The topmost man is a very weak person in a way; he has nothing above him to hold on to. Underneath are people who would not miss a single chance to throw him out, because if they can throw out this man, then one of those three who are under him will come to the top. So he has to fulfill all kinds of criminal things.I know, because that’s how Indira came to power – because she was living with her father. She was a born politician; her husband was not. While studying in England they fell in love. The husband was not even a Hindu, not a brahmin. Indira was a brahmin, a very high-caste brahmin, a Kashmiri brahmin. The man she fell in love with, Feroz Gandhi, was a Parsi. The whole family was against it – nobody had ever heard of a brahmin girl marrying a Parsi, a man who was not even a Hindu. It is a totally different religion.But she was the only daughter of Jawaharlal, and after Jawaharlal’s wife died – she died very early – Indira was the only person close to him. He stood by her and told her, “Don’t be worried about your grandfather and your grandmother. I will manage them. First get married. If you wait for their permission, it will be impossible; even I cannot manage to persuade them. And they will be hurt. It is better that you first get married, and when you come home, married, I will persuade them: ‘Nothing can be done now; the marriage has happened.’” That’s how they got married in the court.But Feroz Gandhi had no interest in politics. Just because he was the son-in-law of Jawaharlal he became a member of parliament, but he had no interest in it at all; that was not his thing. But for Indira that was the only thing. They started quarreling immediately, and fighting, and soon Indira moved to Jawaharlal’s house, the prime minister’s, house and left Feroz Gandhi. They lived separated, not divorced, but for years they were not seeing each other. All those years she was a watcher of all the politicians, and she was collecting information about each politician: his weakness, his crimes against the society, his exploitation of others, his corruption – and yet on the outside that man would go on keeping a pure Gandhian face.She was collecting a file – she showed me the file – against every leader, and that was her power. When Jawaharlal died all these politicians were afraid of Indira because she had the key. She could expose anybody before the public, before the court. She had all the evidence, she had all the letters. They were afraid of her for the simple reason that only she could save them; otherwise they would be exposed. That file was her power.I have looked into the file. All those people were exploiting that poor country. They all had bank balances in foreign countries, in Switzerland, in America. They all had connections outside India, from where they get bribes and money and everything, for giving secrets. They were all connected to one country or other; they were agents. They had one face before the masses, the poor masses; and their reality was something totally different. And they were also afraid because Indira was absolutely incorruptible. That was one thing she had learned from Jawaharlal. He was incorruptible because he was not a politician; he was more a poet. He would have loved to be a painter or a sculptor; any art would have been closer to his nature.Politics was just accidental to him, it was almost forced on him – it sometimes happens. Because he was interested in the independence of India, he fought against the British government, but with no idea that he was going to become the prime minister when the country became free. He had never thought about it. He was just a soldier of the freedom movement, as were many thousands of others. He might have been shot, he might have been killed, he might have been sentenced to death – anything could have happened. There was no question of power.When the fight for freedom was over, then the question arose of who was to be in power? Till then there was no question of power at all. The question was how to remove the invaders. He became interested because he was so sensitive a man that he loved the idea of freedom. It had nothing to do with politics; he loved the idea of freedom – as a poet. But when freedom came there was a great struggle for who should be the prime minister. There were people like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who was a real politician, a solid politician who could commit any crime. He did commit them when he became deputy prime minister. Even Jawaharlal could not stop him.And there were others, because in the freedom fight there were thousands of people of caliber. Jawaharlal was the only one who was not interested in politics, not interested in power. That’s why Gandhi chose him, because to choose those people who were really interested in power… In fact their fight for freedom was not a fight for freedom but just a step to reach power. It was a shock to all the politicians because none of them had been chosen by Gandhi to be the prime minister; and Gandhi had total control of the Indian mind.Sardar Patel was shocked because he was very close to Gandhi and he was also a Gujarati – Gandhi was a Gujarati – and he had served Gandhi his whole life with total trust. And at the last moment Gandhi simply said to Sardar, “Step down. Don’t fight with Jawaharlal. I will make you deputy prime minister but let Jawaharlal be the prime minister.“Why?” Patel asked.And the reason that Gandhi gave was right. He said, “He is the only one who is not interested in power. You will all be fighting with each other; he is the only one who is above all of you.”Because Gandhi said, “Be the prime minister,” Jawaharlal said okay. When Gandhi had said, in 1942, “Be the second soldier in the freedom fight” – the first was Vinoba Bhave – he said okay.Vinoba Bhave was not known at all in India up to that time. He was just an inmate in Gandhi’s ashram. He massaged Gandhi, bathed Gandhi, read scriptures to Gandhi, and because he was a Sanskrit scholar, explained to Gandhi what those scriptures meant. But as far as the country was concerned, he was an unknown person. Gandhi chose an anonymous person to be the first freedom fighter – that he would go to jail first – and the second would be Jawaharlal.Jawaharlal didn’t say, “This looks disrespectful toward me. This man, nobody knows” – and particularly Jawaharlal never liked Vinoba. Jawaharlal was almost a western man, educated in the West, brought up in the West; his lifestyle was western. In every possible way he was not an Indian, except that he was born in India. He was a meat-eater – because he lived in England and grew up in England there was no question of his being a vegetarian. He had every reason to dislike Vinoba, but there was no problem because Vinoba was doing different work. I have talked with both Vinoba and Jawaharlal, and both have confirmed that they had a dislike for each other.For example, Vinoba’s beard: Jawaharlal did not like it. He himself shaved twice a day, and a beard was not the right thing for him. He was very intolerant, impatient: the dress that Vinoba used was not the “right” dress. In the twentieth century you have to be a twentieth century man. Vinoba’s education was an orthodox brahmin education. He studied in Varanasi, in a Sanskrit college, and lived like an old Sanskrit scholar. He was not educated in western subjects, western languages, so there was nothing in common between the two. And to put this man first… Jawaharlal must have felt hurt but his devotion to Gandhi was unquestionable: if Gandhi chose Vinoba to be the first, then it had to be that way.If Gandhi had chosen Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to be the prime minister, Jawaharlal was not going to dispute it or say anything. He had actually offered to Gandhi, “Why create so much misery in these people? I can withdraw; they can choose anybody they want. I am not interested, I have never thought about it. I was fighting for freedom and freedom has come, I am happy.” So he was not corrupted by his prime ministership. He was the second man to Gandhi, and after Gandhi’s death he had the whole monopoly over the Indian mind.But Indira was a politician, a born politician. She dropped her husband and forgot about him; politics was more important than the husband. The whole love affair was finished when it became a question of choosing between them. And Feroz became insistent: “Either be with me or be with your father, the prime minister. I don’t care, but this cannot go on. The whole day you are there and you come here for a few minutes, just to say hello, and again you escape and you are in the prime minister’s house. You go on his travels with him but you never go anywhere with me.” He made it clear that the choice had to be made.Indira simply moved out. She said, “There is no question of choice; I belong to politics, and I am going into politics.” From her father she learned one thing: that no politician can pull you down if you are incorruptible. Let all of them be corruptible but you keep an eye out and go on collecting all the data about them. And that was her whole power; they could not discredit her because she had never done anything wrong, and she could discredit all of them. Politicians are legal constitutional criminals.Now this senator wants to throw me and my commune absolutely out from here. The way these people talk – they are senators – is the way of a fascist, communist, nazi. They talk about democracy, they talk about freedom of speech, they talk about respect for the individual, but I don’t think they belong to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln; they belong to Joseph Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. These people should put themselves in their proper line, and they should try to move Oregon to Russia, then only can they throw me and my commune out; otherwise there is no way.And who are they? But they are cashing in on us. Now, by telling the Oregonians that I have called all of them idiots, he is trying to cash in on us. I have not said that at all. But now I say: the first idiot, I have found. He himself has declared it. And I will wait for the second, because Oregon has two senators, so the second will be just around the corner. He is already late. This senator has come first in the race.My statement is so simple that even a child can understand it. I said the Oregonian idiot is a class in itself. How does he manage to understand from this statement that all Oregonians are idiots? Then what about me? Then what about you? We are all Oregonians. And we are going to remain Oregonians.These people can do, can say, anything. Our sannyasins were there in a hearing where he spoke. He had called the hearing and two or three of our sannyasins were present but they never participated because what is the point of participating in all these nonsensical things? It was so absurd a hearing – one cannot imagine how people go on tolerating such things.On our property we have a few small pieces of land which belong to the government, the federal government. They are leased for fifty years, and when we purchased the land, the lease also came to us. This hearing was about us not allowing people to approach the government land – a charge that was absolutely false, because even the officers who look after the government land said that we had never done anything illegal, we had never prevented anybody. And there is no reason for anybody to go to the bare land or hills.So we never participated and argued there, for the simple reason that the government office itself was arguing for us, that we had never done anything illegal and everything was absolutely as it should be – so there was no case at all. But all the bigots who have been against us since we came here were all present there, giving their evidence against us.This senator, before our sannyasins, was saying to the commissioners how they could manage to destroy the commune, the city. He was giving instructions to these people – in front of our people who were sitting there – about how they could do it and get around the law; how they could make our life impossible so that we had to leave.This is democracy. These are democratic people. They are the people who are looking after people’s needs. This is the democracy that has been described as “for the people, of the people, by the people.” I don’t know who these people are – certainly we are not the people.Osho,Since each of us is born alone and dies alone, and aloneness is the state of our being, what is the function of a commune?The function of the commune is exactly that: to make you aware of your absolute aloneness.The family does not allow you that. The family gives you the fallacy that you have a mother, you have a father, you have a husband, you have a brother, you have a sister – that you are not alone.The society gives you the idea that you are a member of the Rotary Club, the Lions Club; that you belong to this church, to that temple, to this congregation or that congregation – that you are not alone. The society provides you with all kinds of crowds to mingle with. You are republican, you are democrat, you are liberal, but you are not alone, all the republicans are with you.The function of the commune basically is to destroy all these fictions. Nobody is with you. You are alone, and you have to understand that this aloneness is so precious that you should not lose it.It does not mean that you cannot relate. It only means that you don’t believe in relationships. Try to see the distinction between the two.Relating is a flowing river. You can relate, and you can relate only because you are alone, because you are an individual – there is somebody who can relate from your side. And you can relate only to the person who understands his aloneness, otherwise you cannot relate.If you know your aloneness, and you fall in love with a woman who does not know her aloneness, this love is not going to go anywhere. This is going to be finished sooner that you can imagine, because the woman is asking for a relationship. The person who is lonely is asking for a relationship: “Fill the gap, I am lonely. Be part of my being.”But a person who is alone knows that neither you can fill anybody’s gap, nor can anybody else fill your gap. You can meet, but you will remain two alonenesses.And it is beautiful that two alonenesses can meet, two individuals can meet, but the meeting cannot be made solid, concrete. It cannot be reduced to a relationship, it will remain a relating. It will always remain a changing flux, a movement, because the other person is changing and you are changing. You are not static – though that’s what people expect.When two persons get married, both are getting married to a certain image which is going to change tomorrow. The woman you have married is not going to be the same tomorrow. She is alive, she is growing, she is moving – tomorrow will be tomorrow. But if you expect her to remain stuck here, in that moment when you signed the register in the court, you were trying to stop the clock.But even if you stop the clock, your clock is not running the time. Both will carry the image stuck in their minds, and they would like you to go on fulfilling that image. If, in some way, you differ from that image, then you are deceiving, cheating. Nobody can fulfill that image, it is impossible, it is against nature.The function of the commune is to give you the opportunity to be together, without any relationship. It gives you the opportunity to relate to people without getting fettered to people. It gives you the opportunity to know others, feel others, but without any bargain, without any bondage, without any imprisonment. You remain you; the other remains the other.It is good if we meet today, it is a joy to be together, but if it is not going to happen tomorrow then there is no need to go on weeping for spilled milk. It is pointless. Perhaps this meeting was meant to be only for this time. You remain a stranger, the other remains a stranger, and you don’t reduce each other into acquaintances.The strangeness is absolute, indestructible.So the commune is not another society. It is not providing you with a society, a club, a congregation, a party. No, it is simply providing you a space, and an understanding that all these people are lonely, just as you are. But don’t try to fill it, because if you try to fill it, you are trying to do something against nature and you will be miserable. Hence, don’t think in terms of loneliness; better to think in terms of aloneness.And to be alone is so beautiful; untrespassed, nobody trampling on you, you are left to be yourself and you leave others to be themselves. Yes, once in a while you meet…India has produced a few great geniuses in this century; one of them was Rabindranath Tagore. I love one of his novels – The Last Poem is the name of the novel:There are two persons: one, a young man, a poet, a philosopher, actually says what Rabindranath would like to say – he represents Rabindranath – and a woman who is in need of relationship. She is continually harassing him about marriage. And particularly in India, if a woman and a man are even seen walking together, that is enough for a scandal. They might not be doing anything, but just walking together and it is enough for a scandal; the whole town will be agog, and so many stories will start springing up from nowhere. And of course the woman suffers more because everywhere people start pointing at her.So she was desperate. She was saying, “Why do you go on postponing? You love me, you want to be with me. If you don’t love me, I will not force you.”And the man says, “I love you, that’s why I am not going to marry you.” Now, this is very difficult for the woman. If she had been from my commune she would have understood. But what kind of statement is this: because I love you I cannot marry you? But she goes on and on, so he says, “I will marry you on one condition.”They are sitting on the bank of a lake. He says, “I will make my house on this side of the lake and you make your house on the other side of the lake. Once in a while, walking, perhaps we may meet. Once in a while, perhaps I may knock on your door or you may knock on my door. Once in a while, perhaps I am in a boat and you are also in a boat, and we meet on the lake.But it always has to be without any prearrangement. It has not to be a dating. I will never inform you that I am coming; you will never inform me that you are coming. I will marry you on this condition only. For a few days we may not be able to see each other. You will never ask me, ‘Where have you been?’ I will never ask you where you have been. We will never interfere in each other’s freedom. We will remain as strangers, as we are now.”The woman said, “Then what is the purpose of marriage?” Naturally she cannot understand what the purpose of the marriage is.The purpose of marriage is to be in each other’s head twenty-four hours a day. The purpose of marriage is to destroy each other in the name of love: to nag, harass, fight. The man is suggesting exactly the right thing: “It will be a great joy suddenly seeing you on the lake. I will not be expecting it. Unexpectedly, I will find you in the jungle by the side of the lake.” Just to think of that unexpected moment, is relating. There is no relationship.He cannot send a message: “You have to come tonight because you are my wife, otherwise I am going to court.” In fact the husband cannot say to the wife, “Sleep in the other room.” That is enough to create trouble. The wife cannot say to the husband, “You cannot sleep in my bed.” That is enough for trouble, because we have completely forgotten a simple thing: our aloneness. And we are trying to forget it as much as possible – the very idea should be dropped. Aloneness is a natural phenomenon. And there is nothing painful about it. When you know it, it is the greatest bliss.The function of the commune is to give you the space, to give you the understanding, to give you the feel of aloneness, and the experience of relating without getting into relationship.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why are the common masses against you, when what you say appears to be the very truth?That’s precisely why: because it appears to be the very truth. Truth is dangerous, dangerous to all those people who have been living in fictions, beautiful lies, nice dreams, utopias.Truth is bound to be looked upon as an enemy by all these people, because it is going to shatter all that they have believed and lived for. Truth is just the death of all kinds of lies, howsoever consoling they may have been.Why were the common people against Socrates? Why were the masses so antagonistic to al-Hillaj Mansoor? Why were the orthodox, the religious, the respectable, against Jesus? Their only crime was they were saying something which was tremendously disturbing to people’s sleep. Nobody wants to be disturbed when he is having a beautiful dream. And people don’t have anything else except dreams.All around there have been dream merchants who have been selling dreams to people and exploiting people, and in return they were not giving anything. All the religions, up to now have been dream sellers, exploiters of people’s weaknesses. Yes, there are weaknesses. Every man who is born is going to die. You cannot hide the truth of death.How long can you make the cemeteries beautiful? Gardens, lawns, flowers, marble graves…but you cannot hide the fact of death. You can see that in every country the cemetery is outside the city. It should really be exactly in the middle of the city, so everybody passing by comes to be reminded of death again and again – because that is the only thing that is certain. Everything else is just probable; may happen, may not happen. But death is not a probability.Death is the only certainty in your whole life.Whatsoever happens, death is going to be there. You cannot escape from it. You cannot go anywhere away from it. Death will meet you wherever you go.I am reminded of an ancient parable:A very great king dreamed that death was standing before him – a dark figure. He became frightened even in his dream. But he was a brave man; somehow he gathered his courage together and asked this strange figure, “Who are you and what do you want?”The figure said, “I am your death, and I have come to warn you: Don’t forget the right place, and the right time to meet me.” Only this much he said, “Don’t forget the right place and the right time to meet me tomorrow.” And the shock of his statement was such that the dream was shattered, the king woke up. It was in the middle of the night but he immediately called his wise advisers, astrologers, dream-interpreters, future-predictors, all sorts of people; and he told his dream.They all started quarreling and discussing and arguing about what the dream meant. The old servant of the king, who had been almost like a father to him – he had raised him from his very childhood… The king’s mother died early, and his father was constantly going on faraway journeys, invading countries, conquering, expanding the empire. So he was left with this trustworthy servant and he treated him almost like a father.The old man was standing by his side. He whispered into the king’s ear, “Don’t waste time! These people can quarrel for centuries; they have been quarreling for centuries. These philosophers, these astrologers, these prophets – they have never agreed on anything. And it is going to be morning; tomorrow is just going to begin and there is not much time. My suggestion is: take your fastest horse and escape from this place.” The advice appeared to be solid: “And let these people argue. They are not going to come to any conclusion at all. The evening will come soon – they will take centuries – and there will be no conclusion. If you depend on them, you will repent; just escape! Leave these people here, let them argue and I will listen to their arguments.”The king simply slipped away, took his fastest horse and rushed as fast as it was possible, away from the palace where the dream had happened. By the evening he had gone hundreds of miles, and he was very happy that he had come so far away: “Now it will be difficult for death to find me at the place, at the fixed time.”The sun was setting. He had reached the outskirts of the city of Damishk. Just to rest…because the whole day he had not eaten, he had not even taken a cup of water. Time was so precious. Thirst is not going to kill you in just one day; hunger is not going to kill you in just one day. He was going to rest in a garden just outside the city. He went into the garden and was tying the horse to a tree, and was thanking the horse, because the horse was perhaps really the best horse in the world. He was thanking the horse and saying to him, “You really proved your mettle today. Even I was not aware that you could go so fast. Now rest, and I will arrange for your food and for your water.”Just then, he felt a hand on one of his shoulders. He looked back. The same black figure was standing there, laughing. The king was shocked; he said, “Why are you laughing?”Death said, “This is the place and this is the time. I was worried whether you would be able to make it or not – but your horse certainly is the best horse in the world. I also thank him.”Where can you escape? Perhaps wherever you are going, there is the right place and the right time. In fact every place is the right place for death, and every time is the right time.Now, facts like death… Religions have been trying to console you, giving you ideas that can help you to create a buffer between you and the fear of death – shock absorbers – so that you don’t get continually shocked; otherwise life would become impossible. So, all kinds of fictions have been woven into mythologies, into theologies. Anybody saying the truth is bound to cut through all these cobwebs, these mythologies, these fictions.And when you suddenly see the naked truth, you are going to be against the person who has brought you such a shocking gift. You would like to believe that it is not true, but you know it is. Hence the anger; otherwise there was no need to kill Socrates.If you are right, and you know that you are right, then let this man befool himself with his “truth” – it does not matter to you. The people of Athens believed in an afterlife, as did the people of the whole earth. Everybody, except the atheists, believed in an afterlife of some kind. The Greek mythology was rich, but Socrates said, “Nothing can be said about death because nobody has ever returned. So we have to keep our minds open. We cannot accept any fiction about death and life after death, because there has not been a single eyewitness. Until I die, I cannot say whether one lives after death or not. If I die, then there is no question, no problem arises – I am simply not there.“What about before you were born?” His argument was solid. In what trouble were you: what anxiety, what anguish, what suffering? You know that there is no question of any suffering or any anguish before you were born. Who was going to suffer, and who was going to be in anxiety and anguish? You were not there!Socrates just simply looked at death with the same vision. If you are simply finished, as the atheists say; if you completely disappear, if nothing of you remains, then there is no problem because you are not there. All problems, all anxieties disappear. This is one possibility.The other possibility is that perhaps the theists are right, and you survive. But then too, he said, “I don’t see any problem. You are surviving right now, and somehow you are managing your misery, your anxiety, your problems; somehow you are managing. And if you are there, you will be experienced, more experienced; you will still be able to manage.”So he said, “I don’t see any problem to be bothered about. Either I die, then there is no question, or I will be there, more experienced, wiser. And I can trust myself. If I could pass through life, I will pass through death too. But I cannot say anything before I have experienced it. And I cannot promise you either, that when I have experienced it I will be able to come back and tell you, because up to now nobody has come back. Perhaps there is no way to come back. Perhaps the very bridge falls as you pass, all communication becomes impossible – but nothing can be said about it.”He would not say anything definitely, and that was the problem that he was creating in people’s minds. He was creating anxiety. That was one of the points raised against his being in Athens: “He should be expelled or sentenced to death, because this man has been creating anxiety and anguish in people’s minds. People who were perfectly happy doing their work, comfortably… This man meets them, and once he has met them, they are never at ease again.”And this was a routine thing for Socrates: just to go around the town, to catch hold of anybody and ask him any question. Even if the other person wanted to escape, Socrates wouldn’t allow it: “You have to answer!” And then, once you had answered a question, he would hammer your answer from every possible angle and soon you were left without any answer. Then he would tell you, “You can come to my school” – he had a school – “if you want to learn, because your answer was absolutely bogus. Some idiot has sold that answer to you and cheated you. You have been living a lie.”Yes, lies can be comfortable; can be very convenient. Truth, in the beginning, is very inconvenient, is very uncomfortable, but in the end it is the ultimate blessing.We can summarize: a lie is always sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end; the truth is bitter in the beginning, sweet in the end. But you need patience for the end. If you are impatient, then you are going to buy some lie.The common masses have no mind of their own. For centuries they have been conditioned, hypnotized, brainwashed continuously. So when a man like me says something, it needs guts in the first place even to hear it. Then it needs tremendous courage to absorb it, because it is bitter, it goes against all your conditioning.So only a very few people who are really seekers of truth will be ready to go through all this turmoil. Everything will go upside down: their God, their heaven, their hell, their Devil, their messiahs, their prophets.A thick wall exists between you and truth. And all these people are standing between you and the truth. You will have to tell them, “Get lost! Go to Oregon!” That is my translation for “Go to hell,” because that has become too old. We should continue to make proverbs fresh.A Christian will have to put Christ aside; it is very difficult. It was difficult for Jews to put Moses aside when Jesus was telling them something far truer. It was difficult to put Moses aside, now the same problem arises for the Christian: it is difficult for him to put Jesus aside. And Jesus’ claim is far more than Moses ever claimed. Moses never claimed that he was the only begotten son of God.Jesus claims that he is the only begotten son of God. Can you put it aside and tell Jesus, “Go to Oregon”? It will be difficult. Rather than doing that, you would prefer me to leave Oregon. That’s what your politicians are trying to do; they are telling me, “Leave Oregon.” That seems to be simpler, because with me they have no ties. I have not sold them any sweet dreams. I have not promised them anything, nor am I promising them now.My whole work is to demolish: to demolish all the lies that are surrounding you and not to replace them by anything else, but to leave you utterly naked in your aloneness. To me, only in your aloneness will you be able to know the truth – because you are the truth.You have not to go anywhere to find truth. Neither Jesus can give it to you, nor Krishna can give it to you, nor Buddha can give it to you, nor I can give it to you. It is not a commodity that somebody can just give to you. Just think: if truth is a commodity, a thing which can be given to you, then it can be stolen, it can be taken back, it can be lost – anything can happen to it.But nothing happens to truth. It happens to you, but nothing happens to it. It cannot be stolen; it cannot be purchased.There is a story in Mahavira’s life…One of the very famous kings, Bimbisara, had conquered the whole of India and the neighboring countries. He had made a vast empire. He was a man who, once he wanted something, would have it. He had never come across anything that he wanted and could not find a way to get. He had heard many times about Mahavira, who was just resting for the rainy season outside the city, his capital.He inquired, “What has this man got? – because I see thousands of people going to him.”Somebody said, “He has got the truth.”Bimbisara said, “Then there is no problem. How much is he asking for it? I am ready to pay. There is no question of bargaining, simply inquire how much he wants for it.”The man could not say to the king, “You are talking like a fool.” He said, “It is better, your majesty, that you go to him and you negotiate. I am a poor man; don’t put me in this situation. You are a great king; he is a great tirthankara, a great soul which rarely happens. Only twenty-four persons reach that height in one cycle of existence.”He is saying that in millions and millions of years, only twenty-four…and he is the last for this cycle. Now there is not going to be another man of his caliber again in this cycle of existence. When this whole existence burns out – when all these stars and galaxies and solar systems have gone, disappeared, and a new creation starts from scratch – then the first tirthankara will appear. “Now this man is very rare because for millions of years there is not going to be another comparable to him. So it is better you go.”Bimbisara went with all his paraphernalia, and he was respectful to Mahavira – just a formality. In India even if a king goes to a sage, he has to touch the feet of the sage; that is just a formality. And he said, “I have come for a simple thing. Give me your truth, and whatsoever you want – even if you ask for my whole empire – I will give it to you. This is my whole life’s standpoint: anything that I want, I have to have it. It matters not what it is going to cost.”Mahavira laughed, he said, “You unnecessarily came this far. In your very capital lives one of my disciples. He has got the truth; and he is a very poor man – he may be ready to sell it; I am not ready to sell it. And you must know that I am also the son of a king. I was going to inherit the kingdom of my father; I renounced it to get the truth. Now, how can I sell it for a kingdom? Even if you give me the whole kingdom, how can I sell it? I have already renounced a whole kingdom to get this truth, and after forty years of struggle, I have found it. I cannot sell it.”Mahavira must have had a sense of humor that Jainas have missed completely. He sent him back to the poor man in the capital. The king had never gone to that quarter of the capital, because only the poorest, the very poor, in fact the outcasts, lived there. His golden chariot was standing there before the poor man’s hut. The poor man came running, and Bimbisara said, “Rejoice! I am ready to give anything you want, just give me the truth. Your master has sent me; I have come from Mahavira.”The poor man said, “My master must have joked with you. Perhaps he did not want to hurt you before so many people because you had gone with your whole court, all your advisers, ministers, generals. He did not want to hurt you or say no to you. That’s why he has sent you to me. I can give my life if you want. I am just your poor servant; I clean your streets. You can ask for my life and it is here, ready. You can cut off my head – but truth…? Yes, I have got it, but the very quality of truth is such that it cannot be given. Not that I don’t want to give it to you; I am absolutely willing.“If you can take it, take it. You can kill me; if you find it inside me, so far so good – I am ready. I will be happy that I had the chance to serve you so intimately and so closely. But I warn you, you will not find it there because the truth has to be authentically yours, only then is it true. If it is somebody else’s, then it is no longer true. My truth cannot be your truth. The moment I say something about the truth, you only hear the words; the truth is left behind. The truth can never be squeezed into words, there is no way.”Words have been reaching the common people and they have believed that those words are the truth – somebody believing in the words of Jesus, somebody in the words of Buddha, somebody in the words of Mohammed – but they are not the truth.No book contains truth; no word can ever contain it. But you become satisfied, and whenever somebody disturbs your satisfied state, you are angry. And of course you have the majority of people with you. That helps you tremendously – so many people cannot be wrong. But truth never happens to crowds, it happens only to individuals. Whenever truth comes, it comes in the vibe of an individual, so that individual is always standing against the whole crowd.Otherwise, the whole crowd is with you, because they have also been fed with the same kind of stuff. The Catholics: how many are they? – perhaps six hundred million. Now, any Catholic has a great consolation, that six hundred million people are with him. Six hundred million people cannot be wrong. And against one person… Naturally they feel that this person is a disturbance. It is better to finish with this person and go to sleep, back to their dreams.It is not new to me. From my very childhood I have been in the same position…My father would take me with him if he went to some ceremony, some marriage, some birthday party, anywhere. He would take me on the condition that I should remain absolutely silent: “Otherwise, please remain at home.”I would say, “But why? Everybody is allowed to talk, except me!”He said, “You know, I know, and everybody knows why you are not allowed to talk: because you are a disturbance.”“But,” I said, “in things which concern me, you promise me that you will not interfere with me, and I will promise you that I will remain silent.”And many times it happened that he had to interfere. For example, if some elderly man was there – a faraway relative, but in India it doesn’t matter – my father would touch his feet, and would say, “Touch his feet.”I would say, “You are interfering with me, and our contract is finished. Why should I touch this old man’s feet? If you want to touch them, you can touch them twice, thrice; I will not interfere, but why should I touch his feet? Why not his head?”And that was enough of a disturbance. Everybody would explain to me that he was old. I said, “I have seen many old people. Just in front of my house there is an old elephant; I never touch his feet. That elephant belongs to a priest; it is a very old elephant. I never touch his feet, and he is very wise – I think wiser than this old man. Old age does not just give him any quality.“A fool remains a fool – perhaps becomes more foolish as he grows old. An idiot becomes more idiotic as he grows old, because you cannot remain the same, you are going to grow. And the idiot, when he becomes senile, his idiocy is multiplied. And that is the time when he becomes very respectable. I am not going to touch the feet of this old man unless it is proved to me why I should.”Once I went to a funeral; one of my teachers had died. He was my Sanskrit teacher – a very fat man, funny looking, and funnily dressed in the way of old brahmins, ancient brahmins, with a very big turban. He was a laughingstock in the whole school, but he was very innocent too. The Hindi word for innocent is bhole, so we used to call him Bhole. As he entered the class, the whole class would recite loudly, “Jai Bhole” – long live Bhole. And of course he could not punish all the students; otherwise, how was he going to teach, whom was he going to teach?He died. So naturally, thinking that as he was my teacher I would behave, my father didn’t ask for the contract. But I could not, because what happened there I had not expected – nobody had expected it. His dead body was lying there when we arrived. His wife came out running and fell upon him and said, “Oh my Bhole!”Everybody remained silent but I could not. I tried hard, but the harder I tried, the more difficult it was. I burst out laughing and I said, “This is great.”My father said, “I had not made a contract with you thinking that as he was your teacher you would be respectful.”I said, “I am not disrespectful, but I am surprised by the coincidence. Bhole was his nickname and he used to get angry about it. Now the poor fellow is dead and his wife is calling him Bhole, and he cannot do anything. I am just feeling sorry for him.”Every place I used to go with him he always made the contract; and he was the first party to break it, because something or other would happen and he would have to say something. And that was enough, because that was the condition: that he was not to interfere with me.A Jaina monk was in town. Jaina monks sit on a very high pedestal, so that even standing you can touch their feet with your head – at least a five-foot, six-foot-high pedestal, and they sit on it. Jaina monks move in a group, they are not allowed to move alone: five Jaina monks move together. That is a strategy so that the four keep an eye on the fifth to see that nobody tries to get a Coca-Cola – unless they all conspire. And I have seen them conspiring and getting Coca-Cola, that’s why I remember it.They are not even allowed to drink in the night and I have seen them drinking Coca-Cola in the night. In fact, in the day it was dangerous to drink Coca-Cola – what if somebody saw it – so only in the night… And I had supplied it myself, so there was no problem about it. Who else would supply them? No Jaina would be ready to do it, but they knew me, and they knew that any outrageous thing, and I would be ready to do it.So five pedestals were there. But one monk was sick, so when I went there with my father, I went to the fifth pedestal and sat on it. I can still remember my father and the way he looked at me – he could not even find words: “What to say to you?” And he could not interfere with me, because I had not done any wrong to anybody. Just sitting on a pedestal, a wooden pedestal, I was not hurting anybody or anything. He came close to me and he said, “It seems, contract or no contract, you are going to do whatsoever you intend, so from now on we will not make the contract, because it is absolutely pointless.”And those four monks were in such uneasiness and they also could not say anything – what to say? One of them finally said, “This is not right. No one who is not a monk should sit on an equal level.” So they told my father, “Bring him down.”I said, “Think twice. Remember the bottle!” I had supplied the Coca-Cola.They said, “Yes, that’s right, we remember the bottle. Sit on the pedestal as long as you please.”My father said, “What bottle?”I said, “You ask these people. I have a double contract: one with you and one with them, and nobody can prevent me. All four of you agree that I can sit here, or I will start saying the name of the bottle.”They said, “We are perfectly satisfied. You can sit here, there is no harm – but please keep silent about the bottle.”Now, many people were there, and they all became interested – what bottle? When I came out of the temple everybody gathered; they all said, “What is this bottle?”I said, “This is a secret. And this is my power over these fools whose feet you go on touching. If I want, I can manage to tell them to touch my feet, otherwise – the bottle…” These fools!My father, on the way home, asked me, “You can just tell me; I will not tell anybody. What is this bottle? Do they drink wine?”I said, “No. Things have not gone that far, but if they remain here a few days more, I will manage that too. I can force them to drink wine; otherwise I will name the bottle.”The whole town was discussing the bottle, what the bottle was, and why they had become afraid: “We have always thought that they were such spiritual sages, and this boy made them afraid. And they all agreed that he could sit there, which is against the scriptures.” Everybody was after me. They were ready to bribe me: “Ask whatsoever – you just tell us what is the secret of the bottle.”I said, “It is a very great secret, and I am not going to tell you anything about it. Why don’t you go and ask your monks what the bottle is? I can be there, so they cannot lie – and then you will know what kind of people you are worshipping. And these are the people who are conditioning your mind.”In the university there used to be a professor who wanted to resign because of me. He was a very old, senior professor, and very much honored. Perhaps he is still alive. His name was Doctor S. N. L. Shrivastava; he was a PhD, DLitt. In philosophy he was a well known name – and he threatened to resign because of me.His condition to the university was that if I was not expelled from the university, then this was his resignation: only one could live in the university, either I or he. And I was just a student, only a first-year student. I had just matriculated from my village and had come to the bigger town. And within three months he became such a mess that when he saw me he would get out of the class.I would run after him and ask him, “What is the matter? Why are you going away? I pay the fee. You are supposed to teach, I am supposed to learn, and all that I do is learning. If I ask a question, it is just to learn.”“But,” he said, “you ask questions which always put me in such a dilemma. If I say yes, then I am caught; if I say no, then I am caught. Each question is just to provoke other questions, and there is no end to it. Three months have passed; you don’t allow me to go any further than the first day. We are still stuck there; and I know that there is not going to be anything else for the two years you are going to be here with me. You won’t let that first day be finished. So it is better…”“But,” I said, “you are so learned, with so many degrees, honorary degrees, and thirty years’ teaching experience, you must have passed so many students – why are you so disturbed? If you don’t know, you can simply say ‘I don’t know.’ Your only trouble is that you cannot say ‘I don’t know.’ I am not your trouble. You want to keep the pretension that you know everything, and the fact is nobody knows everything, not even you know everything.”He was teaching us Aristotelian logic; he was the professor of logic and philosophy. And in India, for the first two years you have to learn logic, so those two years, the first two years, are devoted to Aristotle and his logic. And I said to him that even Aristotle was not all-knowing; he was as ignorant as anybody else. He writes in his book that women have one tooth less than men.Now look at the fool. He had two wives; he could have told Mrs. Aristotle One or Mrs. Aristotle Two, “Just open your mouth.” And in fact women are always keeping their mouths open; there was no need to say it. If he was afraid he could have counted them in the night when they were asleep. But no, in Greece it was believed, traditionally believed, that a woman had to be, in everything, smaller than man, lower than man. How could she have exactly the same number of teeth as a man? So he never bothered to check.I asked Shrivastava, “This man, you say, is a logician, the father of logic? It is such a simple thing that even a very mediocre man would think that the first thing was to count the teeth; then he could have written it. And what was he doing with two wives anyway? Without counting their teeth he just believed public opinion. And for thousands of years in Greece, this was the opinion – nobody bothered to count them. But it is simply strange that neither any man nor any woman bothered to. At least some woman should have counted them, and said that this was absolutely absurd nonsense.But he said, “It is enough and I don’t want to listen any more. I am going to the vice-chancellor to give my resignation. Either he expels you or I resign.”He didn’t come for three days, so the vice-chancellor called me. I asked him, “What is my misdeed? Expel me – there is no problem with that – but please tell me what I have done wrong? Have I asked any single question which was not related to logic? And if I have come to learn logic, I have to ask questions because my doubts should be satisfied. Otherwise the man should say that he does not know, and I am allowing that. Once he says, ‘I don’t know,’ I will not raise that question again. He is not courageous enough even to say, ‘I don’t know.’ And now there is the threat that he will resign.“He knows that he is a valuable professor. If he resigns in the middle of the term, where are you going to get a man of the same caliber? He knows that against a student who has been in the college only three months, it is going to be decided in his favor. But,” I said, “it is not going to be easy. Then my fight, which was going on with S.N.L. Shrivastava, will start with you. I will be here in your office every day. You will have to give me in writing what the reasons are that I have been expelled.”He was a really nice and intelligent man. He said, “I don’t see that there is any reason for you to be thrown out and I would be the last person to expel you. But please understand my situation: we cannot lose that professor. So do one thing… I will not expel you; I will make arrangements with another college. You have not to do anything, but just do me a favor: I will make arrangements in another college, and you move to that other college. Jabalpur University has at least twenty colleges, so you can choose any college you want.”I said, “It is not a question of my choosing any college. Phone all these principals to see if anybody is ready to accept me, because now everybody knows about this S.N.L. Shrivastava thing: that the best professor of philosophy in the university is ready to resign. Then who is going to take me? You try; I am ready.”Out of twenty colleges, only one principal was ready to accept me – on the condition that I would never go to the class. He would give me the percentage needed, but I should never go to the class.I said, “That is a perfect arrangement. I myself don’t like unnecessarily bothering to go and then finding idiots there who don’t know what they are doing, what they are teaching. So this is a good arrangement; you can make it. But remember, I am not going to pay the fees. I am doing you a favor, so you arrange for the fees for two years. I will never go to that college; you arrange for the fees, and you take care of everything. After two years I will come to you. If anything goes wrong, then you will be responsible.”He said, “I will take every responsibility” – and he took every responsibility.After two years I went to him and said, “Give me my permission card to enter the examination. I have not been going to that college; I have not even seen that college.”This is the common mass – even educated people belong to the common mass – they don’t have integrity, intelligence or even the courage to say, “I don’t know.” Now this condition, I know, had come from the professor. The principal had asked the professor, “Can we accept this student? This is the trouble…”And the professor said, “I don’t want any trouble in my class. You can accept him only on the condition that he never comes to the class.”And now, just before I left India, I read an article by the same professor, Soleri is his name, proudly declaring that I was his student. I have not seen his face, he has not seen my face; I have never been in his class or on his college campus or around there. And now he is proud that I have been his student and that he always knew that I was going to be somebody special. These fools! They can lie so easily. But their whole lives are full of lies.The common masses are, in a way, innocent. But the pedagogues, the priests, the politicians – these are the people who go on poisoning the common masses and keep them at the level of a mob.What we call democracy has not yet come to the point of being a democracy. It is still, everywhere, only a mobocracy, because the mass that elects the people is a mob; it is not yet alert or aware.Just a few days ago there was an election here. What I heard was that before the election on the sixth of November, on the night of the fifth of November, in front of the Wasco County Court, all the Christian congregations gathered. All the priests – who are enemies of each other, continually fighting, arguing about who is right, who is wrong and who is closer to Christ and God and who is not closer, and who is really orthodox and who has just gone astray – they all gathered there together: all the priests, with all their congregations before the county courthouse – for what? – to pray against the Antichrist, to save Wasco County.Now who is the Antichrist in Wasco County? And Wasco County needs to be saved from the Antichrist? I really enjoyed it, that they are all praying for me – because I don’t think there is anybody else who can claim to be the Antichrist. But I am a little crazy. They say I am anti-Christ, anti-Buddha, anti-Mahavira, anti-Krishna, anti-Semite. Anything – just put anti before it and it refers to me. And in reality I am just for myself and not against anybody. I don’t care a bit about Christ, so why should I be anti-Christ? I don’t care about anybody. They never cared about me, why should I care about them?These people go on… The journalists asked the priests, “Who is the Antichrist?” and they were not even courageous enough to utter my name. They just went round and round answering, “We are just praying so that the county is saved from evil forces.” Why only Wasco County? Are all the evil forces gathered here in Wasco County? They should have gone to the White House in Washington and prayed there, because if all the evil forces are gathered anywhere, there are two places: the Kremlin and the White House. And if the world is going to suffer, it is going to suffer from the Kremlin and the White House.But the strangest thing about these priests is: in the Second World War in England they were praying to God, the Christian God, for England’s victory, for Winston Churchill’s safety. And the Christians in Rome, where the pope is, in the Vatican, were praying for Mussolini’s safety and his victory – to the same Christian God. Not only that, Adolf Hitler was being blessed by the Christian bishops, and they were praying for his victory – to the same Christian God. Now what happened to that Christian God? He must have committed suicide! How to decide? – all are his people, and his agents are praying. In whose favor is he going to decide?And Christians don’t see the point that when Adolf Hitler is in power, then the Christian priest prays for Adolf Hitler. He is just a coward. He could not say, “I will not pray for you and the ideology you stand for. I am going to pray that you should be defeated.” But no, brave people don’t become priests; they have other, better things to do. These are cowards. And these cowards go on poisoning other people’s minds; they make other people cowards. They have destroyed the whole of humanity and made it into a madhouse.So if the masses are against me, it is expected. It cannot be otherwise, it is natural.What is unexpected is that there are a few people all around the world who are able to stand with me, who are courageous enough to put their prejudices aside and listen to me, who are intelligent enough to recognize the truth when they come across it – whatsoever the cost and whatsoever the consequence.In fact, nobody before me had such intelligent people as I have around the world, people of such caliber, so receptive, so willing to go through the fire test.Yes, it is walking on fire when you go toward truth.It is going to burn you; it is going to burn you completely. And then that which remains unburned, alive, is your reality. Everything else, which got burned, was rubbish poured over you by others. Nobody can burn the truth, but to attain the truth you will have to drop so many things, so many burdens.But I am fortunate that at least one percent of humanity is almost ready to jump and create the first religion of the world: a religion of truth, consciousness – with no lies about God, heaven, hell, the Devil – just the purest twenty-four-carat truth.Even one percent around the earth is a tremendous force. You should not think that it is only one percent against ninety-nine percent. No, those ninety-nine percent are nothing because they don’t have any fire of their own. They are dead before death; they are just walking corpses.This one percent is tremendously powerful because it is alive.The fire in it is going to transform the whole world. And those ninety-nine percent don’t count at all.So I am not concerned with what the masses think about me. I am concerned only about the one percent of intelligent people in the world – what they think about me.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is renunciation? What is its place in your religion?The idea of renunciation is one of the fundamentals of all pseudo-religions. Its phenomenology has to be understood very deeply.All the religions have been preaching a division between this world and that world which is beyond death – between the soul and the body. The body belongs to this world, the soul belongs to that world; hence if you want to achieve the world beyond death, which is eternal, and the happiness there is unending, then the happiness here is not worth calling happiness; it is momentary, it is dream stuff. It comes, and even before you have been able to grasp it, it is gone. It is illusory; it is a kind of mirage in the desert.When you are far away you see a lake of water. You are thirsty and great hope arises in you. And the lake is absolutely real as far as you can see, because the proof of its reality, that water is there, is that the trees are being reflected in the water. If there is a mountain by the side, the mountain is reflected in the lake, the sun is reflected in the lake. What more proof do you need? Without water these reflections cannot happen. You rush with great hope, but as you come nearer, you find the lake is receding; the distance between you and the lake remains the same.It was just an illusion created by sunrays reflected back from the hot desert sand. When sunrays are reflected back, they move like waves, and their movement from far away creates the illusion of water. And in their wave-like movement they attain the quality of reflecting things; they become just like a mirror. That is one half of the mirage.The other half is in your thirst. If you were not thirsty, perhaps you would have been able to detect, to find out that it was a mirage. You have seen mirages before; you know that mirages can appear almost as if they are real – but your thirst is there. The physical phenomenon of the returning rays of the sun gives half the reality to the mirage. The other, and the far more important half, is contributed by you and your thirst. You want to believe that it is true. Even if somebody was there trying to prove that it was not real, you would feel angry with this man: you are thirsty and the water is there and he is trying to prove that the water is illusory. He does not know what thirst means – perhaps he is not thirsty. There is no way to convince a thirsty man that what he is seeing is not the real thing. All that you see is not necessarily real. Appearance does not mean reality.The religions have been saying to people for millions of years, that the happiness in this world is of the same nature as a mirage in the desert. That’s why you are never capable of catching hold of it. You never get hold of happiness in your fist; it comes and goes. You can feel it like a breeze, but by the time you become aware that it is here, it is already gone. Perhaps it is more unreal than the mirage. A mirage at least has some reality – the reflected sunrays contribute half, and your thirst, the other half. But in your so-called happiness of this world, you are contributing one hundred percent; there is nothing else there which contributes anything.And you know it. Today a woman is so beautiful to you that you can say Cleopatra was nothing before her. She seems to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Not only today – you cannot conceive that there could have been any woman more beautiful ever, or could be in the future. You are projecting, because the same woman to others is nothing; and the same woman tomorrow will be nothing to you too. And then you will be surprised, shocked – what happened? What happened to the woman? Nothing has happened to the woman, she is the same person – something has happened to you.Yesterday you were thirsty; lust was being projected. Today the lust is fulfilled; now there is no biological projection. The woman is an ordinary woman and the happiness that you got was just from your projection – you created the whole game. The woman, at the most, played the part of an inactive participant; she allowed you to project yourself upon her. Perhaps she was also projecting her mind upon you so it was a projection from both sides. Sooner or later it is going to disappear because projections cannot last once their basic cause is missing.The basic cause is in your biology; and biology doesn’t bother about love and poetry and romance, or anything – biology means business! Biology is not interested in foreplay and afterplay: a sheer wastage. Biology is interested in reproduction. Once biology has done its work, it withdraws; the projection disappears. Then you are standing there, the same woman is standing there – but nothing is any longer the same. Where has the happiness disappeared to?You were feeling like you were on the top of Everest, and you have fallen to the depths of the Pacific. The woman deceived you and the woman thinks you deceived her; and you both try to dump on each other. Nobody has deceived; both have been deceived by biology. But biology is not somebody outside you; it is intrinsic to your body. You are a projection of two other biologies, those of your father, your mother, and they were a projection of two other biologies. It is a continuum, a river-like flow.The religions tried to exploit this fundamental truth. It is true that romance and poetry… And the so-called love affair is just a shadow of biology. So it is not very difficult: a certain injection with certain hormones can create all the poetry right now, all the romance. Another injection – and you fall into the Pacific! Now we know a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man; just a little change of hormones, just a little change of chemistry.Religions exploited this simple truth. It is true, but rather than explaining it to you, they exploited it. They said, “This is momentary happiness. Don’t run after it; you are wasting your time. The real world is beyond death.” Why beyond death? Because death will destroy all your biology, physiology, chemistry; everything that is material, death will take away. Only the spiritual will be left behind and the spiritual knows the eternal. The material, the physical, knows only the momentary.It appeared very logical; the first part is true, the second part is fictitious. Yes, it is true that moments of happiness in this life are very fleeting, but that does not mean that there is another life beyond death where these moments become eternal. There is no evidence for it. At least these moments are there, are experienced by everyone. Howsoever small and fleeting, they exist. Nobody can deny their existence. You can say they are made of the same stuff as dreams are made of – but still they are there. Even dreams have a reality of their own. They are there, and they affect you; and when something affects you it becomes real.For example, you are hungry. The whole day you have not been able to eat anything; you are tired, you fall asleep. Now, the body is hungry and wants food. The mind creates a beautiful dream that you are a guest in a great feast. The mind is serving you because if the mind is not going to create the dream, your sleep will be disturbed – the hunger is there. Somehow you have to be convinced that you are eating, that you are not hungry. Your sleep remains undisturbed. The dream is doing something real. How can something unreal do something real? It is not possible – but a dream has its own existence. Yes, it is different from a rock, but so is a roseflower different from a rock. The dream is even more different; but it affects you, it affects your life, it affects your lifestyle – and those changes are real.So, one thing to be remembered: in this life there are momentary pleasures, fleeting experiences of happiness, sudden explosions of joy – but you cannot catch hold of them.You cannot keep them in your safe deposit. You cannot make them permanent. Just because you cannot make them permanent, religions have exploited you. It was a very cunning strategy. You want to make them permanent; your deepest desire is to remain happy for ever, not to know pain, sadness, anguish – ever. Just to be always in paradise – that is your desire.The religions exploited this. They said, “There is such a place, but you cannot get anything without paying for it.” It looks perfectly mathematical, economical. The religions started teaching that you sacrifice this life if you want to attain the permanent world of paradise that is beyond death. And it is very cheap, because what you are sacrificing are just momentary, once in a while, fleeting experiences.If you collect all the moments of happiness in seventy years of your life, perhaps you may not get even seven moments which you can be absolutely certain were of the nature of ecstasy.In seventy years of life, not even seven moments? Then what have you been doing here – torturing yourself and others? Yes, you cannot find even seven moments, because the nature of those moments is such that when they are there, they take you over totally, they possess you – yes, that is the right word – they possess you completely. But when they are gone, they dispossess you as completely as they had possessed you, so only a memory is left. And how long can you live on the memory which proved so deceptive?After a few days you start doubting whether it happened or: “Was I just imagining?” Because in your whole life’s experience that moment is so contradictory: years pass, then one moment perhaps… And that too is not in your hands; when and where it is going to happen, you cannot decide. So, years of dragging, and a certain moment which has remained just a memory… Slowly, slowly, even the smoke of memory starts disappearing.So even if you ask a man seventy years old, he cannot say that there were even seven moments. And as you become older, there is less and less possibility of those moments. There is more and more disillusionment, more and more disappointment. In the future there is only death and darkness, and in the past nothing but deception.The religions had a beautiful space through which to exploit you – and they did well all over the world. For thousands of years they have found the greatest business – greater than anybody else’s: they have been selling you paradise, and almost for nothing.All they ask is: “Renounce this momentary life and the eternal world of ecstasy is yours.” Hence renunciation became a foundational belief: the more you renounce, the more you become worthy, and the more you can be certain that you are coming closer. So people have tried to renounce everything.Mahavira was going to be the king. His father was old, and he was continually asking Mahavira, “Now let me retire. I am tired; and you are ready, young, well-educated – I am perfectly satisfied. Where can I find a better son than you? Just be ready to relieve me.”But Mahavira had other ideas. While he was being educated by the priests and the monks, they had poisoned his mind. They had told him that if he could renounce the kingdom, “Then the Kingdom of God is yours.” The greater the renunciation, the greater, of course, will be the reward. That’s why the twenty-four great masters of the Jainas were all kings.I have been asking the Jaina monks, “What is the secret of this? Was there nobody else in the country who could attain, become a great master – a warrior, a brahmin, a scholar, anybody – why only kings?” They don’t have any answer. I used to tell them, “I am not asking you for the answer because I have the answer. I am just asking you the question so that you start thinking about it.”The answer is simple: because they renounced the kingdom, the greatest reward had to be theirs. A poor man can renounce whatsoever he has – but what has he? He cannot become a tirthankara, the supreme-most master. Even in paradise he will be living somewhere outside the town. He won’t get in because they will ask, “What have you renounced? In the first place what have you got to renounce?”So of course the kings will be very close to the palace of God; then will come the richest, the super-rich people; then the middle class people; then the lowest strata and then will come those who had nothing to renounce – they were already without anything. In fact they should be by the side of God already because they don’t have anything. But they will be outside the boundary lines of paradise; they will not be able to show what their bank balance is in the other world.All the Hindu avatars are kings: Rama, Krishna… Buddha is also a king. It is strange that these people are drawn only from kings, but if you understand the structure, the strategy of the priest, it is clear: they have renounced the most, naturally they are promised the most. Nobody knows whether they get anything after death or not, but the idea became so ingrained for the simple reason that it has a grain of truth in it: in this life everything is momentary.To me, nothing is wrong if it is momentary. In fact, because it is momentary it is so exciting, so ecstatic. Make it permanent, and it will be dead.In the morning, the roseflower opens up, so fresh, with fresh dewdrops still on its petals, so fragrant. You cannot conceive that just by the evening these petals will be falling into dust, and the rose will disappear. You would like it to remain permanent, but then you need a plastic flower; a real flower won’t do. A real flower has to be momentary. To be real it has to be momentary; only plastic things can be permanent.Plastic is a new discovery. It was not known to Buddha, Mahavira, Mohammed, Jesus, but I can say to you that paradise must be made of plastic. If there is any paradise, it cannot be anything but plastic, because plastic has the quality of not dying, it is deathless.Now scientists are worried – particularly the environmentalists are very worried – because plastic is so cheap that you go on disposing of it. Glass was not so cheap; you were saving the bottles or returning the bottles and getting your deposit back. Plastic is so cheap that everything made of plastic is disposable: use it once and dispose of it. But you don’t know where it is going. It is getting collected in the oceans, in the riverbeds, in the lakes under the earth, and there is no way for nature to dissolve it because nature is not prepared, was not made to absorb plastic.If God has made this world, he certainly is not all-knowing. At least one thing he did not know: that plastic was going to happen one day. He has not made anything in nature, any chemicals, which can dissolve plastic, so plastic goes on accumulating. Soon it will have accumulated so much that it will destroy the fertility of the earth, it will poison the waters. Nothing can destroy it; it will destroy everything.In the Hindu paradise, the apsaras – how to translate the word apsara? They are call girls for those great sages who live in paradise. Of course, they need call girls. Those call girls, those apsaras, are the most beautiful; it has to be so. They remain always young – that gives me the clue that they are plastic. They are stuck at the age of sixteen; for millions of years they remain just sixteen. In the Indian mind sixteen is the most mature age for a woman, so they remain at sixteen.Apsaras don’t perspire; neither Mahavira nor Buddha nor Jesus nor Mohammed had any idea of deodorants, so the only thing they could conceive of was that those girls who serve the sages should not perspire. But only if your body is made of plastic will you not perspire; otherwise, perspiration is absolutely necessary. And those girls will not get old, will not die.Nothing dies in paradise, nothing gets old, nothing changes; it must be an utterly boring place. Can you imagine the boredom – where everything remains the same every day? There is no need for any newspaper there. I have heard that only once was one newspaper published – one edition, on one day – and it flopped because after that nothing happened! It described everything in the first edition; that was the last edition also.This desire for permanency is somehow sick; but it was there, so the religious firms – yes, I call them “firms” – Christian, Hindus, Mohammedans, for centuries did great business. They are still doing it, and their business can never end, for the simple reason that they sell invisible commodities. They take visible things from you and they give you invisible things which you have to believe in.I am reminded of a story:A king had conquered the whole world and he was very restless – now, what to do? He was thinking that once he had conquered the whole world he would rest. He had never thought that he would be so restless; he had never been so restless. While fighting, continuously invading, going on and on – because there is always some place to go, some enemy to destroy, some country to conquer – there was no space, no time to be restless; he was so occupied. But now he had conquered the whole world, he was utterly restless – what to do now?A con man heard about this situation. He came to the palace, asked for an audience with the king, and said, “I have the remedy for restlessness.”Immediately he was taken inside, because all the physicians had failed. The king could not sleep, could not sit, was walking back and forth and was worried continually. He was asking, “What to do now? Isn’t there another world? Find out! We will conquer it.This con man came into the court before the king, and he said, “Don’t be worried. You are the first man who has conquered the whole world. You are worthy to receive the clothes of God himself – and I can manage it.”This was a great idea. The king became immediately interested. He said, “Start working! God’s own clothes… Have they ever before come on the earth?”The man said, “Never, because nobody has been worthy of them. You are the first man. So for the first time, from paradise, I will bring the clothes for you.”The king said, “Every preparation should be made, and how much will the cost be?”The man said, “They are beyond cost; still, millions of rupees will be needed – but it is nothing.”The king said, “Don’t be worried, money is not a problem at all. But don’t try to deceive me.”The man said, “There is no question of deception. I will be staying in your palace and you can put your army around the palace. I will be working here; of course, my room has not to be opened until I give a knock from the inside. You can lock it from the outside so you can be completely satisfied that I cannot escape. But whatever money I ask, you have to go on sending to the person whose name I give you. It will take not more than three weeks.” And in three weeks he withdrew millions of rupees. He was sending a name every day: morning, afternoon, night… immediately! Urgent!The king knew that the work was such… And the man could not deceive him. Where could he go? He was locked in. And certainly he didn’t escape. After three weeks he knocked on the door, the door was opened. He came out with a huge beautiful box. He had gone into the room with the box, saying, “I will have to take the box with me for the clothes I have to bring you.” Not to be deceived, the king had opened the box to see whether he was carrying some clothes in it. It was empty, there was no deception; the box was given back to him.And now the con man came out and said, “The box will be opened in the court before all the wise, the learned, the generals, the queen, the king, the prince, the princess – everybody has to be present because this is a unique occasion.”The man must have been really courageous – con men always are. He called the king, “Come close, here. I will open the box. Give me your turban. I will put it in the box, because this is how I have been instructed: first, I put your turban in, then take out the turban which God has given, and give it to you. You put it on yourself. One thing more,” he declared to the court, “these clothes are divine, so only those who are born really from their own fathers will be able to see them. Those who are bastards will miss out. I cannot do anything. This is the condition.”But everybody said, “There is no problem with it. We are born of our fathers.”The king’s turban went in, and the con man’s empty hand came out, and he said to the king, “Look at the beauty of the turban!” His hand was empty but the whole court started clapping, and everybody was trying to outdo the other, shouting that such a beautiful thing had never been seen.Now the king thought, “If I say his hand is empty then I am the only bastard and all these bastards are really born of their fathers. So it is better to keep quiet.” In fact, this was the situation with everybody. They all saw his hand was empty, but who would come out and be condemned when everybody else was seeing something there? They started suspecting, “Perhaps I am a bastard, so better keep quiet. What is the point of becoming unnecessarily condemned by all the people?” So they started shouting more loudly in praise of its beauty.The king put the turban, which was not there, on his head. But it was not only the turban; by and by, other clothes started disappearing. At last, only his underwear was left. The king thought for a moment: “Now what to do?” But it was too late to turn back. “If I have seen the turban and I have seen the coat and I have seen the shirt, then why can’t I see the underwear? Now it is better to see it. There is no way to go back. This man…”The man was holding the invisible underwear in his hands, and was showing them: “Look how many diamonds are on the underwear!” The whole court was applauding, saying, “Such an experience has never happened in the whole history of man.”The king’s underwear also went in. But that con man was something! He said, “When I was coming, God said to me, ‘These clothes are going into the world for the first time, so tell the king from me that when he wears these clothes he has to go in a procession round the whole capital, so all the people can see. Otherwise, those poor people will never be able to see them.’ The chariot is ready, please come on.”Now, with each step it was difficult to go back. The king started thinking, “It would have been better if I had stopped the whole thing with the turban – but now it is too late. If I say I am naked…but the whole court is applauding.”And they started saying, “Yes sir, this is right; if God has asked, it has to be done. And that is the right welcome for the clothes.”The streets were packed with people because the rumor had gone far and wide that God’s clothes were coming. And the king agreed. Naked, he stood on his chariot, and before him the man was announcing, “These clothes will be seen only by those who are born of their own fathers.”So everybody saw them, except a small child who had come with his father. Sitting on his father’s shoulders, he said, “Da” – Da means daddy – “the king appears to be naked.”His father said, “You idiot, keep quiet! When you grow up, then you will be able to see those clothes. It needs a certain maturity; just a child like you cannot see the clothes. Keep quiet if you want to see. I was not willing from the very beginning to bring you here.”But the child could not resist; again and again he said, “But I see him clearly, naked.” The father had to escape with the child out of the crowd, because if others heard him, it would have meant that the child, was not his but somebody else’s.With invisible commodities it is very easy to exploit people, to force them to do things against themselves – and that’s what renunciation is. It is con-manship, done by the priest in the name of God, truth, moksha, nirvana.Their names may be different, but the priest is the greatest con man in the world. Other conmen are just small criminals. Of what can they cheat you? But the priest, the prophet, the messiah, the avatar, the tirthankara – these are the super conmen.They have sold things which nobody has seen, which nobody is ever going to see. Not a single witness exists. Nobody has returned from death and said, “Yes, there is eternal beauty, eternal joy, eternal silence, eternal peace.” The business goes on because nobody can contradict it. If you contradict it you are wrong, because the whole world believes in it.But there was a certain truth which they tried to fix into their strategy of exploitation: in life everything is momentary. But nothing is wrong in it; it has to be so. If it were otherwise, life would have been intolerable.Things change, and it is good that they change, otherwise they would be dead. Change keeps them alive.You are changing continuously. Do you remember on what day you jumped from childhood and became a young man, or when from youth you became an old man? You cannot draw the line between when you were a child, when you were adolescent, when you became a young man, when you became middle-aged, when you became old. Can you draw the line? No, every moment you are changing; it is an ongoing process.Since you were conceived, you have been changing. In the mother’s womb, in those nine months you changed so much; in ninety years of your life you will not change so much. If you are shown pictures of the nine months life in your mother’s womb you will not recognize that they are your pictures. Or do you think that you can recognize them? You have changed completely, and you are changing every moment – and not only you, everything around you is changing. All the stars are moving and changing. Every day some star dies and disappears – it may have been here for millions of years – another star is born. Every day that is going on.Life is a flux, a movement, a continuum.There is nothing wrong in it. Enjoy that moment which comes and goes. Drink out of it as much as you can because it is fleeting – so don’t waste time thinking. Don’t start thinking that it is fleeting. Don’t be bothered about what will happen tomorrow, whether this will be with you or not; and don’t think of yesterdays.While it lasts, squeeze the whole juice out of it, drink of it completely. Then who cares whether it goes away or if it remains? If it remains we will be drinking it. If it goes, good, we will be drinking some other moment.Why should you insist that this moment remain permanent? How do you know that better moments are not coming? Just a moment before you would not have thought of this moment. And who knows – when this moment goes, something better may be on the way. In fact, it is on the way, because if you have drowned yourself in this moment totally, you have learned something of tremendous importance. You will be using that in the coming moment. Each moment your maturity is growing.Each moment you are becoming more and more centered, more and more in the moment, more and more aware, more and more alert, more and more capable of living.So who cares about death? We will enjoy it when we die. Death will also be a moment in life. Death is not the end of life, but only a moment of transformation, because nothing can die. You cannot destroy anything; it only changes shapes, forms.Now science is capable of destroying Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the whole world… But not really. It cannot destroy a single piece of stone. It cannot destroy it totally, it cannot annihilate it; it will still be there. You can break it into pieces but those pieces will be there. You can heat it as much as if you have brought the sun itself under it; it will melt, but it will be there. Yes, you can change the form, but there is no way to throw it out of existence.Nothing dies, nothing is born.Birth simply means that the form that you were was not this form, but some other form, so you cannot recognize it. You cannot recognize even pictures of you in your mother’s womb. If I show you a picture of your past life, are you going to recognize it? Forget about the mother’s womb, you may not be able to recognize the picture of when you were three months old, six months old, nine months old. Continuously, everything goes on changing.Death is a great transformation.You ask about the place of renunciation in my religion. Before I answer you, there is one thing more to be noted: this idea of renunciation became so deep-rooted in the whole of humanity that even the people who have denied the existence of life after death have also used the same logic. The logic became almost universal.For example, in India there was a school of atheists called Charvakas. The word charvaka is worth understanding. Their enemies – and all the religions are enemies of Charvakas – have burned all the books, so not a single book of the Charvakas is available. All that we know is from the scriptures of Hindus, Jainas and Buddhists criticizing Charvakas. So we can guess something of what those people were saying, but we cannot be absolutely certain. And these are all religious people, and they destroyed the Charvakas’ scriptures. Perhaps they have killed many of them also, because today there is not a single Charvaka in India. And all the scriptures are so much against the Charvakas, that it seems they must have once been a tremendous force. Otherwise why criticize them when there is nobody who follows the philosophy?All three religions were continually hammering and arguing against the Charvakas. It must have been a very popular philosophy. And in fact, it is still a powerful philosophy all over the world, but because people are hypocrites, they don’t recognize it. Just listen to their philosophy and you will see that out of one hundred people, ninety-nine point nine percent are Charvakas. They may be Christians, they may be Hindus, they may be Mohammedans, it doesn’t matter; these are just masks.So the enemy scriptures describe the meaning of the word charvaka: eat, drink, and be merry. Charvaka means one who believes in eating, eating, eating – through all the senses. I cannot say that any Charvakas have said it, but it is possible. The enemy scriptures quote Charvakas as saying, “Even if you have to borrow money, don’t be worried, but drink, eat, be merry. Go on borrowing money, because after death neither are you there to pay, nor is there anybody else to ask you, ‘What about my money?’ Everything is finished with death, so don’t be bothered by these priests telling you that you will suffer for your karmas. Enjoy yourself in every possible way. Don’t miss enjoyment. This is the only world.”This is the meaning given by the enemies, but in one enemy scripture – it must have been a very liberal person who wrote it – it says that this is the meaning given by the enemies, by us. But Charvakas themselves have a different meaning of their name. It means one who has a sweet philosophy – that meaning is possible from the same word – one who speaks words of honey. And certainly they do speak words of honey. But they also are trapped in the same logic.The religious people say, “Renounce this world if you want to enjoy that world.” And Charvakas say, “Renounce that world if you want to rejoice in this one.” But the logic is the same. They have taken it from different angles, but both are asking you to renounce one for the other. Charvakas say renounce the other world; there is no God, no nirvana, no paradise – renounce it. This is all there is, so enjoy it.In Greece, Epicurus had the same philosophy and got caught up in the same logic. Even Karl Marx was caught up in the same logic: there is no other world. The first effort is to deny the other world, only then can you enjoy this world. So first demolish the other world: there is no God, no paradise, no heaven, nothing. There is no soul to survive; with your body everything dies. You are nothing but your body, your chemistry, your biology, your physiology, all together – a byproduct of all these things. It is just like a clock that goes on working – it does not mean there is a soul which is moving the hands. Just take the pieces apart and you won’t find any soul, just a certain arrangement of the parts. Arrange it again, and it starts ticking.Karl Marx says, “Consciousness is only a byproduct, it has no independent existence.” So when the body dies, consciousness disappears. Why this insistence on denying the other world? – for the simple reason that unless you deny the other, you will not be able to enjoy this.But please see my point of view which is totally different from all these people – the religious, the anti-religious, the theist, the atheist. I don’t belong to any of them. I say to you that life continues to exist, but there is no need to call it the other world. It is the same world, the same continuity.The Ganges arises in the Himalayas; it is just a small rivulet. As it descends, other waterfalls, other rivulets go on joining it; it goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. When it comes out of the Himalayas it is a vast river. You cannot conceive that it is the same river. You can see from where it arises. Because Hindus love the cow as the mother, they have made the origin of the Ganges a stone cow’s face. The Ganges falls through the face; it is so small, so tiny.By the time the Ganges reaches Benares, you cannot believe its size. And when it reaches near Kolkata to meet the ocean, it becomes almost oceanic itself. Standing there, you cannot decide which is the ocean; it is so vast. It falls into the ocean; then too it remains. Where can it go? Yes, it is no longer a river – perhaps some water may evaporate into the clouds, some water may become ice and move toward the arctic – but it will remain, nothing is lost.So I don’t say that you have to renounce anything: this world for that, or that world for this. You have not to renounce at all.You have to live! You have to live intensely and totally, wherever you are, whatever you are.And if you enjoy this time, this space, this opportunity that is available to you, in its totality, you will certainly be moving to a higher consciousness. You will be gaining, learning, understanding, becoming more aware. Life will continue. It will depend on your awareness what form it takes, higher or lower, whether it moves toward more anguish or more ecstasy – but it depends on this moment. So I am not saying to renounce this world.I am a strange man in a way, because I am against the religions. Religious people in India have been writing against me in books and articles – and communists have been writing books and articles against me too.Once I was traveling, and the president of India’s communist party, S. A. Dange, was also with me in the compartment. His son-in-law had just written a book against me. He asked me, “Have you seen the book my son-in-law has written against you?”I said, “I am so much involved in living that I don’t care who is writing what about me. And anybody who is writing about me must be a fool because he is wasting his time writing about me. He should live! Or even if he wants to write, he should write something about himself. And why should I read his crap? He may be your son-in-law – so you can read it, I’m not interested.”He was ready to give me the book. I said, “Throw it out of the window, because so many books have been written against me, I cannot waste my time.” I told him, “Just for your information, it is strange but religious people write against me and anti-religious people, communists, also write against me. This has never happened before.”But the reason is that I am trying to give you a totally new viewpoint, which goes against all the old logic. They are both partners in the same game, and I am trying to destroy their whole game, the whole logic.They both believe that one world has to be renounced; which one is another matter. But on one point they agree: one world has to be renounced. The religions say this for that; the communists say that for this – that is the only disagreement between them. But the basic logic is similar: you can have only one world. And I say: why can’t we have both? I don’t see any conflict; I am having both. And my experience is that the more you have of this, the more you will have of that, because you will become more experienced.If there is a paradise, then one thing is certain: your monks will not be able to enjoy it. What will they enjoy? The whole of their life they were denouncing women, condemning women, and there they will find beautiful call girls. They will be so nervous; many of them will have heart attacks. Here they are renouncing: you should not eat food with taste, taste is an attachment to food – and there they will be served the most tasteful food; they will be vomiting. Their whole life experience will be against it.Only my people can enjoy paradise fully.Neither the religious people can enjoy it, because they have destroyed and crippled themselves and their capacity to enjoy, nor the communists, because they will not open their eyes. They have denied the existence of anything after death. They will keep their eyes closed to remain convinced that there is nothing; otherwise their whole life’s philosophy is proved wrong. It is better to keep your eyes closed. That’s what people do: if anything goes against you, any fact, you try to avoid that fact; it is disturbing. Communists will go blind; they cannot accept the idea that Karl Marx is wrong and Das Kapital is wrong.And the religious people will be the most troubled people in paradise, everywhere they will find difficulty. Perhaps there are divisions in paradise, as it seems. Mohammedans’ paradise seems to be different from the Hindus, from the Christians, from the Jainas – perhaps different zones are allotted to different kinds of people.In the Mohammedan paradise there are rivers of wine. You drink as much as you want: swim, jump, and drown yourself – whatsoever you want to do. But here – don’t touch wine. Now, this seems to be very illogical. Here these people should be trained for such a great experience or they will simply die. Sitting on the bank of a river where champagne is flowing, they cannot drink because of their past habits, their whole life’s training and discipline. And there is no description of any river which has water; in Mohammedan paradise all the rivers are wine. Why? When you can drink wine, why bother about water? They will either die of thirst, or they will start drinking in spite of themselves. They will really be in a mess. Many of them will go mad: that what kind of reward is this? This is punishment!Only my people will be able to swim in any zone. In the Mohammedan zone they will not be worried; they will enjoy it. They will fit anywhere because they haven’t any fixed routine of living, a fixed style of living.All that I am teaching them is to remain flexible, free, open, available to new experiences, to new explorations. So my people are not going to remain in one zone. They are going to use all the zones and enjoy all the sights of paradise; nobody can prevent them.You can have both worlds – so why cripple people? Make this life an experience, a school, a learning, a discipline, because something unknown is going to open up after death and you have to be ready in every possible way. Don’t miss any opportunity of living. Who knows what kind of life you are going to have after death?I do not give you a fixed idea, because if I give you a fixed idea, I am your enemy; I make you a fixed person, inflexible, rigid, dead. Be flexible, so you can move in any dimension that becomes available.In my religion there is no place for renunciation.The Sanskrit word for renunciation is sannyas, because renunciation became so important that the very word sannyas was used for it. But I have given it a new meaning. The people who have called sannyas renunciation, meant by sannyas “the right way of renouncing life.” By sannyas, I mean the right way of living life.The word sannyas can mean both. When it can mean the right way of living, why cripple people, cut off their life, destroy their naturalness, their spontaneity? Why not help them to have as many aspects to their life as possible, as many dimensions open to them as possible?My sannyasin is multidimensional. The whole of life is yours. Love it, live it to the fullest. That’s the only way to get ready for death.Then you can live death too, to its fullest; and it is one of the most beautiful experiences. There is nothing comparable to the death experience in life, except deep meditation.So those who know meditation know something of death – that’s the only way to know before dying.If I am saying there is no more significant experience in life than death, I am saying it, not because I have died and come back to tell you, but because I know that in meditation you move into the same space as death – because in meditation you are no longer your physiology, no longer your biology, no longer your chemistry, no longer your psychology. All these are left far away.You come to your innermost center where there is only pure awareness. That pure awareness will be with you when you die because that cannot be taken away. All those things which can be taken away, we take away with our own hands in meditation.So meditation is an experience of death in life.And it is so beautiful, so indescribably beautiful that only one thing can be said about death: it must be that experience multiplied by millions. The experience of meditation multiplied by millions is the experience of death.And when you pass on you simply leave your form behind. You are absolutely intact, and for the first time out of the prison of physiology, biology, psychology.All the walls are broken and you are free. For the first time you can open your wings to the existential.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is there really absolutely no place for renunciation in your religion? The question arises because since I came in contact with you, many things in my life have dropped away. I cannot even relate to my old self.There is really absolutely no place for renunciation in my religion. I can understand the question and the difficulty of the questioner. He has not been able to make a distinction between dropping things, and things dropping by themselves.Renunciation is the enforced dropping of things. And whenever you do anything with force, nothing really drops away. It simply goes deeper into your unconscious. It becomes more of a problem than it was before. Now it will try to come up in different ways, garbs, masks, and you may not even be able to recognize it. But it is going to assert itself, and with force. You have given it that force by forcing it deep down into the unconscious.When you force something, you are giving force to it. You are making it stronger, and you are making the enemy hide within you, in the darkness, from where you become more vulnerable. When it was in the conscious, it was in the light; you were less vulnerable.Renunciation is repression. That is the right psychological word for it: repression. How can you renounce sex, except by repressing it? And repressed sex becomes perverted.It is easier to understand sex, to become more aware of it and let it drop by itself, than to understand it when it is perverted, because then it comes in an unnatural form. First it is difficult to recognize it – that it is sex. A person too greedy for money – can you think that this greed for money can have anything to do with suppressed sex? It is so far-fetched it needs a Sigmund Freud to see it. An ordinary person will not be able to connect them at all. How? Money and sex seem to be so far away; they are not so far away.If you repress sex, it comes as ambition. It can become politics. The politician can completely forget about sex, because all his sexuality, his sex energy is now converted into his political ambition. He will have the same kind of enjoyment by reaching higher and higher in the hierarchy. The higher he reaches, the more he will feel a kind of sexual pleasure, which you cannot understand.I used to live with a very rich man. He was a bachelor and he had no interest in women at all. His only interest was money – day in, day out he was working for money – but because I was living in his house, somehow he became interested in my ideas. He had a big house and he was alone; his father and mother were dead. He was unmarried with no children, just servants. I liked the place because there was no disturbance, no children, no old people in the house, and no fighting because he had no wife. It was really quiet, the servants would go away at night, and it was such a big house that we two were almost alone.He was not interested in anything except money. So he would close the doors of his room – there was nobody except me, but he would lock his room from inside – and start working: counting how much he had gained, how much he had lost; how much was in this business and how much was in that business. Before he went to sleep, he would be perfectly clear where he was financially. Only then would he go to sleep – sometimes at two o’clock or three o’clock. By the time I was waking up, at three o’clock, he was going to sleep, and I would go for a walk.I once asked him, “Do you ever think of what you are going to do with this money? You are not extravagant; you are a miser. You don’t have any children to whom you are going to leave the money. You are not so generous that you give it to your friends or to those who are in need. You are not in any way parting with a single pai. What are you going to do? Are you going to take it with you when you die? What is the purpose of this money?”Because money really is meaningless if you don’t use it, its whole meaning is in its use. You may have the same amount of money as I have but you can use it in such a way that you are richer than me. The value of the money is in its use. Certainly those who know how to use money use it a thousandfold more than those who don’t know. They have the same amount of money, but they are poor.Now this man was a poor man. Money was in the safe, money was in the banks, money was in shares – but he was a poor man.I said to him, “There seems to be no reason for you now to go on earning; you have enough. Even if you live two hundred years, it will do. The miserly way you are living, it will do for two thousand years. Two hundred, I am saying if you live like me; otherwise two thousand, and still you may not be able to spend it all. You may go on living just on the interest from it forever. Why are you so worried? You cannot sleep well, you don’t have any time for anything – and have you ever thought about how this disease happened to you, where you got this cancer?”He said, “I have never thought about it, but you are right. I have enough money, and I can live… Certainly I am not going to live for two thousand years – just seventy or eighty will be enough. My father died at seventy, his father died at seventy, so I cannot live more than seventy or perhaps eighty years. Yes,” he said, “this makes sense. But can you tell me why I am doing this?”I said, “For a simple reason: you have avoided women in your life.”He said, “But what have women and money to do with each other?”I told him, “That we will discuss later on, first tell me why you avoid women.”The reason was very simple. He had seen his grandfather being harassed, nagged continually, tortured by his grandmother. He had seen his father in the same position, he had seen his uncles in the same position. They were all miserable, and he thought that their misery was caused by the women. He became a woman-hater from his very childhood. And then he came under the influence of the Jaina monks, because his father was a very religious man.People who are tortured by their wives become religious. Except for religion, there is no other shelter for them. Only religion can give them some consolation: “Don’t be worried, it is only a question of a few years. Next life, don’t commit the same mistake; and start withdrawing yourself even in this life. The woman is powerful over you because you are sexually interested in women. It is your weakness that she is exploiting.” And that’s what he heard from the Jaina monks. In Jainism, sex is the first thing to be renounced, because with it many other things are renounced automatically, you need not work at them separately; sex seems to be the main problem.Seeing the situation of his grandfather, uncle, father, neighbors and then listening to the Jaina monks, it became a decided thing in his mind that he was not going to get involved in this constant headache.I told him, “That’s from where your interest in money arises. The energy needs some object, some infatuation.” And I told him, “You may feel hurt, but I have to say it: I have seen you counting notes, and the way you touch the notes looks as if you are touching your beloved.”He looked at me, shocked. For a moment there was silence, and then he said, “Perhaps you are right. I really enjoy touching those notes. I count them again and again. Although I have counted them, even in the night I count them again. Just touching them gives some strange satisfaction to me – even the notes of other people.For example, sometimes he would come into my room and if there was some money on the table – because that was the only place for me to keep it – the first thing he would do was count it, and I would tell him, “This is simply foolish. It is not your money, why are you counting it?”He said, “I simply enjoy it; it is not so important to whom it belongs.”Can you see the point? If you become interested in somebody else’s wife, do you think of whom she belongs to? There is no question of whom she belongs to – she looks beautiful, that’s all, so you are interested. Whomsoever she belongs to is not your business. This was exactly the case with him: money is money; it is nobody’s really. And just to touch it, to count it, to play with it…I told him, “If you want to get rid of this infatuation with money, which is absolutely idiotic…”I am not against money; I am against the infatuation. The man who is infatuated with money cannot use it. He is really destroying the money, its very purpose. In every language, in all the languages of the world, money’s other name is currency – that is significant. Money needs to be a current, river-like, flowing, moving fast. The faster it moves, the richer is the society.If I have a one-hundred-dollar note with me and I simply keep it in my pocket and never use it, then whether I have it or not, does it make any difference? I could have kept any piece of paper; that would have served the same purpose. But if I use this one-hundred-dollar note and it circulates in here, and everybody who gets it immediately uses it – so it passes through one hundred hands – then it is one hundred dollars multiplied by one hundred; then that much money is here in this room.The miser is really anti-money. He is destroying its utility because he is stopping it being a currency.I told him, “Do one thing: become interested in a woman.”He said, “What!”I said, “Just try. I can arrange for a few women to be introduced to you” – because so many women used to come from the university. There were many women professors from the colleges who came to visit me, to ask about meditation and things. I said, “There is no problem. Just indicate in whom you are interested, I will introduce you; and any woman is going to be interested in you.”He said, “Why?”I said, “Because of all the money. She is not going to be interested in you; she is going to be interested in your money. And once you become interested in the woman, you will start spending money; you will relax. The energy that has become perverted will start moving in the natural way. And you can’t find anybody better than a woman to finish your money. You will not need to live two thousand years; long before that the money will be gone. And once you become interested in a woman, your infatuation with money will drop to its natural state.”He said, “I will have to think it over.”I said, “You can think it over, but don’t waste too much time because right now you are almost forty-five. Once you are over sixty, then it will be difficult even for me to make an arrangement. So don’t waste fifteen years. Think about it tonight and tomorrow morning when we meet, tell me.”He could not sleep the whole night. He thought about it again and again, and slowly the thing became clear to him: “Yes, deep down it is women, and I am constantly keeping myself occupied with money in order to avoid women, because if there is no space, no time, then from where can the woman enter? And why I am so infatuated now makes sense. It is a substitute woman.”So this greed for money, this greed for power, this greed for fame – sex can take any form – will depend on the type of person. You will be aware of the fact that although poets continually write poetry about women, most of the poets have stayed away from women. Most of the great novelists were not interested in women. Most of the great painters were afraid of women for the simple reason that either you can paint or you can be married. You can’t have two wives – together they will kill you.There is an ancient parable in India:A man was caught as a thief in a house. He was presented in court and the magistrate said, “Do you accept your guilt?”He said, “I accept it absolutely but I want to say one thing. You can give me any punishment, but don’t tell me to be married to two women.”The magistrate said, “I have never heard of any punishment like that. My whole life I have been punishing people, but I have never punished anybody that way.”He said, “Then you are a really good man. You can sentence me to death, but not…”The magistrate said, “But I would like to know why this condition?”He said, “This is the reason why I was caught. I entered a house where a man lives with two wives. One wife lives on the ground floor, the other wife lives on the floor above. And they were both pulling at the man – one was pulling him to the upper floor, the other was pulling him to the ground floor. I became so interested that I forgot why I had gone there. I became interested to know what was going to be the result, ultimately who would win. Certainly the man had no chance of winning – he was getting beaten from both sides.“That’s why I got caught – otherwise, in the whole of my life, have you ever seen me in court? I am a born thief; my father was a thief, my father’s father was a thief – this is our inherited profession. And this is the first time anybody from my family has been caught. I am ashamed. My father’s soul, my grandfather’s soul – they will all be ashamed of me. And there was no problem, I could have stolen things and escaped, but the story with those two women and that one man… And a crowd gathered; that is why I got caught. They said, ‘Who is this man? And what is he doing here? He doesn’t seem to be from this neighborhood.’ So you can sentence me to death or life imprisonment, whatsoever you want, but please don’t order me to get married to two women.”This has been the situation for the poet, for the painter, for the musician, for the dancer – any creative artist finds it easier not to get involved with women, or to get involved only casually, perhaps with strangers. Perhaps traveling on a train he may become interested in a woman because there is no fear – at the next station he is going to get off. Artists have told me that they get interested only in strangers; they don’t know their name, they don’t want to know their name. The strangers don’t know the artist’s name nor does he want them to know it – they remain strangers.The fear is deep-rooted, and it has a reality of its own. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why women have never been creative: they could not afford to live alone in this society which is absolutely man-made. A woman living alone is continually in danger. Only recently have a few women started careers – as a novelist, as a poet, as a painter. This is because for the first time, just in these last few years – and that too only in a very few advanced, progressive, avant-garde places – a woman has been able to live independently, just like a man. Then they start painting; they start composing poetry, music.Women have all the talents but for millions of years their sex was their only creativity, and when the whole sexual energy was involved in producing children… You can’t imagine a woman having a dozen children and composing music – or can you imagine it? Those twelve children all around doing everything that is not right… And the woman can compose music or poetry, or can paint? Do you think those twelve will sit silently? They will be painting before she paints!It looks strange that poets are the least experienced people with women. Perhaps that’s why they write about women; it is a perversion. Otherwise, why should poets write about women? They don’t have much experience; they are almost monks. Why do painters go on painting nude women? Why do sculptors go on making marble statues of nude women, for what? It is all perversion: better than collecting money or going into politics, but still it is a perversion. They are satisfying their natural instinct in an unnatural way. So on the one hand they go on doing their painting, music, poetry, and on the other hand they go on feeling that life is meaningless.Artists feel the meaninglessness of life the most. It is strange; they write such beautiful poetry, they paint such beautiful paintings, yet life is meaningless. Life is not meaningless for a clerk, and it is meaningless for Jean-Paul Sartre, who wins the Nobel Prize! It is not meaningless for a schoolmaster who must be the most miserable person in the world – thirty children against one poor man – but he is not feeling life to be meaningless.In fact, the people who feel that life is meaningless are the people who have not moved naturally; their natural energies have taken an artificial, arbitrary route. They will never feel meaningful. They have moved away from life’s source.Similarly, monks are strangely the most articulate against women, and they have no experience with women at all. I have asked Hindu monks, Buddhist monks, Jaina monks, Christian monks, “What experience do you have of women? You speak against them, but more experience is needed to speak against than in favor. What experience do you have?” And none of them could say that they had any experience. I said, “Then why do you go on speaking against them?”Yes, the monks have one experience: the woman in their unconscious is continuously pulling them down from their holier-than-thou pedestal. They are projecting their antagonism against that woman – they don’t know about it, it is deep in the dark – on any woman that they can find outside. All women are evil, agents of evil.These people have no experience at all. In fact, if they stop condemning women, there is a fear that the infatuation for women may come back – it is just knocking on the door continuously. They have to keep themselves occupied, condemning them as loudly as possible so they cannot hear the knock: that the woman is there. If they stop condemning, they will hear the knock and it will be irresistible for them to open the door, and that will be their fall.I told this friend, “Just try – there is no harm. The women who come to me are not poor and they will not ask for money or any costly present from you. And I will be introducing you only as a friend, just so that you can have a little acquaintance with women.”Next morning he said, “I am ready. And perhaps you are right; I will lose my interest in money. The whole night I thought about it, weighed it up: what should I do? But finally I thought that perhaps it is right, that what I am gathering is rubbish.”I introduced him to a woman to whom he got married within six months – and I finished his career! He was thinking of becoming the richest man in the city, but then the woman started using his money. Every day he would see me, and he would say, “You have got me into trouble, there is no end to her demands. And I have lost interest in money, so I am no longer after it as madly as you have known me to be. If it comes it is okay, if it doesn’t come I don’t bother; but she is continually spending. Now, two hundred years or eighty years… I think she will finish me nearabout sixty or before. But you were right.”I said, “Now there is a possibility; before that, there was no possibility. If you had renounced money, you would have been renouncing something which is not at all a natural instinct in you. You would have been renouncing only a path of perversion without knowing that it was a perversion, and the perversion would have taken another path. You may not have been after money, you may have got involved in politics; then power would have become the same problem. But now you are on natural ground. Any transformation can happen only when you are a natural human being.”The philosophy of renunciation is that you renounce money. I know, because money is an artificial thing, man-made, that even renouncing it is not going to lead you anywhere. These people will say, “Renounce the house,” but what does it matter? You will be staying in the temple; you will become a burden on the society. These people say to you, “Renounce earning your own livelihood,” then you will start begging.In India you see so many beggars but you will never come across a beggar who feels guilty that he is begging. I have never come across one. Traveling for thirty years continually, I have never come across a single beggar who thinks he is doing anything wrong. If you don’t give to him, you are guilty.One day it happened, at a station, Khandwa, a junction station. I was coming from Indore, and from Khandwa I had to take a train for Mumbai. I was alone in the compartment, and the train was to leave from Khandwa in one hour’s time. So I was just sitting looking out through the window. A beggar came and told me that his mother had just died and he needed some money for her funeral rituals, so I gave him one rupee.He could not believe it, because he must have been begging his whole life and nobody gives one rupee. He looked at me. I said, “I have given it to you knowingly. Your mother is dead. Go home and do something.”The man thought, “This man seems to be either mad or a simpleton.” He was wearing a coat, but he came back after fifteen minutes without the coat and, pretending to be somebody else told me, “My father is very sick.”I said, “It is bound to be so.” I gave him one rupee and I said, “Go and help your father. Just a few minutes before, somebody’s mother had died. Your father may die; you just go and help.”Now, it was very difficult for the man to go and leave me alone. After fifteen minutes he removed his cap also, and he came again.I said, “Some family trouble?”He said, “How did you guess? Yes, my wife is pregnant; any moment she is going to give birth to a child and I have not a single pai.”I said, “Take one rupee and go fast. Today there are so many things happening. One man’s wife has died – he was wearing a coat and a cap. Another man’s father is almost dying – he was not wearing a coat, but wearing a hat. You don’t have a coat or a cap, and your wife is in danger. Just run!”After fifteen minutes he came back. I said, “Some family trouble?”He said, “No. I was thinking that I am cheating you, and now I feel guilty.”I said, “For what? You are a different man – those people were different.”He said, “No, I’m the same man.”Then I said, “Don’t be worried; then I must be a different man.”He said, “How is it possible?”I said, “Don’t be worried – I must be a different man. Somebody else must have been sitting here before; otherwise an innocent person like you could not do that.”He said, “Now, this is too much. Please take these four rupees you have given to me.”I said, “No. You take one more, so you need not come naked next time, because if you get rid of any more clothes… And from where will you find more family? Your whole family will be dying, finished!”But what he said, I have not forgotten. He said, “You are the first man who has made me feel guilty; otherwise, whenever people give to us we feel they are fools. If they don’t give to us, we say they are sinners; we never think about ourselves.”No beggar does. He is simply giving you an opportunity to be virtuous; you should be obliged to him. He is putting a ladder before you; you can go to paradise. No beggars, although they are begging, ever feel inferior.The mind is so cunning; it can take you in any direction and distort your simple, natural being.Now, nobody naturally would ever like to beg, nobody is a born beggar. But the sexual instinct can take any form – it can become the greed of a rich man, it can become the greed of a beggar.When I was a professor, one student of mine, studying in the post-graduate philosophy department, was always coming with costly clothes and looked rich. One day it happened, I was coming out of the station – because I was continually moving from Jabalpur all over India, twenty days per month I was out of town. I would come back after three days for a few hours, just to show myself in the university, that I was there, because they could not give me that much leave nor could I take that much leave; otherwise from where would I get money?So this was the arrangement: one of my students used to take my car and park it in the same place where I would normally park it. The car was always parked there; that was a symbol that I was in the university. I told him, “So park the car there at two o’clock and at four o’clock take it away – just two hours. Everybody will know it is there because that is the rush hour, when everybody is there, and everybody knows that I never come before two; from twelve to two I sleep. So there is no problem.”So every third or fourth day I was coming and going: coming in the morning and going in the evening. And there was this beggar who was continually getting one rupee, fixed – whether I came or went, he would get it. One day, just by coincidence, I saw this student of mine with that old man, just behind the shed where my car was parked. I went closer: What was this rich man’s son doing with the beggar? And the beggar was giving him rupees.So I went outside and called them both. Both of them started trembling. The old man said, “Don’t tell anybody – he is my son.”I said, “How much do you manage to earn? This boy lives the best in the university, so you must be earning nearly thirty, forty or fifty rupees.”He said, “You are right.”I said, “How much have you got in the bank?”He said, “Now I cannot hide anything from you.” He had fifty thousand rupees in the bank.I told him, “Then why are you begging? You could do some business.”He said, “This is business. And with no investment – in what business can you earn fifty rupees a day in India?”I said, “That is true.”He said, “And I am leaving enough for my son; he can live a rich life. I am not going to die for a few years yet, so I will leave enough for him; and he is now well educated. But please don’t tell anybody, otherwise his career may be affected.”Now, this man is a beggar but he does not think there is anything wrong in begging. It is a business, without investment and with good earnings. All that you have to do is just befool people.The sexual instinct can take many paths. It can become greed. It can become a will-to-power. It can become a subtle ego trip: holier-than-thou.That’s what the monks are doing; otherwise they have no other enjoyment. They are torturing themselves, and have renounced everything you think of as pleasure, as joy. Then what keeps them ticking, going tick-tock? What keeps them ticking? From where do they get the energy? The energy is from a holier-than-thou attitude: you are all sinners, we are the only people who are not sinners; we are saints. And they will look down from heaven and find you there, burning in hellfire.Renunciation can teach you to drop sex, to drop tasteful food, to drop clothes, to be naked, to drop all possessions – but in a strange way you will remain attached to all those things.When I was in Mumbai, a Hindu monk came to see me; he had a disciple with him and he wanted to know what kind of meditation would be suitable for him.I told him, “Tomorrow morning we are meeting near the beach and we will be doing the meditation. It is better that you come there because it is a question of practical experience.”He said, “It will be very difficult for me to come tomorrow. The day after tomorrow I can come.”I said, “What is the problem with tomorrow?”He said, “The problem is that my disciple has some work tomorrow morning, he cannot come.”But I said, “Let him do his work – there is no need for him to come.”He said, “You don’t understand – I have renounced money.”I said, “You are making it more and more of a puzzle. You have renounced money, perfectly good, but what has that to do with this man and his engagement tomorrow morning, and your coming to my meditation group?”He said, “Are you not aware of a simple thing: “I cannot touch money, so he keeps the money for me. And in Mumbai you have to go in a taxi – then who will pay? I cannot touch money; I have renounced it. He keeps the money; he pays out the money and if somebody donates money to me, he receives it. I am completely out of it, I have nothing to do with money.”I said, “Good arrangement! You have nothing to do with money; then what have you to do with this man? You will go to heaven and this man will go to hell; and he, poor man, is simply serving you continually, following you everywhere – and yet he is going to hell. If you have renounced money, then live without money, then suffer without money. Why send this man to hell? You will be responsible for sending this man to hell. You will fall into a deeper hell than this man.”People can find strange ways because they have not understood what they are doing; they are simply following a dead creed, a dead dogma. They are renouncing it because for centuries money has been condemned by the religious people. I said, “But it is becoming more complicated. It would have been simple to put your hand in your own pocket; now you have to put it in somebody else’s pocket. That is pick-pocketing.” I said, “You are also a thief. What are you doing? And you are a bigger pickpocket than others because at least they use their hand; you use his hand, picking up money from his pocket. His pocket, his hand, and you are completely above it, superior.”I said to the disciple, “Escape right now, leave this man here. I will not allow him to go with you. Just escape as far as you can, where he cannot find you again, because he is managing and arranging for your hell. And whatever money you have, it is yours, because he has renounced money. He cannot claim it.”He said, “Is it so – all the money?”I said, “What do you mean by ‘all the money’?”He said, “Right now when we go somewhere, I keep just two or three hundred rupees in my pocket, but at our temple we have thousands.”I said, “All that money is yours. Simply go there. I will keep this man here, so take all that money and escape. And if this man leaves here I will give him to the police because he has renounced money. He cannot even report to the police that his money is stolen.”The monk said, “What! I came here to learn meditation.”I said, “I am teaching you what renunciation means. And what you are doing is just cheating yourself, cheating this poor man, cheating God – cheating everybody.”Renounce anything and you will become more attached to it than when you had not renounced it. Your mind will move around and around it.An ancient parable:A man continually wanted to learn the secret of miracles. He had heard so much about it: that there are sages in Tibet, in the high peaks of the Himalayas who can teach you, who know all kinds of miracles. So he was always serving any kind of sage. In India there are so many sages – just as here there are so many sage bushes. When I first came here and I came to know that there are so many sages here also, I said, “These people are not going to leave me alone.”He found a very old, ancient sage and he was continually massaging his feet, bringing him food and doing whatsoever he could do. The old sage knew, the whole town knew, why he served such people. The old sage said again and again, “I am a simple man, and I don’t know any miracles.”The man said, “That’s the true sign of a sage: those who claim are worthless; you are the person who knows the secret.”He said, “It is very difficult. If I say I know then there is difficulty – you say, ‘Teach me.’ And I am telling you the truth, that I don’t know any miracle and I don’t think that anybody does except people like you, who go on creating myths around somebody; otherwise there is no miracle.”But the man would not leave; day and night he was serving the sage. One night the old man wanted to sleep but the man was massaging him. So he said, “Stop!”The man said, “I am not going to stop until you tell me. If you want to sleep tonight, just tell me a simple secret so that I can do miracles.”The sage said, “Okay, I am going to tell you. It is very simple. Go home, take a shower, sit down in the lotus posture – and this is the mantra: Om mani padme hum, the Tibetan mantra. Just say it five times and in the morning you will be able to do any kind of miracle that you want to do.”Hearing this, the man simply jumped up and out of the room. The old man said, “Wait! You have not heard the condition.”He said, “In the morning I can come again.”The old man said, “No, the condition has to be followed, otherwise the mantra won’t work.”The man said, “What is the condition?”The sage said, “The condition is, while you are repeating the mantra five times, you should not think of a monkey.The man said, “Don’t be worried. In my whole life I have never thought of a monkey. I always think of sages and saints, so this condition is nothing.”But as he was coming down the steps of the temple, wherever he looked he started finding monkeys in the trees, they were hiding in the bushes.He said, “My God! So many monkeys tonight.” They were always there, it was just that he had not renounced them, but today he had renounced them. By the time he reached his house, he could not believe whether it was true or untrue: a crowd of monkeys all around him, making faces. But he said, “First let me take a bath, perhaps that will help.”Nothing was going to help. While he was taking a bath, the monkeys were inside the bathroom. He sat in padmasana, closed his eyes, and just…the monkey – not one, a whole crowd! He could not even repeat Om mani padme hum, just a small mantra, even once. The monkeys were continuously there. He tried the whole night: again a bath, again the posture, but those monkeys…Before the morning he rushed to the temple. The sage was laughing but the man was really angry; he said, “This is no time to laugh. Is it funny?”The old man said, “I have always told you that I don’t know any miracles, secrets, mantras, or anything, but you wouldn’t listen to me, hence I had to lie.The man said, “If you had to lie, you could have at least kept your mouth shut about the monkeys.The old man said, “But without the monkeys, the mantra is incomplete. Did the monkeys trouble you?”The man said, “Trouble me! You are an old sage and I have accepted you as my master, otherwise I would have killed you.”Once you renounce something forcibly – and the very word renunciation means that you are forcing yourself against yourself – you are dividing yourself. All renunciation creates a schizophrenic condition in you: one part renouncing, another part becoming more infatuated – you are being split.All these religions are criminal because they have made the whole of humanity split. You can be one only if you are natural.And I can understand the difficulty of the questioner. But the difficulty is that he has not understood a very clear-cut distinction. Yes, my sannyasins find that many things, many habits, which they had long tried to drop, have simply disappeared on their own. They have not even made an effort. In fact, if they want to revive those habits, it is impossible to revive them.But this is not renunciation; this is transformation.As you become more aware, more natural, more silent, more at ease with yourself – not fighting, in a deep let-go – you start seeing habits which are meaningless; and it simply becomes impossible to continue to do them. It is not that you stop doing them, just the opposite: you simply find, one day… What happened? A certain habit which used to be with you twenty-four hours a day, has not been there for many days, you have not even remembered it.There was one professor at my colleague in the university, who was a chain-smoker. The doctors were against it, his wife, his children and all his colleagues were against it because he was burning his lungs, destroying his health.The doctors said, “If it continues, no medicine is going to help. The moment you wake up, the first thing is a cigarette, and the last thing at night is a cigarette, continuously.” You would never find him without a cigarette. When one cigarette was finished, another cigarette was lit from the one that he was finishing. He never carried a lighter with him, there was no need; he only carried cigarettes, in all his pockets.One day I was sitting in the common room. One chair had become, without any effort, my chair. Somehow, it was just accidental that the first day I entered, that chair was empty and I sat on it. Slowly it became known that it was my chair. In the common room there was nobody’s personal chair. It was a common room and all the professors could use any chair they wanted, and were using them.Just that chair was mine, because people were somehow afraid of me, because I was not interested in their gossips, I was not interested in the movies, I was not interested in their politics, not interested in who was going to win the election for dean or who was going to win the election for vice-chancellor, and this and that. And they were completely clear that I thought it was all crap. So not only that chair – two chairs on this side and two chairs on that side – I had five reserved chairs. Only once in a while would somebody come, very afraid, and ask, “Can I sit?” And I would say, “There is no problem.”This man came one day and almost shaking, with his cigarette in his hand, trembling. I can still visualize him; his fingers were burned, his lips were burned. I said, “Yes, you can sit. Can I be of any help? Nobody comes unless he feels I can be of some help.”He said, “Only one thing: I want to drop smoking. My doctors are after me, my family is after me, my friends are after me; everybody is angry. And it is not that I don’t want to stop – I have tried in every possible way, but I cannot exist without cigarettes. Even for a few moments I cannot sit without cigarettes. And it is sure that I am going to die from them. Can you help me?”I said, “Yes, I can help you. The first thing is, tell all your friends, doctors, your wife, your parents, your children, ‘I’m going to smoke and you have to stop telling me not to. I have heard enough, and if you don’t stop, I will disappear from the house.’”And, I said, “you can come to my house. That will do, that threat will be enough: ‘I will never come back to this house if anyone mentions cigarettes.’” And I told him, “Tell them, ‘If it is possible, now I am going to start smoking even in my sleep’ – but make it absolutely clear.”“But,” he said, “How am I going to stop?”I said, “You don’t have to stop, just do what I say. Stop the very idea of stopping it; this is the first step. The second step is: smoke, but be conscious.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “When you take the packet, take it from your pocket consciously.” I told him, “Show me how you do it.”He simply took it out. I said, “That is unconscious. You were not alert that you were doing a certain action. Your hand, the packet, the weight of the packet, the feel of the packet, the texture of the packet – you have to be alert to it. Try it in front of me.”He tried. He said, “It seems to be different.”I said, “That’s okay. Now take a cigarette out – not the way you usually do. Be alert. And not the way you go on tapping it on the packet, but consciously. If you usually tap it three times, tap it six times, there is no harm – but be conscious. Put it in your mouth, wait a little, there is no hurry. And start carrying a lighter with you. Wait, be alert, then do the same with the lighter. Light the cigarette, but continue to be alert.“Start smoking. Take the smoke in, but be alert that the smoke is going in, that the smoke is going out – be alert. This is what Buddha was doing, without a cigarette,” I told him. “He was just doing it with pure air. You are a modern man, you are doing it with impure air, that’s all, there is no harm, but the consciousness will be the same. Whether you do it with pure morning-fresh air or with dirty cigarette smoke; it doesn’t matter.“And whether you die two years earlier or two years later, what does it matter? What will you do if you live two years longer? You will smoke more – so don’t be worried. And these people will torture you more, so forget about it. Smoking has not to be renounced, it has to be watchfully understood what is happening.”He was really a very intelligent man, because within only twenty-four hours he reported to me, “I am feeling completely different. I can do the same thing just by breathing.”I said, “There is no harm. Try it just by breathing. Don’t use cigarettes, but keep the cigarettes with you. Any moment you feel uneasy, bring out the cigarette, but in the new way, the new style.”In just seven days the man was doing Vipassana with his breathing. I asked him, “Did you have to drop the cigarettes?”He said, “No, they have dropped on their own. And this awareness has not only helped me drop cigarettes, it has helped me in many other ways of which I was not aware.”A sannyasin will find many habits dropping from him, but he is not dropping them. So I repeat categorically, that in my religion there is no place for renunciation. But that does not mean that you will remain the same.I am giving you a potential methodology of transformation, which will take away all that is meaningless, all that is unnecessary, all that is stupid, all that you are doing just out of habit, all that you are doing because others have said not to do it and just to retaliate, as a reaction, you are doing it.Yes, out of you will be born a new man who will find it difficult to relate to the old self – naturally, obviously, because the old self was nothing but a bundle of all the old habits which you have forgotten somewhere on the way. Where you have left it, you don’t know.And the new self is sharpened by your awareness, cleaned by your awareness, is continually rejuvenated by your awareness.Only one thing I want my sannyasins to learn, and that is awareness. It will take care of all your problems. Without awareness, whatsoever you do you will create more and more problems; they will be farther and farther away from your nature, and it will be very difficult to solve them, because they are phony.Even if you succeed in solving them you have not solved anything; your perversion will start moving in another direction, it will take another shape. It may not come in from the same door; it will find another door – your house has many doors, of which many are not even known to you.But with the light, with the flame of awareness inside you, you know your house for the first time, with all its doors and with all its windows. And when the house is lighted, then I don’t say, “Do this, do not do that.” There is no need; you will do only whatsoever is right.People ask me continually, “What is right, and what is wrong? My answer is: that which comes out of awareness is right, that which comes out of unawareness is wrong. Actions are not right and wrong. It is the source from where they come which is.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why have all the religions used repression as a basic strategy?Religion has passed through many phases. The first phase of religion was magical; it has not died yet. The Red Indians in America are still living in the first phase of religion; in South Africa, among the aborigines of India, religion is a magic ritual of sacrifice to God. It is a kind of bribery so that he helps you, protects you. So whatsoever you think valuable in food, in clothes, ornaments, whatsoever you think valuable, you go on giving to God. Of course there is no God to receive it; the priest receives it – he is the mediator, he profits by it. And the strangest thing is that for at least ten thousand years this magical, ritualistic religion has kept man’s mind captured.There are so many failures; ninety-nine percent are failures. For example, the rains are not coming at the right time. Then the magical religion will have a ritual sacrifice and will believe that God is happy now: the rains will come. Once in a while they do come – but they come also to those people who are not doing the ritual and praising God. They come even to the enemies of the people who have prayed to God. Those rains have nothing to do with their ritual, but it becomes proof that their ritual has succeeded.Ninety-nine times the ritual fails; it is bound to fail because it has nothing to do with the weather. There is no scientific cause-and-effect relationship between the ritual, your fire ceremony, your mantras, and the clouds and the rain. The priest is certainly more cunning than the people he is exploiting; he knows perfectly well what is really happening.Priests have never believed in God, remember. They cannot, but they pretend to believe more than anybody else. They have to, that is their profession. The stronger their faith, the more crowds they can attract, so they pretend. But I have never come across any priest who believes that there is a God. How can he believe? He goes on seeing every day that it is only rarely, by a coincidence, that sometimes the ritual succeeds. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it fails. But he has explanations for the poor people: that your ritual was not done rightly, that while doing it you were not full of pure thoughts. Now, who is full of pure thoughts, and what is a pure thought?It is very natural… For example, in a Jaina ritual people must be fasting. And while they are doing the ritual, they are thinking of food; that is an impure thought. Now, a hungry person thinking of food – I don’t see how it is impure. It is exactly the right thought. In fact, he is doing a wrong act at that moment doing the ritual; he should run to a restaurant!But the priest has a very simple explanation why your ritual failed: “God never fails, he is always ready to protect you. He is the provider, the creator, the maintainer; he will never let you down. But you fail him while saying the prayer or doing the ritual: you are full of impure thoughts.” And the people know that the priest is right. They were thinking of food, or a beautiful woman had passed and the idea had arisen that she is beautiful, and the desire to get her… They threw away the thoughts but it was too late; it had already occurred.So everybody knows that their thoughts are impure. Now, I don’t see that there is anything impure. If a beautiful woman passes by a mirror, it will also reflect the beautiful woman. Is the mirror impure? Your mind is a mirror, it simply reflects. And your mind is conscious of everything that is happening around you. It comments, it is continuously making a commentary. If you watch, you will be surprised – you cannot find a better commentator.The mind says the woman is beautiful, and if you feel a desire for beauty I don’t see that there is anything wrong in it. If you feel a desire for ugliness, then something is wrong, then you are sick. Beauty has to be appreciated. When you see a beautiful painting, you would like to possess it. When you see anything beautiful, just by the side of it the idea comes as a shadow: “If this beautiful thing could be mine…” Now, these are all natural thoughts.But the priest will say, “The rains have not come because of your impure thoughts,” and you are absolutely indefensible. You know it; you are ashamed of yourself. God is always right. But when rains came, then too these thoughts were passing through your head; you were exactly the same person. If you were hungry, you were thinking of food; if you were thirsty, you were thinking of water.These ideas were coming to you when the rains came; but then, nobody bothers about the bad thoughts. The priest starts praising you, your great austerity, your deep prayer: “God has heard you.” And your ego feels so satisfied that you don’t say, “But what about the impure thoughts?” Who wants to mention impure thoughts when you have succeeded and God has heard? But ninety-nine times nobody hears; the sky remains empty, no answer comes. But magical religion goes on and on.Magical religion is the most primitive religion, but fragments of it remain in the second phase, there is not a very clear-cut demarcation. The second phase is the pseudo-religion: Hinduism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism – and there are three hundred “isms” in all. These are pseudo-religions. They have come a little further than magical religion.Magical religion is simply ritualistic. It is an effort to persuade God to help you. The enemy is going to invade the country; the rain is not coming, or too much rain has come and the rivers are flooded, your crops are being destroyed. So whenever you find these difficulties, you ask the help of God. But the magical religion is not a discipline for you. Hence magical religions are not repressive; they are not concerned yet with your transformation, your change.The pseudo-religions shift the attention from God to you. God remains in the center, but fades far away. For the magical-religious person God is very close by; the person can talk to him, he can persuade him. Pseudo-religions still carry the idea of God, but now God is far away – far, far away. Now the only way to reach him is not through rituals but through a significant change in your lifestyle. They start molding and changing you.The magical religions leave people as they are, so the people who believe in magical religions are more natural, less phony, but more primitive, more unsophisticated, more uncultured. The people who belong to pseudo-religions are more sophisticated, more cultured, more educated. Religion to them is not just ritual; it is their whole life’s philosophy.Your question comes here, at the second phase of religion. You ask why all the religions have used repression as a basic strategy, for what? The phenomenon of repression is tremendously significant to understand, because all the religions differ in every other way from each other, they are against all other religions in every other aspect.No two religions agree on anything – except repression. So repression seems to be the greatest tool in their hands. What are they doing with it? Repression is the mechanism of enslaving man, of putting humanity into psychological and spiritual slavery.Long before Sigmund Freud discovered the phenomenon of repression, religions had already used it for five thousand years – and successfully. The methodology is simple, the methodology is to turn you against yourself – but it does miracles. Once you are turned against yourself, many things are bound to happen.First, you will be weakened. You will never be the same strong person you were before. Before, you were one; now you are not only two but many. Before, you were a single whole entity, now you are a crowd. Your father’s voice is speaking in you from one fragment, your mother’s voice is speaking from another fragment; and within you they are still fighting with each other – although they may both no longer be in the world. All your teachers have their compartments in you, and all the priests you came across, all the monks, all the do-gooders, moralists have all made places in you, strongholds of their own.Whomsoever you have been impressed with has become a fragment in you. Now you are many people – dead, alive, fictitious – from the books that you have read, from the holy books, which are just religious fiction, like science fiction. If you look inside yourself, you will find yourself lost in such a big crowd. You cannot recognize who you are among this whole crowd. Which is your original face? They all pretend to be you, they all have faces like you, they speak the language like you, and they are all quarrelsome with each other. You become a battlefield.The strength of the single individual is lost. Your house is divided against itself, you cannot do anything with wholeness: some parts within you will be against it, some parts will be for it, and some parts will be absolutely indifferent. If you do it, the parts which were against will go on telling you that you have done wrong; they will make you feel guilty. The parts that remain indifferent will pretend to be holy, telling you that you are just third-rate to listen to these people who don’t understand.So whether you do something or you don’t do something, in any case you are condemned. You are always in a dilemma. Wherever you move you will be defeated and major portions of your being will always be against you. You will always be doing things with minority support. That certainly means the majority is going to take revenge – and it will take revenge. It will tell you, “If you had not done this you could have done that. If you had not chosen this, you could have chosen that. But you are a fool; you won’t listen. Now suffer, now repent.” But the problem is you cannot do anything with wholeness, so that there is nobody later on to condemn you, to tell you that you are stupid, unintelligent.So the first thing: the pseudo-religions have destroyed the integrity, the wholeness, the strength of man. That is very necessary if you want to enslave people – strong people cannot be enslaved. And this is a very subtle slavery, psychological and spiritual. You don’t need handcuffs and chains and prison cells, no; the pseudo-religions have created much improved arrangements. And they start working from the moment you are born; they don’t miss a single moment.In Hinduism, the brahmin gets hold of the child the moment it is born, and the first thing he does is make a birth chart; and he will follow the child during the whole of its life. On every important occasion he is there to guide: about marriage he will decide, in death he will decide. After death he will be the first to be the guest of the family – because in Hinduism, after a death, on the third day there is a feast. So all the brahmins and all the relatives and all the friends come to the feast, just to give solace to the soul of the departed. The priest gets your neck in his hands, and he does not let go even when you are dead.In Hinduism, every year after a death there is a certain festival and ceremony when you pray for the dead: your father, your forefathers, all the people that you represent in some way: the whole long line of generations. In very orthodox Hindu homes you will find a family tree, a map of the generations.One used to be in my family but I burned it. My father was very angry. I said, “You burn these people completely and nobody is angry, and I have burned just the map. And what is the point of keeping it hanging on the wall?”“But,” he asked, “how were they troubling you?”I said, “They were troubling me – just to think of all these dead people every day. I have to pass through this room two or three times a day and this whole tree – generations!”Now there was nothing else he could do so he started to write down again whatsoever he remembered. When he came to Pune to live with me he said, “I don’t remember much – you destroyed the whole tree – I just remember my father’s father and his father, just four generations back.”I said, “That is enough, even that is not needed. What are we going to do with these people and their names? And if you want I can make the tree and put any names – it will be just as valid.”But he was begging me, “Please don’t destroy this paper – at least there are four generations. You are the fifth generation, and then my brothers are there, and their children and their children; my sisters are there and their children.” He was making the tree again.I said, “You are unnecessarily wasting your time because once I get hold of this, I am going to burn it. What is the point of it all?”But the brahmins use it. If you go to Allahabad or Benares, there are brahmin families, and you can go to the same family that your father had gone to. They have written in their books that your father went there on such and such a date, and he gave so much donation, and he did such and such ritual, and that your father’s father went there. They have generations of it, because for generations people have been going there from your family. And now you sign your name and become part of it. They will show you records of thousands of years, because their family has always been doing that work. And you feel really thrilled to know that so many people from your family have gone there – you are not the only one.The whole stream of your forefathers has been going, and this family of brahmins has been serving them as their priest. And they have written down and exaggerated everything – because that is how they are going to exploit you: your father’s father gave a ten-thousand-rupee donation – that donation goes to their family – and his father had given twenty thousand. Now, you don’t have any records, you don’t have any idea, and you feel very poor if you don’t give. At least you should be able to give ten thousand; your father’s father gave it, and it looks shameful if you cannot even uphold the name of the family. But whatsoever you give, don’t be worried; it will be written in thousands for your children – because they will be going there too.From these people you can get your whole family tree. It was difficult for my father to get it, because Jainas don’t go to brahmins in Allahabad or Benares. For certain rituals, as when your father dies, you have to go just to take his ashes to the Ganges. And you go to the family that has been doing this work for generations, which for thousands of years has taken care of the ashes of everybody who has preceded you. That family will take care of you, will take you in a boat on the Ganges and in the middle of the Ganges they will do the whole ritual; there they will drown the ashes.But because Jainas don’t believe in the Ganges and this type of ritual, my father was at a loss; he could not find a way. Jainas have to make their tree themselves or go to the brahmin, because they have to depend on brahmins for certain things. Although Jainism is a religion in revolt against Hinduism and is basically against Brahminism, finally they had to make the compromise, because there were a thousand and one things they could not figure out without the brahmins.Now, who is going to make the birth chart? Jainas had no idea of astronomy, astrology, palmistry, so they finally had to negotiate. In marriage, who is going to do the rituals? The brahmin does it. And the mantras have to be recited; the brahmin has to do it. In death, who is going to recite the mantras when the fire is burning the body? The brahmin has to do it.So finally the whole rebellion disappeared, and Jainism became just a sub-caste, a sub-religion, a branch of Hinduism – but philosophically they are enemies. Deep down, Jainas think that they are higher and they are simply hiring these brahmins for certain works as they hire other servants. Brahmins think that they are higher: “Because without us you cannot even be born, you cannot die.”These pseudo-religions have created a chaos in you – that is very necessary.I have heard:One politician, one advocate, and one priest – three old friends – all had passed their seventieth year, but they used to go every morning for a walk and sit on a bench in the park and gossip about things which only they knew: the good old days. And many times arguments and discussions would start. One morning they started discussing whose profession was the first.The advocate said, “There is no problem about it, my profession was the first profession in the world, because people were fighting and somebody was needed to mediate, to negotiate, to do justice, to be fair to both parties. So of course my profession came first.”The priest said, “But do you know who started the fight? Without the priest, why would they be fighting? It is the priest who gives the basic ideas and creates antagonism in people’s minds. And once they get attached, infatuated with an idea, then they are ready to fight; otherwise why should they fight?”The politician laughed, he said, “You both are right in a way, but you are not aware of the real situation. Why in the first place did people accept your ideas, your philosophies, theologies? – because of us. We created the will-to-power. Of course, the right idea is going to succeed, but we created the whole idea of success, power, of reaching somewhere, of attaining something, being victorious.”Only when there is a will-to-power do you start getting interested in the “right” kind of philosophy, the “right” kind of theology, the “right” kind of religion, so that you can reach the goal. And there are always many others who are saying, “We are right – where are you going?” All the religions are saying, “Except us, everybody is wrong.”The pseudo-religions disturbed man, his inner integrity. They disturbed the society by creating so many fictitious ideologies. You will be surprised if you look into their ideologies and their theologies. You will laugh: “How was it possible that great thinkers were concerned about these things?” In the Middle Ages people like Thomas Aquinas, a great theologian – perhaps the most important theologian among Christian theologians – was much too concerned about the problem of how many angels can stand on the point of a needle. Angels don’t have weight and they do not have physical bodies, but still there must be a limit – how many can stand there?Thomas Aquinas wasted many pages discussing how many angels can manage to stand there – and he was not alone. The whole Middle Ages remained concerned about the question. It was a great religious problem, of great urgency. I don’t know what urgency there could have been. Perhaps they were thinking that after they die, they would become angels and they would have to stand on the point of a pin or the point of a needle. What was the trouble? But that is the situation with all the theologies.Mahavira believed in seven hells and seven heavens. He was old by the time Gautam Buddha started moving around, teaching and impressing people. They had all heard Mahavira, and they would ask Buddha, “Mahavira says so, what do you say?” Somebody asked, “Mahavira says there are seven hells and seven heavens. What do you say?”Buddha said, “He knows nothing. There are seventy-seven hells and seventy-seven heavens.” Now, there is nothing to prove and nothing to disprove it. It is up to you whom you want to believe.The same question was asked of Ajit Keshkambal, who was even younger than Buddha and was just entering the field of controversy. He said, “These people are perfectly right. Up to the seventh, Mahavira is right; up to the seventy-seventh Buddha is right, but there are really seven hundred and seventy-seven hells and seven hundred and seventy-seven heavens – because I have explored them all. Those poor people – about whatsoever they have explored they are not wrong, but if they insist that this is the end and that they have come to the very end, then they are wrong. If they say, ‘This is the point up to where we have reached,’ there is no problem.”Now Ajit Keshkambal was really a man with a tremendous sense of humor; he was just joking. But what was Buddha doing? He was very serious; but to me that too seems to be a joke. What was Mahavira doing? He was even more serious, but to be serious about such things… You cannot give any proof, but you can create conflict in people. Now a few became Jainas, a few became Buddhists, and a few followed Ajit Keshkambal, but because he was a man with a great sense of humor, his religion disappeared; people wanted something serious and soon they realized that this man was not serious.How can you believe a man who is not serious? And in fact my own understanding is that Ajit Keshkambal was more sincere than the other two. He was simply making this theological business a laughing matter. He was saying, “Get rid of all this nonsense! What business is it of yours to be bothered with?”So the pseudo-religions created chaos in individuals, they created chaos in society, and they exploited both.If there are Mohammedans, then Hindus remain united, then Christians remain united. It is just like Russia and America – nobody can stop making nuclear weapons, although both go on talking about peace. Nobody wants a Third World War because everybody understands that it is going to finish everybody. It will be an absolutely idiotic war, if it ever happens, because a war only has any meaning if somebody is going to win and somebody is going to be defeated. But in a Third World War nobody is going to be defeated and nobody is going to be the victor – all are going to be killed. There will not be anybody left to declare, to announce, “We are victorious.”But still they both go on, continually pouring all their resources into nuclear weapons because of the fear that the other is doing it, so you have to do it. The other is also just like you, human – you are doing it, so the other has to do it. Now, where is this going to stop?The same happened with religions. They have all helped each other unknowingly. Hindus became united against Mohammedans, Christians became united against Jews; Jews became united against Christians. And the whole world became a battlefield. Man became a battlefield inside, and the world became a battlefield outside. And the strategy used was repression.How can repression do all these things and many more? Repression simply means: remember that your nature is your enemy – you have to fight it, you have to kill it, you have to destroy it, you have to go above it; then only are you holy.Now, this is impossible. Nobody has ever been able to go above nature. Wherever you are, you are within nature. Yes, you can cripple yourself, you can cut your limbs to the size prescribed by your holy scripture, you can suffer, you can torture yourself as much as you want, but you cannot go beyond nature. Nature is all there is – there is no beyond. Beyond is within nature – not outside it.So those who are fighting with nature never go beyond it. And their continual failure makes them miserable, makes them mentally unbalanced, psychologically insane. And all these things are good for the priest; he exploits you. His whole profession is to help you, but before he can help you, you must be put in a position where you need the help.In India I came across many psychologists, psychiatrists, who had been trained in the West, and belonged to the Freudian school or the Jungian school or the Adlerian school or Assagioli’s school. They had one thing in common: they were all against me. And I told them, “Can you see the point? You are all against each other, but you agree on one point: that you are all against me. Why? – because I can simply destroy your profession.” And with the profession destroyed, the Freudian will suffer just as much as the Adlerian, just as much as the Jungian.I can make man whole again. I can restore him to his integrated, centered, grounded being.I am not a psychologist; I am not treating any psychological problems because to me those problems are created problems. They create the problem and then they come with the solution. And it is so easy to create the problem. You will be surprised how easy it is…One of my professors – I was a student of psychology, and he was a famous psychologist… One day I just told him, “All the problems that psychologists deal with are created by them.”He said, “You will have to prove it.”I said, “Challenge accepted.”And next day I proved it. I went to his wife, who was very loving toward me – he himself was very loving toward me – and I told her, “You have to do one thing, just for my sake, just once.”She said, “What is it? Just tell me. If I can do it, I will.”I said, “Do one thing: when your husband gets up in the morning, just say to him, ‘What happened? Your face looks pale. Couldn’t you sleep the whole night? Your eyes look red.’ Just put your hand on his head and ask, ‘Have you a fever or anything?’ And certainly he will say something. Whatsoever he says, write it down on a piece of paper – his words exactly – because I will collect it later on.”She said, “But what is this whole business about?”I said, “I will tell you by the evening, but right now simply remember it, and do it for me tomorrow morning.”She said, “I will do it. It is done, believe me.”Just on one side lived the postmaster of the university. He was a very old man and a very good man; I went to him and chit-chatted about his garden. He was very interested in flowers but nobody used to come to praise his garden; I was the only person, so he was very happy with me. I said, “Today you have to do something for me.”He said, “What? Anything!”I said, “When Professor Mehta goes to the university, when he comes out of his house, simply remain by the fence and say, ‘What has happened? You look like a ghost! Your legs are trembling.’”He said, “Has something gone wrong with him?”I said, “Nothing has gone wrong. But you have to say this and you have to show by your face that actually you mean what you are saying. He will say something; write it down exactly in his words and I will collect it.Professor Mehta used to come to the department from his house; it was almost a mile, a beautiful road, so he used to walk. On both sides were gardens and professors’ houses, the professors’ colony. So I made a few people ready, particularly the wives, and a few small children – anybody I thought was reliable. And they were very happy, they said, “We will do it.”And lastly, where Professor Mehta used to enter the department, was the peon who used to sit in front of the office. I said to him, “Dhyananda, I have never asked anything of you…”He said, “That’s true. Everybody tortures me: ‘Dhyananda bring this, Dhyananda bring that.’ Professors torture me; students torture me. That’s true; you are the only person… In these two years, you have not even asked for a single glass of water. And I was wondering…this is rare. So whatever is to be done I will do.”I said, “You have to do this: when Professor Mehta comes here, simply stand up and hold him saying, ‘You will fall down. You are trembling. What has happened?’”He said, “But is it true?”I said, “No, it is not true, but you have to pretend it is true.”He said, “Okay. You have never asked anything from me – I will do my best.”The next day I collected all the pieces of paper, because I was just following the professor. He was going ahead of me, and I was just following him collecting the papers. And Dhyananda really did a hatchet job. He really shook him so hard that he fell! I had to support him; we both took him inside. He said, “I am not even able to sit, just put me on the bench.” So we put him on the bench. I ran and brought a pillow and a blanket because he was shivering, perspiring.I asked, “What has happened?”He said, “It seems I have some strange fever. Last night when I went to bed, everything was okay. But now my headache is such as I have never had and I feel my whole body trembling. Just call the doctor. If it had not been for Dhyananda, I would have fallen and broken my leg.”And it was actually because of Dhyananda that he was going to fall. Dhyananda was an uneducated man and he did it for real! I called the doctor, and I explained to him, “You have to be very serious. Nothing is the matter, it is only to do with a challenge that I’ve accepted; so just be kind to me – be very serious.”He was very serious; he checked this and that, and he said, “Mr. Mehta, you need at least three months’ complete rest.”Mr. Mehta said, “Three months complete rest! But what has happened?”He said, “I cannot tell you. I will talk to your wife.”And Professor Mehta said, “But do one thing please. Take me to my house in your car because I cannot walk back again. One mile…”He was walking every day, coming and going, because he loved walking; he enjoyed walking, but he said, “Now I cannot walk.” To me he said, “Just go to the vice-chancellor and tell him that I am in a terrible mess; the doctor is saying three months… I don’t know what is going to happen, so tell him that if for a few days I don’t come, not to mind but replace me with somebody.”I took him in the car with the doctor and we took him inside the house. The wife was just trying to hold herself together, otherwise she might have started giggling and laughing. And really her husband was changed completely. The doctor was holding one hand, I was holding the other hand, and he was not even able to walk. We put him on the bed, and he said to the doctor, “You can tell my wife.”The doctor said, “I will come in my own time. First let me go and prepare some medicines for you. It is urgent.” So he left.Professor Mehta asked me, “Has the doctor said anything to you?”I said, “First look at these papers.”He said, “What papers? Has he given them to you?”I said, “No, read them first. This is the statement you gave to your wife: ‘I am perfectly okay, what nonsense are you talking?’ That was six o’clock this morning. And at seven-thirty you told the postmaster, ‘Yes, the night was a little disturbed.’ And then to Professor Nand Dulare Vajpeyel you said, ‘I had a terrible night.’ These are your statements. Nothing has happened to you – you can get up. There is no need to rest for three months, even three minutes are not needed; you are perfectly okay.”“But,” he said, “I was perspiring and I was just going to fall.”I said, “There is nothing to it. It was Dhyananda who just jumped on you and made you fall and you thought you were falling. He did it too well; I had not asked him to do that much and I had no idea that he would do it so perfectly. So get up!”He immediately got up and he said, “Really? That’s true. I was perfectly okay last night, and this morning I was perfectly okay. When my wife spoke to me I simply said, ‘I am perfectly okay. What has happened to you?’ But when everybody started asking, strangely I started feeling that something was wrong. A small boy said, ‘Uncle your legs are wobbling,’ and I felt that certainly my legs were wobbling, otherwise why was this child…?”I said, “This is the note from the child. These were all my men, women, children, Dhyananda, the doctor. I had to arrange this whole lot because I had accepted your challenge. I created the sickness. I could have managed it for three months, you may have even died.”He said, “I cannot deny it. Seeing what has happened to me, it is possible that if I was in bed for three months and you went on trying your propaganda, you could have killed me.”I said, “This is how your whole religion has been functioning: create problems in people’s minds and then where have they to go? They have to go to the priest. Then the priest gives the solution – and gets paid for it. What the psychologists are doing is the same. Out of a hundred cases, ninety cases are created by you people.”I am not saying that the psychologists do it intentionally – nor are the priests doing it intentionally – they are doing it sincerely; they think it is so. They believe in what they are doing, and their belief is infectious, so the other person starts believing it. And then their solutions are there; their prescriptions are there.If you go to a Freudian, then go to a Jungian, then go to an Adlerian, then go to Assagioli, you will know what I mean. All four will diagnose your disease differently because their scriptures are different. They will all tell you that this is the real problem with you, and no one is going to agree with anybody else. And because the problem is different, naturally the solution is going to be different. The problem has to be different; otherwise what purpose does Jung have in the world? Freud has already done the work.That was the reason why Jung separated from Freud. He saw the point: that with Freud he would at the most be a great Freudian, but he would never be an individual on his own. And what Freud was doing, he could do. And Jung started doing it, and he was perfectly successful. Adler escaped in the same way. If Freud reduced everything to sex, Adler reduced everything to ego.Naturally their solutions are different because they have posed the problem differently. And if by chance you succeed, following their solutions, then their therapy has succeeded, not you. But if you fail, you have failed; you were not following the rules properly. And to follow the rules of psychoanalysis or any other school properly is such a long affair.You may need three years’ psychoanalysis, and by the time you finish the psychoanalysis you end up more puzzled, more messed up than you were ever before. Now you need somebody else’s help. Now you will need help for your whole life. There are people who have been psychoanalyzed their whole life, going from one psychoanalyst to another psychoanalyst.The same was true with religions. They created the problem by repression.In fact psychology has used what the religions, the pseudo-religions, have sown; the psychologists have been reaping the crop. The psychologist is really the modern priest and he is exploiting the same ground, with the same strategy. For thousands of years the priest has prepared the ground, but people were becoming fed up with the priest, so they were very happy that a new science appeared. It is not a science at all, just scientific jargon.So the people who used to go to the priest, if they are educated, cultured, sophisticated, now go to the psychoanalyst – the same people. If they are not educated then they still go to the priest. The priest is cheaper, and less harmful because he is not so clever with words: conscious, super-conscious, sub-conscious, unconscious, collective unconscious, cosmic unconscious, cosmic conscious. The poor priest cannot afford that much.You can be hypnotized by the psychoanalyst and his jargon. He has arguments to support him, and what he is saying is in a way right: you are repressed, but that work was done by religion. Religion condemned sex, condemned your love for food – condemned everything that you can enjoy – condemned music, condemned art, condemned singing, dancing. If you look around the world, and collect together all the condemnations from all the religions, you will see that they have condemned the whole of mankind. They have not left a single inch un-condemned.Yes, each religion has done its bit – because if you condemn the whole of mankind completely, he may simply freak out. You have to do it proportionately, so that he becomes condemned, feels guilty, wants to be freed from guilt and is ready to take your help. You should not condemn him so much that he simply escapes from you or jumps into the ocean and finishes himself. That will not be good business.It is just like the slaves in the old days. They were given food, but not enough that they became too strong and revolted, and not too little either so that they died; otherwise you made a loss. You gave them a certain percentage: just hanging in the middle between life and death, and they went on living and working for you. Only that much food was given, not more than that; otherwise there would be energy left after work, and that energy could become revolution. They could start revolting; they could start joining together, they could start seeing what was being done to them.The same has been done by religions. Every religion has taken a different segment of mankind and condemned it, and through it made him feel guilty. Once guilt is created in you, you are in the clutches of the priest. You cannot escape now because he is the only one who can clean all the shameful parts of you, who can make you capable of standing before God without being ashamed.He creates the fiction of God. He creates the fiction of guilt. He creates the fiction that one day you will have to stand before God: so be clean and be pure, and be in such a state that you can stand before him without any fear, and without any shame.The whole thing is fictitious. But this has to be remembered: it is true about the pseudo-religions. And whenever I say all religions, I mean pseudo-religions; the plural is indicative of the pseudo.When religion becomes scientific, it is not going to be plural; then it will be simply religion, and its function will be just the opposite of the pseudo-religions. Its function will be to make you free from God, to make you free from heaven and hell, to make you free from the concept of original sin, to make you free from the very idea that you and nature are separate; to make you free from any kind of repression.With all this freedom you will be able to learn the expression of your natural being, whatsoever it is.There is no need to feel ashamed. The universe wants you to be this way, that’s why you are this way. The universe needs you this way; otherwise it would have created somebody else, not you.So not being yourself is the only irreligious thing according to me. Be yourself with no conditions, no strings attached – just be yourself and you are religious, because you are healthy, you are whole.You don’t need the priest, you don’t need the psychoanalyst, you don’t need anybody’s help, because you are not sick, you are not crippled, paralyzed. All that crippled-ness and paralysis has gone with the finding of freedom.Religion can be condensed into a single phrase: total freedom to be oneself.Express yourself in as many ways as possible without fear; there is nothing to fear, there is nobody who is going to punish you or reward you. If you express your being in its truest form, in its natural flow, you will be rewarded immediately – not tomorrow but today, herenow.You are punished only when you go against your nature. But that punishment is of help; it is simply an indication that you have moved away from nature, that you have gone a little astray, off the road. Come back!Punishment is not revenge. No, punishment is only an effort to wake you up: what are you doing? Something is wrong, something is going against yourself. That’s why there is pain, there is anxiety, and there is anguish.And when you are natural, expressing yourself just like the trees and the birds, who are more fortunate – because no bird has tried to be a priest, and no tree has yet got the idea of being a psychoanalyst. Just like the trees, and the birds, and the clouds, you will feel at home in existence.And to be at home is all that religion is about.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Do you really believe that God does not exist?I do not believe that God does not exist, I know for sure he does not exist. And “thank God” that he does not exist – because the existence of God would have created so many problems, difficulties, that life would have been almost impossible.You may not have looked at it from the angle from which I am going to talk to you – perhaps nobody has ever tried to look at it from this angle. The Christians say that God created the world. In fact, the hypothesis of God is needed for the creation. The world is there; somebody must have created it. Whoever created it, that creator is God. But do you see the implication? If the world was created, then there can be no evolution. Evolution means that creation continues.Think of the Christian story: God created the world in six days, and then on the seventh day he rested, and since then he has been resting. The whole of creation was completed in six days. Now, where is the possibility for evolution? Creation means: finished! The full stop has arrived. On the sixth day, the full stop; and after that there is no possibility of evolution.Evolution implies that creation is not complete, hence the possibility of evolving. But God cannot create an incomplete world; that will be going against God’s nature. He is perfect, and whatsoever he does is perfect: neither is he evolving, nor is the world evolving; everything is at a standstill, dead. This is the reason why the popes were against Charles Darwin, because that man was bringing in an idea which was going to kill God sooner or later. Those popes were perceptive in a way; they could see the faraway implications of the idea of evolution.Ordinarily you would not connect creation and evolution. What connection is there between God and Charles Darwin? There is a connection. Charles Darwin is saying that the creation is an ongoing process, that existence is always imperfect, that it is never going to be perfect; only then can it go on evolving, reaching new peaks, new dimensions, opening new doors, new possibilities.God finished his work in six days and not long ago: four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ was born. It must have been the first of January, a Monday, because we manage to fit God into everything that we have created. He has to follow our calendar. If you ask me, I will say it must have been Monday, the first of April, April Fools’ Day, because that day seems to be absolutely suitable for doing such an act of creating a complete ready-made existence.If evolution becomes impossible, life loses all meaning, life loses all future: then it has only a past. It is not unnatural that religious people are constantly past-oriented; they only have the past. Everything has already been done; there is nothing to be done in the future, the future is empty, blank – and yet you have to live in that future. Everything that had to happen, happened four thousand and four years before Jesus was born. After that there has been no addition, no evolution, no development.God created the world just as a potter creates a pot, a dead thing out of mud. But remember, the potter can destroy the pot any moment. If you give the power of creation to God, you are simultaneously giving the power of un-creation too. These are the implications that have not been looked into. God can un-create. April Fools’ Day comes every year; any year on the first of April he can un-create. At the most it may take six days again.The very idea that you have been created makes you a thing; it takes away your being. You can be a being only if there is no God. God and you as a being cannot coexist. That’s why I say I am sure God does not exist, because I see beings everywhere.The presence of beings is enough proof that God does not exist, cannot exist. Either you can exist or God can exist; you cannot both exist. The person who starts believing in God, is unknowingly losing his beinghood; he is becoming a thing. So there are Christian things, Hindu things, Mohammedan things, but not beings. They have dropped their being of their own accord; they have given their being to God.The fiction has become alive, and the alive has become a fiction. I am simply putting things right side up. When I say God does not exist, I have no grudge against God. I don’t care a bit about God, whether he exists or not – it is none of my business.When I say God does not exist, my purpose is to give you your lost beinghood; to show you that you are not a thing created arbitrarily by somebody. Why did he decide, on a certain day, four thousand and four years before Jesus was born, to create the world? What caused the idea of creation? Was there something else that was forcing him to create? Was there some serpent seducing him to create? Why on a certain day, and not before? I want you to see the point. It is arbitrary, whimsical. If the story is true, God is insane. What was he doing for the whole of eternity? The idea of creation came so late to him.The very idea of creation makes us arbitrary, whimsical, whereas evolution is not arbitrary or whimsical. Evolution is eternal; it has always been going on. There was not a time when existence was not; there will never be a time when existence will not be.Existence means eternity.God makes everything silly, small, arbitrary, meaningless, whimsical. Just that old man – and he must have been really old, really, really old – and then this idea of creation came to him, and in six days he completed it. That’s why the popes were against Charles Darwin: “You are saying that it is not yet completed, it is evolving. You are against the Bible, the Holy Scriptures. You are against God, against the idea of creation.”Charles Darwin was simply saying, “I am not against any God, I don’t know any God.” He was a very fearful person, and he was a Christian. He used to pray; in fact he started to pray more after he wrote the theory of evolution. He became very much afraid: who knows, perhaps he was doing something against God. He had believed that God created the world, but the facts of nature were telling a different story: everything is evolving, life is never the same again.So if anybody believes in God, he cannot believe that you are a being. Only things are created; they have a beginning and an end; beings are eternal.Because of this fact, two religions in India, Jainism and Buddhism, dropped the idea of God – because to keep that idea simply meant you were dropping the idea of being, which is far more significant. They would have liked to keep both, but it was logically impossible.Once you accept that you have been created, you accept the other part of it, that the same whimsical man, any day, can un-create you. So what meaning do you have? – just a toy in the hands of some whimsical old man. So whenever he wants, he plays with the toys, and whenever he wants, he destroys them? It was really a great, courageous step on the part of Mahavira and Buddha to choose being and drop the idea of God – and that too, twenty-five centuries ago. They could simply see that you cannot manage both; they are against each other. But they were not aware of evolution; that was a later development. Now we know that creation goes against the idea of evolution too.Creation and evolution are absolutely against each other. Creation means completion; evolution means constant growth. Growth is possible only if things are imperfect and remain imperfect. Howsoever they grow there is always a possibility of growing more.There are a few other things which have to be considered. If you are created, you can’t have freedom. Have you seen any machinery having freedom, any thing having freedom? Anything that is created is in the hands of the creator, just like a puppet. He has the strings in his hands; he pulls one string… You must have seen a puppet show. The strings are pulled, the man is behind the screen; you don’t see him, you simply see the puppets, and they dance and they fight, but that is all false – the puppeteer is the reality.These puppets cannot have freedom to fight, to love, to get married – all these things happen in a puppet show – to dance or not to dance; or when they don’t want to dance, to say, “No, I am not going to dance.” The puppet cannot say no. And all the religions have been teaching you not to say no: don’t say no to God, to his messiah, to his holy book – never, never think in terms of saying no.Why? If you cannot say no, what is the meaning of your yes? It is a corollary. Yes has meaning only when you are capable of saying no. If you have to say yes, and there is no other alternative except yes…I have heard that when Ford first started manufacturing cars, he himself used to go to the showroom and take an interest in the customers, talk to the customers. He would say to them, “You can choose any color provided it is black” – because at that time there were only black cars. But he used to say, “You can choose any color provided it is black.”You are free, provided your answer is yes. What kind of freedom is this? Puppets cannot have freedom. And if God has simply made you, you are a puppet. It is better to revolt against God and be a being than to submit and be a part of a puppet show, because the moment you accept yourself as a puppet, you have committed suicide.You see puppets the whole world over, with different colors, different names, different rituals. Hindus say that without God’s will, even a leaf in the tree cannot move – so what about you? Everything happens according to God. In fact, he has determined everything the moment he created; it is predestined. Now, it is so strange that intelligent people also go on believing in such garbage.Just see the garbage: on the one hand God has created you; on the other hand, when you do something wrong you will be punished. If God has created you, and he has determined your nature and you cannot go against it, you don’t have any freedom. With God there is no possibility to have freedom; then how can you commit a crime, how can you be a sinner and how can you be a saint?Everything is determined by him, he is responsible; you are not. But people go on believing in both things together: God creating the world, God creating man, woman, everything, and then throwing all responsibility on you. If there is something wrong with you, God is responsible and should be punished. If you are a murderer, then God created a murderer; then he should be responsible for Adolf Hitlers and Joseph Stalins and Mao Zedongs. He created these people.But no, the religious mind loses intelligence, becomes rusted, forgets completely that these are incompatible things; God and freedom are incompatible. If you are free, then there is no God.I remind you again of Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement. This man was certainly crazy, but sometimes the so-called sane people are so dumb and so dull, so idiotic, that crazy people come up with great insights – and Nietzsche had that genius. Once in a while he came up with such a great insight that you cannot believe why people had not seen it before; and Nietzsche lived just a hundred years ago.He said, “God is dead, therefore, I declare, man from now onward is free.” This whole sentence brings freedom and God together for the first time in the whole history of mankind. It was waiting for this crazy man, Friedrich Nietzsche, to put these together: that God is dead, therefore you are free; otherwise, you are not free.You may not have thought about it. How can you be free with a creator who is continuously watching you, who is continuously maintaining you and directing you? In the first place he has put everything into you as a fixed program. And you will follow that program; you cannot do otherwise. What you feed into the computer, the computer can only answer with that. If you start asking things which you have not fed into the computer before, the computer cannot answer them. The computer is a mechanism: first you have to feed it all the information, then whenever you need, you can ask the computer and the information will be available.You are a computer if there is a creator! He has put certain information into you, he has programmed you, and you are doing things accordingly. If you are a saint, you are not to take the credit for it; it was the program. If you are a sinner you need not feel condemned and bad; it was the program.In India, the life of Rama has been played every year for ten thousand years. Almost all over the country, even in the smallest village there is a drama company. Once a year the drama company starts preparing one month ahead, and big cities who can afford it can ask professional companies. There are professional companies, particularly in Ayodhya, which was the capital of Rama, and in other religious places. So, big cities that can afford to, ask the professional companies. Small villages, towns which cannot afford to, make their own company.It happened in one of the villages: the drama begins with Sita’s marriage. In those days particularly, princes used to have a certain ceremony called swayamvar. All the eligible young men – of course young princes, because nobody else would be allowed in the palace – from all over the country would gather together, and the girl, the princess, would take a garland in her hand and move about. It was for her to choose anybody she wanted. Or, if she was worried that on what criterion… It was a difficult job: a hundred princes were there, and they were all beautiful and from royal families, and young and strong. It was not easy to choose just like that, and it was not something that tomorrow you could reject.In India it is not only a life-long affair, it is going to be for many lives. It is really a great burden on the mind of the girl: how to choose? So she can take the help of God in a certain way. Some device can be managed: that whosoever solves this puzzle will be the person she will choose. Now she is leaving it to God – it is easier, in wiser hands.In Sita’s swayamvar, the device was a bow of the Lord Shiva, which was given to Sita’s father because he was a devotee of Shiva. The bow was so heavy – of course, it was a god’s bow – that even to take it up needed a superman. An ordinary man would not be able even to move it; and to use it – that was something almost impossible.There was a fish, an artificial fish placed on the ceiling, and on the ground there was a small pond, which reflected the fish. You had to look in the pond at the reflection, and with Shiva’s bow and arrow you had to shoot the fish above – a great warrior was needed. First, the problem was how to lift up the bow. Even if you managed to lift it, then the problem was how to use it; it was not an ordinary bow. And then the puzzle was that you had to look at the reflection in the water and shoot the fish, which, like the reflection, was moving; it was on a wheel.The whole country was agog. All the great warriors and kings, they all gathered there. Ravana was one of the greatest warriors of those days. He was the king of Sri Lanka and there was every chance that he would win the contest because he was also a devotee of Shiva, perhaps a greater devotee than Sita’s father. His devotion to Shiva was such, so the story says, that when Shiva was not listening to him, Ravana said, “If you don’t listen to me, then I will cut off my head and put it at your feet. What more sacrifice do you want?” And he did cut off his own head and put it at Shiva’s feet. Of course more sacrifice is impossible.This is a strange story – how can you cut off your own head, and then put it at Shiva’s feet? How will you manage to find where Shiva’s feet are? Your head is cut off; your eyes have gone. But that’s the story – he managed.Shiva was very happy with him and said, “Because you have done something which nobody has ever done, I will give you something which has never been given to anybody: you will have ten heads. Because you have sacrificed one, I will give you ten heads. And any enemy cutting off one of your heads will not be able to kill you – immediately another head will grow. The ten heads will remain ten.”This man with his ten heads was coming to the swayamvar. There was every fear that… And he must have been the ugliest man; even one head is enough, but ten heads! Everybody was afraid that he was coming and there was every chance that he would take up this bow; there seemed to be nothing to prevent him. Rama was also participating as a prince of Ayodhya. He was a young man, very young, and it was not known that he was a great warrior or anything. There was no possibility for him to win the contest.So the sages who wanted Rama to win the contest and get married to Sita arranged a conspiracy so that when Ravana went to pick up the bow, a man came running and told him, “Your capital” – which was made all of gold – “is on fire and you are immediately needed. Without you everything will be gone.” So poor Ravana had to leave the bow and rushed to Sri Lanka. Meanwhile Rama won the contest, and was married.This is the story – the beginning. In this particular village the actors were all programmed and being prompted from the back. But when the man came saying, “Sri Lanka is on fire,” the man who was playing the role of Ravana said, “Let it be! I am going to marry Sita. Enough is enough; this time I am not going to go anywhere.The prompter was trying hard: “This is not what we have told you.”The actor said, “Stop all this prompting – I know what I am doing.” In fact he was in love with the girl who was playing the role of Sita, and the girl’s father was not willing for them to marry. This was the only chance to declare before the whole town… And before anybody else could do anything, Sita garlanded him.Now, the whole town was in a shock. The story was finished before it had even started, because this was the beginning only, just the introduction; the real things were just about to happen. The actors were in such a hurry; they even forgot to pull the curtains. The whole mass was shouting and screaming and clapping, and saying, “We have seen many things but nothing like this. This is just the best drama that we have seen!”In a drama you may go against the program, because it is acting, it is not your being; your being is still free. You may be acting the part of Ravana or Rama, but those are parts, roles; your being is still free. You can decide for or against. But if your being is created then there is no possibility of your going anywhere other than where the program says, doing anything other than what’s in the program.If there is a God who has created the world, then nobody is responsible except him. And to whom can he be responsible? There is nobody above him. You are not responsible because he has created you. He is not responsible because there is nobody else to whom he can be responsible. God means the world loses all responsibility, and responsibility is the very center of your life.Then you can play the role, but you are not there, only promptings; whether given from the outside, from behind the curtain, or whether given from the inside through the hormones, through biology, physiology, psychology doesn’t matter. You are only a collection of promptings, and you are just following them. It takes all dignity from man totally. It reduces you to a puppet.To accept God is not to be religious, because without responsibility how can you be religious? Without freedom how can you be religious? Without an independent being of your own, how can you be religious? God is the greatest anti-religious idea.If you look into it from every aspect, then those who believe in God are not religious, cannot be religious. So when I say there is no God, I am trying to save religiousness.There is no danger from the Devil; the real danger comes from God. The Devil is only his shadow. If God disappears the shadow will disappear automatically. The real problem is God.And you can see what I am saying if you look at history. Every step in evolution has been stopped by the churches out of fear that it proves creation is incomplete. Man has reached the moon, but in India I have come across Hindu shankaracharyas, Jaina acharyas – they are equivalent to the pope – who don’t believe it, because their scriptures say that the moon is a goddess. The sun is a god; the moon is not a planet. You will be surprised to know that one Jaina monk has accumulated millions of rupees in donations because he is creating a lab to prove that man has not reached the moon, but has landed on some other planet!Now, these idiots – and people believe in them because the scriptures are in their favor – collect all the quotations from all the scriptures spoken by people who are omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent: avatars, tirthankaras, God’s special messengers. And if they say this, then what can poor scientists do?They are deceiving you, cheating you and cheating themselves. A fact that nobody can deny, a fact that all the scientists of the whole world, including India, have accepted, is not acceptable to the religious mind because it will destroy their faith in the scriptures. They are more worried about their faith than about reality.When I say God is the greatest enemy of religion, it is going to shock the so-called religious people, because they think praying to God, worshipping God, surrendering to God is what religion is. They have never thought about responsibility, freedom, growth, consciousness, being; they have never bothered – and yet these are the real religious questions.Your prayers are silly. You are simply praising God in the same way you have been praising kings and queens; in the same tone, in the same words. You are praising God and thinking that just as your queens and kings become influenced by your prayer and you can persuade them to do favors for you, so will you be able to persuade God.The Bible’s statement that God created man in his own image is absolutely wrong. Just the contrary is true: man created God in his own image, God is man’s creation. Hence the Hindu God is different, the Mohammedan God is different, the Jewish God is different, because different people were trying to figure out how God looks, what language he speaks. Now, Jews cannot believe that he speaks any other language than Hebrew, and Hindus cannot believe it: “God speaking Hebrew! Have you gone mad? Do you think God is a Jew? He speaks pure Sanskrit.”I have heard that after the Second World War, a German general and a British general – just resting, taking a sunbath on the beach – started talking. The German general said, “I am simply puzzled by one thing: that we were praying to the Christian God, and you were praying to the same Christian God, but we are defeated and you have won. Is it not partial?”The English general laughed and said, “It is not partial. Just tell me one thing: in what language were you praying – in German? That’s where the fault was. God understands only English, no other language, and we were praying in English. There is no mystery in it, it is simple.”Man, imposing himself by this creation of God in man’s own image, is not aware of what he is losing. He is losing all that is valuable, everything that is beautiful, everything that can become a blessing to him.The religious person starts focusing himself upon a fiction and forgets his own reality, forgets himself and thinks of somebody there above, in the sky. That person above in the sky is nonexistential, but you can focus on any nonexistential thing. And you can forget yourself in that focusing.And that is where real religion happens: within you.Hence prayer has nothing to do with religion. In my religion there is no place for prayer. No true religion can have anything like prayer, which is absolutely bogus.What are you doing in prayer? You are creating first an image of your own imagination, surrendering to your own imagination; then talking to that image. You are just performing an insane act. In all the churches, in all the synagogues, in all the temples and in all the mosques of the world, these people are doing something insane – but the whole earth is full of these insane people.Because they have been doing this for centuries, and you have accepted them as religious, it shocks you when I say that they are not religious. They are not even normal – to be religious is far away. They are below normal. They are doing something so stupid that if they go on doing it, whatsoever little intelligence is left in them, by and by, will go down the drain. Perhaps it has already gone.To me, religion is a tremendous phenomenon. It is not fictitious. It is entering into the very heart of reality. It is knowing existence from its very center. But you will have to drop your fictions. Those fictions will never allow you to enter into yourself, because those fictions are projected outward, and you get completely identified with them.You know, you watch a movie or a television show and you know perfectly well that many times tears have come to your eyes, although you know that it is only a television screen and there is nobody there. But you forget completely that you are only a watcher. You become identified with someone, so much so, that if the other person is in great suffering, tears come to your eyes.In Kolkata there was a very famous scholar of Indian literature, theology, history, and all that you can conceive. He was a rare mind, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. Vidyasagar means ocean of wisdom. That title was given to him by the All-India Conference of Hindu Scholars. It has not been given to anybody else, either before or since. He was really an ocean of what they call wisdom. I will not call it wisdom.I will show you how wise he was: because he was so famous a scholar and carried all kinds of DLitts. from different sources, one Sanskrit university, instead of a DLitt., gave him the title Vidya Varidhi; that too means ocean of wisdom. Another gave him the title Vidya Vachaspati, master of wisdom, and the Hindu University of Benares gave him the title Mahamahopadhyaya: the greatest teacher of all.He had all these degrees, and he was respected all over the country and particularly in Bengal; there was nobody who even came close to him. He was invited to a drama, to inaugurate it, and it was arranged by such great people that he could not refuse. Even the viceroy of India was going to be present there, because Kolkata in those days was the capital of India. So he went to inaugurate it.He inaugurated it and was sitting by the side of the viceroy, just in the front row. In the drama there is a very corrupted, cunning character, a villain who is continually after a very innocent woman. The story becomes so intense that at one point he finds the woman alone, far away from the village. She had come to the river to collect water. There is nobody around, the village is miles away, and he gets hold of her…There was pin drop silence because there was going to be a rape; that’s what the man intends to do. And suddenly – the audience could not believe it – Ishwar Vidyasagar jumped onto the stage and started beating the man with one of his shoes!For a moment nobody could think what to do or what not to do about Vidyasagar. But that actor took the shoe in his hand and he said to Vidyasagar, “This I will not return; it is the greatest prize in my life. I have been playing this role my whole life, but if a man like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar gets so involved and identified that he forgets himself, and forgets that it is only a drama, and I am not going to rape the woman… In the first place she is not a woman – you know it, and everybody else knows it. That chap is a young man from your own town.”Ishwar Chandra felt very ashamed, and said, “I am sorry that I disturbed the whole drama. But it is true; I forgot completely that it is a drama. I forgot completely who I am. I forgot completely that the woman is not a woman and that you are simply playing a role; you are not going to rape her. Before thousands of people and the viceroy of India, you are not going to rape her. I just forgot.”But you are also forgetting when you become emotionally involved in a film or a novel. And this is what your so-called religious people have been doing. They have become involved with imaginary gods and goddesses of all kinds and types you can imagine. And they have completely forgotten themselves. They are worshipping something which is not there, but they have been worshipping so intently that they can create the hallucination of it.It is possible for a Christian to see Jesus with open eyes; it is possible for a Hindu to see Krishna with open eyes. But the greatest difficulty would be for Jesus to appear to a Hindu. For a Hindu, Jesus never appears – never, even by mistake – and Krishna never appears to a Christian. Once in a while it wouldn’t do much harm, but they never commit that mistake. The Christian will not allow the mistake to be committed; his hallucination is of Jesus, he cannot hallucinate about Krishna. Only what you are projecting appears on the screen.If you are projecting a film, only that appears on the screen; if you project another film then another film appears on the screen. It is not possible for you to project one film, and another film starts appearing on the screen – that is not possible. That’s why it is not possible for Krishna to appear to a Christian, or a Mohammedan or a Jew. It is not possible for Jesus to appear to anybody else except Christians.Still we go on and on strengthening, enforcing our imagination and hallucinations. And what have you got out of it? From thousands of years of hallucinations, what have you got, this humanity that you see around the world, this mess? This is the result of thousands of years of religious practices, discipline, ritual, prayer. Millions of churches, synagogues, temples, all around the earth, and this is the result: the man you see, the actual man, has come out of this whole effort.It was bound to be so, because we have wasted all these years in sheer stupidity, calling it religion. We have wasted much time in which man could have grown to heights unknown, to depths unfathomable, to the freedom of the spirit, the compassion of the soul, integrity, individuality. If all these thousands of years had not been wasted with a bogus God, just hocus-pocus, of no worth, not a single penny…And you ask me, “Do you really not believe?”It is not a question of believing or not believing – there is no one to believe in or not to believe in. There is no God!So please remember: don’t start saying that I am an unbeliever. I am neither a believer nor an unbeliever. I am simply saying that the whole thing is a mere projection of the human mind and it is time that we stopped this game against ourselves.It is time that we said good-bye to God forever.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I was shocked to hear you say that God does not exist. Then the question arose in me: how can there be any religion without God? Isn't God the center and religion the circumference?It is fortunate that you were shocked. It needs intelligence to be shocked.Millions of people on the earth have lost the quality of being shocked. They have been hypnotized for centuries, conditioned in such a way that no shock ever reaches them. All the religions, the so-called religions, pseudo-religions, have been doing only one work: creating shock absorbers in you.My function is to destroy all your shock absorbers and make you vulnerable so that you doubt, you question, and inquire.One who doubts to the very end finds the answer. One who inquires to the very end comes to know.Those who go on believing without doubting, without questioning, without inquiring remain dull, dead, idiotic. So I congratulate you that you are shocked; it is a good beginning. The stupid person will be angry, not shocked. He will immediately become an enemy; he will not be shocked. To be shocked means that something in you is still alive, that the priests, the politicians, the pedagogues have not been completely successful with you. Perhaps a window has remained open; that’s why you are shocked. And do you see the miracle of that shock?Immediately a question of tremendous importance arises in you. Your question is not out of anger; it is not out of irritation. It is a valid, intelligent, tremendously significant question: how can there be religion without God? That’s what you have been told for centuries, that God is the center and religion is its circumference. This is an absolute lie. Religion has nothing to do with God at all.Yes, it has much to do with you, your consciousness, your being.You ask: how can there be a religion without God? One day, if you go on inquiring, you will ask me how can there be a religion with God? And I would like you to contemplate how there can be a religion with God.God is nothing but our idea of the ultimate dictator, the ultimate Adolf Hitler. He created the world, just whimsically; there was no reason to create it. No religion has been able to answer why he created the world in the first place. And this world: ugly, nauseous, disgusting, this humanity which religions go on proclaiming to be the highest peak of God’s creation, that God created man in his own image. What can be higher than that? And what has man been doing? In three thousand years, five thousand wars! The whole of history is a history of murder, rape, crime – and murder, rape and crime in the name of God. Millions of people have been killed, burned alive in the name of God.And God created man in his own image. So you can think something about God too, just a little inference that if this is the image, then what will be the real thing? If Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini and Mao Zedong are only carbon copies, then what will be the original? It is going to be terrible!If God created this world, man and everything, it should show signs of divinity, signatures of God, but they are completely missing. If he cannot read and write, he can at least make a thumbprint. There seems to be no signature anywhere. It seems more probable that it was created by the Devil rather than by God, because ninety-nine percent of proof is for the Devil, not for God.With God you cannot create religion, for the simple reason that God has already created the Bible for the Christians, the Torah for the Jews, the Vedas for the Hindus… He has created them already; he has given you ready-made religions. He has not allowed you to seek and search and find.And there is something of immense importance about truth: unless you find it, it never becomes truth to you. If it is somebody else’s truth and you borrow it, in that very borrowing it is no longer true; it has become a lie. This is one of the reasons why the great mystics of the world have been saying again and again that truth is inexpressible, because the moment you express it, in the very process of expression it becomes a lie. All your holy scriptures are full of lies.God has not given you the chance to discover religion, he has given you ready-made religion; and he does not allow you even to question, to doubt – that is a great sin. There are all kinds of stupidities in your religious scriptures, but you have to believe in them totally.A man like Bertrand Russell became very puzzled, for the simple reason that there are things which anybody who has a little intelligence cannot trust – but to doubt makes you a sinner; you start feeling guilty. Finally he wrote a book: Why I am not a Christian, and collected all the points that hindered him from becoming a Christian. For example: the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. It is so unscientific that to believe it is to destroy all your intelligence. To have faith in such an idea is suicidal; you are destroying yourself, and what are you gaining? A stupid idea – virgin birth!If Bertrand Russell could not believe in it, we cannot blame him. It was the Bible that prevented a man who could have been religious… Russell asked, “Why in the trinity is there not a woman included? God the father, God the son, and the Holy Ghost – what kind of family is this? This holy family seems to be very idiotic. Why could they not put a woman in it? – because all the religions have been against women. To put a woman into the trinity, in the highest position of power, was impossible for them; hence they had to put the Holy Ghost.Now, nobody knows about the Holy Ghost, whether he is man or woman or neutral. And this Holy Ghost is the person responsible for making Mary pregnant – and still he is holy! He is a rapist, because Mary was not aware of it; she was not a willing partner in it, and she was already married. But the Holy Ghost did this, perhaps he is still around in the world – and he is one third of God!A man like Bertrand Russell was prevented from being a religious person because of the idea of God. And any idea of God will create problems. The Hindu God… Instead of the trinity the Hindus have a parallel – trimurti: one god with three faces, three persons joined together in one person. But all three are constantly fighting each other – so childish is their behavior. It is good that Sigmund Freud was only aware of Christian and Judaic traditions. If he had been aware of Hindu tradition he would have found immense support for his hypothesis.In Hinduism God created the world. The first being he created was a woman, naturally, because without a woman nothing else can grow – the woman has to come first. But in creating a beautiful woman, he himself became infatuated. Now, the father becoming infatuated with his own daughter… That’s what Freud was looking for but nobody informed him that it was available. For his whole life, Freud was trying to prove that each father is infatuated with the daughter and each mother is infatuated with the son. And there is some truth in it – but God getting infatuated with his own daughter…Then the woman becomes afraid and she tries to escape, and the only way to escape is to change shapes, forms, disguises. She becomes a cow, but how can you deceive God? He becomes a bull. She becomes other kinds of animals, and God follows. That’s how the whole creation comes into being – the woman running and the father following her and trying to rape her. He is still doing the same thing.With such a God, what kind of religion do you think is possible? This God is a sexual maniac; he needs psychotherapy. He cannot be the center of religion; he cannot even be on the circumference of religion. He should be inside a mental asylum. But if you read Hindu scriptures you will be very disturbed by the kind of things that millions of people belonging to the oldest religion in the world are carrying.These are the three phases of the Hindu God: Brahma is the creative phase, he creates the world; Vishnu, the second phase, maintains the world; and Shiva destroys the world when the time comes to destroy it. In a way it is perfectly balanced: all the three functions that existence needs – creation, maintenance, and one day, de-creation. But if you look into the inner life of these three persons, you cannot believe it.One day, Vishnu and Brahma are quarreling about something. In the first place, the idea of a quarrel between two parts of God makes him schizophrenic. If your hands start fighting each other… And that’s what you are doing in your mind: one part fighting against the other part. Sometimes you become so split that you are already two persons, and sometimes you are many persons. God is already three persons – he is not one whole, one piece – and all the three are constantly quarreling.These two were quarreling and they could not find a way to settle the argument, so they both thought it would be better to look for Shiva; perhaps he might be helpful. So they went to look for Shiva. Shiva must have been American – it was morning and he was making love to his wife, Parvati. Indians don’t do that; that is absolutely unheard of. I think Shiva is the first American – making love to his wife in the morning, with the doors open. Perhaps it would be better to call him Californian – doors open! Just American will not do.Brahma and Vishnu both entered, not knowing what was happening inside, and Shiva was so much into his act of making love that he didn’t bother about them. Both were very angry. In the first place, making love in the morning does not suit a god; secondly, with the doors open, anybody could come in. And thirdly, he does not even tell them to sit down; he has not even looked at them. Both the gods were very angry, so angry that they cursed Shiva, saying, “You will be known in the world by the phallic symbol.” That’s why in India you find no statue of Shiva, only the phallic symbol. This is the curse of those two gods: “You will be known and recognized as a phallic symbol.”You may not be aware that shivalinga, the phallic symbol for Shiva, is not alone; it is placed in a vagina. Both are in marble, and for thousands of years Hindus have been worshipping it. And still Shiva is one third of God!You can take any other conception of God and you will find it impossible to make a religion around it. But up to now this has been the case. The fiction of God is there in the center, and around the fiction all other fictions have been created: of heaven and hell, sin and punishment, repentance and forgiveness. And this whole circus is nothing but exploitation by the cunning priests of all the religions.Yes, without God there can be no priest. Without God there can be no concept of sin. Without God there can be no heaven and hell. Without God there can be no temple, no synagogue, no church.If you think these are the things which make a religion, then of course you will find it difficult: how can there be a religion without God? But these things have nothing to do with religion. In fact, to me these are hindrances to finding religiousness.And let this be another shock to you: the authentic religion is going to be Godless – and also religionless. I am teaching you a religionless religion.You will have to go a little deep into this because the words seem to be contradictory: religionless religion. When I say religionless religion I mean that the priest, the synagogue, the rabbi, the pundit, the pope, the church, the prayer, the holy scriptures, the holy and unholy ghost – all these have to be dropped because this is what you have known as religion.The holy scriptures are nothing but religious fiction, just as there is science fiction. And it is beautiful to write science fiction; it is art. Those religious fictions are not even artistic; they are ninety percent rubbish, crap. Nobody reads them except a few people who have some vested interest in reading them.I have heard:A man who was selling dictionaries house to house, rang the bell of a house. The housewife came out and asked, “What do you want?”He said, “I have beautiful dictionaries. You must have children; they may need dictionaries, and I have all kinds for all ages.”The woman wanted to get rid of him, so she said, “But we have got a dictionary.” And far away in the corner, on a table, there was a thick book looking like a dictionary.The salesman laughed, he said, “That’s a Bible.”The woman could not believe it because from that distance it was impossible to figure out that it was a Bible. She said, “You surprise me. Yes, it is a Bible. I was just trying to get rid of you, saying that we have got a dictionary. But how did you manage it? Tell me and I will purchase a dictionary from you, but tell me the trick.”He said, “There is no trick. I just saw how much dust had gathered on it.”Only Bibles, holy books, gather dust. A Playboy magazine does not gather dust. Who wants to open the book? It has not been opened perhaps for years; perhaps it has never been opened.Religious fiction has to be dropped because it is hindering your way, preventing you from reaching reality. You have to get rid of all nonsense that has been told to you by your parents, by your society, by your teachers, by your religious elders.Unless you clean yourself completely you cannot take the first step toward being religious. Religiousness is a quality of your being; it has nothing to do with any ritual outside you, it is a quality of your being.There are a few things which are qualities of your being and are in a dormant state because you have never thought that they are to be developed. Have you tried to develop your consciousness? Have you tried to develop your compassion? Have you tried to develop your intelligence?The scientists say that even the people who are geniuses use only fifteen percent of their intelligence; eighty-five percent remains unused. And this is about a man like Albert Einstein or Karl Marx or Rutherford, the Nobel Prize-winners, What about the common man, how much does he use? – not more than five percent. And that five percent he uses because it is needed for day-to-day work: his business, his family, his so-called religion, his political party and his club. Five percent is enough. You don’t have to be a genius to become a Rotarian. I don’t think a genius would like to become a member of the Lions Club. A man trying to become a lion seems to be falling down rather than rising up.If the genius himself uses only fifteen percent, then that means nobody is trying to sharpen their intelligence. You only go on using whatsoever life, its situations and circumstances, forces you to use. If there is nobody, no situation forcing you to use it, you will not use even five percent. That’s why you will not find rich people’s sons and daughters getting gold medals in the universities and topping the universities. No, they don’t need to use their intelligence; their servants can do that. And now computers are available. Soon you will not be using even five percent; people will be carrying a small computer. They are already carrying them. Have you not seen it?In my childhood, in my family, my father was very particular about handwriting. He would not allow a fountain pen in the house, because you cannot have the quality of an ordinary old pen with a fountain pen; the fountain pen is going to destroy your handwriting.And you can see it. Just look back: before the press was invented, all the books were written by hand – such beautiful, artistic handwriting. What the book contains is another thing; just the handwriting itself is a work of art. But that art disappeared with the fountain pen. And when the typewriter became available to people, even the little bit that was possible with the fountain pen disappeared – people are typing. Now tell them to write and their writing looks as if they are uneducated. People are now carrying small computers to calculate: calculators – they will forget the small calculations that you can do.There is a woman alive in India, Shakuntala, who has toured all around the world and has been exposed to the greatest mathematicians. She is only a matriculate and knows nothing of higher mathematics, but even Albert Einstein was puzzled by her. Just write any figure, howsoever big it is doesn’t matter; tell her to multiply it by as big a figure as you want – and before you have finished writing the second figure down, the answer is there. Einstein said, “If I had done it, it would have taken at least three hours.”But what is happening to this woman? She knows nothing about it. She says, “Just simply looking at the figures that have to be multiplied…” All that happens to her is a kind of silence; in that silence, figures start coming up, and she starts speaking, “Write down this figure – I don’t know how it comes.” It seems from birth she has had a very sharp intelligence, so that within the flicker of an eye something happens in her mind. And this is not the only case; there have been others.A young boy, Shankaran, was so poor that he used to pull a rickshaw. Now, it is an ugly thing; it should not exist anywhere: that a man is pulling a vehicle with you sitting in it. And he was just a boy – but his father was old – and in Chennai he was just pulling the rickshaw. The mathematics department of the university became interested in him by accident. One day the professor, the head of the department, went in his rickshaw and just started talking to him. He said, “You are so young: you should be reading and studying.”The boy told him about his family. “But,” the boy said, “even without reading and studying – I know that you teach mathematics – I can do mathematics. That, somehow I know.” The professor tried him out, and he was amazed: the boy was a miracle. He sent the boy to Oxford at his own expense, to display his ability, and wherever he went he simply amazed great mathematicians. Rutherford said that a certain question that had been bothering him for years, the boy solved within seconds. And once he solved it, Rutherford saw that it was so simple – how had he missed it? Somehow he had gone round and round, just missing the point, and this boy simply jumped to that point. But he was not educated.Intellect can be sharpened; there are ways to sharpen it. Modern psychology is trying to measure it. I say don’t be foolish, don’t waste time in measuring it – what is there to measure? The average person remains at the mental age of thirteen; he may be seventy but his mental age remains thirteen, and he uses five to seven percent of his intelligence. Now why waste time in finding more accurate methods to measure it? Why not use methods which can sharpen the intellect? That’s what I have been teaching you.If you doubt, your intellect will be sharpened.If you believe, your intellect will go rusty; it will start gathering dust, because you are not using it. Doubt is bound to sharpen it, for a fundamental reason: you cannot remain at ease with doubt. You have to do something about it; you have to find the answer. Till you find the answer the doubt is going to harass you, nag you – and that’s the way doubt sharpens your intellect.But all the religions teach that to doubt is sin, to believe is to be religious. I say to you: to doubt is to be religious, and to believe is to be irreligious.But those pseudo-religions were really cunning and clever. What psychologists have not found even now, they found five thousand years ago: that doubt is dangerous; it sharpens the intellect. Belief is comfortable, convenient; it dulls. It is a kind of drug; it makes you a zombie. A zombie can be a Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan – but all are zombies, with different labels. And sometimes they get fed up with one label, so they change the label: the Hindu becomes a Christian, the Christian becomes a Hindu – a new label, a fresh label, but behind the label the same belief system.Destroy your beliefs. Certainly it will be uncomfortable, inconvenient, but nothing valuable is ever gained without inconvenience.In three hundred years, science has used doubt as its method, and given the world so much in three hundred years. In ten thousand years religions have not been able to give even a thousandth part of what science has given. The religions have not given anything. On the contrary they have prevented everything in every possible way. They were trying to prevent science too, and they tried hard – they are still trying.Now, the Catholic pope goes on teaching the Catholics that methods of birth control should not be used – they are against God. Strange, even the Holy Ghost must be using birth control methods, because Jesus says, “I am the only begotten son of God.” What happened to God? Has he stopped creating sons, daughters? Either he has become a brahmacharya, a celibate, which is not very likely, or he is using birth control methods. But the pope goes on continually talking against birth control, because it is against God – but God is sending the people.This earth is already overloaded; it is already such a situation that if we don’t cut its population by half, humanity is going to die. There will be no need for a Third World War; just the population itself will be enough to kill everybody, to starve everybody.And God is continually sending people. Either he has no idea: at least send a small piece of land with each child, or try some new way so nobody is hungry. Rather than real babies, make plastic babies which run on batteries; that would be easier. Once in a while you go and you can get your battery charged. And for God everything is possible. He has been doing all kinds of miracles, his son was doing all kinds of miracles. This will not be much of a miracle, creating a baby that runs on a battery.But he goes on giving us stomachs and hunger, and no land – and the old land is losing its fertility every day. And the Catholic pope goes on saying no birth control, no abortion. Why no abortion? – because it is killing. But it is very strange coming from a pope’s mind, because these popes have been conducting all kinds of crusades in the past and killing thousands of people. That has been their whole business: burning people, burning women just because of a fictitious idea…Anybody could write to the pope informing him: “In our village there is a woman who is a witch.” That was enough to start an inquiry; and there was a special court to inquire into whether the woman was a witch or not. They would torture the woman so much that she would find it easier to accept that she was a witch rather than being continually tortured. They would torture her till she accepted that she was a witch; and once she accepted that she was a witch she had to be burned alive. They burned thousands of women alive.Now suddenly, their interest is in nonviolence since abortion is violence. And the same pope’s predecessors blessed Benito Mussolini in the Second World War. Was that not violence? The archbishop of Canterbury in England blessed the British forces – and that was not violence? That was perfectly good? One wonders at what point abortion becomes violence.At what point – a child is conceived this moment – is he alive or dead? He is alive, but from where has the life come? He was alive in the semen cells before he became conceived in the mother’s womb; the semen cells are all alive. They have a small life span, just two hours, so if within two hours they can find a female egg, and can enter the egg, the child is conceived. The egg is alive. Half of your being, the feminine part, is in the egg, and half of your being is coming from your father’s semen. And in a single intercourse millions of cells are rushing…You will be surprised to know that it is there that politics starts. Everybody is running fast toward the egg, because whosoever reaches first becomes President Reagan. Those who are left behind, just a little behind – finished! Only one sperm is going to enter; then the woman’s egg becomes hard and no more can enter. That is the natural process; it is available only to one. Only once in a while does it happen that two male cells reach exactly at the same time and enter. That’s why sometimes you have twins, or three or four or five or six – even eight children have been known. But that is a very rare event.Millions of sperm…and they are really fast. It is almost like a car race. They are all racing, and they have to be quick. Within two hours if they don’t reach, they are finished. In a single intercourse you are responsible for killing millions of beings. And what about an abortion? – just one. So whether it’s one million or one million plus one, what difference does it make?But the Catholic pope is ready, just as the Mohammedan chief imam is ready, and the Hindu shankaracharya is ready to let the population grow, because numbers have a political significance. It is the politics of numbers – how many Catholics are there? The pope is not interested in humanity, in the future, in a global suicide, no. His whole interest is in how many Catholics there are. The more Catholics there are, the more power he has. The shankaracharya is interested in more Hindus, so he has more power.Everybody is interested in power. In the name of God they are simply trying to become more and more powerful. God is just a useful instrument in the hands of the priest. Whatsoever the priest wants, he makes God say. He writes the scriptures, he writes all kinds of nonsense in them. And it is a strange fact to be understood about human beings that people become very impressed with nonsense, because it seems mystical.For example the Bible says: “In the beginning was the Word.” Now how can the word be in the beginning? Do you make any distinction between sound and word, or not? A word is a meaningful sound. Perhaps it can be said that in the beginning there was sound – but not word.A word presupposes there was somebody who made the sound meaningful, who used a word. “In the beginning was the Word.” I am just saying hypothetically that sound would be better, more logical; in fact sound is also not possible. Scientifically sound is possible only if somebody is there to hear it, otherwise there is no sound.I am speaking here. If nobody is here there will be no sound, because for sound two things are needed: me making a noise and your ears receiving it. Between these two the sound happens. When there is nobody near a waterfall, you may think there will be much sound still happening near the waterfall. You are wrong; there is no sound because there is no ear.So even if sound is not possible, what to say about a word! But they say, “In the beginning was the Word” – just see how nonsense becomes mystical. “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God.” You have spoiled the first statement already. “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God,” so already there were two – you have contradicted it immediately – and the third sentence, “And the Word was God.”Now, such garbage impresses people: “Something very profound must be in it, that’s why we cannot understand it.” There is nothing profound in it – just some idiot writing. But Christian theologians have been commenting on it for centuries, different commentaries on what it means. What is “the Word”? What does it mean that “The Word was God,” that “The Word was with God”? – just three sentences, and all contradictory to each other.If you analyze any scripture you will find these kinds of statements. And they say, “Don’t doubt, believe, have faith and great will be your reward; doubt and you are misguided.” But in this darkness, except for doubt, there is no light.Doubt! And not half-heartedly: doubt with your total intensity so that doubt will become like a sword in your hand, and it will cut all the garbage that has gathered around you. Doubt is to cut the garbage, and meditation is to awaken yourself.These are two sides of the same coin, because burdened with all the garbage you will not be able to wake up. That garbage will create sleep in you; that’s its function. It is meant to keep you asleep. Have faith and go to sleep so that you don’t bother the politicians, the priests; you don’t bother the vested interests, you don’t bother anybody. You yourself become a man without any soul, a mechanism, a slave.So doubt, and meditate! And by meditation I mean a very simple thing: just be silent and start drowning in your silence.In the beginning that too creates fear because silence is like an abyss – perhaps there is no bottom, and one wants to cling to anything available. Silence needs courage, just as doubt needs courage.To doubt is to throw out everything that others have put in you. And meditation is, after everything has been thrown out, to enter into your self – which no God, nobody has put there. It has been your being for eternity and it is going to be your being for eternity.Drown yourself in silence. Enjoy, drink it, taste it!Just in the beginning there is fear. Once you have had a little taste, just a little taste on the tip of your tongue, then all fear disappears, because it is so sweet, so nourishing, so immensely centering and grounding. It gives you for the first time the feeling that alone you are enough, that no God is needed, no prayer is needed, that the temple is not outside but within. And as the feeling grows and you go on entering into it, you will be surprised.In the beginning there was silence, not sound. In the middle there is silence. In the end there is silence.It is perpetual, continuous, and it is your very being: so fulfilling, so tremendously fulfilling, giving you such contentment that for the first time you feel nothing is needed. All that is needed is provided already within you.Existence is very generous. God is very miserly – of course, because misers have created the fiction in their own image. God is very miserly, very cruel, very jealous, very revengeful. Just for small things… Somebody smokes cigarettes – now what kind of sin is he committing? I cannot conceive that he is committing any sin. Perhaps he is committing some mistake, but that is a medical thing, it has nothing to do with religion. Perhaps he is not taking proper care of his body, but that is his business. Perhaps he will die two or three years earlier, but if he thinks of what he is going to do for two or three years more, he will smoke more, so what is the point?But there are religions like Buddhism and Jainism – smoke and you are in hell. Strange, here that man is smoking, and there you will throw him again into fire. Here he was throwing fire into himself; there you throw him into fire! What kind of revenge is going on? And he was not throwing anything on you; whatever he was doing, he was doing to himself. And he has suffered for it: he may have tuberculosis, he may have cancer, he may suffer for it. He has suffered, now what is the need of a hell? Small things, natural things, and the religions have made so much fuss about them because of the very tiny mind of God.Existence is very generous, always forgiving, never punishing. But the only way to reach to existence is through your own innermost silence. That is the silence between the stars – the same silence; there is no difference.There are no types of silence, remember that. There cannot be two kinds of silence. Silence is simply one: just the taste of it, and you have tasted the silence that is there millions of light years away, surrounding the whole universe.By feeling your inner silence you have felt the pulse of the universe.I say to you, with God there is no possibility of religion. And I say to you also, that with the so-called religions that have existed up to now, there is no possibility of religion either. I teach you a Godless, religionless religion.Of course, then my meaning of religion will be “religiousness.” You are not a Christian, you are not a Hindu, you are not a Mohammedan. You are just a man of silence, a man of truth, a man of compassion, a man who is no longer searching – one who has arrived. And the feeling of arrival… Then there are no questions, no doubts, no beliefs, no answers either.When Bodhidharma was dying his disciples asked him, “Master, your last message?”He opened his eyes, and said, “I do not know anything at all – I have arrived. Knowledge is left far behind; who cares to know? There is nobody asking, there is nobody questioning, there is nobody answering; all has become silent. Hence,” he says, “all that I can say is that I do not know.”That was the statement of Socrates also in the end. He said, “When I was young I thought: ‘I know much and soon I will know all.’ But as I went on searching, doubting, inquiring” – and he was a man not of belief, but of doubt… He was far superior to any of your religious prophets, messiahs, avatars, tirthankaras – he was far superior. In the end he said, “The more I started to know, the more I started to feel that I don’t know anything.”His statements are tremendously beautiful, because on the surface they look contradictory. He says, “The more I knew, the less I knew. The moment I came to know all, all was lost; only ignorance remained.” So he said, “There is a knowledge which is ignorant, and there is an ignorance which knows.”With belief you will come to knowledge, which is ignorant. With doubt, inquiry, meditation, you will come to a state of ignorance, which knows.There is no need for you to be labeled. There is no need for you to be part of a congregation. My commune is, in a way, strange, a contradiction. My function is to make you free of all congregations, to give you total freedom to be yourself.But perhaps alone you are not able to stand against the whole world. You need fellow travelers. You need people who are walking on the same path to give you courage, to keep you inspired; otherwise I would not have given you a certain red color to wear. Those who are with me know perfectly well that this is just playfulness. Any color will do, because what has the color red to do with truth? It has nothing to do with truth. Green will be as good, blue will be as good – and even if you are naked, that will do. But I have given you the red color just out of playfulness, to give you a certain identity, a togetherness – because the vast mass is out there.These people poisoned Socrates. These people killed Jesus. These people killed Al-Hillaj Mansoor and so many others. I would not like that to happen to any of you. Hence I had to commit a contradiction, and create a commune. But you have to remember that this is just out of playfulness; you have not to become serious about it.I have given you the mala with my picture in its locket. It does not make you my followers. It simply means that you are available to me, receptive; that you can listen to me putting all your prejudices aside. And I am not giving you any doctrine. I have none. I will take all doctrines away from you. I want you to become just emptiness. And that is the ultimate quality of a religious man: to know the inner emptiness. It is unbounded. It is as vast as the universe. It contains the whole universe in it.When you are absolutely empty, stars start moving within you. The whole universe and you are no longer separate. You have found a subtle, secret door that goes from you to the whole.God is not needed. It is an absolutely useless hypothesis. Nor are religions needed. But a religious consciousness is absolutely needed – more today than ever before.If we cannot create a great movement for religious consciousness there is no future for humanity – man is doomed. The priests, the politicians and other vested interests together have prepared your grave; any moment they will push you into it. Many of you, of your own accord, are sitting in that grave. The world has never before been at such a critical moment. If a great release of religious consciousness is not made available, man is doomed.But I hope that religious consciousness is going to prevail, that man will pass through this dangerous moment and will come out of it far superior, far higher, far more humane.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,God did not create people like Adolf Hitler in his own image. He created people like Jesus Christ, Hazrat Mohammed, Krishna and Buddha.It is not a question. It is a statement, an answer, but I have not asked the question. The person seems even to know whom God created in his own image and whom God did not create in his own image. The person seems to be an eyewitness. What was he doing there? Did God create him in his own image? Then what is he doing here? But I can enjoy even answering an answer.He says God did not create people like Adolf Hitler in his own image. What is wrong in Adolf Hitler? The followers of Adolf Hitler believe that he was the reincarnation of the great Jewish prophet, Elijah. It is as true as the Christian’s belief that Jesus is the only begotten son of God, and the Mohammedan’s belief that Mohammed is the only messenger of God. Nobody else believes it, but that is not the point. Christians believe it, the followers of Adolf Hitler also believe it.And Adolf Hitler was a very religious man. Let me give you a little glimpse of Adolf Hitler’s life. He lived like a monk, in an underground cell. He was not interested in so-called worldly things that everybody is interested in. He was a vegetarian; he never ate any nonvegetarian food in his whole life. He remained unmarried almost his whole life – except for three hours, the last three hours. That is almost his whole life – what do three hours count? And what is possible in three hours of marriage?The marriage was arranged after he decided to commit suicide, because he had been continually harassed by this woman: “Why don’t you get married to me?” And he always refused. He lived like a monk, absolutely alone in his cell, and he was worried that once he got married it would be difficult to live alone, this woman would force her way into his room. So he kept on postponing.When he finally decided, Berlin was falling and the bombs were falling on the street outside the house; he could hear the bombs exploding from his cell. He immediately asked for a priest to be called so that the marriage could be arranged. Marriage for what? – to commit suicide together. Perhaps most people do the same, not knowingly. Perhaps their three hours are very long; and the longer they are, the more tedious.A priest was somehow brought in. He quickly performed the marriage ceremony, and after the ceremony was over they drank poison and killed themselves. And his order was that petrol should be poured over them and they should be burned completely; not even a trace should be found – and that’s how it was done.This man used to wake up every morning before sunrise. Not all monks are so religious. I know monks are supposed to get up before sunrise – but human beings are human beings. Adolf Hitler was made of a different mettle. Even in winter he would get up before sunrise, and the whole year round he would take a cold shower after getting up – the first thing, a cold shower – a very disciplined monk. He would go to sleep exactly at nine at night. He was not interested in anything that you can call bad. He neither played cards nor smoked cigarettes. His food was very simple, very frugal and he never drank wine – no alcoholic beverages.When Germany took over France, all his generals wanted him to come to the most beautiful city in the world, but he was not interested. Beauty was not a concern in his mind at all, but because everybody was asking him – and they had done a great job of conquering France – he went there, but he stayed for only twenty-four hours in his hotel room and did not go out to see Paris.You say God did not create Adolf Hitler in his own image. Why not – because he killed so many people? But every day God is killing millions of people – who else is killing them? Adolf Hitler was simply sharing a little bit of God’s job. People have to be killed, everybody has to die; so what is wrong in it if Adolf Hitler shares a little work, takes a little burden off God?And he did perfectly well, far better than God himself. Sometimes it happens, the carbon copy comes out clearer than the original. He invented gas chambers, the most nonviolent method of killing man, but you cannot call it killing; killing is too cruel. In a gas chamber the person never comes to know when he is and when he is not. It is so quick: just a switch flicked on and there is only smoke – you can call it holy smoke! He did his job perfectly.In fact Hitler had this belief, this fanatic idea that he had been sent by God to destroy all that was not right, all that was hindering the growth of the superman on the earth. He was doing it in good faith.You cannot suspect his faith, his intention, because if he had been a little bit doubtful it would have been impossible to do what he did: killing millions of people. It needs tremendous faith, fanatic blind faith that what you are doing is the right thing. There was no doubt in his mind, no doubt at all, that he was doing God’s work: cleaning the world of all that was not in tune with the evolution of the superman.You say God did not create Adolf Hitler in his own image. That raises a question: then who created Adolf Hitler? Are there a few other gods also? That means there is a choice; you can shop and choose in whose shape you want to be created. You can just go into the mall and choose your own god: “I want to be created in this god’s image.”This is an old strategy of the so-called pseudo-religious people: that whatsoever is good belongs to God, and whatsoever is bad belongs to the Devil. Then who created the Devil?God has to take responsibility at some point or other. I cannot leave him out of it. If he says that Adolf Hitler is being created by his enemy, the Devil, okay, but who created the Devil? God cannot shirk the responsibility; shrug it from his shoulders. He must have created the Devil, otherwise from where did the Devil come? And if the Devil can come from somewhere else, then anybody can come from somewhere else. So what is the need for God to create? Creation is being done somewhere else too.God should be told, “You are not a monopolist, there are other potters – and perhaps there may be better potters, because the world that you have created does not seem to be a perfect world. And you seem to be absolutely impotent. If the Devil goes on smuggling his people into your world, what are you doing there? At least you can stop this smuggling business. And it is going on, on a tremendously vast scale. In fact your people seem to be very few, can be counted on one’s fingers, and the Devil’s people seem to be in millions.”It is strange that God goes on sitting on his throne, gossiping with the Holy Ghost, playing with his only begotten son, Jesus; and the Devil goes on running the whole world – goes on creating Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong… The whole of history seems to be ninety-nine point nine percent a creation of the Devil.Then why go on giving credit to God as the creator? He may be an amateur potter – once in a while he makes a pot – but the Devil seems to be the professional. Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and Ivan the Terrible – just go down through history – were all these people not created by God? They were, but you are afraid to accept the fact because then your God becomes almost a devil.You say God created men like Jesus Christ, Hazrat Mohammed, Krishna and Gautam Buddha. Let us look at these people whom you think God created. Jesus was a Jew – born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew. He had never heard the word Christian, and I don’t think that he had any idea of creating a religion called Christianity. There is no indication anywhere to even create a suspicion that he had it in mind to create a new religion, no. For his whole life he was trying to do only one thing – to be accepted by the Jews as their messiah.Now, the God of the Jews is a Jew, Jesus is a Jew, the high priest of the Jews is a Jew. The rabbis, who are in the highest posts in the great temple of the Jews, are all religious people, very scholarly and very knowledgeable. It is difficult to find more scholarly people than rabbis; their whole life is devoted to study, to scholarship. And the high priest must have been a great rabbi; that is why he had been chosen.They decide to crucify Jesus. A Jewish God creates Jesus in his own image, but Jewish rabbis, their high priest, and the Jewish community, do not recognize that man at all, that he is an image of God. They look upon him as a mischief-monger, as a cheat, a deceiver.Now, if God sends his own son, can’t he send a small message to the high priest: “Please take care of my son, my only begotten son,” and they are all Jews so they all understand the same language. There would not have been any difficulty – but he remains silent. Jesus is crucified and God is silent; his image is destroyed and he remains absolutely indifferent.In fact, Jesus was not such a disciplined man as Adolf Hitler. Jesus drank wine and even turned water into wine, which should be a crime. You try turning anything into LSD! Do that miracle and you will be in jail. Turn ordinary grass into “real grass” and you will find what it means to perform a miracle.Now, this man was turning water into wine, and he was drinking wine without any feeling of guilt. No Hindu, no Mohammedan, no Jaina, no Buddhist will accept this man as an image of God. An image of God drinking alcoholic beverages! The image of God should be the pinnacle of consciousness, and drinking anything alcoholic is just the opposite of being conscious; it is drowning yourself in unconsciousness. It is one of the most anti-religious acts possible.This man Jesus, although he taught about meekness and humbleness, was very arrogant himself. Buddha could not have accepted him as an image of God. His proclamation, “I am the only son of God,” is the greatest egoistic proclamation ever made. Adolf Hitler’s claim is not that great. Elijah… Who knows this Elijah? He must have looked into the Old Testament and found a name somehow appealing to him for some reason, because with Adolf Hitler you could never be sure what reason… Perhaps he was counting the numbers which numerology gives to each letter of the alphabet, and found that Elijah was a good numerological name – because these were the things in which Adolf Hitler believed: numerology, astrology, palmistry.You will be surprised that even his attacks on countries were not decided by generals but by astrologers. In fact, this was the reason for his continual victory in the first four years – it was not that astrology is right but that his enemies could not figure out where he was going to attack. If he had been listening to his generals, then of course every other country would have been able to figure out his plans, because all the generals think in a certain way. There is a military science based on simple arithmetic: you don’t attack the enemy where he is strongest; obviously you attack him where he is weakest.But Adolf Hitler would attack where the enemy was strongest. And the enemy would be thinking: “Here we are strongest; Adolf Hitler is not going to attack here,” so they would move their armies to the weakest point. But he was not going to attack there, because he depended on astrology. The stars were in favor of another point, so at he would attack that point.Now, if both sides were deciding through the generals, both sides would have been absolutely clear where the attack was going to happen, because both function according to the same logic, but here there was no question of logic. And Adolf Hitler’s word was law. There was no “Why?” – that could not be asked of Adolf Hitler. You could not ask, “Why have you decided on this procedure?”Nobody was allowed to ask – even the closest people were not close enough. Not a single man was close enough to put his hand on Adolf Hitler’s shoulder. Nobody was a friend; Adolf Hitler never allowed any friendship. The reincarnation of the prophet Elijah was far above that with you ordinary human beings crawling on the earth – and you ask him why!So he was continually winning for four years, until Winston Churchill himself had to come down to the same rules, against his will: “This is stupid, but what to do? If you are fighting with an idiot, you have to be an idiot, otherwise you are going to be a loser.” He had to call astrologers from India, because that is where you can find the best astrologers. And the Indian astrologers felt tremendously proud, that finally even Winston Churchill had understood that: “Astrology is a science and we are far more advanced than you are.”And with astrology entering in, Winston Churchill certainly started winning, because now he was also going crazy. He was a great general but now he was doing things against himself, against his whole reason and experience – but what to do? “That other fellow will be listening to astrologers; you have to listen to astrologers. And it is a question of victory, so it is not the time to argue about astrology; the time for that argument we can find later on. First finish this man and this mad situation.”When Winston Churchill started listening to astrologers, he started winning because he also began attacking in a crazy way with no logic. And certainly he had stranger astrologers than Adolf Hitler, because Adolf Hitler’s astrologers were Western. You could find in London the same kind of astrologers who could tell you what those German astrologers would be suggesting to Adolf Hitler – but these Indian astrologers had a totally different astrology.Adolf Hitler had no way to find out what these astrologers were suggesting, because both were different in their workings. Even in palmistry… In western palmistry a line indicates something; in Indian palmistry the same line indicates something else – because there is nothing written on the line. It depends on you, what you want to make out of it.Jesus died on the cross – that does not seem to be the right place for the son of God. And if you ask Jainas, Buddhists and Hindus, you will find meaning in what they say. You will be surprised by their answer, but their answer seems to be more rational. They say, “He must have committed some great sin in his past life and this is the outcome of that great sin – the simple law of karma. Otherwise, why should he be crucified?”No Hindu avatar was crucified, no Jaina tirthankara was crucified, no buddha was crucified – that is impossible! In fact when Mahavira, the Jaina tirthankara, walked on the road – and in those days there were no tar roads or cement roads, just muddy tracks – if there was a thorn on the road it would immediately turn its pointed part downward so that Mahavira’s feet remained unhurt and unharmed.Because that man had finished with all his karmas, even a thorn could not hurt him – what to say of a cross! Even a thorn had to consider that: “A man is coming here who is finished with all his karmas. You cannot bother him; you had better put yourself in such a position that you don’t hurt him.” Now, these people – how could they accept Christ as the son of God, a messiah?In Buddhist scriptures there are so many incidents described. A mad elephant was released toward Buddha to kill him. The mad elephant had killed many people; whoever came in his way, he finished them. He was kept in chains by the king, just for the simple purpose of killing criminals.The whole royal family, their advisors and their ministers, would sit on the balconies of the palace and enjoy the game. Down on the ground the criminal would be standing; the elephant would be brought in and his chains taken off. He would rush immediately toward the man who would run and scream; and all those people would enjoy it, just as you enjoy a bullfight or Mohammed Ali’s boxing. All these are of the same type, there is not much difference. What you are enjoying is violence, because the elephant was bound to kill him – where could the man escape to?The elephant was sent to kill Buddha, but even this mad elephant, when he saw Buddha, recognized that this man had finished with all his karmas; you could not hurt him, rather this was an opportunity to touch his feet and to earn some good karma for your future life. So he touched Buddha’s feet and sat down there. The king could not believe his eyes. They had all followed what had happened; they said to Buddha, “Only you can say what happened.”He said, “Nothing special. The elephant is wiser than you: seeing that all my karmas are finished and I have no more to suffer, my accounts are closed, the balance sheet is complete – whatever I have done, I have suffered for it, and I am completely clean. Seeing this, the elephant thought, ‘Why miss this opportunity? Where will I find another such man?’ So he touched my feet to be blessed. In fact he is already blessed; he has already gained enough virtue – he will be born in his future life as a great buddha. He will become enlightened himself, because if he can recognize a buddha even in madness, then he is not identified with his madness. He is still aware that he is different.”Now, do you think Buddhists will accept Jesus, the image of God, being crucified? Even an elephant can see when a buddha is there; yet those thousands of Jews were there and nobody could see, not a single person, that this man was the image of God and you should not destroy him. It is just your conditioning; otherwise no other religion is going in any way to accept Jesus.He was mixing with people Mahavira would not allow his monks to mix with, what to say of Mahavira himself – Jesus was mixing with gamblers, prostitutes, thieves, the lowest strata of society. Mahavira would not allow it; Buddha would not allow it. And why was he mixing with those people? – because nobody else was ready to mix with him. The higher classes, the richer classes, the educated, cultured and sophisticated people were not ready to mix with this carpenter’s son: uneducated, a village idiot who was declaring himself son of God.Only one time had a professor come to him, and that too in the middle of the night. He was a rabbi and a known professor, Nicodemus. He came in the night when there was nobody around and all the apostles had fallen asleep. Jesus was saying his last prayer before he went to sleep. In the dark came this very respected, rich rabbi, a professor in the university, and he introduced himself. Jesus said, “Why don’t you come in the day? It is the middle of the night; I was just going to sleep. I have just finished my last prayer.”Nicodemus said, “In the day I cannot come because people will see that I associate with a man like you. I have heard about you so much that curiosity has brought me here, but in the day I will not admit the fact that I came to see you.” The higher class people were not mixing – what to say of mixing – they were not even ready to talk to this man.This is the son of God, created in his own image – and nobody in the whole of Judea could recognize him except those few fools who had no religious education, no understanding. They were fishermen, woodcutters, farmers; they enjoyed the idea of being associated with the only son of God because that gave them the hope that: “When we reach the Kingdom of God we will be with the son, close to God. Then all these rich people, these kings, these viceroys and these rabbis will see who we are. Right now we are only fishermen, woodcutters, farmers.” So that was their hope. That’s why it was so cheap to enter the Kingdom of God with Jesus. This opportunity was not to be missed. But he could find only those twelve people in the whole of Judea.No great religion in the East will accept him, because a man is known by his company – and his company was certainly not good. And that company became his apostles, that company created Christianity; so if Christianity is a third-rate religion there is no wonder about it – it has come from a very third-rate source. It hasn’t the profundity of Jainism or Buddhism or Hinduism; there is no comparison.You are asking about Hazrat Mohammed. Now what do you see in Hazrat Mohammed that you think he can be proclaimed as the image of God? His hand was always on his sword, even in his sleep, his whole life was a continual war. Of course on his sword he had written “Peace is my mission.” A strange peace: that you have to write on your sword “Peace is my mission.”And with this sword Mohammed wanted to bring peace into the world. Either you accepted that he was the messenger of God or you were finished – that was the “peace.” In both ways there would be peace: either you became Mohammedan and there was peace, or you were no longer and there was peace. Certainly that message on his sword was really meaningful. He allowed you to choose between two kinds of peace.Mohammedanism has converted millions just on the fear of death. Man’s lust for life is such that he will be ready to do anything. And what was he asking? It is nothing to make much of a fuss about. His religion is simple: repeat the name of Allah five times, and for one month every year, the month of Ramadan, keep a fast in the day. In the night you can eat; in the night there is a feast, so the whole day you fast and in the night you feast.This is a strange kind of fasting – in India it is just the opposite. In the night you cannot eat at all – feasting or not feasting is not the question, but while you are fasting it is absolutely impossible to eat in the night. The sun has gone down, life has gone to sleep, and this is not the time for eating.And it seems to be rational, reasonable that when the sun is there digestion is easier. You will be working, you will be perspiring, you will be doing something – digestion is easier. When in the night the sun has gone down and you are going to sleep, if you eat, then digestion is not going to be good. It is a simple fact.But why did Mohammed choose the other way? The reason was that the whole day they were fighting. In the night the fight had to stop because in darkness, in the desert you could not fight, so in the night you could eat and enjoy. In the day, the month of Ramadan is a month of fasting and fighting.And when you are fighting it is good to fast so you are not bothered by food. Otherwise you need a food break, a tea break, a coffee break, and in war you cannot take all these breaks; in war you have to be totally in it, no break. In the desert, when the sun sets, war ends; you cannot fight in the night. Then you are free; then with ease, with comfort you can eat, dance and enjoy yourself late into the night and then go to sleep – and be ready again in the morning with the sword, to bring peace into the world.In the whole of history not a single Jaina has been sentenced to death because he murdered; it is not possible. He can be murdered, but he cannot murder. Even if you give him a sword, it will fall from his hand immediately; he cannot hold it; he may not even know how to hold it. Except for the small knife that he uses in the kitchen, he knows nothing about any weapon. He will find it easier to be killed than to kill, because if you are killed you are not going to fall into hell, and if you are killed without any resistance, then heaven is yours – just the opposite of the Mohammedan.If you kill somebody in a war of religion, jihad, what Christians call a crusade… And all wars are jihads, they are for religion; they are to convert the other person. I would not like to use the word convert.Mohammed said that the more people you bring to Mohammedanism, the more virtue you are attaining. And if you have to kill many people, don’t be afraid, that too will be counted as virtue because you have saved those people from remaining heretics all their life. The man may have lived forty years longer, so you have saved him from forty years of a heretic’s life. That much compassion you have shown to him – strange logic! But all these pseudo-religions are full of strange logic.Hazrat Mohammed had nine wives; God has not even one! He married nine women and allowed all Mohammedans to marry four women. The reason was that Mohammed wanted more and more soldiers, and from where to get soldiers? One woman can get married to four men but then too, in one year she will give birth to only one child, and that is absolutely uneconomical. But if four women are married to one man, then certainly they can give birth to four children in one year. He wanted more and more Mohammedans, more and more children, more and more soldiers – and this was a way to get them. But where are you going to find so many women?For that there is also a good strategy: you can steal anybody’s woman and you can convert the woman to Mohammedanism. Now in India, a woman who has been converted by the Mohammedans – if even for one night she has remained in a Mohammedan house – will not be accepted back into a Jaina family or into a brahmin family or into a Buddhist family. That is impossible because Mohammedans are thought by Jainas and brahmins to be the worst people in the world – the woman has remained the whole night with those people and they have even converted her – and their method of conversion is something which creates nausea in Jainas, Buddhists, brahmins.The conversion method is that you have to eat with Mohammedans from one plate. So four, five, six – as many Mohammedans as are available will all sit around a table… Their brotherhood is guaranteed now. The new person who is being converted will also eat from the same plate with them and then they will all drink from the same cup; the new person has also to drink from the same cup. Now, to any other Indian religion this is not acceptable at all. I know, because I had Mohammedan friends, and it was such a difficulty.One of my friends in the university who was almost not a Mohammedan – he was just born a Mohammedan – because a fanatic Mohammedan cannot be friendly with me at all. Listening to me he still remained my friend; that was enough proof that he had an open mind. Professor Farid was his name, and many times he would come with me to my village, which was eighty miles from the university. Once in a while I would drive to the village just to see my father because he was so attached to me that if I did not come for eight or ten days, he would come to see me; he would not be satisfied that everything was okay without seeing me. He was always afraid that something was going to be wrong.So rather than troubling him I used to drive there, and many times Farid came with me. I had to explain to him, “Listen, you are going to a Jaina family, so don’t feel offended – even I am not allowed in the kitchen, so what about you! They suspect me of eating with Mohammedans and Christians.”You will be surprised that the Hindi word for Christian is Kristan. In the beginning Kristan was used for the Christian, but by and by it became associated with something wrong, something bad. So if you are doing something wrong, they will say, “Don’t behave like a Kristan.” First I was puzzled that Kristan is the Hindi for Christian, but then I understood why, because to them, a Christian or a Mohammedan belongs to the anti-religious: their religions are not worth anything.So I told Farid, “We will be sitting outside when eating, and you will be given a special plate that is kept separate, because they know that once in a while I bring a Christian or a Mohammedan home. So they keep a whole set separate and nobody in the family will touch that set.” I had to bring it in and put it before my friend; then I had to clean it because nobody else was going to clean it. I said, “Don’t feel offended in any way; this is just how things are. And don’t disturb these people, because even this much is too much for them: that just outside their kitchen a Mohammedan is sitting; this is too much.”So it was very easy in India to get hold of anybody’s woman and just keep her one or two days in your house; then she could not go back. Even if she wanted to, even if you were ready to send her back, she could not go back; she had to get married to you – there was no other way. But this is ugly.They converted millions of women in this way; and with the women came the increase in population.If you convince somebody about your truth and he wants to come and belong to your fold, it seems human. But to threaten him: “You will be killed if you don’t become a Mohammedan,” and out of that threat he decides to live as a Mohammedan rather than to die as a Hindu; this is not at all religious.In India now the constitution gives the right to have only one woman, but still Mohammedans go on marrying four women; and you cannot interfere, because if you interfere, riots immediately break out all over India. Thousands will be killed immediately and nothing will be changed. Simply thousands will be killed, thousands of houses will be burned, temples will be burned – so it is better to tolerate it. The constitution is there, the law is there, but who cares?The Mohammedan goes on doing this because it is his religious principle, and you should not interfere in his religion. The government is secular, so it cannot interfere. It is strange, some religion can make cannibalism its principle, then you can start eating human beings and the government cannot do anything, because it is your religion and they should not interfere in religion.You ask me about Krishna. You must have thought that I would at least accept Krishna and Buddha as the images of God – no. There is no God in the first place so how can there be any image? And whoever you bring before me as an image, I am going to hammer hard on. It is a fight with the fictitious God; it is not a fight with Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna or Buddha. If that fictitious God is finished with, much of the glory of these people will be demolished.If there is no God, then “I am the only begotten son” cannot be said. Then, “I bring the message of God, and only my message is true because it comes from God” cannot be said. So I am trying to destroy the fiction of God. Of course I will have to beat the images too, because just by being God’s image they go on giving life to a fiction.Krishna was one of the most cunning politicians the world has ever known; and perhaps in the future it will not be possible to have such a cunning politician. He was not a man of his word at all; that’s why I call him a politician. He would say one thing and would do exactly the opposite. He would make you a promise and he would break that promise any moment he found that it was in his favor to do so. You could not rely on him at all. His whole life was full of using people’s trust, taking advantage, deceiving, but the Hindus go on saying, “This is God’s play.”You can always find good words for anything. The young girls of the town were taking a bath in the river and he would collect all their clothes and sit in a tree. Now, they would be asking for their clothes, standing naked in the water. Anybody else doing such a thing would be immediately taken to the police station. But in many Hindu families you will find this picture hanging – of course not in those houses where I have stayed!Once, I said, “You should be ashamed – keeping this picture here, just in your sitting room. You think you are displaying some great religiousness – this is religiousness? If I did the same with your wife and with your daughter, then…”The man said, “What do you mean?”I said, “Yes, if I actually do this, as Krishna was doing, that would be God’s play. Why should he be an exception?” Sixteen thousand wives stolen by Krishna, forcibly taken away from people, from their husbands and from their children… He must have created a great concentration camp for these wives. And I don’t think that he would have recognized who was his wife and who wasn’t. And I don’t think that this is in any way an exaggeration.It used to happen in India; kings used to have hundreds of wives. Even today, the Nizam of Hyderabad, who died just a few years ago, left five hundred wives behind him – five hundred widows…one man. So sixteen thousand doesn’t seem too big a number – only thirty-two times more than the Nizam of Hyderabad. The person’s richness was counted by how many wives he had, and Krishna was certainly thirty-two times wealthier than the Nizam of Hyderabad.A poor man could not afford even one wife; for a poor man to have one wife, only one wife, was difficult – he could not manage two meals a day for himself. So in ancient India the way to show how wealthy you were was to have many wives – and Krishna defeated everybody. Just to defeat everybody, sixteen thousand wives and sixteen thousand families were destroyed. The children may have become orphans or beggars – what happened nobody knows – and this man is thought to be the image of God! Can’t you see his cruelty? And it was not for love’s sake. He did not even know these women. How can you know sixteen thousand women? What love can you give to sixteen thousand women? What relatedness is possible with these women? They are just imprisoned to show your greatness.With the same egoistic attitude, perhaps even stronger, Krishna said to his disciple, Arjuna, “Surrender at my feet, leaving aside everything – your doubts, your thinking – leave aside everything, just surrender at my feet. I am your salvation, I am your refuge.”Now, anybody saying that seems to be ugly. If it were true, then even Arjuna would recognize it himself. You need not declare it, you need not persistently say to him, “Surrender at my feet.” Certainly he was not surrendering, hence the insistence. Arjuna was continually arguing, bringing doubts, questions; he was not convinced. I don’t think he was ever convinced.I have tried hard to look into the whole conversation between Arjuna and Krishna – that is the Shrimad Bhagavadgita, the whole conversation. The way Arjuna was arguing was perfectly right and the doubts he raised were perfectly valid, but what Krishna was saying, his answers, were not justified. They didn’t dispel the doubts and they didn’t dispel Arjuna’s confusion; hence, tired of arguing with Arjuna, Krishna said, “Leave everything aside and simply surrender at my feet, because I am the perfect incarnation of God.”But if you have to say it, then I say, you are not! If the other recognizes it even though you deny it, then perhaps there is something to it. If you are denying it, but the other goes on seeing something which is more than can be understood by the mind, which is more than can be comprehended by intellect… If the other goes on feeling it, the presence of it, the smell of it, and against your denial he says, “You can go on denying it, I don’t care; I listen to my heart, and my heart is saying something to me,” that is something totally different. But that does not happen in the whole conversation in the Gita.Krishna simply forced him; and seeing the situation and the awkwardness of the situation – because they were standing on the battlefield, Krishna was functioning as his charioteer and both armies were facing each other, just about to begin the war for which they had been preparing for years and which was going to be decisive for the whole of India… And it proved to be decisive; it destroyed the very backbone of the country.I find three men responsible for India’s downfall. The first was Krishna, because he destroyed India’s zest, gusto for fighting. He drove India into a kind of Third World War, in which almost the whole country was devastated and destroyed. Everybody, whosoever was alive, became so shaken and afraid of war that they were ready to do anything rather than go to war.And then came Buddha and Mahavira who started talking about nonviolence. That appealed very much to people who were so tired of war. And they had seen such a great war that they never wanted to have anything to do with it again. It would be better to be slaves rather than to have such a war and such destruction.Mahabharata was the name of the war, the Great Indian War; since then there have been only battles, nothing like the Great Indian War. Its magnitude was almost universal: whatsoever was known of the world at that time, every part of that world joined in the war, either from this side or from that side. Both sides were cousin-brothers and the problem was: who should inherit the kingdom?On one side were one hundred Kauravas, one hundred brothers. Now you can see… The father was blind, yet he must have had thousands of wives – even a blind fellow managed to produce one hundred sons. His brother had five sons, the Pandavas. The conflict was: who is going to inherit the kingdom? They could not negotiate in any way, so that the only way to decide was go to war. And because it was one family, all the relatives were divided – somebody was fighting from that side, somebody was fighting from this side; a brother from that side, another brother from this side, and all their friends were there from all over the world.You will be surprised to know that Arjuna had one wife from Mexico too – Mexican kings had come with their armies to fight on Arjuna’s side. The Sanskrit name for Mexico is Makshika; Mexico is a distortion of Makshika. Now much historical evidence has been collected and it is certain that Makshika is Mexico. In Mexico, Hindu temples have been found, Hindu gods and goddesses and their statues have been found. And the latest discovery is that there was a time when the water between Asia and America, the ocean water, was so shallow that you could simply walk from America to Asia. You could simply walk over the ocean; it was one foot deep at the most.So the whole known world of that time had gathered for this decisive battle and all were ready for the signal to be given. But they were waiting because Krishna was still persuading Arjuna. Arjuna wanted to leave; he said, “I want to renounce war because I don’t see any point in it. All these people are my people: on this side are my people; on that side are my people. I see my friends on that side whom I will have to kill and I see my friends on this side. These people, these hundred Kauravas are my brothers, and I have to kill these people just for the kingdom? Millions of people will be killed in the war, and even if we win, who will be left to rejoice in the victory?”And he was absolutely right: “Who will there be to rejoice in the victory over the corpses of millions of relatives and friends? These are the people for whom we would have fought, for whom we would have won the victory so that they could rejoice with us, celebrate with us – but all these people will be dead. There is no certainty we will win; there is no certainty that the other party will win, because both are equally balanced. But one thing is certain: whosoever wins, almost everybody will be dead.” And that’s what happened.Finally Krishna argued: “You are a coward, you are an impotent man escaping from the warfield; you are a warrior, and the religion of the warrior is to fight. Are you afraid of killing, of murdering? These people are going to die anyway.” Just see the argument, what he is saying: “These people are going to die anyway, any day.” Nobody is immortal, so if you murder these people you are not doing anything that you have to be worried about. Perhaps you have taken a few years off this man’s life, but in that too you are wrong to think that you are doing it. The doer is God, and whatsoever happens, happens through his will; we are only his instruments.That’s what I was telling you: that these religions have been reducing humanity to puppets. Krishna’s whole Gita can be condensed into a single sentence: “Man is a puppet; the puppeteer is God.” So whatever the puppeteer wants, you do. If he makes you dance, you dance; if he makes you jog, you jog – whatsoever he makes you do, leave everything to God. Simply act and don’t think of the consequences or the results. That’s the whole message of the Gita, on which the whole of Hinduism stands: go on surrendering everything to God, and don’t bother about the result – the result is in his hands.Now this is a very tricky argument. If I had been in Arjuna’s place I would have slapped Krishna then and there, told him to get down from the chariot and said, “I am going – because this is the will of God. Who am I to think? Now my whole being is saying to renounce this war – I am going. This is God’s voice. Who are you? And I am not going to think about the consequences: that people will think me a coward. Let them think it – that is their business.”In fact the argument that Krishna gave to Arjuna was so bogus that if Arjuna had a little insight into argumentation he could have turned the whole thing round. Krishna was saying, “Only do, and don’t think of the result.”Arjuna should have said, “Great! So I will only do this, and I will not bother about the result” – and he should have turned his chariot toward the jungle. But he was befooled, perhaps by the situation or the pressure. He had collected all these people, he had invited all these people, and now at the last moment to escape… “What will the world say? And Krishna is God’s incarnation – that’s what people say – and if he is saying, ‘Fight and leave the consequences in God’s hands,’ then I should fight.” So he fought and they won. But whatsoever he was afraid of did happen. The whole country has never been again alive in the same way as it was before. It lost its backbone; it lost its manliness.I cannot say that Krishna is the image of God. He is far closer to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong than to God. This is what Adolf Hitler was doing, what poor Adolf Hitler was doing – why should he be condemned? He was doing God’s will and not bothering about the consequences. It was the same thing with Krishna: forcing Arjuna to do something that he wanted, argued for it – and destroyed the country for at least five thousand years. It is still not free of the shadow of the Mahabharata; that Great War still falls like a shadow on India.And the last person the questioner asks about is Gautam Buddha. He must have thought that at least I will agree about Gautam Buddha – but he is wrong. In the first place Gautam Buddha does not believe in God, that God exists, so he will not agree that he is an image of God. He himself would disagree with this statement, that he is an image of God. He does not believe in God. He himself cannot say he is an image of God, and he has never said that.The very idea of “the image of God” is inapplicable to Gautam Buddha – Krishna was born as an incarnation of God, Jesus was born as the only son of God, Mohammed was born as the only messenger of God, but this is not the case with Buddha. He was born a human being, and he went in search of truth. If he were made in the image of God he would have known the truth already, but he had to go in search, a long search.Buddha took immense pains in every possible way to find out the truth. He did everything he was told. He went to all the teachers that were well known in the country until each teacher said, “Now I cannot teach you any more, because whatsoever I know I have taught you. Move on, go somewhere else; you know more than I know now.” But this knowledge was not satisfying. He did everything, and that was his basic mistake: all the teachers got fed up with him.Teachers never get fed up with a person who goes on committing mistakes. Then the teacher is always happy: “You committed this mistake, that’s why you are missing; you committed that mistake, that’s why you are missing.” But this man was so particular that he was overdoing what the teacher was saying. No teacher – and he was with dozens of teachers – could say to him that he had failed because he had not done something, or he had missed something. No, every teacher understood that he had done everything – and nothing had happened.He was standing there saying, “You said all these things were to be done; I think they have been done to completion. If not, tell me where the mistake is, and I am going to correct it. But nothing was happening. The teachers soon realized that they could not cheat and exploit this man; he was ready to go to any lengths.But a point comes where the teacher becomes afraid because he himself does not know. He is just a scholar, a great scholar maybe; he can teach you all the methods but he himself has never done them. He knows no truth; he has not realized himself, so this man becomes a question mark to him, because he is doing exactly what is being told and yet nothing is happening.Finally the last teacher he was with told him, “Don’t waste your time with teachers. I am the greatest of all those teachers; many of them have been my students. Seeing in your eyes your sincerity, your authenticity, I would like to say to you that you have to go on your own. Nobody can take you there, nobody can lead you there; you have to go there on your own. So forget about teachers, forget about teachings and just move on your own. You have done enough of all these disciplines, Yogas, mantras, tantras, all that is available.” And India is a great bazaar, buzzing with all kinds of things that you can do; it can drive you on for many lives. And those methods will not end; they are always there, and new ones too.Buddha understood it because he had wasted twelve years and he was nowhere. But really, he had achieved something without being aware of it: he was finished with following. And that is a great achievement. To become religious; that is one of the greatest achievements: to be finished with following.He went alone. He himself had gathered, in those years, five followers. He also told them, “Forgive me, all those teachers wasted my time and I don’t want to waste your time – go on your own. Leave me alone and I will leave you alone. I am not your leader, and you are not my followers. From now onward I am alone. I will risk everything, and if there is any truth, I will find it; if there is none, I will find that.”This man had never claimed that he was a born God, deity, messenger, prophet or anybody’s incarnation, no. And what he found was not God. He found absolute silence: no word, no idea, no image. He found tremendous contentment, but no God, nobody there even to thank. The whole universe was there, and he was grateful to the whole universe, but it was not separate so there was no question of saying thank you to it; he was part of it.Buddha made no claim to be God or his image. That’s why I have loved him the most, because he is the most human of all these people. Of course Buddhists corrupted all his teachings, made statues of him, started worshipping him and made a God out of him. But for that he cannot be held responsible.You have not asked me a question you have made a statement. But I have still answered you, for the simple reason that anybody living close to me and carrying such statements in the mind will miss me, is bound to miss me.You have to drop your answers. I am enough to wrestle with your questions; with your answers, you are the least able to wrestle.Drop them and I will kill your questions.The day there is no question and no answer within you, and you are just sitting here empty, you have come home – from ignorance to innocence.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Are you against all the religions? What is their most fundamental mistake?Yes, I am against all the so-called religions because they are not religions at all. I am for religion but not for the religions.The true religion can only be one, just like science. You don’t have Mohammedan physics, Hindu physics, Christian physics; that would be nonsense. But that’s what the religions have done – they have made the whole earth a madhouse.If science is one, then why should the science of the inner not be one, too? Science explores the objective world and religion explores the subjective world. Their work is the same, just their direction and dimension is different.In a more enlightened age there will be no such thing as religion, there will be only two sciences: objective science and subjective science. Objective science deals with things, subjective science deals with being.That’s why I say I am against the religions but not against religion. But that religion is still in its birth pangs. All the old religions will do everything in their power to kill it, to destroy it – because the birth of a science of consciousness will be the death of all these so-called religions, which have been exploiting humanity for thousands of years.What will happen to their churches, synagogues, temples? What will happen to their priesthood, their popes, their imams, their shankaracharyas, their rabbis? It is big business. And these people are not going to easily allow the true religion to be born.But a time has come in human history when the grip of the old religions is loosening. Man is only formally paying respect to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, but basically anybody who has any intelligence is no longer interested in all that rubbish. He may go to the synagogue and to the church and to the mosque for other reasons, but those reasons are not religious; those reasons are social. It pays to be seen in the synagogue; it is respectable, and there is no harm. It is just like joining the Rotary Club or the Lions Club. These religions are old clubs, which have a religious jargon around them, but look a little deeper and you will find they are all hocus-pocus: no substance inside.I am for religion, but that religion will not be a repetition of any religion that you are acquainted with. It will be a rebellion against all those religions. It will not carry their work further; it will stop their work completely and start a new work: of real transformation of mankind.You ask me: “What is the most fundamental error of all these religions?” There are many errors and they are all fundamental, but first I would like to talk about the most fundamental. The most fundamental error of all the religions is that none of them was courageous enough to accept that there are things which we don’t know. They all pretended to know everything, they all pretended to know all: they were all omniscient.Why did this happen? It was because if you accept that you are ignorant about something then doubt arises in the minds of your followers. If you are ignorant about something, who knows? – you may be ignorant about other things also. What is the guarantee? To make it foolproof, they have all pretended, without exception, that they are omniscient.The most beautiful thing about science is it does not pretend to be omniscient. Science does not pretend to be omniscient; it accepts its human limits. It knows how much it knows, and it knows that there is much more to know. And the greatest scientists know of something even deeper. The known they know, the boundaries of the knowable they will know sooner or later – they are on the way. And the unknowable: only the greatest scientists like Albert Einstein will be aware of the third category, the unknowable, which will never be known. Nothing can be done about it because the ultimate mystery cannot be reduced to knowledge.We are part of existence – how can we know existence’s ultimate mystery?We have come very late; there was nobody present as an eyewitness. And there is no way for us to separate ourselves completely from existence and become just an observer. We live, we breathe, we exist with existence – we cannot separate ourselves from it. The moment we are separate, we are dead. And without being separate, just a watcher, with no involvement, with no attachment, you cannot know the ultimate mystery; hence it is impossible. There will remain something always unknowable. Yes, it can be felt, but it cannot be known. Perhaps it can be experienced in different ways, not like knowledge.You fall in love – can you say you know love? It seems to be a totally different phenomenon. You feel it. If you try to know it, perhaps it will evaporate in your hands. You cannot reduce it to knowing. You cannot make it an object of knowledge because it is not a mind phenomenon. It is something to do with your heart. Yes, your heartbeats know it, but that is a totally different kind of knowledge; the intellect is incapable of approaching the heartbeats.But there is something more than heart in you: your being, your life source. Just as you know through the mind, which is the most superficial part of your individuality, you know something from your heart, which is deeper than the mind. The mind cannot go into it; it is too deep for it. But behind the heart, still deeper, is your being, your very life source. That life source also has a way of knowing.When mind knows, we call it knowledge. When heart knows, we call it love. And when being knows, we call it meditation.But all three speak different languages, which are not translatable into each other. And the deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes to translate, because at the very center of your being there is nothing but silence. Now, how to translate silence into sound? The moment you translate silence into sound you have destroyed it. Even music cannot translate it. Perhaps music comes closest, but still it is sound.Poetry does not come quite as close as music, because words, howsoever beautiful, are still words. They don’t have life in them; they are dead. How can you translate life into something dead? Yes, perhaps between the words you may have a glimpse here and there – but it is between the words, between the lines, not in the words, not in the lines.This is the most fundamental error of all religions: that they have deceived humanity by blatantly posing as if they know all. But every day they have been exposed and their “knowledge” has been exposed; hence, they have been fighting with any progress from knowledge.If Galileo finds that the earth moves around the sun, the pope is angry. The pope is infallible; he is only a representative of Jesus, but he is infallible. What to say about Jesus – he is the only begotten son of God, and what to say about God… But in the Bible, which is a book descended from heaven, written by God, the sun goes around the earth.Now, Galileo creates a problem. If Galileo is right, then God is wrong; God’s only begotten son is wrong, the only begotten son’s representatives for these two thousand years – all the popes who are infallible – are wrong. Just a single man, Galileo, destroys the whole pretension. He exposes the whole hypocrisy; his mouth has to be shut. He was old, dying, on his deathbed, but he was forced, almost dragged, to the court of the pope to ask for an apology.And the pope demanded, “Change it in your book, because the holy book cannot be wrong. You are a mere human being; you can be wrong but Jesus Christ cannot be wrong, God himself cannot be wrong, hundreds of infallible popes cannot be wrong. You are standing against God, his son, and his representatives. You simply have to change it!”Galileo must have been a man with an immense sense of humor – which I count to be one of the great qualities of a religious man. Only idiots are serious, they are bound to be serious. To be able to laugh you need a little intelligence.It is said that an Englishman laughs twice when he hears a joke: once, just to be nice to the fellow who is telling the joke, out of etiquette, mannerism; and secondly, in the middle of the night when he gets the meaning of the joke. The German laughs only once, just to show that he has understood it. The Jew never laughs; he simply says, “In the first place you are telling it all wrong…”You need a little intelligence, and Galileo must have been intelligent. He was one of the greatest scientists of the world, but he must be counted as one of the most religious persons also. He said, “Of course God cannot be wrong, Jesus cannot be wrong, all the infallible popes cannot be wrong, but poor Galileo can always be wrong. There is no problem about it – I will change it in my book. But one thing you should remember: the earth will still go around the sun. About that I cannot do anything – it does not follow my orders. As far as my book is concerned I will change it, but in the note I will have to write this: ‘The earth does not follow my orders, it still goes around the sun.’”Religion was against each step of science. The earth is flat, according to the Bible, not round. When Columbus started thinking of going on a trip with the idea that the earth is round, his arithmetic was simple: “If I continue journeying directly, one day I am bound to come back to the same point from where I started – the whole circle.” But everybody was against it.The pope called Columbus and told him, “Don’t be foolish! The Bible says it clearly: it is flat. Soon you will reach the edge of this flat earth and you will fall from there. And do you know where you will fall? Heaven is above, and you cannot fall upward – or can you? You will fall downward into hell. So don’t go on this journey and don’t persuade other people to go on this journey.”Columbus insisted that he was going; he went on the journey and opened the doors of the new world. We owe so much to Columbus that we are not aware of: the world that we know was brought to light by Columbus. If he had listened to the pope, the infallible pope who was talking just nonsense…but his nonsense was very holy, religious.All the religions of the world are bound to pretend that whatsoever there is, they know it. And they know it exactly as it is; it cannot be otherwise. Jainas say their tirthankara, their prophet, their messiah, is omniscient. He knows everything: past, present and future, so whatsoever he says is absolute truth. Buddha has joked about Mahavira, the Jaina messiah. They were contemporaries twenty-five centuries ago. Mahavira was getting old, but Buddha was young and was still capable of joking and laughing. He was still young and alive; he was not yet established.Once you become an established religion, then you have your vested interests. Mahavira had an established religion thousands of years old, perhaps the oldest religion of the world – because Hindus say, and say rightly, that they have the oldest book in the world, the Rig Veda. Certainly it is now scientifically proven that the Rig Veda is the oldest scripture that has survived. And in the Rig Veda, the first Jaina messiah is mentioned; that is proof enough that the Jaina messiah has preceded the Rig Veda. And he is mentioned; his name is Rishabhdeva.He is mentioned with a respect that it is impossible to have toward a contemporary. It is just human weakness, but it is very difficult to be respectful toward somebody who is contemporary and alive, just like you. It is easy to be respectful to somebody who has died long ago. The way the Rig Veda remembers Rishabhdeva is so respectful that it seems that he must have been dead for at least a thousand years, not less than that, so Jainism is a very long-established religion.Buddhism was just starting with Buddha. He could afford to joke and laugh, so he jokes about Mahavira and his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. He said, “I have seen Mahavira standing before a house begging” – because Mahavira lived naked and used to beg just with his hands. Buddha said, “I have seen him standing before a house which was empty. There was nobody in the house – and yet this man, Jainas say, is a knower, not only of the present, but of the past and the future.”Buddha said, “I saw Mahavira walking just ahead of me, and he stepped on a dog’s tail. It was early morning and it was not yet light. Only when the dog jumped, barking, did Mahavira come to know that he had stepped on his tail. This man is omniscient, and he does not know that a dog is sleeping right in his way and he is going to step on the dog’s tail.”But the same happened with Buddha when he became established. After three hundred years, when his sayings and statements were collected for the first time, the disciples made it absolutely clear that “Everything written here is absolutely true, and it is going to remain true forever.”Now, in those statements there are so many idiotic things, which may have been meaningful twenty-five centuries ago, but today they are not meaningful because so much has happened in twenty-five centuries. Buddha had no idea of Karl Marx, he had no idea of Sigmund Freud, so what he had written or stated, is bound to be based on the knowledge that was available at that time.“A man is poor, because in his past life he has committed bad actions.” Now, after Marx, you cannot say that: “A man is rich because he has committed good actions in his past life.” Now, after Marx, you cannot say that. And I don’t think Buddha had any idea that there was going to be a Karl Marx, although his disciples said that whatsoever he said is going to remain true forever – another way of saying that he was omniscient.This was good consolation for the poor, that if they did good works, in their future lives they would also be rich. It was a joy for the rich too: “We are rich because we have done good works in our past life.” And they knew perfectly well what good works they were doing right then, with their riches increasing every day – the past life was finished with long ago and yet their riches went on increasing. The poor people go on becoming poorer and the rich go on becoming richer.But in India no revolution has ever been thought about; there is no question of its happening – and India has lived in poverty such as no other country has lived. India has lived longer in slavery than any other country of the world. But slavery, poverty, suffering, everything has to be accepted because it is your doing. You cannot revolt against it. Against whom are you going to revolt? The only way is to do something to balance your bad actions with good actions. The very idea of revolution has never happened to the Indian mind. If slavery comes, you have to accept it.The Hindus know all the answers. They say, “Without God’s will nothing happens.” So if you are a slave… And for two thousand years India has been in slavery. It is a miracle that such a big country has remained in slavery for two thousand years. And the people who invaded India were small barbarian tribes; they were nothing compared to India. They could have been simply crushed by the crowd; there was no need even to take sword in hand.But anybody – Hunas, Moguls, Turks, Mohammedans, Britishers – anybody who was ambitious and wanted to invade India was always welcome. It was ready – obliged that you came from so far away, and you took so much trouble! The simple reason was that the Hindus know the answer: it is God’s will; nothing happens without God’s will, so this slavery is God’s will. And a man like Mahatma Gandhi – one would think that a man like Gandhi would show a little more intelligence, but no. If you are a Hindu you cannot show more intelligence than you are supposed to.In Bihar, one of the provinces of India – the poorest province – there was a great earthquake. It was already poor; every year it suffers from floods. And then this earthquake…thousands died. And what did Gandhi say? Gandhi said, “Bihar is suffering because of its bad actions.” In the twentieth century, an earthquake and the whole population of Bihar…?It was understandable that you had been explaining to single individuals that they were suffering because of their bad karmas, but the whole state suffering because of its bad karmas…! – as if all these people in their past life were also in this same state, and they all committed such bad karmas that the earthquake happened. And the whole of the rest of India did not suffer from the earthquake because they had done good karmas in their past life. Strange!It is even stranger because Bihar is the birthplace of Mahavira, of Gautam Buddha, of Makhkhali Gosal, of Ajit Keshkambal – great teachers and great prophets – and Bihar is suffering because it has committed bad karmas! In India no other state has given birth to so many prophets, philosophers, thinkers. And what wrong could Bihar have done? But Hinduism knows everything.I want you to remember that the basic mistake that all the religions have committed is, they have not been courageous enough to accept that there are limits to their knowing. They have not been able to say on any point: “We don’t know.” They have been so arrogant that they go on saying they know, and they go on creating new fictions of knowledge.That’s where the true religion will be different, fundamentally different. Yes, once in a while there have been single individuals who had the quality of true religion…For example, Bodhidharma, one of the most lovable human beings; he went to China fourteen hundred years ago. He remained for nine years in China and a following gathered around him. But he was not a man belonging to the stupidity of the so-called religions.Formally he was a Buddhist monk, and China was already converted to Buddhism. Thousands of Buddhist monks had already reached China before Bodhidharma, and when they heard Bodhidharma was coming, they rejoiced, because Bodhidharma was almost equal to Buddha. His name had reached them long before he came. Even the king of China, the great Emperor Wu, came to receive Bodhidharma on the boundary of China and India.Wu was the medium to transform the whole of China into Buddhism, to convert it from Confucius to Gautam Buddha. He had put all his forces and all his treasures into the hands of Buddhist monks – and he was a great emperor. When he met Bodhidharma he asked, “I have been waiting to see you. I am old, and I am fortunate that you have come after all; all these years we have been waiting. I want to ask a few questions.”The first question he asked was: “I have devoted all my treasures, my armies, my bureaucracy – everything that I have – to convert this vast land to Buddhism, and I have made thousands of temples for Buddha.” He had made one temple to Buddha in which there were ten thousand statues of Buddha; the whole mountain was carved. Because ten thousand Buddhas had to be carved, the whole mountain was finished – carved into Buddhist statues, so the whole mountain became a temple. He asked, “What will be my benefit in the other world?”That’s what the other monks were telling him: “You have done so much to serve Gautam Buddha that perhaps when you reach the other world, he himself will be standing there to welcome you. And you have earned so much virtue that an eternity of pleasures is yours.”Bodhidharma said, “All that you have done is absolutely meaningless. You have not even started on the journey; you have not even taken the first step. You will fall into the seventh hell – take my word for it.The Emperor Wu could not believe it: “I have done so much, and this man says ‘You will fall into the seventh hell’!”Bodhidharma laughed and he said, “Whatsoever you have done is out of greed, and anything done out of greed cannot make you religious. You have renounced so many riches, but you have not renounced unconditionally. You are bargaining; it is a business. You are purchasing in the other world. You are moving your bank balance from this world into the other world, transferring it. You are cunning because this world is momentary – tomorrow you may die – and these other monks have been telling you the other world is eternal. So what are you doing? Giving momentary treasures to gain eternal treasures? Really a good deal! Whom are you trying to deceive?”When Bodhidharma spoke to Wu in this way, before all the monks and the generals and the lesser kings who had come with Wu and his whole court, Wu was angry. Nobody had spoken this way to him before. He said to Bodhidharma, “Is this the way for a religious person to talk?”Bodhidharma said, “Yes, this is the only way a religious person talks; all other ways are of people who want to cheat you. These monks here have been cheating you; they have been making promises to you. You don’t know anything about what happens after death; nor do they, but they have been pretending that they know.Wu asked, “Who are you to speak with such authority?”And do you know what Bodhidharma said? He said, “I don’t know. That is one point that I don’t know. I have been into myself, I have gone to the very center of my being and come out as ignorant as before. I do not know.”Now this I call courage. No religion has been courageous enough to say, “We know this much, and that much we don’t know; perhaps in the future we may know. And beyond that there is a space which is going to remain unknowable forever.”If these religions had been that humble, the world would have been totally different. Humanity would not have been in such a mess; there would not have been so much anguish. All around the world everybody is full of anguish. What to say about hell – we are already living in hell here. What more suffering can there be in hell?And the people responsible for it are your so-called religious people. They still go on pretending, playing the same game. After three hundred years of science continually demolishing their territory, continually destroying their so-called knowledge, bringing forth new facts, new realities, still the pope is infallible, still the shankaracharya is infallible!In Jaipur there was a Hindu conference and one of the shankaracharyas… There are four shankaracharyas in India and they are equivalent to the pope: each one ruling one direction – for the four directions, four shankaracharyas. One of the shankaracharyas belonged to Jaipur; he was born in Jaipur. He was basically an astrologer, a great scholar, so when one shankaracharya died, he was chosen to be the shankaracharya of Jagannath Puri.I had known him before he was a shankaracharya and this conference was the first time that I had met him since he had become a shankaracharya. I asked him, “Now you must have become infallible. And I know you perfectly well – you were not so before. Can you tell me on what date, at what time you became infallible?”He said, “Don’t ask inconvenient questions in front of others. Now I am a shankaracharya and I am supposed to be infallible.”I said, “Supposed to be!”He said, “That is for your information. If you ask me in public, I am infallible.”A Polack has become pope. Have you ever heard of any Polack becoming infallible? But one pope, a Polack, has become infallible. How far has this world to fall? Now there is nowhere to fall. When the Polack dies – because popes die very quickly, for the simple reason that by the time they become pope they are almost dead. It takes such a long time to reach the Vatican, that if they survive a few years that is enough. Now after that pope whom are you going to choose? Can you find anybody else? I think Oregon will be good. After Poland, Oregon will be the right place. You can find far superior idiots here, but they will also become infallible once they become the pope.A true religion will have this humbleness of accepting that only a few things are known, much more is unknown, and something will always remain unknowable. That something is the target of the whole religious search. You cannot make it an object of knowledge, but you can experience it, you can drink it, you can have the taste of it – it is existential.The scientist remains separate from the object he is studying. He is always separate from the object; hence knowledge is possible, because the knower is different from the known. But the religious person is moving into his subjectivity, where the knower and the known are one.When the knower and the known are one there is no possibility of knowledge. Yes, you can dance it, but you cannot say it.It may be in the walk, the way you walk; it may be in your eyes, the way you see; it may be in your touch, the way you touch – but it cannot be put into words. Words are absolutely impotent as far as religion is concerned. And all these so-called religions are full of words. I call it all crap!This is the fundamental mistake. But there are other mistakes too, worth remembering. For example: every religion is egoistic. Although every religion teaches its followers to drop the ego, to be egoless, to be humble, the religion itself is not humble; it is very arrogant.Jesus says, “Be humble, be meek,” but have you ever thought: Jesus himself is not humble, not meek, not at all. What more arrogance and what more egotism can there be? He declares himself to be the only begotten son of God! You cannot declare yourself to be another son of God – not even a cousin, because God has no brothers. You cannot have any relationship with God, that one relationship is closed; Jesus has closed the door.He is the Messiah and he has come to redeem the world – nobody seems to be redeemed, and two thousand years have passed. He himself died in suffering on the cross – whom is he going to redeem? But the idea that “I am going to redeem you, come follow me”… This has been one of the most important factors in destroying humanity – because all religions claim that they are the only right religion, and all other religions are wrong. They have been continually fighting, killing each other, destroying each other.Just the other day I saw a panel on the TV. A rabbi, a Protestant priest and a Catholic monk were discussing me. And they came to the conclusion… The rabbi suggested, “It is time now – we should make an effort to have a dialogue with this man.” I could not believe it – a rabbi talking to the Catholic priest, suggesting that a dialogue is needed. Why? There were so many rabbis in Jesus’ time, why wasn’t a dialogue needed with Jesus? Was crucifixion the dialogue?And this idiot Catholic agrees. He does not even say, “You, being a rabbi, do you believe in dialogue? Then what happened with Jesus? Was crucifixion a dialogue?” No, he does not ask that. Nor does the rabbi wonder what he himself is saying. Jesus was a Jew – it would have been perfectly right for rabbis to have a dialogue with a Jew. If he has gone astray, bring the Jew back on the right path; or perhaps he is right, then you come to his path. But was crucifixion the dialogue? It is not even a monologue!But now they are all established. The Catholic, the Protestant and the rabbi have no trouble because they are now part of the vested business. And they all know that they are doing the same things, they are in the same business. Jesus was trouble; perhaps dialogue was not possible. It is not possible with me either, but the reasons are different.With Jesus the dialogue was not possible because he was the messiah – who are you? A dialogue is possible only among equals. He is the son of God. Who are you – son-in-law? You have to be something; otherwise what dialogue? No, it was not possible because Jesus was so egoistic that the rabbis knew perfectly well a dialogue was not possible. Once or twice they had approached him.Once a rabbi asked him, “On what authority are you speaking?”He said, “On my own authority – and remember, before Abraham was, I am.” Abraham was the forefather, the ancientmost; and Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I am. What more authority do you want?” Now this man is saying, “Blessed are the meek,” but he himself is not meek. “Blessed are the poor, blessed are the humble.” But what is the reason? Why are they blessed? They are blessed because they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.Strange argument! Here you lose; there you gain a thousandfold. But what do you gain? – the same things. Here you are poor, there you will be rich. Here you are a beggar; there you will be a king. But what is the qualitative difference? – just here and there: two different spaces. And these people are trying to be meek and humble and poor for a simple reason: to inherit the Kingdom of God. Now this man is provoking and exploiting your greed. All the religions have been doing that.A dialogue with me is also impossible, but for different reasons. First: I don’t know myself – about that no discussion is possible – and that is the most fundamental thing to be discussed. What dialogue? Either you have been within or you haven’t. If you have been within, then just looking into your eyes is enough – that’s the dialogue. If you have not been within, then just looking in your eyes is also enough. The dialogue is finished before it begins.With me a dialogue is impossible because I am not a scholar. I cannot quote scriptures; I always misquote. But who cares? I don’t pay any respect to those scriptures. I don’t believe them to be holy. They are just religious fictions, so misquoting from religious fictions is not a problem at all. In fact I have never read them carefully. I have gone through them, here and there, just looking, and even then I have found so much garbage.So what dialogue is possible with me, on what points? There needs to be a certain agreement, and there is no agreement possible because I say there is no God. Now what dialogue is possible? You will have to prove God, then the dialogue can begin. Or bring God to the witness box; then we can discuss whether he is truly a God or just a phony American.I don’t believe that there is any heaven or hell. What dialogue is possible? Yes, in other religions you can have dialogues because these are the points of agreement. A Mohammedan, a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew – they can discuss God. One point is certain, that God is. Now, the question is only about his form, attributes, qualities – but the basic thing is agreed. They all agree on heaven and hell. Now, it may be that somebody believes in seven hells, somebody believes in five, somebody believes in three. This is only a question of numbers, not so important. With me what kind of dialogue is possible?When I heard the panel, I started wondering, that if a dialogue has to happen, how is it going to start – from where? There is not a single point of agreement, because all those religions are pseudo, they are not true religions; otherwise there would have been…With Bodhidharma I can have a dialogue. He says, “I do not know who I am.” That’s enough agreement. Now we can hold each other’s hand and go for a morning walk. Now there is no need to say anything more, all is said.After nine years, when Bodhidharma was returning to India, he gathered four of his chief disciples and he asked them, “Condense religion into a single statement so that I can know whether you have understood me or not.”The first one said, “Compassion is religion. That is Buddha’s basic message: compassion.”Bodhidharma said, “You have my bones, but nothing else.”The second disciple said, “Meditation. To be silent, to be so utterly silent that not a single thought moves inside you: that is the essence of religion.”Bodhidharma said, “You have my flesh, but nothing more; because what you are saying, you are only repeating my words. In your eyes I don’t see the silence; on your face I don’t see the depth that silence brings.”The third one said, “It cannot be said. It is inexpressible.”Bodhidharma said, “You have my marrow. But if it cannot be said, why have you used even these words? You have already said it. Even saying, ‘It cannot be said, it cannot be expressed,’ you are saying something about it; hence I say you have only the marrow.”He turned toward the fourth. There were tears in the disciple’s eyes and he fell at Bodhidharma’s feet. Bodhidharma shook him and asked him again and again, “What is religion?” But only tears of joy, and his hands touching Bodhidharma’s feet in gratitude… He never spoke a single word, not even, “It cannot be said, it is inexpressible.”Bodhidharma hugged him and said, “You have me. Now I can go in peace because I am leaving something of me behind.”Now with these rabbis, Catholic priests, Protestant priests, what dialogue! Two thousand years have passed and the rabbis have not apologized yet for crucifying Jesus. He may have been an egoist, he may have been wrong, he may have been teaching something faulty, but nobody had the right to crucify the man; he had not harmed anybody. All that was needed was a gentlemanly argument, but they were not competent enough to argue with him.Crucifixion is not an argument. You can cut off my head – that is not an argument. That does not mean that I was wrong and you were right. In fact, cutting off my head simply proves that you were incapable of arguing your point. It is always the weak one who becomes angry. It is always the weak who want to convert you at the point of a sword. After two thousand years and still I wonder that not a single rabbi has apologized. Why should they? They think they were right then and that they are right now.I wonder what kind of Catholic is this priest and what kind of Protestant is this priest who are sitting with the rabbi and discussing me. They should talk first about themselves, about why they are sitting together.All these people have been egoists. Now, rabbis go on teaching people to be humble but they cannot give an apology. That is impossible. They have not even mentioned the name of Jesus in their scriptures, in their books. You will not find any mention of Jesus, his crucifixion or the birth of Christianity in Jewish sources, no. It is not even worth mentioning. But the same is the situation of other religions. Mohammed says, “I am the only messenger of God. One God, one messenger and one holy book, the Koran – if you believe in these three things, that’s enough, you are saved.”That brings me to the second point, that all these religions have been against doubt. They have been really afraid of doubt. Only an impotent intellect can be afraid of doubt; otherwise doubt is a challenge, an opportunity to inquire.They have all killed doubt and they have all forced on everybody’s mind the idea that if you doubt you will fall into hell and you will suffer for eternity. Never doubt. Belief is the “in thing.” Faith, total faith – not even partial faith will do, but total faith. What are you asking from human beings – something absolutely inhuman? A man…how can he believe totally? And even if he tries to believe totally, that means doubt is there; otherwise against what is he fighting? Against what is he trying to believe totally? There is doubt, and doubt is not destroyed by believing; doubt is destroyed by experiencing.They say, “Believe!” I say, “Explore!”They say, “Don’t doubt!” I say, “Doubt to the very end, till you arrive, and know and feel and experience.”Then doubt evaporates by itself, there is no need to repress it; then there is no need for you to believe. You don’t believe in the sun, you don’t believe in the moon – why do you believe in God? You don’t believe in ordinary facts because they are there, but they are not ultimate truth.A roseflower is there in the morning; by the evening it is gone. Still you “believe” in it; there is no question of doubt. Your belief in a rose flower is a simple belief, not against doubt. Just so that you don’t get confused between a simple belief and a complicated belief, I have a different word for it: it is trust.You trust a roseflower. It blooms, it releases its fragrance, and it is gone. By the evening you will not find it; its petals have fallen and the wind has taken them away. But it was not an eternal truth; you know it as a fact. And you know again there will be roses, again there will be fragrance. You need not believe; you simply know from experience, because yesterday there were roses and they also disappeared. Today again they appeared – tomorrow nature is going to follow its course.Why believe in God? Neither yesterday did you have any experience of God, nor today – and what certainty about tomorrow? From where can you get certainty for tomorrow? Yesterday was empty, today is empty, and tomorrow is only an empty hope, hoping against hope. But that’s what all these religions have been teaching: destroy doubt.The moment you destroy doubt you have destroyed something of immense value in mankind, because it is doubt which is going to help man to inquire and find. You have cut the very root of inquiry; now there will be no inquiry.That’s why there is rarely in the whole world, once in a while, a person who has the feel of the eternal, who has breathed the eternal, who has found the pulse of the eternal – but very rarely. And who is responsible? All your rabbis and all your popes and all your shankaracharyas and all your imams – they are responsible because they have cut the very root of inquiry.In Japan they grow a strange tree. There are in existence, three-hundred or four-hundred-year-old trees, five inches tall. Four hundred years old! If you look at the tree, it is so ancient but such a pygmy of a tree – five inches tall. And they think it is an art! What they have been doing is to go on cutting the roots. The earthen pot in which the tree is has no bottom, so once in a while they take up the pot and cut the roots. When you cut the roots the tree cannot grow up. It grows old but it never grows up. It becomes older and older, but you have destroyed it. It might have become a big tree, because mostly those trees are bo trees.Japan is a Buddhist country, and Gautam Buddha became enlightened under a bo tree. The bo tree is called a bo tree in English too, because under it Gautama Siddartha became a buddha, attained bodhi, enlightenment. The full name is bodhi tree, but in ordinary use it is enough to call it a bo tree. So all those trees are bo trees. Now no buddha can sit under these bo trees. You have stopped who knows how many buddhas from becoming buddhas by cutting these bo trees.The tree under which Buddha became enlightened was so big that one thousand bullock carts could rest underneath it. It was so big. It is still alive – not the same tree of course, but a branch of the same tree. Mohammedans destroyed the tree. They could not tolerate that a tree exists underneath which somebody became far greater than their Mohammed. They burned the tree; they completely destroyed the tree.But one of the emperors of India, Ashoka, had sent a branch of the tree as a present to Ceylon with his own daughter, Sanghamitra, who had become a sannyasin. Sanghamitra carried that branch of the bo tree to Ceylon where it grew into another tree, and from that bo tree a branch has been brought back again and put in the place where Buddha became enlightened. It is part of the same tree, but the third generation.But what these people in Japan are doing shows something significant: it is what religions have done with man. They have been cutting your roots so you don’t grow up – you only grow old.And the first root they cut is doubt; then inquiry stops.The second root they cut turns you against your own nature, condemns your nature. Obviously when your nature is condemned, how can you help your nature to flow, grow and take its own course like a river? No, they don’t allow you to be like a river, moving zigzag.All the religions have turned you into railway trains, running on rails, from one station to another – and mostly just shunting, not going anywhere but still on rails. Those rails they call discipline, control, self control.Religions have done so much harm that it is almost incalculable – their pot of sins is full, overflowing. It just needs to be thrown into the Pacific, five miles deep, so deep that nobody can find it and start the same idiotic process again.The small number of people in the world who are intelligent should get rid of all that their religions have done to them without their knowing. They should become completely purged of Jewishness, of Hinduism, of Christianity, of Jainism, of Buddhism. They should be completely clean. Just to be human is enough.Accept yourself. Respect yourself. Allow your nature to take its own course. Don’t force, don’t repress.Doubt! – because doubt is not a sin, it is the sign of your intelligence. Doubt and go on inquiring until you find. One thing I can say: whosoever inquires, finds. It is absolutely certain, it has never been otherwise. Nobody has come empty-handed from an authentic inquiry.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the greatest harm that the so-called religions have done to humanity?The greatest harm that the so-called religions have done to humanity is to prevent humanity from finding the true religion. They pretended to be the true religion. All the religions of the world have conditioned the human mind from the very childhood to believe that theirs is the true religion: the religion in which the child is born.A Hindu believes his religion is the only true religion in the world; all other religions are false. The same is the case with the Jew, with the Christian, with the Buddhist, with the Mohammedan. They are in agreement on one point, and that is that there is no need to find the true religion; the true religion is already available to you – you are born into it.I call this their greatest harm because without authentic religion man can only vegetate, cannot really live. He remains a superficial being; he cannot attain to any profundity, authenticity. He knows nothing about his own depths. He knows about himself through others, what they say. Just the way you know your face through the mirror, so you are acquainted with yourself through other people’s opinions; you don’t know yourself directly. And the opinions that you depend on are of those people who are in a similar situation: they don’t know themselves.These religions have created a society of blind people, and they go on telling them “You don’t need eyes.” Jesus had eyes – what is the need for Christians to have eyes? All that you have to do is to believe in Jesus; he will lead the way to paradise, you simply have to follow. You are not allowed to think, because thinking may take you astray. It is bound to take you on different paths than they want you to go, because thinking means sharpening your doubt, your intellect. And that is very dangerous for the so-called religions. Those religions want you dull, dead, somehow dragging; they want you without intelligence. But they are clever in using good names: they call it faith. It is nothing but the suicide of your intelligence.A true religion will not require faith from you. A true religion will require experience. It will not ask you to drop your doubt, it will help you to sharpen your doubt so that you can inquire to the very end.The true religion will help you to find your truth.And remember, my truth can never be your truth because there is no way of transferring truth from one person to another. Mohammed’s truth is Mohammed’s truth; it cannot be yours just by becoming a Mohammedan. To you it will remain only a belief, and who knows whether Mohammed knows or not? Who knows, Jesus may simply be a fanatic, neurotic. That’s what modern psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts agree upon: that Jesus was a mental case.To declare oneself to be the only begotten son of God, to declare, “I am the messiah who has come to redeem the whole world from suffering and sin” – do you think it is normal? And how many people has he redeemed? I don’t think that he was able to redeem even a single person from suffering and sin. He was certainly a megalomaniac.How can you have faith? Even if a Gautam Buddha knows the truth, there is no way for you to know whether he knows it or not. Yes, you can recognize somebody knowing the truth, if you also know it; then you will have the capacity to smell it. Otherwise you simply believe in public opinion, you believe in mass psychology, which is the lowest.Truth comes to the highest intelligence.But if from the very beginning you are taught to believe, then you are crippled, you are destroyed. If from the very beginning you are conditioned to have faith, you have lost your soul. Then you will vegetate, you will not live. And that’s what millions of people around the world are doing: vegetating.What life can you have? You don’t even know yourself. You don’t know from where you are coming, to where you are going, what the purpose of all this is. Who has prevented you? Not the Devil but the popes, the priests, the rabbis, the shankaracharyas – these are the real devils.As far as I can see, all these synagogues, temples, mosques, churches – they are all dedicated to the Devil, not to God, because what they have done is not divine, it is sheer murder: slaughter of the whole human mind.But they have done many other things also. This fundamental harm cannot be done alone, it needs support from many other harms. For example: the religions have demystified the universe. I consider that to be one of the greatest crimes.Let me repeat, they have demystified the universe, and I consider it to be one of the greatest crimes. They have done it so cunningly, so cleverly that you are not even aware what has been done.What do I mean when I say demystifying the universe? I mean they have supplied ready-made answers for you. All the religions have a certain catechism. Christians have approached me: “Why don’t you publish a small booklet which contains your catechism? Because you have so many books that it is difficult to read them all, to find out and figure out what your message is. It will be easy; just like the Christians have done, you can publish the catechism on a postcard.”I had to tell them, “It is impossible for me because I don’t have a catechism at all. You will have to look into my books. You will have to enter into this jungle and you will have to find the message. And I don’t know whether you will be able to find one, or whether you yourself will be lost; the second is the more probable possibility.”But all the religions have provided a catechism. What is a catechism? For questions which are unanswerable, they give you answers, even before you have asked. The child has not asked who has created the world; the child is not yet mature enough to ask such a question, but religions catch him before he becomes mature and the question arises. Once the question has arisen, their answer is not going to help.Once the child asks who has created the world then the answer that God has created the world is not going to help, because the child is bound to ask, “Who has created God? The answer is not an answer because the question remains the same; it is just delayed a little bit – one step backward. And finally religions say, “God has not been created by anybody.” Very strange – because the logic behind their God is that everything that exists needs a creator.I said to one of my religious teachers – I had to go every week to listen to his crap – “You gave me the logic: everything that exists needs a creator.”He said, “Of course.”I asked him, “Does God exist or not?”He became alert: if he said that God exists, then he needs a creator – according to his own logic. And where this is going to land is a regress absurdum. You can go on: A created B, B created C, C created D – you can go on and the whole alphabet will be finished, and Z will be standing in front of you with the same question mark. Nothing has changed. The question was bogus; it was not answerable.But no religion is courageous enough to say, “There are things about which you can ask a question, but don’t expect the answer. Life is a mystery.” And life can only be a mystery if there are questions which are unanswerable.But then the religion loses all grip on your neck. If there are questions which are unanswerable, then what have your messiahs and messengers of God and incarnations of God…? What have all these fools been doing? They have all answered questions which are basically unanswerable, and should be left unanswerable. An honest person, a sincere mind, will accept the fact that yes there is a question but there is no answer.Hence I say poetry is far more religious than your so-called holy books. Music is more religious than your so-called sermons of great apostles. Painting is more religious because paintings are not answers, they are rather reflections of the mystery that is existence. Poetry does not answer anything for you, it simply reflects: the sunrise, the sunset, a cloud wandering in the sky, a bird on the wing, a rainbow. It does not give you any answers.A Zen haiku says:The wild geese fly over a lake.The lake of course reflects them.They neither ask, “Please reflect us,” nor does the lake say, “Thank you for coming to be reflected in me.” The lake is silent, the wild geese are silent; the reflection happens, but not a single word is uttered from either side. Not only that, the wild geese have no expectation that they should be reflected; if they are not reflected they won’t feel offended. If the wild geese never come to the lake, the lake will not feel offended, rejected, humiliated. It has never asked, never invited them.Things happen but there is no why to it. In poetry, painting, in music… Have you ever asked about great music: “What is the meaning of it?” Listening to Beethoven or Mozart have you ever asked, “What is the meaning of it?” Or looking at the paintings of Picasso…It happened once: an American super-rich millionaire said to Picasso, “I want a few of your paintings.”Picasso said, “But my paintings are very costly.”The man said, “Money does not matter at all. Give me two paintings and whatsoever is the price – I will not ask the price – I will simply give it to you cash.”Picasso was in difficulty because he had only one painting ready right then. He went inside and cut the painting in two, brought out two paintings and sold them.One of his friends who was sitting and watching the whole scene said, “In the first place the painting was absolutely meaningless; I have never been able to figure it out. In fact it is difficult to know how you manage to find which is the top and which is the bottom, and how you manage to hang it. I have tried it all ways, but it is still beautiful any way you hang it – and that means that it has no meaning. And now you have done a great miracle. You have cut the painting in two, and that man has left with two paintings which cannot be meaningful because each painting is only half – the other half is missing.”“But nobody will ever come to know,” Picasso said, “that they are not two paintings. I could have even made it four. I don’t know, myself, what it means, but it was such a joy to paint it.” And tears were in his eyes that he had to sell it.These painters, poets, musicians have given the human mind a richness because they do not demystify existence. In the beginning science was moving on the same lines as the so-called religions. In the eighteenth century science was doing the same stupid thing, perhaps because there was only one precedent: religions. It was trying to demystify existence, but soon it realized that the deeper you go into existence, the farther you are moving into mystery.Soon science realized the great statement of Socrates: “The man who knows less, thinks he knows more; and the man who knows more, knows he knows less. The man who is just an idiot thinks that he knows all, and the man who is really wise knows only one thing, that he does not know anything at all.”As your intelligence becomes more and more mature and you enter into existence from different directions, and you start feeling and living and loving it; it becomes more like poetry, painting, music, dance, a love affair – but not theology. It becomes, slowly, slowly, so much more mysterious that you could never have imagined that you are sitting on immense treasures of mystery. But religions give you ready-made answers.Existence is there and naturally the question arises, “Who created it?” Remain with the question. Don’t accept anybody’s answer – because there are peddlers all around: Christians, Mohammedans, Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas, Jews, all kinds of peddlers in search of customers, trying to sell you something which is simply poison and nothing else.They will say, “God created it,” or “Allah created it.” Yes, they have given an answer, but do you know what harm they have done? If you accept their answer, your question dies. And with the death of the question, your inquiry dies; now you will never inquire. If you had inquired, I can say with my own authority… And my authority does not depend on the Vedas or the Bible or the Koran, it depends only on my experience, on my inquiry. I say with my own authority that if you go on questioning without accepting anybody’s answer, including mine, by and by you will find that the answer is not found but the question disappears.And that is the moment of feeling the mystery.Do you see the difference? The so-called religions repress your question; they put an answer on top of it to cover it up, an answer which they give as if God himself has given it. Hindus say that the Vedas were written by God. Sheer nonsense – because in the Vedas there are so many things which have been proved absolutely absurd. If God wrote these absurdities then he should be dethroned.They will all make their answer important, significant, infallible – as if coming from God himself or from God’s son or from his messenger. All these strategies are used to make their answer penetrate your being and condition you so deeply that your question disappears into your unconscious.The function of a true religion is to discard all these answers, to discard all these authorities and bring out your authentic questioning, your doubts, your inquiries, and help you to go in search of the unknown, of the uncharted. It is a dangerous journey.Religions have given you comfortable lives, convenient ways of living. But there is no way to live unless you decide to live dangerously, unless you are ready to go into the dark, to seek and search for yourself. And I say to you, you will not find the answer. Nobody has ever found the answer. All answers are lies.Yes, you will find reality, but reality is not the answer to your question. Reality will be the death of your question. And when your question disappears and there is no answer available, that space is mystery.A true religion is mysticism.In the beginning science tried to follow the well-trodden path of the old religions. But science could not go for long on those lines because science had to tackle reality, and religion, so-called religion, is fictitious. So religion could go on living in its fictitious world but science had to encounter reality sooner or later. Not even for one century could it continue with the idea: “Soon we will demystify the whole universe, soon we will come to know everything.”Now, ask Albert Einstein or Lord Rutherford… Ask these people who have penetrated into the deepest mystery of matter, and their statements look like the statements of mystics, and they are now very humble. The old egoism of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century scientist has disappeared from the world. Now the scientist is the most humble person in the world because he knows that it is impossible to know.We can manage to live better, we can manage to live longer, we can manage to live more comfortably – but we cannot know what life is. That question will remain a question to the very end.My whole effort here is to help you to become ignorant again.The religions have been making you knowledgeable, and that is the harm they have done. They hand over to you the whole Christian catechism which you can learn by rote within an hour and can repeat like a parrot, so easily and so simply. But you will not come to know the truth, the real; the one that surrounds you within and without. The catechism is not going to give it to you.But to drop knowledge is one of the greatest problems, because knowledge gives so much nourishment to the ego. The ego wants all knowledge within its power. And when I say you have to drop knowledgeability and you have to become again a child, I mean you have to start from that point where the rabbi or the priest distracted you. You have to come back to that point again.You have to be innocent, ignorant, not knowing anything, so that the questions can start arising again. the inquiry becomes alive again, and with the inquiry becoming alive you cannot vegetate.Then life becomes an exploration, an adventure. Everything starts having a mysterious aroma around it.Then you cannot just pass by when a roseflower is calling you. What is his perfume if not a call? It is his language: “Please just for a moment be with me. It is too cold here, too alone.” You cannot pass by; no child can pass by.But the rabbi, the pundit, the maulvi, and the scholar are so burdened with books, their minds are so cluttered with junk – all these people are collecting antiques, dead skeletons – that the rose will not be heard. And anyway they know everything. They know even who created God, they know who created the world, they know who created the soul, so what about this poor roseflower?But ask a poet and the poet can say, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Is that an answer? Is that a question? It is neither a question nor an answer. It is simply a description, a reflection; he is simply saying what he is seeing. He is not quoting scriptures. But there are people who go on…I was in Kolkata some ten years ago, and a man came to me – a famous scholar, a professor of philosophy, Doctor Bhattacharya, a well-known name in the philosophical circles of the world. He asked me, “Can you say something – because this question has been bothering me a lot – is there such a thing as holy language, different from ordinary language?”I answered, “A strange question – it has never occurred to me. Language is language; what has language to do with holy and unholy? But I can understand your question, because Hindus say Sanskrit is a holy language, a divine language.” Hence brahmins, the priests, have kept a monopoly over it.The large part of Indian society has been deprived of knowing Sanskrit. No woman is allowed to study Sanskrit. For women they have created different scriptures which are just stories, religious stories, just not of any significance. But something has to be given to the women so they don’t start harassing them about the real scriptures.They were not willing to publish, to print, those real scriptures because once they were printed then it would be very difficult to keep a monopoly on them. So for centuries the press was available but the Vedas were not published. It was with great difficulty that the Vedas were published. Then they started saying that they should not be translated into another language, because then all their holiness would be gone. So it took centuries of fighting to translate them, but the brahmins still believe that the translations have lost the quality of holiness. How can the Vedas be written in English or in German or in French? These languages, for the Hindus, are not divine.But the same is the case with other fools; they are not different in their foolishness. For the Jews, Hebrew is the language of God. When he spoke to Moses he spoke in Hebrew. One of the sins of Jesus was that he was using Aramaic, not Hebrew. Aramaic was the language of the lowest class of people and he was a carpenter’s son, not God’s only begotten son; otherwise he would have known Hebrew. Even with God he was talking in Aramaic, and this was an unholy act – to use the language of ordinary people.So I told Doctor Bhattacharya, “I understand your question although it is stupid, but it is scholarly.”He said, “Stupid and scholarly both!”I said, “There is no contradiction. These people are the same people. Some people call them stupid, some people call them scholars, because who is going to become a scholar other than a stupid person, for what? When existence is available, when life is everywhere vibrant, you are pondering over a book!”I am reminded…but of that a little later on. First let me finish with Professor Bhattacharya. I told him, “Yes, you can make a distinction between holy language and unholy language.”You should not be deceived by the name of Professor Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya is the surname of high class brahmins in Bengal, but his father was a beggar, so he became converted to Christianity. And it was through Christianity that this man was brought up in convent schools, sent to the best colleges, sent to the West. He was a Christian, so I told him, “It is simply like this: ordinary people say, ‘You son-of-a-bitch.’”He said, “You are calling me that!”I said, “No, I am not calling you that, I am simply giving you an example. People say, ‘You son-of-a-bitch.’ This can be translated into holy language: ‘You son-of-the-Holy Ghost’ – only this much difference. But I think the first is at least human, true, possible. The second is inhuman, untrue, impossible.”Now, let me tell you what I was reminded of. One of India’s greatest poets was Rabindranath Tagore. He is the only Indian poet who got the Nobel Prize. The reason is not that there are not other poets, in fact there are many who are far greater than Rabindranath Tagore, but they write in their own languages.India has thirty major languages of such tremendously beautiful qualities that they cannot manage to translate them into English. Rabindranath got the Nobel Prize for the simple reason that he could write in English – in the beginning he would write in Bengali, then he would translate it into English – just for that simple reason.Otherwise in India right now you can find one hundred poets who deserve the Nobel Prize, but nobody will ever hear their names, for the simple reason that the Nobel Prize is not available to those languages in which they are writing.But Rabindranath, being a very rich man’s son, was brought up in England, educated in England, so it was easy for him. Although he himself never felt that what he has written in Bengali has really been expressed in English, he still got the Nobel Prize for one of his books, Gitanjali: an offering of songs. While he was writing Gitanjali it was his usual practice to go on a small houseboat and live on the river, moving alone, and he would stop the boat wherever he liked. Those were the days when he would compose his poetry.A full-moon night and he was writing about the full moon, the beauty of the full moon, sitting inside the small room in the houseboat, not at all aware that outside the full moon was there. He was in one of the best beauty spots of the river, for miles there was nothing but silence. Once in a while a waterfowl would disturb the silence, but after this disturbance, the silence would become even deeper.He was unaware – just by candlelight he was writing about the full moon, its beauty. In the middle of the night, feeling tired, he blew out the candle, and as he blew out the candle… He writes in his diary, “A miracle happened. I was shocked, because as the candle was no longer there, from every nook and corner…” The hut that was on the houseboat was made of bamboos as they are in Bengal. So from every gap in the bamboos the moon started showering in.For a moment he was struck dumb. He had never seen so much silence. He came out, he saw the moon and he wept. He went back and tore up the poetry he had written about the moon and the light of the moon and the beauty of it, and wrote in his diary: “I was very unfair to the moon, to the silence of the night. My poetry was just rubbish; it could not represent even a thousandth part. The moon was outside just knocking on my door, but I was so involved in writing my own book, I didn’t hear the knock. I was talking about silence in my poetry and the silence was so profound outside – I have never before come across such silence, nor since. I would have missed it if I had gone to sleep without blowing out the candle. That small candlelight was enough to prevent the moon from shining in.”These people are full of books and words which are not their experiences. And unless something is your experience, don’t go on deceiving yourself. Knowledgeability can be very deceptive; and these religions are responsible for making people knowledgeable.They should help people to become innocent, they should help them to become ignorant; they should help them to inquire, search, seek. But rather than that, they have given you everything, presented to you on a plate all the answers that you have to find. And what you have lost in receiving their present, you are not even aware of.You have lost everything. You live a borrowed life because they have told you how to live. They have told you how to discipline your life. They have told you how to control your behavior, your nature, and you have been blindly following them, not understanding a simple principle: Gautam Buddha is born only once. For twenty-five centuries millions of people have tried to become Gautam Buddha – not a single one has succeeded.A simple fact, and I say it is fortunate that nobody has succeeded; it would have been unfortunate if somebody had succeeded. Nobody could succeed because every being has some uniqueness to him. Gautam Buddha has his uniqueness; you have your uniqueness. Neither has he to follow you, nor have you to follow him. Following creates imitators. The moment you become an imitator you lose contact with your life. That’s what I mean when I say that you start vegetating. You are playing somebody else’s role; you have completely forgotten your real life.In my village, every year, the drama of Rama’s life is played. Once it happened when I was present… It was so hilarious, and so meaningful. In the story Rama’s wife, Sita, was stolen by Ravana. Rama and his brother Lakshmana both gather armies and go to fight. After three years of Sita being imprisoned in Sri Lanka, they started fighting. Ravana was a great warrior; Rama and Lakshmana were also great warriors, but they were young. Ravana was very experienced; his first arrow hit Lakshmana, and it was known that whoever was hit by his arrow could not manage to survive.The greatest physician was immediately called to do something. He said, “There is only one possibility. There is a mountain, Arunachal, in south India. On Arunachal there is found a small plant sanjivani, a life-giving plant. If within twenty-four hours that plant can be brought here, then there is a possibility; otherwise, after twenty-four hours nothing can be done, the poison will have spread all over” – he was already in a coma.One of the disciples of Rama, Hanumana, who was a great warrior himself, said, “I will go immediately and I will find it, but just give me an indication – because by the time I reach there it will be night – how am I to find this sanjivani, this life-giving plant?”The physician said, “It is very simple, particularly in the night. In the day it is very difficult to find, but that plant gives off light in the night, so you can find it easily wherever it is. You will find it surrounded by rays as if it is aflame.”In the story, Hanumana is the king of the monkeys and is himself a monkey. All the Hindus say that it is a fact. Hanumana flew – but monkeys can do that, perhaps with a little bit of jumping from tree to tree – I don’t know how he managed but he flew. I know how it is done in the drama; a rope is tied to him; the rope moves and he is shown to the public, flying.When he reached the mountain there was trouble. The trouble was that the mountain, the whole mountain, was aglow with light. Now, Hanumana was at a loss what to do. Which plant was the sanjivani – because so many plants were like flames, were they all sanjivani? He tried to look; those plants were different… Now what to do? But he was a crazy devotee – he took the whole mountain!And in religious stories everything is possible: Jesus walks on water, turns water into wine, turns stones into bread; everything is possible. So he came back with the mountain. But what happened in the drama?He came in with the mountain – the mountain was made of cardboard – and he was carrying the mountain while suspended by the rope. Somehow the rope got stuck, and he was left hanging in mid-air! The people – at least fifty thousand people, because people would come from far and wide for the drama – were screaming and shouting. Rama was standing there, Lakshmana was lying down in a coma and the physician was sitting with him. The prompter went on telling Rama whatever his part was, so Rama went on saying, “Oh, Hanumana, where are you?” – and he was just above his head – “Where have you gone? Come back soon; otherwise if you are not back before sunrise, my brother will be dead!”The manager of the drama was at a loss what to do. He ran onto the stage, tried to free the rope somehow, but nothing worked. He was in such a nervous state he cut the rope. Hanumana, with his mountain, fell on top of Lakshmana. Lakshmana stood up, but Rama was still saying what was being prompted: “Oh, Hanumana, you have come at the right time…”Hanumana said, “Shut up! You and your brother go to hell! First tell me who cut the rope. I will take care of him first, then the story can start again.” And he was a wrestler in the town, so the manager simply escaped, afraid that Hanumana would give him a few fractures.But I was watching and I saw one thing: although he was acting Hanumana, when he fell from the rope, just in that moment he forgot all about the drama. He said, “To hell with you” – he was saying “To hell” to his God! – “and to hell with your brother! First tell me where the manager is! Who cut the rope? First things first – this drama can wait a little.” Of course he was heard by everyone, and the whole fifty thousand people were laughing at him.The mountain was all in pieces and Lakshmana had already recovered, so there was no need… The physician simply slipped out by the back door. There was no need for sanjivani any more – Lakshmana was already standing up and looking at what had happened. They had to drop the curtains immediately and remove all those people from the stage. They changed Hanumana and when the curtain went up it was another person, because that Hanumana was so angry that he said, “Unless I see that manager I am not going to act. I am going to find him, wherever he is.”Just a single hit, and whatever you are – you may be acting a Buddha, a Christ, a Krishna – it will disappear, just by a simple hit on your head. Imitation cannot go to your being; it is going to remain just on the surface. You can practice it for thirty years, forty years… There are monks who have been practicing for fifty years. There are monasteries, Catholic monasteries, where once a monk enters, he never comes out; and thousands of people are living in such monasteries. What are they doing? Continually trying, making an effort somehow to become a little bit like Christ; if not the whole Christ, even a partial Christ will do. But that imitation is not going to help. It may give you a pseudo, phony mask, but scratch it just a little bit and you will find the real person is still there. You cannot deceive existence by imitation; you can only deceive yourself.These religions, by giving you ideals – what to do, what to think, what to be – have supplied everything. They have not left anything for you to do; you just have to follow blindly. And if the whole of humanity is functioning in a blind way, it is no wonder.But who is responsible? All these religions are responsible for making you phony, plastic. They have told you in detail what to eat, what not to eat; when to go to sleep, when to get up – you are absolutely controlled. You are transformed into a robot, and the more you are a robot, the greater saint you are. Then you will be worshipped and will have the respect of your religion. The more you are unreal, the more respectable you are. And if any moment you show your reality, all respect for you will be withdrawn.It happened when I was in Hyderabad that a Jaina monk, listening to me, became so interested that he dropped his monkhood. He came to the place where I was staying, and I told my host, “He has taken a great step, so be careful – the Jainas will now be murderous toward this man. This same man, they were touching his feet for years, but now they would like to kill him, so just be careful and be protective. I will be leaving after three days, then I will take him with me and send him somewhere where he can live for a few months without being troubled by the Jainas.”But that very day I was going to speak in the Corporation Hall of Hyderabad city, and the Jaina monk insisted, “I would like to come with you.”I didn’t see that was any problem, so I said, “Okay, you can come.”But I became aware when I reached the town hall that the whole Jaina community was there. Hearing that I was going to give an address in the town hall, they figured it out, they guessed that the monk would also be coming – “and that will be our chance.”Seeing the situation, I told the monk, “Just come with me onto the stage, and sit behind me on the stage. Now we have to see what happens.”The mayor introduced me, but he was not even finished when hundreds of people stood up and said, “We want that Jaina monk to be removed from the platform.”The mayor was in difficulty. I was his guest and the monk had come with me; he was my guest. So I told the mayor, “Sit down and let me tackle the problem.”I asked those people, “Do you want to touch his feet again?”They said, “Feet! We will cut off his head!”I said, “Just see the point. How many years has he been a monk – twenty years? He became a monk when he was only twenty, now he is forty. For twenty years you have touched his feet, you have asked his advice – and just within a few hours you are ready to cut off his head. What has happened? The man is the same. You would have never allowed yourself to sit with him on the same floor, and now you are asking that he should be thrown off the stage and forced to sit on the floor where everybody else is sitting. What change do you see? Can you tell me what has changed?”They said, “Everything has changed – he is no longer a Jaina monk.”I said, “That is true; he is not in the dress of a Jaina monk, but were you worshipping the dress? I have brought it with me.”I had carried his dress in a bag; he was not even aware of it. I brought the dress out, put it on the platform and said, “You can touch the feet of the dress – this is your monk. That man has nothing to do with you because you have never touched his feet. You need not be so angry that you want to cut off his head. You neither touched his feet, nor do you have to cut off his head. That man is absolutely a stranger to you, but this dress and his begging bowl, these are here. You can do whatsoever you want: if you want to touch the feet, you can. If you want to cut off the head, cut off the head.”I told them, “Can’t you see a simple thing: that twenty years of following the discipline…”And you cannot deceive Jainas because five monks have to live together. No monk is allowed to live singly because you can’t trust just one monk; he may find some way to do something, which is not according to the rules. Four are spying on the fifth – in fact they are all spying on each other.They are not supposed to stay in anybody’s house, they can only stay in a temple, because in a house anything is possible. Women will be there, food will be there – and these people are hungry for food, for women, for everything. They are completely hungry.They must eat only one time a day and they cannot touch a woman. What to say about touch, they are not allowed to see a woman. To avoid seeing them, the instruction is that they should walk looking at the ground four feet ahead, exactly four feet ahead, their eyes slowly becoming fixed to four feet ahead. That’s the way they have to walk, so even if they happen to see a woman they will see only her feet, nothing else.They are not allowed to stay in a house with a family, because, who knows, in the night they may open the fridge. Hungry people are hungry people. In the temple there is no fridge, no food and no water. They are not even allowed to drink water in the night.I said, “This man was worshipped by you, like a god, for twenty years. Just because today he has thrown off his dress and changed his clothes, you are ready to murder him. You are nonviolent people, but you are talking of cutting off his head.”And to the monk I said, “You see these people, all these people have been touching your feet. This was a mutual understanding, they gave you respect; you remained their slave. Become more and more their slave, and they will give you more and more respect. Lose your individuality completely, become phony and they will carry you on their shoulders. But a single moment of reality and they are your enemies.”No, nobody can give a discipline to you. You will have to find it through your own awareness. When sannyasins ask me how they should live, what they should do, what they should not do, I simply tell them, “You don’t understand me. My single message is be more and more yourself.The first thing is to be oneself.And the second thing is to know who you are.So remain yourself, remain natural. Try to become more and more aware of what this life current is that is running in you. Who is beating in your heart? Who is behind your breathing?Just become more and more alert – about whatever you do, whatever you think, whatever you feel – just remain alert, a watcher on the hill. And that watching will help you to find the discipline that is your discipline.The watching will help you to find what to eat and what not to eat, what to do and what not to do. Watching continuously will make you aware to drop many things you are unnecessarily carrying which have become burdens, and to choose only that which is in harmony with you – not a burden, but a relief.If you live with alertness, you live rightly. If you live in imitation, you live wrongly.To me there is only one sin, and that is not to be yourself. And to me there is only one virtue, and that is to know yourself.All the religions have prevented this happening. It is time that we got rid of all this nonsense, which the past has left over our heads.If you can become Adam and Eve again: no Moses, no Mahavira, no Mohammed, no Jesus, no Confucius, no Lao Tzu… If you are Adam and Eve, just born, just getting out of the Garden of Eden – nobody to ask what to do, nobody to ask what discipline is right, no priest, no rabbi, no pope is available – what are you going to do?Do that!

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is more important in your religion – to be thyself or to know thyself?Do you think they are different? How can you know yourself if you are not yourself? And vice versa: how can you be yourself if you don’t know who you are? To be thyself and to know thyself are not two separate things, hence the question of choice does not arise. They are two aspects of a single process.You have to work on both together, simultaneously; neither can be neglected. But it is easier to start from being thyself, easier because you have been distracted from yourself by others. The masks that you are carrying are not your own imposition. Unwillingly, reluctantly, you have been forced to be someone other than you are; hence it is easier to throw it off.Slavery of any kind is easier to get rid of, because intrinsically who wants to be a slave? That is not in the nature of any being, human or not human. Slavery is against existence, hence it is easier to throw it off. It always remains a burden, and deep down you continue to fight with it. Even though on the surface you follow it, deep down nobody can make you accept it. At the innermost core of your being it remains rejected forever, hence it is easier to throw off.The process is simple. Whatever you are doing, whatever you are thinking, whatever you are deciding, remember one thing: is it coming from you or is somebody else speaking? And you will be surprised to find out the real voice; perhaps it is your mother – you will hear her speak again. Perhaps it is your father; it is not at all difficult to detect. It remains there, recorded in you exactly as it was given to you for the first time: the advice, the order, the discipline, the commandment.You may find many people: the priest, the teachers, the friends, the neighbors, the relatives. There is no need to fight. Just knowing that it is not your voice but somebody else’s – whosoever that somebody else is – you know that you are not going to follow it. Whatsoever the consequences, good or bad, now you are deciding to move on your own, you are deciding to be mature. You have remained a child long enough. You have remained dependent long enough. You have listened to all these voices and followed them enough. And where have they got you? – in a mess!So once you figure out whose voice it is, say good-bye to it, because the person who had given that voice to you was not your enemy, his intention was not bad. But it is not a question of his intention; the question is that he imposed something on you, which is not coming from your own inner source – and anything that comes from outside makes you a psychological slave.[aside] Sheela, put this light out; it is driving me Oregonian!It is only your own voice, which will lead you into blossoming, into freedom.Yes, the path in the beginning will look dangerous, because you were always holding the hand of your father, your priest, your rabbi, your mother; and when a child holds the hand of the father there is no fear, no danger. He can rely on his father. But now you are holding his hand only in imagination – there is no father; it is pure imagination. And it is better to know that you are alone and there is no hand supporting you, because then you will try to find your own way to protect yourself against dangers.It is dangerous to go on believing that you are still protected when you are not really protected. That’s what has happened to millions of people in the world. They feel they are protected, protected by God, protected by all kinds of things.There is no God. There is nobody to protect you. You are alone, and you have to accept your aloneness joyously. In fact, it is a tremendous ecstasy that nobody is holding your hand.My grandfather loved me very much because of my mischief. Even in his old age he was mischievous. He never liked my father or my uncles because they were all against this old man’s mischievousness. They all said to him, “You are now seventy and you should behave. Now your sons are fifty, fifty-five, your daughters are fifty, their children are married, their children’s children are there – and you go on doing such things that we feel ashamed.”I was the only one with whom he was intimate; I loved the old man for the simple reason that he had not lost his childhood even at the age of seventy. He was as mischievous as any child. And he would play his mischief even on his own sons and daughters and sons-in-law, and they would be just shocked.I was his only confidant because we conspired together. Of course he could not do many things; I had to do them. For example, his son-in-law was sleeping in the room and my grandfather could not go up onto the roof, but I could go. So we conspired together; he would help me, he would become a ladder for me to go onto the roof and remove a tile. And with just a bamboo and a brush attached to it, in the night, touching the face of the son-in-law… He would scream, and the whole house would run there: “What is the matter?” But by that time we had disappeared, and he would say, “There was some ghost or somebody just touching my face. I tried to catch him but I could not; it was dark.”My grandfather remained utterly innocent, and I saw the great freedom that he had. In my whole family he was the eldest. He should have been the most serious and most burdened with so many problems and so many anxieties, but nothing affected him. Everybody was serious and worried when there were problems; only he was not worried. But one thing I never liked – that’s why I remembered him this moment – and that was sleeping with him. He had the habit of sleeping with his face covered and I would have to sleep with my face also covered, and that was suffocating.I told him clearly, “I agree about everything else, but this I cannot tolerate. You cannot sleep with your face uncovered; I cannot sleep with my face covered – it suffocates me. You do it lovingly” – he would keep me close to his heart and cover me completely – “that’s perfectly good, but in the morning my heart will not be beating. Your intention is good, but you will be alive in the morning and I will be gone. So our friendship is out of the bed.”He wanted me there because he loved me and he had said, “Why don’t you come and sleep with me?”I said, “You know perfectly well that I don’t want to be suffocated by anybody, even if his intention is good. You love me and you would like to keep me close to your heart even in the night.”Also, we used to go for a long walk in the mornings, and sometimes in the night when there was a moon, but I never allowed him to hold my hand. And he would say, “But why? You may fall, you may stumble upon a stone or anything.”I said, “That’s better. Let me stumble, it is not going to kill me. It will teach me how not to stumble, how to be alert, how to remember where the rocks are. But you holding my hand – for how long can you hold my hand? How long are you going to be with me? If you can guarantee that you will always be with me, then of course I am willing.”He was a very sincere man, he said, “That I cannot guarantee; I cannot even say about tomorrow. And one thing is certain, you will live long and I will be dead, so I will not be here forever to hold your hand.”“Then,” I said, “It is better for me to learn from now, because one day you will leave me in the middle, helpless. And if you have trained me to hold your hand, then there are only two ways: either I start living in a fiction: God the father…”Why do you call God “the father”? Yes, there are two kinds of religions in the world. A few religions call God “the mother,” and a few religions call God “the father.” The majority of religions call God “the father” for the simple reason that the majority of societies are patriarchal, male chauvinist. But around the world, a very few, small tribes are still matriarchal, where the woman is higher than the man. Naturally God cannot be a man in those societies; in those societies God is the mother.But no society calls God “uncle.” It is strange, very strange, because uncle is an older word than father. Father is not very old; it is a very late addition to language. The further back you go, the more you will find there were societies all over the world – just as it is with other animals, birds – where the mother took care of everything. The father’s function was finished once the woman was pregnant.In fact, in olden days it was difficult to know who the father was. So all the males of the age of the probable father – somebody was the father – all the males of the probable age of the father were called uncle. So uncle is an older word, far more prestigious. Father only came later on when men became very possessive of women.It came with private property. The word father is joined with private property. When people started having private property – their land, their house – then they wanted to be certain about their son because he was going to inherit it. Then monogamy became the basic system: you had to marry one woman, and the woman had to remain absolutely surrendered and committed to you, so that there was no possibility of her conceiving somebody else’s son and him possessing your property. This whole business of monogamy is a question of economics, not of psychology.And man kept himself free. He created prostitutes and he created all kinds of ways to get out of monogamy without disturbing the woman. But the woman had to remain absolutely dedicated to the man – not only in life, even in death.In India the woman had to die with the husband; she had to jump, alive, onto the funeral pyre where her husband was being burned, because the husband was so jealous: “What is the guarantee after I am dead that my wife may not start having some relationship with somebody else?” And the basic problem was that the property he had accumulated – he had earned it, exploited for it, robbed for it – should not go to somebody else; it should go to his own blood.So if one day you find the father’s hand is missing, you start creating a fiction: God the father – who is invisible of course – is holding your hand and he is leading you.I told my grandfather, “I don’t want to be left in the situation where I have to create a fiction to live in. I want to live a real life, not a fictitious life. I am not a character in a novel. So leave me alone, let me fall. I will try to get up. Wait, just watch, and that will be more compassionate toward me than holding my hand.”And he understood it, he said, “You are right – one day I will not be there.”It is good to fall a few times, get hurt, stand up again, to go astray a few times. There is no harm. The moment you find you have gone astray, come back. Life has to be learned through trial and error.So the moment you start listening to the voices – and they are all recorded exactly as they were given to you – you will be surprised when you try to hear who is speaking to you. You will simply laugh: “Oh, this is my mother. I have not seen her for twenty years, and she is still trying to manipulate me.” She may be dead, but from her grave she is still keeping her hand on your neck. Her intention is not bad, but she is crippling you.I used to tell my father, “Don’t give me any advice, even if I ask you. You have to be very straightforward about it. You simply have to say, ‘Find out your own way.’ Don’t give me advice” – because when some cheap advice is available, who bothers to find one’s own way?I had been consistently telling my teachers, “Please remember one thing: I don’t want your wisdom – simply teach your subject. You are a teacher of geography and you are trying to teach me morality? What relationship has morality with geography?”I remember the poor man who was my geography teacher. He was in trouble because I had taken something from the pocket of the student who was sitting by my side. I had taken his money from his pocket and this teacher was telling me, “Don’t do that.”I said, “That’s not your business. You are a geography teacher and this is a question of morality. If you want, I am ready to go to the principal; you come with me. Nowhere in the geography syllabus… I have read it and nowhere is it said that you cannot take somebody else’s money. And money is simply money; whoever has it, it is his. Right now it is mine. A few moments before it may have been his but he has lost it. He should be more alert. If you want to give advice, give advice to him.“In the first place, what is the need to bring so much money to the geography class? There is nothing to buy, nothing to purchase, there is not going to be any shopping. Why did he bring his money here? Then if he has brought the money he should be alert. It is not my fault, it is his fault, and I have simply taken advantage of it, which is my right. To take advantage of situations is everybody’s right.”I remember that poor man. He was always in difficulty, always in difficulty with me. He would see me out of class and he would say, “You can do whatsoever you want to do, just don’t bring so much philosophy into poor geography. And I don’t know anything about philosophy – I simply know about geography. And you turn the question in such a way that even in the night I go on thinking whether it was geographical or religious or philosophical.”Just in front of my school there were two beautiful Kadamb trees. The Kadamb is a very fragrant flower, and I used to sit in those trees whenever I could escape from the classes. That was the best place, because teachers would be passing underneath and the principal would be passing and nobody would be thinking that I might be hiding in the tree – and the trees were thick. But whenever this geography teacher would pass by there, I could not resist dropping at least one or two stones on his head. And he would look up, and say, “What are you doing there?”One day I said, “This is not a geography class. You disturbed my meditation.”And he said, “What about those two stones that fell on my head?”I said, “That is simply coincidence. I dropped the stones; it’s strange how you appeared exactly at the right time. Now I will be wondering about it. You can also wonder about it, exactly how it happened.”He used to come to tell my father, “Things are going too far.” He was a bald-headed man; and in Hindi the word for bald-headed is munde. His name was Chotelal, but he was known as Chotelal Munde. Chotelal was rarely used, just Munde was enough because he was the only completely bald-headed person. When just in front of his house, I would knock on the door and his wife or somebody else would open the door, and they would say, “Why do you torture him? You torture him in the school, you torture him in the market, you torture him in the river when he goes to take his bath.”One day his wife opened the door and she said, “Will you stop torturing Munde or not?” and he was just there, behind her.He grabbed his wife and he said, “You also call me Munde! This boy has spread around the whole city the idea that my name is Chotelal Munde – and now my own wife has been converted by him. I will kill you if you call me Munde. I can forgive everybody else but my own wife, in my own house…”But I was insistent with my teachers: “Please keep on your track and don’t give me any advice that does not belong to your subject, so that I can explore my life in my own way. Yes, I will commit many mistakes, many errors. I am willing to commit mistakes, errors, because that is the only way to learn.”There is no other way to learn. If you make learning completely foolproof, so that no mistake is possible no error is possible, then you will become a parrot. You may start repeating words, sentences, but you will not know exactly the meaning of what you are saying.So, first find out the voices within you – and it is simple. Whenever you decide to do something, just sit silently and listen to the voice that is telling you to do this or not to do that. And try to find out whose voice it is. Once you have found it is your father, your mother, your uncle, your teacher, your aunt, your brother, it is very easy; then thank your brother and tell him, “It is so good of you; although you are dead you are still taking care of me. But please, now leave me alone.”Once you have told a certain voice clearly, “Leave me alone,” your connection with it, your identity with it, is broken. It was capable of controlling you because you thought it was your voice. The whole strategy was the identity. You were thinking, “This is my voice, this is my thought,” hence you were doing what it said. Now you know it is not your thought, not your voice; it is something foreign to your nature. Recognizing it is enough. Just be grateful to your father: “You are still taking care of me but I don’t need any more care. You have made me mature enough that now I can start taking care of myself.”Get rid of the voices that are within you, and soon you will be surprised to hear a still, small voice, which you have never heard before; you cannot decide whose voice this is. No, it is not your mother’s, it is not your father’s; it is not your priest’s, not your teacher’s… Then a sudden recognition comes that it is your voice. That’s why you are not able to find its identity, to whom it belongs.It has been there always, but it is a very still small voice, because it was suppressed when you were a very small child and the voice was very small – just a sprout, and it was covered with all kinds of crap. And now you go on carrying that crap and you have forgotten the plant that is your life, which is still alive, waiting for you to discover it.Discover your voice! Then follow it with no fear.Wherever it leads, there is the goal of your life; there is your destiny. It is only there that you will find fulfillment, contentment. It is only there that you will blossom – and in that blossoming, knowing happens.How can you know yourself? – you have not even grown. Perhaps you are still in the seed, perhaps even the sprout was not allowed. Every religion takes care: take the child to baptism immediately, take the child to circumcision, take the child to some Hindu ceremony. And the child knows nothing of what you are doing to him.Just wait – even for having the voting right he will have to wait twenty-one years; just for third-rate politics he will need twenty-one years of life. But, for religion no maturity is needed? Perhaps forty-two may be the right time for a person to decide about religion. But it is not when the child is born and others are deciding.Yes, you can take him to the voting. You can give him the vote and you can hold his hand to drop the vote in the box, and you can make him choose the president, the prime minister – but the child is completely unaware of what is happening: what is this box about, and what is this card all about?But you don’t do that. You understand that for politics, at least twenty-one years – at least – are needed for a person to understand. But for religion you don’t give any time at all. There is a reason why you don’t give any time at all. You are afraid, because if you give him time and you don’t mess his mind around before he starts thinking on his own, starts hearing his own voice, then there is no chance for you. You will never be able to make him a Jew or a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan.He may become someday religious, but that will be his own search. Someday he may find paths leading to silence, ways of moving to the innermost core of existence, but that will be his own exploration.And remember one thing: whatsoever you find on your own gives ecstasy. Even if God is given to you ready-made, you will not find any ecstasy in it.And just running on the seashore finding seashells of no value, you can see a child is ecstatic.I used to come from the river when I was very small. All my pockets… I used to have many pockets, I insisted on having many pockets. My father said, “It looks crazy. People ask me… You are continually a trouble and for no reason at all. Why should you have four pockets in front and two pockets by the side?”I said, “I need them. My needs and your needs are different. I never say to you that you should have so many pockets or that you should not have them; that is your business.” I needed pockets because when I went to the river I found such treasures – so many beautiful stones, so colorful, that I was for hours walking on the sands to collect them. And I would come home full – almost double my weight.My father would see me entering the house and he would say, “This is the use of the pockets? Are you mad or something? Why do you go on bringing all these stones? And we have to throw them out every day.”I said, “You don’t understand. You can throw them out, but if you have any understanding of a simple thing… I feel so ecstatic, so joyous when I see these stones. I am not interested in your money and I am not interested in anything else; I simply collect the stones.” But the joy was in exploring for them, finding them far away by the side of the river – just to find one beautiful stone.One day my father got so fed up that he brought four laborers and told them, “Go to the river and bring as many stones as possible, because he is wasting hours every day.” So they brought buckets full of stones. They knew exactly from where to get them – I had no idea that there was a mine – and they poured them out in my small room where I had my own world, where nobody was allowed to enter. My father said, “You can keep all these. Now there is no need to go there because you cannot find anything more. All colors and all kinds of stones we have collected for you… You waste so much time.”I said, “You have destroyed my joy. It was not the stones; it was my finding them. Now I see this: thousands of stones are here and I don’t feel any joy. Take them away. You have destroyed something.”“But,” he said, “I thought you loved stones.”I said, “No, there is no question of loving stones, it was the finding. Stones were just an excuse. Sometimes it is stones you are finding, sometimes it is butterflies you are finding, sometimes it is flowers you are finding, and sometimes it is truth you are finding – but remember, the beauty is always in the finding, not what you find. That is just an excuse.”He said, “Whatever is done, it seems difficult to make you happy.”I said, “That’s true. Never try to make anybody happy. Nobody can do that. You can make me unhappy – that is possible – but happy… That is simply my absolute right, to be or not to be. You cannot force me to be happy – this is an enforcement. Pouring all these stones in front of me, are you trying to make me happy?”But it was happening continually about everything. Slowly, slowly they started to understand that this boy seems to be eccentric, so leave him alone.When I was very small I had long hair like a girl. In India boys don’t have hair that long – at least at that time it was not allowed. I used to have very long hair, and whenever I used to enter – and the entrance was from the shop, the house was behind the shop, so to enter I had to pass through the shop – my father was there, his customers were there, and they would ask, “Whose girl is this?”My father would look at me and say, “What to do? He does not listen.” And he felt offended.I said, “You need not feel offended. I don’t see any problem. If somebody calls me a girl or a boy, that is his business; what difference does it make to me?”But he was offended that his boy was being called a girl. Just the idea of a boy and girl… In India when a boy is born, there are gongs and bands and songs, and sweets are distributed in the whole neighborhood. And when a girl is born, nothing happens, nothing! You know immediately that a girl has been born because there are no gongs, no bells, no band, no singing, nothing is happening, no distribution of sweets – that means a girl has been born. Nobody will come to ask because it will offend you: you will have to answer that a girl has been born. The father is sitting with his face down… A girl is born.So he said, “This is strange. I have a boy, and I am suffering from having a girl.” So one day he really became angry because the man who had asked was a very important man; he was the collector of the district. He was sitting in the shop, and he asked, “Whose girl is this? It is strange, the clothes seem to be a boy’s – and with so many pockets and all full of stones?”My father said, “What to do? He is a boy; he is not a girl. But today I am going to cut his hair – it is enough!” So he came with his scissors and cut my hair. I didn’t say anything to him. I went to the barber’s shop, which was just in front of my house and I told him… He was an opium addict, a very beautiful man, but sometimes he would cut half your mustache and would forget the other half. You would be sitting in his chair, with his cloth around your neck and he was gone, so you would search. Where had he gone? It was difficult; nobody knew where he had gone. And with a half mustache, where would you go to search for him? But he was the only one I liked, because it took hours.He would tell you a thousand and one things, unrelated to anything in the world. I enjoyed it. It was from this man, Nathur – Nathur, that was his name – that I learned how the human mind is. My first acquaintance with the human mind came from him, because he was not a hypocrite. He would say anything that came into his mind; in fact, between his mind and his mouth there was no difference! He simply spoke whatsoever was in his mind. If he was fighting with somebody in his mind, he would start fighting loudly – and nobody was there. I was the only one who would not ask, “With whom are you fighting?” So he was very happy with me, so happy that he would never charge me for cutting my nails or anything.That day I went there and I told him – we used to call him Kaka, Kaka means uncle – “Kaka, if you are in your senses, just shave my whole head.”He said, “Great.” He was not in his senses. If he had been, he would have refused because in India you shave your head only when your father dies; otherwise it is not shaved. So he had taken a good dose of opium and he shaved my head completely.I said, “That’s good.”I went back. My father looked at me and said, “What happened?”I said, “What is the point? You cut my hair with the scissors; it will grow again. I am finished with that. And Kaka was willing. I asked him; he said he was willing: ‘Whenever there is no customer you can come and I will shave your head completely, and no question of money.’ So you need not be worried. I am his free customer because nobody listens to him; I am the only person who listens.”My father said, “But you know perfectly well that now this will create more trouble.”And immediately a man came and asked, “What happened? Has this boy’s father died?” Without that, nobody…Then my father said, “Look! It was better that you were a girl. Now I am dead! Grow your hair as fast as you can. Go to your Kaka, that opium addict, and ask him if he can help somehow; otherwise this is going to create more trouble for me. The whole town will keep coming. You will move around the whole city and everybody will think that your father is dead. They will start coming.”And they did start coming. That was the last time he did anything to me. After that he said, “I am not going to do anything because it leads into more trouble.”I said, “I had not asked – I simply go on doing my thing. You unnecessarily interfered.”But I never allowed him to give me advice. And soon everybody understood in my family that I was very averse to advice, because whatsoever they would say I would do just the opposite, to prevent them giving me any advice. I told them, “If you give me advice I will do just the reverse, so just don’t give me any advice. I don’t want to carry these voices all my life within myself – please leave my mind clean. I want to listen to my own voice, if there is any. If there is none, I am perfectly happy with that. I am happy with my authenticity.”Then slowly, slowly they understood that I should not be interfered with, and there was no point, it created more trouble because I would find a way which was more troublesome for them. Then a time came when I would be sitting in the room, and my mother would look around and say, “Nobody is here. I wanted somebody to go to the market to fetch some vegetables.”I said, “I don’t see anybody either. There is nobody; only I am sitting here, there is nobody.”I was not counted as anybody at all – just nobody. She would see me in front of her and say, “I don’t see anybody.” And she would agree with me: “Neither do I see anybody, the room is empty” – and she would go back to find somebody else somewhere, to send to the market.The moment they recognized me as nobody… I can see in myself that since that moment I don’t hear any voices. And it must have been at the age of nine or ten that they recognized it. They had to recognize me as nobody; not to count on me in any way, not to depend on me for any work, any small things.My mother would say, “Go and bring a dozen bananas,” so I would go. The market was not far away, just two furlongs; it was a small place. But in those two furlongs I would meet so many people and there would be so many discussions that by the time I reached the market, I would forget what I had come for. And moreover the time was also finished. I had to pick up something quickly because the sun was setting or had gone down long before.I would come home to ask, “What was it that you wanted?”And my mother would say, “You are good for nothing. I asked for a simple thing, one dozen bananas, and it took you five hours to come back empty-handed to inquire.”I said, “What to do? There were so many people on the way, so many problems, questions, arguments. By the time I reached the market I had forgotten, so I have come back to ask.” They dropped the idea that I could be of any use; but it helped me tremendously. Slowly, slowly in my own house I became an absence. People would be passing but they would pass as if nobody was there. There was no need to say hello to me. There was no need to inquire anything of me.I remember that since then I don’t find any voices. But up to ten they had been trying their hardest, and when I started working on myself I had to pass through all those voices and consciously drop them. It is not a difficult process, you have simply to recognize that this is not your voice, this is your father’s voice, your mother’s voice, your rabbi’s voice, and you have to give a grateful thankyou: “Great of you to follow me up to now, but no more, not any further. Here we part.”And once you are empty of all the voices, only then…because in the crowd, in the marketplace that you have become inside it is almost impossible to hear your own voice. That is the beginning of being yourself, then much more happens, but that is very natural; you are not to do anything about it.All you have to do is to negate the voices that have been covering your voice. Once that has happened you start growing your own insight. Slowly, slowly you start becoming aware of problems which you were never aware of before, because you were carrying answers. For the first time you start hearing questions of tremendous importance, which you were not even aware that you had.And your question, just because it is yours, is significant, because in that very question is hidden the answer.It has to be your question, only then it carries its own answer. But these so-called do-gooders go on giving you their questions, their answers. Nobody bothers whether it is your question or your answer. In fact, they are afraid that some day you may find your question. The day you find your question all their answers will become invalid, all their scriptures will be rubbish. And they are afraid that by finding your own being you will become an individual.The society does not want you to be individuals. It wants you to be a Christian, a good Christian, a good Jew, a good Hindu, respectable. But they don’t want you to be individuals, because individuals move, act, live in freedom. Individuals would be happy to die, but they cannot be forced to become psychological slaves.And once you are an individual it is so simple to know thyself, because now you are thyself. Then it is only a question of closing your eyes and seeing who you are.So don’t divide the question into two. Don’t ask me what is more important, being yourself or knowing yourself. I can see why the question has arisen, because the famous maxim of Socrates is “Know thyself,” and one of the greatest findings of modern psychology is “Be thyself.” Hence the question: which is more important?Socrates is not somebody that you can put into the past. There have been a few people who will always remain contemporaries. Socrates is one of those people who will always remain contemporary. When he says, “Know thyself” he is implying that without being yourself, how can you know yourself? So if you want to know yourself you will have to be yourself; they are two aspects of the same coin.But to start with, be yourself, because so much has been disturbed in you, so much has been diverted from you, so much has been taken away from you. Your being has been covered in so many layers of personality that you will have to do exactly what you do with an onion: you start peeling it. The moment you peel the onion and one layer is removed, a fresher layer is there. You remove it and there is another, even fresher and more alive. And that’s how you are – covered with layers of personality.The word personality is worth remembering. It comes from the root persona. In Greek drama the actors used to have masks, and they would speak through the mask. Sona means sound. Persona means sound coming from a mask. You don’t know who the person is, you only hear the sound and it is coming from a mask. From this word persona comes the English word, personality. It is literally true: your personality is nothing but many, many masks. And whatsoever you say and do is just coming through the mask; it is never truly your own, it has not your signature on it.So, first drop all personalities.And you don’t have just one, remember. People ordinarily think they have one personality – absolutely wrong. You have many personalities. You have many stored personalities, so whenever you need a different personality you immediately change your mask. You become a different person immediately; not even a moment is lost. It has become almost automatic – the change from one personality to another. And there are so many, you will not even be able to count how many personalities you have.The more personalities you have, the more sophisticated, respected a citizen you will be in society. Obviously your personalities give you more facilities. They make you capable of functioning in many ways in which others cannot function.Gurdjieff used to play a game with his disciples. He would be sitting in the middle, one disciple on this side, another disciple on that side. And he had worked tremendously on personalities. He had worked so consciously that he had become capable, as many actors become capable, of showing… From this side of the mouth one disciple would see that he was in a very happy mood, and from that side, another disciple would see that he was very angry and it was not the time to say anything; he might hit you or do something. He was capable of smiling with half his mouth, and the other side would remain very somber and serious. It is difficult to learn, but one can be trained. It is not much of a problem – actors, great actors, are continually doing it.You see the whole movie; you don’t see that one moment the actor has to laugh, another moment he has to cry. While the movie is being filmed, he goes on changing personalities. You see only the story that is presented to you, but what happens to the actor? He falls in love with a woman whom he hates, and shows everything that even a lover may not be able to show: in his eyes, his face, his words, his hug, everything. For that moment he becomes the lover. He takes on the whole personality of the lover of the woman in front of him.In the second scene maybe he has to cry – and actors become capable of crying, of bringing tears to their eyes. In the beginning they have to use chemicals to bring forth tears, but that is only for amateur actors. Once an actor really becomes capable then there is no need; he simply changes his personality. He brings the face of sadness, sorrow, and tears start flowing. He is not only deceiving you, he can deceive his own chemistry.All these personalities are continuously moving with you. You are a crowd, many people together, all divergent – many enemies to each other in continuous conflict, fighting, wrestling. That’s why you see people in such anguish. Otherwise, there is no reason to be in anguish if you do not have many voices inside you, conflicting, fighting, trying to control all the others – one voice trying to become the monopolist.Gurdjieff calls them selves; it is the same. You can call personalities, selves or egos, and you can start looking for them – it is a tremendously charming game to look at them. In the evening, you decide that tomorrow morning you are going to get up at five. This you have been deciding for many years, and you know it: that every evening you decide. But this night is different – that too, you know. Every night you have been saying, “This night is different; tomorrow I am going to get up. There is a limit to everything!”But you have been saying all these things every night. You are not saying a single new thing, but you are not aware of it. And at five o’clock when the alarm goes, you just press the button; and you are angry at the clock. You may throw the clock, turn over and say, “Such a cold morning, and this stupid alarm clock,” and you go back to sleep. You are just going for a few minutes… And this has been happening for years.Every morning, “just for a few minutes,” you go back to sleep. When you wake up it is nine o’clock, and again you are repenting, sad, thinking, “How does it happen? I had decided to get up.” And you will do it again but you will never see that the personality that decided in the evening must have been a certain personality, and the personality that threw the clock away is a different personality. These are not one personality; they cannot be one personality.The personality that was saying, “Tomorrow I am going to get up,” is no longer on top, is no longer on duty. Somebody else is on top and says, “Forget all about this nonsense,” and throws the clock and says, “Go to sleep. It is so cold out – are you stupid or something?” And it feels so warm and good to turn over, and after the disturbance of the clock it feels an even better sleep. And at nine o’clock when you wake up again you are sad. This is a different personality. It has not thrown the clock; it was not the personality who said to you, “Just for a few minutes…” And this personality decides, “Now, whatever happens, tomorrow morning I am going to get up.”You will do this your whole life, and you will never be able to see a simple fact: you have many personalities, and each time a different personality is speaking, speaks differently, has different ideas.Just watch it; just watching it is such a great joy, such a great drama that one need not go to any movie. You can simply close your eyes and see the movie that continues there, with so many actors and so many actresses, everything is there that is needed: raw footage, unedited.But before you can come to know yourself you have to be yourself. You have to drop all these personalities like clothes and you have to come to your utter nudity.The beginning starts from there, and then the second thing is very simple. The whole problem is with the first thing; the second thing is very simple. When personalities have gone, the crowd has left you, you are alone, close your eyes; you will see who you are, because there is nobody else. There is only awareness of immense silence, of no object.You will not meet any God there or any soul there or any angel there – all that is fiction. If you meet somebody, remember that you are again hallucinating. If you meet Jesus, throw him out! If you meet Krishna, tell him, “Get out. This is no place for you people, just leave me alone.” Only Buddha had the courage to say, “If you meet me on the way, cut off my head immediately.”You have to cut off the head of the Buddha; otherwise you will not be alone – and without being alone how can you know yourself? In aloneness, suddenly out of nowhere, comes the fragrance called enlightenment. You become illuminated, for the first time full of light, all darkness dispersed.The night is over, the sunrise has happened, and a sunrise that is never going to become a sunset.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why, in the first place, have people been distracted from their original self?Man is born with an unknown, an unknowable potentiality. His original face is not available when he comes into the world. He has to find it. It is going to be a discovery, and that’s the beauty of it. And that’s the difference between a being and a thing.A thing has no potential; it is what it is. A table is a table; a chair is a chair. The chair is not going to become anything else, it has no potentiality; it has only actuality. It is not a seed of something. Man is not a thing. That brings all the trouble and all the joy, all the challenges, all the disturbances.The child comes just empty, with no writing on him, no indications even of what he is going to be – all dimensions are open. This is the first basic thing to be understood: that a child is not a thing, a child is a being.He is not yet; he is just going to become. He is a process, and there is no possibility to predict where he is going to end, what will be the ultimate outcome of his life’s experiences, anguishes, anxieties, ecstasies, what is it going to finally amount to in the end? The final sum total of his whole life is not available in the beginning.He does not bring a chart with him. All the astrologers have been befooling you, palmists have befooled you, and they could befool you because there was a chance to befool you. The parents are concerned what the child is going to be. And their concern is out of love; hence they can be exploited by all kinds of con men. Those con men can predict, “He is going to be this, or that,” but they don’t do much harm; they simply exploit a little bit. Their predictions never come true.The greater problem arises from the priests, from the politicians, from the pedagogues. The politician is not interested in what the real potential of the child is. He is interested that the child becomes a part of his power trip. He has an investment in every child, because every child is a potential friend or enemy. It is good to start canvassing as early as possible. So before the child starts on his own, he is distracted onto a path which is going to fulfill the politician’s desire, but which is going to kill the seed in the child himself.The priest is interested; he has an investment. The pope is a bigger pope if he has more Catholics in the world. If Catholics disappear, what is the value of a pope, who cares about him? Each child that is born has some power, which can be exploited by politicians and priests.Soon the child is going to become a fully-fledged citizen of the world – he should be grabbed. He should become a Catholic if he is born out of Catholic parents or if fortunately, he is an orphan, then Mother Teresa can look after him and convert him into a Catholic. They are immensely happy. The more the world has orphans, the more Mother Teresas can get Nobel Prizes, and more orphans means more Catholics. The more poor people in the world… They can be easily converted to Christianity.Jesus says man cannot live by bread alone. That is true of an authentic man but not true about the masses. As far as the masses are concerned, I say to you, man lives by bread and bread alone. And there are only masses. Where is the authentic man? These politicians, these priests, these pedagogues don’t leave anybody to himself so that he can become authentic, so he can get his original face, so that he can find himself.Everywhere there are people with vested interests in every child. And the child is simply a tabula rasa, nothing is written on him; it is a great temptation for everybody to write something on him. The parents, of course, would like to write their religion, their caste, their philosophy, their politics, because the child should represent them. The child should carry their inheritance.If they have been Hindus for centuries, the child should be a Hindu, carrying the heritage of Hinduism to future generations. They are not interested in the child’s own potential – nobody is interested in it – they are interested in their own investment, and of course everybody is investing.Parents are investing too much in the child, giving birth to him, raising him, educating him; and everything is conditional – whether it is said or not, that is not the point. They will say one day, “We have done so much for you, now is the time that you should do something for us.” They themselves may not be conscious of what they are doing, – because this is how they have been brought up by their parents, generation after generation, the same process.The teacher is interested that the student should represent him. The religious teacher is interested that the disciple should be a model of his teachings. What I want you to remember is that everybody is interested in the child, for something which the child is not interested in at all.And the child is very helpless, he cannot fight all these people. They are powerful. He’s dependent on them; if they want to make something of him, he has to become that. This much is absolutely clear to the child: if he goes against the parents he is misbehaving, he is betraying them. These ideas are also given by the parents, the priests, the teachers, so he feels guilty.Any assertion of his own self becomes guilt, and every pretense of the parents, of the religious priests, of the educationists, of the politicians – which is only a pretense – pays very well. The child starts learning politics from the very beginning, to be hypocritical, base – be authentic and you are punished. Now, the child has a simple arithmetic, and we cannot condemn the child.In my childhood – because from there I can speak to you more authoritatively, I don’t know your childhood, I know only my childhood – it was an everyday question. I was continually asked to be truthful. And I said to my father, “Whenever you say to me to be truthful, you have to remember one thing, that truth has to be rewarded; otherwise you are forcing me not to be truthful. I am willing.”Very easily I figured out that truth does not pay – you are punished. Lies pay – you are rewarded. Now it was a question of very decisive, very great importance. So I made it clear to my parents that it had to be understood clearly: “If you want me to be truthful then truth has to be rewarded, and not in a future life but here and now, because I am being truthful here and now. And if truth is not rewarded, if I am punished for it, then you are forcing me to lie. So let this be clearly understood; then there is no problem for me, I will always be truthful.”I don’t think that every child tries to figure it out and makes a clear-cut contract with the parents. But this became a contract with my father. Howsoever the truth was against him, his morality, his family, his society, his respect, that did not matter, what mattered was that I was true. And for that I needed immediate reward, “Otherwise next time you know I will say what you want to hear – but remember, it will be a lie.”The day I said this to my father for the first time, he said, “Let me think it over, because you seem to be tricky. You are putting me into a subtle net. You do some mischief and are truthful, and I will have to reward you for your mischief.”I said, “It is your business to decide whether you want me to be truthful or not. Anyway, I am going to do what I want to do. The mischief would have happened anyway. It has happened, only afterward the question arises to be true or to be untrue. So why bring mischief into it? It has already happened. Now nothing can be done about it. You cannot undo it.“What can be done is: you can force me to lie, and I can lie. And I can lie with such a face that you will think I am absolutely truthful. I will learn. If that is the way, then let it be the way, but remember, you have been responsible for distracting me from truth because you were rewarding lies and punishing the truth. You can think it over. I am not in a hurry. You are asking me.”What had happened was that, living two or three blocks away from my family was a brahmin family, very orthodox brahmins. Brahmins cut all their hair and leave just a small part over the seventh chakra on the head uncut, so that part goes on growing. They go on tying it up and keeping it inside their cap or inside their turban. And what I had done was, I had cut the father’s hair. In summertime in India, people sleep outside the house, on the street. They bring their beds, cots, on the streets. The whole town sleeps on the streets in the night; it is so hot inside.He was sleeping, and it was not my fault… He had such a long choti – that bunch of hair it is called a choti. I had never seen it because it was always hidden inside his turban. While he was sleeping, it was hanging down and touching the street. From his cot it was so long that I was tempted, I could not resist; I rushed home, brought the scissors, cut it off completely, and took it and kept it in my room.In the morning he must have found that it was gone. He could not believe it because his whole purity was in it, his whole religion was in it – his whole spirituality was destroyed. But everybody in the neighborhood knew that if anything goes wrong, first they will rush to me. And he came immediately. I was sitting outside knowing well that he would come in the morning. He looked at me. I also looked at him. He asked me, “What are you looking at?”I said, “What are you looking at? Same thing.”He said, “Same thing?”I said, “Yes, the same thing. You name it.”He asked, “Where is your father? I don’t want to talk to you at all.”He went in. He brought my father out and my father said, “Have you done anything to this man?”I said, “I have not done anything to this man, but I have cut a choti which certainly cannot belong to this man, because when I was cutting it, what was he doing? He could have prevented it.”The man said, “I was asleep.”I said, “If I had cut off your finger while you were asleep, would you have remained asleep?”He said, “How can I remain asleep if somebody is cutting off my finger?”I said, “That certainly shows that hairs are dead. You can cut them but the person is not hurt, no blood comes out. So what is the fuss about? A dead thing was hanging there, and I thought that you are unnecessarily carrying this dead thing inside your turban for your whole life – why not relieve you of it? It is in my room. And with my father I have the contract to be true.”So I brought out his choti and said, “If you are so interested in it, you can take it back. If it is your spirituality, your brahminism, you can keep it tied and put it inside your turban. It is dead anyway, it was dead when it was attached to you; it was dead when I detached it. You can keep it inside your turban.”And I asked my father, “My reward?” – in front of that man.That man said, “What reward is he asking for?”My father said, “This is the trouble. Yesterday he proposed a contract that if he speaks the truth, and sincerely… He is not only speaking the truth, he is even giving the proof. He has told the whole story, and even has logic behind it, that it was a dead thing so why be bothered with a dead thing. And he is not hiding anything.”He rewarded me with five rupees. In those days, in that small village, five rupees was a great reward. The man was mad at my father. He said, “You will spoil this child. You should beat him rather than giving him five rupees. Now he will cut off other people’s chotis. If he gets five rupees per choti, all the brahmins of the town are finished, because they are all sleeping outside in the night; and when you are sleeping you cannot go on holding your choti in your hand. And what are you doing? This will become a precedent.”My father said, “But this is my contract. If you want to punish him, that is your business; I will not come into it. I am not rewarding him for his mischief, I am rewarding him for his truth – and for my whole life I will go on rewarding him for his truth. As far as mischief is concerned, you are free to do anything with him.”That man told my father, “You are putting me in more trouble. If I do something to this boy, do you think things will stop there? I am a family man, I have my wife, my children, my house – tomorrow my house will be burned down.” He was very angry, and he said, “Especially now it’s a problem, because tomorrow I am going to perform a ceremony in the next village, and people seeing me without my choti…”I said, “There is no need to worry – I am giving you back the choti. You can also reward me with something for giving your choti back. Just don’t ever take off your turban in the other village, even in the night keep your turban on. That’s all. It is not a big problem; it is only a question of one night. And in the night who is going to look for your choti? Everybody will be asleep.He said, “Don’t give me advice. I feel like beating you but I know better, because that will create a whole chain of events.”I said, “It has already been created. You have come to complain; you are not rewarding me for being so absolutely honest and sincere, and telling you that I could not resist the temptation. And I have not done any harm to anybody; no violence has happened – not a single drop of blood came from your choti. Just by complaining to my father you have already created a chain of reactions.”He said to my father, “Look!”My father said, “That is not my business.”And I said to my father, “That’s what the whole brahminism teaches: the chain of reactions.”My father said, “You keep your philosophy to yourself. And stop going to those lectures of the sadhus and the monks and mahatmas, because whatsoever you get from them, you then somehow manage to conclude such strange things.”I said, “But this is what I am saying, and it is not strange. That’s exactly what the theory of karma is: you act and the reaction will follow. He has done an act of complaining against me, now the reaction will follow.”And the reaction followed, because he had told me that he was going to the other village. He was very angry with me, but when you are angry, you are angry – and he was really completely freaked out. So he was angry with his wife, with the children… I watched everything, and he somehow managed to get his things together and went off in a horse buggy.The moment he left, I told his wife, “Do you understand where he is going? He is going forever – and you don’t know. He had come to say this to my father, that he is going forever and he is not coming back.”The wife suddenly started crying and screaming, “Stop him!” Other people ran and they stopped his buggy.He said, “Why are you stopping me? I have to catch the train!”They said, “Not today. Your wife is crying and beating her heart – she will die!”He said, “But that is strange. Why should she beat herself, and why should she cry?” But the people would not allow him to go, and they were pulling at his bag and suitcase.The man who was driving the buggy said, “I will not take you. If this is the situation, that you are leaving your wife and small children forever, I will not do such an act. Small children…”The brahmin said, “I am not leaving, I will come back, but right now I don’t have time to convince you. I will miss the train because the station is two miles away from my house.But nobody was listening to him, and I was provoking people: “Stop him, otherwise his wife, his children… You will have to look after them. Who is going to feed them?”They brought him back with his bags, and of course he was angry and threw the bags at his wife. His wife asked, “What have we done? Why are you…?” And I was there outside in the crowd.He said, “Nobody has done anything. That boy told me there would be a reaction. The reason is that three days before, in the temple, I was teaching the philosophy of action and reaction and this boy was present. Now he is teaching me.” He told me, “Forgive me and I will never say a single word about this action and reaction. And you can cut off anybody’s choti if you want, I will not complain. You can cut off my head and I will not complain – because I want to stop this chain completely. My train has gone.”Then everybody asked, “What is the matter? We don’t understand. Who has cut your off choti?I said, “Look! The chain is impossible to stop. These people are asking, ‘Whose choti? Who has cut it off? Where is the choti?’” I said, “Just look inside his turban.” And a man who was considered to be a wrestler in the town came up and took off the turban and the choti fell out.My father was also there, and saw it. When we were returning home he said to me, “I will reward you but don’t take advantage of our contract.”I said, “I am not. It is not a contract between me and you. My contract is that I will always speak the truth to you, and you will reward me for it.” And he remained consistent. Whatsoever I had done, howsoever wrong in his eyes, he continually rewarded me. But it is difficult to find a father like that – the father has to forcibly impose his ideals on you.My father was condemned by the whole city: “You are spoiling the child.”He said, “If it is his destiny to be spoiled, let him be spoiled. I will not be responsible for interfering in his destiny; he will never be able to say, ‘My father spoiled me.’ And if he is happy with being spoiled, then what is wrong in being spoiled? Wherever, and whatsoever happens in his life, I don’t want to interfere. My father interfered with my life, and I know that I would have been a different person if he hadn’t.“And I know that he is right, that every father turns the child into a hypocrite, because I have been turned into a hypocrite. When I want to laugh, I am serious. When I want to be serious I have to laugh. At least let one person laugh at the time when he wants to laugh. And let him be serious when he wants to be serious.” He said, “I have eleven children but I think of myself as having only ten.” And he always thought that he had only ten. He never counted me among his children because, he said, “I have given him total freedom to be himself. Why should he carry any image of me?”In a better society… And when I say in a better society, I mean a society which understands each person’s integrity, respects even a small child’s being, and does not impose on it. But that society seems to be far, far away, because all people have got their vested interests, and they cannot stop their trips; they have to use and exploit people.Somebody becomes a president; you never think that he has become president at your cost, that something in you has been killed so that this man can become the president of the country. If everybody was left unique, original, it would be impossible for the people who are presidents and prime ministers, who are ruling the whole world and who have been destroying the world for thousands of years and go on destroying it, to continue doing this.With individuals there will be totally different kinds of societies: there will be communes, not societies. There will be no nations, because there is no need.What is the need of nations? The whole earth is one.Only on maps do you go on drawing the lines, and over those lines you go on fighting and killing and murdering. It is such a stupid game: that unless the whole of humanity is mad, it is impossible to think how it goes on continuing. What is the need of nations? What is the need of passports and visas and boundaries? This whole earth belongs to us and wherever one wants to be, one has the right to be there.The sun is nobody’s property, the earth is nobody’s property, the moon is nobody’s property; the wind, the clouds, the rain – nothing is anybody’s property. Why do you draw these lines?You can understand it easily; soon you will see lines on the moon. Right now there are none, but soon you will see a Russian zone, an American zone, a Chinese zone. Nobody lives there; nobody will ever live there. There seems to be no possibility of life growing on the moon. The moon is a dead planet – not a single drop of water. Yes, you can be there for a few hours with all your gas masks and oxygen cylinders and everything, but this is not the way that people can live there. But already they have put their flags…There is nobody to see the flag, there is nobody to salute the flag – not even a bird sometimes, to shit on the flag! The first thing the Americans did was to place a pole, and put up the flag. How idiotic, and for whom? But soon other fools will follow. They will go to Mars, they will go to other planets, and they will do the same thing everywhere.There is no need for nations, except that politicians need nations because without nations there will be no politics; except that generals need nations because without nations there will be no wars; except that the factories that produce weapons will go out of production. What will happen to your nuclear weapons plants and all the energy involved in them? If there are no nations there is no need to create nuclear weapons, for whom?The simplest solution to save humanity is to remove all the lines from the map, and just from the map – on the earth there are no lines. Just simply remove all the lines from the maps and you won’t have a Third World War, and you will not need so many armies all around the world.Millions of people are doing nothing except turning left, turning right… If somebody is watching from above, he will be surprised. Why do people go on turning right, then left, then about turn, then march, then come back, disperse? Every day millions of people all around the earth… He will certainly think something is wrong – some nut, some bolt, needs to be put right.These nations can exist only if your personality is false. These churches and religions can exist only if you don’t have your original face – because a man who has his original face, what business has he to do, that he needs to go to the pope? For what? There is no reason he should go to any religious teacher or to any temple or to any synagogue. And why should he become a Mohammedan, a Christian, a Hindu? Why?With your original face you will feel so contented, so immensely fulfilled and at home, that there is no search left; you have found it. But these people will not allow you to find it. They will distract you, for the simple reason that they have some trips, they have some ideas of their own, and you have to be sacrificed for their ideas. Politicians will sacrifice you for their politics. Religions will sacrifice you for their kind of politics. Nobody is interested in the child, and the reason is clear: the child has to be molded into a certain pattern, which fits into a society, into a nation, into a particular ideology.In the Soviet Union the child has to be taught Communism from the very beginning. He has to know the names of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin – they are their gods. In non-communist countries it is the same thing only the names differ. Everybody is sacrificed to some stupid ideology, theology, politics, religion. That’s why people get distracted.But the child allows it for the simple reason that he does not know who he is going to become. Naturally he depends on his parents, elders: those who know better. And he is not aware that they don’t know better; they are in the same boat, as ignorant as the child. The only difference is the child is innocent also. They are cunning but ignorant, and just because of their cunningness they go on hiding their ignorance in borrowed knowledge.My grandfather used to take me to any mahatma, any saint, and he used to say to me, “If you don’t come then I am not going, because then it is so dull. You make it alive.” And I was simply raising very simple questions. What can a child do?One Hindu monk, Swami Vidyananda used to come to the town every rainy season. For four months he lectured there – he was a well-known teacher. The first day I went with my grandfather, I simply stood up, and because of my grandfather nobody could throw me out or tell me to sit down.Everybody knew about him, that he was a dangerous man in that matter. If anybody said, “Boy, sit down, you don’t understand such great things,” my grandfather would say “But I don’t understand either, and I am seventy years old. So you keep quiet, understand! And he would tell me, “Ask.”It was clear that they could not throw me out, they could not stop me, so I simply asked Vidyananda, “One thing I want to know about what you are saying: is it borrowed or experienced? Now, remember that you are sitting in the temple of God.” It was a Rama Mandir, the best place in the town, the most precious temple of the town with a very beautiful marble hall – so all the best discourses were arranged there.I told him, “Look at the statue of Rama; and remember that you are in a sacred place and remember your robe, that you are a monk. Don’t disgrace your robes and don’t disgrace your God; just say the truth – whatever you are saying, has it been experienced? Do you know God? Have you seen God just the way you are seeing me? Have you talked with God the way you are talking with me? Or have you just learned from the books?” There was a great silence. The man hesitated.I said, “Your hesitation says everything. You better tell the truth because if you have seen God, why should you hesitate? You feel a little afraid – I can see perspiration on your forehead, and it is cool inside.”The man said, “I have never thought about it. But being a sannyasin and being in the temple of God, I cannot speak untruthfully. I have no experience. I am saying whatsoever I have heard and read and studied.”Then I said to him, “Get out! Get out from this place immediately. Then find a person who himself has known, and bring him here. You are throwing borrowed rubbish on these poor people’s heads, and giving them the idea that they also know – because I know these fools, they are all from my own town, and they talk as if they know.”And I told the people, “Listen to your guru!” He was the guru of almost the whole city, because for years – he must have been sixty at that time – for years he had been visiting the town for four months every year. But that was the last time. Since then I have not heard about him.When I was traveling in India I went on inquiring about what happened to Vidyananda, whether he died or he was still alive – what happened? Finally I met him in a place I had never expected, near Madras, in Adyar. Adyar is the headquarters of the Theosophical Movement. I had gone to deliver a few talks in Chennai, and my host wanted to go and see Adyar. Adyar is beautiful: the theosophists had done a really good job. They had made a beautiful place, but it is now lying deserted, nobody goes there. They had made beautiful houses, cottages, a great garden – a whole colony.Adyar has perhaps the biggest bo tree. When the Theosophical Movement was alive, they used to have their conventions underneath that bo tree; thousands of people can sit under its shade. And Adyar has perhaps one of the most precious libraries in the world. Theosophists had collected manuscripts from China, Tibet, Ladakh, Mongolia, Korea – strange places, strange languages – and they have a very great underground library of ancient scripts. I found this man there in the library; he was working as a librarian, but he was no longer a monk.I asked him, “What happened?”He said, “That day you changed my whole life. After that I could not speak with the same authority as I had before. I lost my courage. I tried, but every time the question arose in me that I don’t know, so why am I telling these people? Perhaps it is not right, perhaps it is right – who knows? I am committing a sin, because these people will start thinking that they know. That day in your city…”He had not been able to recognize me. I had to remind him because he had last seen me as a child. I could recognize him, although by then he was near-about ninety – but from sixty to ninety years nothing much… Yes, you become older, but no basic change happens. He was older, fragile, but in a way younger, more alive.I said to him, “You are thirty years older now, but I can see your eyes are younger, more alive.”He said, “Yes, because I have dropped that life of phoniness. Now I am simply what I am. I don’t know – I am searching but I don’t know that it will be possible to know in this life, because so much is lost.I said, “Don’t ever be pessimistic. It can happen any day – it can happen today. If it is not happening that means that somewhere you are still carrying the borrowed. Can I ask you another question again, after thirty years?”He said, “I will be obliged because that first question has done me a great service. It has taken away my monkhood, my mahatma-hood, my followers – everything.”I said, “Why did you start working in the library as a librarian? – because again this is the same kind of business. Now you are searching in ancient scripts found in Tibet, found in Ladakh, found in Nepal. You are still not looking into yourself. First you were searching for truth in printed books, now you are searching for it in hand-written ancient scripts, thinking that these people must have known. But again you are doing the same foolishness. Neither the printing press knows… It goes on printing Bible after Bible – millions of Bibles – and the printing press remains just a printing press; it does not even become a Christian.“And do you think you will be able to find the truth, in hand-written scripts? These people were just working as writers. They were simply copying, and they were being paid for it. It is not that they were knowers, they were copiers, and they were doing a primitive method of printing. In those days printing was not possible so people used to write, copying from one manuscript to another manuscript, and from that to another manuscript, and they would sell them. Do you think these people knew?”He said, “Again you are right. I have been here for twenty years in this underground library, looking into all kinds of strange methods, ideologies – very impressive, very logical – but certainly I am doing the same thing; I am not looking in. So from now on you will not find me anywhere.”He dropped his job that very day. While I was still in Adyar he left. When I came back after walking around… It is a big place and once it was a very throbbing commune; when Annie Besant was alive thousands of people lived there. When I came back to the main office and inquired about Vidyananda they said, “He has left. What have you told him? – because after you met him in the library he came into the office and he said, ‘I am leaving, and leaving forever. I am finished with books. Although I am much too old… But perhaps a few days may be enough, or at least before I die I should begin rightly. Perhaps in the next life I can complete my search, but at least I should begin.’”Nobody is asking, “What do you know, is it your knowledge?” If it is not your knowledge, put it aside, it has no value. “What you are doing, is it your aspiration? Do you really feel a bell ringing in your heart?” If it is not so then don’t waste a single moment more.People go on doing things which other people have forced them to do – and people are going to continue to force them. It is most improbable that parents will stop forcing their children to be just images of their own ideas, that teachers will stop forcing on them whatsoever they know – as if they really know, but they will go on pretending they know.My principal in high school was a mathematician. I was not a student of mathematics but I used to go to his office whenever I saw that he was alone and talk about higher mathematics – because now the older mathematics is not applicable any longer to physics, biology, chemistry, biochemistry. They are going beyond it. So he told me, “Why don’t you start attending my classes?”I said, “I have no problem, I am not a student of mathematics, but whenever I am free and you have a class I would love to come if you allow me. But then don’t get disturbed by me because I will not just be dead there, I will be alive.”He said “What do you mean by being alive?”I said, “Exactly what it means: being alive. Just give me a chance and see.”I was always interested in many things, trying to find out whether they were really based on knowing or were only hypothetical – because if they were hypothetical then they were not really true; they were just pragmatic, helpful, convenient. For example, Euclidian geometry – that’s the class he was teaching when he allowed me for the first day… Now Euclid’s definitions – even a child can see that they are wrong. Euclid says: “A line has length but no breadth.” Now, without breadth, how can a line be? It is so simple, one does not need to be a mathematician.I am not a mathematician, and I was not at all at that time. And I said to him, “This is stupid what you are saying, that it has length but no breadth – it does have breadth. Draw a line on the board without breadth, just with length, then I will accept your hypothesis.”He said, “Now I know what you mean by being alive. I have done post-graduation mathematics and this question never came to my mind. Euclid says so; every school, every college, every university teaches it, so I never thought… But perhaps you are right. I can see, there is…”And I said, “It is measurable. With the chalk you draw a line on the blackboard, and still you’re saying that it has no breadth. ‘And the point’ Euclid says, ‘has neither length nor breadth.’ Then how can it be? It may have a very, very small length, a very, very small breadth, but that does not mean that it has none. You just need a magnifying glass. Just wait and I will run to the chemistry lab and bring the magnifying glass and show you.He said, “There is no need to go; I can understand. But then what am I to teach? Euclid is finished, because these are basic definitions.”I said, “These are hypotheses. You have to accept just one thing: that these hypotheses are practical, but not truth.”So you have to find out about whatsoever you know: whether it is just hypothetical, useful in life, or really a truth that you know, that you have felt, that you have experienced. If it is only a hypothesis, put it aside and you will feel such an unburdening. All hypotheses, all borrowed knowledge that has gathered there and which you are carrying – you are dragging a mountainous load, you are being crushed under it – just put it aside.Be ignorant; accept that “I am ignorant.” And from that point you can start the search.Every child is going to be burdened. I hope that someday it will not be so. In fact there is no need, because when you are teaching Euclid, you can teach very simply that this is not truth, it is only a hypothesis. With this hypothesis it becomes easier to understand the triangle, the circle and everything. But remember that at the base there is a hypothesis, and the whole palace is hypothetical.Similarly, your God is a hypothesis and the whole pyramid of theology is based on nothing but that hypothesis. If you start looking into things it does not need great intelligence, it needs only simple innocence to see.That principal called me into his office and he said, “You are not to come again to my classes because now it will be difficult for me to deal with the children. They have seen me as ignorant and up to now I was an authority. You destroyed that.” But he was a sincere man in a way. He said, “I can understand you, but don’t do it to any other teacher, because they may not understand it. And now I know why so many complaints go on coming against you: that you are a disturbance. But this was not a disturbance. You have opened my eyes; I will never again be able to be the same. But what puzzles me is that I never thought about it, I simply accepted it.”And that’s the point I want you to notice. You have accepted everything up to now; what they have said, you have accepted. You have to start questioning, doubting. Don’t be afraid of authorities; there is no authority. Krishna or Christ, Mohammed or Mahavira: nobody is an authority. And if they are an authority, then they are an authority to themselves, not to you.You will be an authority only to yourself if someday you come to know the truth of your own original face. Then too, you will not be an authority to somebody else. Nobody can be an authority to anybody else. This whole idea of authority has to disappear from the world. Yes, people can share their experience, but that is not authority.I don’t want to force anything on you – not a single word, not a single concept. My whole effort is to somehow make you alert and to beware of all authorities. And the moment you see there is some authority hanging around your being throw it out.Be finished with all that has been given to you, forced upon you, and the original face will start showing up. You never know, you cannot even imagine what your original face will be, what your true being will be. You will know only when you know, when you are face to face with yourself, when there is no hindrance of any kind and you are left totally alone.In that aloneness have flowered all the beings that have flowered.Not many have flowered. Only once in a while… It is a strange tragedy that millions of people are born and only once in a while a person blossoms. That’s why I say there is no gardener, no God looking around, watching, caring – otherwise millions of trees and only one tree comes to flower…? Spring comes and goes and only one tree blossoms; millions of trees simply remain barren, unproductive. What kind of gardener is looking after the garden?This is enough proof that there is no gardener, no God, but that does not mean that you have to become pessimistic. In fact that gives you a new dimension: that you have to be your own gardener. It is good that there is no God, because you can be your own gardener. But then the whole responsibility is yours; you cannot blame anybody.I am taking God away, so that you cannot blame the poor old man. He has been blamed enough for everything: he created the world, he created this, he created that. I take all that blame away from him – he does not exist.You have created him just to throw your responsibility on him. Take your responsibility back.Accept your aloneness. Accept your ignorance.Accept your responsibility, and then see the miracle happening.One day, suddenly you see yourself in a totally new light, as you have never seen yourself before. That day you are really born. Before that it was only a pre-birth process.There are reasons why people have been distracted from their originality. First, you don’t know what your originality is. Second, there are people who are in a hurry to impose some idea of their own on you, because once that idea is imposed, you are psychologically enslaved.A Christian cannot find truth, a Hindu cannot find truth, because Christianity is a prison, Hinduism is a prison; somebody is burdened by the Koran and somebody else is burdened by the Torah.So it is not a question of what has to be thrown out, whatever it is. That’s why with me, a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Jaina, a Buddhist, a Parsi, a Sikh… Anybody can find something transpiring in him, because what I am saying is applicable to all.Whether you are burdened with the Bible or the Koran makes no difference. I am not interested in you throwing away the Bible; I am interested in you throwing away any kind of garbage that you are carrying. And I call it garbage because it has been given to you by others; it is not yours.Remember it: only what you experience is yours.What you know, only that you know. Let it be very small, don’t be worried; seeds are very small, but a seed has potentiality. It is not a thing, it is a being who is ready to burst forth – it just needs the opportunity.And that’s what to me the function of the master is: to create the opportunity. Not to give you knowledge, not to give you discipline, not to give you a doctrine or a dogma, but to create an opportunity where all these things slowly, slowly disappear. They are not clinging to you, you are holding onto them hard.So when I say they disappear, I mean slowly, slowly you open your fist. Of course you take time because for so long you have thought that you are holding something precious, but even if you understand me, again and again the idea comes that perhaps if you drop it you may lose something precious. But there is nothing precious there.Remember one criterion: anything precious is only that which you know, and there is no way to lose that which you know. Anything that can be lost, and which you have to cling to, cannot be precious because it can be lost. That shows that it is not your experience.So we have to accept that the society is going to continue the way it has continued, but we can find intelligent people and take them out of the society. That’s what I mean by sannyas.People cannot understand it because they think that I am trying to create a certain religion by giving you a certain dress, a certain identity. No, I am not creating any religion. It is absolutely religionless religion.This dress I am giving you is simply so that you start having a distance from the crowd, so that the crowd pushes you out and does not allow you in. Otherwise you would like to be inside. Who wants to be outside the crowd? It is so cozy there, so warm.I give you this dress simply as a strategy, a device so that people will avoid you; wherever you go, people will turn away. That’s the only way to save you; you cannot mix with the crowd. Otherwise it would have been easier for me and easier for my sannyasins if I had not made look so different from other people. Many more people would have come around me more easily. But I am not interested in many more people. I am not a politician, I am not a pope; what do I have to do with many people?I am interested only in those chosen few who are intelligent, courageous, capable of coming out in the cold and dropping the coziness of the crowd and the mob. Only in the beginning it feels cold; soon your body has its own system of creating warmth. Your being soon starts creating its own aroma.So we have to go on pulling people from the crowd, and continue to destroy whatsoever the crowd has given to them, because when you pull a person out of the crowd that person brings the crowd in his mind. You can pull the person out of the crowd very easily – it is not so difficult – but the person brings the crowd in his mind. Then the second part of the work is more difficult: to push the crowd out of his mind.Both things have to be done: pull the person out of the crowd, and then push the crowd out of the person, so he is simply left alone.And to me there is nothing greater than to be left utterly alone, in your pure, essential being-hood.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is it possible for a politician to be a religious man or for a religious man to be a politician?It is absolutely impossible for a political man to be religious, because the ways of politics and religion are diametrically opposite. You have to understand that it is not a question of adding something to your personality – religion is not an addition. If you are political, you can be a painter, you can be a poet, you can be a musician – those are additions.Politics and music are not diametrically opposite; on the contrary, music may help you to be a better politician. It will be relaxing, it will help you to get unburdened of the whole day and the anxieties that a politician has to go through. But religion is not an addition; it is a diametrically opposite dimension. So first you have to understand the political man, exactly what it means.The political man is a sick man, psychologically sick, spiritually sick. Physically he may be perfectly okay. Usually politicians are physically okay; their whole burden falls on their psyche. You can see that. Once a politician loses his power he starts losing his physical health. Strange, when he was in power, he was so burdened with many anxieties and tensions, but he was physically perfect.The moment power has gone, all the anxieties have also gone; now, they will be somebody else’s business. His psyche is unburdened, and in that unburdening all his sickness falls on his body. The politician suffers, as far as his physiology is concerned, only when he loses power; otherwise politicians tend to live long, and are physically well. Strange, but the reason is that their whole sickness is taken by their psyche, and when the psyche takes on the whole sickness, then the body can live unburdened. But if the psyche releases all its sickness, where is it going to go? Lower than the psychic is your physical existence – all sickness falls onto the body. Politicians out of power die very soon. Politicians in power live very long. It is a known fact, but the cause is not well known.So the first thing to be understood is that the political man is psychologically sick, and psychological sickness tends to become spiritual sickness when it becomes too much, when the psyche cannot hold it any more. Now, be careful: if the politician is in power, then his psychic sickness is bound to spread to his spiritual being, because he is holding his psychic sickness so it does not fall downward. It is his power, he thinks it is his treasure; he won’t allow it to fall down.I am calling it sickness. To him it is his whole ego trip. He is living for it; there is no other purpose for him. So, when he is in power he holds his sickness tightly, but he does not know anything about the spiritual realm, so those doors are open. He cannot close those doors; he has no idea that there is something more than his mind. When he is in power, if his psychological sickness is too much, after a certain point it overflows his psyche and reaches to his spirituality.If he is out of power then he tends not to hold all that stupidity. Now he knows what it was, now he is aware that it was nothing worth holding. And anyway there is nothing to hold; the power has gone, he is a nobody.Out of desperation, he relaxes – perhaps I should say, relaxation comes to him automatically. Now he can sleep, he can go for a morning walk. He can gossip, he can play chess; he can do anything. Psychically he finds himself loosening. The doors that he had kept closed between his psyche and the body start opening, and his body is bound to suffer now: he may have a heart attack, he may get any kind of sickness; everything is possible. His psychic sickness will flow to the weakest part of his body. But in power it flows upward, toward his being, of which he is unaware.And what is the sickness? The sickness is the inferiority complex. Anybody who is interested in power is suffering from an inferiority complex; deep down he feels himself worthless, inferior to others.And certainly in many ways everybody is inferior. You are not a Yehudi Menuhin, but there is no need to feel inferior because you never tried to be, and that is not your business. Yehudi Menuhin is not you either; so what is the problem, where is the conflict?But the political mind suffers from a wound of inferiority, and the politician goes on scratching the wound. Intellectually he is not an Albert Einstein – he compares himself with giants – psychologically he is not a Sigmund Freud. If you compare yourself with the giants of humanity you are bound to feel completely shrunk, worthless.This worthlessness can be removed in two ways: one is religion; the other is politics. Politics does not really remove it, it only covers it. It is the same sick man, the same man who was feeling inferior, who sits as a president. But just sitting on a chair as the president, what difference can it make to your inner situation?My first conflict with Morarji Desai happened exactly in such a situation. One of the great Jaina monks – great to the Jainas, not to me, to me he is the phoniest person you can find, in fact it is very difficult for me to compare him with any other phony person, he will defeat all – had called a religious conference. That was their annual celebration, the birthday of their founder. Morarji Desai was invited. I was also invited. There were at least twenty guests from all over India, from every religion, from every direction of thought and ideology, and at least fifty thousand of Acharya Tulsi’s followers.Before the meeting, Acharya Tulsi greeted the guests, those twenty special guests. It must have been 1960, in a small, beautiful place in Rajasthan, Rajsamund. It has such a beautiful lake, so big and vast, hence the name, Rajsamund. Samund in Rajasthani means the ocean, and raj means royal. It is so beautiful that the name suits it exactly. It is a royal ocean, very emperor-like. The waves on it are almost as big as in the ocean. It is only a lake but you cannot see the other shore.He called us to meet – before we all went and talked to the fifty thousand people who had gathered there – just to be introduced, and because he was the host who had invited us there. But from the very beginning, trouble started.The trouble was that he was sitting on a high pedestal and all the guests were sitting on the ground. It was not a problem to anybody except to Morarji Desai, the politician. He was the only politician among those twenty people – somebody was a scientist, D. S. Kothari who was chairman of the atomic energy commission in India, somebody was a vice chancellor… Those people had come from different directions, but it was not a problem for any of them.Morarji said, “I would like to start the conversation.” He was just sitting by my side. Neither he nor I knew that now a lifelong friendship was starting. He said, “My first question is that you are the host, and we are the guests. Guests are sitting on the floor and the host is seated on a high pedestal. What kind of courtesy is this? If you were addressing a meeting it is understandable that you should sit higher so the people can see and hear you. But here there are only twenty persons, and you are not addressing a meeting, just chit-chatting, just introducing people to each other before the conference, the real conference starts.”Acharya Tulsi was at a loss. It would have been so easy for a real religious person to come down, and apologize: “This is really a most idiotic error on my part.” But he did not budge from his place. Instead he told one of his chief disciples, who has now become his successor, Muni Nathmal, “You answer the question.”Muni Nathmal was even more nervous – what to say? Morarji Desai at that time was finance minister of India and that’s why they had invited him. They were making efforts to create a university for Jainism, and he was the man… If he was willing, then finance would not be a problem. Muni Nathmal said, “It is not any discourtesy to the guests, it is just our tradition that the head of the sect sits higher. And just a convention is being followed, nothing else is meant by it. Nobody is insulted by it.Morarji is not an easy person to be silenced by such answers. He said, “We are not your disciples, you are not our head. None of these twenty people here recognize you as their master or head. You may sit on any pedestal you want among your disciples, your sect, your people – but we are guests. Secondly, you proclaim yourself a revolutionary saint, so why cling to a convention, tradition, which is so uncivilized, uncultured?” That was one of the claims of Acharya Tulsi, that he was a revolutionary saint.Now Nathmal was silent, Acharya Tulsi was silent, and all the other guests started feeling a little uneasy; this was not a good beginning. I asked Morarji Desai, “Although this is not my business, I am not concerned at all, but seeing the situation, would you like me to answer you? It is just to start the conversation so this group does not end in an awkward situation.”He said, “I am concerned about the answer. Yes, you can answer.”I said to him, “A few things: first, there are nineteen other persons, you are not alone here. Nobody else asked the question – why did only you ask it? It didn’t occur to me.” And I asked the people, “Had the question occurred to you? If it has not occurred, please raise your hands.” All the eighteen hands were raised – that it didn’t occur to them.Then I said to Morarji, “You are the only person who felt hurt. You must be carrying a wound, you must be suffering from some inferiority – you are a psychological case. You can see – you know Doctor D.S. Kothari perfectly well, because he is chairman of the atomic commission of India; you know these other prominent people – nobody is bothered by it. And what does it matter?“Do you see the spider walking on the ceiling? He is higher than Acharya Tulsi. Just being higher, do you become greater? But somehow it hurts you. There is a wound in you which has not been filled even by being the finance minister of India. You would like one day to be the prime minister of India.”He was very angry. He said, “You call me psychologically sick?”I said, “Certainly. These eighteen hands were raised for what? They are supporting me, they are saying, ‘This man seems to be very vulnerable as far as his ego is concerned, shaky’ – just a monk sitting a little higher, and it disturbs you.”I said, “Let us assume, for example, if Acharya Tulsi invites you also to sit with him on the high pedestal…” And let me remind you, even then Acharya Tulsi did not invite him. I said, “For example, if he invites you and you are on the pedestal, will you ask the same question again for these eighteen poor souls who are sitting on the floor? Will the question ever arise?”He said, “That I have never thought of. Perhaps the question will not arise, because in hundreds of meetings and conferences, I have been sitting on the high pedestal, but the question has never arisen.”I said, “That makes it clear that it is not a question of why Acharya Tulsi is sitting higher than you. The question is why you are sitting lower than Acharya Tulsi. Change the question to, ‘Why am I sitting lower than Acharya Tulsi’ – this is what you should have asked. It would have been more authentic. You are projecting your sickness on somebody else.“But perhaps that somebody else is also as sick as you, because if I was in his place, in the first place, I would not have sat there, if I was the host and you were my guests. Secondly, if by chance, by some coincidence I had been sitting there, the moment you asked the question I would have come down. That would have been enough of an answer: ‘There is no problem; it is just our convention and I forgot that you are my guests, because only once a year do I meet guests, but every day I meet my disciples. So just forgive me and let us start our conversation for which we have gathered.’“But he did not come down. He has no guts. He is sitting there almost dead, he cannot even breathe he is so afraid. And he has no answer – he asked his secretary to answer you. And the question that you have raised, about which he is also silent, is that he has been proclaiming himself a revolutionary saint. He is neither a revolutionary nor a saint, so what answer can he give to you? But my basic concern is not with him, my basic concern is you. This is the political mind which is always thinking in terms of lower and higher, in terms of power.”Of course he was angry, and is still angry, and has remained angry for all these twenty-four, twenty-five years. And he has been in positions from where he could have harmed me, but he has no guts either. He was deputy prime minister and then became prime minister. Before he became prime minister, he had even asked for my help. He had called me, unaware… Later on he came to know that to call me was absolutely absurd. He was Indira Gandhi’s deputy prime minister – the post is not in the constitution itself.The first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, had a clash with another disciple of Gandhi’s, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The clash was such that if voting had been allowed then Vallabhbhai Patel would have won. He was a real politician. He was just like Joseph Stalin.Joseph Stalin was the secretary of the communist party when the revolution happened. He was not a great leader or anything. His function was in the office; he was the head clerk of the communist party to put it exactly. But because he was the secretary he knew everything, everything passed through his hands. Every person had to be acquainted with him, and he had a tremendous grip on people.The same was the situation with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He was a very strong man, I told you, just like Joseph Stalin. Stalin is not his real name, it was just given to him because it means in Russian, “man of steel.” Strangely, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was called in India, lauha purush, that also means “man of steel.” It is exactly the translation of Stalin.Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had a grip on the organization, an inside grip. He was not an impressive person like Jawaharlal in public. If the whole of India was going to vote, Jawaharlal would have won, nobody was going to win against him. But if the voting was going to be inside the congress party, the ruling party, then Vallabhbhai could have defeated anybody.To avoid this voting, because this was going to be a party decision, Gandhi said, “It will be good to create a post of deputy prime minister, so Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel will be happy that he is, if not the first, at least the second man.” And there is every chance, anytime, for the second man to be the first man, once you throw the first man out or he dies or something happens.And Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was clever enough to throw out the man who was in front of him. Jawaharlal was innocent in that way. He was not a politician at all. So without any constitutional basis for it, immediately an amendment was made that there would be a post of deputy prime minister. It was created for Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.Once Nehru and Patel both died the post was dissolved, because it was unconstitutional, but it was again revived with Indira and Morarji Desai. The same conflict: Indira was Jawaharlal’s daughter, and Morarji Desai was almost a politically adopted son of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He was his disciple in politics, the chief disciple.Morarji became aware later on, that it was my suggestion to Indira to throw him out. And I had suggested it just by the way. I was talking for almost an hour to her. She listened, and in the end said only, “Whatever you are saying is right and should be done, but you don’t know my situation: my cabinet is not mine, my deputy prime minister is not mine. There is so much conflict and continual fighting in the cabinet; he is trying to throw me out by hook or by crook any way, and to become the prime minister.“If I say the things that you are saying, everybody will be with him; nobody is going to be with me, because the things that you are suggesting are so much against the Indian mind, the Indian tradition, the Indian way of thinking, that nobody is going to support me. If you want, I can propose it before the cabinet, but the next day you will hear that Indira is no longer prime minister.”Then just by the way, I said, “Then why don’t you throw out Morarji Desai first, because he is the man who will manipulate all others. All those others are pygmies. They don’t have any national character; they are all provincial people. In certain states, in Bengal or in Andhra or in Maharashtra they are important, but a provincial person cannot fight with you, he has no grounds.“Only one man can manipulate all those pygmies, and that is Morarji Desai, so first finish him. And they will all be with you if you finish him – because of him none of them can become the second man. So create the situation that this man is blocking everybody’s way; throw him out, and nobody is going to support him.”And exactly that happened: within eight days Morarji Desai was thrown out, and nobody supported him. They were all happy because now they were all equal; nobody was of national importance except Indira. So once Indira had gone, died, or something happened, then those pygmies were bound to have the power; otherwise they could not have it. So Morarji’s removal was almost half the journey finished; now Indira was the only problem.Morarji was not aware of it, but later on he became aware. Indira’s secretary, who was listening from the other room, told him. But before the secretary told him, Morarji Desai had asked me to help him. He said that he had been thrown out and it was unfair, unjust; without being given any reason, any cause, he had just been told to resign.And he said, “The strangest thing is that just eight days before there was no question of any change, there was no conflict between me and her. And another strange thing is: I had always thought that the other people would support me against Indira. When I was thrown out, not a single cabinet minister was against it. They rejoiced! They had a party, a celebration.” He said to me, “I need help.”I said, “You have asked the wrong person. I would be the last person in the world to help you. If you were drowning in a river, and I was going along the side, and you shouted, ‘Help! Help! I am drowning.’ I would say, ‘Do it quietly. Don’t disturb my morning walk.’”He said, “What! Are you joking?”I said, “I am not. With politicians I never joke; I am very serious.”Later on he found out that it was basically my suggestion that got stuck in Indira’s mind; it was clear mathematics that if she threw this man out, then there was nothing to be worried about. All the others were provincial people, then she could do whatever she wanted to do and nobody could oppose her, because nobody represented India as such. And India is such a big country – thirty states – that if you represent one state, what does it matter? So it stuck in her mind. And Morarji became even more inimical.Just as he had asked for my help, he was asking everybody’s help, whomsoever he thought had some kind of power over people, he was asking everybody. He was a beggar. And he found one man who was a national character, Jaiprakash Narayan, but he was never in politics. He had renounced politics, and he was a sincere man, but as I go on explaining to you, even the sincerest man…He was a great public servant, he did much service for India in many ways, but he proves my point. He devoted his whole life to the freedom struggle, and after freedom Jawaharlal wanted him to be his successor – he refused. Naturally, anybody would think that he was a humble man – what more humility, what more meekness? He accepted to remain nobody when Jawaharlal was offering him: “Just be in my cabinet and I will make you my successor. I am ready to declare it.” And he was capable of being the right successor to Jawaharlal.Morarji went to him too, and Jaiprakash Narayan agreed to help him for a strange reason – that’s why I am telling the story so that you understand that even such a man, who could renounce the premiership of India, was still a deep egoist. That renunciation was not out of humbleness, the renunciation was out of ego: that “I don’t care.” Perhaps the very idea that Jawaharlal was offering him the successorship was not acceptable to his ego. He can become the prime minister on his own. Who are you to announce, proclaim, declare that he is your successor?He had his own authority, and he was very influential – perhaps next to Jawaharlal in India, he was the most loved by the people. And the love became more and more as Jawaharlal became more and more engulfed in politics, and became farther and farther away from people. Jaiprakash became more and more close to the people, and the people started loving him because: “Here is a man who can renounce.” And in India, renunciation is the last word; you cannot go beyond that. That is the highest point. But a small thing triggered him and all the humanity, all the meekness, everything, disappeared.I have told you that the richest man in India, Jugal Kisore Birla, had offered to give me a blank checkbook if I was ready to spread Hinduism to the world at large, and create a movement in India to force the government to ban cow slaughter. When I refused him he said, “Young man, think twice because Jawaharlal gets money from me, Jaiprakash Narayan gets money from me, Ram Manohar Lohia gets money from me, Ashok Mehta gets money from me.” All these were the topmost leaders.He said, “And every month I am giving them money, as much as they need. Even to Ashok Mehta who is the president of the Socialist Party of India, which is against the rich people – even he is my man.” He said, “I give to all party presidents, important people; whoever comes to power will be my man. Let them say what they say; talking does not matter – I have purchased them.”I told Indira about Jaiprakash, just in that conversation in which I talked about Morarji: to throw him out. She was shocked! She could not believe it because she called him uncle; he was almost like a brother to Jawaharlal. He had been Jawaharlal’s secretary for many years and their relationship was very close. And Indira was brought up in front of his eyes; when just a small child she used to call him Kaka – uncle.And when I said, “Jugal Kisore himself has told me, and I don’t think that old man was telling a lie. In fact, how does Jaiprakash maintain himself? – because he does not belong to any party. He does not have any group of supporters; he has renounced politics. He does not earn a single pai. How does he manage to have two secretaries, a typist? How does he manage to continually travel in airplanes? Money must be coming from somewhere, and he has no visible source. My feeling is that Jugal Kisore was not lying.”Indira mentioned this to Jaiprakash: “Do you get a salary every month from the Birla house?” And that was the thing that hit him hard; that was when he decided that Indira could no longer be tolerated. He willingly became a partner of Morarji Desai and all the people – it always happens whenever you are in power that you manage to create enemies – all the enemies together. But Jaiprakash was the key. Morarji was not capable of gathering anybody – he is simply retarded – but Jaiprakash was an intelligent man.He managed to overturn the government and to show his last renunciation: that although he had overturned the government, he was not going to be the prime minister. He wanted to prove that he was higher than Jawaharlal. That was his only, his deepest longing: to be higher than Jawaharlal. So he placed Morarji Desai in the prime ministership just to show to history: “Somebody was trying to place me as premier, but I don’t care about these premierships, I can create my own premiers.” But it was all egoism.I used to speak in Patna – Maitreya is here, he will be aware of the fact – and because Jaiprakash also belonged to Patna, his wife used to come to attend my meetings. I was puzzled. I inquired of my host, “The wife comes, but I never see Jaiprakash.”He laughed, he said, “I asked the same question of Prakashwati, Jaiprakash’s wife. She said, ‘He comes but he sits in the car outside and listens from there. He cannot gather courage to come in and let it be seen by people that he has come to listen to somebody.’”The ego is so subtle and so slippery. And the politician is sick because of his ego. Now there are two ways: either he can cover the wound by becoming a president, a prime minister. He can cover the wound, but the wound is there. You can deceive the whole world but how can you deceive yourself? You know it. It is there; you have covered it.I am reminded of a strange story…It happened in Prayag, the very holy place for Hindus, where three rivers meet. You know in India the whole country is treated as a toilet; there is no demarcation where the toilet is and where it is not. Wherever you can find a place, that is the toilet.One brahmin, early in the morning, must have gone to take his bath, and before his bath he went to defecate. Perhaps he was in a hurry, perhaps he had some stomach trouble or something, but he just went on the ghat. Ghat means the paved place where people put their clothes and go to take their bath. It is not allowed; nobody prevents you, but it is not conventionally allowed that you defecate, on that paved place where people are going to put their clothes.But the man must have been in trouble. I can understand, I don’t doubt his intention – I never doubt anybody’s intention. He defecated there, and as he was finishing he saw people coming. So he simply covered his shit with the flowers that he had brought to worship with. What else to do?The people arrived and they asked, “What is this?”And he said, “A shivalinga, I am worshipping.” And he started worshipping, and because a brahmin was worshipping, others started pouring their flowers on it – a shivalinga had appeared! It is thought to be a great miracle in India – whenever any statue just appears or whenever you want to create a miracle, this is the simplest way. Other people started chanting mantras, and what to say of that man… He was feeling so bad. Not only had he dirtied the place, he had lied. One lie begets another lie, and then… Now what was he doing? He was worshipping it, and others were worshipping it!But how can you forget it? Is there any way for this man to forget what is under the flowers? The same is the situation of the politician: just pus, wounds, inferiority, feeling worthless.Yes, he had reached higher and higher, and on each step of the ladder, the hope was that on the next step the wound would be healed. Inferiority creates ambition, because ambition simply means an effort to prove yourself superior.There is no other meaning to ambition but an effort to prove yourself superior. But why make an effort to prove yourself superior unless you are suffering from inferiority?I have never voted in my life. My uncles, my two uncles – I have two uncles who both were in the freedom struggle – both have been to jail. Neither of them could complete his education because they were caught and imprisoned. One uncle was just here for the festival. He was only in his matriculation class when he was caught, because he was part of a conspiracy to destroy a train, to bomb a bridge. They were making a bomb – and he was a student of chemistry, so he used to bring from the chemistry lab things needed to make the bomb. He was caught when he was just going to take the examination, just ten days before. And his education was finished, because after three years when he came back it was too late to start again and be…So he went into business. My elder uncle was in his BA final when he got caught, because he was also part of a conspiracy group against the government. My whole family was political, except my father. So they were all asking me, “Why don’t you register, why don’t you vote, and why are you wasting your energies? If you move in the direction of politics you can become the president of the country, you can become the premier of the country.”I said, “You have completely forgotten with whom you are talking. I don’t suffer from any inferiority, so why should I be interested in becoming the president of the country? Why should I waste my life in becoming the president of the country? It is almost as if I have no cancer and you want me to be operated on for cancer – it is strange. Why should I be operated on unnecessarily?You suffer from some inferiority complex, and you are projecting your inferiority complex on me. I am perfectly okay as I am. I am absolutely grateful to existence wherever I am. Today whatsoever happens is good. More than that I have never asked, so there is no way to disappoint me.”They said, “You talk of strange things. What is this inferiority complex and what has this inferiority complex to do with politics?”I said, “You don’t understand simple psychology and neither do your great politicians understand simple psychology.”All these politicians on top in the world are sick people, so one way is to go on covering their wound. Yes, they can deceive others. When Jimmy Carter smiles you are deceived, but how can Jimmy Carter deceive himself? He knows it is just an exercise of the lips. There is nothing else inside, no smile.People reach to the highest rung of the ladder; then they become aware that their whole life has been a wastage. They have arrived, but where? They have arrived at the place for which they had been fighting – and it was not a small fight; it was tooth and nail – and destroying so many people, using so many people as means, and stepping on their heads.You have arrived at the last rung of the ladder but what have you gained? You have simply wasted your whole life. Now to even accept it needs tremendous courage. It is better to go on smiling and go on keeping the illusion: at least others believe that you are great. You know who you are. You are exactly the same as you were – perhaps worse, because all this struggle, all this violence has made you worse. You have lost all your humanity. You are no longer a being.It is so far away from you, that Gurdjieff used to say that not every person has a soul, for the simple reason – not that it is literally true, but he used to say – “Not everybody has got a soul, only a very few people who discover their being have.” They have it; others are simply living in the illusion, because scriptures say, and all the religions preach, that you are born with a soul.Gurdjieff was very drastic. He said, “It is all nonsense. You are not born with a soul. You have to earn it; you have to deserve it.” And I can understand what he means, although I will not say that you are not born with a soul.You are born with a soul but that soul is only a potential, and whatsoever Gurdjieff is saying is exactly the same. You have to bring that potential to actuality. You have to earn it. You have to deserve it.The politician recognizes it when his whole life has gone down the drain. Now, either he has to confess – which seems very stupid because he is confessing that his whole life has been the life of an idiot…Wounds are not healed by covering them. Religion is a cure. The word meditation and the word medicine come from the same root. Medicine is for the body; what medicine is for the body, meditation is for the soul. It is medicinal, it is a cure.You ask me, can a politician be religious? Remaining a politician, it is impossible. Yes, if he drops politics, then he is no longer a politician; he can become a religious man. So I am not dividing, not preventing the politician from becoming religious. What I am saying is: as a politician he cannot be religious because those are two different dimensions.Either you cover your wound or you cure it. You can’t do both together. And to cure it you have to uncover it, not cover it. Uncover it, know it, go deep into it, suffer it.To me that is the meaning of austerity – not standing in the sun, that is an idiotic act. And particularly in Oregon you should not do that. Stand in the sun, the Oregonian sun and the Oregonian atmosphere, and immediately you will become the Idiot General of Oregon. Avoid it! Or starving yourself or standing in the cold, in the river, for days together, this is not the way to cure yourself; you are just being befooled. Anybody who knows nothing is going to give you advice: “Do this and you will be cured,” but it is not a question of doing something for the cure.What is needed is an exploration of your whole being, unprejudiced, without condemnation, because you will find many things which you have been told are bad, evil. So don’t shrink back, let them be. You simply need not condemn them.You have started on an exploration. Just note that something is there, note it and go on. Don’t condemn it; don’t name it. Don’t bring any prejudice against or for, because that’s what prevents you from exploring. Your inner world closes immediately, you become tense – something evil. You go inside and you see something, and you become afraid that it is evil: greed, lust, anger, jealousy. My God! All these things, in me – it is better not to go in.That’s why millions of people don’t go in. They simply sit on the staircase outside their house. They live on the porch their whole life. It is a porch life! They never open the door of their house. And the house has many chambers; it is a palace. If you go in you will come across many things which others have told you are wrong. You don’t know, you simply say, “I am an ignorant man. I don’t know who you are. I have just come to explore, to do a survey.” And a surveyor need not be bothered about what is good and what is bad, he simply goes on looking, watching, observing.And you will be surprised by the strangest experience: that what you have called love up to now, hidden just behind it is hate; just take note. What you have been saying up to now is humbleness, just behind it is hidden your ego; just take note.If somebody asks me, “Are you a humble man?” I cannot say, “I am,” because I know humbleness is only the ego standing on its head. I am not an egoist, how can I be humble? Do you understand me? It is impossible to be humble without having an ego. And once you have seen that both are together, the strangest thing happens, as I was telling you.The moment you see that your love and your hate, your humbleness and ego are one; they evaporate.You have not to do anything at all. You have seen their secret. That secret was helping them to remain in you. You have seen the secret, now there is no place for them to hide. Go in again and again, and you will find less and less things there. Gatherings inside you are withering; crowds are going away. And the day is not far off when you will be left alone, and there is nobody, emptiness is in your hands. And suddenly you are cured.Don’t compare at all, because you are you, and somebody else is somebody else. Why should I compare myself with Yehudi Menuhin or with Pablo Picasso? I don’t see the point at all. They are doing their thing; I am doing my thing. They are enjoying doing their thing, perhaps – because about them I cannot be certain. But I am certain about myself that I am enjoying whatsoever I am doing or not doing.I said I cannot be certain about them because Pablo Picasso was not a happy man, in fact very unhappy. His paintings show his inner misery in many ways and he has spread that misery on the canvas.And why did Picasso become the greatest painter of this age? The reason is because this age knows inner suffering the most.Nobody would have thought him a painter five hundred years ago. They would have laughed, and they would have put him into a mental institution. And five hundred years ago, mental institutions were not easy places to be in. They did all kinds of things, particularly beating, because they thought it was possible to beat the madness out, because madness was thought of as something like an evil spirit possessing you. A good beating every day, and they thought the madness would go.They used – just three hundred years ago – to take blood out of the madman, so he became weakened. They thought that his energies were being possessed by an evil spirit; if you took his energies out, the evil spirit would leave the place because there was nothing to feed on: it was feeding on his blood. Good logic – and they were doing just that.Nobody would have thought that these were paintings. Only this century could believe that Picasso is a great painter, because this century suffers, is a little alert of suffering, of inner misery – and this man has put it in color. What you cannot put even in words, Picasso has been able to put in color. You don’t understand what it is, but somehow you feel a deep at-one-ment. It has an appeal; something clicks in you. It is not intellectual because you cannot figure out what it is, but you remain stuck watching, looking, as if it were a mirror and something of your inside, of your intestines, is there. Picasso’s paintings became the greatest in this age because they served almost like an X-ray. They brought your misery out. That’s why I said perhaps. And about anybody else I can only say perhaps.Only about myself can I be certain. I know that if you go on exploring your inner world without condemnation, without appreciation, without thinking at all, just watching the facts, they start disappearing. A day comes, you are left alone, the whole crowd has gone away; and in that moment, for the first time you feel what psychic healing is.And from psychic healing the door opens to spiritual healing.You need not open it, it opens on its own. You just reach to the psychic center and the door opens. It has been waiting for you, perhaps for many lives. When you come, the door immediately opens, and from that door, you not only see yourself, you see the whole existence, all the stars, the whole cosmos.Hence I can say absolutely: no politician can become religious unless he drops politics. Then he is not a politician, and what I am saying does not refer to him.You have also asked: can a religious man become a politician? That is even more impossible than the first because there is no reason at all for him to become one. If inferiority is the cause that drives you into ambition, then how can a religious man become a politician? There is no driving force. But once in a while it has happened in the past, and it may happen in the future, so let me say this to you.In the past it was possible because the world was dominated by the monarchy. Once in a while, the king’s son might turn out to be a poet. It is very difficult for a poet to become the president of America; who is going to listen to him? People think he is crazy, and he will look like a hippie. He cannot shape up himself, and he is trying to shape up the whole world?But in the past it was possible because of the monarchy. The last emperor of India, from whom the Britishers took over, was a poet – that is why Britishers could take over India – Bahadurshah Zafar, one of the greatest Urdu poets. Now, it is not possible for a poet to become an emperor; it was just accidental that he was born a son of an emperor.The enemy forces were entering the capital and he was writing poetry. When his prime minister knocked on the door and said, “It is absolutely urgent, because the enemies have entered the capital,” Bahadurshah said, “Don’t disturb me. I am writing just the last four lines. I think I will be able to finish these four lines before they come here. Don’t disturb.” And he started writing. He finished his poem; that was more important for him.And he was such a simple and good man; he came out and he said, “What is this nonsense of killing people? If you want the country you take it, what is the fuss about? I was burdened with all the anxieties, now you can be burdened with all the anxieties. Leave me alone.”But they would not leave him alone because they were politicians and generals. To leave this man in New Delhi was dangerous: he may collect his forces, he may have resources – nobody knows. They took him from India into Burma; he died in Rangoon. In his last poem that he wrote from his deathbed, he said, “How poor I am. I cannot get even six feet in my beloved’s street.” He is talking about New Delhi, which he loved, which he had created; and he was a poet so he made the city as beautiful as possible. He said, “I cannot get even six feet to be buried in my own beloved’s street. How unfortunate Zafar” – Zafar was his poetic name – “How unfortunate, Zafar, you are.”He was buried in Rangoon; they did not even bring his dead body to New Delhi. He insisted, “At least when I am dead take my body to my city, to my country. A dead body cannot be dangerous.” But politicians and generals think in different ways. Bahadurshah was the emperor loved by the people. Seeing him dead, “There may be a revolt, there may be some trouble, why get into trouble? Bury him there in Rangoon. Nobody will even hear for years that he has died.”So in the old monarchical days it was possible that in the western hemisphere a man like Marcus Aurelius could happen. He was a religious man, but this was just accidental. Marcus Aurelius could not become a president or a prime minister today because he would not go asking for votes; he would not beg – for what?In India it happened a few times. Ashoka, one of the great emperors of India, was a religious man. He was so religious that when his son asked – the only son, who was going to be the successor – to become a monk, he danced. He said, “This is what I have been waiting for, that one day you would understand.” Then his daughter, his only daughter, he had only two children, one son and one daughter, when the daughter, Sanghamitra, asked him – she also wanted to go into the world of meditation – he said, “Go. This is my only happiness.” But today it is impossible.In India there was one great king, Poras; he fought against Alexander the Great. And you will be surprised at how western books have been unfair to this man Poras. Alexander the Great becomes a pygmy before Poras. When they reached India, Alexander played a trick – he was a politician…Alexander sent his wife to meet Poras, on a particular day. There is a day in India, the day of the sisters, when the sister just binds a thread on your wrist. You may be her real brother, you may not be her real brother, but the moment she binds the thread on your wrist you become a brother to her. And it is a double oath: the brother says, “I will protect you,” and the sister says, “I will pray for your protection.”On that particular day, Alexander sent his wife to Poras. He was staying outside Poras’ kingdom. There is a river that was the boundary of Poras’ kingdom; he was staying outside, and he sent his wife. And when it was declared in Poras’ court, “The wife of Alexander the Great wants to meet you,” he came out to greet her, because in India that was a tradition. Even if the enemy comes to your home, he is a guest, and the guest is a god.He took her into his court, gave her a throne to sit on, and said, “You could have called me. There was no need for you to come such a long way.”She said, “I have come to make you my brother. I have no brother, and today, I heard, is the sisters’ day; I could not resist.”This was a political game. And Poras could understand what Alexander and his wife understood about sisters’ day, and why Alexander waited up to this day to send his wife, but he said, “This is perfectly right. If you don’t have any brother, I am your brother.” She had brought the thread; she tied it and Poras touched her feet. The brother has to touch the feet of the sister; whether she is younger or older does not matter.A tremendous respect for womanhood has been there, side by side with a tremendous bitterness against women. Perhaps the bitterness was created by the monks and the priests, and the respect was created by the religious people. Immediately Alexander’s wife said, “Now you are my brother, and I hope you will save me, but the only way to save me is not to kill Alexander. Would you like your sister to remain a widow all her life?”Poras said, “There is no question about it. You need not speak about it – it is settled. Alexander will not be touched at all. Now we are related.”And this happened: the next day Alexander attacked, and a moment came in the fight when Poras killed Alexander’s horse. Alexander fell from the horse and Poras was on his elephant – because in India, the elephant was the real fighter’s animal, not the horse – the elephant was just going to put his feet on Alexander, and Alexander would have been finished. Just by habit Poras pulled out his spear and was going to kill Alexander, when he saw the thread on his wrist. He put his spear back, told the mahout, the man who guides the elephant, “Move away, and inform Alexander that I will not kill him.”That was the moment when Alexander would have been killed, and all his desire for conquering the world would have been finished; the whole of history would have been different. But Poras was a religious man, made of a different mettle: ready to be defeated but not ready to be demoralized. And he was defeated – he missed his chance.Poras was brought before Alexander in his court, a temporary court, with chains on his hands and his legs. But the way he walked… Even Alexander said to him, “You are still walking like an emperor, even with chains on your feet and chains on your hands.”Poras said, “This is my way of walking. It has nothing to do with my being an emperor or a prisoner; this is my way of walking. This is how I am.”Alexander asked him, “How would you like to be treated?”Poras said, “What a question! An emperor should be treated like an emperor. What a stupid question.”Alexander says in his notes, “I have never come across a man like Poras. He was in chains, imprisoned – I could have killed him immediately, then and there – but the way he walked, the way he talked…” Alexander was really impressed. He said, “Take away his chains; he will remain an emperor anywhere. Give his kingdom back to him. But,” he said, “before we leave I would like to ask you one question. When the chance was there when you could have killed me, why did you pull your spear back? Just one more second and I’d have been finished, or your elephant could have crushed me, but you prevented it. Why?”Poras said, “Don’t ask that. You know it; you are a politician, I am not. This thread – do you recognize it? You had sent this thread with your wife; now she is my sister, and I cannot kill my own brother-in-law. It is not possible for me to make her a widow. I chose to be defeated rather than to kill you. But there is no need for you to feel obliged toward me; this is just how a really centered man should behave.”So in the past it was possible because of the monarchy. But within the monarchy idiots also became kings, madmen also became kings, everything is possible. So I am not supporting monarchy, I am simply saying that it was possible within the monarchy for a religious man, by accident, to become an emperor.In the future, democracy is not going to last long, because the politician is already ignorant before the scientist; he is already in the hands of the scientist. The future belongs to the scientist, not to the politician.That means we will have to change the word democracy. I have a word for it: meritocracy.Merit will be the decisive factor. Not whether you can gather votes by canvassing all kinds of promises and hopes, but your merit, your real power in the scientific world will decide. And once government comes into the hands of the scientist, then everything is possible because I have called science, objective religion; and religion, subjective science.Once it comes into the hands of science, the world map will be different, because what is the fight between the Russian scientist and the American scientist? They are both working on the same projects; it will be far quicker if they work together. This is sheer stupidity, that all over the world the same experiments are being repeated in every nation; it is unbelievable. All these people together can do miracles. Divided, it becomes more expensive.For example, if Albert Einstein had not escaped from Germany, then who would have won the Second World War? Do you think America and Britain and Russia would have won the Second World War? No. A single man’s escape from Germany, Albert Einstein escaping from Germany, has shaped history. All these bogus names: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, they don’t mean anything. That man did the whole thing because he created the atom bomb. He wrote a letter to Roosevelt: “The atom bomb is ready with me, and unless you use it there is no way to stop the war.”He regretted it his whole life, but that’s another story. The atom bomb was used, and the moment it was used there was no question of Japan going on fighting. The war was won: Hiroshima and Nagasaki burning ended the Second World War. Albert Einstein was working on the same project in Germany. He could have written to just a different address – instead of to Roosevelt, to Adolf Hitler – and the whole history would have been different, totally different.The future is going to be in the hands of the scientist. It is not far away. Now there are nuclear weapons, politicians cannot manage to be on top. They know nothing about it, not even the ABC.It was said while Einstein was alive that only twelve persons in the whole world understood his theory of relativity. One of those twelve people was Bertrand Russell who wrote a small book for those who could not understand it: The ABC of Relativity. He thought that at least they could understand the ABC – but even that is not possible, because if you can understand the ABC then the whole alphabet becomes simple. It is not a question of only understanding ABC; then XYZ is not far away. The real problem is to understand the ABC.Now all these politicians don’t understand anything at all. Sooner or later the world is going to be in the hands of the people who have merit. First it will move into the hands of the scientists.This you can take almost as a prediction that the world is going to move into the hands of the scientists. And then a new dimension opens up.Sooner or later the scientist is going to invite the sage, the saint, because he cannot manage it alone.The scientist cannot manage himself. He can manage everything but he cannot manage himself. Albert Einstein may know all about the stars of the universe but he knows nothing about his own center.This is going to be the future: from politicians to scientists, from scientists to religious man – but that will be a totally different kind of world. Religious people cannot go asking for votes. You will have to ask them. You will have to request them. And if they feel that your request is sincere and the need is there, they may act in the world. But remember it will not be politics at all.So let me repeat, the politician can become religious if he drops politics; otherwise it is impossible. The religious man can become part of politics if politics changes its whole character; otherwise it is impossible for a religious man to be in politics. He cannot be a politician.But the way things are moving, it is absolutely certain that first the world will go into the hands of the scientist, and then, from the scientist it will go to the mystics. And only in the hands of the mystics can you yourself be safe.The world can be really a paradise. In fact, there is no other paradise unless we make one here.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is the hypothesis of God not useful in any way? – because the very thought of dropping the idea of God makes me feel immensely afraid.It is already too late! The moment one starts calling the idea of God a hypothesis, the idea of God is already dropped.The so-called religious people will never use the word hypothesis for God. For them God is not our hypothesis, but on the contrary we are his creation; he is the very source of existence, he is the most existential being. But when you call God a hypothesis that means you are putting him in the same category as Euclidian hypotheses in geometry, or other hypotheses which are only assumptions; they may prove right, they may not prove right. Only experiment, only experience is going to decide it, and that too will not be an ultimate decision because future experiments may cancel it.A hypothesis is an assumed fact – for the time being accepted as true, but only for the time being. Nobody can say it will be true tomorrow too. In three hundred years of scientific growth you can see it: something was true for Newton, it is not true for Rutherford; it was true for Rutherford, it is not true for Albert Einstein. Better experiments, better instruments can always change the hypothesis.So no theologian is going to call God a hypothesis – for the theologian God is the very truth, and he is not dependent on your experiments. If you cannot find him it is your failure, not a proof that God does not exist. If you succeed, of course, he exists. If you fail, you fail; God still exists.Hypothesis is a scientific term, not a theological concept; and science is very honest. Theology is just the opposite, very dishonest. The very word theology shows its dishonesty, insincerity. Theo means God, logy means logic. But nobody has ever offered any logic about God. Every argument goes against God; no argument has been yet produced which proves God. Still they go on calling it theology – “logic of God.”It would have been more honest for the theologians to call God a hypothesis, but you cannot worship a hypothesis, can you? Knowing that this is only a hypothesis, perhaps right, perhaps wrong… But worship is not possible with a “perhaps,” with a maybe; worship needs a blind faith that it is so. Even if all the evidence goes against it, then too it is so. That’s the meaning of faith. Faith is not logic, it is absolutely illogical. And to call the idea of God a hypothesis means destroying all the churches, all the temples, all the synagogues.The word hypothesis is very significant: it means you are allowed to doubt because you are allowed to experiment and find. It is only a temporary assumption to begin with – one has to begin with something, so for the time being, just to begin with, we accept a hypothesis. But how can you worship it? How can the priest exploit you? It is absolutely against the religious people to use the word hypothesis. They will not even agree to call God an idea, because an idea is your mind thing, your projection. To them God is not an idea, God is the only truth.In India, where religion has taken very subtle forms, they say you are an idea in the mind of God, not vice versa. God is not an idea in your mind – because in your mind there is all kinds of rubbish: you have nightmares, you have dreams, you have all kinds of desires. God is also put in the same category? And your ideas change every moment; they are just like clouds, changing their form continuously.Certainly when you were a child your ideas were different. When you were adolescent your ideas were different, when you became a young man your ideas were different, and when you become old you cannot have the same ideas that you had in your youth. Experience changes everything. It will be simply impossible to retain the same idea your whole life; only a superb idiot can do it. If you have a little bit of intelligence then your idea is going to change with life.Even to call God an idea will not be acceptable to the religious people – hypothesis is far away. That’s why I say it is too late.You are calling God an idea… And the definition of meditation is to be in a state of mind where no ideas exist, not even the idea of God.Gautam the Buddha says, “If you meet me on the path cut my head off immediately, because what am I doing there? – disturbing you. The idea of me is a disturbance.” It is just like throwing a pebble in a silent lake, and so many ripples, millions of ripples arise. A simple idea thrown in the silent lake of your mind creates millions of waves; it may take you far away from yourself.Every idea takes you away from yourself; hence the definition of meditation: a state of consciousness without any ideas.So in meditation there is no way to go away from yourself, you are simply centered in your own being. There is no object that you can see. You are left totally alone. Your consciousness starts turning upon itself.Consciousness is just like light. The light is here, we are all here; the light is falling on us, on the walls, on the curtains, on everything that is here. These are all objects. Just think for a moment: if all the objects are removed, then there is only light, not falling on anything. But light is unconscious – you are conscious. So when all objects are removed, your consciousness falls upon itself, turns upon itself; it is a turning in, because there is nothing to prevent it.That is the meaning of object: object means that which prevents, raises an objection, obstructs, is a hindrance. When there is no object, where can you go? You have to turn upon yourself, consciousness being conscious of itself – there is no idea of God.In ordinary states of mind, ideas are just rubbish. In that extraordinary space of no-mind, ideas don’t exist. So either you have to put God in the category of rubbish, or you have to put him where no objects are allowed.The word idea cannot be used by religious people for God. Idea is used by the philosophers, just as hypothesis is used by the scientist. For the religious person God is the only reality, but in using the word idea you have already gone too far – too far from the so-called reality of God.But your question is significant from many points. First: you ask, isn’t the hypothesis useful in any way? It is useful – not for you but for those who want to exploit you: the priest, the rabbi, the pope, the whole army of all these people around the world. Without the hypothesis of God, what is a pope? What is a shankaracharya? Just nobodies! Then who is Jesus? You cannot be a son of a hypothesis, it will look very odd. You cannot be a messiah of a hypothesis. It would be a very strange world if hypotheses started sending messiahs.God has to be real for all these people to exploit you, and for thousands of years they have been exploiting. And they will continue to exploit you for the simple reason that you are afraid to drop this idea.That shows a tremendously significant point within your being. Why do you feel afraid of dropping the idea of God? Certainly the idea of God is somehow preventing you from being afraid; so the moment you drop it, you start feeling afraid. It is a kind of psychological protection, that’s what it is.The child is bound to be afraid. But in the mother’s womb he is not afraid. I have not heard that any child in the mother’s womb ever thinks of going to the synagogue or to the church, or reading the Bible or the Koran or the Gita; or even bothers about whether there is a God or not. I cannot conceive that a child in the mother’s womb will in any way be interested in God, in the Devil, in heaven, in hell. For what? He is already in paradise. Things cannot be better than they are.He is completely protected in a warm, cozy womb, floating in chemicals which are nourishing. And you will be surprised – in that nine months the child grows more than he will ever grow in ninety years, proportionately. In nine months he travels such a long journey; from being almost nothing he becomes a being. In nine months he passes through millions of years of evolution, from the very first being up to now. He passes through all the phases.And life is absolutely secure: no need for any employment, no fear of starvation, hunger; everything is being done by the mother’s body. Living nine months in the mother’s womb in such absolute security creates a problem, which has produced your so-called religions.As the child comes out of the mother’s womb, the first thing that happens to him is fear. The reason is obvious. His home is lost, his security is lost. His warmth, his surroundings, all that he knew as his world is completely lost, and he is thrown into a strange world, of which he knows nothing. He has to start breathing on his own.It takes a few seconds for the child to recognize the fact that he has to breathe now on his own – your mother’s breathing is not going to help. Just to bring him to his senses the doctor hangs him upside down, and hits him on his bottom, hard. What a beginning! What a welcome! And just out of that hit he starts breathing.Have you ever observed that whenever you are afraid your breathing changes? If you have not watched it before, you can watch it now. Whenever you are afraid, your breathing will change, immediately. And when you are at ease, at home, unafraid of anything, you will find your breathing falling into a harmony, in a deep accord, becoming more and more silent. In deep meditation it happens sometimes that you feel as if your breathing has stopped. It does not stop, but it almost stops.The beginning for the child is fear of everything. For nine months he was in darkness, and in a modern hospital, where he is going to be born, there will be just glaring tube lights all around. And on his eyes, his retina, which has never seen light before, not even a candle light, this is too much. This light is a shock to his eyes.And the doctor does not take even a few seconds – he cuts the connection that is still joining the child with the mother, the last hope of security – and such a tiny being! You know it perfectly well, that nobody is more helpless than a human child, no other child in the whole existence.That’s why horses have not invented the hypothesis of God. Elephants have not thought about the idea of God; there is no need. The child of the elephant immediately starts walking and looking around and exploring the world. He is not as helpless as a human child. In fact, so much depends on the helplessness of a human child that you may be surprised: your family, your society, your culture, your religion, your philosophy – everything arises out of the helplessness of the human child.In animals, families don’t exist for the simple reason that the child does not need the parents. Man had to decide for a certain system. The father and the mother have to be together to look after the child. It is the outcome of their love affair; this is their doing. Now if the human child is left alone, just like so many animals are, you cannot imagine that he is going to survive: impossible! Where is he going to find food? Whom is he going to ask? What is he going to ask?Perhaps he has come too early? There are a few biologists who think that the human child is born premature – nine months are not enough, because he comes into the world so helpless. But the human body is such that the mother cannot carry the child for more than nine months, otherwise she will die, and her death will mean the death of the child.It has been calculated that if the child could live in the mother’s womb for at least three years, then perhaps there would be no need for a father and mother and the family, and the society and the culture, and God and the priest. But the child cannot live in the mother’s womb for three years. This strange biological situation has affected the whole of human behavior, thinking, the structure of family, society; and this has caused the fear.The first experience of the child is the fear, and the last experience of the man is also fear.Birth is also a kind of death, you should remember; just look at it from the child’s point of view. He was living in a certain world, which was absolutely satisfactory. He was not in any need at all, he was not greedy for anything more. He was simply enjoying being, enjoying growing – and then suddenly he is thrown out. To the child, this experience is an experience of death: death of his whole world, of his security, of his cozy home.Scientists say that we have not been able yet to create a home as cozy as the womb. We have been trying – all our homes are just efforts to create that cozy home. We have even tried to make water beds, to give you the same feeling. We have bathtubs with hot water; lying down in them you can have a little feeling of the child. Those who know how to take a really good hot bath will also put salt into it, because in the mother’s womb it is very salty – the exact amount of salt that is in sea water. But how long can you lie down in a bathtub? We have isolation tanks which are nothing but a search for the same womb that you have lost.Sigmund Freud is not an enlightened man – in fact he is a little bit cuckoo, but sometimes cuckoos also sing beautiful songs. Sometimes he has significant ideas. For example, he thinks the idea of the man making love to the woman is nothing but an effort to enter the womb again. There may be something in it. This man is crazy, the idea seems to be farfetched; but even if a man like Sigmund Freud is crazy he has to be listened to very carefully.I feel that there is something of truth in it: the search is for the womb, for the same passage as he had come out from. He cannot reach that womb, it is true. Then he created all kinds of things; he started making caves, houses, airplanes. You see the interior of an airplane – it will not be a wonder if one day you find that in the airplane people are floating in tubs of hot water, salted. The airplane can give you exactly the same situation, but it is not going to be satisfactory.The child has not known anything else. We try to make it similar – just push a button in the airplane and the air hostess is there. We make it as comfortable as possible, but we cannot make it as comfortable as it was in the womb. There, you had no need even to push a button. Even before you were hungry you were fed. Even before you needed air, it reached you. You had no responsibility at all.So the child coming out of the mother’s womb, if he feels it at all, must feel it as death. He cannot feel it as birth, that is impossible. That is our idea – those who are standing outside – we say that this is birth.And the second time, again one day, after his whole life’s effort… The person has been able to make something – a little house, a family, a small circle of friends, a little warmth, a little corner somewhere in the world where he can relax and be himself, where he is accepted. Difficult – a whole life’s struggle, and suddenly, one day, he finds again he is being thrown out.The doctor has come again – and this is the man who had hit him! But that time it was to start the breathing; this time, as far as we know… Now we are on this side, we don’t know the other side. The other side is left to the imagination; that’s why heaven and hell, and every kind of imagination has gone wild. We are on this side and this man is dying. To us he is dying; perhaps he is again being reborn. But that only he knows, and he cannot turn back and tell us, “Don’t be worried; I am not dead, I am alive.” He could not turn in his mother’s womb to have a last glimpse and say good-bye to everybody. Neither can he turn back now, open his eyes and say good-bye to you all, and say, “Don’t be worried. I am not dying, I am being reborn.”The Hindu idea of rebirth is nothing but a projection of the ordinary birth. For the womb – if the womb thinks – the child is dead. For the child – if he thinks – he is dying. But he is born; it was not death, it is birth. The Hindus have projected the same idea on death. From this side it looks as if he is dying, but from the other side… But the other side is our imagination; we can make it as we want it.Every religion makes the other side in a different way because every society and every culture depends on a different geography, a different history. For example: the Tibetan cannot think of the other side as cool – even cool is fearful, cold is impossible. The Tibetan thinks that the dead person is warm, in a new world which always remains warm.The Indian cannot think that it always remains warm. Even four months’ heat in India is too much, but for eternity to remain warm – you will be cooked! The Hindu religion had no idea of air conditioning, but the way they describe their paradise, it is almost air conditioned – always cool air, neither hot nor cold, but cool. It is always spring, Indian spring – around the earth there are different kinds of spring, and this is the Indian spring. All the flowers are in blossom, the winds are full of fragrance, the birds are singing, everything is alive – but not warm, cool air. That they remind us again and again: cool air continues to flow.This is your mind that is projecting the idea; otherwise, for the Tibetan or for the Indian or for the Mohammedan, it would not be different. The Mohammedan cannot think that the other world is going to be a desert – he has suffered so much in the Arabian desert. The other world is an oasis – an oasis all over. It is not that after a hundred miles you find a small oasis with a little water and a few trees, no – just oases all over, and desert nowhere.We project, but to the person who is dying it is again the same process that he has experienced once. It is a well known fact that at the time of death, if the person has not become unconscious, has not fallen into a coma, he starts remembering his whole life cycle. He goes on back to the first moment of his life when he was born. It seems to be significant that when he is leaving this world he may have a look at all that has happened. Just in a few seconds the whole calendar moves, just as it moves in your movies. That calendar goes on moving, because in a two hour movie they have to cover many years. If the calendar moves at the usual pace, you will be sitting in the movie hall for two years, and who is going to be able to afford that? No, the calendar just goes on moving, the dates go on changing, fast.It goes even faster at the time of death. In a single moment the whole life flashes by, and stops at the first moment. It is the same process that is happening again – life has come around full circle.Why did I want you to remember this? – because your God is nothing but your first day’s fear which goes on and on until the last moment, becoming bigger and bigger. That’s why when a person is young he may be an atheist, he can afford to be, but as he grows older, to be an atheist becomes a little difficult. If you ask him when he is just coming close to his grave, one foot in the grave, “Are you still an atheist?” he will say, “I am having second thoughts” – because of his fear of what is going to happen. His whole world is disappearing.My grandfather was not a religious man, not at all. He was closer to Zorba the Greek: eat, drink and be merry, there is no other world, it is all nonsense. My father was a very religious man; perhaps it was because of my grandfather – the reaction, the generation gap. But it was just upside down in my family: my grandfather was an atheist and perhaps because of his atheism my father turned out to be a theist. And whenever my father would go to the temple, my grandfather would laugh and he would say, “Again? Go on, waste your life in front of those stupid statues!”I love Zorba for many reasons; one of the reasons was that in Zorba I found my grandfather again. He loved food so much that he used to not trust anybody; he would prepare it himself. In my life I have been a guest in thousands of families in India, but I have never tasted anything so delicious as my grandfather’s cooking. He loved it so much that every week it was a feast for all his friends – and he would prepare the whole day.My mother and my aunts and the servants and cooks – everybody was thrown out of the kitchen. When my grandfather was cooking, nobody was to disturb him. But he was very friendly to me; he allowed me to watch and he said, “Learn, don’t depend on other people. Only you know your taste. Who else can know it?”I said, “That is beyond me; I am too lazy, but I can watch. The whole day cooking? I cannot do it.” So I have not learned anything, but just watching was a joy – the way he worked, almost like a sculptor or a musician or a painter. Cooking was not just cooking, it was art to him. And if anything went just a little below his standard, he would throw it away immediately. He would cook it again, and I would say, “It is perfectly okay.”He would say, “You know it is not perfectly okay, it is just okay; but I am a perfectionist. Until it comes up to my standard, I am not going to offer it to anybody. I love my food.”He used to make many kinds of drinks… And whatsoever he did, the whole family was against him: they said that he was just a nuisance. He wouldn’t allow anybody in the kitchen, and in the evening he gathered all the atheists of the town. And just to defy Jainism, he would wait till the sun set. He would not eat before then, because Jainism says to eat before sunset; after sunset eating is not allowed. He used to send me again and again to see whether the sun had set or not.He annoyed the whole family. And they could not be angry with him – he was the head of the family, the oldest man – but they were angry at me. That was easier. They said, “Why do you go on coming again and again to see whether the sun has set or not? That old man is getting you also lost, utterly lost.”I was very sad because I only came across the book Zorba the Greek, when my grandfather was dying. The only thing that I felt at his funeral pyre was that he would have loved it if I had translated it for him and read it to him. I had read many books to him. He was uneducated. He could only write his signature, that was all. He could neither read nor write – but he was very proud of it.He used to say, “It is good that my father did not force me to go to school, otherwise he would have spoiled me. These books spoil people so much.” He would say to me, “Remember, your father is spoiled, your uncles are spoiled; they are continually reading religious books, scriptures, and it is all rubbish. While they are reading, I am living; and it is good to know through living.”He used to tell me, “They will send you to the university – they won’t listen to me. And I cannot be much help, because if your father and your mother insist, they will send you to the university. But beware: don’t get lost in books.”He enjoyed small things. I asked him, “Everybody believes in God, why don’t you believe, baba?” I called him baba; that is the word for grandfather in India.He said, “Because I am not afraid.”A very simple answer: “Why should I be afraid? There is no need to be afraid; I have not done any wrong, I have not harmed anybody. I have just lived my life joyously. If there is any God, and I meet him sometime, he cannot be angry at me. I will be angry at him: ‘Why have you created this world? – this kind of world?’ I am not afraid.”When he was dying I asked him again, because the doctors were saying that it was a question of only a few minutes. His pulse was getting lost, his heart was sinking, but he was fully conscious. I asked him, “Baba, one question…”He opened his eyes and said, “I know your question: why don’t you believe in God? I knew that you were going to ask this question when I was dying. Do you think death will make me afraid? I have lived so joyously and so completely, there is no regret that I am dying.“What else am I going to do tomorrow? I have done it all, there is nothing left. And if my pulse is slowing down and my heartbeat is slowing down, I think everything is going to be perfectly okay, because I am feeling very peaceful, very calm, very silent. Whether I die completely or live, I cannot say right now. But one thing you should remember: I am not afraid.”You tell me that the moment you think of dropping the idea of God, fear comes up. It is a simple indication that with the rock of the idea of God, you are repressing fear; so the moment you remove the rock, the fear springs up.I had a teacher in my high school days who was a very learned brahmin of the place. Almost the whole city respected him. He used to live behind my house, and a small path by the side of my house went to his place. Just at the end of my house was a very big neem tree. He taught Sanskrit and was continually teaching about God and prayer and worship. In fact he was indoctrinating everybody’s minds.I asked him, “My grandfather does not believe in God, and whenever I ask him why, he says, ‘Because I am not afraid.’ Are you very afraid? You seem to be continually hammering this word God into our heads, and I see you every morning in your house chanting so loudly for three hours that the whole neighborhood is disturbed. But nobody can say anything because it is religious chanting.”If you do something like modern dancing, or play jazz music, then everybody will be on your neck, complaining that you are disturbing them. He was disturbing everybody, every morning from five to eight – and he had a really loud voice – but it was religious, so nobody could complain.I said, “Are you so afraid? Three hours every day you have to pray. It must be a great fear if for three hours every day you have to persuade God to protect you.”He said, “I am not afraid. Your grandfather is a rascal.” They were almost the same age… “He is a rascal, don’t listen to him. He will spoil you.”I said, “It is strange: he thinks you will spoil me, and you think he will spoil me; and as far as I am concerned nobody is going to spoil me. I believe my grandfather when he says that he is not afraid – but about you, I am not certain.”He asked, “Why?”I said, “Because when you pass the neem tree in the night you start chanting” – because it was known that the neem tree had ghosts in it, so people ordinarily never went near that tree in the night. But he had to go that way because his house was there; otherwise he would have to go almost half a mile round by the main road and then reach his house from the other direction. Going that way round each time was too difficult, so he had found a religious strategy: he would start chanting. As he entered the path, he started chanting. I said, “I have heard you. Although you don’t chant as loudly as you chant in the morning, you do chant, I have heard you. And I know there are ghosts so I cannot say you are doing anything wrong.”He said, “How did you come to know?”I said, “Many times I am there by the side of the neem tree in the darkness; your chanting becomes louder and you start walking faster – that much I know. Why do you chant there if you are not afraid? And if you are afraid of ghosts, then that three-hour morning chanting with God is useless. Can’t he save you against ghosts?”He said, “From today I am not going to chant.” Certainly he kept his word. He was not chanting, although he was walking faster than usual. And all that I had to do was to sit in the tree with a kerosene can – empty, so I could beat it like a drum. I simply drummed the can and threw it on top of him. You should have seen the situation! He ran away screaming and shouting, “Bhoot! Bhoot!” Bhoot is the Hindi word for ghost.In India the ancient traditional dress is not like western dress. Now it is changing because western dress is more utilitarian; Indian dress is more luxurious but is not utilitarian. If you are working in the field or in the factory, Indian dress is dangerous because the robe is long and loose, it can get caught in any mechanism. Then the dhoti, the lower dress, that too is very loose. It reminds us that once the country must have been in a very comfortable time.You cannot give the Indian dress to soldiers; otherwise they will not be able to fight, their clothes will be enough to finish them! Even if they had to run away they would not be able to. Can I run in my robe? Impossible. It would be easier to die rather than to run.This man became so afraid… When the tin can fell on him with a loud noise, his dhoti opened up and he was so afraid that he entered his house without it, naked! His dhoti was left there. I came down the tree, took the dhoti, and with my can I escaped from there.His whole house was in a chaos. Everybody, all the neighborhood people around were asking what had happened. He said, “That boy disturbed everything. He told me this morning, ‘Don’t do the mantra. If you are not afraid, don’t do the mantra.’ He gave me a challenge. Tomorrow I am going to see him about what happened to me. It is because of him that in my old age I have become a laughingstock. The whole neighborhood has seen me naked!” And in India to be naked, and that too for one of the very respected priests and scholars of the town…He came the next day and was very serious. I knew that he was coming, so I took the tin with his dhoti inside. When he saw me coming with that tin, he said, “What is that?”I said, “First, you start. You have threatened, you have told the neighbors that you will come to see me. I have also come to see you – now it is a question of who sees whom. You can impose any punishment you want on me, but remember, I will open this can before the whole school.”He said, “What is in it?”I said, “Bhoot! Ghost! I have caught in it the ghost that made you afraid.”He said, “Ghost? Is this the tin can that fell from the tree?”I said, “Of course.”He said, “Take it back, it is dangerous.”But I said, “Please look inside and see what is there.” I opened the tin can and took out his dhoti and said, “At least take your dhoti back.”He said, “But how did you manage it?”I said, “Whom do you think was managing it all? You should thank me for taking all the trouble of climbing the tree, drumming the tin can, and then throwing it on top of you; then collecting your dhoti in darkness, and escaping before I was caught. It was just to show you not to lie to me.” And since that day, although he knew that I was the person who did the whole thing, he stopped coming by that path, he would go around. I asked him why – “You know perfectly well I was the person.”He said, “I don’t want to take a chance. I don’t believe you – you may have collected the dhoti and the tin can in the morning, and it may have been really a ghost.”I said, “I am telling you, I was in that tree.”He never came again in the night on that path. My whole family knew that I was the person responsible, because they had seen me going up the tree, but even my family became afraid. They started saying, “Perhaps the ghost took possession of you.”I said, “Strange people! I have said I did it, but now you are projecting new ideas: that the ghost took possession of me, that’s why I did the whole thing. You can’t take simple facts as simple.”If the fear comes up, that means you have to face it; it is in no way going to help you to cover it with the idea of God.You cannot have faith again, that is destroyed. Once you have met me you cannot have faith in God, because doubt is a reality, and faith is fiction. And no fiction can stand before a fact. Now God is going to remain a hypothesis to you; your prayer will be useless. You will know it is a hypothesis, you cannot forget that it is a hypothesis.Once you have heard a truth it is impossible to forget it.That is one of the qualities of truth, that you don’t need to remember it.The lie has to be remembered continually; you may forget. The person habituated to lies needs a better memory than the person who is habituated to truth, because a true person has no need of memory; if you only say the truth there is no need to remember. But if you are saying a lie, then you have to continually remember, because you have said one lie to one person, another lie to another person; something else to somebody else. To whom you have said what, you have to categorize in your mind and keep. And whenever a question arises about a lie you have to lie again, so it is a series. The lie does not believe in birth control.Truth is celibate, it has no children at all; it is unmarried in fact.Once you have understood, only once, that God is nothing but a hypothesis created by the priests, the politicians, the power elite, the pedagogues – all those who want to keep you in psychological slavery, who have some vested interest in your slavery… They all want to keep you afraid, always afraid, trembling deep inside, because if you are not afraid, you are dangerous.You can either be a person who is a coward, afraid, ready to submit, surrender, a person who has himself no dignity, no respect for his own being – or you can be fearless. But then you are going to be a rebel, you cannot avoid that.Either you can be a man of faith or you are going to be a rebellious spirit. So those people who don’t want you to be rebels – because your being rebellious goes against their interests – go on enforcing, conditioning your mind with Christianity, with Judaism, with Mohammedanism, with Hinduism, and they keep you trembling deep inside.That is their power, so anybody who is interested in power, whose whole life is nothing but a will-to-power, has tremendous use for the hypothesis of God.If you are afraid of God – and if you believe in God you have to be afraid – you have to follow his orders and commandments, his holy book, his messiah, his incarnation; you have to follow him and his agents. In fact he does not exist, only the agent exists. This is a very strange business.Religion is the strangest business of all. There is no boss, but there are mediators: the priest, the bishop, the cardinal, the pope, the messiah, the whole hierarchy – and on top there is nobody. But Jesus derives his authority and power from God – his only begotten son. The pope derives his authority from Jesus – his only true representative, infallible. And it goes on and on to the lowest priest. But there is no God; it is your fear.You asked for God to be invented because you could not live alone.You were incapable of facing life, its beauties, its joys, its sufferings, its anguishes. You were not ready to experience them on your own without anybody protecting you, without somebody being an umbrella to you. You asked for God out of fear. And certainly there are con men everywhere. You ask and they will do it for you. You asked and they said, “We know God is, and you have just to say this prayer…”Tolstoy has a beautiful story. It became a great trouble for the highest priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, because three men who lived beyond a lake under a tree became very famous; so famous that instead of people coming to the high priest they started going to those three saints.Now, in Christianity saint is a very strange word. In any other language saint and the equivalent of saint are very respectful words. But not in Christianity – because saint means only sanctified by the pope, certified by the pope. Joan of Arc was made a saint after three hundred years. One infallible pope burned her alive. After three hundred years they changed their minds, because people were becoming more and more favorable to Joan of Arc; then the pope thought it was a good time to declare her a saint. She had been declared a witch and was burned alive – and this was done by one infallible pope. Then another infallible pope, after three hundred years, declared Joan of Arc to be a saint. Her grave was dug up again and whatsoever was there – a few bones may have remained – was brought out, worshipped, sanctified. She has become a saint.“Saint” in the Christian reference is ugly. The Sanskrit word is sant, equivalent to saint. If you derive it from sant, if you write sant, you can read it saint; but sant means one who has arrived, one who has known satya. Sat means the ultimate truth, and one who has realized it is called a sant – not somebody certified! It is not a degree or a title that somebody can give to you.The high priest was very angry because people were talking about those three saints. He said, “But how did they become saints? I have not certified anybody. This is simply outrageous.” But people are people… People were still going, so finally he decided, “I have to visit these people. Who are they? They have declared themselves saints! I don’t even know who they are. I have not even been informed, and it is in my power only to sanctify a person to be a saint.” He was very angry.He went in his boat – and he had a beautiful boat because he was the high priest and he was higher than the czar as far as religion was concerned. Even the czar and czarina used to come to touch his feet. And he thought, “Who are these fools, unknown, anonymous? – declaring themselves saints!” He went there and found those three very simple people, three old people, sitting under the tree. They immediately stood up, touched the feet of the high priest and they said, “Why did you take all this trouble? You could have sent a message and we would have come.”The high priest cooled down a little bit, but he said, “Who declared you saints?”They said, “We don’t know. We didn’t even know that we are saints. Who told you?”The high priest could see that all three were absolutely uneducated and knew nothing about Christianity or religion. And he said, “What is your prayer? Do you know the orthodox prayer? Without it you cannot be even a Christian, what to say about a saint!”They said, “We are uneducated and nobody ever taught us any prayer. But if you forgive us, we will tell you – we have composed a prayer of our own.”He said, “What! You have composed a prayer of your own! Okay, let me listen to what your prayer is.”One said to the other, “You tell him.”The other said, “You can tell him.” They were all feeling very shy and very ashamed.The high priest said, “You tell it! Anybody tell it.”They said, “We all three will tell it together.” Their prayer was simple: “‘You are three – God the father, the Holy Ghost and God the son. You are three, we are also three – have mercy on us.’ This is our prayer. More than that we don’t know. We have heard that he is three, and we know that we are three, and what more is needed? ‘Have mercy on us – you are three, we are three, have mercy on us!’”The priest said, “This is unforgivable. You are making a mockery of religion.”They said, “Then you can tell us what the prayer is so we can repeat it.”The high priest told them the prayer, a long prayer of the Russian Orthodox Church. They listened and they said, “Wait, you repeat it again because this is so long and we may forget it. Our prayer is so short, and we never forget it because it is so simple and we always remember that He is three, we are three, have mercy on us. There is no problem about it. Your prayer – if we forget or if we commit some mistake…”So he repeated it a second time. They said, “One more time.” He repeated it thrice, and they said, “We will try.”He was very happy that he had put those fools on the right path. This is prayer, and they have become saints? And he started back, very happy that he had done a good deed. These are the do-gooders.Just in the middle of the lake he saw all the three old men running, coming, on the lake! He could not believe his eyes. They said, “Wait! We have forgotten the prayer! Just one more time, and we will never bother you again.” And they were standing on the water!The high priest touched their feet and said, “Forgive me. You repeat your prayer, that’s perfectly right. And you need not come to ask me; if I have something to ask I will come. I know now whose prayer is right.”Those three persons indicate one simple truth: if you have faith that does not prove that there is a God. But your faith can give you a certain integrity, a certain strength. But the faith has to be very innocent. They were not hiding any fear behind it. They had not gone to any church to learn the prayer, they had not asked anybody, “What is God? Where is God?” – nothing. They were simply innocent people, and out of innocence was their faith.That faith does not prove that God is; that faith simply proves that innocence is a power.It is only a story, but innocence is a power. Yes, you can walk on water but out of innocence; and out of innocence, if there is faith. But that very rarely happens, because every parent and every society destroys your innocence before you are even aware that you had it. They go on forcing some belief on you, and that belief you accept because of fear. In darkness the mother says, “Don’t be afraid; God is there looking after you. He is present everywhere.”I have heard about a Catholic nun who used to take a shower with her clothes on inside the bathroom. Other nuns became a little worried: “Has she gone Oregonian or something?”But the poor nun said, “It is because I have heard God is everywhere, so he must be in the bathroom too. And to be naked before God does not look right.”This woman may look foolish but she has a certain innocence. And out of this innocence, if faith arises, then it doesn’t matter in what the faith is.Innocence gives power, but innocence is destroyed, and this is what I am trying to bring back to you, so that you become innocent again. And to become innocent again you will have to pass through these stages.You will have to drop this idea of God which helps you to remain unafraid. You will have to pass through fear and accept it as a human reality. There is no need to escape from it. What is needed is to go deep into it, and the deeper you go into your fear, the less you will find it is.When you have touched the rock bottom of fear you will simply laugh, there is nothing to fear. And when fear disappears there is innocence, and that innocence is the summum bonum, the very essence of a religious man.That innocence is power. That innocence is the only miracle there is.Out of innocence anything can happen, but you will not be a Christian out of that, and you will not be a Mohammedan out of that. Out of innocence you will become simply an ordinary human being, totally accepting your ordinariness, and living it joyously, thankful to the whole existence – not to God, because that is an idea given by others to you.But existence is not an idea. It is there all around you, within and without. When you are utterly innocent, a deep thankfulness – I will not call it prayer because in prayer you are asking for something, I will call it a deep thankfulness – a gratitude arises. Not that you are asking for something, but you are giving thanks for something that has already been given to you.So much has been given to you. Do you deserve it? Have you earned it? Existence goes on pouring so much over you that to ask for more is just ugly. That which you have received, you should be grateful for it.And the most beautiful phenomenon is that when you are grateful, existence starts pouring more and more over you. It becomes a circle: the more you get, the more you become grateful; the more you become grateful, the more you get… And there is no end to it, it is an infinite process.But remember – the hypothesis of God is gone; the moment you called it a hypothesis the idea of God had been already dropped. Whether you are afraid or not, you cannot take it back; it is finished. Now the only way left is to go into your fear. Silently enter into it, so you can find its depth. And sometimes it happens that it is not very deep.A Zen story is: a man walking in the night slipped from a rock. Afraid that he would fall down thousands of feet, because he knew that place was a very deep valley, he took hold of a branch that was hanging over the rock. In the night all he could see was a bottomless abyss. He shouted; his own shout was reflected back – there was nobody to hear.You can think of that man and his whole night of torture. Every moment there was death, his hands were becoming cold, he was losing his grip… And as the sun came out he looked down and he laughed: there was no abyss. Just six inches down there was a rock. He could have rested the whole night, slept well – the rock was big enough – but the whole night was a nightmare.From my own experience I can say to you: the fear is not more than six inches deep. Now it is up to you whether you want to go on clinging to the branch and turn your life into a nightmare, or whether you would love to leave the branch and stand on your feet.There is nothing to fear.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/from-ignorance-to-innocence-17/

Osho,You have said that God is neither a hypothesis nor an idea. Then what is God? Has anyone ever met God or not?God certainly is not a hypothesis. A hypothesis can only be part of an objective science. You can experiment upon it, you can dissect it, analyze it.That’s what Karl Marx has argued: “Unless God is proved in a scientific lab, I am not going to accept him.” What Karl Marx is saying is that, “I can accept God as a hypothesis, but a hypothesis is not a truth. It has yet to be proved, and the proof has to be scientific.”But if God is put into a scientific lab, in a test tube, and dissected, analyzed, and we know all the constituents that make God, will it be the God who created the world? And if Marx is going to accept God only then, that means God has to be reduced into a thing.Then what would be the difficulty in manufacturing God? Once you have analyzed all the constituents of God, all the chemicals, then there is no problem. Get your discovery patented, and start manufacturing God. But that manufactured God will not be the God you are asking me about.God is not a hypothesis, cannot be a hypothesis, because the very word hypothesis takes the ground from beneath his feet. God is not to be proved. If science has to prove God then the scientist becomes higher than God. The poor God will be just like a white rat. So you play around and make boxes, and God moves from one box to another, and you find out how much intelligence God has.Delgado, the psychologist, will be very happy to find God in a mousetrap, because all that psychologists have found about man is not about man, it is about mice. They first find out about the mice, and then they project it onto human beings – because it looks inhuman to dissect a human being, to torture him and to experiment upon him. But it is very strange that the mouse gives clues which help to understand the human mind, human psychology. Certainly man is more developed. You can multiply it, but the basic idea you can get from a mouse.God, according to the pseudo-religions, is the creator of the whole of existence. According to them, we are his creation. To make God a hypothesis means from now onward he is going to be our creation. We are trying to reverse the roles, putting the creator as a creature and the creature as the creator. The pseudo-religions will not agree. I also do not agree, but our disagreements are basically different.They cannot agree because God is above everything; nobody can be above God. The scientist has to be an observer, above, to watch, and then God becomes just a plaything in his hands. He will put electrodes in God’s mind. He will have remote control so whenever he wants, God laughs; whenever he wants, God weeps; whenever he wants, God runs; whenever he wants, God stops. The pseudo-religions cannot agree for this reason. They say that God is not a creature, not a thing; he is the creator. He has made you, you cannot be above him, in no way.My disagreement is that even for something to be a hypothesis a certain probability is needed – not certainty, but at least a probability. God is not even probable. My reasons are totally different. A scientist starts with a hypothesis because he sees some probability in it, some possibility, some potentiality.God is only a word without any substance in it; a hollow word with no meaning at all.Perhaps we have to interpret the Bible a little differently. It says, “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God.” In this reference perhaps it is true, that the beginning of God is nothing but a word. And then the word starts gathering moss around it; as time passes people go on giving more and more meaning to it. What meaning they give to the word is their need. You should remember it.God is all-knowing, because man has felt in every direction that his knowledge is very limited – just a little light, a candlelight throwing a small circle. Beyond that circle all is darkness; and that darkness creates fear. Who knows what it contains? Somebody is needed who knows. If he is not present, he has to be invented.God is an invention of man’s own psychological need.He is all-knowing. You cannot be; whatsoever you know, howsoever you know, you can never be all-knowing. Existence is so vast and man is so tiny, so small, that to conceive that your small brain will be able to know all – past, present, future – seems to be a fool’s dream. Even a fool will not dream such a thing. But to live in a world surrounded everywhere with darkness is difficult. You cannot be certain even of what you know, because the unknown is so vast, that who can say that if you know a little more, your known will not be found invalid.In fact that has been the case. The more man knew, the more he became aware that the knowledge that was knowledge yesterday, today has become ignorance. What about today’s knowledge? Perhaps tomorrow this too will become ignorance.It became a great psychological need to have someone who knows all.The priests did a great job, perhaps the greatest job ever done, and did it perfectly well: they invented God.It helped in many ways. Man became more certain of himself, more stable, less afraid, because there is an all-knowing God, all-pervading God, present everywhere. All that you have to know is the key to turn God in your favor. And the key was with the priest, who was ready to part with it. Every religion has been pretending that they have that key which unlocks all the doors, the master key. And if you attain the master key, you will be just like gods; you will be all-knowing, you will be present anywhere you want, you will be all-powerful. You just see in these three words, man’s three needs.Man’s knowledge is very limited, very poor. What really do we know? Even small things can make you aware of your ignorance.Our power… What power do we have? Perhaps man is the only animal in the world who has no power. Can you fight with a lion? – with a tiger? Forget about lions and tigers, can you fight with a dog or a cat? You will be surprised – what to say about a cat, if even a hundred thousand flies attack you, what are you going to do? You have never thought about flies attacking, but if they attack, if some fly turns political, you will be helpless, you cannot survive.Forget about flies; in fact there are plants in South Africa which catch birds and animals, suck them completely dry and throw them away. There are science fiction stories about plants attacking men. In these stories there are plants that can catch men, they are big enough. If you are in their vicinity their branches can just catch hold of you like the trunk of an elephant, and crush you completely. And they have ways to suck your blood. Such perfect surgery – all over your body their branches will start penetrating you. And how thick is your skin? Just a little scratch is enough and blood is available. And those trees live on blood; they are man-eating trees – the man is still alive and they start eating him.There are science fiction stories about all the trees around you going crazy. They can go crazy because they have a certain kind of brain, a certain kind of mind. Now, it is a proved fact that they think, feel; that they have emotions, sentiments; that they love, they hate. Now there are scientific proofs about all this.Buddha and Mahavira, twenty-five centuries ago, said not to hurt trees because they are as alive as you are. People at first laughed: trees – and alive? But Buddha and Mahavira had no scientific proofs for it. It was only their experience in silence. Sitting under a tree, utterly silent, Buddha suddenly felt that the tree is not dead, that it is thriving with life. But these were their personal experiences; they could say it, but they could not prove it.It was left to be proved by another Indian, Jagdish Chandra Bose, who devoted his whole life to finding scientifically whether Buddha and Mahavira were right or wrong. And he conclusively proved that trees are alive. He was given a Nobel Prize for proving trees to be alive. But that was only the beginning. Then more and more researchers went into it. Just to be alive is not enough.Soon it was found that they have a different kind of brain system, but they do have one. You should not look for the same brain as you have. This is a stupid human idea, that your brain is the only kind of brain. If there can be so many kinds of bodies, why can’t there be so many kinds of brain? And soon it was found that trees have a certain kind of brain system, and the research went on…Just a few years ago it was found that trees not only have a certain way of knowing which we call a brain, they have a heart too. Certainly it does not beat like yours, because they have their own kind of heart. If their surgeons come to look around you, they will find no heart in you, no brain in you, because they will be looking for their type of brain, their type of heart.Trees feel emotions, sentiments. For example when a gardener comes to water the tree, the tree feels happy. Now, the happiness can be measured on a graph like the cardiogram. The graph becomes harmonious, as if it is a song, rhythmic. If somebody comes with an ax to cut the tree… He is far away but the graph changes. The man has not even said that he is coming to cut the tree, he has only thought about it, but the tree somehow has become aware of his thought.If he is not going to cut the tree, and has no thought of it, he can pass by the tree with the ax in his hand and the graph will continue the same. But if he has the thought to cut the tree, then the graph immediately changes, zigzags, all the harmony is lost, there is no rhythm. The tree is shaking with fear. And if he cuts the tree, then the graphs of other trees around start going berserk. They are feeling hurt because one of their fellows, friends, a neighbor, is being cut.So it is not impossible – if they have sentiments, emotions, a certain kind of thinking… My idea is not outlandish: sometimes they can go crazy, because all these things are needed to go crazy. They have them; and man has done so much harm to them that it is time they should go crazy. And he goes on harming them. There must be a limit, and it is not far away. Man has destroyed the whole environment.After my graduation I went to the Hindu university in Varanasi to study, because that is the biggest university in India. But I stayed there only twenty-four hours. The man I was staying with was Doctor Rajbali Pandey; he was the head of the department of history. He tried to persuade me not to leave: “Why? – you will not find a better place, at least not in India. It has the best scholars, the best professors, all the best facilities possible. You should think about it.”I said, “I am not going because of this university, I am going because of you.”He said, “What! What have I done to you?” He had stayed with me once, just accidentally. I was traveling in the same compartment to Jabalpur in which he was traveling. He missed the train that he had to catch from Jabalpur to Gondia – it was on a different line. Our train was late so he was very much worried, “Now, what am I to do?” Only after twenty-four hours – Gondia is a small place – would a very small train, a toy train go to Gondia, and the same train would come back. It takes twelve hours to go and twelve hours to come back, and it is not that far, just the train is such…So I said, “Don’t be worried, come and stay with me.” I was staying with one of my uncles. So in this strange way we became known to each other. And in the morning I took him for a walk – Jabalpur is very green, so full of trees that you don’t see the houses, you see only the greenery. And he said to me, “I hate these trees, because these trees are the enemies of man. If just for five years you stop cutting them, they will run over the whole city and destroy all the houses.”There is truth in what he was saying, that man has created all these cities by cutting the trees. And if you allow the trees to grow again, they are going to destroy your so-called civilization. He said, “Whenever you come to Benares, you are welcome to be my guest.” After two years I had to go, so I stayed with him. And in the morning I was going for a walk, so he said, “I followed you in Jabalpur for a walk, so I will here also.”Benares is barren, no trees at all. The whole university is just buildings and buildings, beautiful buildings because all the Maharajahs of India contributed to make a great Hindu university. The idea was a Hindu university should be parallel to Cambridge, Oxford, or Harvard. So much has been done, and beautifully done; there are marble buildings, great buildings, beautiful hostels, but no trees at all.I said to him, “Now I understand why you were so much offended by the trees that I love. I cannot survive here. It is true that trees had to be cut to make houses and cities, but that does not mean that trees have to be completely destroyed. Then you will die too. There needs to be a balance because the trees are continuously giving you oxygen. When you breathe in, you take oxygen; the oxygen is absorbed by your blood system and the carbon dioxide is thrown out.“Trees take the carbon dioxide; that is their food. That’s why when you burn a tree you get coal. Coal is nothing but carbon dioxide in solid form, it is carbon. They live on carbon dioxide, you live on oxygen; it is a good friendship. Neither do they have to destroy the civilization, nor do you have to destroy them. You should live in coexistence; that’s the only way to live – and here I don’t see a single tree.“And just twenty-four hours here and I am feeling dry. Without seeing greenery your eyes will lose luster. No, I cannot be in this university. It may have great professors, it may have great libraries, it may have great facilities, but I would prefer some huge, big, ancient trees.”And I wandered all over India to find a university where there was something better than Jabalpur. And when I found Sagar I remained there, because Sagar is just unimaginably beautiful. It is a small city, but the city is way beyond a very big lake. The city is on one side of the lake, and on the other side there is a range of hills, and on the hills is the university. And all around, huge trees, and so silent… Benares was so crowded and so buzzing with ten thousand students in the university. Sagar is a small place, and the university was new. I remained there.Rajbali Pandey once came to Sagar while I was still there to deliver a series of lectures on history, and he saw me and he said, “What happened? I thought you had gone back to Jabalpur.”I said, “First I tried to look all over, perhaps there was something better – and here, you see… The trees in Jabalpur are good but not so huge and not so ancient. And these hills and this lake and those lotuses… It is the right place.”Man has done so much harm to nature, that when I say that one day nature can go crazy, it is not only science fiction, it is possible. If all these trees that we have been cutting and destroying become just a little bit united… I don’t think they know anything about trade-unions and things like that. They have not heard Karl Marx’ famous slogan: “Proletariat of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, and you have the whole world to gain.” So just change the word proletariat: Trees of the world unite, you have nothing to lose, not even chains, and you have the whole world to gain!If these trees start attacking you, do you think you will be able to survive, even with all your nuclear weapons? – impossible. And it has happened a few times, that’s why the science fiction came into existence. In a few places it has happened. Once it happened in Africa, that a certain bird suddenly started attacking people, and it killed many people; before they could kill all those birds, a few people were killed.It happened once in Indonesia with another bird; the whole community of that species started attacking people. They simply attacked the eyes and they made hundreds of people blind before anything could be done. Because we don’t think about these things, we are not prepared.You have a fire brigade because you know fire can happen. You have the police for the criminals; you have the army if somebody attacks. But if birds start attacking your eyes, by the time you get ready to do something, much harm would have happened. And it was only one kind of bird.If all birds and all animals and all trees simply decide one day, “It is enough, now get rid of these people,” I don’t think man can survive, there is no way. All your armies will be useless, all your arms will be useless, all your nuclear weapons will be useless-and then you will understand how weak you are.You have forgotten your weakness because of all these things. But think of the man in the beginning, when there was nothing, and he felt himself absolutely weak. Just think of before even fire was invented. What was the situation of man? – the weakest animal on the earth.Fire is perhaps the greatest discovery of man, not nuclear weapons, because it was fire that gave man tremendous courage. Then in the night he could make a bonfire and sleep around it; and the animals were afraid of fire so they would not come. Otherwise sleep was impossible – if you slept you were finished; any animal could take you away.The whole day you are hunting, and in the night you cannot sleep. In the day you can somehow survive – you can go up a tree, you can hide in a cave – but in the night, when you are asleep, what can you do? And the animals of those days are no longer here – only a few specimens like the elephant, which is not that huge. There were animals ten times larger than the elephant.For example, the crocodile – there were crocodiles that were many times bigger, which are no longer here. They did not need to chew you if they ate you, they simply swallowed you, they were such big animals. You simply slipped down their throat – and gone! There was no need for chewing or anything.With these animals, with all the darkness, the people who invented God must have done a service in the beginning. They gave courage. They said, “Don’t be afraid. All that you have to do is to be prayerful, faithful.” Certainly they took a certain amount of commission, and I don’t think that it was bad, because business is business. They were giving you so much, and if you gave a little bit to those people, you should not be grumpy about it.So a little bit was given to the priest and the priest gave you the confidence and an omnipotent God – omniscient, omnipresent – and you began to start feeling at ease in the world. The priest gave you the idea: “God has created man in his own image, so don’t be afraid. You are his special creation. All these animals he has created for you, all these trees he has created for you.”That’s the Mohammedan logic still. You cannot talk about vegetarian food because they say, “Why did God create the animals then? The Koran says that God created the animals to eat. When the holy book says that the animals are created to be eaten, how can it be a sin or anything wrong?”The priest made man, at least in his mind, stronger. Of course they exploited him, and slowly, slowly, there were many more psychological needs.And they had found a great treasure in the word God: it fulfilled all kinds of things, all needs.The greatest need of man is to be needed.If you are not needed by anybody in the world you will commit suicide, you will not be able to live. Strange – perhaps you have never thought about it, that you are seeking continuously to be needed. That gives you preciousness, some value, some meaning. Perhaps a woman marries a man simply to fulfill the need that she is needed. And the same may be the reason for the man, that he wants to feel that some woman needs him.The man has tried to make the woman not earn money, not do any work, not be educated. There are political, economic, and other reasons but the psychological reason is that he wants her to be dependent on him so she is always in need of him, and he can feel good that he is needed. They will produce children and both will feel good that now these children need them: you have some purpose to live for. You have to live for these children, you have to live for your wife, you have to live for your husband: life is no longer meaningless.And the priest has given you the greatest consolation – that God needs you; so much that he sends his son to save you from going astray. He continually sends prophets, paigambara, tirthankaras, incarnations, to save you, to keep you on the path. You are not neglected. He is constantly concerned about you.Krishna in the Gita says, “Whenever there is a need, and whenever people are going astray, I promise you I will come back.” Jesus says, “I will be coming back to take my flock.” Why have people accepted these things? They wanted somebody to be concerned about them. And if God is concerned, what can be more fulfilling? And when you pray, and by chance if your prayer is fulfilled, then you know perfectly well that in this vast universe you are not just nothing. Your prayer is heard, it reaches to God; not only that, there is a response.In my neighborhood there was a temple, a temple of Krishna, just a few houses away from my house. The temple was on the other side of the road, my house was on this side of the road. In front of the temple lived the man who had made the temple; he was a great devotee.The temple was of Krishna in his childhood – because when Krishna becomes a young man he creates many troubles and many questions, so there are many people who worship Krishna as a child – hence the temple was called the temple of Balaji. Balaji means… Bal means child, and Balaji has become the name for Krishna. And then everything is simple because about his childhood you cannot raise all those questions which would be raised later on.He becomes a politician, a warrior, manages the whole war and collects all those women – anything that you can imagine, he has done it. So in India there are many temples which are of the child Krishna. One of the greatest Krishna devotees, Surdas, a poet, simply sings songs only of the child Krishna; he never goes beyond that. Beyond that he cannot go. Beyond that it is much too difficult, particularly for Surdas.Surdas was a monk, and he used to beg. It is not thought right for a monk to go again and again to the same house, because it may be burdensome to the family. They may not be so rich that every day they can give you food. But the woman who came to give him food was so beautiful that it was irresistible. If she had been only beautiful it would have been possible to resist, but what he saw in her eyes was a tremendous love toward him; that was more difficult – now the temptation became thousandfold. The fire was on both sides.The next day he went again. The woman placed the food with great love, devotion. And the next day, again he was there; it became a routine. He saw that the woman certainly had fallen in love with him. Of course he was not courageous enough to accept the fact that he had also fallen in love with the woman; he was a monk, he was not supposed to do such things. But what was he doing, going for one month continuously to the same house?One day is allowed; in certain difficult situations, three days are allowed, but that’s all. You may be sick and you cannot go far away, then three days, but not more than that. So the next day when he went, he gathered courage and he asked the woman, “I have been coming here for one month. You have been giving me food every day, better and better more and more. What do you see in me, and why did you never remind me that this is not right for a monk? – one day is allowed, at the most three days. And I see so much love coming from you toward me. I would like to know the exact truth. What is the situation?”Now, he is throwing all his lust, all his desire on the poor woman; and what the woman said was a great shock. She said, “I simply love your eyes, they are so beautiful and so silent, and I would pray that you go on coming. We are not poor, but I want to see your eyes at least once a day. I have never seen such eyes.” She was not concerned with Surdas at all. She was talking about the eyes as you would talk about a flower, a rose; she wanted to see those beautiful eyes – there was nothing else.Surdas – that was not his name at that time. You don’t call a blind man a blind man, because that looks bad, unmannerly; all blind men in India are called surdas – surdas means blind man. That was not his name before; but he went home, took both his eyes out, went back with the help of another monk and presented those two eyes to the woman. He said, “Keep these eyes because soon we will be moving and I will not be able to come every day. You can see these eyes, you can keep them, and for me anyway it is good that I don’t have them.”That day he expressed his heart, “I was also feeling a certain desire arising in me. Now I will never see beauty. Now these eyes are closed. The world of beauty is no longer there.”I will not support such a thing because you can be blind but you can still dream of beautiful women, which is more dangerous. Because no real girl is a dream girl, but all dream girls are real when you are dreaming, remember – very real.You will get frustrated with any beautiful woman. She may be Cleopatra, Amrapali, anyone, but you will get fed up, actually fed up, because this desire for beauty is also a kind of hunger; you are feeding on it. It is a kind of food, a nourishment, but you cannot eat the same food every day. Sooner or later you are going to be fed up. Those words fed up are very beautiful. The same food can bring nausea if it is given to you every day.So just by destroying your eyes you cannot go beyond your desire – that is stupid. But Surdas did that. And he was writing poetry only about Krishna’s childhood, because how can this man, who has taken his eyes out to avoid desire, think of his god dancing with girls, other people’s wives, and living the life of the most materialist person possible? So for him, Krishna never goes beyond seven years of age; he remains just below seven. And in India many temples are called Balaji’s temple, which means Krishna in his childhood.This Balaji’s mandir was just in front of the house of the man who had made it. Because of the temple and the man’s devotion, continuous devotion… He would take a bath – just in front of the temple was a well – he would take a bath there first thing. Then he would do his prayers for hours; and he was thought to be very religious. By and by people started also calling him Balaji. It became so associated that I don’t remember his real name myself because by the time I had any idea that he existed, I only heard his name as Balaji. But that cannot be his name; that name must have come because he made the temple.I used to go to the temple because the temple was very beautiful and very silent – except for this Balaji who was a disturbance there. And for hours – he was a rich man so there was no need for him to be worried about time – three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening, he was constantly torturing the god of the temple. Nobody used to go there, although the temple was so beautiful that many people would have gone there; they would go to a temple further away because this Balaji was too much. And his noise – it can only be called noise, it was not music – his singing was such that it would make you an enemy of singing for your whole life.But I used to go there and we became friendly. He was an old man. I said, “Balaji, three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening – what are you asking for? Every day? And he has not given it to you?”He said, “I am not asking for any material things. I ask for spiritual things. And it is not a matter of one day; you have to continue your whole life and they will be given after death. But it is certain they will be given: I have made the temple, I serve the lord, I pray. You can see that even in winter, with wet clothes…” It is thought to be a special quality of devotion, to be shivering with wet clothes. My own idea is that with shivering, singing comes easier. You start shouting to forget the shivering.I said, “My idea about it is different but I will not tell you. Just one thing I want because my grandfather goes on saying, ‘These are only cowards; this Balaji is a coward. Six hours a day he is wasting, and it is such a small life; and he is a coward.’”He said, “Your grandfather said that I am a coward?”I said, “I can bring him.”He said, “No, don’t bring him to the temple because it will be an unnecessary trouble – but I am not a coward.”I said, “Okay, we will see whether you are a coward or not.”Behind his temple there was what in India is called an akhara, where people learn to wrestle, do exercises, and the Indian type of wrestling. I used to go there – it was just behind the temple, by the side of the temple – so I had all the wrestlers there as my friends. I asked three of them, “Tonight you have to help me.”They said, “What has to be done?”I said, “We have to take Balaji’s cot – he sleeps outside his house – we have just to take his cot and put it over the well.”They said, “If he jumps or something happens he may fall into the well.”I said, “Don’t worry, the well is not that deep. I have jumped into it many times – it is not that deep nor is it that dangerous. And as far as I know Balaji is not going to jump. He will shout from the cot; sitting in the cot, he will call to his Balaji, ‘Save me!’”With difficulty I could convince three persons: “You have nothing really to do with it. Just alone I cannot carry his cot, and I am asking you because you are all strong people. If he wakes up in the middle it will be difficult to reach the well. I will wait for you. He goes to sleep at nine o’clock, by ten the street is empty and eleven is the right time not to take any chances. At eleven we can move him.”Only two persons turned up; one didn’t turn up, so we were only three. I said, “This is difficult. One side of the cot… And if Balaji wakes up…”I said, “Just wait, I will have to call my grandfather.”And I told my grandfather, “This is what we are going to do. You have to give us a little help.”He said, “This is a little too much. You have some guts to ask your own grandfather to do this to that poor man who does no harm to anybody except that he shouts six hours a day, but we have become accustomed to it…”I said, “I have not come to argue about it. Just come, and anything that you want, anytime, I will owe it to you; you just say, and I will do it. But you have to come for this thing, and it is not much – just a twelve-foot road has to be crossed without waking up Balaji.”So he came. That’s why I say he was a very rare man – he was seventy-five! He came. He said, “Okay, let us have this experience also and see what happens.”The two wrestlers started escaping, seeing my grandfather. I said, “Wait, where are you going?”They said, “Your grandfather is coming.”I said, “I am bringing him. He is the fourth person. If you escape then I will be at a loss. My grandfather and I will not be able to manage. We can carry him, but he will wake up. You need not be worried.”They said, “Are you sure of your grandfather? They are almost of the same age; they may be friends and some trouble may arise. He may tell on us.”I said, “I am there, he cannot get me into any trouble. So don’t be afraid, you will not be in any trouble, and he does not know your names or anything.”We carried Balaji and put his cot over his small well. Only he used to take a bath there, and once in a while I used to jump into it, which he was very much against – but what can you do? Once I had jumped in, he had to arrange to take me out. I said, “What can you do now? The only thing is to take me out. And if you harass me, I will jump in every day. And if you talk about it to my family, then you know I will start bringing my friends to jump into it. So right now, keep it a secret between us. You take your bath outside, I take my bath inside; there is no harm.”It was a very small well, so the cot could completely fit over it. Then I told my grandfather, “Go away because if you are caught then the whole city will think that this is going too far.”And then, from far away we started throwing stones to wake him up, because if he did not wake up the whole night, he might turn and fall into the well, and something would go wrong. The moment he woke up he gave such a scream! We had heard his voice, but this…! The whole neighborhood gathered. He was sitting in his cot and he said, “Who has done it?” He was trembling and shaking and afraid.People said, “Please at least get out of the cot. Then we will find out what has happened.”I was there in the crowd, and I said, “What is the matter? You could have called your Balaji. But you didn’t call him, you gave a scream and you forgot all about Balaji. Six hours training every day for your whole life…”He looked at me and he said, “Is that too a secret?”I said, “Now there are two secrets you have to keep. One you have already kept for many years. This is now the second.”But from that day he stopped that three hours shouting in the temple. I was puzzled. Everybody was puzzled. He stopped taking a bath in that well, and those three hours evening and morning he just forgot. He arranged a servant priest to come every morning to do a little worship and that was all.I asked him, “Balaji, what has happened?”He said, “I had told you a lie that I am not afraid. But that night, waking up over the well – that shriek was not mine.” You can call it the primal scream. It was not his, that is certainly true. It must have come from his deepest unconscious. He said, “That scream made me aware that I am really an afraid man, and all my prayers are nothing but trying to persuade God to save me, to help me, to protect me.“But you have destroyed all that, and what you have done was good for me. I am finished with all that nonsense. I tortured the whole neighborhood my whole life, and if you had not done that, I may have continued. I am aware now that I am afraid. And I feel that it is better to accept my fear because my whole life has been meaningless and my fear is the same.”Just in 1970 I went for the last time to my city. I had a promise with my mother’s mother that when she dies – she had taken it as a promise – that I would come. So I had gone. I just went around the town to meet people and I saw Balaji. He was looking a totally different man. I asked him, “What has happened?”He said, “That scream changed me completely. I started to live the fear. Okay, if I am a coward, then I am a coward; I am not responsible for it. If there is fear, there is fear; I was born with it. But slowly, slowly as my acceptance grew deeper, that fear has disappeared, that cowardliness has disappeared.“In fact I have disposed of the servant from the temple, because if my prayers have not been heard, then how is a servant’s prayer going to be heard, a servant who goes to thirty temples the whole day?” – because he gets two rupees from each temple. “He is praying for two rupees. So I have disposed of him. And I am perfectly at ease, and I don’t bother a bit whether God exists or not. That is his problem, why should I be bothered?“But I am feeling very fresh and very young in my old age. I wanted to see you, but I could not come, I am too old. I wanted to thank you that you did that mischief; otherwise, I would have continually prayed and died, and it was all just meaningless, useless. Now I will be dying more like a man freed, completely freed.” He took me into his house. I had been there before; all the religious books were removed. He said, “I am no longer interested in all that.”You ask me: “If God is not a hypothesis, if God is not an idea, then what is God?” It is not a hypothesis because there is no way for science to discover God. Science does not move inward, it moves outward, and there you will find the world of things.If you want to know consciousness, that center is within.So God is not a hypothesis. God is not an idea because an idea is a philosophical concept, and philosophers only go on weaving thoughts, ideas, rationalizations – and they create great systems of thought…If you look into their systems of thought you will be immensely impressed. For example, Hegel or Kant… If you are not alert, you will be surprised at what a palatial system they have made – but there is no base. And it is not a palatial building either; if you come closer you will find it is made of playing cards. A little breeze and the whole palace will fall down, because there is no base to it.Philosophy is baseless. It makes castles in the air. Ideas are just ideas: you can project any idea you like, nobody can prevent you; and once you project the idea you can find all kinds of rationalizations to support it. There is no difficulty.One man came to me, he was an American. He was a professor in a Christian theological college. Jabalpur has one of the greatest theological colleges in the whole of Asia, where they train ministers and priests and missionaries, and they go on sending them all over Asia to convert people to Christianity. There they teach everything – if you just go and see, you will laugh. I used to be invited there to speak on some subject.This professor became interested in me. He took me around the whole college. In one class they were teaching how you have to stand up when you preach in church, in public; on what sentences you should put the emphasis, what words should be pronounced loudly, what gestures should be made with your hands.I was simply amazed and said, “What are you doing? Are you making these people actors or ministers?” And these people go on doing that acting – every priest will do the same. It is a training, a kind of exercise; there is no heart in it.If there is heart in your words, the emphasis will come on its own. If there is something that has to be expressed by your hands, the hands will take care of it, you need not do anything. If something comes to your eyes, it will come. You are not to bring it, otherwise the whole thing becomes hypocrisy.He became friendly. One day he brought me a book which said that in America – I don’t know how far it is true – number thirteen is thought to be something bad. He showed me that somebody had done this research in his theological college under him: that thirteen is really bad. So he had collected all the information about how many people die every month on the thirteenth. People die every day, but he had taken only the figures for the thirteenth: how many wars have broken out on the thirteenth, how many disasters, calamities, earthquakes. From the whole of history he had collected thousands of facts – that all this had happened on the thirteenth.So the professor was saying to me, “This man has done a great job. He has really proved it.” That professor told me – I don’t know, because I have never stayed in any hotel, but the professor told me, “In America the thirteenth floor is simply missing because nobody wants to stay on the thirteenth floor.” So after the twelfth, comes the fourteenth! Great idea! Even deceiving God just by changing the number.I told him, “Do one thing… I would like to meet your student too. So tomorrow when I go to my university, I will be coming here at this time. Keep your student in your room.”I asked the student, “Have you thought about number twelve or number eleven before you submitted this thesis? And this professor who is your guide for a PhD thesis should have been intelligent enough to tell you that you should look for each date, and only then can you prove that the thirteenth is bad.“If on the first there were only five wars and on the thirteenth there were five hundred, then it proves something. If on the second only five people died, and on the thirteenth, fifty thousand people died, it proves something. You count the whole month; you have to present thirty-one days and compare them. There is no comparison here.“You have simply collected anything that is bad, that happened on the thirteenth. I can tell anybody to collect for the twelfth, or eleventh, or tenth, and the same kind of facts will be collected and the same number of facts. This is not a thesis, this is simply stupidity. You wasted your time, and your professor has been wasting his time.”He had been working on this thesis for three years and he was getting a scholarship for it.Once you get an idea – it may be the date thirteen, it doesn’t matter – you can make a great philosophy out of it.God is not an idea, although philosophers have tried…because philosophers are trespassers; they simply don’t believe that any territory is not their territory. They will enter into every direction, into every dimension, and they have some idea for everything. A philosopher never says, “I don’t know.” He knows! And not only does he know, but he will give you all the arguments and proofs that his knowledge is valid. So how can they leave out such an important area like God?They have discovered four arguments for God. Christians have accepted those four arguments, but none of those four arguments has any validity. They are all bogus.The first argument I have talked to you about is that everything needs a creator; hence God is needed. Now it is clear that this is not an argument. Immediately the question is shifted back – who created God? And then there is no end to it. But this is thought to be the most important argument brought in by philosophers in support of God.It has been so easy for the atheists to laugh at these philosophers and these theologians: “What kind of arguments are these people giving?” But atheists have not been very different either.One very famous atheist, Diderot, was speaking and he stood up and told the audience, “If God exists and you say he is all-powerful then let him stop the clock, this very moment. I will wait one minute.” He waited one minute. The clock did not stop. He said, “Now you see he is not powerful. He cannot even stop the clock. He is not even courageous enough to accept my challenge.”But are these arguments? Some cunning person can manage to fix the clock so that at nine it will stop. And when it reaches nine, he stands up and says, “God, prove yourself: if you are real let the clock stop within one minute; otherwise it will prove that you don’t exist.” And the clock stops; God is proved. These are arguments? Neither stopping the clock nor not stopping the clock can make any substantial contribution to the proof of God.Hence I say God is not an idea. You ask me: Then what is God?It is simply a word, a meaningless word, hollow inside, with no substance in it.Samuel Beckett has written his masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, a very small piece of tremendous importance. Two persons are sitting under a tree. Both are hobos. One hobo says, “It is getting late and he has not come yet.”The other says, “I also think that he must be coming.” They are waiting for Godot who has never said to them, “I will be coming.” Nobody knows who this Godot is. They have never met him, but just to pass time they have invented this idea of Godot, because those two hobos, what are they going to do the whole time? So they sit and they wait, and they argue, “I don’t think he is a man of his word.”The other says, “No, I know perfectly well that if he has promised he will come. He may be a little late but he will come, don’t be worried.” This conversation continues, and then one becomes fed up and says, “I am going. It is enough. Now I cannot wait.”The other says, “Then I am also coming with you; we will wait there together, wherever you go. Anyway what is the point? Do you think you will meet him there? We don’t know where he is.”When I first came across this small play, I thought perhaps Godot was German for God – these Germans are just such crackpots that they can make anything out of anything, so they must have made God a Godot. But I inquired of Haridas. Haridas said, “No. In Germany we don’t call God Godot, we call him Gott.”So I said, “I was not very far off: G-o-t-t, Gott.” I said, “You have come very close to Godot. It is perfectly okay. My guess was not absolutely wrong, I was on the right lines that it must be some German idea of turning God into Godot.”But whether you call him God or Gott or Godot, it doesn’t matter because the word means nothing – so you can call him anything. It is simply a word without any meaning at all, so you can play with it. And in fact that’s what Samuel Beckett was doing. He means God. He doesn’t say so, but it is a clear-cut indication – waiting for God; but then it would have lost some beauty. When he makes it waiting for Godot, you know who Godot is yet you cannot say that you are speaking against God.Nobody has seen him. Nobody has met him. Nobody has heard him. Still everybody is waiting for him: now he must be coming, it is time, he should be here.What are the Jews doing? Waiting, waiting. And they were angry when Jesus said, “I have come.” He was disturbing their waiting. Just think if you had gone to those two hobos and you had said, “Okay, I have come.” They would have both killed you – “You think you are Godot? Do you know who Godot is? Are you trying to deceive us?” Even if Godot himself had come, they would not have believed that he was Godot – because how he can prove that he is Godot? They don’t have any photograph. They don’t have any address, a phone number. How can they recognize him? They have not seen him before.That’s one thing which should be clearly understood. When Moses sees God, nobody asks him, “How did you recognize him? – because you have not seen him before.” Recognition needs you to have seen him before; otherwise some charlatan or somebody may be deceiving you. “How, on what grounds…?”When Jesus hears voices of God, or Mohammed hears them, how do they recognize that those voices are God’s? Have they heard him before? Their recognition is not valid. They may have heard some voices, many mad people hear them. They may have seen somebody, many mad people see somebody. You can go into any madhouse and you will see a madman alone talking to another who is not there, and not only talking, but answering also from his side.There is a game of cards that one man can play. In trains, once in a while, I came across a person…because I would not speak in the trains. That was my only time to be silent, otherwise in the cities with five meetings a day… So only between two cities, on the train, was the time when I would be silent and rest. But I saw people playing cards, alone. I was puzzled: this was a great religious game! They had a partner, and for that partner’s side they also played; they knew both sides and they knew both hands of cards.Those two hobos were not doing anything new. All these religions for centuries have been doing just that, waiting for Godot, because waiting at least keeps you hoping that tomorrow… If not today, then tomorrow – but it is going to happen. And when so many people are waiting, somebody must know, somebody must have heard, somebody must have seen – he must have spoken to somebody! And then there are people who say, “He has spoken to me.”I used to receive so many letters. Even now I receive them, but I don’t see the letters because I stopped looking at all this rubbish. I used to receive letters – and still they come but my secretary simply reports to me: “Fifteen or twenty letters of this type have come, saying that they have seen God and they want to meet you so that you can see whether their realization is true or not.”“They have seen God,” I said, “they should have asked him. Why should they bother me? I am absolutely unconcerned with you and your God; why should you bother me? If you have seen God then what is the suspicion? Why should you need a certificate from me?”Just pure hallucinations, imagination, continual listening to idiotic sermons… Millions of people waiting with great expectation – the imagination fires up: just a little effort and you will see God.But remember, whatever you see is not you. Whatever you see is some object. And religion’s basic concern is not objective. Its basic concern is your subjectivity. When all seeing disappears, all hearing disappears, and all thinking disappears… When all your senses are silent, in that silence it transpires.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the difference between a religion and a cult? – because the Christians go on calling the people around you a cult. It seems difficult for them to accept us as a religion. What could be the reason behind it?It is a complex question. You will have to understand many things before the question can be answered.Religion is an individual experience. Only an individual can be religious. The cult is an establishment, it is an organization, it has nothing to do with religion at all. It exploits in the name of religion. It pretends to be religious and lives on the past.For example, Christians will say that they have a two thousand year history. But the past is dead, it is a corpse. This is a very strange world in which we live. When Jesus was there, Jews could not accept him as religious: he and his followers were a “cult.”Jesus is a religious man so there was the fragrance of religion around him, and those who were sensitive, available, receptive, came close to Jesus. This coming to Jesus was not a question of any intellectual conviction; it was more like a love affair. They simply fell in love with the man. The religious man never converts anybody, but his presence inspires many people to be with him. A religious person has no followers, only fellow travelers – it is impossible for a religious person to insult somebody by calling him a follower.When Jesus was crucified, a strange thing happened, something that has happened to almost all the religions. The same type of people who had crucified Jesus – the rabbis, the priesthood – the same type of people gathered around the dead religious phenomenon, which had gone, which was not there anymore.It is just like the fragrance of a flower. The flower is gone, the fragrance lingers on a little – and then it is lost. Religion cannot have a continuity. It will always be individual, here and there. One individual becomes enlightened and suddenly people start becoming attracted toward him as if by a magnetic force.Jesus is not an intellectual; he is not even educated. He is not a theologian; he cannot argue for God or for religion. In all his teachings there is no argument, they are statements. A philosopher argues, a religious person states. The philosopher argues because he does not know; it is through argument that he wants to come to a conclusion. But the religious person knows it. He states it, it is a declaration – and he also knows that there is no way to prove it. No argument is going to be supportive of it.But once that magnet disappears… The priest is the most cunning part of humanity – and clever. He is a businessman, he sees the opportunity of a great business. While Jesus is alive, it is dangerous to be with him. No businessman will come close to him – only gamblers may risk it and be with him. It is dangerous to be with him: he can be crucified, you can be crucified.But once he is dead it is a great opportunity for business. Then a new kind of people start gathering around: they are the priests, the popes, the imams, the rabbis – learned, scholarly, argumentative, dogmatic. They create the dogma, the creed. They create the cult.On the dead body of a religious person, a cult is created. Christianity is a cult.Friedrich Nietzsche used to say… And I feel that he has the tremendous quality of seeing certain things which others go on missing. The man was mad, but sometimes mad people have a very sharp intelligence. Perhaps that is the reason that they go mad. Friedrich Nietzsche says, “The first and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years ago. Since then there has been no Christian at all.” And he is absolutely right.Jesus was the only Christian, although he never knew the word Christian. He knew only Aramaic, the language which he spoke, and a little bit of Hebrew, the language which the rabbis spoke. But he had no idea of Greek. The word Christ is a Greek word, and the word Christian comes out of Christ. Jesus never in his life heard the words Christ or Christian. The Hebrew word for Christ is messiah, so Jesus knew messiah.But once he died… And it was very strange that when he was alive, overflowingly alive, and was ready to give, to share, to pour his being into their being, the people were avoiding him. But once he was dead, the priests were not going to miss the opportunity.The priests immediately gather around the dead body of a Buddha, of a Jesus, of a Lao Tzu, and they immediately make the catechism. They start making a church on the dead body.If Jesus comes back, the pope will be the first person to ask for his crucifixion again, because Jesus will disturb the whole business. That’s what he was doing the last time he was here.Why were the rabbis angry? The business was going so well, everything was settled, everybody was satisfied and suddenly this man Jesus comes and starts disturbing people’s minds. He starts people thinking, inquiring, seeking. The establishment cannot tolerate such a person, because if you start seeking and searching, soon you will find that the establishment is standing on a dead body.I have heard that one day the bishop of New York phoned the pope, a long distance call, and he was really in a very shaky condition. He said to the pope, “A hippie-like man has entered the church and when I asked him, ‘Who are you?’ he said, ‘Can’t you recognize me? I am your Lord Jesus Christ, exactly.’ What am I supposed to do in such a situation?”The pope said, “You idiot! Just call the police. If he is just a hippie, there is no problem. If he is really Lord Jesus Christ then let him be imprisoned before he creates any disturbance – and get moving. If he is the Lord, just get busy and phone the police – and be quick to get him imprisoned.”The same trouble will be there. Jesus has promised in the Bible, “I will be coming back,” but I can tell you authoritatively that he is not going to come – one experience was enough. Who wants to be crucified again? And that time at least there was a consolation: these were Jews, orthodox, traditional; they could not understand the revolution that he had brought. This time, even that consolation will not be there. It will be the Christians, his own people, who will crucify him.Last time, Jesus had prayed to God, “Forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing.” What is he going to do this time? He will have to pray, “Forgive these people – they know perfectly well what they are doing.” But they will do exactly the same thing.A cult is a business, a religious kind of business. It has a religious jargon; it has no experience. Yes, once somewhere in the past there may have been a flower, but it is gone. Centuries have passed, and since then the priest goes on pretending that he is the representative of that fragrance. Nobody can represent fragrance: it comes with the flower and goes with the flower. But the priest can create a plastic flower, can even put French perfume on it… And that’s what he has been doing in all the religions.Religion is rebellious, is bound to be so, because religion starts saying things that the tradition will oppose. Only one of these two can exist: either the mass, unintelligent crowd mind which creates the tradition, or a man like Jesus or Buddha or Mahavira. They are alone. And what they are saying can be understood only by the chosen few. What they bring to the world is something so otherworldly, that unless you can have a heart to heart contact with them, there is no way of understanding them – you will misunderstand.Jesus is misunderstood. Socrates is misunderstood. Al-Hillaj Mansoor is misunderstood. Whenever you find a religious man, it will be simple to ascertain that all around him there will be misunderstanding. But once he dies, things settle down. Once he dies the priesthood makes a new business. Now, Jews have been suffering almost a heart attack for nearly two thousand years, for the simple reason that they missed the business. Christianity is now the biggest business in the world, and they missed. And Jews are not the people to miss when there is a business; they have the eye to see it.I have heard a story…It has been happening for centuries that every year on a particular day in the Vatican, the chief rabbi of the city comes with roll in his hand to Saint Peter’s Square where the pope waits for him. Jews and Christians gather in thousands to see this meeting of the pope and the chief rabbi, but what transpires between them, nobody knows. The rabbi bows down, gives the roll to the pope. The pope bows down – that’s all.The next morning, the roll is sent back to the rabbi to keep for the next year. For two thousand years no pope bothered to look into it, but this Polack pope became curious: what is this? What kind of convention is this that has been going on and on? And every time the rabbi gives it to the pope and the next morning it has to be sent back, ceremoniously – the same roll goes back. What exactly is in it? He opened the roll. It was very ancient – two thousand years old. And do you know what he found? It was the bill for the last supper!The Jews were still asking, “Pay for it at least.” And of course Jesus died without paying, so…Religion is basically rebellion against dead traditions, meaningless conventions. It is a revolution to bring the birth of a new man, of a new consciousness.The cult is not concerned with the new man. The cult does not want the new man ever to be born, because with the old, things are so at ease, why create trouble? Who knows what the new man will be?And they are right. The new man is going to be trouble. He is not just going to accept any idiotic concept; he will ask questions. He is not going to be faithful. He will be basically a man of inquiry. He will doubt – he will not believe.A religious man doubts, but never believes. He inquires, because doubt leads into inquiry; and he questions till he finds the answer on his own. Then there is no question of belief or faith – he knows.If you ask him, “Do you believe in God?” he will say no. You will be surprised – a religious man saying no! And if you ask him, “You are a religious man and you say that you don’t believe?” he will say, “Yes, I repeat it again: I don’t believe because I know; belief is for those who are blind. A blind man believes in light, a man with eyes knows. Do you believe in light?”But the believers are docile, ready to submit, to surrender to any idiotic concept. Ask the Christian, “What do you mean by the virgin birth?” – and each Christian believes in it; if you don’t believe in it you are not much of a Christian.Just a few days ago a bishop in London was thrown out of his bishophood because he said, “I don’t believe in the virgin birth.” If you don’t believe in the virgin birth, then you are not a Christian, so what right have you to be a bishop? And you are spreading dangerous ideas in people’s minds. Tomorrow you will say, “I don’t believe in the Holy Ghost.” It is bound to come, that “Who is this fellow, the Holy Ghost? Doing unholy things, making a poor virgin Mary pregnant, still he remains the Holy Ghost!”And if you suspect the virgin birth and the Holy Ghost, how long can you believe in a God? – because out of the trinity you have already doubted two. The third you have not seen, and you cannot meet a person who has seen him. They will quote scriptures, but scriptures cannot satisfy a religious man. He wants to taste truth himself. But that creates difficulty for the cult. The cult may be any: Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish; it doesn’t matter – these are all cults. Perhaps there has been a religious man in the beginning. I say “perhaps” because priests are so cunning they can make a whole church even without a real religious man’s dead body; that is not such a necessity.I am reminded of a small story.A young devil comes running to the chief devil and says, “Do something quickly; just now one man has found truth. I am coming directly from there. Something has to be done. His truth has to be stopped, otherwise he will destroy our business.”It is obvious, if people become truthful and people start discovering truth, what business has the devil left? But the old devil laughed and he said, “You are too young, too new to the business. Our people are already there.”He said, “But I didn’t see anybody.”The old devil said, “You will take a little time to understand. Did you see the priests around the man?”He said, “Yes.”The devil said, “They are our people. They won’t let the truth go anywhere. They will make a dogma out of it and they will not leave the man who has found the truth. Let him find it. They will surround him – they will become the mediators between him and the masses, and they are our agents.”All priests are the devil’s agents. They have no interest in truth, no interest in inquiring about the ultimate reality. Their interest is how to exploit man’s fear, man’s greed.They exploit your fear by creating hell. They exploit your greed by creating heaven. They exploit your helpless state by creating God. They give you certain scriptures, mantras, prayers, and they say, “These will save you; you are protected. You need not be worried, you are not helpless. And we are always there between you and God – you can depend on us.” They don’t know of God at all. They have nothing to do with God. But God is a beautiful concept to exploit people who are feeling psychologically sick, afraid, fearful – and the whole of humanity is in the same situation.Whenever a religious man comes, he starts transforming you, not consoling you, because by consolation, your sickness is not going to disappear. Only by transformation can you be absolutely on your own, can you be absolutely contented with yourself and with existence.But the priest does not want you to be contented. He wants you to be discontented; otherwise why will you go to the priest? For what? He does not want you to become courageous. He wants you to be cowards forever, because only cowards will come crawling to his feet. Why would the courageous come to him? There is no need.The religious man destroys the need for the cult; hence, whenever there is a religious man and around him the climate of religion, all the cults will be against him.So this is a strange situation – Christians calling us a cult! They are a cult. Hindus are calling us a cult; they are a cult because their religious people died two thousand, three thousand, five thousand years ago. And nobody actually knows whether there has been any religious person in the beginning at all or whether it was a fiction from the very beginning.George Gurdjieff, one of the most penetrating intellects of this century, used to say, “There has never been a Jesus Christ. It was only a drama that used to be played; and slowly, slowly, the priests became aware that this drama can be utilized: ‘Make it history.’” One thing is certain, that except for the Christian New Testament, there is no reference to Jesus Christ anywhere, in any scripture.If a man of the caliber of Jesus was there, it is impossible that somewhere in the Jewish scriptures his name would not have been entered – and particularly when he was crucified. Crucifixion makes his name the most historical name. In fact, now we know history only according to Jesus: before Christ, after Christ… That’s how we know history. That man becomes the central point of our whole history. Such an important person is not even mentioned anywhere: neither in Jewish scriptures, nor in Roman scriptures – Judea was under the Roman Empire.Certainly in the Roman files Jesus must have been referred to. If you crucify a man, at least he deserves a place somewhere in your bureaucratic files. But nowhere, except those four gospels which are written by his four disciples… He is simply nonexistent. If you just lose those four disciples’ gospels, Jesus becomes only gossip. Gurdjieff was very insistent that he was just gossip, and that cunning people had used the drama and made history out of it – and a great business of course!It is bound to be the case, that while I am here nobody is going to accept you as a religion. And you are a religion only while I am here. The moment I am gone, the best way is to disperse just like a fragrance. The worst way is to become a cult. Then these people – Christians and Jews and Hindus and Mohammedans – will accept you also as a religion. They will accept you as a religion only when you have become a cult. Do you see the strange logic of the world? When you have lost contact with a living experience, then of course you are as dead as they are, and of course dead people don’t argue. And one dead person pays respect to another dead person – it is just courtesy, simple manners.But how can the dead people be respectful to a living person? They are dead; that hurts. They don’t know; that hurts. They have only beliefs – and who knows whether those beliefs are true or not. There are three hundred religions on the earth, three hundred different dogmas, creeds. Do you think all three hundred dogmas and creeds can be true?Truth can only be one.You may verbalize it differently, but you cannot make two creeds out of it. Your languages may be different. Your concepts about it may be different, but anybody can see that it is about the same truth.You must have heard the story of the five blind men who went to see an elephant. In the first place, blind people should not go to see something; that is an absurdity. But they were curious, and the whole village was agog because for the first time an elephant had come to the village. So they also decided, “Let us go.”They could not see but they said, “We can at least touch and feel, and we will see what this elephant is.” And they all five touched the elephant, of course from different angles. Somebody touched the leg of the elephant; he said, “I have found it. The elephant is just like a pillar, the pillars that we have in the temple, exactly like a marble pillar.”Another man said, “You idiot, you must be touching some pillar, because what I see is totally different.” He was touching the ear of the elephant, and he said, “It looks like a fan.”In India, in the hot summer, before electricity came into being, there used to be fans hanging from the ceiling. And one person, a poor person, would go on pulling the fan with a rope the whole day, and the fan would give you, at least for the few rich people, cool air the whole day. Or people would be standing on both sides with two big fans the shape of an elephant’s ear, and they would both be fanning you.So the second man said, “This is impossible what you are saying.”A third one contradicted them both, and the fourth one contradicted all three. Then the fifth one said, “You are idiots; I should not have come with you, because it is nothing but a brush” – he was holding the tail. “And so much ado about nothing; just a brush hanging with something… I don’t know what it is hanging with because I can’t see.” They were all quarreling the whole way back home.But how can you decide when you are blind? You should accept one thing, that you cannot see. If you don’t accept that then there is going to be trouble.These cults have no eyes. I have asked bishops, rabbis, shankaracharyas, Jaina monks, Buddhist bhikkus, “Have you experienced it? And at least, for once, be sincere and be truthful.”And they have all told me, “In private we can say we have not experienced it, but in public, if you ask us, we will absolutely deny that we have ever said it – because in public we have to pretend. We have studied…”When I spoke for the first time in Mumbai, in 1960, a Jaina monk also spoke with me. We were the two to address the meeting. He spoke before me because he was a well-known person; I was absolutely unknown. And when he finished and I stood up, people from the hall started leaving because nobody knew me. I had to tell those people, “Just for five minutes, stand still wherever you are. After five minutes you are free to leave or to sit down.” Of course they stopped because I was asking for just five minutes and it wouldn’t have looked good to go out just like that.I said, “Just for five minutes – look at the clock and after five minutes just empty the hall; there is no need to be here. But I have just a few things to say in five minutes. First: this man who spoke before me knows nothing; he is just a dodo!” Many who were standing sat down. I said, “For five minutes, stand up! For five minutes keep standing then you can either sit or go out.”This man had been talking about Mahavira, the founder of Jainism. Mahavira’s original name was Vardhaman. Mahavira is a given name. Mahavira means very courageous, a great warrior – because in Jainism, truth has to be conquered. That is the exact meaning of Jaina; Jaina means the conqueror. Jainism means: the religion which teaches you how to conquer the truth – and Mahavira conquered it, so his name was changed from Vardhaman to Mahavira. Now, Vardhaman is almost forgotten.That monk was saying, “Vardhaman was born as a son to a king,” and “Vardhaman renounced the palace, the kingdom,” and “Vardhaman became realized.” And he was using both names – Vardhaman and Mahavira – without any trouble, and all the people who were present there were Jainas so they understood it.But I said, “This man does not understand that he is talking about two persons, and he is very confused.” The people looked at me. I said, “Vardhaman is one person; Mahavira is totally another. When Vardhaman died, then Mahavira was born; they never met. This man has been talking as if they were one person and was saying that Mahavira was born to redeem you all from suffering, from misery.”I said, “That’s a lie, because Mahavira himself has said, ‘Nobody can make you miserable, and nobody can make you happy, except you.’ So how can he redeem the whole world? He cannot redeem a single person. He himself is saying the truth: ‘It is you who cause your misery. If you understand the cause of your misery, you stop causing it.’ And ecstasy is your nature. Misery is your effort, your great endeavor, your success.“To be miserable, you have to stand on your head, upside down. You have to be as unnatural as possible, you have to swim upstream. To be ecstatic, blissful, you just go down with the river. You are in a let-go. You simply allow your nature to be what it is. Mahavira says, ‘Nobody can make you miserable. Nobody can make you happy’ – and this poor fellow was saying that Mahavira was born to redeem the whole world.”I said, “Five minutes are over, now you can decide: either you sit down or get lost.” They all sat down, but the monk was very much puzzled. It was an air-conditioned hall but he started perspiring. But he was a sincere man, and when I finished, he whispered in my ear, “Can you come to my temple just for ten minutes? I cannot come to your place – otherwise I would have come – because my followers will not allow me to go anywhere.” Such a great monk with so many followers, and going to meet some unknown person; and someone who has made a mockery of him, who has criticized him on every point.I said, “There is no problem; I will come.”I went there. Nearly one thousand people had gathered because people came to know that I was coming, and they had seen what had happened in the morning. But the monk said, “I want to talk to him in private, so please sit outside; we will be going into the small room.” We went in. He closed the door and started weeping, crying, tears…and he must have been seventy years old. I said, “But why are you crying?”He said, “I am crying because for the first time I felt that I really don’t know anything. For fifty years – because I was twenty when I became a monk – for fifty years I have been teaching people as if I know. I have called you just to confess that I don’t know anything. I cannot say it in front of people – I am not that courageous – because if I say that in front of people, I will be thrown out.“No, for fifty years I have not worked. I have been worshipped for fifty years. I have been looked after; thousands of people think of me as their master, and if I say that I don’t know anything, they will kill me. They will say, ‘Then why have you been deceiving us for fifty years?’ I cannot say it to them, but I wanted to unburden my heart to you – I don’t know. First I was shocked, angry, by what you said in the morning, but as I started thinking about it, everything seemed to be right.“First I was thinking to stand up and argue against you, but I saw clearly that no argument was going to help – because I am not arguing; what I am saying is simply stating.” He said, “I would love to know myself. Enough of belief – fifty years I have wasted; and I am just standing where I started.”This happened to many religious leaders with me. When they were alone they accepted what I was saying, but in public they have a different face, a different mask. Now, these people – they may be Christians, they may be Jews, they may be Hindus – they don’t know. Knowing is not a function of a crowd. I can see, you can see, but there is no way that we can both see from the same place.You cannot see through my eyes. I cannot see through your eyes. I can neither stand in your space, where you are standing, nor can you stand in my space, where I am standing.Exactly like that, religion is absolutely individual. And whenever you organize it, the priesthood immediately takes over. If the man who has experienced is alive, he may try to make sure that the religion does not become a cult.That’s what my whole effort is.So as long as I am here with you, it is not going to become a cult. But once I am gone then it will be very difficult to avoid, because up to now, there are so many religions in the world and nobody has succeeded.Krishnamurti tried his best. Nobody has done so much against becoming a cult, but it seems not to be succeeding. He dissolved the organization in 1925. An organization had been made for him, The Star of the East, to spread his truth and experience to the whole world. He dissolved the organization. He returned the castles and the money and the land, and everything that had been donated to the organization, to their original owners. And he said, “I don’t want any followers.”He has been continually saying from that time, “Nobody is my follower,” but there are people who say, “We are Krishnamurtiites.” Now, what can you do? He is still alive, and every day he is saying, “Nobody is my follower, and I am not your leader, teacher, master, anything.” But people just repeat these words and say, “We are Krishnamurtiites.”When Krishnamurti dies they will again join together, because the master is dead now and something has to be done in his memory – make a temple, make a church, make a memorial, make an organization – so his truth goes on living.Truth is not some thing. It is not a thing that you can preserve. It disappears with the person who has experienced it.Can you preserve love? There may be two great lovers and you see the phenomenon of love happening; can you preserve this phenomenon? Those two lovers die; can you preserve that climate? – that transfiguration that was happening between those two persons? How can you? It is not a thing; you cannot hold it in your hands, and you cannot put it in a safe deposit. You cannot make a temple out of it or a church out of it or a creed out of it.Love happens between two persons – truth is even more difficult: it happens within a single individual being. At least in love there were two, and there was something visible outside also. Any observer could have seen something intangible but yet comprehensible transpiring between two persons. You can see it in their eyes, in their faces.Once I was traveling in a train, and a couple was with me, a very old couple, a Spanish couple. They had come to India to travel. The man must have been eighty, the woman must have been seventy-five; it was time they should have been in their graves. But I was surprised to see their love – because we had to be together for twenty-four hours – in each and everything that they did, just small things. It is not in big things that you have to show your love, just small things…. But I could almost touch their love. It was so visible you could see it. I asked the old man, “This is a rare phenomenon; how long have you been together?”He said, “If you count the years, we must have been together for at least sixty years – she was fifteen when I first met her – but those sixty years don’t seem to me as sixty years; they have all become a small moment, condensed, herenow. I never think of all those moments that have passed because this moment contains all of them.”But once these people are gone, you will not find that aroma, that aura, that feel. It will be gone too; it is too subtle.With truth it is even more difficult, because it is a single individual who has experienced his own being and is so full of ecstasy that if you allow, he may overflow; if you are available, he may enter in you.If you are reluctant and resistant… This phenomenon is so delicate that a little resistance on your part and you miss it. So anybody who comes here with a certain prejudice, a certain mind, a certain idea, is going to miss me. If he comes here open, vulnerable, then he will taste something of religion, he may smell something of religion. And that is the only way to know religion: to be in close proximity to a religious man. It is infectious.But you cannot get it even if you hug pope the Polack. There is nothing… A Polack is just a Polack. He may also hug you and may crush your bones, because a Polack hug is a little difficult on the ribs. But you will not find anything.I have met thousands of people who are known as great religious masters and teachers. India is so full of sages and saints you can meet them anywhere. There is no need to seek and search. They are seeking and searching for you, and fighting: “You belong to me, not to yourself” – whosoever catches hold of you first. But they are all parts of a certain cult, repeating parrot-like – exactly parrot-like or you can say computer-like – scriptures, great words. But words only mean that which the person has.When Jesus says “truth” or Buddha says “truth,” the word has meaning in it. When the Buddhist monk says “truth,” there is no meaning in it; it is an empty word, there is no content in it.You ask why they can’t accept you as a religion. It is obvious: they are in the marketplace; everybody is shopping and peddling his own goods. Now you come as a competitor, and you start selling new things which are more attractive because they are alive. They become afraid that their young people, their young boys, their young daughters, may get attracted to you – and they are getting attracted, they are not wrong. And that’s what makes them freak out: these people should be going to church or to the synagogue – what are they doing here, in this place? They should listen to the rabbi, to the minister – what are they doing here?And certainly when they see you, they cannot figure it out. They have a certain idea: you should fit with that idea, then you are religious. And certainly I am trying my best so that you cannot fit in with anybody’s idea – including mine! – so that you can be just yourself.My whole religious approach is to give you back to you.You have been stolen. You have been covered, conditioned in every possible way. They have closed all the doors of approach to yourself.My whole work is just to make doors and windows in you. And if I can withdraw all the walls and leave you just an open sky, you will know what religion is. But you will not fit with anybody else’s idea of religion. They are going to call you all kinds of names. For them, cult is a condemnation, so they call you a cult.Just the other day I was looking at a panel on the TV with one rabbi and two Christian priests – one must have been Catholic, one Protestant or something, different denominations – discussing me and what is happening here. And the rabbi said, “It is a cult.”The coordinator asked, “What is a cult? – and what is the difference between a cult and a religion?” And what the rabbi said, I agree with, but for a totally different reason.The rabbi said, “A cult is when there is a charismatic person and people are hypnotized, magnetized by him, surround him; and when the man dies the people disperse – no tradition is created. That is a cult.”What he is saying, I am also saying – exactly the same but for different reasons. He says, “If the cult survives the death of the founder, then it becomes a religion.” When Jesus is alive it is a cult, because it is his charismatic personality… When Jesus is dead then it becomes a religion. A very strange idea: religion being born out of a cult. The cult should not be a condemnatory thing; it is the mother of religion, it is the womb from where the religion comes. It is a potential religion.But he was saying, “The cult is bound to disappear because it was only the charismatic person, it was his charisma, his magic that kept people together. Once he is gone, then there is nothing to hold onto. Then people disperse and the cult dies.” I say this is actually the definition of religion.In a more intelligent world there will be no tradition. Religious people will be born, and with a religious person a religion will happen. Many more people will come, become close to him and will drink out of his well. Jesus says, “Eat me, drink me.” Yes, they will eat, they will drink and they will be transformed in the whole process. And when the religious person is gone, certainly there is no need to make a tradition, because tradition will be dead.Yes, you loved your father but when he died you took him to the grave. You didn’t say, “He was my father, how can I take him to the grave or to the funeral pyre? I am going to keep him in my house. I loved him, he loved me…” No, when your father is dead it is sad but a natural phenomenon. Everybody who is born is going to die. You say good-bye to him with all your gratitude. The same should be the case with every religious teacher.Jesus is perfectly good, but Christianity is a disease. Moses is perfectly good, but Judaism is a curse. And the same is true about all of the religions. The people at the very source were really beautiful, but every beautiful flower dies. Even beautiful stars die and disappear, and don’t leave even a single trace behind. So what is the need for any religious person to leave a tradition behind him?I am not going to leave a tradition behind me.While I am here, enjoy the moment. Celebrate the moment. Why be bothered for the future? And remember one thing: anybody who tries, after me, to make a tradition is my enemy, is not my friend and is not your friend either. He belongs to the devil. He is now creating a church – and then the popes will come and everything. Then the businesses start and businessmen come in and religion disappears completely.It is better it disperses in the universe, rather than becomes a part of the religious marketplace.So whenever people ask me, “What is going to happen to your religion when you are not?” I say, “Why should you be worried? While I am here, it is enough.” And there will be people… Somebody will blossom and there will be religions. People will go on blossoming, but don’t make traditions because those traditions prevent other people from blossoming. Leave the space. If you had not been told to be a Jew or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian, and space had been left for you, perhaps you may have blossomed by now.But from the very beginning they started clipping you, cutting you, cropping you…Mukta was my gardener in Pune. She was always moving around with scissors, and whenever she would see me she would hide her scissors. I said, “Don’t do this. Why are you unnecessarily cutting these trees?” One tree particularly she used to call a monster, because she wanted to cut it. So first you have to call it a monster and then it becomes easy to cut.First you give it a bad name – it is a cult – and then it is good to destroy it. It was a monster. And it was such a beautiful tree, it was growing huge, but whenever I was not watching, she was cutting it. If it is a monster, then let it be a monster; it is that tree’s nature. Who are we to destroy it or to give it the shape of our ideas? Mukta has been in difficulty with me because she is Greek and follows the tradition of Aristotle – logical, mathematical. She wanted to create a European garden around my house.I said, “It is not possible.” And a European garden, particularly the English garden, is so much against nature, because where in nature do you find symmetry? But in an English garden you will find symmetry. They will cut two trees symmetrically, will make lawns symmetrical, will put plants symmetrically… Symmetry is unnatural, nature is asymmetrical.So in a Zen garden in Japan you will not find any symmetry. Even if there is, the Zen people won’t allow it; they will disturb the symmetry – something has gone wrong.Nature is wild, and when it is wild it has freedom.A religious person is also wild. In his wildness is his freedom and in his freedom he finds truth. In his freedom he finds himself. In his freedom he finds everything that there is to be found in existence.But a cultist remains full of rubbish and crap, borrowed empty words; maybe great words – God, soul, truth – but all empty because he has not lived any of them. And unless you live it, it has no meaning.Only life gives meaning.So it is true that they will not accept you as a religion – but why bother about them? Who cares? I am not interested that they should accept us as religion. We don’t need anybody’s acceptance, recognition, certificate. Who are they?Those three people in the panel finally decided, “It is time now that we should have a dialogue. We should go to these people and we should have a dialogue.” I simply laughed at the idea – the Jew sitting there, and on each side the two Christians sitting there.The Jews did not have the courage to have a dialogue with Jesus – or do you think the crucifixion was a dialogue? What dialogue can they have with me? If they know, there is no need for them to come here. If they do not know, then it is going to be a monologue. I will speak and they will have to listen. A dialogue is not possible.If you also know, and I also know, there is no need for a dialogue – silence is enough.If you don’t know, and I don’t know, then too there is no point in a dialogue, because it will not be a dialogue, it will become a wrestling match.I say I know. So with me there is only one possibility – a monologue.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is it not possible in any way to preserve your living religion and not let it be reduced to a cult like Christianity? The very idea of your religion being reduced with time to a cult is unbearable.It is almost impossible to preserve a religion as a religion. Up to now nobody has succeeded in doing it.But I said it is almost impossible, not absolutely, because we are fortunate in seeing all the failures of the past: all that helps a religion to become a cult can be dropped from the very beginning. We know that many people have tried before. Their efforts are also helpful.There is not an intrinsic impossibility of a religion remaining a religion. The reasons that reduce it to a cult are not very fundamental.The first thing: it is not “my religion.” I have nothing to do with it. In fact, when I ceased to be it came into being. This is the first thing to remember – it will help the religion to remain a living current. Do not make it a certain kind of religion – Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism – no, just let it be pure religion. Let it be just religiousness.Nobody can reduce religiousness to a cult. That is absolutely impossible. And what I am doing continually is withdrawing all possibilities, all potentialities, which can reduce it to a cult. For example, I have removed God. Without God it is very difficult to reduce a religion to a cult. That’s why Christianity is more of a cult than Buddhism.This is our blessing, because we can look back upon the whole of history. And only fools say that history does not repeat itself; it continuously repeats, unless you prevent it from repeating itself. If you have accepted the idea that history never repeats itself you are not going to prevent it from repeating itself, there is no need. I say to you that it always repeats itself, unless somebody intelligently prevents it.Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, are all God-oriented. Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, are not God-oriented. And the difference can be seen immediately. The God-oriented religions become cults immediately.God is a very dangerous concept because in the name of God comes the priesthood. If there is no God it is very difficult to create a priesthood. In Jainism there is no priesthood. They have to borrow priests from the Hindus for their worldly rituals; for example, marriage. They don’t have any priests, their religion is against Brahminism. But Hindus have the greatest and the longest-standing priesthood; the most sophisticated, cultured, very solidly based establishment.When my first uncle was getting married… At that time I became aware of a strange thing, that a brahmin had been called. I asked my father, “Jainism is against Brahminism, it was a revolt against the brahmin ritualistic, magical religion. And the marriage is being performed by a brahmin? From the very beginning the marriage is invalid. Can’t you manage to have a Jaina perform the marriage?”He said, “You raise inconvenient questions, but I must accept that your questions are never wrong. We may not be able to answer them, we may have practical difficulties in answering them, but that is really our problem – and we get angry at you! Now, the ritual is going to be performed; everybody is ready – the bride and the bridegroom, all the guests and the brahmin have come – it is just about to begin and you are starting to ask a troublesome question.”I said, “It is my uncle’s marriage. I have every right to be concerned that it is done rightly.”My father wanted me to be quiet. He said, “You can have a few rupees but get lost, go away.”I said, “This is not the time – no bribery is going to help. I am going to create trouble; I am not going to allow this brahmin to do the marriage ceremony. Just the very idea… He is your enemy; the brahmins are continually condemning Jainism, all their scriptures are full of condemnation. Jainas are continually condemning brahmins, their whole philosophy is against brahmins. I will not allow it. Either the marriage has to be performed by a Jaina, or I am going to create trouble.”And I created trouble. I stood up and I asked all the Jainas – all the elders of the society were there – I asked them, “What is the meaning of all this? Can anybody answer me?”One old man said, “This question has been arising in me my whole life – because I must have seen thousands of marriages. Each time the question was there, but I was not courageous enough to inquire. This boy is right. And one has to begin someday.”I told my grandfather, “Now, you come to my help. What this brahmin is doing, anybody can do. If you allow me, I can do it.”They said, “That will be too much. Let some elderly person do it.”I said, “That’s okay.”The same old man performed the ritual. That was the first marriage in India among Jainas performed by a Jaina. I said, “Don’t be worried. Whatsoever the brahmin is saying in Sanskrit, you say in Hindi. In fact it is better to say it in Hindi, because both the bride and the bridegroom will understand what you are saying. What the brahmin says is all nonsense – all Greek and Latin! He may be simply talking gibberish, and you think he is saying great things. All that is wanted is a commitment, a promise, a word given before the society that you will take care of each other. All else is non-essential.”And that old man performed it in Hindi. The brahmin was so angry because he lost his fee… And that was the beginning. After that marriage in my city no Jaina marriage was performed by a brahmin.Jainas have no priesthood because without God what is the function of the priest? Things are interrelated. God is absolutely needed to create the hierarchy – then the messiah, then the pope, then the cardinals, then the bishops, then the priest… And it goes on and on; from the bottom to the peak, so many steps. But they are all possible only if you accept the peak, and the peak is fictitious. God is fictitious.If I had met Jesus I would have told him, “God is fictitious. I am not denying you anything; I am simply saying that unless you prove God as a fact, your messiahship is out of the question – so there is no need to deny it, as the Jews are denying it, saying that you are not the messiah, not the true messiah.”Just a few days ago I saw a film, a beautiful film on a Jewish family, a very orthodox Hasid family. The Jews don’t accept Hasids as really equal to them, they are outcasts. The Hasids even today don’t accept the nation of Israel, because they say, “Israel will be established when the messiah comes – but where is he?”Their logic is perfect. This Israel is created by the politicians, not by the messiah. They don’t accept this nation – and I agree with them that this is just a creation, a forced creation. It is not a nation that grew naturally; hence the Jews in Israel are going to be in trouble forever.The Jews think that the Americans have done them a great favor by creating Israel; it is not so. They have done something worse than Adolf Hitler did, because this is going to be a constant problem. Israel had not existed for centuries; it was a Mohammedan country, Palestine, surrounded by Mohammedan countries.Now just because you won the Second World War and you happened to be in control of the land of Palestine, you forced the creation of a nation. It is arbitrary. The people are Mohammedans, it is their country. Israel may have been, thousands of years before, the country of the Jews. But for thousands of years it has been a country of the Mohammedans, and suddenly you simply change the map. And surrounded by the whole Mohammedan world… In the Middle East all the countries are Mohammedan.This small country, Israel, is going to continuously suffer; and how long can America help it? And how long are American Jews going to pour their money into Israel? Sooner or later the truth of history will have to be accepted. If America had been really compassionate toward Jews, they should have given them an Israel in America. Oregon would have been perfectly good! I propose it: let Oregon be Israel. But what kind of compassion is this? – putting Jews there. They will never be able to live at ease, never.So when I saw in this film the rejection of Israel by the Hasids… Of course their reason is different. I have always been against the creation of Israel. I was a child when it was created but even then my first reaction was that this was absolutely idiotic.The country is populated by Mohammedans – all around there are Mohammedan countries, they are all together – and you put the poor Jews among this vast ocean of enemies. Previously they had somehow escaped from that Israel – history was more compassionate to them. And there was no need for a nation; they were living all over the world. The whole world had become their nation. When you lose your nation, the whole world becomes your nation – why bother about a nation?My reasons were different: that this was a political strategy to keep a military base – because Israel will always need the help of America, so America will always keep its military base in Israel, which is close to Russia. And the Jews are not going in any way to be against America because they are protected by America; they are almost slaves of America.Without America Israel would be immediately finished, they would be slaughtered; so they depend on America, and their dependence is a guarantee that America has a base in the Middle East. Other Mohammedan countries will not give you a base – you are Christians, and Mohammedans and Christians have been fighting for fifteen hundred years, crusades upon crusades.My reason is different, but the Hasidic reason is worth consideration. They say the scriptures are clear that the messiah will come and reestablish the kingdom of Israel. Where is the messiah? Franklin Roosevelt? Winston Churchill? Who is the messiah? Then this Israel is bogus!I like the idea. But for me it is bogus for different reasons, but it is bogus; on that I agree with the Hasids. Without God you cannot have a messiah. I would not have argued with Jesus that “You are not the messiah,” because that is a secondary question. The primary question is that “You have to prove God exists.”But because Jews accepted God, they never argued on the basic point. And on the secondary point you cannot argue because Jesus says, “God has sent me.” And the Jews had been accepting other prophets sent by God, so what was wrong with poor Jesus? – why should he not be accepted? But if God had been denied, then… “There is nobody to send you. First you prove the existence of God – then only the secondary question arises; then we will discuss it.” And Jesus would have been at a loss to answer and the crucifixion would have been easily avoided.But Judaism is God-oriented, Mohammedanism is God-oriented, hence Mohammed becomes his messenger. And somebody has to be the messenger, otherwise how is there going to be any kind of communication between God and his creation? – a mediator is absolutely needed. It appears logical.The people in the Arabian countries believed in God, so they could not raise the basic question. They only argued that, “You are not the right messenger.” But how can you prove who is the right messenger and who is the wrong messenger? You are fighting on very secondary issues. The real fight has to be on the primary issue.In Jainism there is no possibility of a messiah. Nobody can declare that “I am a messiah”; people will simply laugh and say that you have gone mad. Nobody can declare that “I am a messenger of God”; he will be just a laughingstock, people will just joke around. He cannot say, “I am an incarnation of God,” because God does not exist. From where are you getting this incarnation – an incarnation of nobody?So in Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, no problem arises about the messiahs, messengers. And then how can you have popes and bishops and priests? This is the whole ladder. If you accept the highest rung on the ladder you will have to accept the ladder. But if the ladder is going nowhere, if it is just standing on the ground and leading nowhere, reaching nowhere, all the rungs on the ladder will become meaningless.I have denied the idea of God.And with God disappears all messiahhood. You cannot declare me a messiah even when I am dead. You cannot declare me an incarnation, even when I am dead. You cannot declare me a messenger.Do you see the simple fact? – that even when I am dead you cannot go against me. How can you create a cult? – because I am denying all the necessary ingredients for a cult. I am saying there is no messenger. I am saying there is no avatar.But although Mahavira saved Jainism from the priesthood, he could not save it from becoming a cult, because he brought in a new concept – the tirthankara.You have to understand: that concept is totally different from a messiah. A messiah is one who comes from God; that’s the exact meaning of avatar. Literally it means descendance – coming down from above. Tirthankara means growing up from below. It is man who has blossomed to his fullness, who has achieved the ultimate. It is not a descendance of anybody; it is a growth. It is from the roots, it grows like a tree.The avatar is upside down, the messiah is upside down, hanging from above, coming downward; they are a kind of fall. A tirthankara is man risen up to his full potential.Mahavira thought…and that was the concept of Buddha, the same – they were contemporaries, and they both thought, “This way we avoid the priesthood, God, because we have made man the central point.”One Baul poet of Bengal… Baul means mad, and they are really mad people – madly in love with existence. One of the most important of the Bauls is Chandidas. His famous statement is, “Sabar upar manush jati, tahar upar nahin: Above all is the truth of man, and above that there is nothing.” Now man becomes the ultimate truth.It was a great revolution – to throw God from his throne and put man on his throne.But a cult still came into being. They forgot something, but we can remember it. They were experimenting; they were the first people, and they have done a great deal. They have cut out almost half the possibilities, but the other half of the possibilities are enough to create a cult: they made the tirthankara an extraordinary man, a superman. They had to, because the question was of continuous comparison – Hindus have avatars; they are all supermen with divine power.The ordinary people would like to follow a man who has divine power, rather than only a man. Naturally, when you are going to shop, you shop for the best and the cheapest. Now, Mahavira was neither. He was the costliest because his discipline was very difficult; that was the price you had to pay if you were to follow him. If you were to go on that path of austerity, that was the price you had to pay to become a superman – and still you would be a man.So much trouble, so much fasting, living naked… The Jaina monk cannot even use fire. In the night when it is cold, winter, he cannot use a blanket, he cannot even use fire. There are naked Hindu monks also but they are not troubled: they do two things which are very inventive of them. First, they always sit with a bonfire in front of them, so they are warm. And second, they go on rubbing, all over their body, ashes from the fire. So all the pores in the body which breathe are closed – not completely, otherwise they would be dead, but closed enough so that their body heat does not go out. Then there is also the heat from the outside which prevents them from being cold.The Jaina monk is also naked, but with no heat, with no ashes rubbed on his body. He shivers. Shivering is the only method, the natural method to create a certain heat. Shivering is a natural protection against cold. You shiver, the body starts shaking; that creates a certain movement, exercise in the body, and creates heat. That’s all they can do the whole night. In the summer they are naked under the sun. They are completely burned up, with little food to eat and a small quantity of water to drink.So the path is arduous, and what do you gain? You are just following a man who is not even a descendant of God, who is not even a relative of God, who is not even a messenger of God. Who knows whether he is mad, sane, insane? He is just a man, just like you. While, in comparison, there are messengers of God, messiahs of God, avatars of God, God himself coming down…So in the market it was a difficult thing to sell. Hence they had to raise the tirthankara to the same status as the avatar, the messiah, even higher. This is simply the market economics. The tirthankara is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; he has the qualities of God. The messiah is only the messiah, the messenger is only a messenger, but the tirthankara has all the qualities of God himself. This created the base, the loophole for turning the religion into a cult.Hence I am insisting that I am an ordinary man. You cannot put me up for sale – who is going to buy me? When Jesus is available, Mohammed is available, Krishna is available, Mahavira is available, Buddha is available, do you think anybody is going to go for me? – a simple man, an ordinary man, himself insisting continually on his ordinariness.I have been denying miracles, saying that they have never happened, they never happen, and they will never happen. Mahavira and Buddha both faltered on that point – but they were pioneers. I have twenty-five centuries of experience behind me. I am standing on their shoulders; I can see far away. They could not think that these things would become their very weaknesses. They all – because Krishna was doing so many miracles, Rama was doing so many miracles… What to say of Rama – even his devotees, just in his name can do miracles.For example, between India and Sri Lanka there is an ocean, and it was a problem for Rama to cross the ocean to attack Sri Lanka and get his wife back. But his disciple, the monkey god, Hanumana, said, “Don’t be worried. Your name is enough.” And in his name he started throwing stones in the ocean – and because of Rama’s name the stones were floating, not drowning.The whole army of monkeys and of donkeys, and perhaps Yankees, all were there; so he started throwing stones, rocks, in the name of Rama, and the rocks started floating – soon there was a bridge. They passed over the bridge just by the using the name. Hanumana said, “You need not be worried, your name is enough. You don’t need to do anything.”Now, where such stories are going around what chance you have got to compete? Buddha’s disciples had to invent stories, Mahavira’s disciples had to invent stories. They are all invented stories; and invented in such a way that they made Mahavira and Buddha superior to Rama, to Krishna, to the Hindu trinity, the trimurti – Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh.When Buddha became enlightened, the story is that all the gods – Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh – all three came down to touch his feet, because an enlightened person is far higher than any gods. You should note that in Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, God is always singular; in Hinduism God is always plural – it is “gods,” thirty-three million gods.The chiefs of all these thirty-three million gods are these three, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh. The moment Buddha became enlightened, all three ran down from paradise to touch his feet. For seven days Buddha remained silent. It was Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh, these three gods, who persuaded him to speak because even gods don’t know the supreme truth. Even gods are eager to hear from you: What have you attained? What’s your realization? What has it done to you? Buddha argued in many ways, but finally he was persuaded by the three gods.His argument was very good. He said, “If I speak, in the first place what I have experienced will not be conveyed through the words. Secondly, even if a little fragrance of it goes with the words, where are the people who will be able to receive it? Where are the people who are available? And who wants truth in the first place? People want consolation.”But the three gods said, “You may be right about ninety-nine point nine percent of people, but still there is point one percent of people left who are available, who are receptive, who are willing to go to the further shore. Will you disappoint them?”Now this whole story is just to prove that even gods are not enlightened. And in Buddhism and in Jainism both, gods are people who have earned much virtue, and because of their great virtue they are rewarded with paradise. But there is a time limit to it. Sooner or later the reward for their virtues will be finished; they will have to come back again to the earth and again move into the wheel of life and death.That’s why there are thirty-three million gods, because with one god how can you manage this idea? So many people, in millions of years, have been virtuous, religious, truthful, honest – they all have to be rewarded; paradise is a reward.In Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, you don’t have anything above heaven. In Jainism and Buddhism, you have something above heaven. Heaven is only a pleasure place, a holiday, a pleasure resort – a holiday from this continuous wheel of misery, anxiety, anguish. One needs a little holiday, a long weekend.Heaven to the Jainas and the Buddhists is only a long weekend. But don’t forget! – it comes to an end and you fall back again into the same rut. And now it is even more unbearable because you have lived in such tremendous pleasure and splendor and now again you are living this boredom called life. It becomes more of a hell than it was before because you have something to compare it with.The tirthankara does not go to heaven, the buddha does not go to heaven, remember. The enlightened person goes to moksha, which is beyond heaven. From there, there is no coming back. One has got out of the wheel of life and death completely. It is not a holiday resort.Do you see my point? The Jainas and Buddhists had to create something above heaven. They had to give qualities to their tirthankaras, better, higher, superior to even those your god has, because it was a question of simple competition in the marketplace. But they forgot that this competition is going to be their very failure.They succeeded in attracting people: almost the whole country’s intelligentsia was influenced by them. Only unintelligent people, the masses, remained with Hindu gods. The intelligent people could not bow down to a monkey god – it looked so idiotic; they could not worship a tree. Just any kind of a stone, you paint it red, put two flowers on it, and wait. Soon, somebody else will come and put flowers, somebody else will come and put a coconut – and a god is born, you have given birth to a god. And this happens every day.The corporations in India, the municipal committees in India are in continual trouble. In the middle of the road a god appears! Now you cannot remove it; that is interfering with the feelings of religious people – and soon a temple will arise there. First any stone colored red, any shape will do – because with thirty-three million gods, who knows how many shapes they have? Just all that you need are worshippers, and worshippers are available. Then neither the government can remove it, nor can anybody else remove it.And when the god is there, a shelter is needed for it. A temple is going to be raised there, just in the middle of the road. To remove it means immediate riots; people will be killed and slaughtered, and that fire will spread all over the country; so it is better to allow the god to remain there. It destroys the beauty of the road, it disturbs the traffic, it is dangerous, it can cause accidents, but there is nothing you can do.In India only Jaipur has straight and plain roads – the only town, the only city – and it is perhaps the most beautiful city in India. But it happened because the man who made it, Jai Singh – he was the king of Jaipur state – was an atheist. And he called from south India, from the Nizam of Hyderabad… The Nizam of Hyderabad had a very intelligent chief minister, Mirza Ibrahim. Jai Singh was born a Hindu but he asked Nizam to give Mirza Ibrahim to him for at least a few years while he was making Jaipur. He wanted it to be India’s Paris.And he almost succeeded; he made something tremendously beautiful. And why did he ask a Mohammedan? He told Mirza, “I don’t want any nuisance – because it is going to happen: everywhere temples and mosques and things will start happening, and our whole plan will be disturbed.“So if a temple appears – you are not a Hindu, simply remove it in the night. No hustle, no bustle about it; the way it appears, the same way it disappears. In the morning it is not there at all. Nobody should even be suspicious that it is disappearing; everything should go quietly, but in the night the whole temple is to completely disappear. And if any mosque appears, I am not a Mohammedan… Perhaps you will feel it is difficult…?”Mirza said, “That’s true: A mosque I cannot remove.”Jai Singh said, “That, I will do.”They removed many temples, many mosques that were appearing, and Jai Singh proved right: they were bound to appear because Jaipur has the biggest roads. Now, on any crossroad where he wanted a garden to be, Hindus would love to have their temple. Where you can find such a beautiful place? And you need not buy it, you need not ask anybody for it, because for God there is no question.And all that you have to do, simple things… You just go in the night, you put a round stone – dig a little hole in the earth, put in the round stone – and the next morning you declare that in the night a God appeared to you, and he said that at such and such place he had been waiting for many, many centuries, and now it was time that he should be brought to people’s notice and a temple should be raised.Soon crowds will rush to check whether the dream is true or not. And it is going to be true: a god is found! – and it is god’s own indication, you cannot interfere. But Jai Singh managed very well. The god would appear; they would start working, and in the night the god would disappear. And Jai Singh would say, “What can I do? The way he appears, the same way he disappears. We cannot prevent him from disappearing; we cannot prevent him from appearing, what can we do?” That’s how he managed to have beautiful streets in Jaipur.While he was alive, Jaipur had only one color, red. All the houses, on the main streets were made exactly the same; so for miles you could see the same houses. It looked so beautiful. And they were all made with red stone, nothing else was allowed. The whole city was red stone. And with the greenery, the red stone is so beautiful because green and red are the basic colors of nature. Nature knows only two colors, red and green.Since Independence everything has been disturbed. Every year I would go there, and I would see gods appearing, temples being raised in the middle of the street, on the corner of the street, anywhere. Now, the secular government cannot do anything. The man had made it so beautiful… And now people are painting different colors on their houses because how can you prevent them, it is their house.Jai Singh was a crazy king. There was no question of anybody raising the idea that a house could be of any other color. In Jaipur only one color was allowed: “If you don’t want that color, get out of Jaipur” – and he was whole and soul!Even in his time, efforts to change it were made in the Supreme Court of India. But the Supreme Court said, “As far as internal affairs are concerned we cannot do anything; that is our agreement with the king – only on foreign affairs, but this is not a foreign affair. He is absolutely sovereign. If he wants the red color, we cannot do anything. If he wants only one kind of model for all the houses, we cannot do anything.”But now… When I visited the last time, I almost felt like crying, because they have destroyed the whole thing. All those beautiful lanes with similar houses had something poetic; and all those red stones with green trees… The whole place was a vast garden. Now all kinds of colors have appeared. Old houses are being demolished, skyscrapers are being made. People are changing their houses because people don’t want a similar model, the same model, and nobody can prevent them. On the streets – temples, mosques, gurdwaras; in the name of religion you can do anything.Buddha and Mahavira tried, but were not aware of all the implications. I am aware of all the implications. You may not be able to see what I am trying to do: I am destroying all the bases, so that when I am gone you will not find a single base to make a cult out of my religion.Hence I said, it is almost impossible, because people are so stupid that out of their stupidity they can start inventing things for which I am not even leaving a single seed. For example: just the other day a letter was brought to me. Professor Vijay Chauhan, a professor in Washington University, gave an interview about me saying that we were great friends, and we used to have long discussions.I have never seen this man, what to say about long discussions! – and friendship? Yes, I have heard his name, so I know who he is, but I have not seen him. His mother was a great poetess, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, and because of her I used to go, once in a while, to her house, and she used to recite her poems to me. She just had mentioned to me, “I have two sons, one is Ajay Chauhan, the other is Vijay Chauhan – but it is strange that whenever you come they are not at home. I would like you someday to meet them.” But she died and that day never came. I was never introduced by her to her two sons.Ajay Chauhan I have seen, just on the road, but we were not acquainted with each other. But this man, Vijay Chauhan, I have not even seen – and he is saying that he was a great friend and for hours we used to discuss philosophy, religion, and great problems.Now, many letters of this type come. Sheela asks me, “Do you know this man?” – she brings the photograph. “This man says that he knows you from your very childhood, and you have stayed with him many times in his home.” I see the picture…and my memory is not bad, not so bad. I have never seen this man in my whole life, not even heard his name.One letter was from New York; I had never heard the name. The man was from India; he says that he is a great poet and I have been quoting his poetry in my lectures. I have never known his name, I have never known any poetry connected with him, any book written by him. But he says that we are great friends. Now what to do with these people? Once I have gone, all kinds of stories will start.It will be for you to stop all these kinds of stories. Remember, whatsoever is meaningful I have told you, and whatsoever I have not told you is meaningless: that should be the criterion.If somebody comes and says, “I have seen a miracle…” And there will be people; it gives them importance – that I performed a miracle. Yes, a few times I have performed a miracle.One man, Doctor Bhagwandas – he is a professor now; we studied together in the same university, although he was in a different department. But we were friendly; he used to come, and he used to go for a walk with me. He invited me once to go to his home. His home was not very far away from the university, just fifty miles.So I said, “Next Saturday we can go. It is not far away.” We went there; we were both sleeping in the same room, on two beds. Between our two beds was a small table with a clock, because I wanted to get up at three. At that time I used to get up at three, but in case I went on sleeping, I told him to put on the alarm – but he had no alarm clock.He said, “I don’t have an alarm clock here.”So I said, “Then forget about it.” I went to sleep.But he felt uneasy, so he went to the neighbor, borrowed an alarm clock and put it in the middle on the table. I was asleep. Because of my habit of getting up at three, I woke up at three, and I heard the tick tock of the clock by my side, so I looked. It was a luminous clock, so I could see that there were still five minutes to go before three o’clock. So I covered myself, and from inside the blankets I said, “Bhagwan” – his name was Bhagwandas, and I used to call him Bhagwan – “It is five to three.”He opened his blanket, and looked at me covered in blankets. He looked at the clock… Five to three! He said, “What?”I said, “It is five minutes to three. After five minutes wake me up.”He said, “You are already awake.”I said, “Just in case I fail asleep, because there is no clock and…”He said, “No clock!”And the next day the whole town was talking about it: a miracle! Exactly five minutes! The next day I told him, “There was no miracle, nothing; I was just joking. I just looked at that clock and I thought, this is good… You think that I didn’t know about the clock because you must have brought it in later on after I had fallen asleep.” But he wouldn’t believe me.He said, “You are trying to just drop the idea of miracles, but it was a miracle.”I said, “I am saying that it was nothing.”I explained the whole thing to him, but he said, “This is all mere explanation.”Now what to do with these people? Once I am not there, they will all be there… And I have been in hundreds of homes, and many miracles I have performed – but none of them was a miracle. I was just joking, and when I found there was a possibility, I never missed it.So remember it, that I have never performed a miracle, because miracles as such are impossible. Nobody has performed them.But the gullible mind…A man came to me almost in the middle of the night; it was twelve, I had been asleep for three hours. He knocked on the door, and made so much noise that I had to wake up and open the door, and I asked, “What is the matter? What do you want at this time of the night?”He said, “I have a terrible pain in my stomach, and this pain has been coming on and going away, coming on and going away, for at least three months. I go to a certain doctor, he gives me medicine, but no permanent cure has happened. And just nearabout ten, this pain came; it was so terrible that I went to the doctor and he said that this pain was something spiritual – he suggested your name.”I asked him, “Who is this doctor? Is his name Doctor Barat?”He said, “Yes.”Barat was my friend. He was an old man, but he loved me very much. So I said, “If Barat has sent you then I will have to do something. But you have to give me a promise that you will never say anything about this to anybody, because I don’t want to be disturbed every night, and I don’t want patients to be here the whole day. I have other things to do.”He said, “I promise, but just help me. Barat has told me that if you give me just a glass of water, with your hand, I will be cured.”I said, “First give me the promise.” And he hesitated, because if he has found such a source of miracles, to give such a promise…He said, “You don’t see my pain; you are talking about your promise. Just give me a glass of water – I am not asking much.”I said, “First you give me a promise. Take an oath in the name of God” – and I could see that he was a brahmin and he had… Brahmins of different faith believing in one god or another god have different marks on their forehead; those are trademarks, so you can judge, and know who the man is worshipping. So I knew that he was a devotee of Shiva, and I said, “You will have to take the oath in the name of Shiva.”He said, “This is very difficult; I am a loudmouth, I cannot keep anything to myself. Such a great thing, and you are asking me to make a promise. I may not be able to keep it because if I keep it then it will be more painful than my pain. I won’t sleep, I won’t go anywhere, I won’t talk to anybody because it will be just there waiting to come out.”I said, “You decide. I have to go to sleep, so be quick.”He said, “You have created a dilemma for me. Whatsoever I do I will be in trouble. This pain is not going to go away because to keep your promise… And you don’t know me – I love gossiping. I am a liar; I go on lying – and this is the truth.”But I said, “Then you decide. Keep your pain.”Finally he said, “Okay, in the name of Shiva I give you the promise. But you are too hard, too cruel.”I gave him a glass of water. He drank the water and he said, “My God! The pain is gone!”Now, there was no miracle, but because I haggled so much about the promise he became more and more certain that the miracle was going to happen: “Otherwise this man would not insist so much.” The more I delayed, the more I insisted, the more he became certain that there was something in it. That certainty worked.It was simple hypnosis, he got autohypnotized; he became ready. If I had given him the water directly, the pain would not have disappeared. This much of a gap of haggling was needed. And I reminded him when he was leaving, “Remember, if you break the oath, the pain will be back.”He said, “You have destroyed me. I was thinking that when Shiva meets me I will be able to fall at his feet and ask his forgiveness; and I have heard that he is very forgiving. Now you have destroyed that too – and the pain will come back.”I said, “Certainly the pain will come back, once you utter a word.”And the next day he was there. He said, “I could not manage it. At least I had to go to Doctor Barat and tell him, ‘All your medicine and medical knowledge is nonsense. Just a glass of water did what you could not do in three months. And you have been taking fees each time I was coming – give my fee back. If you knew it beforehand then for three months you have been cheating me.’ But the pain came back.”He came running to me, “I am a fool, but what to do? I just could not resist putting this Doctor Barat right in his place. For three months I have been suffering and he knew the cure, and he went on giving me this tablet and that, and then he started the injections. Finally he started saying, ‘You may need surgery’ – and just a glass of water! And he did not suggest that at all.”I said, “I cannot help you. Now the water won’t work; you have broken the promise – the miracle will not happen again. Now go to Doctor Barat and take his medicine, or do whatsoever you want.”But he went around, even though still in pain, saying, “I have seen a miracle.”These people are there – sometimes very educated people, but deep down they are as gullible as any uneducated person. Once I am not there, you have to remember it, that all my miracles were simply jokes and nothing else; that I have been enjoying every opportunity. If there was an opportunity to manage a miracle, I have not missed it. But there was no miracle at all. If you know just a little bit of human psychology you can do great things which are not prescribed in the psychology literature and textbooks – because they are not concerned with that.But if you know a little bit of human psychology, just a little bit – not much is needed… And man is ready, he wants the miracle to happen. He wants to see the miracle happen; he is ready for the messiah. He is hankering, desiring deep down to find someone who is higher than him, more powerful than him; then he can follow him.But I have been cutting all the roots. You ask me, “Is there any possibility of your religion not being reduced to a cult?” Yes, there is a possibility, only one possibility – and that is that sannyasins go on becoming enlightened, so there is always a chain of enlightened people around.Buddha’s religion was not reduced to a cult for five hundred years. For five hundred years the chain continued; there was always somebody who was enlightened, so in some way the Buddha consciousness was present. It remained alive. But after five hundred years the gap came, and then for six hundred years Buddhism was just a cult.Then came Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma created a new dimension, Zen, which is still alive fourteen hundred years later. This is the longest time any religion has been alive. Bodhidharma has got the trophy, because in Zen, continuously in these fourteen hundred years, there has not been a single day when there was not somebody alive and enlightened – no break, no gap. Hence it is possible – difficult, but possible.All that you have to remember is: no God, no priesthood, no holy scripture, no miracles, no superman. For the first time in the whole of history I am saying that an ordinary man can be enlightened. In fact only an ordinary man can be enlightened. Ordinariness for the first time is given this much respect. So don’t try to make me someone extraordinary.I am trying in every way so that you cannot make me in any way special. I go on doing everything that will prove that this was not a superman or a messiah or a tirthankara. I will not fit with any image. You cannot manage to make me extraordinary. Beware of the human tendency: one wants one’s master to be extraordinary. But this is what leads ultimately to the death of religion.You should not desire your master to be extraordinary. You should rather rejoice that an ordinary man has become enlightened. That means he has opened the doors to enlightenment for everybody. You need not be the only begotten son of God, you need not be a tirthankara earning virtue for millions of lives, you need not be born with special qualities, talents.Have you seen the statue of Mahavira? In India you may have visited a Jaina temple – otherwise you can look in a book. On all twenty-four tirthankaras you will see a few very strange things. One is that all twenty-four statues look exactly alike. You cannot say which is which, who is who. Even Jainas cannot say, so they have made small symbols under every statue: under one statue a lion, under another statue something else, under another statue the swastika. You may not be aware of it but just underneath the statue there is the symbol which indicates whose statue it is – Mahavira’s? – otherwise there is no difference.Now, this is not possible. These twenty-four people were born over ten thousand years; there is no possibility of them all being similar – the same face, the same nose, the same body, the same proportions. You will see one thing more strange: all their ears, their ear lobes, will be touching their shoulders – such long ear lobes. That is especially needed if you are a tirthankara.I have seen foolish Jaina monks massage their ear lobes, pull them to make them longer, because the longer they are, the more respectable you start becoming. It is possible that perhaps Mahavira had long ear lobes – I don’t think that long; he was a man, not a donkey. Otherwise all donkeys have at least one quality to help them become a tirthankara. I have seen one man with ear lobes that long, so it is possible that Mahavira had them – but twenty-four people!It is all imagination. Once Mahavira becomes established, then whatsoever he has becomes a necessary characteristic for anybody else to become a tirthankara. All tirthankaras have also to be molded again into the same pattern.Remember, I don’t have any talents – because religion is not a talent. Music is, poetry is, painting is.Religion is not a talent. Religion is simply seeing yourself.You may be a painter, you may be a poet, you may be a musician, you may not be anybody, but you are! This is not a talent, this is your existence. And to experience it is everybody’s birthright.You can save this living religion only so long as you go on meditating and you go on creating new flowers, new blossomings – so that you never become a desert; there is always some oasis. Just a single person among you is enough to keep the religion alive and prevent anybody from reducing it to a cult.But please don’t call it my religion. It has nothing to do with me. It is simply religion. You have to understand, as totally as possible, that just a pure religion has more possibility of surviving, because then you don’t put any boundaries on it.I have not put any boundaries on it. And I don’t want to put any boundaries on you of discipline, of morality, of virtue. I have given you freedom, and I have given you individuality, and I have given you just a little taste of something that is always yours.You just have to claim it.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Isn't organization a necessity for a religion to survive?Unfortunately, it is.Religion needs some kind of organization, but a problem arises. Organization in itself is a political entity; organization does not need religion at all. To survive, religion needs organization. To survive, organization needs no religion at all. There is the crux of the whole problem.There have been in the past efforts to create religion without any organization, seeing that all the organizations somehow end up in being anti-religious. For example, the Catholic Church – it is a very solid organization but only an organization; there is no religion left. Religion is a disturbance as far as the hierarchy of the organization is concerned. Religion is a continuous trouble; religious people will be trouble.The Catholic Church has been throwing out all the people who are really religious from the church because those people will not support this criminal act of destroying religion. They will oppose it, they will rebel against it. But the church has so much authority. The head of the church, the pope, is a religious head and also a temporal head; the Vatican is his kingdom, a political nation. Once it was big, vast; now it is only eight square miles, but still he is the temporal head and the spiritual head.There are religions where the temporal head is separate and the religious head is separate, but then there were problems of conflict. The temporal head has all the power of the army, the law, the state; and the spiritual head has no temporal power. For example in Hinduism, the Shankaracharya is only a spiritual head. But that creates this other problem: a continuous conflict between the state and the religion – and of course the state is powerful.You have to remember that the higher a thing, the more fragile it is. The lower a thing, the more strong it is. Roots are strong, flowers are not; although roots are meaningless if the flowers disappear – the roots have meaning only because of the flowers. But the tree is not as stupid as man; so there is a harmony between the flowers and the roots, there is no conflict.Flowers represent the spiritual fragrance, and the roots represent the state, the army and all its power.The roots can deny food to the flowers and the flowers will die and disappear within no time. But no tree is so stupid: there is a harmony; the roots go on supporting the flowers, the leaves, the branches. And it is not only one-sided. The flowers, the leaves, the branches go on taking rays from the sun and carbon dioxide from the air, and they go on continuously sending them to the roots.It is a communion, there is no question of conflict. But in religion it has been a problem. If you keep them apart then soon the state starts trying to control the religion. For example, in England the church is separate but the queen is really the head of both: of the church and of the state. The church has its own head but there is a crowned head who is over him. What can the archbishop of Canterbury do against the queen?In Russia the situation was the same. The church was separate, the czar was separate, but the whole power was in the hands of the czar. So it was just for show that the head of the church crowned the czar as if he was above the czar. But he knew and everybody knew that this was only ceremonial. In reality he had to follow the czar and the state, support the czar and the state, because without the czar, the church would die: it wouldn’t have any support, financial or otherwise. That’s why Catholics tried to make church and state, one: to give both powers into the hands of one man so there was no conflict.But the trouble is when a man becomes politically powerful, that political power tends to corrupt him. He may misuse it; it is almost certain that he will misuse it.In the first place, if the head has both temporal and spiritual power, then the people who are spiritual will not make any effort to become the head, because the spiritual person does not want to get involved in power politics. Then, only the people who are politically minded become involved in the organization. They may be in a religious robe, they may be bishops and cardinals and ministers and they may have studied theology, but they are not spiritual people. If they had been in the world they would have tried to become the president or the prime minister; it is just accidental that they are in the religious robe. Their ambition can be fulfilled here only by becoming the pope. So they will make every effort to become the pope.When they have the power they are bound to misuse it. They were never spiritual in the first place.Hinduism tried another thing also. If you make one person a spiritual head there is a possibility that the person is not really spiritual. You may have erred, because there is no criterion by which to judge, and it cannot be decided by election because people have no idea what spirituality is. How are they going to decide who is spiritual? They can only nominate. It cannot be chosen in an election – if you have an election you bring politics in.The Catholic pope is elected, so naturally the politically minded cardinals make every effort to approach all those people – perhaps there are two hundred cardinals who choose the pope – so there is an undercurrent of campaign, an election campaign, continuously. Even when there is a pope the campaign continues because popes don’t live long, for the simple reason that by the time the person becomes a pope he’s nearabout seventy. So you can hope that within two, three, four or five years he will be gone.A Polack is going to be tough – you cannot hope that he will be gone so easily, he may stay longer. His predecessor was only in office for nine months – that is more gentlemanly, but who expects a Polack to be a gentleman? That was more gentlemanly: in nine months the previous pope disappeared to give an opportunity for another person to become a pope. But very few people are so generous.Hinduism tried to ensure that their religion would have many heads; all would be nominated. But then there is another problem: great confusion. Hinduism is a great confusion – you can’t even call it one religion. It is a thousand and one religions together, because there is no central control. Anybody can gather disciples and can become a head and nobody can prevent it.The idea was to give freedom but it turned out to be confusion. Any idiot can find a few other idiots who are always available everywhere. There are so many sects in Hinduism; each sect has many sub-sects and each sub-sect has its own head. They don’t even have a talking relationship with the other heads of the same religion! They are continually fighting in the courts because sometimes it happens that two persons claim that they are the head and if they can give some kind of proof…One of the most important temples in India for Hindus is in the Himalayas, Badrinathdham. For almost ten years it has been locked under police control because the court is unable to decide who the head is, because the Shankaracharya who died ten years ago wrote two wills. He wrote one will perhaps twenty, thirty years earlier when he found somebody who was potentially very capable, and he forgot about the will because he lived so long. For thirty years he must have kept it somewhere. That man stole the will.And when the Shankaracharya was dying he was asked – by that time that man had left him – so he chose another person and made another will; the first will could not be found in his papers. Now before the Allahabad High Court there are two wills from the same man and both persons are claiming that they are the head. And the temple is one of the richest temples in India so it is not only a question of being head: it has money, it has power, it has lands – and it has millions of followers.But both wills are from the same man. Now, how to decide? The signature experts have decided that both signatures are from the same man. There are eyewitnesses for both. But neither Shankaracharya is able to function because the court goes on postponing, simply for the reason that they don’t see any way of deciding it. They are simply hoping that one of these two dies, so that will decide the case. Otherwise it won’t be decided.Hinduism has so many sects because each person in Hinduism… The caste system is very strict but as far as thinking is concerned you are absolutely free. If you are born in the house of a shoemaker you cannot change it, you will have to remain a shoemaker. No other profession will allow you in. You cannot move from one caste to another caste; that movement is absolutely closed.So for centuries your forefathers and their forefathers and their forefathers and their forefathers were all making shoes – so you will make shoes. If they were weaving clothes, you will weave clothes; you will be a weaver. If they were carpenters, you will be a carpenter. There is no movement as far as your business, trade, lifestyle is concerned, but as far as thinking is concerned there is no bondage. You could move from being a follower of Shankaracharya and you could become a follower of Vallabhacharya, another spiritual head, a contemporary of Shankaracharya’s and against Shankaracharya.Sanskrit is such a language that with just a little logic everything can be interpreted in many ways. Each word has many meanings; that gives beauty to it. It gives it poetry because you can play with the word in so many ways, it does not have a fixed meaning. But it is also dangerous: you cannot write signs in Sanskrit because then there will be so many interpretations, and that is what has happened. On the Gita there are one thousand famous commentaries, to say nothing about non-famous commentaries! – there will be many thousands more. But there are one thousand very famous commentaries.It is thought that anyone who writes a commentary on three of the scriptures – the Vedas, Badarayana’s Brahmasutras and Krishna’s Shrimad Bhagavadgita – becomes an acharya, a head: he can create a following. Now it is not very difficult to write commentaries on these three scriptures.Many commentaries are available. Shankara wrote one in his own time. Vallabhacharya wrote differently, a totally different interpretation. Ramanujacharya wrote one, different again from both. Nimbarkacharya wrote one different from them all – not only different but quite the opposite. But the Gita is capable of being looked at from any angle. It gives tremendous freedom to think, to comment, but it also creates great confusion.So Hinduism is not a religion like Christianity, Judaism or Mohammedanism. In Mohammedanism there is one prophet, one god, one book – that’s all. In Hinduism there are thousands of scriptures, all of tremendous value; and on each scripture there are thousands of commentaries, and every commentary has some value, some insight. Then there are commentaries upon commentaries… Shankara writes a commentary on the Gita; then among Shankara’s followers one follower writes one commentary on Shankara’s commentary, and another follower writes another commentary on Shankara’s commentary – because the commentary is also as vulnerable to interpretation as the original. Then their disciples go on writing more commentaries.If you just look, Hinduism is like a tree: each branch brings new branches, then small branches, then more small branches. And they are all creating a great noise, great controversies – one cannot say what exactly Hinduism is. Organization has been avoided in a way, but the religion has not been saved – it has fallen into a confusion. It has not become a cult and a creed; it has become a confusion.Seeing this situation, Mahavira’s orthodox followers… They are called Digambaras because they live naked, their monks live naked. Digambara means one whose only clothing is the sky – nothing is between him and the sky. To avoid confusion, to avoid commentaries, to avoid organization, they simply destroyed all Mahavira’s scriptures.So Digambaras don’t have any scriptures of Mahavira – a strange act, just to preserve his teaching. It is given by word of mouth to the disciple but is not in a book. You cannot sell it in the market; nobody can write a commentary on it. The teaching goes on silently, transferred from one generation of monks to another generation of monks. It was a great effort of tremendous courage to destroy all the scriptures, so you could not print them. But what happened was that even by transferring it from individual to individual, there were different versions, because naturally…You are all listening to me, but if you all go back home and write down what I have said, do you think you will be reporting the same? Tomorrow morning you can look at all the notebooks and be surprised that everybody has got something else, has laid emphasis on something which you have completely ignored. You have not heard it at all, but somebody else has heard only that. What you have heard, she has not bothered about.So even though they tried to avoid written scriptures and remain consistent, there are different versions. There are only twenty-two naked monks now; I have met all twenty-two. I was puzzled that they all have different versions from their teachers, and they are giving a different version to their disciple who someday will become a naked monk. They are training the disciple, and they think in this way the purity of the message is preserved.But I asked them, “Have you ever compared notes with the other twenty-one?”They said, “No, that is never done. What my teacher has given to me, I will give to my chief disciple, and he will give it to his chief disciple.”But I said, “I have met all twenty-two and you are all saying different things.” If it was in a book at least there would have been some possibility to come to some agreement. Now there is no way to come to any agreement. There are twenty-two religions arising from one source – which they have destroyed. So now there is nothing to fall back on and check; and you cannot prove anybody is wrong or anybody is right.The other sect of Jainas is the Shvetambaras. The name, shvetambara, means white-robed; they are not naked, they use white robes. They have scriptures but they have many sects themselves. And on such small points there is so much difference that one cannot imagine what will be happening about spiritual, philosophical things.They have strange disagreements – about whether Mahavira was married or not, there is a difference. One sect believes he was not only married, he had a daughter. The daughter was married – he had a son-in-law, and the daughter and the son-in-law were both initiated by Mahavira. Not only that, they believe that the son-in-law slowly became more political, thinking, “I am the son-in-law of Mahavira…” He must have been hoping that he would succeed him. But Mahavira simply did not encourage him. It came to such a point that he rebelled against Mahavira with five hundred other monks and made a totally different religion.Now this is so much that it cannot be just invented – and for what? But the other sect says that he was never married because tirthankaras are not married. That is part of the definition of a tirthankara, that he remains unmarried; so how could Mahavira have been married? He was not married.And to say that he had a child means he had a sexual relationship – that is an absolutely ugly thing to think of a tirthankara. Then you are doing more and more harm: the tirthankara’s daughter is married! Now the daughter of a tirthankara – his blood – thinking of marrying? Impossible!And worse, you say that the son-in-law rebelled against him. How could anybody have rebelled against a man like Mahavira – what to say about the son-in-law! – it is impossible. This whole story is bogus, according to the other sect. Their scriptures say that he was never married, there was no question of a daughter, no son-in-law, no rebel.If on such points, which are factual, there is so much difference, then what to say about the teaching! On every point there is a difference. To avoid the differences the orthodox Digambaras destroyed the scriptures – but just destroying the scriptures won’t help. You have to create a certain mythology around it. And the mythology is that Mahavira never spoke. So there is no question of there being any scriptures – he never spoke.Now the Shvetambaras have the scriptures, sermons of Mahavira on each subject, detailed instructions for the monks about each special thing: how he has to sit, how he has to stand up, how he has to walk, how far he can see. He should look only four feet ahead so he never sees a woman, because looking four feet ahead, at the most you can see the feet of a woman, that’s all.He should walk very slowly, very carefully, so he does not kill any ants or anything. He should carry a woolen brush with him so that before he sits he brushes the place. It has to be woolen so that no ant or anything is killed by it, it is so soft. Such details! – that he has to have three pieces of clothing, one begging bowl, one brush, one small mattress which he keeps rolled under his arm. He should not sit on anybody else’s clothes because you can’t be certain about the vibrations of other people… And Digambaras say Mahavira never spoke!What did he do instead of speaking? He had chosen twelve chief disciples with whom he had a mind-to-mind communication. He didn’t need to speak to them; it was a silent communication to twelve teachers. Those twelve teachers were to tell all the other monks what they had heard in Mahavira’s silence. Now a very complicated affair… And all those twelve didn’t agree, so from the very beginning there have been twelve versions of Mahavira’s teachings.To avoid organization Mahavira said, “Now, there will be no successor to me.” But that did not make any difference. Yes, there is no one successor to him, but there are thousands of heads of small sects. They don’t claim to be successors of Mahavira, they don’t say they are tirthankaras; they are teachers of Mahavira’s teaching. But all those teachers are continually in conflict about everything.The same happened to Buddha. While he was alive he did not allow what he was saying to be written down – you were simply to understand him, to experience him. And your experience and your understanding you shared with people. Otherwise there was every possibility that people would start worshipping those books – like Mohammedans worship the Koran, Christians worship the Bible.“So it is better not to have my words,” Buddha said to his disciples, “in a book form.” When he was saying it, of course it was going to be so. But when he died the disciples were in difficulty because there were so many people saying different things, something had to be decided – already there was chaos.Then three hundred disciples together compiled what Buddha had said. The compilation was done in a closed place because there was so much conflict and they did not want people to know that the chief disciples were in conflict and fighting: “This was not said by Buddha…” So in a closed place somehow they came to some agreement, through negotiations, following the middle path: “If two persons are saying two things then come to the middle and keep that.” But that was a hodgepodge.Buddha would not be able to recognize that those were his words – those were three hundred people’s agreement. Now, three hundred people in disagreement, coming to an agreement – you can imagine what the outcome will be. Yes, to the world they could then show that they had a scripture, but those who understand – how can they deceive them? Buddha avoided making any head of his religion. That created thirty-two sects immediately after his death.There were other teachers in Buddha and Mahavira’s time too. One was Sanjay Vilethiputta. He avoided even initiation, he said, “Simply listen to me. If you feel like doing what I am saying, you do it, but I will not initiate you. If I initiate you, soon you will create an organization. You will need an organization to keep all the people who are my disciples together. There are so many reasons for them to be together – for their security, for their safety, because they will be persecuted by the other religions. And if they are left alone in the vast ocean of enemies, they will be destroyed.”And in India they have a very simple method of destroying anybody. India is a country of small villages, very small villages, millions of small villages. In a small village there are only twenty houses; twenty families are living there. They can destroy anybody by a simple method, a very nonviolent method. They decide that a man is not to be accepted as part of them, so he cannot be invited to any marriage, to any ceremony.Nobody will talk with him. He’s not allowed to take water from the village well. If the river is five miles away, he has to carry his water from there. When crops are to be cut, nobody is to support him. Otherwise, in a village, that’s the way: when one person’s crops are ripe, the whole village helps him to cut the crop. Then somebody else’s are ready and the whole village helps him. Single-handedly, he will be in immense trouble.Nobody will talk to him. People should not recognize him on the street, should not say hello. You will kill the man – and he cannot go anywhere else because in India people are tethered to their land. Nobody is going to purchase his land, his house. If he wants to leave he can leave, but where is he going to go and what he is going to do?It’s a very easy, very nonviolent, but really cruel method; far more cruel than killing the man. His children will not be playing with other children, his wife will not be meeting with any other woman. He’s boycotted.So Sanjay Vilethiputta said, “If I initiate you an organization will be necessary. I will not give you initiation, then it cannot be known to others that you are my followers. You just go on living, experiencing, doing what I have told to you. And if you feel to convey it to somebody, you can convey it, but there is no question of initiation. So nobody knows that you belong to Sanjay Vilethiputta.”But what happened? We don’t have Sanjay Vilethiputta’s scriptures. The man must have been of immense intelligence because Buddha criticizes him, Mahavira criticizes him. Otherwise, Mahavira and Buddha would not criticize a man who had no status. He must have had a status exactly the same as Buddha and Mahavira. Mahavira does not criticize Buddha, he was too young. Mahavira was too old; it was below him to criticize Buddha.It happened to me… It was Gandhi’s one-hundred-year celebration year, a century was complete; if he had been alive he would have been one hundred years old. So one year, a whole year of celebrations was made in India. And I made it a point that for the whole year I would criticize him because that was the right time. So I spoke all over India, criticizing him everywhere.The oldest Gandhian was Kaka Kalelkar. He was one of the very early disciples and by then was the most authoritative person. When he was asked in New Delhi what he thought about me, he said, “He’s too young, and youth is bound to be rebellious. When he is my age he will not criticize Gandhi.” I was in Ahmedabad when I received the message. Someone from Delhi brought me a newspaper and showed me that this is what he had said.I said, “My comment is that Kaka Kalelkar has gone senile. If youth is rebellious and if it is to be decided by age… He has not said anything against my arguments. He’s indicating my age, that I am saying these things because I’m too young; he’s not saying anything against what I have said. Then naturally the simple answer is that he is senile. He’s too old to understand; he’s lost his brains and he should be in his grave.“As far as I am concerned, one thing is certain: even in my grave I will criticize Gandhi because my arguments have nothing to do with my age, no relevance to my age. Gandhi was against everything that has been invented after the spinning wheel. I cannot conceive that even if I am three hundred years old I will support this idea that the spinning wheel should be the last invention of man, and after that everything is evil!”Now almost twenty years have passed and I am still of the same opinion. Gandhi, about certain things, was absolutely fanatic. He wanted the world to remain at least three thousand years back, stuck there, not to move from there. And the reason he was giving was absolutely meaningless. The reason was that at that time people were happy, people were moral, people were religious, people were spiritual. Now, all these things are wrong.In Mesopotamia they have found a stone – the whole civilization of Mesopotamia has disappeared – it is a six-thousand-year-old stone with writing on it. If you read it you will think it is from somewhere in today’s newspaper’s editorial. It says, “Young people are getting lost” – the generation gap, six thousand years ago – “the young people are disobedient and don’t listen to their fathers and mothers and elders. This is the age of degradation” – six thousand years ago!And it was the age of degradation. Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna, were all teaching people continually – Mahavira for forty years, Buddha for forty-two years – and what were they teaching? “Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t lust after other people’s women.” Now if people were not doing these things then Mahavira and Buddha were both insane, completely insane. When people are not stealing, what is the point of teaching for forty years continually, “Don’t steal”?I was in Bhopal sitting in my host’s bedroom, and I saw on the wall a small notice: “Please don’t spit on the floor.” Strange… I said, “People do?”He said, “Yes, in Bhopal this is the trouble. Only in Bhopal is this the trouble: people chew betel leaves and spit them out wherever.” He said, “You are surprised? You will find this kind of notice in every nice house.” But this notice is enough proof that people are spitting. Otherwise I have never seen that notice anywhere in India.In my university, one day I saw one of the professors spitting betel leaf on the floor – the pan that Indians go on chewing. Taru is here, she is an expert in it! I saw him spitting there, just in front of me. I was sitting alone and he was sitting in another corner and he just spat by the side of the chair. I went over and asked him, “Are you from Bhopal?”He said, “Yes, I have just been transferred from Bhopal.”I said, “That explains it.” He said, “What?”I said, “We will now have to keep a small notice here that says, ‘Please don’t spit on the floor.”‘He said, “Strange, but it is true that only in Bhopal people spit, and this is general. And nobody cares about those notices. Notices are there – in fact they remind you to spit. You may be chewing your pan joyfully and suddenly you see that board, and the desire to spit arises. They don’t prevent anybody.”If Gandhi says everything was moral three thousand years ago, then to whom was morality being taught? If everything was spiritual, then what was the need of so many spiritual leaders? If everything was good then why do you go on remembering only a few good names? – Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna – that can be counted on your fingers.If everybody was good, Buddha and Mahavira would have been lost in the crowd because the whole crowd was good. Just because you remember these few names shows that they rose above the masses; so high, that even three thousand years, five thousand years afterward, you can still see them. The masses have completely disappeared; there is no description of the masses at all.But Gandhi was adamant about technology: the telegraph, the telephone… I don’t see that the telegraph or the telephone are in any way violent. In fact these are very nonviolent things; they should be supported by nonviolent people. If you don’t have a telephone then you will have to walk down to the place, and walking may kill a few insects. Or if you drive the car there then you are going to kill a few small insects on the road – or you may have an accident, kill somebody or get killed yourself. The telephone is saving you from all this violence.I don’t see that I can change my argument anytime, because it is a simple argument. It has nothing to do with my age.Mahavira did not criticize Buddha. To me that is a criticism of Mahavira. It was an egoistic attitude to think, “He is too young and I am too established; he is just starting from scratch – who cares about him?”But he could not ignore Sanjay Vilethiputta. Neither could Buddha ignore him, so it seems the man must have been of great influence. We find his name in the books of his enemies, and we find a few things that he must have been teaching – that too in the books of his enemies. His books are not available because there was no disciple to preserve them, no organization to preserve them.And we cannot trust what his enemies were saying against him because this is an old logical strategy: to describe, to destroy, to criticize your enemy, first you impose a certain doctrine on him which is not really representative of the person. It may be similar but first you impose a similar doctrine on the person’s name – knowing perfectly the loopholes because you are imposing the doctrine – and then criticize it. Then whosoever reads your book will find your criticism is perfectly right. This has happened to me, that’s why I know.One of the great Hindu monks, Karpatri, has written a whole book against me; and when I saw it I wondered how he managed. Statements that I have never made, he makes in my name, and then criticizes them. Now, anybody reading his book will think that he has finished me completely. He has not even touched me.His secretary has written the introduction to the book, and seems to be an intelligent man because in that introduction he says, “We are obliged to Osho because he created this opportunity and the challenge for all those who think to reconsider everything and not just to accept anything without reconsidering it.”The secretary is a follower of Karpatri, so he thanks Karpatri for doing a great job in accepting the challenge of Osho and criticizing him. He came personally to give me the book. I looked in it here and there and I asked him, “You are the secretary to Karpatri” – he was a Hindu sannyasin himself – “Have you not noticed that these statements are not mine? Most probably the book was dictated to you.”He said, “I was afraid that you were going to say that.”I just looked here and there in the book and I told him, “This statement is not mine. Not only is it not mine, it is contrary to me, absolutely against my statements. You are an educated person: how did you allow it to happen? You should have prevented it, because this book is absolutely false and whosoever reads it will have a totally wrong concept of me.”So you cannot trust these people – because I have compared what Buddha said about Sanjay Vilethiputta, and what Mahavira says about him is something else. Buddha quotes Sanjay Vilethiputta’s philosophy differently, Mahavira differently. That shows certainly that nobody is representing the other person accurately. That is dishonesty. The honest person should first state the other person’s argument in its totality, in its full strength, and then he should criticize it.But without an organization Sanjay Vilethiputta is completely lost – we don’t have anything of his to compare. And we don’t have any disciple’s notes because he never initiated anyone. So perhaps within one or two generations the thing must have disappeared – and the man’s contribution must have been of immense value.Krishnamurti is doing exactly what Sanjay Vilethiputta did. He abandoned the organization and for almost sixty years he has been trying to help people individually to understand – but nothing has happened; he’s the most frustrated master ever. And now at the age of eighty-five he creates the Krishnamurti Foundation in England. This is the experience of sixty years – that he understands that the moment he dies there will be nobody even to preserve his words. What to say about his experience – even his words will not be there.What is happening around me is totally different from what has been done up to now, because nothing has been successful; in one way or another every effort has failed.Now the effort around me is not to create an organization like the Catholics because then the whole power becomes concentrated in one person – and that is dangerous. That creates ambition in others to reach to the highest post. They forget about spirituality, growth. Then their whole effort is how to become the pope. Deep down that desire… So it becomes another world, an other-worldly politics. And all the power in one person’s hand is always dangerous.Around me the effort from the very beginning has been to decentralize power. So around me many parallel organizations are slowly being created, and each organization is autonomous, functioning in one direction.For example, Rajneesh Foundation International will be looking after my words and other religious affairs. The Academy, another organization, will be purely esoteric. For the Academy I have created three circles of people. They will be the Academy; they will have the spiritual power in my physical absence. It will have all the best, the most intelligent sannyasins in there. Their combined intelligence will be enough – a power unto itself.Then the commune will have a separate body of its own. Now there are almost one dozen communes around the earth, and all the communes are patterned exactly alike. They are coming up to the standards here; Europe is almost there – in Europe there are ten communes now.Small centers have dissolved into bigger communes because small centers can be crushed very easily; only communes can live. So now the Zurich commune has hundreds of people; Medina, in London, has hundreds of people; Berlin has hundreds of people. So now these people can stand up for themselves and will not be easily persecuted.Each commune is autonomous. Still they are all alike, exactly patterned like the commune here. Their clothes are of the same quality; their food is of the same quality – because I was shocked when I heard that a few communes were so poor that they were only eating bread and soup.So I am now sending Sheela for three days every month to each commune, to see that the religious work is carried out according to my vision, and so that no sannyasin living in any commune feels that he’s deprived of any facility. All the facilities should be absolutely similar, and each commune is autonomous.Our sannyasins in many ways are very innocent people. They may be very educated but they are innocent people – and after becoming sannyasins they have become more innocent. Therefore there is no problem; it needs a simple common sense.Organization cannot be avoided. We just have to be a little more sophisticated and more scientific and more mathematical about it. We have to use it rather than being used by it. So I am not against organization, but we can learn from the past. Whatsoever has happened in the past we can avoid, and we can do something totally new which has never been done.If you can see all the possibilities which destroy religion… Before they get hold of my religion I am going to finish all the possibilities. Sannyasins can have a totally different organization. That promise you can always remember: I will not leave you under a fascist regime.In the past what has happened? These people created their organizations at the very last moment when they were dying; or mostly the organizations were created after the founders were dead, because when the founder was alive, there things were going perfectly well, so who bothered about it. But when the founder was dead, immediately the need…his absence was there. And it was such a big emptiness that it was impossible for people to connect. They had connected with the founder, but they had no interconnection among themselves.And that’s really what organization is. The word is very meaningful; it comes from organ. Your hand is your organ, your leg is your organ; your nose, your eyes – these are your organs. And your whole body is the organization. And they’re all functioning in immense harmony.How many parts you have – and they’re all functioning in harmony; you are not even aware of it. Everything is going on so silently that scientists say that if we were to make such a mechanism that works so silently and does all the work that the body does, we would need at least a one square mile area to make it in the factory.Even today it is not possible to turn bread into blood – how your body does it is an everyday miracle. Millions of living cells are within you; you are almost a city. There are seven million living cells, perhaps having a certain small brain of their own, because their work is so intelligent you cannot say they don’t have any brain.Everything is being shifted, is being supplied to the place where it is needed. Care is even being taken by those small cells inside you so that the nourishment should reach first to the parts which are most essential. Your brain gets the nourishment first, the legs can wait a little.But if just for few minutes – I think six minutes – your brain does not get oxygen, it starts disintegrating. So the first thing is – and how these small cells are doing and deciding it is a mystery – oxygen should reach to the brain. When the brain’s need is fulfilled, then second-grade organs, third-grade organs, fourth-grade organs… That way it should move.You are a city of seven million living beings. This is an organization, and this is what it should be. All our separate organs should be connected, helping each other, remembering where help is needed more, and first; and remembering that your whole function is to be enlightened, so the torch of enlightenment remains burning. There is no gap. And I’m taking every care that there will be no gap.Bodhidharma will feel jealous of me!

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have been speaking about the importance of being oneself. Could you talk about the paradox of being an individual and melting into the commune?There is no paradox as such, as far as the individual and his melting into the commune is concerned. The question has arisen out of a confusion between two words: individuality and personality.Yes, with personality there is trouble. The personality cannot melt into anything – into love, into meditation, into friendship. The reason is that the personality is a very thin mask given to the individual by the society. And every society’s effort has been, up till now, to deceive you and everybody, and to focus your attention on the personality as if it is your individuality. The personality is that which is given by others to you.Individuality is that which you are born with which is your self nature: nobody can give it to you, and nobody can take it away.Personality can be given and can be taken away. Hence, when you become identified with your personality you start becoming afraid of losing it. So anywhere when you see that a boundary has come beyond which you will have to melt, the personality withdraws. It cannot go beyond the limit it knows. It is very thin, an imposed layer. In deep love it will evaporate. In great friendship it will not be found at all.In any kind of communion the death of the personality is absolute.And you feel identified with the personality: you have been told that you are this by your parents, teachers, neighbors, friends – they have all been molding your personality, giving a shape to it. And they have made something of you which you are not and which you can never be. Hence you are miserable, confined in this personality. This is your imprisonment. But you are also afraid to come out of it because you don’t know that you have anything more than this.It is almost a situation like this: you think your clothes are you. Then naturally you will be afraid to stand naked. It is not a question only of the fear of dropping the clothes, but the fear that if you drop the clothes there will be nobody, and everybody will see that there is emptiness, you are hollow within. Your clothes go on giving you substance. The personality is afraid, and it is very natural that it should be afraid.As far as individuality is concerned, once you know your individuality… And my religion is nothing but a process of individuation, finding, discovering your individuality. And in that finding – this is the most important step – you discard personality, you take away the identity; you withdraw from the personality and you start looking at it from a distance.Create that distance between you and personality.You have come so close that you cannot see the separation. Once you have understood that you are somebody other than your personality… You have been thinking up to now that you were somebody else: You are A, and you have been thinking up to now that you are B. That fallacy is bound to be afraid, that fallacy cannot be in love – there is no possibility.That’s why lovers are constantly in conflict. It is not their individualities conflicting, it is their personalities in conflict. Both want the other to melt, and both are afraid that if they melt they are lost, they are gone.Friendship has disappeared from the world just as love has disappeared, because friendship is possible only when you meet naked, as you are – not as people want you to be, not as you should be, but simply just as you are. When two persons open up to each other just as they are, friendship grows.When two persons are ready to drop their masks, they have taken a tremendous step toward religiousness. So love, friendship, anything that helps you to drop the mask, is taking you toward religion.But the pseudo-religions have done just the opposite. They are against love. You can understand now, why they are against love: because love will destroy the personality, and the pseudo-religion depends on your personality. The pseudo-religions have made a great effort – all these churches and priests and sermons – and what are they doing? Their whole work is to create the personality. They manufacture personality – of course, different kinds of personality: a Hindu personality, a Christian personality, a Mohammedan personality. These are different models of personalities. All these religions are just like factories creating different models of cars, but the function is the same.The pseudo-religions are all afraid of love. They talk about love, and they teach you marriage. They talk about love and they say marriages are made in heaven. It is not something that you have to find out; God has already found the person for you. The astrologer will help you, the palmist will help you, the priest will help you, the parents will help you to find them – because God has already created the person for you, you are not to find the person on your own.They prevent you from loving, and they go on saying great things about love. But their great words about love are bogus; they have no substance in them.Jesus says, “God is love.” There is no God – then what about love? So as far as Jesus’ love is concerned, there is no love. If God is love, then with God’s disappearance love also disappears.And to make God synonymous with love is a beautiful strategy. He has raised love to such a high pedestal – do you think it can happen between a man and a woman? God is going to happen when you fall in love? That is sin!God is love when you love humanity, when you love words which don’t mean anything. Have you ever met humanity anywhere? Can you imagine that someday you will encounter humanity? You will meet only human beings. Humanity is simply a word.“Love humanity” – it gives you the idea of something abstract. “Love God, love truth” – the sentences seem to be linguistically right, but existentially they mean nothing.And you have to remember it: that most of our beautiful words are only words. You can play with them, you can create poetry, but you cannot live them because words cannot be lived. There is nothing living in them.Now, just think of the idea: “Love God.” What does it mean? How does one fall in love with God? You have not seen God. You don’t know him. How are you going to recognize that this fellow is God?I was watching a film, The Difficulties of an Ordinary God. It is a beautiful film. A man starts seeing a very ordinary God, just like an old hobo, with a hat cricketers use. Now, God in a hat which cricketers use! And he looks also like a cricket player. He is very old, but must have been in his young days a cricket player. And when God declared to this man, “You don’t recognize me: I am God, I created the world,” the man said, “My God! You created the world! Don’t say it to anybody otherwise people will think you are mad.”But the old man insisted, he said, “You want some proof?”The young man said, “I don’t want any proof. Just seeing you is enough to know that you are no God. This is not the way – that God suddenly stops you on the way; that you are going somewhere and he wants a lift! This is a strange meeting. I have heard about the God Moses met on the mountain and Jesus heard from the sky, and Mohammed – but God asking for a lift?”But the old man was stubborn, he said, “I will give you proof.” And he gives him proof: he simply disappears.The young man looks all around – he was in the car sitting by his side – he is not there! He says, “My God! Perhaps he really was God, but what a funny God! And I missed the opportunity.”The old man appeared again, he said, “Look, when I was gone you started thinking you had missed an opportunity.”But seeing him again the young man said, “You did some trick, you must know some magic. But I cannot accept you as God. Your clothes seem to be purchased from a secondhand place, or you have stolen them. They don’t fit you, they are too loose and too dirty – as if you have not taken a bath for many years.”But the old man said, “God is so pure that he does not need any bath or anything. And of course the clothes are very old, because I am very old. I have told you that I created the world; at that time I created these clothes. Since then I have not created anything, so they are very ancient.”The young man said, “What to do about you? Where do you want to get out?”He said, “Anywhere, because I am everywhere.”The young man said, “Then why did you want a lift?”He said, “Just because I see a potential in you, that you can become my messenger.”The young man said, “My God! Your messenger? If I say to anybody that you are God they will think I am mad!”But God said, “Try,” gave his picture to him and disappeared.The young man looked at the picture and said, “It is better to keep silent about the whole thing. Either I am hallucinating, dreaming…”He came home. His wife looked at him and said, “You look very worried.”He said, “No, nothing, there is nothing.”She said, “But you look very worried and pale and afraid, as if you have seen some ghost or something.”He said, “My God! You think I have seen something?” He took out the picture and showed the wife: “Can you recognize this man?”She said, “He looks like a hobo – perhaps an old cricket player, or maybe he just got a hat from some old clothes store. And what kind of clothes…? Where did you find this picture, and why did you bring it home?”He said, “Can you keep this thing secret? I have something to tell you. Close the door. This man is God. He asked for a lift.”His wife looked at her husband and said, “Wait, I will phone the doctor. What are you saying? – God asking for a lift in your car? And he has given this picture to you?”He said, “Yes, he has given this picture to me so that I can become his messenger. He wants me to become his messenger.”The wife said, “The first thing is, meet the doctor.”He tried hard: “I am perfectly sane, there is no problem.”But the wife said, “If you think this man is God, it is certain that there is some problem!”So she takes him to the doctor, and the doctor is also puzzled. He said, “I have seen many ideas about God but this is an absolutely novel idea. Where did you get this picture?”He said, “From God himself. He himself gave it to me by his own hand; and he has shown a miracle too.” And he told them about the miracle.The wife, the doctor, the nurses, they all laughed; they said, “This is…!”So he said, “Wait.” He raised his eyes upward and said, “God, now please help me – because these are all my friends. The doctor is my friend, the family doctor; my wife, the nurse – there is nobody from the outside, we are all like family. Please appear, otherwise they are all going to think that I am mad.” And suddenly the man came out from the ceiling!They all looked at him, and he said, “Wherever you need me I will be present; you just go on spreading the word.”But he said, “This is a very difficult word, just because of your picture. Can’t you dress a little better?”But he said, “No, this are my clothes, and this is the way I am.”Now, four or five people had seen him and they were all shocked: “This man is not mad, there is something in it.” The whole town became agog with the rumor that five people had seen God. And the thing became so hot that the church became immediately annoyed and irritated thinking that this was a joke. “This man, and God!” The picture was printed in the newspapers and everybody was laughing: “If this is God, then everything is finished.”The problem became so much that the church had to call a meeting of the elders and force this man who was the messenger to appear before the council and prove that this was God. He tried, he told them, “Many times he has showed me miracles. Just this morning when I was shaving in my bathroom, a doubt arose in me that perhaps something was wrong with me; it was possible that I was simply fantasizing. And he immediately looked at me from the mirror. My picture disappeared and his picture was there in the mirror, and he said, ‘Again I go on giving you proof, and you are again doubting.’”And then at the church, the young man appeared before the church council. The high priest was there, and they were determined to punish this man if… And they said, “You say that this man is God?”He said, “I have to say it. I have seen him many times. He has shown me many miracles. This morning he appeared in my mirror.” Everybody laughed, and this poor man said, “He has chosen me as his messenger.”They said, “This time he has really chosen a great messenger! Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus – they were some people – but this man is just a clerk in a railway station. Now what qualities have you got that he would choose you as the messenger?”He said, “I don’t know. I don’t have any qualities, and I have never dreamed in my life that God would choose me. But he has chosen me and he has promised that if there is a need he will come to support me.”So the church council asked, “Then let him appear.”And they all were amazed that the door behind the priest opened, and God appeared. There was silence for a moment. Seeing God, the priest gathered courage and said, “You think you are God?”He said, “I don’t think, I am. And this is my messenger. But,” He said, “you can understand the difficulties of an ordinary God. I am an ordinary God, that’s why I have chosen an ordinary messenger, because to find an extraordinary messenger would be very difficult for me. You can see I am an ordinary, poor God. So don’t be angry with this poor clerk; what he is saying is absolutely right.”How are you going to recognize God if he meets you in a cricketer’s hat? – and of course he will be wearing some kind of hat – or without a hat. If he is like me, bald, then he will be using a hat, some kind of hat.This reminds me of the man I have been talking to you about: my geography teacher, Chotelal Munde. He had cursed me because I made him famous as “Munde”; so much so that once he had to sign himself as Chotelal Munde. That day he was just fire… I had asked the whole class for a collection. Twenty rupees were collected, and we made a money order in Chotelal Munde’s name. And we arranged with the postman, “Come into his class when he is taking our class” – we gave him the time. So he appeared exactly on time, with a twenty-rupee money order, sender anonymous.Chotelal Munde was a poor man with a big family. He could not lose twenty rupees. In those days twenty rupees was a lot of money. In India, in those days, a man could live on two rupees for the whole month, things were so cheap. Before the First World War things were so cheap that servants used to get one rupee, two rupees, three rupees a month at the most. And that was enough. Twenty rupees…But the postman said, “You will have to sign ‘Chotelal Munde’, because it is in the name of Chotelal Munde.”He thought for a moment, and he said, “I know who this anonymous sender is. He is here, and I will teach him a lesson because now he has forced me even to sign ‘Munde.’” And he had to sign; he signed “Chotelal Munde.” Then he came to me and he said, “I curse you, that one day you will become bald headed just like me.”I said, “That’s perfectly okay. There is no harm in it.”And he said, “Anonymous!”I remembered him just a few days ago when Sheela brought a newspaper which said that in Oregon people have found a new word for a rascal: Rajneeshee. That was Chotelal Munde’s second curse, that “You will be known as ‘the rascal.’”I said, “This is perfectly good.” Both his predictions have come true.If you meet God in any dress, in any form, you will not be able to accept him, because there is no way for you to recognize him. There has never been any way to recognize him. That’s why I say Jesus and Moses and Mohammed were all hallucinating. They had no grounds to declare that that was God’s voice because they had never heard it before. So what evidence was there that this voice was God’s voice? If they saw somebody standing before them, how did they recognize that this person was God? There was no way.Jesus says, “God is love.” But God is unproved, just a vague word. He makes love also a vague, meaningless word. Between you and God, what kind of love will happen? What will be the relationship between you and God? All the religions have tried to find some kind of relationship with God. Many religions call him father. There are a few which call him mother. There are a few which call him the beloved; for them he is a she, not a he.In India there is a religion which believes that he is a lover and they are his beloveds. These people who believe God to be their lover and themselves to be his beloveds – in the day of course they are ashamed so they cannot move about in women’s clothes, but in the night they do wear women’s clothes, because the lover will be coming to meet them. And they sleep with a statue of Krishna, their lover.Now what kinds of foolishness have been going on for centuries? And it is not that these people are idiots. Very scholarly people are among them, very learned, but there is a blind spot. In every religious – so-called religious – person’s mind there is a blind spot. Everywhere else is light, but on that spot is complete darkness. Just as there are people who are color-blind, these people, in a certain way, in a certain aspect of their mind, are blind.Bernard Shaw was color-blind. He came to know it when he was sixty. For sixty years such an intelligent man was not aware that he was color-blind. On his sixtieth birthday somebody sent him a present, a suit, but the person forgot to send him a matching tie. So with his secretary he went to the market, because he liked the coat, the pants – everything was really the best available. So he went with his secretary to find a matching tie for it. And when he was looking for the tie – the suit was yellow – he looked at a green tie.The woman secretary nudged him and told him, “This won’t look right: a green tie on a yellow suit. It will look odd.”The shopkeeper also said, “Yes sir, she is right. I was also worried about that.”He said, “But isn’t it the same color? – my suit and this tie?”They said, “No, this is green and this is yellow.”He said, “My God! I have never in my whole life thought that these are two different colors.” He was blind to green; it appeared to him as yellow. Green did not exist for him at all. Many people remain color-blind their whole life and never come to know about it. It was just a coincidence… If he had passed sixty years he could have passed forty more; there was no problem in it. It was just a coincidence.In the same way, every pseudo-religion creates a blind spot in your mind, and from that blind spot it goes on manipulating you. That blind spot creates your personality; and because the blind spot creates your personality you can’t see anything wrong in it.It is all wrong for the simple reason that it is not you; it is something glued over you. It fulfills other people’s needs – it destroys you completely. And naturally when you are covered by a painted paper you will be afraid to go in the rain. You know that you will start disappearing.The question is: on the one hand I teach you individuality, on the other hand I teach you to melt with the commune. There seems to be a paradox; there is none.The personality is afraid; hence the personality will prevent you from melting in all the situations where melting is needed. And it seems absolutely logical that the personality should be afraid. But individuality is never afraid of melting, because it is your nature; there is no way to lose it.You can melt in the commune, and by melting you will simply be more authentically individual than you were before. The very step – that you dared to melt – is going to throw away your personality, and only the individuality will remain.Individuality is your intrinsic nature. Nobody can take it, nobody can steal it. If it were possible to take it away, society would have taken it away already; they would not have taken any chances. They would have taken the individuality from every child as he was born. But because it cannot be taken away, there is no way, they have tried another strategy: cover it. It can only be covered or uncovered.I teach you to melt in the commune because that will uncover you. It will destroy your personality. If you are too attached, you will find excuses for not melting, but those excuses are coming from your personality, not from your individuality. And the sooner the personality melts the better, because out of that melting you will find for the first time who you are. And you will be surprised that all along you have been playing a role which was prompted by the society, by the educationist, by the priest, by the parents. They were all prompting you, manufacturing you for a certain career.I was staying in a friend’s house in Amritsar. Early in the morning I went into the garden. My friend’s young child, not more than eight years old, was also there picking flowers. Seeing me, he came to me and we started talking. I asked him, “What are you going to become in life?”And he said, “My mother wants me to become a doctor, my father wants me to become an engineer, my uncle wants me to become a scientist, my younger sister wants me to become the prime minister; and as far as I am concerned, nobody asks me. And I don’t know either. If somebody asks the way you have asked, I don’t know who I want to become.”But this is the situation of every child. He is being dragged by others, forced by others this way and that. Of course he lands somewhere, he becomes something, but he loses his being. In this becoming, he has lost his most precious treasure.Hence, I teach you melting with the commune. The commune is only a device for you to melt. What will be melting will not be really you, only your personality. And what will emerge out of that will be you.But right now you don’t know who you are. And the one you think you are, you are not. That which you are not is going to melt, certainly. And that which you are is going to be a revelation, to you and to everybody. That is going to be a finding; and it brings tremendous joy, ecstasy.In just coming to know who you are, all your fears, phobias, and mind problems simply disappear, evaporate, because they were part of the personality.All your inner conflicts are no longer there.There is only harmony and a silence which is so profound that there is no way to imagine it. And to see one’s original being is to see all that is worth seeing, because from there the door opens toward existence.So I am teaching you everything that will help you to melt. I teach you love, not marriage. I teach you friendship, or even better, friendliness. I teach you melting with the commune.The commune is not the family. You are born in a family… You have to understand a little bit about the family. The family is a very strange institution, and one of the most poisonous institutions. The parents think they own you. The mother thinks she has given birth to you, the father thinks he has given birth to you: you are his blood.It was a continual problem in my childhood with my parents. I would object whenever they would mention or indicate indirectly that I belonged to them. I said, “That’s absolutely wrong. Forget the idea of possessing me. Yes, I have come through you, but just because of that you don’t become my possessor; I am not your possession. A child comes through you: you are a passage. If passages started possessing, then any road you pass by will call to you, ‘Where are you going? I possess you, I have brought you here.’”My parents would say, “You can say anything you want to say to us, but such things, not in front of others. If anybody hears that you are telling your father, ‘You are just a road’…”I said, “But I have to say these things because you provoke me; the whole fault lies in you. You start – of course unconsciously, but you start thinking that you possess me.” He wanted me to become a scientist, and I told him, “You should leave it to me. I am now mature enough to decide in what direction to go. And I am thankful that you have brought me up to this point; but now, leave me alone. And this I am not saying out of any ungratefulness; I am grateful that you have made me capable of choosing my path. But one day I have to tell you: ‘Now, leave me alone.’ It is shocking, it hurts, but what to do? You are the cause because you have raised the expectation that this is what you would like.”He was rarely angry with me, but on that point he was very angry; and he was right in everybody’s eyes. The whole family was in agreement with him. The neighborhood was in agreement with him, “What is the point in going to an arts college and studying philosophy? You will be good for nothing.”In India many universities have closed their philosophy departments, and other universities which still have a philosophy department only get girls as their students. I myself was with two girls – only three students. And girls join it for a different purpose: because in the philosophy department the professors are continuously in need of students, they are afraid to fail anybody. If people don’t come then their department is closed, and they will be unemployed; so they persuade students to come. And for girls in India, a degree is only for marriage. A postgraduate girl will get a rich husband, a cultured family. She will move in the highest circles immediately. She has nothing to do with philosophy.One of my professors was a Bengali, and he believed in celibacy – fanatically. In departments of philosophy you will find all kinds of strange creatures. Whether it was raining or not, whether it was hot or not, sun or not, he would walk with his umbrella just covering almost his face so he did not have to see any woman. The university was full of girls, and in his class there were two girls. Because of those two girls, he used to teach with closed eyes.For me that was a great opportunity; I used to sleep. For six months it went perfectly well. One day the girls didn’t turn up, but that was my time to sleep, so I went to sleep. That day he was teaching with open eyes – I did not think that he would teach with his eyes open. So he said, “You can open your eyes. I know you also believe in celibacy.”I said, “For six months you were thinking this? I was simply sleeping. I believe in sleeping, not in celibacy.”He said, “This is strange; I was thinking you are just like me, and I was feeling great respect for you. You deceived me for six months.”I said, “I will deceive you in future too. It is not a deception, this is just my time to sleep. And it was good that you were teaching with your eyes closed, so there was no trouble, no conflict – because nobody was listening.“Those girls are not interested in philosophy in any way, and what you are teaching is so much crap that once in a while in my sleep when I hear it, I just throw it out. And those two girls have nothing to do… You can teach, you are paid for it. But those girls are just earning a degree so that they can get a good marriage partner.“I come here just to sleep, and you come here to teach; our ideas are different. I don’t say to you, ‘Don’t disturb me,’ and I don’t disturb you either. I am sound asleep and I don’t snore. Have I ever snored?”He said, “You are strange, you drive me nuts! You take the question in such a direction where I have nothing… Now you are asking about snoring. Come to the point.”I said, “I am exactly on the point. I am saying, have I ever disturbed you? If I have not disturbed you then what is the complaint against me? I could have not listened to you with open eyes. That’s what those two girls are doing, but they are not interested in philosophy at all. While you are teaching with your closed eyes, they are talking about clothes, about their saris, and inquiring where to get this from, and how much…? That’s what they are doing.“Am I such a fool that I should listen to those two girls and you? Only I am caught in between. So I simply sleep; that’s the only way to escape from all this. And you know perfectly well from now on that I am not deceiving you. If you had asked before I would have told you; it was just your assumption. You presumed that I am also a celibate, you projected that idea.”But he was so afraid of seeing a woman. And I said. “Now that you have raised the question I would like to say to you that your celibacy is not worth anything. You can’t even look at a woman? Are you so afraid? Your umbrella is nothing but your cowardice. You are continually carrying it all around the university, and everybody is laughing. People can’t see your face, you can’t see people’s faces.” He would walk so fast that nobody could start walking with him or talking with him. And he had a really good walking pace – fast, covered with his umbrella.“How long is this umbrella going to protect your celibacy, you tell me. And have you heard of any scripture that says an umbrella can help you to remain celibate? Have you seen any pictures of Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna carrying an umbrella? You are the first celibate in the world who is trying to be celibate by using an umbrella. And I know perfectly well that you must be looking; here in class also you must be looking sometimes, just opening your eyes a little bit.”He said, “But how do you know, because you are fast asleep?”I said, “How do you know that I am fast asleep? You must be looking. How long can you keep your eyes closed? And then to teach…”The family tries to make something of you. My family wanted me to become a scientist; they saw a potential. I said, “I do understand that as a scientist I will be paid more, I will be respected more. As a philosopher perhaps I may remain unemployed. But the time has come that I should choose my own path. If it leads into the desert at least I will be happy that I have followed my own path; there will be no grudge against anybody. Following your path, even if I become the greatest scientist, I will not be happy because I have been forced; it is a kind of slavery. And you have the power to force me, but remember that I will not in any way allow anything to be imposed upon me.”That time my father became angry. He said, “Okay, go to the arts department but I am not going to give you any money.”I said, “That’s settled. Money is yours; I am not yours. If you don’t want to give me money, that I can understand. And I can understand that if I go to the science department, you are ready to give me money because then I am following your desire. You are ready to give money to me only if I remain under your control.“So that’s perfectly clear: you are using money to force me in a certain direction which I refuse. But,” I said, “you will suffer repentance just because you mentioned money. Do you think you can force me by threatening that you are not going to give me any money?”I left the house. For two years he was continually coming, saying, “Forget that and forgive me. I am really sorry that I mentioned the money. I can see your trouble, and I am the cause of it” – because at night I used to work as an editor in a newspaper just to earn money so that in the day I could join the university. But I said, “How can I accept money from you?”One day, when tears came to his eyes, I said, “Okay, if you insist, just put the money on the table. I will not take it from your hand. From the table I can take it because with the table I have no problem, no trouble, no conflict.” So that’s the way it continued the remaining four years. He would put it on the table and I would take it from the table, but not from him – “because,” I said to him, “that strategy is ugly.”But the family exploits every child because it has the power of money, prestige, the power of numbers. And a child is just a child; how can he revolt? And the family poisons the child: you are a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian. It poisons the child: you are a republican, you are a democrat, you are a socialist, you are a communist. It goes on poisoning him. And this whole poisoning piles up and becomes your personality.The commune is not your family… Or it is your real family.Strangely enough, every boy hates his father, every girl hates her mother; but nobody says so. On the surface everything is polite and nice, just goody-goody. Deep down there are wounds. All the wounds that have been inflicted upon you in your childhood you will carry your whole life. And those wounds will work upon you in such a way that they will spoil your whole meaning.For example, I see that the girl who hates her mother will behave exactly like the mother – because from where is she going to learn? The mother was the first woman she knew. She hates her because the mother forced her to be someone who she is not, and now she has to carry that burden.So on the one hand she hates her; on the other hand that was the woman she came to know most intimately. So in her gestures, in her language, in her reactions, in everything she will repeat her mother. She will be just a carbon copy: the personality that she is carrying is her mother’s personality.No wonder that people hate themselves too. It is for the simple reason that the personality they think they are, is the personality given by the people whom they wanted to rebel against, but against whom they were helpless.Sigmund Freud has made a significant point about it: that the idea of God as father must have arisen as a compensation. Somewhere back in primitive prehistory days, some young man must have killed his father because that was the only way to be himself. But then the repentance for killing the father…Sigmund Freud has no historical facts about it, there is no history available, but his deduction is psychological, not historical. He says that every boy is going to hate his father. He will go on hating him.But in hating one’s own father, the conscience is disturbed. To console the conscience, he starts worshipping the father.In India particularly – because I know India more than any other country – the son has to touch the feet of the father, of the mother, of everybody who is older than him. This is just a way to help him: by touching the feet of the father, he balances his hate with respect, and he feels at ease that he respects his father.If you don’t hate your father, I don’t think there is any need to touch the feet of the father. Perhaps once in a while, out of gratitude, you may touch them; but that cannot be a formality, it can only be an informal happening. Right now, people touch the feet, but there is no feeling in it. How can there be feeling in it? There is hate inside: this is the man who has spoiled your life.The family becomes your basic unit; so if your family is in conflict with the neighbor, then it is your family – right or wrong, you will fight alongside your family.In front of my house lived a goldsmith – he was a little eccentric. One of his eccentricities was that whenever he would go to the market or to the river, he would lock his house – even if his wife was inside, his children were inside. He would lock the house from the outside and would pull the lock two or three times to see whether it was really locked. And if anybody created suspicion – and I was continually… I would stand just a few houses away when he was going to the river, and I would say, “Soniji” that means “goldsmithji” – “have you forgotten to check your lock?”He would say, “Have I forgotten?” and back he would go. Once when he was taking a bath in the river, I told him, “Today you have forgotten.”He said, “Really?”I said, “I was sitting in front of you.” And half-bathed he ran back first to check.He was in some conflict with my father – a legal case about some land. The land really belonged to him, but my father had paid his younger brother for it. The younger brother had pretended that it belonged to him, so my father paid him. And on the registry day, it was found out that the man was deceiving: the land belonged to the other brother. He would not return the money, and my father would not give up control of the land to the other brother to whom it belonged; so there was a legal case.I told my father, “I will be coming to support the eccentric goldsmith.”He said, “What! You will be a witness against me?”I said, “Of course. I know that you have paid, but that was your fault. You should have found out to whom the land belonged before you paid. And that poor eccentric goldsmith, what fault is it of his? – the land belongs to him. And anyway he is far poorer than you; so even if you lose the money, it is better than if he loses the ground, because he is really poor.”My father said, “But you don’t understand a simple thing: being against your own father…?”I said, “It is not a question of being against my own father. I don’t believe in this ‘right or wrong, my family…’ And I know that your claim is right, but it is your mistake; you should suffer. And I have been harassing that poor goldsmith, so it is a chance to help him. I will be helping him.”The family wants you to be with it. I have seen families, generations after generations fighting in the courts, destroying each other, killing each other, for generations. Because your forefathers were against somebody – you have nothing to do with these people who are living now, they have not done anything wrong to you – somewhere in the past, four, five, six generations ago… You may not even know the names of the people who fought, but the enmity goes on.The family tries to disconnect you from the whole society, just as the nation divides you from other nations. It is the same strategy of division. A commune is not a family. Nobody here is father, nobody here is mother. Nobody here is brother or sister. Nobody here is husband or wife.Here are only individuals, and these individuals have decided to live in freedom, and to support each other in living the way of freedom. Nobody possesses anybody. Nobody has any hold on anybody. Everybody is supportive of whatsoever you are, of whatsoever you can be.The family is dictatorial. A commune is simply supportive. I don’t give you even guidelines, because even guidelines may become dictatorial in your mind, because your mind has been made by the society. Even if I give you guidelines you may think these are commandments.Guidelines are not commandments. You are not to follow them, just understanding them is enough. Then follow your path. Perhaps on your path something that I had said may be of use, or perhaps nothing will be of any use. So there is no need to have faith in it.A commune is a gathering of free individuals – undemanding, non-forcing, non-dictatorial – just supporting and helping. Because alone it will be difficult; you will find it almost impossible to be yourself in the so-called society, because that society is not supportive. Yes, if it supports, it supports conditionally; it is always a bargain, a business. The society will do this for you if you are ready to do that for the society: a simple contract.A commune is not a business, a relationship. There is no contract: just a few people who feel imprisoned in the society drop out and create a gathering of similar rebels. They are all rebels, and they are all supportive of each other. Whatever one’s rebellion, and whatever one wants to be, the commune’s support is unconditional. But the commune can exist only if you merge with it. If you keep yourself aloof, there is no commune because there is no communion. Hence I say, dissolve yourself in the commune.And remember that you will become an individual by this dissolving. You will not lose your individuality, you will find it – that’s the only way to find it. In the society you can go on changing your personality, but you will never find your individuality. You can change from a Catholic to a communist, but that will not make any difference at all. You will not go any longer to the Vatican, but now to the Kremlin – those red stars will be holy. Now Russia will become your holy land.You have simply changed from one ditch and you have fallen into another ditch. Maybe they have a little different shape, but ditches are ditches. From one jail you move into another jail. Of course, while you are moving from one jail to another, just in between you will have a little taste of freedom. Don’t think that this is going to be the taste of the other jail. That is only in between.Escape! Don’t go to the other jail; escape from any jail. And never go again into the same structure, because all structures are the same.A commune is an immensely spiritual phenomenon: you are with people and yet you are alone. Nobody trespasses on your aloneness. Everybody respects your aloneness. You are with many people, you are together, but nobody tries to impose any condition, any relationship, any bondage. Nobody takes from you any promise for tomorrow, because tomorrow you will be different, the other will be different. Who knows about tomorrow? When tomorrow comes we will see.The commune has no tomorrow, it lives here and now. And it lives totally and intensely, because we are not living as a means to some other life. We are living as an end to itself.Catholics are living for some other life; this life is only a ladder. And the same is true with all the religions: this life is to be sacrificed. They all teach you sacrifice – they really sacrifice you. You are all butchered – on different altars, in different temples – but you are all butchered.The only way to save yourself from these butchers who are all around is to join together with similar kinds of rebels, so the way of revolution becomes strong, grounded, self-supporting. And then you find everybody is living intensely. We are not living for another world, so why should we live lukewarm?We should live real hot!In Ahmedabad I used to go often on a bridge where there was a very big advertisement. I liked that advertisement; just one word was not right. It was an advertisement for a certain cold drink. The advertisement said, “Livva little hot, sippa Gold Spot” – Gold Spot is something like Coca-Cola. But they have found a really good slogan: “Livva little hot” – but why a little? That was my trouble. Sippa anything, but why a little?Jayantibhai used to drive me over that bridge, and he would go fast when the board was there. And I would say, “Jayantibhai, wait!”He said, “That is why I was going fast; otherwise you will see that board again…”And I told him, “That board is really very philosophical – just a little mistake, but all philosophers have been making mistakes. A little hot? – that hurts. Be really hot, because there is nothing to sacrifice for.”All religions teach you to be martyrs. All families teach you to be martyrs. All nations teach you to be martyrs. It is a strange world. Why are people being taught to be suicidal? – because to be a martyr is just a good word for committing suicide. Nobody teaches living. Nobody encourages living. Nobody teaches you that you can be a little more hot – why are you just smoking with no fire? Many people are just smoking with no fire.How long have you been smoking, and how long are you going to smoke? Create some fire!And when there is real fire, there is no smoke. When it is really hot there is no smoke. Burn like a flame without any smoke! But everybody is telling you to keep a low profile. Why? Such a small life, why keep a low profile?Jump as high as you can.Dance as madly as you can.Melt as totally as you can.And out of that burning, living, melting, you will find your authenticity, your individuality. Individuality is never afraid.In front of my house there was a tall tamarind tree. Now the tamarind tree is not very strong, its branches can break very easily. It was so tall, and I was always going and climbing it. My whole family would gather around and they would say, “Now stop, no further!” I would continue going higher, and they would shout, “Do you hear or not? No further.”I would say, “Till you stop shouting ‘No further’ I am going to climb. At the most I can fall – perhaps a few fractures; but the height is so challenging, it is calling me up. You shut up completely, then I will stop.” When they saw that I had reached a place from where a fall was certain then they would shut up. And that was a condition: “Unless you stop trying to stop me, I will go on and on.”Only my grandfather used to say, “Don’t be worried about anything. These people are all cowards. I would have loved to come with you but I am too old, but you should remember always that I am with you. So let them shout ‘Stop!’”Even neighbors would come and start shouting, “Stop!” But I had made it a condition again and again: “Unless you stop shouting, I will go still higher. And now it is getting really dangerous, so be quiet.” They had to be quiet. But again, next time I would… And they would shout again, and I would say, “You don’t understand. Just leave me alone! At least trust that I can also see that the branch is now getting thinner, and the wind is stronger, and the tree is swaying. I can also see it. Let me see and let me feel. And let me decide; don’t decide for me. I hate that.”But every family goes on deciding for you.A commune does not decide for you. At the most it helps you. So with the commune there is no paradox between individuality and melting. It is not a society, not a family. It is a gathering of rebels of all kinds. So there is no need to fit with each other and be like each other. All are rebels of different kinds. One thing is common, that they are rebels.The rebellious spirit is the common factor that joins the commune and makes it one whole – without destroying anybody’s individuality, without destroying anybody in any way.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is there any point in living?Man has been brought up by all the traditions in a schizophrenic way.It was helpful to divide man in every possible dimension, and create a conflict between the divisions. This way man becomes weak, shaky, fearful, ready to submit, surrender; ready to be enslaved by the priests, by the politicians, by anybody.This question also arises out of a schizophrenic mind. It will be a little difficult for you to understand because you may have never thought that the division between ends and means is a basic strategy of creating a split in man.Has living any meaning, any point, any worth? The question is: Is there some goal to be achieved by life, by living? Is there some place where you will reach one day by living? Living is a means; the goal, the attainment, somewhere far away, is the end. And that end will make it meaningful. If there is no end, then certainly life is meaningless; a God is needed to make your life meaningful.First create the division between ends and means. That divides your mind. Your mind is always asking why? For what? And anything that has no answer to the question, “For what?” slowly, slowly becomes of no value to you. That’s how love has become valueless. What point is there in love? Where is it going to lead you? What is going to be the achievement out of it? Will you attain to some utopia, some paradise? Of course, love has no point in that way. It is pointless.What is the point of beauty? You see a sunset – you are stunned, it is so beautiful, but any idiot can ask the question, “What is the meaning of it?” and you will be without any answer. And if there is no meaning then why are you unnecessarily bragging about beauty?A beautiful flower, or a beautiful painting, or beautiful music, beautiful poetry – they don’t have any point. They are not arguments to prove something, neither are they means to achieve any end.And living consists only of those things which are pointless.Let me repeat it: living consists only of those things which have no point at all, which have no meaning at all – meaning in the sense that they don’t have any goal, that they don’t lead you anywhere, that you don’t get anything out of them.In other words, living is significant in itself. The means and ends are together, not separate.And the strategy of all those who have been lustful for power, down the ages has been that means are means, and ends are ends. Means are useful because they lead you to the end. If they don’t lead to your end, they are meaningless. In this way, they have destroyed all that is really significant. And they have imposed things on you which are absolutely insignificant.Money has a point. A political career has a point. To be religious has a point, because that is the means to heaven, to God. Business has a point because immediately you see the end result. Business became important, politics became important, religion became important; poetry, music, dancing, love, friendliness, beauty, truth, all disappeared from your life.A simple strategy, but it destroyed all that makes you significant, that gives ecstasy to your being. But the schizophrenic mind will ask, “What is the point of ecstasy?”People have asked me, hundreds of people, “What is the meaning of meditation? What will we gain out of it? First, it is very difficult to attain – and even if we attain it, what is going to be the end result?”It is very difficult to explain to these people that meditation is an end in itself. There is no end beyond it.Anything that has an end beyond it is just for the mediocre mind. And anything which has its end in itself is for the really intelligent person.But you will see the mediocre person becoming the president of a country, the prime minister of a country; becoming the richest man in the country, becoming the pope, becoming the head of a religion. But these are all mediocre people; their only qualification is their mediocrity. They are third rate and basically they are schizophrenic. They have divided their life into two parts: ends and means.My approach is totally different: to make you one single whole.So I want you to live just for life’s sake.The poets have defined art as for its own sake, there is nothing else beyond it: art for art’s sake. It will not appeal to the mediocre at all because he counts things in terms of money, position, power. Is your poetry going to make you the prime minister of the country? – then it is meaningful. But in fact your poetry may make you just a beggar, because who is going to purchase your poetry?I am acquainted with many kinds of geniuses who are living like beggars for the simple reason that they did not accept the mediocre way of life, and they did not allow themselves to become schizophrenic. They are living – of course they have a joy which no politician can ever know, they have a certain radiance which no billionaire is going to know. They have a certain rhythm to their heart of which these so-called religious people have no idea. But as far as their outside is concerned, they have been reduced by the society to live like beggars.I would like you to remember one great, perhaps the greatest, Dutch painter: Vincent van Gogh. His father wanted him to become a religious minister, to live a life of respect – comfortable, convenient – and not only in this world, in the other world after death too. But Vincent van Gogh wanted to become a painter. His father said, “You are mad!”He said, “That may be. To me, you are mad. I don’t see any significance in becoming a minister because all I would be saying would be nothing but lies. I don’t know God. I don’t know whether there is any heaven or hell. I don’t know whether man survives after death or not. I will be continually telling lies. Of course it is respectable, but that kind of respect is not for me; I will not be rejoicing in it. It will be a torture to my soul.” The father threw him out.He started painting – he is the first modern painter. You can draw a line at Vincent van Gogh: before him painting was ordinary. Even the greatest painters, like Michelangelo, are very small compared to Vincent van Gogh, because what they were painting was ordinary. Their painting was for the marketplace.Michelangelo was painting for the churches his whole life; painting on church walls and church ceilings. He broke his backbone painting church ceilings, because to paint a ceiling you have to lie down on a high stool while you paint. It is a very uncomfortable position, and for days together, months together… But he was earning money, and he was earning respect. He was painting angels, Christ, God creating the world. His most famous painting is of God creating the world.Vincent van Gogh starts a totally new dimension. He could not sell a single painting in his whole life. Now, who will say that his painting has any point? Not a single person could see that there was anything in his paintings. His younger brother used to send him money; enough so that he did not die of starvation, just enough for seven days’ food every week – because if he gave him enough for a whole month he would finish it within two or three days, and the remaining days he would be starving. Every week he would send money to him.And what Vincent van Gogh was doing was for four days he would eat, and for the three days in between those four days he was saving money for paints, canvasses. This is something totally different from Michelangelo, who earned enough money, who became a rich person. He sold all his paintings. They were made to be sold, it was business. Of course he was a great painter, so even paintings that were going to be sold came out beautifully. But if he had had the guts of a Vincent van Gogh, he would have enriched the whole world.Three days starving, and van Gogh would purchase paints and canvasses. His younger brother, hearing that not a single painting had sold, gave some money to a man – a friend of his not known to Vincent van Gogh – and told him to go and purchase at least one painting: “That will give him some satisfaction. The poor man is dying; the whole day he is painting, starving for painting but nobody is ready to purchase his painting – nobody sees anything in it.” Because to see something in Vincent van Gogh’s painting you need the eye of a painter of the caliber of van Gogh; less than that will not do. His paintings will seem strange to you.His trees are painted so high that they go above the stars; stars are left far behind. Now, you will think that this man is mad: trees going up higher than the stars? Have you seen such trees anywhere? When Vincent van Gogh was asked, “Your trees always go beyond the stars…?” he said, “Yes, because I understand trees. I have felt always that trees are the ambition of the earth to reach the stars. Otherwise why? To touch the stars, to feel the stars, to go beyond the stars – this is the desire of the earth. The earth tries hard, but cannot fulfill the desire. I can do it. The earth will understand my paintings, and I don’t care about you, whether you understand or not.”Now, you cannot sell this kind of painting. The man his brother had sent came. Van Gogh was very happy: at last somebody had come to purchase. But soon his happiness turned into despair because the man looked around, picked one painting and gave the money.Vincent van Gogh said, “But do you understand the painting? You have picked it up so casually, you have not looked; I have hundreds of paintings. You have not even bothered to look around; you have simply picked one that was accidentally in front of you. I suspect that you are sent by my brother. Put the painting back, take your money. I will not sell the painting to a man who has no eyes for painting. And tell my brother never to do such a thing again.”The man was puzzled how he managed to figure it out. He said, “You don’t know me, how did you figure it out?”He said, “That’s too simple. I know my brother wants me to feel some consolation. He must have manipulated you – and this money belongs to him – because I can see that you are blind as far as paintings are concerned. And I am not one to sell paintings to blind people; I cannot exploit a blind man and sell him a painting. What will he do with it? And tell my brother also that he also does not understand painting, otherwise he would not have sent you.”When the brother came to know, he came to apologize. He said, “Instead of giving you a little consolation, I have wounded you. I will never do such a thing again.”His whole life van Gogh was just giving his paintings to friends: to the hotel where he used to eat four days a week he would present a painting, or to a prostitute who had said once to him that he was not a beautiful man. To be absolutely factual, he was ugly. No woman ever fell in love with him, it was impossible.This prostitute out of compassion – and sometimes prostitutes have more compassion than your so-called ladies, they understand men more – just out of compassion she said, “I like you very much.” He had never heard this. Love was a far away thing. Even liking…He said, “Really, you like me? What do you like in me?” Now, the woman was at a loss.She said, “I like your ears. Your ears are beautiful.” And you will be surprised that van Gogh went home, cut off his ears with a razor, packed them beautifully, went to the prostitute and gave his ears to her. And blood was flowing…She said, “What have you done?”He said, “Nobody ever liked anything in me. And I am a poor man, how can I thank you? You liked my ears; I have presented them to you. If you had liked my eyes, I would have presented my eyes to you. If you had liked me, I would have died for you.”The prostitute could not believe it. But for the first time, van Gogh was happy, smiling; somebody had liked at least a part of him. And that woman had just said jokingly – otherwise who bothers about your ears? If people like something, they like your eyes, they like your nose, your lips – you won’t hear lovers talking about each other’s ears, that they like them.Only in ancient Hindu scriptures on sexology: the Kamasutras of Vatsayana… That is the only book I have been able to find that can be connected to this incident five thousand years afterward with Vincent van Gogh, because only Vatsayana says, “Very few people are aware that ear lobes are tremendously sexual and sensitive points in the body. And lovers should play with each other’s ear lobes” – and this is a fact, although unknown.If you start playing with the ear lobes of your lover, she or he may think that you are a little crazy – what are you doing? Because people have become fixed on certain ideas: kissing is okay… But there are tribes where nobody has ever heard about kissing; they rub noses with each other, and that is thought to be the most loving gesture. Certainly it is more hygienic, far more medically supportable than the French kiss. Those people who rub noses think of people giving French kisses to each other as just dirty, simply dirty.But this prostitute perhaps was aware – because prostitutes become aware of many things which ordinary women and men don’t become aware of, because they come in contact with so many people. Perhaps she was aware that ears have a sexual significance. They certainly have. Vatsayana is one of the greatest experts. Freud and Havelock Ellis and other sexologists are just pygmies before Vatsayana. And when he says something, he means it.Van Gogh lived his whole life in poverty. He died painting. Before dying he went mad, because for one year continually he was painting the sun: hundreds of paintings, but nothing was coming to the point he wanted. But the whole day standing in the hottest place in France, in Arles, with the sun on the head – because without the experience how can you paint? He painted the final painting, but he went mad. Just the heat, the hunger… But he was immensely happy; even in madness he was painting. And those paintings which he did in the madhouse are now worth millions.He committed suicide for the simple reason that he had painted everything that he wanted to paint. Now painting was finished; he had come to a dead end. There was nothing more to do. Now to go on living was occupying space, somebody’s place; that was ugly to him.That’s what he wrote in his letters to his brother: “My work is done. I have lived tremendously – the way I wanted to live. I have painted what I wanted to paint. My last painting I have done today, and now I am taking a jump from this life into the unknown, whatever it is, because this life no longer contains anything for me.”Will you consider this man a genius? Will you consider this man intelligent, wise? No, ordinarily you would think he is simply mad. But I cannot say that. His living and his painting were not two things: painting was his living, that was his life. So to the whole world it seems suicide – not to me. To me it simply seems a natural end. The painting is completed. Life is fulfilled. There was no other goal; whether he receives the Nobel Prize, whether anybody appreciates his painting…In his life nobody appreciated his work. In his life no art gallery accepted his paintings, even free. After he died, slowly, slowly, because of his sacrifice, painting changed its whole flavor. There would have been no Picasso without Vincent van Gogh. All the painters that have come after Vincent van Gogh owe him, incalculably, because that man changed the whole direction. Slowly, slowly, as the direction changed, his paintings were discovered. A great search was made.People had thrown his paintings into their empty houses, or in their basements, thinking that they were useless. They rushed to their basements, discovered his paintings, cleaned them. Even faked paintings came onto the market as authentic van Gogh. Now there are only two hundred paintings; he must have painted thousands. But any art gallery that has a Vincent van Gogh is proud, because the man poured his whole life in his paintings. They were not painted by color, but by blood, by breath – his heartbeat is there.Don’t ask such a man, “Is there any meaning in your painting?” He is there in his painting, and you are asking, “Is there any meaning in your painting?” If you cannot see the meaning, you are responsible for it.The higher a thing rises, the fewer the people who will recognize it.When something reaches to the highest point, it is very difficult to find even a few people to recognize it. At the ultimate omega point, only the person himself recognizes what has happened to him; he cannot find even a second man.That’s why a buddha has to declare himself that he is enlightened. Nobody else can recognize it, because to recognize it, you will have to have some taste of it. Otherwise, how can you recognize it? No recognition is possible because the point is so high.But what is the meaning of buddhahood? What is the meaning of becoming enlightened? What is the point? If you ask about the point, there is none. It itself is enough. It needs nothing else to make it significant.That’s what I mean when I say that the really valuable things in life are not divided into ends and means. There is no division between ends and means. Ends are the means, means are the ends – perhaps two sides of the same coin inseparably joined together – in fact, they are a oneness, a wholeness.You ask me, “Is there any point in life, in living?” I am afraid that if I say there is no point in living, you will think that means you have to commit suicide, because if there is no point in living, then what else to do? – commit suicide! I am not saying commit suicide, because in committing suicide also there is no point.Living: live, and live totally. Dying: die, and die totally. And in that totality you will find significance.I am consideredly not using the word meaning, and using the word significance because meaning is contaminated. The word meaning always points somewhere else. You must have heard, you must have read in your childhood, many stories… Why are they written for children? – perhaps the writers don’t know, but it is part of the same exploitation of humanity.The stories are like this…A man is there whose life is in a parrot. If you kill the parrot, the man will be killed, but you cannot kill the man directly. You can shoot, and nothing will happen. You can swing your sword and the sword will pass through his neck, but the neck will remain still joined to the body. You cannot kill the man – first you have to find where his life is. So in those stories the life is always somewhere else. And when you find out you just kill the parrot and wherever the man is, he will immediately die.Even when I was a child, I used to ask my teacher, “This seems to be a very stupid kind of story because I don’t see anyone whose life is in a parrot or in a dog or in something else, like a tree.” It was the first time I heard that story, that type of story; then I came across many. They were written specially for children.The man who was teaching me was a very nice and respectable gentleman. I asked him, “Can you tell me where your life is? Because I would like to try…”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I would like to kill that bird in which your life is. You are an intelligent man, wise, respected. You must have put your life somewhere else so nobody can kill you. That’s what the story says – that wise people keep their life somewhere else, so that you cannot kill them, so that nobody can kill them. And it is impossible to find where they have kept their life unless they tell the secret, nobody can figure it out. This world is so big, and there are so many people and so many animals, and so many birds, and so many trees… Nobody knows where that man has put his life.“You are a wise man, respected, you must have kept it somewhere; you can just tell me in private. I will not kill the bird completely; just give him a few twists and turns, and see what happens to you.”He said, “You are a strange boy. I have been teaching this story my whole life, and you want to give me a twist and turn. This is only a story.”But I said, “What is the point of the story? Why do you go on teaching this story and this kind of things to children?”He could not answer. I asked my father, “What can be the meaning of this story? Why should these things be taught, which are absolutely absurd?”He said, “If your teacher cannot answer, then how can I answer? I don’t know. He is far more educated and intelligent and wise. You harass him, rather than harassing me.”But now I know what the meaning of the stories is and why they are being taught to the children. They enter in their unconscious and they start thinking life is always somewhere else – in heaven, in God, always somewhere else – it is not in you. You are empty, just an empty shell. You don’t have meaning in your life herenow. Here you are only a means, a ladder. If you go up the ladder, perhaps someday you will find your life, your God, your goal, your meaning, whatever name you give to it.But I say to you that you are the meaning, the significance, and living itself is intrinsically complete.Life needs nothing else to be added to it.All that life needs is that you live it to its totality. If you live only partially, then you will not feel the thrill of being alive. It is like any mechanism when just a part is functioning… For example in a clock: if only the second hand is working but neither the hour hand nor the minute hand moves – only the second hand goes on moving – what purpose will it serve? There will be movement, a certain part is working, but unless the whole works and works in harmony, there cannot be a song out of it.And this is the situation: everybody is living partially, a small part. So you make noise but you can’t create a song. You move your hands and legs but no dance happens. The dance, the song, the significance comes into existence immediately your whole functions in harmony, in accord. Then you don’t ask such questions as: Is there any point in living? – you know.Living itself is the point. There is no other point.But you have not been allowed to remain one and whole. You have been divided, cut into several parts. A few parts have been completely closed – so much so that you don’t know even that they belong to you. Much of you has been thrown in the basement. Much of you has been so condemned that although you know it is there, you cannot dare to accept it, that it is part of you – you go on denying it; you go on repressing it.You know only a very small fragment in you, which they call conscience, which is a social product, not a natural thing, which society creates inside you to control you from inside. The constable is outside, the court is outside controlling you. And the conscience is inside, which is far more powerful.That’s why even in court they will first give you the Bible. You take the oath on the Bible because the court also knows that if you are a Christian, putting your hand on the Bible and saying, “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” your conscience will force you to speak the truth, because now you have taken the oath in the name of God, and you have touched the Bible. If you speak a lie you will be thrown into hell.Before, at the most, if you were caught you would be thrown into imprisonment for a few months, a few years. But now you will be thrown into hell for eternity. Even the court accepts that the Bible is more powerful, the Gita is more powerful, the Koran is more powerful than the court, than the military, than the army.Conscience is one of the meanest inventions of humanity. And from the very first day the child is born we start creating a conscience in him; a small part which goes on condemning anything that the society does not want in you, and goes on appreciating anything that the society wants in you. You are no longer whole.The conscience continuously goes on forcing you, so that you have to always look out – God is watching. Every act, every thought, God is watching, so beware!Even in thoughts you are not allowed freedom: God is watching. What kind of peeping Tom is this God? In every bathroom he is looking through the keyhole; he won’t leave you alone – even in your bathroom?There are tribes in the world where even in your dream if you do something wrong, in the morning you have to go to the person… For example you have insulted somebody in your dream – in the morning you have to go to apologize: “Forgive me, last night I insulted you in a dream; I am so sorry.” Even dreams are controlled by the society. You are not allowed even in a dream to be yourself.They go on talking about freedom of thought – that’s all nonsense because from the very beginning they put the base in every child for unfreedom of thought.They want to control your thoughts. They want to control your dreams. They want to control everything in you. It’s through a very clever device – conscience. It pricks you. It goes on telling you, “This is not right, don’t do it; you will suffer.” It goes on forcing you: “Do this, this is the right thing to do; you will be rewarded for it.”This conscience will never allow you to be whole. It won’t allow you to live as if there is nothing prohibited, as if there are no boundaries, as if you are left totally independent to be whatsoever you can be. Then life has meaning, then living has meaning – not the meaning that is derived from ends, but the meaning that is derived from living itself. Then whatever you do, in that very doing is your reward.For example, I am speaking to you. I am enjoying it. For thirty-five years I have been continually speaking for no purpose. With this much speaking I could have become a president, a prime minister; there was no problem in it. With so much speaking I could have done anything. What have I gained? But I was not out for gain in the first place – I enjoyed.This was my painting, this was my song, this was my poetry.Just those moments when I am speaking and I feel the communion happening, those moments when I see your eyes flare up, when I see that you have understood the point… They give me such tremendous joy that I cannot think anything can be added to it.Action, any action done totally, with every fiber of your being in it… For example, if you bind my hands I cannot speak, although there is no relationship between hands and speaking. I have tried.One day, I told a friend who was staying with me, “Tie both my hands.”He said, “What?”I said, “Just tie them, and then ask a question.”He said, “I am always afraid to stay with you, you are crazy. And now if somebody sees that I have tied your hands, and now I am asking a question and you are answering it, what will they think?”I said, “Forget all that. Close the door and do what I say.”He did, because he had to do it; otherwise I would have thrown him out, saying, “And being my guest, you cannot even do this simple thing for me? Then don’t bother me at all, just get lost.” So he tied my hands to two pillars, and he asked me a question. I tried in every possible way, but my hands were tied; I could not say anything to him. I simply said, “Please untie my hands.”He said, “But I cannot understand what this is all about.”I said, “It is simply that I was trying to see whether I could speak without my hands. I cannot.”What to say about hands… If I put this leg on the other side, and the other leg on top of it – which is the way I sit in my room when I am not speaking… If I have to put it under the other leg, then something goes wrong, then I am not at home. So the way I am sitting, the way my hands move, is a total involvement. It is not only speaking from a part of me; everything in me is involved in it. And only then can you find the intrinsic value of any act. Otherwise you have to live the life of tension, stretched between here and there, this and that faraway goal.The pseudo-religions say, “Of course, this life is only a means so you cannot be involved in it totally; it is only a ladder you have to pass. It is not something valuable, just a stepping-stone. The real thing is there, far away.” And so it always remains far away. Wherever you will be, your real thing will be always far away. So wherever you will be, you will be missing life.I don’t have a goal.When I was in the university I used to go for a walk in the morning, evening, anytime… Morning and evening absolutely, but if there was another time available, I would also go for a walk then, because the place and the trees and the road were so beautiful, and so covered with big trees from both sides that even in the hottest summer there was shadow on the road.One of my professors who loved me very much used to watch me: that some days I would go on this road, some days on that road. There was a pentagon in front of the gate of the university, five roads going in five directions, and he lived just near there; his were the last quarters near the gate. He asked me, “Sometimes you go on this road, sometimes on that road. Where do you go?”I said, “I don’t go anywhere. I just go for walking.” If you are going somewhere then certainly you will go on the same road; but I was not going anywhere, so it was just whimsical. I just came to the pentagon and I just used to stand there for a little while. That was making him more puzzled: how do I figure it out, what do I figure out standing there?I used to figure out where the wind was blowing. Whichever way the wind was blowing I would also go; that was my way. “So sometimes,” he would say, “You have been going on the same road for a week continually; sometimes you go only one day, and the next day you change. What do you do there? And how do you decide?”And I told him, “It is very simple. I stand there and I feel which road is alive – where the wind is blowing. I go with the wind. And it is beautiful going with the wind. I jog, I run, whatsoever I want to do. And the wind is there, cool, available. So I just figure it out.”Life is not going somewhere.It is just going for a morning walk.Choose wherever your whole being is flowing, where the wind is blowing. Move on that path as far as it leads, and never expect to find anything.Hence I have never been surprised, because I have never been expecting anything – so there is no question of surprise: everything is surprise. And there is no question of disappointment: everything is appointment.If it happens, good; if it does not happen, even better.Once you understand that moment-to-moment living is what religion is all about, then you will understand why I say drop this idea of God, heaven and hell, and all that crap.Just drop it completely because this load of so many concepts is preventing you from living moment to moment. Live life in an organic unity. No act should be partial, you should be involved fully in it.A Zen story:A very curious king, wanting to know about what these people go on doing in the monasteries, asked, “Who is the most famous master?” Finding out that the most famous master of those days was Nan-in, he went to his monastery. When he entered the monastery he found a woodcutter. He asked him, “The monastery is big, where can I find Master Nan-in?”The man thought with closed eyes for a few moments, and he said, “Right now you cannot find him.”The king said, “Why can’t I find him right now? Do you understand that I am the emperor?”He said, “That is irrelevant. Whoever you are, that is your business, but I assure you, you cannot find him right now.”“Is he out?” asked the king.“No, he is in,” replied the woodcutter.The king said, “But is he involved in some work, in some ceremony, or in isolation? What is the matter?”The man said, “He is right now cutting wood in front of you. And when I am cutting wood, I am just a woodcutter. Right now where is Master Nan-in? I am just a woodcutter. You will have to wait.”The emperor thought, “This man is mad, simply mad. Master Nan-in cutting wood?” He went ahead, and left the woodcutter behind. Nan-in again continued to cut wood. The winter was coming close, and wood had to be stored. The emperor could wait, but winter wouldn’t wait.The emperor waited one hour, two hours – and then from the back door came Master Nan-in, in his master’s robe. The king looked at him. He looked like the woodcutter, but the king bowed down. The master sat there, and he asked, “Why have you taken so much trouble to come here?”The king said, “There are many things, but those questions I will ask later on. First I want to know: are you the same man who was cutting wood?”He said, “Now I am Master Nan-in. I am not the same man; the total configuration has changed. Now here I am sitting as Master Nan-in. You ask as a disciple, with humbleness, receptivity. Yes, a man very, very similar to me was cutting wood there, but that was a woodcutter. His name is also Nan-In.”The king got so puzzled that he left without asking the questions he had come to ask. When he went back to his court, his advisers asked what happened. He said, “What happened it is better to forget about. This Master Nan-In seems to be absolutely insane! He was cutting wood; he said, ‘I am a woodcutter and Master Nan-In is not available right now.’ Then the same man came in a master’s robe and I asked him, and he said, ‘A similar man was cutting the wood, but he was the woodcutter; I am the master.’”One of the men in the court said, “You have missed the point of what he was trying to say to you – that when cutting wood he is totally involved in it. Nothing is left which can claim to be Master Nan-In; nothing is left out, he is just a woodcutter.”And in Zen language, which is difficult to translate, he was saying not exactly that “I am a woodcutter,” he was saying, “Right now it is wood cutting, not a woodcutter – because there is not even space for the cutter.” It is simply wood being chopped, and he is so totally in it, it is only wood cutting: wood cutting is happening. And when he comes as a master, of course, it is a different configuration. The same parts are now in a different accord. So with each action you are a different person, if you get totally involved in it.Buddha used to say, “It is just as the flame of the candle looks the same, but is never the same even for two consecutive moments. The flame is continuously becoming smoke, new flame is coming up. The old flame is going out, the new flame is coming up. The candle that you had burned in the evening is not the same candle that you will blow out in the morning. This is not the same flame that you had started; that has gone far away, nobody knows where. It is just a similarity of the flame that gives you the illusion that it is the same flame.”The same is true about your being. It is a flame. It is a fire.Each moment your being is changing, and if you get involved totally in anything then you will see the change happening in you – each moment a new being, and a new world, and a new experience. Everything suddenly becomes so full of newness that you never see the same thing again.Then naturally, life becomes a continuous mystery, a continuous surprise. On each step a new world opens up, of tremendous meaning, of incredible ecstasy.When death comes, death too is not seen as something separate from life. It is part of life, not an end of life. It is just like other happenings: love had happened, birth had happened. You were a child, and then childhood disappeared; you became a young man, and then the young man disappeared; you became an old man, and then the old man disappeared – how many things have been happening! Why don’t you allow death also to happen just like other incidents?And actually the person who has lived moment to moment lives death too, and finds that all the moments of life can be put on one side and the one moment of death can be put on the other side, and still it weighs more. In every way it weighs more because it is the whole life condensed; and something more added to it, which was never available to you. A new door opening, with the whole life condensed: a new dimension opening.Okay, you can ask your second question…Osho,On the face of American money is the phrase, “In God we trust.” the priests have lied and said that there is a God. The politicians have lied and said that the American constitution and civil rights would ensure social justice for all. How can I now trust in a religionless religion?I have never asked you to trust in a religionless religion. How can I ask you? – because that very asking has been religion up to now. To boycott it I am calling it religionless religion, using an obvious contradiction. But the reason is clear. Calling it religionless means that I will not ask you for any faith, any belief, any trust.If trust arises in you, that is a totally different thing.The religions ask that you believe in one God, one messiah, one book. I do not ask you; but how can I prevent you if trust arises in you? Then trust is nothing but a kind of love. It is not belief, it is not faith, because belief has to be forced to repress doubts; faith has to be continually indoctrinated in you. You hear it so many times that slowly, slowly you start forgetting that you have only heard it, that you don’t know anything about it.You have a tendency – and a comfortable tendency – to forget your ignorance and cling to your knowledge. Faith is conditioned knowledge given by others to you, forced upon you. But slowly, slowly, it goes so deep in your mind, it becomes part of you. You start thinking it is “my faith.” Trust is neither.Nobody can ask for trust, just as nobody can ask for love. Can I ask anybody, “Love me”? The person will say, “But how?” If love arises, it arises; if it does not arise then what can be done? Yes, you can pretend, as the whole world is pretending. Trust can also be pretended if asked for. I am not asking. I want you to be completely saved from any kind of pretension, hypocrisy. But if trust arises I cannot help it, you cannot help it. Nobody can do anything about it if it arises. You suddenly feel a new heartbeat in you – what can you do?In my religionless religion, trust is not required. Trust is not demanded, not ordered, not commanded. It happens. And we are all helpless about it; nothing can be done about it when it happens. It is so beautiful that who would like to miss it when it happens?Yes, the politicians have deceived people, the religions have deceived people. And I have lived my whole life condemned by all the religions and all the politicians, for the simple reason that I was exposing them.This is very strange. The question says that on the American dollar it says, “In God we trust.” My God! On the dollar you say, “In God we trust” – then what is this attorney general of Oregon doing by trying to declare our city illegal? He should declare America an illegal country! – because this is mixing state and religion.If Rajneeshpuram is declared an illegal city… And we have not done anything like that: saying, “In God we trust” on the dollar, you are mixing God with money, mixing state with religion. This attorney general of Oregon can make history. He should declare the whole American nation illegal.They use the Bible in the courts for taking the oath – that is mixing law with religion, state with religion – or they ask, “In the name of God…” All this mixing is happening, except in Rajneeshpuram, where there is no mixing happening. In fact, we don’t have any God to mix!These people are strange, and it looks as if they don’t think about what they are doing, what they are saying. There seems to be no coordination in their mind; otherwise… The president of America goes to a certain church; before he takes the oath of the president he goes to be blessed by the priest of his church. Now what business has a priest to bless the president, and why? The president should start from the very beginning mixing church and state?Why does the president of America go to the Vatican to meet the pope? As president he should not go. He can go as Ronald Reagan, but then he should not have any facility that is provided for a president. But he goes as the president. And still we are blamed that we are mixing religion and state. We don’t have anything that can be mixed with the state!I am against politics. How can you mix it with politics? I condemn politics. My whole life I have been condemning the politicians. I see them as criminals who are clever enough not to be caught, clever enough to cheat people by giving them false hopes, phony utopias. We don’t have any politics here. And we don’t have any religion that they think is religion.My religion is a way of life. It is not a way of prayer, it is a way of living.Can you mix love with state? How will you mix them? They are unmixable. And this phenomenon that is happening here is of the same quality as love. We love life, and we want to live it in its fullness. Who cares about your politics and your state?The mayor of Rajneeshpuram is not a politician. It is just because of your stupid categories, that a city should have a mayor, that we have a mayor. If you allow us to be a city without a mayor, we will be immensely happy; and our mayor, K.D., will be immensely happy, because whenever I look at him, he feels ashamed, he looks downward because the poor man has to be in the position of a politician – just a necessary evil. And it is just because of your constitution and your legal structure.We can’t change your constitution and your legal structure, so we decided: okay, let one sannyasin fall into the gutter. Let him become the mayor, what else to do? K.D. is suffering in the gutter, and we will pull him out. We will not leave him there forever, because he has not come here to become a mayor! Nor is anybody concerned in becoming the attorney general of Oregon or the governor of Oregon or the president of America. Nobody is interested at all.We are interested simply in being left alone.But these people are strange, they cannot leave us alone. They are afraid, they are worried. They are suspicious: what is happening, what is going on? They are not even courageous enough to come here and see; just on rumors – public opinion – and that public has also not come here. And these people go on deciding things!The city of Rajneeshpuram the attorney general has declared illegal. This is a unique situation; in fact a unique city in the whole world, because there is no city in the whole world which is illegal, and there never has been before. Either a city is a city, or it is not a city. But an illegal city, that’s something that is absolutely unique!But leave all this nonsense to these people. They should also create a post in Oregon: the Idiot General of Oregon, and he should be given all these kinds of things to do. Then one can understand that it is just humor; one can laugh at it and enjoy it. And they are very serious people; they are not doing things out of a sense of humor. And my religion has a basic quality: a sense of humor. If out of sheer being with me, with my people, a trust is born… And it is not trust in God, it is not trust in somebody particular; it is just a quality, unaddressed.There is no address on the envelope: “In God we trust.” Who are you to trust in God? On what authority do you trust in God? – you don’t know God. You are dragging God also to the same status as a dollar, making him a thing of the marketplace. And you cannot find anything more dirty than currency, because it moves in so many hands.I have not touched any note for thirty-five years. It is the dirtiest thing. Not that I am against money but it is the most dirty thing. All kinds of people…somebody may have cancer, somebody may have tuberculosis, somebody may have AIDS, and who knows what he has been doing with his notes? Anything is possible, because people are so perverted, they can do anything with bank notes. I said, “I am not going to touch them” – and I stopped touching them. And on that note you write, “In God we trust”? Please forgive God and forget all about him.The trust that arises in my sannyasins is simply a quality of their heart; they just start trusting. It is not trust in something. They start trusting; even when they are deceived, they trust: knowing that this man has deceived them, they trust. It is not a question of whom, it is just their aroma.In the university I had to live for a few days with a roommate. I had never lived with anybody but there was no space and the vice-chancellor said to me, “For a few days you manage and I will find some other place for you. I can understand that you will not like anybody to be in the room, and it is good for the other fellow also that he is not in your room, because you may drive him crazy. I will arrange it.”But it took four, five months before he arranged it. And that man was a very good boy; he just had one problem – just one, so you cannot say that it was a big trouble – he was a kleptomaniac. Just for sheer joy he would steal my things. I had to search for my things in his suitcases, and I would find them, but I never said anything to him.He was puzzled. He would use my clothes. When I was not in the room he would just take anything. He would take my shawl and go for a walk, so when I came back the shawl would be gone. I would say, “It will come back, soon it will return.” To save money from being taken by him I used to deposit it with him and say, “Keep this money, because if I keep it you will take it anyway. And then it will be difficult to know how much you have taken and how to ask you for it. It looks awkward. Just take it. It is this much: you take it!”He said, “You are clever. This way I have to return all the money whenever you need it.”But after four, five months… Because whenever and wherever he was, with whomsoever he lived – his family or friends, or in the hostels – everybody was condemning him. But I never said anything to him – instead of looking in my suitcases I just looked into his. It was simple! It was not very different; my suitcases were in this corner, his suitcases were in that corner.He said, “You are strange. I have been stealing your things and you never say anything.”I said, “It is a very small problem. It can’t create distrust in me for a human being. And what trouble is there? Rather than going to my suitcase, I simply go to your suitcase, and in your suitcase I find whatsoever I need.”He said, “That’s why I was wondering… I go on stealing from you, you never say anything, and those things disappear from my suitcases again! So I was thinking that perhaps you also are a kleptomaniac.”I said, “That is perfectly okay. If you stop taking from my suitcases, I will stop taking from your suitcases. And remember, in this whole game you have been losing.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I take a few things that are not mine” – because he was stealing from everywhere, other rooms, professors’ houses; anywhere he would find any window open, he would jump in. And there was no intention of stealing, just the joy of it, just the challenge; an opportunity and challenge that nobody could catch hold of him.I said, “I will never prevent you. You can go on moving my things, you can move my whole suitcase under your bed; it doesn’t matter. In fact I am perfectly happy with you. I am worried now that soon the vice-chancellor is going to give me a single room. Where will I find a person like you? – because you provide so many things which I need. And I trust you perfectly!”

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You have been saying that disobedience is a religious quality. It suddenly means I have to disobey you, the commune and the discipline of sannyas. I cannot even participate in our prayer, the gachchhamis.The questioner is certainly an Oregonian, a born Oregonian, not just twenty days resident in Oregon. As far as I am concerned it is enough to breathe Oregon’s air for twenty minutes to become an Oregonian!I have said that disobedience is a religious quality, but to be disobedient you need to be very intelligent. To obey – an idiot can do it. All that he has to say is, “Yes sir.” To disobey is not just saying no; that too can be done by an idiot very easily.Disobedience needs tremendous intelligence because you are deciding your life, your future, your destiny.I have said disobey anything that is imposed on you, against you, against your will, against your intellect, against your reason, against your being. Then risk everything and disobey it – because in fact by disobeying it, you are obeying your inner self. By disobeying it, you are obeying existence.In other words, by disobeying it you are disobeying the personality and obeying the individuality.I have not said that you have to disobey everything – you will go nuts, unless you are already nuts. I have emphasized disobedience because all the religions have been emphasizing obedience. Obedience to whom? Obedience to their God, which is their creation; obedience to the commandments, which are their creation; obedience to society, convention, tradition – which are all their vested interests – obedience to the parents, to the teachers, to the priests.All the religions have been teaching you obedience; hence, just to emphasize it clearly before you, I had to say disobey, rebel.That does not mean that I am against obedience. But the obedience I am for is a very different phenomenon. It does not come as an imposition on you, it comes as a flowering of your being. It is your intelligence, your maturity, your centeredness, your aliveness, your response. You are the source of it; not Moses, not Mohammed, not Jesus, not me, but you, just you.But do you know who you are? You know you are a Jew, and you are not. You know you are a Christian, and you are not. You know you are a Hindu, and you are not. These are all impositions.People have been painting on you as if you are a canvas. They are making your face according to their idea. They want to become in some way ideals for you, and they want to reduce you to imitators.There is a great Christian classic, Imitation of Christ, which is respected by the Christians almost next to the Bible. But it is an ugly book. The very title of the book shows what it is: Imitation of Christ. You may imitate Christ for millions of lives; still you will not be a Christ, you will be only an imitation. And the imitation is not your original face.The more you succeed in imitating, the more you are failing as far as your being is concerned. The deeper you go into imitation, the farther away you are going from yourself; and the return journey is not going to be easy.It is going to be immensely difficult, because when you were continuously imitating a certain pattern, you were becoming identified with it. The return journey means you will have to start killing all that identification. It will look like committing suicide, as if you are cutting off your own limbs. It is not going to be just like dropping your clothes, not that easy. It is going to be like peeling your skin.It is so difficult that even a very intelligent man like Bertrand Russell confessed, “My reason says that Gautam Buddha is certainly the greatest figure in the whole of human history, but although I am not part of any Christian congregation, although I have completely disassociated myself from Christian mythology, religion, theology, somewhere I cannot put Buddha above Christ. With my reason I understand, but as far as my feelings are concerned Jesus remains higher – and I know he is not.”Now, a man like Bertrand Russell cannot get rid of a certain conditioning. He has been told from his very childhood that there has never been anybody like Jesus. Although he has renounced Christianity consciously, publicly… He wrote a very famous book, Why I Am Not a Christian, and gave all his reasons, very valid reasons. Anybody who has a little bit of intelligence can understand that if what Bertrand Russell is saying is the case, then you cannot be a Christian either. And that is the case; he has exposed Christianity completely.But even after that… And this confession was long after he had written that book. He had written the book some twenty years before, and this confession came when he was nearabout eighty-five, absolutely mature. He remained intelligent to the very last moment of his life. He lived almost a century; he never became senile. Even at the last moment of his life he was as intelligent and alive as ever.He confessed: “As far as my feelings and emotions are concerned, Jesus somehow hangs above everybody else. And I know perfectly well there is no comparison of Gautam Buddha with Jesus; Gautam Buddha is far superior. But that is only intellectual; emotionally Christ still has the grip.” Although he has said that he is not a Christian, he is still a Christian.That’s why I say it is very difficult to come back. Going is difficult, but coming back is far more difficult. Imitation is going to be a difficult thing: you are trying to be something which you are not meant to be, which is not your destiny. You are going against the very nature of your being, you are trying to swim against the current. Yes, it is difficult to imitate – but not so difficult as when you start coming back to your natural self.You have lost it somewhere far back. You can’t remember even where you lost it. You can’t remember where you deviated from yourself. You deviated in such moments when you were not even aware.If you remember your past, you will at the most go back to the age of four, on average. Not all people can go back to the age of four. A few people, very rare people can go to the age of three. And rarely, once in a while, you can find a person who can go back to the age of two. It happens only once in a century that a person can go back to the age of one. And it happens only once in many centuries that a person can go into the memories of his mother’s womb.But your deviation starts even when you are in your mother’s womb, because whatsoever your mother is doing is affecting you. When you are in your mother’s womb, your mother’s mind is your mind, her feelings are your feelings, her emotions are your emotions. If she is angry, something in you gets angry. If she is happy, something in you rejoices.In the East, psychology is one of the most ancient sciences; in the West it is just a hundred years old – not even a hundred years old. The oldest name in Western psychology, the ancientmost, is Sigmund Freud, who was alive just a few years ago. But in the East, in India, psychology goes as far back as Patanjali – five thousand years. And Patanjali cannot be said to be the source because he quotes more ancient sources. In China it goes as far back as Lao Tzu. But Lao Tzu quotes at least five-thousand-year-old sources: five thousand years before Lao Tzu, who is twenty-five centuries before us.Eastern psychology says that when the mother is pregnant, those nine months are the most important period in the life of the child who is not yet born. In these nine months as much care as possible should be taken. The mother should not become angry, should not become sexual, should not become worried, should not become irritated, annoyed. She should be kept in such a way that the child is not affected at all by her emotions. She should be almost in a meditative state for all those nine months.That’s the recommendation of Eastern psychology, that the mother for nine months should be continuously in a meditative state; that’s the only way to save the child from becoming an imitator. Otherwise neither the mother knows the child, nor the child knows himself, and he becomes an imitator. This is the situation in the womb – what to say about when the child comes out of the womb. Then, at every step everybody is determined to give a certain shape, a certain color, a certain character, a certain career to you – and with all good intentions. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. Nobody is your enemy, but they all prove to be your enemies.There is one statement of Gautam Buddha which Buddhists try to avoid because they don’t have the understanding to explain it. And it is so clear, they cannot even explain it away. The statement that Buddha makes is, “Unless you hate your father, your mother, your brother, you cannot follow me.” Now, what kind of statement is this? – “Unless you hate your father, your mother, your family, you cannot follow me.”The Buddhists don’t quote it. In no Buddhist monastery does anybody even give a sermon on it. Monks just pass it by quickly. How to explain it? A man like Buddha who teaches love, nonviolence, is saying to hate your mother and father.Then Jesus certainly seems to be far superior: “Love your enemy; not only the enemy, love your neighbor” – which is certainly far more difficult. The enemy is far away and once in a while maybe there is some trouble, but the neighbor is a twenty-four hour trouble, and just a pain in the neck continually, twenty-four hours a day. And Jesus says, “Love your neighbor just like yourself.”Naturally if you compare these statements Jesus will look far more religious than Buddha. But before I say anything else, let me quote Bodhidharma, who defeated his own master, Buddha, in every possible way. And that is the only joy of a real master, that he should be defeated by his disciple. Of course, they were not contemporaries; there was at least eleven hundred years’ difference between Buddha and Bodhidharma.Bodhidharma says: “First go and kill your father and mother, then come to me. First, be finished with your father and your mother and then come to me. Otherwise go somewhere else – I am not for you.” How you are going to explain it? And I say to you that what Jesus says is just hocus-pocus.What Bodhidharma is saying is pure psychology. He is not saying that you should kill your father and mother, but in a certain way you have to kill the father that has entered you, and the mother that has entered you. That is your family inside, which is surrounding your being, which won’t allow any ray of light to reach your innermost corner. The crowd has gathered there, and because of that crowd the inner center is in darkness.Bodhidharma brings Buddha’s statement to its logical conclusion. Why just hate? – be completely finished, because hating is again a relationship, just like love. If you love somebody, you remember him; you cannot forget him – you are not supposed to forget the person you love. Sometimes you may forget the person you love, but you cannot forget the person you hate. Although all the so-called moral teachers have been telling you to forgive and forget, you can neither forgive nor can you forget. Perhaps you can forgive, with effort, but how can you forget? Then you will remember two things: first, that you hated him and second, that you have forgiven him – now you will remember even more. So what have you done?You cannot forget your enemy. It is a relationship, a very close, very intimate relationship. And that’s why it is very easy for lovers to become haters, friends to become enemies, enemies to become friends. It is very easy because both are relationships: just a little turn, a little change in the situation…For example, in the Second World War America and Russia became friends, great friends, fighting together hand in hand. They were enemies before, they are enemies afterward. Strange! But the situation took such a turn… Adolf Hitler did a miracle, he was a man worth counting. All the miracles of Jesus are nothing compared to what Adolf Hitler did: he turned Americans and Russians into friends. Both flags flying together by courtesy of Adolf Hitler! And the moment Adolf Hitler was finished, the friendship evaporated immediately, instantly. They were enemies again.You could see the Berlin Wall… Half of Berlin remained with the Russians – they could not even wait for Berlin to become whole again. Adolf Hitler gone, the friendship finished. When the magician is gone, the magic is finished; the enemies are again enemies. But enemies can become friends, and without becoming friends you cannot become enemies. First you have to be friends, that is the first step; then only can you become enemies – that is something higher, more evolved. Perhaps you have brought your friendship to its logical conclusion.So Buddha, by saying hate your father and mother, also does not mean your father and mother, but the father and mother that have penetrated you, that have become like a thick layer of personality in you. But he was a very sophisticated man, the son of a king, very educated. Bodhidharma is very raw; he simply calls a spade a spade. Why bother about sophistication, hate, and this and that – simply kill. And I say to you, without killing you cannot get out of the prison.So when I say disobey, I mean disobey everything that is not coming from your own self.Obey that which is your nature.Now, this man is saying that this means he cannot obey me. That’s why I called him a born Oregonian, because if listening to me say disobey, you disobey, that is obedience – can’t you see it? Before listening to me you were obeying; now because I have said disobey, you have to disobey. This is disobedience? Then what is obedience? This will be obedience!You have not understood me at all. You have just heard that I am saying disobey, so now you have to disobey me, disobey the commune, disobey the discipline of sannyas. This man may be representing parts in all of you, because I have been receiving letters continually: “Osho, you are teaching disobedience, and in the commune we have to follow a certain discipline.” To them it seems contradictory.Disobey me, or the commune, or sannyas, if it is not from you. Who has forced you to be part of the commune? It is your choice. You were not born in the commune. It is your choice, and a difficult choice, because by being part of my commune you are going against everybody else around you. You are taking a risk.It is dangerous to be part of my commune. It is dangerous to be in association with me. You have chosen it. I don’t convert anybody; I try my best to dissuade you from becoming a sannyasin – what more can I do? I give you no consolation.There is one question: “Osho, you have taken God away, now there is only existence. Existence means nature; it is harsh, it is indifferent, it doesn’t care. If there is no God then I feel very much afraid.”Naturally, you will feel very much afraid because your God was nothing but a way to hide your fear. It was fear-oriented. It was just to keep your fear suppressed. Take God away and fear springs up. It is there; even when you are putting the rock of God on the spring, it is still there. You know perfectly well that it is there, alive, ready to burst forth any moment – just waiting for its chance, an opportunity.Your whole life you have believed in God, and I have just said that there is no God – and that’s enough! Perhaps for fifty years you have believed in God, found consolation in it, then just an ordinary man like me says there is no God, and fifty years of conditioning disappears and fear arises! Whom are you trying to deceive?If I can do this, anybody can do this. Just anybody meeting you on the road can whisper in your ear, “There is no God” – finished! Your God is dead! Your fear is more alive than ever. Hence all the religions teach, their scriptures teach, “Don’t listen to anybody who does not belong to your faith.”In India, Jaina scriptures say that if you are being followed by a mad elephant and you come close to a Hindu temple – although you could be saved if you take refuge in the temple and close the doors – don’t go inside the temple. It is better to die on the road under the mad elephant’s feet, because who knows? – in the Hindu temple you may hear something which will spoil your faith. And the same, exactly the same, is repeated in the Hindu scriptures: “Don’t go in a Jaina temple, because sometimes a single sentence coming from an antagonistic religion may spoil your whole life’s effort.” But this is strange.Just a few days ago an old man was here because he wanted to sit close to me at least once. He has been coming here for almost one year, has been doing all kinds of therapy groups, meditations, and is immensely interested in becoming a sannyasin – but unfortunately he is a billionaire. The family, the company of which he is the chairman… He is afraid of all those people – the board members, the company, the family.They give millions of dollars every year in donations, but of course those donations go to the faith in which he was born. This time he was wavering between to be or not to be. Finally he decided that it was better, before he takes sannyas, to go and tell the family and the whole board of directors. Rather than afterward, it was better to say it before. So he went. Now, he must be at least sixty, not less than that – not somebody immature who can be easily converted, programmed, deprogrammed. But you will be surprised: his family immediately went to a deprogrammer. The first thing, hearing his ideas they were shocked, they were angry; they could not believe that a man of sixty years old who earns one thousand million dollars per year can be so easily converted by a cult. He has to be deprogrammed.These people are not special; it’s just the common mind. And the deprogrammer suggested, of course, the right thing to do. He said, “He is not a child so you have to be very careful. You are not to be angry, you are not to show that you are against his new ideology, because your anger and your clear disappointment in him will take him farther away from you. You have to be very supportive, very loving.”The deprogrammer is really cunning but he understands one thing, that a sixty-year-old man cannot be treated like a child, that you deprogram him in two days. And we have not programmed him at all. We have not tried to make him become a sannyasin, he was asking to become a sannyasin. Now the family is pretending to be loving and very supportive. And the old man finds it very strange. The message has come, “Very strange things are happening. My family has never been so loving.”But deep down they are all boiling inside. I don’t think that by their lovingness and supportiveness, which is all phony and American, the man can be prevented from coming here. In fact he will think – which the deprogrammer has not thought about – that my ideology is so beautiful that just hearing about it the family has become so loving and so supportive. It would have been perfectly right to go as a sannyasin. And next time he is going to become a sannyasin.But they will make every effort: this is just trying the first deprogrammer. If it doesn’t work they may try saying, “This man is mad, he cannot be in a responsible post like the chairman of a company. He should be put into a mental asylum or into some nursing home where he needs to be treated psychiatrically.” They will not leave him so easily. That’s why I said unfortunately he is a billionaire. If he were a poor man, the family would have been happy: “Get lost. Who cares! It is good that we get rid of you. Why have you come back? You should have become a sannyasin there.”I have not given you any discipline. The questioner says, “…the discipline of sannyas.” Can’t you understand a little bit of humor? What discipline of sannyas have I given to you? That you have to wear red clothes – does that mean anything? It is simply to annoy the old traditional sannyasins, just to give them a good headache. And that’s what we were doing in India, because I had thousands of sannyasins and it was becoming difficult for people to decide who was my sannyasin, and who was the old traditional sannyasin.They would even touch the feet of my sannyasins. But when they looked at my picture on the mala, they were shocked! That mala and picture are just to shock people. What discipline have I given to you? You don’t know discipline. You should go and look in a Trappist monastery and then you will understand what discipline is.I am reminded of a story:In a Trappist monastery you enter for ever; you cannot get out unless you are thrown out. Unless you become a nuisance and the monastery decides to throw you out, you cannot get out on your own. That freedom is not allowed; about that, you have to decide before you enter. You can take your time, but once you enter the monastery it is for your whole life, it is lifelong. Only your dead body will come out of the monastery.This man entered the monastery, perhaps the most orthodox in the whole world. The monks remain absolutely silent. Only one time can they speak, after three years. After each three years they have the right to speak once, if they have any complaint or any difficulty or any problem.This man was suffering continually for three years because he had no mattress, so he was just sleeping on the naked floor, and it was really cold. Even his bones started hurting. But you had to wait three years before you could say, “I need a mattress.”After three years all the monks of the monastery gathered and the chief abbot asked them, “If anybody has anything to say, he can say it. For three years again there will be no meeting; nothing is to be said.”This man waited, then he said, “I need a mattress.” Now, do you think for three years he was thinking of Jesus Christ? – only the mattress. And waiting and waiting, looking at the calendar for three years.The chief abbot said, “Okay. For three years, now, no more complaints. In three years time you can speak again. A mattress will be provided.”The mattress was provided but it was too big, and his cell was too small, so that while they were bringing in the mattress they broke the glass of the door. The mattress was in but the glass was broken so the wind started coming in, the rain started coming in, and now three years… The poor man. At least before he could stretch his body; now he was sitting in a corner, the rain was coming in, the snow was coming in.And what do you think? – that for these three years he was praying? Yes, he was praying that these three years should pass, “And if I am still alive…” It looked as if it would be difficult to be able to survive three years, but he survived. Man has an immense capacity to adjust to any kind of circumstances. Even in a Trappist monastery people survive. He survived.And after three years, again the gathering. He came running to the gathering, and even before the chief abbot had asked, he raised his hand. The chief abbot was very angry. He said, “You are the same man again! Any complaint?”He said, “For three years I have been suffering rain, wind, snow. My glass was broken when the mattress was brought in. The mattress was big, and the door was small.”The chief said, “Okay. Now for three years be silent. Your door will be mended.”The door was mended. The three years he had survived, but the mattress had not survived. It was stinking, and because the door had been open the stink was not so much. Now the door was closed and no air was coming in… And the mattress had become utterly rotten because for three years every kind of hazard that had been possible… Now the man could not breathe! It became so… And for three years!He said, “Now these are my last days. I will not be able to raise my hand again.” But he survived. Again he survived, because the adjustment capacity of man is really tremendous. If you are living in a stinking room, sitting on a rotten mattress, soon you will not smell it because your sensitivity to smell will be dulled, will be killed by the stink, the continuous stink. Your nose is not so strong, it is not made of steel, and very small parts in your nose have the capacity to smell. If there was this continuous warfare against your capacity to smell your nose would become dead.He survived, but when three years had passed he ran as fast as he could. And before he could raise his hand, the abbot said, “Stop! Since you have come I have never heard anything but complaints. Get out! I don’t want to listen anymore.”He said, “But I have not said anything yet. Just please listen to me.”The abbot said, “This type of people are not acceptable in a Trappist monastery. I have not heard anything from you in nine years except complaints, complaints, complaints.”They threw the poor man out.And you say that you cannot follow the sannyas discipline? I have not given you any discipline. Yes, three things I have done…I have given you a new name so that you can start disidentifying yourself from your old personality, and you can begin anew, as if a new child is born.I have given you red clothes to wear just to destroy the monopoly of traditional sannyasins on red clothes – they are nobody’s monopoly. And it was just a mockery of the sannyas that has existed in the East for thousands of years. I was saying that just by changing your clothes to red you don’t become a sage.I have given you a mala, because all the ancient sannyasins of all religions have used a rosary for prayer. I have not given it to you for any prayer.It was an old method of counting. For example in Hinduism: how many times you take God’s name is your account in the other world. But to remember “Ram, Ram, Ram…” You will forget. But to continue to remember, “One Ram, two Ram, three Ram” will be a disturbance. And “one, two, three, four, five” will grow to “one thousand and four…one million, two million, three million…” You are going to get lost somewhere and forget the counting. Then it will be a real loss because God will ask, “How many times…?”So the rosary was a method: you count, you just go on, you say “Ram” and you slip one bead down. You needn’t say “One.” You say “Ram,” and you slip the second bead down. You don’t say “Ram two, Ram three,” you just go on slipping the beads down. And it was good also because you could say it inside with nobody knowing about it. In India they have a small bag hanging around the hand, and the rosary is inside; so even walking on the road they can go on counting.You will see shopkeepers selling things, and their hand is in their rosary bag: they are counting. With the customer they are talking but deep down they are saying, “Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram,” and with the rosary they are counting. In between they will say to the wife: “The beggar!” and their rosary continues.It was just to mock all these idiots that I put the rosary around you. It is not a prayer method for you, it is just a mockery of the whole tradition. And then I put an ordinary man’s picture – anybody’s picture will do. That annoys them even more.But this world is strange. Sometimes things can happen which you had never expected or even dreamed of. Just the other day Sheela brought a letter from the Punjab – because in the Punjab there has been great trouble, with Hindus and Sikhs continually fighting and killing each other. Thousands of people have been killed.In one small village there were two Sikhs, both our sannyasins, but the whole village was Hindu. These two Sikhs were teachers in the school. The principal suggested to them, “Don’t come out of your home; and be careful, very careful because the whole village is mad. The whole of the Punjab is in madness, and you are only two – the crowd can kill you.”And that day, the whole day the crowd was moving around the city to find some Sikh to kill. They knew those two Sikhs were there, but where had they disappeared to? By the night as the sun set and darkness came over, those two Sikhs thought the crowds must have disappeared. The whole day they had been hiding in the house, so they thought to just come out for a little bit and breathe fresh air.When they came out, immediately – as if the crowd had been waiting, hiding just nearby, knowing that they were hiding in the house – from both sides the crowd rushed toward them. One of them escaped into a nearby forest; in the darkness it was difficult to find him. But the other one was caught. He has written the letter to thank me, because when the crowd took hold of him, somebody in the crowd said, “This is not a Sikh, this is an Osho sannyasin!” So they said, “It is useless to kill this man – he is no longer a Sikh.”He writes to me, “Osho, you saved me; otherwise they would have cut me into pieces.”I have never thought that somebody would be saved by me, but strange things in this world always happen! This is simply a strange thing. You can be killed in my name, but you cannot be saved. It was a strange situation: they were going to kill a Sikh, but seeing his orange clothes and the mala with my photo, they said, “This man is already no longer a Sikh. To kill him is pointless.” And they left.But basically I had put that picture there so that it hangs around your neck and irritates everybody, and you cannot go anywhere without being noticed.One of my sannyasins in Mumbai… He took sannyas, and after two, three days he came back and said, “I am in a real trouble. Will you give sannyas to my wife too? I have brought her.”I asked, “Why?”He said, “The problem is, wherever I go with her people say, ‘What kind of sannyasin is this? Sannyasins are not supposed to move around with women.’ And I cannot say that she is my wife, because if I say that, they will kill me. A sannyasin having a wife? So it is very awkward; what to do? It is better you give sannyas to her.”I said, “I will give sannyas to her but this won’t solve the problem. Try it.” I gave sannyas to his wife. After two days he was back. He said, “You were right. Yesterday in the train…” It was a local train; he takes the train to work in his office and goes back. It was a holiday so he had come with his wife and child. A crowd gathered, and they asked, “Whose child is this?” – because in Mumbai children are being stolen. In all the big cities of India children are being stolen. Then they are crippled, blinded, and they are made beggars. And there are gangs: a certain man who feeds them and takes all their earnings in the evening. He feeds them, he gives them clothes, he gives them shelter. But unless they are blinded, crippled, their legs cut off or their hands cut off, who is going to give them money? The more crippled and the more miserable they look, the better are their chances for begging, and the more money they bring in.So in every big place children are being stolen. And they end up in some gang where there are hundreds of children. The police know; the police take their own part of the money. The police do not prevent the children from begging on the streets; rather, they protect them. In fact they help the owner of these children so that these children cannot escape anywhere.In fact these children cannot escape because they have been blinded, crippled – where can they escape to? Who will look after them? They don’t know where their father is, their mother is, from where they have been brought – because if they were caught in Kolkata, they would be used in Mumbai. If they were caught in Mumbai, they would be used in Chennai. So they don’t know where they come from or where they are right now.They cannot escape, but the police still keep an eye out so that nobody tries to escape. Everybody has his share, except that child. And if he comes back from begging one day without any money, then he gets beaten. So he has to come with it. He cannot try to hide some money from the owner, because he knows how much a child earns.The owner goes on walking around and looking to see how much this child will have earned by the end of the evening. So tentatively he knows that this boy is bound to come with ten rupees, fifteen rupees. And if he comes with only two rupees then he gets beaten. And where can he hide the money? That money is found immediately.So a crowd gathered and they asked, “You are both sannyasins; this woman is a sannyasin, you are a sannyasin. In the first place, why are a woman and a man sannyasin together? That is not allowed. In the second place, this child – from where did you get this child?”They said, “This is our child.” They had to say it. And people started getting ready to beat them: “This is your child? You are a sannyasin and you have a child.”Somehow they tried to explain, showed the mala, and said, “We are not old, traditional sannyasins.”Somebody in the crowd knew about me. He said, “Leave them. They are not your type of sannyasins. They belong to a different kind: neo-sannyas.”From the station they came directly to me. They said, “Give sannyas to our child also, because without it we will be caught again. We are poor people and anybody can start beating us and can create trouble for us.” I had to give sannyas to the child too!It was not a discipline; it was simply a revolt. I wanted to show the sannyasins of India, who are in millions, that just by changing the clothes or having a rosary it does not mean that you have become a saint. I can create millions of saints like them without any trouble. And I have created them!The only thing that you can call a discipline is meditation. And it is not an order from me that you have to meditate. I explain to you what meditation is. If it appeals to your reason, if something clicks in you, if a desire arises in you to explore this dimension of meditation, then it is not that you are following my idea, you are following your own intelligence. And if it does not appeal to you, of course you should not do it.And saying, “I cannot even participate in the gachchhamis,” the person has used the words “our prayer.” It is not prayer. A prayer is always to beg for something. That’s actually the meaning of the word prayer, praying for something: “Give us, Lord, our daily bread,” or whatsoever it is, but “Give us something. You are the giver, and we are the beggar. You are compassionate, and we are in need of your compassion; save us. This life is miserable, this existence is suffering, take us out of this wheel of life and death.” Different religions, different prayers… But everybody is asking for something.You cannot call our gachchhamis “prayer.” It is not; because what do you say in the gachchhamis? “I go to the feet of the awakened one; I go to the feet of the commune of the awakened one; I go to the feet of the ultimate truth of the awakened one.”You are declaring something, you are not praying. It is a declaration, and a determination – “I go the feet of the awakened one” – a determination to drop the ego, a declaration, “From now on, to be awakened is going to be my whole effort, my whole involvement, my whole commitment; I am not going to live an unconscious life anymore.” It is not a prayer.In my vision there is no place for prayer because there is no place for God. To whom can you pray? – there is no one. The sky is absolutely empty. You are simply wasting your time and throwing nonsense words into the atmosphere, crowding the atmosphere with meaningless words.You must remember: these words never die. Once uttered, a word goes on resounding just like a pebble thrown in a lake: waves start moving toward the farther away shore. But this existence has no shores, no banks, no boundaries. Once you say something it is going to remain forever. It will go on resounding farther and farther away. It will touch other planets, it will touch other stars; it will go on moving and moving.Now we know – before the invention of radio we had no idea – that something said in Washington is passing just by your side. Now you know because we have discovered how to catch hold of it. Whatsoever they are creating is already passing all the stations of the world. Of course they are creating very strong vibrations. They go on moving around you; you just have to attune your radio to a certain wavelength, then on that wavelength whatsoever is uttered will be caught.It is true about us too. Whatsoever we are saying is not very strong, but it never dies, the sound continues. One day we will find a way to catch hold of sounds which were uttered by different people in the past – because each person has a different vibe, a different frequency. If we can get hold of the frequency of Krishna, then what he really said in the Gita five thousand years ago, and whether it was said at all or not, will be caught again. And I am certain that this big book, the Gita, could not possibly have been written in the situation in which it was said to have been.Two armies facing each other – they are just waiting for the signal and they will start slaughtering each other. And Arjuna says to his charioteer, Krishna, “Take me in front.” He is the chief warrior of one side. Seeing all the people there, his friends, his relatives… The other party was nobody else but his cousin-brothers, and they had all grown up in the same house, in the same palace, they were taught by the same man. Dronacharya, the man who had taught both parties the art of archery, was there on the other side: his own master.On this side everybody was related to those on that side. On that side everybody was related to those on this side: it was a family quarrel. Arjuna freaked out. He simply said to Krishna, “I will not fight this war. This is not war, this is simply suicide. These are all our people. Whosoever dies will bring tears to my eyes. My father’s father, my grandfather, is standing there. My master who has taught me, who has brought me up to be the greatest archer in the world, he is on the other side. No, I cannot fight. I would rather renounce the world and become a sannyasin and go to the Himalayas.”Now, this is the situation. This big book is a dialogue in which Arjuna goes on asking questions and Krishna goes on answering them. For me to comment on it took almost – Taru, how many years? – perhaps three years: twelve volumes, one thousand pages each. In this situation it doesn’t seem to be likely that this big sermon… In eighteen days the whole war was finished; in eighteen days the whole Gita cannot be finished! So perhaps he had spoken a few words and later on it is just elaboration, and more and more was added to it to clarify and simplify and to make it understandable.But one day it is possible that we may catch hold of Krishna – or Jesus giving his sermon on the mountain – because no sound ever dies; once it is uttered it remains forever. Yes, it will become weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker, and you will need more and more forceful, forcible, stronger receivers to catch hold of it. And of course it will be a tower of Babel, because millions of people have been speaking for millions of years and all their words will be mixed.But there is a possibility… It is just as your fingerprints are yours alone: they have never existed before and there never will be a possibility for them to exist in the future. You fingerprints are simply your fingerprints. Your sound prints are also simply your sound prints; sooner or later we will be able to sort them out. And once we get your sound print, your frequency, then whatsoever you have said in your whole life can be reproduced.You will be surprised to know that Mahavira is the only man in the whole of history who has said, “Don’t say anything which you would not like to be associated with you forever, because whatsoever you say is going to be eternal.” He is the only man, but what he is saying certainly has a tremendous insight. His reason for not saying bad words, ugly words, is very scientific, not religious. He is saying it because those words will remain always; they will be your footprints in time. Don’t leave anything ugly behind you.When you declare, “Buddham sharanam gachchhami – I go to the feet of the awakened one,” you are not saying a prayer. You are simply declaring to existence, to yourself, your intention: “I want to drop my ego.”Hence, gachchhami – gachchhami simply means “going.” The English word go comes from the Sanskrit word gachchh. You will be surprised that the Sanskrit word for cow is gau, because the cow was very much loved by the Hindus, worshipped as a mother, thought to be holy. The movement of the cow – cow is pronounced gau – his movement is called “Gachchh.” And from gachchh comes the English word.“Going to the feet” needs one absolutely necessary condition: that you drop the ego. With the ego you cannot go to the feet of the buddha, the awakened one. And by “the awakened one,” we are not saying any particular person. We are simply saying that because the quality of awareness is the same, all the awakened ones become the same when they are awakened: there is no difference at all. Awakening is simply awakening. So we go to the feet of whosoever is awakened, wherever he is awakened – in the past, in the present or in the future.It is a decision to drop the ego. It is a declaration that: “Existence, remain my witness, I am going to the feet of the awakened one. Let me be reminded if I forget.” That’s why it has to be repeated. The more you repeat it, the better, because the more it becomes a determination, the more it becomes a clear perception of what it means.But to go to the feet of the awakened one is not very difficult. It is very easy. The very presence of the awakened one will create in you the desire to go to his feet. It is not something literal, that you have to go to his feet. It simply means that you start feeling a kind of surrender. The surrender is not asked; if it is asked, disobey. If the surrender happens to you, obey; it is your own feeling, your own authentic experience. But it is easy, hence the second gachchhami: “Sangham sharanam gachchhami.”It is easy to go to the feet of the awakened one, it is a little difficult to go to the feet of the commune of the awakened one, because in the commune all will not be awakened. Many will be fast asleep and snoring; many will be even deeper in sleep than you. Now, the ego will feel it more difficult to go to the feet of these people. That means you will have to drop the ego now even more determinedly. Perhaps in the first gachchhami you had only dropped a few leaves of your ego. In the second you will have to drop the whole tree.The third is even more difficult, but for a different reason. “Dhammam sharanam gachchhami – I go to the feet of the ultimate truth of the awakened one.” What it is that the awakened people have experienced, they have not said; it is inexpressible. They have all remained silent about it.Where are you going to find the feet of the ultimate truth? And in your state of unawareness, in your state of unconsciousness, in what direction are you going to search? And not knowing where to surrender, to whom to surrender, what to surrender, it becomes even more difficult for the ego. You will even have to bring the roots of the tree out from the ground; they are hiding underground. Even if the tree has fallen, the tree can again grow from the roots. These are simple declarations – and they have to be your declarations, they can’t be my declarations.But listening to me saying that disobedience is a quality of religion, immediately the desire to disobey arises in you. And you have listened to many things from me, but never before has any desire like this arisen. Certainly deep down you want to disobey.Perhaps you have forced yourself into obedience. Then you have done wrong; then this is not the place for you. Then you have simply trapped yourself in something which has not come out of your decision. Perhaps you have imitated some other people – perhaps your friend was becoming a sannyasin, and you became a sannyasin. Perhaps you were impressed by my words, impressed by my reasoning. But your sannyas has not arisen from your deepest core; otherwise after listening to me say that disobedience is a religious quality, you would have waited a little and thought about it.You should have asked, “Then what is obedience? Is not obedience also a religious quality?” That would have been the right question. I am continually giving you the right answer to the wrong question, but nothing else can be done. I can understand you can’t ask the right question and I can’t give you a wrong answer; so what to do? This way it goes on. You go on asking the wrong question. But I don’t care much about your question: I go on answering what I want to answer. Your question is just an excuse.Obedience is a greater religious quality than disobedience.Disobedience is only for the beginners who are just starting to learn how to walk – wobbling. Disobedience is a religious quality for those who are much too attached to their personality, their conditioning, their programming. Disobedience is a technique for you to deprogram yourself, so that you become clean of all Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. You simply come clean out of all that. You come out just simple, yourself, innocent. Then obedience is the quality of religion.Then comes the time to obey; but first learn to disobey. Disobey is a negative word. It is simply to cut all the crap from you, to burn all the rubbish in you. It is a negative process. But it is only the beginning. When this negative process is complete and you have burned all the crap, and you are unburdened and free and ready to fly, then obedience is the quality of religion. But that is a higher quality, a far more conscious quality.But you don’t obey anybody else. You now simply obey your being. Wherever it leads you, go fearlessly, in freedom.To be with me you have to disobey all that has been taught to you. I have not taught you anything. I have not said to you, “Do this, don’t do that.” I am not bothered about details, I am simply concerned with the fundamentals; to make clear to you that these are the fundamentals. Now it is up to you what you want to do with these fundamentals. You can turn your back and go anywhere you like, and it is perfectly okay with me. But when you understand the fundamentals you cannot turn your back on them. It is not possible; in the very nature of things it is impossible.Once you see a certain truth you cannot do anything other than obey it. But it has to be your seeing, your perception, your realization.Begin with disobedience. It is always necessary to begin with the negative, with the no. If you want to reach the yes, you will have to say a thousand no’s to find one yes in life. Because your whole life has been ruined by so many people, you will have to say no to all those people. And after a thousand no’s, perhaps you may find yourself in a state where you can say yes.But that yes will come from the deepest core of your being, and it will bring out a fragrance in you.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Yesterday we were met by five bible-packing Christians who had come to save us. What do you say? Can we be saved?These idiots are all over the world, perhaps more so in Oregon. The very idea of saving somebody is violent. It is interfering, trespassing on somebody’s life. Nobody has the right to save anybody.He can save himself… But there is a psychological reason why these Bible-packing people start saving others: they are not confident that they are saved. To gain that confidence they have to shout loudly, make a noise, make efforts to save others. And certainly they will find a few fools who are ready to be saved. That will give them tremendous confidence, but there is no base. Their very life is just the life of a fanatic who thinks he is saved because he believes in Jesus Christ.Life needs transformation, and transformation is a great work upon oneself. It is not a child’s play: “Just believe in Jesus Christ, go on reading the Bible again and again, and you are saved.” Saved from what? Saved from transformation!So if you meet these people again, please tell them, “You have come to the right place. Here we unsave people who have fallen into the mistaken idea that they are saved. We unsave them again. We pull them back to the earth from their foggy mind.”But the responsibility is not with these poor people – they are pitiable – the responsibility goes back to Jesus himself. He was trying to save people. And what signs was he providing them? No signs, no idea how they can change their lifestyle, how they can find their true being, how they can discover the truth that they are carrying within themselves. No structure, no process, no methodology is given. All that is required is: “Believe that I am the only begotten son of God, that I am the Messiah,” and that’s enough.Is transformation of life so cheap that you believe in anybody and just by believing…? You are not losing anything, and Jesus is not giving you anything but a sort of hallucination that you are saved.Not a single person has been saved by Jesus. And I don’t think he was able to save himself. The way he behaves, the way he talks all show that it is not the flavor of an awakened being; something is missing. His ego is tremendously strong. Yes, it has a religious jargon about it, the “only begotten son of God” – but any madman can say that.What evidence does he bring? It is because of this that the Christians go on emphasizing the miracles of Jesus, because without those miracles what evidence has he got? And those miracles were never performed, because if such things were performed, it is impossible that Jewish sources would not have mentioned them. He would have been accepted as the messiah.The Jews never accepted him, not even today. His contemporaries have to be asked why not a single authoritative source even mentions his name. And if such a miracle man was around he would be the only news for centuries, but not even his contemporaries bothered about him. And his contemporaries have given a clear-cut indication by crucifying this man. Why did they crucify him?People have not inquired into the incident, why the Jews crucified Jesus. They crucified him for the simple reason that this man is mad, and is pretending something which will misguide millions of people. It is better to be finished with him. He is not the messiah because the Jews have criteria for who is the messiah, who will save the whole world from suffering, from misery, from anguish. The same idea that Jesus gives to the Christians, he has got from his ancestors. He is a perfect Jew.What the Jews were saying was about some messiah somewhere far away, happening in the coming history, in the future. Jesus’ fault was only this: he started saying, “I am that man you have been waiting for. I am that hope you have been desiring. I have come.” And they really laughed at him – anybody would have laughed at him.The hope of the Jews has to remain a hope. Whenever anybody will try to say, “I have come to fulfill the hope,” he will be crucified, for the simple reason that he is taking away the hope of a whole race. They are living on that hope; that is their only light, their only guiding star. And this carpenter’s son – ignorant, illiterate, good-for-nothing – wants to prove that he is that hoped for messiah: “This man has to be finished off!”And there was one more reason why they crucified him: “If on the cross he can manage to provoke God to help him, then we will be able to see whether he is the messiah or not – God will save him.” If God is not even bothering about saving his own son on the cross, then what to say about others? And if Jesus cannot provoke God to save him, how can he provoke God to save others?The crucifixion was going to be a criterion. Thousands of people had gathered; it was not an everyday thing. Only once in a while a madman declares such a thing. And they were laughing and joking and throwing stones at him and spitting on him.They had put a crown of thorns on him, they had forced him to carry his own cross. Three times he fell on the way; the cross was too heavy. He could not carry his own cross and he was trying to carry the crosses of the whole of humanity, trying to save the whole of humanity, taking all their miseries, their anguishes, their sufferings. And whenever he fell people laughed, and they said, “You can’t carry even your own cross, how you are going to carry the crosses of everybody else?”And on the cross they had written “King of the Jews,” just as a joke, because this man was constantly talking about the Kingdom of God, and saying, “Those who believe in me will be saved. At the judgment day, I will be there with God indicating the people who are my people: sorting out people into those who have to be saved, and those who have not to be saved. And I am going to be your witness. The judgment is in my hand.”On the cross he himself feels shaken up. He cries to God, “Have you forgotten me? Have you forsaken me?” – because he sees that the crucifixion is happening and there is no miracle. He looks upward toward the sky…that God will be descending on a white cloud, angels will be coming, singing “Alleluia, Alleluia.”But no angels are coming, no God is seen anywhere; the sky is completely clear, not even a cloud. And the crowd is shouting and rejoicing and dancing. They are hilarious, saying, “Look at the fool! He was going to save the whole world!”And he feels thirsty, obviously. Walking a long way, carrying a heavy cross in the hot sun – and the crucifixion happened on a hill, Golgotha – he was thirsty, and on the cross as blood started oozing out from his hands and feet…The Jewish crucifixion was the most cruel way of killing a man that has been practiced anywhere. It took sometimes thirty-six to forty-eight hours for a man to die. An electric chair is far more nonviolent. You simply sit in it and you are gone – just a switch. Perhaps you may not even hear the click. By the time you hear the click, you are no more.Every country has its way, but the Jews had the most torturous. Death is not a torture; death may be a relief from a torturous life, but on the Jewish cross you will be praying, “Kill me, God, kill me; I cannot wait anymore” – because you are hungry and thirsty, and as the blood goes out of your body, you feel more thirsty, more thirsty, because you are losing liquid. You are still alive, and the pain is tremendous. Such a slow death. It is not just death. Death can be very simple: you cut the head off the person; it’s not much of a problem. It does not need forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours of dying.He started asking for water. Now, this is the man who used to walk on water. This is the man who used to turn water into wine. This is the man who raised the dead from their grave. But he cannot stop his blood flowing out of his body. He cannot make his blood flow backward into the body. He cannot even manage a glass of water – and he was able to change stones into bread!Why can’t he change the air into water? Why can’t he arrange a cloud to shower just on him so he can have a good shower and drink the water? He proved absolutely impotent on the cross.But the Christians go on, all over the world, saving people. They don’t even understand what it means to save.In the East, no religion has ever proclaimed that anybody can save you except yourself; and the East knows far more deeply about man’s life and its transforming forces. It has been working on the human psyche for thousands of years. Still much has to be discovered – perhaps that is not the right word: rediscovered will be the right word – by the West, which the East has already discovered long before.For example, when Sigmund Freud, Jung and Adler and other great psychologists of the beginning of this century started talking of the unconscious mind, the subconscious mind, the conscious mind, it was Freud’s rediscovery. But he never came to know that it was a rediscovery, that in India for thousands of years we have known all these divisions are there.But the West was shocked, could not believe there was an unconscious. “If there is an unconscious then why is it not mentioned in the Bible? – because anything which is not mentioned in the Bible certainly does not exist. God has given the whole message entirely about everything: the unconscious mind is not mentioned.”Jung went a little deeper and found the collective unconscious mind. But you will be surprised that Buddha talks about not only these minds but a few more minds, because this is only one way… For example, Freud goes downward: the conscious mind is of course acceptable to everybody because that’s where we are, but Freud goes downward and finds the subconscious mind. That’s when you dream. A boundary line between the unconscious and the conscious, it is just the middle part that joins the unconscious with the conscious.Jung goes a little deeper and finds that if you go deeper into the unconscious, you suddenly find a depth which is not individual, which is collective. It is as if on the surface you see many icebergs, but as you go deeper you find only a big iceberg with many peaks above the surface of the water – but underneath it is only one big iceberg.Buddha goes upward too. He goes downward – and farther than Jung. After the collective unconscious mind he says there is a cosmic unconscious mind, because the collective unconscious mind means the unconscious mind of the whole humanity – but what about the animals and the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the stars? Go a little deeper and you will find a cosmic unconscious mind.And Buddha goes upward too. So going downward, the conscious mind is just in the middle, where we are. Below it are the subconscious mind, unconscious mind, collective unconscious mind and cosmic unconscious mind. He also moved upward, which in the future psychology has to do. He says, “Above the conscious mind is again the same ladder that goes downward. Just as below there is a subconscious mind; above there is a superconscious mind.”If you move upward then above the superconscious mind you will find, in Buddha’s language, the super-superconscious mind. Then you will find the collective conscious mind, and then you will find the cosmic conscious mind. Then you have traveled the whole journey, downward and upward.Now, before Sigmund Freud, people thought that Buddha was just imagining. But Freud was not a religious man in any sense. He had a scientific mind: he proved the subconscious, the unconscious. Jung was not a religious man; he proved the collective unconscious. Now some other scientist is needed to prove the cosmic unconscious.And he will be coming soon, because if it is a fact – and it must be, because if this man Buddha goes about finding the fourth absolutely correctly, there is no reason to doubt that he is correct about the fifth. And if he is correct about the downward ladders, then why should he not be correct about the upward ladders?But to move upward you will need the religious mind. The scientific mind will not be enough.The scientific mind can go more toward things. And this is how you are going to move toward things: from the conscious mind you have to come to the cosmic unconscious mind. Perhaps things have a cosmic unconscious mind, absolutely dormant, but it must be there. Otherwise how is it possible that you eat food, which is dead, which is a “thing,” but it feeds your brain, your mind, and keeps them functioning. Somewhere, some part of the things you eat is releasing some consciousness, some mind quality to you. Otherwise from where do you get your mind?They say if you don’t breathe for six minutes, and oxygen does not reach the brain, the brain starts deteriorating. Its cells are so delicate that at the most they can survive without oxygen only six minutes.It happened in the Second World War that a few people had heart attacks, just a psychological heart attack: a bomb fell just in front of them, exploded and killed many people. When you see so many people dying – suddenly an explosion and so many people dying – it is possible to have a psychological heart attack. You may fall dead. You are not dead, but among so many dead how can you stand alive? You can’t be an exception. You are not the only begotten son of God; you are just an ordinary human being, and when everybody is dying what are you doing here? Just the shock may stop your breathing.They revived many people like this in Russia in the Second World War. If the person was revived after six minutes had passed, he became alive, but he never became conscious. He remained in a coma because already the brain had broken, but the rest of the body came back; everything else started functioning.I have seen one woman who had been for nine months in a coma, with everything functioning. She was breathing, her pulse was normal, everything was good, just somehow her brain had gone into non-functioning. The doctors said she could live years. If you went on supporting, helping, feeding her, she could live for years, but there was no hope that her brain could be restored. And we don’t yet have banks for brains, to put somebody else’s brain in your skull.But somebody else’s brain will bring somebody else’s personality, not your personality. That is a difficult problem. Even if one day we can manage to have banks of brains for transplant, those brains will be carrying memories of somebody else, his education… Perhaps he was a mathematician, a poet, a painter; perhaps he was a beggar or a very rich man: he will have different kinds of memories.His brain could be fixed into your skull, but it will not be you who comes back to consciousness, he will come back: he will use your body. He will speak his language: if he was French, he will speak French, if he was Russian, he will speak Russian. He will not take any notice of who you are, whether you have been somebody who had not even heard a single word of Russian.That’s a problem. First, to have transplant banks is a problem because the brain cells die so quickly. But perhaps we can find some way that when a person is dying, before he dies the brain is taken out and put into a tank where enough oxygen is available, so the brain can go on functioning. He will be dreaming there in the tank – making love to a woman, or if he is a pervert then doing something else. Still, certainly he will be dreaming and doing his thing – what he was doing inside his original body.Now he will be doing it in the tank – perhaps far better because more oxygen and more pure oxygen will be available. And he will not be able to know that he has been taken out, because one strange thing about your skull is that inside the skull there is no sensitivity.So if you take the brain out, the brain will not feel as if it has been taken out, removed from its original place, placed into something else. It could simply live on its own. It could function on its own. And whenever it is put back again into a body, the body will start following the orders of this brain.Buddha goes upward too. He says this brain… And there are certain facts about the mind and the brain to be known, which scientists have discovered that half of the brain is non-functioning. Only fifty percent of your brain is functioning, and the other fifty percent of the brain, toward the back, is almost completely non-functioning.Now, nature never creates anything for non-functioning. It only creates things to function, and such a valuable thing as the brain… If half the brain is non-functioning it simply means that we don’t know its uses yet. We have not discovered for what it is meant to be used.That gives me a clue. The half of the brain that is functioning is being discovered by our psychologists, and the half of the brain that is not functioning starts functioning with meditation. And slowly, slowly you start becoming aware of something higher than you, beyond you, and beyond, and beyond. The cosmic conscious mind is your ultimate truth.Unless you know it you are not saved, because then you will be moving in the labyrinth of the unconscious, the collective unconscious, the cosmic unconscious; you will be moving in this labyrinth of darkness which creates all your misery.Now, what does Jesus know about it? Just by his telling people, “Believe in me,” I don’t think that the other half of their brain will start functioning. These Bible-packing people – do you think that their other half is functioning? Most probably their whole mind has stopped functioning; they are in a coma.Faith is a kind of coma. You stop reasoning, you stop doubting. You stop questioning. Naturally, because these are the functions of your mind, and when those functions disappear, by and by your mind stops. If it is not used it gathers junk; it becomes more and more dull, because doubt is not allowed. Strange things are expected from you…Just the other day, Sheela brought me the latest message to humanity from pope the Polack, a message of one hundred and thirty-nine pages. Naturally it has to be one hundred and thirty-nine pages because he has not left a single stupid thing unsaid. You will be surprised that he has found some new sins which are not mentioned in the Bible. Only a Polack can do that; otherwise what were all those Old Testament prophets, and then Jesus, doing?The Polack has found new sins, but those sins are worth consideration. One of the sins that he speaks of is the idea of class struggle: to believe in the idea of class struggle is a sin, a major sin. Now whether you believe in the class struggle or not, the class struggle is there. There is a struggle between the rich and the poor. It is not a question of your belief.In India there is a struggle between castes, a double struggle: class struggle and caste struggle. Hindus have divided their society into four major varnas. The word varna is significant; it means color. Perhaps in the beginning the division was done by color. The whitest were the Aryans, whom Adolf Hitler claimed to be the Germans, the Nordic Germans, the purest Aryans. He used the word Aryans for Germans, and he used the Aryan symbol of the swastika for his flag. That is a Hindu symbol, an ancient Aryan symbol. They were the highest, and as your color became darker, you became lower and lower and lower.South India is almost black. If you cut Africa and India from a map and put them side by side, you will be surprised – they fit absolutely. It is a very recent finding that once South Africa and India were connected, then slowly they drifted away. So South India is really of Negro blood. And it is strange in many ways that the color of the South Indians is black and their languages are the only languages in India which are not Sanskrit-oriented, while all the European languages are Sanskrit-oriented. For example, thirty percent in English, forty percent in German, thirty-five percent in Russian, seventy percent in Lithuanian, forty percent in Italian…So in Europe the roots have come from Sanskrit, but the South Indian languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam… Not a single percent of their language has been borrowed from Sanskrit. This is a very strange thing. It indicates something: these people are not Aryans. Germans and Russians and Swiss and French and English are offshoots of the Aryans, but the South Indians are not Aryans.So perhaps in the beginning just on the basis of color… That’s why they call them the four varnas; but later on, slowly the color got mixed. When you live with people… Even in America, you will find a person who is half Negro and half Caucasian, half Negro, half Italian, half Negro, half English. When people live together they go on mixing. It is very difficult to keep blood separate. So slowly the varnas got mixed, the colors got mixed, but the castes remained.There is a certain struggle between the brahmin and the sudra. The brahmin is the highest caste, and the sudra is the lowest caste. There is a struggle, a five-thousand-year-old struggle. Thousands of sudras have been killed, murdered, butchered, burned alive; even today that continues for small excuses.For example, in a small Indian village you will find two wells. One well is for the higher castes, the three higher castes: the brahmins, the priest class; the kshatriyas, the warrior class; and the vanikas, the business class. And the sudras, the untouchables, have a second well. Untouchables are not allowed to take water from the same well as the three higher classes.And sometimes it happens that those poor people cannot manage to have a deep enough well – and they are the poorest of the poor. In summer their wells dry up, so they have to go miles to a river or to a lake to bring water, but they cannot go to the well in the city. If they are found… Sometimes it happens in the night, when somebody is thirsty. The river is so far away, everybody is asleep, and nobody will come to know… He goes silently and tries to take a bucket of water – and he is caught. That is enough. That well has become impure, and that will create a riot.These poor untouchables, the sudras, live outside the town. They don’t live inside the town, hence their other name is antyaja. Antyaja means “those who live outside the town.” And they have the poorest huts made of grass and bamboo. You can go with just one burning torch in your hand and set fire to the whole of their village. Just a single man within five minutes can set the whole untouchables’ village on fire.Their children will be burned, their animals will be burned, their old men who cannot escape in time will be burned. And if a whole village is trying to burn the sudras, then with torches, burning torches, they will not allow anybody to escape; they will force them back into their burning huts. This happens even today on any small excuse.A rumor that a high-caste girl is being seduced by an untouchable young man – just a rumor is enough! It may not be true; most probably it is not true, because in an Indian village it is very difficult to have any love affair, it is such a close-knit society.And the women are not free to move outside the house. They don’t go to school, they don’t go to college, they don’t go to the university; there is almost nowhere they can go. The only places they go are the water well and the temple. In both places, the sudra is not allowed. So where will a high-caste girl meet an untouchable? To fall in love you have at least to be introduced.And the sudras are so impure, so dirty in the minds of the higher classes that even their shadow is dirty. Great imagination! Now, a shadow has no existence. A shadow is simply there because you are standing in the way of the sun rays so the sun rays cannot pass you; hence you create a shadow. There is nothing like a shadow. You cannot catch hold of it, you cannot put it in a bag and take it home; you cannot escape from it, it will follow you. It does not exist; it is just an absence of rays because you are blocking them.But Hindus have condemned those poor people so much that even if their shadow passes over you – you are sitting and a sudra passes by, not touching you but his shadow touches you – it is enough to create a riot! A few people may be murdered, because: “Why was he so arrogant? He should be more careful.”In the old days, and in very remote corners even today, the sudra first has to declare, “I am a sudra and I am coming; so please, if anybody is on the road, move away.” In the past a sudra used to have to do two things… There were streets which were not open for him, he could not go on them. But for certain purposes it was impossible not to, so at certain hours he was allowed.For example, he was to clean the latrines of the higher classes, so at certain hours, early in the morning before anybody gets up, he would come and quickly clean the latrines. But even then – perhaps somebody may have gone for a morning walk – he had to go on doing two things. He had to shout, “I am coming – I am a sudra. Please move away if you are somewhere on the way.”And the second thing – you will be surprised – he had to keep something like a brush made of a certain kind of grass that is used in India for cleaning the floors. That brush, that grass brush, used to hang behind him just like a tail; he had to keep it tied to his waist. That was to clean the path behind him. As he was moving, automatically the brush was cleaning the path after him, his shadow, any dirt that he is leaving behind – so nobody becomes impure. This is a caste struggle.Now, no sudra was allowed to study or be educated. If he was found studying, perhaps secretly, then it was enough of a crime for him to be killed; that was the only punishment.And this pope, the Polack, says, “The idea of class struggle, the very idea is a sin.” This is a great discovery! And why does he say it? The fear of communism – he is not courageous enough to say that to believe in communism is a sin because the whole philosophy of communism is based on the idea of class struggle. Cunning. Why not be clear that to be a communist is a sin? He must be afraid that when he goes back to Poland, then those communists there will kill him. And what will happen to communists in Poland? Poland now is a communist country; the whole of Poland will become sinners.You see the trickiness of these priests? So he calls it class struggle: the idea of class struggle, to spread the idea of class struggle, is a great sin.And another thing, even more marvelous: he says that nobody can have a direct contact with God; that is a sin. You have to go via the Catholic priest; you cannot confess directly, that is not possible. God is not going to hear you. Your confession is useless.Can you see the strategy? The strategy is very complicated, but simple to understand. The Catholic priest lives on your confessions. The whole function of the priest disappears if you can have a direct contact with God; then what is the need of the priesthood?The pope is not interested in saving you, he is interested in saving the priesthood. He is the head of the priesthood class, and he is worried about the thousands of Catholic priests if people start a direct communication with God. You have to go to the Catholic priest to confess; only then will you be forgiven. The priest will persuade God to forgive you. You cannot ask directly.The implications are many. The Catholic priest knows about every Catholic: with whose wife he is flirting, who is a homosexual; he also knows with whom his wife is flirting. He knows about every Catholic – that is his power. No Catholic can go against him. He has all the keys in his hands; he can expose you at any moment.Confession is a strategy of power politics. Hence the Catholic is the most imprisoned religious man in the world, because the priest knows every wrong thing that you have done. The court does not know, the police do not know, your wife has not any knowledge of it, but the priest knows everything. That is his power over the flock: he can expose you any moment in front of the society. The police will be after you, the government will be after you, your wife will be after you, your father will be after you – you will be crushed.He knows all the sins that you have committed; but you have not been caught, so they are not crimes. And you yourself had gone to confess. In fact, that is his only joy in life. The Catholic priest, what else has he got? There is no need for him to go to the movies or to see the television: just sitting in his confession box and listening to all the groovy things is such a joy. And he goes on giving the punishment also. He says, “Go out in the church and do this prayer ten times.”One day it happened…A rabbi who was a friend of a Catholic priest was visiting the priest; it was a confession day. Suddenly a man came running. The Catholic priest had just finished one confession and given the man a punishment of ten prayers because he had raped a woman. The rabbi was also sitting in the confessional box. They were friends so he was just listening to what was going on.The man came running and said, “Somebody is very sick, almost dying and you are needed to bless him for the journey.”So the priest said to the rabbi, “I will have to go. I will come back as quickly as possible. But meanwhile somebody may come to confess, so you just sit here.”The rabbi said, “But what am I to do?”The priest said, “You just have to listen to so many confessions; just give them some punishment. And you can’t see them face to face – there is a curtain – so nobody feels awkward.” Otherwise confessing one’s sins feels awkward. And the priest, inquiring more about it and going more and more into your sin – how you committed the rape, and what happened; what you did and what she did – would feel awkward asking these things… “So the curtain is there so nobody will know who is inside – a rabbi or a Catholic priest.”So the rabbi said, “Okay, go, but come back quickly because I am not accustomed to this business – we do things differently.”A man came, and by chance he had also committed a rape. The rabbi felt at ease, he said, “Don’t be worried, son.” Exactly in the tone of the minister: “Don’t be worried, son. You just go and do ten prayers.”But the man said, “The last time I committed a rape you asked only for five prayers.”The rabbi said to himself, “This is a difficult problem.” So he said, “Don’t be worried; you can commit one more, but do ten prayers.” What else to do? “For the future, you have five in advance.”Now these people are gathering details of your underground life, which is very dangerous because that man now has every power over you. Whatsoever he says, you have to do it. Now, the pope is trying to save the priesthood and its power, and its hold over you. It has nothing to do with saving you, because what is the problem in confessing directly to God? What can this priest do? But no, you have to go via the right channel, the proper bureaucracy. Even with God there is a bureaucracy: you have to go through the priest. You cannot contact God directly.This is his great message to humanity: disconnecting you from God completely; your only approach is the priest. It is none of your affair to think of having any direct contact with God. Now is this a religion?True religion teaches you that you are part of this existence, already connected with it, already one with.The pope is teaching that you are not connected, that you are a lost soul; only through the priest can you be saved.So when these Bible-packing Christians come to you, tell them, “In the first place we are not lost, so don’t waste your time. In this place nobody is lost, we have never been lost, so the question of saving does not arise. And for your sake, we advise you, don’t come near here because our whole effort is to unsave people who believe that they are saved. If you go on coming here, we will unsave you again.”In India I have come across these kinds of people; they are the most stupid type. And perhaps if they are Oregonians – and they must be – then they have an even better chance of being idiotic. In fact, listening to the question I thought that it would be a good idea to have a special election on the first of April every year.All Oregonians would be eligible candidates and eligible voters. The only hearing process would be that before the polling booth they would have to do twenty minutes’ deep breathing. That is enough to prove that they are Oregonians. A simple process, not a difficult process – I believe in simple things. Just breathe for twenty minutes and that is enough proof that you have lived in Oregon. And twenty minutes are enough to contaminate anybody.This election will choose three persons: The Idiot General for Oregon, the Idiot General for America, and the Idiot General for the whole world. But all the three can only be Oregonians. If nobody stands then you can fill in the name of anybody you feel is the right person. And the polling booth will only be in this unique illegal city of Rajneeshpuram.So each April I now give this work to poor K.D., the mayor of the illegal city of Rajneeshpuram: he has to listen to the breathing, the twenty minutes’ breathing, and then everybody… And there will be no age limit, because children are more capable of seeing who is an idiot. By the time you become older, you become duller. And living with idiots, and dealing with idiots, you start, by and by, speaking their language. So even children, anybody who wants, man, woman, living, dead… Just the breathing process will decide who can vote. The dead person of course will be in difficulty, but he need breathe for twenty minutes only.Every April first we will declare three Idiot Generals: Idiot General of Oregon, Idiot General of America, Idiot General of the world. And you cannot fill in the name of anybody who is outside Oregon because those idiots are lukewarm idiots. Here you will find real hotcakes.Okay, you can ask one more question. My hands are not tired yet.Osho,Were you not punished for your mischievous acts in childhood?I have been punished, but I have never taken any punishment as punishment. From my very childhood that has been my attitude: that how you take a thing makes all the difference. Nobody can punish me if I don’t take it as a punishment.One of my teachers in the primary school when I was in the fourth grade… It was my first day in his class, and I had not done anything very wrong, I was just doing what you do in meditation: “Aum, aum…” but inside, with closed mouth. I had a few of my friends, and I told them to sit in different places so he could not figure out from where the sound was coming. One time it was coming from here, another time it was coming from there, another time it was coming from here; he went on looking from where the sound was coming. So I told them, “Keep your mouths shut, and do the aum inside.”For a moment he could not figure it out. I was sitting at the very back. All the teachers wanted me to sit in the front so they could keep an eye on me, and I always wanted to sit at the back from where you can do many more things; it is more feasible. He came directly to me. He must have heard from the third grade teacher, “You keep an eye on this boy!”So he said, “Although I cannot figure out who the people are who are doing it, you must be doing it.”I said, “What? What am I doing? You have to tell me. Just saying, ‘You must be doing it’ does not make sense. What…?”Now it was difficult for him to do what I was doing, because that would have looked foolish, and everybody would have started laughing. He said, “Whatsoever it is, hold both your ears in your hands and sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up – five times.”I said, “Perfectly okay.” I asked him, “Can I do it fifty times?”He said, “This is not a reward, this is a punishment.”I said, “This morning I have not done any exercise so I thought that this was a good chance, and you would be very happy. Instead of five I will do fifty. And always remember, whenever you give me any kind of reward” – that’s exactly the word I told him – “whenever you give me any kind of reward, be generous.” And I started doing fifty.He went on, “Stop! It is enough. I have never seen such a boy. You should be ashamed that you have been punished.”I said, “No, I am doing my morning exercise. You helped me, you have rewarded me; this is a good exercise. In fact, you should do it too.”I never took any punishment as punishment. How can you punish a man who is ready to accept it as a reward?In my high school it was an everyday affair that I was standing outside the classroom, because the moment the teacher would see me, he would say, “You better go out before you do something. I will have to send you out in any case. Please go out and leave us alone.”And I would say, “Thank you sir, because outside I enjoy it so much; it is so beautiful.” And we had beautiful trees and birds and vast greenery for miles behind the school. “Standing on the verandah is such a joy and the air is so pure that I feel sorry for you all sitting in this dirty room.” And I really enjoyed it outside.They figured out that this was not a punishment, they were really providing a good opportunity and a chance for me to enjoy myself in complete freedom – because outside I was free to move anywhere or to just go into the thick forest that was behind. They figured out that this was not a punishment, this was a reward. They started stopping it.I would ask them, “What happened, has the policy changed? I am no longer sent outside. Have I to do something before you send me? It saves me from the torture of you and your history. I am not interested in Alexander the Great, I am not interested in Emperor Akbar. What have I to do with these people? I am not interested in history at all. If I am interested then the only interest can be to make history. Only fools who cannot make history, read history. Read, and teach all these fools that are here, but throw me out.The teacher of history took me to the principal. He said, “What am I supposed to do? You cannot give him any corporal punishment – he immediately threatens to go to the police station, and unfortunately the police station is just nearby, in front of the school, and he will create trouble. And he is so strange that he has found a legal expert to support him.”One of my friends’ fathers was the best advocate in the city. Everybody called him Bachchubhaiya, I don’t know what his full name was. Bachchu is just a nickname for small children. It means just a child; the literal meaning is “a child.” He must have been loved by people; he was a very lovable person. He used to be called Bachchubhaiya. Bachchubhaiya means brother. He was almost sixty, still everybody called him Bachchubhaiya, and he was very friendly with everybody.So I went to him and asked him, “They threaten me with corporal punishment. You have to support me, because I will report it to the police but the police may listen to me, may not listen to me. It is better I go with a legal expert.”He said, “Don’t be worried. I will keep your case prepared. Whenever you want I will come along with you and I will see that what you want has to be done.”So this teacher of history told the principal, “Bachchubhaiya has promised him that he will go with him. That will create immediate trouble because the police inspector, the police commissioner, nobody can deny Bachchubhaiya: he is the most powerful advocate, and he has power over all police authorities, civil authorities, criminal authorities. And Bachchubhaiya has told him that if the police inspector does not listen he will go directly to the collector. So we cannot punish him.“I asked him to sit down and stand up. He thinks this is exercise. And one day it became such a scene that he told all the students ‘Why are you sitting? You also do it. Exercise is exercise, it is good for the body.’ And all those students – they listen to him more than to me – they all started doing the exercise. I looked like a fool standing there, and I started thinking why I punished him. And he won’t stop. Then I started throwing him out of the class, but he enjoyed it so much that it is not a punishment any more.”The principal sent me back. He wanted to talk with the teacher in private. He suggested, “Give him a punishment such that his family comes to know.”There used to be a register in the principal’s office – whenever somebody was doing real mischief, the teacher would go and write in it his name and the fine of ten rupees. Then I would have to collect the ten rupees from my family, from my father; I would have to ask them.So he did that. He put a ten-rupee fine on me and came back and told me, “We have found the way: I have put a ten-rupee fine against your name.”I said, “Okay. Now I am going to fine you.”He said, “You are going to fine me?”I said, “Of course, because in the register it is not mentioned anywhere that only teachers can fine the students. There is no condition like that.” And I went and I put twenty rupees against his name.The principal said, “Are you mad or what? You are a student!”I said, “I know I am a student, but is there any prohibition that says I cannot fine a teacher if he is doing mischief? – and this is mischief. If I am doing anything wrong then I should be punished; this fine is punishing my father. Can you justify it? Why should my father be punished? He is not involved in it at all.”I wrote my teacher’s name and the twenty-rupee fine and I said, “Unless he pays, I am not going to pay.”Still in that register those two punishments remain unpaid because he would not pay me what the principal asked: “You pay the twenty rupees.”And I told the principal, “Don’t cross this out, otherwise I will fine you. And even crossing it out won’t make any difference because when the inspector of the school comes I am going to report this, and I am going to show him what has been crossed out, and you will have to answer for it.”So he never asked for the ten rupees from me because my condition was: “First you get twenty rupees from that man, then I will consider it.”Punishments have been given but I enjoyed the whole thing. It was sheer joy. It is a question of attitude – how you take it – and that is something to be learned about your whole life.I am reminded…There was a world conference of psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists – people who are involved in the mind games. They are still games, they have not yet got to the point where you can call them a science. Although they are arriving slowly, and are on the right track, still they are playing games. It was a world conference of all the famous psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists.While the president was inaugurating the conference, he was feeling very uneasy, very disturbed by something just in the front row. There was a beautiful woman, a famous psychiatrist, and an old psychologist, also very famous in his own way – the only surviving colleague of Sigmund Freud. He was playing with the tits of the woman; and just in the front row! Now, how could the president go on speaking?He tried looking this way, looking that way, but you can’t address a conference just looking this way or that way; you have to look in front too, at least once in a while. And it was too much. The old man was really something; he was not worried that the whole conference, everybody in the hall, could see what was happening. And the woman was even greater; she was sitting and listening to the lecture.Finally it was too much, and the president said, “Please forgive me, but, lady, can I ask you a question?”She said, “Of course.”He said, “Why don’t you complain against this dirty old man?”She said, “It is his problem, it is not my problem. His dirtiness or whatever he is doing, that is his problem. How am I concerned in it? – he is doing no harm to me. And if it gives him some consolation, some satisfaction, so far so good. He is a patient, that much I can say; he is not a therapist, he is a patient. But you don’t complain against a patient – I feel sorry for him. Buy why are you disturbed? Continue. If I am not disturbed then why are you disturbed and why is everybody else disturbed?”It is not a joke. The woman is saying something immensely meaningful: she is saying, “It is his problem, and he is suffering from a problem. He needs sympathy not complaint.” But this woman must have been of immense understanding, really a therapist, not only playing games but moving to the very roots of man’s psychic troubles.The woman simply said that he is behaving like a child, and treating her like his mother, so what is wrong with it? He has not grown up, he is retarded. Now, to make a fuss about it, to disturb the whole conference about it, is meaningless. Let him. She told the old man, “Continue,” and she told the president, “You also continue. I am undisturbed because it does not concern me at all. Just touching my skin, what does it matter?”This woman can become awakened because she is behaving like a watcher, even about her own body. She is not identified with the body, she is far above, looking at the retarded old man but not feeling offended – because “I am not the body.”I have been caned, not by my teachers, because they were afraid I would go to the police station, but by my uncles. My grandfather was always favorable toward me about anything. He was ready to participate if he could; of course he never punished me, he always rewarded me.I used to come home every night and the first thing my grandfather would ask was, “What did you do today? How did things go? Was there any trouble?” We always used to have a good meeting in the night in his bed, sitting together, and he enjoyed everything. I used to tell everything that had happened in the day, and he would say, “It was really a good day!”My father only punished me once because I had gone to a fair which used to happen a few miles away from the city every year. There flows one of the holy rivers of the Hindus, the Narmada, and on the bank of the Narmada there used to be a big fair for one month. So I simply went there without asking him.There was so much going on in the fair… I had gone only for one day and I was thinking I would be back by the night, but there were so many things: magicians, a circus, drama. It was not possible to come back in one day, so three days… The whole family was in a panic: where had I gone?It had never happened before. At the most I had come back late in the night but I had never been away for three days continuously, and with no message. They inquired at every friend’s house. Nobody knew about me and the fourth day when I came home my father was really angry. Before asking me anything, he slapped me. I didn’t say anything.I said, “Do you want to slap me more? You can, because I have enjoyed enough in three days. You cannot slap me more than I have enjoyed, so you can do a few more slaps. It will cool you down, and to me it is just balancing. I have enjoyed myself.”He said, “You are really impossible. Slapping you is meaningless. You are not hurt by it; you are asking for more. Can’t you make a distinction between punishment and reward?”I said, “No, to me everything is a reward of some kind. There are different kinds of reward, but everything is a reward of some kind.”He asked me, “Where have you been for these three days?”I said, “This you should have asked before you slapped me. Now you have lost the right to ask me. I have been slapped without even being asked. It is a full stop – close the chapter. If you wanted to know, you should have asked before, but you don’t have any patience. Just a minute would have been enough. But I will not keep you continually worrying where I have been, so I will tell you that I went to the fair.”He asked, “Why didn’t you ask me?”I said, “Because I wanted to go. Be truthful: if I had asked, would you have allowed me? Be truthful.”He said, “No.”I said, “That explains why I did not ask you – because I wanted to go, and then it would have been more difficult for you. If I had asked you and you had said no, I still would have gone, and that would have been more difficult for you. Just to make it easier for you, I didn’t ask, and I am rewarded for it. And I am ready to take any more reward you want to give me. But I have enjoyed the fair so much that I am going there every year. So you can… Whenever! I disappear, you know where I am. Don’t be worried.”He said, “This is the last time that I punish you; the first and last time. Perhaps you are right: if you really wanted to go, then this was the only way because I was not going to allow you. In that fair every kind of thing happens: prostitutes are there, intoxicants are available, drugs are sold there” – and at that time in India there was no illegality about drugs, every drug was freely available. And in a fair all kinds of monks gather, and Hindu monks all use drugs – “so I would not have allowed you to go. And if you really wanted to go then perhaps you were right not to ask.”I told him, “But I did not bother about the prostitutes or the monks or the drugs. You know me: if I am interested in drugs, then in this very city…” Just by the side of my house there was a shop where all drugs were available: “The man is so friendly to me that he will not take any money if I want any drug. So there is no problem. Prostitutes are available in the town; if I am interested in seeing their dances I can go there. Who can prevent me? Monks come continually in the city. But I was interested in the magicians.”And my interest in magic is related to my interest in miracles. In India, before the partition, I have seen every kind of miracle being done on the streets by magicians, poor magicians. Perhaps after the whole show they may get a one-rupee collection. How can I believe that these people are messiahs? For one rupee, for three hours they are doing almost impossible things. Of course everything has a trick to it but if you don’t know the trick then it is a miracle.You have simply heard – I have seen them throwing a rope up, and the rope stands by itself. They have a boy with them they call “Jamura”; every magician has a jamura. I don’t know how to translate it… Just “my boy.” And he goes on talking with the jamura, “Jamura, will you go up the rope?”And he will say, “Yes, I will go.” And this continual conversation has something to do with the trick; it keeps people’s mind on the conversation, and the conversation is funny in many ways. I have seen that boy climbing up the rope and disappearing!And the man calls from down below, “Jamura?”And from far above comes the voice, “Yes, master.”And he says, “Now I will bring you down part by part.” Then he throws a knife up, and the head of the boy comes down! He throws the knife up, and a leg comes down! Part by part the boy comes down, and the magician goes on putting the parts together, covers them with a bed sheet and says, “Jamura, now be together.”And the jamura says, “Yes, master.” The magician removes the bed sheet and the boy stands up! He pulls down the rope, winds it up, puts it in the bag and starts asking for money. At the most he would get one rupee – because in those days sixty paise was equivalent to one rupee and nobody was going to give him more than one paise, two paise at the most; a very rich person would give him four paise. If he can gather one rupee for his miracle he is fortunate. I have seen all kinds of things, and the people who are doing them are just beggars.So when I hear that your faith in Jesus will disappear if you know that he never walked on water, that he never turned water into wine, I cannot conceive of it, because in the twentieth century, the secrets of how to do all these magic tricks are available, even in books. And you can do them, you just have to learn a little strategy.One sannyasin was with me; he lived with me in Mumbai, and he was interested in magic. So I told him, “Have a press conference and give a show of your magic, but call them miracles, not magic.” And he did it. Even my caretaker Vivek was one of the participants in his magic – miracles, not magic.The miracle was that Vivek had to swallow a thread, a long thread which she goes on swallowing. And then he takes back that thread from her navel; he goes on pulling it and it all comes out. And the whole trick was just a small operation. A few days before, he just made a little cut near the navel and pushed a thread inside; and this was the thread that was coming out. The thread that she had swallowed was a different thread – but to the press it was a miracle. “The woman has taken the thread inside and he takes it out from her navel! – and it comes out, the same length and everything.” But just a small trick…He did many things there, and you know, just because he was my disciple many papers described how I had done these miracles. He drank some poison, enough to kill a man… But everything was a trick. He was just practicing there, in my own house and on my own people, and they all were saying, “What is happening?”Vivek was saying, “This is cheating. I thought it was going to be a real miracle. It is nothing like a miracle, it is just a cheat.”I said, “Everybody has been a cheat; there has never been a miracle.”So I told my father, “I was interested only in the magic, because in the fair all kinds of magicians gather together, and I have seen some really great things. My interest is that I want to reduce miracles into magic. Magic is only about tricks – there is nothing spiritual in it – but if you don’t know the trick, then certainly it appears to be a miracle.”I have been punished, but I have enjoyed every mischief so much that I don’t count those punishments at all. They are nothing.I have a certain rapport with women, perhaps that’s why mischief – if it was Mister Chief or Master Chief, perhaps I would have avoided it, but Miss Chief! – the temptation was so much that I could not avoid it. In spite of all the punishment I continued it. And I still continue it!

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,How does one explore the higher states of consciousness?There are not many ways, there is but one: the way of awareness.Man is almost unconscious. I say “almost” – there are moments, situations where he becomes conscious, but they are momentary.For example, suddenly your house is on fire. You will feel a flare-up within you, a sense of alertness that was not there before. You may have been tired, you may not have slept for a few days, you may have been traveling and you were hoping that as you reached your house, the first thing you were going to do was to fall asleep – but the house is on fire!All tiredness disappears. You forget the whole nightmare of the journey, and inside you find something new which perhaps you will miss because the house is on fire; so you will become not alert of your alertness, but alert of the fire that is burning your house.In ordinary life also, there are moments when people touch a higher state of consciousness, but miss because that higher state comes as an emergency, and they have to first tackle the emergency that is facing them. And that cannot be the circumstance where they can start exploring what is happening inside them.But if you can remember – even as a memory – some moments in your life when suddenly you were more aware than you usually are, it will be a great help to understand what I am going to say to you.I have told you that modern psychology has moved below the so-called human consciousness. And when people like Sigmund Freud found that just underneath your thin layer of consciousness there is another layer, it was a great discovery for him, and for the West. And his whole life he devoted to exploring the underground, the basement of your consciousness.That’s why he became interested in the analysis of dreams, because when you are conscious you can pretend, you can be a hypocrite. You can say something that you don’t mean, you can do something that you never wanted to do. You can smile, and inside you want to cry, weep. You can cry and weep, and inside you are enjoying, you are rejoicing.So your consciousness has been so polluted by the society, it is not reliable. This was one of the most significant contributions of Sigmund Freud: that your consciousness is not reliable. Strange, that he feels your unconsciousness is more reliable than your consciousness.Nothing can be a greater condemnation of the whole human civilization, the whole human history of all the religions. What else can be a greater condemnation than this: that your consciousness is not reliable; that your society, your tradition, your religion, your convention, have made it unreliable.In one of Kahlil Gibran’s stories, the mother and her daughter are both sleepwalkers. The daughter one night walks in her sleep, goes into the garden and starts saying nasty things about her mother. And just by accident her mother also sleepwalks behind her and starts saying ugly things about her. But the cold wind outside suddenly wakes them both.And the daughter says, “Mom, you don’t have anything warm around you, you should not come out at your age. You make me so worried.”And the mother says, “My beloved daughter, in this whole world there is nobody except you whom I can call mine.”This much is the story, but it contains the whole discovery of Sigmund Freud: while they were asleep they were saying really what they feel about each other. When they wake up they are saying what they are supposed to say to each other. And they will not become aware of their two sides.And if there were only two sides, things would have been far easier, but there are many more sides. I have told you – it will be good to be reminded – consciousness is a very thin layer where we are existing. Below it is the subconscious mind; that is half-conscious, half-unconscious. That’s why you remember dreams only of the later part of the night. You don’t remember all your dreams from the whole night because in eight hours of sleep, for six hours you are dreaming.Now this is a scientifically proved fact. Only here and there for a few minutes you fall into deeper sleep where there are no longer dreams; the total is two hours. But the dream total is six hours. You don’t remember in the morning six hours’ dreams – almost the length of three movies. At the most you remember some fragment, or sometimes a whole dream, but that dream was the last dream when you were waking up.The subconscious mind has two sides. One is connected with the unconscious, the bottom part. When you are deeply asleep, dreams are moving at the bottom part of the subconscious. The conscious is very far away. But when you wake up in the morning, you are coming closer to the conscious mind, then the top layer of the subconscious is dreaming.That’s why your consciousness can hear little bits and pieces of dreaming, and in the morning you can remember something. But that is only the tail of the elephant. The whole elephant has disappeared, you have no notion of it. And of course the tail makes no sense because the elephant is not there.Hence the psychoanalyst is needed to find out the elephant: what kind of elephant it was, whether it was an elephant or a camel or a cow or a horse, because you have only a tail – perhaps not even the whole tail, a few hairs of the tail.The whole function of psychoanalysis is to put those hairs together and to figure out whose tail this can be; to dig you from this corner and from that corner, and hit you from this point and that point, so something comes up which is there, but of which you are not aware. The psychologist makes almost the whole animal on the basis of a few hairs of the tail. That’s why there are so many schools of psychoanalysis.It was bound to be so. Sigmund Freud wanted psychoanalysis to remain one integrated movement. It was impossible, because the work of the psychoanalyst is more or less imagination: he has a few things in his hand but those things can lead to any conclusion.If you go to Sigmund Freud then those same hairs will prove you are sexually obsessed: that is his elephant. And once he has found the elephant you will start seeing according to his vision, and you will find explanations that perhaps he is right. And perhaps he is right.If you go to Adler, he has a different kind of imagination: will-to-power. For Sigmund Freud it is will-to-sex, will-to-reproduction. To Sigmund Freud it is more of a biological phenomenon than to Adler.To Adler it is more of a political phenomenon: will-to-power. If you take the same hairs to Sigmund Freud he will manage to figure out and discover perversions of sex in you. And I am saying perhaps he is right, and I also want to say perhaps Adler is also right.If you go to Jung then he will find through those same hairs some mythological phenomenon. It will not be biological, it will not be political, it will be mythological. And I want to say: perhaps he is also right.All these three continually quarreled, not knowing that man’s mind has multi-aspects, that it is not exhausted by one explanation, that not only are there these three, there are more possibilities. Just a few more Freuds, Jungs and Adlers are needed who have some poetic imagination, and some scientific way of explanation.Man’s mind is multidimensional. And every dimension is connected.For example: sexuality is part of his will-to-power, it is not separate. Through sex also he is trying to be powerful, to be a creator, to give birth, to possess a woman or a man. And you can look at any couple: they are continually in a power conflict – who possesses whom?The wife is trying in every possible way… And she has some natural capacity which she uses. If you are not allowing her to be more powerful than you then she will deprive you of sex, and she knows that you cannot starve as far as sex is concerned. You are going to beg her, you are going to persuade her: you are going to bring chocolates and ice cream and beautiful clothes. She understands that this is all bribery. You also understand it, that this is trying to make coexistence possible.But your effort is also continuously to dominate her.One of my friends was in love with a woman but was not ready to marry her. Now the woman was troubled; she came to me and she told me, “This is strange. Now my family is after me saying, ‘If he loves you then he should marry you, otherwise you are passing the marriageable age.“’And in India it is then difficult to find a young man of your age available. They will already be married. Then you will have to be married to somebody who is far older than you – perhaps once or twice married before, and whose wives fortunately went on dying and who is still a bachelor.’ So, they are after me: ‘Either he marries you or we choose somebody else.’”I said, “Let me ask him what the problem is.”And he told me, “I cannot hide it from you. I really love her, but when the question of marriage arises, the trouble is, she is taller than me.”I said, “What kind of trouble is that? I don’t see any trouble in it. If she is taller, you can stand up on a stool and kiss her – at the most a stool is needed!”I showed him a picture – just that day it was in the newspaper and the newspaper was laying there – of Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, who was a very tall man, with the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was only five feet five. So when he gave the oath to Jawaharlal it would have looked really bad: the prime minister would have looked very small, the viceroy really tall. He must have been six and a half feet, or even more, so they arranged it in the picture…I showed him, “You see the management. Jawaharlal is standing on a step, the steps that lead to the throne. He is standing on a step, and Mountbatten is standing on the floor so they seem almost equal in size.” I said, “Can you see the trick? It is not much of a problem. You can have a folding stool which you can always have in the back of your car, so wherever you need you take your stool.”He said, “You are making a laughingstock of me. I am serious, because wherever I go, she will be taller and I cannot continually walk with the stool. And in the marriage ceremony when I am taking the seven rounds around the sacred fire, she is so tall I will be ahead of her looking almost like her child. I love her, but I cannot marry her because everybody will laugh.”And in the marriage ceremony in India all the relatives and friends from faraway gather. It is a gathering of thousands of people. And they were rich people, so everybody would come and everybody would see only one thing: the tallness of the wife. Love had to fail before the power instinct.I said, “What does it matter? You can tell them, ‘I am not taller than my wife.’”But you can look around the whole world, and you will find the husband always taller than the wife. How has it been managed? Why has the woman remained smaller than the man? It is simply a question that for millions of years that was the choice: the man will always choose a wife smaller than himself. Slowly, by sheer selection, the taller women went out of existence; it was difficult for them to find a husband. They became prostitutes, they became part of the marketplace, available to all. They could not live a respectable life unless they happened to meet a man taller than them.But the man was always taller; slowly, slowly, this is how it happened. You can inquire of those people who crossbreed animals. After generations of this continual crossbreeding: taller husband-smaller wife, taller husband-smaller wife…If the woman is so tall that she cannot find a husband, she becomes a prostitute, she goes out of the biological market, she is a dropout. She will not be creating children any longer, because a prostitute cannot afford children. So her line dies out; that branch grows no further.It is not natural that women have to be smaller. It is the power instinct, the will-to-power.But sexuality and the will-to-power are not two separate things, not as separate as Adler and Freud think. The people who become very much power-oriented start losing interest in sex because their whole energy moves into the will-to-power. The people who are very deeply interested in exploring their sexuality cannot go into politics; they don’t have any energy left.You can see it in actuality in many places. We don’t allow soldiers to have their wives on the battlefield. The general can, because the general remains behind; he is not really fighting, he is simply ordering people to fight. And he is perfectly defended; if there is any danger, he will be the first to get out. He is far behind the forces. He is allowed to have a wife there because there is no problem, he is not going to fight. But the soldiers are not allowed to. Why? – for the simple reason that if their energy goes into sex, they don’t feel like fighting.You can observe it in yourself. If you are deeply in love with a woman, you don’t feel like fighting with anybody. But if you cannot find any outlet for your sexual energy then you will become a criminal, you may kill somebody. You may be constantly searching for some excuse to fight.It is not just a coincidence that all the religions have preached that their monks remain celibate, because once they are celibate then their whole energy starts moving toward an imaginary God – then God becomes their sexual object.And you can see it in the songs of the devotees. They talk of God almost as if they are talking of a beloved or of a lover. Meera, one of the most famous mystics in India, must have been studied by Sigmund Freud. If he did not study her, he will have to be born again, because those two have to meet and come to an understanding. Freud never heard about Meera, otherwise he would have found all the great explanations that he needed and searched and looked for – and was unable to find.Meera talks of Krishna almost in sexual terms. She sleeps with the statue of Krishna. She calls Krishna “my husband.” And the words she uses are exactly those romantic words which lovers use for each other. The same is true about the Sufi mystics who think of God as a beloved, a woman. And you have to see their description of the beauty of God, the youthfulness of God.When Fitzgerald, a very talented poet, translated Omar Khayyam, a Sufi mystic, he did something almost impossible, because Omar Khayyam, in the original, does not seem to be as impressive as he becomes in the translation of Fitzgerald. And the reason is, Fitzgerald had no idea that Omar Khayyam was talking about God, not about a woman.The Sufis call God, saki. A saki is the woman in the pub who pours wine for the customers. Particularly in the Arabic and Persian nations, the sakis are chosen just as in the West you choose Miss World, Miss Universe, Miss America. The saki is chosen just like that. The most beautiful girl in the city will become the saki. The most beautiful women move into the profession of being the saki. And Sufis call God saki.Fitzgerald had no idea that saki means, to a Sufi, God. He simply translated literally that saki is a woman, and when Omar Khayyam says, “Saki, fill my cup full,” he thinks he is asking a woman to fill his cup full. And when Omar Khayyam says, “Even the wine is not so sweet as your kiss,” he is thinking of a woman; hence, his poetry becomes more romantic, more colorful. One who understands the Sufi terminology will not find much in Omar Khayyam.You will be surprised that in Persia, Omar Khayyam is not known as a great poet. But in the whole world, Omar Khayyam is Persia’s most important poet, and this miracle has happened because of Fitzgerald. And you would not have enjoyed Omar Khayyam. He was a mathematician – the first mistake that he made was to be a mathematician. Now, a mathematician writing poetry, you understand, cannot be juicy. From where can a mathematician get juice? Then over and above that, he is a Sufi, a seeker of God. There is no place for any woman in his life; he lived a celibate life.Fitzgerald never bothered about the man’s life. Before he translated his poetry he should at least have looked to see whether this man was capable of writing poetry about women. He was a celibate mathematician! A Sufi. But Sufis, remaining celibate, think of God as a woman, dream of God as a woman, the most beautiful woman of course – there can be no comparison with God. So they pour all their sexuality onto the image of God, the beloved. He is not a man.In Omar Khayyam’s book – it is an illustrated book – naturally Fitzgerald saw the most beautiful pictures of women pouring wine. He thought that this was really a woman. And he looked at the poetry; it talks about the woman. Sufis are very angry: Fitzgerald made Omar Khayyam world famous, while their real poets of Persia are unknown to the world. This man was not thought to be a poet at all. Once you understand that this woman is not a real woman but God looked at through the eyes of a celibate Sufi… It is a hallucination.Religions understood it: that if you stop sexual energy moving in its natural way, then the man can manage to see God, to meet Jesus, to talk to Krishna; anything is possible. The sexual energy is a kind of drug, the most powerful drug that nature has invented. That’s why, when you fall in love with a woman, you start seeing in that woman things that nobody sees. It is your projection, it is your drug, your chemicals, your hormones which are creating the hallucination around the woman. The woman is just an object, a screen, on which you are projecting your picture.And once your sex is satisfied with the woman, you are going to be very disappointed. You will find that this is not the same woman: you had fallen in love with somebody else. This is not the woman… But you know that this is the woman. So there is some deception, this woman deceived you. You are being deceived by biology, not by this woman.This woman was also projecting on you. And once the honeymoon is over, the projection is over. Now she looks at you and finds just an ordinary man, nothing special about you. Everything was special before: the way you walked, talked, everything had something unique. Now you are just an Oregonian, nothing more. There is great frustration on both sides. Now you are standing face to face, seeing each other without any projection; hence the continuous fight. It is bound to be so.In India, where even today ninety percent of marriages, or even more, are arranged marriages, this kind of frustration never happens. In an arranged marriage you are not given the chance of hallucinating. From the very beginning you are just standing on the earth, and there is no romance. You cannot even see the woman before you get married to her.The very cultured families now allow the picture of the woman to be seen. Now a picture of the woman, and with all the photographic tricks – and that too only if you ask… You are going against the heritage, the culture, you are not supposed to ask. And particularly the girl cannot even see the picture of the man she is going to be married to. And even after marriage, they are not going to see each other in sunlight. They will meet each other in the darkness of the night. Of course, they remain to each other mysterious.The mystery lingers longer in India than anywhere else. In the day they cannot talk to each other because in India there are joint families. They cannot talk in front of the children because that is a bad example, they cannot talk in front of the elders because that is disrespectful. And there are so many elders in the house, and there are so many dozens of children in the house, there is no possibility.You will be surprised that the father of a child cannot take the child in his hands in front of others: that is disrespectful. I was told by my father, “I took you in my hands only when you were five years old.” The grandfather can, that’s why I became friendly with my grandfather. Naturally, he was acquainted with me, and me with him, from the very beginning. The father came after five years; he remained a stranger for five years. He never talked to me for five years.I have asked my mother. There was no possibility of their talking or meeting or seeing. They did not see each other for years after their marriage. Children were born, but they had not seen each other because they would meet only in the darkness of the night. And in India, in a joint family, there are sometimes forty people, fifty people in the house. And those houses are just like Noah’s ark.For example, my grandfather used to have his horse tied to his cot in the night too. And I told him “The smell of the horse is so much that even if I want to meet you, your horse prevents me.” Cows in the house, elders, children, everybody in the house – how Indians manage to make love is a mystery.How they manage to produce dozens of children is simply mystifying. It all happens in darkness, without whispering a single word. What to say of loving chitchat and foreplay and afterplay. There is no possibility: only the play is enough! Fore and after does not exist; and the play has to be quick – so nobody comes to know.I was staying with my grandfather in the house of one of his friends – and when a very close guest is there, in India, you don’t allow him to sleep in a separate room, that is not hospitality. My grandfather and I were sleeping in the same room where my grandfather’s friend, his son, and his son’s wife were sleeping. And what I learned… My grandfather was old so once in a while he would cough; his friend was even older than him, and once in a while he would cough. And because of their coughing my sleep was difficult, so once in a while I would wake up. And once in a while I would see the son of my grandfather’s friend making love to his wife – then I would cough.That was enough! That was enough; he would jump into his own bed. And while I remained there I did not allow him to sleep with his wife. On the day we were leaving he pulled me aside and said, “You rascal!”I said, “What? Why are you calling me a rascal?”He said, “You coughed exactly at the time… Do you sleep or not? Those two old men, I know they cough – but not exactly at the time. I am so happy that you are going because for these two months I have not met my wife, because the moment I started moving toward her bed you would start coughing.” And coughing is such a thing that when I started then those two old men would hear it and start; it is infectious. One person starts, then the other starts feeling a temptation too.Stop the sexual energy of people, then it will find some other outlet. Religions learned the trick: stop sexual energy – it moves, and gives the movement toward God. The military generals found it very soon: stop the sexual energy and the man is ready to fight, to quarrel; he is just hankering to fight.In fact Sigmund Freud’s explanation for all weapons is just sexual. He says that when you throw a knife into somebody’s body, it is sexual penetration. A bullet is a sexual penetration from a faraway distance. He is a little bit obsessed with sex, but there is some truth in it, because sexually fulfilled people have not discovered weapons. There was no need.So, all these explanations are about your dreams because your dreams are truer than your waking life. In waking life you don’t beat your teacher, but in dreams you can. That’s your real desire. If you were allowed, or if you were powerful enough you would have done it. But it is not possible, not practical. In dreams you are free to do it; it is a kind of substitute.So below the conscious is the subconscious, which is the field of your dreaming. Below the subconscious is the unconscious, which is the field of your dreamless sleep, when you are in a kind of coma. You reach the same state as you were in your mother’s womb; hence the relaxation, hence the feeling of rejuvenation. After a deep sleep, when you wake up you are fresh, young, full of energy.If those two hours have been missed then you may have tossed and turned and dreamed a thousand and one things, but in the morning you will find yourself as tired as when you had gone to bed, perhaps more tired. That coma is needed, because in that coma your mind stops functioning and your body takes over.When you are conscious, it is mind over body; when you are unconscious, it is body over mind. And the body has a wisdom because the body is far more ancient. Mind is a very late development, a very new comer, just amateurish. Hence, anything important, nature has not left to mind. Everything important has been left to the body, because body will take care more proficiently, more professionally, more wisely, without any mistakes, errors.For example, breathing has not been left to the mind; otherwise sometimes you may forget, particularly in sleep. What will you do? – when deep sleep comes breathing will stop. No, breathing is not left to the mind. It is a body function because it is so essential for your life. And the mind is so amateurish and so stupid, because it is just trying to wake up, it is still not awake.Nature has given every power to the body, all essential powers to the body. Your mind can be put aside and your body will go on functioning perfectly well. In fact, mind is always a hindrance in everything. He tries to overcome body, because mind is a power tripper, he wants to control everything.What do these people go on doing in the name of Yoga? They are trying to control even their pulses, they are trying to control even their heartbeat. For what? – what do they gain out of it? I have seen people practicing for forty years how to stop the heartbeat; and certainly if they do that much practice they can stop the heartbeat for a time.But what is the gain? You cannot see anything. I have seen these people: you don’t see any aura, you don’t see any fragrance. You don’t see in their eyes that there has been any vision of reality. You don’t see in their life any impact of the higher consciousness.But they have immense power over the body. I have seen people lying down and a car passing over their body; they will simply stop their breath and the car passes over with no harm. I have seen one man stopping the body of a railway engine just with his hands. And all that he was doing was stopping his breath. By stopping his breath he was capable of stopping a railway engine or any car.Strangely… It was as if he had become a rock, so heavy that it was impossible for the car, a four horsepower or six horsepower car, to push the man aside. With his breathing disappearing, it was as if all his hollowness had disappeared and he had become a solid rock. The earth and its gravitation is functioning perhaps ten times more on that person than it functions on you.It is just like when you are in water: the gravitation functions less on you; that’s why you can float on water. In water you can take a big rock in your hands without any trouble. You cannot pick up the same rock outside the water.Water cuts somehow the power of gravitation. The water has the quality of levitation, of taking things up; levitation against gravitation. That’s why you can take a bigger man’s body in your hands in water, just like a child, as if he is a child. Outside the water you cannot do the same, he is so heavy.Perhaps by stopping the breath – the quality of air must give a great levitation – the person becomes so heavy, and the power of gravitation is almost eight times more that he can manage normally. The wheels go on moving, but the car cannot move a single inch.But what is the point of it? I have asked these people, “Yes, you have done a great job, but to me it seems idiotic. What is the point? How have you become more spiritual by this? You have simply proved that you are eight horsepower. The car is six horsepower, so you now have eight horses’ power in you.”We still measure with horsepower because man takes a long time to forget the old language. Now horses are disappearing, horse-drawn buggies are disappearing. There are cars, there are airplanes, there are trains, but still we measure their power through the horse. An eight horsepower car means there are eight horses in your chariot.“So of course you are more powerful than the car, but is that your goal – to become a powerful engine in a car? And you wasted forty years in learning the trick!” Yes, it influences people because everybody is a power tripper. It shows what great power this man has. It makes you feel inferior; he becomes suddenly superior.Why do so many millions of people go on watching boxing matches? For what? Two fools beating each other for no reason at all. If there is any argument, sit down and settle it, negotiate. But there is no argument, no problem; the problem is only who is more powerful. That too can be decided in a more human way: just toss a coin and be finished. But why beat each other and break each other’s bones? And the noses are bleeding, and the eyes are red, and millions of people are clapping, enjoying somehow a certain identity.There are fans of Muhammad Ali, and there are fans of other Ali’s. So these two fools are doing their stupidity, and a million fools are there to support and give them the idea that they are doing something important. I cannot see that in a little bit more enlightened humanity things like boxing can exist.Boxing simply looks so primitive, so ugly, so inhuman; but millions of people… And these are not the only people: millions more will be sitting in front of their televisions. It seems the whole humanity is somehow after power. So whoever shows some power of any kind: power of money, power of body, power of politics, position, status, anything, people become impressed.Sheela has just brought to me two days ago the news that since Indira Gandhi’s assassination, her son Rajiv has been fighting the election to become the prime minister. He has chosen people very cleverly: he has chosen many of the film stars as his candidates. Poor Vinod, who is here, missed! If he had been in India he would have been in the prime minister’s cabinet next month. His rival in the film world, Amitabh Bachchan… These two were the topmost actors of the Indian film world. And you will be surprised that India produces more films than Hollywood. Hollywood is number two; India is number one as far as film production is concerned.These two persons, Amitabh and Vinod, were the top two. He has chosen Amitabh as one of his candidates, and Amitabh is going to be in his cabinet, absolutely certainly. And he will win, because film actors have a certain power, glamour, as if they are superhuman. He has chosen old descendants of royal families. One is a very strange fellow, but he will be elected.Mysore was one of the richest states in India because Mysore jungles are jungles of sandalwood, and that is the costliest wood in the whole world. All the jungles were the private property of the maharajah of Mysore. And Mysore has the greatest population of elephants, so Mysore’s maharajah has the biggest tusks of elephants in his palace. It is unique, because for thirty-six generations they have been kings.Now there is a descendant of this family – the estate is no longer there, but he has his private property: a palace worth fifty million or more dollars, a vast palace all made of Italian marble. His throne must be priceless because it has so many diamonds, so many sapphires, so many rubies, emeralds – because Mysore has many mines, and the king had first rights to all the best stones found in those mines. Just the gold is worth nearabout fifty million dollars. The gold of the throne and all these diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds – there is no way to count how much they will be worth. But that kind of throne is just one of its kind, there is no other.This young man weighs three hundred and fifty pounds. He never goes out of the palace. He speaks in a nasal tone, almost inaudible. He has never spoken in public in his whole life because how can he speak? What he says is almost inaudible; perhaps only a few servants who are continuously with him understand him. He has an imported dog; his name is Kinky – and all that he does is go on playing with Kinky.Now he has been chosen as a candidate for election in India by Rajiv Gandhi. He will win the election, because in Mysore, who can win against him? In Mysore the royal family is thought to be the descendants of God. And thirty-six uninterrupted generations of royal blood – and in no small quantity, three hundred and fifty pounds! There is no need for him to make a public speech. He cannot, he may not even go out of his palace, but he will win. And he has been chosen just because he has status and people worship him. So it is impossible for anybody to stand against him. And he has money, so he will give money to the election campaign, as much as they want.People are not conscious of what they are doing. Now the people who are going to vote for this man, will you call them human beings? Perhaps Kinky the dog is far more intelligent than the man who goes on playing with him: he is an utter idiot. He has not done anything else in his life; but just to belong to a royal family is enough. And he has money, and money is power. Perhaps he may become a cabinet minister.You are in your unconscious mind when you are fast asleep with no dreams. Freud had reached the unconscious just by analyzing dreams. If you are on the right track and you analyze a dream rightly, the miracle is, once the dream is analyzed completely – that means you become aware of its reason, why it happens, why it is, of what it is constituted – once you become aware of a dream, its total structure, root and all, it disappears.To summarize: to be aware of a dream is the death of the dream.And after a few years of psychoanalysis when all your dreams slowly disappear… Then Freud became aware that there is still another depth. He died before he could penetrate the other depth, but he had found it, discovered it: the unconscious.Jung tried to go as deeply into the unconscious as possible. It is easier in hypnosis to reach the unconscious of any person, very easy. Hence in the future hypnosis is going to become part and parcel of every psychology. In India it always has been, because three years of psychoanalysis is a wastage of time. Within three minutes you can be hypnotized and all your dreaming process can be put aside; then there is direct entry into the unconscious.Because Jung was interested in hypnosis, Freud condemned him as unscientific. It is not right. Hypnosis is a scientific method of digging deeply into you. And when Jung tried to go deep into the unconscious, he was surprised to find that underneath the unconscious there is still another layer: the collective unconscious, the unconscious of the whole humanity.Everybody has it; and sometimes from that collective unconscious you get ideas, but because they come from so far away from your conscious, you think that they are coming from somewhere outside you. When Jesus hears the voice of God, it is not God speaking, it is the collective unconscious. But it is so far away that poor Jesus can be forgiven. He is simply mistaken, and he had no idea that there are depths within depths, depths behind depths.This collective unconscious is to do with the mythological. Hence, Jung became interested in mythology to discover its existence, just as Freud became interested in dreams to discover the subconscious. Mythologies are dreams dreamed by the whole of humanity over thousands of years, but those mythologies carry some idea, some significance. For example, the Indian mythology that life for the first time appeared as a fish. The first incarnation of God is Matsyavatar: incarnation as a fish. A strange mythology – how did they figure it out?Out of this vast world of animals, why did they fall upon the fish? – some indication from their collective unconscious. Now science says that perhaps life was born first in the ocean. It comes very close to the fish. And the child in the beginning, in the mother’s womb, looks like a fish. He moves from there and passes through all the stages that man has passed through in millions of years – there is a point where he looks like a monkey.Jung’s discovery of mythology and its connection with the collective unconscious is of immense importance. But he stopped there because he was afraid, and obsessed with death, just as Sigmund Freud was himself obsessed with sex. Anything you brought to him – I say anything, and I mean anything – he would immediately manage to make it sexual. Whatever it was, it did not matter; he was capable of making it sexual.Freud’s whole mind was focused on one point; but perhaps that’s the only way. In a small life, what can a man do? If he can work out only one idea in its totality, then he needs to be obsessed; otherwise it is difficult, life is so vast. If you go on jumping all around on everything, then it is difficult for you to move in one direction to the very end.Hence all scientists, all philosophers, all thinkers, are obsessed with one particular idea. And then they try to fit everything into that idea. That’s where they go wrong. If they were a little more alert they would see that life is vast. Their idea is meaningful, but meaningful only from a certain aspect.Jung was very much afraid of death; he was death-obsessed. Just as Sigmund Freud was sex-obsessed, Jung was death-obsessed. And the two obsessions are not very different. Sex is the beginning of life and death is the end of life. Sex is the A and death is the Z; it is one alphabet, connected. It is not different but distant, so distant that neither Freud nor Jung could see that they were both concerned with one thing; but the poles were so far apart that they were unable to join them.Jung was very much afraid of death, and as he came closer to another layer behind the collective unconscious he backed out. He tried many times to approach the idea of death. He went to India because in India people have been thinking about every possible aspect of life for thousands of years. Of course, about death India has thought much more than anybody else – but he avoided the man who could have been of some help.He was asking people who were educated in the West – professors in the universities who had Western degrees, doctors who had Western degrees – because he had a fixed idea that East and West can never meet. The idea was old; it was given by an English poet, Rudyard Kipling, that East and West can never meet: “East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”Somewhere in Jung’s mind that idea remained his whole life, and he was continually insisting to his disciples that the West had to discover its own methods; it should not use Eastern methods, because they could prove dangerous: “They are not our heritage.”Now, this is a strange situation and a strange argument. A man who discovers the collective unconscious still believes in East and West. Then there are two collectives: Eastern collective unconscious and Western collective unconscious. He never became aware of the simple fact that if you talk about collective unconscious then East is no longer East and West is no longer West. And if you think they cannot meet then you can come and see here in Rajneeshpuram: they are meeting. They have met!Just a few days ago one man from South Africa declared a new conflict. He said the real conflict is not between East and West, it is between North and South. That was never thought of before, it is a real discovery. But it has a point in it. There is a conflict, just like the one between East and West which has become famous and well-known. But South and North are also in conflict, which has not become so well-known. But then there will be four collective unconsciouses, and it is going to be very difficult.But Jung was not aware. One thing he was certain of: Eastern methods were not to be used. So he avoided the only man alive in India, Raman Maharishi, who could have taken him to the lowest level which Buddha called the cosmic unconscious. But that is almost a death. It is a death, because you are no longer there.The cosmos is, but you are no longer there. The seeker disappears; he has found what he was seeking, but he is no longer there. That’s a quantum leap.The subconscious, unconscious, collective and cosmic unconscious – these four layers are under your conscious. Above are also four layers. The question is how to reach the higher states of consciousness.The method is a very strange one, but there is only one way. You have to go down first. You have to enter the cosmic unconscious. Unless you disappear into the cosmic unconscious, you cannot enter into the superconscious, the first level above conscious.What actually happens: as you enter the cosmic unconscious, your subconscious, your unconscious, your collective unconscious all disappear, just like small rivers falling into the ocean – a vast ocean of cosmic darkness. It is a death. And unless you are born again you will not enter the kingdom of God.Jesus must have heard that statement somewhere in India from a Buddhist monk, because it has no source in Jewish religion. Its only source can be a Buddhist source, because that’s what Buddha was teaching: that you dive deep into the cosmic unconscious, and as you enter into it, all is darkness, you are lost completely. But wait – don’t be in a hurry and don’t back out. Don’t run back, because where will you go? You will go back again to the same routine world in which you had lived.Don’t run. Wait, wait a moment. And the darkness as you wait starts becoming less and less dark. It is almost as if you are coming from the outside in the hot sun, and enter in the house and you suddenly see darkness because your eyes are focused for the light outside. The sunlight is so bright that your pupils shrink. They cannot bear that much light going in, so they become small, very small. And then suddenly you enter your house; it takes a little time for your eyes to adjust to the new situation; the sun is no longer there. Your pupils start becoming bigger. When they become bigger, then the house has more light.That’s how thieves who come into your house in the night when everything is dark… You yourself in your own house cannot move around; you may stumble into this desk, that table, this chair. But a thief who has never been in your house, who knows nothing about the house enters in darkness, and without stumbling into anything finds exactly the place where you are keeping all your treasure. It needs training; it is an art. Of course it is a crime. That’s another aspect; I am not concerned with that. But it is an art.The famous Zen story is:A very great master who was also a master thief was getting old. His son asked him, “Before you die, please teach me your art of stealing.”He said, “I was just waiting for you to ask because we never impose; art is something that you should have a feel for. If you are ready, I am ready. Today is the beginning of your teaching. Tonight you come with me.”The old man takes the young man. The young man is trembling, his heart is throbbing. He is looking from side to side, but the father is moving as if going for a morning walk, at ease. He cuts a hole in the wall – the son is perspiring and it is a cold winter night. And the father is doing his work so silently, and so artfully, the son is amazed.The father goes in, calls the son in. They move inside the house. The father has the master key, he opens the doors. They reach the innermost chamber of the palace. The father opens a cupboard, a walk-in cupboard, and tells the son to get in. The son is trembling, just trembling. He gets in and asks, “What I am supposed to do?”He said, “Simply get in. You are not supposed to do anything. Simply get in and then whatsoever happens, happens.”He got into it. The father locked the door and ran out leaving the son inside the cupboard, and while he was leaving the house, he shouted, “Thief! Thief!” so the whole house woke up. All the servants were running here and there, and were searching with torches everywhere. And they found the hole in the wall: certainly somebody has come in. A maidservant looking closely on the floor found some foot marks and went exactly to the wardrobe.The son is aware; he cannot even breathe. He knows now that somebody is there, and is coming in with a torchlight: “Soon they will open it and I am caught. And this old man… In what unfortunate moment I asked him to teach me the art; and is this a way of teaching? He finished me in the first lesson!”But suddenly – and that is God’s voice – he heard somebody inside him saying, “Make the sound of scratching, as if a rat is inside scratching or eating.” He could not believe it – who was speaking inside? He had never heard such a thing: making a scratching noise like a rat? But he made the scratching noise, and the woman opened the door, certain there was a rat inside… She opened the door, and he came out.She was holding just a candle in her hand. He blew the candle out and ran away. When he was running out, people followed. He could not figure out who had said to him: “Blow the candle out.” He had heard the voice say, “Blow the candle out and run away,” but it was not his thinking because he had heard it; it was coming from somewhere.And now in the dark night, he is running and people are following him, and they are coming closer and closer and they are shouting, “He is there! Catch him!” – they can see him.He comes near a well, and the voice inside him says, “Take a rock and throw it in the well.” So he takes a rock… There is no time to question why, and “Who are you?” and “What purpose will it serve?” These are questions which you ask when you are conveniently, comfortably seated in a classroom, when there is no hurry for the answer – neither do you mean that you really need the answer. But in such a situation when he is just about to be caught, the voice speaks and he follows.He throws a rock into the well and runs away. Certainly, the rock falling in the well makes a big noise, and all the people who are following him stop near the well – they think that the man has jumped into the well. So now some arrangement has to be made: more light has to be brought, somebody has to go down and find out who this man is, whether he is alive or dead. Now their whole minds are diverted.He reaches his home, really angry, almost ready to kill the father. And the father is sound asleep, covered with his blanket – it was a cold night. He pulls off his blanket, and he asks, “Is this the way to teach your own son?”He said, “Are you back? That’s enough; you have learned the art. Now go to sleep, we will discuss it in the morning.”But he said, “You should ask me how I managed to escape!”He said, “That does not matter. You are back; about the how, we will discuss in the morning. And I know how, because the same voice that has been speaking in you has been speaking in me my whole life. That’s why I was the master thief. It was not the working of the brain, it was not the working of the mind; it was from my very depths. I have followed only the deepest in me, and I have never gone wrong.“You are back; that simply means you heard it, and that’s the whole secret of the art. There is no other lesson. The first lesson is the last lesson. If you were not back it meant the student was not able to survive the first lesson: finished. He was not capable.”You have to take a jump. First it will be dark, very dark. Rest in that darkness: darkness has a beauty of its own.You have known the beauty of light, and the beauty of flowers and trees, and men and women: that is all beauty in light, through light. It is all light reflected: different colors, different faces, different flowers, but it is all the world of light.You have not known the silence, the depth, the unboundedness of darkness. It also has its own beauty, totally different.It is the beauty of death.And once you have allowed it to happen, once you relax in it, you say, “Okay. If it is death then let it be death, but I am not going back.” Once you relax in this darkness of the cosmic unconscious, slowly it starts becoming lighter. And the first glimpse of light is the beginning of the superconscious.When it becomes even lighter, so that you can see the tremendous emptiness, then it is the supersuperconscious. When it becomes so strong a light that it becomes unbearable – again you may feel like escaping – it is the collective conscious. It is not only your conscious, it is the consciousness of all human beings, of the whole history, in totality, condensed. Hence it is too bright.Just as darkness makes you afraid, too much brightness also makes you blind and afraid. Don’t be afraid, there is nothing to be afraid of. It is your nature; there is nothing to be afraid of, it is your being. If you allow this tremendous intensity of light of the collective conscious, you enter into the cosmic conscious.Cosmic consciousness is neither dark nor light.If you can find just the middle point between light and darkness – very soothing, warm from the side of light, cool from the side of darkness – it is the meeting, the ultimate meeting of the polar opposites.And this cosmic consciousness is what I call enlightenment.In darkness you were lost, but the fear, the trembling, the death surrounding you kept something of you still there: a very subtle ego which you cannot catch hold of. You feel you are lost but there you are still, because you are afraid. If you are not there, who is afraid? The darkness is so much that you are focused on darkness, and you are not in your focus at all.In the cosmic consciousness you are really lost. There is no fear, there is no way of going back, or of going anywhere. Hence I call this the arrival – from where you had never departed in fact. It was always there above you, hanging above you, for millions of lives, just waiting, waiting. But to reach it first you will have to go deep down to the very roots.Friedrich Nietzsche again – because this man I find tremendously insightful. On the whole he is a mess, but in fragments he has such penetrating insight, which is rarely available anywhere else. He says, “Before you can reach heaven, you have to reach to hell. Unless you have fathomed hell completely, there is no way to heaven.”It looks very absurd. And he used to write in maxims; he never wrote essays explaining anything, that was not his way. Insights never come in essays, in theses; they never come for PhD, DLitt degrees. No. For a PhD degree you have to sit in a library and do a clerical job, just collecting from here and there. You can simply take a pair of scissors and if you can cut from this book and that book, this journal and that journal, and just go on collecting them in a file, sooner or later you will be a PhD. There is not much more to it.Men like Nietzsche only write maxims. One day suddenly he will write a maxim, and then for months he will not write. This is the meaning of what he says… Now, Jesus cannot understand it. Jesus says, “If you want to avoid hell, come follow me, I will take you to heaven. That’s the only way to avoid hell.” Nietzsche is saying, “If you avoid hell, heaven is already avoided, because heaven is a second step. You have missed the first step.”In another passage, a similar passage, Nietzsche says, “Before you can reach to the top of a tree and can understand the flowers blossoming there, you will have to go deep to the roots, because the secret lies there. And the deeper the roots go, the higher the tree goes.” So the greater your longing for understanding, for cosmic consciousness – because that is the ultimate lotus, the lotus paradise – then the further you will have to go to the deepest roots in the darkest underground; and the way is only one.Call it meditation, call it awareness, call it watchfulness – it all comes to the same: that you become more alert, first about your conscious mind, what goes on in your conscious mind. And it is a beautiful experience. It is really hilarious, a great panorama.In my childhood in my town there were no movies, talkies. There was no cinema hall. Now there is, but in my childhood there was not. The only thing that was available was that once in a while a wandering man would come with a big box. I don’t know what it is called. There is a small window in it. He opens the window, you just put your eyes to it and he goes on moving a handle and a film inside moves. And he goes on telling the story of what is happening.Everything else I have forgotten, but one thing I cannot forget for a certain reason. The reason, I know, was because it was in all those boxes that came through my village. I had seen every one, because the fee was just one paise. Also the show was not long, just five minutes. In every box there were different films, but one picture was always there: the naked washerwoman of Mumbai. Why did it used to be in every one? – a very fat naked woman, the naked washerwoman of Mumbai. That used to be always there. Perhaps that was a great attraction, or people were fans of that naked washerwoman; and she was really ugly. And why from Mumbai?If you start looking… Just whenever you have time, just sit silently and look at what is passing in your mind. There is no need to judge, because if you judge, the mind immediately changes its scenes according to you. The mind is very sensitive, touchy. If it feels that you are judging, then it starts showing things that are good. Then it won’t show you the naked washerwoman of Mumbai, that picture will be missed out. So don’t judge, then that picture is bound to come.Don’t judge, don’t make any condemnation, don’t make any appreciation. Be indifferent. Just sit silently looking at things, whatsoever is happening. And absurd things will be happening: a horse becomes a man… Now you need not ask why, there is no need to ask, simply see it.For anything that is happening, you have only to be a seer.That’s the strategy that helps the whole scenery to slowly disappear from the conscious mind. And when the conscious mind disappears from the screen, the subconscious starts emerging. Subconscious is more colorful, technicolor. The conscious mind is just black and white, old style. But the subconscious is very colorful, much more meaningful, much more truthful.But remember not to judge; otherwise the subconscious will slip down and you will be back into the conscious.So two things: no judgment, just simple alertness.Soon you will find these pictures also disappearing. Then the unconscious appears, which has very strange things to say to you, very mysterious. No need to be afraid; they are voices from the past, of your past lives and of other people’s past lives. They carry pictures of your past life and other people’s past life. Now you are moving into a denser forest, of a tremendous magnitude. Don’t become afraid. The voices are very strong, and it is not only voices…The unconscious remembers not only the voices, not only the pictures, it remembers all the experiences of all your senses. You will smell things that you have never smelled But sometime in a past life somewhere, you must have smelled that smell; it is still there. You may hear music that is not known to you. You may hear languages which you are absolutely unaware of. You may taste the taste of strange foods. All the five senses will supply experiences of many, many lives. You have simply to remain a seer, no judgment. Then these start disappearing.And when the collective unconscious opens, then animals and trees and birds – all are available to you. You are not separate from them. Stories like Saint Francis can be right. But there is no miracle in it. This man is perhaps the most important man in the whole of Christian history, because he talked to birds, animals, and they understood it. He would just sit on the bank of a river and start calling the fishes, and the fishes would start jumping all around him, listening to him. And he would talk to them. He would say, “Sisters, how are you?” His disciples would think he was mad, but they could not say that, because they could see that the fishes were listening, nodding their heads. Even the donkey on which he used to move he used to call “brother donkey.” He just had to say, “Brother donkey, move right” – and the donkey would move right.When he was dying, his last words were not said to any man, they were said to the donkey. He said, “Thank you, brother donkey; you have carried me your whole life and I am immensely grateful” – and there were tears in the donkey’s eyes. As Francis died the donkey died. He could not bear the separation.Now, there is nothing miraculous in it. This man has moved through the collective unconscious; perhaps just one more life and he will be able to enter the cosmic unconscious; and from there begins the upward flight.It’s very strange: if you want to go above consciousness, you have to go below consciousness. But there is only one method.My name for it is meditation.But meditation is equivalent to watchfulness, awareness, alertness.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 27 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What do you want man to do? What is right and wrong according to you? Is there something like sin and its punishment too?My concern with man is not about his doing, but about his being. And this is a very fundamental issue to be understood by you.All the religions have been concerned about man’s doings. They have been labeling a few acts as wrong, a few other acts as right, a few acts good, a few acts bad. They have not at all pondered over the real problem.Man is asleep, and when a man is asleep the question is not what he should do or should not do. The question is: he should be awakened, he should be awake.And remember, awakening is not a question of doing right, avoiding wrong; not committing sin, doing virtue.Man’s sleep is not an ordinary sleep. He walks, he talks, he does things, but it is all being done in sleep. So when I say man is asleep, I mean metaphysically, spiritually, man is asleep. He knows nothing about himself.His innermost center is in darkness, and the society, the religions, the parents, the cultures, civilizations – nobody is bothered about his being awake. Their concern is that he should do things which are comfortable to them, convenient to them.They reward you, they give you respectability, and they encourage your greed: so even in the other life, if you go on doing the right thing you will be immensely rewarded, and if you do the wrong thing you will be punished, heavily punished.Centuries of conditioning have made you ask this question. I am not at all interested in what you do, because a man who is asleep, unaware of himself, whatever he does is wrong.Let me repeat it: whatever an asleep man does is wrong. He may be doing virtuous acts: charity to the poor, opening hospitals, schools, colleges, universities; educating people, donating to every cause, helping in every calamity – but I still say whatever he does is wrong, because he is asleep. He cannot do right. In sleep it has never been possible to do right.Just the other day, Sheela brought me the news: in India, in one of the biggest cities, Bhopal, a few days ago there has been a great accident. One big factory which produces some poisonous gas – must be for military reasons – exploded. It is just in the middle of the city. Two thousand people who were close to the factory died immediately, and one hundred thousand people have been seriously injured.It is a big accident, and naturally – you can guess – Mother Teresa is running from Kolkata to Bhopal, because these people like Mother Teresa are praying every day to the Lord, “Give us an opportunity to serve.” And the Lord, their Lord, is so compassionate, he goes on giving opportunities to serve. She went to Bhopal, moved around the injured, went to the families whose people have died, and what she said to them is very important. She said, “Don’t take it as a tragedy.”This is what the religions have been doing for thousands of years: befooling people. This is a tragedy. She told people, “Don’t think of it as a tragedy, it is a great opportunity. Look positively. It has brought the best out in man. So many people are serving others, helping in every way. Look at this side of it: the situation has brought the best out in thousands of people. They may never have done anything good in their life, but they are doing it now.”But do you understand the implications of it? It means it should happen in every factory! It should happen in every city, because it brings the best out in people. What can be more beautiful than this? A great opportunity to be good, to do good, to serve those who need your service, to help those who are in a helpless condition. This is a God-given opportunity for do-gooders. And nobody objected to her!Perhaps I am the only person here, on this whole earth, who is objecting that this is befooling people. This is creating a camouflage, a bogus spiritual jargon. If God has any sense, any intelligence at all, he should find some better way to bring the best out in people. This does not seem to be very intelligent. If this is what God is doing then where is the Devil? And what will the Devil do? God has taken his job too; the Devil is unemployed.And people applauded her; she is a great saint. And what present has she brought to them? – a small statue of Mother Mary. A great help: “Pray to Mother Mary, and don’t take it as a tragedy and don’t complain that it is the fault or carelessness of certain officers concerned; no, that is not good.”Of course if those people were not careless, and those officers had not allowed this tragedy, then Mother Teresa could not be a saint. Her sainthood depends on these stupid officers, this bureaucracy. Now she is consoling people, giving them the impression that it is a God-given opportunity.Two thousand people have died, two thousand families are now on the streets; children, wives, old parents will become beggars. One hundred thousand people are seriously injured; many of them will die, and if they don’t die they will live a crippled life: somebody blind, somebody without legs, somebody without hands, somebody deaf, somebody dumb. Mother Teresa is consoling these people, giving them a Madonna, Mother Mary’s statue saying, “Pray to Mother Mary and everything will be okay – and don’t complain against the officers.”Now, that’s strange! Why? – because those officers, the government, go on showering money on her charitable trusts: “All help to Mother Teresa, all great titles of the country to Mother Teresa.” Every university is competing with the others to give honorary degrees to Mother Teresa; naturally she has to protect those people also. These people should be punished if it is their carelessness – but she is protecting them: “Don’t complain, because your complaining means you are taking things negatively. Take it positively.”So she is doing two things: consoling people – which is just rubbish, because this consolation is not going to help, the tragedy is not going to become comedy, they will have to suffer it. And secondly she is protecting those people whose fault it was. They should be really punished! But they are not to be punished, “Don’t complain against them” – because she is gathering favor with the government, gathering favor with the officials, with the hierarchy, the bureaucracy.And the last thing she did, which was her real purpose in going there, was to tell her secretary to write down all the names of the orphans. Many children have become orphans. That was her actual purpose in going there: she is in search of orphans. She has many orphanages, which are just factories to turn orphans into Catholics. You see the works, the miracles of saints!All those orphans will be taken by her. The government will be happy, the people will be happy, the city will be happy that all those poor children… Who was going to take care of them? They would have been a nuisance. And in India if two thousand people die that means at least twenty-four thousand children must have been left as orphans. This great chance she could not miss.Kolkata is far away from Bhopal – a thirty-hour journey by train – but she rushed immediately. Nobody takes note of where these orphans go on disappearing to. She goes on collecting these orphans, then where do they go on disappearing? She goes on giving them for adoption to Catholic families – but remember, only to Catholic families.One American wanted a child; he simply went for that because the doctors had said that the situation was such that he and his wife couldn’t have children; they would have to adopt. He simply went to India to get a child from Mother Teresa. But he forgot one thing, that he is a Protestant. He would have never thought about it. And when he wanted a child to adopt, the secretary asked him about his religion, because she had to fill in the form. When he said that he was a Protestant, she said, “There is a difficulty. Right now we don’t have any orphans to give for adoption.”Now, in India you don’t have any orphans…? Mother Teresa is collecting hundreds of orphans every day. And if there was no orphan, why did you want him to fill in a form in the first place? You should have told him before, “There is no orphan right now, we are helpless. We will inform you; you just leave your address.”But the secretary was willing to give him a child – just fill in the form, and you go in and choose a child – but as he was a Protestant… He is still a Christian, what to say about a Hindu, a Mohammedan or a Jaina. And those children belonged to Hindus, to Jainas, to Mohammedans.For example, in Bhopal – Bhopal is a Mohammedan city – those children will be mostly Mohammedans. They will not be given to Mohammedans, to Hindus, to Jainas, no – even a Protestant Christian is denied. And what an excuse: “There is no orphan available.” There were seven hundred orphans already inside that orphanage, and the secretary was denying that there was one orphan.These children go on increasing the Catholic population. God is gracious, compassionate: let all the factories explode! Let everybody become an orphan so Catholics go on increasing by millions, and the pope again becomes the emperor of almost the whole world.There is no wonder that the pope respects Mother Teresa and gives her all the great titles of the church. There is no wonder that she receives the Nobel Prize, because she is being recommended even by the pope. You can’t get a Nobel Prize unless you are recommended by a certain category of people. Either they have to be Nobel Prize winners, or they have to be kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers.The pope is the king of that small kingdom of the Vatican, eight square miles. He is the king of that kingdom – he has twenty soldiers, and six hundred million Catholics around the world. He has great power, and people like Mother Teresa are working everywhere to bring in more and more people.You ask me what I want man to do. First thing: I want man to recognize that he is asleep, because unless he accepts and acknowledges that he is asleep there is no possibility of waking him up. Can you wake a man who thinks he is awake? He will slap you! “Stop all this nonsense, I am awake! What are you doing?” First you have to recognize it, create a recognition.I have always loved this story:A few friends, on a full moon night, got drunk. The night was so beautiful and they wanted to enjoy it, so they drank to the full and went to the beautiful river. The boatmen had gone, leaving their boats on the bank on the river. It was the middle of the night, the full moon was just above their heads, and it was a fairyland all over.Seeing the boats, one of the friends said, “It will be good if we go in the boat, on the river. Just look! The moon is reflected in the river, and when something, a waterfowl, runs over the water or takes a dip into the water, the whole water becomes silver. The moon spreads all over the river.”They were just a little bit awake the way man is: ninety-nine percent they were drunk. They went into a boat, they took the oars and started moving out into the river. The others who were just sitting went on telling the people who were rowing the boat, “Go faster, it is so beautiful. Don’t move so slowly, make speed.” And the oarsmen were trying hard and perspiring.As the morning was coming closer, one of them said – because a cold wind started blowing and they came back to their senses a little bit – one of them said, “We must have come miles away from our place. Somebody should get out and have a look where we are, so that we can go back home. Soon the sun will be rising, and before that we have to get back; otherwise that boatman whose boat we have picked up without asking will create trouble.”One man got out and started laughing madly. They said, “Why are you laughing?”He said, “Just come here and you also will laugh.”They all climbed out – and then they sat there laughing, because they had forgotten to unchain the boat! The whole night they had rowed and had tried to go faster and faster and they were exactly where they had started. Not a single inch… The boat was tied on the bank, it was locked.This is the story of man as he is.Now, Mother Teresa must be thinking that she is doing good. I have no doubt about her intentions, but I have tremendous doubt about her wakefulness. She is not awake, she is fast asleep. In sleep at the most you can go on dreaming good dreams or bad dreams; but what does it matter? If it is a dream, whether you dream of heaven or hell, what does it matter? In the morning you will find both were dreams.In a dream you can be a thief, or you can be a monk. And of course in the dream you will enjoy being a monk and the ego that comes with it; it is part and parcel of a very polished, cultured ego. And if you are a thief, certainly, even in your dream you will feel bad that unfortunately you have to become a thief. You don’t want to become one, but situations are forcing you to become a thief even though it is a sin.You ask me: “Is there something like sin?” There is only one sin: that is not recognizing your sleep, not recognizing your state of deep hypnotic slumber. That’s the only sin. There is no other sin.Out of this one sin, millions of things can arise, but this is the root. And if this sin is there you cannot do anything right. Even if you try to do anything right you will do it for the wrong reasons, the wrong motives. The action may look right, but the motivation will be wrong. You are wrong; so from where can you get the right motivation?Now, what is Mother Teresa running around for in her old age? There should be a time of retirement even for saints. These poor saints never retire; they become senile but still nobody retires them. Nobody tells them, “Now retire, you have done enough. Now let others do some good works; otherwise you will be the only monopolist in heaven. Share with other saints also. Now retire, and we will do the good things you were doing.” But no, saints never retire.Sinners retire but saints never retire. Strange… It’s because the saint never gets tired, for the simple reason that his ego goes on becoming stronger and stronger. And he is collecting virtue; his treasure in the other world is increasing more and more. He is coming closer to God every day, so certainly he needs orphans, he needs accidents, he needs poor people.On the one hand the pope says, “The idea of class struggle is a sin. The poor have to remain poor; they should not make any effort to change the structure of the society. This is the only society that has been given to them by God. Who are you to think that you can improve upon it?“If the class structure is there it is a great opportunity, not a tragedy. If you are poor it is a great opportunity: Blessed are the poor for theirs is the Kingdom of God. If you want the Kingdom of God then don’t make any effort to change the society, to create a revolution, to create some kind of structure where there is not so much distance between the rich and the poor.”I know it will be difficult for the asleep man to create a society where there is no class at all. A classless society can only be an enlightened society. Before that, a classless society is not possible. Marx is as much asleep as you are. Communists are as much asleep as the capitalists.So in the Soviet Union, what happened? Sixty years, more than sixty years have passed. They changed the old structure; now there is nobody who is rich and nobody who is poor. That division they destroyed, but a new division has come in: between the bureaucracy – one who is in the government – and one who is just an ordinary citizen. Now all the power is in the hands of the bureaucracy: much more so than had ever been in the hands of rich people.Rich people had power because they had money; through money they could purchase anything. But in the Soviet Union, the bureaucracy has every power over every individual: to let you live or to finish you off, to keep you in the country or send you to Siberia to die in that eternal world of ice. They have power over your life and death. Such power was never in the hands of the people who had money.Yes, they had certain powers. They could have a better house than you, they could have more luxuries, more comforts than you, but they did not have the right over your life and death. If they killed you, then in the court they were treated in the same way as everyone else. Perhaps they may have managed a little bit by bribing the court, the judge, but that was very indirect, very difficult. In the Soviet Union it is blatantly naked: direct power is in the hands of the bureaucracy.I have heard that when Stalin died… Stalin remained in power perhaps longer than anybody else in the whole world. Alexander the Great died very young; he was thirty-three, the same age as Jesus was when he died. Napoleon Bonaparte died on a small island, Saint Helena, as a prisoner. Adolf Hitler committed suicide.Stalin seems to be the only man in the whole of history who ruled over the biggest of empires – because Russia is one sixth of the whole earth – for almost half a century. He had all the powers that you can imagine. He killed millions of people. Nobody could even raise a finger, because the moment you raised a finger against Stalin, the next day you disappeared.When he died Khrushchev came to power, his second man, his very right hand. And at the first communist party meeting he spoke against Stalin. He said, “I have been watching all these years what this man has been doing. He has brought back the classes; only the name has changed. There are powerful people and there are powerless people, and the distance between them is the same as it was before. In fact the distance has increased, it has become bigger, tremendously big” – because in a capitalist country a poor man has every chance to move into a higher society: he can become rich.Henry Ford was not born rich, and he became the richest man in the world, just through his own talent, his genius. When he was a child he used to polish boots for people. And when his children were born, he was already moving higher and higher, becoming richer and richer. When they came from college he said, “First, start polishing people’s shoes in front of the factory” – where he created the Ford cars – “in front of the doors, start polishing shoes.”They were shocked. They said, “What are you saying? We are your sons and we should polish the shoes of your servants, your workers?”Henry Ford said, “That’s the way I made it, and I would not like you to just inherit capital; that is below your dignity. You are a Ford. You have to earn it, you have to show your mettle.” And you will be surprised – his sons had to polish people’s shoes in front of Ford’s own factory. That man was absolutely right: those people, starting from scratch, became rich in their own right. And Ford said, “Now everything of mine belongs to you. You deserve it.” But just being a son of Henry Ford was not enough.In a capitalist society it is difficult for a poor man to rise, but it is not impossible. In fact rich people’s children, because they are born in riches, don’t know how to create wealth, and slowly, slowly their wealth disappears. By the third or fourth generation you will find them on the streets among the hippies. The poor man’s son knows what poverty is; it hurts. He puts his total energy, all his talents to work. His only focus becomes how to get out of this imprisonment of poverty.Yes, it is difficult, but not impossible. In fact, the richest people of the world come from poor families. But in a communist world it is almost impossible to enter into the elite few. It is almost impossible. First, to become a member of the communist party in the Soviet Union is very difficult.The Soviet Union is not like other countries where you pay a little money and you become a member of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, the Liberal Party or the Socialist Party. In the Soviet Union, to become a member of the Communist Party you have to prove that you are a communist every inch, that there is not even a lurking shadow of the bourgeoisie. And that you have to start proving it from your very childhood, because there are many layers of the communist party – even the kindergarten communist party!Now what do you think of that – little kids, the kindergarten school? From there the conditioning begins. And the teachers recommend who is possibly the right candidate to become, one day, a member of the communist party. Then there are youth leagues. All those kindergarten children who have come with recommendations will not be chosen for the youth league, but only a few of them: a few fortunate ones who have proved their devotion.And how do you prove your devotion? A very strange method of proving your devotion – to spy on your mother, to spy on your father, to spy on your family and to report to the communist party that your mother has been complaining against the government, that your father is deep down against communism… And it is not just a question of complaint; you are arranging murder, imprisonment – a life sentence, a death sentence for your mother and father – and you know it.But this is the only way to prove your devotion. Wives spying on husbands and reporting against them, husbands are spying against wives and reporting them. And they know what that report means. It means that tomorrow the wife will be simply missing; you cannot even find where she has gone. There is no case in a court, there is no question of appeal – she simply disappears.Either she is killed… Mostly they were killed, because Stalin never believed in unnecessarily burdening the economy of the country with people who were against communism, and if you keep them in prison you have to feed them, you have to give them clothes. And why should your country feed its enemies? What is the point? Get finished with them. Unburden the country. And he really unburdened in millions.Khrushchev was very angry, and he said, “This man is the greatest murderer in history, and it is good that he is dead. We should remove his grave from Red Square” – because when Stalin was in power, at that time he had ordered his grave to be made near Lenin’s grave in Red Square. While he was in power, the grave was already made according to his design, according to his idea. It had to be the grave of one of the greatest communists.Khrushchev said, “We have to remove that grave. It is an ugly spot.” And he removed it. Stalin’s bones were taken out and sent back to the faraway Caucasus where he was born. There, near a monastery where he was educated, is now his poor grave, made with ordinary earthen bricks. That marvelous Italian-marble grave simply disappeared from Red Square.While he was speaking to the communist party, a member at the back stood up and said, “You have been with Stalin all these years; why didn’t you say these words then?” And the man sat down.Khrushchev said, “I will answer your question; just please stand up again and say what your name is. Comrade, stand up again!” Nobody stood up again. He said, “This is my answer. Why aren’t you standing up again and saying your name? And now you know why I was silent too; because tomorrow you would disappear. If I have lived to this day, it is because I kept absolutely silent.” Even walls have ears in Russia; you cannot even whisper in your bathroom, because nobody knows… And particularly people who were in power, like Khrushchev, who was next to Stalin. His bathroom, his bedroom, everything must have been bugged. A slight suspicion and that was enough.Stalin never wanted proofs for anything; just a suspicion was enough proof for him. The idea of justice that has prevailed in the world, the whole world, is that not a single innocent man should suffer. Even if ninety-nine criminals have to be left unpunished, not a single innocent man should suffer. That has been the criterion.Stalin reversed it. He said, “Not a single criminal” – and criminal means one who is against communism – “not a single criminal should be left, even if ninety-nine innocent people have to be killed.” Just the suspicion was enough; there was no need of finding proof.And what harm was there? – because communism believes that man is only matter. Is there any harm if you dismantle your chair? Is there any harm if you take your clock apart and put the parts all over the place? Nobody can call you a criminal, although the clock was something alive, moving, and all these parts separated cannot show you the time and will not give the tick-tock of a clock.Marx’s idea about man is exactly like a clock; man is only a by-product of matter. In a certain arrangement, he speaks, talks, thinks, loves, feels – but all these are epiphenomena, not real phenomena. Put all the parts aside, take man apart: put the head on one side, leg on another side, hands there, heart here, and everything stops, nothing is left. And you can weigh all the parts, they will weigh exactly the same as the man. That is his scientific logic: that no soul has left the body. Nothing has gone, it is the same weight. You have just dismantled the organism – it was a machine.According to Marx, in summary: man is a robot. So to kill a robot who is creating a nuisance can’t be thought of as anything bad. Stalin did not think he was doing anything bad. He was serving the society, serving the great ideal of communism, bringing the classless society closer and closer. But all that he brought was a new class society, divided between the bureaucracy and the people. Now the bureaucracy is exploiting the people in every possible way, torturing them. Every property belongs to the government. There is no private property any more.In the very beginning of the revolution, that is from 1917 to 1927, for ten years, the idea was discussed continually, “Should we do the same with women also as we have done with other property?” – because a woman is property. She should not belong to a single man; all women should belong to the nation.But it seemed difficult, too difficult. The whole nation was against it. Nobody wanted his wife just to be public property like a public bench in the park or a public bus. Even the communists themselves were not ready for that, although Stalin was very much in favor of it. He treated his own wife almost like a thing; he used to beat her.I have met Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. After Stalin’s death she came to India. Just by chance I happened to be in Delhi, and the woman I was staying with… She is a rare woman. I will not tell you her name because what I am going to say refers to people who are still alive, and particularly to a person for whom I have tremendous respect. This woman is now nearabout seventy-five. I have never come across a woman that old and yet so beautiful.She was in love with J. Krishnamurti. She wanted to marry J. Krishnamurti, but Theosophists did not allow Krishnamurti even to meet with any women. They wanted him to become a world teacher, and a married world teacher does not look right – I don’t know why. Perhaps it creates the suspicion that whether you are a world teacher or not, if you have a wife she will be boss. And the world teacher should not have a boss. He is the boss. So they prevented it in every possible way. And finally J. Krishnamurti, even though he renounced the Theosophical movement – their world teacherhood that they were going to impose on him – he continued to have the idea that a man like him should not be married.This is how millions of years of conditioning goes deep. If you don’t want to marry that is perfectly okay; it is your decision to be married or not to be married. But to make it something unholy – that is strange. He still stays in this woman’s house if she is in Delhi, because she is in a very high government post. Her principal house is in Mumbai. If he is in Mumbai then he stays in her house in Mumbai.It is because of Krishnamurti that she became interested in me, because Krishnamurti was continually speaking against me to her. Naturally she became interested, because if Krishnamurti speaks against me… And he never speaks against anybody else by name, that is below him: this is a subtle kind of ego. For example, if I criticize Mahatma Gandhi, I criticize him openly. Krishnamurti criticizes him but he never mentions his name; that is below him.But with me Krishnamurti is really cross, particularly because of my sannyasins. Wherever he goes, anywhere in the world, they are sitting in the front row. And the moment he sees their red clothes and the mala, he freaks out. Then he forgets on what subject he was going to speak. Then he starts speaking against me, against sannyas, against the rosary, against disciplehood and against masters.In Mumbai I have many sannyasins and they used to ask me what to do. I said, “Just go and sit in front. There is nothing you have to do, just smile and enjoy it.” And the more they enjoyed it, the more he would beat his head; he would just go out of his senses. He would forget all awareness. He would act just like a bull does when you wave a red handkerchief or a red umbrella or a red flag: the bull becomes mad. I think Krishnamurti must have been a bull in his last life.So he was continually speaking against me to this woman. And the woman’s sisters, sisters-in-law – her whole family became very much interested in me; they were all my people. Krishnamurti was speaking against me and all the family was speaking for me. Finally the woman decided that she had to meet me. She invited me, saying, “If you pass through Delhi, stay with me this time.”I was staying with her and she told me, “Svetlana is here. Would you like to see her?”I said, “That’s very good. I wanted to meet Stalin, but no harm; some part of Stalin…at least royal blood!”When I asked her, “How was he behaving with your mother?” she just started weeping.She said, “He was a monster. He used to beat my mother. He used to beat me for any small thing and we could not say a single word against him, because he would do the same to us as he would have done to anybody else – he would kill us. We were treated just like servants.”Even Stalin’s wife could not enter his room without knocking and asking permission. She had to make an appointment – and they lived just in the same house. Stalin was very much in favor of what he called women’s liberation. And people thought it was not women’s liberation; it was just making all women prostitutes. Everybody was against it. All of the communist party’s high-ranking people were against it; not a single person was in favor. That’s why the policy was dropped.Otherwise everything that was private became public – and by public it simply meant it became state-owned. Your house, your horse, your hands, your land – everything became state-owned.Hence, in the Soviet Union it is not communism. I call it state capitalism. The state became the only “monopolist.” In America there are many capitalists; in the Soviet Union there is only one capitalist. And certainly to have many is better. Rather than giving all the power to one person… And it is like a pyramid: the communist party is the base and then slowly the pyramid becomes smaller and smaller with higher bureaucrats and finally and ultimately comes the central committee of the communist party with only twelve persons.One of the central committee will be the president and one of them will be the prime minister. And the prime minister is the real power; the president is only a rubber stamp. He has to sign anything that the prime minister decides. Even if the prime minister decides that the president has to be sentenced to death, he has to sign it. He has no other power except to stamp it. Whatsoever comes from the prime minister, he stamps it. This is a new class structure.Now, the pope seems not to be aware that to call the class struggle a sin means you are supporting not only America, you are also supporting the communist countries. Of that he is not aware. That’s the situation of a man who is asleep. He does not know the implications of his own words, his own actions, because class exists everywhere on the earth. There is no country which is classless.And yes, it is needed that one day the world becomes classless. And by a classless society I don’t mean communism. I simply mean enlightened people who can see that there is no need for poverty to exist; we have enough technology to destroy it. There is no need to destroy the capitalist. All that is needed is to spread capitalism so that everybody becomes a capitalist.Now, my approach is just the opposite of communism.In Russia, in China, in other communist countries what have they done? They have destroyed all the capitalists and made the communist party the only monopolizing agency, the only capitalist alive. And what have they distributed? Poverty! – because after sixty-five years Russia is still poor, still starving, still without enough clothes, still without enough medicine. Seventy percent of their budget goes to the army. Only on thirty percent of the budget does the country live. Seventy percent is absorbed by arms and the army and the piling up of nuclear weapons.It is such a small thing to see: if we stop the idea of war, which the pope does not call a sin… War is okay. He does not include war in his long list of sins. War is okay – because if he says war is a sin then all the popes up to now have been sinners because they have been continually warring, crusading against Mohammedans, against Jews, against everybody. And they have been saying that the crusade is a holy war!No war is holy. No war can ever be holy. How can destruction be holy? How can killing be holy? How can butchering, slaughtering innocent people, children, women, old people, be holy? It must be holy in the same sense as the Holy Ghost: it is absolutely unholy.But the classes are there. The capitalist wants the classes to remain because he feels that without the poor he will not be rich. That is wrong! That is absolutely wrong! Do you think that if poor people breathe then you cannot breathe? All that you need is enough air.Certainly if air is in short supply then only rich people will breathe, because you will have to pay for it. Of course millions of poor people will die because they cannot pay – they don’t have money to breathe. It is just like in a desert: you have to pay for water.When Alexander came to India he met a fakir. The name of the fakir, he reports in his diary, does not seem to be Indian, but perhaps he misspelled it, mispronounced it, which is natural – just like me!The Oregonians are very angry because I pronounce it Oreg-on; it should be Oreg-un. I cannot do that. I will go on pronouncing it Oregon. Oregun? – sounds like son-of-a-gun. It doesn’t feel right.Alexander pronounces the name of the fakir, Dandamesh. Dandamesh is not an Indian name at all, it cannot be. It must have been Dandami. And there is in India a sect of monks who carry a staff in their hands called a danda: danda means “a big staff.” These monks are called Dandadhari, staff holders; that is their symbol, their sect’s symbol. Perhaps that man was carrying a danda and was known as Dandami: one who always keeps a danda. He was a naked man but the danda was absolutely necessary.You may not understand why it is so. India is so full of dogs, and for certain reasons dogs are very much against monks, policemen, postmen: anybody who has a uniform. All the dogs are against uniforms. I don’t know whether it is true in other countries or not, but in India… Indian dogs are absolutely against uniforms; anybody in uniform will be in trouble. And because of nonviolence, dogs cannot be killed, so their population goes on increasing.This staff was invented so that the poor monk, who has nothing, can at least protect himself against the dogs, because naked men also look like they are in a uniform, to the dog. In a way it is a uniform. All the naked monks, and there are many… And at the time when Alexander went to India, India was full of naked monks. The poor naked monk had to keep the danda, the staff.He met Dandami, and a small dialogue between the two happened. Dandami was so blissful that Alexander felt jealous. He writes in his memoirs, “I felt jealous. That man had nothing except a staff and he looked so fulfilled, so contented, so immensely rich that I, Alexander the Great, the very great conqueror of the whole world, standing before him, looked like a beggar. The very flavor of the man was that of an emperor.”Alexander said to Dandami, “I would love it if you can accept my invitation. I would like to take you to Greece, particularly, because my teacher” – his teacher was Aristotle – “has asked me when I was leaving for India, ‘If you come across a real sannyasin – because a sannyasin is something Eastern – if you find a real, authentic sannyasin, invite him as a royal guest and bring him here. I would love to see and meet a sannyasin. I have heard so much; so many rumors have been coming about sannyasins.’”Dandami laughed and he said, “What can you give to me?”Alexander said, “Whatever you ask.”He said, “If I ask for half of your kingdom?”For a moment Alexander was stunned; what to say? But before he could say anything, Dandami said, “Okay, I ask for the whole kingdom. Don’t be worried. I can see your worry – it is not up to your standards to give just half the kingdom. Okay, you give me the whole kingdom.”Alexander said, “You are asking too much. I had never thought…”But Dandami said, “Do you think your kingdom is too much? In a desert you would give it for one glass of water; that’s the value of your kingdom. Keep it, I was just joking. I am not going anywhere. If Aristotle wants to see a sannyasin he will have to come here. The thirsty go to the well, not the well to the thirsty. Tell Aristotle that you have met me. But your kingdom is not worth more than a glass of water. In the last stage in a desert, at the last moment when you are thirsty and dying, and somebody says, ‘Here is a glass of water, but I want your whole kingdom’ what will you say?”Alexander had to accept it: “Yes, I would give the whole kingdom for one glass of water.”When water is scarce then of course rich people will be able to have control over water. If air becomes one day scarce, as is possible, because with more and more great happenings like Bhopal – that great opportunity, where the best comes out of man… The air is becoming polluted, so much so that soon you will see that only rich people will be capable of breathing – not everybody – because they will have stores of oxygen and oxygen masks. Just let there be a nuclear war anywhere and you will see that rich people will have facilities to protect themselves, and poor people will simply be dying.There is no need for war; there is no need for poverty. We have enough money, enough resources, but seventy percent of the whole world’s resources goes toward war. If that seventy percent is prevented from going toward bringing death to humanity, there is no need for anybody to become less rich. The living of all poor people can be raised higher. Marx’s idea, Lenin, Stalin, Mao – their whole philosophy is to bring the richer people down to the level of the poor people. That they call communism; I call it stupidity.My idea is to raise every poor person higher and higher and bring him to the level of the richest person. There is no need for poverty.I will also have a classless society, but it will be of rich people. If Marx succeeds, he will also have a classless society – but phony. First, it will be of poor people. Secondly, because of those poor people, you will need a very strong and powerful bureaucracy to keep them down; otherwise they will revolt.In America there is a possibility of a revolution, but in the Soviet Union you cannot conceive even the idea of revolution. You cannot talk with anybody about revolution. The very word will be enough for you to evaporate in some gas chamber.Russia is not classless. America is not classless. Yes, there are different classes, but nobody is classless. And when the pope says that the idea of a class struggle is a sin, he certainly implies that the idea of creating a classless society is also a sin. No, the poor should remain poor, the rich should remain rich.The very idea of class helps the so-called religions, because if everybody is rich and everybody has everything that is needed and everybody lives comfortably and luxuriously, who is going to bother about your heaven? Instead people will pray, “Please, send me back to the earth. I don’t want to come to your heaven.”In the first place heaven will be a very ancient place – perhaps even bullock carts may not be available there, because I have never heard that God created bullock carts. And the spinning wheel… I sometimes feel sad for Mahatma Gandhi: if he has reached heaven, what will he be doing? – because the spinning wheel is not available there. There is no mention in any religious scripture that the spinning wheel is available to the angels.Mahatma Gandhi will be simply dying to get back to the earth to find his spinning wheel again, because the whole day he was spinning. In the train, traveling, he was spinning; talking to people, he was spinning; dictating letters, he was spinning; dictating articles, he was spinning. He carried the spinning wheel everywhere.There is no need for poverty, but the spinning wheel will keep people poor. Even if you spin for twelve hours a day you will not be able to create enough clothes for yourself. And there are other things to do, not just make clothes. You will need to eat something, drink something. And there are many other things you will need, not just clothes. Even if after twelve hours spinning you can make enough clothes to cover your body somehow, by that time the body will have disappeared because there will not be any food.Gandhi wanted cultivation also to be done by ancient methods. That would mean that India had to fall back to Buddha’s time, twenty-five centuries back. Then there were only twenty million people in India. Now there are seven hundred million people in India. You would have to cut out six hundred and eighty million people completely. And this will be nonviolent?Yes, two million people, twenty million people are capable of living by ancient methods – a little food they can manage – but what to do with seven hundred million people? By the end of this century India will be the biggest country in the world, it will have gone ahead of China. Right now China has the biggest population: India will have passed beyond that by the end of this century.But there will be more orphans, more poor people to be converted to Catholicism, to be made Christians, and more Saint Teresas.No, a man asleep cannot do right. You ask me what is right, what is wrong?I say to you to be awake is right. To be asleep is wrong. I don’t determine acts wrong and right as such. My focus is your being. My effort is that you are there, in your being.Then whatever you do is right.A Zen monk used to steal – and he was a great master – but I say it was right because he was fully awake. Now, stealing in itself does not matter; whether it is right or wrong. It is a question of who is doing it. And why was this master stealing? He had never said why in his whole life.All his disciples suffered for it because everybody was telling them, “What kind of master have you got? He talks about great things and then suddenly one day you find him stealing some small thing. And he always gets caught. Even ordinary thieves don’t always get caught. And you say he is fully aware, careful, alert. And we understand, because even his disciples have a different quality surrounding them. And we know your master, we see him. We are surprised – why should he steal?”And the disciples used to ask him and he would simply laugh. At last, when he was dying, a disciple said, “Now at least tell us why you were doing this stupid thing. And you have not been stealing big treasures or anything, just somebody’s cup and saucer, somebody’s coat, somebody’s shoes, even one shoe! – which is meaningless. What were you going to do with one shoe? And then too you would be caught. And the judges are tired of you, the jailers are tired of you.”At the last moment he said, “I was stealing because nobody takes care of those thieves and prisoners inside the jail. That’s a great place to teach awareness; and those people are very innocent. And I love them because I have found them getting the idea more quickly than the so-called ordinary people. So I have been stealing and going inside the jail because that was the only way to get in. But those idiot judges would not send me for a long time, for two months, three months, because I am a great Zen master.“I used to tell them, ‘Give me as long a term as you can manage,’ and they would say, ‘What kind of man are you? We respect you. What do you want for just stealing one shoe – that we should send you for your whole life? Fifteen days will do.’”He used to quarrel: “No, not fifteen days. At least three months, four months.”“But for what?” they said.He simply said, “I love to be there. Outside I don’t like it at all.”The jailers were tired, and they would see him and say, “Again!”He said, “Where to go? Outside I don’t like it at all. Inside the jail looks almost like my home.”And in fact it was his home because almost his whole life he had lived there. For just a few days he would be out, and then soon he would be in again. But he changed thousands of people inside the jail. He said, “Where can you get so many people? In the monastery people come, but not in such quantity; and not such qualitatively innocent people.”So to me it is not a question of what you do: the act is neither right nor wrong, the act is neutral. It depends on who does it, that person’s integrity, awareness. If an awakened man is doing it, it is right. Otherwise whatever you do, it is going to be like Mother Teresa’s work: on the surface looking really great; deep down just third-rate.You also ask: “Is there something like sin and its punishment?” I have told you there is only one sin: that is unawareness. And you are being punished every moment for it. There is no other punishment.Do you want more? Your suffering, your misery, your anxiety, your anguish – and you are still hoping to be thrown in hell? You are not satisfied with all the misery that you are going through? Do you think hell is going to be better than Oregon? What more punishment is there?Each moment of unawareness carries its own punishment, and each moment of awareness carries its own reward. They are intrinsic parts, you cannot divide them.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 28 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,It seems that all the pioneers in art and science have reached the unknown spaces through some kind of obsession. What kind of obsessions has the new religious man?Science, art, and other dimensions open to the human mind are all one-dimensional – hence the obsession. The mind moves in one direction, dropping all others. It chooses a single point to be focused on, against the whole of life, hence the obsession. Concentration is obsession, but there is no other way – science and art can work only obsessively.For example, a man like Albert Einstein… He is a man of tremendous intelligence, a superb genius, but he is obsessed. He is so much in his own dimension, the world of stars, the universe, that by and by he becomes completely blind to everything else. He forgets when he has to go to sleep, he forgets when he has to come out of his bathroom.Sometimes for six hours Einstein used to remain in his bathtub – till his wife started making too much fuss, knocking on the door. And she was understanding, hence she tolerated as much as was possible – but six hours in the bathtub! And she would be sitting with his lunch getting cooler and cooler and colder and colder, and she knew it was not good to disturb him because even while he was in his bathtub playing with the soap bubbles, his mind was moving into depths of the universe.He discovered his theory of relativity in his bathroom. He used to say, “Don’t disturb me. Nothing is more important. When I am moving in a certain direction, and I am coming close to the clue, and you knock on the door… Let lunch be cold, throw it away, because just for your lunch you have distracted me. I was just getting close; now I am as far away as I was before. And nobody knows when again I will come so close to the point. It is not within my hands.” Now, this man is certainly obsessed.Edison was a great genius; perhaps nobody else has so many discoveries to his name, to his credit, as Edison: one thousand discoveries. But he was so obsessed that once he forgot his own name. That is a very rare possibility, most improbable – forgetting one’s own name! Then you can forget anything.It was before the First World War, when, for the first time in the world, ration cards were invented, and he had gone to take his ration. He was standing in a line and people went on moving forward. When his number came and he was at the front of the line, they called again and again, “Thomas Alva Edison, is there anybody by the name of Thomas Alva Edison?” And he looked here and there: who is this Thomas Alva Edison?One neighbor standing behind, far back in the line, said, “What are you looking at? You are Thomas Alva Edison, I know you.”He said, “If you say so, then certainly I must be, because you are such a nice guy, you can’t lie.”What happened to him? How did he forget his name? Even standing in the queue for the ration card, he was not there. He was in the world of electricity. He was figuring out things which had no concern with the place where he was standing or with the ration card or with the person named Thomas Alva Edison.It is said… Perhaps it is just a joke, but it is possible that if a man can forget his own name it may be true and not a joke. He was going on a journey. He kissed his maidservant thinking she was his wife, and patted his wife thinking she was the maidservant. They both were shocked. But he said, “What is the matter? Why are you both looking shocked? Aren’t you my wife and isn’t she my maidservant?” And he was not joking; he was simply not there.Obsession means you are possessed by some idea so totally that everything else becomes absolutely unimportant, everything else falls into darkness. Only one spot remains lighted, and it goes on growing narrower and narrower and narrower. That’s the way of discovery. When it comes to be the narrowest, you have found the center for which you have been looking for years. But when your focus is narrowing, and when the circle of your focus is becoming smaller and smaller, what about you? You are also becoming narrower and narrower – one-pointed. The whole universe disappears for you.The scientist is bound to be obsessed: the greater the scientist, the bigger the obsession. Hence, obsession is not a disease for a scientist, it is absolutely necessary. It is his way of working. If you relieve him of his obsession he will be an ordinary man, not a scientist.It is defined, that science knows more and more about less and less. The object of knowledge becomes less and less, and your knowledge of it becomes more and more. If the definition is stretched to its logical conclusion, it means science ultimately will come to a point where it knows everything about nothing. That will be the logical conclusion.And science is coming closer to that point where it knows all about nothing, because “less and less” is finally going to become nothing. And knowledge about “more and more” is finally going to become all.The situation of religion is just the opposite. It knows less and less about more and more. Obviously a religious man becomes more and more nonobsessed. The more he becomes religious, the less obsessed he is. His method is to know less and less about more and more. His ultimate conclusion is to know nothing about all. That’s why Bodhidharma says, “I know nothing.” Socrates says, “I know nothing.”Nothing about what? – about all.The focus is no longer there. The religious man is just a presence opening into all dimensions simultaneously.Art is similar to science. Everything except religion is bound to be a kind of an obsession, for the simple reason that you have to go deeper and deeper to find the source of something; but your vision becomes narrower, and everything else starts falling out of your vision. You don’t see, you become more and more blind about everything else except the one thing with which you are obsessed.The painter, while painting, is not aware of anything; the poet also.One of the greatest poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, used to lock himself in his room or in his porch for days together. He was not to be disturbed for food or anything. Nobody knew what he was doing inside his room because he had locked it from the inside. Sometimes three days would pass and the whole family would be in a panic, wondering whether that man was still alive or dead. But there was no way to disturb him. They would all move around outside his room just to figure out if there was some noise inside or not, at least some indication that he was still alive.When he was asked, “Why do you do it?” he said, “Unless I forget the whole world, and my family…” His family was a big family. His father was one of the richest men in Bengal, his grandfather was even richer. The British government had given them the title of rajah, the king, although they were not kings. But they had so much land and so much property and so much money that they were equivalent to any king; they had their own kingdom.There were one hundred people in the family. Rabindranath writes in his autobiography: “There were many people that I never came to know who they were. Guests used to come and then never go, and nobody would bother about it. Faraway relatives would appear – nobody had heard about them, they just used to declare that they were faraway cousins. That was perfectly okay, they were allowed in the family. They stayed in the family, they lived in the family, and they were so rich that nobody bothered whether these people should work or anything.So, Rabindranath says, “In that family it was always a marketplace. It was impossible to be in that space where poetry becomes possible. It comes only when you are alone. It is very shy, it is very feminine; it won’t come in a crowd. It won’t come if you are concerned with something else. It will come only when you are concerned only with it. It is very possessive, just like the feminine. Of course, as graceful as the feminine, and as shy as the feminine, but of course, as possessive too.”He said, “When I am possessed I don’t want any disturbance. So many times I have missed, and a half poem has remained half. I could not manage that space again; the remaining lines never came. And I am not a poet who will compose poetry just intellectually. If it comes from the beyond, I am receptive.”And that beyond is really within your unconscious; it comes from there. But it looks like it is coming from the beyond.Now, if you cure the poet of obsession, you kill him. Sigmund Freud is not needed by poets and scientists and artists. He will destroy them all. He will psychoanalyze them, disperse their obsession, and they will be reduced into ordinary human beings. But religiousness is not one-dimensional, hence there is no need for any obsession. In fact, if you are obsessed you cannot be religious.Yes, these people – scientists, poets, painters, musicians, dancers – have sometimes reached into unknown spaces through their obsession. But those unknown spaces are not spiritual spaces; they are within the mind, and they belong to some part below the conscious mind, either to the unconscious or to the collective unconscious or to the cosmic unconscious.The deeper the space is, the more unknown it is. But just because it is unknown does not mean that you have touched something spiritual. It is unknown but part of the unconscious world of your mind – it is not spiritual. It is tremendously exciting because it is so unknown. You have entered into an unknown corner of your being.It is just a tremendous discovery, but still it is not religious. It won’t bring you to the ecstasy and the blessing of a religious man. On the contrary, it may create a tremendous anguish in you, a tension which is unbearable, a nightmare which is pure suffering. Hence, you will find poets, musicians, scientists, in a kind of anguish. What they are doing is certainly a kind of fulfillment to them, but it does not bring solace to the soul.Albert Einstein, before dying, said, “If I am born again I would prefer to be a plumber than to be a physicist.” What anguish he must have suffered, that he is ready to become a plumber and does not want to be a physicist again! – because any obsession is a torture. You are being stretched. It is not a harmonious growth of your being because it is one-dimensional. It is as if a man’s head starts growing and becoming bigger and bigger and bigger; the whole body shrinks and the head becomes so big that he can only stand on his head, there is no other way. The body cannot support the head.In Japan they have dolls called daruma dolls. Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma. Those dolls are beautiful. They represent Bodhidharma: their bottom is heavy, very heavy, so you throw the doll in any way, and it will always sit in the lotus posture again. Because the base is heavy and the head is light, and the whole body is light, it cannot remain in any other position. If you put it in any other position it will immediately turn and sit in the lotus posture. The daruma doll was created because of a certain statement of Bodhidharma. He said, “When you become really centered in your being, nothing in the whole of existence can create even a slight trembling in you. No fear is possible. And when you are centered in your being, even if the whole of existence wants to throw you upside down, it is impossible; you will always come rightside up.” That gave the idea of the daruma doll.The religious man is multidimensional. All his windows and all his doors are open. His consciousness is available to everything.He is not looking for a certain discovery, he is not looking even for God. That is why I am continually saying to you, “There is no God, don’t look for him otherwise you will be obsessed. That’s why I call all the religions that have existed up to now pseudo-religious: they are obsessed, just like anybody else – in fact, more obsessed.What is a Tibetan monk doing his whole life? – just repeating the name of Buddha. If that is not an obsession, then what can be an obsession? – and a useless obsession too. If Albert Einstein is obsessed, at least he contributes to the world. He suffers, but he gives something to the world.These Tibetan monks, what have they given to the world? The Hindu monks, what have they given to the world? What is their contribution? Of the Christian monks, the Catholic monks alone are one million in number. One million monks! And what is their contribution? They are just burdens on humanity – obsessed people, but obsessed with something that does not exist; hence there is no contribution.The scientist is obsessed with something that really exists – he is obsessed with some objective reality. The poet is obsessed with something of subjective reality. But your pseudo-religious man is obsessed with a God which does not exist, and out of a nonexistent God what are you going to get? Where are you going to reach? These monks are moving in circles their whole life. They are obsessed.So let me make it clear to you. If you find a religious man obsessed, then that is enough proof that he is not religious. A really religious man is not obsessed at all. He is open to the whole. And he is not concerned in any way to discover something, to create something: a song, a painting, a dance, a sculpture. No, he is not concerned.It is possible that a really religious man may create a song, but that is just play; he is not serious about it. It is just… You are sitting on the beach and you start playing and making a statue out of wet sand. You are not obsessed with it; there is no need to complete it. And when you leave you may give a hit to the statue that you have been creating for hours.This was not an obsession, you were just being playful. Sitting alone… You were not doing something serious. A religious man sometimes composes poetry or music or dance or a statue or a painting, but they are all just games.There are millions of statues in the East so beautiful that Michelangelo would feel jealous, but the sculptors have not even signed their name: that would become a serious affair. Millions of statues of the same caliber and quality as those of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo – but nobody knows who made them. The people who made them were just enjoying, playing. If something comes out of play, you cannot claim it is your creation and that you have to sign it.Who made the Ajanta caves? – the Ellora caves? Who made the Khajuraho temples? Who made the Konarak temples? There is no way to find out. The people who made such tremendous beauty, incomparable, were not concerned at all to leave even a single trace behind. They enjoyed making it, of course, but that was all. It was not an obsession.If you go to the Ajanta caves, which are Buddhist caves, where for thousands of years Buddhist monks must have been working… Many caves are incomplete. I used to go there, and I asked the guides – different guides – again and again… There were many guides, and I would always choose a different one so I could torture him. Incomplete caves, incomplete statues, Buddhas only half-made… And I would ask, “What was the matter?” And they would have no explanation.Somebody said, “Perhaps the artist died.”I said, “There were so many other artists – there must have been thousands of artists for so many caves; each cave must have needed hundreds of artists to make it – couldn’t they even complete a Buddha? Just the body is there, the head was just being started. This looks a little disrespectful to Buddha. You should complete it.”And they would say, “What can we do? Nobody knows who made them. Nobody knows why they stopped in the middle.”I said, “I know, that’s why I am asking. This whole thing was just a big game. The person who was making it was not obsessed, otherwise he would have completed it. If he was dying, he would have taken a promise from a friend to complete it.”The obsessional man is a perfectionist. He will not leave anything incomplete, he will make it entire; he will not rest till it is complete. But to a religious man… They played as long as they enjoyed it. The moment they felt it was time to stop this game, they stopped the game. And because they stopped the game, no other artist – they were all religious people – would interfere with it.Anybody could have completed it; just a little work was needed and it could have been completed. It was almost complete, but nobody interfered with it because that was trespassing. If that man wanted his Buddha to remain this way, it was his business. And that man may have started something else, because it was all play.A religious man can create playfully but cannot be serious.Seriousness is part of obsession. For example, Karl Marx is the ideal obsessional man. His whole life he spent in the British Museum library. He had no actual experience of poverty; he had never been part of the proletariat, the laborers for whom he was going to be the messiah. He had not a single friend who was a laborer.He had only one friend, who was a capitalist, Friedrich Engels. And he had to be friendly toward Engels because who was going to feed him? His obsession was to create the whole philosophy of communism, in its entirety, so there would be no need for anybody else to add anything. He was a Jew – and somehow it is very difficult to get rid of your conditioning. Although he became an atheist, denied God, denied the soul, a Jew is a Jew – he wanted to make communism absolutely complete.Before the museum library was open, he was standing there at the door. The librarian would come after him; before he came, Marx was waiting. And the whole day he was in the library. The library would be closed, and the librarian would be persuading him, “Now, please stop. Come tomorrow.”And Marx would say, “Just wait a few minutes longer; something is still incomplete. I have to complete this note.”In the beginning they used to be nice to him. Finally they found this was not going to help: they had to forcibly throw him out of the library. Four people would take him out, and he would be shouting, “Just a few minutes longer! Now, are you mad, or what? What are you doing? Tomorrow I will have to work hours to find those few sentences that I could write just now. Just wait!”But the library has to be closed at a certain time, and those people have to go to their homes. They are just servants. They don’t care about your communism and what philosophy you are writing. And you have been doing this for twenty years, thirty years, forty years! Forty years continuously! And sometimes it used to happen that he would not eat. The food would be with him, because he used to come with his food so that he did not have to go home or to a hotel and waste time.So he would be just eating and referring to encyclopedias and books: with one hand he would be continually writing, and with the other hand he would be eating. And sometimes he forgot to eat; and as he became older, many times it happened that he was taken not to his home but to the hospital, because he was found unconscious: hungry, continuously reading, writing, reading, writing.One feels sad that nobody reads this poor Karl Marx’s book, Das Kapital – nobody! I have not come across a single communist who has read it from the first page to the last. Perhaps I am the only person who has read it from the first page to the last – just to see what kind of madman this Karl Marx was. And he was certainly a madman – so obsessed with economics, with exploitation, that he forgot the whole world.He forgot small things. He was moving into the higher realms of mathematical theorizing, and he forgot simple mathematics, simple economics. He was a chain-smoker; he was reading, writing – and smoking. His wife, his physician, his friend Engels were all worried that this smoking would kill him.One day he came home with big boxes of a certain cigarette that had just come on the market. His wife could not believe it: “Are you going to open a shop? Are you going to sell cigarettes? So many big boxes!”And he was so happy. He said, “You don’t understand. I have found this new cigarette, just introduced on the market. And the cigarette that I was smoking was costing double. Now with this cigarette you smoke one cigarette, and you save so much money; you smoke two cigarettes and you save so much money again. The more you smoke, the more money is saved! And I am going to smoke them because everybody has been torturing me, saying, ‘You don’t earn.’ Now you will see how much money is saved.”The wife thought, “Your economics…!” She informed his friend Engels, and called him to come immediately. “Your friend seems to have gone completely mad, because this stupid thing even I can understand. How will money be saved? But he does not listen and he is just in his room smoking two cigarettes together, to save money!”Engels came, took the cigarettes from his mouth and said, “Are you mad? What are you doing?”He said, “I am just trying to do something so that I need not depend on you: I am saving money.”It was so difficult to explain to him, “Nothing will be saved, you will simply kill yourself. Yes, in figures it looks as if you smoke one cigarette and half the money is saved, but in actuality there is no money saved. And just to save that money you will be smoking double, treble, four times the number of cigarettes. So in fact you will be wasting more money than you were wasting before. And money is not the question,” Engels said, “I take care of it. You need not be worried about it.” He was a millionaire, owned factories, and he loved Karl Marx.But Marx was so obsessed with making the system complete. And of course he has left a complete system; after Marx there has been no addition to it. To add anything to it, first you will have to read him, and that is going to drive you nuts.Aristotle has created the whole system of logic; that was his obsession. Just a single man… His whole life, whole obsession was this: that the system of logic that he was creating should be complete; he should leave it as a closed chapter. So for future generations, for the whole future eternity, he would remain the logician, the only logician. And he completed a system. Of course he was obsessed. Day and night he was working: he wouldn’t sleep until he fell asleep on his books. But these people are not religious people.You ask me, what kind of an obsession will the new religious man have? The new religious man is simply the religious man. The old religious man was not religious, he only pretended to be religious. He made religion also an obsession. He was more obsessed than the scientist, than the painters and poets – because at least poets were going to the coffee house, meeting with the friends, doing things other than poetry. Painters were not only painting, they were doing a thousand and one other things too. But these pseudo-religious people were not doing anything else. They closed themselves in cells, in monasteries, and all that they were doing was nagging God.Nietzsche said, “God is dead.” Nobody asked him, “Who killed him?” I know: these so-called religious people! They nagged him for centuries. And all kinds of religious people, in all languages, nagging a single poor God – he must have committed suicide. His suicide is more probable than a natural death. He cannot die a natural death; he must have committed suicide.But those people are still after him. Even in his grave he will be tossing and turning, because the Catholic is shouting in his ear, the Protestant is shouting in his ear, and then come the witnesses of Jehovah, who can drive anybody nuts. All these people, all around the world, day and night, year in, year out, after just one single poor old God. These people must have provoked the desire for suicide in him.It is a known fact that God never created anything after he created man. I have been wondering why. Why did he stop with man? Up to man’s creation; everything was good. The horses were not becoming monks. The donkeys were not becoming priests. The monkeys were not declaring themselves popes. God was happy. It is said that he created each thing and said, “Good” – just the way I say, “Good.” He must have learned it from me because I don’t know anybody else who says good the way I say good. But when he created man he didn’t say that.He must have lost his nerve – “What have I done?” – because immediately man must have created the business of the so-called religions. He must have caught hold of his feet immediately: “God, my Lord…” Since then nobody has heard about him, where he is. Either he escaped to the farthest star – and physicists say those stars are running farther away; perhaps it is because of God.Those stars are not static there. That was the idea up to this century, that the stars are static there, far away, but they are there. Now physicists say that they are not there. Where you see the stars in the night, there they may have been millions of light-years ago. The light has reached your eyes tonight, but light takes time to travel.Where you see a certain star tonight. one thing is certain: it is not there. It may have been sometime far, far back – perhaps when the earth was not made, when even your solar system was not in existence, the star was there. That day the light started moving toward the nonexistent earth and the nonexistent sun, and it has arrived today. That much time it took to reach. Meanwhile the star is not sitting there. The light is coming toward you and the star is going farther away with the same speed as light – that is, at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, the light is coming toward you and the star is going away from the point where it was.Perhaps God is riding on the farthest star and running as fast and as far away as possible from all these prying monks and religious people and churches, temples, mosques, synagogues. But it is good to say that there is no God, it saves God all the trouble. And one day it will save man also from this stupid obsession.The religious man has no obsession. His life is simple, natural, spontaneous, moment-to-moment. He has no great ideas that he wants to bring to the world. He has no great ideologies that he wants to impose on humanity.He is a simple man. That’s why it is very difficult to find a religious man, because he will be so simple and so ordinary that you are going to miss him. He won’t have any talent. He will not be a Picasso, he will not be an Einstein, he will not be a Stalin; he won’t have any kind of talent. You will not be able to judge his genius because his genius is unobsessed, so he cannot produce science, he cannot produce new discoveries, new inventions.It is not just a coincidence that in the East, where religion has existed for at least ten thousand years… And there have been a few authentically religious men. Of course there has not yet been an authentic religion; but here and there, once in a while, there have been authentic religious men.But the East has not been able to create science. Do you think Buddha had not the genius equivalent to Albert Einstein? He had a far bigger, higher, deeper genius than any Albert Einstein could ever have. But he is not obsessed, hence his genius does not move in one direction. His genius becomes a fragrance around him, becomes a light around him. Those who have eyes can see the light. Those who have ears can hear the music around him, can hear the silence that surrounds him, can smell the fragrance of the man.But Buddha is not going to invent a computer. He is not obsessed; he is absolutely unobsessed. So you can feel his genius, but you cannot see it reflected in some objective achievement. What is his achievement? Far smaller people have achieved much more. He has not achieved anything, but he has been just himself. If you can call it an achievement, then call it an achievement. But it is not achievement.What he is, he has always been. An achievement means something that was not there and now is there. But to realize oneself; to know oneself, is not to bring any new thing into existence. It has been there; whether you know it or not does not make any difference to its existence. It has been there. It is there. Yes, there was a time when you were keeping your back to it, and now you have taken a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and you are facing it – but nothing new has come into existence.You can feel that experience – yes, it is an experience. All that you need is to be receptive, available, open, because a man like Buddha cannot even knock on your doors: even that will be interfering with somebody else’s being.Buddha can stand before your doors and wait till eternity: someday you may open the door, someday you will invite him in. Without your invitation he is not going to come in. There is not a question of ego. It is your house, you are the host, and unless you invite him it is not right to trespass on your privacy in any way.Buddha became enlightened – but for seven days he remained silent. And he gave many arguments why he remained silent for seven days; in fact he wanted to remain silent forever. Later on when he was asked again and again why he had remained silent for seven days and then had spoken, he said, “Even to speak is to interfere; let the other understand the silence. And if he cannot understand the silence, do you think he will understand my words? – because my words will be far away from my silence, they won’t be representative. There is every possibility he may be misguided by my words, and I may be helpless to prevent it. In silence if somebody comes to me, he cannot misinterpret it. He may understand, he may not understand; there are only two possibilities, and I will not be responsible for sending him on a track which was not my intention at all. But my words can take him in a direction which is not the direction I am pointing at.”So for seven days he remained silent and people asked, “Why did you speak?”He said, “Now, this you will have to just take on faith, if you trust me. But there is no need to accept it, because it is meaningless. I was persuaded by other enlightened beings who are in the cosmos. But this you will have to take it on faith, unless you reach that state.” He insisted, “This should not be part of my teachings; I am just fulfilling your curiosity. You can reject it because it is not an essential part of my teaching. But if you insist on asking why I spoke, then I have to answer you.”Buddha said, “People who have become enlightened before persuaded me, argued with me. They said, ‘In thousands of years a man comes to the state of being where you are. Even if out of a hundred people, one person understands your words rightly, that is enough. Don’t be worried about the ninety-nine because they will go astray even without hearing you. They are bound to go astray.“‘If they can go astray even hearing you, then what do you think – that without hearing you they will not go astray? Take it for granted: those ninety-nine are determined to go astray whether you speak or not. But what about that one percent? We appeal to you for that one percent who may not be able to find the path without your speaking.’”And Buddha said, “I am speaking for that one percent.”Strangely, I am still speaking for that one percent.The world has not moved a single inch. Twenty-five centuries and man is as blind, as asleep, and unconscious as he ever was.Charles Darwin was absolutely wrong, because looking at man there seems to be no evolution: as far back as we can see, he is the same. If for ten thousand years there has not been any evolution in man, do you think one day suddenly a few monkeys jumped from their trees and, without any Patanjali to teach them Yoga exercises, stood – instead of on their four legs, on two legs? And their two front legs turned into two hands? And their monkey mind became man’s mind?It seems to be a far greater miracle than any prophet or messiah has been performing. It would have been far better for Jesus to turn a monkey into a man, because that would have proved poor Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But he could not even turn man into man – what to say about turning a monkey into a man!In English you have only one word for man; that is a poverty of language. In Hindi we have two words for man: one is admi – that is from Adam – and another is insan: both mean man. Admi is the lowest state of mankind; insan is the highest state of mankind.One of the great poets, Mirza Ghalib, has a statement in which he says, “In this world the most difficult thing is the transformation of an admi into an insan. It is one of the most difficult things to make man really a man. He is subhuman.”So I say, still I am speaking for the one percent. And that one percent are not people having a special talent, a special quality, no – they just have an open heart, an open being, open from all directions, unobsessed with anything. They will be pure ordinariness – not in any way tense, pushed, pulled in any direction, as if there was a magnet. They will be relaxed, with no tensions.Yes, if the whole of humanity one day turns into a religious commune, many things will disappear from the world which are not needed.Ninety percent of scientific discoveries are used only in war; they are not needed. Ninety percent of paintings are just absurd; they are not needed. Ninety percent of problems that you continuously have to face are absolutely unwanted, unbased. They will disappear.And whatever ten percent is left, the whole of humanity, radiant in its innocence and simplicity, will be able to cope with.There will be no problems.With that much innocence on the earth, and that much fragrance on the earth, and that much light on the earth, it is inconceivable that any problem could exist.But many professions will disappear. What will the psychoanalyst do? What will the psychologist do? What will the therapist do? What will the priest do? Hence all these people are going to prevent the coming of the new man in every possible way, because his coming is their departure.Who will bother about nuclear scientists? They will be simply cured from their obsession. Nuclear science? – you must be nuts! Man is starving, and you are piling up atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and neutron bombs – and man is starving. What kind of intelligence is at work? People are dying for small, little things: no shelter, no clothes, no food – and you are trying to reach the moon! For what? At what a cost!Nobody asks, “Please at least let us know what the point is. Even if you reach there, then what you are going to do?” What did those people really do when they reached the moon? They must have looked absolutely foolish standing there – and they had risked their lives. They went through all kinds of strange training – in isolation tanks, in isolation rooms, in airless rooms, in gravitation-less rooms, for years. And then the whole journey, which was full of hazards – any moment anything could have gone wrong. And when you arrived what did you do there? What has been the attainment?Now they are trying for Mars and other planets. Something seems to be crazy, buzzing in the politicians’ mind, in the scientists’ mind. Something seems to be basically wrong. And I say to you, it is the unobsessed religiousness that is missing. When a man is simple, innocent, ordinary, with no pretensions, no hypocrisy, his eyes are clear, he can see through and through: problems simply drop.There is no need for problems to be. We create problems with one hand and we try to solve the problems with the other hand – and both are our hands! And where is this nonsense going to stop? Because with one hand we will go on creating problems, and with the other hand we will go on solving the problems. And it is our energy.The religious man simply understands that these are both his hands; they have to learn to be together, they have to learn to function together in harmony.If all the scientists of the world can have a little understanding of religiousness, they can at least refuse to create for war.And if politicians are so interested, they can have wrestling matches. Everybody will enjoy it and there will be no harm. Why kill people? – people who have no interest in anything for which they will be killed. Why kill children? Why kill women? Why kill old people? They have no desire, no ideology; they simply want to live and be left alone to live. But the politicians won’t let them.Now, is it not a simpler thing that the president of America goes into a wrestling match with the president of Russia? Then whosoever wins, good. And drop all this nonsense – just a little sportsmanship will do; no politics is needed, no army is needed. If your generals are so interested in fighting, then let generals have boxing matches – or Indian-style wrestling, which is far better, far simpler, more human: you don’t hit people’s faces and their noses and their eyes and their lips and you don’t disfigure them. And you don’t break people’s bones; there is no need. It is more articulate, more sophisticated. Just let the politicians – rather than have the Olympics for ordinary people, have Olympics for politicians, generals, and each year you can decide who is the winner. It is simple.What I am saying is that to me it looks so simple that the world can be one. And there is the solution: the whole world, one. Poverty cannot exist. All the efforts going into war can move into production. All the sciences working to kill each other can work together – they are both our hands. And I don’t see that there is any problem that cannot be solved; we only need a simple vision.The religious man’s vision is simple, uncomplicated, clear.Unclouded is his being.He is just a mirror. You can see your face in the mirror. You can see how you are creating your troubles, how you are creating your misery, your suffering, and then searching for solutions. Once you can see how you create the suffering, you stop creating it. There is no need for any solution, no question needs any answer, you just have to be simple to see that the question is meaningless, and the question drops. And in the dropping of the question, without finding any answer, you have found it.Let me repeat: except for the religious man, every direction in life is in some way obsessional. The religious man is not moving in any direction, he is simply sitting in himself, just being himself, not going anywhere. He has no goal, no target.He simply is, and in his is-ness there is no possibility of any obsession. He is the only really healthy and whole person. Everybody else is sick – in different ways, but sick all the same.And I call the whole man the holy man.Yes, once in a while these people have existed, but one person in centuries is not much help. It is just dropping a teaspoonful of sugar in the ocean to make it sweet. Obviously you simply lose the one teaspoonful of sugar which might have been used in a cup of tea. Make a cup of tea, that is understandable, but don’t try to make the ocean sweet. The ocean is too big. For the ocean you will need oceanic methods.My basic effort is to create communes – rather than the religious man, religious communes. Religious men have existed but they have not been of much help. Yes, to themselves – they arrived home – but the whole of humanity is still wandering in darkness. I want religious communes all over the world. Slowly, slowly in every city, create a religious commune. Many religious people together may perhaps be able to transform the face of the earth and to create a new world, which is urgently needed.If we miss twenty years more then there is no hope, because the other side is coming to a climax. The mad side of man – the politician, the priest – is coming to a climax where the only conclusion is war.And this war means total annihilation of all life from the earth, which will be the most idiotic thing to do.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 29 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I am a firm believer in the philosophy of positive thinking, and it was a great shock to hear you speak against Mother Teresa and her philosophy of positive thinking.I am pleased that at least someone was listening, someone was awake, someone was not asleep. This is what positive philosophy is: you are shocked and I am happy!But I am not a believer in anything at all. Belief as such is against my way of looking at things. Belief is a blind man’s groping in the dark. I do not believe in anything, I do not disbelieve in anything – because both are belief systems. Either I know or I don’t know. I am absolutely clear about it.You are saying that you are a “firm believer.” What does it mean? A firm believer – why have you used the word firm? There must be some infirmity hiding behind it. Is not just being a believer enough? You know it is not; hence you have to add something more, make it more solid, more strong. But whatever you do, a belief is a belief, and can never become knowing. Your firm believing simply proves that your doubting is very firm. A firm doubter needs a firm believing. An ordinary doubter simply believes.Belief is to cover something. If the doubt is too big then you have to stretch the belief into a firm belief. You have to repress your doubt very strongly, because you know that if it is not repressed strongly it will throw off the cover of belief and you will be naked before your own eyes – hence the shock. The shock is not irrelevant.If I criticize Mother Teresa, why should you be shocked? Either you see that what I am saying is right and there is no question of shock, or you see that what I am saying is wrong; then too there is no question of shock. From where comes the shock?Shock needs two things: one part of you – the deeper part of you, the repressed part of you – sees the truth of what I am saying, and the repressor part of you does not want to see it. This conflict creates the shock.You may be a firm believer in the philosophy of positive thinking, but I don’t think you understand what the philosophy of positive thinking means.First, the philosophy of positive thinking means being untruthful, it means being dishonest. It means seeing a certain thing and yet denying what you have seen; it means deceiving yourself and others. Positive thinking is the only bullshit philosophy that America has contributed to human thought – nothing else. Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and the Christian priest, Vincent Peale – all these people have filled the whole American mind with this absolutely absurd idea of a positive philosophy. And it appeals particularly to mediocre minds.Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, has been sold in numbers just next to the Christian Bible. No other book has been able to reach that popularity. The Christian Bible should not be a competitor in fact, because it is more or less given free, forced on people. But Dale Carnegie’s book people have been purchasing; it has not been given to you free. And it has created a certain kind of ideology which has given birth to many books of a similar kind. But to me it is nauseating.The very idea that you want to influence people is the idea of a salesman, and that’s what Dale Carnegie was – salesman turned philosopher. It has happened many times. Just recently Werner Erhard, the founder of EST… He was a salesman of encyclopedias, dictionaries, but in trying to sell encyclopedias and dictionaries he became aware of salesmanship. Then why bother about encyclopedias? Why not sell ideas directly? – which are a more invisible commodity.People can’t see it and yet they go on purchasing it. And once you have paid two hundred and fifty dollars for a certain idea which you can’t see, you have to pretend that you have got it; otherwise people will think you are a fool. Two hundred and fifty dollars, and you have not “got it”…? It is very simple.In the East there is an old story…A king caught his prime minister fooling around with his wife. Naturally he was mad. In those days, this was a common punishment: he cut off the nose of the prime minister. And the nose was cut off only when somebody was caught fooling around with somebody else’s wife, so that became a signboard. Wherever you went, your missing nose went ahead of you as a declaration.But the man was a politician, he was a prime minister. He simply escaped from his kingdom to another kingdom and entered the other kingdom as a saint. Now, nobody can doubt a saint. The nose was certainly missing, but to doubt a saint is to commit a sin. But some curious people asked him, “What happened to your nose?”And the saint smiled; he said, “That’s a secret. It is a certain technique to attain to the ultimate truth. But you have to lose your nose: the nose represents the ego.” He is on the right lines: he is creating a philosophy – people’s egos are written on their noses. The crowd thought that what he was saying was significant. The nose represents the ego, and the ego is the only barrier between God and man. There must be some technique that if you remove the nose, the ego is removed and you meet the ultimate truth, you realize it.One idiot immediately was ready. The politician-turned-saint called him in the night, alone, because it was an absolutely private matter. Before he cut off the nose of the man he said, “When I cut off your nose, keep your eyes closed. When the nose is removed I will say, ‘Open your eyes,’ and you will see God standing before you.” The nose was cut off, and the saint said, “Now you can open your eyes: God is standing before you.”The man opened his eyes – there was nobody. He said, “But I don’t see anybody.”The saint said, “Now it is your problem. If you don’t see God, people will think you are an idiot. Do you think I see him? I don’t see him either, but now try positive thinking. What is the gain in being proved an idiot? Say that you have got it.”Werner Erhard may think that he has created the philosophy of EST. That is not so. It was created thousands of years before by this politician who cut off the nose of that idiot. That was the first EST graduate.The idiot thought it over and he said, “That seems to be the right thing; yes, I see it.”The saint said, “You have also become a saint. From tomorrow start spreading the philosophy by word of mouth.”It was just as Werner Erhard has been doing: no need to advertise in the newspapers and the magazines; no need – just by word of mouth. It is more impressive, more alive: there is an eyewitness. An advertisement in a newspaper may be just not true, but the man with the nose missing, smiling, radiant with the realization of the ultimate truth…The next day people saw there were now two saints. And the number started increasing by the same strategy. First your nose is cut off, then the alternative: either you prove yourself an idiot, or you become a saint. Now who is going to choose to be an idiot? Even an idiot cannot be that idiotic – when he can become a saint so easily. And now there is nothing left, he has to become a saint. It seems to be perfectly right – people are respectful, and the crowd around the saints is increasing, and the saints are increasing…Even the king of that kingdom became interested; he asked his prime minister. The prime minister said, “Wait a little, because I know this man – he was the prime minister of the neighboring kingdom. I don’t think that he has attained ultimate truth, he has simply lost his nose.” Politicians easily understand the language of politicians. He said, “Wait. Let me inquire of the other king, and investigate the whole thing before you lose your nose and realize God. Give me just a little time.”He inquired of the other king. He said, “That man is really a nasty man. It is my fault because I cut off his nose. I should have cut off his head. I never thought that he would do such a thing as cutting the noses off thousands of people. Every night hundreds of people are turned into awakened souls, enlightened people, God-realized.”He got the whole information and then he said to his king, “This is the information I have got. Now I will invite the great saint to the palace and give him a good beating.”The saint was invited and of course he was very happy; and all the other saints also were very happy that now even the king was becoming interested in the positive philosophy. That’s what he was saying: “This is simply positive philosophy. Now, bothering about the missing nose is a negative approach. It is gone; what is the point of all this crying over spilled milk? Why not make something positive out of it? And I am giving you the ultimate truth, just for the price of a nose.”They were all happy. They all went and waited outside the palace. The great sage entered – by now he had become a great sage. The prime minister closed the doors. He had two wrestlers, strong men, there, and they started beating the man. The sage said, “What are you doing?”The prime minister said, “Now tell the truth, otherwise the beating will continue. We will not kill you, but we will not allow you to live either. We will keep you hanging between death and life. It is better that you say it quickly.”Seeing the situation he said, “Okay, the truth is that my king has cut off my nose because I was fooling around with his wife. Now, what do you suggest? What should I have done? In this situation, with a nose missing, wherever I went I would have been condemned, boycotted. So I found this positive philosophy. In the same position, wouldn’t you have done the same?”The prime minister said, “Of course I would have done the same – but now it is time that you move from this kingdom, because even my king is becoming interested, and I don’t want his nose to be removed by you, and him to become a sage. Move from this country to another. The world is large; there are fools everywhere, and you will find them everywhere. Right now you already have a great following.”When Werner Erhard or people like him found that they could sell encyclopedias, worthless encyclopedias which nobody is going to read, and nobody is going to look into… People keep encyclopedias simply for show, in their study or in their sitting room. They look beautiful. They are not to be read, they are to be looked at. If you can sell encyclopedias – and people are so foolish that they will purchase useless books, highly-praised but meaningless books, at a high cost – why not sell ideas? Once you know the simple technique of salesmanship you can sell anything.Positive thinking is just deceiving people. If influencing people and winning friends becomes your ideology, you will have to do two things. One is you will have to act, behave the way people like you to act and behave. That’s the simple way to influence them, there is no other way.The whole philosophy can be condensed into a simple sentence: if you want people to be influenced by you, just behave the way they think is the right way to behave. You prove to be their ideal, which they also want to be but have not been able to be yet. Of course, you cannot become anybody else’s ideal, but you can pretend. You will become a hypocrite.And if you are going to influence many people, then of course you will have to have many personalities, many masks, because each person is influenced by a different mask.If you want to influence a Hindu, you have to have a different kind of personality than when you are trying to influence a Christian. To Christians, Jesus crucified on the cross is the symbol of the greatest sacrifice anybody can make to redeem humanity.To the Hindus, crucifixion simply means this man must have committed a great sin in the past. Their philosophy is of karma and its consequence. You cannot be just crucified without any karma on your part. You must have acted in evil ways, and this is the outcome of that. The crucifixion of Jesus does not prove to the Hindu or the Jaina or the Buddhist that he is a messiah.But to the Christian, Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu – nobody seems to be comparable to Jesus. In fact to a Christian mind they all look very selfish: they are just working for their own redemption while Jesus is working for the redemption of the whole of humanity. A man who is interested in his own ultimate realization is obviously the most selfish man in the world. What selfishness is possible which can go beyond this selfishness?If he renounces the world, that is selfish because he simply wants his soul to be freed from the wheel of life and death. He wants to meet the universal spirit of God, or he wants to enter nirvana and disappear into the cosmos where there is no suffering, where there is only bliss, eternal bliss. And this man does not bother about anybody else. You call him a saint? – an incarnation of God? – a tirthankara? No, not to the Christian; that is not appealing.If you want to influence many people you will have to have many personalities, many masks. You will have to continuously pretend that which you are not, and you will have to hide that which you are. Now this is what makes a man phony. Dale Carnegie’s whole philosophy is for phonies.In fact, the word phony is also a contribution of America. Strangely, it means exactly what personality means. In Greek drama the actors used masks and they spoke through the mask. Sona means sound, and sound coming from a mask is called persona in Greek – it is not the real man, but the mask. You don’t know who is behind it; all that you hear is the sound, and you see a mask. The mask is a mask, it cannot speak. And the one who can speak you don’t see; he is hiding. From persona comes the English word personality. And phony is exactly the same.Since telephones came into existence, you can hear people’s voices through the telephone, and you don’t see the person. And of course the voice also is not exactly the same; coming through wires or by wireless much is changed. It is phony; phony comes from phone. Strangely, persona and phony mean exactly the same. You don’t see who is speaking, you only hear the voice. That too has gone through a change, through the mechanism; it is not exactly the same voice.Dale Carnegie’s philosophy creates phonies, but the real purpose is to influence people. Why? To win friends, but why? What is the need? Two things have to be understood. First, influencing people is only a means to win friends. The word win has to be underlined. It has the whole of politics in it. The more people are under your influence, the more powerful you are. Your power depends on how many people are supportive of you, how many people you have influenced so much that they will be ready to do anything for you.Hence, the politician speaks in a language which is always vague, you can interpret it the way you like, so that many people can be influenced. If he is very clear and what he says is absolutely scientific – without any vagueness, certain – if it has only one meaning, then perhaps he will succeed in annoying people.That’s what I have been doing my whole life – how to lose friends, how to create enemies… If somebody wants to learn it, they can learn it from me. And the reason is that I don’t want to influence anybody. The very idea is ugly, and against humanity. To influence means to interfere, to trespass, to drag you onto a path which is not yours, to make you do things which you have never thought of before.To influence a person is the most violent act in the world. I have never tried to influence anybody. It is another thing if somebody saw some truth in what I was saying or I was being, but it was not my effort to influence him. If, in spite of me, he was able to see something, then the whole responsibility is his.Jesus says to his people, “On the judgment day I will sort out my sheep and tell God that these are my people – they have to be saved. For others I am not concerned.” If there is something like a judgment day – there is none, but just for the argument’s sake – if there is something like a judgment day, and if I am to do the sorting out, I will not be able to find a single sheep, because I have never influenced anybody. And when you influence somebody, certainly you become the shepherd and that person becomes just a sheep. You are reducing human beings to sheep; you are taking their humanity away. In the name of saving them you are destroying them.Don’t be influenced by anybody. Don’t be impressed by anybody. Look, see, be aware – and choose. But remember, the responsibility is yours. You cannot say, “Lord, I followed you – now save me.” Never follow anybody, because that’s how you go astray from yourself.Dale Carnegie started this whole school of positive philosophy, positive thinking: don’t see the negative part, don’t see the darker side. But by your not seeing it, do you think it disappears? You are just befooling yourself. You cannot change reality. The night will still be there; you can think that it is daytime for twenty-four hours, but by your thinking it, it is not going to be light twenty-four hours a day.The negative is as much part of life as the positive. They balance each other.After Dale Carnegie, the great name in the tradition of this positive thinking is Napoleon Hill. Think and Grow Rich is his greatest contribution to the world – a beautifully written book, but all crap. Think and grow rich: you don’t have to do anything, you only have to think in absolutely positive terms and riches will start flowing toward you. If they don’t come, that simply means that you have not been thinking absolutely positively.So these are beautiful games in which you cannot defeat the man who is proposing the game. He has the key in his hands. If you succeed by chance, then he succeeds because his philosophy – think and grow rich – has succeeded. You have been thinking and thinking and thinking and positively thinking that dollars are showering on you – these are not snowflakes but dollars showering on you – and suddenly your uncle dies and leaves you a big inheritance. Naturally, positive thinking works!But if you don’t succeed… And ninety-nine percent of the time you are not going to succeed – you know perfectly well that your positive thinking is not absolutely positive; you know that there is doubt. Once in a while you open your eyes to see whether they are dollars or just snowflakes. You see they are just snowflakes, and you again close your eyes and start thinking that dollars are showering. But the doubt is there, that these really are snowflakes. Whom are you trying to befool? All these thoughts are going on: “This is just nonsense, I shouldn’t waste my time, I could be earning some dollars; this way I am losing rather than gaining.”But Napoleon Hill writes beautifully and gives examples of how people have succeeded by positive thinking. And you can find people – this world is big enough. For everything you can find an example. Why one? – you can find hundreds of examples if you just look around and try to find them. And all these people have been doing just that: they find examples, and they place the examples in beautiful poetic prose. And of course you want to be rich, so they exploit your ambition, your desire. They give you such a simple method – and they don’t ask anything of you in return.About Napoleon Hill I remember… He himself was a poor man. That would have been enough proof to disprove his whole philosophy. He became rich by selling the book, Think and Grow Rich. But it was not positive thinking that was making him rich – it was fools around the world who were purchasing the book, it was his work, his labor, his effort. But in the very beginning days, when his book came out, he used to stand in bookstores to persuade people to purchase the book.And it happened that Henry Ford came in his latest model car and went into the bookshop to find something light to read. And Napoleon Hill did not want to miss this chance. He went forward with his book and he said, “A great book has just been published – you will be happy with it. And it is not only a book, it is a sure method of success.”Henry Ford looked at the man and said, “Are you the writer of the book?”Napoleon Hill said proudly, “Yes, I am the writer of the book.” And he can be proud: that book he has written is a piece of art. And to create a piece of art out of crap is real mastery.Henry Ford, without touching the book, just asked one question, “Have you come in your own car or on the bus?”Napoleon Hill could not understand what he meant. He said, “Of course, I came on the bus.”Henry Ford said, “Look outside. That is my private car, and I am Henry Ford. You are befooling others; you don’t have even a private car and you write a book called Think and Grow Rich! And I have grown rich without thinking, so I don’t want to bother with it. You think and grow rich! – and when you grow rich then come to me. That will be the proof. The book is not the proof.”And it is said that Napoleon Hill never could gather up the courage to meet this old man, Henry Ford, again, even though he became a little richer. But compared to Henry Ford he was always a poor man and was bound to remain a poor man, always. But Henry Ford’s logic was clear.Out of these people, one Christian priest, Norman Vincent Peale, has created a positive philosophy. And he has tried to convert the whole Christian attitude, as if it is a philosophy of positive thinking. And of course he could have quoted all the religions of the world, but he wants to spread Christianity, so he doesn’t take account of any other religions.And in Jesus you can find… All the religions have been doing the same harm that Jesus did: “Blessed are the poor for theirs is the Kingdom of God” – now Mother Teresa is not saying anything different. Norman Vincent Peale has become a world-famous preacher. His whole standpoint is: don’t look at anything from the negative, critical attitude. Look from the positive, accepting, receptive attitude. And he says that if you do it, you transform the nature of the object – which is absolutely wrong.Just by saying, “Blessed are the poor because theirs is the Kingdom of God,” you don’t change poverty. Otherwise in two thousand years Christian priests would have made poverty disappear. Poverty goes on growing, the blessed people go on growing.In fact, there will be so many blessed people that in the Kingdom of God, shared by all these blessed people, they will again be poor; they are not going to get much share in it. All these shareholders in the Kingdom of God will make God also poor. It will be a company of poor shareholders and directors – the directors of course must be the beggars who are poorer than the poor.Two thousand years of continuously teaching… Has it changed the nature of poverty? No. It has done only one thing – it has killed the revolutionary spirit in the poor. Poverty remains in its own place and goes on growing in leaps and bounds.But it has done one thing certainly: it has taken away the guts of the poor man. His rebellious spirit has been poisoned. And on one thing only I agree with Karl Marx – that religion is nothing but opium for the poor people. I have to agree with him because that’s what all the religions in the world have done. They have given opium, a drug, so you can have beautiful dreams.In India it is a common routine… In Indian villages poverty is such that if only the man goes to work, it is not enough; the wife also has to go. It is against the Indian idea which is that women should not go to work; their place is the home, and they have enough work there. But even if it goes against the Indian culture, the Indian civilization, poverty is so great that just the man earning cannot feed the whole family – the woman has to go.And the woman may be carrying a small child, because Indian women are constantly either pregnant or getting ready to be pregnant again; meanwhile they raise the other child. They have to carry the child to the place where they are working, maybe on the road, making the road, or in the field or in the garden, or in construction, anywhere. But what to do with the child? They will be continuously at work and the child will be lying down by the side of the road.So the routine method is that they give a little opium to the child. All over India that is done, even though opium is now illegal; but nothing can be done about it. And everybody understands that that is the only way. The child remains hungry but happy. Just a little opium and for six to eight hours he is floating in the lotus paradise. He will not cry, he will not weep; he will not disturb the mother.Religions have done the same to the whole of humanity: be hungry, be uneducated, be sick, suffer every kind of misery possible – but take it positively. No. I do not believe in any philosophy of positive thinking; nor do I believe in the opposite, in the philosophy of negative thinking – because both are there. The positive and the negative make one whole.My philosophy is holistic – neither positivist, nor negativist, but holistic, realistic. See the whole in its totality, whatever it is. Good and bad, day and night, life and death, they are both there.My approach is to see exactly what is the case. There is no need to project any philosophy on it.Mother Teresa says to these people in Bhopal, – “Take it positively.” Two thousand people dead! Certainly through some mistake of some lazy Indian. And it has been happening in many places all over India; it is not a singular case. Bridges fall down after millions of rupees have been put into years of construction. The first day the train passes by… And with the bridge, the train and the passengers all go down into the river – but take it positively.Dams continually go on flooding thousands of miles because they break. India goes on borrowing money from all over the world, from the World Bank and from other sources, to make new dams. And with all the engineers and all that expertise, what happens? It does not happen anywhere else in the world, it happens only in India! India is a very positive country because the people who are responsible are not punished; otherwise it would stop.The contractor should be punished when a bridge kills thousands of people and destroys the labor of thousands of people and makes the country borrow more and more – which India will never be able to repay. That is absolutely clear, because how are you going to pay it back? Slowly, slowly you are becoming slaves again – economic slaves.Political slavery is gone; now economic slavery is coming from the back door. If you cannot pay money, then you will have to substitute it with something. If you owe to America, or if you owe to Russia, then you will have to give them bases for their military forces. You have to, because there is no other way to pay them back. And why do these countries go on giving to these poor countries, knowing perfectly well that they cannot get it back? In fact they don’t want to get it back! This is a new form of slavery.People don’t understand that forms go on changing but things remain the same. Political slavery became costly, very costly. To those who were the masters, it became more costly to have a slave country than not to be bothered with slave countries. That was more economically profitable. Leave these poor countries politically free – but what are they going to do with their economy? They will beg from you, and then you can exploit them economically. And in fact that is the real exploitation. Political slavery was useful because you were powerful enough to exploit them economically.All such exploitation is economic – if you were politically powerful then of course you could exploit them economically. By the end of the Second World War it became clear that it was no longer feasible, no longer economically useful to have political slavery in the world. But the real thing was economic exploitation. Drop the political slavery, influence people, make friends – and go on exploiting them economically the way you were doing before. Now you will do even better because you are friends, you are helping in every possible way – but for what reason are you helping?Soviet Russia goes on pouring money into India. In Russia itself there is poverty; they are not too worried about that poverty, they are more concerned to create factories in India, steel plants in India. Go on giving as much money and expertise as India asks, because soon they will be so much in debt that while politically they can remain free, it will make no difference – your armies, your military bases will be inside their country; they will have to give in to you. Their political freedom will be just paper freedom: underneath they will be slaves again.And in India nobody is punished for all these things which go on happening. In India there are really miracles that happen. They have five-year plans just like Russia used to have five-year plans. In those five-year plans so many dams have to be made, so many roads, so many bridges, and the country is given a great hope that within five years everything will be changed: poverty will be gone, every village will have a school, a hospital, and everything.And on paper these things do happen. You can see the road has been made, on the map. The contract has been given, the contractor has taken the money, the engineers have been working, the laborers have been paid, the machines have been purchased. Five years of work and the road is ready. The road is even inaugurated by a great leader – and there is no road!You see the picture of the leader in the newspaper, inaugurating the road. They have made just a small piece for the inauguration, so that a small piece of road is shown in the picture. And the leader is inaugurating it, cutting a ribbon with the scissors, and people are all around, clapping. And it is a miracle! If you go just one furlong ahead, there is no road – and the road was going to be one hundred miles in length. It is nonexistent.Great miracles! But take it positively, and don’t complain against anybody, otherwise everybody will be caught: the leader who inaugurated the road will be caught and asked, “What road have you inaugurated? Where is it?”The minister who gave the contract must have been bribed. The contractor must have taken the major portion of the money that was going to make the bridge, and everything else is fictitious. Engineers have been paid, workers have been paid; for years the work goes on, and reports go on coming into the files that the work is going well, and the road is coming along, and it will be ready even before the time set for it.It can be ready any day; the way it is going it can be ready any day. And then the great leader comes to inaugurate it, and people are clapping because they believe in positive philosophy. They know the road goes only one furlong, but still they are clapping because a great leader has come, and they have all been given money to clap, praise the leader, wave flags to welcome him. And these pictures will be the proof. All these people have to be punished.And Mother Teresa says to those poor people, “Don’t complain.” Whom is she going to save? The criminals? Yes, I use the word criminals, because I don’t know anything worse than that. I cannot call them sinners because I don’t believe in sin. But they are criminals. If it is the carelessness of one person who did not lock the plant correctly, and it kills two thousand people…And this is a government report of two thousand people killed. Whenever there is a government report, particularly from India, multiply it by five and you will be almost right. If they say two thousand people have died, that means at least ten thousand people have died. If they say one hundred thousand people have been seriously injured, don’t believe their numbers – at least five hundred thousand people must have been injured. Who is going to count? The government officials reduce it as much as possible so that there is no negativity in people, and positive philosophy goes on living. And then they call in these people like Mother Teresa who say, “Don’t complain.” Why?Then what about Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers? Take it positively – and yes, if you want to take it positively, it can be argued in a very positive way: those millions of Jews that evaporated in the gas chambers of Adolf Hitler… Now think positively. If they had lived they may have been poor. They may have suffered any kind of disease, tuberculosis. cancer. And they were all Jews, so you can understand they could have suffered from AIDS, because Jews are the oldest homosexuals in the world. And it is not that I am saying it, I am simply quoting the Old Testament.Even God could not take it positively! He had to destroy two cities, Gomorrah and Sodom, in the Old Testament. It is not written by me. God had to destroy both the cities completely! Why? Sodom became so famous that now we have the word sodomy because of Sodom. People were making love to animals – that’s what sodomy is. Now sodomy means making love to animals, but it comes from the name of the city, Sodom. People were making love to all kinds of animals.And Gomorrah – just the sound of the name is enough to give you an idea what else must have been happening there – homosexuality, sodomy, other kinds of perversions. I have always wondered why people have missed on this name Gomorrah; it is so phonetically connected with some sexual perversion. God had to destroy both cities completely.God could not take it positively. God has never taken anything positively, otherwise why is there hell? If God takes things positively then he will just hug and kiss criminals and say, “Come on, boys! I was just waiting for you. This paradise is yours because I take things positively. I have read the books of Norman Vincent Peale.” But he goes on throwing people into hell. Mother Teresa seems to be very anti-God. But all these religions are in a contradiction.Here they go on saying one thing, and there they go on saying, “You will be punished. Each sin will be counted, calculated. And you cannot hide anything from God; he will read you just like an open book – there is no way to hide – and accordingly you will be judged.” So Christians have judgment day: if God believes in the philosophy of positive thinking, then what is the need of a judgment day? All are to be forgiven, and whatsoever they have done has to be looked at positively. Then what is the need of a day of judgment? Saints and sinners will be the same, they will receive the same welcome – but that creates trouble.That is why nobody has raised this question: what about God and his philosophy? If you say that God is going to forgive everybody, then sainthood loses all charm. Then who is going to suffer all the austerities and fasts and prayers, and renounce all the pleasures of life – knowing perfectly well that those who are having all the pleasures here on earth will again have the same pleasures that you will have in heaven? So you are a loser!And perhaps because your whole life you denied yourself pleasures, you may not be able to enjoy them, because you will be so inhibited that when beautiful girls in the Hindu paradise appear dancing before you… The saints are certainly bound to close their eyes, just out of habit of millions of lives – for Hindus it is a question of millions of lives.Gandhi used to have three monkeys just by his side on the table. They were presented to him by a Japanese saint; in fact, four were presented, but the fourth has been missing from all the pictures. When I went to Gandhi’s ashram I asked his son Ramdas, “Where is the fourth monkey?”He said, “How did you come to know about the fourth monkey? – because when they came, all four were joined together, they were not separate, and immediately the fourth was separated and destroyed. How did you come to know? – because this thing happened long ago.”I said, “I am really an explorer of strange things. Tell me about the fourth.”“But,” he said, “it has been completely destroyed. How did you…? Who told you?” – because except Gandhi, Ramdas, his son, and Ba, his mother, nobody knew about it. “We opened the parcel, and we destroyed the fourth.”I said, “That’s okay. I was also present.”He said, “You must be joking.”And nowhere is it mentioned that there were four monkeys. But I know because originally those four monkeys were Chinese. They are very traditional, Taoist monkeys, at least three thousand years old, so I knew the fourth was bound to be there. From Taoism they traveled to Japan, and they had never been three. But his whole life he kept those three monkeys by his side; they are still preserved in the Gandhi memorial museum in Delhi. But it is a lie, because the fourth is missing.One monkey has his hands over his eyes, closing them. “Don’t see anything evil” is the message. The second one has his hands over his ears: “Don’t hear anything evil.” The third monkey had his hands over his mouth – not to throw a kiss at you, but: “Don’t say anything evil.” What was the fourth doing so that they destroyed him? The fourth was keeping both his hands over his sexual organ: “Remain celibate, don’t do anything evil.” Now, Gandhi was worried that this monkey would create trouble. “Anybody coming will ask what he is doing. And just sitting by my side… Destroy this one; these three are okay.”All the religions have been teaching these saints to practice it but when they are in paradise and have freedom, it is going to be difficult for them, really difficult. The sinners will enjoy paradise; the saints will hide just at the sight of an approaching apsara – that is a young woman that is made available to all in paradise – and there are thousands of beautiful apsaras. You can call them divine call girls. I don’t know how to translate that word because in the Christian heaven apsaras don’t exist.What the saints will do is start shaking and feeling nervous and perspiring, and they will immediately close their eyes because that is what they have been doing their whole life.To make the distinction clear, they had got to be realistic, the way I am telling you to be realistic – to see the wholeness of a thing.Now this woman, Mother Teresa, is a bigger criminal than those people who created the calamity of Bhopal, because she is not only trying to cover their laziness, their mistake, their error; she is giving the idea that wherever such a thing happens you just cover it up.So I say that when millions of Jews are evaporated, Hitler must be doing great, positive work: perhaps with a smaller population there will be less poverty. And these Jews were the richest people in Germany, so let their money and their riches be distributed. And anyway they are going to die sooner or later, so why not sooner? What could they have done by living? So why make so much fuss? They may have died from a very terrible disease – AlDS, cancer, or something – and Hitler has given them the simplest and the quickest death, a painless death. Look at it positively!But Mother Teresa will not have the guts to say, “Look at it positively,” because the Jews in America who go on giving respect to her will be immediately enemies. She cannot say that.Why not take the Russian revolution positively? Stalin killing millions of people – has she ever said to take that positively? It is good: those millions of people are freed from life’s miseries, sufferings, troubles. But she will not say that. Communism cannot be taken positively – her master, pope the Polack, has just declared that the very idea of class war is a sin. Now, is that taking things positively? Then class war is not a sin but a virtue, if you take it positively.But why do such an ugly thing to the poor Indians? And your purposes are clear. Your purpose is political: to keep the government happy. Because in India it is a problem… Many missionaries have been deported from India, and there is constant pressure from the Hindu population that missionaries should be deported from India because they are exploiting poverty and converting people to Christianity – not by argument, because as far as argument is concerned Christianity has nothing compared to Eastern religions. They cannot win in any argument; Christianity has no argument at all.India has had ten thousand years of continual argumentation and nothing else! As far as argument is concerned, nobody can come close to the Indians because they have done only that one thing for ten thousand years – nothing else. They have tried to split hairs, and they have succeeded. There are books which cannot be translated even today because scholars find that it is impossible to find any Western words equivalent to them. For example, Indian logic is impossible to translate – Aristotle is just a pygmy. Indian logic has gone so deep in continually splitting hairs and has created such words because it needed them.Words are created only when you need them. For example, here you have snow, ice, and perhaps one more word I don’t know. But ask the Eskimo; he has a dozen words for snow. No other language has a dozen words, but the Eskimo has. And the reason is he knows those twelve different qualities. He has lived for thousands of years with snow. He is acquainted with it. He can make differentiations which nobody else can.Now, after ten thousand years of continually arguing, India has come to words that no other language in the world can translate. Even to understand them is as difficult as to understand Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, perhaps more difficult.So India is continually deporting missionaries; the pressure goes on becoming bigger and bigger. The reason… Hindus are not worried about argument. If you want to argue they are ready, the Jainas are ready, the Buddhists are ready. About argument there is no problem; your Christian missionaries will not have any chance of winning. But they can convert people by giving bread, by giving medicine, by opening a hospital, by making a school, a college, by creating institutions for the orphans, for the widows.All these things Indians cannot do; they have never done them, they have never bothered about them. In fact, they have reasons, explanations, arguments why: if somebody is an orphan, it means in his past life he has done something wrong. Now let him suffer, don’t interfere; otherwise he will have to be an orphan again in the next life, and you will be simply prolonging his suffering. Let him be finished with it and the accounts be closed, so that in the next life he comes fresh and is not an orphan. Widows – it is their fate; if their husbands have died, it is nobody else’s business. According to Hindus these women must have done immense wrong in their past lives, so they are suffering.So nobody is going to do anything about any real problem. Christian missionaries tackle the real problems. And naturally, when they feed, give medicines, serve the poor with their doctors, their nurses, their hospitals, their schools, their teachers – those people become impressed: “No Hindu ever cared, nobody bothered about us. If we were dying they just left us dying. You care for us – certainly you are really religious.” And if they start getting more and more involved with Christianity, it is simple. But they are not converted the way conversion should happen. It is smuggling them through the back door.They don’t know about their own religions, because nobody has taught them. But Christians are teaching them about Christianity; that is their only knowledge. And they see these people and their service, their compassion, their sympathy, and naturally they think this is the religion you should belong to. And if these missionaries are doing so much, what about Jesus, the messiah? If he says that he will redeem the world, he means it. These people are his representatives.But Hindus are pressuring the government that these people should be thrown out because they are misguiding people, taking advantage of their poverty, of their sickness, of their old age. But nobody can dare to say, “Deport Mother Teresa,” because she is continually protecting the government. This is a political strategy: protecting the officers, protecting the rich, and underground doing the real work of converting people to Christianity.I am not against anybody being converted to Christianity. If with understanding, with feeling a person moves toward Christianity, it is perfectly good; nobody has the right to prevent him. But if he is in some way bribed, seduced, then this should be prevented. Whether he was going to become a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Christian or a Buddhist, it does not matter: nobody should be allowed to cunningly change a person’s life, his vision, his thinking. He should be left alone. All missionaries – it makes no difference to which religion they are connected – all missionaries are against humanity. But people like Mother Teresa do their work in a very sophisticated way, a very polished way.You ask me if am I against positive philosophy. Yes, because I am also against negative philosophy. I have to be against both because both choose only half the fact, and both try to ignore the other half.And remember: a half-truth is far more dangerous than a whole lie, because the whole lie will be discovered by you sooner or later. How long can it remain undiscovered by you? A lie, of course, is a lie; it is just a palace made of playing cards – a little breeze and the whole palace disappears. But the half-truth is dangerous. You may never discover it, you may continue to think it is the whole truth. So the real problem is not the whole lie, the real problem is the half-truth pretending to be the whole truth; and that is what these people are doing.The philosophy of positive thinking says: “Take everything positively. The negative should not have any space in your approach, there should be no negative part.” This is making a part, the positive part, almost the whole.The same is true about negative people, although there are none who preach the philosophy of negative thinking, because who is going to listen to them? They will say, “If somebody is smiling, find out – there must be something he is hiding behind the smile. In fact, he must want to cry or weep. Find out – don’t be deceived by his smiling; find the negative. If he is looking very happy, that means certainly there is something that he is trying to hide behind his happiness.”People are so miserable, who is going to listen to such a philosopher? They will say, “We are already so miserable, and you are teaching us to search for more misery! Even if a false smile is there, at least it is there. Please forgive us, we can’t go on digging and finding the tears. We have enough tears. And just a smile – although it may be just a mannerism, a formality, just a civilized way of meeting somebody…”When you meet somebody and ask, “How are you?” he says, “I am perfectly well.” Now, if you are a negative philosopher you have to find out what this man is hiding: “How can he be perfectly well? Have you ever heard of anybody in the world being perfectly well? He is lying!” But nobody will listen to a negative philosopher. You also say, “I am perfectly well. You are perfectly well? – good.” And you depart in good spirits. What is the point of showing one’s wounds to each other and making each other more miserable than before?So there is no school of negative philosophers. But there are more people who believe in negative philosophy without knowing it than there are people who believe in positive philosophy.In fact, all these believers in positive philosophy are basically negative. To hide that negativity they believe firmly in the positive philosophy.I am not in support of either side. I am in favor of taking the whole truth, and that’s what I would like you to do too: take the whole truth, because the negative is as essential as the positive.You cannot create electricity with only the positive pole; you will need the negative pole too. Only with both the negative and the positive pole can you create electricity. Is the negative absolutely negative? It is complementary, so it is not against the positive.If I had been in Bhopal I would have told them, “Find the people who are responsible for this calamity; it is manmade.” Of course we cannot find God when there are natural calamities. If we could then I would be in favor of catching hold of God and punishing him, because this is not even a human way – what to say about a divine way! But we cannot catch hold of God because he is nonexistent – so we are helpless.But when manmade calamities are there, please don’t say such stupid things to people as, “Take it positively. Don’t complain.” No, find out who the criminals are and let them be punished as heavily as possible. You punish a single man if he kills somebody, and perhaps a single man was behind the whole explosion which has killed thousands of people, crippled thousands of people. But he will be left completely free to do it again, and people like him will also not feel any necessity to be more alert, to be more careful.If India has become a country of lazy and lousy people, the reason is simple and clear: nobody has bothered to deal with the sources from where this laziness and lousiness arise. And everybody is lazy and lousy.When I joined the university I was puzzled because the whole years’ course was not enough for more than two months; in two months it could be finished. I used to finish it in two months. My professors, senior professors, the head of the department, the dean all told me, “This is not the way. You simply finish in two months a course which has to be finished in ten months. That makes us all feel guilty.”I said, “That is your business. If you don’t want to feel guilty, finish your course also in two months, or change the syllabus – make the syllabus in such a way that the course is really for ten months. This is lousy, absolute laziness, and I cannot be part of it.”It is because of this that I used to travel so much. My students were not at a loss at all. I would finish their course quickly and then would say, “Now unnecessarily you will be bothering and I will be bothering… What is the point? Once in a while, whenever I am here, I will come. If you have any questions you can ask them, otherwise I will see you when the examinations come round.”And my professors, my department, my head were not courageous enough to report me because they knew that if they reported me, then I was going to expose the whole thing: that these people were lousy. And my students would have been my witnesses that I had finished my course – now for what did they want me here too?I was moving around the country. Everybody knew because the newspapers were publishing that I was in Kolkata addressing the university, I was in Benares… And they knew that I was supposed to be there in Jabalpur. My principal once asked me for dinner, and at his home he said, “Do at least one thing: Go wherever you want, but don’t let it be published in the newspapers because then it becomes a problem. People start asking us, ‘If he is in Chennai… But we don’t have any application for leave. He never informs us when he goes or when comes back.’”I said, “I cannot do anything about that. How can I prevent the journalists reporting? What can I do? I don’t know who is reporting; I simply speak and move on, and whatsoever they want to do, they do. But if you have any problems, if anybody reports to you, you can call me. I can put that man right, there and then.”For nine years I managed this way. The whole university was just in a state of shock. They could not believe that nobody raised any question against me. I got the whole salary, and I was rarely seen. But the reason was that my department was afraid to report me, for the simple reason that I had said that I would expose the whole thing.The country has become lazy. I told the vice-chancellor, “All your courses are not enough for the whole year. What you teach in six years can be taught very easily in two years; you are wasting four years. In those four years you could teach so much that the degrees of no other country could be compared to your degrees. Right now no country even accepts your degrees.”He said, “Perhaps you are right, but no professor will agree because they are happy with the way things are going; they have always done it this way. So I don’t want to take the responsibility on myself.”Doctor Radhakrishnan, who became president of India, was basically a professor of philosophy. First he was professor of philosophy, then he became vice-chancellor of the Hindu university in Varanasi, and then he managed and manipulated to become the president of India. When he became the president of India, he declared his birthday as “teachers’ day.”That is a very cunning strategy that is being done in India. Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday is “children’s day,” because once Jawaharlal was dead people would soon forget about him. But children’s day will continue because children are not going to disappear from the world, and on children’s day Jawaharlal will be remembered.So Doctor Radhakrishnan created a teachers’ day. On the first teachers’ day in my university, I asked the vice-chancellor, who was presiding over the meeting, “I want to inquire about a simple thing: why do you call it teachers’ day?”He said, “You don’t know? It is so simple. A teacher has become president of the country.”I said, “Who is being respected, a teacher or the president of the country? I will call it a teachers’ day if a president drops his presidency and becomes a teacher. Then it will be a teachers’ day, putting teaching higher than the presidency of the country. Let him resign from the presidency and become a teacher.“This is my challenge to Doctor Radhakrishnan: resign from your post, become a teacher, and we will celebrate the teachers’ day. Right now this is absolutely absurd. Tomorrow a shoemaker becomes a president and so then a ‘shoemakers’ day’; someday, somebody else is a cloth merchant, then ‘cloth merchants’ day’. But in all these days you are respecting the post of the president. So simply call all these days ‘president’s day’. Why drag the poor teacher into it?”My vice-chancellor said, “Will you please keep it to yourself! Soon the media will be here, and if they hear your challenge or anything, then I at least am in difficulty because it is because of Radhakrishnan that I have been appointed vice-chancellor here in this university. I am his student, and what you are saying is perfectly right, but – forgive me – don’t say it in front of people.”I said, “Everybody goes on: ‘Be truthful, be honest, be authentic,’ and whenever I try to be truthful, honest and authentic, immediately I am stopped.”I am certainly against people like Mother Teresa, because I count them as criminals, not as saints. And I will not take them positively because they are doing certain harm – and so subtle a harm to humanity that it cannot be forgiven.It may have shocked you. Think about your shock and look at both the sides of the shock, the negative and the positive, so that you can understand why the whole phenomenon happened to you.And this is going to be my approach to everything.Look holistically. Be a realist and you will be surprised, amazed. When you look at both sides they fit together, they complement each other. They are just like the Chinese symbol of yin and yang.Have you seen the Chinese symbol of yin and yang? – two fish in a circle, one fish in one half-circle, the other fish in the other half-circle; but both fish fitting together, making it a whole. Yin means the feminine; yang means the masculine.This is applicable to all polarities, positive and negative; they are just like two fish moving in such a way, so closely, that they make a circle.Then you look at existence with the eyes of a religious man. Then there is no saint, no sinner; they are all complementary to each other. They both are needed in some way.Yes, better ways can be found so that they can complement each other more lucidly, more gracefully, more beautifully.

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From Ignorance to Innocence 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Ignorance to Innocence 30 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the place of surrender in your vision of a new religious consciousness?I do not teach the ego, hence I cannot teach surrender, because surrender is nothing but the subtlest form of the ego.Surrender is not against the ego, it is in fact an act of the ego. Who surrenders? And by surrendering, who becomes humble? Who becomes meek? It is the ego standing upside down. It makes no difference whether the ego is standing on its legs or on its head. In fact it is more dangerous when it is on its head because then you will not be able to recognize it.Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek,” but what is meekness? “Blessed are the humble,” but what is humbleness? Can a man who has no ego be humble? How can he be humble? Who will be humble? A man who has no ego has no way to be meek or to be humble. He cannot be an egoist on the one hand; he cannot be a humble person on the other hand.To teach surrender is to give you a strategy to hide your ego, to sublimate your ego. Yes, that’s the right word, sublimation. A Freudian word, very significant. You can sublimate anything, so much so that recognition becomes impossible. You may even start thinking that this is the very opposite of the original thing. Meeting a humble man you will feel how egoless he is – he also feels how egoless he is. The ego has come from the back door and now it is no longer condemned, but appreciated.And why is a meek person, a humble person appreciated? That too is a strange story. He is appreciated because he fulfills everybody else’s ego. Just see the whole game of it. Why do you appreciate a humble person? – because being humble to you, he buttresses your ego. And because your ego is buttressed, you in response buttress his humbleness.Now a vicious circle is created. He will become more and more humble because everybody loves his humbleness. He gains respectability, and everybody enjoys his humbleness because everybody is being satisfied by his humbleness – it is a deep satisfaction for the ego.Yes, blessed are the humble and the meek because without them how are the egoists going to be contented? And when you say, “They shall inherit the Kingdom of God,” then naturally one is ready to do anything.I want you to understand it clearly: ego and surrender are two sides of the same coin. I don’t teach the ego, so how can there be any place for surrender in my vision? I don’t teach you to be meek, I don’t teach you to be humble.I teach you to be authentic, integrated individuals with immense self-respect. The word self-respect may create doubts in your mind because self-respect seems to again mean the ego. It is not so. You have to understand both words, self and respect; both are significant.Self is that which you are born with. Ego is that which you accumulate; ego is your achievement.Self is a gift of existence to you. You have not done anything to earn it, you have not achieved it; hence nobody can take it away from you. That is impossible because it is your nature, your very being.Ego is all that you go on accumulating through education, manners, civilization, culture, schools, colleges, universities… You go on accumulating it. It is your effort, you have made it, and you have made it so big that you have completely forgotten your real self.To know the real self is enough: the ego falls flat on the ground without any effort to surrender it. Unless the ego falls on its own, without your effort, it is not going to leave you. If you make effort to drop it, and that is what surrender is… All the religions teach surrender, hence I say they don’t understand even the very basics of psychology. Ego has not to be surrendered, it has to be seen. It has to be understood through and through.That is the meaning of respect. It is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It does not mean what it has come to mean: honor. No – respect simply means re-spect, to look again. That’s the literal meaning of the word; there is no place for honor. Just look again, look back, look deep. Spect means to see, look; re means again. Once, you had known it.Before you entered and became part of a society, a culture, a civilization, you knew it. It is not a coincidence that people go on thinking that their childhood was the most beautiful part of their life. It is a long-forgotten memory, because there have been days in your life, the earliest days, which you cannot remember exactly; only a vague feeling, a kind of fragrance, a kind of shadow is there.If you re-spect, if you look again and go deep into your existence, you are going to find the place from where you started losing yourself and gaining the ego.That moment is a moment of illumination because once you have seen what the ego is, the game is finished.So I cannot say to you, drop the ego, because that means I accept the reality of your ego. And how are you going to drop it – you are it. Right now, you are it. The self you have lost far away back in the past. There is a great distance between you and your self. Right now you are existing at the periphery of your self. That periphery is pretending to be your self. That pretender is the ego. Now telling the ego, “Drop! Surrender! Be humble!” is simply idiotic.I used to go at least three or four times a year to Mount Abu in India. Mount Abu has one of the most artistic temples in the whole world. They are Jaina temples, Delwara temples. The carving in the marble is incomparable. When for the first time I went to Mount Abu, the priest of the Delwara temple came to invite me. I went with him to his office. The Delwara temple is a very precious temple, very ancient, and yet as fresh as if it had just been finished, just created.Marble has that quality of freshness: for thousands of years it remains young, fresh, innocent. And Delwara temples are just marble and marble. The Taj Mahal is nothing compared to Delwara temples. The Taj Mahal is a simple structure, but Delwara temples are the artwork of thousands of artists, perhaps over hundreds of years. Each inch is carved.In his office – and he had a beautiful office, because governors, governor – generals, and even George V, the king, had come to visit the Delwara temples. If you miss the Delwara temples you miss much of India, the India that was. Delwara has something of the past beauty and glory. So he had a beautiful office because he was continually receiving guests from foreign countries, prime ministers, presidents, kings, queens.I went into his office. And in his office there was carved on the marble wall, a beautiful sentence, a statement from Mahavira. The statement is such that nobody could object to it, and nobody had ever objected. The priest was almost seventy years old and the priest’s forefathers, and their forefathers from generation to generation, had served the temple. The statement was simple. The statement was: “The humble man is respected universally. Be humble.”But the reason you are given for being humble is that you will be honored universally. The whole statement of Mahavira is: “The king is honored in his own country, but the humble man is honored universally” – there are no boundaries to his honor. A king’s honor has boundaries – within his own kingdom. Beyond those boundaries he is nobody. But the humble person has no boundaries to his kingdom, the whole universe is his kingdom; he is universally honored.But to whom is this idea going to appeal? The ego will immediately catch hold of it. That’s what the ego wants: to be honored universally! And if humbleness is the way, then okay, the ego is ready to be humble. If surrender is the way, the ego is ready to surrender.People used to come to me and they would say, “We want to surrender to you.”I would say, “But what will you surrender to me?”And they would say, “It is such a simple thing – we want to surrender our ego.”I would say, “That is okay, but what will I do with all these egos? You are tortured by one, I will be tortured by the thousands of egos you surrender to me. It is as if somebody comes and says, “I surrender my cancer to you.” Great surrender! You are obliging me? And how can you surrender your ego? Have you ever met it? Have you even seen it? Have you seen its subtle ways of movement, its workings? Do you know it? You don’t know it.”I asked the priest, “Remove this sentence from this temple. Mahavira has no understanding about ego because what he is saying is an appeal to the ego. Yes, he will get people ready to surrender, ready to be humble, ready to be meek; but behind their meekness will be a sophisticated ego, far more dangerous than the ordinary raw quality of the uncultured ego, which can be easily traced to where it is.”The sophisticated ego becomes more and more difficult to find. It becomes so subtle that it goes on slipping from your hands. And it becomes so clever at changing its faces. If it can change its face to meekness, humbleness, surrender, then what else do you want it to do? It is doing almost the impossible: it is pretending to be its opposite.And the religions have been exploiting the idea; they say, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” Now, to inherit the earth… What more can your ego demand? And what more can your ego find? And this man is giving you a simple proposal: “Be meek, and the earth is yours.” It is a bargain! And you are not going to be the loser. What you are losing? – you are simply gaining. Karl Marx, in his most famous book, The Communist Manifesto, has a beautiful sentence at the end. With that sentence he concludes the communist manifesto. The sentence has some great insight in it. It says, “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”He is calling on the workers, the proletariat, the poor people of the world, the laborers, to unite, to fight for their rights, to rebel against the whole system of exploitation, because what have you got to lose except your chains? You don’t have anything else except your chains, so there is no need to be afraid of fighting. The other party has to lose. If you win, you gain. If you are defeated, you lose nothing, because you don’t have anything in the first place.He was giving a great incentive. He thought that the revolution would happen first in America. He had never even dreamed that it would happen first in Russia. He must have been puzzled in his grave, almost shocked.He had never thought that the revolution would happen in Russia, in China, in Poland, in Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia – those names had never occurred to him, could not have occurred to him. He thought the revolution would happen where capitalism had come to its peak, where the class division was perfect, where you could see the rich and the poor.Marx forgot just one thing, and that changed the whole course of communism. He forgot that the American poor have something to lose. He forgot his own declaration. When he predicted that the revolution would happen first in America, he forgot completely that the American poor have something to lose. The Russian poor have nothing to lose, the Chinese poor have nothing to lose. The wonder of wonders is India! It has the poorest people in the world; you cannot conceive what they can lose, but no revolution has happened there.In India it could not happen because the religious tradition is so deep that it has told the poor people, “You are the blessed people. Your poverty is just a test of your faith. All these small troubles are nothing before the blessings of paradise. This life is just a life consisting only of four days.”That’s a proverb in India, that life is nothing but four days. Two days pass in desiring, the remaining two days pass in waiting. It is so small that half of it – while you are young, you have ambitions and desires to be someone, to be somewhere, to get your name carved for the coming generations – those two days pass in desiring. And the other half, when you start getting older, those two days pass in waiting for some miracle to happen and your desires to be fulfilled. This is all your life is: a soap bubble.For this small life are you going to lose the blessings, eternal blessings of heaven? Be patient. Have faith. Your poverty is a God-given opportunity. If you can pass this fire test – which is not a long journey, just four steps – the doors of paradise open, and you will be received with bands and singing and dancing.In India revolution seems to be impossible. It should have happened first in India, because what Karl Marx says has a truth in it. When you don’t have anything to lose, what is the fear of fighting, of rebelling, of risking?I have told this ancient story many times, but each time that I have told it I have loved it more…A master is going from one place to another with his chief disciple. They have to cross a jungle. The disciple is puzzled because the master says, “Move a little quicker, we have to pass through the jungle fast. The sun is coming down and soon it will be night.”The disciple has been with the master for many years and the master has never been afraid of the night. He has never been in such a hurry. Moreover, he is keeping a bag hanging from his shoulder. He is clutching that bag, and once in a while he puts his hand inside and feels something there, and then looks at ease.The disciple was very puzzled: what is the matter? What is he carrying in the bag that he is so afraid? But the path was long, and although they were almost running, in the middle of the jungle the night came. The disciple saw for the first time the master trembling, almost in a nervous breakdown.He said, “What is the matter? We have been in jungles many times, and we have stayed in jungles. We are sannyasins – we have renounced the world. Even if a wild animal comes and eats us, there is nothing much to be worried about. One day one has to die. There will always be some excuse – about some disease, wild animals, some enemy. And it does not matter when one dies; what matters is how one dies. And you know and I know how to die. So why be afraid?”But the master is no longer in a state to listen to him. They stop at a well, and the master says, “I am tired and thirsty so let’s pull up some water so we can wash our faces and drink some water and do our prayer: the prayer that is done at sunset.” In his nervousness he even forgot that the sun had already set.He gave the bag to the disciple and told him, “Be careful with the bag.”The master went to pull water from the well. This was the chance the disciple had been waiting for, to look into the bag to find out what was the matter. He opened the bag and found what the matter was – the master was carrying a brick of solid gold. Now he knew what the fear was. It was not death, it was not wild animals, it was not the night – it was robbers, thieves. This gold brick was the cause.So he took out the brick, threw it away in the jungle, found a stone of the same size, weighing almost the same, and put it in the bag. And when the master was back, the first thing he did was take away the bag. It was as heavy as before – the brick was inside.They started walking again, faster than before. The disciple said, “Now there is no need to go so fast.”The master said, “What do you mean?”He said, “I have thrown away the cause of fear, long ago.”The master said, “The cause of fear? How can you throw away the cause of fear?”He said, “You can look in your bag.”The master took out the stone. He said, “My God! You have thrown away my gold brick. Now there is no need to rush, we can stay here the whole night.” And they stayed in the jungle.In the morning the master thanked the disciple: “You did right. Because I had something to lose, there was fear. When there was nothing to lose, there was no point in the fear. I slept such a beautiful sleep. With that brick I could not have slept the whole night. At least a dozen times I would have touched the brick and felt whether it was still there or gone. But you did the right thing.”When you have something to lose, there is fear. That’s why in America the revolution has not happened, and is not going to happen – because America has really rich people and poor people, but the poor are almost in the same position as the middle classes in poor countries. The middle class never revolts because it has something and it can hope for more; it can invest for more, it can desire, be ambitious, wait. So of course the middle class can never go into revolution. Who knows? – you may lose even that which you have got.America has two classes, the middle class and the rich class, hence there is never going to be a revolution. In Russia it happened, in China it happened, because they were class-divided societies with clear-cut divisions. Now, in India ninety-five percent of the people have nothing to lose. Four percent of the people, the middle class, have a little bit to lose. One percent of the people, the super-rich, have much to lose.But in India the revolution has not happened in five thousand years. Religion is the cause: it goes on giving you the whole of paradise, for nothing. Why bother about the revolution? What are you going to gain? Rather, be patient, prayerful, faithful; surrender to God and you will have everything.Jesus says to the poor people that it is possible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, but it is not possible for a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven. I don’t believe it. This is simply a consolation. This is poison, pure poison. There is every possibility that the rich man will get through the gates of heaven. He may bribe the gatekeeper – and if the gatekeeper is Indian, there is no problem.And the rich man, whom Jesus says cannot pass through the gates of heaven, has done everything to be qualified to get through the gates of heaven. He has made synagogues, temples; he has been donating to the poor, giving charity, making hospitals, schools. What are the poor doing? Do you think just being poor is a qualification?At the gates of heaven will you be just saying, “Because I was poor, I claim… And where is that guy Jesus who said, ‘Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the Kingdom of God’?” You won’t find Jesus there either. He himself was poor – who will allow him to enter heaven? There is no possibility.Poverty is not a qualification for anything.The rich man will find a thousand and one ways. All the priests will be there to support the rich man. All the scriptures will be there to support the rich man – because they were all created by the money of the rich man. The priests have lived off the money of the rich man. Even God is the creation of the rich man to befool the poor. And you think the poor will enter heaven?In fact, there is no heaven. It has been created to give hope to the poor, to give consolation, to titillate their greed – using simple methods which the poor can afford, like being humble. In fact, what else can he do? His poverty has humiliated him enough and now you are saying, “Be humble.” No, I cannot say that. I cannot humiliate anybody. And this teaching is nothing but a strategy to make peace with his humiliated state.You have been humiliated by everybody, you have been trodden on by everybody, you are crushed by everybody – and then comes the priest to give you the opium: “Don’t be worried, my son, this is just a passing phase. If you remain humble and surrendered, everything is going to be okay for you. And these rich people who are treading all over you – they will be thrown into hell.”And this priest lives on the money of the rich. He knows there is no hell. The rich know there is no hell, there is no heaven, that this is a strategy for the humiliated to be consoled. No, I am not at all in favor of surrender.My religion has no place for surrender. It teaches you integrity. It teaches you individuality. It teaches you selfhood. It teaches you self-respect. And the magic of self-respect is that the moment you start searching for yourself, you will come across many shadowy selves, all phony. And it is not difficult to see what is phony because anything that you come across is phony. A simple criterion: anything that you find within you and think, “This is my self,” know well that it is phony.It is the finder who is the true one, not the found. The found is just the object that you have achieved and accumulated. Discard all those selves that you go on finding within you: “This is the self… No, this is the self…” Go on discarding them. A simple criterion, there cannot be a simpler criterion: anything that you find as your self is not your self.Go on discarding, and a moment comes when you cannot find any self anywhere. You cannot find anything – all is empty. And that is the moment of awakening. Suddenly the seer is seen.You are awakened to your own awareness.You don’t find an objective self, you find a subjectivity, and finding it is such a blessing, such an ecstasy that you will not care a bit about paradise. And you will not be bothered any more about surrendering because there is nothing to surrender. You have discarded all that was phony, that was only pretension.You have been told you are this, you are that, and you have accepted it. You have started playing the game of being this and being that, and nobody has told you – nobody can tell you – who you are. It is only you who can discover it. In discovering it, the ego evaporates. It is not surrendered, because it is a nonexistential, a shadowy thing, it has no substance in it.A famous incident…One of the kings, Bimbisara, came to Buddha. That day a rare thing had happened. A poor man, a shoemaker, Sudas was his name… Sudas means a good slave, a nice slave, a slave who has no ideas of rebellion, of revolt or anything, who is absolutely contented with his slavery. He had a small hut and a small pond behind the hut.That day, in his pond a lotus flower blossomed out of season. Once in a while things like that happen in nature. It’s nothing to brag about, nothing to make a miracle out of. Sudas asked his wife, “I should take this to the richest man in the town because he goes every day to Gautam the Buddha, and he will be delighted. And at least he is going to give me one rupee as a reward.”The wife said, “Go, be quick – he may be leaving.”He went out on the road and found that the chariot of the richest man was coming, going toward the mango grove where Buddha was staying. He stopped the rich man and said, “Out of season a rare lotus flower has blossomed in my pond, and I thought it would be good if you could present it to your master, Gautam the Buddha.”The rich man was really happy. He said, “Of course, because even my master will be surprised to see it. This is not the season for lotuses. I will give you one thousand rupees as a reward.”The poor Sudas could not believe it – one thousand rupees! In those days rupees were solid gold. In fact the word rupee comes from the Sanskrit word rup, which means gold, pure gold. The coins were pure gold – one thousand gold coins! The poor man said, “Please say it again, I cannot believe my ears.”The rich man thought that perhaps he was not willing to sell for one thousand rupees. He said, “Don’t be worried: I will give you ten thousand, or you can ask and whatever you ask I will give you, because I would love to put this rare flower at Buddha’s feet; perhaps nobody has ever presented such a thing to him.”Sudas was so shocked, he lost his voice. He could not say, “Yes, ten thousand is enough.”And the rich man said, “Why are you silent? Are you not willing?”While this negotiation was going on another chariot, the chariot of King Bimbisara, came by. Seeing the lotus flower, the king stopped and said to Sudas, “Sudas, whatsoever the rich man is going to give to you, I will give you five times more. Whatever he is giving, just come to the palace and collect five times more.”Sudas was almost on the verge of falling dead. The rich man was giving ten thousand, and he was willing to give even more. And now comes the king who says, “Five times more, whatever!” – he is not even inquiring. Kings are kings, they should not inquire the prices of things. And of course in front of the king the rich man could not say anything. He knew well that whatsoever he says, the king will give five times more. He had lost it.The king asked Sudas… Sudas opened his mouth and said, “Forgive me, but if this flower gives you so much pleasure, just presenting it to Buddha – then I am going to present it myself. You can keep your money.The king could not believe it. The rich man could not believe it. They both said, “What are you saying?”He said, “I am a poor man, but I manage to live. What am I going to do with all your money? But I am not going to miss this chance that you think is so precious. I am going to put this flower at Buddha’s feet myself.”But kings cannot be denied. The king said, “Then you should be aware that you will never reach Buddha; your head will be cut off. I will give you ten times.”Seeing the situation, the poor man had to give the lotus to the king. The king was already going with a very precious diamond to present to Buddha. That diamond that Bimbisara had was the biggest diamond known in those days. Now he had two presents. When he went to Buddha, both hands were full; in one a very precious diamond, in the other a very rare flower. Which to present first? – of course he thought of the diamond.As he was going to place the diamond, Buddha said, “Drop it!” He did not give him the chance to put it at his feet, he said, “Drop it.” And when Buddha says drop it, he has to drop it – unwillingly, reluctantly, because such a precious diamond… In the whole country, all the kings were jealous of the diamond – he was the owner of a rare piece – and Buddha says, “Drop it!” He is not even giving him the chance to put it at his feet.Then he raised the other hand with the flower, and Buddha said, “Drop it!” So he dropped both and stood there empty-handed.Buddha said, “Drop it!”Bimbisara said, “Either you are mad or I am mad. Both my hands are empty – now what can I drop?”Sariputta, one of Buddha’s disciples, said, “You have not understood Buddha. He is not interested in your diamond or in your lotus; you can take them away. Drop the real thing.”“What real thing?” he said. “I have only brought two things.”Buddha said, “Drop yourself!”“But,” Bimbisara said, “myself? I don’t know who I am.”Buddha said, “That was the point. Go home, find out, and when you find out who you are, then come back.”It was very insulting in a way. In front of ten thousand sannyasins – and Bimbisara is told to go back and look into himself and find out who he is. But he was a man of tremendous courage, intelligence, integrity. He told the palace, “Nobody should disturb me. Whatsoever time it takes, I am going to find what this man says.”For three days he remained in isolation. The fourth day he came out, radiant, and went to Buddha. And when Buddha saw him, Buddha said, “Now there is no need to drop anything because what you have found cannot be dropped. I can see it on your face, in your eyes. I was telling you to drop that which you were not.”But you cannot drop it unless you find who you are. And the moment you find who you are there is no need to drop it, it simply drops of its own accord.Let me repeat your question. You asked me: “What is the place of surrender in your religion?” From my side, there is no place.I do not ask you to surrender. I ask you to seek and search your being. Surrender will happen, but it will be a happening, not a doing. Neither I will ask you for surrender nor have you to do it. But what I am asking you to do, if you do it, surrender is going to happen. And when it happens of its own accord then it is a totally different phenomenon, qualitatively different. Then it is not ego pretending to be humble and meek and surrendered. Then it is a state of no-ego.The ego disappears in a very simple way. It is just like you are doing some arithmetic and for two plus two, you put five. Somebody draws your attention to the fact that two plus two are four, not five, and you see the point. Do you have to drop five? Will it take effort to drop five? – struggle, austerities, fasting? You simply erase it. It was just a mistake, and you will write four.The ego is just a mistake – just like two plus two is equal to five. Just like that, when you look inward and search for the real self, you come to know that two plus two is four, not five. Nothing has to be dropped, but something has disappeared from you. Something that was continuously pretending to be your self, something that was destroying your whole life, something that was messing up everything is found no more.When the ego is not found, I call that surrender from your side; it is not part of my religion. I will not ask you to surrender, but I will ask you something else which brings the surrender of its own accord. But then you are not humble, you are not meek, you are very grounded, very centered, very self-respectful. And only a man who is self-respectful is capable of respecting others.The man who respects himself cannot humiliate anybody else, because he knows that the same self is hidden in every being, even in the trees and the rocks. Perhaps it is fast asleep in the rock, but that doesn’t matter; it is the same existence in different forms.A man who respects himself suddenly finds himself respecting the whole universe.He cannot humiliate anybody, he cannot be disrespectful to anybody.But remember – he is not humble, he is not meek; you cannot exploit him in the name of meekness and humbleness. He will not allow you to put him in a position of humility, and he will not care about your Kingdom of God.He will say, “You can go to your Kingdom of God. I have found my Kingdom of God; it is within me. I don’t need any messiah to take me to the kingdom of God, all I need is an inner search. Except me, nobody else can do it. I am responsible for losing my self; I have to be responsible for finding it.”The truly religious man is difficult to understand because he will not fall into any category of yours. Your categories are opposites: arrogant-humble… Now where can you put a religious man? Arrogant? – he is not arrogant. Humble? – he is not humble. He is simply himself.A religious man cannot be categorized. All your categories fall short. He is beyond all your categories, hence he is bound to be misunderstood.I am not an arrogant man; I am not humble either. But then the question arises, where do I stand? I don’t even stand in the middle of both because that will be just half and half, something of arrogance and something of humbleness. No, I don’t even stand in the exact middle. That’s where I disagree with Gautam Buddha. He teaches to be always in the middle: don’t be arrogant, don’t be humble, just be in the middle. But I say: exactly in the middle you will be something of both.No, the really religious man is beyond the categories of opposites. You cannot categorize him. He is neither on this pole nor on that pole. He is not in the middle either; he is just above.He is a watcher on the hills, and everything else is deep in the valley. Nothing touches him.So sometimes you can interpret him as arrogant, sometimes you can interpret him as humble, but those are your interpretations. As far as his own experiences are concerned… And I can say it with my authority, I do not need any scriptures to support me. I am not arrogant, I have never been arrogant; I have never been humble either. I have been just myself. So whatever the situation demanded, I acted, responded, neither with humbleness nor with arrogance, but just whatsoever the moment needed – with awareness.Hence my teaching is in a way very simple if you can see the point.If you miss the point it is very difficult.I will not say to you to turn your other cheek if somebody hits you, no. Jesus can say it because he teaches humbleness. I cannot say that. I can only say one thing: let that moment decide. Sometimes perhaps you have to turn the other cheek. Sometimes perhaps you have to hit the man harder than he has hit you. Sometimes perhaps you have to hit him on both cheeks – but nothing can be given to you as a ready-made formula. It will depend on you, the person, the situation.But act with awareness, then whatever you do is right.So I don’t label acts as right and wrong. To me, the quality of your awareness is decisive. If you can respond with awareness, then whatever your response is, I declare it right. If you lose your awareness and react, then whatever you do – you may be turning the other cheek – is wrong. Do you see I have used two different words? With awareness I used the word response; with unawareness I used the word reaction.Response comes from yourself.Reaction is created by the other man: he has hit you. He is the master of the situation, and you are simply a puppet. You are reacting. His action is decisive, and because he has done something, now you are doing something in reaction. This is the unconscious man’s behavior. That’s why the unconscious man’s behavior can be manipulated very easily. You smile, he will smile. You be angry, he will be angry.It is because of this that people like Dale Carnegie can write books like How to Win Friends and Influence People. All that you have to know is simple reactions. He himself describes a situation…He was functioning as an agent of an insurance company. And there was a rich woman, the richest in the town, , who was very much against insurance, and insurance agents; so much so that insurance agents could not even see her – just from the gate they were thrown out. Her orders were, “Throw them out!” No question of an appointment…And when he came to the city, all the other agents said, “You have written this book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, now, if you can insure this old lady we will think that you have something to say, otherwise it is all hocus-pocus.” Dale Carnegie managed to insure the woman. How did he do it? A simple method.Early in the morning he went around the woman’s house. She was in the garden. Standing outside the fence, he said, “I have never seen such beautiful flowers.”The old woman said, “Are you interested in roses?”He said, “How did you know? I am mad about roses; the only flower that attracts me is the rose.”The woman said, “Why are you standing outside? Come in. I will show you my roses. I am also mad about roses, and you will not come across such big rose flowers as I have got.” And he was invited in. They went around her big garden, full of beautiful roses. And he was all praise, and all the poetry that he knew… The woman was so immensely impressed that she said, “You seem to be such a wise man that I want to ask you one question. What do you think about insurance?” – because she was tortured by these insurance agents continually, and they were being thrown out.He said, “For that I will have to come again because I will have to think it over and do a little research on it. I never advise anybody unless I am certain.”The woman said, “That is right. You are the first man who is not too eager to advise. That is the sure sign of a fool: too eager to advise.”He said, “No, I will have to look at the whole matter. Perhaps it will take a few days.” And during those few days he used to come every morning and stand outside the fence.And the woman said, “Now there is no need to be standing out there – I have told all the servants that for you the doors are open twenty-four hours a day. Whenever you want to come into the garden, you can come. If you want to come into the house, you can. It is your house, don’t be shy.”And within a few days he came with all the forms, the files and everything. He said, “I have worked out the whole thing. In fact I had to become an agent of an insurance company to find out absolutely all the details, the inside story, because from the outside you cannot know much. Now I am absolutely certain that this is the thing for you.”Now, this is the way the whole of humanity functions: reaction. You just do something that you know how the other unconscious being is going to react to. And it is very rare that an insurance agent will meet an awakened man, a rare possibility. In the first place the awakened man will not have anything to be insured. Only with the awakened man will Dale Carnegie fail, because he will not react, he will respond. And about response you cannot be predictable.The man of awareness is unpredictable because he never reacts. You cannot figure out beforehand what he is going to do. And each moment he is anew. He may have acted in a certain way in a certain moment. The next moment he may not act in the same way because in the next moment everything has changed.Every moment life is continuously changing. It is a moving river; nothing is static except your unconsciousness and its reactions, which are static.I was expelled from one college – I was expelled many times. I loved it, I enjoyed it; I am not complaining. I have no complaint against anything in my life. Everything has been tremendously beautiful. That expulsion was also beautiful. I had to search for a new college, but before I could be admitted I somehow had to persuade the principal, because the whole city knew – there were twenty colleges – the whole city was aware that I was continually being expelled from one college to another.I have been educated in many colleges. People ordinarily for one degree go to one college; for one degree I have gone to a dozen colleges. For two or three months at the most they were able to withstand me. So I went to the principal’s house, not to the college. I inquired about him from the neighbors, what kind of man he was. They said, “Very religious; every morning… He is a follower of the goddess Kali.” He himself was a very strong man, black – kali means black – very tall and very fat. He never needed any microphone, there was no need; he could address ten thousand students without any loudspeaker system.So the whole neighborhood told me, “Early in the morning for two hours, three hours, he is such a nuisance because he just continues, ‘Jai Kali! Jai Kali! Jai Kali!’ – and you know the man and his voice!” “Jai Kali” means victory to the mother goddess Kali. “And he gets so agitated that he gets louder and louder. First he starts by sitting, and then he stands up. And he almost looks like Kali himself.”Kali is a very ugly goddess, a very ugly woman with four hands, with a necklace of human skulls. With one hand she is holding a head, freshly cut off, blood dropping from it; in another hand, a sword. And she is standing on her husband’s chest! – a real woman. The world needs such women.So I inquired about everything, and then I went early in the morning at six o’clock and he was doing his thing, and really he was hot! He had a small temple in his house. I simply went in and sat there by the side. When he was just coming to the end of it I started, “Jai Kali!”He looked around and he said, “Who are you?”I said, “Don’t disturb me,” and I started again: “Jai Kali!”He said, “But this is strange. For the first time – and you are so young. Are you a devotee of Kali?”I said, “What do you think? Do you think you are the only devotee of Kali in this city?”He said, “I used to think that nobody was such a devotee as I am, but you certainly seem to be!”I said, “No, not compared to you. You are far ahead. You are almost a saint; I am just a beginner, an amateur.”He said, “No, you are not an amateur! What do you do?” He wanted to talk and he pulled me along: “Come with me, have breakfast.” So I had breakfast with him. He said, “You are the only man who has understood me – when you said, ‘You are almost a saint…’ Nobody thinks me a saint, they think that I am a monster. And these neighbors would kill me if they could manage, but knowing me they are afraid, they are cowards. You are the only man in my whole life who has understood me. What do you do?”I said, “I study in a college.”He said, “Drop that college. Join my college.”I said, “If you say so, I can drop anything. Dropped! Done!” And I joined his college.After a few days he came to know. Then he called me and said, “You are a rascal.”I said, “You should have understood, even on that day. You are not a saint either, but I wanted admission. What else to do?”Unconscious people are predictable. You can manage them easily. You can make them do things, say things, even things that they never wanted to do or never wanted to say, because they react.But a man of awareness, an authentically religious man only responds. He is not in your hands; you cannot pull him down, you cannot make him do anything. You cannot manage to draw out even a single sentence from him. He will do only that which in that moment he finds – through his awareness – is appropriate.Yes, surrender happens. But remember, in my religion there is no place for “doing” surrender. Surrender is not expected of you, it is not asked from you, but it happens. I am simply making you aware of it. And when it happens nothing can be done about it. But the happening is so graceful and beautiful it does not leave any trace behind it.The ego simply evaporates and you are left without ego – neither humble nor arrogant, just without ego.You cannot even say, “I am egoless,” because there is no longer an “I” to declare it; there is only a kind of am-ness, there is no “I” in it. The “I” goes with the ego.Am-ness remains with your existence and becomes really a tremendous force, changing everything that you have been before.It cuts you from your past.It gives you a new birth.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Seeing and hearing you speak, one thing continues to strike me: from your earliest childhood, up until the latest split second, you have always had so much self-respect and so much self-delight. Are we all capable of so much?Man is not aware of what he is capable unless he comes to realize it.It is just like a small young bird. The bird, sitting in the shelter the mother and the father have made, watches them fly, can see the delight of their flight. He himself would also like to fly in the same way, be on the wing in the infinite sky, under the sun. Seeing them going higher, moving with the winds, a great urge arises in him also. But he is not aware that he is capable of the same flight, the same delight, the same dance. He is not even aware that he has wings.It takes a little time for the mother and the father to persuade him. And they have a certain methodology to persuade him. The mother may sit just a little higher on another branch and give a call to the child. The child tries to fly but is afraid he may fall. But the mother goes on calling him; that gives him confidence. Sometimes it is needed for the father to actually push him out of the shelter. There is fear, he is nervous, but one thing is certain: for the first time he knows he has wings.He flutters his wings. He does not know how to fly, but the mother is not far away; he manages to reach her – the miracle has happened. Now the mother’s call will be coming from a second tree, and then the call will be coming from a far-off forest. But once he knows that he has wings, then distances don’t matter. Slowly there is no need for the mother to call or the father to push him.One day comes when he simply says good-bye to his father and mother and flies and never comes back. He has become an individual on his own.Whatever you see in me, feel in me, is there in you, but only as a potential.Nobody has called you from a distance and given you the confidence that you have wings. Nobody has pushed you and of course in the beginning it will look as if he is your enemy, pushing you to your death: you will fall! But unless you are pushed, and you see that by fluttering your wings you remain in the air and you don’t fall…. Then a great potential has become actual: the first vision of your own flying. Now it is no longer a dream, you can realize it.This is the problem – that man is not as alert as the birds are, that the child has to be made aware of his potentiality.Man’s misfortune is this – that the father is not interested in the child’s potentiality. He is interested in his own investment. He would like the child to be part of his business, of his religion, of his politics, of his ideology. The mother is not interested in the child’s development because that’s an unknown factor. It is not as simple as a bird’s; man is a complex being, multidimensional. The child is capable of becoming so many things, but the mother has her own investment – she would like the child to become someone in particular. IMan’s parents, because of their own investment – business, politics, religion, philosophy – are less interested in the potential of the child. They are more interested in how to mold the child so that he fits in their world, becomes respectable in their world, is not an outcast, is not a misfit.All this arises out of good intentions, but the result is not good. It is almost slaughtering the child, destroying, killing him. Most of his potential will always remain only potential. He will never be even aware what treasures he has brought with his life. He will die and those treasures will remain unopened.He lived his whole life according to somebody else’s dictates: he lived a borrowed life. He smiled because it was expected; he paid respect to people because that was what he was taught. He went to the church, to the synagogue, to the temple because his parents were going there, everybody else was going there. This was the thing to do, this was the in thing.With me something went wrong from the very beginning.The reason was that for seven years I was not with my parents, I lived with my maternal grandfather and grandmother. Those two old persons had no investment – they simply loved me. They knew perfectly well that sooner or later I would be gone, I was only a guest. You don’t start investing in a guest – tomorrow morning he will be gone. They acted out of a space which parents cannot. That’s where things went wrong with me.They allowed me total freedom to be myself because they had no desire to mold me. In fact, they wanted me to go back to my parents, so whatsoever my parents wanted me to become I would be available. My maternal grandfather actually said to me many times, “Our whole effort is to return you to your parents the same clean slate as they gave us. We don’t want to write anything on you. Who knows? – it may be against your parents’ wishes. You belong to them, to us you are a guest: all that we can do is give you freedom, our love, space to grow.”But the first seven years are the most important in life; never again will you have that much opportunity. Those seven years decide your seventy years, all the foundation stones are laid in those seven years. So by a strange coincidence I was saved from my parents – and by the time I reached them, I was almost on my own, I was already flying. I knew I had wings. I knew that I didn’t need anybody’s help to make me fly. I knew that the whole sky is mine.I never asked for their guidance, and if any guidance was given to me I always retorted, “This is insulting. Do you think I cannot manage it myself? I do understand that there is no bad intention in giving guidance – for that I am thankful – but you do not understand one thing, that I am capable of doing it on my own. Just give me a chance to prove my mettle. Don’t interfere.”In those seven years I became really a strong individualist: hard-core. Now it was impossible to put any trip on me.I used to pass through my father’s shop, because the shop was in front – at the back was the house where the family lived. That’s how it happens in India: house and shop are together so it is easily manageable. I used to pass through my father’s shop with closed eyes.He asked me, “This is strange. Whenever you pass through the shop into the house, or from the house” – it was just a twelve foot space to pass – “you always keep your eyes closed. What ritual are you practicing?”I said, “I am simply practicing so that this shop does not destroy me as it has destroyed you. I don’t want to see it at all; I am absolutely uninterested, totally uninterested.” And it was one of the most beautiful cloth shops in that city – the best materials were available there – but I never looked to the side, I simply closed my eyes and passed by.He said, “But in opening your eyes there is no harm.”I said, “One never knows – one can be distracted. I don’t want to be distracted by anything.”Naturally, he wanted me – I was his eldest son – he wanted me to help him. He wanted me, after my education, to come and take charge of the shop. The shop he had managed well; it had become a big place, slowly, slowly. He said, “Of course, who else is going to look after it? I will be getting old; do you want me continually to be here?”I said, “No, I don’t, but you can retire. You have your younger brothers who are interested in the shop, in fact too interested – even afraid that you may give the shop to me. I have told them, ‘Don’t be afraid of me; I am no one’s competitor.’ Give this shop to your younger brothers.”But in India the tradition is that the eldest son inherits everything. My father was the eldest son of his father; he inherited everything. All that he had now was for me to take care of Naturally he was worried…but there was no way. He tried in every possible way, somehow to get me interested.He would say to me, “Even if you become a doctor you cannot earn as much in the whole month as I can earn in a day. If you become an engineer, what salary are you going to get? If you become a professor – I can hire your professors, no problem. And you know there are so many thousands of graduates, post-graduates, PhDs, unemployed.”First he tried to persuade me not to go to the university because he was very much afraid that it would make me absolutely independent for six years – going far away. Then he would not even be able to keep an eye on me. He had already been regretting that for seven years he left me with my mother’s parents.I told him, “Don’t be afraid. What has to happen has happened: I am really graduated. Those seven years…. No university is needed to corrupt me; I am corrupted completely – out of your hands. And these means of persuasion – salaries, respect, money – I don’t give any value to them. And I am not going to become a doctor or an engineer, so don’t be worried. In fact, I am going to remain a vagabond my whole life.”He said, “That is even worse! It is better you be come an engineer or you become a doctor, but vagabond? – that is a new profession. You have got some mind to find such things. You want to become a vagabond! Even those who are vagabonds feel humiliated if you say, ‘You are a vagabond,’ but you are telling your own father that all your life you want to be just a vagabond.”I said, “That is what is going to be.”Then he started saying, “Then why do you want to go to the university?”I said, “I want to be an educated vagabond, not a vagabond out of weakness. I don’t want to do anything in my life out of weakness: because I could not be anything, that’s why I am a vagabond – that is not my way. First I want to prove to the world that I can be anything that I want to be, Still I choose to be a vagabond – out of strength. Then there is respectability even if you are a vagabond, because respectability has nothing to do with your vocation, your profession; respectability has something to do with you are acting out of strength, clarity, intelligence.“So be perfectly aware that I am not going to the university to be able to find some good job; I am not born to do such stupid things. And there are so many to do those things. But a very cultured, sophisticated, educated vagabond is very much needed because you don’t see any around. There are vagabonds but they are just third-grade people, they are failures. I want first to be absolutely successful and then to kick all that success and just be a vagabond.”He said, “I cannot understand your logic, but if you have decided to be a vagabond I know that there is no way to change you.”Those seven years…he reminded me again and again, That was our basic fault. That was the time we could have managed to make you something of worth. But your Nana and your Nani, those two old fellows destroyed you completely.”And after my Nana’s death, my Nani never went back to the village; she was so heartbroken. I have seen thousands of couples very intimately because I have been staying with so many families, wandering around India, but I could never find anybody who could be compared with those two old people: they really loved each other.When my Nana died, my Nani – my maternal grandmother – wanted to die with him. It was a difficult task to prevent her. She wanted to sit on the funeral pyre with her husband. She said, “My life is gone – now what is the point of being alive?” Everybody tried, and by that time…. This is an ancient tradition in India called suttee.The word suttee means the woman who dies sits on the funeral pyre, alive, with her dead husband. The word suttee means truthfulness. Sut means “truth,” also “being”; suttee means “who has a true being – whose being is of truthfulness.” She has loved the person so deeply that she has become identified with his life; there is no point in her living. But after the British Raj the suttee tradition was declared illegal.To the Western eye it looked almost like committing suicide; literally it was so. And for almost ninety-nine percent of women who became suttees it was nothing but suicide. But for one percent I cannot say it was suicide. For one percent, to live without the person whom they had loved totally and from whom they had never thought for a single moment to be separated, living was suicide.But law is blind and cannot make such fine distinctions. What Britishers saw was certainly ugly and had to be stopped. The one percent went on the funeral pyre of their own accord. But it became such a respectable thing that any woman who was not willing to do it…and it was really a very dangerous, torturous way of dying – just entering the funeral pyre alive!Ninety-nine percent were not willing to do it but their families, their relatives felt awkward because this meant the woman never loved the man totally. It would be a condemnation of the whole family: the honor of the family was at stake. So what these people did was they forced the woman; and a certain climate was created in which you would not be able to discover that the woman was being forced. She was of course in a terrible state, in a great shock.She was taken to the funeral pyre and on the funeral pyre so much ghee, purified butter, was poured that there was a cloud of smoke all over the place; you could not see what is happening. Around that cloud there were hundreds of brahmins loudly chanting Sanskrit sutras, and behind the brahmins there was a big band with all kinds of instruments making as much noise as possible – so to hear the woman screaming or crying or trying to get out of the funeral pyre was impossible. Around the funeral pyre the brahmins were standing with burning torches to push the woman back in.When Britishers saw this – this was certainly not only suicide but murder too. In fact, it was murder; the woman was not willing. The whole atmosphere was created so that you could not hear her screams, you could not see that she was trying to escape – everybody else was out of the circles of brahmins.When Britishers found out that this was something criminal and ugly, they made it illegal: if any woman tried it and was found out and caught alive, she would be sentenced for her whole life. And anybody who persuaded her – the family, the priests, the neighbors – they were also partners in the crime and they would also be punished according to whatsoever part they had played in it.So the institution slowly slowly disappeared; it had to disappear. But once in a while those one percent of women were always there for whom it didn’t matter, because their lives were now a sentence unto death. Why not take the chance of finishing it with your loved one?So they all tried, everybody, to persuade my Nani not to do it, but she said, “I have nothing to live for. I cannot go back to my village because in that same house where we both lived our whole life for sixty years, I cannot live alone. He will be too much there. I have not eaten a single meal before he did; it will be impossible for me to eat. In the first place, impossible to cook because I used to cook for him; he loved delicious foods and I enjoyed cooking for him. Just to see him delighted was my delight. Now for whom am I going to cook?“And I have never taken my meal before him. Even if it was very late if he had gone to some other village for some work, or to the court in a faraway town – I had to wait the whole day, but it was a joy to wait for him. In sixty years of married life I have not eaten a single meal before him.”That has been a tradition in India: how can you eat unless the person you love and for whom you have cooked and prepared has eaten? Just the other day my mother was saying…. She told me that she had wanted to tell me before but could not gather courage to tell, that day she wanted to say it because it was like a heavy weight on her heart.I said, “You should have told me before; if just by telling me that weight disappears, why should you keep it?”She said, “l felt so ashamed to mention it to you, but I cannot bear it any more, for the simple reason that if any day I die, I will die with this heavy weight, so it is better I should tell it.”And what was the matter? The matter was nothing – to the Western eye it is meaningless. The matter was this, that she had also never eaten before my father, but on the last day, when my father died…. She used to come from the hospital in the night and in the early morning she used to go back. She was just preparing tea before she went to the hospital, just about to take a cup of tea when the phone call came that my father’s condition was serious, so without drinking the tea she went to the hospital. He was going up and down the whole day, so she completely forgot about eating.By the evening my father was better. I went to see him nearabout three, and he was as good as one could hope – and that was a dangerous signal because it always happens before a man dies that he becomes absolutely okay. When death is coming, somehow the whole life flame gathers together to face death as the last challenge. That’s why before death people become almost cured. It is just like before a flame disappears from the candle: in that last moment before disappearing it burns really bright, and with full vigor, with intensity.Life is almost a flame. Even scientifically too it is a flame; that’s why you need constant oxygen – oxygen is needed by every flame. If you cover a candle with a glass, soon the candle will be gone because inside the glass there is only a little bit of oxygen. Once that oxygen is burned by the flame, the flame is finished. You need constant oxygen just to keep your flame burning. So scientifically also you are a flame, not only poetically.When I went to see him at three o’clock he was perfectly cured. He was laughing, sitting up, enjoying himself; and he said to me, “Now I am feeling perfectly good, and I think tomorrow I can come home.” I could see what was going to happen. He was going home but he was not coming home.So I tried to change the subject of home, because it was difficult for me to say, “Yes, tomorrow you are coming home” – because what I was seeing was that he was going home that day. But I said, “That is perfectly okay. Why wait for tomorrow? If you are feeling good and there is no problem, and the doctor allows it, you can come today.” And I tried to talk about mundane things. I told him, “We have brought a new, very big car for you. It has come, and whenever you are ready you will be coming home in your own new car.”He was almost childlike as he went deeper into meditation. And he took sannyas only when he had touched the rock bottom of meditation, not before it. People take sannyas to enter into meditation; he waited. My mother took sannyas, my uncles took sannyas, but he waited.Everybody was asking me, “Why don’t you tell your father?” My uncle was saying it, my mother was saying it. I said, “He has never told anything to me, never forced me to do anything. Now this would be absolutely unfair on my part to tell him to do something – and particularly to take sannyas. Whenever he wants, he will say; I am not going to tell him. And I know he is waiting” – because he was continuously reporting about his meditation to me: how he was going, what he experienced, for how many seconds his thoughts disappeared and what kind of thoughts came when they came.Whenever he came to me he was mentioning his meditation – and that was a clear indication that he was waiting; until he had touched rock bottom he would not say anything about sannyas. And he knew perfectly well that I was not going to say anything.One day, in the morning…he used to meditate from three o’clock in the night up to six – three hours. So just nearabout six, Laxmi came running and said, “Your father wants you immediately, and he also says, ‘Bring a mala and the sannyas form.’ I don’t know what has happened to him.” He had been sitting for three hours; he was staying in the room where afterward Laxmi stayed – in Lao Tzu house in Pune, the same room. He had just come for a few days, so Laxmi had moved out and he was staying there. I went into the room. He said, “Now the time has come: give me sannyas.After that day he became more and more childlike – interested in any small thing, just like a child. But that day when I mentioned, “We have brought a very big car for you, perhaps the biggest available in India” – and you can find the biggest cars in India because elsewhere, all over the world, they have disappeared – “and now you will not feel any discomfort, any trouble,” he took no notice. That was another indication to me that he was feeling something. I left him after ten minutes and I told him, “I will inquire of the doctor, and if you are cured then why wait for tomorrow? – you come home today.”When my mother saw him he was looking perfectly well. He said that he wanted to go out and sit on the verandah and just see the outside world. After my leaving they took him out. At that time my mother realized that she had not eaten the whole day. She felt so hungry that she told Sohan, or somebody who was there, “I am feeling very hungry, my stomach is almost hurting.” She told my father, “Sohan is coming soon with the food so you eat first – my stomach is hurting.”But my father said, “I am not feeling like eating. I am feeling so good that I don’t want to disturb my body by anything; I simply want to sit and look at the sky. Don’t be worried – you go and eat” – and she was so hungry that she ate before my father.This weight she had been carrying – that for the whole of her life she never ate before my father, and on the last day she did. As she finished, my father came in and she brought his food: he took one bite and said, “My body doesn’t feel to take anything.” Within half an hour he was gone; his body came home that night – he came home in that car that Laxmi had been trying to bring.But my mother just said the other day, “Relieve me of this pain because this hurts. That last day I completely forgot that he has to eat first.”I said, “Perhaps he could see better, that now you will be eating alone; it will not be possible any longer to give him food first and then eat. So just out of compassion he told you, ‘You eat, don’t be worried. There is nothing in it – who eats first, and who eats later. It is all the same.’“My feeling is that he was also feeling that there was not much time left, and then you would have to eat afterward without giving food to him. He must have been happy to see that you had eaten, that you would not be in the same position as my mother’s mother was.”For almost ten or twelve days my grandmother didn’t eat. First it was difficult to prevent her from going on the funeral pyre. Finally they all, my whole family, told me, “Only you can persuade her; you have been with her for seven years.” And certainly I succeeded. All that I had to do – I said to her, “You are saying constantly, ‘For what do I have to live?’ Not for me? Just tell me: you don’t want to live for me? Then I will tell the whole family that we both are going on the funeral pyre.”She said, “What!”I said, “Then why am I going to be here? For what? It is good we both go.”She said, “Stop this nonsense. Who has ever heard of a boy, seven years old…? It is not for you, it is for a woman whose husband has died.”I said, “Your husband has died, my Nana has died, and my Nani is going to die – it is enough reason for me. And anyway, any day I will have to die, so why wait so long? Finish it quickly.”She said, “I know you are mischievous and even though your Nana is dead you are playing a trick on me.”I said, “Then stop harassing the whole family, otherwise I am coming with you.” She agreed that she wouldn’t go to the funeral, she would live for me.She stayed in my father’s town, but she was a very independent woman: she did not like the big joint family; my father’s brothers, their wives, their children – it was a huge caravan. She said, “This is not the place for me. I have lived my whole life with my husband, in silence. Only for seven years were you there, otherwise there has not been much conversation either, because there was nothing to say. We had talked about all those things before, so there was nothing to say – we just sat silently.”And it was a beautiful place where they lived, facing a very big lake, so they would sit looking at the lake and the water birds flying, coming in thousands in certain seasons. She said, “I would like to live alone.” So a house was found for her near the river where she would find some similarity; in this town we had no lake but we had a beautiful river.The whole day I was in school or roaming around the town or doing a thousand and one things, and at night I always stayed with my Nani. Many times she said, “Your parents may feel bad. We took you from them for seven years, for which they cannot forgive us. We thought that we should return you as clean as we had got you, not trying to impose anything on you. But they are angry; they don’t say so but I can feel it and I hear from other people that we spoiled you. And now you don’t go to sleep with your father and mother and your family; you come here every night. They will think that the spoiling is continuing – the old man is gone but the old woman is still here.”I said to her, “But if I don’t come can you really sleep? For whom do you prepare the second bed every night before I come? – because I do not tell you that tomorrow I will be coming. About tomorrow, from the very beginning I have been uncertain because who knows what will happen tomorrow? Why do you prepare the second bed? And not only the second bed….”I had a long habit which Devaraj somehow had to manage to finish; it took him almost two or three years. I had, from my very childhood, as long as I remember, needed sweets before going to bed, otherwise I could not sleep. So she was not only preparing my bed, she used to go out and buy sweets, the sweets that I liked, and she would keep the sweets by my bed so that I could eat; even in the middle of the night if I felt like it again, I could eat. She would put enough so that if you ate the whole night there would be no problem.I asked her, “For whom do you bring these sweets? – you don’t eat them; since Nana died you have not tasted sweets.” My Nana loved sweets. In fact it seems he gave me this idea of sweets; he also used to eat before going to sleep. That is not done in any Jaina family. Jainas don’t eat in the night; they don’t even drink water or milk or anything. But he lived in a village where he was the only Jaina, so there was no problem. And it is perhaps from him that I got the habit. I don’t remember even how I started it: it must have been he, eating and calling me also to join him. I must have joined him, and by and by it became a routine thing. For seven years he trained me!I could not go to my house for two reasons. One reason was those sweets – because in my mother’s place it was not possible: there were so many children that if you allowed one child, then all the children would ask. And anyway it was against the religion – you simply could not even ask. But my difficulty was this, that I could not go to sleep without them.Secondly, I felt, “My Nani must be feeling to be alone, and here it is difficult to be alone so many people, it is always a marketplace. Nobody will be missing me if I am not here” – nobody ever missed me. They just made certain that I was sleeping with my Nani, then there was no problem.So even after those seven years I was not under the influence of my parents. It was just accidental that from the very beginning I was on my own. Doing right or wrong – that was not the important thing, but doing on my own. And slowly slowly, that became my style of life, about everything – for example, about clothes.In my town I was the only non-Mohammedan dressed liked a Mohammedan. My father said, “You can do anything but at least don’t do this, because I have to live in the society, I have to think of the other children. And from where did you get this idea?”Mohammedans in my town used instead of the dhoti that Indians use, a certain kind of pajama that is called a salwar. That is used by Pakhtoons in Afghanistan and Pakhtoonistan – those faraway places near the Himalayas, beyond the Himalayas. But it is a beautiful pajama, and not made in a miserly way, like a pajama; it has so many folds. If you have a real salwar you can make at least ten pajamas out of it; it has so many folds. Those folds give it its beauty, when they all become gathered. And I wore a long Pakhtoon kurta – not an Indian kurta. The Indian kurta is short and the sleeves are not very loose. The Pakhtoon kurta sleeves are very loose and the kurta is very long; it goes below the knees. And I had got a Turkish cap.My father used to tell me, “You enter the shop anyway with closed eyes, and with closed eyes you go out. Why don’t you use the back door?” He said, “You can come in from the back door, you can go out from the back door; you can have the key to yourself because nobody uses the back door. At least we will be saved the trouble of answering every customer, ‘Who is the Mohammedan going inside with closed eyes?’ And you get these strange ideas. We have a cloth shop – all kinds of cloths are there, ready-made clothes are there – you can have any style, but Mohammedan?”In India, a Mohammedan is the worst thing. I said, “This is why, because all you people think that the Mohammedan is the worst thing. I am protesting against you all, that the dress of the Mohammedan is the best. And you can see it; wherever I go only I am noticed, nobody else is noticed. Whenever I enter the classroom I am noticed; anywhere I go I am immediately noticed.”And the way I was using that dress…. It was a really graceful dress, and with a Turkish cap. The Turkish cap is long and has a tassel of hair hanging by the side; very rich Turkish people use it. I was so small, but that dress helped me in many ways.I might go to meet the collector, and the man, the peon, guarding the gate would just look at me and he would tell me, “Come on.” Seeing that dress…. He would not have allowed me, a small boy, to enter, but, “With this dress he must be a sheik or somebody very important.” And even the collector would stand up, seeing my dress. “Sheik” is used for very respectable people, and he would say, “Sheikji, baithye – Sheikji, please sit down.”I told my father, “This dress helps me in so many ways. Just the other day I went to see a minister and he also thought that I am a sheik belonging to some rich Arabian family or Persian family. And you want me to drop this dress and just use a dhoti and kurta which nobody is going to notice?” I continued to wear that dress up to my matriculation.They tried hard to stop me, but the harder they tried, the more…. I said, “If you stop trying perhaps I may drop it; while you continue to try I am the last person to drop it.”One day my father took all my salwars my kurtas and my three Turkish caps in a bundle and put them in the godown, the basement, where all the broken, useless things were kept. I could not find anything to wear, so when I came out of the bathroom I simply went naked, with my eyes closed, into the shop. As I was going out my father said, “Wait! Just come in. Put on your clothes.”I said, “You bring them, wherever they are.”He said, “I had never thought you would do this. I thought you would look around and search for the clothes; and you would not find them because I had put them in such a place you couldn’t find them. Then naturally you would wear the normal clothes that you are supposed to wear. I never thought that you would do this.”I said, “I take direct action, I don’t believe in unnecessary talk. I didn’t even ask anybody where my clothes were. Why should I ask? My nakedness will serve the same purpose.”He said, “Have your clothes. Nobody is going to bother you about your clothes, but please don’t start walking naked because that will create more trouble – that a cloth merchant’s son has no clothes to wear. You are notorious and you will also make us notorious with you: ‘Look at the poor child!’ Everybody will think that we are not giving you clothes.”Since then they stopped; by the time I passed matriculation I dropped those clothes. When I left the town, I changed my clothes to those more suited to my college life. I had found that in the first college I went to, wearing a cap was compulsory – you could not go there without a cap. That was a great idea. You had to come very properly dressed: shoes, buttons fastened, wearing a cap. I went there with no buttons, with no cap, with my wooden sandals – and suddenly I became a celebrity.The principal immediately called me. He said, “What is this?”I said, “This is just a way to get introduced to you, otherwise it may take years. Who bothers about a first-year student?”He said, “You have some idea behind it, but it is not allowed; you will have to wear a cap, and your buttons have to be fastened.”I said, “You will have to prove to me the scientific grounds for wearing a cap. Does it help in any way to increase intelligence? Then I can even use a turban – why a cap? – if it increases brain power. But the fact is that most idiots in India are in the Punjab, and they wear a turban, tied tightly. Perhaps they are the only people in the whole world who tie a turban so tightly; their mind is completely imprisoned, finished. And the most intelligent people in India are the Bengalis, who don’t wear caps.” I said, “Just tell me: What are the fundamental, scientific reasons that I have to wear a cap?”He said, “This is strange – nobody ever asked for the fundamental, scientific reasons for caps. This is simply our convention in this college.”I said, “I don’t bother about convention. If the convention is unscientific and destroys people’s intelligence, I am the first to rebel against it. And soon you will see caps disappearing from the college because I am going to tell people, ‘Look – Bengalis have the best intelligence and they don’t wear caps.’“In India, two Nobel Prizes have gone to Bengal. I don’t think ever in the future there is going to be a single Nobel Prize to Punjab. I am going to spread this movement, but if you keep silent and allow me the way I am, I won’t create a nuisance. Otherwise there will be a movement: you will see bonfires, caps burning in front of your office.”He looked at me and he said, “Okay, don’t create any nuisance, just go on the way you are. But I will be in trouble because sooner or later others are going to ask, ‘Why did you allow him?’”I said, “The fact is that if you are an honest man; you should stop wearing the cap yourself because you don’t have any scientific grounds for it. Otherwise, whosoever comes, tell him to find scientific, fundamental reasons for it – that in some way it helps intelligence. The college is meant to help people’s intelligence; it should be sharpened. In what way does the cap help? It imprisons.”But he said, “At least buttons…”I said, “I don’t like them. I like the air going directly to my chest, I enjoy it; I don’t like buttons. Nowhere in your college code are caps mentioned, so for the cap I need scientific reasons. Nowhere is it mentioned that you have to have buttons.” But nobody there had ever thought that people would come to college without buttons. I said, “You can see: I don’t even have the holes for the buttons.”I won the first prize in my first year in an inter-university debate competition, and this principal was very happy. He said, “I knew that you would win because you find proofs and reasons which nobody even suspects exist. But now there is a problem: we need your photograph with the trophy and everything; it is going to be published. The cap I cannot say anything about, leave it; but buttons, without buttons…. The picture will be going to all the newspapers.”I said, “Then you can stand in my place, with buttons, proper dress and cap. I am not interested. And when I was debating I did not have buttons; I won the trophy without buttons. And in the photo I have to be without the buttons, otherwise you are not being fair. You should have told me there that without buttons I could not participate in the debate.“You had chosen me to participate out of all the candidates in the college – at that time also I had no buttons. I participated in the debate, I won the competition; now the trophy is there. If you cannot stand in my place because everybody will recognize that you are the principal, then just hang your coat with the buttons by the side of it. I have no interest in it. But if I am going to stand, I am going to stand the way I am. Even with the buttons I am not the same person.”He was shocked but he agreed that it was true. Even with buttons it would not be the same person. The personality consists of very small things; just a slight change…. I said, “Just think” – he had a good mustache – “if we shave your mustache and tell you, ‘Please pose for us because your photo is going to be printed,’ would you be willing?”He said, “But that would not be like me.”I said, “Exactly. With buttons it would not be me.”It went on – I never missed a single opportunity to sharpen my intelligence. I turned every possible opportunity to sharpening my intelligence, individuality. You can understand now, looking at the whole picture, but in fragments…. The people who had come in contact with me of course were unable to understand what kind of man I am – crazy, nuts – but I was going very methodically.Each fragment may not give you the idea because it is out of context, but if you put it in the whole context…. I was being expelled from one college, another college, but I was enjoying it – and that’s what was shocking to them.When I was expelled from one college, my first college, it was this same principal who had to expel me. He felt very sorry, because it was not right to expel me; and by and by he had come to have a certain liking for me, for my absolute determination to be myself whatsoever the cost. He had grown, by and by, a certain respect: “This man can sacrifice anything even for buttons, just for the cap.”He tried to persuade me, “If you wear the cap I guarantee you that you will get the first class first in the intermediate examination, because it is in my hands.”I said, “I would prefer to be failed now, but the cap I am not going to use. I am ready for the consequences: it is in your hands; fail me.” But before he could fail or pass me he had to expel me, because one professor insisted he would resign or I had to be expelled. He felt sorry because the professor was just being illogical – and strangely, he was the professor of logic! He was being absolutely illogical, because all his complaint was, was that I continually argued.I told the principal, “The class of logic is meant to argue. We have come to learn logic, not to sit there like dodos. And that old fellow goes on saying any absurd thing. I cannot tolerate it. If anything illogical is said in the logic class, I am going to fight, I am going to stand for logic. It is a question of defending logic and its reputation. Just for an ordinary professor I cannot tolerate any illogical thing.“And this is absolutely illogical: he gives no reason why I should be expelled, what crime I have committed. He just says that I argue – but is argument a crime? And ask him whether he has been able to answer my argument. Is it my argument that hurts him or that he cannot answer it?”He said, “I can understand and I feel sorry for you.”I said, “Never feel sorry for me, because I enjoy being expelled – it is creditable – and expelled for no reason at all, expelled for being right. I feel proud.Don’t feel sorry for me, I feel sorry for you all that none of you have guts. You are the principal of the college and you don’t have guts. And remember that Life is a very strange phenomenon: today you are in a position of power; tomorrow I may be in a position of power.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I don’t mean anything, I am simply saying that one day it is possible you may be in trouble and only I can save you.”He said, “That is almost impossible. What trouble could I be in? Don’t try to confuse me.” He was already becoming afraid: “What trouble and what power is he talking about?”I said, “One day, God willing, we will see.”And, strangely, it happened that ten years after that incident I became a professor. One of the colleges near Gwalior was opened by a Jaina family. The family donated all the money, all that the college needed. And they were very much in love with me, so they put me on their managing committee. This principal – I had completely forgotten about him. Ten years is a long time, and in ten years I had been expelled so many times. There had been so many principals and vice-chancellors that I had been fighting and fighting; but it went on helping me to become more and more solid, confident.This principal had lost his job; his was a private college, and the managing committee decided to throw him out, so he applied for this new college. I had no idea. I was on the committee to interview principals and professors for the college. When he came up – his name was Principal Paranjpe…when he came up and saw me sitting in the place of the chairman of the managing committee he started trembling.I said, “Principal Paranjpe, don’t be afraid.”Then he said, “Forgive me. What I did with you was absolutely unfair and wrong. Please forget about it.”I said, “There is no question…I cannot forget it, I am going to reward you for it. You are chosen as the principal for this college because you expelled me. Now I cannot in any case not choose you because that would be simply, in your mind, revenge. Although you are not the best candidate – there are more qualified people than you – I have to choose you.“Do you remember, I had said to you that one day things can be just upside down? That day you were sitting in the chair and I was standing in front of you. Today I am sitting in the chair and you are standing in front of me.“Life is a very strange drama…but I appoint you to be the principal of this college, only because you expelled me. How can I forget it? Forgive?, that is perfectly okay – I have forgiven you long ago because no harm has been done to me – but forget?, that I cannot do. If I forget it you will not be appointed. Now tell me, should I forget it? – then you cannot be appointed. There are far better candidates, you can see. This is the list: there are PhDs there are DLitts – you are only a double MA“Your only qualification is that I remember that you expelled me without any reason. Now being the principal of this college don’t do any idiotic thing like that.”He could not believe it. In the evening he came to see me where I was staying, in the family who had made this college. He had tears in his eyes; he said, “I cannot believe it! I was certain that I was finished. Seeing you there I had lost all hope. I have been out of a job for one and a half years – I am in a terrible state. And you saved me, knowing perfectly well that I have been unfair to you.”I said, “Forget about it. That is your problem – to be fair or to be unfair – but it helped me immensely. If you had not expelled me I would not have found a better college, a better principal, better professors. I am really thankful to you.”Actually that was the thing: because of his expulsion I found a better college. But from there also I was expelled, and finally I had to leave Jabalpur because no college was ready to give me admission. But that was also a great blessing. In my whole life, looking backward, I find that if you are just a little alert everything turns into a blessing. I don’t remember anything in my whole life which turned out to be a curse. All nights have proved to be the beginnings of a brighter day.When all the colleges refused me, I was living in Jabalpur with one of my father’s sisters who was married. She started crying and her husband was in tears. They said, “We have been telling you; why do you unnecessarily get into trouble? And it is not just one college – in four years how many colleges have there been? And you again do something. It surprises us that whatever you do you are righteous about it. And in fact we cannot say that you are wrong; you are right too. We have never seen such a thing happening to any student – who is always right and is expelled. If you are wrong and expelled it is understandable.” I said, “This is the beauty in my case. I am never wrong; but in this whole wrong society, to be right is to be wrong. Here, wrong is acceptable, right is not acceptable; hence I don’t feel that it is any insult. These are all certificates for my character.” And that’s how it turned out to be.I moved to another city, Saugar, and gave all my certificates of expulsion to the vice-chancellor of the university. He said, “But why are you telling me all these terrible things?”I said, “I am telling you: these are my character certificates. And I don’t want to keep you in the dark; first you should know about me, only then give me admission. Otherwise it is safer not to give me admission, rather than expel me later on, because then it will be your responsibility. And you will be condemned for it, because I always do the right thing; perhaps at the right moment, the right thing done rightly is too much, and the people who have been continually doing wrong things freak out. So I am telling you these are my character certificates.”He said, “You are a strange young man but I cannot refuse you, because who else would give such character certificates? And I am the last to think of expelling you, because each time you are right. I am not going to deny you admission.”He gave me admission – not only admission, he gave me scholarships. He gave me free food, lodging, boarding, everything free. He said, “You should be given all respect, because so much injustice has been done to you.”I told him, “One thing you should remember: you are doing all these things; it is so compassionate of you; but if sometimes a problem arises then I am going to give you a tough time. I will not think of your favors – that you must keep in your mind – I cannot be bribed.”He said, “l am not bribing you, these are not bribes. I really am impressed.” He was the only person who did not expel me for two years continuously. And those two years were the hardest for my professors because those were the two last years, the post-graduate years. So many complaints….But that man, Doctor Tripathi – he was a very great historian. He was a professor of history at Oxford, and from there, when he retired, he became vice-chancellor of Saugar university. He kept his word.He simply went on throwing all complaints into the wastepaper basket, although every day when I used to go for a morning walk, passing his house, he would tell me, “So many complaints came yesterday; they are all in the wastepaper basket.” And he was so happy that he had been able to keep his word against all odds. It was really difficult for him; there were complaints from students, from superintendents, from the proctor, from professors. But he went on inquiring, “Was he wrong or right?”One professor was delivering a lecture. He said in his lecture – it was the anniversary celebration of the founder of the university – he said, “There was a time when India was known as a golden bird. It was so rich and so religious that there was no need to lock your doors – locks were not invented even.”I stood up and asked him, “If this is true – that people were not keeping locks on their houses because there was no question of anybody stealing, of thieves, of criminals – then why does Gautam Buddha go on continually teaching people, ‘Don’t steal, don’t be a thief’? Do you think you are saner than Gautam Buddha? Mahavira continues, all the teachers from the Vedas…. If there was no stealing happening then these people seem to be utterly mad. For forty years Buddha teaches against stealing – to whom?”I said, “Take your statement back. I can accept the idea that locks were not invented; that may be the reason why people were not locking their doors. A second reason is: there was nothing to be stolen, people were so poor. And poverty has existed since the days of the Vedas; it is mentioned in every scripture.So the only explanation is that people were poor, so poor that what could you steal? – they had nothing. Moreover, to invent locks some kind of technology is needed – they don’t just grow on trees. The technology was missing. Of course the rich people had no need of locks because they had naked swords guarding their palaces and houses. But guarding against whom? There must have been poverty just on the other side of the road.”He complained. But at the lecture he said, “Okay. I don’t want to make this celebration a place of argumentation or discussion. I take my statement back.”I said, “You are not taking it back, you are just trying to save your face. But okay, this will do.”Later he complained, “This man insulted me before the whole university.” By chance, when he was complaining I went to see the vice-chancellor for some other reason. I was the prefect of the hostels, and the superintendent of the hostels was continually issuing orders – of course they had to pass through me. If I found they were not right I threw them away; if they were right then I pasted them on the board. He was very angry.He told me, “It is not within your power to throw away my orders.”I said, “You prove that it is not within my power.” So I had gone just to explain the whole thing, and that the superintendent would be coming, and that this was the situation: “He issues stupid orders. Now I am not so stupid as to put those orders on the board of the hostel. So either you accept my resignation as a prefect, or when he comes make it clear to him that these orders are stupid and the prefect is doing right.”For example, one order was that exactly at nine all the lights should be out. I said, “This is nonsense. I read up to three o’clock in the night; and I have come to the university to study as much as possible. I am not doing any harm to anybody. I am not going to put my light off at nine o’clock. It will be put off at three o’clock. He can put his lights off at eight o’clock or nine o’clock or whenever he wants. He should put them off forever – I have no problem.“And no student has reported that they have any trouble – because all the students have their own times and their freedom. Somebody studies up to ten, somebody studies up to twelve. Somebody goes to bed early, gets up early and starts reading at three o’clock; when I am going to sleep he is going to start reading and puts his light on. Now to change this is nonsense. And I have told the superintendent, ‘You are trying to control even our sleep. In the day you control us: what to do, how to do it, where to go, where not to go. Even in the night – soon you will be starting to control our dreams and asking us, “Why did you dream of this?”‘“I told the vice-chancellor, “You are a man of history, you must know that one emperor of Egypt issued an order – this is an historical fact – a pharaoh issued an order to the whole kingdom that nobody should enter his dreams. If anybody tried he would be sentenced to death. Naturally, nobody should interfere with his sleep.“Now, this was a troublesome thing. One of his courtiers appeared the next night in his dream. Immediately he was caught. He tried hard to explain, ‘I had not gone out of my house.’The pharaoh said, ‘That is not the point. Why did you appear in my dream? Who are you to disturb my sleep?’ Now, it is the pharaoh’s dream, his imagination – that poor fellow had nothing to do with it; he had not even thought about the pharaoh, but he was given a punishment. Because he was part of the court, of course he was not given the death sentence but just a few years’ imprisonment.”I said to the vice-chancellor, “You must remember that. Now this man will soon start ordering, ‘You have to dream this, you have to dream that’; and ‘you should dream only up to this point and then all dreams stop.’ I cannot put up with this kind of nonsense – students are free. There is no trouble and no problem. Nobody is disturbing anybody.”So I had gone to tell him, “Soon there is going to be trouble and a fight between me and the superintendent. Either you will have to change me or the superintendent; we cannot coexist. And if you remember your word, you have to change the superintendent because he cannot prove that he is right.”At that same time he said, “You see this other professor sitting here – he says that you disturbed his meeting.I asked the professor, “You had taken your statement back and I told you that you had not taken it back. If you had taken it back, why are you here, complaining? If you had not taken it back you should have been courageous enough to argue. I cannot sit there just listening to stupid things – it is insulting to the university. I was not disturbing the meeting. You started the disturbance – I was trying to put it right.”And the vice-chancellor said to that professor, “Now prove him wrong, because this is my promise to him, that if he is proved wrong only then can any action be taken against him.”But everything helped me. The more I went into conflicts with people of intelligence, education, culture, sharpness, the more I found it immensely helpful…not the textbooks, not the class lectures, but what I used to call – they don’t call them – extra-curricular activities. I used to call my activities, extra-curricular; and they were really paying.When on the first day I entered the university’s philosophy class, I met Doctor Saxena for the first time. Only for a few professors did I have really great love and respect. These two were my most loved professors – Doctor S.K. Saxena and Doctor S.S. Roy – and for the simple reason that they never treated me like a student.When I entered Doctor Saxena’s class the first day, with my wooden sandals, he looked a little puzzled. He looked at my sandals and asked me, “Why are you using wooden sandals? – they make so much noise.” I said, “Just to keep my consciousness alert.”He said, “Consciousness? Are you trying to keep your consciousness alert in other ways too?”I said, “Twenty-four hours a day I am trying to do that, in every possible way: walking, sitting, eating, even sleeping. And you may believe it or you may not, that just lately I have succeeded to be aware and alert even in sleep.”He said, “The class is dismissed – you just come with me to the office.” The whole class thought I had created trouble for myself the first day. He took me into his office and took from the shelf his thesis for a doctorate that he had written thirty years before. It was on consciousness. He said, “Take it. It has been published in English, and so many people in India have asked to translate it into Hindi – great scholars, knowing both languages, English and Hindi, perfectly well. But I have not allowed anybody, because the question is not whether you know the language well or not; I was looking for a man who knows what consciousness is – and I can see in your eyes, on your face, by the way you answered…you have to translate this book.”I said, “This is difficult because I don’t know English much, I don’t know Hindi much either. Hindi is my mother tongue, but I know only as much as everybody knows his mother tongue. And I believe in the definition of the mother tongue. Why is every language called the mother tongue? – because the mother speaks and the father listens – and that’s how the children learn. That’s how I have learned.“My father is a silent man; my mother speaks and he listens – and I learned the language. It is just a mother tongue, I don’t know much; Hindi has never been my subject of study. English I know just a little bit, and that is enough for your so-called examinations, but for translating a book which is a PhD thesis…. And you are giving it to a student?”He said, “Don’t be worried – I know you will be able to do it.”I said, “If you trust me, I will do my best. But one thing I must tell you, that if I find something wrong in it then I am going to make an editorial note underneath, putting a star on it, that this is wrong, and how it should be. If I find something missing, I am going to put a star again and a footnote that something is missing, and this is the part that is missing.”He said, “l agree to that. I know there are many things missing in it. But you surprise me: you have not even seen the book, you have not even opened it. How do you know that things will be missing in it?”I said, “Looking at you…in the way you can see by looking at me, that I am the right person to translate it, I can see perfectly, Doctor Saxena, you are not the right person to write it!”And he loved that so much that he told it to everybody. The whole university knew about it – this dialogue that had happened between me and him. In the next two-month summer vacation I translated the book, and I made those editorial notes. When I showed him, there were tears of joy in his eyes.He said, “I knew perfectly well that something is missing here, but I could not figure it out because I have never practiced it. I was just trying to collect all the information about consciousness in Eastern scriptures. I had collected a lot, and then from that I started sorting it out. It took me almost seven years to finish my thesis.” He had done really a great scholarly job – but only scholarly. I said, “It is scholarly, but it is not the work of a meditator. And I have made all these notes – that this can be written only by a scholar, not by a meditator.”He looked at all those pages and he said to me, “If you had been one of my examiners for the thesis I would not have got the doctorate! You have found exactly the right places that I was doubtful about, but those fools who examined it were not even suspicious. It has been praised very much.”He was a professor in America for many years, and his book is really a monumental work of scholarship; but nobody criticized him, nobody has pointed…. So I asked him, “Now what are you going to do with the translation?”He said, “I cannot publish it. I have found a translator – but you are more an examiner than a translator! I will keep it but I cannot publish it. With your notes and with your editorial commentary it will destroy my whole reputation – but I agree with you. In fact,” he said, “if it were in my power I would have given you a doctorate just for your editorial notes and footnotes, because you have found exactly the places which only a meditator can find; a non-meditator has no way to find them.”So my whole life from the very beginning has been concerned with two things: never to allow any unintelligent thing to be imposed upon me, to fight against all kinds of stupidities, whatsoever the consequences, and to be rational, logical, to the very end. This was one side, that I was using with all those people with whom I was in contact. And the other was absolutely private, my own: to become more and more alert, so that I didn’t end up just being an intellectual.Intellect and meditation, meeting together, growing together, give you the wholeness of being.There have been meditators who have not had very grown-up intellects. They enjoyed their meditation, they were fulfilled, but they were incapable of conveying the message to anyone – because for that a very sharp intelligence is needed. You will have to cut the whole jungle of the other person’s mind, you will have to make a path in the jungle of thoughts. You will need a really sharp, sword-like intelligence.But if you just create the path, that is not the purpose. A path is meaningless unless there is a traveler.Intellect can make the path but meditation travels on it.You ask me, Is that the same potential of all? Yes, absolutely yes. It is everybody’s birthright. You have just never tried it.You have wings but nobody has pushed you.You have not taken the jump on your own: you are still sitting in the shelter.The whole sky is yours – but you are not claiming it.My function here is to drag you out of your shelter.Whatever is needed to be done, I am ready to do it If you need a push, good; if you need a hit, good.I am ready to do anything to give you just a little experience – to experience that you have wings, then my work is finished.If you can just flutter from one tree to another, you have got the golden secret in your hands.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is meditation?It is the most important question as far as my religion is concerned. Meditation is the very center of my whole effort. It is the very womb out of which the new religion is going to be born.But it is very difficult to verbalize it. To say something about meditation is a contradiction in terms. It is something which you can have, which you can be, but by its very nature you cannot say what it is. Still, efforts have been made to convey it in some way. Even if only a fragmentary, partial understanding arises out of it, that is more than one can expect.But even that partial understanding of meditation can become a seed. Much depends on how you listen. If you only hear, then even a fragment cannot be conveyed to you, but if you listen… Try to understand the difference between the two.Hearing is mechanical. You have ears, you can hear. If you are getting deaf, then a mechanical aid can help you to hear. Your ears are nothing but a certain mechanism to receive sounds. Hearing is very simple – animals hear, anybody who has ears is capable of hearing – but listening is a far higher stage.Listening means that when you are hearing, you are only hearing and not doing anything else – no other thoughts are in your mind, no clouds pass in your inner sky. So whatever is being said reaches as it is being said. It is not interfered with by your mind; not interpreted by you, by your prejudices; not clouded by anything that, right now, is passing within you – because all those are distortions.Ordinarily it is not difficult: you manage just by hearing because the things that you are hearing are common objects. If I say something about the house, the door, the tree, the bird, there is no problem. These are common objects; there is no need of listening. But when we are talking about something like meditation – which is not an object at all, it is a subjective state; we can only indicate it – you have to be very attentive and alert, and then there is a possibility that some meaning reaches you.If even a little understanding arises in you, it is more than enough because understanding has its own way of growing. If just a little bit of understanding falls in the right place, in the heart, it starts growing of its own accord.First try to understand the word meditation. It is not the right word for the state about which any authentic seeker is bound to be concerned. So I would like to tell you something about a few words. In Sanskrit, we have a special word for meditation, the word is dhyana. In no other language does a parallel word exist; the word is untranslatable. It has been recognized for two thousand years that this word is untranslatable for the simple reason that in no other language have people tried it or experienced the state that it denotes. So those languages don’t have that word.A word is needed only when there is something to say, something to designate. In English there are three words: the first is concentration. I have seen many books written by very well-meaning people, but they are not people who have experienced meditation. They go on using the word concentration for dhyana – dhyana is not concentration. Concentration simply means your mind is focused on one point; it is a state of mind. Ordinarily the mind is continuously moving, but if it moves continuously, you cannot work with the mind on a particular subject.For example, in science, concentration is needed; without concentration there is no possibility of science. It is not strange that science has not evolved in the East – I see these deep inner connections – because concentration was never valued. For religion something else is needed, not concentration.Concentration is the mind focused on one point, which has its utility because then you can go deeper and deeper into a certain object. That’s what science goes on doing: finding out more and more about the objective world. A man with a mind which is continuously roaming around cannot be a scientist. The whole art of the scientist is that he is capable of forgetting the whole world and putting his whole consciousness onto one thing. And when the whole consciousness is poured into one thing, it is almost like concentrating sun rays through a lens: you can create fire.Those rays themselves cannot create fire because they are diffused; they are going farther away from each other. Their movement is just the opposite of concentration. Concentration means rays coming together, meeting on one point; and when so many rays meet on one point, they have enough energy to create fire. Consciousness has the same quality: concentrate it and you can penetrate deeper into the mysteries of objects.I am reminded of Thomas Alva Edison – one of the great scientists of this country. He was working on something with such concentration that when his wife came with his breakfast, she saw that he was so involved that he had not even heard her coming. He had not even looked at her, he was not aware that she was there, and she knew that this was not the right time to disturb him. “Of course the breakfast will get cold but he will be really angry if I disturb him – one never knows where he is.”So she simply put the breakfast at his side, so that whenever he came back from his journey of concentration he would see the breakfast and take it. But what happened? In the meantime a friend dropped by – he also saw him so concentrated. He looked at the breakfast getting cold and said, “Better let him do his work. I should finish the breakfast, it is getting cold.” He ate the breakfast and Edison was not even aware that this friend was there and had eaten his breakfast.When he returned from his concentration, he looked around, saw the friend and saw the empty plates. He told the friend, “Please forgive me. You came a little late and I have already taken my breakfast.” Obviously, because the plates were finished somebody had eaten, and who else could have eaten it? He must have! The poor friend could not understand what to do. He was thinking to give him a surprise but this man had given him a bigger surprise: he had said, “You came a little late…”But his wife was watching the whole thing. She came in and said, “He has not come late, you have come late! He has finished your breakfast. I was watching, but I saw that it was getting cold. Anyway, at least somebody ate it. You are some scientist! I cannot understand how you manage your science. You don’t even know who has eaten your breakfast and you are apologizing to him: ‘You came a little late, I am sorry…’”Concentration is always the narrowing of your consciousness. The narrower it becomes, the more powerful it is. It is like a sword that cuts into any secret of nature: you have to become oblivious of everything. But this is not religion. Many people have misunderstood – not only in the West, but in the East too. They think that concentration is religion. It gives you tremendous powers, but those powers are of the mind.For example, the king of Varanasi in India went through an operation in 1920 – just this century – and created news all over the world because of the operation. He refused to take any anesthetic. He said, “I have taken a vow not to take anything that makes me unconscious, so I cannot be put under chloroform. You need not be worried.”It was a major operation – to remove his appendix. Now, to take out somebody’s appendix without giving him anesthetics is really dangerous; you may kill the man. He may not be able to bear the pain because it is going to be terrible. You have to cut open his stomach; you have to cut out his appendix, you have to remove it. It will take one hour, two hours – one never knows in what condition his appendix is.But he was no ordinary man either – otherwise they would have forced him – he was the king of Varanasi. He said to the doctors, “Don’t be worried” – and the best doctors available in India were there; an expert from England was there. They all consulted: nobody was ready to do the operation, but it had to be done, otherwise any moment the appendix could kill him. The condition was serious and both alternatives seemed to be serious: if you left him without the operation he might die; if you did the operation without making him unconscious – which had never been done, there was no precedent…But the king said, “You don’t understand me. There has never been any precedent because you have never operated on a man like the man you are going to operate upon. Just give me my religious book, Shrimad Bhagavadgita. I will read it and after five minutes you can start your work. Once I am involved in the Gita, then you can cut any part of my body. I will not be even aware of it; there is no question of pain.”He insisted – and anyway he was going to die, so there was no harm in trying. Perhaps he was right – he was well-known for his religious practices. So it was done. He read the Gita for five minutes and closed his eyes; the Gita dropped from his hands and they did the operation. It took one and a half hours. It was really serious: just a few hours longer and the appendix might have burst and killed him. They removed the appendix and he was completely silent – not even a flicker of his eyes. He was somewhere else.It was his life-long practice to read for just five minutes, then he was on track: he knew the Gita by heart, he could repeat it without the book. Once he started going into it, he was really in the Gita; his mind was there – it left his body totally.That operation made news all over the world; it was a rare operation. But the same mistake was committed again. Every newspaper had it that the rajah, the king of Varanasi, was a man of great meditation. He was a man of great concentration, not of meditation.He too was in the same confusion; he also thought that he had reached the state of meditation. It was not meditation. It is just that your mind is so focused that everything else falls out of its focus; you are unaware of it. It is not a state of awareness, it is a state of narrowed consciousness – so narrowed that it becomes one-pointed and the rest of existence falls out of it.So before I answer your question “What is meditation?” you have to understand what it is not. First: it is not concentration. Second: it is not contemplation.Concentration is one-pointed; contemplation has a wider field. You are contemplating about beauty… There are thousands of things which are beautiful; you can go on moving from one beautiful thing to another. You have many experiences of beauty; you can go on from one experience to another. You remained confined to the subject matter. Contemplation is a wider concentration, not one-pointed, but confined to one subject. You will be moving, your mind will be moving, but it will remain within the subject matter.Philosophy uses contemplation as its method; science uses concentration as its method. In contemplation too you are forgetting everything other than your subject matter. The subject matter is bigger and you have more space to move; in concentration there is no space to move. You can go deeper and deeper, narrower and narrower, you can become more and more pointed, but you don’t have space to move around. Hence scientists are very narrow-minded people. You will be surprised when I say this.One would think that scientists would be very open-minded. That is not the case. As far as their subject is concerned, they are absolutely open-minded: they are ready to listen to anything contrary to their theory, with absolute fairness. But except in that particular matter, they are more prejudiced, more bigoted than the ordinary, common man, for the simple reason that they have never bothered about anything else: they have simply accepted whatsoever society believes.Many religious people brag about it: “Look, he is such a great scientist, a Nobel prize-winner,” and this and that, “and yet he comes to church every day.” They forget completely that it is not the Nobel prize-winning scientist who goes to the church. It is not the scientist who goes to the church, it is the man without his scientific part who goes. And that man, except for the scientific part, is far more gullible than anybody else – because everybody is open, available, thinks about things; compares what religion is good; sometimes reads also about other religions, and has some common sense, which scientists don’t have.To be a scientist you have to sacrifice a few things – for example, common sense. Common sense is a common quality of common people. A scientist is an uncommon person, he has an uncommon sense. With common sense you cannot discover the theory of relativity or the law of gravitation. With common sense you can do everything else.Albert Einstein was perhaps the only man in history who dealt with such big figures that only one figure would take up the whole page – hundreds of zeros following it. But he became so involved with big figures – which is an uncommon thing, thinking only of stars, light-years, millions, billions, trillions of stars, and counting them – that he became oblivious about small things.One day he entered a bus and gave the conductor the money. The conductor returned some change. Einstein counted it and said, “This is not right, you are cheating me. Give me the full change.”The conductor took the change, counted it again and said, “Mister, it seems you don’t know figures.”Einstein remembers: “When he said to me, ‘Mister, you don’t know figures,’ then I simply took the change. I said to myself, ‘It is better to keep silent. If somebody else hears that I don’t know figures and that too from a conductor of a bus…’ What have I been doing my whole life? Figures and figures – I don’t dream about anything else. No women appear, no men appear – only figures. I think in figures, I dream in figures, and this idiot says to me, ‘You don’t know figures.’”When he arrived back home, he told his wife, “Just count this change. How much is it?”She counted it and said, “It is right.”He said, “My God! This means the conductor was right: perhaps I don’t know figures. Perhaps I can only deal with immense figures; small figures have fallen out of my mind completely.”A scientist is bound to lose his common sense. The same happens to the philosopher. Contemplation is wider, but is still confined to a certain subject.For example, one night Socrates was thinking about something – one never knew what he was thinking about – standing by the side of a tree and he became so absorbed in his contemplation that he became completely oblivious that snow was falling. In the morning he was found almost frozen. There was snow up to his knees and he was standing there with closed eyes. He was almost on the verge of death; even his blood might have started freezing.He was brought home and massaged, given alcohol, and somehow brought to his common senses. They asked him, “What were you doing there, standing outside in the open?”He said, “I had no idea whether I was standing or sitting, or where I was. The subject was so absorbing that I went totally with it. I don’t know when the snow started falling or when the whole night passed. I would have died, but I would not have come to my senses because the subject was so absorbing. I was still not finished; it was a whole theory and you have awakened me in the middle. Now I don’t know whether I will be able to get hold of the unfinished theory.”It is just as if you are dreaming and somebody wakes you up. Do you think you can catch hold of your dream again by just closing your eyes and trying to sleep? It is very difficult to get back into the same dream.Contemplation is a kind of logical dreaming. It is a very rare thing. But philosophy depends on contemplation. Philosophy can use concentration for specific purposes, to help contemplation. If some smaller fragments in it need more concentrated effort, then concentration can be used; there is no problem. Philosophy is basically contemplation, but once in a while it can use concentration as a tool, as an instrument.But religion cannot use concentration and it cannot use contemplation either because it is not concerned with any object. Whether the object is in the outside world or the object is in your mind – a thought, a theory, a philosophy – doesn’t matter; it is an object.Religious concern is with the one who concentrates, with the one who contemplates: Who is this one? Now, you cannot concentrate on it. Who will concentrate on it? You are it.You cannot contemplate on it because who is going to contemplate on it? You cannot divide yourself into two parts, so that you put one part in front of your mind and the other part starts contemplating. There is no possibility of dividing your consciousness into two parts. And even if there were a possibility – there is none, but just for argument’s sake I am saying if there were any possibility to divide your consciousness in two – then the one that contemplates about the other is you; the other is not you.The other is never you. Or in other words, the object is never you. You are irreducibly the subject. There is no way to turn you into an object.It is just like a mirror. The mirror can reflect you, the mirror can reflect everything in the world, but can you manage to make the mirror reflect itself? You cannot put the mirror in front of itself; by the time you put it in front of itself it is no longer there. The mirror itself cannot mirror itself. Consciousness is exactly a mirror. You can use it as concentration for some object. You can use it as contemplation for some subject matter.The English word meditation is also not the right word, but because there is no other word we have to use it for the time being. Dhyana is accepted in the English language just as it has been accepted by the Chinese, by the Japanese – because the situation was the same in those countries. When Buddhist monks entered China two thousand years ago, they tried hard to find a word which could translate their word jhana.Gautam the Buddha never used Sanskrit as his language, he used a language that was used by common people; his language was Pali. Sanskrit was the language of the priesthood, of the brahmins and it was one of the basic parts of his revolution that the priesthood should be overthrown; it had no business to exist.Man can directly connect with existence. It need not be through an agent. In fact, it cannot be through a mediator.You can understand it very simply: you cannot love your girlfriend, your boyfriend, through a mediator. You cannot say to somebody, “I will give you ten dollars – just go and love my wife on my behalf” A servant cannot do that, nobody can do it on your behalf; only you can do it. Love cannot be done on your behalf by a servant – otherwise rich people would not be bothered with the whole greasy affair. They have enough servants and enough money, they could just send a servant. They could find the best servants, why should they bother themselves? But there are a few things which you have to do yourself. A servant cannot sleep for you, a servant cannot eat for you.How is a priest, who is nothing but a servant, going to mediate between you and existence, or God, or nature, or truth? In the pope’s latest message to the world, it is counted as a sin to try to have any direct contact with God – a sin!You have to contact God through a properly initiated Catholic priest. Everything should go through the proper channels. There is a certain hierarchy, a bureaucracy; you cannot just bypass the bishop, the pope, the priest. If you simply bypass them, you are directly entering God’s house. This is not allowed; it is a sin.I was really surprised that this Pope the Polack has the nerve to call it a sin, to say that man has not the birthright to be in contact with existence or truth itself; for that too, he needs a proper agency! And who is to decide the proper agency? There are three hundred religions and all have their bureaucracies, their proper channels; and they all say the remaining two hundred and ninety-nine are all bogus. But the priesthood can exist only if it makes itself absolutely necessary. It is absolutely unnecessary, but it has to force itself upon you as something unavoidable.Just now the Polack Pope is again on tour. Yesterday I saw a picture of him in some Catholic country. He was kissing the earth. He was asked by the news media,“What do you think of the welcome?”He said, “It was warm, but not overwhelming.”Now this man must be expecting something; he was not satisfied with warm, he must have been expecting an overwhelming reception, welcome. And when he says “warm” you can be absolutely certain it must have been lukewarm – he is trying to exaggerate it as much as he can. Otherwise a warm reception is overwhelming – what more do you want? Hot dogs? Then it will be overwhelming? A warm reception is enough. But I know what the problem is; it must have been lukewarm, or perhaps even cold.This year he is going to call a synod – that is the Catholic senate – in which all the bishops and cardinals of the whole Catholic world will meet to decide certain urgent matters. And you can be sure of what those urgent matters are: birth control is a sin, abortion is a sin; and this new sin which has never been mentioned before – to make an effort to be in direct contact with God.Now he is going to put the thesis that he has propounded before the synod to get their agreement; it becomes an appendix, almost as holy as the Bible. If it is unanimously accepted by the synod, then it has the same status. And it is going to be accepted because no priest will say that it is wrong, no cardinal will say that it is wrong. They will be immensely happy that he has a really original mind – even Jesus was not aware of this!When I received the message that any effort to make direct contact with God is a sin, I wondered what Moses was doing. It was a direct contact: there was no mediator, there was no one present. There was no eyewitness when Moses met God in the burning bush. He was committing a great sin according to Pope the Polack.Who was Jesus’ agent? Some agency was needed. He was also trying to contact God directly, praying. And he was not paying somebody else to pray for him, he was praying himself. He was not a bishop, not a cardinal, not a pope; neither was Moses a bishop, nor a cardinal, nor a pope.They are all sinners according to Pope the Polack. And the synod is going to sign it – I can say that before it is signed – because all over the world the priesthood is in a shaky condition.The truth is that it is your birthright to inquire into existence, into life, to enquire what it is all about.Contemplation is theoretical, you can go on theorizing… It also takes away your common sense. For example, Immanuel Kant was one of the greatest philosophers the world has produced…He remained his whole life in one town, for the simple reason that any change disturbed his contemplation – a new house, new people… Everything had to be exactly the same, so that he would be completely free to contemplate.He never married. One woman had even offered, but he said, “I will have to think over it.”Perhaps that is the only answer of its kind; ordinarily the man proposes. She must have waited long enough and when she found that he was not going to propose, she proposed. And what did he say? – “I will have to think over it.” He contemplated for three years on all the favorable points for marriage, on all the unfavorable points against marriage. The trouble was that they were all equal, balancing, canceling each other.So after three years he went and knocked on the door of the woman’s house to say, “It is difficult for me to come to a conclusion because both sides are equally valid, equally weighty, and I cannot do anything unless I find one alternative more logical, more scientific, more philosophical than the other. So please forgive me. You can marry somebody else.”The father opened the door and Kant asked about his daughter. The father said, “You have come too late; she is married and has a child now. You are some philosopher – three years later you come to give her your answer!”Kant said, “Anyway the answer was not yes; but you can convey to your daughter my inability to find out. I tried hard to find out, but I have to be fair: I cannot cheat myself by putting up only the favorable reasons and dropping the unfavorable reasons. I cannot cheat myself “Now, this man used to go to the university to teach at exactly the same time every day. People used to fix their clocks and watches on seeing him: you could be certain second to second – he moved like the hands of a clock. His servant used to declare, not “Master, your breakfast is ready,” no, but “Master, it is seven-thirty”; “Master, it is twelve-thirty.” There was no need to say that it was time for lunch: “Twelve-thirty…” only the time was to be told.Everything was fixed. He was so absorbed in his philosophizing that he became dependent – almost a servant to his own servant because he would threaten him any moment saying, “I am going to leave.” The servant knew that Kant could not afford to let him go. Sometimes it would happen that because he was threatening, Kant would say, “Yes, you can go. You are thinking yourself too important. You think I cannot live without you? That I cannot find another servant?”The servant said, “Try.”But it did not work out with the other servant because he had no idea that the time had to be announced. He would say, “Master, lunch is ready” – and that was enough of a disturbance for Kant. He had to be awakened early in the morning, at five o’clock and the instructions to the servant were, “Even if I beat you, scream, and say to you, ‘Get lost, I want to sleep!’ you are not to leave. Even if you have to beat me, beat me, but pull me out of bed.“Five means five. If I am late getting out of bed, you will be responsible. You have all the freedom to do whatsoever you want to do and I cannot say anything. Sometimes it is too cold and I feel like sleeping, but that is a momentary thing – you need not bother about it. You have to follow the clock and my orders, and when I am asleep you need not bother about what I am saying. I may say, ‘Go away! – I will get up.’ You are not to go away; you have to get me out of the bed at five o’clock.”Often they used to fight, the servant used to hit him and force him out of bed. Now a new servant could not beat his master; and the very order seemed to be absurd. “If you want to sleep, sleep; if you want to get up, get up. I can wake you up at five, but it seems to be strange that there has to be this wrestling.” So no servant survived.Kant had to go to the old servant again and ask him, “Come back! Just don’t die before me, otherwise I will have to commit suicide.” Each time this happened, the servant would ask for more pay. And that’s how it went on.One day, when Kant was going to the university, it was raining and one of his shoes got stuck in the mud. He left the shoe there because if he tried to take the shoe out he would be a few seconds late, and that was not possible. He entered the class with only one shoe on. The students looked at him and asked, “What happened?”He said, “One shoe got stuck in the mud, but I cannot be late: so many people fix their watches and clocks by me. My shoe is not that important. When I return home, I will get it back because who is going to steal one shoe?”Now these people have lost their common sense; they are living in a different world. And as far as his theoretical world is concerned, he is a top logician; you cannot find any flaw in his logic. But in his life… It was just insane. Somebody purchased the house next door and Kant became sick, badly sick. The doctors could not find the problem because there seemed to be no sickness, but Kant was almost on the verge of death – for no reason at all.One of his friends came by and he said, “There is no problem, as far as I see. The house next door has been taken by somebody and they have grown their trees, so Kant’s window is covered. It was part of his absolute timetable that he would stand in the window at the end of the day and look at the sunset. Now the trees have grown too high, they have covered the window. That is the cause of his sickness and nothing else: his timetable is disturbed, his whole life is disturbed.”Kant got up. He said, “I was also thinking that something was wrong: ‘Why am I sick? The doctors say there is no sickness and yet I am on the verge of death.’ You are right, it is the trees: since those trees have grown, I have not seen the sunset. And I have been missing something, but I could not figure out what I was missing.” The neighbors were asked and they were willing: if just because of the trees such a great philosopher was going to die… They cut back the trees and the next day he was perfectly okay.His timetable, his schedule – or should I say “skedule”? I don’t know what is right here. The first American girl I met was some time in 1960. She asked me, “What is your skedule?”I said, “My God! What is a skedule?” In Britain, in India, it is “shedule.” I could not figure out that it had something to do with schedule.She said, “You don’t understand what I am saying?”I said, “I have never heard this word. Please try and explain to me some other way, use some other word.”It is better to let me use “shedule”… His schedule was disturbed. If it was perfect, then he was absolutely free to contemplate. He wanted life to be almost robot-like so his mind would be absolutely free from ordinary mundane affairs.Religion is not contemplation; it is not concentration. It is meditation.But meditation has to be understood as meaning dhyana because the English word meditation again gives a wrong notion. First try to understand what it means in the English language itself. Whenever you say “meditation,” you can be asked, “Upon what? Upon what are you meditating?” There has to be an object: the very word has a reference toward an object: “I am meditating upon beauty, upon truth, upon God.” But you can’t simply say, “I am meditating.” The sentence is incomplete in the English language. You have to say upon what – what are you meditating upon? And that is the trouble.Dhyana means “I am in meditation” – not even meditating. If you come even closer: “I am meditation” – that is the meaning of dhyana. So when they could not find a word in China, they borrowed the Buddhist word, jhana. Buddha used jhana; it is a Pali transformation of dhyana.Buddha used the people’s language as part of his revolution because, he said, “Religion has to use the ordinary, common language, so that the priesthood can simply be dropped; there is no need for it. People understand their scriptures, people understand their sutras, people understand what they are doing. There is no need for a priest.”The priest is needed because he uses a different language which people cannot use. He goes on enforcing the idea that Sanskrit is the divine language and not everybody is allowed to read it. It is a special language, just like a doctor’s. Have you ever thought about it? Why do doctors go on prescribing in Latin and Greek? What kind of foolishness is this? They don’t know Greek, they don’t know Latin, but their medicines and the names of their medicines are always in Greek and Latin. This is the same trick as the priesthood.If they write in the common people’s language, they cannot charge you as much as they are charging now because you will say, “This prescription – you are charging me twenty dollars for this prescription?” And the chemist, the druggist, cannot charge much money either because they know that they can get the same thing from the market for just a rupee and you are charging fifty. But you don’t know what it is in Latin and Greek. If they write “onion” then you will say, “Are you joking?” But if it is written in Greek and Latin, you don’t know what it is; only the doctor knows or the chemist knows.Their way of writing is also important. It has to be written in such a way that you cannot read what it is. If you can read it, perhaps you can consult a dictionary and find out what it means. It has to be quite unreadable, so you cannot figure it out. In fact, most of the time the chemist does not know what it is, but nobody wants to show his ignorance so he will give you something.It happened once…A man received a letter from his family physician; it was an invitation to participate in his daughter’s marriage. But the doctor wrote in his usual way, just habitually. The man could not read what the letter said. He thought the best way would be to go to the chemist: “Perhaps it is something important. If I go to the doctor, he will think that I cannot even read. It is better to go to the chemist.”He went to the chemist and gave him the letter. The chemist simply disappeared with the letter and after ten minutes came back with two bottles. The man said, “What are you doing? That was not a prescription, it was a letter.”The chemist said, “My God! It was a letter?” But he had figured out… The bride and bridegroom, he figured out were two bottles. So he prepared some mixtures and brought two bottles.Buddha revolted against Sanskrit and used Pali. In Pali, dhyana is jhana. Jhana reached China and became chan. They had no other word, so they took this one – but in each language the pronunciation is bound to change: it became chan. When it reached Japan, it became zen; but it is the same word, dhyana. And we are using the word meditation in the sense of dhyana, so it is not something you meditate upon.In English, it is something between concentration and contemplation. Concentration is one-pointed; contemplation has a wide area, and meditation is a fragment of that area. When you are contemplating on a certain subject, there are a few things which need more attention; then you meditate. That is what in English is meant by meditation: concentration and contemplation are two poles; meditation is exactly in the middle. But we are not using the word in the English sense, we are giving it a totally new meaning. I will tell you a story that I have always loved, which will explain what meditation is.Three men went for a morning walk. They saw a Buddhist monk standing on a hill and, having nothing to do, they started discussing what he was doing. One said, “As far as I can see from here, he is expecting somebody and waiting for him. Perhaps a friend was left behind and he is waiting, expecting him.”The second man said, “Looking at him, I cannot agree with you because when somebody is waiting for a friend who has been left behind, once in a while he will look back to see whether he has come or not, and how long he will have to wait. But this man never looks back, he is just standing there. I don’t think he is expecting anybody. My feeling is that these Buddhist monks have cows…”In Japan, monks have a cow for the milk for their morning tea; otherwise they have to go begging for an early morning cup of tea. And Zen monks drink tea at least five or six times a day: it is almost a religious thing to do because tea keeps you awake, alert, more conscious; so they keep a cow in the monastery.The second man said, “My feeling is that his cow is lost somewhere, must have gone to graze, and he is just searching for it.”The third man said, “I cannot agree because when somebody searches for a cow, he need not just stand like a statue. You have to move around, you have to go and look from this side and that side. He does not even move his face from side to side. What to say about his face – even his eyes are half-closed.”They were coming closer to the man, so they could see him more clearly. Then the third man said, “I don’t think you are right; I think he is meditating. But how are we to decide who is right?”They said, “There is no problem. We are coming close, we can ask him.”The first man asked the monk, “Are you expecting a friend who is left behind, waiting for him?”The Buddhist monk opened his eyes and said, “Expecting? I never expect anything. Expecting anything is against my religion.”The man said, “My God! Forget expecting; just tell me – are you waiting?”He said, “My religion teaches that you cannot be certain even of the next second. How can I wait? Where is the time to wait? I am not waiting.”The man said, “Forget expecting, waiting – I don’t know your language. Just tell me, have you left some friend behind?”He said, “Again the same thing. I don’t have any friends in the world, I don’t have any enemy in the world – because they come together. You cannot sort out one and leave the other. Can’t you see that I am a Buddhist monk? I don’t have enemies, I don’t have friends. And please get lost, don’t disturb me.”The second man thought, “Now there is hope for me.” He said, “I had already told him ‘You are talking nonsense. He is not waiting, not expecting – he is a Buddhist monk; he has no friends, no enemies.’ You are right. My feeling is that your cow is lost.”The monk said, “You are even more stupid than the first man. My cow? A Buddhist monk possesses nothing. And why should I look for somebody else’s cow? I don’t possess a cow.”The man looked really embarrassed: “What to do?”The third man thought, “Now, the only possibility is what I have said.” He said, “I can see that you are meditating.”The monk said, “Nonsense! Meditation is not some activity. One does not meditate, one is meditation. To tell you the truth, so that all you fellows don’t get confused, I am simply doing nothing. Standing here, doing nothing – is it objectionable?”They said, “No, it is not objectionable, it just does not make sense to us – standing here, doing nothing.”“But,” he said, “this is what meditation is: Sitting and doing nothing – not with your body, not with your mind.”Once you start doing something, either you go into contemplation or you go into concentration or you go into action – but you move away from your center. When you are not doing anything at all – bodily, mentally, on no level – when all activity has ceased and you simply are, just being, that’s what meditation is. You cannot do it, you cannot practice it; you have only to understand it.Whenever you can find time for just being, drop all doing. Thinking is also doing, concentration is also doing, contemplation is also doing. If even for a single moment you are not doing anything and you are just at your center, utterly relaxed – that is meditation. And once you have the knack of it, you can remain in that state as long as you want; finally you can remain in that state for twenty-four hours a day.Once you have become aware of how your being can remain undisturbed, then slowly you can start doing things, keeping alert that your being is not stirred. That is the second part of meditation. First, learning how just to be, and then learning little actions: cleaning the floor, taking a shower, but keeping yourself centered. Then you can do complicated things.For example, I am speaking to you, but my meditation is not disturbed. I can go on speaking, but at my very center there is not even a ripple; it is just silent, utterly silent.So meditation is not against action. It is not that you have to escape from life. It simply teaches you a new way of life: you become the center of the cyclone. Your life goes on, it goes on more intensely – with more joy, with more clarity, more vision, more creativity – yet you are aloof, just a watcher on the hills, simply seeing all that is happening around you.You are not the doer, you are the watcher.That’s the whole secret of meditation: you become the watcher. Doing continues on its own level, there is no problem: chopping wood, drawing water from the well. You can do all the small and the big things; only one thing is not allowed, and that is that your centering should not be lost.That awareness, that watchfulness, should remain absolutely unclouded, undisturbed.Meditation is a very simple phenomenon. Concentration is very complicated because you have to force yourself; it is tiring. Contemplation is a little better because you have a little more space to move. You are not moving through a narrow hole which is going to become narrower and narrower.Concentration has tunnel vision. Have you ever looked into a tunnel? From one side, where you are looking, it is big. But if the tunnel is two miles long, the other side is just a small round light, nothing else: the longer the tunnel, the smaller the other end will be. The greater the scientist, the longer the tunnel. He has to focus and focusing is always a tense affair.Concentration is not natural to the mind. Mind is a vagabond: it enjoys moving from one thing to another; it is always excited by the new. In concentration, the mind is almost imprisoned.In the Second World War, I don’t know why, they started calling the places they kept the prisoners, “concentration camps.” They had their own meaning – they were bringing all kinds of prisoners and concentrating them there. But concentration is actually bringing all the energies of your mind and body and putting them into a narrowing hole. It is tiring. Contemplation has more space to play around, to move around, but still it is a bounded space, not unbounded.Meditation, according to me and my religion, has all the space, the whole of existence available. You are the watcher, you can watch the whole scene. There is no effort to concentrate on anything; there is no effort to contemplate about anything. You are not doing all those things, you are simply there watching, just aware. It is a knack. It is not a science, it is not an art, it is not a craft; it is a knack.So you have to just go on playing with the idea. Sitting in your bathroom, just play with the idea that you are not doing anything. And one day you will be surprised: just playing with the idea, it has happened – because it is your nature. Just the right moment… You never know when the right moment is, when the right opportunity is there, so go on playing.Henry Ford had said: “My success is through nothing but catching the right opportunity at the right moment. People either think of opportunities which are in the future – you cannot catch hold of them – or they think of opportunities which are past. When they are gone and only dust is left on the road, they become aware that an opportunity has passed.”Somebody asked, “But if you don’t think of an opportunity in the future and you don’t think of an opportunity which has passed, how can you suddenly get hold of it when it comes? You have to be ready.”He said, “Not ready – you have just to jump. One never knows when it comes. When it comes, just jump upon it!”What Henry Ford said has tremendous meaning. He said, “You simply keep on jumping. Don’t wait; don’t bother whether an opportunity is there or not: just go on jumping. One never knows when it will come. When it comes, jump upon it and be gone. If you go on looking into the future: ‘When is the opportunity coming?…’ The future is unpredictable. If you wait, thinking ‘When it comes I will catch hold of it,’ by the time you become aware that it is there, it is gone. Time is fleeting, so fast, only dust will be there. Rather, forget about opportunities, simply learn to jump, so that whenever it comes…”That’s what I say to you: just go on playing with the idea. I am using the word playing because I am a nonserious man and my religion is nonserious. Just go on playing – and you have enough time.Anytime – lying in bed, if sleep is not coming, play with the idea. Why bother about sleep? It will come when it comes. You cannot do anything to bring it; it is not in your hands, so why bother about it? Forget all about something which is not in your hands. The time is in your hands, why not use it? Lying in your bed, on a cold night under your blanket, cozy and enjoying – just play with the idea. You need not sit in the lotus posture. In my meditation, you need not torture yourself in any way.If you love the lotus posture, good; you can sit in it. But Westerners go to India and it takes them six months to learn the lotus posture; they are torturing themselves so much. And they think that when they have learned the lotus posture, they will have gained something. The whole of India sits in the lotus posture – nobody has gained anything. It is just their natural way of sitting. In a cold country you need a chair to sit on, you can’t sit on the ground. In a hot country, who bothers about a chair? You sit anywhere.No special posture is needed, no special time is needed. There are people who think there are special times. No, not for meditation. Any time is the right time – you just have to be relaxed and playful. And if it does not happen, it does not matter. Don’t feel sad… I am not telling you that it will happen today, or tomorrow, or within three months or six months. I am not giving you any expectation because that will become a tension in your mind. It can happen any day, it may not happen: it all depends on how playful you are.Just start playing – in the bathtub, when you are not doing anything, why not play? Under your shower, you are not doing anything; the shower is doing its work. You are simply standing there; for those few moments just be playful. Walking on the road, walking can be done by the body; you are not needed, the legs do it. Any moment where you can feel relaxed, non-tense, play with the idea of meditation the way I have explained it to you. Just be silent, centered in yourself and someday…And there are only seven days – don’t be worried! So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or by Sunday at least – within seven days – some day it is going to happen. Just enjoy yourself with the idea and play with the idea as many times as you can. If nothing happens – I am not promising you anything – if nothing happens, that’s perfectly good, you enjoyed yourself. You played with the idea, you gave it a chance.Go on giving it a chance. Henry Ford said, “Go on jumping and when the chance, the opportunity comes, jump upon it.” I say just the reverse. Just go on giving a chance to meditation and when the right moment comes and you are really relaxed and open, it jumps upon you.Once meditation jumps upon you, it never leaves. There is no way for it to leave, so think twice before you start playing!

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is initiation according to you?The search for truth is as old as man himself.But there are many kinds of seekers.The first category I call the curious.They are the most superficial. They are not read to do anything, sacrifice anything, make any effort. Their curiosity is just like a child’s curiosity – he goes on asking about everything. He does not even bother to listen to your answer; while you are answering him, he is asking about something else. If you don’t answer him, he does not persist in questioning. He has no involvement in it – it is just a little superficial, intellectual irritation, a kind of itching in his mind.But the curious are many, the majority. They are not ready to pay anything for their question. They want answers given to them ready-made. They are not even ready to thank you for your answer…as if they have obliged you; as if just by asking they have made you important.The curious go on their whole life like driftwood, just moving in any direction with no idea where they are going, with no sense of direction at all. Why they are going they don’t even consider. Their life is accidental. Somebody is going somewhere – they may start following, imitating. Somebody is asking about truth – they may start asking about truth. They are more like monkeys than men.I am reminded of a beautiful story: There was one old man who used to sell caps, and in India particularly, in those days, a certain kind of white cap had become a symbol of revolution. The cap was called the Gandhi cap, although Gandhi himself never used it; you cannot find a single picture in which Gandhi is using that cap. But it became known as the Gandhi cap because the followers of Gandhi were using it as a symbol. The white cap became your declaration against the British Raj.This old man was doing good business selling white caps to people, so wherever there was any kind of gathering, he would go to sell the white caps. Between two gatherings, two fairs, exhibitions, he would make as many caps as he could. It is a simple thing to make – the Gandhian cap may be perhaps the simplest cap in the world. It is just like a small bag; then you fold it three times, it becomes a cap. You open it, and you can use it as a small bag for carrying vegetables or anything. It is multipurpose.The old man was earning enough, so his son was doing nothing. But the old man was becoming old and he told the son, “Now I am not capable of moving from one place to another place, walking from one town to another town, so you start. I will simply make the caps in the house, you go and do the selling.”So the son went to sell the caps. On the way – it was too hot a day, and he was still miles away from the place where he was going – he thought to have a little rest under a big Bo tree. He kept all his caps that he was carrying in a bag by his side and went to sleep – and of course, he was wearing a Gandhi cap himself, just as an advertisement.He didn’t see that the whole tree was full of monkeys. The monkeys became curious about the cap, and they came down; the man was asleep. They looked in the bag and found the caps. So all the monkeys put the caps on their heads, and they were really enjoying themselves, and they were looking cute! When the young man woke up he found his bag empty. He looked all around: who had taken his caps? And then he heard the laughter of the monkeys. When he looked up, all over the tree there was revolution: the whole army of monkeys against the British Raj.Now there was no way to get those caps back. He came back home very sad and told his father, “I was a fool; I went to sleep and this happened. All the caps are lost, I did not reach the place…and those monkeys made such a fool of me! They were giggling and laughing and making all kinds of faces at me, and there was nothing that I could do.”The father said, “It happened to me in my young days too. It was my fault that I forgot to tell you. You forget about it. I will tell you the secret – the secret that I also had to learn the hard way by once losing all my caps. And then I inquired of an old man and he gave me the secret; and this is the secret. Tomorrow go again under the same tree. Put your bag in the same place and go to sleep at least pretend, even if you are not sleeping – and let those monkeys take your caps.”And it happened. He went; he pretended to sleep. The monkeys came one by one, and they were very happy that this man had come again with the same kind of thing. Yesterday’s caps they had lost already: it was just a curiosity, it was nothing of any interest to them. They had played a little with them and when the man was gone they threw the caps. But again he had come – seems to be very stubborn!But monkeys won’t accept defeat so easily; they again did their thing. And when they all had their caps, the man woke up – he had been simply pretending – and opened his eyes. When they giggled, he giggled louder than them. They were a little shocked: what had happened? Yesterday this man was just ashamed, afraid.They tried to make faces, but the man made faces at them. They tried to scream, the man screamed louder. They looked at each other: “What has happened? Something strange….” And then the man in great anger took his cap and threw it away.All the monkeys in anger took their caps and threw them down on the road! “What does this man think – only he can throw? We can also throw.” The man collected all the caps, and laughing, he left. The monkeys were really at a loss; they have been befooled.But that’s the secret with all monkeys’ minds: Imitation.They simply imitated, with no idea what they were doing, with no idea why this man was throwing his cap. They simply did it to outdo him, with no thought but how to be on top of him; he could not be allowed to do something that they could not do.He had defeated them by giggling, by laughing louder, by screaming, by making faces; and this was too much. Now they were not going to let him throw his cap while they just sat there ashamed, feeling impotent that they could not do anything. This is the quality of the monkey’s mind; whether it is in man or in animals does not matter.The curious mind is monkeyish, the lowest kind of mind.The second, a higher category, is the student.He has an intellectual involvement. When he asks something it is not only out of curiosity, it is genuine interest. He wants to know, he is really in search of an answer, but it is still not very deep; it is intellectual, deeper than curiosity. Curiosity is not even intellectual; even idiots can be curious – in fact only idiots are curious. A man of intelligence will not waste his time and energy on unnecessary curiosity.A Sufi mystic, Bayazid, lived for twelve years with his master. His master used to live behind a very big hall in a small cottage. The hall was for meetings, but Bayazid was continually coming to the master just to sit by his side.In Sufism this is one of their methodologies: For years the master will not even ask, “Who are you? What is your purpose? Why have you come?” That sorts out the curious without any wastage of time. If the man is such that you go to him and he does not even ask, “Who are you? Sit down; why have you come?” then the curious are not going to remain there for a year or two years.Twelve years is a long time. After twelve years the master asked the first thing of Bayazid. He said, “My son, just go in the hall. You must have observed that on the right hand there is a shelf containing a few books. You have to bring me this book and he gave its name.Bayazid said, “I had no idea that on the right side there is a bookshelf because I have never looked to the right or to the left; I was just looking toward you. I was coming to you, I had no interest in looking at anything else. Why should I waste my energy in any way? My whole purpose was just to look at you as much as I could, just to be here with you as much as I could – just to drink your silent presence.”The master was happy, and he said, “You are accepted. If you had brought the book you would have been rejected.” Very strict, too hard, too inhuman it seems…. The curious person has no place in the world of religion. He should go to circuses, carnivals, movies, television – and there are thousands of things all around the world football matches, volleyball matches, hockey matches, bullfights, boxing. For the curious, the whole world is available. He should not bother about truth, he should leave truth alone; that is not his business.The student has an intellectual involvement. Intellect is not very deep, but in comparison to curiosity it is really very deep. The people who surrounded Socrates were intellectuals, students. They were asking questions Socrates was giving them answers; then they were asking more questions about his answers, and they were trying to go deeper and deeper into the question, into the answer. But it all remained a gymnastics of intellect.Socrates is one of those unfortunate masters who wasted his life only with students. He was not a man meant to be just a professor, just a teacher; he was a man born to be a master. But Athens was not the right place for it – he should have been in India; he would have become another Gautam the Buddha – because in Athens the student was the last category, there was nothing deeper than that.Socrates had giants of intellect come to him – Plato, Aristotle – but they were only intellectuals. A blind man can philosophize about light, there is no trouble about it; intellectually he can know everything about light. But to know light and to know about light are two totally different things.Intellect is always about and about – it does not bother whether the man has eyes or not. Yes, the man can hear: you can talk about light, you can give him all theories about light, the latest developments of scientific progress, the latest discoveries about light, its nature, its constituents…. Everything can be explained to him. He is blind but that does not mean that he is without intelligence.Most probably a blind man has more intelligence than those who have eyes, for the simple reason that the man who has eyes uses eighty percent of his mind-energy through the eyes. If he wants to know something about light, he will open the door and go into the open and see the sun. If he wants to know about colors he will go to the garden and see all the flowers and all the trees and all kinds of colors. He has eyes – there is no need to be very intelligent to work out what light is – but the blind man has only one way, and that is through understanding.Seeing is not possible. And that eighty percent of energy that goes out from the eyes, if one has eyes, is not available for the intellect to use. That’s why blind people hear better than people who have eyes, because their ears get more energy. More energy is available, because otherwise eighty percent is used only by the eyes; twenty percent remains for your whole being.And when one hundred percent is available…. The blind man’s touch has more energy, more feeling, more emotion, more warmth. It says something. The man with eyes can shake hands and you can feel that you are shaking hands with a dead tree or something. There is nothing, no message. He can hug you and you can feel pressed, that’s all, but there has been no transmission of any kind of energy.People are without energy; only twenty percent is distributed to all the other senses, so every sense is starving because the eyes are monopolizing your whole energy. It is not without any reason that you become affected, impressed by the eyes more than by anything else. You can simply see that eyes are the most living part in your whole body. What makes your eyes most alive? It is the energy flowing through them. That constant flow of energy makes them so alive.It is also not a coincidence that if you see a blind man you feel very sad for him. You don’t feel so sorry for a deaf man; you don’t feel at all sad for somebody who cannot smell. In fact, he is in a far better situation; to him nothing stinks. You don’t feel sad if any other sense is missing.Even if somebody’s legs are missing, hands are missing, you don’t feel sad the same way as when you see a blind man. Why? Without knowing, without being clearly conscious about it, you feel that eighty percent of his life is cut off, he is only twenty percent alive. Naturally, a blind man gets more sympathy.I have heard that a blind beggar was spreading his hands at the corner of the street and saying, “Give something to a blind man.” And the man who was passing was really generous; he gave him one rupee. And the man said immediately, “But this is not authentic.” In India, to find anything authentic is very difficult. Even if you want to commit suicide, the poison will not work. You cannot find even authentic poison. By the morning you will find yourself perfectly awake and surprised: “What happened to the poison?”But the blind man saying that the rupee is not authentic…. Naturally the man said, “Are you blind or not? I know the rupee is not authentic, that’s why I have given you the rupee; otherwise who gives a rupee to a blind man? I did it because I could not give it to anybody else; wherever I wanted to purchase something, immediately it was returned because it was not authentic, and they even threatened that they would give me to the police! Somehow I said, ‘It is not my fault, somebody has given it to me, so please forgive me.’ So finally I thought, ‘It is better to get rid of it, otherwise somewhere I am going to get into trouble.’ So I gave it to you.”The man said, “The real thing is that I am not really a blind man; the real blind man is my friend. Today he has gone to see the movie, and he told me to sit here so nobody takes his place. I am just pretending, I am not blind: the real blind man has gone to see the movie. But sitting in his place I have found that this is far better.“I have been pretending up to now that I am crippled, but from tomorrow I am going to be blind. This pays far better, and people are more sympathetic. Nobody starts preaching to you that you should work and you should do this and that. People give more – and more politely and more nicely; they don’t treat you the way people treat a beggar.”In India only the blind man is treated by people with respect; they will call him Surdasji even if he is a beggar. Surdas was one of the most important poets of India. He was blind, and because of his blindness his name became synonymous with blindness. His name does not mean blindness; surdas means a servant of music. And he was a great musician, a great poet, a great singer – but blind. “Ji” is used for respect. So people will not even call a blind man just Surdas, because that is not respectful; he will be called Surdasji.The man said, “Today I have discovered that my friend is doing a far better job. I have been trying to pretend to be crippled and I have been treated as badly as you can imagine but his going to the movie has changed my whole life – I have decided.”A blind man simply creates a sympathy in your heart because eighty percent of his life is missing. He has no idea of colors, no idea of light, no idea of beauty, no idea of faces. He is living in complete darkness – that’s what you think; but he does not know even darkness, because for that too, eyes are needed. To see darkness you need eyes.The blind man has no idea what light is, has no idea what darkness is. That makes it even more strange. In what kind of a world is he living? In what kind of surrounding is he living, where there is no idea of light, not even the idea of darkness? But all his other senses are more alive.The blind man hears better than you, he tastes better than you, he smells better than you, he touches better than you, and if he thinks, he thinks better than you. If he pours his mind into some subject, he has more intelligence available to do it than you have. Your intelligence is so divided between so many things. He has nothing to divide his attention.The student is intellectually interested to find what this life is all about, but he is not willing to change himself in order to know anything. He wants to remain the way he is, and just mentally he wants to be fed knowledge. He can become immensely knowledgeable. That’s how all your professors, all your great thinkers are: knowledgeable. They know too much without knowing anything at all.Existentially they know nothing. If you ask them to give a sermon on love, they can give a sermon on love. But if you ask them, “Have you ever loved? Do you know by experience what love is?” you will shock them, surprise them: What kind of question are you asking?This was one of my problems when I was a student, because I am not a student, I don’t belong to that category. And every professor wanted me to be just a student – obviously; you enter the university to be a student. And I said, “My interests are deeper. They are not only intellectual, but existential. I simply don’t want to be fed like a computer, I want to experience and know.” And this was really very outlandish to them.I was sent to the vice-chancellor with a note: “This student says that he is not a student, that he does not belong to the category of student. If he does not belong to the category of student – there are only two categories here, either there are professors or students – what to do with him, because he insists.”The vice-chancellor said, “You insist that you are not a student?”I said, “Yes, because I am not.”He said, “Then why have you entered the university?”I said, “I have entered the university not to be a student but to be a disciple. Don’t you accept disciples in this university? You give me that in writing, because I am going to make it available to the news media that in this university no disciple is accepted, that to be in this university you are not to be a disciple.”He said, “My God! You want to create trouble for me. But what is the difference between student and disciple?”I said, “You are a vice-chancellor and yet you have not come to know the difference between the student and the disciple? Please resign.”He said, “I was thinking that your professors are a little too fussy and are exaggerating about you, but I was wrong. You are too much! You are asking for my resignation?”I said, “Of course, because if a vice-chancellor has no idea what a student is and what a disciple is, what is he doing here? You just get out of this place, and take with you all those professors who don’t understand the distinction, because they are all still students.”To be a student is good in comparison to being curious, but in comparison to the disciple it is simply of no value. It is bogus knowledgeability. And you can go on collecting all kinds of theories, ideologies, philosophies, and you can become a walking encyclopedia, but that will not change you even a single inch. You will remain the same old donkey – now carrying a big load of books too.Do you think if you put on a donkey the whole set of the Encyclopedia Britannica – of course it will be too heavy and the donkey will be in trouble – do you think the donkey will become in any way a lesser donkey or a better donkey? No, no change is going to happen. He is simply a donkey and he will remain simply a donkey. The Britannica is not going to make any change in him.Your head is capable of collecting the whole information that is contained in all the libraries of the world. The people who are interested in computers have become aware of the fact that perhaps we will never be able to create a computer that can contain so much as a man’s mind – and in such a small space! Your skull is not very big, but in such a small space you can put all the knowledge available in all the universities of the world. And that is not small.Just the library of Moscow has enough books that if they are put in a line, the line will go three times around the earth. Perhaps the British Museum library will make four or five lines around the earth. And there are libraries in China and there are libraries in India and there are libraries in America – all over the world are libraries.There are millions of scriptures in Tibet, Ladakh, Nepal, which are never printed. But all these can be contained in a single skull – such is the capacity of your mind. But it remains only a memory. It does not transform you at all, it has no way of changing you. Yes, you will be deluded by it; you will start hallucinating that you know. You will become respectable.That was my continual fight with my professors: “All that you know is only verbal – your experience is nil. You may know everything about swimming – all the books about swimming you may have read – but the real test is to come with me and jump into the river. If your knowledge makes you swim, then I will accept it.” And I told this to a professor who I knew did not know how to swim.So he said, “Only that test will prove it?”I said, “Only that test.”Just behind our college was a big lake, so I said, “You come. I have not read a single book about swimming; why should I when I can swim? Why should I waste time in reading a book about swimming when I can enjoy the same time swimming in the lake? Come on with me.”He could not say that he did not know how to swim, because that would prove my point, so he came along with me. But it was dangerous to take the test…and a few other students came to see what happened. Finally he said, “I never thought that you would drag me to the very logical conclusion of it. I don’t know how to swim, although I can give lectures on swimming.” And he was thought to be the best expert; for those students who were training for competitions, the national competition, he was thought to be the best expert.I said, “Just think twice before you speak again, because if you speak again I am going to come and throw you into the swimming pool. I will not think of the consequences, of whether you die or you live.”It is very easy intellectually to hoard:Intellect is a hoarder.The second category is dominating the whole world, dominating the first category: the idiots are being dominated by the knowledgeable. These knowledgeable people become politicians, professors, doctors, engineers, scientists and they dominate the idiots, the monkeys with Gandhi caps.To me, you have to understand the third category, the disciple.The disciple is one who is existentially interested. He does not want just to know about love, he wants to taste what love is. He wants to experience…his whole concentration is experiential. He will not be satisfied by theories about love, theories about beauty, theories about truth. He wants something tangible – not theories, not empty words – something solid. And it is only experience that can be solid. It is the disciple…. It is a rare category because when you can become respectable just by being knowledgeable, why should you bother about existential knowing? It is risky, dangerous.Knowledgeable you can become sitting comfortably in a library. But to know, you may have to change yourself drastically because there may be things in you which are preventing knowing. There may be barriers in you which have to be broken. There may be walls around your being which have to be removed. And the most difficult thing is that there may be things which you think are very valuable but which in fact are the hindrances to be removed before you can become a knower.For example, if you want to experience love, you have to forget all about the love that you have learned from the poets and the so-called professors and writers. You will be surprised, but my own understanding is that the people who have been writing about love are the people who have never loved. Writing about love is their way of finding a substitute. They make beautiful poetry, but have you ever heard of a poet who was really deeply in love, who has experienced love?For example, Omar Khayyam writes about women, wine, love. Reading him you will think this man must have been the greatest hedonist ever; and the beauty of his poetry is simply incomparable. But the man was a celibate, he never got married, he had no love affairs. He was a mathematician, he was not even a poet. He was a Sufi, and what he is writing when he writes about beauty…. You will think he is talking about the beauty of women – no, he is talking about the beauty of God.To the Sufis, God is a woman, the beloved, and you are the lovers. When he is talking about love, he means love between you and God. Now, can you visualize what kind of love is possible between you and a God who does not exist at all, whom you have never seen? And he is talking about the beauty of God.His books in Persian are illustrated and God is actually there as a beautiful woman having wine in her hands to offer to you. Sufis use wine as a symbol: to the man who loves God, God offers a kind of intoxication that does not make him unconscious, but makes him perfectly conscious an intoxication that wakes him up from his sleep.Fitzgerald, the English translator of Omar Khayyam, had no idea of these symbols. He was a simple earthbound poet, and really a better poet than Omar Khayyam. When he translated, he simply understood that a woman means a woman, wine means wine, love means love. These were not symbols to him.Fitzgerald made Omar Khayyam world-famous by his misunderstanding. If you try to understand Omar Khayyam in the original you will find such a gap between Omar Khayyam and Fitzgerald that you cannot conceive how Fitzgerald managed to create such beautiful poetry out of this mathematician’s mind.Even great poets like Byron who continually talk about love have never known love, except casual, fleeting relationships with women – very casual. He was very young when he was expelled from England, not more than thirty. And he was expelled because he became a danger to all beautiful women, particularly to the royal family and the lords and their families. It is known that when Byron would…. He was beautiful also, really handsome, and had a charisma; and his poetry, his name, and his beauty, all together…any woman was ready to fall in love with him.It was known that whenever he would enter a restaurant, husbands would take their wives’ hands and get out from the other door. Finally the government decided that he should be expelled – because his love affairs were not love affairs at all. He would meet one woman one night and it would be a great love affair; he could not live without her, and his whole life was now in her hands – and the next day he would not even recognize the woman; he had found another, and then the same dialogue…. It is said that sixty women confessed – perhaps there had been many more who had not confessed – sixty young girls confessed that he had deceived them. And when it became a well-known fact and women started talking about what he had said to them, then it was known that it was the same dialogue that he was using again and again on each new woman.Will you call this man a lover? Can he know the depths of love? Love needs a certain intimacy, a certain time to grow, a certain closeness. It needs two persons to know each other in all ways, good and bad, dark and light. If you only know the person from one side you cannot say that love has yet ripened. The other person has not revealed to you his other side; he cannot yet trust you.Lovers start opening themselves completely to each other when they know that now even their thorns will be accepted with their flowers, that as they are they are going to be accepted; there is not going to be any rejection, not even a partial rejection. But this needs time. Just meeting casually may be entertainment, but it cannot be love.Yes, love has its own troubles – anything real has its own troubles. Many people have decided to avoid the troubles; and the only way is to avoid love – then casual relationships are good.One very intelligent woman – she is English, she is my sannyasin – is married to a very rich man in the Philippines. She is married to his riches, not to him; she is not at all concerned with him, what happens to him. And she is happy because he is continually on tour; his businesses are all over the world, so only once in a while do they meet. She is free. He is moving around, she is moving around. She told me, “I would like to confess to you that I am afraid of love, and I have lived up to now only on casual relationships – so much so that I don’t want to know even the name of the other person, what to say about other qualities and attributes.”She said to me, “My most beautiful experiences have been while traveling in a train. Suddenly you meet a person; there is no need to know about him because at the next station or after a few hours he will be gone, you will be gone. Perhaps you are not going to see each other again. There is no need for getting in any way personal – it is a kind of impersonal love.”It is not love, it is simply sex; it is just bodily, biological. But I can understand. The woman is very intelligent. I asked her, “Then there must have been a tragic love affair in the beginning; otherwise, how did you conclude this?”She said, “That is true. Not once, but three times I have been deceived. I thought it was love, it was not love; again I thought it was love, it was not. And life is short. Three times I trusted those people, but they were simply exploiting my sexuality; and once they were satisfied they became strangers. Then I decided that I have to do something; I am losing my life unnecessarily. So the first thing I did, I married a man whom I do not love, whom I never hope to love, but who has enough riches so that about money I am not going to have any trouble.“Secondly, I chose this man because he is constantly on tour, so he will not constantly torture me, and we will not be together constantly to harass each other, to embarrass each other. He is free – wherever he wants to go, with whomsoever he wants to go. I am not concerned because I don’t love him, so there is no question of jealousy. And I am free. And when, even after loving a person for three years, ultimately it turns out that he is only a stranger, then what is the point of wasting three years?“Strangers you can meet every day. And I decided to have relationships only with strangers, traveling in a plane, traveling in a train, meeting somebody in a tourist place for one day or two days or three days; and then to be finished, because more than that and you start becoming addicted to each other – then problems are bound to arise.”I said to her, “What you are saying makes sense, but you don’t know that you have missed the experience of love completely, just because of its troubles. Just because of the thorns you won’t grow roses in your garden? That will be stupid. Roses will be missed just because of the thorns.“Thorns can be accepted with the roses – you just have to be a little careful. And what harm can a thorn do? – at the most bring a drop of blood from your finger. But a rose is far more important than a drop of blood from your finger. You have chosen to protect your fingers and you have forgotten completely that you are missing the roses. Are you happy?”She said, “I am not, that’s why I have come to you from the Philippines. I have everything – money, rich friends, casual relationships, respectability – but I am unhappy.” I said, “You are going to be unhappy, and you will become more and more unhappy because as time passes you will find more and more that what you have chosen is not the right thing.”The poets who have been writing about love have only momentary relationships. That is thought to be something artistic, avant-garde. Painters, poets, musicians, singers – they are not supposed to have a long-term intimacy, that is against their profession. That makes them common people, ordinary people, household people – and they are superior people.But these are the people who have given you all the ideas about love. The people who know nothing about love have given you all the ideas about love; and all their ideas are fundamentally wrong because they have come out of zero experience.For example, all around the world the idea is accepted by all cultures and societies that love is something that happens only once. That’s absolutely wrong. It can happen as many times as you are capable of. It depends on you, on how much love you have in your heart. Yes, there are a few people for whom it happens only once because the quantity of love that they have is finished. Even in one love affair it is gone; then they are empty.But love is not something that needs to be in such a small quantity. You can have many love experiences, but each experience has to be, for the time that it exists, total, intense. If you are from the very beginning careful – “it is just a momentary thing and tomorrow I say good-bye forever” – then there is no possibility of love happening. But if you think that this love is going to last forever, that for eternity you are going to love this man or this woman…. It may end tomorrow morning – that is not the point – but for the moment this is your feeling, that you have found the person for whom you have been searching, and your total heartbeat is in tune with the other person. For the moment there is nobody else in the world except your beloved. The whole world has disappeared, and you are ready for this moment to become your eternity.Then even in a single moment you can have the taste of love. It may last for years, it may not last, that is irrelevant – who knows about tomorrow morning? But if somebody asks you this moment, you are ready to promise for the whole of eternity – not just for tomorrow morning, but for all the tomorrows to come.But the people who have given the ideas about love have given very wrong notions. One notion that they have given is that if you love a person then you have to love the person forever – if it is real love. That is their criterion. If some day after ten years you find your paths separating, then the criterion that you have been carrying in the mind says, “All these ten years you were in a false love and you thought it was real.”I want to say to you that the reality of love has nothing to do with its longevity. Is the flower not real just because by the evening it fades? Is only the rock real because it will remain tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that, because the day you were born it was there, and the day you die it will be there? Is only that rock real; and the flowers, thousands of flowers that came and disappeared, came and disappeared, were they unreal? Do you make length of time the criterion of reality? I don’t see any relationship between the two. But because of this idea many people go on hanging around each others’ necks because their love has to be real. They are killing each other to make the love real. If they separate that means their love was not real.I am not saying that they have to separate to make the love real – don’t move to the opposite extreme, that you have to separate. It will depend on each individual case separately. It is possible that two persons may love their whole life without ever looking anywhere else. It is possible that one may love one person for the time being and then suddenly find that energy is no longer there.It had come from the unknown.It has gone to the unknown.It was not within your power to love somebody; it is not in your power to prevent love from disappearing. You cannot do anything about it, you are simply helpless; so is the other person. Don’t blame anybody. Because of the wrong idea of love, lovers go on blaming each other: “You are destroying it.” Nobody is destroying it. It is a free breeze; it comes, goes – you cannot hold it. And if you close all the windows and all the doors to hold the breeze, it is no longer the same cool breeze. Soon it will be stale as all marriages are – stale, dull.Both the partners are trying to escape through some place – some window, some door – but the other is keeping watch. The other is also trying to escape from some door but the other is keeping watch. Soon husbands and wives become each others’ jailers. Love has to be for the whole of life, then only is it real – this is stupidity. And because of this idea in the name of love, marriage had to be invented. It is a more stable thing, permanent, legal, social – just like the rock. It is no longer a flower.The idea has come through people who have not experienced. The same is the case about other ideas – for example, truth. People who know nothing about truth go on talking about it. It is an experience, it is not some object somewhere which one day you are going to find and catch hold of and put in your safe or in a bank.Truth is not some thing, it is an experience.You cannot talk about it – you can talk it.It can be in your very gestures.It can be in your eyes.It can be in your presence.But you cannot talk about it, because when you know truth you know it is your very being, it is – you. It is not somewhere else. You cannot give any description of it, you cannot draw a picture of it. No words are capable of describing it.Every language falsifies the truth.Every expression destroys it.Then what to do? What has the disciple to do? – because he wants to know truth existentially. Then there comes initiation.Initiation is not needed for the curious – he cannot stay that long. I have been traveling in India for so many years and I was puzzled…. Once I was going to catch the train and somebody came running and said, “Just a minute – does God exist?”I said, “You must be mad – my train is leaving! What do you want? Do you want Him to exist or not? – because I have to catch my train; I cannot at this moment discuss God’s existence.” He said, “Just a minute – the train is not leaving for three minutes more – just a minute, a single question. I have been trying to find you, and today at last I have found you, but you are in a hurry to catch a train, and you don’t see that I want to know about God.”I said, “You come to my place…be with me.”But he said, “That is a little difficult because to come a hundred miles…and then I will have to take leave from my firm, from my office.”I said, “Then first take care of your office, and your family. Then when you are finished with all these things, and if I am still alive, you come about God…because you are not interested in God, you simply want a man who is running to catch the train. And you don’t see your stupidity – is this the time to ask about God?”But there are people who are just curious like that. Initiation is not for them, there is no question of initiation. For the student there is no initiation either, because intellectually he can attain knowledge from the universities, from the libraries. There, no initiation is asked for – just of course, registration.When they asked me to go to the office of the registrar to register, I said, “But I have come to be initiated, not to be registered.” And the man who has invited me to his university, Doctor S.S. Roy, wanted desperately that I should come to the university where he teaches.For four years continually I had been coming to his university to participate in an inter-university debate, and he was always one of the judges. For four years he had listened to me, and each time he listened to me he invited me, after the debate, to his house. And he would say, “Only one thing: You just leave everything – just come. I want a student like you. My whole professorship is going just rotten. Why don’t you come here? I will make all the facilities possible for you.“And I cannot help you in any way in some other university because I don’t have any power there. Here, I am the head of the department, dean of the faculty; any day I can become the vice-chancellor. And even if I don’t, the vice-chancellor is my friend, and I will arrange everything.“I want to remember later in my life that you were my student. And I feel so helpless when you come once a year – I wait the whole year until the university again arranges an inter-university competition. I am always one of the judges…and you can’t see my trouble, that I cannot give you a hundred percent because that will look as if I am favoring you – so I give you only ninety-nine percent. But even then all the judges look at each other, because each year I give you ninety-nine.”So he had invited me, and finally, after my graduation, I said, “Okay, I am coming for post-graduate work to your college, to your university, and to your department.”He told me, “You go to the registrar’s office, fill in the form and be registered.”I told him, “Professor Roy, I have not come here to be registered. What kind of a third-rate word do you use here – registered? Is it an army office or is it a university? Where is the man who is going to initiate me?”He said, “I knew that you would be a trouble and that I am asking for trouble. You are not yet part of the university and you have started creating trouble! I knew, because for four years I have been listening to the way you use words, the meaning you give to words. I can see “registered” is just ugly; it should be initiation, you are right. But what to do? There is no initiator here, nobody. You will have to get registered.”I said, “This is simply ugly, because I have come to be a disciple, not to be a student. Isn’t there anywhere a place for a disciple who wants existentially to know?But there is no place in your ordinary universities because they don’t go beyond the student.Initiation comes only when somebody is ready to take a great quantum leap from intellect to existence, from words to experience.You ask me, “What is initiation according to You?.”The first thing that is needed:The person should be ready to be a disciple.So let me explain it to you. A disciple means one who is ready to change himself to know the truth…because as you are you cannot know it; otherwise, you would have known it. As you are, something is basically wrong, upside down, not in the right place.The disciple is one who is ready and available and gives himself to the master, saying “Do whatsoever you want to me. If you want to cut my head off, cut it, but I have come in order to know the truth.”A disciple is ready to pay the price whatsoever it is, because at any cost, truth is cheap. Even if you give your whole life, then too you get it for nothing. What is your life? What value has it? It is just a soap bubble – soon it will burst.But truth will transform you from a mortal into an immortality.From time, it will take you into eternity.From all that is tense, full of anguish, a hell, it will pull you out into a state of blissfulness.The disciple has to be ready to change.Krishnamurti has been trying his whole life to work with people without initiation – that has been his failure. Of course he could get hold only of students; he could not go deeper than that. He had something to give to those who can go deeper than students, but he himself was preventing disciples from coming to him. Those who had come, he was condemning them. He was forcing them to remain students, just on the intellectual level.So for sixty years there have been people, thousands around the world, who have listened to him year in, year out; read him continually, and have become completely full of his ideas, but have not changed in any way. They are the same people they were sixty I years before. And now he feels frustrated – but the whole fault is his own. He seems to feel as if people are not intelligent enough. That is not the case.The people are intelligent enough but you debarred the real intelligent people and you raised and praised high the intellectuals – who are not the real intelligent people. The intelligent person will say, “I am ready to change, but I want to know, not verbally – I want to experience it. And I am ready to do anything, unconditionally.” That unconditional commitment I from the disciple is an absolute necessity for initiation. The word initiation is a very profound word.It means something that cannot be said, cannot be verbalized; something that is impossible to impart through mind…but still there is a way to imbibe it. And that is the way of initiation. Initiation means the disciple is ready to be available, open to the master, to his presence, his being, his silence.I say unto you; do not be too much concerned with what I say, but be concerned with what I am.What I say is only the circumference, what I am is the center.When a disciple is ready to join with the center of the master, initiation happens. It is an entry into the house of the master.The doors are opened for the disciple to come in because the disciple has opened his heart for the master to come in. It is on both sides an opening – availability, vulnerability.And when both sides are open – the master’s side is always open, even to those who are not open; it is only a question of the disciple, because he is continually defending, afraid. That’s what the whole society has been teaching him: “Be on the defense, otherwise somebody is going to exploit you. Be alert, don’t be gullible. Keep yourself ready; if somebody is trapping you, you can escape.”If this mind is there then you can’t go beyond the stage of the student.To be a disciple you have to be ready – knowingly, with your eyes open – to step into the unknown, dropping all fear, because the master is the most unknown and unknowable thing in existence. It is not his body, it is not his mind. It is his vibe, his presence – not his person. And to enter into his presence you have to drop all your defense measures. That is initiation. It may take any formal structure. That is not essential; that is just to make it visible.You are given a red robe, a mala; they are not essential. They are just to make your initiation visible to others, because if it is visible to others they will remind you. Standing before a mirror you will be reminded; continuously you will be reminded that you are a disciple and you have to behave like a disciple. It is just an outer protection.But the real initiation is something inner, something that triggers in your heart…a moment when the master’s heart and your heart beat in the same rhythm.When there is a moment when your breathing and your master’s breathing are one, when the twoness is lost, and oneness is felt – that feeling of oneness with the master is initiation.Disciplehood is a necessary condition for initiation.And as your initiation becomes ripe, as it becomes easier, natural, spontaneous, then comes the fourth category: the devotee.Between the disciple and the devotee is the bridge of initiation. The disciple is on the other shore, the master is on this shore. But the disciple is ready to cross the river, to risk his life. To him there is nothing more important that to be with the master. Whether it is a river of water or fire makes no difference, he is going to pass through it.That very decision changes him from a student into a disciple. That very decision, and immediately – the master may be on the other shore, but he starts pulsating with him – a synchronicity arises. He starts feeling as if he is part of him, not separate. Slowly the bridge is built. More and more your defenselessness, without any effort, just becomes natural to you. The day it becomes natural, you have crossed the bridge: the disciple disappears and the devotee appears. That is the highest category in the world of seeking.A devotee is one who has nothing to ask, nothing to seek. He has found the master, and that’s enough. He has left himself in the hands of the master, and now he is at ease.It is just like a small child walking with his father hand-in-hand. The father may be afraid – it is a thick jungle, and the night is coming – but the child has no fear. He is enjoying himself and he is talking about all kinds of things, and the father wants to say, “Shut up! Just walk fast – the night is coming.”And the child says, “But look at the trees, and look at that tiger!” He is not afraid because he knows his hand is in his father’s hand.A moment comes when the disciple starts feeling the same way with the master.Then he is a devotee, then it is a love affair.Now it has nothing to do with seeking, searching, finding, not finding; there is no question of going anywhere.Now wherever the master is, is home, is paradise.You have lost yourself totally in your master’s being.And the strangest phenomenon is: the moment you are lost utterly in the master’s being, for the first time you have found yourself, and found who you are.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Do values like love, religiousness, authenticity, happiness, change as human consciousness grows upward?The movement of human consciousness from darkness to light, from unconsciousness to consciousness, is the greatest revolution there is.Everything in human life changes, even with a slight movement in consciousness. All depends on where your consciousness is. But this is something which has never been explored. If you look into the dictionaries you will not find three meanings of love there should be. You will not find three meanings of religiousness; there should be. You will not find three meanings of happiness either; there should be. Let us move step by step. Love, for the person who lives in the darkness of his instincts, is not even worth calling love. It is simply sex, a strategy of nature to go on reproducing itself.You are being used as a means – that is the ugliest part of it. You are not the master of it, you are in the hands of biology. And whatever you are doing, it is not your doing either: you are forced by your instinctive nature to do it – there is no option, it is not your choice. You cannot choose – as far as instincts are concerned, their grip on you is absolute; you are simply a prisoner.But you go on befooling yourself: you think it is something that you are doing – it is something that is being done through you.There is a story in India…. In Jagannathpuri, one of the sacred places of Hindus – jagannath means the lord of the world; the temple in Jagannathpuri is the temple of the lord of the world. Because of the temple, the city has grown around it, and because of the temple, the whole city is called Jagannathpuri.Every year there is a great festival; millions of people gather. The statue from the temple is taken on a chariot for people to see, and it goes around those millions who have gathered. The chariot is drawn by beautiful horses, twelve, of the same color, pure white – the color of the lord of the world. The chariot is golden, of immense value.Once it happened – this is how the story goes – that a dog started walking in front of the chariot, in front of the horses. Now, when millions of people were there, who was going to bother about a dog who is walking in front of the chariot? People were falling on the ground, prostrating, to give respect to the lord of the world. And the dog thought, “This is great! I have so many followers – I had no idea before. Such a multitude of disciples…I must be some great master.”Obviously – the logic is simple – the disciples were there and everybody was prostrating to him. He was not aware of the lord of the world, who was behind. Even if he tried he could not see, because the statue was high in the chariot, and then there were twelve horses. It was not possible for the dog to find out to whom…and they were almost touching his feet. And when somebody is respected by millions of people in this way, the very idea of thinking that this respect is being given to somebody else who is behind is impossible – it is against the ego. And the evidence is so clear, anybody can see.This is the situation of man as far as biology is concerned. The chariot of biology is behind you, carrying the lord of nature, and you think everything is being done by you. Just a little alertness is needed and you will be able to see that it is nothing to do with you. Nature wants to fulfill itself – you are being used as a means.The antagonism of religion against sex is ninety-nine percent stupid, but there is one percent of truth which I cannot deny. But I have never talked about that one percent of truth to you because there is the danger that the one percent truth may deceive you and you will forget the ninety-nine percent which is untrue. So I have been hammering on the ninety-nine percent. But to make my picture complete…these are my last touches to the picture, so I cannot leave anything out.That one percent of truth is significant; in fact because of that one percent, all religions became anti-sex. And that truth is that sex makes man a fool, gives him the idea that he is the master of it, while he is only a slave. And the slavery has to be broken – he has to be pulled out of this ditch. But if he thinks that that ditch is a palace then you cannot pull him out. You cannot even persuade him to come out of it; hence, the condemnation of sex by all the religions.But they overdid it, and they forgot the ninety-nine percent dangers just for the one percent. It could have been done very easily without taking the risk of ninety-nine percent falsehood. But they saw the danger of man being simply a means, and that is the lowliest position possible; you are just a means, not an end. You are being used by some unknown force of which you have no idea. And you go on thinking in your mind that all these prostrating people are prostrating to you.The man living on the instinctive level only has an hallucination of love. That hallucination is created by nature, by biology, chemistry. You have in your body drugs which are released when you are making love, and you start moving into euphoria. That is one of the reasons why people who become addicted to drugs slowly slowly become uninterested in sex.The hippies and yippies and all kinds of people – when they became too interested in drugs, they lost their fervor for sex completely, because now they had found a better way of getting into a euphoric state. Now sex seemed to be nothing compared to it. That can give you a clue that both are drugs.Nature has been using that drug in a very minute quantity; there was no need for more up to now. Perhaps nature will have to think again – find out better drugs, create better chemistry, bring its level up to date; it is lagging far behind. Man’s mind has created things like LSD far superior; so superior that a man like Aldous Huxley thought that LSD gives you samadhi – that it is actually what Kabir and Buddha and Rumi and all the mystics of the world have been talking about. But they had bullock-cart methods to reach to this state.Now science has given us very advanced drugs, there is no need for yoga and tantra and other things – you just take an injection. You yourself push the injection, there is no need for somebody else to do it. And for hours you are in a euphoric state which is certainly superior to what you call orgasm, because orgasm is so momentary that it only creates more desire for it; it never gives you any satisfaction.The second symptom that it is a drug is its power of addiction: people become addicted to sex. And a very strange thing about addiction is that if you have the drug, it is nothing; if you don’t have it, you are missing. You never think what you are missing because when you have it, it is nothing. Each time you have it you feel that it is just a futile effort, nothing comes out of it. You don’t move a single inch in evolution. You just jump for a moment in the air and with a thump you fall back on the ground.That’s why people don’t like to make love publicly, there is no other reason. The reason is nobody wants to look so foolish. Now, in California, which is the most advanced stupid place in the whole world, they have hotels for peeping Toms – you have to pay for it. Inside two fools are making love, and many around the room are sitting and looking and enjoying what the two fools are enjoying. They are enjoying how the couple are making fools of themselves. People pay for it, but those two people are not aware of it; they have also paid.One man, the first day, was inside the room, but coming out he found many people really hilarious. He asked them, “What is the matter?”They said, “The show was so good!”“Which show?” he asked.They said, “You don’t know? Come tomorrow – it is worth seeing.” The man was such an idiot, and he had been doing such idiotic things, it was worth seeing. The next day the man came with these friends. Now he was outside the wall – and then he found what the matter was: the previous day he had been inside and all these people had enjoyed him. This was tricky – now he was enjoying somebody else!All the cultures around the world have prohibited, in some way or other, lovemaking in public places, for the simple reason that if you want to be idiotic then at least find some privacy. Don’t make yourself unnecessarily a public show free of charge. A crowd will gather and they will enjoy. Nobody can pass by that place; they will all stop there. And they know they all are doing the same kinds of things. But it is an unconscious state.Love, at the instinctive level – which is the lowest level – is just a dream created by nature so that you can pass through this arduous job of making love. If there is no euphoria around it, you are going to refuse: “I am not going to make a fool of myself.” Nature has given you a certain allurement.So in the unconscious state where instinct functions, love is only a name. It means nothing, it simply means foreplay…because just going to a woman and asking her, “Are you ready to come with me to bed?” looks so sudden and so inhuman that the woman, even if she wanted to come with you, is going to slap you. Instead of sleeping with you she is going to slap you then and there.No, you have to follow a certain procedure – and that procedure you call love. It is not that you do it deliberately to cheat the woman, no: you are being cheated as much as she is being cheated by the same biological forces. The same force is making you say beautiful things to her, what you call “sweet nothings,” whispered into her ear. And the same force is managing things from the other side also, so that she believes you. Whatever you are saying – even if the woman is the ugliest that you have seen, if you say to her, “You are the most beautiful woman in the world, perhaps another Cleopatra,” she is going to believe it! And it is not that you are saying it to cheat her, to deceive her in any way; in that moment you are really true.One of my friends, a very rich man, who presented me with almost everything…. He made it a point that nobody could present anything before him, so everything that I needed or could have needed anytime he managed to present to me – things which I never used. I asked him also “What am I going to do with this?”He said, “That is not the point. The point is, nobody is going to present you anything before me. Later on they can go on presenting you with things – and millions will be presenting you things out of love – but they will always be after me. Nobody else can be first.”And I was very reluctant, because if there was something I was not going to use, if it was no use to me, he was unnecessarily wasting money. And he was so particular and such a perfectionist that only the best satisfied him. If I would not take something then he would find ways somehow to smuggle the thing into my house. Once, when I was leaving – I used to stay with him at least three days every year, that was a commitment. So three days I used to stay with him every year, and when I was leaving he said to me – which he had never said before – “Just be a little careful about your suitcase.”I said, “I have come so many times, and so many times you have come to the train to say good-bye to me, but you have never said to me, ‘Be careful about the suitcase.’ What is the matter?”He said, “Nothing is the matter,” and he gave me the key.I said, “Strange – why are you keeping the key? If it had been left with you, then I would have been in trouble” – and it was a thirty-six-hour journey from his place to Jabalpur.He said, “No, I was not going to forget it.”As the train left, the first thing I did, I opened the suitcase: what was the matter? The suitcase was full of one-hundred rupee notes. I thought, “My God! What has he done?” And there was a slip in an envelope: “This is for a new Fiat car. Purchase it immediately. And you cannot say no to me because that will hurt me my whole life.”I said, “This is strange.” I am continually traveling – in Jabalpur I remain only for five to seven days a month at the most, and that too, not at one stretch. But he will be certainly hurt.” And as I reached home, immediately my phone was ringing. He said, “You have to do first things first. I have already arranged it. I have contacted the Fiat company in Jabalpur – and the car is ready there. Just take the suitcase and take delivery of the car.”I said, “You don’t leave anything for me!” The car was already standing there ready and the man said, “We have been waiting for you.”I said, “What to do? The train was two hours late.” And my friend must have been phoning according to the timetable. In India it is said that that’s why the timetable is published – so you can find how late the train is; otherwise how will you find out by how much the train is late? The timetable is absolutely a necessity. Only once it happened that I got into a carriage at the exact time. Traveling for thirty years continually, that was the only time the train arrived exactly on time; it was a miracle. I went to the guard and thanked him; I said, “This is a miracle.”He said, “It is not a miracle. You don’t know – this is yesterday’s train! We are twenty-four hours late, we are not on time.”I said to the man at the garage, “What could I do? – the train was late, so two hours….”He said, “Your friend was very particular about everything; a radio had to be in the car.” And he had made sure of everything, insurance…. And he asked the garage owner to arrange a license for me because otherwise the car might just stay parked at my place. He gave me the first tape-recorder, the first camera – everything that he could find, he would immediately bring to me.This man was rare in many ways. He was a miser – such a miser that beggars simply bypassed his house. If any beggar ever stood there, other beggars thought, “This seems to be a new man – standing before Rekhchand Parekh’s house, begging!” He had never donated to any institution in his life, never given a single pai to any beggar.His wife had taken me to introduce to her husband because she said, “He is so miserly, and he has so much money. And we have only three daughters, who are married and have rich houses, so there is no problem. And there is no son, there is nobody after us, but he goes on collecting – even I don’t know how much he has.”They lived in a place, Chanda, in Maharashtra. She said, “He had purchased almost one-third of the houses of the city – it seems he is going to purchase the whole city. If there is any house for sale, he is not going to let anybody else purchase it. And his only joy seems to be just accumulating money. I have brought many Jaina monks” – because they were Jainas, and they were Gandhians – “and I have brought many great disciples of Gandhi, thinking perhaps somebody will change his mind. But he is very straight and does not give any chance for anybody to even touch him.”So I said, “Okay, I will come. I cannot guarantee anything; I don’t know what type of man he is, but he appeals to me.”He had come to receive me at the station. While we were going to his house – he was driving – I told him, “One thing I should tell you is that your wife has brought me here to persuade you not to be miserly. She wants you to donate to institutions who are doing a public service, to religious institutions, to schools, to hospitals. I am not interested in all of these things; I have just come to meet you because you attracted me. You are a rare man! Never in your life have you given to a beggar, never have you donated a single pai?”He said, “Never, because I am waiting for the man who is worth to be given everything.”When we reached his house, his wife was surprised because never before had he taken to his sitting room any saints that she had brought. And he told the servants that I would be staying in his guest house, in his sitting room; that I would be there: “And tell my wife she need not worry about this man.” His wife was at a loss: What had happened?A sudden synchronicity, he told me – not the word synchronicity, he had never heard that, but he told me, “It is strange, the moment I saw you, I felt, ‘This is the man.’” And even after we had known each other for twenty years, there was not a single question from him – no question, no doubt, no argument – whatever I was saying was truth to him.I asked his wife only one question. After being there for the first time for three days, I asked his wife, “Is your husband interested in sex or not?”She said, “Not at all, and it is not that he represses, he is simply finished. And you can see now that he is a strange man. He has told me, ‘If you are not finished you are free; you can have sex with whoever you want. I am finished with it.”‘The moment a man is finished with sex as an instinct that is forcing him to do something, he becomes in a certain way a master of himself and he starts having insights, visions which the unconscious, instinctive man cannot have.Just looking at me – not a single word had been said – he said, “I have found the person.” And then whenever I needed any amount of money, for myself or somebody else, I had just to inform him, “Give this much money to this man.”He never asked, “Who is this man and why is so much money needed for him?” He simply gave it. His wife was simply shocked. She could not believe that this miserly man…how suddenly he had completely become just the opposite.I told her, “There is no problem. He is not miserly – it was your misunderstanding. He never wanted to give to those people who are not worthy of it. And coming from the station to the house he said to me, ‘I have found you; now all that I have belongs to you. Whatsoever you want to do with it you can do.’ He is not a miserly man, it was your misunderstanding. It is difficult to find such a man, so generous.” But from where was his generosity coming? His generosity was coming from a certain mastery over himself.The instinctive man clings to everything: to sex, to money, to power – to everything.I asked him, “Why do you go on purchasing all the houses?”He said, “Some day you may like to have a commune – then from where am I going to suddenly give you a commune? By that time I will have purchased the whole city. I know that you will take a little time before you need a place – I am preparing it for you.” Now, nobody would have thought that he was purchasing houses…that even before knowing me, he was purchasing them for somebody who was going to come into his life, who one day may need this whole city.And many times it happened…he used to come with me once in a while for a tour. Anybody would think that he was a miser because he was such a rich, super-rich man, but he would always travel third class on the passenger trains. Never express trains, mail trains, no; never first class, air-conditioned – out of the question. But whenever he would travel with me, he would say, “You can travel in the air-conditioned class; I will travel in the third class.”Once I asked, “Why do you insist on traveling third class?”He said, “I have my own ideas. People think I am a miser – I don’t care a bit about money. What am I going to do with the money? Soon I will die and all this money will be lying here. But to travel in the third class is an experience: the crowd, the people, the gossips, and things that go on happening in the third class of an Indian railway train….” He had traveled all over India, and he had friends at every station; he would call the coolies by their names. And he knew every place where you could get the best milk, where you could get the best tea, where you could get the best sweets.He said, “With an express train, a mail train, this is not possible, because they stop only at a few stations and I want to stop at every station, because at every station I have friends and I have things to do. The passenger train stays longer at every station. If other trains are passing, then the passenger train will be delayed; no other train will be delayed, so you always have hours on your hands. And all these stationmasters are my friends, the guards are my friends, the drivers are my friends – because I call all of them when I know that a particular sweet is made the best at that station. So they say to me, ‘Parekh, enjoy yourself! Unless you enter the train, the train will not move.’ “And he said, “I like to be the master rather than the servant – not that they give the whistle and you run, no.”That was his reason: “I want to be the master. When I enter the train, then whistling and flagging and everything happens – but first they have to see that Parekh has entered.”He was an old man – I was only thirty-five, he was fifty at that time – but he would take me out of the station, and he would say, “Come outside. The mango trees are great here.”I would say, “The train is there – are we going to pick mangos? And then if we miss the train…. I have my appointment.”He would say, “Don’t be worried. Until I enter the train, the train remains in the station. You can go up the tree, I am also coming; we will go up the tree and pick mangos.”One day it happened: we were picking mangos and Parekh said to me, “Just look upward,” and there was another man. He said, “He is the driver. He knows that I will come to pick mangos so the train has to stay. So why waste time? – collect a few mangos, and these mangos are really sweet! In fact, the guard will be in some other tree…. It is all under my control.”This man had no instinctive force. He was not in any way interested in any particular food; he liked all kinds of food, he liked all kinds of clothes. In fact he was so disinterested that anything would do – no special liking, disliking. But he was a man full of love.Once in a city in Rajasthan, Biawar, he was with me, and I had a fever. The whole night he remained by my side. I told him, “Parekh, you go to sleep. Because of you I cannot go to sleep!”He said, “That is up to you – that is your problem. I am not saying to you, ‘Don’t go to sleep’; I am trying to help you to go to sleep. As far as I am concerned I cannot sleep knowing that you have a fever. The fever may increase in the night and I may be asleep. That is not permissible.”And actually it happened: in the night the fever increased; at two o’clock it was one hundred and five. He said, “Do you see the point? You would not have awakened me.”I said, “That is true.”He called the doctor and he said to me, “This is not the time for you to leave the body. If you can make some arrangement, I am willing to leave the body and you remain in the body – because you have much to do, and I have nothing to do.” This is love of a totally different kind – a caring, a friendliness.The instinctive love can become any moment hate. The man who was ready to die for you can kill you. The woman who was so caring toward you, so loving toward you, can poison you; literally she can poison you. Love, if it is instinctive, is not in your hands; you are just a slave. The unconscious is very easily convertible into its opposite, and you cannot do anything about it.But when love comes to the conscious level – that is, when it comes to the level of intellect, not instinct – then it has a different flavor. Then it has no biological purpose.What biological purpose can music have? What biological purpose can poetry have? or painting? or philosophy? But Socrates is ready to die for his philosophy. There seems to be a tremendous love affair with his own system that he has created. He knows perfectly well that his death is not going to destroy his philosophy, but if he compromises just to go on living, that may destroy his whole philosophy. The very compromise – because that was one of his teachings: never compromise.Truth is truth, and untruth is untruth.And there is no possibility of compromise.Just the other day I received a very beautiful, nice, elegant letter from a council of priests, bishops, Christian theologians. They have a certain council in America, and they have written that they have been discussing me now for almost two to three years – reading, discussing. I have become their center of discussion. They have invited me to come, and they will take every care; they want to exchange thoughts with me. That’s where the trouble is.The whole letter is beautiful. And in this too – they have not consciously written anything rude – they are unconscious people. An exchange of thoughts is not something bad, but they don’t know that you cannot exchange thoughts with me; I don’t deal in that business. If you know, then I will not bother. If you don’t know, then how is the exchange going to be? What are you going to give me in exchange? Either you know or you don’t know; there is no third position. You cannot say, “A little bit I know,” because truth cannot be divided into fragments.You cannot know truth a little bit; either you know it, the whole of it, or you don’t know it, the whole of it. So what exchange?Now, I may look rude to them. I am not ready for any exchange because as far as I am concerned I don’t need anybody’s ideas. It was so difficult to get rid of them, now again to exchange…. It took me twenty-one years to get rid of other people’s ideas. I am not interested. Even if God invites me for an exchange of ideas – nothing doing! You can have your ideas, and I don’t have any ideas to give you.I can share myself, but it is not going to be an intellectual discussion. It is going to be an intelligence communion; but for that, that council cannot be ready. They have already decided what is right, who is the messiah. They have already decided that God exists. Now what remains to be exchanged?You have your whole theology already decided, by others, not by you. You have borrowed it and now you are feeling in confusion because of my ideas. If my ideas are so confusing, that is proof enough that you don’t know what truth is; otherwise, what is the point of discussing for three years? Who am I? – I have not been discussing those fellows, not even for three days, what to say about three years. And they must have written great theological books….There is no possibility of exchange; but at the instinctive level, everything is an exchange. You give something, you take something – and there is every effort to take more than you give. That’s the whole difficulty of all the couples around the world. The wife goes on saying, “I love you, but you don’t love me.” The husband says, “How to prove it? I love you.” But nobody can convince the other.It is not a question of convincing. But why does the question arise that “You love me less,” or “I love you more”? At the instinctive level, love is a quantity. You can measure it – how many kilos you give and how many kilos you get in return, in exchange. And you can see who is a loser. It is a business deal. And people are continually quarreling, and trying to manage to snatch as much from the other as possible.But when love moves to the conscious level, when it has no biological slavery, when it is free of biology…that does not mean that you cannot make love to someone. You can make love to someone, but now it will have a totally different quality. It will not be in any way a bondage, an enforcement by nature. It will be out of your freedom; you can share.The right word to use will be…it will be just playfulness. Yes, you can play with somebody’s body. You like the body, you enjoy the body, you enjoy the warmth of the body, you enjoy the contours of the body. You can be playful, there is no business deal.In fact that is why – along with many other reasons, this is also one of the reasons – I am in favor of birth control methods, while all the religions are against it. You will be surprised to know what is going on in the minds of the popes, shankaracharyas, imams, rabbis. You may not have thought of it in that way, perhaps they are not even aware themselves, but I want it to be clear to you and to them. This is the fact that is going on in religious people’s minds:If birth control methods become more prevalent, then sex will be a playfulness.Then you cannot call it sin.There is nothing involved, no sin at all. Two persons enjoying each other’s warmth – there is no problem in it. They cannot condemn sex, they cannot condemn you, that you are in bondage, a slave. They cannot say to you, “You are only a means in the hands of biology,” because birth control methods make you capable, even if you are not conscious, they make you capable of turning sex into playfulness; and that is the danger. Their whole theology will collapse because no religious scripture had the idea that there were going to be birth control methods.They were happy with the slavery of sex because then they could condemn it and you could not argue – it is so clear that it is a slavery, and nobody wants to be a slave: So repress it, get out of it. But the dilemma is that the more you repress it, the more you try to get out of it, the more you are caught in it. Only by playfulness is there a possibility one day, suddenly, to get out of it, because it is no longer a serious business.One fundamental you have to remember: if you fight with something you will have to remain on that level to fight; otherwise how can you continue the fight? If you are fighting sex, then you cannot move beyond your instinctive level – impossible – because then who will fight? If you start moving upward then all those wolves in your unconscious will run amok. You cannot leave that place, you have to be there constantly fighting, repressing. How is transformation possible for a man who is fighting with his own nature? It is impossible.Take it as a categorical principle; there is no exception to it. With whomsoever you fight you will have to remain with that person, with that state, with that space. But if you are playful, then it is a totally different thing. If you are on the war front you cannot say to the soldiers on the other side, “Now I am feeling tired; we will go home now and start tomorrow.” You cannot say that. If you turn your back that fellow is going to shoot you then and there, and finish all your tiredness.On the front you cannot do that, but if you are playing with somebody, playing cards, you can say, “Now I am tired. Tomorrow we will start; we can start even from this point where we are stopping.” There is no problem in it, it is only a play.Let your instinctive world become a playfulness….And that’s the fear of all the priests in the world. They are condemning me continually for the simple reason that I am giving you a chance to get out of the grip of your instinct. But that is also the grip of the priest; that is also the grip of the pornographer.If you get out of your instinctive level, you are free from the priest, the pope, and the pornographer. The pornographer and the priest are using the same methodology. And they are partners, whether they know it or not, in the same business.You will be surprised to know that in aboriginal tribes you cannot make anybody interested in a nude, pornographic picture. You cannot make anybody interested. I have lived in Bastar, and gone there again and again…because in India a few tribes are left which are five thousand years old. And they have not kept pace with time; they have stood still. So it is good for a visit into history, five thousand years old; there is no other way to visit history, to go back in time.But in Bastar it is not the twentieth century. You can touch a woman’s breast and ask, “What are these?” and she will say, “You don’t know? These are tits for children to drink milk.” She is not offended by that, that you touched her tits. She is simply surprised that you don’t know such a simple thing.They are almost naked. They only wrap a cloth around when they come to the cities, down from their hills, out of their forests; otherwise they are all naked. How can you make an aboriginal of Bastar interested in a Playboy magazine or Stern? He will be simply surprised: “What is this?”It is like a magazine on fruits advertising tomatoes half-clothed, tightly clothed A man who grows tomatoes will be simply surprised: “Are these people mad? If you are advertising tomatoes, then advertise tomatoes, but why these strange clothes, tight around the tomatoes?”These pornographers are using what the priest has done before. The priest is the head partner, perhaps the major shareholder. He represses sex; he makes people interested in sex beyond all rationality – he drives them irrational about sex. Then comes the pornographer, and naturally, the repressed person would like at least to see the photographs. He is not allowed to see living human beings, that is a sin. At least The Bible has not said, “Cursed are those who will see pornography. They will inherit the kingdom of hell.” I think pornographers will be needed in heaven too, because all your monks will die…. They may have already found a way to smuggle in Playboy, Stern, and all kinds of third-rate magazines from around the world.You may even be surprised to find God looking at a Playboy magazine, because He is the original source of this whole business. And it is natural, because He has not even a girlfriend – what to say of a wife, not even a girlfriend. In the name of a girlfriend he has the Holy Ghost. Just think of yourself with the Holy Ghost as your girlfriend; you would like better to live alone. You would ask the Holy Ghost, “Leave me alone, you go somewhere else.”The priest creates the business basis: repression.Then the pornographer uses it.I am destroying their business completely.Sheela informed me from New Delhi – she had taken our latest publication, This Very Place The Lotus Paradise, to show to people – that one minister, the finance minister of India, came to see her. She showed him the book. K.D. was with her, and K.D. could not believe what that man was doing…. Because in The Lotus Paradise we have a few pictures of our nature institute; naked women walking by the lake or massaging each other, or just sitting and giving an interview.Sheela was sitting in front so she could not see, but K.D. was at the side so he was amazed when he saw that the man was touching the bottom of a girl in the picture! And these are the people who are in power.He is one of the persons who has been creating all kinds of hindrances for our commune in Pune and still goes on doing it. In parliament he spoke against me. In parliament the man said it is good that I have left the country, because “this man was dangerous; he was preaching sex as if he is doing something religious.”Now, this man is simply insane. But who has driven him insane? A picture is just printed paper. There are not any buttocks or anything, but he is trying to touch the buttocks and feel them. And K.D. saw such a greasy feeling on his face – as if this man could rape a woman if he had a chance. He can rape even a picture! If he can touch the buttocks in the picture, can’t you imagine him raping a picture of a naked woman? He is capable.This is what the priests have done to the world.Now these people are all turned into customers for pornographers.And our pictures in that book are not even pornographic, because a naked picture by itself is not pornography. A naked child – can you call him pornographic? A naked Mahavira, can you call him pornographic? – then all the temples of the Jainas in India are pornographic. But no – if you go and see Mahavira’s statue standing naked, you cannot say that it is pornography. There is no pornography at all; he is simply nude. But he is not exhibiting his nudity; he is not trying to pollute your mind and poison you. He is not trying to attract you sexually – and in fact, facing a statue of Mahavira naked you will never feel sexual.He has a beautiful body, very proportionate, but it is impossible even to think of pornography. Children are there, women are there, men are there – they are all worshipping the naked Mahavira, and there is no question….Pornography needs something more. It is not just a naked body. It needs to place the body in such a situation, in such a posture, with such clothing that it releases your imagination. Just a naked body cannot release your imagination. In fact it stops it; where to go? A naked woman is standing before you; what to do? How long can you look at a naked woman or a naked man? Soon you will say, “Shit! I am going home. What nonsense is this?”But the pornographer’s art is to make the woman naked enough so that you feel attracted and covered enough so that your imagination is allowed to discover what is hidden, what is covered. The real art of pornography is in the balance: the body should not be too naked, otherwise you will soon be bored; it should not be too covered, otherwise you will soon be bored. It should be covered in such a way that your imagination can start working on it, so that you can close your eyes and you can contemplate what is hidden. And in your contemplation you can make it as beautiful as you want it is your imagination.All religions are pornographic in this sense because they are partners in the same business, they are the major shareholders. They create the situation to be exploited. But they are afraid if you are free from the sexual instinct and other instincts which are minor, if you are free then they are committing suicide.As you come to the level of intellect – and the only way, I told you, to come to the level of intellect and consciousness is not to repress, but to enjoy everything that nature has given to you, playfully, non-seriously. And you will – be soon beyond it; you cannot go on playing with it your whole life.It is just like teddy bears. There are a few people who in many ways need teddy bears even in later life – very important people even.I have met one very famous saint, Shivananda. He had many followers in America and around the world, and he was thought of as one of the greatest living yogis. Seeing him, I was simply in shock that this man – he used to eat so much that perhaps he must be the weightiest man in the world. He was just like an elephant, not like a man. His hands were so heavy he could not raise them himself. Two persons were needed to hold his hands when he stood up, they were so heavy, so thick. When I saw him I said, “My God! This man is a yogi?”But what had happened – he had repressed when he was young. His master was continually forcing his fasting, fasting; so he fasted, starved himself. When the master died and he became the successor, then naturally, the first thing he did – anybody can imagine it – the first thing he did, he started eating as much as he could. All those years of starvation had to be compensated. His body was the ugliest; he could not carry his own weight.And this man was talking about becoming fearless because fear keeps you worshipping wrong gods; out of fear you start worshipping anything. Yoga does not believe even in God. That’s one of the beauties of yoga, that it is very scientific.The yogis never mention the fact that yoga does not believe in God. They simply ignore the statement or camouflage it in commentaries, and this and that; but the statement is clear. What I am saying is what yoga says. Yoga says God is a hypothesis. There is no need to believe in it, there is no need not to believe in it; it is just a hypothesis. It can be used for certain purposes. But God is not some existent thing.It is just like I don’t want a child to go out because it is so cold; the child will not listen so I say, “Wait, outside there is a ghost. Now if you want to go, you can go.” Now the child will sit just by my side. I will say, “You go out, the ghost is waiting.” Now the ghost is a hypothesis, but it has a function. Yoga says God can be used just like a hypothesis, for certain purposes in practice. It is perfectly good for a child. He has been saved from the cold.I wanted Shivananda’s disciples to give more information about Shivananda – what he eats, how much he eats, when he gets up, when he goes to sleep. In that information I found one item which was just hilarious. He sleeps keeping one foot in a plastic bag full of salt. I have read all about yoga but I have never come across this exercise.They said, “This is not a yoga exercise; this keeps ghosts away.” There is in India a belief that if you keep one leg in salt then ghosts can’t come and kill you. This man is continually teaching fearlessness, and in the night…. Of course ghosts don’t listen to the sermons of the yogis; and who knows? – they may be there. It is better to be on the safe side.I told one of his chief disciples, “I would love to see it.He said, “There is no problem. When he goes to sleep I will leave the window open; you can simply slip in and see.”So I opened the window and saw: he was there lying on the bed with one of his feet tied inside a bag. I said, “If you are not finished, playfully, with your unconscious then it is going to come up in some way or another. You can teach beautiful things but you can’t have the quality of those things.”As you move up, playfully, exhausting the biological sources, fulfilling what biology wants you to do, it relieves you; you are freed, you become conscious. And conscious love is a totally different thing. It is just friendliness.You don’t fall in love – no more fall – you rise in love. The more you love, the more you feel you are going higher in your consciousness. And the same is true about other values: authenticity, religiousness, happiness.Happiness on the instinctive level is only pleasure; happiness on the level of intellect is joy. When you listen to great music, or you see a beautiful painting – a sudden upsurge of joy. No animal can enjoy a painting. He can eat it, but he cannot enjoy it.No animal is capable of enjoying anything that belongs to the second level – your consciousness – because no animal rises to that level; only man…and not all men either. Few men are capable of enjoying things which have no biological purpose. What biological purpose does a painting serve? – or music? or poetry? There is no biological purpose. That’s why no parent wants you to become an artist.One of my uncles is a poet, but the whole family was against him; they destroyed him. They did not allow him…they withdrew him from the university because they saw that if he passed from the university then all he was going to do was write poetry. But if he had no certificates, then he had no way to escape anywhere; he had to sit in the shop.And I have seen him – when I was small, I saw him sitting in the shop. And if there was nobody else, only I was there…he knew that I never disturb anybody’s business. You just have to be aware not to be disturb my business; then it is a contract. And it was a contract between me and him that he should never interrupt anything, whatsoever it was.He said, “Okay, but don’t you report anything about me.”I said, “I am not concerned.”What he used to do – a customer would come and he would simply wave his hand as if the customer where a beggar: “Just go!” He would not speak because somebody might hear, so he would just make a gesture with his hands: “Move on!” My father, my grandfather, they were all puzzled: “Whenever you sit here, no customer comes in.”He said, “What can I do? I can sit here but if nobody comes it is not my fault.”He was not interested in business at all; while sitting in the shop he was writing poetry. But soon they arranged his marriage. And I went on telling him, “You are getting trapped. First, why did you come back from the university? Don’t you have any guts? You could have done anything – pulled a rickshaw, been a coolie at the railway station. You could have done anything.”I told him, “Your poetry is just lousy. They stopped sending money to you so you are back; now they are arranging your marriage and you don’t know that that is the end of your poetry. At least right now you can shoo away the customers and go on writing a little bit. You will not be able to do that when your wife is here.”He said, “But my wife will be in the house, and I will be in the shop.”I said, “You just wait…because I see what happens to my father. My mother only sees him when he is there for his lunch or his supper. He simply goes on eating, his eyes down, and she goes on hammering him about all kinds of things. And she screams, ‘You don’t say anything, no or yes. I know you are not listening to me.’ And he will say, ‘I can do only one thing at a time – let me first eat.’ But she will say, ‘Once you finish you escape; then again at supper time – I see you only twice.’”And she had problems. She was not very old but the whole family had fallen on her head, because my father’s mother died after his marriage. And my grandfather was a problem because he was continually inviting people, all kinds of people; he had so many friends. He had no other business, he had left the business to my father. He had only one business – to make friends. And the best way to make a friend is to invite him for lunch, supper, dinner, anything.And my mother was angry, perfectly logically: “You should at least inform me how many people you are bringing because from where can I produce food suddenly? You simply come in the kitchen with a dozen people, and I have no idea even that a dozen people are coming.” So she had her problems. But my grandfather was not a man to listen to anybody; he would do whatsoever he wanted.He had created a great stir…. Just the other day I was telling you about Haji Baba of Pakistan, who is now nearly one hundred and ten years old. He was present at my father’s marriage and he had come with the marriage party to my mother’s place. It created a great stir in the whole Jaina community, because it is a tradition that when the bridegroom comes to the house of the bride they have to be received on the boundary of the town, and the chief of the family has to be garlanded. A turban, a very valuable turban, has to be put on his head, beautiful shoes made of velvet have to be put on his feet and he is given a robe, specially made for him.My grandfather said, “Haji Baba is the chief of our family.” Now, a Mohammedan, chief of the family of a Jaina…my mother’s father was at a loss – what to do? Haji Baba was saying, “Don’t do this.” But my grandfather was never able to listen to anybody. He said, “It doesn’t matter. Even if we have to go back, we will go back, but you are my family’s chief I have always been like your younger brother, and how can I be received when you are here?”There was no other way; my mother’s father had to receive Haji Baba as the chief of the family. I asked my mother – because in his letters he goes on writing to her, “How is my Bahurani?” Bahurani means bride-queen, and that is used only for young brides when they are just married. Now she is seventy-five and he goes on asking, “How is my Bahurani? Does she remember me at all?”So I asked my mother, “Why does he write to you as Bahurani?”She said, “He is the only man who can write to me as Bahurani, because I was only seven years old when he came as the chief of your father’s family with the procession. I was only seven years – for him I am still seven years. For him your grandfather was a brother, your father was a son, you are a grandson.”So I told my uncle, “You don’t know your father but he is my friend and I know the whole trap, what is going on – the whole conspiracy. But I have also a pact with my grandfather that I will not reveal any rumors in the house. But this is something serious; they are going to trap you. They have just found a really beautiful woman for you, there is no doubt about it”…because my grandfather had taken me to choose her. He said, “I have become too old, and you are so sharp. Find out whether this girl will do or not.” And he had found really a beautiful girl.So I said, “He has found a beautiful girl but the reason why he is trying to find a beautiful girl is so that you forget all your poetry.” And that’s what happened. Once he got married then most of his time he was with his wife or he was in the shop – and slowly slowly his poetry started disappearing. And his wife started dominating him for the simple reason that she felt guilty because everybody in the house, children included, knew that “your husband is just a do-nothing, useless, just a wastage.”So she was nagging my uncle, “You forget about all poetry.” She burned the copies of his poetry, his years’ work, and she told him, “No more poetry for you – because I feel ashamed, everybody laughs at me.” They destroyed his poetry.I asked my father, “Why are all you people against my poor uncle? He is not doing any harm. Poetry is not harmful, it is not violent. He is not writing war songs or anything like that; he writes beautiful love poetry. Why are you against him?”They said, “We are not against him; all that we want is that he should stand on his feet. Now he is married, tomorrow he will have children; who is going to feed them continually?” And that’s what happened. Now he has a shop and now he no more moves people on. His children are married; they have children.The last time I went, in 1970, I asked him, “What about the customers?”He said, “There is nothing about the customers – all my poetry is gone. And you were right that my wife would be real trouble. Neither my grandfather, nor your father, nor my other brother – nobody was such a trouble. But my wife continually nagging…finally I had to decide. Either I have to become a monk renounce the world – but that too is difficult: a Jaina monk cannot write poetry because poetry belongs to ordinary people. And poetry is something basically connected with the affair of love, so what can a monk write?”I said, “You can write sutras, religious bhajans devoted to some god – songs, devotional songs.”He said, “But I am not interested in any god, in any devotion. I want to write what I feel in my heart.”I said, “That is finished – your heart is married!” And in India at that time divorce was not legal either. And even though now it is legal it rarely happens, and only in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, New Delhi – nowhere else. They destroyed his poetry to keep him tethered to the lowest part of his being.All the painters, all the poets, all the musicians have faced a world which is against them. Why? – because what they are doing is something which has no relationship with the whole world and its life. The love they are talking about is not the love that people are living. They are talking about love which is something airy-fairy, not of the earth. They are doing some great creative work. To paint a Picasso you need a certain quality of consciousness; to be a Leonardo da Vinci you need something that is missing in ordinary mortals.What has he got? The whole grip of biology is not on him. That’s why he can devote his whole energy to a new kind of creation – not children, but paintings, poetry, songs, dances, statues. This is non-biological creation. This is conscious creation; he is the master of it. It serves no purpose as far as nature is concerned, but it certainly serves some purpose as far as human consciousness is concerned.Just watching Mahavira’s statue you may fall into a meditative state. That was their original function. They were not made to be worshipped, they were made to make you aware of a certain state. The statue is of a certain state, not of a certain man; that man is irrelevant.It happened that some photographer took a picture of Ramakrishna. That was his first picture and the photographer was very happy. He brought the large framed picture to present to Ramakrishna who was sitting with his disciples. He took the picture in his hand and kissed the feet in the picture. The photographer could not believe it! Is this man sane or insane? His own picture, and he is kissing the feet!Vivekananda, his chief disciple, was sitting by the side. He said, “Paramahansadeva, what are you doing? This is your own picture. Have you seen it or not?” He thought he had not looked at the picture – Just that the man had given it to him, and he must have thought it was some god’s picture, so he had kissed it.Ramakrishna said, “Is it so? Let me look.” He looked and he said, “Yes, it is my picture,” and he kissed the feet again!Vivekananda said, “Now this is too much.”Ramakrishna said, “I am not kissing my own feet. This is a picture of a state, it has nothing to do with me. Just look at the picture,” he said, “It is a picture of a certain state. The body is just the outer lines, but look into the eyes, look into the face. And I remember perfectly where I was when this picture was taken: I was in samadhi, so it is a picture of samadhi. And I say to you that only this picture should be distributed, no other picture.”So only that picture hangs in the houses of people who worship Ramakrishna, because that picture was worshipped by Ramakrishna himself. It is absurd logically, but just a little bit of patience and you can see the point. It is a picture of a state. It is immaterial whether Ramakrishna was in that state or Mahavira was in that state or Buddha was in that state. It is immaterial – what matters is that consciousness.Good music, good poetry, can raise your consciousness. They can create the situation for the entry into the third. Very few musicians have been there very few poets, very few painters, and very few sculptors are capable of creating such artifacts that can give you a resonance inside you.Gurdjieff has called such art, objective art. He has given it a special name. All art is not objective art. The Taj Mahal is objective art. It was made by Sufi mystics – they were the architects, they designed it. The whole structure is made in such a way that on the full-moon night, exactly at nine in the night, if you sit silently there, you will fall into a deep sleep – which is not sleep. You will be aware. You will experience what I have been telling you about: hypnos. And from there meditation is very close.The man who guards the Taj Mahal is traditionally a Sufi mystic. If you meditate, at a certain moment you can inquire of him, What else to do to change the hypnos into meditation? And he will give you the method, how hypnos can be changed into meditation.Now, Gurdjieff has called the Taj Mahal objective art. And I agree with him because I have been to the Taj Mahal hundreds of times and I have watched it in every part of the night – dark nights, moon nights, full-moon nights, no-moon nights – and I can tell you that in each different period it gives you a different taste, a different flavor. It is not just an ordinary building, not just a beautiful marble memorial. That was only an excuse; hidden behind is the secret of meditation.So when your state changes, your love changes, your religion changes, you cannot remain a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist.In the conscious state you have to find out your own religion, you have to choose.You cannot be born in a religion; that is sheer nonsense. Religion is not something one can be born with.It is a search, you have to find it. It is a risk – you have to go a long way and to risk everything. Only then can you get it.Your religion will be different.Your authenticity will be different.An unconscious man has no authenticity. Not that it is his fault. He is many persons at the same time; how can he be authentic? He says one thing – tomorrow he is not the same person, somebody else has come on top of the wheel. There are spokes on a wheel – exactly like that there are many personalities on the wheel. The wheel is moving, and the wheel is you. Now which personality has promised? The other spoke has no idea about it; it may simply say, “I have never said anything to you.”When you become conscious you become conscious of this wheel. You become conscious also that these spokes are not you, and you should not allow them to speak on behalf of you. For the first time you start speaking on behalf of yourself. Then there is authenticity, sincerity, honesty, truth – and these, I am saying, only on the second level. As you reach the third level…these things will help you to move to the third. Then things are beyond description.It is on the third level, the highest level – intuition – where Lao Tzu feels nothing can be said. Only up to the second can something be said, because intellect is still functioning. On the third, you have gone beyond intellect. Now things cannot be said, but can only be showed. That’s my expression – because all these people have said, “Nothing can be said.” True, but much can be showed.I may not be able to say something about the beauty of the moon but I can catch hold of your hand and take you to the window, and I can raise my fingers toward the moon. I am not saying anything, but I am showing something.On the intuitive level, only fingers showing the moon…everything becomes inexpressible. But everything becomes visible, tangible.Yes, even love, religiousness, authenticity, truth – they all become tangible. They are no more theories philosophies, they are realities. You can live them, you can become them.All that is needed is that you move to the third level. And that is not a great thing, it is a simple process.Live completely the first level, then energy starts moving on its own toward the second, and starts hitting the third. Soon it will make a way in the jungle.Your work consists only in the first story of your life; the second story and the third story happen of their own accord. All the scriptures describe only up to the second; the third can only be said by silence. But silence is expressive enough if you are ready to listen in silence. Then, from the master to the disciple, any moment the jump happens.That transfer of flame from the master to the disciple is what I call the very soul of my religion.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Did you drift away on many points yesterday?I am constantly drifting away every day. It is something in the very nature of things I am talking about. I cannot help it. With each word spoken, I have so many dimensions available; I have to choose one. Which one I choose makes no difference, the others are left. And then there is no way of coming back to them because each new word will be bringing new implications. So you have to go on reminding me – don’t feel shy about it.I am reminded of a story because I told you about reminding me…. That’s how I go on drifting! Now what do you say, should I tell it or…? Because if I tell it, then I have gone again. If I don’t tell, then too…. It is better to tell it. Whenever it is a question of doing something or not doing something, it is better to do it.In a small church, the priest was very much annoyed, disturbed, irritated by an old man who was the most respected member of the congregation. He was the richest man of the town; he had donated so much to the church, and he was always donating to all kinds charities. Of course, he was sitting in front every Sunday, and even before the priest would start speaking he would start dozing away. And if he was only sleeping while the priest was speaking, it would not have been such a big problem. The real problem was, the moment he went to sleep he would start snoring so loudly – and the church was so small and the congregation was so small, there was no loudspeaker even.And he was snoring just in front of the priest.But the old man used to come with a young child, his grandson. The priest thought of an idea. After the service was over, he took the little boy aside, and told him, “I will give you half a dollar per Sunday if you go on keeping your old man awake. All that you have to do is, the moment he snores you push him and wake him up.”He said, “Done – in advance?”The priest said, “You are as smart as your old man – in advance.”The little boy said, “In advance – I don’t believe in people. You give me half a dollar and you see: next Sunday I will not let him sleep or snore.”The next Sunday was really a beautiful day because the boy did not allow his grandfather to sleep or to snore. But the old man was very angry with the boy. After the sermon he said, “What happened to you? Why did you go on waking me up? – you disturbed my whole day. In fact, this is the only time when I sleep, and sleep well. In the night I don’t have that good a sleep – so many thoughts and so many problems…. And here, listening to that idiot – the same sermon, the same monotonous voice – it gives me such a good sleep. I have tried all medicines and nothing works like him.“What happened to you? You have always been sitting silently, but today you went on poking me and waking me up.”His grandson said, “Business is business.”The old man asked, “What business?”He said, “The priest has given me half a dollar in advance and today I am going to take another half dollar for the next one, because I believe in payment in advance.”The old man said, “Don’t be worried: I will give you one dollar, and I will give it in advance.” The boy took one dollar from the old man and the old man said, “You just sit silently as you used to sit before and don’t disturb me. It is not costly; this good sleep for one dollar I can afford.”The priest was very puzzled. The next Sunday, many times he looked at the boy and even indicated to him to do something, but the boy simply said, No, and the old man went on snoring. He really snored better than ever because one Sunday he had missed – just compensation.After the service, the priest called the boy and said, “You are a cheat. You took the advance payment but still you were sitting silently; and that old man went on snoring and disturbing my sermon and everybody else. Nobody could listen because of his snoring.”The boy said, “Business is business.”The priest said, “What business?”He said, “The old man has given me one dollar in advance, and he is going to give me one dollar per Sunday. If you are interested, then the rate will be higher now.”The priest said, “I am a poor priest, I cannot compete with that old man, because how much can I give to you? He will always be giving more. It is better I should talk to the old man.”He went to the old man and he said, “This boy is cheating us both. It is better to be clear about it: you are disturbing my sermon.”The old man said, “Your sermon is just meaningless – you are disturbing my sleep. Which is more costly? – your sermon or my sleep. I wait seven days for your sermon in church on Sunday mornings. This makes me refreshed. And you are trying to sabotage it through my own grandchild. And as far as I am concerned, I am going to sleep.”The priest said, “You can sleep, we have no objection; in fact many other people sleep also. But they have also objected, not to your sleep but your snoring because that wakes them up. And you have such a great snore.”The old man said, “I can’t help it, because when I am asleep what can I do about snoring? If I am awake I can stop it, but when I am awake it doesn’t happen – it happens only when I am asleep. But you can’t expect an asleep man to do something about snoring. I am helpless. So please continue as we have continued before.”I am also helpless. I know perfectly well that many things are being left out, but there is no other way. This is the problem of language. Language is linear, and existence is multidimensional. If I were only a thinker I would not be drifting at all because thinking is linear, just like language. Thinking is in language, in words. So the words move in a row – it can be miles long but it is linear.But existence is multidimensional. From each point…as if it is a sun with millions of rays moving toward infinity. Each ray can lead you to infinity, but if you choose one, of course you have to leave others; and you can choose only one. You cannot even ride on two horses, what to say about two dimensions? You cannot ride on two boats, what to say about two dimensions? – because they are going to diverge more and more, more and more; as you go further, there will be an infinite unbridgeable gap between them. At the source they are one. From there you can choose any one, but once you have chosen a line then others are dropped.I have been drifting my whole life. You have to be alert. And if you can remind me that somewhere I have drifted, I can catch hold of a dimension that has been left behind. But you should not expect that I will stop drifting, because in catching hold of the other dimension, again I will be leaving many more.On each step there is a problem of choosing, because I am an existential person, I am not a thinker. It is not a logical syllogism that I am propounding to you. It is my experience that I am trying to share with you – and experience is so vast that I can only show you a little part of it. But you are always welcome to remind me. Yes, I remember I had drifted on many points; perhaps a few I can manage to catch back again.One was religion – religion at the lowest level of mankind, the instinctive level. All primitive tribes, aboriginals, are still living under that first kind of religion, which theologians call “magic.”It believes that if you sacrifice to a god, if you do a certain ritual, a certain dance, a certain prayer, then the god is satisfied with you and reward will be coming. For example, when it is not raining – these are the problems of primitive people – when it is not raining, what will the primitive tribe do? It will arrange a ritual, perhaps a sacrifice of a living human being – their god is very bloodthirsty. Or, if the tribe has evolved a little, then instead of a man it will choose an animal. If the tribe has evolved a little more then it will choose not even an animal, not even a man, but something similar.Now, for example, in India they break a coconut. The coconut is very similar to the skull of a man. It has a little beard, a mustache, two eyes, a little nose. In fact, in Hindi the skull is called khopri and the narial ‘a coconut’ is called khopra. The similarity is so much that both have the same name. Breaking a skull was the ritual originally, but now it would be criminal. They have found a good substitute, a coconut, but the idea is the same.They think whatever makes them feel pleasure also makes their god feel pleasure in the same way. A naked, beautiful girl will be placed before the god, all kinds of foods will be prepared and placed before the god, and they will go into a mad dance: it is a way of pleasing the god.God is displeased, that’s why rains are not coming. If he is pleased, rains will be coming – and rains, sooner or later, do come; then their ritual is proved valid, the rains have come. Once in a while it happens that rains don’t come at all. Then the god is really very badly displeased and needs more sacrifice, more ritual.This is the lowest kind of religion – call it magic-religion – the belief that just by chanting a few words, doing a few actions, you can change the course of existence. It is simply stupid. Existence has no need of your sacrifices, existence has no need of your dances – and nothing reaches to existence. But the instinctive man, the primitive man, cannot do more than that. That is the limit of his understanding.That primitive man has not died completely, even in so-called civilized people. You also think in the same logic. You don’t sacrifice somebody, but even civilized people, cultured, educated people, when they are in a difficulty, immediately their primitive man comes up. Your wife is sick and the doctors say, “All that we could do, we have done. Now only a miracle can save her.” Even the doctor is becoming primitive.He is telling you, “Only a miracle, only something magical…. Medicine has failed, science had failed; whatever we could do, we have done. Now if she is saved it will be through the grace of God or the grace of a saint, so now you go to the temple, to the mosque, to the synagogue, to the church, or go to some priest or go to some sage.” The doctor has fallen into primitive religion.And the man, of course, is absolutely willing to go anywhere, to do anything, because he wants to save his wife. This is not the time for him to think over philosophical matters – whether it is right or wrong, whether it is primitive or civilized, whether it is stupid or intelligent. This is not the time. He runs! He had never been to a saint but now he goes and falls at his feet and prays, “Save my wife!”The primitive man is still within you because the unconscious is still within you. The primitive man disappears only with the disappearance of the unconscious. When your unconscious and conscious become one, your whole mind becomes consciousness; then there is no way to fall back to the primitive man. Otherwise, nine times more than the civilized man is the primitive man inside you. Any time your conscious mind starts failing, your intellect starts failing, you fall into the mumbo-jumbo of the primitive.Religion of the intellect – the second category, the higher category – is pseudo-religion. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Mohammedanism – these are all products of the intellect. They are not magico-religious. They have theologies: they have thought about existence, its creation, why it has been created; how one can get out of this wheel of life and birth. They have been thinking about it, pondering over it for thousands of years, and each religion has developed a theology.The word theology means logic about God. It is a contradiction in terms. God is not a logical proposition: you cannot prove it by logic, you cannot disprove it by logic. Logic is utterly irrelevant to God. But pseudo-religions cannot do more than that, they can only think about. And they have great imagination to portray God. Their scriptures say God created man in his own image. The reality is just the reverse: man creates God in his own image. That’s why there are so many gods – because there are so many men, so many races, so many different faces – eyes, nose…so many different kinds.You cannot think of a Negro inventing a white god. You may not have thought about why your devil looks like a Negro, why your devil is black. The Negro’s god will be black; and of course the devil has to be pure white. And the white man has proved devilish enough. The Negroes have not only an argument in favor of it, but history also, giving all the evidences of what the white man has done to the colored people of the world. It must have been the greatest evil that has happened in history.How can a Chinese think of God in any other way than as a Chinese? When Marco Polo went to China, he was the first Western man to reach China. China was under the great empire of Kublai Khan, son of Genghis Khan. Perhaps Kublai was one of the greatest emperors in the world because he ruled over all China, middle Asia, the Far East.When Marco Polo reached China, he wanted an audience. Kublai Khan was a man of great intelligence. His prime minister said, “A man who looks like a monkey wants to see you. It will be absolutely unprecedented – no emperor has ever given audience to a monkey.” A white man looked like a monkey to them.Kublai Khan said, “No need to be worried. If he can speak he cannot be absolutely a monkey; there is something human. You bring him in.” And he became interested in Marco Polo. Marco Polo was a very intelligent young man, and he became very intimate with Kublai Khan. When he came back to Europe he reported to the pope, “In China they worship a different God, who looks like a Chinese, and they think of us Europeans as monkeys.”To us they look a little strange. They have a very little beard – a few hairs, you can count them – flat noses, very outstanding cheekbones. You cannot think of a more ugly face – but they think that is beauty. A man or a woman who does not have those outstanding cheekbones will find it hard to get married; so would a man with a nose that is typical of the Aryan races: Indians, Germans, English, French, Scandinavians, Dutch, Russians…. These are all one race, and to them a pointed nose, a long nose, is thought to be beautiful. But in China that is ugly; and they cannot make their God ugly.Marco Polo said, “This makes me think that perhaps we are all imagining about God. Nobody knows how he looks.”The pope was very angry and he said, “You must be imagining things. You are creating a fiction so that you can be thought of as a great explorer of a new land. I cannot believe that anything bigger than Christianity exists anywhere.”Marco Polo said, “Buddhism is far bigger; it has millions of monks, thousands of temples and monasteries. Beside it your Christianity is nothing.” But he was alone. What proof did he have? He had brought a few things which were taken away from him and burned to destroy the evidence.This is the pseudo-religious mind. The pseudo-religious mind believes in its own imagination, in its own thinking, and is afraid of anything that goes against it or is even a little different from it. Otherwise, religions would not have been fighting for thousands of years.This is something strange: all religions teach love, and all religions end in hatred. All religions teach the brotherhood of man, but they only create enemies of each other.All religions teach that every man has a potential right to reach God, but practically they say: Only our religion is the true religion. Yes, every man can reach God but he has to reach through our way: Unless you follow Jesus Christ you have no chance. But the same is said by Krishna: “If you surrender to me, leaving everything aside, I will take care of you, you need not worry.” And the same is true about all other religions. They seem to be competing shopkeepers – everybody is trying to sell his thing: his holy book, his messiah, his god.Pseudo-religion is always basically afraid, because deep down the pseudo-religious person knows that it is only his imagination, he has no actual experience. He himself is not convinced; hence, he needs to convince others. He goes on sending missionaries to other countries to convince, convert more and more people into Christianity, into Mohammedanism. Why? Why this great urge to convert? Psychologically it is of tremendous importance to understand.The person who wants to convert anybody is a person who is suspicious of his truth. He is really trying, by converting people, to convince himself that he is right. If he can convert so many people that gives him enough support: “So many people cannot be fools. I may be a fool but so many people cannot be fools. Such intelligent people…and they have come to believe in my belief My belief is bound to be true.”Christianity seems to be the most bogus of all religions because it is more interested in converting people than any other religion. In fact, Judaism and Hinduism, which are the two ancientmost religions, are not interested in converting anybody. You have to understand the psychology of it.Why are Jews not interested in sending missionaries and converting people to Judaism? A Jew is born, not converted. Have you seen any converted Jew anywhere? It is simply absurd. Jews will not take anybody through conversion. If God has not made you a Jew then there is no other way; they are the chosen people of God. By converting all kinds of rubbish, can you improve upon God’s choice? If God has not made you a Jew that means that you are not meant to be a Jew; you are already rejected. So for thousands of years they have never thought about converting people into Jews.The Hindus have the same idea – that they are the only people to whom God has chosen to give the first holy book in the world. Certainly their Rig Veda is the ancientmost scripture in the world and certainly it is the scripture of the most ancient religion. They have four castes: the brahmin, the priest; the kshatriya, the warrior; the vaishya, the business man; and the sudra, the untouchable. Now, it was a problem: how could they convert anybody? And in which caste were they going to put him?Hinduism is not one piece, it is four castes. The brahmin is the highest. You cannot convert anybody into a brahmin. He represents God, hence the name. The name of God in India is Brahma, and brahmin means one chosen by Brahma, appointed by God himself. There is no way for anybody to become a brahmin. It is decided by birth, because birth is decided by God, it is not in man’s hands to decide such things.Now, the kshatriya also will not allow anybody in. He is the second most important, and it is a traditional thing for him to be a warrior; just anybody – X, Y, Z – cannot be a warrior. It needs a long tradition, training. You have to have the blood of a warrior, you cannot be converted.The only people who can absorb you are the untouchables. The business people are the third, but they are higher than the untouchables. Only the untouchables can absorb you, but without the permission of the brahmin they cannot do anything. Conversion – such a religious phenomenon – is beyond their capacity. They are outcasts themselves.Hindus and Jews are born so. That’s why both these religions are the most egoistic. Naturally, other religions have to rely on conversions, otherwise from where are they going to get their customers, their clients? God has made Jews, God has made Hindus; now the whole world is divided into two chosen people of God. From where is Jesus going to get his people? From where is Buddha going to get his people? They had to depend on conversion. From where is Mohammed going to get Mohammedans?These are latecomers. The old shops have credibility; they are already established, and established by God himself. These others are newcomers in the market. Naturally they have to attract clients from the old shops; otherwise no customer is going to come to them. And they have to create new allurements, cheaper prices, better reward. And you can see that….The god of the Jews is a very tough guy. But the god of Christians is pure love. You don’t know…it is such a simple mathematics: the god of the Jews can be a tough guy, but Jesus has to convert people, so he has to create a better image of God, more polished, more refined, more humane, so he can make the Jewish god outdated.Whom is he going to convert? Rich people certainly are not going to be converted because they are already established, respectable, on the highest level of the society. They are not going to follow a vagabond. They are not going to become a laughingstock – for what? Hence all those beatitudes of Jesus: “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God…” because you can only get hold of the poor. The poor are already angry, jealous of the rich, and here comes a man who says, “My God is love. And my God allows only poor people in heaven; rich people have no place there.”This is simple business tactics – nothing profound in it. But nobody has bothered to watch how new religions have tried to pull customers from the old shops to their own shop. They are all in favor of the poor. Strange – Jews don’t have a single statement in which the rich are condemned and the poor are raised high just because of their poverty. Jews have not a single statement in which poverty is something sacred; Hindus also don’t.The rich man, according to Hinduism, is rich because he has been religious, virtuous, in his past lives. It is a reward from God. And the poor man is poor because he has been evil, unreligious, in his past lives. He has been punished for it. Poverty is a punishment, richness is a reward. Hindus or Jews, who are established already – why should they bother about the poor and the downtrodden? But Buddha, Jesus, Mahavira, Mohammed – their whole interest is in the poor, the downtrodden.It is a simple thing: these are the people who can be converted, these are the people who are vulnerable. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain. For example, if a sudra becomes a follower of Buddha, immediately he is no longer untouchable. If a sudra becomes a Christian he is no longer untouchable. This is a very strange world.I had a friend who was the principal of a theological college in Jabalpur, Principal Mackwan. I was saying this thing to him – “Why are you Christians interested only in the poor?”He said, “Please come to my house” – I was sitting in his office. He said, “My house is just behind the college; come to my house; I want to show you something.”He showed me an old man and woman’s picture. They were certainly beggars, in rags, dirty; you could even see it in their faces – so hungry. You could see that all their lives they had suffered; it was written in the lines on their forehead. He said, “Can you recognize who these are?”I said, “How can I recognize them? – I have never seen these people, but they look like beggars.”He said, “They were beggars. He is my father, she is my mother. And not only were they beggars, they were sudras, untouchables. They became converted, in their old age, to Christianity because they were so old, tired of begging; and now they were concerned about their children – particularly this boy who is now principal of Leonard Theological College. What would happen to him if they died? He would also become a beggar.”Because they were sick they entered a Christian hospital, because no other hospital will take poor people and give them free medicine, food, care, doctors. So they entered, they had to enter, a Christian hospital. And there the whole methodology is: with the medicine to go on giving as much of The Bible as possible; with each injection a little Bible. With food, the doctor talks about it, the nurse talks about it; the priest comes every day to inquire about their health, how they are.For the first time they felt that they were human beings. Nobody had ever asked them about their health. They were treated like dogs, not like human beings. And had they remained Hindus they would have died like dogs, dying on the street corner. You don’t know, because that is not the way in the West. In the West, dogs have a better death, a better life, because any dog who is not owned by somebody is to be killed. The dog has to be owned by somebody, a collar proclaiming the ownership. But in the East you cannot kill anybody. There may be a dog spreading sickness and disease, but you cannot kill it – killing is sin.It happened…. I am drifting – just remember!In Lucknow there is a temple of Hanuman, the monkey god. Strangely enough that temple is surrounded by big trees, and all the trees are full of monkeys – you will never see so many monkeys together. Perhaps it is for the simple reason that whatsoever is offered to the monkey god those monkeys eat, so by and by they have become permanent residents there. And the temple has such fame that people come to it from far and wide, from faraway places because it is thought that whatever you wish there it will be fulfilled. So they wish something and they take the oath before the monkey god that: “If our wish is fulfilled then we are going to bring fifty-one rupees worth of sweets” – or anything they want to bring, or whatsoever they can afford.So every day so much food is being offered – and it is not anything to do with the monkey god. If a hundred people come to ask, at least one-third of them – just by simple arithmetical rules – one-third of them are going to get their wishes fulfilled. Even if they had not come they would not have been losers, but now they believe that the wish has been fulfilled because of the monkey god. The two-thirds whose wishes have not been fulfilled have moved to some other temple – naturally, because this monkey god does not seem to be kind toward them.You cannot ask any reason or anything, but it is sure that your wish is not fulfilled, so you move to some other temple. And there are hundreds of temples in India with wish-fulfilling trees. You just go and ask…and you just have to give a small bribe. But the one-third of the people whose wishes have been fulfilled…. And what kind of wishes people make: “That my son passes in his matriculation examination; or “That my son gets the job he has applied for”; or “That my daughter gets a husband because I don’t have much money to give”; or “My wife is sick, please make her healthy again”…just simple, mundane, human trivia.They are not asking for some miracles, “That when I pass through the ocean it should separate like it did for Moses.” Then they would know whether the monkey god can do anything or not. But that your son passes his matriculation…and thousands of people are passing matriculation without the help of the monkey god. In fact the monkey god was not a matriculate himself! And even if he does the examination, he is not going to pass; you cannot hope he will pass.But these people feel that their wishes are fulfilled so they bring…. So monkeys have slowly gathered – the whole road, on both sides, is full of monkeys. And for a strange reason, monkeys and dogs are all against uniforms. Perhaps in their past lives they have been revolutionaries: any kind of uniform – postmen in India have a uniform, the policeman has a uniform, the army, the sannyasins…. Anybody in a uniform, and dogs and, monkeys are against them.Perhaps seeing so many people in different clothes different styles, and then suddenly seeing somebody in uniform, they feel a danger: “This man does not look like a man, something is wrong somewhere”…and they are on the attack. It is not the discovery of Machiavelli that attack is the best way to defend, that if you want to defend yourself, then attack. Don’t wait for the other party to attack, because then you will be already late in defending. Don’t give them that chance.So monkeys and dogs attack uniformed people. It is simply my feeling that they are afraid; these people look a little strange, not just like other human beings. Millions of human beings are there, and they are not attacking them. And they don’t attack these people either if they are not in uniform; they attack the uniform. The uniform gives them some idea that something is fishy about this man.So it started at the temple that the monkeys began to attack policemen, postmen, army people…and the monkeys were in thousands. Perhaps somebody had triggered their anger; nobody knows how it started, because they have been there for hundreds of years, many generations. The temple is very ancient and they had never done this, but just ten years ago, one day suddenly a riot broke out between monkeys and all uniformed people.It became very dangerous because so many monkeys…even one monkey is enough for you to freak out, but when many monkeys, hundreds, are just roaming on the road…. The road was blocked, nobody was passing on the road. It was a main road, so Lucknow was divided into two parts; the monkeys wouldn’t allow anybody to cross.It became a question in the assembly of the state of Uttar Pradesh – Lucknow is the capital – that “these monkeys have to be shot. They have disturbed the peace of the capital. People cannot go to the other side, people cannot come to this side. Offices are closed because many people live on that side; many offices are on that side and people live on this side. Somebody who had gone to that side for some work had been detained, he could not come back here. Something has to be done immediately.”One man stood up and he said, “If a single monkey is shot then there is going to be great bloodshed, be cause the monkey is a Hindu god: you are shooting a Hindu god. It will not be tolerated.” He was a Hindu chauvinist belonging to a Hindu chauvinist party. And although the whole parliament was privately in favor of their being shot – what else could be done? – the resolution had to fail because they knew that what this man was saying was going to happen. Immediately there would be a massacre.And that’s what they want: all politicians want some trouble somewhere, because only then are they needed. If everything goes right, if there is no news, nothing is going wrong, the politicians start feeling lost.I have not been in India for four years now. Now the journalists are missing me. Strange people! – they were all against me; when I was there, they were all against me. They were writing against me, not even bothering whether it was true or untrue; ninety percent of it was absolutely untrue. They were writing it but it was news, sellable news. Now they are missing me because the news that they were making around me they cannot make any longer, and there is nobody to replace me.Journalists, politicians – these types of people are in search of some spot which can become dangerous, some man who can prove dangerous, some situation which can become a problem. Then they will all try to make it a problem as quickly as possible.The resolution could not pass; for almost two weeks the road remained blocked. Monkeys don’t have long memories; they must have forgotten and they cooled down slowly slowly. First the devotees started coming with sweets and offering the sweet to the monkey god, and then the traffic started again….But you cannot kill. You cannot kill dogs; killing is not allowed. But these religions have been killing each other. They cannot kill a dog, they cannot kill a monkey, but they can kill a man. That is very strange. I have been asking Hindus, Mohammedans, “You cannot kill animals but you can kill men without any problem, as if man has no life?” No, the thing is business. Man can be converted to be a Mohammedan – a dog cannot be. Dogs are beyond the reach of your preachers and missionaries.Professor Mackwan told me, “This is my father and mother. They would have died like dogs and the municipal truck would have thrown them out of the city with all the garbage that it carries every day, because there is nobody to carry a beggar to the funeral pyre. Who bothers about a beggar? Beggars are not men, not human beings.”And then he took me to another picture of his daughter and his son-in-law. I was looking at three generations: the father and mother, almost below human beings; Mackwan, who has gained status and is now in a very respectable post, highly salaried. Now brahmins come and shake hands with him, not knowing at all that he is the son of two beggars who were sudras. I know his daughter, one of the most beautiful women I have seen; she is married to an American.Looking at the three generations…such a change. You cannot connect the daughter with the grandmother and how can you connect the son-in-law with her grandfather? There seems to be no bridge. The son-in-law is a well-known scholar, professor – six months teaching in India, six months teaching in America. Saroj, the daughter herself is a professor. They are all well-educated; the son is a principal. They have moved in a completely different direction by being converted to Christianity. I could not object. I said, “Your father and mother did well.”Hindus and Jews are established. Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists are not established. They try to convert people; but in their conversion, deep down what is going on? The established religion has a past to support, thousands of years of past, which means millions of people have been on the path; you are not alone. But when you follow Jesus you know only that this guy has got these fantastic ideas. Who knows? – you are following a fool or really a son of God? He can be either this or that; there is no third alternative. Either he is a perfect idiot….In fact Fyodor Dostoevsky has written a book, The Idiot; that is the title of his book. But the idiot, the character, is almost Jesus-like: very innocent, simple, who has never done any harm to anybody. In fact, he is better than Jesus. But Dostoevsky has titled the book The Idiot.Jesus needs converted people. He himself may be feeling shaky about what he is saying and about whether it is true or not. In fact, why did he want Jews to accept him, his messiah-hood? Why was he so insistent that they had to crucify him? He must have nagged them, tortured them with the idea. They must have got so fed up that they decided, “This man won’t leave us in peace – he has to be crucified, otherwise he will go on torturing us.”And he was getting more and more fanatic. He started calling the great temple of the Jews, “my Father’s house,” and “…I have come to clean my Father’s house.” And he really wanted to clean it of all the priests and all the rabbis: What is the need of all these people when the only begotten son is there? HeI had become a nuisance. He must have been thinking in some silent moment, “Perhaps I am just mad. I have not been able to convince a single rabbi.”In fact, I have never tried to convert anybody, but there are a few rabbi sannyasins. That is strange! And not ordinary rabbis, famous rabbis. And I have not been in any way trying to convert anybody because I don’t have any doubt. Why should I bother about converting anybody? I don’t have to convince myself that I am right. I am!If not even a single person is with me, I will be as right as I am now. My rightness does not grow with the growing number of people around me does not increase with the increasing number of people around me. My rightness is from my experience.Jesus seems to be worried, and all Christians have carried his sickness in their minds. They are all worried. I cannot think that the pope really believes that he represents God, it is impossible – unless you are mad, then everything is possible.Pseudo-religions are continually trying to convert people or they are so ancient that the question of conversion had never arisen. They are the beginners; from the very beginning they caught hold of the customers. Because of this idea of converting people there are constant fights, crusades, jihads, holy wars.And pseudo-religions go on creating more and more theology; nobody reads it. I have never seen in my life anybody reading a theological book. I have visited hundreds of libraries but I have never seen anybody, in any library, reading a theological book. I have looked into university libraries and government libraries and asked the librarians one question, “I would like to know whether any book from the theological section is taken out by people?”They said, “You are the first person to inquire about it. The theological section? – nobody bothers. People are interested only in novels. Who is going to bore himself with a theological book?” One took me to the theological section. That was the only section where you could see that all the books were untouched by human hands, so clean.Hundreds of theologians continually creating more and more books…. For what? – because the basic questions have not been answered yet. They go on improving upon the books, but whatsoever they do, the fundamental questions remain at the same place, because intellect has no answer for them.A simple thing has not occurred to them, that if in five or ten thousand years of theological thinking you have not been able to demolish a single question, now it is time to stop: perhaps you are not moving in the right direction.Religion in the second stage of consciousness, of the conscious mind, intellect, is theology. I call it pseudo-religion – just words about truth, God, love, but no experience to support it.When religion reaches the third, the highest peak, then only is it religiousness.So the first I call magico-religiousThe second I call pseudo-religion.And the third I call religiousness.Then it is a quality, then it has no adjective to it.Then it has no tradition.Then it has no scripture, then it has no theology.Then the origin is not in the past.And paradise is not in the future.Then both are within you.Then you have a fresh experience, and that experience will express itself in lovingness, friendliness, compassion.This religion will not bother about God:Its concern will be compassion.This religiousness will not bother about heaven and hell.Its concern will be how to share its blissfulness.This religion is not interested at all in converting you to believe certain dogmas; its only interest is to say to you, “I have found it. If you are interested, I can share my experience. There is no condition that you, have to accept it, there is no condition that you have to believe me. It is simply my joy to share it with you. Then it is for your consideration whether you want to do something with it or not. Either way I am happy and grateful that you allowed me to share something so intimate.”A religious man, functioning from the highest point of consciousness intuition is just like the fragrance of a flower.There is no question of your being converted. Even if nobody passes by the side of the rose, the fragrance will still be spreading around, moving…somewhere, somebody may get it. And even if nobody gets it, it doesn’t matter; it is simply natural for the flower to explode into fragrance.I was explaining to you how happiness appears. At the instinct level it was pleasure, I told you yesterday. At the intellect level it was joy. But I drifted and forgot the last – what happens at the level of the intuition. There, happiness is blissfulness.Pleasure is momentary, very momentary. In a split second it is gone. It only leaves a memory. You never catch hold of it when it is there – it comes so quickly, and goes so quickly, and you are not that swift.I have seen a painting – but just keep reminding me…. It was one of the most beautiful paintings, but very strange. It was the painting of a man whose hair had grown all over his face, and his skull was completely bald, with no hair. I thought, “This seems to be a strange painting.”I inquired about the painter, who was present at the exhibition. He came and I asked him, “What kind of painting is this?”He said, “This is a painting of time.” I said, “That makes sense.”He said, “But will you please tell me what sense it makes to you, because I have made it but it makes no sense to me. The idea just came to me and I made it, but I don’t have any…. If somebody asks what it means I simply say, ‘It is time,’ and people just stop asking and move on. You are the only one who says it makes sense.”I said, “Yes, it makes sense because time you can catch only when it has not come, from the front. By the time it has passed behind you it is a clean-shaven head; you cannot catch hold of it. It is just gone.”He said, “This is great! Can you someday spare time and come to my studio, because there are many paintings which I don’t know the meaning of. Perhaps you can make some sense of them – because now this makes sense: You can catch hold of time before it, comes.” But how can you really catch it before it comes? It has not come, you cannot catch it. And when it is gone it is just a skull, so clean-shaven there is nothing to catch; your hand just slips.That’s what pleasure is. You are waiting and waiting and waiting…and it is gone! You were just waiting, and now it is a memory. Pleasure is momentary, very momentary. Joy is much profounder, much deeper. You can enjoy a beautiful song for years. And each time you can go on stepping deeper into yourself.One song I have with me, sung by some Nirmala Devi. All my life, around India, I have been inquiring about the woman because I want her other songs too. But I have not been able to find who the woman is, where she disappeared. And I have no memory either of who sent me this tape. People go on sending me tapes; whenever I have time, I listen. This song remained with me in Pune for seven years but I never listened to it. I had never heard of the name, so whenever I came across the name and the tape I simply put it away; someday I would…. Nirmala Devi – nobody had ever heard the name.Here, one day, I thought, “The woman has waited too long, and perhaps she has something. There is no harm – let me listen.” Her singing is something tremendously beautiful. Since then I have not missed a single day of listening to it. And each time I listen there is something more to it, a new layer, a new meaning – not only in the words but in the voice, its subtle nuances.The song is simple but profound, immensely profound. She is singing a song which means, “Just let me get ready….” She is talking to death. It is understood, it is not said in the song, but she is saying to death, “Just wait a little. Let me sing my last song.”This very idea, to say to death, “Just wait a little, and let me sing my last song…. I have lived in sadness and sorrow so long. Let me dance a little before I join you. I have been crying and weeping; my whole sari is soaked with my tears. Just wait a little. Let me at least dry my sari, let me at least regain, remember, recall my smile. Just a little…so that I can get ready. I would not like to go with you in this sad miserable condition. I would like to go with you dancing, smiling, singing.” A simple song, but her voice, the ups and downs of her voice, the beautiful turnings of her voice give it so much beauty, color and depth.Happiness at the second level is joy. Pleasure you cannot share with anybody. It is something so tiny, so fleeting, so small, there is no question of sharing; but joy you can share. At the third level, happiness becomes bliss. Joy you have to share; blissfulness you need not share – it simply surrounds you. Whoever is courageous enough to come close to you will have it.Bliss is not something that you have to do anything about; it is already there around you, it is your milieu.The blissful person – you can call him the awakened, the enlightened, you can give any name…the blissful person is simply showering his bliss continuously.Whoever is thirsty can drink of it.It is not a question of his making an effort to share:He is blissfulness itself.Just be with him in close intimacy, and you will have the taste of it, the silence of it, the beauty of it.And one thing finally you have to remember:The highest always contains the lower.The highest is not against the lower. It is all-comprehensive.What you have known in pleasure, you will know in bliss – but, ancient scriptures say, one thousandfold. I cannot say that, because that sounds as if the difference is only of quantity. The difference is of quality. But whoever has written that, that bliss is one thousandfold the pleasure of sexual orgasm, was trying. He failed in what he was saying, but he was trying just to give an idea of what you are missing. No, it is not even ten thousandfold, or one hundred thousandfold. It is simply so different…but the flavor of pleasure is there, contained in it. The higher always contains the lower; the lower cannot contain the higherJust draw a small circle – that is pleasure. Draw a bigger circle around it – that is joy. Draw another, bigger circle around it – that is bliss. It contains joy, it contains pleasure, and much more, which is inexpressible but not inexperienceable.I may not be able to say it to you, but I can pour it into you; you just have to allow me.All depends on your vulnerability, defenselessness. All depends on your love, trust, courage to open your heart.You all have been brought up in such a way that you have become defensive, continually defensive…always afraid somebody is going to cheat you, somebody is going to kill you, somebody is going to mistreat you, humiliate you. And in a way you are right, because this is what has been happening to everybody in society. You have to be always on guard.But if you meet a master, then don’t be on your guard. That is the secret of being with a master.Don’t be on your guard. Let the guard go on a long, long leave! Unguarded, open, defenseless…And it is going to happen. Nobody can prevent it.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/from-misery-to-enlightenment-07/

Osho,Would you like to throw some light on politics, according to the three different levels of consciousness?The world of politics is basically of the instinctive level. It belongs to the law of the jungle: Might is right. And the people who get interested in politics are the most mediocre. Politics needs no other qualifications except one – that is, a deep feeling of inferiority.Politics can be reduced almost into a mathematical maxim:Politics means will-to-power.Friedrich Nietzsche has even written a book, Will To Power. It is very significant because will-to-power expresses itself in many ways. So you have to understand by politics not only the politics that is known by the name: wherever somebody is trying a power number, it is politics. It does not matter whether it relates to the state, the government, and matters like that….To me, the word politics is much more comprehensive than is generally understood. Man has been trying throughout history a political strategy over women – that she is lower than him. And he has convinced the woman herself. And there were reasons that the woman was helpless and had to concede to this ugly idea which is absolutely absurd. The woman is neither inferior to man, nor is she superior. They are two different categories of humanity – they cannot be compared. The very comparison is idiotic, and if you start comparing then you will be in trouble.Why has woman been proclaimed inferior by man all over the world? – because this was the only way to keep her in bondage, to make a slave out of her.It was easier. If she were equal then there would be trouble; she should be conditioned to the idea that she is inferior. And the reasons given are: she has less muscular strength; her height is less; she has not produced any philosophy, any theology; she has not founded any religion; there have not been significant women artists, musicians, painters. That shows that she has not enough intelligence, she is not an intellectual, she is not concerned with higher problems of life; her concern, is very limited: she is only a housewife.Now, choosing to compare this way, you can easily convince the woman that she is inferior. But this is a. very cunning way. There are other things also to be ~; compared. A woman can give birth to a child, a man L cannot. He is certainly inferior; he cannot become a mother. Nature has not given him that much responsibility, knowing that he is inferior. The responsibility goes to the superior. Nature has not given him a womb. In fact, his function in giving birth to a child is nothing more than that of an injection – a very momentary use.The mother has to carry the child for nine months and take all the trouble of carrying the child. It is not an easy job. And then to give birth to the child…that is almost as if one is passing through death. Then she is involved in bringing up the child for years together – and in the past she was continually giving birth to children. What time have you left her to become a great musician, a poetess, a painter – have you given her any time? She was constantly either pregnant or taking care of the children to whom she has given birth. She was taking care of the house so that you were able to contemplate on higher things.Just for one day, for twenty-four hours, change your work: Let her contemplate, create poetry or music; and for twenty-four hours you take care of the children, of the kitchen, of the house. And then you will know who is superior. Just twenty-four hours will be enough to prove to you that to take care of so many children is just to be in a madhouse.They are not so innocent as they look. They are as naughty as you can conceive, and they are doing all kinds of mischief They will not leave you for a single moment; they want attention continuously – perhaps that is a natural need. Attention is food.And just one day of cooking the food for the family and the guests, you will know that in twenty-four hours you have experienced hell. And you will forget that idea that you are superior, because in twenty-four hours you will not think even for a single split second about theology, philosophy, religion.Think of it in other ways; the woman has less muscular power, because for millions of years she has not been given the work that creates muscles. I have been to aboriginals in India where the woman is muscular and the man is not. So it is not something natural, it is something historical. But for so long women have not been given muscular work that their bodies, by and by, naturally have lost the capacity for muscular development.But in these aboriginal tribes the man is almost a housewife, and the wife is really the husband because she goes to work. She chops wood, she hunts for food; and the man simply sits, drinks alcohol, bums around, takes care of the children and the house. And for centuries he has been doing that; naturally, he has shrunk, he has lost his muscles. Strangely enough, with the muscular power gone his height has also dropped; the woman is taller.When I first entered such an aboriginal tribe, I could not believe my eyes. I had never thought that this was something historical, that it had nothing to do with nature. And why has man in those aboriginal tribes chosen this way? That too is cunning – because those tribes allow you to have as many wives as you want. This is a beautiful thing. A man marries five or six wives and then he just relaxes, drinks, and the women have to work.The women have been working at all kinds of things that man is supposed to do. Naturally, they have become stronger. And you will be surprised to know that it is the woman who plays on the musical instruments, who dances, who tries to make beautiful artifacts, sculpture. Anything beautiful that is done is done by the woman. She spins and weaves the clothes with beautiful designs.The man has done nothing; for millions of years he has been uncreative in those tribes. He has just lived the life of a drunkard, and because he is so often drunk he cannot even take care of the children or prepare food. So when the wives return they have to prepare the food too and take care of the children, collect them from wherever they are – because the husband is flat on the ground. And he can afford to be flat on the ground because he has married…the only great thing he has done – he has married six or seven wives. Now, what more do you expect of him? He has done his job.The society of these aboriginal tribes is matriarchal because the chiefs of the society are women. They have a committee to decide about problems concerning their lives. It is not the men who have the decisive power.You have to think from other angles too. The woman has more resistance – power than man. Now that is a medically – established fact. Women fall sick less than men; they live longer than men, five years longer. It is a very stupid society where we have decided that the husband should be four or five years older than the wife – just to prove that the husband is more experienced, elderly, to keep his superiority intact. But it is not medically right because the woman is going to live five years longer. If you think medically, then the husband should be five years younger than the wife so that they can die at the same time, almost at the same time.On the one hand the husband has to be four or five years older, and on the other hand the woman is not allowed to marry again, in almost all cultures and societies. It is a new development that she is being allowed; and that too only in very developed countries. You don’t allow her to marry so she is going to live at least ten years of widowhood. This is medically unsound – just the arithmetic is not right. Why enforce ten years of widowhood on a poor woman?The best way would have been that the wife should be five years older and the man should be five years younger. That would have settled the whole matter. They would be dying almost simultaneously, at the same time. There would be no need for widowers and widows, and the problems that arise out of that.Now if you think that a woman lives five years longer than a man, then who is superior? If she falls sick less, has more resistance, then who is superior? Women commit suicide fifty percent less than man. The same ratio is true of madness: fifty percent less women become mad than men. Now, these facts have never been considered. Why?Why does man have to commit suicide at double the rate of women? It seems to be that he has no patience with life. He is too impatient and is too desirous, expectant; and when things don’t go his way then he wants to finish himself. He gets frustrated very soon. That shows a weakness: he hasn’t the courage to face the problems of life. Suicide is a cowardly step. It is escaping from problems, it is not solving them.The woman has more problems – her problems and the problems that her man creates for her. She has double the problems, and still she manages to face them courageously. And you go on saying that she is weaker. Why do twice as many men as women go mad? That simply shows that his intellect is not made of strong materials – he pops off anytime.But why has it been insisted continually that the woman is inferior?It is politics. It is a power game.If you cannot become the president of a country – it is not easy because there is so much competition. You cannot become a messiah because it is not so easy; the moment you think of becoming a messiah, crucifixion comes to the eye.Just the other day I saw an advertisement from some Christian mission for new recruits, with Jesus hanging on the cross; and the advertisement says: “You need guts to be a priest.” Great advertisement! But that means except for Jesus…what about all other Christian priests? They are not priests, that advertisement is proof enough. So there has been only one priest.All these popes, and cardinals, and bishops what are these? These are not priests…because when Jesus proclaimed his ideas, the cross was the answer. And when these popes go around the world…red carpets, warm, overwhelming welcomes from presidents of the countries, prime ministers of the countries, kings and queens – this is strange. You should not misbehave with popes and bishops – yes, it is misbehavior; you are proclaiming that he is not a priest. Crucify him! – that will be the only certificate that he was a genuine Christian. Crucify as many priests as you can. It is not my idea, it is their idea. They publish the advertisement that “you need guts,” with a picture of Jesus on the cross.It is so simple to be a politician. One need not be concerned only with government, the state and connected affairs. Any power trip makes you a politician. The husband trying to be superior to the wife – it is politics. The wife trying to be superior to the husband…because the wife simply cannot accept the idea…. Even though for millions of years she has been conditioned, she finds ways to sabotage it.That’s the whole reason why the wife goes on nagging, throws tantrums, starts crying over any small matter, makes a fuss over anything – things that you could not even have imagined would create a fuss. Why does all this happen? This is her feminine way to sabotage your political strategy: “You think you are superior? Go on thinking you are superior, and I will show you who is superior.” And every husband knows who is superior; still he goes on trying to be superior. At least outside the house he straightens up, makes his I tie right, smiles and goes on as if everything is good.In a small school, the teacher was asking the students, “Can you tell me the name of the animal who goes out of the house like a lion and comes back like a mouse?”A small child raised his hand. The teacher said, “Yes, what is your answer?”He said, “My father.”Children are very observant. They go on looking at what is happening. The father goes out almost like a lion, and when he comes home he is just a mouse. Every husband is henpecked. There is no other category of husbands. But why? Why has this ugly situation arisen? There is a male form of politics, there is a female form of politics – but both are trying to be on top of each other.In every other area, for example in university…the lecturer wants to be the reader, the reader wants to be the professor, the professor wants to be the dean, the dean wants to be the vice-chancellor – a constant struggle for power. At least one would think it should not be so in education. But nobody is interested in education, everybody is interested in power.In religion it is the same: the bishop wants to be the cardinal, the cardinal wants to be the pope. Everybody is on a ladder trying to climb higher, and others are pulling his legs downward. Those who are higher are trying to push him so that he cannot rise up to their level. And the same is being done to those who are on a lower rung of the ladder: some are pulling their legs; others are kicking and hitting them to keep them down, as low as possible. The whole ladder, if you see it just as an observer, is a circus. And this is happening all around, everywhere.So to me politics means an effort to prove yourself superior. But why? – because you feel, deep down, inferior. And the man of instinct is bound to feel inferior – he is inferior. It is not an inferiority complex; it is a fact, a reality – he is inferior. To live the life of instinct is to live at the lowest possible level of life.If you understand the struggle, the fight for being superior, and you drop out of the fight – you simply say, “I am myself, neither superior nor inferior….” If you just stand by the side and watch the whole show, you have entered into the second world – the world of intelligence and consciousness.It is only a question of understanding the whole rotten situation in which everybody is caught. You have just to give a little patient observation to the whole situation: “What is happening?…And even if I reach to the highest rung of the ladder, what is the point?” You are just hung up in the sky looking like a fool. There is nowhere else to go.Of course, you cannot come down because people will start joking about you: “Where are you going? “What happened? Are you defeated?” You cannot come down and you cannot go anywhere else because there is no step higher, so you are hung up in the sky pretending – smiling a Jimmy Carter smile – that you have arrived, that you have found the goal of life. And you know that you have not found anything. You have been simply a fool and your whole life is wasted. Now there is no way to go up; and if you go down then everybody is going to laugh.So anybody who becomes a president of a country or a prime minister of a country – his only prayer is that he should die at his post…. Because lower you cannot go – that is very insulting, humiliating; higher, there is no way. You are stuck; only death can release you from the dilemma.One of the chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh was very intimate with me. I was very young, but he loved me and he liked to discuss things with me. I told him many times, “You should discuss with people who are capable of understanding politics. I don’t know politics.”He said, “That’s why I discuss with you – because I cannot say these things to anybody else. I can only say them to you because you will not tell them to anybody – in fact, you won’t be able to figure out what the problem is. But just talking to you I feel relieved.”I said, “Okay, if you feel relieved I am ready to listen.” And this was the basic problem coming up again and again: “The only thing I hope is to die as chief minister. I don’t want to die in retirement.”I asked him, “But what is the joy of dying remaining at your post? You can relax, you can retire – you are old enough.”He said, “Never suggest that, because if I am without power then it is going to be a humiliation. The moment you lose power, everybody forgets you. I want to die with all the honors of a chief minister; with honors from the army, the government, the police – all the honors that are appropriate.”He was the first chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, and he remained clinging to the very last. He died still the chief minister, and he was very happy.Just one day before he died I went to see him, and I asked, “How are you feeling?”He said, “I am feeling very good because it seems the time has come and I am still at my post.”It seems sad. This man for his whole life struggled! to become chief minister. He was just a schoolmaster. It was a long way from being a high-school teacher to pass all the politicians – and all of them great, cunning, clever, trying in every possible way to prevent him – but he was determined, and finally he managed.But he lost his whole life just to receive a great celebration, with a military parade and twenty-one guns, and a seven-day holiday all over that state. And all the flags were down for seven days in his honor. But what is the point? The man was dead! Whether you throw him in a municipal truck or you do all this, it makes no sense. Just for this army honor he lived and died.If you watch you will be simply surprised; it must be something crazy in man’s mind that gives him continuous energy to go on rising higher and higher. I know for certain that the man who first reached the top of Everest was not the man that is known to the whole world. The real man who reached first the world will never know because he was just a servant: Tensing, a Nepalese, a poor man.He reached first…because it was a very unsafe place. Hundreds of people had died within a hundred years just trying to reach the top of Everest. Of course the man who was arranging and investing money in it would not take the risk of being first because Everest is just a peak. Only one man can stand there, and that too, not for long, because the wind is so strong and the height is such that if you step one step this way or that way, you are gone, miles down. You will never be found again – nor what happened to you.But the poor servant tried first, and when he found that it was safe, then he came back. Then the great explorer, and the “first” man to reach the top of Everest, Hillary, stood there ready to pose for a picture. And he put up the flags of Britain, India, and Nepal, because all three countries were concerned. So three flags he left there, but he was there not more than ten minutes; to be there longer was dangerous.But the poor man who had really reached first, history will never know. And of course Hillary gave him enough money to keep his mouth shut. He opened a great institute, and made Tensing the principal of the institute for training people to climb mountains, mountaineering, the art of mountaineering. But such things cannot be hidden – because it was not only Tensing, there were at least fifty other servants also carrying every kind of instrument, tents, food, clothes. They all saw who had reached first. They all had been bribed, but when fifty persons see such a thing it is very unexpected if the rumor does not spread.I have met one of the persons who was part of the team, and he said, “This is a truth – but we are poor people, and we are just servants.” He said, “It is just like when two armies fight and soldiers kill each other: one party wins, one is defeated, but the name of the victor is always the commander who never really fights, who remains far behind the soldiers, keeping enough distance so that in any dangerous situation he will be the first to move away from the dangerous spot. But when victory comes then he gets medals and everything. But this is how the world goes.” He said, “We are poor people and we have no complaint because he has given us enough money.”Man is continuously trying in every possible way to be somebody higher, special, superior – but this is all politics. And according to me only the mediocre people are interested. The intelligent people have something more important to do. Intelligence cannot waste itself in struggling with third class, ugly politics, dirty politics. Only the third class people become presidents, prime ministers. An intelligent person is not going to be distracted by such a desert which leads nowhere, not even to an oasis.So on the instinctive level politics is just, Might is right – the law of the jungle. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mussolini, Bonaparte, Alexander, Tamerlane – all these people are more like wild wolves than human beings.If we want a real humanity in the world we should cross out these people’s names completely. We should forget that these people have existed; they were just night mares. But strangely, the whole of history is full of all these people.I went to the history class in my college for only one day. When I had gone to fill in the form, the principal asked, “What subjects do you want to study? Four subjects you can choose.”I said, “I will fill in the form, I will sign it and I deposit the fee, but I would like a little taste of all the professors who are teaching – because to me, the teacher is more important than what he is teaching. And moreover I have to be acquainted a little bit with what kind of subjects these people are teaching.”He said, “This is a very unprecedented thing. This is something that you have to fill in first, only then can you enter the college.”I said, “You will have to make an exception, otherwise I am ready to appear before the committee who I runs the college, to let me convince them. How can I choose subjects which I don’t know? and I don’t want much – just a little sample here and there of all subjects. I want just two weeks’ time: I will move around the whole college, and in all the subjects – I will have a little taste of the subjects, of the students, of the teacher, and then I will fill in the forms.”He said, “Okay, but you had better keep quiet. Don’t say anything to anybody, because I think you would convince the committee.”I said, “Obviously, because even if a person goes into the market to purchase an ordinary earthen pot, he goes to a few shops, knocks and feels.” In India at that time it was only one or two paisa for a beautiful earthen pot, but still you checked whether it had a hole or not. If it has a hole it makes a certain sound; if there is any crack, it has a different sound. and if it is really perfect then it gives a musical sound. “Even for a two-paisa earthen pot, people move around the whole market – and I am going to decide about four years of my life. You want me to fill in the forms without knowing what I am doing?”The principal said, “Okay, I will keep it in my file. For two weeks go around, but don’t create any trouble, because if I am caught with this form then I will be in trouble.”I said, “Don’t be worried.”The first class I attended was history, because just accidentally that was the first classroom I came to as I entered the building. So I said, “Okay, this is good: start with history.” The lecturer was giving a general introduction, and all the people he was talking about were these idiots: Nadirshah, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Babur, Humayun, Aurangzeb – all the invaders of India.I asked him, “Are you teaching us or are you simply reminding us that we are born to be slaves? Are you teaching us history or are you simply reminding us that we have been slaves for thousands of years and we are always going to be slaves – because a country so big has been conquered by small armies, barbarous, uncivilized.”I said to him, “If you have any sense of dignity please stop all this nonsense. Can’t you find something that gives dignity to man, that makes him feel that the past has not been just idiotic and stupid, that there is something in the past which makes him feel that he inherits something of beauty, of grandeur, and makes him hopeful about the future?”He said, “Have you come here to change the whole syllabus of history?”I said, “Totally, because only then can I study here. I have come just to check whether it is worthwhile wasting time, because all these nightmares…. What have I to do with Nadirshah? And why should I want to know about him? There is something far more beautiful. Can’t you talk about Buddha, Bodhidharma Nagarjuna, Shankara, Parshvanatha, Mahavira, Vasubandhu? Can’t you talk about these people?”He said, “My God! I have never heard these names! Vasubandhu? I am a doctorate, a degree-holder in history, but Vasubandhu? – I have never heard the name.”I said, “Then you come down and sit here, and I will teach something about Vasubandhu. And this is not the only name that you don’t know. I will tell you a few other names that you don’t know either. Do you know Dharmakirti? Do you know Chandrakirti?”He said, “No. Are you inventing these names?”I said, “I am not inventing them – these are the real people. But they are not even in your footnotes because they never killed anybody, they never invaded any country, they never made any empire, they never massacred people, they never slaughtered people, they never raped women, they never burned people alive.What is history? Just cuttings from newspapers of ancient times. If you go and help somebody, no newspaper is going to publish the story; you go and kill somebody and all the newspapers are full of it. And what is your history about except these people who have been a nuisance, who have left wounds on human consciousness? This you call history?”I said, “If this is history then it is not for me, because I have a different dimension of history. What you are teaching is really the history of politics. You should change the name of your subject. This is not history, it is political history. And what I am talking to you about is the history of human intelligence and ultimately the history of human enlightenment.”He was simply in shock. He just told the class, “Now I am not in a position to say anything. First I have to see the principal about this boy.”I said, “There is no need to see the principal – I have seen him. He knows what I am doing. And I am not going to come again so you need not be worried; you go on teaching about all these idiots. You have only this garbage in your mind. It is very strange that the real flowers of intelligence are not even mentioned.”It was so difficult for me to find out about these people. I had been looking in so many libraries, trying to find out something more about these people who; are really the creators; they have put the foundations. But we know only one kind of world, the world where might is right.No, on the second level, right is might. Intelligence believes in finding what is right.There is no need to wrestle with swords or bombs and kill each other, because might does not prove anything right. Do you think that Muhammad Ali boxing with Gautam Buddha…of course he will be the winner – in the first round. There will not be a second round, the first hit will be enough; poor Buddha will be flattened! And seeing the situation he himself will start counting: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He will not wait for the referee to count. And he will not move from the ground; Lying flat on the ground he will count up to ten. And he will say, “It is finished – you are the winner.”But might does not prove right. It is perfectly okay in the world of animals and in the world of instinct. Intelligence reverses the whole role: Right is might – and right has to be decided by intelligence, by logic, by reason, by argument.That’s what Socrates was doing in the court. He was ready to answer any question that the juries and the judges wanted. He asked, “What are my crimes? Just start telling me them one by one – I am ready to answer.” They knew that it was impossible to argue with this man; but vague crimes – they thought perhaps Socrates could not answer about these. And even if he did the jurors were not going to be convinced, because it would go against their whole conditioning. The first thing they said was, “The greatest crime that you have been committing is that you are corrupting the minds of the youth.”Socrates said, “That’s true, but it is not a crime. And what you call corruption I call creation. You have corrupted those peoples’ minds; now I have to destroy that corruption. And if you are right then why don’t you open a school, an academy, just as I have my school and academy? To whomever is right, people will be coming there.”Since Socrates had opened his school all the schools of Athens were closed, because when a man like Socrates is teaching, who can compete? In fact, all the teachers who had been running schools became students of Socrates. He was a real master.Socrates said, “You present before me a single young man who is being corrupted by me…. And what do you mean by corruption?”They said, “You teach that there is no God or gods.”He said, “Yes – because there is no God, no gods. What can I do about it? It is not my responsibility. If God does not exist, are you corrupting the mind of youth or am I corrupting the mind of youth? I am simply telling the truth. Do you think truth can corrupt the minds of the youth?” The debate continued for days. Finally the judges decided that “As far as intelligence is concerned he has shut the mouth of you all” a single man alone against the whole mediocre society of Athens – “so we should not argue any more; we will simply ask for a vote.”Socrates said, “Voting cannot prove what is right and what is wrong. In fact, the greater possibility is that the people will vote for that which is wrong, because the majority consists of mediocre people.”Socrates was trying to establish that right should be decided by intelligence. That’s what finally created the whole evolution of science. Socrates should be known as the father of all science, because in science it is not a question of: “You are powerful, that’s why you are right.” The question is: anybody can prove right; howsoever powerful you are does not matter. The question has to be decided by logic, by reason – in the lab, with experiments and experience. So on the second level of consciousness politics is a totally different matter.India has been for two thousand years in slavery – for many reasons, but one of the reasons and the most fundamental reason is that all India’s intelligent people turned their back on politics of the lowest, the third class, the instinctive level. All intelligent people were, simply not interested in politics or power. Their whole interest was to decide what is true, what is the meaning of life. Why are we here?At the time of Gautam Buddha, perhaps around the whole world, the second level of consciousness came to its highest peak. In China, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu – these were the people, contemporaries. In India, Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Makkhali Gosal, Ajit Keshkambal, Sanjay Vilethiputta – they were overpowering, giants. In Greece, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras – they touched the very peak of intelligence. All over the world, suddenly it was as if a tidal wave of intelligence came. Only idiots remained fighting; all the intelligent people were deep into finding ways how to decide what is right and what is wrong.In India it was a tradition for every philosopher to travel all over India, challenging others. Challenge was not inimical – you have to understand that. On the second level there is no enmity, both challengers are seekers. It is a friendly phenomenon, it is not a fight; they both want the truth to win. Neither of them is trying to win over the other. That is not the question at all.When Shankara began his discussion with Mandan Mishra, he touched his feet and asked his blessing, that truth wins. Now, to touch the feet of your enemy – what does it show? There is no question of conquering the person; he is old and respected all over the country. Shankara is just a young man, thirty years old; Mandan Mishra is of his grandfather’s age. Shankara touches Mandan Mishra’s feet, because it is not a question of defeating him; and he asks for a blessing, not so he should be the winner, but that the truth should win. And truth is nobody’s property.That was happening all over the country. And such great intellectuals were born that even today we cannot find that quality, that sharpness – for the simple reason that all the intellectuals have moved toward science. Philosophy is deserted. At that time, all those people were in the world of philosophy.But you have to remember, it is a fight but no longer a personal quarrel – not a desire to prove oneself superior, but an inquiry to find the truth. The whole emphasis has changed: the victory of the true…. The famous dictum in Indian history of philosophy – is: Satyameva jayate – ‘Truth should win, no matter who defeated.’ It is not arising out of an inferiority complex but it is coming out of a really superior intelligence.The tradition went to China, to Japan, and it spread to other fields also. That is why if you see two Japanese boxers or aikido fighters or jujitsu or judo fighters, you will be surprised – first they bow down to each other with tremendous respect. There is no question of enmity.This is one of the teachings of judo and all martial arts in Japan, that when you are fighting with somebody it is not a question of personal enmity. If it is personal you are already ready to be defeated because it is based in ego – you are falling to the lower level.In the art of judo, whosoever proves the art of judo superior is the winner, not the person; it is the art that wins. Just as in philosophy it is the truth that wins is now the art that wins. Not even for a single moment should you remember yourself and your victory because that will be the moment of your defeat.And it has happened many times – which nobody else can understand except one who has understood whole tradition of the Eastern way. Sometimes there are two equally non-egoistic fighters; then nobody wins. The fight continues for days, the end goes being postponed, but nobody wins. Every day they come and they bow down to each other – with great joy, with great respect. In fact they are honored by the person because he is not an ordinary person; just to fight with him is honor enough.And the fight continues. Finally the judges have to say “Nobody can win. Because both are equally egoless – nobody can find the way to defeat the other.” Ego is the loophole. Ego is a kind of sleep in which you can be defeated. Just for a moment a thought can come in, and that’s the end of you. The art of judo, jujitsu, aikido – they are all similar, with only little differences, subtleties, but the basic foundation is one. And the basic foundation is that when you are fighting, you should not be there but utterly absent; then no sword can cut you. And if you see two swordsmen fighting, you will simply amazed….One of my friends – he became my friend after he came from Japan – was caught in the second world war. He was in the British army, a colonel. He was a Sikh, a Sardar; Chanchal Singh was his name. He was caught by the Japanese as a war prisoner. And then one of the Indian revolutionaries, Subhash Chandra, went through Adolf Hitler to Germany, and then to Japan; and with Adolf Hitler’s recommendation Japan allowed all the Indian war prisoners to be trained by Subhash to fight against the British army.The Japanese thought this a good idea; otherwise they were unnecessarily a burden. Subhash was fighting for the freedom of their country so he was easily able to convince the Indian prisoners. For them too it was good. In the first place, who would not like to fight for one’s own country? Secondly, it was better than being a prisoner. There was a chance to escape too!Subhash trained them in all martial arts. After the war, when the prisoners were released, Chanchal Singh came back. I was simply sitting in a hotel with a friend discussing about the freedom of the country and I was telling the friend, “Just throwing out the British kingdom does not automatically mean freedom. Freedom is a positive concept. You can throw away the Britishers but if your mind remains the mind of a slave then anybody who rules – he may be Indian, but you will not be free.“Yes, rulers will change: white skin gone, black skin comes in its place; but do you think by the change the color of the skin, slavery can become freedom? Freedom needs some positive change and transformation of mind. If you have the mind of a slave, you will be a slave; whoever is on the throne makes no difference.”And I still hold to that argument because forty years have passed and India is still a slave, more than ever. At least when it was under the British Raj there was a possibility to throw the responsibility on the Britishers, that they were responsible. Now they don’t even have that excuse.Just the other day, information came to me about something which can happen only in a country whose mind has become so accustomed to slavery that whatever you do it cannot accept itself as free. The information was that a truckload of all the secret files of the Indian government was caught crossing the country border going into another country – all the secret files! The driver was Indian, the conductor was Indian, and the truck belonged to a very big industrialist. And this industrialist…when the truck was caught, this industrialist was caught; then more, almost a dozen people have been caught, and it was found that perhaps this was the last truck of many. It is wondered whether India has been left with any secrets.This has never happened in history. All the secrets were being sold by – Indians! No agents from other countries were doing it; they were being contacted by Indians – the slavery and its mind! – and asked, “Do you want the secret file about the nuclear plant that India is making?” And a plant worth fifty million was sold for fifty dollars! – the whole secret file, the whole plan, the place, everything.A French private detective was purchasing all information. He had no purpose against India, but if such secrets are being given so cheaply they are worth collecting; any moment you can earn millions. If India goes to war with China, then China will be ready to pay anything for these secrets. If Pakistan goes to war against India, Pakistan will be ready to pay anything: Whatever you ask, you will get.The most miraculous thing is that Russia tries to send spies into America, and America sends spies into India…. Then too it is not an easy job to find secrets. And the French agent gave the news to the media that “in the afternoon something was decided by Indira Gandhi and by the evening it was in my hands – just within three, four hours at the most. Any secret that was discussed in Indira’s cabinet was in my hands within three hours.”So it is not only some industrialist and some other people, but even the cabinet ministers, the topmost…because a few secrets were discussed only with the three topmost cabinet ministers and the president. Only four persons knew about them, yet they were being sold in the open market everywhere. So who betraying? And what kind of people are these? Slavery has become part of their blood. They need a complete change and transfusion of new blood. They need a new mind.I was discussing this slavery with some friend and this Sardar was also listening; while drinking tea, he was listening. Finally he could not resist the temptation and he came over and said, “Can I sit here? – because the discussion is really interesting. If you allow me to sit down – and let me introduce myself to you, because I have been a freedom fighter. I have been in Japanese jails and British jails – first I was a major in the British army – and I have just been released; because the British government has left the country, all the prisoners have been released. And I am searching for some job, some work, because I don’t know anything except fighting. But I do know Japanese martial art. Perhaps you can help me; I could open a class for students of martial arts.” And he became a friend.We managed to open a school for him, and he was really deeply involved in it. And he used to show us small things once in a while just as an entertainment. He said, “In Japan they have a certain training for the voice. If somebody attacks you with a sword and you don’t have any arms, you just make a certain sound and he sword will fall from his hand.”I said, “It seems to be really something! I have a wrestler-friend,” I said; “he does not know about swords, but with a staff…. And it is good because if you miss or something goes wrong then he will cut off your head. I will unnecessarily be in trouble – you will be gone but I will be in trouble unnecessarily, so it is better to try with a big staff.”And I used to know a wrestler too. So I found the wrestler I used to know and told him about this thing. He said, “There is no problem. I will split open that Sardar’s head into two parts; just one hit, and that’s enough.” He was a strong man, and when he went to hit Chanchal Singh – just as he raised his hand to hit Chanchal Singh gave a shout, and the staff dropped from the wrestler’s hand as if his heart had stopped beating! Whatever happened, his hand lost all its power – just the sound!I said, “How do you make that sound? – because it is nothing special; it can be learned very easily.”Chanchal Singh said, “The sound can be learned very easily; the thing behind it is that you should not be there. That is the most difficult thing. I have been in Japan for all these years: everything is simple, only that is the trouble – that you should not be there. And at a time when somebody is going to make two parts of your skull, at such a time you are absolutely needed there!”Even at such a time you are not to be there – only the sound with no ego behind it. Suddenly the man will forget what he is doing; he will be completely at a loss. Even his memory for a moment has slipped. He is not aware of what is happening, of what he is doing, of what he was doing. It will take a little time for him to recover. Just your ego has to be absent. That absence creates a certain change in the mind of the person, certain kind of break, a sudden break.But if both persons are egoless then it is very difficult. Then a strange thing is known to happen in Japan, an everyday thing: before you take up your sword to hit the other man, the other man’s sword is already ready to defend. It is not taken up after your move, no, but before you have even thought of the move. It is as if in that split second when you think of the move, before your hand makes the move, the thought has reached him and the man is ready to defend.That too happens only if you are absent. Then the sword is not separate from you. You are not doing anything; you are simply there, absent, allowing things to happen. But if both are egoless then it can go on for days. Nobody can hit, even scratch, the other person.This is not the ordinary, instinctive level. You have moved to a higher level, even higher than the second you have moved to the third level, the intuitive. Just as it can happen with swords or boxing or Eastern – style wrestling, the same can happen with intelligence on the third plane.One of my professors I have told you about.. I have loved only two professors in my whole career. I have troubled many, and I have not left even these two alone, but I loved them. About one, Doctor S.K. Saxena, I have said something to you. The other was Professor S.S. Roy. He had written his doctoral thesis on Shankara and Bradley – a comparative study. He presented the first copy of it to me. I said, “This does not look good: I am your student and you are presenting me with the first copy of your thesis, as it came from the press.”He said, “In my opinion, you deserve it.”I said, “But in my opinion your whole thesis is…even the title is wrong because you are comparing two men of two different levels. Bradley is an intellectual, a great intellectual…. He dominated, in the beginning part of this century, the whole world of philosophy. He was the topmost intellectual. Shankara is not an intellectual at all.“Of course they both come to similar conclusions, that’s why you have compared them; you see the conclusions are similar. But you don’t see that they come to similar conclusions from different routes. And that my objection to it – because Bradley simply comes to those conclusions through logic while Shankara comes to those conclusions through experience.“Shankara is not just arguing about them as a philosopher. He argues as a philosopher too, but that is secondary. He has experienced a truth. Now, to express that truth he uses logic, reason, intellect. Bradley has no experience, and he accepts that, that he has no experience, but intellectually he finds these conclusions the most tenable, the most valid.”So I told Professor Roy, “If you ask me, you have compared two totally different persons who are not comparable.”He said, “That’s why I have given you my first book. I know that if anybody will even think about it, go deeply into it, it is you. I will present this book to the vice-chancellor, to the head of the department and all my friends, but I don’t even hope that anybody else is going to object just seeing the title.”I said, “You should go through it again because I will be reading it, and there are going to be a hundred and one questions. So you go through it again. You may have completely forgotten…. You have been working on the thesis for five or six years.”And there were other points, but the basic point was continually, again and again, coming up. It is possible to come to a conclusion just logically, and it may be right, may not be right; you cannot be certain about its rightness. But to Shankara it is not a question a whether it may be right, or may not be right: it is right. Even if you prove logically that he is wrong, he will no move from his position. Bradley will; if you can prove to him that he is wrong he will move. I simply gave Professor Roy one example that I remembered.Bradley says that the universe, the existence – he calls it “the absolute”…. Shankara calls it “Brahma,” but the definition is the same – the absolute. I drew, circle and asked S.S. Roy, “If this circle is perfect the there is no possibility of any development, evolution any progress. Perfection does not allow any change. I existence is absolute, perfect, then it is dead. If you want it to be alive, then keep it open, don’t close the circle; let it grow, move, evolve.“I don’t agree with Bradley because he will not be able even to answer a simple argument such as: ‘Is your universe dead or alive?’ Of course he cannot accept that it is dead. If it is dead, then I am dead, Bradley is dead, everything is dead. Who is arguing? – and for what? There should be complete silence – everything dead. He cannot concede that. But if he accepts that is living then certainly he will have to accept that it not absolute yet, and it will never be absolute, ever.“My conclusion is that it is always coming closer and closer to the absolute but is never going to become absolute. It will be always coming, coming, coming, but never arriving at the absolute: it will remain alive.“Bradley will have to change his idea. And you being a disciple of Bradley” – and Professor Roy was philosophically a disciple of Bradley – “you have to accept this on behalf of Bradley, otherwise I am ready…. Tell me, How can you save the idea of an alive universe with a ‘perfect, absolute’ idea?”He said, “That’s true, I have never thought about it; Bradley cannot be defended.”But I said, “Shankara is also saying that God, Brahma, truth, is absolute. He cannot defend his argument either because the argument is the same. But the difference is that Bradley will have to change his standpoint and Shankara will simply laugh and say, ‘You are right. My expression was wrong and I knew that somebody who knows will find out that the expression is wrong. You are absolutely right, my expression is wrong.’ But Shankara will not concede that he is wrong. His position is that of experience, it is intuitive.”There is no fight at all at the intuitive level. The politician on the instinct level is just a wild animal. He does not believe in anything except being victorious. Whatever means are needed to be victorious, he will use. The end justifies all his means, howsoever ugly they are.Adolf Hitler says in his autobiography, “Means don’t matter; what matters is the end. If you succeed, whatever you have done is right; if you fail, whatever you have done is wrong. You lie, but if you succeed it will become truth. Do anything, just keep in mind that success must be at the end; then success, retroactively makes everything right. And defeat…you may go on doing everything right, but defeat will prove everything wrong.”On the second level there is a struggle, but now the struggle is human; it is of intellect. Yes, there is still a certain struggle to prove that what you are holding to is true, but the truth is more important than you: If you are defeated in favor of greater truth you will be happy, not unhappy. When Shankara defeated Mandan Mishra, Mandan Mishra immediately stood up, touched the feet of Shankara and asked to be initiated.There is no question of fight. It is a human, far superior world of intelligence. But still somewhere in the name of truth a little politics is lurking behind. Otherwise, what is the need even to challenge this man? If you know the truth, enjoy it! What is the point of going around the whole country defeating people? If you know the truth, people will come to you.There is some very subtle politics in it. You can call it philosophical – religious politics but it is still politics – very refined.Only on the third level, when intuition starts functioning, is there no fight at all. Buddha never went to anybody to conquer them, Mahavira never went to anybody to conquer them, Lao Tzu never went to anybody to conquer them. People came; whosoever was thirsty came to them. They were not even interested in those who came to challenge them for an intellectual discussion.Many came – Sariputta came, Moggalayan came, Mahakashyapa came. All these people were great philosophers with thousands of disciples and they came to challenge Buddha. His simple process throughout his whole life was: “If you know, I am happy. You can think you are victorious, but do you know? I know, and I don’t think that I have to challenge anybody…because there are only two types of people: those who know and those who don’t know. Those who don’t know – how can I challenge those poor fellows? It is out of the question. Those who know – how can I challenge those rich fellows? That is out of the question.”He asked Sariputta, “If you know, I am happy; but do you know? And I am not challenging you, simply inquiring. Who are you? If you don’t know, then drop the idea of challenging me. Then just be here with me. Some day, in some right moment, it may happen – not through challenge, not though discussion, not even through expression.”And people were really honest. Sariputta bowed down and said, “Please forgive me for challenging you. I don’t know. I am a skillful arguer and I have defeated many philosophers, but I can see you are not a philosopher. And now the time has come for me to surrender and to see from this new angle. What am I supposed to do?”Buddha said, “You have just to be silent for two years.” That was a simple process for every challenger who came – and many came: “Two years’ complete silence and then you can ask any question.” And two years’ silence is enough, more than enough. After two years they have even forgotten their own names, they have forgotten all challenge, all idea of victory. They have tasted the man. They have tasted his truth.So on the intuitive level there is no politics at all. In a better world the people of intuition will be the guide lights for those who can at least understand them intellectually. And the intellectual politicians – professors of politics, the intelligentsia, theoreticians – they will be the guide for the instinctive politicians. Only this way can the world be at ease, live at ease.The light should come from the highest level. It will have to be passed through the second category because only then may the third category be able to catch hold of something of it; the second category will function as a bridge. That’s how it was in ancient India – it happened once….The really intuitive people lived in the forests or in the mountains, and the intellectuals, the professors, the pundits, the scholars, the prime ministers, used to come to them with their problems, because, they said, “We are blind – you have eyes.”It happened to Buddha. He was holding his camp by the side of a river, and on both sides armies were standing. There were two kingdoms and the river was the boundary, and they had been fighting for generations over which kingdom the river belonged to, because the water was valuable. And they had not been able to decide – so many times they had made the river red with blood and the fight had continued. Buddha had his camp there and the generals of both the armies came to him. Just by chance, at the same time they entered his camp and saw each other. They were shocked at this strange coincidence, but now there was no way to go back.Buddha said, “Don’t be worried; it is good that you have come both together. You both are blind, your predecessors have been blind. The river goes on flowing, and you go on killing people. Can’t you see a simple fact: you both need water, and the river is big enough.“There is no need to possess the river – and who can be the possessor? – all the water is flowing into the ocean. Why can’t both of you use it? One side belongs to one kingdom, the other side belongs to the other kingdom – there is no problem. And there is no need even to draw a line in the middle of the river because lines cannot be drawn on water. And use the water; rather than fighting….”It was so simple. And they understood that their fields and their crops were dying because they had no one for them. Fighting was first: who possesses the river? First water had to be possessed; only then could you water all your fields. But the stupid mind thinks only in terms of possession. The man of insight thinks of utility.Buddha simply said, “Use it! And come to me again when you have used all the water. Then there will be a problem, then we will see. But come to me again only when you have used all the water.”The water is still flowing after twenty-five centuries. How can you use all the water? It is a big river, thousands of miles long. It brings the water from the eternal snows of the Himalayas and takes it to the Sea of Bengal. How can you exhaust it? And those kingdoms were just small kingdoms. Even if they wanted to exhaust it, there was no way.The insight should come from the intuitive person. But the insight can be only understood by the intelligent, and the intelligent can help the politician of instinct, for whom the only desire is power.This I call meritocracy because the ultimate merit dominates and influences the lower rungs and helps them to rise above their level. It has no vested interest, and because it has no vested interest, it is free and its insight is clear. It will be difficult for the intuitive person to explain anything to the instinctive person because they are so far apart, belonging to two different dimensions without any bridge. In the middle, the intellectual can be of immense help.The universities, the colleges, the schools should not only teach political science – it is such a stupid idea to teach political science! Teach political science but also teach political art, because science is of no use; you have to teach practical politics. And those professors in the universities should prepare politicians, give them certain qualities. Then the people who are ruling now all over the world will be nowhere at all. Then you will find rulers well-trained, cultured, knowing the art and the science of politics, and always ready to go to the professors, to the scholars. And slowly it may be possible that they can approach the highest level of meritocracy; the intuitive people.If this is possible then we will have, for the first time, something that is really human – giving dignity to humanity, integrity to individuals.For the first time you will have some real democracy in the world. What exists now as democracy is not democracy – it is mobocracy.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,How can the idea of meritocracy be practically realized?One thing is absolutely certain: The days of the politicians are over.They have done too well their job of being destructive, violent.They have come to a point where humanity has to decide either to die remaining with the politicians, to commit a global suicide, or to throw out the politicians and save humanity, civilization, culture, life.Nothing is favorable to the politician; and as each day passes his death comes closer. He himself is responsible. He improved the weapons which can bring death to the whole world to such a point that there is no way of going back. Either there will be an ultimate war – which means death to all and everything – or a total change in the whole structure of human society. I am calling that change, meritocracy.One thing – we have to drop the idea that every man, just because he is twenty-one, is capable of choosing who is the right person to decide the fate of nations. Age cannot be the decisive factor. We have to change the decisive factor; that is changing the very foundation.My suggestion is that only a person who is at least a matriculate should be able to vote. His age does not matter. And as I explain to you the whole thing, it will become easier. For the local government, matriculation will be the qualification for the voters. And graduation from a university, at least a bachelor’s degree, should be a necessary qualification for anybody running for election, for the candidates. A master’s degree should be a minimum qualification for the one who is running for mayor.For the state elections, graduation with a bachelor’s degree should be the minimum qualification for the voters. A master’s degree in science, the arts, commerce, should be the necessary degree for the candidates. For the ministers an MA first class should be the minimum necessary qualification; more will be, of course, more appreciated. And anybody trying to become a minister will have to know something about the subject. His qualification should correspond to the subject matter that he is going to deal with in his ministership.For example, I have known, in India, in the central government, a health minister who knows nothing about health, who has not even the qualifications of a pharmacist, what to say about a doctor. He does not know even what first aid is. And he is the health minister! Now what is he going to do?I have seen education ministers who have never been to university. Before they became education ministers they had never even seen a university campus. Yes, after becoming education minister they start giving convocation addresses to the universities. Universities start giving them degrees, honorary degrees, because actually they are not even matriculates. A few of them can only sign their signature, and a few of them even cannot do that; they have to make their signature by the mark of their thumb on the paper.It happened; one man has recently became education minister in Madhya Pradesh; he is utterly uneducated, but rich, clever, cunning. And he was inaugurating the state yearly game competitions…. It goes on for at least one month; the whole state, all the colleges, schools, universities participate. It is a small, miniature Olympics. In his first address after becoming the minister, he said, “There are three kinds of games: football, volleyball and the Olympics.” He had no idea even that the Olympics is not a game. And I don’t think he had any idea what football is and what a volleyball is.So if somebody is going to be an education minister, then his qualifications should make him capable of being an education minister. He should have at least a master’s degree in education, first class; with less than first class nobody should be a minister on the state level. Yes, if he has better degrees – doctor of education, PhD in education – that is good, that will make him more qualified.The attorney general should have at least the degree doctorate in law, an LLD; not less than that, because he is going to defend the law of the state, the rights of the citizens. He should have the best degree possible so he knows everything about it.The governor should have the best of all the degrees possible for him: MA first class, PhD – his subject for PhD should be on political science – and at least one honorary degree, a DLitt or LLD.For the federal government, a master’s degree will be the voter’s minimum qualification. A first class master’s degree and PhD should be the minimum for the candidates running for election. And the ministers should all have the highest degrees in the subjects for which they are going to be ministers. If it is education then the highest degrees available in the country; if it is going to be health, then the highest degrees available in the country.The president should have at least two PhDs and one honorary DLitt or LLD; and the same for the vice-president because he can become president any day.In this way mobocracy is destroyed. Then just because you are twenty-one it does not mean you are capable of choosing the government. Choosing the government should be a very skillful, intelligent job. Just by being twenty-one you may be able to reproduce children – it needs no skill, even animals are doing perfectly well. It needs no education, biology sends you well prepared. But to choose the government, to choose people who are going to have all the powers over you and everybody and who are going to decide the destiny of the country and the world…the way we have been choosing them is simply idiotic.Just the other day I got this information – and I congratulate Oxford University for it; perhaps this will be the only congratulations they will receive. In England, as in every country, there are conventions. Every prime minister in England conventionally gets an honorary doctorate from Oxford. This time – this is unprecedented in the whole history of England – Oxford university has decided not to give the degree to Margaret Thatcher. I congratulate them, because this is how every university in the whole world should act.Of course the reason why they have stopped is not very great, but that is irrelevant. At least they have shown enough courage. And Margaret Thatcher will also be an historical person because no prime minister of England has gone without an honorary doctorate from Oxford. The reason they decided this was that she had cut the budget for Oxford university, particularly for research in literature. The reason is not very great, but still it is significant. A woman who thinks that literature does not deserve any research certainly does not deserve any doctorate from the university.I would like all the universities of the world to think again; just don’t go on conventionally honoring stupid, idiotic politicians with doctorates. In this way you are simply insulting yourself. In this way you are degrading the status of education.On the contrary, I would like all the universities – first of just one state – to call a convention of all the vice-chancellors and the eminent professors; of the eminent intelligentsia who may not be part of the university: painters, artists, poets, dancers, actors, musicians. It would include all kinds of people who have attained a certain eminence and have shown their caliber – excluding politicians completely.All the Nobel prize-winners should be invited – excluding the politicians again, because within these past few years a few politicians have managed to get Nobel prizes, and this has degraded the value of the Nobel prize.It has not added any value to the politician; he still remains in the gutter, and he will remain in the gutter because that’s where he belongs. He cannot live out of the gutter – he would die. And if you give him a Nobel prize he will drag the Nobel prize also into the gutter: of course wherever he lives he is going to take the Nobel prize, doctorates, and all kinds of degrees with him.Every state should call a convention of all the intelligentsia who are part of the universities or not part of the universities – writers, novelists, all dimensions of talents – and they should choose a delegation for the national convention. So from all the states a national convention meets and goes into details of how the meritocracy can work.From the national candidates there can be an international convention of all the universities of the world and the intelligentsia. This would be the first of its kind because never has the whole intelligentsia of the world come together to decide the fate of humanity.They should write the first constitution of the world. It will not be American, it will not be Indian, it will not be Chinese – it is going to be simply the constitution of the whole of humanity. There is no need for different kinds of laws. There is no need all human beings need the same kind of laws.And a world constitution will be a declaration that nations are no longer significant. They can exist as functional units but they are no longer independent powers. And if the whole intelligentsia of the world is behind this convention it will not be very difficult to convince the generals of the world to move away from the politicians.And what power do politicians have? All the power that they have we have given to them. We can take it back. It is not their power, it is our power. We just have to find a way to take it back – because giving is very easy, taking is a little difficult. They will not be so simple and innocent when you take the power back as they were when they were asking it from you. It is our power, but they will go on having it if the mob remains there to give it to them; the mob can be convinced about anything.It is the function of the intelligentsia…. I would like to say that now if anything happens to humanity, the whole condemnation will go to the intelligentsia: “What were you doing? If those idiots were ready to kill humanity, what were you doing? You could not even manage those idiots? You simply went on grumbling, being grumpy, but you did nothing else.”And the time is running short. Once we decide that the voting power is not the birthright of every human being but is a right which you have to earn…. You have to see the distinction. It is not a birthright, it is a right that you have to earn by your intelligence. Everybody is given the opportunity to earn it, there is equal opportunity for all to earn it, but it is nothing birth – given; you have to prove it.Once we move the power from the mob into the hands of the few intelligent people and the people who know what they are doing…. If a man who has devoted his whole life to thinking about education and its problems – has done all that was possible to do to find out every detail, every fundamental of education, all the possible philosophies of education – if he becomes an education minister, there is a possibility that he will do something. And at the same time, I want to shift completely from the mob to the chosen few.I am not against the people. In fact, in the hands of these politicians, the people are against themselves. I am all for the people, and what I am saying can be said to be exactly what has been said about democracy: for the people, by the people, of the people – just “by the people” I will have to change. This intelligentsia will be for the people, of the people. It will be serving the masses.It is so simple a thing. You don’t elect a doctor, that just anybody can stand, it is a birthright, and people can vote. Two persons fighting to be the doctor or to be the surgeon? What is wrong in it? The people choose for themselves: for the people, by the people, of the people. They choose one person, a surgeon, because he speaks better, he looks good on the television and he makes great promises.But he is not even a butcher! – and he is going to become a surgeon. He is not even a butcher. Even a butcher would have been better; at least he would have known how to cut, and finish you. This man…but you don’t choose a surgeon by election.How can you choose a president by election? How can you choose a governor by election? You are giving so much power to power – hungry people; with your own hands you are telling them to hang you! This is not democracy. In the name of democracy these people have been exploiting the masses.Just to make a distinction I am calling my system meritocracy. But merit for what? The merit is to serve and share. And once you have decided to shift the power from the politicians to the intelligentsia, everything is possible – everything becomes simple.Then I want every university to have two compulsory institutions, because that is the way I would like the people who are going to be powerful to be prepared.Right now, up to now, for thousands of years you have never prepared anybody. If somebody is going to be a boxer you don’t just push him into the ring and say, “Start!” He has to learn. If somebody is going to be a swordsman, it will take him years. Otherwise he won’t even know how to hold the sword – using it and fighting with it will be impossible. First he will have to find out how to take it out from its sheath, how to hold it. It needs training. You don’t just give a guitar to somebody who has never seen the instrument before and expect him to be a Yehudi Menuhin or a Ravi Shankar.Now this is your fault: these people who are in power, have you trained them? Has anybody ever thought that the people who will be holding so much power need some certain qualities so that they don’t misuse power? It is not their fault.So I propose two institutes in every university. One institute is for deprogramming. Anybody who gets a graduation certificate will first have to get a clearance certificate from the deprogramming institute – which means it has deprogrammed you as a Christian, as a Hindu, as a Mohammedan, as a Jew…because this has been our trouble.And four years is enough time. Deprogramming does not take that much time; just a few hours a month for four years and you will be deprogrammed. And you will not get any certificate from the educational institute unless you are cleared by the deprogramming institute that “this man is now simply a human being. He is no longer a Christian, no longer a Hindu, no longer a Mohammedan, no longer a Jew.”The second institute will be an institute for meditation, because just deprogramming is not enough. Deprogramming takes rubbish from you, but you are left empty – and it is difficult to be empty; you will start gathering rubbish again. You cannot manage by yourself to learn how to live joyfully with your emptiness. That’s the whole art of meditation.So on the one hand the deprogramming institute cleanses you, empties you, makes you a vacuum; and the meditation institute goes on helping you to enjoy your nothingness, your emptiness, your inner vacuum its cleanliness, its freshness. And as you start enjoying it you start feeling that it is not empty at all, it is full of joy. It looked empty at first because you were accustomed to having so much rubbish in it, and that rubbish has been removed so you say it looks empty.It is just like a room full of furniture: you have always seen it full of furniture; then one day you come and all the furniture is removed and you say, “The room looks empty.” The room is not empty, the room is simply clean. The room is roomy for the first time. It was cluttered before, burdened, full of rubbish; now it is pure space.You have to learn meditation to enjoy your emptiness.And that is one of the greatest days in life – when a person starts enjoying emptiness, aloneness, nothingness.Then nobody can reprogram you, nobody in the world.Even if Jesus comes and says to you, “You are blessed. Just come, follow me, and I will take you to God,” you will say, “You go to hell with your God. Where I am, here is paradise. Wherever I am, here is paradise. You go, you follow yourself – and carry your cross also. And if nobody crucifies you, you crucify yourself because without crucifixion you will not be the real messiah.”This is what Buddha actually said to his disciples: “If I come in the way, immediately cut off my head. I should not clutter your inner cleanliness. I should not be there, nobody should be there – no god. You alone are enough, more than enough. It is so overflowing.”So a second institute is needed in every university which will be giving you a simple meditation. There is no need for any complexity. Universities, intelligentsia tend to be complex, tend to make things complex. A simple method of just watching your breath is enough. But every day for one hour you have to go to the institute. Unless the meditation institute gives you its degree, the university is not going to give you its degree.The university’s degree will come only when a clearance certificate from the deprogramming institute and a graduation certificate from the meditation university have been granted. It will depend on you – you can graduate in one year, you can graduate in two years, you can graduate in three years, four years. But four years is too much. Any imbecile, if he just sits for one hour every day doing nothing for four years is bound to find what Buddha or Lao Tzu have found, what I have found.It is not a question of intelligence, talent, genius. It is only a question of patience.So from the university meditation institute you get a degree, a bachelor of meditation; then you get a bachelor of arts or commerce or science, not before it. And in the same way it continues. You get a master’s degree in meditation, MM., and again you will be required to continue with the deprogramming institute for two years, because you can’t be left so easily alone. People are, in some strange way, collectors of all kinds of things. A few people collect antiques, a few people collect stamps – postal stamps!I was staying in a home in Madras, and the old man – he must have been sixty-five – my host, said, “Would you like to see my stamp collection?”I said, “Your stamp collection?”He said, “Yes, from my very childhood. But you will be surprised, I have such rare stamps.”He had a room full of all kinds of stamps. I said, “That’s all you have been doing your whole life?”He said, “You say, ‘That’s all?’ This is the best collection in the whole country!”I said, “It may be the best collection, but you wasted your life collecting all this rubbish, these used stamps?”He had devoted his whole life – and he had great certificates of appreciation from governors, from chief ministers, from prime ministers, from the president. They all had come to see: Anyone of any importance who came to Madras was bound to go to see his collection; it was the best in India.I said, “The collection is okay, but leave the collection alone; I am worried about you.”He said, “What is wrong with me? I am perfectly okay.”I said, “You are not okay! If you were an eight-year-old child it would be okay, this collection. But you are sixty-five, and you are still collecting.”He said, “I am still collecting. I am going to collect as much as I can.”I said, “You go on collecting, but death will be coming soon: this collection will remain here and you will be gone without ever having lived because your whole time was wasted in collecting stamps.”People are collectors. I think there is some psychological necessity. Because they feel meaningless, because they feel that they are not of any worth, they try to fill this gap by collecting something. By collecting knowledge, by collecting any kind of thing, they want somehow to feel that they are not empty and they have something valuable; they are worthy, they have not wasted their life.So if you are going to continue on to do your master’s degree, then for two years you will continue with the institute of deprogramming – because there is no end to cleaning you. Every day the dust collects. It is not a question of your collecting it, it is just like a mirror: every morning you have to clean it and dust goes on collecting on it.The mind is almost like a mirror, a reflector. Memories collect, experiences collect – this is the dust that is happening twenty-four hours a day. So unless you go on cleaning it continuously, soon you will be covered with dust again. So it is good experience: for two years again you are being deprogrammed; and for two years again you are meditating.These processes go on simultaneously deprogramming and meditation. One goes on cleaning you, emptying you; the other goes on filling you not with something but some quality: blissfulness, lovingness, compassion, a tremendous feeling of worth for no reason at all. Just that you are living, breathing, is enough proof that existence thinks you worthy of living, that existence thinks you worthy of being here.You are indispensable to existence.This indispensability is discovered only through meditation; there is no other way. And unless you discover this indispensability to existence, you are going to do something stupid to feel worthy.But when existence overwhelms you, showers all its blessings on you, then the urge to collect garbage simply disappears.Then you live each moment and you die each moment. That is the time when meditation has come to its perfection:Living each moment, dying each moment.Dying to the memory that you have lived.Dying to the moment that is just passing.It can leave its trace, its lining, its signature, its memories…. No, die to all that so you are again fresh, ready to mirror existence with a clear reflection.So if a person continues to study in the university, then he continues to go to the meditation institute for one hour every day; and before he gets his MA, he gets his MM – that is, master of meditation. He can get it in one year, he can get it in two years; or he may take a longer time if he is not meditating, because there is not going to be any verbal examination – it is going to depend on the master.If the master feels, watching you coming every day, sitting, going – for two years he watches you, inquires about you, how you are feeling, how things are going – and never sees any tension in you, never feels that you are in a hurry, anguished, worried; and that you are always relaxed, at ease, at home; that you don’t feel nervous about anything; that you are not concerned about the past and not concerned about the future….Just all these things he goes on watching, and if he feels – and there is no question of misjudging. If he is a meditator, he is not going to misjudge anybody; that is impossible. He will know for sure that you have the taste of it, and he will give you the certificate.These are clearance certificates for your MA degree. And I want this to continue: if you are going to do your PhD then you do three years deprogramming and three years meditation. Those are compulsory to the very end, so when you come out of the university you are not only an intelligent person, well-informed, you are also a meditator – relaxed, silent, peaceful, observant, watchful, intuitive. And you are no longer a Christian, no longer a Hindu, no longer an American, no longer a Russian. All that bullshit has been completely burned, nothing is left of it.This is the only way, to replace the politicians by the intelligentsia. But as the intelligentsia is now, it won’t be of much help, because they are all as much into power politics as the politicians. That’s why I make these two conditions necessary. If you get a PhD, simultaneously you will be getting a D.PhilM, a doctor’s degree in meditation. And if the meditation institute feels that somebody has come to a point where he should be honored, then they can give him a DLittM.So while you are being educated you are, in a very silent and subtle way, being prepared to be in power, in such a way that power cannot corrupt you, that you cannot misuse it.So meritocracy is a whole program of transforming the structure of society, the structure of government, the structure of education.It looks utopian. Who is going to do it? How is it going to happen? Hence the question – how are we going to make it a reality?It is utopian, but the situation is such that within twenty years politicians will bring you to the brink of death. Then you will have to choose; and at that time, when you have to choose between death and meditation, I think you will choose meditation – you are not going to choose death.If at that time you have to choose between death and deprogramming, you will choose deprogramming: “Let the Christian die, but I can live. Let the Jew die, I can live.” And who bothers when it is a question of you or the Jew? If you can choose only one, either you or the Jew, I don’t think you are going to choose the Jew; even Moses would not have done that. I trust him to have been at least that intelligent.Politicians have brought this great challenge to the whole of humanity. In a way we should be thankful to these fools: they have dragged the whole of humanity to the point where humanity has to decide, “Now either we can live or these politicians can remain in power – both are not possible.”My professor, Doctor S.K. Saxena, used to have a car, a very ancient model. It used to remain standing in his porch. I asked him, “I have seen this car standing there – either sell it and get rid of it…. Then at least we will have some space in the porch – in the morning we can have tea; we can sit there, play cards or do something, but this stupid car…”He said, “Never speak against my car. I have been keeping it for almost twelve years in the hope that one day I will be able to afford both the car and a driver. The problem is….” He was a spendthrift, he was not a miser. He was getting a good salary, he could afford both a driver and a car, but he was always in debt, and asking for money from his students. After the fifteenth day of each month he was finished.So he said, “The problem is either I can have the car or I can have a driver. So finally I said to myself, ‘Just having a driver will look more foolish – the driver will be sitting in the porch the whole day, and people will ask, “Why are you keeping this driver if you don’t have a car?”‘ So finally I thought having a car is a better idea.“You are the only person who goes on poking at me about the car, otherwise nobody bothers. They say, ‘Professor, you have a car?’ I say, ‘Yes, I have a car.’ Nobody bothers that the car never moves; nobody is interested in its movement – only I am interested,” he said. “And I manage – all the neighbors have cars so anybody can pick me up going to the university. And they all know that I don’t have a driver. I don’t know even whether having a driver now is going to help, because for twelve years this car has been just standing there. I have no idea in what condition it is.“So in this life at least,” he said, “I have lost hope. Next life I will manage both from the very beginning, so I will not get into trouble. Having just one is troublesome.” Every day at least he had to clean it himself because it used to collect dust – and just sitting in the porch, a dirty thing…so he used to clean it.I said, “You do it, I am not going to help” – because I used to stay with him many times. “I am not going to help at all, because according to your Hindu philosophy, everybody has to suffer for their karma. I have no involvement with the car and you should not look with expectant eyes at me, as if to say, ‘It is mannerly for a student that when the old professor is cleaning his car, you should help.’ You should not look like that. Each according to his karma!”The politicians are bringing you to that point; they have brought you there already. So I say that now the universities have to become more bold, courageous, united, and they have to gather all the intelligentsia round them – which is not difficult, because all over the world I have seen that every kind of intelligent person is against these political fools. But he cannot do anything alone – what can he do? And he does not see that there is any alternative.I wonder why you can’t see any: you have so many universities of great prestige. For example, if Oxford can gather courage to refuse, to say that the university is not going to give Thatcher an honorary doctorate, why shouldn’t a university like Oxford – which is prestigious, old enough, respected around the world – start calling these conventions? Why shouldn’t Oxford become the center of a new power, the power of the intelligentsia?And it is not so difficult as it looks. One thing I forgot. I said, “Exclude the politicians”; I wanted to include one thing more: exclude the priests, the pope, because the religious establishment has always been supportive of the political establishment. They are in deep conspiracy together, they support each other. And they support in such absurd conditions also that one cannot make any sense out of it.Adolf Hitler was blessed for victory by the Christian high priest in Germany; he prayed for Adolf Hitler to be victorious. And he was very happy because Adolf Hitler was finishing the Jews; perhaps he has done greater service to the Christians than anybody else – millions of Jews he finished. So the Christian priest might have been feeling he was doing the right thing by blessing him: revenge against the Jews had to be taken. But he forgot completely that Churchill was being blessed for victory by the Christian archbishop in England; that in America, the American president was being blessed…strange! And they were all praying to one God!Now God must have been in a difficulty: who to listen to? But he, being an old Jew it seems, heard Churchill, who was not a religious man at all. He neither looked religious, nor did he look intelligent. If Churchill was to be sent to the right place, he should have been in a circus or in a carnival somewhere, selling hot watch – dogs; that man does not look like an intelligent person.So all these bishops and popes have to be excluded; they have nothing to do with it. And we have to exclude them because we are going to deprogram, and the deprogramming is one of the most significant things to be done; otherwise, the world cannot be saved.These people – priests, popes, shankaracharyas, imams – have been doing the ugliest things in the world, but because of the facade of religion you let them go free. If anybody else were doing them he would be caught immediately.The previous pope, Pope Paul the Sixth – before this Polack came upon the stage…. This Pope Paul the Sixth was a cardinal in Milan before he became pope. And the whole world knew that he was homosexual. It was such a known fact, particularly in Italy and more particularly in Milan, that there was no question about it.He had a boyfriend, a male ballet dancer; and when he became the pope, in Italy just as a joke, the ballet dancer also became famous. They changed the pope’s name in Italy: they made him a feminine pope. They gave him the name Papessa Pauletta. This was the first woman pope, Papessa Pauletta. The Italian language seems to be groovy; I would have learned it, but Italians look greasy, so I don’t want anything to do with it.But not a single newspaper around the world published the facts. Strange – the whole country knows, all cardinals, all bishops, everybody knows, still it is not published anywhere? It is because the pope is a political power too: your paper could be crushed, you could be destroyed.They go on writing things against me which are absolutely absurd, lies, because one thing they are certain of: no politician can be in support of me, no power is going to support me. I am against all those who are powerful. Naturally, anybody can write anything against me. The courts, the political powers, the governments – they are all already against me; they are prejudiced beforehand. But you cannot write against the pope that he is having…that this guy is a gay guy. And even after becoming pope he was moving with that boyfriend, Papessa Pauletta was always….The rumor is all over the capital that one of the most prominent politicians is a homosexual. That is old news, but just two days ago it has been discovered that this man is not only a homosexual – he has AIDS. And now he is going to run for president in the next election; he is trying for it. Right now he is a senator and one of the most powerful senators, and he is preparing to run for the presidency. But all the newspapers are silent.What kind of news media exists? It seems it is only against people whom you can harm but who cannot harm you. For example, I cannot harm anybody so they can write anything against me; right or wrong is not the question. You know perfectly well that before seven thousand people, a knife was thrown at me. Twenty policemen and four police officers were present – eyewitnesses. The man was caught red-handed – and yet he was released. Seven thousand witnesses didn’t prove anything; even police officers could not prove anything – because the government wanted him freed.The magistrate knew that if he did not listen then his promotion would be stopped. And he was not concerned with me or my life, he was concerned with his promotion. So to get the promotion he simply released the person with no punishment.But a person who has AIDS may become the president of America – and everybody will keep silent about it. Nobody is going to open his mouth, because anybody who opens his mouth will be in danger from those in power. But I don’t have anything to lose so whatsoever I want to say, I say. And I know that that man cannot challenge me because if he challenges me then he has to come to the hospital and prove that he does not have AIDS.Pope Paul the Sixth of course is dead so he cannot do anything against me; I don’t believe in ghosts. But just think: if Pope Paul the Sixth – who was thought to be a very wise man, perhaps one of the wisest popes in the whole of history – could do such stupid things, what about the Polack Pope? You can just imagine what he can do. He cannot be defeated by Pope Paul the Sixth; he will do something to defeat that fellow and he must be doing it. But these things you come to know when the person is dead. Now Pope Paul the Sixth’s story is known to everybody – because dead people cannot influence anybody, cannot take revenge, cannot harm you.So the politicians and the priests have to be avoided. The politicians are going to say that what I am saying is anti-democratic. It is not, because nowhere does democracy exist.I love the statement by H.G. Wells. Somebody asked him, “What do you think about democracy?”He said, “It is a good idea.”The man said, “A good idea?”He said, “Yes, it has yet to happen.”It has not happened yet. In the name of democracy something else is going on.While I was in India I used to think that perhaps in America something of democracy is happening. But coming to America has been a tremendous disappointment. There is no democracy anywhere – neither in America, nor in the Soviet Union, nor anywhere else. It is only a word that politicians have been exploiting.So first it does not exist, so there is no problem that I am against democracy, anti-democratic. There is no democracy, so how can I be anti-democracy? What I am proposing is the right way to change the whole structure, so that one day meritocracy can merge into democracy – because sooner or later everybody can be educated. I am not preventing anybody; I am simply saying that right now give the power of governing only to those who are entitled to it and prepared for it. Meanwhile, go on preparing other people.We may not be here, that does not matter. But within three or four generations, everybody can pass through the process of deprogramming, meditation and education. Then all people are entitled – because by twenty-one, most have already matriculated: they can participate in the local election. A few of them are graduates: they can participate in the state election. And by twenty-four, most of you are post-graduate: you can participate in all the elections. And before thirty you can be able to stand for the presidency of the country.I am not asking much, just a ten-year preparation. And if the whole government is meditative, deprogrammed, unprejudiced – just visualize it – then bureaucracy disappears, hierarchy disappears; then things that take years can be finished within seconds.I know of one case, one of my friends – he was a very old man, he just died two years ago. He was a very famous historian, Pandit Sunderlal. Sometime in 1920 he wrote a book of history in which he disagreed with British historians; and he was perfectly right, because what British historians were presenting was not factual. It was one-sided, naturally – they were the victors, the defeated ones had lost even their voice.The victors can write anything. So if the defeated were going through a revolution, the victors would not call it revolution, they call it mutiny. If the revolutionaries become victorious then even if it was a mutiny, it becomes revolution. It depends on who is going to write the history.The British historians wrote about the leaders of the Indian revolution as if they were criminals and of course in their eyes they were criminals. They were trying to overthrow the government, creating disorder, chaos. Naturally, these people were criminals. But to the Indians, those people were their heroes, not criminals. They were fighting for their freedom; they sacrificed their lives for the freedom struggle.So Sunderlal wrote – he was the first historian to write from the side of the Indians. Of course his book was immediately banned and a case started against him, which continued up to ‘82: sixty-two years. The case continued for sixty-two years – can you imagine? If a case needs sixty-two years to decide, my God! Then who is going to be punished? All those people are gone!It was tried by at least eight High Court judges; all died. At least one dozen advocates who fought both for and against all died. Of the publisher of the book, the printer of the book, the writer of the book, and the distributor of the book – the case was against all four – three of them died. Only the writer continued to live, and because of him the case continued because there was no way…. Even the government who had started the case died. The country became free, the ban from the book was removed – but the case continued.I asked Sunderlal, “Panditji, this is a miracle. You have killed everybody: twelve advocates, eight magistrates, two governments – and when is this case going to be finished?”He said, “Until I die this case is not going to be finished because there are legal problems. They cannot just finish it, they cannot just close the file. They have to come to a certain conclusion. Now it has become, it is becoming every day, more and more complicated.” All the magistrates that were trying the case before India became independent – they have their notes and their opinions; they were against Sunderlal, they all wanted him to be imprisoned for life.After the government changed, India became free. Now the magistrates are all for Sunderlal: “He has done a great service, he should be honored.” But what to do with the opinions of their predecessors? It does not matter to which government they belong; it is the same court and the same law. “And the complexities were such,” he said, “that those judges have said, ‘Unless you die we cannot close the file, the case will continue. We are not going to punish you – we cannot punish you. Even they could not punish you.”‘They could not punish him because all their witnesses had died – three “major criminals” had died. Only that one man, Sunderlal, remained, and that man was a very intelligent man. He fought continually, saying that whatsoever he had written was right: “Unless you prove it wrong…and you cannot just prove it with your British writers because what do they know?They were not present here, they don’t know the Indian situation; they remained in England and they were writing history in England about India! They never came to India, and their histories are being taught in the universities. And I have been here, I have seen with my own eyes what has happened. I am an eyewitness, and you are telling me that I am wrong. You call your historians: they have to prove on what grounds they got their ideas.”Those historians were collecting simply from British newspapers. Naturally, all that they were collecting was favorable to the British government. Sunderlal was collecting raw material from the Indian masses about what had happened; he was far truer. And it was felt by all the judges that he had a point there – that he was an eyewitness here. But although they were feeling that he had a point there, they had to protect the government. They were servants of the government, they were there to serve the British empire.In schools, before 1947, students had to pray for the queen: “God save the Queen” or “God save the King.” My principal was a certain Badri Prasad Gupta. The day I entered the school my father told me, “Don’t create trouble about this ‘God save the Queen.’ Let him save her; don’t create trouble on this point.”I said, “I have no problem with that, don’t be worried.”He said, “Promise that you won’t create any trouble about the queen.”I said, “Promise.” And I never created any trouble about the queen. I asked the principal, “Where is God? I cannot pray…to whom? I have no problem about the queen – just show me God so I can pray.”Badri Prasad Gupta said, “Up to now there have been some students creating problems because they come from revolutionary families. Their question was, ‘We cannot pray for the queen. Why should we pray for somebody who is imposing slavery on us?’ That I have heard, but this is a new problem.”I said, “I have no problem with the queen; I will pray, but first show me God. If you cannot show me God, whom do you want me to pray to? – to you?…’Badri Prasad Gupta, Save the Queen’?”He said, “No, don’t say that! I am a government servant and you are making me also involved in it. It may become a trouble.”I said, “Then I cannot pray.”When I came home, my father was waiting. He said, “No trouble?”I said, “Trouble was bound to be there but I kept my promise to you.”He said, “How did you manage?”I said, “I changed the subject. Instead of bothering the queen, I said, ‘Why bother about the queen? Why not hit God himself so there is no question of prayer?’ And I told Badri Prasad Gupta, ‘I can pray to you, Badri Prasad Gupta,’ but he was so afraid that he said, ‘Don’t mention my name, because if some British officer comes to know that I am teaching students to pray, “Badri Prasad Gupta, Save the queen,” they will hang me! My job will be gone…and how am I going to answer those people? Just don’t mention this and don’t say it to anybody else, because these children are just a nuisance: they may start shouting in the streets, “Badri Prasad Gupta, Save the Queen.” But I will be killed; the queen will be saved, but I will be gone.’”I said, “No, I will not create any trouble – you just have not to ask me again. I will remain silent. If God wants to save, let him save, if he does not want to save, that is his business and his problem. It is not of my concern. I am absolutely impartial about whether the queen is saved or not; I have no interest either way.”But those British officers…Badri Prasad Gupta was an Indian, but being the principal of an English high school was enough to make him afraid. Every official was afraid, judges were afraid, Indian officers were afraid, because the power….So politicians and priests both have to be dropped out of their long, long-standing establishment, and a totally new kind of management has to be developed.It is a difficult job, arduous but not impossible – particularly in such a situation when death is the only alternative.Osho,What do you say about meditation according to the three states of consciousness?Meditation I have explained to you so it won’t be difficult…just a little bit of new perspective.Concentration is concerned with the instinctive layer, hence even animals are capable of concentration. When an animal is hunting game he is utterly concentrated. He is unmoving, not making even a little stir. And if you see his eyes, they are fixed, unblinking.In fact, it is one of the findings of great hunters…. Once in a while it has happened that barehanded a hunter has come across a lion, and there was no way to escape – the lion was coming closer to him with his eyes fixed. Because the hunter was unable to escape, just unconsciously, without knowing what he was doing – of course he was frozen to death – the hunter’s eyes also became unblinking, and he was watching every move of the lion, so he was looking into his eyes.And this is how it was discovered that if you look into the eyes of the lion just for a minute or two, the lion becomes hypnotized. He forgets to kill you. He forgets everything; he falls into a coma.Gurdjieff remembers in his memoirs that while he was moving with the nomads near the Caucasus, he found they all hypnotized their animals. Nomads are moving people, a few days here, a few days there; they don’t stay in one place. They have a totally different culture. They don’t think much of you who live in cities and in houses. They think you are dead, finished; you have made your graves yourself.What is life if you are not under the sun, under the sky, always moving into the unknown? – managing moment to moment, not being worried about tomorrow. They don’t believe in your law, they don’t believe in your state – they don’t believe in anything. They can steal, there is no problem; they can kill, there is no problem. They are a totally different people, and they are not ready – many governments have been trying to settle them, prohibiting them….But you will be surprised, even in Europe the nomads are all Indians from Rajputana. In fact, all over the world the nomads are Indians from Rajputana – one particular state. They all speak Rajputani. The language has changed, taken on different forms, but still you can figure out that they are speaking Rajputani. In Europe you call them gypsies, because from Rajputana they first went to Egypt, and after remaining in Egypt they moved to Europe. Because of this movement coming from Egypt, they became gypsies.Gurdjieff was with these people, and these people have a different kind of wisdom – not bookish but from actual experience. And they have been moving around the earth experiencing so many things…. A person who flies from New York to London cannot say that he has toured from New York to London, flying in an airplane is not an experience. But moving on the earth, making your way through different societies, different laws, different difficulties, different problems, every day is real experience.Gurdjieff said that these people knew a certain art of hypnosis. It was not much of an art, it was a simple process you can practice on your dog, on your cat. But if they are your pets it becomes difficult because they start moving here and there; they will not keep their eyes fixed on you. On wild animals it is very simple.These nomads had to pass through wild areas, and that was their practice…. Gurdjieff was very young nine or ten, and he watched them: even if a lion came all the nomads, the men, would stand in front staring at the lion without blinking their eyes. And something happened – the lion simply collapsed, fell, as if there were no life in him. And immediately those gypsies would jump and catch hold of the lion; and by the time he came back to his senses, he would be captured, without any weapon.Concentration is instinctive.Everybody can practice it; all that is needed is to pinpoint your consciousness.Contemplation is of the intellect.It is beyond animals, and beyond most human beings – not absolutely beyond; if they try they can rise up to it. Contemplation needs your interest to be wide enough so that you can create a space in the mind to move. You need much information about a single subject so that you can move around the single subject without changing it, and yet moving, keeping in the same area.For example, you are thinking about truth or love or religion: you keep yourself in the same area, but you look at it from every possible angle. And you will be surprised – there are always angles which have never been looked at. Life is so mysterious, there are always aspects which you may be the first to discover.That’s how science functions. The subjects are not new, these are the same subjects. From Archimedes to Albert Einstein there is not much difference; they are thinking about the same subject, but new aspects go on revealing themselves. And each aspect becomes almost an area in itself. You can watch the progress of science, then you will understand.In Oxford University the board hanging by the department of physics says: “Department of Natural Philosophy.” That is strange, because it was one thousand years ago that physics was part of natural philosophy. The board is one thousand years old; although painted again and again, although different boards may have come, the writing has remained the same. Now philosophy has nothing to do with physics.In Saugar University where I did my postgraduate work, by the department of philosophy the board read: “Department of Psychology and Philosophy.” That too is one hundred years old. The university is new, but the founder was an old man and when he was studying philosophy and psychology were one subject. Now psychology has a separate individuality.I told my professors, “This is stupid – drop it.”But they said, “It is a historical monument. Leave it there.”I said, “Now psychology is no longer being taught here. Why psychology and philosophy?” It used to be that psychology was part of philosophy, then they separated; now psychology has separated into different parts. Philosophy was part of physics; now physics has separated into different departments.You go on contemplating and you find a new area which is vast enough to be a subject unto itself. And as you go into details you find that there are still branches moving apart. So there is now biophysics. No philosopher has ever contemplated that biophysics is possible. Metaphysics is possible, but it is completely finished; there is no department of metaphysics anywhere.Metaphysics used to be in Aristotle’s time – and for a very strange reason. Aristotle wrote the first history of philosophy; he wrote all the chapters. One of the chapters is physics, and after the physics chapter comes philosophy. Just because it comes after physics – metaphysics means after physics – because the chapter came after physics, slowly it became known as metaphysics: the chapter that comes after physics.When philosophy came into its own, metaphysics, the very word, simply disappeared. It is not used anymore – although it seems it may have a revival, a resurrection, because now physics is coming very close to philosophy, becoming more mysterious, finding more areas which cannot be explained by logic, cannot be explained by science. Perhaps they will start calling it metaphysics. It is beyond physics, after physics. Higher physics they are calling it now.Contemplation is just the process of thinking, refining your thoughts; and the more you practice this refinement, the finer they become. And it is a joy in itself. It is a joy far superior to anything like food, sex, clothes; it is a finer joy. When you come across a new phenomenon which for millions of years people have passed by and nobody has detected and which you are the first to detect, a tremendous joy arises in you.Contemplation is of the intellect.Meditation is of intuition.Meditation has no subject matter.It is pure subjectivity.Meditation is not thinking about something.It is not thinking at all.But one thing has to be remembered: it does not mean falling asleep. That’s what happens; if you are not thinking then the mind says, “What are you doing? Go to sleep.” Mind is at ease with thinking or with sleep, and just between the two is meditation: no thinking, no sleep. Thinking has been dropped and sleep has not been taken up. You are fully awake. It is awareness without thoughts. The road of your mind is completely empty of the continuous traffic of thoughts.In that state of no-mind is hidden the ultimate secret – the secret of your being and the secret of the whole universe…because at the point of your being all points meet together. Your point is also the center of the whole universe. The further you go into thought, the further you move away from your center and also from the universe. Hence, I was suggesting a very simple method for all universities.Buddha used to call it Vipassana. The word is beautiful, simple, meaningful. It means just watching. Pashya means to see and passana means to see very carefully. Vipassana means to see carefully but without thinking. You are just there, sitting silently, doing nothing.In the West the proverb is that the idle mind is the devil’s workshop. It is not true. The idle mind, absolutely idle, is where your real birth happens. The mind full of thoughts is the devil’s workshop because it is continuously giving you ideas: “Do this, do that.” The silent mind…how can the silent mind be the devil’s workshop?The West never attained to the state of meditation; it remained only at the state of contemplation. Concentration happened, contemplation happened, but meditation remained something unexplored by the West. Perhaps the conditions were not ready for it, ripe for it. Perhaps the West was too much concerned with physical survival. Life was difficult, the climate was cold; hard work was needed to survive.In the East the climate was warm and not much work was needed to survive. One person in a family used to work and the whole family used to enjoy themselves. There was no need for everybody to work. The land was fertile, the population was small – and the land was giving so much without much effort that naturally people started exploring just sitting silently, doing nothing. It was a natural phenomenon to happen.So many people were without any work – that’s why so many people became monks. And there was no trouble, no problem. Otherwise to so many monks you have to give food, you have to give clothes, you have to give shelter, because they don’t work. But there was no problem: people had enough to eat and they could give enough. Millions of monks roamed around the country, and all that they were doing was one thing…. Never in the history of man were so many people trying to sit silently and just be absolutely quiet not even a stir, not even a little breeze. And they attained it.And that’s why I suggest each university should have an institute for meditation. Arrange the right climate, the right atmosphere – beautiful gardens, Zen-type cottages, ponds, trees, and small, Zen-type meditation rooms so every student, before he comes out of university, brings the quality of meditation with him.Once we can help people to be deprogrammed and leave them just clean slates and, secondly, can help them to enjoy this cleanliness so that they never clutter it up again, we have prepared the foundation for a new humanity, for a new world without boundaries, without nations, without cults, creeds, religions – just one vast commune surrounding the whole world.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You were more awake as an infant than I am now. How did this courage and awareness happen?It is very simple, and yet not so easy to explain to you. The reason is that it relates to your past life. Now, as far as I am concerned it is a reality. As far as you are concerned it can only be a hypothesis. I am not saying to you to believe in it.That is my most fundamental approach – never to tell anybody to believe in anything. I am simply explaining how it happened to me. You can find out ways to experiment with the hypothesis; perhaps it may happen to you too – and it is never too late.The moment the child is born, you think, is the beginning of its life. That is not true. The moment an old man dies, you think, is the end of his life. It is not. Life is far bigger than birth and death. Birth and death are not two ends of life; many births and many deaths happen within life. Life itself has no beginning, no end: life and eternity are equivalent. But you cannot understand very easily how life can turn into death; even to concede that is impossible.There are a few inconceivables in the world; and one of them is, you cannot conceive of life turning into death. At what point is it no longer life and it becomes death? Where will you demarcate the line? Neither can you demarcate the line about birth, when life begins: when the child is born or when the child is conceived? But even before conception the mother’s egg was alive the father’s sperm was alive – they were not dead, because the meeting of two dead things cannot create life. They were both alive, and they merged into one and created a life which, rightly understood, is neither just man’s nor just woman’s.A man has a woman hidden in him, the woman has a man hidden in her. It is bound to be so, because they are the contribution of one man and one woman – the father and the mother; they both contributed fifty percent to your being. If you are a man that simply means that the male side is above and the female side is below. If you are a woman the female side is above, and the male side is below. And this you can watch in your own life.There are moments when a man feels very feminine, very vulnerable, very loving, caring. In fact he can be more feminine than a woman, because the woman’s femininity is an everyday affair. She takes it for granted; she has used it her whole life, it is nothing special. But for a man when the moment of femininity happens – there are moments of tenderness, everybody knows – he is also surprised of such a tenderness…and in him? That tenderness is fresh. The woman’s tenderness is getting stale, routine.The same happens to the woman. There are moments when she feels the man coming up from deeper sources of her unconscious. She can show so much strength, courage, daring, that even a man may feel inferior. The simple reason is that man’s manliness is there, and he has been using it every day – it is not fresh, it is not so alive. That is why when a woman becomes angry she is more ferocious than man.In animals it has been watched. The female becomes ferocious only in certain moments when her children are attacked. They may be attacked even by the father himself…because the institution of father is a human institution, it does not exist in animals. The children will never know who is their father, the father will never know that he has produced children. But the mother is not a human invention. The mother is something in nature itself.That’s why you cannot put the father higher than the mother, except perhaps in Germany. Those fools go on calling their motherland, fatherland. The whole world calls their country their motherland, but German fools have some speciality. It doesn’t look right either – fatherland?The earth is feminine, the sky is masculine. Because the earth gives birth to everything – to animals, to insects, to birds, to trees, to man – the earth can be called mother. You will be surprised to find the similarity between these words. The English word matter and the English word mother are both derivations from a Sanskrit root, matra. Matri means mother, and matra means matter, quantity. From matra are derived both matter and mother.The earth is the most tangible material phenomenon. You cannot call it father; it has no relationship with fatherhood. But you can’t argue with Germans either. When I hear their language, I cannot help thinking that if in hell any language is spoken, it must be German. The way it hits you! It has no roundness anywhere…everywhere knives coming out of the language from each word. I cannot conceive how people can love in the German language; it will look like a fight. Perhaps it is! There are languages in which even if you fight it will look like you are having a sweet conversation.The man and the woman are not really two separate entities, but the personality of the man needs the supporting qualities of the woman. If those supporting qualities are not there, the man will fall apart. And the same will happen to the woman. She cannot exist only on female qualities, she needs male supporting qualities. So each human being is a composite whole of two polarities which appear opposed to each other but are not really opposed; they are basically, absolutely essential components of each other.At what point is the child born? Science has not been able to decide. There is no way to decide, because the eggs that the mother is carrying in her womb she has been carrying from her birth….By the way – don’t let me just drift!It has been found – and this seems to be the only explanation that can save Jesus from being a bastard – it has been found that a girl was born with her twin inside her womb. In fact she was going to be two girls but somehow the other girl, who was going to be the twin, never grew up; she became part of the girl that was born. She can carry that twin in her womb. That twin is alive, and at the right time, without any sexual interaction with a man, the girl will give birth to a child.Now this is scientifically proved a fact. In a few animals it has been found again and again. And just the other day Vivek has brought one news item of a similar case. I have for at least twenty years been thinking about it, because I came to know twenty years ago about a case, a similar case, where a girl gave birth to a dead child. And even doctors confirmed that the girl was absolutely innocent.I had been there in the medical college, to see the whole thing. It is a difficult problem in India – it is not so difficult in the West: if it was proved that the girl had some sexual relationship with a man then there would be no possibility…her whole life would be ruined. She could never be married, and she would be condemned everywhere. It would be better for her to die than to live.But all the doctors were absolutely certain that this dead child was not conceived by her. She had carried the small, miniature child in her body since her very birth, and when she became sexually mature the child started to grow – exactly then, because for the child it made no difference…. For the child it was the same whether it was conceived sexually by a new man – but in fact the child was really carrying the girl’s father’s genes, and the mother’s genes. The child that was born to the girl was not her child but her sister. It was good that she was born dead.It would have been good if Jesus also had been born dead, but unfortunately he was born alive. This is the only scientific way to save the poor fellow from being a bastard; otherwise no Holy Ghost can help. All that is nonsense.One thing has to be accepted, that half of your being is alive in your mother, even before you are conceived. And half of you is to be contributed by your father – that too has to be contributed alive. When the sperms leave your father’s body they are alive, but they don’t have a long life, they have only two hours’ life. Within two hours they have to meet the mother’s egg. If within two hours they don’t meet, if they start bumming around here and there….It is absolutely certain that each sperm must have its own characteristic personality. A few are lazy fellows; when others are running toward the egg, they are just taking a morning walk. This way they are never going to reach, but what can they do? These characteristics are present from their birth: they cannot run, they would prefer to die; and they are not even aware what is going to happen.But a few guys are just Olympic racers, they immediately start running fast. And there is great competition because it is not a question of a few hundred cells running toward the mother’s single egg…. The mother’s womb has a reservoir of eggs which is limited and which releases only one egg every month. That’s why she has the monthly period; every month one egg is released. So only one fellow out of this whole mob, which consists of millions of living cells…it is really a great philosophical problem!It is nothing, just biology, because the problem is that out of so many millions of people, only one person can be born. And who were those other millions that could not get into the mother’s egg? This has been used as one of the arguments in India by Hindu scholars, pundits, shankaracharyas, against birth control.India is clever about argumentation. The pope goes on talking against birth control but has not produced a single argument. At least the Indian counterpart has produced a few very valid – looking arguments. One of their arguments is: At what point to stop producing children? – two children, three children? They say that Rabindranath was the thirteenth child of his parents; if birth control had been practiced there would have been no Rabindranath Tagore.The argument seems to be valid because birth control means stopping at two children, at the most three: don’t take any chance, one may die or something may happen. You can reproduce two children to replace you and your wife, so no population increase happens; but Rabindranath was the thirteenth child of his parents. If they had stopped even at one dozen then too Rabindranath would have missed the train. Now how many Rabindranaths are missing trains?I was talking to one of the shankaracharyas. I said, “Perfectly right; for argument’s sake I accept that this is true: we would have missed one Rabindranath Tagore. But I am willing to miss him. If the whole country can live peacefully, can have enough food, can have enough clothes, can have all basic needs fulfilled, I think it is worth it. I am ready to lose one Rabindranath Tagore, it is nothing much.“You have to see the balance: millions of people dying and starving just to produce one Rabindranath Tagore? So you mean every parent has to go up to thirteen? But what about the fourteenth? What about the fifteenth?” And forget about these small numbers; in each love-making a man releases millions of sperms – and every time a man makes love a child is not conceived.You will be surprised to know that if from the age a man becomes sexually mature, that is fourteen, he continues, according to my calculations, up to the age of forty-two, which I feel is a new maturity…. Just as sex matures at fourteen, spirituality starts growing at forty-two. There is a seven-year cycle.In the first seven years there is no question of sex. The child is innocent. He may be playing sexual games, but those are unconscious and he has no idea that those games are sexual. And he is not playing those games for sexuality. He is being prepared by biology because later on he has to play all these games – some rehearsal is needed.I told you that there are two games children play all around the earth; one I completely forgot that day. One is hide-and-seek, and the second is doctor and patient. That is strange…and the patient is always the girl, and the doctor is always the boy! I have inquired, “Does it happen sometimes the opposite way, that the girl is the doctor and the boy is the patient?” No, the girl is not interested at all in such curiosities.The woman is not so much attracted by man’s body; she is attracted more by man’s charisma, impressiveness, personality – the way he walks, the way he talks. She is not much interested in his physical beauty she is interested in something which is not tangible. But the woman has that instinct to find what is attractive in the man.Many times a man will be surprised: “I don’t see anything attractive in this man,” and it happens that that man is almost a hero among women. Many women get attracted to that man. They see something, they feel something which no other man will ever be able to see in that man. But their attraction is not physical, it is something more subtle; more the vibes of the energy, more on the esoteric side.For example, Chetana has a boyfriend, Milarepa – Milarepa the Great. Milarepa is just a lady-killer, continually killing ladies here, there, and everywhere. And I can’t even recognize him! Vivek goes on showing me, Chetana has been showing me: “This is Milarepa,” and the next time again I forget who Milarepa is. He is such a lady-killer that I want to see him and look better at him, to see what is the matter. But I simply go on forgetting his face.Just yesterday, Vivek told me, “He was standing with the drum just in front of you.” With a drum! – in front of me! I saw the drum and missed Milarepa. The drum was good and the drumming was good – everything was good – but I simply did not look at the man who was drumming it. He is a great drummer. I again missed.I go on asking Chetana about Milarepa, and she has described to me everything about Milarepa. In fact Milarepa is the only person about whom I know any kind of information. Every day I try to find out – one day I am going to figure out that this is Milarepa. But yesterday I lost hope.He was standing in front of me drumming – what more can the poor fellow do? Just, I am blind. And he is certainly a personality like Lord Byron in that even though he goes with so many ladies, no lady feels offended. They all accept that he is such a person that you cannot possess him.From the very beginning there are individuals. And millions of people in each love-making simply disappear. We will never know how many Nobel prize-winners were there, how many presidents, prime ministers…all kinds of people must have been there.So this is my calculation: from the fourteenth year to the age of forty-two, if a man goes absolutely normally about his love-making, he will release almost the equal amount of sperms as is the whole population of the earth. A single man can populate the whole earth – overpopulate it! – it is already overpopulated. And this can be done even by a single Milarepa; nobody else is needed. And all these people will be unique individuals, not having anything in common except their humanness.No, life does not start there either; life starts farther back. But to you that is only a hypothesis – to me it is an experience. Life begins at the point of your past life’s death. When you die, on the one side one chapter of life, which people think was your whole life, is closed. It was only a chapter in a book which has infinite chapters. One chapter closes, but the book is not closed. Just turn the page and another chapter begins.The person dying starts visualizing his next life. This is a known fact, because it happens before the chapter closes. Once in a while a person comes back from the very last point. For example he is drowning, and he is somehow saved. He is almost in a coma; the water has to be taken out, artificial breathing has to be given, and somehow he is saved. He was just on the verge of closing the chapter. These people have reported interesting facts.One is, that at the last moment when they felt that they were dying, that it was finished, their whole past life went fast before them, in a flash – from birth to that moment. Within a split second they saw everything that had happened to them, that they had remembered, and also that which they had never remembered; many things which they have not even taken note of, and that they were not aware were part of their memory. The whole film of memory goes so quickly, in a flash – and it has to be in a split second because the man is dying, there is no time, like three hours to see the whole movie.And even if you see the whole movie you cannot relate the whole story of a man’s life, with small, insignificant details. But everything passes before him – that is a certain, very significant phenomenon. Before ending the chapter he recollects all his experiences, unfulfilled desires, expectations, disappointments, frustrations, sufferings, joys – everything.Buddha has a word for it, he calls it tanha. Literally it means desire, but metaphorically it means the whole life of desire. All these things happened – frustrations, fulfillments, disappointments, successes, failures…but all this happened within a certain area you can call desire.The dying man has to see the whole of it before he moves on further, just to recollect it, because the body is going: this mind is not going to be with him, this brain is not going to be with him. But the desire released from this mind will cling to his soul, and this desire will decide his future life. Whatever has remained unfulfilled, he will move toward that target.Your life begins far back before your birth, before your mother’s impregnation, further back in your past life’s end. That end is the beginning of this life. One chapter closes, another chapter opens. Now, how this new life will be is ninety-nine percent determined by the last moment of your death. What you collected, what you have brought with you like a seed – that seed will become a tree, bring fruits, bring flowers, or whatever happens to it. You cannot read it in the seed, but the seed has the whole blueprint.There is a possibility that one day science may be able to read in the seed the whole program – what kind of branches this tree is going to have, how long this tree is going to live, what is going to happen to this tree – because the blueprint is there, we just don’t know the language. Everything that is going to happen is already potentially present.So what you do at the moment of your death determines how your birth is going to be. Most people die clinging. They don’t want to die, and one can understand why they don’t want to die. Only at the moment of death do they recognize the fact that they have not lived. Life has simply passed as if a dream, and death has come. Now there is no more time to live – death is knocking on the door. And when there was time to live, you were doing a thousand and one foolish things, wasting your time rather than living it.I have asked people playing cards, playing chess, “What are you doing?”They say, “Killing time.”From my very childhood I have been against this expression, “killing time.” My grandfather was a great chess player, and I would ask him, “You are getting old and you are still killing time. Can’t you see that really time is killing you? and you go on saying that you are killing time. You don’t know even what time is, you don’t know where it is. Just catch hold of it and show me.”All these expressions that time is fleeting, and passing, and going, are just a kind of consolation. It is really you who are passing – going down the drain every moment. And you go on thinking that it is time that is passing, as if you are going to stay and time is going to pass! Time is where it is; it is not passing. Watches and clocks are man’s creation to measure the passing time, which is not passing at all.Only in one madman’s house did I see the right kind of clock. I was traveling and I just missed the train. To catch the same train, I rushed to pick up a taxi to go to the other station – which was possible because the train went on a longer route of one hundred and twenty miles, so the taxi could reach there first by the sixty miles the road went. So I rushed to the taxi stand and there I found one of my friends from my school days – we studied in the high school together. So he was very happy.He said, “Don’t be worried will put you on that train, if not at the next station, then at the next, or the next; or I will take you the whole journey. Don’t be worried – but you have to come to my house.”I said, “There is no time for me to waste. I have to catch the train.”He said, “You have to come. I have been waiting for you for years, and I have been hearing about you, and reading about you in newspapers and everything. I was waiting, thinking that someday you would come here too – and today you have come, and you are in such a hurry, you can’t even come to my house just to see in what misery I have fallen.”I said, “What has happened?”He said, “You just come.”There was no way out! And he was the only taxi owner there; there was no other taxi, it was a small town. I said, “There is no other way so I will come, but remember that I have to catch the train whatsoever happens, wherever you catch it – but I have to catch the train.” That he promised.He took me to his home and there I could see even through the window – the window was open – that his wife was mad. She was standing there holding the steel rods which were fixed on the windows to prevent her coming out. And the way her hair was falling, and the way she looked….He said, “This is my wife.”I said, “Good, but what can I do? – I am in a hurry. And do you want me to treat your wife or something?”“No,” he said, “no, I don’t want you to treat her. I just want you to see her and suggest to me what I can do.”I said, “Okay.” I went in and there I saw a clock – in my whole life the only right clock I have seen, and that woman had made it. It had only the hour hand. You could not figure out what the time was. I asked the man, “What is the point of keeping this clock here with only an hour hand?”He said, “This woman has her ideas. I have had that clock fixed dozens of times but she always removes the minute hand.”I said, “How do you tell the time?”He showed me another watch. In his pocket he had a pocket watch which had only a minute hand. He said, “I keep both watches in front of me and figure out what the time is.”I said, “Your wife is mad, but you are also mad. This is something! Really, you are a creative, inventive scientist – and you are driving a taxi! I could not have imagined that two clocks would do the work.”He said, “They do perfectly well. Because she is not going to listen, I had to manage something myself.”That is the only clock that is right because you could not figure out the time.In India, in Punjab, if you are traveling in Punjab – you can ask Neelam – never ask anybody, “What is the time?” because if it happens to be twelve you will be beaten. And if you can escape alive it will be just a miracle. It is just for a very philosophical reason – but when philosophy comes into the hands of fools, this is what happens.Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, has said that the moment of samadhi is just like two hands of the clock meeting on twelve, where they are no longer two. He was just taking an example – that in the moment of samadhi the twoness of your being dissolves and you arrive at oneness. The same happens in death too. He explained later on that the same happens in death. Again the two hands which have been separately moving come together and stop, become one: you become one with existence.So in Punjab, twelve o’clock has become the symbol of death. So if you ask any Sosan, “What is the time?” if it happens to be twelve, he will simply start beating you, because that means you are teasing him, and you are cursing him with death. About somebody with a long face, miserable, in anguish, in Punjab they will say, “On his face it is twelve o’clock.” I have seen Sardars changing their watch quickly: when it comes to twelve they will move it five minutes ahead quickly. They won’t keep it on twelve; it hurts that their own watch is playing tricks on them. Twelve reminds them only of misery, sadness, death; they have completely forgotten about samadhi which Nanak was really trying to explain to them.When a person dies – when it is twelve o’clock for him – he clings to life. His whole life he has been thinking time is passing; now he feels he is going, he has passed. No clinging can help. He becomes so miserable, and the misery becomes so unbearable, that most people fall into a kind of unconscious state, a coma, before they die. So they miss recollecting their whole life.If death is without any clinging, if there is no desire to remain alive, even for a single moment more, you will die consciously because there is no need for nature to make you unconscious or force you into a coma. You will die alert, and you will recollect the whole past. You will be able to see that whatever you have been doing was simply stupid.Desires have been fulfilled – what have you gained? Desires have remained unfulfilled and you have suffered – but what have you gained when they are fulfilled?It is a strange game in which you are always losing: Whether you win or lose makes no difference.Your pleasures were nothing, just signatures made on water.And your pain was engraved on granite.And you suffered all that pain for these signatures on water. You suffered your whole life for small joys which don’t appear to be more than toys at this stage, from this height, from this point where you can see the whole valley of your life. Successes were also failures. Failures of course were failures, and pleasures were nothing but incentives to suffer pain.All your euphoria was just the function of your dream faculty. You are going with empty hands. This whole life has been just a vicious circle: you went on moving in the same circle, around and around and around. And you have not arrived anywhere because by moving in a circle, how you can arrive anywhere? The center always remained at the same distance wherever you were on the circle.Success came, failure came; pleasure came, pain came; there was misery and there was joy: everything went on happening on the circle but the center of your being always remained equidistant from every place. It was difficult to see while you were in the circle – you were too much involved in it, too much part of it. But now, suddenly all has dropped out of your hands – you are standing empty.Kahlil Gibran, in his masterpiece, The Prophet, has one sentence…. Al-Mustafa, the prophet, comes running to the people who are working in the farms and says to them, “My ship has arrived, my time has come to go. I have come here just to glance back on all that has happened and on all that has not happened. Before I go aboard the ship I have a great longing just to see what my life here was.”The sentence that I was going to remind you of is…he says, “I am just like a river which is going to fall into the ocean. She waits for a moment to look back at the whole terrain that she has passed – the jungles, the mountains, the people. It has been a rich life of thousands of miles, and now, in a single moment, all is going to dissolve. So just like a river on the brink of falling into the ocean looks back, I want to look back.”But this looking back is possible only if you are not clinging to the past; otherwise you are so afraid to lose it that you don’t have time to observe, to see. And time is just a split second. If a man dies fully alert, seeing the whole terrain that he has passed and seeing the whole stupidity of it, he is born with a sharpness, with an intelligence, with a courage – automatically. It is not something he does.You ask me, “You were sharp, courageous, intelligent, even as an infant; I am not that courageous even now….” The reason is that I died in my past life in a different way than you died. That makes the great difference, because the way you die, in the same way you are born. Your death is one side of the coin, your birth is another side of the same coin.If on the other side there was confusion, misery anguish, clinging, desire, then on this side of the coin you can’t expect sharpness, intelligence, courage, clarity, awareness. That will be absolutely unwarranted; you cannot expect that.From the very beginning I have not done anything in this life to be courageous or to be sharp and intelligent, and I have never thought about it as courage or sharpness or intelligence.It was only later on that I slowly became aware of how stupid people are. It was only a later reflection: earlier I was not aware that I was courageous. I thought everybody must be the same. Only later on it became clear to me that everybody is not the same.One of the joys in my childhood was to go to the highest hill by the side of the river and jump. Many neighborhood boys would come with me to try it. But they would just go to the very brink and come back. Seeing the height they would say, “Suddenly something happens.” I used to tell them again and again: “If I can jump – I don’t have a steel body – and if I go on managing, surviving, why can’t you?”They said, “We try our hardest” – and they really did try. There was one brahmin boy living just next door who was very humiliated because he could not jump. So he must have asked his father what to do, “…because it is very humiliating. He goes on top of the hill and jumps from there, and we just watch. We can see that if he can jump, we can jump; there is no problem in it. If the height cannot kill him, why should it kill us? But when we gather courage, making all kinds of effort, and we rush, suddenly there comes the break. From where the break comes, we don’t know, but just something inside us says, ‘No, these rocks, and this river – if you fall on a rock, or… And the river is deep, and when you fall from a height, first you go to the very bottom of the river then you come up; you cannot do anything else.’”His father said, “This is not good” – because his father was a very good wrestler, one of the champions of the district. He used to run a gymnasium and teach other people how to fight Indian free-style wrestling. That is more human, more skillful, and more artful than boxing. Boxing seems to be an absolutely animal type of behavior.In Indian wrestling you don’t hurt the other person. A very good wrestler simply touches the other person, and the other person falls flat. It is an art, a craft; the body has been taught point by point. Howsoever strong the other person is, if you just hit him this much – just this much – at a perfect angle behind the knee, the man will fall. Howsoever strong he is does not matter; you just have to know the right point where to hit with your hand. Your hand may be just a delicate hand – there is no need for it to be a hammer – the man will fall.They know all kinds of strategies, there are thousands; and it is an art, certainly an art. Nobody is hurt, there is no desire to hurt anybody. And the game is worth seeing; it almost takes your breath away because it happens so quickly when there is a master wrestler.And this man was a master wrestler. He was not very giant-like, and that was one of the reasons he became famous. He was middle-size in height, not a heavyweight champion but very thin. And in fact whenever he was challenged or he challenged somebody, the other wrestlers used to laugh: “This man? He may get killed! His bones may get fractured! This man is going to fight? The other man is so strong he will just take him up in both his hands and throw him down.”That was his whole art, because everybody was ready to fight with him thinking that they were going to be victorious. And what he did on the field… The Indian wrestling field is not like the boxing ring. Very fine powdered earth, six-inches thick, is spread on a big piece of ground, so if they fall nobody is hurt. It is far softer than velvet, it is ground so fine, and they find the best kind of soil for it.What he used to do first… The other wrestler would stand there, of course perfectly certain that he was going to win. And this poor fellow, who looked poor but always proved to be the winner, would go around in the circle of people standing to see – inside the circle was the wrestling area. He would go around dancing backward, and that dance was worth seeing. He wouldn’t look backward; he would look ahead while dancing backward and would still go exactly in a circle.After his dance was over – and the other man was taken aback with what he was doing, the dance was so beautiful, so graceful – after the dance he would immediately jump on the fellow, as a tiger or a lion jumps on game. He was so lightweight he could almost fly in the air, and the man was simply taken by surprise: “What is happening?” First, his dance was strange, no wrestler I have seen dances that way, and after the dance he would simply jump on the fellow. And he had such small strategies that within seconds… People were not able to figure out what he did, and how the other man was flat on the ground and how this man was sitting on his chest.If the child had belonged to somebody else, his father would have told him not to go there at all, but this man was not that type. He said, “If he can jump and you cannot, that is a disgrace to me. I will come with you. I will stand there, and don’t be worried: when he jumps, you jump.”I had no idea that his father was going to be there. When I went there I saw the father, the son and a few other boys who had gathered to see. I had a look and I figured out what was the matter. I said to the boy, “Today you need not bother – let your father jump. He is a great wrestler and there will be no problem for him.”The father looked at me, because he had come just to encourage the boy so that he did not become a coward. He said, “So I have to jump?”I said, “Yes, you can have your dance – you can do anything that you want. Get ready!”He looked down, and he said, “I am a wrestler. These rocks and this river – and you have found some spot! You must have been rehearsing here. Anybody else trying to jump is going to break his neck or leg or anything.”I said, “You brought your son.”He said, “I brought him not knowing what was the situation. I thought if you can jump, he can jump; he is of the same age. But here, seeing the situation, I was worried and thinking that if you didn’t turn up today it would be a great thing, because my boy is not going to survive. But you are clever: you simply dropped my boy and caught hold of me. I will try.”And the same thing happened. Even that wrestler who was so courageous in every way, who had been fighting his whole life… But coming to the brink, the sudden break – because the slope was such, at least fifty feet down, and the river was thirty feet deep, and the rocks were such that it was beyond your control where you would land, what would hit you. And standing on the top of the hill the wind was so strong that you could be simply killed.He just stopped there and he said, “Forgive me.” And he told his son, “Son, come home. This is not our business. Let him do it – perhaps he knows something.”That day I felt strangely about myself: why doesn’t that break come to me? I had tried on very strange places…The railway bridge was the highest point on the river, naturally, because in the rains the river swells up so big and the bridge always has to remain above it, so it was made at the highest point. And there were always two guards at the bridge, for two reasons: firstly, so that nobody committed suicide, because that was the place for people to commit suicide. Just falling from there into the river was enough. You never reached the river alive, you lost your breath somewhere in the middle. It was so high that just to look downward was enough to give you a nauseous feeling.And secondly, there was a fear of revolutionaries who were planting bombs, blowing up bridges, burning trains. To destroy a bridge was very significant for the revolutionaries because those bridges were joining two parts of the province. If the bridge was broken then the army could not pass, and the revolutionaries could do something in the other part where there was no army headquarters. So these guards were there twenty-four hours a day. But they accepted me.I explained to them, “I neither want to commit suicide, nor have I come to blow up your bridge. In fact I want the bridge to be guarded carefully because this is my place. If this bridge is gone then my highest point of jumping is gone.”They said, “This is your practice?”I said, “This is my practice. You can watch, and once you have seen you will be convinced that I have no other desire.”They said, “Okay, we will watch.”I jumped. They could not believe it. When I came back I asked them, “Would you like to try?”They said, “No, but for you it is always free; you can come at any time. We have seen you going so easily, but we cannot jump – we know people have died from here.”That bridge was known as Death Bridge and that was the easiest, cheapest way to commit suicide. Even if you purchased poison, some money was wasted, but from that bridge it was simply easy. The river there was the deepest and it took you away. Nobody would even find your body because just after a few miles it met a bigger river, a huge river – and you were gone forever.Seeing the fear on those two guards’ faces, seeing the fear in this wrestler, I simply started wondering, “Perhaps I miss the breaks; perhaps they should be there because they are protective.” But as I started growing up… And I have been growing up, I have not been growing older. From my very birth I have been growing up, growing up, growing up. Never think that I am growing older. Only idiots grow older, everybody else grows up.As I started growing up I started becoming aware of my past life, and death, and I remembered how easily I had died – not only easily but enthusiastically. My interest was more in knowing the unknown that was ahead than in the known that I had seen. I have never looked back. And it has been my whole life’s way not to look back. There is no point. You can’t go back, so why waste time? I am always looking ahead. Even at the point of death I was looking ahead – and that’s what made me clear why I was missing the breaks.Those breaks are provided by your fear of the unknown. You are clinging to the past and you are afraid to move into the unknown. You are clinging to the known, the acquainted. It may be painful, it may be ugly, but at least you know it. You have grown a certain kind of friendship with it.You will be surprised, but this is my experience of thousands of people: that they cling to their misery for the simple reason that they have grown a certain kind of friendship with misery. They have lived with it so long that now to leave it will be almost like a divorce.The same is the situation with marriage and divorce. The man thinks at least twelve times in a day about divorce; the woman thinks also – but somehow both go on managing, living together, for the simple reason that both are afraid of the unknown. This man is bad, okay, but who knows about the other man? He may prove worse. And at least you have become accustomed to this man’s badness, unlovingness. And you can tolerate it, you have tolerated it; you have also become thick-skinned. With the new man, you never know; you will have to start from the very scratch again. So people go on clinging to the known.Just watch people at the moment of death. Their suffering is not death. Death has no pain in it, it is absolutely painless. It is really pleasant; it is just like a deep sleep. Do you think deep sleep is something painful?But they are not concerned about death, and deep sleep, and pleasure; they are worried about the known that is slipping out of their hands. Fear means only one thing: losing the known and entering into the unknown.Courage is just the opposite of fear.Always be ready to drop the known – more than willing to drop it – not even waiting for it to be ripe. Just jump on something that is new…its very newness, its very freshness, is so alluring. Then there is courage. Courage is not something that you have to exercise for and practice, do yoga asanas and go to a gymnasium for. No, I have seen those courageous people. They are not courageous at all.I had a friend when I was in my matriculation year, who was very much interested in wrestling. He was a good wrestler, and of course he was thought to be very brave and courageous; he had won the state championship for wrestling.In those days in our town there was the high school, but examinations for matriculation were not held there. For matriculation we had to go to the district place where the examinations were held. So we all went to the district place. It was not far away, just thirty miles, but we had to stay there for fifteen or twenty days – as long as the examination continued. By chance it happened that he had no place to stay, so I said, “You can stay with me.”One of my father’s friends, who was a kerosene oil dealer, had a beautiful house. In front of the guest house there was a big house which he used for empty kerosene tin cans – just to collect them there – and on the side was his shop. What I had experienced many times before – many times I had been there and had stayed in their guest house – was that in the hot summer in India, when it is so hot in the day, the tin cans expand, and in the night they again come back to their size. So they make much noise, and if there are thousands of tin cans in the house, then you can think what kind of noise they will create.So this wrestler…we were talking about things and for some reason we started talking about ghosts. He said, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”I said, “It is not a question of belief. Do you want to see one?”He said, “No, but there is no question of seeing. I don’t believe in ghosts.”I said, “If you don’t believe, then don’t be afraid. I can manage a meeting this very night.”Now he was in a corner. He said, “Okay. I don’t believe that there are ghosts.” But I could see on his face all his wrestling – because you can’t wrestle with a ghost. And I said, “A simple thing has to be done. You see the house in front?”He said, “Yes.”I said, “On the second floor, there is a beautiful room. Go there. Sleep there tonight and you will meet them because the ground floor of this house is occupied by ghosts.”He said, “I don’t believe it – this is all nonsense.”I said, “No problem. If by chance you are right, there is no problem; if by chance you prove wrong, I am always here. You can just give me a call from the balcony.”He said, “There will be no need of calling anybody.”He went into the house. The staircase went by the ground floor where all those tin cans were gathered. He looked at all those tin cans, but he had no idea what those tin cans could do. He went up and he said, “There is nothing – no problem.” I left him upstairs and I told him, “I am going out. Please lock it from within so nobody comes in.” So he came back, locked the door and went up.Nearabout one o’clock in the night, it started. Of course I was fast asleep by that time thinking that nothing was going to happen. I had waited for one and a half hours, and then I said, “Perhaps today the climate is not good, or something else is the matter.” So I went to sleep. But by one or one-thirty, there was such a crowd that I woke up thinking, “What is the matter?” I had completely forgotten that I had put that boy there – and that was the matter.A whole crowd was gathered there, and he was standing on the balcony, screaming; he could not make any words come out. He became almost like a person who cannot speak, and as he saw me – because all those people were strangers to him – as he saw me, he just raised his hand, and I said, “What is the matter – ghosts?”He said yes with his head – he could not say it with his mouth; with his head he said it. So I said, “Why don’t you come and open the door?…”We had to put a ladder up to the balcony, but he was so shaky that two persons had to put him on the ladder, and somehow we brought him down. I had to pour cold water on his head; then he started speaking. He said, “My God! If you had said that there were so many ghosts I would not have believed you. I thought that maybe there would be one or two I could manage them. But there were so many, and they were going from one tin can into another, from another into another. They were passing by and running all around, and making sounds – and you told me to come down by the staircase which passes just by the side of those cans!”I said, “Now do you think that ghosts exist?”He said, “Not only do I know, I will never forget; this experience is enough for my whole life. I will never say anything against any ghost. Although they did no harm to me, I have never been shaken so much. I feel as if all my energy is gone and I have become hollow within.”I said, “Don’t be worried, by the morning you will be solid again; just have a good sleep.”But he could not sleep the whole night, tossing and turning, and he said, “Can you hear the noises even from here?”I said, “I can hear them, but I know those ghosts are very friendly people and I have been here many times. You are unnecessarily getting worried.”He said, “Friendly? Ghosts – and friendly! Only you can sleep here – I am going. I will sleep in the railway station, and in the morning I will find some other house, because even in this house I can hear that sound. I can neither study, nor can I take the examination if these sounds continue.”And actually that’s what happened. He went in the middle of the night to the railway station. I don’t know what he did, where he slept in the railway station, but in the morning he was not in the examination hall. I made inquiries; I phoned his family, and they said, “Yes, he has come back by the night train. He says, ‘There are so many ghosts – this year is gone. This year I cannot sit for the examination in that city. Next time I will choose another center, another district place, not that town.’ And he is so afraid…. What really happened?”I said, “Nothing has happened, and when I come I will explain the whole thing. But the year is gone and he is responsible, because he insisted, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’ I said ‘I know their place,’ so I showed him the place.”His family is still angry with me because then he never passed matriculation; he is still a non-matriculate. He tried eleven times, but the fear went so deep in him that at examination time he would start feeling nervous. The whole experience of that night would become alive again; he would start reliving it.After eleven years even the family said, “Don’t unnecessarily harass yourself – forget about it. It is your doing: Why did you insist to that person that there are no ghosts? You know that he is clever enough to arrange something, and he must have managed it. We can’t see how he managed, but he must have done something.”I explained to them that there was nothing managed; that it was just tins, empty tins, which shrink in the night when it gets cold, and they make a noise. And because they are piled on top of each other it seems as if something is going from one to another, passing by, roaming around. But no explanation could help. That shock really went deep into his heart.The fear of death is certainly the greatest fear, and the most destructive of your courage.So I can suggest only one thing. Now you cannot go back to your past death, but you can start doing one thing: Always be ready to move from the known to the unknown, in anything, any experience.It is better, even if the unknown proves worse than the known – that is not the point.Just your change from the known to the unknown, your readiness to move from the known to the unknown, is what matters. It is immensely valuable. And in all kinds of experiences, go on doing that. That will prepare you for death, because when death comes you cannot suddenly decide, “I choose death and leave life.” These decisions are not made suddenly.You have to go inch by inch, preparing, living moment to moment. And as you grow more familiar with the beauty of the unknown you start creating a new quality in you. It is there, it has just never been used. Before death comes, go on moving from the known to the unknown. Always remember that the new is better than the old.They say all that is old is not gold. I say, even if all that is old is gold, forget about it. Choose the new – gold or no gold, it doesn’t matter.What matters is your choice: your choice to learn, your choice to experience, your choice to go into the dark. Slowly slowly your courage will start functioning. And sharpness of intelligence is not something separate from courage, it is almost one organic whole.With fear there is cowardliness and there is bound to be retardedness of the mind, mediocrity. They are one part. They are all together, they support each other. With courage comes sharpness, intelligence, openness, an unprejudiced mind, the capacity to learn – they all come together.Start by a simple exercise, and that is: always remember, whenever there is a choice choose the unknown, the risky, the dangerous, the insecure, and you will not be at a loss.And only then…this time death can become a tremendously revealing experience and can give you the insight into your new birth – not only insight but even a certain choice. With awareness you can choose a certain mother, a certain father. Ordinarily it is all unconscious, just accidental, but a man dying with awareness is born with awareness.You can ask my mother about something – because she happens to be here. For three days after my birth I didn’t take any milk, and they were all worried, concerned. The doctors were concerned: “How is this child going to survive if he simply refuses milk?” But they had no idea of my difficulty, of what difficulty they were creating for me. They were trying to force me in every possible way. And there was no way I could explain to them, or that they could find out by themselves.In my past life, before I died, I was on a fast. I wanted to complete a twenty-one day fast, but I was murdered three days before my fast was complete. Those three days remained in my awareness even in this birth: I had to complete my fast. I am really stubborn; otherwise, people don’t carry things from one life to another life. Once a chapter is closed, it is closed.For three days they could not manage to put anything in my mouth; I simply rejected it. But after three days I was perfectly okay and they were all surprised: “Why was he refusing for three days? There was no sickness, no problem, and now, after three days, he is perfectly normal.” It remained a mystery to them. But I don’t want to talk about these things to you because they will all be hypothetical, and there is no way for me to prove them scientifically. And I don’t want to give you any beliefs, so I go on cutting away all that may create a belief system in your mind.You love me, you trust me, so whatever I say you may trust it. But I insist again and again that anything that is not based on your experience, accept it only hypothetically. Don’t make it your belief. If sometimes I give an example, that is sheer necessity. The questioner has asked, “How did you manage to be so courageous and sharp in your childhood?”I did not do anything, I simply continued what I was doing in my past life. And that’s why in my childhood I was thought to be crazy, eccentric – because I would not give any explanation of why I wanted to do something. I would simply say, “I want to do it. There are reasons for me why I am doing it, but I cannot give you those reasons because you cannot understand.”My father would say, “I cannot understand and you can?”I said, “Yes, it is something that belongs to my inner experience. It has nothing to do with your age, your being my father. You, of course, can understand much more than I can understand, but this is something which is inside me; only I can approach there, you cannot.”And he would simply say, “You are impossible.”I said, “If everybody accepted this it would be a great relief. Just accept me as impossible so I am no longer a problem for you and I don’t have to trouble explaining all kinds of things. I am going to do whatever I am going to do. There is no way to change it. For me it is absolute. It is not a question of your giving me permission or not.”So this was my usual practice: whatever I wanted to do, I would do. For example, in my town, in those days before India was divided…. The creation of Pakistan has destroyed many things in India. All the snake charmers were Mohammedan; they all moved to Pakistan. India is almost empty of snake charmers; otherwise every day Indian roads were simply a joy. On one corner you would see a magician doing such tremendous tricks that you would completely forget that Jesus was a man of miracles. People on the streets were doing things just to collect perhaps one rupee at the most after the whole show – and that was a lot. And some other place somebody is making the snakes dance around him with his special kind of flute.I was interested in snakes; I watched many snake charmers. I was looking for somebody who could have a little compassion on a child. I followed one old man. Snake charmers used to stay outside the town on the other shore of the river. The municipal committee did not allow them to stay on this side because of their snakes. They had to stay on the other side of the river so even if snakes wanted to come to this side they couldn’t.I followed him. Many times he looked back, and when we were alone, he said, “My son, why are you coming behind me?”I said, “I have been looking for you for years.”“For me?” he said.I said, “Yes, because I wanted to know: what is the art catching snakes?” But he said, “Why did you wait for me? There are so many snake charmers coming and going.”I said, “I wanted somebody who can have compassion on me. I cannot give you money because I cannot tell my parents that I need money to learn snake-charming. That will be the end of it.”He said, “That’s true. But have you got their permission?”I said, “If I get their permission I get their permission only when I don’t want to do something. Whenever I want to do something I do it first, then whatsoever happens, happens. When I have done it, they ask, ‘Why didn’t you ask?’ And my answer is always, ‘Simply because I wanted to do it, and you were not going to permit me. Now you make it difficult for me. If you give me a blank permission there is no problem, or if you promise me that even if I ask you such a thing you are going to say yes, I will ask.’ But snake-charming? I think,” I told that old man, “they are not going to permit me. But there is no need, you just tell me the trick.” And I persuaded him.He was a very loving man; he said, “Okay. One day I was also a child, and one day I also wanted to learn and had asked somebody, and so many people refused. No, I cannot refuse you.”And he told me small tricks. He said, “First you start catching water snakes because water snakes don’t have poison; They look absolutely like other snakes but they are without poison. So,” he said, “practice with water snakes.”“Water snakes?” I said. “I know many of them because all around the river I am familiar with their places. How do I catch them?”He said, “The method is very simple. You have just to hold their mouth tight so they can’t bring their tongue out. So one thing: so that they don’t bring their tongue out, you hold their mouth very tight. And the second thing: with the other hand, hold their tail, because if you leave the other end, they will immediately wind themselves up around your hand, and they wind themselves so tight that your hand opens. And once their tongue is out then you cannot be saved. But with water snakes there is no problem, even if their tongue is out; that’s why, for practice, you start with water snakes.“First, hold their mouth, keep it tightly closed catch hold of their tail and stretch them as much as you can, so that even if sometimes you forget or you lose your grip…. Stretch them as much as you can so that they cannot just circle around your arm and press it so much that your hand opens. And even if your hand opens and their tongue comes out, hold them with both your hands. Don’t let them turn upward.“The snake has its glands of poison in the top of the mouth, and its method of biting is, first, it bites with its teeth; that is just to make a wound in your body. Then it turns itself upward, so from its gland the poison starts flowing on your wound. He does not bite you really, his teeth are not poisonous. His teeth are just to create a wound so blood is available to pour poison in; then the blood will take the poison around your body. So even if he opens his mouth, don’t be worried. Just don’t let him turn upward – hold him.”I tried it with the river snakes. That was a great experience. They are really quick, it is not so easy. Once I had learned with water snakes, I told the man, and he said, “Now you try with my snakes because they are trained and their poison gland has been removed. But wild, these are really dangerous snakes. You should not start with them; first try with the trained ones. These are all for show business. Their glands have been removed so they cannot do anything; but they can make all the show of biting. And that’s how snake-charmers used to sell medicine.”A small seed of some tree, which is rare and is found only in the Himalayas – it has value because you cannot find it anywhere else – they used to sell that. Their simple method was: they would let their snake bite them in front of you and blood would appear. The snake would turn upward – nothing but saliva was pouring on their blood – and then they would just put that seed, which was a porous seed, on their wound. It sticks onto the wound and sucks the blood and the saliva that the snake has left there; when they take it off, their hand is almost clean, there is nothing. They were selling those seeds – and they were useless, there was nothing in it. With the real snake nothing is going to work, but those snakes were just show business.So he told me, “This is our business. We have nothing to do with real snakes. Don’t bother with real snakes, you can play with my snakes. But once you learn, then if a chance arises you can catch hold of any snake.”And when my parents came to know…they had to come to know because that was the whole thing that I was learning. I brought a long water snake into the class. That was the class the principal himself used to take. He was always talking of courage, and this and that. And when I came in with the snake hanging over my back and holding his mouth and went just close to his desk, he stood on his chair. He said, “Keep away! Keep away! Don’t come close.”I said, “This is nothing, this is just a poisonous snake. You are not a cowardly man, come down.”He said, “Get out of the room! I want nothing to do with you. And I promise I will not punish you – just get out. I will never raise the question that you brought the snake into the class. Just get out!”But I remained there, and I said, “What about my father? You have to promise before thirty students that I never came into this class with a snake. Say it loudly.”And the snake was so big that he had to say loudly, “I promise that you never came into this class with any snake.”I said, “That’s okay. I am going.”But he became so freaked out…”This is now too much. If this boy starts doing this kind of thing, he can bring a lion or something. How did he manage?” He rushed to my father, and he told him. He said, “Don’t say that I have told you because he has taken my promise before thirty boys who are always in his favor because if they are not he will create trouble for them. So the whole class as a solid unity is always behind him. Whatsoever he does doesn’t matter – they are in his favor. So they will say he never came with any snake.”I came home. My father said, “Anything happen today?”I said, “Every day something or other happens. Life is such a joy.”He said, “It may be for you but for others you are a nuisance. I am thinking of sending you to a boarding school.” I said, “That’s a great idea. Boarding school, you mean?”He said, “You have some ideas about boarding school?”I said, “It would be perfectly good because you will not be there, the family will not be there. Nobody to bother me – and all that freedom…. And I will continue to do the same things that I do. I know what is troubling you. Badri Prasad Gupta was here?” I smelled around and said, “I can smell him – he stinks!”My father said, “Just get lost! I don’t want to talk with you because from the very beginning you are prepared.”I said, “Yes, and if you want to see the snake it is in the bag.” He escaped from me, ahead of me – he was out of the room!But there was no training as such; I was just enjoying everything. It was such a joy to learn to catch snakes. I followed the magicians to learn their small tricks, anything that I came across. And I learned much more outside the school walls, colleges and university than in the university, colleges and schools themselves.So I feel really sad and sorry for all those people who think all learning is confined to those walls. The real learning is outside. What is inside the walls of schools, colleges, universities is all borrowed, bogus, with none of the authenticity of your own experience, or exploration.Courage will come to you.Just start with a simple formula:Never miss the unknown.Always choose the unknown and go headlong. Even if you suffer, it is worth it – it always pays. You always come out of it more grown up, more mature, more intelligent.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the difference between accepting myself and loving myself?There is great difference between the two. Accepting yourself is a much lower state of consciousness – better, of course, than rejecting yourself. It is a medicine; the disease is rejection. And anything medicinal has no permanent or ultimate value; its value is only in curing the disease. Once the disease is cured the medicine has to be thrown away.The idea of accepting yourself arose because of all the religions for centuries teaching you not to accept yourself. They have created a certain conditioning in the mind which condemns you. It is the priest, the state, which have managed, by continuous repetition, to convince you that a few things are ugly in you: you have to hide them, repress them. And they also give you the idea what is good – which is not in you, which you have to learn and practice.This point has to be noted: the bad is in you, born in you, part of your nature – obviously it has to be repressed, condemned, controlled, kept in order. The best thing is to destroy it completely. If it is not possible for you to destroy it, then at least don’t leave it uncontrolled; keep it in control. And the society respects the man most who has destroyed that bad part completely, burned it out.Such people are called saints, sages, mahatmas.Lower than them are those people who have not been able to destroy it completely, but have been successful in controlling the bad part. It is within boundaries. They have created a cage for it – it can go on roaming inside it, roaring inside it. It is troublesome to them but it brings tremendous respectability outside in the world.These are the respectable citizens.The most condemned are those who allow freedom to their natural parts which religions think are bad they go with them. These people are condemned as criminals by the law. And if they are not caught by the law then religions have provided a God who is all-observing for twenty-four hours a day.He never sleeps for a single moment, never takes his eyes off you as if you are the only person in this whole infinite universe – and goes on noting in detail what you are doing; not only that, but what you are thinking, dreaming, fantasizing. And all this has to be accounted for one day; on the day of judgment, you will have to answer for it.So those who are caught by the law, the law will punish, and those who are somehow not caught by law – and of course the law cannot catch you if you are thinking a bad thought, fantasizing something. Even if you are fantasizing a murder, it is not illegal, it is not a crime; the law cannot punish you. The law can punish you only when your thought becomes an action.But religions were not satisfied only with that, they want to punish your thoughts too; so, God will punish you…. And they have created their hell for those who allow their unacceptable parts to go according to nature.In short, the natural being in you is not acceptable in its totality to these religions. Many fragments of it are absolutely condemned. A few fragments of it can be used, but in moderation, with control. And the real good has to be learned. You don’t bring it from nature: it has to be earned, deserved.Now, if for millions of years this kind of conditioning goes on and on, naturally you start having a certain conscience – which is not consciousness.Conscience is a social by-product.Consciousness is your ultimate nature.For consciousness there is nothing wrong in you. Everything that nature has provided you can be used for the growth of consciousness. It is raw material.Have you seen when a building is being constructed and all the raw material is there? You cannot conceive that a beautiful building will come out of it, that a Taj Mahal will be created out of this mess. Your immediate idea will be, “What is this mess all about? Clean ground is far better.” But you don’t know that all that is cluttering the ground can become part of an immensely beautiful building. It just needs the right architect, the right builders.There is a Sufi school whose name is simply “The Builders.” They have chosen the name “The Builders” because of this fact that man comes from nature as raw material. Nature gives you everything that you need to become a god; but it gives you freedom. It does not impose it on you, because if you are made a god, manufactured a god, your godliness will be worthless. Then you are assembled in a factory.No, so much freedom is given to you that from the same raw material you can create a devil, you can create a god; you can create a hell for yourself, you can create a heaven. You can fall to the lowest and you can rise to the highest. But nothing is unnatural, neither the highest nor the lowest. Both are your possibilities, and you are free to choose.But religions have been telling an absolute lie.They have been saying that you are born in sin, that your nature is basically leading you toward more and more sin. You have to fight with nature, so everything natural becomes in some way evil, and everything that you can do against nature becomes good. That is their definition.Just look at all the religions and their definitions of good and bad. They may differ about certain things – whether they are good or not – but as far as their fundamentals are concerned, there is no difference.This is the basic fundamental: that all that has a natural pull on you is sick. You have to get out of the grip of nature – nature is evil and you have to become something supernatural. Then this question of rejection naturally arises. Much has to be rejected in you; almost everything that is natural has to be rejected in you.It means, in other words, life has to be denied, love has to be destroyed, laughter has to be crippled. You have to be made almost a robot, functioning according to principles given by your pseudo-religious prophets, messiahs.For example, Jesus says, “Love your enemy.” He himself cannot love, neither can his God do that. It is such a simple thing: if God loves his enemies then the sinners should be sent to paradise, not to hell. And the whole bogus theology falls with a single hit, nothing much is needed. If God loves his enemies, then what about the devil? The devil is God’s archenemy – he should make him a boyfriend, a girlfriend, anything, but he should love him.And what are people doing in hell if God loves his enemies? If Jesus loves his enemies then, on the day of judgment, first he should choose his enemies to enter paradise. Christians should be the last because they are not his enemies; his love first should go to those who are against Christians. But that is not the case.He promises his disciples that, “At the last judgment day, I will be there to sort out my people, my sheep.” And it is significant that he calls them sheep. Whether he was a shepherd or not is questionable, but those people were certainly sheep – and they still are. In fact, except sheep, who needs the shepherd? – not man.Jesus reduced people to sheep by forcing them to believe, to have faith – not to argue, not to doubt, not to question. You are destroying man’s humanity, and by and by he becomes a vegetable. Of course vegetables are great believers. They never argue, they never doubt; even if you cut them they don’t distrust you. You go on butchering them, they go on believing in you – and that’s what Jesus wants from people.Jesus cannot love his enemies. And he knows perfectly well that his father who is in heaven is also of the same mind, because when he was crucified…. His last prayer has never been looked at from this angle. It has been thought beautiful; from one angle it looks beautiful, but before you judge anything you should move around it and see it from all angles.Jesus says, “Forgive these people for they know not what they are doing.” He is asking his father to forgive these people who are crucifying him “because they know not what they are doing.” Now, two things are certain: Firstly, he is not certain whether his father is going to forgive them or not; otherwise, what is the point of the prayer?If he loves his enemies, he will simply give embraces and kisses to these people who crucified his son. There is no question of forgiving them; otherwise you are depriving them of the kisses of God and the embraces of God and the love of God. If he forgives them, they are no longer enemies; they have not done anything wrong so the question of loving them does not arise. And Jesus praying certainly shows that he is not certain that God is going to forgive them. He is suspicious; otherwise prayer is irrelevant, absurd.Secondly, even though praying for them, that they should be forgiven, he goes on being arrogant – for which he is being crucified. And he is not leaving that point at all. In the end he adds his insistence, “Forgive them….” Why? “…because they know not what they are doing.” They are ignorant and he knows. This idea, that they are all ignorant, is simply egoistic.And you don’t have any proof of what you have been telling them. They are simply asking for the proof, and this is one of the ways of finding out whether you are the messiah or not: the messiah should be crucified and there will be a resurrection. So these poor fellows are simply following religious scriptures. They know exactly what they are doing. They are not ignorant, they are really much too knowledgeable. Ignorant people are innocent; ignorant people don’t crucify anybody.These are knowledgeable rabbis, the high priests of the Jewish temple. These are very knowledgeable people, far more knowledgeable than Jesus is. And this is the whole conflict, that they think this man is simply a crackpot – with no arguments, with no logic, with no rationality, with no support of the scriptures – who goes on proclaiming that he is the only begotten son of God. Now, anybody can say that. There is no way to disprove it.I have heard a story…. A man, very ugly, dirty, poor, uneducated, fell in love with a very beautiful girl of the city – rich, cultured. And he was in difficulty, how to get this girl? Even to meet her was difficult. The story belongs to India, it can happen only in India. One Gandhian, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, suggested a simple method: do what Gandhi did.The man said, “What am I supposed to do?”The Gandhian said, “You simply go with your bed, spread the bed before the palace of that rich man and go on a fast. Say that unless you are married to the girl you are not going to break your fast – a fast unto death. And I will collect people; don’t be worried.”The idea was appealing, and soon the man was lying there with signboards all around and flags and decked, “With our love….” “Fast unto death for love.” Nobody had ever heard of such a great lover before – and so religious too; not threatening anybody, simply killing himself. Now, you cannot take action against any person…and particularly in India. All the Gandhians were in support because of course it is a non-violent method. The police cannot interfere, the government cannot interfere.The father was in trouble, thinking, “This is something strange. If he dies I am condemned for my whole life. People will say, ‘You killed that man.’ The murder is on my head. And I cannot let this man get married to my daughter. He has no merit, no qualification he is a beggar, a criminal.”Two or three days passed and it was in all the newspapers with big photos of the man saying that he was dying for love, and condemning the rich man.Finally, the old man went to an old Gandhian to ask, “You suggest something, because I have inquired of all my friends and they say, ‘Nothing can be done against it; even the British government had to leave because of Gandhian fasts. And who are you? – you will have to give in, otherwise that man will die on your floor and you are condemned forever. And nobody is going to marry your daughter either, remember, because a murder is on you, on your daughter: you killed a poor man.”‘So finally he thought it was better to ask some Gandhian, an old Gandhian. The Gandhian said, “It is very simple – just use a Gandhian technique against a Gandhian technique. I know a prostitute uglier than that man, very old, just on the verge of death, suffering from leprosy. Just for a little money she will be ready….”The rich man could not understand; he asked, “What do you mean? What will that prostitute do?”He said, “She will do everything. We have to give some money to her and tonight she will also come with her bed, lie down by the side of the man and say, ‘I will die if you don’t marry me.’ And by the morning the man will be gone – don’t be worried. Just seeing that woman will be enough! He will never come back to your house.”And that’s what happened. The man did not even wait for the morning; the moment he saw the woman coming he asked, “What is the matter? What are you doing here?”She said, “I am going to marry you, otherwise I am going to do a fast unto death, here, just by your side. Either marry me or I will die.”The man looked here and there, but it was silent and in the middle of the night there is nobody. He rolled up his bed and not only escaped from that place, he escaped from the town for a few days, because who knows, that woman might find him and catch hold of him…. He himself had started the Gandhian game; now he was caught in it.It is a very cunning device invented by all the religions…. They had to invent it because without it there was no way to catch hold of humanity. And certainly, they have been successful. For millions of years they have been sitting on your head. They have reduced all humanity to slavery, in every possible way.What they have done is this: what is natural to you they have condemned some part of it. Different religions have chosen different parts – that doesn’t matter. All that matters is, it has to be natural.Natural means whatever you do you cannot destroy it. Whatever you do there is no way to get rid of it; at the most you can repress it, hide it so deep within yourself that nobody may be able to detect. But you will know always…. The priest, of course, knows; and the priest has ways of finding out.First, it is absolutely there; there is no question about it, because it is against nature to drop it. The priest knows it is there, you know it is there. You may even forget it is there but the priest will not allow you to forget that. He will go on reminding you in every sermon, every scripture, every day in every possible way, that your animal – they call your natural being the animal, the devil – is within you, it is there. And the more sophisticated religions even make you confess it – for example, Catholicism.You have to go to confess to the priest what sin you have committed, what sin you have been thinking to commit, what your fantasies are, what your dreams are. The pope has called it also a sin to confess directly to God. The world seems to be absolutely idiotic, dumb: this Polack goes on saying things and nobody even raises a question. Confessing to God directly is a sin? Why? Is not God your father also? No, the reason is, if you start confessing to God directly, what about the priest?The whole key to the Catholic enslavement of its followers is in the hands of the priest. He knows all the dark corners of everybody in the congregation. You cannot leave the congregation – he may expose you. He is dangerous in a way because you have confessed your secret to him, and you have confessed those things which you have been hiding from everybody else. Your whole respectability he can throw within a second; you will be nowhere. Right now you are at the height of respectability, but before the priest…he knows where you are, exactly.Now, that is a great invention of Catholics – making you confess. But it makes no difference: all other religions, even without confession, know you…because what they have been asking of you is impossible. They have been telling you that two plus two is five, and they know it cannot be. Two plus two is always four.And you have agreed with them that two plus two is five; now you are caught. If you say two plus two is four you are falling into your animal-hood; two plus two has to be five. And you know that that is wrong, but the wrong is respected. The right is not right; the natural is not acceptable.It is because of this that psychoanalysis became such a tremendously successful phenomenon. It took over the whole world. Never has a single man’s idea been so significant that in his own lifetime it became a worldwide revolution. What was his secret? There was no secret. Simply seeing what Christians, Jews and other religions have been doing to people…. They have all repressed your sexuality; on that point they all agree, because sex is the most significant force in you.Sex is your life-force.It is from this energy that you come.It is this energy that keeps you running, alive.Call it elan vital, call it life-force – because the word sex has become so condemned by the priests that even to use it is to feel as if you are doing something wrong. Use “life-force” and you can see the difference. With the word life-force you don’t feel at all guilty. With sex immediately something inside you starts pinching – that is your conscience. The priest has managed to create a small mechanism in you; it starts pinching you, telling you that something is wrong.Sigmund Freud is a by-product of the religions. If there had been none of these religions, there would have been no possibility of any psychoanalysis, because what would there be to analyze? First one needs a repressive system, then a Sigmund Freud is needed, an Adler is needed, a Jung is needed and they will go on coming.While religions go on suppressing, more and more sophisticated methods of psychoanalysis and treatment will be coming. It is a growing profession. But they should remember this, and I think they have understood the point; within this half century psychoanalysts have understood the point. Now they are functioning in cooperation with religions as deprogrammers…very strange.A Christian father may take his son to the deprogrammer because the son is moving away from Christianity to some new movement, to some new idea, some new ideology; and the psychoanalyst helps the father. Of course he charges – that is his business – and he deprograms the son. And things can be vice versa too.Just a few days ago an old man was here, perhaps he is sixty-five. Now his children are thinking to take him to the deprogrammer because he has been coming here for one year continually, and joining in therapies and meditations, and now he is thinking of taking sannyas. Now a crucial moment has come – the family is afraid. He is the head of the family – not only the head of the family, he is the chairman of the corporation, the family’s business, which is tremendously large; one thousand million dollars per year he earns.Of course millions of dollars he gives to charity, to Christians, so that religion is involved. They are afraid if he becomes a sannyasin, those millions will not go to Christianity. The children are afraid because it is all their inheritance but it is in his power. The psychiatrist is there, ready to help bring him back to the Christian fold.Psychiatrists have understood this perfectly well, that the whole of their religion and their profession are together, they cannot be separated. If psychoanalysis succeeds, it will commit suicide; hence, psychoanalysis goes on and on, it never succeeds. It is not meant to succeed, because if a man is successfully psychoanalyzed he will be deprogrammed completely; then there is nothing to be done with him. He is completely free.He will do things…. Now he need not have anybody else to guide him, to show him the way, to lead him to God. In his utter freedom he will know that he is part of this eternal existence and there is nobody to lead him. His nature is enough. His intuition is enough. Now he is clean enough to have his intuition function. No, psychoanalysis will not ever be complete.And in the beginning of psychoanalysis the approach appeared as if it was against religion. It is not. They are conspirators in the same game. First the priest and the politician were two shareholders in the conspiracy. Now, a third shareholder has entered – the psychotherapist, the psychoanalyst, the psychologist; and they have all kinds of varieties. They have all joined in the conspiracy.Just the other day I heard the news that four priests in South America – in one small country which has gone into the hands of the leftist revolutionaries, four priests have been told that they are no longer priests because they have accepted government posts. One is an education minister, three others are in higher posts. Now the pope cannot tolerate this – in a leftist government?America has been trying to sabotage that government. You can see how conspirators, without even meeting each other, go on functioning in synchronicity. America is trying to sabotage that country; the pope is trying to sabotage it from his side. Those four priests – what wrong have they committed? I don’t think there is any problem.If the priest becomes an education minister the pope should be happy that now the priest will have enough power over education: he may be able to educate people in religion. He should be happy, he should welcome it. But no, the priest is expelled from the priesthood. The reason given is that no priest is allowed to have a governmental post.I was surprised. Then what about the pope himself? – because he is the head of the government in the Vatican. The Vatican is a country, an independent country – not very big, just eight square miles, but it is an independent country; and the pope is the head of the state and of the church, both.This man should be expelled immediately. But who will expel him? – that is the question. Only I can expel him, but it will not be followed. I declare him expelled, he is no longer a pope at all – because if just by becoming an education minister in a small country somebody loses his priesthood, then your becoming the head of the whole government….And the Vatican may be small but it has immense political power around the world, because six hundred million Catholics…. So the land may be small – that does not matter – but six hundred million Catholics around the world, that is his real state. It is all over the world, spread all over the world. But I wonder whether he himself thought about it, what he is doing. It can backfire. But it won’t backfire because nobody who has power is going to say anything against it; they will all be happy.By the way these priests were thrown out, the pope has shown his attitude – that he is against the leftist government, that Catholics should get out of this movement, that they should be against the government, not for the government. He has shown, “I am for America,” without saying anything.In the Vatican they have created an academy of sciences. The purpose is not science; they will exploit it. Already twenty-six Nobel prize-winners are members of the academy. It has already become respectable. Who is going to be welcomed in the academy? Sixty other scientists around the world have joined the academy. Four times it will be meeting in the year, discussing scientific progress and the problems that scientific progress creates.But the real reason is that they will supply to that pope all the necessary information, the latest in all fields of science, so that he can decide what is right and what is wrong; so he can decide whether science should move in this direction and should not move in that direction. Particularly his interest is in genetic engineering.Now, that is going to happen sooner or later, and it has to be done. We are capable now of engineering the human child in thousands of ways. We can give him a lifelong healthy body, from the very beginning prepared to resist all kinds of sicknesses. We can arrange how long we would like him to live, how long we would like him to be young; he can be young to the very last breath.There is no need for old age. Old age simply can be wiped out, just as sickness can be wiped out. Man can grow up to youth, and then he can remain young for a hundred years, two hundred years; three hundred years is very easily possible. Right now it can be done, but it is not being done, because nobody is interested in life. All governments are interested in death.All governments are putting seventy-five percent of their budget into arms. Even the poor countries are in the same competition: seventy-five percent of the budget of their country. People are dying, they don’t have enough to eat – and they are creating nuclear bombs and atomic bombs.Nobody is interested in life; otherwise all facts and research are available to show that man can at least live three hundred years. In fact scientists say, “We don’t see any reason why man should have to die, because if he can manage for seventy years on an automatic renewal system, all that is needed is that his genes be reprogrammed.” That is genetic engineering.If your father lived to seventy, and your grandfather lived up to seventy, you can be quite certain that you cannot live more than that. Maybe you will live a year or two more because you have better medical facilities, but not much more because they have given you genes which have a program. Those are the same genes that your father had, your grandfather had, your mother had, your grandmother had. At the most you can take the average of the combination of all those people’s genes, and that will be nearabout your life span.But the genes can be reprogrammed; it is only a question of putting the right idea in their minds. Those genes have a certain small mind, and that mind carries the idea of seventy years of age. If you can just put one zero more it becomes seven hundred, and those poor genes will not in any way object to adding one zero more. It is no problem for them, not a burden. And genetic engineering is now capable of this; in animals it has succeeded, so there is no reason…because the process is the same whether in animals or man.Now the pope is worried about that. And that is one of the reasons for creating the academy, so that genetic engineering be prohibited, or the pope decides whether it is moral or immoral. And certainly I can say that he will decide it is immoral, because God gives you seventy years – it is a God-given thing – and you try to improve upon God and make man seven hundred years old?Certainly it will have implications, tremendous implications, because a man who is going to live seven hundred years will remain young at least up to five hundred years. That will be the equivalent of fifty – up to five hundred years he will remain interested in women!You will have to change that phrase “dirty old man”; there will be no dirty old men. Up to five hundred years a man will be interested in women the women will be interested in men, and they will be capable of making love.Of course the pope is worried. That’s what he has been trying to cut down as much as possible – and these fools, genetic engineers, they are trying to prolong it. Just seventy years is enough for eternal hell. Five hundred years of youth – they will have to create new hells for you. The old hell will not hold that much population; such great old sinners will come in that the former old ones will look childish and be told “Just get out of here!”It is strange that the academy that the pope has created is not interested in any real problem of life, but is interested only in how to cut man’s life – not to solve any problems. But this is the logical end of their whole history. Your nature has to be destroyed, crippled repressed. That creates the greatest religious thing. guilt. And any man who is guilty cannot get out of the prison of the religions.He may change from one prison to another; he may become a Christian from a Hindu, or a Buddhist from a Christian. That doesn’t matter; it is simply choosing your prison. That much you are allowed, because these prisons are without walls; you can simply move from one prison into another prison. But you will remain imprisoned because every religion depends on guilt.That’s why I say my religion is the first authentic religion; it has no idea of guilt at all.I don’t want you to feel guilty about anything, because nature has given to you out of its bounty. It is a gift to be received with joy, whatever it is. And a gift has not to be thrown out, repressed. Enjoy it.So the first thing is accepting yourself – which is not very great; but seeing the situation in which humanity is, still it is a great revolution: accepting yourself.But I don’t like the word accept, because that means somehow “What to do? This is the way I am; I accept it.” No, with my religion just accepting yourself is not enough.Loving yourself, that is totally different.Then you are feeling blessed.Whatever nature has given – and we are nature, extensions, parts of it – we have to live it with a song, with a dance, with no question of guilt. That idea of accepting yourself has arisen because of guilt. Guilt says, “Don’t accept yourself; reject, go on rejecting. The more you reject yourself, the greater a saint you are.”If you look into the history of religions you will find how many kinds of perversions have arisen out of this rejecting.In Soviet Russia before the revolution there was a Christian cult, very prominent, which used to cut off their genitals. Every year at Christmas time – of course, that is the holiest time – these people would gather in great crowds around the churches and cut their genitals off and pile them up. Now women were at a loss, but not for long; soon they discovered they could cut off their breasts…and they started cutting off their breasts. It was such a bloody, idiotic affair, but these people were respected, worshipped almost like sages – they had done a great thing.But even if you cut off your genitals that doesn’t mean that fantasies about sex will disappear or sex will disappear. It is in the very cells of your body, every fiber of your body. But educated people, even in the beginning of this century, were doing this. It was only because of the revolution that it became a crime. It was very difficult to stop them even after the revolution because it was their religious practice. It continued even after the revolution, here and there; in secret they would gather and do it.More or less all the religions have been doing it in different ways. Jainism gives its monks so little food that there is no possibility that they might be able to generate any sexual energy. The food is just enough for them to breathe – only that much energy…Jaina monks are just skeletons. But the surprising thing is, sexual fantasy does not leave. The body has almost gone, there are only bones: the food is not enough for the most essential things in the body, so of actual sex there is no question.First your life has to be saved. Sex is the life of your children, of your future generations; but first your life has to be saved; so when food goes into you it has priorities. First, it has to save your brain; otherwise, even if you are alive you will not be of any use, you will be worse than dead.So the first priority is for the brain. But you will see in the Jaina monks, their brains start disappearing. You can see from their face no sign of any intelligence. They have not done a single creative act in five thousand years. So many people doing nothing – what happened to their brains? Those very delicate tissues died because the food was not available. Right proteins were not available, right vitamins were not available – those tissues slowly slowly died.Then the heart has to be looked after. Then there are other functions in the body. Only when your whole body is looked after well do you accumulate sexual energy, because sexual energy is not in any way concerned with your life, it is concerned with lives to come. It is concerned with future generations, it can wait. But if you die there is no question of waiting; first you have to be preserved.So Jainism has cut the food of the Jaina monk in such a way that he has simply destroyed his whole life energy, the whole system. He lives – that means he breathes – and he dies. He never experiences any joy, he cannot even smile. There is nothing left in his life to smile or laugh about.All the religions in subtle ways – for example, Catholics have monasteries where only monks live, no woman can enter. There are nunneries where only nuns live, no man can enter. And when they say no man can enter or no woman can enter…. I have inquired, “There must be some age limit – for example, a six-year-old boy, he is a man, can he enter where the nuns live? Or a six-year-old girl, can she enter where only monks live?”They said, “What are you saying? Scriptures say even a six-month-old girl “a six-month-old girl! “cannot enter the monastery.” And for one thousand years, in one monastery, Athos, no woman, not even a six-month-old girl, has entered. Now, they have cut out sex in a different way – but they have created a thousand and one perversions.Homosexuality is one of the by-products of religions.Now when I say it, all the religions will feel offended; let them be! Homosexuality is a by-product of religions – I cannot deny the truth – because you forced monks to live separately, nuns to live separately, you encouraged it.Wherever only men are living, sooner or later homosexuality is going to happen. In army camps, in religious monasteries, in boys’ hostels, in girls’ hostels, in nunneries – wherever a single sex is living, an intelligent human mind will find some way to express its sexual energy; it is bound to find a way into homosexuality.All religions condemn homosexuality.And they are the producers of it.They are playing really a very criminal game with humanity. On the one hand they are the causes of all perversions; on the other hand they condemn you because you are perverted.My whole effort here is to make you aware that the people who cause perversions are not the people who are going to help you out of them. They are living respectable lives – rabbis, sages, popes, bishops, cardinals – on your guilt.Let the guilt disappear from humanity and you will see all the religions disappearing so quickly…. It is just as when the early morning sun rises, and you can see that in the cool night, drops of water have accumulated on the petals of roses, on the leaves of trees. They are there, but as the sun rises they start evaporating; just within a few minutes they are gone.Once guilt is dropped religions will simply evaporate; they cannot remain on the earth even a single moment more. It is guilt that keeps giving them food, sustenance; hence, the idea of accepting yourself arose. It is a humanitarian idea. It has come from those people who have been thinking, “How has man become unnecessarily miserable? He has made himself miserable just by fighting against himself.” They created the idea of accepting yourself. It was good for its time, but it is not enough.It is the minimum that you can do. But when you can do the maximum, why stop at the minimum? When you can dance to abandon, then why go on just moving your body a little, as if under compulsion, ashamed: “What am I doing?” Accepting yourself is just like that: smiling, and yet still feeling, “What am I doing?…”Something is negative in “accepting” yourself. The very word, acceptance, means there has been rejection before, a denial, and now you are trying to cover that denial, that rejection, with acceptance. No, I don’t want this kind of idea to be implanted in you.My whole vision is of a human being, totally alive, intensely alive, enjoying everything that life makes available, and enjoying it with grace, with gratitude toward existence.And that’s what loving yourself means.It means that you have thrown all the garbage of religious rejection, repression. You have dropped all the ideals that they have given to you; you are now standing on your own as if you are Adam and Eve. No priest has been there before, no religion has been there before; you are uncorrupted, unspoiled, clean.Start like Adam and Eve – just think of the idea!Why bother about the past? Forget about it. You are the first man.Start living as if you don’t know how to live. Nobody is there to teach you, no guidelines exist. No books exist which say how to do this, how to do that. You are just left alone on an island. Everything is available: Intelligence is within you, instinct is within you, intellect is within you, intuition is within you. Now start moving.Yes, perhaps you may commit a few mistakes – there is no wrong in it, that’s how one learns. Perhaps a few times you may fall – nothing to be worried about. You can get up again; and next time you will be walking more carefully, more alert, so you have gained something out of that fall. Out of each mistake, each error, you are constantly gaining something.Errors are valuable. Mistakes are immensely necessary. If you are somehow protected from committing mistakes and errors, you will never grow, you will never learn a thing, you will never mature.So behave as if you are the first here. The whole world is available to you to explore. And in exploring it you will be surprised that simultaneously your inner world is being explored too, because as you explore the outer world your insight becomes deeper, your intelligence becomes sharper, your awareness becomes keener. And a perfectly fulfilled man is one who explores both the outer and the inner, and who, at the moment of death, can have a smile on his face: he lived totally, he is happy that he lived totally, he burned his life’s candle from both ends together.When you can burn your candle from both ends together, why be miserly and burn just one end? When you can enjoy double the light and two flames together, enjoy it – because enjoyment is not simply enjoyment. Every joy is growth and brings you closer to blissfulness, to ecstasy.And unless you have attained to a state of ecstasy where you can say, “I have arrived, I am fulfilled…. The purpose of existence in me is completed. If now death comes, it is welcome. Now that is the only thing that I don’t know.” A man who can say, “Death is now the only thing that I don’t know – life I have known,” will be enthusiastic about death, will be eager to meet it, would like to have a plunge into it.And this is the paradox of life:One who is ready to die, never dies.One who is himself ready to jump into death, for him death disappears.Death is only for cowards.Death is only for those who have not lived, who have really remained dead their whole lives.Death is not for the living.The more alive you are, the farther away is death.If you are totally living, there is no death:Death exists not.Then there is only life, life eternal.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Can you talk about responsibility and what it means for us? I feel its importance more and more, but I am also confused about it. Am I avoiding something?The problem of responsibility is one of the most fundamental issues. But before we can go into it, a few words will have to be understood rightly. The so-called religions have prostituted language as much as they could. In fact they are responsible for all kinds of prostitution in the world – they have not left even language alone.Responsibility in itself is a beautiful word of tremendous grace, significance, but in passing through the hands of the religious people it has become almost ugly, disgusting. First, the natural meaning of the word: it comes from response. To understand response you have to understand reaction.Somebody insults you; that is his action. You get irritated, annoyed, angry; that is reaction. You are not acting on your own – the other has pushed your button. He is the master, you are behaving like a slave.Let me tell you one story, but don’t let me drift…because stories are dangerous, intriguing. And when I start a story I have something in my mind, and by the time I end the story I have forgotten why I had started it. So I have to start again from something, where the story ends. But this story is not like that.It is reported that Gautam the Buddha was passing by the side of a village. The village was populated by anti-Buddhists; so much so that although Buddha had just bypassed them – he had not even entered the village for the simple reason that he did not want to create any unnecessary scene there – those idiots were not going to leave him so easily.They came rushing out of the village behind him surrounded him and started abusing him in every possible way, using language which one should not use against another human being – what to say of a man like Gautam the Buddha. The followers of Buddha really became angry. They were ready to hit back, but in front of Gautam the Buddha it was impossible for them to take any action before he said something. And what he said puzzled everybody, shocked everybody.He turned to his disciples and said, “You have disappointed me. Those people are doing their thing. They are angry. They think that I am an enemy of their religion, of their moral values – naturally they are angry. And I am listening to them; they are abusing me, not abusing you. Why are you getting angry? Although you are controlling yourself, that does not make any difference. You have allowed those people to manipulate you. Are you their slaves?”The people of the village were also puzzled. They fell into a strange silence. Buddha said to them, “I am in a hurry to reach the other village, where people are waiting for me. If you are finished, I can go. Or if something else is still there in your mind, when I come back I will inform you ahead. At that time you can complete the whole thing. So am I allowed to go?”Those people said, “We have been abusing you, saying all sorts of dirty things against you; many of them are lies, we know – but in love and war everything is right. But you are so cool and calm, as if we have just welcomed you, greeted you, and you are asking our permission to go ahead.”Buddha said, “Whatever you have done, that is your problem. I do not react, I act. Nobody can force me to do something, nobody can influence me to do something. If I want to do it, nobody can prevent me from doing it. My actions are my actions – they are never reactions.”When you act, that is response; when you react, that is not response. But to act you have to be very conscious so that nobody can push your buttons, so that nobody can manipulate you into a certain kind of action.Everybody is being manipulated.Our whole society depends on manipulating.Parents are manipulating their children, politicians are manipulating the masses, priests are manipulating their congregations.Even children start manipulating their fathers, their mothers…very small children. Even a child six months old starts learning how to manipulate. He knows that if he smiles he is going to get toys, sweets, hugs, kisses. He had no desire to smile, but he has learned a certain exercise of the lips. It is just there on the lips, an exercise – he just opens his lips. It looks as if he is smiling, but if you look into the eyes of the child you will be surprised – there is a politician.A six-month-old child has to become a politician: What kind of society have we created?He manipulates, and you go on rewarding his efforts of manipulation. Slowly slowly, he may forget that his first smile was false and all other smiles are just a continuation of his first smile. Perhaps his last smile when he is dying will be also just a continuity of the I first.He may never discover what a real smile is – a smile that comes from within you for no motivation, not to ask something, not to be rewarded by something. It is not a business deal. You are so joyful inwardly that a smile spreads all over your body.When a real smile is there it is all over the body. You may be able to detect it only on the lips, perhaps in the eyes, but it is all over the body. Every fiber of your being is rejoicing. So it is not a question of being rewarded. It is not a question of desiring something, bribing somebody…. But it is not only the smile, he learns to manipulate with everything else too.Buddha said to his disciples, “You are behaving like slaves to these people.” And he said to the villagers, “You have come a little late. You should have come ten years earlier – then I would have cut off your heads, then you would have known what it means to abuse. Now it is too late! I cannot function like a slave. Now I am a master – you cannot manipulate me.“I would like to ask a question of you. In the last village people brought sweets, fruits, flowers, just to greet me. I told them, ‘We had our breakfast in a village earlier; now take these fruits and these sweets with my blessings. We cannot carry them. We don’t carry food, we don’t carry anything for the future. We will see what happens later on: somebody may offer something. And it has always been happening, so there is no problem in it.’“l ask you: those people had taken the sweets and fruits back – what must they have done with them?”One of the men in the crowd said, “They must have distributed the fruits, the sweets, to their children, to their families, to themselves. They must have enjoyed them.”Buddha said, “That’s where you make me sad. Now what will you do? I reject, I don’t take your abuses. If I can reject fruits and sweets then those people have to take them back. What can you do? I reject your abuse, I don’t take such things. For ten years I have not taken any such things from anybody. So now carry the load back home, distribute it among yourselves, to your children, your friends; whatever you want to do you can do.“But this is your doing; I have nothing to do with it; I simply refuse. And I have the right to refuse anything. You are giving it to me and I am saying, ‘Thank you, I don’t want it.’ You cannot force it on me. I only act out of my own consciousness. You cannot cloud my consciousness with your abuse and make me unconscious, and make me react.”Reaction is unconscious. You do not know exactly that you are being manipulated. You are not aware that you are behaving like a slave, not like a master.Action out of consciousness is response.But the religious people have made such an ugly association with the word responsibility that it has lost all its original quality: They have made you “responsible” for many things. What is right, they have told you; what is wrong, they have told you – they have not left you to decide. No religion leaves you to be really responsible – because to me the word responsible means you are capable of taking decisions. You are mature. You are conscious enough to decide what to do and what not to do.Just now I had this news: Pope the Polack, addressing the youth in Latin America, said, “My dear ones, beware of the devil. The devil will tempt you with drugs, alcohol, and most particularly premarital sex.”Now, who is this devil? I have never met him, he has never tempted me. I don’t think any of you have ever met the devil, or that he has tempted you. Desires come from your own nature, it is not some devil who is tempting you. But it is a strategy of religions to throw the responsibility on an imaginary figure, the devil, so you don’t feel you are being condemned.You are being condemned, but indirectly, not directly. He is saying to you that you are the devil, but he has not the guts even to say that. So he is saying that the devil is something else – a separate agency, whose only function is to tempt people.But it is very strange…millions of years have passed and the devil is not tired, he goes on tempting. And what does he gain out of it? In no scripture have I found what is his reward for all this arduous work for millions of years. Who is paying him? By whom is he employed? That is one thing….And the second: Is not your God omnipotent? That’s what your scriptures say, that he is all-powerful. If he is all-powerful, can’t he do a simple thing? – just stop this devil from tempting people. Rather than going to every person and telling every person, “Don’t be tempted by the devil,” why not finish this one person? Or whatsoever he wants, give it to him. This is something to be decided between God and the devil. What business is it of ours to be unnecessarily trampled between these two?God has not been able in millions of years to convince the devil or to change the devil or to finish the devil. And if God is so powerless before the devil, what about his poor people to whom these representatives of God go on saying, “Don’t be tempted by the devil”? If God is so powerless and impotent before the devil, what can ordinary human beings do?For centuries these people have been telling these lies, and not even once have they themselves tried to be responsible. This is irresponsibility – telling young people, “Be aware, the devil is going to tempt you.”In fact this man has put the temptation already in the minds of these people. They may not have been thinking right then of drugs, alcohol, premarital sex. They had come to listen to the pope, to some spiritual sermon. They will go back home thinking of premarital sex, how to get tempted by the devil, where to find the drug dealers.And alcohol is certainly not a temptation of the devil, because Jesus Christ was drinking alcohol – not only drinking it but making it available to his apostles. Alcohol is not against Christianity. Christianity accepts alcohol perfectly because to deny alcohol would be putting Jesus in jeopardy. Jesus was not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He enjoyed drinking, and he has never said that drinking is a sin – how could he say it.Now the Polack Pope seems to be far more religious than Jesus Christ. And I can certainly visualize that if the only begotten son drinks, the father must be a drunkard, and the Holy Ghost too. These people may be the cause because from where did Jesus learn? Certainly the devil could not tempt him. We know that the devil used to tempt him, and he said to the devil, “Get behind me, I am not to be tempted by you.”But these people seem to be mentally sick. You never come across the devil, and you don’t talk with the devil this way: “Get behind me, and let me go on my way. Don’t prevent me, don’t try to tempt me.” And if you do say these things and somebody hears, he is going to inform the nearest police station that here comes a man who is talking to the devil, and we don’t see any devil anywhere.”Jesus is also contaminated by the rabbis and the priests. It is the same company, just with different labels and different trademarks. But the business is the same, the company is the same, their work is the same – they corrupt human beings, they destroy your innocence.This Polack Pope is worried about premarital sex – it must be on his mind, otherwise how can it come out of it? And that is his most emphatic thing. But what is wrong with premarital sex? It was a problem in the past, but have you entered into the twentieth century or not?It was a problem in the past because sex can lead to pregnancy, to children, and then the problem will arise of who is going to bring up those children? Then who is going to marry that girl who has a child? So there will be complications and difficulties.There need not be – it is just in the mind. In fact most marital difficulties arise because premarital sex is denied. It is as if you are told that until you are twenty-one you cannot swim: Don’t be tempted by the devil; pre-adult swimming is a sin.Okay, one day you become twenty-one but you don’t know how to swim. And thinking that now you are twenty-one you are allowed to swim, you jump into the river. You are jumping to your death because just by becoming twenty-one, there is no necessity, there is no intrinsic law that you will learn how to swim. And when are you going to learn to swim?What actually are these people saying? – they are saying that before entering the river you should learn to swim; if you enter the river you are committing a sin. But where are you going to learn to swim – in your bedroom, on your mattress? For swimming you will need to go to the river.There are aboriginal tribes which are far more human, natural, where premarital sex is supported by the society, encouraged, because that is the time to learn. At fourteen years of age the girl becomes sexually mature; at eighteen years of age the boy becomes sexually mature. And the age is going down: as human societies become more scientific, technological, food is sufficient, health is taken care of, and the age goes on falling.In America girls become mature earlier than in India. And of course in Ethiopia how can you become sexually mature? – you will die long before. In America the age has fallen from fourteen to thirteen to twelve because physically people are more energetic, have better food, a more comfortable life. They become sexually mature early, and they will be able to function also longer than in poor countries.In India people simply cannot believe when they read in the newspapers that some American at the age of ninety is going to get married. The Indians cannot believe it – what is happening to these Americans? By the time an Indian is ninety he has been in the grave almost twenty years; only his ghost can get married, not he. And even if they are in their bodies, a ninety-year-old person marrying a woman who is eighty-seven…just great! Simply unbelievable! And they go on a honeymoon….They are really very practiced, they have done this all their lives many times – getting married, going on a honeymoon – and they have been fortunate enough so that in one life they have lived at least five, six, seven lives.Premarital sex is one of the most important things to be decided by human society.The girl will never be more alive sexually than she is at the age of fourteen, and the boy will never be so sexually alive as he is at the age of eighteen. When nature is at its peak, you prevent them. By the time the boy is thirty you allow him to get married. He is already declining in his sexuality. In his life energy he is already on the decline, he is losing interest. Biologically he is already fourteen or sixteen years late – he has missed the train long ago.It is because of this that so many marital problems arise and so many marital counselors thrive, because both partners have passed their peak hours, and those peak hours were the time when they could have known what orgasm is. Now they read about it in books and they dream of it, fantasize about it – and it doesn’t happen. They are too late. The popes are standing in between.I would like to say to you: don’t be tempted by the popes. These are the real evil ones. They will spoil your whole life. They have spoiled the lives of millions of people.When you are thirty you cannot have that quality, that intensity, that fire that you had when you were eighteen. But that was the time to be celibate, not to be tempted by the devil. Whenever the devil tempts just start praying to God, repeating a mantra: om mani padme hum. That’s what the Tibetans do.Whenever you see a Tibetan quickly doing “Om mani padme hum,” you can be certain he is tempted by the devil, because that mantra is used to make the devil afraid. And the faster you do it, the faster the devil will run away.In India there exists a small book, Hanuman Chalisa. It is a prayer to the monkey god, Hanuman, who is thought to be a celibate and a protector of all those who want to remain celibate. So all people who want to remain celibate are worshippers of Hanuman. And this small book you can memorize very easily.They go on repeating this prayer, so Hanuman goes on protecting their celibacy, goes on protecting them from the devil who is always around, waiting for the chance to get hold of them and tempt them.Nobody is tempting you.It is simply nature, not the devil.And nature is not against you:It is all for you.In a better human society premarital sex should be appreciated just the way it is appreciated in a few aboriginal tribes. The reasoning is very simple. First: nature has prepared you for something, you should not be denied your natural right. If the society is not ready for you to get married, that is society’s problem, not yours. The society should find some way.The aboriginals have found the way. It is very rare that a girl gets pregnant. If a girl gets pregnant the boy and the girl get married. There is no shame about it, there is no scandal about it, there is no condemnation about it. On the contrary, the elders bless the young couple because they have proved that they are vigorous; nature is powerful in them, their biology is more alive than anybody else’s. But it rarely happens. What happens is that every boy and every girl become trained.In aboriginal societies I have visited, it is a rule that after the fourteenth year the girl, and after the eighteenth, the boy, are not allowed to sleep in their houses. They have a common hall in the middle of the village where all the girls and all the boys go and sleep. Now there is no need for them to hide behind the car, in the car porch. This is ugly. This is society forcing people to be thieves, deceivers, liars.And their first experiences of love have happened in such ugly situations – hiding, afraid, guilty, knowing that it is a temptation of the devil. They cannot enjoy it when they are capable of enjoying it to its fullest, and experiencing it at its peak.What I am saying is that if they had experienced it at its peak, its grip over them would have been lost. Then their whole life they would not be looking at Playboy magazines; there would be no need. And they would not be dreaming about sex, having sexual fantasies. They would not be reading third-rate novels and looking at Hollywood movies.All this is possible because they have been denied their birthright.In the aboriginal society they live together in the night. One rule only is told to them: “Don’t be with one girl more than three days, because she is not your property, you are not her property. You have to become acquainted with all the girls, and she has to become acquainted with all the boys before you choose your life partner.”Now, this seems to be absolutely sane. Before choosing a life partner you should be given a chance to be acquainted with all available women, all available men. No astrologer can manage to fit you to each other….One astrologer used to live by my house. And he was very famous. People from far away used to come for his advice about marriage, and they would bring the birth charts of the boy and the girl. His fee was higher than anybody else’s…. And I used to see him being beaten by his wife.One day, walking in the morning, suddenly I came across him. I asked him, “I can understand that you are a great astrologer, but what happened? – you could not manage your birth chart? And your wife beats you!”He said, “Don’t say it to anybody. This is the only problem in my life; otherwise my profession is going so good and I am earning so well. But this woman…I have to keep her out of the view of my customers and clients, because if they see her and her behavior with me they will think, What kind of astrologer is he?”I said, “Then you have to promise me one thing; otherwise I am going to make it well known, I am going to publish it in the newspaper.” I was editing a newspaper, so I said, “I am going to publish it. This is cheating.”He said, “I will do whatever you say.”I said, “Just promise me – whenever I say, ‘Let these two get married,’ you have to manage it.”He said, “I will do it, there is no problem, this is just a game. Whatever you say I will do.”And once in a while it used to happen…. One of my friends was very worried because his girl’s birth chart was not matching with any boy’s, and he was tired of it all.I said, “Don’t be worried. Just bring both charts Ihave the best astrologer.”He said, “But his fee is too high and I am a poor man.”I said, “Don’t be worried, there is no fee. Just give me both charts and I will take them to him and he will manage.”And what he used to do if they were not meeting – he would make another chart which did meet, and throw the old one! He said, “There is no problem in it. Sometimes people come to me and say that these two charts should not be allowed to meet. I take my fee for that. I don’t let them meet; I tear one up, even if they are meeting, because another astrologer could fix them – so I just change the chart.”These people, and they are very religious people…. But this is not the way. You can see all over the world that neither arranged marriage has been successful, nor what you call love – marriage. Both have failed, and the basic reason is that in both cases the couple is inexperienced; the couple has not been given enough freedom to find the right person. There is no other way than through experience to find the right person.Very small things can be disturbing. Somebody’s body smell may be enough to spoil your whole marriage. It is not a great thing but it is enough: everyday…how long can you tolerate it? But to somebody else that smell may be very fitting, may be the smell that he likes.Just let people have experience – and particularly now, when problems of pregnancy are no longer there. Those aboriginals were courageous to do it for thousands of years. And then too there have not been many problems. Once in a while the girl may get pregnant, then they get married; otherwise there is no problem.In those tribes there are no divorces, because, of course, once you have looked at all the women, have been with all the women of the tribe, and then you choose, now what else are you going to change? You have chosen out of experience, so in those societies there is no need, there is no question of divorce. The question has not arisen.It is not that divorce is not allowed; the very question of divorce has not arisen in those tribes. They have not thought about it, it has never been a problem. Nobody has said that they want to separate.All civilized societies suffer from marital problems because the husband and wife are almost enemies. You can call them intimate enemies but that does not make any difference. It is better that the enemies are far away and not too intimate. If they are intimate that means that it is a twenty-four-hour a day war, continuously – day in, day out. And the simple reason is the stupid idea of these religious teachers: Beware of pre marital sex.If you want to beware, beware of marital sex, because that is where the problem is. Premarital sex is I not a problem, and particularly now when all birth I control methods are available.Every college, every university, every school, should make it a point that every child, girl or boy, goes through all kinds of experiences, all types of people, and finally chooses. This choice will be based and rooted in knowing, in understanding.But the problem for the pope is not that the whole of humanity is suffering from marriage, that all couples are suffering from marriage, and that because of their suffering their children start learning the ways of suffering – he is not concerned. His whole concern is that birth control methods should not be used. In fact the pope is not saying, “Beware of the devil”; he is saying “Beware of birth control methods.”Real problems are not being dealt with, only unreal, bogus ones. And he goes on advising the whole world…. And this time when he goes back to the Vatican he will find all the workers in the Vatican – eight hundred in all – are threatening a strike because they are not paid well.The promises that had been given to them have not been fulfilled. For eighteen months they have been waiting and asking. So this time they are ready; when the pope comes back from his tour of Latin America, then they are going to give him a hard time.He cannot manage eight hundred people – and he is trying to manage the whole world. Everybody’s psychological problems he is trying to manage – and he cannot manage even eight hundred poor people. And they must be desperate, only then could they have come to the point of declaring that they are going on strike if action is not taken immediately.And the pope is now the richest person in – the world. Six hundred million Catholics go on pouring their money into the Vatican – and you cannot feed eight hundred people rightly? And you go around the world preaching great sermons….These people have given a wrong idea of responsibility: you are responsible to your parents, you are responsible to God, you are responsible to the priest, you are responsible to the teacher, you are responsible to the society; you are responsible to everybody except yourself. This is the idea that they have imposed upon you.And I want to say to you that you are only responsible to yourself, and nobody else.And when I say it, don’t misunderstand me – because a person who is responsible to himself is automatically responsible to everybody with whom he comes into contact. He cannot be irresponsible. His every act comes out of consciousness, how can it be irresponsible?What have religions done? – they have done just the opposite. No religion says you have to be responsible to yourself; but to the motherland, to the fatherland to the church…to all kinds of nonsense. And by being responsible to all that nonsense you destroy your freedom, your consciousness.They have given you another word, conscience. Otherwise there was no need. They have repressed consciousness and put on top of it a conditioned layer, which they call conscience. Conscience means what your religion wants you to do; if you go against it you are being irresponsible. And the scripture decides what is right and what is wrong.No, no scripture can decide what is right and what is wrong. Each moment the situation changes, and each moment you have to come up with a fresh decision, whether it is right or wrong. No dead principles can help, but only living consciousness. And there is no need….Only a blind man asks, “Where is the door?” and, “Should I go to the right or to the left?” But when you have eyes there is no need to ask, “Where is the door?” – you can see. In fact, there is no need even to think where the door is; when you want to get out you simply get out, you have eyes.Consciousness gives you eyes.Conscience gives you only words.And then everybody is ready to exploit you.One of my professors was annoyed with me, and the reason for his annoyance was valid. He was the professor of economics. And just then it was happening that in Indian universities the change of the medium from English to Hindi was taking place. The professors were all accustomed to English – although they all could speak Hindi. They were Hindi speakers, it was their mother tongue, but as far as their subject was concerned English was easier for them. They were accustomed to teach in English, but once in a while they got stuck at a certain word.This professor knew that I had always been of help to him; whenever he was stuck with an English word and he could not find the equivalent in Hindi, I used to supply him the equivalent Hindi word. So he trusted me – but he had no sense of humor at all. One day he was teaching about bargaining and haggling. On the word “haggling” he got stuck. What in Hindi is haggling? So he asked me, “What is the Hindi word for haggling?”I said, “Chakallas.” It sounds close to haggling, the sound of the two words was very close, but chakallas means “joking,” it does not mean haggling. So he started using chakallas. Now whenever he said, “You go to the market and you start chakallas,” the whole class would laugh. Whenever he used the word chakallas, everybody would laugh; so he said to me, “What is the matter? Why do you all suddenly start laughing for no reason at all?” But he could not figure out that it was chakallas, the word, that was creating the whole trouble.But he must have inquired of others, and they said, “That boy played a joke on you. Chakallas does not mean haggling, that’s why they all were laughing.”Next day when he came in he was very angry, and he said to me, “You stand up!”I said, “I know…it must be chakallas.”He said, “Yes.”I said, “But it was only chakallas – don’t take it seriously. You are so serious that this was the first time in your class there was laughter. You should enjoy it.And nobody was harmed, nobody was insulted – we just enjoyed it. Do you hate us enjoying ourselves once in a while and laughing once in a while?”He said to me, “Nobody has asked me before, but because you have raised the question, it makes me really feel sad for myself because I have never enjoyed laughter. And if others are laughing I feel irritated, I am angry.”I said, “Then you are in a great mess. We can pull you out. As far as I can tell you must have been in a convent school.”He said, “Yes.”I said, “That’s what convent schools do to people – they make them serious.”Everything religious is serious, and everything that is joyful is somehow condemned. Have you ever seen any picture of God laughing? I don’t think He has ever smiled in millions of years – he is running a serious affair. The thing is so serious that even the devil does not laugh. You can just think to what extent existence has become serious: even the devil has forgotten laughter.This professor called me home, and he said, “I thought about it again and again and I feel that I am missing something. My life seems to be so dry, and I cannot even make friends with people.”I said, “You need just a little chakallas.”He said, “Don’t use that word! That word made me the laughing stock of the whole college. Now everybody saying that I was befooled. This translation into Hindi such a trouble, and I have to take your help. Never do such a thing again.”I said, “I cannot promise because promising is not my way of life. Tomorrow we will see, tomorrow will take care of itself. I never promise. If you are afraid, stop asking me. You can ask anybody else, or you can manage on your own; I am not interested. But if you ask me once in a while there will be chakallas. I don’t like that serious, dead class. And how can you manage for years living in this deadness? What is the point? If you cannot even laugh, commit suicide.”These people have destroyed so much in human beings that you will be surprised: If it all can be replaced, you may feel for the first time really alive. They have taught you “responsibility” for everything.In my final years in the university, in India a law was imposed on all the university students that everybody had to take army training. I went to the vice-chancellor and said, “I cannot follow this law. If there is any punishment I am ready for it.”He said, “No, there is no punishment but they have created trouble: if you don’t bring the certificate from the army office that you have been attending their courses regularly then we cannot give you the certificate. Their clearance is needed first.”So I said, “I won’t ask for the certificate.”“But,” he said to me, “you have a responsibility toward the motherland.”I said, “Don’t talk nonsense to me. The whole earth is mine so why should I have responsibility only to this small piece of land? And on what grounds have you divided it? Who are you to divide the earth into lands and then impose the idea of responsibility?“l am responsible toward existence. I am not responsible to any nation, to any political division. And I am going to fight for it – if you don’t give me the certificate I will go up to the supreme court to fight for it. You cannot impose on me any army training, because I don’t want to kill anybody. I would prefer to be killed – there is no problem in it – but I don’t want to kill anybody, and I don’t want any training of this kind.”He understood that it was going to be tough and I some trouble for him. So he said, “Don’t be worried I will talk to the colonel in the army and I will manage somehow to get a clearance for you.”I said, “That is your business. You have to give me the certificate, otherwise I go to the court. I don’t have any responsibility for any piece of land. And you have to prove on what grounds and on what authority I have any responsibility to any part of the land.“Just a few years before I was responsible to the land which is now Pakistan. Now I am not responsible to it. It was my mother country; now it no longer is. Bangladesh was my responsibility; now it no longer is. So what guarantee is there? – I may die for this land, and tomorrow it may not even be my motherland?“You first give me a clear-cut idea of what my motherland is – because I have seen before my eyes part of the country become Pakistan. It is no longer my motherland, it is an enemy country, and this whole I training is for nothing but to fight with Pakistan. Bangladesh was my part of the country, now this whole training is to fight with Bangladesh. Tomorrow perhaps Punjab will become an independent country, then it is no longer my motherland.“So what kind of mother is this? – hands, head, legs go on disappearing, and to whatsoever remains I am still responsible. My responsibility does not reduce with my mother reducing continually. At least that much freedom should be given to me: as much as you reduce my mother….”,He managed something with the army. He gave me a certificate and he said, “You keep it to yourself because if you spread this thing then other students will create trouble. For one I can manage but for everybody I cannot manage. And I know you are right.”The land is simply land. Either the whole earth is our mother or no land is our mother. Countries go on being born and disappearing – just political games, chess. Israel was not there for hundreds of years, now it is there. And now it is the motherland of the Jews, and their responsibility is to die for it – and they are dying for it.And they will have to continue to die for it because it is never going to be a safe, secure, peaceful land; that is impossible, because it is surrounded, all around, by the Mohammedans. And in fact for centuries it has been a Mohammedan country – Palestine. Centuries before, sometime, it was Israel, but you cannot go back. And those Mohammedans are not going to leave it.When it was created I was a very small child, but even then I said, “This is simply stupid. Look at the map: it is surrounded by Mohammedans, it is a Mohammedan country. You are just changing its name and giving it to the Jews because you are now in power.”Britishers and Americans – because they won the second world war and were in power, and their armies were there – simply handed over Israel to the Jews. I don’t think that this was an act of friendship, this was an act of absolute enmity.”They have created an eternal trouble spot for Jews for the future, one which will never be solved; there is no way to solve it. The Jews will have continually to fight, and they will have to be continually beggars, asking for help from all over the world, particularly help from America.So America has played a good political game: fix the Jews there so their whole problem is there, their trouble is there. If Jews were intelligent enough, they would have refused it, and said, “We don’t want a country which has been Mohammedan for centuries, populated by Mohammedans, dominated by Mohammedans. Now it is their country.”If America is so compassionate toward Jews, then give them Oregon. Make it the new Israel – that will be perfectly good. And all the money that is being wasted in Israel would remain in America, and Oregon would become a beautiful country.Jews have done tremendous labor there, but it is all futile. And they have poured all their money there, which is all futile. Nothing is going to help: the trouble spot will remain continuously a trouble spot. It is just a small island in an ocean of Mohammedans. You cannot finish that ocean; that ocean is, sooner or later, going to drown you all.Giving Oregon to the Jews – this would have been generosity, compassion, friendliness. Anyway, fifty percent of Oregon’s land is already federal government land, and the remaining fifty percent they also want to purchase. They want to make it a federal, a completely federal, state.So it would have been very easy to give it to Jews; there would have been no problem. It would have helped the Jews, it would have helped America. The money would have remained here, the people would have remained here. New people would have come from all over the world. And New Israel would be far better than getting that old rotten Israel which Moses had found. And he did not find it really….Moses was tired of searching, so finally he said, “This is it” – because at some point he had to say it…forty years’ search! Just the way I have said, “This is it”…. How long can one go on searching? Otherwise, do you think of this desert I was going to say, “This is it”? But now there is not much time for me, and I cannot go on and on.The same I know happened with Moses. Israel is not something better than you have got; it is worse. He was just tired, utterly tired. His disciples dying every day, three-quarters of the original already dead…. A new generation had come up who did not even recognize him, who he was and what he was. And they didn’t care about him at all, because there was a gap, a big gap. And even his closest friends were angry: “It is time; forty years we have been wandering – where is your Israel?”This is the trouble with all utopians. They can paint the utopia so beautifully that many become fascinated. But once you start searching for the utopia then the trouble starts, because that kind of utopia never exists anywhere. It has to be created, not found. And that was the basic mistake; they were searching, believing that somewhere there was Israel. INowhere is there any Israel. You have to create it.’So I have not been searching that way: thinking that somewhere some place is there and we have just to reach there and all is okay. I have been looking for a place where we can create it. It is always going to be a creation.But now that Mohammedan country is the responsibility of the Jews….One of the great poets of India was always complaining about his sons because they were not listening to him and they were not following him. And he was a well-respected man; he was known as the national poet. He was Maitreya’s friend, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. Tired of his continuous talking about his sons, that they didn’t listen, I asked him, “Did you ever ask them before giving birth to them, ‘Do you want to be born? “‘He said, “What?”I said, “Have you asked them? It is your responsibility, not their responsibility. You brought them on the earth and now you go on imposing every kind of responsibility on them: ‘I am your father; you have to respect me, and you have to do things according to me.’ Why should they? In the first place you forced them to come into the world without their permission, and now you want them to continue to follow you – and you want them to feel guilty about it.“You again and again are asking me…for what reason? You want me to tell your sons, ‘This is your responsibility.’ I cannot say that. You lived your life the way you wanted. Now let them live their life the way they want. Why are you interfering? And they are not children.”He looked at me for a few moments. He said, “So I you are also with them?”I said, “No, I am not with them. I have never seen them, I have never met them. But if you want, then next time I come to Patna, arrange a meeting.”He said, “No, I don’t want any meeting with you – you will spoil them more. You are saying that it is my responsibility that I have given birth to them?”I said, “Then whose responsibility is it? Mine? And even after giving birth to them, into this miserable world, you want them still to follow you? It is enough that they don’t kill you!”That was the last time…. After that I used to inquire, “What about your sons?”And he would say, “Never mind my sons! Don’t bring that subject up at all; I have dropped that subject. At least with you I am not going to discuss that subject.”Fathers and mothers go on forcing on children that, “this is your responsibility.” They have given the word responsibility a strange turn.It simply means response-ability. Break it in two: not responsibility, but response-ability, your ability to respond. That means you have to drop all your conscience, things that people have told you are right and wrong. It may have been right and wrong for them, you have nothing to do with that.Drop your conscience, which is imposed, and become conscious of every situation that faces you. And every moment there is a situation that faces you; become conscious of it, and out of that consciousness, act.And whatever you do out of consciousness is right.And whatever you do unconsciously is wrong.So to me the act itself is not right or wrong. To me it depends on you – your consciousness, the quality of awareness that you bring to the act. Then everything has a different perspective.I will tell you a few Zen anecdotes. One is: A great Zen master had this habit, that once in a while he would just raise his finger toward the sky for no apparent reason. Talking of something else, without any relevance, not in context, suddenly he would raise his finger toward the sky, as if there was some undercurrent also going on of which nobody was aware.One of his young disciples was just a little boy of twelve years old who used to stand by his side to fan him because it was too hot. He also saw this finger, and he learned to imitate it because he was standing at the side a little back; the master could not see him.Once in a while, just while fanning the master…and then everybody would start laughing, and he would start fanning him again. The master could not figure out what was happening, why people started to laugh, and from where it came. And that boy was just waving his fan again, and once in a while…. Finally the master found out.One day when the boy did it, the master caught hold of his finger – he had a knife with him – and he cut off the boy’s finger completely! It was a shock. Nobody could have even imagined that the master would do that. He cut the finger completely off! And not only that, he said, “Now, point it again!” The boy was in such a shock – the blood was falling from his finger, and the finger was already on the ground, but the master said “Point!” And the boy pointed the finger which was no longer there.For a moment there was great silence. And then the boy came in front, bowed down, touched the master’s feet and said, “I had never thought…I have been listening, standing there, knowing that it is not for me, but then…no thought, no mind, and bliss started showering.“When you shouted at me I was full of pain, but I forgot it when you shouted, ‘Now point your finger!’ And you pulled me in front and I pointed my finger which was not there. And because my finger was not there and I was pointing it, suddenly my whole thinking stopped. My mind could not make any sense out of it, what was happening?”It was so sudden – the cutting of the finger and the shouting of the master, everybody in shock, blood on the floor, the finger on the floor…and he says, “Now point it!”And the boy said, “At that moment, just for a split second, there was no mind. I was not there. Just as my finger was not there, I was not there, and there was no mind. And you are right, master, blessings started falling on me.”Now cutting off anybody’s finger, is it right or is it wrong? – moral or immoral? Very difficult to say. If a Zen master does it, you cannot say it is wrong. And the result shows it is not wrong: that boy became his master’s successor. That cutting of the finger began a process in his life of which he was not aware at all. He was just a servant, he was not even part of the congregation.It is difficult to decide just on the act itself. The question is, what do you make of it? The question is, who does it? From what consciousness does it come? and to what result does it lead?It came from a pure, conscious mind, and it led to a moment of pure consciousness. The cutting of the finger means nothing. If the master had cut off the whole hand even then it would not have been bad. Even to cut off the head and give a chance for a moment to pass without a thought, without a mind, to make time stop…. Even if the man is beheaded the act is absolutely right.I am not saying that you should start beheading people. My emphasis is that the act is unimportant. That’s what all religions have been trying to teach: The act is right or wrong. If you do it, you are responsible; if you don’t do it, you are irresponsible.I am changing the emphasis from the act to the actor.It is you who are right or wrong, it is never the act.It is always my consciousness which is decisive.The act in other hands may be immoral, but in the hands of a conscious mind it changes its very quality.Consciousness is the only magic there is.So I call responsibility ‘action with awareness.’And if you simply go on doing the so-called responsibilities unconsciously, I don’t consider them responsibilities; you have been cheated.Now that is what the pope is going to do with the academy of sciences that he has created in the Vatican. The whole purpose is to create a sense of guilt in the scientist…because this is a very strange step. Popes have always been against science, against scientists.Three hundred years ago no pope could have even thought that in the Vatican there would be an academy of sciences. But if they had had the whole idea of what is behind it then they would not have been surprised. For three hundred years they have been trying to prevent science in every possible way. They have failed, they could not prevent it. Now they want to persuade.It is no use trying to be antagonistic – for three hundred years they have been enemies and Christianity has failed; science has been the victor. Now the pope is taking another move. If by enmity it was not possible, then perhaps it may be possible through friendship. He is certainly a cunning man. And scientists are never cunning, that is the difficulty.Priests are always cunning, and scientists are always innocent people, even lacking in common sense because their whole mind is concentrated on their work. They are absolutely oblivious of the other aspects of life. They live a very simple life, concentrated on their own work. But priests are cunning.Now this academy of sciences is one of the most cunning steps a pope could have taken – and the scientists are falling prey, falling into his trap because he is making it a question of great respectability. To be a member of the academy of scientists, to be an academician of the Vatican academy is a respect which will not be available to all. Very few people, like Nobel prize winners, will be accepted; great scientific institutes can suggest a few names and they will be considered.And because science is mostly a Western monopoly there is not going to be much trouble: most of the scientists are Christians and half of them or more than half, will be Catholics. Most of the scientists are spread in America, in Europe, in England.The only problem is about the Soviet Union. So he has opened the door for the Soviet Union too; their scientists are welcome. Four have already joined the academy. Of course Soviet scientists will join for a different reason. They will join to find out what is going on there, so that nothing should go against the Soviet Union. They will be spies there.But the pope is going to make a fuss about it, that I now this is an international, the only international academy where all are represented, even atheists, communists – all are represented.And what does he want to do with this academy? He wants to decide what science should do and what science should not do. That will be the pope’s decision. And he will corrupt these scientists’ minds – because just now he has declared that science is not the ultimate value; the ultimate value is religion, morality. So the decisive point is going to be religion and morality, not science.The position does not change, the position is the same. That’s what they have been saying for all these centuries, that the scientists should listen to the pope, to the church, because the ultimate value is religion. Science has to be only a servant. It can be a good servant if it follows religion, otherwise it is a bad servant.The same position…. Now he declares that science is not the ultimate value, the ultimate value is religion and morality. Of course religion and morality have to be decided by the pope.The academy’s function is to review what is happening in different fields of science, just a synopsis of the latest developments in different fields, so the pope can declare whether they are moral or immoral, whether they should be pursued by Christian scientists or not. It will not be said directly Christian scientists – they are all Christian – but in this way he will sabotage scientific progress and try to turn it toward lines that the church wants science to go on.I would like to say to you:Science is the ultimate value.And there are only two kinds of sciences: one, objective science, that decides about the outside world; and two, subjective science, which up to now has been called religion.But it is better not to call it religion. It is better to call it the science of the inner, and to divide science into science of the outer, and science of the inner-objective science and subjective science. But make it one solid whole, and science remains the ultimate value – nothing is higher than that. And the decision should not come from a third-class pope who knows nothing about science. The decision should come through a consensus among scientists themselves.If we were to create an academy here of scientists then I would like them to meet – we should only provide a meeting place, a relaxing place, a holiday for them. They should meet here and they should come to a consensus among themselves. That is their business – what has to be done or not done. If they want any help from us, we can give that help in a totally different form, not as a decision – because who are we to decide?Our help can be only through meditation. We can tell them to meditate with our meditators.That will give them more consciousness, more awareness.And out of consciousness whatsoever they do will be responsible. And out of unconsciousness, even if the pope guides them, whatever they do will be irresponsible.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Are you against God and Jesus Christ too? It freaks me out.It freaks me out too. How I can be against God, who does not exist at all? To be for or to be against, one thing is absolutely necessary, the existence of God.There are fanatic theists in the world, and similarly fanatic atheists too. Those who believe that God exists, their fanaticism can be forgiven. But those who think that God does not exist, their fanaticism is unforgivable. They should not bother about God at all. I don’t bother a bit.But there is a human weakness, the weakness of categorizing: if you are not for, then you are against. And the mind functions in polarities, it does not allow the middle way. This is something significant to understand, that the mind can exist only at the extremes. The farther away you go from the middle point, the more you become a mind. The closer you come to the middle point, the more your mind starts disappearingWhen you are exactly at the middle, there is no mind at all. That’s why Buddha called his path majjhim nikai ‘the middle path.’ He chose really a very profound name, the middle path – avoiding both the extremes. But mind feels uneasy…. With any extreme it is perfectly at ease.So if I say there is no God you naturally start inferring that I am against God, but you have not thought of a simple thing – that if there is no God, how can I be against him? The people who are for God may turn against him. But you can depend on me: I cannot turn against him because to be against I would have to invent him first.Friedrich Nietzsche says, “God is dead.” I cannot even say that. He thinks he is saying something tremendously anti-God, anti-religion, anti-Christianity, anti-Christ. This is not so. To say that God is dead implies that he was there, alive. You have accepted the existence of God – if not in the present, then in the past – and it is going to be very difficult to prove how the existent God died. Nietzsche never argued further and the theists are not capable of raising significant questions.The whole of western Christianity was shocked by the statement that God is dead. They were angry, they would have liked to kill Friedrich Nietzsche. But nobody asked him, “You have accepted the primary existence of God, now you have to explain how he died And if he was God, how could he die?” And particularly to ask Nietzsche…because Nietzsche believes in the recurrence of life, that life continues. He is the only Western philosopher who believes in the Eastern idea of reincarnation.If God is dead, he must be born again. That is a simple corollary of his own philosophy. If man dies and is born then why be so unfavorable to God? At least give him as much as you give to ordinary human beings, to animals, to birds – to all life.Either God has never been there or will always be there. Life can change its forms but can never become death. That, Nietzsche accepted. And no Christian bothered him, raised the question, argued with him.I cannot say God is dead. I think Nietzsche is not really against God. He is against the priesthood, against Christianity particularly, against Jesus. But God is the foundation of all these, so he has to hit God to demolish the whole edifice of the only begotten son, the messiah, the pope, the church, and the whole ugly history of Christianity. Without God it all becomes absurd. That is the reason he says God is dead, but deep down he knows God is.My situation is totally different.I am not against God.I have been searching and seeking him everywhere.And this is my finding – that he is not anywhere.I have looked in, I have looked out; I have done everything that is possible to be done. There is no God. This is a simple statement of fact, with no anger, with no enmity. What can I do if he does not exist? It is not my fault.But man’s mind wants some extreme position. It is worth understanding.Why does man’s mind want some extreme position?Either you have to be theist or atheist; either you have to be for or against. It does not allow you a third alternative. The reason is simple: the third alternative becomes the death of the mind. Mind lives on extremism; that is its very nourishment.Exactly in the middle, where two polarities dissolve and contradictions meet, mind simply goes out of function. The mind cannot conceive how contradictions can meet, how polarities can be one. But in existence they are meeting, they are one.Have you seen life and death separate? It is your mind that makes the categories and words separate But look into existence – it is life turning into death, death turning into life. There is no division, they are part of one whole. It is the mind that has created the idea of beauty and ugliness.But in existence…do you think that if all human minds for a moment disappeared from the earth – would there be beauty in anything, ugliness in anything? Would the rose still be beautiful? No, as the mind is not there, there is nobody to judge and beauty and ugliness are mental judgments.The rose will be there, just as the thorn will be there, but there will be no evaluation because the evaluator is not there. They will both exist without any hierarchy. The rose will not be higher than the thorn. The flower of the marigold will not be a poor flower and the rose, a rich flower; they will be on the same plane.All hierarchy is created by the mind: the lower, the higher, for and against.Think in another way: for a moment, let the mind be there but drop judgment – which is a little more difficult. You can visualize a state where all minds have disappeared and certainly you can see there is no possibility of anything being ugly, beautiful. Things will be there, just themselves, with no comparison, no judgment, no labeling.Now try the other, which is a little more difficult. Let the mind be there – so all the minds are there but nobody is judging – for one hour, no judgment. Can beauty be there, can ugliness be there? Can something be moral and something immoral? Can there be a sinner and a saint?For that one hour, all these categories will disappear and you will have, for the first time, a real contact with reality as it is, not as projected by you, manufactured by your mind. Your mind is continuously manufacturing reality; otherwise, who is a saint and who is a sinner?Just now I read the news that in England a vicar has died of AIDS. Now it is not right for saints to do this, priests to do this! And he has created a trouble. All the old ladies are phoning in inquiring about it, because in Christianity, the vicar drinks the wine as the blood of Christ and then, from the same cup, everybody else drinks – particularly the old ladies. Because who else goes to these vicars? – you think young girls? They have many other things to do. These old ladies have done everything and found nothing; now they are trying God.Now the old ladies are worried that they may have contracted AIDS from the vicar. Now it is time that Christians should stop this stupidity of passing the bread and the wine, because the saliva of the priest, the vicar, the cardinal may be carrying AIDS.Now this is something about which the Polack Pope should declare: “From now on this is a sin, to drink the blood of Jesus….” In fact it was a sin from the very beginning. Just an ugly idea: drinking the blood of Jesus, eating his flesh. That was okay up to now, but now…and the priest has to start the game.The pope is involved in things which have nothing to do with him – this is. Now I am giving him a problem which faces him, and if he has the courage then he should declare that this practice is immoral. Then all the popes up to now have been doing immoral things; even Jesus was doing immoral things.AIDS may not be a new disease, it may be only a late discovery. It may have been happening before, because it has no symptoms. It is a strange kind of disease, without symptoms. To call it a disease is not right – it is really a slow death, a very slow death. So you cannot find symptoms. You can only watch a man’s life: if he is losing his resistance to diseases then he has AIDS.This is a very complicated phenomenon. If he is losing resistance to other sicknesses then he has AIDS Thus only a long observation can make it certain that you have AIDS: You go on getting infections, and to cure any infection becomes more and more difficult and slowly you find your life-force falling lower and lower, and for no particular reason you start losing well-being. You cannot pinpoint that this is the reason why you are losing your well-being – just suddenly you don’t feel okay. Nothing is wrong, but your life no longer has the same force.This kind of thing may have always existed but to detect it was not possible before – only now, and even now it is in a great confusion. But the confusion will be cleared up. Perhaps the cultures where kissing is thought to be unhygienic have a far more advanced idea…and these are primitive people.Perhaps the brahmins in India, Jainas in India have a better idea in reference to AIDS, because there this is not their practice, that you drink from the same cup; that is thought to be ugly. And to make it a religious thing is going too far. Sooner or later the pope will have to be forced to prevent this practice.What I was saying was this, that it is very difficult to say who is a sinner and who is a saint. Now, this vicar was a saint up to now. The fool should have chosen to die a little earlier; just one or two years earlier and he would have remained a saint. But now, what is going to be the situation?It is proved that he was a homosexual, it is proved that he was not a celibate, it is proved that he was indulging in perverted kinds of sexuality. If he had died two years earlier he would have been in heaven. Now ask Lord Jesus Christ where his vicar goes. And with this vicar many more will soon be discovered all around the earth, because that is one of the most dangerous things about AlDS – that through saliva it can be given to anybody.Perhaps the French will prove the highest, the greatest…because they have discovered great kisses. And the French must have given AIDS to many more people than anybody else in the world. Now, these French people should be stopped. It is a question of world health, life, future. These idiots should be told, “Stop all this nonsense. Find out some better ways of loving” – and there are….In some islands near Japan lovers rub noses. That’s perfectly healthy and hygienic, and it gives you the same joy. What joy are you getting in kissing? You think you are gaining something? Rubbing noses is more clean – that seems to be far better.The Indian sex scripture, the first sex scripture in the world, Maharishi Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutras, suggests all kinds of things which can become prevalent in the world. For example: lovers should play with each other’s ear lobes. That’s perfectly hygienic; and ear lobes are very erotic. Try to discover it; just play with ear lobes. It may look a little dry – it is dry cleaning – but at least you can avoid AIDS.Man’s mind is easily ready for any extreme because the extreme is its life-force. When two extremes meet, they cancel each other and they leave a vacuum. That’s the meaning of the middle way: let the extremes come to a point where they cancel each other and suddenly you are left neither atheist nor theist. Those questions become irrelevant. But the mind is not ready to drop either in religion, in philosophy, or even in science.Vivek just gave me a documentary film on the history of mathematics. The whole history of mathematics can be said to be the whole problem of the human mind. For two thousand years or more in the West and for five to ten thousand years in the East, mathematicians have been trying to find the ultimate science.One thing is certain in their eyes, that only mathematics can become the ultimate science, for the simple reason that there are no mathematical things around you. It is a pure science. You don’t see mathematical objects: this is a mathematical chair and that is a mathematical house.Mathematics is just a pure ideological game. It consists not of things but ideas. And because ideas are properties of your mind, you can refine them to their ultimate purity. So it has been an accepted thing that mathematics can become the purest science possible. But there have been problems. Those mathematicians were not aware that your mind itself is the problem, and the mind is going to create a science which will have no problems, no contradictions, no paradoxes.You can play the game. You can make a great edifice but whenever you look at the base, you will know that at the very base the ultimate problem remains unsolved. For example, Euclid’s geometry…. I could not go much into it for the simple reason that I could not agree with the basic hypotheses.My teacher of geometry simply told me, “Your problem has nothing to do with me. Find Euclid – get out of the class. Find Euclid and settle things with him. I am a poor teacher, I just get my salary; I have nothing to do with his fundamental axioms. Whatever is written in the book, I teach. I am not interested at all whether his fundamental hypotheses are right or wrong. You get out.He wouldn’t allow me in the class. I said, “But how can you go on teaching year after year knowing that the basic points are absurd?”He said, “I never knew; it is you who is hammering on my mind that they are absurd. I have never bothered; I am not a scientist nor a mathematician, just a poor teacher. And I never wanted to be a teacher, I wanted to be an inspector, but they didn’t choose me. I tried to be an inspector, but they didn’t choose me. I tried other jobs; everywhere no vacancy. It is just out of compulsion that I am a teacher here.“Don’t torture me. Your problem is with Euclid – don’t bring me in. If you want to read what is written in the book, I am ready. But if you tell me that the fundamentals are wrong….”I said, “I cannot go on unless I am certain about the base, because this is dangerous: the foundation of the house is missing and you tell me to go on up in a skyscraper. I cannot move a single inch. First I have to be certain about the foundation, whether the foundation is there which can support this skyscraper. You are going to fall – that is your business – but I am not going to fall with you. If you want to commit suicide, do it.”He said, “This is strange! With Euclid, nobody commits suicide. What are you talking about?”I said, “I am talking about exactly what I said. It is suicide. Not a single hypothesis of Euclid’s is explainable.”And still for two thousand years Euclid has been the foundation, not only of geometry but of all other sciences, because he has to be used in other sciences too. He says about a line, its definition, that it has only length – only length.I asked my teacher, “Draw a line which has only length. The moment you draw it, it will also have some breadth, howsoever tiny.” And a point, according to Euclid, has no length, no breadth. I said, “Make a point which has no length and no breadth. And the same Euclid says a line consists of points – one point after another point, in a row. Now, a line has only length the point has no length, no breadth – then how can the line have length? because it has only points standing in a queue. From where does the length appear?”He just folded his hands to me and said, “Simply go from here. I have told you that I am just a poor teacher and you are beyond me.”I said, “This is not the answer. You can simply accept that these axioms are not explainable.”But the mind has some difficulty in accepting the idea that something is there which is not explainable. Mind has a very mad urge for everything to be explained…if not explained, then at least explained away. Anything that remains a puzzle, a paradox, goes on troubling your mind.The whole history of philosophy, religion, science, mathematics, has the same root, the same mind – the same itch. You may scratch yourself one way, somebody else may do it differently, but the itch has to be understood. The itch is the belief that existence is not a mystery: mind can only feel at home if somehow existence is demystified.Religion has done it by creating God, the Holy Ghost, the only begotten son; different religions have created different things. These are their ways to cover up a hole which is uncoverable; whatever you do the hole is there. In fact the more you cover it, the more emphatically it is there. Your very effort to cover it shows your fear that somebody is going to see the hole.It used to happen in my childhood every day because I love to climb the trees: the higher the tree, the greater the joy. And naturally I fell many times from the trees; I still carry on my legs and knees and everywhere, scratches. Because I was continually climbing the trees and falling, every day my clothes were torn, and my mother would say, “Don’t go out with that hole in your clothes. Let me do a little patchwork.”I said, “No, no patchwork.”She said, “But people will see that you are the son of the best cloth merchant in the town, that you are always roaming around the whole town with torn clothes; and nobody takes care.”I said, “If you patch it then it becomes ugly. Right now anybody can see it is fresh. I did not come out of the house with this hole. This is fresh, I have just fallen from a tree. But with your patchwork…this is an old thing that I have been hiding.“Your patchwork will make me look poor, my torn shirt simply makes me look courageous. Don’t be worried about it. And anybody telling me about it I can challenge, ‘You can come with me up that tree, and if you can manage without falling then only have you any right to say anything.’ “And there are a few trees in India which are very soft, easily breakable. One is a Jamun tree. Jamun is a very sweet fruit, but the tree goes very high and is very weak; its branches can break any time. And unless you go higher you don’t get the best quality of fruit because the lower ones have been taken by lower quality people already – those who could dare to go up only to ten feet.If you have courage to go to thirty feet, then you will get real juicy ones. They are preserved for those who have courage. But from there, a fall is almost certain. You cannot do anything about it, it is not in your power. Just a little strong wind…. You cannot get down very quickly; the whole branch breaks away from the tree, and before you can do anything you are already on the ground.But my mother could never understand my idea. I tried to explain to her, “It is very simple. If you have not mended my shirt, it simply means the tear is fresh; just now it has happened. But mended – that certainly shows it is not fresh. You have come from home with a mended shirt. It stands out more then, and I don’t want to be thought so poor.”She said, “I cannot understand what kind of mind you have got, because everybody else in the house – whenever somebody’s shirt is torn or some buttons are missing – they come to me and say, ‘I am going out – first mend it.’ And you are the only one…I have to come to you, and still you are not willing for the mending to be done.”I said, “No, not for mending. If you want to give me another shirt, that’s okay. A mended shirt I am not going to wear. Unmended, I can wear it for the whole year; there is no problem because it is always fresh. I can always say I have just fallen from a tree.”The whole history of mind, in different branches, has been doing this patchwork – particularly in mathematics because mathematics is purely a mind game. There are mathematicians who think it is not, just as there are theologians who think God is a reality.God is only an idea. And if horses have ideas their God will be a horse. You can be absolutely certain it will not be man, because man has been so cruel to horses that man can only be conceived as a devil not as God. But then every animal will have its own idea of God, just as every human race has its own idea of God.Ideas are substitutes for where life is mysterious and you find gaps which cannot be filled by reality. You fill those gaps by ideas; and at least you start feeling satisfied that life is understood.Have you ever thought about this word understand? It means standing under you. It is strange that this word has by and by taken a meaning which is far fetched from the original idea: anything that you can make stand under you, that is under your thumb, under your power, under your shoe, you are the master of.People have been trying to understand life in that same way, so that they could put life also underneath their feet and declare, “we are the masters. Now there is nothing which is not understood by us.”But it is not possible. Whatever you do life is a mystery and is going to remain a mystery. Even if you I mean man someday comes to understand the whole of life, a new problem will arise: “Who is this man, this mind, this consciousness which has understood everything? From where does it come?”In that documentary film one thing will be helpful to you. One of the mathematicians in the beginning part of the century – a very famous mathematician, one of the greatest in the whole history of mathematics – Frege, was doing the same work. His whole life he had devoted to creating a mathematical system which dissolves all paradoxes, all mysteries, all puzzles, and solves everything – the ultimate solution.And he was just going to publish it – it is published now and it is a tremendous task that he has done…. But Bertrand Russell – a young man at that time, and not very famous, just a little bit known as a philosopher in philosophical circles – was also interested in mathematics. Later on Russell wrote one of the monumental books on mathematics, Principia Mathematica, in which three hundred and sixty-two pages are devoted only to proving a simple problem: one plus one is equal to two.The book is just impossible – to go on trying to read it is enough to drive anybody crazy! Even Bertrand Russell accepted that “after writing that book I have never been so sharp again; my whole sharpness got lost.” Certainly he put too much energy into it, and a strange kind of energy; nobody reads that book.I have been touring in India, visiting all the universities, great libraries, and I had a few things which I always took note of. One was to look at the book Principia Mathematica of Bertrand Russell, to see whether anybody had read it or not. Its pages were not even cut, many pages were still joined.In the old days, particularly the very famous publishers used a method – I don’t know why – in which they never cut the pages, they left them joined. It was a much later development, just within thirty, forty years, that all the publishers started cutting the pages. But I think that one thing was good about it, about not cutting the pages: you could always know whether the book had even been read or not.I have never seen in any university of India, in any library of India, the book’s pages cut. Who is going to read three hundred and sixty-two pages just to find the conclusion that one plus one makes two? It is really so! Who is going to read three hundred and sixty-two pages of a large-size book?…and then it goes on for thousands of pages.So Bertrand Russell was interested in mathematics. Knowing that Frege was going to publish a book which was going to solve all paradoxes, mysteries, and mathematical problems, he sent a paradox to this great mathematician who was trying to solve all great mysteries – a simple paradox.Frege was devastated, he felt all enthusiasm gone. The books were ready – two volumes, his whole life’s work – and this man sends a brief letter with a small paradox saying, “Before you publish your book, please think about this paradox.” That paradox has become famous as Bertrand Russell’s paradox.It is very simple, but Frege had no answer for it He did not publish his books in his life; they were published after his death. They are monumental, but he failed in the purpose of solving all paradox. He could not solve the single paradox that Russell had sent him.The paradox is very simple: All the libraries in the country are ordered to make a catalogue of all the books in the library and send the catalogue to the national library. One librarian made the whole catalogue, and as he was going to pack and send the catalogue to the national library, a question arose in his mind: “Should I also include this catalogue inside or not? – because this too is a book in the library. And the order is clear that all the books in the library should be catalogued.“Now, what am I to do about this catalogue? This is a book in the library, so to include it seems to be right according to the order.” This problem must have arisen in many a librarian’s mind. What happened was that two types of catalogues arrived in the national library.The national librarian made two piles, one which included the catalogue also in it, and another pile which did not include the catalogue in it. The national librarian was ordered to make a catalogue of all the catalogues that didn’t include the catalogue in themselves. So he made a catalogue of all those catalogues which did not include the catalogue in themselves.But when he was finishing he was puzzled what to do about his own catalogue. If he did not include it, then one catalogue which did not include itself would be left out of his catalogue. If he included it then this would not be a catalogue of only those catalogues which did not include themselves.So Russell sent this simple paradox: “What is this librarian supposed to do? Before you go on solving other, bigger problems, please solve this problem! This librarian is in a difficulty.” Now, whatever you do is wrong. If you don’t include this catalogue, then one catalogue which does not include itself is out of your catalogue: all catalogues which do not include themselves are not included in it. If you include it then this is not a catalogue of only those which do not include…. You follow me?But I don’t see any problem. Frege was finished; Russell also had no answer for it. And every science, every philosophy, every religion, comes to the same point: somewhere or other something comes to the point where either you have to accept it unquestioningly, blindly…that’s what religion calls faith, belief It is a patchwork.By asking you to believe in it, to have faith in it, it means you shouldn’t try to take away the patch because there is a hole – abysmal, bottomless – cover it! But by covering it, it is not dissolved. Nothing is solved; nothing is helped by covering it – except that you remain blind. So why cover it? – just close your eyes.That’s why all followers are blind followers, because if they have eyes then there is going to be trouble. Then they are going to find problems which are unsolved, questions which are unresolved.Why has God been created? – just to solve an unresolved question: Who created the universe? From that question all the religions take the plunge into some hypothesis – God created the world….But the question is exactly the same as Bertrand Russell’s paradox. It is nothing different, it is just that that is mathematics and this is religion – but the problem is the same. The axiom is that anything that exists has to be created by somebody. How can it come into existence by itself? This is the problem.Everything that is, has been created; otherwise how can it come in the first place? So they bring in God to help you solve the problem. Who created the universe? But what are you going to do with God? Does God exist?If he exists, then who created him? If he does not exist then how could he create the universe? If he himself does not exist, how can he create existence?If he exists, then what about your basic maxim, that anything that exists needs a creator? No, about God don’t ask that. That’s what all the religions say – about God don’t ask that. But this is strange – why not? If the question is valid about existence, why does it become invalid about God?And once you ask about God, who created God, then you are falling into a regress absurdum. Then you can go on: God one, God two, God three, and you go on numbering them and…but finally the question will be the same. After thousands of Gods you will find the question stands clean, clear, untouched; not even a dent has been made in the question by all your answers. Who created existence? – it is the same question.To me existence is a mystery.There is no need for it to stand under our feet, there is no need for existence to be understood.Live it, love it, enjoy it – be it.Why are you trying to understand it?I am not against God, I am only against a stupid hypothesis which leads nowhere.And you ask me, Am I against Jesus Christ too? Why should I be against that poor fellow? I feel sorry for him, sad for him. I don’t think that he deserved to be crucified. Yes, he was a bit crazy – I cannot deny that – but anybody who is a little bit crazy…that does not mean that he needs crucifixion. And crucifixion is not a cure for craziness.In fact in crucifying Jesus you have created Christianity and you have driven so many people crazy. It is the crucifixion which is responsible for all this nonsense which has been going on for two thousand years and is still continuing.Two of our sannyasins who are teachers in a school in Germany have been told that they cannot go in orange clothes and with the mala. They have been going for two years, so they asked, “What happened? – because we have been coming with the mala and with our orange clothes and it has not disturbed our teaching. Has there been any complaint? Is our teaching in any way affected by it? Have we tried to convince anybody of our religion or our ideas?”They said, “That’s not the question. These are religious symbols and we don’t want anybody to have religious symbols here.”Those teachers said, “Many people have crosses – then their crosses should be taken away.”And you will be surprised what the answer from the committee was: “The cross is not a religious symbol it is just a piece of jewelry.” So they wrote a letter to me asking, “What to do now? They say it is a piece of jewelry.So I advised them, “Go to court and take your chairman to court. Let him prove that the cross is a piece of jewelry, that is has no relationship with Christianity, with Jesus Christ. Then inquire why only Christians use this piece of jewelry? Then ask why this cross is there in every church? A piece of jewelry…what is a piece of jewelry doing in the church? Why is it on top of every church – a piece of jewelry? And what is this piece of jewelry doing in every graveyard, on every grave? And that, only in Christian churches, on their graves; no Hindu uses the piece of jewelry. A strange piece of jewelry!“So take him to court and let him prove that this is a piece of jewelry, and it has no religious significance. Let him say that. Then he will be condemned by Christians themselves. And if the cross is allowed then he cannot prevent my people having their mala and their clothes,”It is the crucifixion which made Christ – without his knowledge – the founder of Christianity.I am not against that poor guy. In fact, he deserved a little better treatment. If we can find him somewhere there is no need to crucify him; he needs a few therapies to put him right, to put him together.A little deprogramming…”You are not the son of God – drop this idea. This is what is making you look unnecessarily a clown. It does not prove that you are a messiah, it simply proves you are nuts. And we have put many nuts together who were falling apart. Just a few people’s nuts get loose, a few people’s bolts get tight – we just have to fix them a little bit.”Jesus was nothing dangerous. He was a nice fellow, but just to be nice is no protection against going crazy. He was nice, and gullible. He heard this idea continually proclaimed, “The messiah is going to come who will save the whole of humanity,” and it got into his head; he had a swollen head. Just a little bit of treatment here and he would have been a perfectly good sannyasin.I am not against him, I feel for him. This was too much, to put him on the cross; he had not committed any crime. And freedom of speech allows it; anybody can say, “I am the son of God.” I don’t think it harms anybody, or it takes away anybody else’s right. You can say you are also the son of God. There is no problem in it.Why did they make so much fuss about him? There was no need at all. All that he needed was to be ignored. If nobody had taken note of him he would have come to his senses by himself without any therapy. But because people started taking note of him and people started getting angry at him, he became more and more obsessed with the idea.It is a natural conclusion: “If people are annoyed, irritated, then there must be something in it, otherwise why…why should they bother? If I was just a madman they would have laughed and gone home.” But the whole of Judaism, all the rabbis, were disturbed. That was enough proof for Jesus that whatever he was saying must have had some significance.Those old fools, those rabbis, destroyed that young man. By giving him importance, attention, they spoiled him. In fact, they needed to be punished – and he was punished. I feel sorry for him. I am not against him. I am all for his treatment, cure, and a long, healthy life.And you say you are freaking out.Should I be freaking out or should you be freaking out?I have been explaining to you continually that I want existence to be accepted as a mystery, because only as a mystery is it beautiful, livable, lovable, blissful, ecstatic.It is good that existence cannot be demystified.There is no way to demystify it.And I am the last person to demystify anything.My purpose is just the opposite.That’s what I have been doing my whole life – mystifying everything. It is not a difficult job because people have forced demystifications on things; I simply remove the cover, the patchwork, and I give you the raw life as it is.There is no answer anywhere which is ultimate.And there will never be any answer which will solve all the problems; hence, God is an impossibility because God means the ultimate answer.And it is good that there is no God, otherwise we would be condemned. Then there would be no possibility of any joy, freedom, exploration, ecstasy – no possibility for anything. God would have killed everything.So I say to you, even if God was there then I would have trained you in how to kill him. But fortunately he is not there, so we are saved from being in any way violent; otherwise that one violence I would have allowed. Even though I am for vegetarianism, if God was there I would have told you, “Finish him! because with him life is impossible.”You have not thought about the implications:Only without God are you free.Then your inner being has freedom. Then your essence has all possible potentialities to grow. Then there is nobody to dominate, nobody to dictate, nobody to manipulate.You are not responsible to anybody except to yourself. Nobody can question you, why you did this; nobody can punish you or reward you. There is no way of somehow manipulating you into a certain way of life, because there is no God; and because there is no God how can there be a messiah and the son of God?That’s why I call Jesus nuts. It is just out of love and compassion that I call him nuts. But I am not against him. If I had been there I would have told the Jews and Pontius Pilate, “What are you doing? You are creating a religion – of nuts!“By crucifying this man you are committing a crime against the whole of humanity for centuries to come. Just leave him. Let him talk. What harm is it? – it is just pure entertainment. People enjoy, they gather and they listen to him – there is no harm in it. And he is not saying anything against the scriptures. Let him be free so that no religion is created.”He was incapable of creating Christianity, you can see that perfectly well. All that he could manage were twelve uneducated dodos; they became his apostles. But in this world it is very difficult to find who is the greatest dodo – very difficult. Those dodos were great, but there are even greater dodos – like Ronald Reagan.Now, in his speech on the budget he is quoting those dodos from The Bible. Those illiterate, uneducated fishermen, farmers and woodcutters – what do they know about America and the budget? They may never have heard even the words budget, economics planning – and he is quoting them! That’s why I say it is very difficult to say who is the greatest dodo. There are dodos and dodos.Jesus would have been unable in any way to create Christianity. He had no organizational power, he had no capacity to influence the cream of the society. How was he going to create a religion? But the crucifixion did everything. In this world things function in a very strange way.Once he was crucified thousands of people who had never bothered about him felt sympathy for him. The same people who would not have even gone to listen to him if he had passed their way felt sympathy for him. And it was natural. Even Jews felt, “This is too much. The man was innocent…maybe talking in an outrageous way, but it was only talk, hot air – nothing much in it. There was no need to crucify that fellow.” It created a great wave of sympathy. Such sympathy is a natural phenomenon.And those twelve dodos for the first time found that people who had never listened to their master were listening to them. And slowly slowly, people started gathering. They made The Bible. They created the church. They started stories, miracles – which are easier when the person is gone.In those days these things were just rumors. And a rumor from one mouth to another ear has a tendency to become bigger because everybody wants to add something to it, some spice to it. Over three hundred years Jesus became a thousand times bigger than he ever was: by then he was a myth.The real person was just an ordinary carpenter’s son talking off the wall. But in three hundred years’ time people’s imagination did the whole work. And then in these two thousand years, scholars, professors, theologians, philosophers – they are all going to increase the myth as much as they can and bring out of Jesus, meanings, words, philosophies, and ideologies of which that poor fellow was never aware.I am not against God, or against Jesus Christ – or against anyone.But I am for the truth.If it goes against anybody, I am helpless.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Do miracles really not exist?I am sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t help it.I cannot give you the consolation that has been given by all the religions down the centuries. I cannot do it because that consolation has cost too much. It has not given anything; on the contrary, it has taken away your very religiousness.I cannot say anything that in the short-term may seem to help your growth toward religion, but in the long-term is simply poison. That’s what the idea of a miracle is.The human mind is begging for it. It is the need of a sick mind – but all minds are sick.Mind as such is the sickness of man.When the mind disappears you are, for the first time, really healthy and whole. Mind needs all kinds of poisons to continue to exist. The idea of miracles is one of the most important. The idea is absolutely against existence.First you have to understand, what does a miracle mean? It means that existence is not trustable, that nature is not unprejudiced, that the laws of life allow exceptions. This is an absolute absurdity. Existence has no prejudices – that for Jesus it has a soft corner in the heart, and not for you; that it allows Mohammed to go beyond natural laws, but it does not allow you. A miracle simply is a condemnation of the fairness of existence.No, there is no such thing as a miracle – never has been, never will be. If miracles happen then science cannot happen; and we know that science has happened. And as science has grown, miracles have diminished in exact proportion. The more science grows, the less and less are there miracles. If you go farther back you can find thousands of miracles happening.Most of those miracles are just stories invented to create messiahs, prophets, reincarnations of God – because how can you manage to put a certain man above all humanity? How can you manage to make him superhuman? His body follows nature, his life follows nature. From birth to death there is not a single exception.But the fools around the world will not accept an ordinary man as enlightened. They need a superman, only then is their mind satisfied: Of course, he is a superman, a messenger of God; he can be enlightened – but how can we poor human beings be enlightened?And how to prove that he is superior to you? Just look: Jesus is not superior as far as intelligence is concerned, shows no special intelligence. There were hundreds of more learned rabbis, great scholars of profound intelligence; he is just an uneducated, unpolished carpenter’s son.By intelligence he cannot prove – nor can his followers – that he is superior, that he is special, that he is the only begotten son of God. By physical strength he cannot prove that either. Any Muhammad Ali will throw him flat. Just by a single hit on his nose he is finished. Physically he cannot prove that he is superior.Now these are the only two things in human life where you find…. Somebody is an Albert Einstein, a Bertrand Russell, a Jean-Paul Sartre – they have proved intellectually they are sharper, more talented. But a strange thing is, they don’t claim they are the only begotten son of God. No intelligent person can claim such an unintelligent thing.Or there are people who are physically talented. They may come first in the Olympic race, in some game, in some wrestling, but that simply shows a difference between you and them of quantity, not of quality. Howsoever powerful a man may be, he is only quantitatively different from you; and the difference of quantity is no difference at all.If you had worked on the same lines with the same gymnastics for the same time, perhaps you might have proved even a better wrestler, a better runner. All that is proved is that this man has practiced a certain talent. Certainly he should be respected – but he does not become the messenger of God.There are people who are world champions in chess playing. Certainly they have a tremendously complicated mind. A real chess player has to think five moves ahead. When you play chess you only think of one move ahead, at the most two moves; more than that and you will get puzzled.Five is the minimum to become a world champion. Five moves means you take one move, the other person will take a move. You have to visualize what he is going to take, then what you will do, then what he will do, then what you will do – five times. You have to be clear about five moves ahead, only then can you be a world champion; otherwise it is impossible. That much concentration, practice…it is a maddening thing.But even then, somebody becoming a world champion in chess is not a prophet. He has a mind closer to a computer than you have. Your mind is simpler, a little more primitive a computer; his mind is a little more sophisticated a computer. Your mind can be trained also in the same way. It is only a question of training. The difference is only of degrees, there is no difference of quality. He is just as human a being as you are.Then how to prove that Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna – that these people are not just ordinary like you? The way that has been discovered is called the miracle. That makes them qualitatively different from you, because whatsoever you do, you cannot get trained in walking on water. Whatever you do you will be drowned again and again. So it is not a question of training, discipline, knowing certain strategies – no, nothing will help. How can you turn stones into bread? How can you turn water into wine?These stories are invented for a certain purpose – to make that man qualitatively higher than you. But this is exploiting humanity, corrupting human consciousness, giving people false ideas.Just look at these miracle-men of the world and you can see that of all those miracles, ninety percent were invented by the followers or by the originators themselves. It is difficult at such a long distance to know who started them. Most of them must have been started by the originators themselves, and of course followers go on adding to them.It becomes an absolute necessity for followers to go on adding more and more miracles, because it is a competitive business and everybody has to prove his messiah the highest, the greatest. Everybody else is below him. Now, only miracles can do that miracle, there is no other way.Jainas have twenty-four tirthankaras, twenty-four messiahs. Because Jainas had twenty-four, Buddhists were at a loss; they had only one – Gautam Buddha. In the market – and this whole world is a market and every human being is a customer – when you are selling your messiah, your religion, your holy book, small things count. A Buddhist feels at a loss because people ask how many buddhas there have been. Just one? Looks very poor – Jainas have twenty-four!Hindus up to that moment had ten incarnations of God. They immediately changed to twenty-four because ten looked poor before twenty-four. The idea of Jainas having twenty-four…. Before Mahavira, all Hindu scriptures talk of ten avataras; after Mahavira suddenly a great change happens – Hindus start talking about twenty-four.Buddhists are at a loss because their religion starts with Buddha, so where to put twenty-four buddhas? But they have to be a little more creative. They started talking about twenty-four lives of Gautam Buddha – this was the twenty-fourth life. He had been an awakened one twenty-three times before.You can see a clever legal process. They had no historical grounds to prove that there had been twenty-four buddhas. Even Buddha cannot say that because he was the originator. But this was easy, to invent twenty-three previous lives.The span is thousands of years, and in those days particularly in India history was not written. History was not even counted as a subject. Writing history was introduced by the Mohammedans in India. In India the idea was that history consists of mundane, ordinary, day to day things, which go on being repeated. A king is born, a king dies; another king will be there, he will die. Empires are built and disappear.If you look at the millions of years in India it has been the custom to look at existence extending for millions and millions of years – what does it matter that a man was a prime minister for three months in a country? Why bother? For three months out of millions and millions of years, in a country on a very mediocre planet, of a very mediocre solar system, a certain man was prime minister – why bother? The Indian attitude is, why unnecessarily waste time?So instead of history…the Indian word for history is very significant. It is itihas. The word means “that which comes and disappears like a soap bubble” the end is not very far from the beginning. So instead they used to write puranas. Now, the word puranas means something not concerned with individuals but with essentials.For example, a tirthankara is not just a person. There are only twenty-four tirthankaras in one creation, and one creation means millions and millions of years. Each tirthankara simply represents the essence of consciousness touching the highest peak. In millions of years only twenty-four times has human consciousness risen so high that it touches the ultimate.Now, this is essential. When Mahavira was born and when he died – that is history – doesn’t matter; any date will do. What difference does it make whether he was born twenty-five centuries ago or twenty-six centuries ago, on Monday, on Sunday, on Saturday – what does it matter? What matters is that a consciousness reached a peak.If you go in a Jaina temple you will be surprised to see twenty-four tirthankaras all looking exactly alike. This is impossible, that all these twenty-four persons – and they were born over a long period of thousands of years – looked absolutely alike. Their noses, their eyes, even their ear lobes…because a Jaina tirthankara’s ear lobes have to be so long that they touch the shoulder – on all twenty-four tirthankaras.You cannot say whose statue this is – even Jainas cannot say whose statue this is. So they had to make, near the feet, a symbol: a lion represents Mahavira, a peacock represents somebody else…. So if you ask a Jaina he will just immediately look at the symbol near the feet. Only by the symbol can he say who this is; otherwise they are all alike.It certainly is not history. No two persons are ever born exactly alike; to find twenty-four people exactly alike is impossible. But they are not concerned with those persons – their bodies, their noses, their ears – their concern is with their consciousness; and everything else is representing symbolically the highest peak of consciousness.For example, the ear lobes touching the shoulders…. Perhaps once in a while you may find a person whose ear lobes do touch, but I have never seen one. I have seen millions of people and I have looked at their ears, but I have never seen a single person whose ear lobes touched the shoulders. Just one person I know – he was a colleague of mine in my high-school classes – who had special kind of ears.He could move them according to his will and wish. You cannot do it. You don’t have muscles, you cannot do anything with your ears. Just try to do something; you cannot do anything. But this boy was a miracle! He could turn his ears down, up, move them in and out.He is now a doctor, but more famous for his ears than anything else. Patients will come and ask, “Doctor, please, just show your ears.” I have been searching for a second person who can do that even better – I have not found one. Some freak of nature…. It seems he has some muscles and nerves in his ears which are not needed, so he can pull his ears and do things with them.But what were these tirthankaras doing with ears that long? One thing, it is not history, so it is not representative of reality; it is representative of something different. To me those long ears simply mean that these people were capable of listening. Now, how do you represent in a marble statue that they were totally capable of listening? Now, to represent that, they don’t care about history; it is puranas. Puranas means we are concerned about the essentials.All these twenty-four statues have their eyes half-closed. You can see only the lower white part of the eyes; otherwise the eyes are closed. But why half? That is the only difference you will find in a Buddhist statue and a Jaina statue: the Buddha’s statue has the eyes completely closed.Again, it is not history. They are not saying anything about these people; they are saying that a man who touches the highest consciousness is so complete that the outer and the inner become one. His half-closed eyes symbolize that the outer half and the inner half are meeting. This is what I mean by essence.Mahavira had twenty-three predecessors – Buddha was in a difficulty. And there were so many miracles about those twenty-three predecessors of Mahavira that Buddha looked poor. So first he had to create the idea that he had been a buddha twenty-three times before; and then about those twenty-three buddhas he created miracles. Perhaps the miracles about him are created by his disciples later on, but he must have initiated them in some way.At least one thing is certain, that none of these fellows prevented their disciples by saying, “Don’t do this mischief to me.” Even if they had not created the miracles themselves they allowed them by remaining silent. If the rumors were going around that they were doing miracles or miracles were happening, there is not a single statement from Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Mahavira, Mohammed, which says no, these were rumors.My mother was telling me just yesterday… Vivek listened to her talking so animatedly for the first time in so long; otherwise whatever she is asked is answered in one or two words: yes or no, and the conversation is over. But yesterday she was talking for a long time and she was very animated, so Vivek asked me, “What was your mother telling you?”I told her she was remembering a few things. I have not yet told Vivek what my mother was telling me because it was a long story. She was telling me that when I was five months old in her womb, a miracle happened.She was going from my father’s house to her father’s house, and it was the rainy season. It is customary in India for the first child to be born at the maternal father’s home, so although it was the rainy season and very difficult – no roads, and she had to go on a horse – the sooner she went, the better. If she waited longer then it would have become more difficult, so she went with one of her cousins.In the middle of the journey was a big river, the Narmada. It was in flood. When they reached the boat, the boatman saw that my mother was pregnant, and he asked my mother’s cousin, “What is your relationship?”He was not aware that he would get into trouble so he simply said, “We are brother and sister.”The boatman refused; he said, “I cannot take you because your sister is pregnant – that means you are not two, you are three.”In India, there is a custom, an old custom – perhaps it started in the days of Krishna – that one should not travel on water, particularly in a boat, with one’s sister’s son. There is a danger of the boat sinking.The boatman said, “What guarantee is there that the child in your sister’s womb is a girl and not a boy? If he is a boy, I don’t want to take the risk because it is not a question only of my life; there are sixty other people going in the boat. Either you can come or your sister can come; I won’t take both.”There were hills and jungle on both sides, and the river was really vast at that point. The boat used to go only once a day. It would go in the morning and then it would come back by the evening. The next morning it would go again, the same boat. So either my mother had to remain on this side, which was dangerous, or go to the other side, which was just as dangerous. For three days they continued to ask him, beg him, saying that she was pregnant and he should be kind.He said, “I can’t help it – this is not done. If you can give me a guarantee that it is not a boy, then I can take you; but how can you give me a guarantee?”So for three days they had to stay there in a temple. In that temple there lived a saint, who was in those days very famous in that area. There has now arisen a city around the temple in the memory of that saint, Saikheda. Saikheda means “the village of the saint.” Sai means saint; he was known as Sai Baba. He was not the same Sai Baba who became world famous – Sai Baba of Shirdi – but they were contemporaries.Sai Baba of Shirdi became world-famous because of the simple coincidence that Shirdi is near Mumbai, and all the celebrities of Mumbai and the rich people of Mumbai started going to Sai Baba of Shirdi. The richer you are, the more famous you are, the more successful you are, the more you are in need of something to give you fulfillment, because all your success, your riches, your fame has brought you nothing. These are the emptiest people in the world, the hollowest. And because Mumbai is a world center, soon Sai Baba of Shirdi’s name started reaching outside India, and so many miracles were created around him.The same was the situation with this Sai Baba who lived in that temple. Finally my mother had to ask him, “Can you do something? We have been here for three days. I am pregnant and my cousin has told the boatman that he is my brother, and he won’t take us in the boat. Now, unless you do something, say something to that boatman, we are in a fix. What to do? My brother cannot leave me here alone; I cannot go alone to the other side. On both sides are wild jungles and forests, and for at least twenty-four hours I will have to wait alone.”I never met Sai Baba, but in a way I did meet him; I was five months old. He just touched my mother’s belly. My mother said, “What are your doing?”He said, “I am touching the feet of your child.”The boatman saw this and said, “What are you doing, Baba? You have never touched anybody’s feet.”And Baba said, “This is not just anybody, and you are a fool – you should take them to the other side. Don’t be worried. The soul that is within this womb is capable of saving thousands of people, so don’t be worried about your sixty people – take her.”So my mother was saying, “At that time I became aware that I was carrying someone special.”I said, “As far as I understand, Sai Baba was a wise man: he really befooled the boatman. There is no miracle, there is nothing. And boats don’t sink just because somebody is traveling with their sister’s son. There is no rationality in the idea, it is just absurd. Perhaps sometime it may have happened accidentally and then it became a routine idea.”That is my own understanding because in Krishna’s life his mother’s brother was told by the astrologers: “One of your sister’s children will kill you.” The brother kept his sister and his brother-in-law in prison. She gave birth to seven children, seven boys, and he killed them all. The eighth was Krishna, and of course when God himself was born, the locks of the prison opened up. The guards fell fast asleep, and Krishna’s father took him out.The river Yamuna was the boundary of Kansa’s kingdom. Kansa was the person who was killing his sister’s sons in the fear that one of them was going to kill him. The Yamuna was in flood, and it is one of the biggest rivers in India. Krishna’s father was very much afraid, but somehow the child had to be taken to the other side, to a friend’s house whose wife had given birth to a girl so he could exchange them. He wanted to bring the girl back with him because the next morning Kansa would be there asking, “Where is the child?” and planning to kill him. He wouldn’t kill a girl – it had to be a boy.But how to cross this river? There was no boat in the night, but it had to be crossed. When God can open locks without keys, without anybody opening them – they had simply opened up, the doors opened up, the guards fell asleep – God would do something.So he put the child in a bucket on his head and passed through the river – something like what happened to Moses when the ocean parted. This time it happened in an Indian way. It could not have happened to Moses because that ocean was not Indian, but this river was.As he entered the river, the river started rising higher. He was very much afraid: what was happening? He was hoping the river would subside, but it started rising. It went to the point where it touched the feet of Krishna, then it receded. This is the Indian way, it cannot happen anywhere else. How can the river miss such a point? When God is born and passing through her, just giving way is not enough, not mannerly.Since that time there has been this idea that there is a certain antagonism between a person and his sister’s son: Krishna killed Kansa. The river was crossed, it subsided; it favored the child. Since then all the rivers of India are angry against maternal uncles. And that superstition is carried even today.I told my mother, “One thing is certain – that Sai Baba must have been a wise man and had some sense of humor.” But she wouldn’t listen. And it became known in the village what had happened, and to support it, after a month, something else happened – in life there are so many coincidences out of which you can make miracles. Once you are bent upon making a miracle, then any coincidence can be turned into a one.One month later there was a great flood, and it was almost like a river in front of my mother’s house in the rainy season. There was a lake, and a small road between the lake and the house, but in the rainy season so much water came that the road was completely like a river, and the lake and the road became merged into one. It was almost oceanic; as far as you could see it was all water. And that year India had perhaps the biggest floods ever.Floods ordinarily happen every year in India, but that year a strange thing was noted: floods started reversing the rivers’ flow of water. The rains were so heavy that the ocean was not able to take the water as quickly as it was coming, so the water at the ocean front was stuck; it started flowing backward. Where small rivers fell into big rivers, the big rivers refused to take the water because they were not able even to contain their own water. The small rivers started moving backward.I have never seen it – I also missed that one – but my mother says that it was a strange phenomenon to see the water moving backward. And it started entering houses; it entered my mother’s house. It was a two-story house, and the first story was completely full of water. Then it started entering the second story. Now, there was nowhere to go, so they were all sitting on the beds, the highest place that was possible there. But my mother said, “If Sai Baba was right, then something will happen.” And it must have been a coincidence that the water came up to my mother’s stomach and then receded.These two miracles happened before I was born, so I had nothing to do with them. But they became known; when I was born I was almost a saint in the village. Everybody was so respectful; people were touching my feet, even old people. Later on I was told, “The whole village has accepted you as a saint.”When I must have been nearabout four, I was the only child in the house – nothing to do, no school, no place to go. My maternal grandfather had a multipurpose shop, of all kinds of things. That was the only shop in the village so there was every kind of thing: it was a very miniature market rather than a shop. So I started playing with sweets and things, and I don’t know how it occurred to me, but soon people were continually coming who were sick – and there was no doctor, no physician, no hospital, even for hundreds of miles.Somehow it came to me that if people think of me as a saint, and they touch my feet, I could start giving them medicines. The medicines were nothing but mixtures of a few well-ground sweets, powdered, and kept in bottles of different colors. And of course, people who get fever or headache or a stomachache don’t die. They started getting cured; they were going to be cured anyway. That was not a miracle, but it became a miracle.My nana, my maternal grandfather, started saying, “You will spoil my shop – now it is a hospital! The whole day people are coming and sometimes even I have to give your medicines, and I have no idea what those medicines are. You are destroying my sweets and my shop, but they are getting cured, so no harm – continue.”When after seven years I moved to my father’s house, I dropped that business of giving medicines, but whenever people from that village would come, they would remind me. They had already started calling me “Doctor Sahib,” and I would say, “Please don’t use that word here, because I have stopped that profession completely. In the first place there are no sweets here; my father has a cloth shop; I cannot make medicines out of cloth. And here nobody knows that I can do miracles. First people have to know, then you can do them; otherwise you cannot.”Coincidences perhaps may have happened in the lives of Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, but it would have been far more honest of them to say that these were coincidences, that nature had not broken its law, it had not given a special power to somebody. But they remained silent about it. Silence is a support. Perhaps there was not any bad intention, because it has been noted that people are not in search of truth but in search of power – and the miracle is a symbol of power, not of truth. Truth has nothing to do with miraclesBut who is interested in truth?Everybody is interested in power.So when you see a man of miracles you are immediately impressed: here is a man who has power. And that is your deepest urge – the will-to-power. Then you start following this man. In fact, if somebody tries to explain to you that these are not miracles you don’t want to listen because he is taking away your power; your only hope he is destroying.So the people who believe in miracle-men are not ready to listen for the simple reason that you may destroy their faith, their belief You may be able to prove that either it is magic – that means just conjuring tricks – or it is simply a coincidence, or it is just an invented story. And many things can be managed very easily….I used to know in Jabalpur a man from south India. He must have come some thirty, forty years before from Madras, and he had lived in Jabalpur for forty years; still he was known as Madrasi Baba because he was from Madras. It was known that he had revived dead people. I was a student in the university; I heard this many times so I collected a few people and one night we went to Madrasi Baba. He used to live in a small hut outside the town, so it was very easy.We all entered his hut, and we took hold of him – he was lying down on his cot. We tied his feet and hands, and I told him, “You have to tell the truth – we are not going to tell anybody, but if you don’t tell us the truth then today we are going to do a miracle.”He said, “What kind of miracle?”I said, “Today we are going to turn an alive man into a dead man. Just in front of your house there is a big lake; we are going to throw you into it. And we will make every certainty and surety that you cannot survive. We have big rocks outside which we are going to put on your chest, bind with your cot and throw the whole cot with you and the rocks. And you will go down – unless you tell us how you managed to revive a man.”He said, “I will tell you but please don’t tell anybody; otherwise my whole life will be ruined. I live only on that miracle.”I said, “First tell us.” And what miracles had he done? It was one of his friends who pretended to be dead. He was a practitioner of yoga, they both were practitioners of yoga. If you practice yoga then there is a possibility that for at least ten minutes you can stop your breathing.With certain exercises it is possible that your heart goes on at the minimum, the pulse at the minimum, and your breathing completely stops – but for not more than ten minutes. But ten minutes are enough to prove a man dead, you don’t need more.One morning he declared that his friend had died. People came, they looked, they took his pulse; it was gone. There was no breathing, his heart was not beating – he was dead. They covered him, and then Madrasi Baba chanted some mantras in Telugu, in his language, so nobody knew whether he was chanting mantras or singing film songs. And after seven rounds of chanting and throwing some invisible power over the man he took off the cover, put his hands on the nose of the man, looked upward – and slowly slowly, the breathing came back, the pulse came back and the heart started beating.The man is still alive, the other man. And we confirmed the story through this other man also, in the same way; we had to because there was no other way. We said that Madrasi Baba himself had told the whole story, “but now you are also in the same situation. So you just tell us, otherwise you will go; we will perform the real miracle.”And he said, “It is true, I conspired with him – we are partners. Whatsoever money he gets, half he gives to me. For these forty years life has been very pleasant, without any work, without any trouble; we have lived comfortably, and people respect us. Now I am his disciple in people’s eyes, but really I am a partner in his business.” So either miracles are invented….Now, nobody can say this Lazarus was not a partner in the whole conspiracy. He was a friend of Jesus’ – that much is reported. And why only Lazarus? There were so many people dying. Did he have to wait to do the miracle only when Lazarus died? And Lazarus was young – it was not his time to die either. He was Jesus’ friend so there is every possibility that Jesus may have told him, “Just pretend you are dead.” He had learned all yoga practices in India, in Egypt; both countries know the secrets about stopping the breath.Either it is a coincidence, or it is a conspiracy, or it is just a myth created when the person is gone. But you can judge very easily.Jesus can revive a dead man, but when he is feeling thirsty on the cross he cannot materialize a single glass of water, or just a Coca-Cola. That would have been a real miracle – if he had produced Coca-Cola. Then I would never say that miracles don’t exist, because to produce Coca-Cola at that time would not have been possible. Even today you cannot make it, because the secret of Coca-Cola is absolutely preserved, there is no way…. There are so many cold drinks available in the world, but nothing comes close to Coca-Cola.If Jesus had produced that, with the label of Coca-Cola and the bottle and everything, then there would have been no need for any other proof; they could have just preserved the Coca-Cola bottle in the Vatican.But whatever he did is not of much significance, and he could not do it when he was himself in need. He could revive the dead but he could not change those apostles, transform their beings.What to say of transformation – even on the last night when Jesus is to depart he says to them again and again, “Remain awake, don’t fall asleep! This is my last night; tonight they are going to catch me. Remain awake so that I can pray silently – and be watchful!”And after each hour he comes and he finds his disciples are fast asleep, snoring. He wakes them up and tells them again, “Have you forgotten?”Now, with these stupid people Jesus wasted his whole life – people who were not even capable of remaining awake just one night. When the master is going to be crucified the next day, even out of curiosity one would have remained awake; but even curiosity is not there. The moment Jesus goes back behind the bushes to pray…and why does he go behind the bushes? That I don’t understand. You can go behind the bushes to piss, not to pray, but it would stink.He should have remained just in the middle of those fools and prayed there; that would have kept them awake at least. But going behind the bushes…. Again and again, the whole night that drama continues, but they are not ready. You can’t change people’s minds just a little bit but you can raise people from the dead? It doesn’t seem to be possible.There are miracles around Buddha – that when he passes, trees blossom out of season. The whole forest might be dry if the season was fall and all the leaves had fallen, but if Buddha passes through the forest it looks disrespectful – those barren trees without leaves, without flowers. No, suddenly the whole forest changes its course of millions of years; suddenly there are leaves, suddenly there is greenery, flowers, fruits.I can say this must be a myth because Buddha himself has a personal physician continuously moving with him, his Devaraj. For what? If even trees understand, I won’t his body understand? The most famous physician of those days, Jivaka, was continuously with him, just like a shadow, taking care of his body – and still he died of food poisoning. Not a great way to die, through food poisoning.If some glutton dies of food poisoning he can be forgiven, but not Buddha. The poison had no consideration for Buddha, the food had no consideration, the body had no consideration – and the trees and the forest and the mountains had consideration for him?He was sitting in meditation, and his brother, his own brother, Devadatta, who was a follower…but he wanted Buddha to declare him his successor. Buddha said, “That is not possible. You are not yet capable of such a position. And there are people – Mahakashyapa, Sariputta, Moggalayan – so many people who are already enlightened. How can I declare you, an unenlightened person, as my successor? I am not going to declare anybody my successor because there are so many people who are capable of being my successor – how am I to choose?”But Devadatta was very angry, so angry that he left Buddha, taking five thousand disciples of Buddha with him. And he tried many ways to kill Buddha. One was that while Buddha was meditating, sitting on a rock Devadatta slid a big rock from the mountain top aimed exactly to hit Buddha.And it would have simply crushed him – there was no chance – but the rock, just on the way, thought, “There is Buddha, and this would not be right, to go on falling in the traditional way.” It moved, changed its course – which was very strange because there was no reason for it to change its course, no obstacle that moved it from its course.Devadatta brought a mad elephant who was known to have killed many people and so was kept always in chains. He brought him and left him without chains close to where Buddha was sitting. And the elephant came rushing, because after many days he had got the chance to kill somebody. He was murderous. But just coming close to Buddha, a sudden break: no, this is not the man to kill. He lowered himself, went on his knees and touched Buddha’s feet.Now if elephants, mad elephants, rocks and trees are so careful about Buddha – and I would like them to be so careful, there is no harm in it. I would like them to be so careful about everybody, why only about Buddha? But when he eats the poisonous food his own body does not bother; the poison takes no care. That proves that all other stories are beautiful stories created to make Buddha a superhuman being.The same is true about all your miracle-men. As far as I am concerned, a miracle is something against nature, against existence; hence it is impossible. Yes, your mind wants it because your mind is sick. It is hungry for power and it would like its master to be a man of power. Then of course you can hope that some day you can manage – by serving the master, by trusting the master, by surrendering to the master – you can get some power yourself.It is a deep desire for power that goes on asking again and again whether miracles happen or not.I say categorically they have never happened, because in the very nature of things a miracle is an absurdity. It simply means suddenly nature forgets its laws, existence changes its course. No, existence is fair, it is equal to all, exactly the same to all. And it is good that it is fair and equal; otherwise there would be the same bureaucracy and hierarchy that goes on in governments.And that’s what religions have been trying to create. What is this Christianity? A certain kind of bureaucracy from God, the Holy Ghost, Jesus, the messiah; then the pope, his representative; then the cardinal, then the bishop, and so on and so on…. It goes on and on to the lowest priest in the village.This is a hierarchy, a bureaucracy. But everything is based on the miracles of Jesus. That’s why I want to hammer those miracles as forcibly as possible. If they are broken completely the whole hierarchy and bureaucracy falls down; they have nothing else to support them. And the same is true about all religionsI know only of one miracle which is not included in your question about miracles; and that miracle is a jump of consciousness between the master and the disciple.Something transpires, but it is not done by the master, it is not done by the disciple. Both are surprised when it happens.The master is available.Whenever the disciple is also available, it simply happens.This is the only miracle I know ofBut it is not to be categorized with other miracles because it is really the ultimate law of existence. It is not something against existence, it is something which is the deepest, most central, most fundamental part of existence itself.Just look for this miracle, wait for this miracle, and forget all nonsense about everything else.If you really want to be religious, if you really want to be transformed, then you have to destroy all barriers between you and the transformation you are searching.Yes, that miracle is possible. That miracle is possible any moment – here, now. So prepare for that. Don’t go on digging in bullshit.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why is the world in so much misery? Why can't we all be just as blissful as you always are?The child is the father of the man, and down the centuries we have been destroying the child. And once the child is destroyed, the whole life becomes unnatural, miserable, meaningless.The question is, Why has every society, every civilization tried to spoil the child?It is something very important to understand, that all that we have created up to now – social structures, religious philosophies, teaching systems – knowingly or unknowingly all need a miserable man for their existence. They are parasites.If man is not miserable then all your so-called great institutions will disappear from the earth. Just think: no animal needs any religion, no animal needs any philosophy, no animal needs any culture, civilization. Still, the animals have been living happily, far more happily than your man has managed to live. You will not find animals in misery, in anguish.All these institutions which exist upon your misery are bound to create more and more misery; that is their feeding ground, that is their food. A miserable man is bound, sooner or later, to end up in a religion because he will need consolations. He does not have reality to support him; he will need fictions to substitute for reality.He knows nothing about love. He has been prevented from the very beginning from knowing what love is. He has been diverted into something else which is not love, which is only a game – artificial, a hypocrisy. You can pretend, but it is not going to nourish you. It is, on the contrary, going to exhaust you. It is going to take so much out of you because it is not a simple phenomenon.To pretend continuously is a heavy job, perhaps the heaviest in the world. You can carry a mountain on your head – that will not be so heavy as carrying for your whole life, all kinds of lies, pretensions, false faces.You become a mess just trying to keep all those faces, pretensions, lies, together. They are all falling apart; all are against each other, and they have no roots in reality. You have to feed them your own blood, your own heart, your own marrow. Naturally it creates a miserable world.But the priests are happy with the miserable world. They were very unhappy with pagans, so unhappy with pagans that the very word pagan became condemnatory.One day I was talking to Vivek, just taking my tea. I said, “I am a pagan.”She said, “Never use that word in the West.”I said, “Why? It is such a beautiful word.”She said, “It may be beautiful for you, but Christianity, Judaism, the whole West, uses the word in a very derogatory sense.”I said, “I was not aware of it. That means now I have to use it for myself. The word has to be freed from these criminals and their hands. They have destroyed a beautiful word.”Once the pagan existed on the earth and he was as happy as any other animal; he knew nothing of misery. He loved, he lived, never bothering about ultimate questions and problems. He enjoyed eating, drinking – the simple things of life, not making everything a problem. The pagans have disappeared from the world. Religions destroyed them everywhere, all over the world.All the religions have been against the pagans because if pagans exist then there is no possibility for religions. They cannot coexist because the pagan is not interested in what happens after death. He is not interested in what happened before birth.He says, “Between birth and death, it is so much just to live. First let me finish this – don’t bring in unnecessary things to waste my time. Right now I am in the middle of life, let me live it. When I am in death I will try to live it too, but why should I bother about death now? – because I don’t remember ever bothering about life before. Right now life is in my hands, and I want to squeeze the whole juice out of it.”I am reminded of a beautiful story; it is so beautiful that one wants…. It would have been good if it was true too; but it is very close to truth.In paradise, in a restaurant, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, all four are sitting gospeling. And then an apsara, a beautiful dance girl, comes dancing with a flask in her hands – it is full of wine – looks at them and says, “You are talking about life, and listening to you talk about life I wondered…. Life is available here in this restaurant; that’s our special recipe. We make life, the juice called life. I have brought this flask. There is no need to discuss it, why don’t you drink, taste it?”Buddha immediately closed his eyes. He said “Birth is pain, death is pain, and between two pains there is no possibility of life being bliss. I don’t even want to see it.”Jesus looked at the girl and told her, “Life is born in sin, and you are trying to tempt us? You must belong to the devil. Get out of my sight!”Confucius was more human; he said, “I cannot be like these two guys; they are against life. I am a pragmatist.” Confucius made China one of the most pragmatic countries, very practical. He said, “I am a practical man. I cannot say anything without tasting – give me a little taste of the juice you call life.” He tasted it a little, gave the cup back and said, “No, it is bitter. Those two fellows are right.”Lao Tzu said, “Unless you drink the whole of it you cannot pass any judgment, because there are things which are bitter in the beginning and sweet in the end. And moreover, one has to learn tasting too. Just taking one sip, with no previous experience of drinking life…your judgment is simply worthless.“Confucius, you are a confused man and you have confused thousands of others. You pose as if you are pragmatic, but what kind of pragmatism is this, that just by tasting a little bit you make a judgment about the whole? By knowing the part you don’t know the whole. Yes, by knowing the whole you know the part, but not vice versa.”Lao Tzu took the whole flask – he was not a man to drink from a cup – drank the whole flask, emptied the flask, thanked the lady, and told all those great friends of his, “You are all idiots! It is tremendously beautiful, delicious, but one has to experience it in its totality. Less than that won’t do.”This is the whole approach of the pagan.Lao Tzu is a pagan. That’s why in his writings you will not find God mentioned, or heaven and hell talked about. He is solely concerned with here and now. He lived that way.Once Confucius had asked him, “People ask me about death but I don’t know anything about death. Perhaps – you are older and wiser, and you love to move into dangerous spaces of consciousness – perhaps you have some idea about death.”Lao Tzu said, “Without dying, there is no way to know death. Commit suicide; go and jump from the hill and you will know what death is. The only way to know is to live it. Asking about death, trying to find an answer about death, is silly. Right now try to live; otherwise you will miss this too.“And mind my advice, that you are not going to live forever; soon you will be dead. Then, Lying in your grave, meditate upon death as long as you want – nobody will disturb you.“But don’t waste your lifetime thinking about death, because those are the people who, when they are dying, will be thinking of life. That’s how their mind functions. They are never where they are, they are always where they are not. That has become their routine. While alive they are worried about death – while dying they will be worried about life.”I am a pagan.And only a pagan can drop miseries.Only he has the guts to drop miseries.The society won’t allow you to drop your miseries – it has so much investment in them.You are miserable, you go to the priest; he gives you fictions, consolations. Of course he takes his fee and assures you that he will take care of you; he will persuade God in favor of you. You just be patient and accept whatever happens to you, trusting in God, trusting in the holy book, trusting in the messiah. You need not be worried: these miseries will be soon over, life is so short.For people who don’t know how to live, life is so short.For people who know how to live even a single moment is equal to eternity.The priests will tell you, “It is just a short life, it will pass. It is just like a nightmare, but you will wake up in paradise. Just keep faith burning in your heart, don’t lose your belief”Now, if you are not miserable, there is no need to go to a priest. I have never been to a priest. I have never asked anybody how not to be miserable, because in the first place I am not miserable.Once in a while it happens…because no system can be one hundred percent foolproof, for the simple reason that all systems are made by fools – how can they make a system foolproof? So once in a while a few people have slipped through the loopholes.From my very childhood it has been my basic contention that blissfulness is natural, just like health. You don’t have to find reasons why you are healthy. You don’t go to the doctor, worried, and say, “Doctor, for a few days I have been having this problem of health. Am I supposed to do something or just continue being healthy?” No, you don’t make health a problem. Why? You accept it as natural. Disease is not natural.The word disease is beautiful. It simply means a state of uneasiness. Whether it is physical, psychological, or spiritual, does not matter; disease can be on any plane. Dis-ease is not going to be your nature, it is something unnatural; you have got diverted from your natural course. So whenever you find yourself miserable, that simply means you are doing something to create it.This has been my basic contention from my very childhood, that just like health, happiness is a natural phenomenon. But unhappiness is not natural; something somewhere has gone wrong. If a person is continuously miserable, that means many things have gone wrong together. And if the whole world is miserable, that means the whole world is functioning on wrong principles.For example: each child is told not to be himself. You may not be told so directly, but you are told in a thousand and one ways not to be yourself: you are not acceptable. You can be acceptable if you follow certain rules given by your parents, your priests, your teachers.But neither the teacher is nature, nor the priest is nature, nor do your parents have any monopoly on nature. But they all are trying to push you into some unnatural way of life. They call it principles, discipline, ideals. They give you great ideals: you have to become like Krishna, like Jesus, like Rama.In my town there was only one church. There were very few Christians, perhaps four or five families, and I was the only non-Christian who used to visit the church. But that was not special; I used to visit the mosques, the gurudwara, Hindu temples, Jaina temples. I always had the idea that everything belongs to me. I don’t belong to any church, I don’t belong to any temple, but any temple and any church that exists on the earth belongs to me.Seeing a non-Christian boy coming continually every Sunday, the priest became interested in me. He said to me, “You seem to be very interested. In fact, in my whole congregation – it is such a small congregation – you seem to be the most interested. Others are sleeping, snoring, but you are so alert and listening and watching everything. Would you like to become like Jesus Christ?” and he showed me Jesus Christ’s picture, of course of him hanging on the cross.I said, “No, absolutely no. I have no desire to be crucified. And a man who is crucified must have something wrong with him; otherwise who cares to crucify anybody? If his whole country, his people, decided to crucify him, then that man must be carrying something wrong with him. He may be a nice man, he may be a good man, but something must have led him to crucifixion. Perhaps he had a suicidal instinct.“The people who have suicidal instincts are not generally so courageous as to commit suicide, but they can manage to get others to murder them. And then you will never find that they had a suicidal instinct, that they prompted you to kill them so that the responsibility falls on you.”I said, “I don’t have any suicidal instinct in me. Perhaps he was not a suicidal man but certainly he was some kind of masochist. Just looking at his face – and I have seen many of his pictures – I see him looking so miserable, so deadly miserable, that I have tried standing before a mirror and looking as miserable as he looks, but I have failed. I have tried hard, but I cannot even make his face; how can I become Jesus Christ? That seems to be impossible. And why should I become Jesus Christ?”He was shocked. He said, “I thought you were interested in Jesus.”I said, “I am certainly interested, more interested than you are, because you are a mere preacher, salaried. If you don’t get a salary for three months you will be gone, and all your teaching will disappear.” And that’s what finally happened, because those Christian families were not permanent residents of the town – they were all railway employees, so sooner or later they got transferred. He was left alone with a small church that they had made. Now there was nobody to give money, to support him, nobody to listen to him except me.On Sundays he used to say, “Dear friends – “I would say, “Wait! Don’t use the plural. There are no friends, just ‘dear friend’ will do. It is almost like two lovers talking; it is not a congregation. You can sit down – nobody is there. We can have a good chitchat. Why unnecessarily go on standing for one hour, and shout and…?”And that’s how it happened. Within three months he was gone, because if you don’t pay him…. Although Jesus says, “Man cannot live by bread alone,” man cannot live without bread either. He needs the bread. It may not be enough, he needs many more things, but many more things come only later on; first comes the bread.Man certainly can live by bread alone. He will not be much of a man – but who is much of a man? But nobody can live without bread, not even Jesus.I was going into the mosque, and they allowed me, because Christians, Mohammedans – these are converting religions; they want people from other folds to come to their fold: They were very happy seeing me there – but the same question: “Would you like to become like Hazrat Mohammed?” I was surprised to know that nobody was interested in my just being myself, helping me to be myself.Everybody was interested in somebody else, the ideal, their ideal, and I have only to be a carbon copy? God has not given me any original face? I have to live with a borrowed face, with a mask, knowing that I don’t have any face at all? Then how can life be a joy? Even your face is not yours.If you are not yourself, how can you be happy?The whole existence is blissful because the rock is rock, the tree is tree, the river is river, the ocean is ocean. Nobody is bothering to become somebody else; otherwise they would all go nuts. And that’s what has happened to man.You are being taught from the very childhood not to be yourself, but the way it is said is very clever, cunning. They say, “You have to become like Krishna, like Buddha,” and they paint Buddha and Krishna in such a way that a great desire arises in you to be a Buddha, to be a Jesus, to be a Krishna. This desire is the root cause of your misery.I was also told the same things that you have been told, but from my very childhood I made it a point that whatsoever the consequence I was not going to be deviated from myself Right or wrong I am going to remain myself Even if I end up in hell I will have at least the satisfaction that I followed my own course of life. If it leads to hell, then it leads to hell. Following others’ advice and ideals and disciplines, even if I end up in paradise I will not be happy there, because I will have been forced against my will.Try to understand the point. If it is against your will, even in paradise you will be in hell. But following your natural course of being, even in hell you will be in paradise.Paradise is where your real being flowers.Hell is where you are crushed and something else is imposed on you.I am reminded of a story. One very famous philosopher of England, Edmund Burke, was puzzled about a question because he read, and heard also in the sermon of the archbishop of England, that those who have faith in Jesus, in God, in the Holy Ghost – those who have faith, their entry into heaven is guaranteed. Those who have not faith, they can be certain of falling into the darkness of hell.Edmund Burke was a philosopher. Naturally, philosophers are hair-splitters; he thought about it and he came up with a question. The question was: A man who has faith but is in every way evil, bad, a sinner – what is going to happen to him? And on the other hand, a man who is very good, virtuous, compassionate, always ready to serve others, has never harmed anybody, has never done anything that you can call sin, but has no faith – what happens to him?Edmund Burke could not figure it out himself so he went to the archbishop and said, “I am in trouble – listening to your sermon this problem has arisen.”The archbishop was also in trouble because he had never thought about it. The question was valid: “A man can be good and without faith; there have been men…. What about Gautam Buddha? What about Socrates? These people you cannot say were bad people. Even one who is against them cannot say that they were bad people. It is difficult to find better people than those – but they were without faith. What about these people? And there have been many like that: Mahavira, Epicurus, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu – what will happen to these people?“And we know there are, in your congregation, all kinds of sinners. In fact you even go to the prisons to give sermons to people who have committed all kinds of crimes, even murders, and are sentenced to death or sentenced for life – and they have faith.”In fact, if you think in a very clear way, only these people need faith. Why should a good person need faith? Isn’t goodness enough?That was Buddha’s point, his argument against God: Is not being virtuous, innocent, harmless, truthful, honest…all the qualities of a good man – are they not enough? Is faith in a god still needed? A god for which there is no proof, which a really sincere and honest man cannot accept.That was the situation in India. Once I was in court; they asked me to take the oath in the name of God. I said, “No, I can take the oath in anybody’s name but not God’s, because I am a man of truth.”The judge said, “A man of truth, and you cannot take the oath in the name of God?”I said, “It is obvious. A man of truth, how can he accept this fiction of God? I don’t see any truth in it.”He said, “You are the first person to raise this question about the oath.”I said, “That simply means you have been meeting criminals, sinners – all these people, your advocates, and perhaps you yourself, are afraid to lose faith in God because that is your only saving device; you don’t have anything else.”In India there is a proverb – I quoted it. The proverb is: For a drowning man even the support of a straw floating in the water is enough. He starts hoping that even by clinging to the straw he will be saved; he can’t lose the straw. Any man of a little intelligence will know that the straw will not help you; but to a drowning man even the straw…. Perhaps there is no straw at all, just a fiction, just the drowning man dreaming that there is some support. He may not open his eyes even, because who knows? – if he opens his eyes and finds that in his hands there is nothing….I said, “I cannot take the oath in the name of God because that will be the beginning of lying – and you want me to say only the truth. You are asking a contradiction of me. In the name of the greatest lie, I have to take the oath to speak the truth? If you want me to speak the truth please forget all about God, because you cannot prove God’s truth, and without the proof I cannot take the oath.”The judge was really in trouble. He said, “But somehow the case has to be started.”I said, “The case can be started – I can take the oath on my own authority. If you can believe my oath in the name of God, whom are you believing, God or me? I am taking the oath, and if I am determined to lie, I can lie even while I am taking the oath. Who can prevent me? The oath cannot prevent me. You are trusting me if I take the oath. You can’t trust me directly? A fiction is needed? I say on my own authority I will speak the truth and only the truth.“You can start your case. If you insist on God then this case is never going to start, because for millions of years people have tried to prove God and not been able to. Now, first you prove God, then we will see.”You have been told beautiful lies, fictions. You have been persuaded, bribed, to become somebody else. And you have been trying hard to become somebody else. Of course you cannot become, it is not in the nature of things. You cannot become somebody else, hence the misery.Because you go on failing, you go on failing, you go on failing – how can you be happy? Whatever you do makes no sense; something somehow always goes wrong. You never arrive at any goal. You don’t get any juice out of life – but life is not at fault.You are trying to get juice out of stones. There is no juice in those stones. They may look beautiful, they may have been sculptured like flowers, like fruits, they may have been painted like fruits, they may look even better than fruits, but you cannot get any juice out of them.And if you are not getting any juice out of your life, that simply means the foundations are wrong.The first foundation is you are trying to be somebody else – knowingly, unknowingly, that is not the point. You will have to find out what you have been trying to be. You may not be very clear. It may not be one image, it may be many images in your mind, because your father is putting something in your mind, your mother is putting something in your mind….Your teachers – and there are so many teachers – they are putting different things in your mind. It may be a confused image, not clear-cut; you may not see Krishna, or Jesus, or Buddha, so clear-cut.You may be born into a Hindu family, then you may have been taught by Christian missionaries in a Christian school. Now your Hinduism and your Christianity are bound to get mixed up. And it is going to be a very difficult mixture to sort out because the flute of Krishna and the cross of Jesus are so mixed up that Krishna is playing his song on the cross and Jesus is crucified on the flute of Krishna! It is going to be a maddening affair…. The head may be of Buddha and the hands may be of Krishna and the legs may be of Christ and the voice may be of Socrates.You are in a tremendous confusion, but the confusion is rooted in the idea that you have to become somebody else.Then many people came in your life and gave you the same idea, but with a new ideal. Now you don’t know where to go. You are standing before the White House on the Pentagon. A crossroads is at least symmetrical – even if you are divided, you will be divided in four equal parts – but on a pentagon! One leg is going on one road, another leg is going on another road; one hand is moving on one road, another hand on another road; your head has run on some other road. It is a pentagon situation.It is going to be difficult to put all your parts together again because they are all running fast to reach the goal. And who is going to bring them all together? Your parents, your society, have not left you in a position of control. On the contrary, they are in the position of control, they know how to control you. In fact, before they could control you it was absolutely necessary that you were no longer in control of yourselfIn my childhood there was an everyday problem with my parents. I told them again and again and again, “One thing you should understand: if you want me to do something, don’t tell me because if you tell me that I have to do something, then I am going to do just the opposite – whatsoever happens.”My father said, “You will do just the opposite?”I said, “Exactly, just the opposite. I am ready for any punishment, but really you are responsible, not I, because I have made it clear from the very beginning that if you want something to be done, please don’t tell me. Let me find it myself.“Once I am ordered, I am determined to disobey, even though I know that what you are saying is right; but that is not the question. This small thing and its rightness does not matter much. It is a question of my whole life. Who is going to be in control? These small rights and wrongs don’t matter to me. What do they matter?“What matters to me – it is a life and death question – is who is going to be in control. Are you going to be in control, or am I going to be in control? Is it my life or your life?”They tried a few times and they found that I was determined. I would do just the opposite. Of course it was not right, what they wanted was certainly right. And there was no denial of the fact from my side: “What you wanted was right. But that you wanted it was not right; you should have allowed me to want it. You were impatient; you forced me to take the opposite action. Now who is responsible that things have gone wrong?”For example, my grandfather was sick. My father was going out and he told me, “You are here, and you are such a great friend to your grandfather, so just take a little care. This medicine has to be given at three o’clock, and that medicine has to be given at six o’clock.”I did just the reverse – I gave the medicine that was to be given at six o’clock at three, and gave the medicine at six o’clock that was to be given at three – changed the whole order. Of course my grandfather became more seriously ill. And when my father came he said, “This is too much. I had never imagined that you would do this.”I said, “You should have imagined. You should start imagining, visualizing. When I have said it, I have to do it even if it means putting my grandfather in danger. I told him that I had reversed the order because I had to do it this way. And he agreed with me.”My grandfather was a jewel of a man. He said, “Do exactly what you have said. Remain determined. I have lived my life, your life is ahead. Don’t be controlled by anybody. Even if I die, never feel guilty about it.”He did not die, but I had taken a risky decision. My father stopped telling me to do things from that day. I said, “You can suggest, you cannot order. You have to learn to be polite to your own son, because as far as our beings are concerned, who is father and who is son? You don’t possess me, I don’t possess you; it is just an accidental meeting of two strangers. You had no idea to whom you were going to give birth. I had no idea who was going to be my father, my mother. It is just an accidental meeting on the road.“Don’t try to exploit the situation. Don’t take advantage because you are powerful, you have money, and I don’t have anything. And don’t force me because it is ugly. Suggest to me. You can always give me a suggestion: ‘This is my suggestion, you can think over it. If you feel it is right, do it; if you feel it isn’t, don’t’” And slowly it settled that my family started giving only suggestions. But they were in for a surprise because I started giving suggestions too. My father said, “This is a new development. You had not told about that.”I said, “It is simple. If you can give suggestions to me because you are experienced, mature, I can also give you suggestions because I am inexperienced. And that is not necessarily a disqualification, because all the great inventions in the world have happened through inexperienced people. Experienced people go on repeating the same – because of their experience they know the ‘right’ method; they cannot invent anything.”For invention you have to be ignorant of the “right method” that has always been done; only then can you break new ground. Only an inexperienced person will have the guts to go into the unknown.So I said, “You have the qualification of experience, I have the qualification of inexperience. You are mature, but maturity also means that your mirror is no longer as clean as my mirror is: much dust has gathered over it. Yes, you have seen much of life – so that is your qualification.“My qualification is I have not seen any of life. No dust has gathered on my mirror – my mirror reflects more clearly, more accurately. Your mirror may simply imagine that it is reflecting. It may be just an old memory floating, not a real reflection of the objective reality.“So this has to be: if you can give suggestions to me, I can also give suggestions to you. I am not telling you to follow them. It is not an order. You can think over it, just as I think over your suggestions.”But each child has to fight from the very beginning; this is the trouble. Children fight, but fight for wrong reasons, wrong things. I have never asked for a single toy. My father used to go at least three, four times a year to Mumbai, and he would ask all the children, “What would you like?” And he would ask me also, “If you want anything, I can note it down and bring it from Mumbai.”I never asked him. Once I said, “I only want you to come back more human, less fatherly, more friendly, less dictatorial, more democratic. Bring a little more freedom for me when you come back.”He said, “But these things are not available in the market.”I said, “I know they are not available in the market, but these are the things I would like: a little more freedom, a little bigger rope, fewer orders, fewer commandments, and a little respect.”No child has asked for respect. You ask for toys, sweets, clothes, a bicycle, and things like that. You get them, but these are not the real things which are going to make your life blissful.I asked him for money only when I wanted to purchase more books; I never asked money for anything else. And I told him, “When I ask for money for books you had better give it to me.”He said, “What do you mean?”I said, “I simply mean that if you don’t give it to me then I will have to steal it. I don’t want to be a thief but if you force me then there is no way. You know I don’t have money. I need these books and I am going to have them; that you know. So if money is not given to me, then I will take it; and remember that it was you who forced me to steal.”He said, “No need to steal. Whenever you need money, simply come and take it.”I said, “Be assured it is only for the books,” but there was no need for the assurance because he went on seeing my library growing in the house. Slowly there was no place in the house for anything other than my books.And my father said, “Now, first we had a library in our house, now in the library we have a house! And we all have to take care of your books because if something goes wrong with any book you make so much fuss, you create so much trouble that everybody is afraid of your books. And they are everywhere; you cannot avoid stumbling on them. There are small children…”I said, “Small children are not a problem to me; the problem is the older children. The smaller children – I respect them so much that they are very protective of my books.”It was a strange thing to see in my house. My younger brothers and sisters were all protective of my books when I was not there: nobody could touch my books. They would clean them and they would keep them in the right place, wherever I had put them, so when I needed any book I could find it. It was simply because I was so respectful to them, and they could not show their respect in any other way than to be respectful to my books.I said, “The real problem is the older children – my uncles, my aunts, my father’s sisters, my father’s brothers-in-law – these are the people who are the trouble. I don’t want anybody else to mark my books, underline in my books, and these people go on doing that.” I hated the very idea that somebody should underline in my books.One of my father’s brothers-in-law was a professor, so he must have been in the habit of underlining. And he found so many beautiful books, that whenever he used to come he would write notes on my books. I had to tell him, “This is simply not only unmannerly, uncivilized, it shows what kind of mind you have.“l don’t want books from the libraries, I don’t read books from the libraries, for the simple reason that they are underlined, marked. Somebody else has emphasized something. I don’t want that because without your knowing, that emphasis enters your mind. If you are reading a book and something is underlined with red, that line stands out. You have read the whole page but that line stands out. It leaves a different impact on your mind.“l have an aversion to reading somebody else’s books, underlined, marked. To me it is just like somebody going to a prostitute. A prostitute is nothing but a woman underlined and marked – notes all over her from different people in different languages. You would like a woman fresh, not underlined by somebody else.“To me a book is not just a book, it is a love affair. If you underline a book then you have to pay for it and take it. Then I don’t want that book here, because one dirty fish can make the whole pond dirty. I don’t want any book prostituted – take it.”He was very angry because he could not understand. I said, “You don’t understand me because you don’t know me much. Just talk to my father.”And my father said to him, “It was your fault. Why did you underline his book? Why did you write a note in his book? What purpose did it serve to you? The book will remain in his library, and in the first place, you never asked his permission to read his book.“Nothing happens here without his permission if it is his thing, because if you take his things without permission then he starts taking everybody’s things without permission. And that creates trouble. Just the other day one of my friends was going to catch the train and he was looking for his suitcase…”My father’s friend was going crazy: “Where is the suitcase?”I said, “I know where it is, but one of my books is in your suitcase. I am not interested in your suitcase, I am simply trying to save my book.” I opened it. I had said, “Open the suitcase,” but he was very reluctant because he had stolen the book. The book was found in the suitcase and I said, “Now pay the penalty because this is simply barbarous.“You were a guest here; we respected you, we served you. We did everything for you – and you steal a book from a poor boy who has no money: a boy who has to threaten his father: ‘If you don’t give me money then I am going to steal. And then don’t ask why I did it – because then wherever I can steal, I will steal.’“These books are not cheap – and you just put it in your suitcase. You cannot deceive my eyes. When I enter my room I know whether my books are all there or not, whether something is missing.”So my father said to the professor who had underlined my book, “Never do that to him. Take this book and replace it with a fresh one.”My approach is simple:Everybody has to be assertive, not aggressive.Those two words are totally different. You can be assertive and very humble. You cannot be humble and aggressive. Aggressive is trespassing somebody else’s right. Assertion is simply making your right proclaimed, clear. These are totally different processes.Assertion is everybody’s fundamental right: “If you are not capable of understanding then I have to shout, but I am not interfering in any way in your life. I am simply saying, please keep away from my territorial prerogative. I will never trespass your territory, but the same I expect from you.”That’s what I would like our small children to be from the very beginning – assertive, not aggressive; humble, but not ready to be enslaved by anybody.The whole of humanity is enslaved, and enslaved by such beautiful names: God, religion, morality, truth, motherland, father, mother, family. In all these good names are hidden the very poisonous seeds of your slavery.This type of man cannot be blissful; so misery in the world is simply the outcome of all this. Now we cannot do anything about the past – that is gone – but you can start from this very moment to live an assertive, individual, humble but clear-cut life: it is your life, and you want to live it this way. And you will have to insist because from everywhere there will be pressure that “you should not live this way, this is wrong. We know the right way, you do it the right way.”I was just reading a news item that in Israel a great problem has arisen and has stirred the whole Jewish community around the earth, particularly in America. The question is, Who is a Jew? Because only a Jew will be allowed entry into Israel, so first it has to be defined who a Jew is. It is not so easy.So they have defined that first, his mother has to be Jewish – because about the father one can always only infer, one can never be absolutely certain. The mother has to be Jewish, born Jewish, then the person can be allowed.Second, because of Christianity and Islam…the Jewish community is surrounded by both these, Mohammedans and Christians, and both are converting religions. Judaism is not a converting religion, just like Hinduism is not a converting religion. They are the oldest religions; they had no need to convert anybody. But both have had to submit to the times; otherwise they were losing their people and they were not getting anybody from the other folds.So in Hinduism there has been a movement, arya samaj, of very scholarly people, but not saintly at all. Maharishi Dayananda inaugurated and founded Arya Samaj. It is a fanatic sect to convert everybody into Hinduism.In the same way, the Jews had to take some steps. Orthodox Jews were of course very reluctant. So the unorthodox ones, particularly the Hassidic Jews, started conversion; they have converted many people. And they have something beautiful which appeals; people can get caught in the whirlwind of Hassidism.Hassidism is really something, one of those rare flowers that have come into the history of human consciousness. Zen, Taoism, Sufism, Hassidism: these four seem to be the four pillars that have arisen out of the whole of history – something tremendously beautiful. But to be that beautiful they had to be unorthodox, they had to be rebels, they had to be life-affirmative.So they are condemned everywhere by the orthodox people. Zen is not liked by orthodox Buddhists; it is condemned. Sufis are not liked by Mohammedans; they are murdered, killed, they have to remain in hiding. You will not find Sufis if you go inquiring in the middle East, “I want to meet some Sufis.” It is not that they have signboards; you cannot find them that way. That is not the way.No Sufi will you find, because Sufis are in hiding, otherwise they are killed. So unless you have some source, some contact…. If I send you somewhere, to go to Istanbul and meet this goldsmith at this address, then this goldsmith will take you to the meeting of the Sufis.And it will depend on the goldsmith and the Sufis as to when they allow you, so you will have to wait. Only if you have a contact – then too you are not directly sent to the Sufi community. You are sent to somebody who can inform the Sufi community, which meets irregularly in different places, to ask their permission – whether to admit this man or not.Then the Sufi community will give a time: “Wait for four weeks,” because for four weeks their people will watch this man to see whether he is worth allowing in the community, or whether he may create unnecessary trouble. If they decide in favor of the man, only then will he be allowed.The Hassids are thought to be a lower kind of Jew – fallen Jews, not the right kind. But they are the people who have converted people to Judaism. Now there is trouble. The trouble is, eighty percent of converted Jews are converted by the Hassids, and they are not accepted as Jews in Israel.If a converted Jew is to be accepted, he has to be converted by orthodox Jews, and orthodox Judaism has nothing of appeal in it – who wants to become an orthodox Jew? – unless you are some kind of crackpot or…. For what reason? And to be converted to orthodox Judaism is such a process that no intelligent person would submit to it.So there is a great stir about what will happen, because eighty percent of Jews converted in America are converted by unorthodox people. These people will not be entitled to enter Israel or become part of that country – and these are the people who have been contributing millions of dollars to Israel. So why should they contribute? If that is not their country and if they are not even Jews, then why should they bother about Israel?But do you see the point, why this question of who is a Jew has arisen? A Jew has to be absolutely a slave of orthodoxy, of convention, of all that is old. He should not think in terms of freedom, individuality, enlightenment, meditation. These are not part of orthodox Judaism. He should not think of dancing and singing and enjoying; that is not religion.Every religion wants you to be a slave to the old, to the dead.How can you be happy?To be happy you have to be alive.To be alive you have to assert your right.You have to throw all that hinders.And you tell me that you would like to be as blissful as I always am. No, don’t be: Your bliss will be your bliss. It has not to be just like mine; that’s again your slave speaking. Take note of that slave.I try to bring him out from one cell, and he immediately slips into another cell. He has become so accustomed to darkness and solitary confinement that he cannot bear the light. Why should you be just like me? I am not “just like” anybody else, that’s why I am blissful. And if you try to be just like me you have started the game of misery again – a fresh game, but again on the road.And remember one thing:I am not here to create replicas of myself. One is enough.Now everybody has to actualize his potential a contribute to existence something new. Unless you present something new to existence, you have failed and you will, be miserable. You have not been creative you have not been able to repay existence for all the favors that it has showered upon you.Just be yourself.You can be certain you will not be like anybody else in the world, so don’t be worried about that; be happy about it.And the second thing is very fundamental:Your love, your joy, your silence, will have some thing in it of you – the flavor, the fragrance, the aroma.My joy, my blissfulness, my meditation, will have something of me. There is no need even to compare. My blissfulness has not to be copied. Yes, my blissfulness can create a great urge in you to be blissful. But you blissfulness will be yours, authentically yours.We use the same names because there are so man people in the world that if we start using different words for everybody’s experience, language will become impossible. So we use one word, love, but have you not felt it? – that every man’s love has a different quality to it, something unique to it.Have you not felt – you have so many friends, and every friend’s friendship, friendliness has a different taste, a different warmth? The same is true about all qualities: they are individual.Something is certainly similar, that’s why we give them one name. The fragrance of a rose and the fragrance of the night queen are totally different fragrances; but something is similar – they are fragrances. Their being a fragrance, only that much is similar; otherwise a rose is a rose, a night queen is a night queen.In India I was searching in many botanical gardens, because I was moving all around the country, and I had my own crazy ideas. I was always concerned…because I had beautiful plants of night queens around my house, and when they all blossomed in summer my neighbors complained that they could not sleep – the fragrance was so much. And I had them all around my house, at least two hundred plants. And when they blossom, they blossom all together in one night, and each plant has thousands of flowers – a very small flower, but with so much fragrance that my neighbors started complaining: “You have to cut these trees.”I said, “I cannot. You can move away. There is no law…I don’t enter your house, but I don’t think there is any law that the fragrance of my flowers cannot enter your house. You go to the court, we will see you in the court.”They said, “Who is talking about courts? We are bothered: the whole day we work, and in the night we cannot sleep. And it is beautiful for a few moments, but the whole night? – it is too much!”I was always inquiring, “If there is a night queen, is there something like a day king?” and the gardeners would say, “Never heard of it.”I would say, “There must be, because queens cannot be without kings.” And finally I found out there is a plant in Kulu-Manali in the Himalayas which is actually called the day king. It is exactly the same plant, the male, just a little bigger flower – but the same leave everything the same. It is of the same species, but not having that fragrance, a different fragrance.When you are by the side of a night queen you are almost taken into an embrace; it surrounds you from all over. It is not just your nostrils, it surrounds you from all over. Like a cloud it comes and you are surrounded by it. The male plant is not the same. The fragrance also is different – more subtle and less aggressive. The female plant is really aggressive; you cannot escape, you are simply caught by the lady. She simply pulls you by the hand, she possesses you – that was my feeling.I brought the male plant also to my garden just to see how different they were, and I could see that the female plant’s fragrance has something of the woman in it – the jealousy of a woman, the possessiveness of, woman. The male plant looks almost like a hen-pecked husband, like a husband entering in his house, afraid repeating some mantra. In the same way the male plant’s fragrance enters the house, step by step, cautiously. The female’s fragrance simply comes and fill your whole house, not bothering about you, knocking everything out of the way.I can see that on my drive every day. There are men trying to dance, moving, but it looks like they are doing some exercise; and the feminine sannyasins are just possessed. The dance is not an exercise, the song is no an exercise – they are completely into it, they have for gotten themselves. The man cannot forget himself. He keeps his composure, remains standing up straight, just the way he used to stand in his principal’s office where he was called. And this is not your principal’s office.And when he sees all around, when he looks all around at what the women are doing, he starts moving a little bit, otherwise it will look odd. Otherwise if he is allowed, he will put his hands into his pockets and stand there, a little apart, as if to say, “Let these mad women do what they are doing.” But here nobody is allowed to keep his hands in his pockets – nobody is allowed to be out of the line. And the women are pushing the fellow from all sides; sooner or later he says it is better to go with the wind. But those differences are there….So my blissfulness will remain my blissfulness.There is no question of superiority or inferiority – your blissfulness will have its own unique qualities. And it is absolutely up to you if you want to be blissful. Let the whole world remain in misery, you start being blissful. At least the part of the world that you are, you can change. Perhaps that may trigger the process of change in others.So don’t be bothered that the whole world is in misery, or why the whole world is in misery. Forget it. Let them – if they choose to be miserable that is their birthright. What can we do? We cannot force them to be blissful.You start being blissful.And remember, blissfulness is not something that is to be learned, that you have to be trained in.You have just to relax and allow it.It is there inside you, it is your very nature.Just drop those idiotic ideas, ideals, principles, disciplines that are surrounding you; just be finished with them. Be a free man – free from nations, free from cultures, free from religions – just a pure freedom. And you will see arising within you a tremendous joy that you have never seen before.And it may help others. When you are lighted up it is bound to help others to see why they are in darkness. And I want very ordinary people to be lighted up. If somebody in a monastery becomes enlightened, it doesn’t help the world at all, because people say, “For twenty years he has been meditating in the mountains, in a monastery; he has renounced the whole world – and perhaps for many lives he has been doing it – it is not for us ordinary people.”I want to destroy this whole stupid idea.Enlightenment is your birthright.It has nothing to do with a monastery, nothing to do with renunciation. So I want you to be blissful sitting in a restaurant, in a disco, gambling….I want you to be blissful.I want my people to become enlightened in places where nobody has ever dared to become enlightened.Only that will help humanity, because that will make it clear: This man became enlightened in a disco! Under the Bodhi tree is one thing, sitting in a forest for six years…but this Milarepa, killing so many ladies, became enlightened drumming!Somebody just told me, “Have you heard that Milarepa is going to England?” – sannyasins are having a group tour of England – “what do you say about it?”I said, “What can I say about it? I can only say, God save the queen!”

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I heard you say that Jesus' finger pointing to the moon is not a very good one. Is there a better one?I have never said that. I could not have said it because Jesus’ finger is not pointing to the moon at all.This is something to be deeply understood: What does it mean when it is said, “Fingers pointing to the moon”?The moon is only symbolic. It is not somewhere faraway there in the sky. We are not referring to that moon, because any idiot’s finger can point to that moon. It does not need any intelligence to show the objective moon in the sky by your finger. You may be an idiot, your finger may be crooked, it does not matter, because basically the moon outside is not meant at all.“Fingers pointing to the moon” refers not to the moon, but to you, to the light within you. And why has the symbol of a finger been used? – because words are very inadequate, language insufficient.No song can sing it.No music can indicate it.But something has to be found; otherwise there will be no possibility of communication, of communion, there will be no bridge between the one who knows and the one who does not know.Some bridge has to be found.By “fingers,” that invisible bridge is meant.It does not mean the physical fingers, it means a way of touching your heart with the heart itself. The fingers simply symbolize touching. You can touch with fingers, you can indicate with fingers. The heart can do it directly.All that is needed is that the one who knows and the one who does not know are in a state of deep silence, openness, vulnerability. Not searching for anything, not looking for anything; just waiting for the unknown, for the unexpected, for the unimagined, for the unexpressed. You cannot visualize it, you cannot fantasize about it. You have no way. You can just be silently waiting. You cannot even say for what you are waiting.A really religious person is simply waiting.His waiting is very absurd:He cannot even say for what, for whom.But his heart is throbbing with great expectation.He is silent because any moment the knock may be heard on the door. He is utterly aware, because one never knows when the master comes. It is just like a breeze. If you are unaware, it may come and go; you had it, yet you missed it.Fingers are symbolizing only a state of silent awaiting with someone who has it. Just because he has it, it creates a certain aroma around him, a fragrance. If you were ready to receive, the fingers would have touched you: the fingers would have pointed to the moon.The one who has asked the question has no idea that I could have never said it. It has nothing to do with my memory, it is just impossible for me to say that, because Jesus’ finger is not pointing to the moon at all. It is not a question of finding a better finger. Jesus’ whole ideology is focused on God, far away. There is a distance in space, in time; in space he is far away in heaven. Nobody is certain where this heaven is, except stupid people. Nobody has claimed anything like that.Just yesterday I heard there is a commune in Europe, a small commune of fifty people, around a woman called Maria. They are simple people, villagers. That woman is also simple – but there is not much difference between the simple and the simpleton. It is almost meeting and merging at a certain point; the simple can become a simpleton at any moment.This woman, Maria, is a fanatic Christian. She believes that she goes to heaven every Sunday. She meets Jesus once a week, has direct contact with God. One thing certainly that that group has got from us…what they are doing in the name of meditation is Dynamic Meditation. They do the Dynamic Meditation, they do it totally, and with her hands upward the woman goes into a state which she calls “going to heaven.” And she is gathering disciples.For centuries Christians have been doing that….God is somewhere far away in space – how far none of them have said. Although this Maria goes four times a month, I don’t think she can say the exact distance from the earth to heaven. She meets Jesus once a week, has a direct contact with God. Certainly these entities are outside you; the God is outside. You can have a direct contact, you are not it. You can meet Jesus once a month; certainly you are not Jesus. Jesus is separate from you, then only is meeting possible.And the woman goes to heaven – of course there is a distance that has to be traveled. So there is a distance in space, and there is a distance in time, because Jesus continuously talks about the kingdom of God – but that is going to happen after this life.Everything of Jesus’ religion is after death. So one thing can be said absolutely, that he is life-negative, he is against this life. This life is not the right life, the right life begins after death – and that too can begin only if you believe in Jesus and his teaching, if you follow him; otherwise even after death you may go wrong:In death there is no certainty that you will enter into the kingdom of God: you can enter into the kingdom of God only if you are following Jesus.Now, this is not the way of the people who know. First: existence is always here and now, for all those who know. There is no distance in space and time. Those who have known, have known it here and now; there is no postponement. And whenever you will know it will be always here and now.Just think, can you know something tomorrow? – it is impossible. You cannot know anything tomorrow. If you did, tomorrow would have turned into today. But knowing will always happen today, here and now. Can you know anything yesterday, which has passed? There is no way of going back, and there is no way of jumping ahead.You are always here and now. You cannot move backward, you cannot move forward. So if you are determined to remain ignorant, you will be here and now; or if you decide to be a knower, then too you will be here and now. At least one thing between the knower and the ignorant is similar: both are here and now. That’s why communication is possible.That’s why fingers can point to the moon. If I were tomorrow and you were today, then there would be no way of pointing to the moon.Jesus is continuously talking of the future. He is future-oriented, like all utopians. The word utopia is very beautiful. It means that which never comes, that which is always coming, coming, coming, but never actually comes; that which is always a hope and never becomes reality. Jesus is a fanatic utopian. He believes there is a God, but he knows nothing about God. Those who have really searched have found one thing absolutely certain, that there is no God. It is the greatest lie that man has invented.There is no heaven, no hell. Yes, you can live in heaven or in hell, but that is something psychological. It has nothing to do with the physical world, that beyond the stars, far away, is heaven waiting for you with all the pleasures that you can imagine; and down there is hell waiting for you with all the tortures that man’s mind is capable of thinking of.Those who have looked, those who have searched, have not found anything like heaven or hell.I say it on my own authority: there is no hell, no heaven, no God.Hell is the state of your mind when you are miserable, when you are torturing yourself.Heaven is the state of your mind when you are enjoying, when you are feeling a well-being, a deep sense of inner health.And above both of these there is also a third state in you where there is no pain, no pleasure, but a totally new kind of experience.I call it blissfulness.I can call it godliness – but not God.It is a quality.So I don’t know about Jesus’ fingers. And how can I say anything about Jesus or Buddha or Zarathustra and their fingers? I can say only about my finger. Only about that am I absolutely certain, and I want to talk only about absolute certainties.My finger is pointing to the moon.And why should I bother about Jesus’ finger? In the first place nobody knows whether this man ever existed or not, or even if he existed, whether he had a finger or not. And I suspect very much – he may have existed, he may have had fingers, but I doubt very much that he had ever heard the expression “fingers pointing to the moon.” No, there is not a single possibility of it, because that is a Zen expression that comes from Japan. Jesus was born before it.The expression is only fourteen hundred years old – Jesus was born six hundred years before the expression. And that expression can come only through that kind of mind which Zen possesses.Jesus never says that words are inadequate. In fact the Christian Bible says, “In the beginning was the word.” Now, Zen people will simply laugh. This first statement cancels the whole book. It is all nonsense, because if the first statement is wrong, the very base is wrong; then, as a corollary, everything else which is going to follow is going to be wrong.The first statement, “In the beginning….” Try to figure out each single word: “In the beginning….” For those who know, there has never been any beginning, cannot be; it is impossible. Can you imagine any beginning of existence? It is so simple to see that even to begin you will need something before it. How can you begin something with nothing preceding it? If God created the world, at least he would have needed raw Materials, or did he create out of nothing?There has never been any beginning, because to begin you always need something. So whenever you begin you will need something; it cannot be just out of nothing. Even if you insist that there was nothing, then nothing becomes the something that preceded the beginning: At least nothing was there – and that’s enough to cancel the idea that this is the beginning. You have to go again a little farther back, before nothing began.So those who have a little intelligence can understand: there is no beginning, no end. They are not in the very nature of things, they are impossibilities. Existence has always been there – or better, has always been here.The statement is, “In the beginning there was the word…” That is even more absurd, because you can simply make a distinction between a word and a sound. A word is a sound which has meaning. Now, how can there be a word in the beginning when there is no one to give it meaning? Perhaps there was sound, but not word.A waterfall in the hills makes much sound, the ocean makes much sound, the waves crashing on the seashore make much sound – perhaps there was sound, but not word. The wind passing through the pine trees does not speak, does not even whisper; sound it creates, but not word.So the first thing: there is no possibility of a word because a word needs somebody to give sound a meaning. A mind is needed to give meaning to the word. Yes, the word has to be canceled completely.Sound is a little better, but not enough, because you will be surprised to know that in the mountains, where the waterfall is creating much sound, if there is nobody to hear it there is no sound. You will be thinking that even if you are not there, the sound must be there: no. For sound to exist, ears are absolutely needed; without ears there is no sound. This is the latest finding of science, that sound or color need – it is absolutely necessary – somebody to hear, somebody to see.For example, if we all close our eyes, you will think that your clothes still have colors; you are wrong. The moment you all close your eyes, the colors disappear, because the color exists in the combination of your eye and the light reflected from your clothes. The light falling on your eyes creates color.Color is not there in your clothes, it is not in your eyes either, it is not in the light either: it is in a combination. Your eyes, the clothes, and light reflecting – these three things create color. If one is missing, color will not be there. So when there is nobody in the forest, trees are no longer green, flowers are no longer white or red; all colors disappear, all sounds disappear.So even to say that in the beginning there was sound is not scientifically right. There was no sound either. In the beginning there can be only silence.But The Bible starts with a very idiotic statement, and that gives you the taste of what is going to follow. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God.” Can you see the contradiction? In the beginning was the word, and yet the word was with God, so already you have made two: the word was not alone, it was with God. And no Christian sees the contradiction in it.The third sentence makes it even more absurd. “In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, and the word was God.” So why all this hullabaloo? Just say, “In the beginning was God” and be finished with it. Why these unnecessary things?No one who knows existence can say anything about the beginning because he knows we are part of eternity, and each moment is eternal. There is no beginning, no end. Silence is the deepest center of existence, and in that silence there is nobody else – not even God, because that will be enough disturbance. Silence is absolutely empty.Jesus’ idea, his religion, is a very poor religion. His ideology is not even worth calling an ideology, and that is one of the reasons why this planet earth has become almost a madhouse. If anybody is responsible for this madness in the world, Jesus comes first. Yes, in that he is the champion.You just look around the world. Christianity is the greatest religion as far as numbers are concerned; and those who are not Christians, they are too much influenced by it – so much so that you can almost call them Christians, just they don’t go to the church and don’t worship the cross. For example, a man like Mahatma Gandhi: he is at least ninety percent Christian. And if Mahatma Gandhi is ninety percent Christian, what to say of other people in India? And he goes on imposing his Christian ideas on Hindu scriptures.The same is true about all other religions in the world. They are all influenced by Christianity so much, for the simple reason that Christianity has the biggest numbers. Christian countries have ruled over almost all the world for three centuries. They have corrupted every mind, every child. Every school, every education system is somehow based on Christian ideas. And slowly, slowly you have completely forgotten what you are saying. You may be a Hindu, you may be a Jaina, you may be a Buddhist, but ninety percent of your beliefs are Christian. They have sabotaged you.To me Jesus has proved to be one of the greatest criminals in history.Just the other day I heard that in Europe six Christian countries are preparing to destroy a tremendous amount of foodstuff to keep the value of things in the market the way they want. There are countries in which people are dying: in Ethiopia, not far away from Europe, every day hundreds of people are dying of starvation. In India, hundreds of people are dying of starvation. And Christian countries are thinking how to destroy foodstuff so that values in the market don’t fall.Just to destroy that amount of foodstuff, one hundred thousand dollars will be spent – in destroying! It has nothing to do with the price of the foodstuff – just carrying it to the ocean and throwing it in the ocean will take one hundred thousand dollars. Three hundred thousand tons of oranges have to be thrown into the ocean, eight hundred thousand tons of tomatoes have to be thrown into the ocean – and people are dying, with no food. And these are great Christian countries: France, Germany, England.Where goes all that religion: “Love your enemy,” “Love your neighbor,” and “Blessed are the poor…”? And these people will continue to go to the church, these people will continue to read The Bible, these people will go on and on worshipping Jesus, but they don’t see any contradiction. Business is business, religion is religion – they make a distinction.To them a religion has to be something separate from life: It is a Sunday affair, and that too for only one hour. In the morning you get finished with it, then for the remaining time you can be irreligious, anti-religious, or whatever you want. But one hour every Sunday – and what is required of you to be religious? Just to be in the church, having a good sleep while the priest goes on preaching to you the same nonsense that he has been doing every Sunday. He knows nobody is listening, nobody cares; he himself does not care, he is concerned with his salary. People are concerned just to show their faces in the church so that on the last judgment day Jesus recognizes them: “Yes, you have been coming to the church.” But their lives…!Now, how can a human being think of this? And this is not the first time. Almost every year it is being done; food is being destroyed by rich countries – which are all Christian. Strange. Why are Christian countries rich? – because according to Jesus they all should be poor! The camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but the rich man cannot pass through the gates of heaven. What about all these Christian countries? Because they are the richest.I don’t think, if Jesus is right, that these people are going to enter the kingdom of God. But these are his followers, and the rest of the world, which is not Christian, is poor. If he is right – “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God” – then Christians are lost; the blessed ones live in Ethiopia, in India, in Thailand, in Vietnam. Those will be the ones who enter the kingdom of God – Christians don’t have any chance.And their behavior shows perfectly well that they don’t have any chance. Every year food is being destroyed in millions of tons, and this is not only in the capitalist world: Christianity has corrupted so deeply that even in communist Russia the same is the situation. For years they have been burning wheat instead of coal in their railway trains because they have a surplus growth of wheat, and it is cheaper than coal. The whole world is dying of starvation, and they are burning wheat in their railway trains.It seems that certainly we are living on a mad planet. How can people think of it? When I heard yesterday that these six countries are meeting and planning how much to spend – because to destroy so much has to be…. With that same money, the whole amount can be sent to Ethiopia. Strange minds – but that’s how economics works. You have to keep in the market fewer things than the demand, then only can you have enough of a price rise. If there are more things than the demand then the prices start falling, so once in a while they have to destroy.It is the Christian countries that have created two world wars.This is Jesus’ finger pointing to the moon for two thousand years – but it is always the wrong moon. For two thousand years there have been crusades; millions of people have been killed in the name of religion and God. And I don’t see any reason at all.It is your problem whether you believe in God or not. It is your concern, it has nothing to do with me. Why should I force you at the point of a sword to be a Christian or a Mohammedan? No – but the strange logic is, ““I am doing it for your own good. If you don’t turn and become a Christian you will fall into hell, and I cannot allow that, my compassion cannot allow that. I would rather kill you and send you to heaven instead of leaving you alive and falling into hell.”This compassion…Mohammedans have also the same compassion. It is good that Hindus don’t have that compassion, Buddhists don’t have that compassion, Jainas don’t have that compassion. But communists have that compassion. They are not concerned about heaven or hell, they are concerned about this earth. They want to change you into a communist so that this earth can be made a classless, equal society. They want paradise to be brought onto the earth. That too is in the future; it is not going to happen.Sixty years in Russia – first they were thinking that within ten years it was going to happen. That’s what Lenin died thinking, that within ten years it was going to happen. He died with this idea, that within ten years Russia would be rich, with equal opportunity for all. equal education, and everybody served according to his needs. It is good that that poor man died, otherwise he would see that after sixty years it is in a worse condition than before. It has now become a big concentration camp. It is no more a country; it is a big jail.But if communism is introduced forcibly, that is a Christian idea. It is from Christianity that it came to Islam, to communism, that by forcibly changing…. If people are not willing, if they are not intelligent enough to change, then change them forcibly.Russia was getting settled after the second world war. It had had so many shocks, so much disturbance in the second world war that it was not interested in a world revolution right then. But Mao, in China, was very excited about transforming the whole of Asia into communism. That became a rift between Mao and Stalin, because Stalin wanted to settle down first; the second world war had disturbed Russia so much that if Stalin started thinking of world revolution, Russia itself might get lost in it. So he was more concerned about Russia.But Mao was ideologically right. He said, “Then you are becoming a nationalist, and communism is an international philosophy; we are not to be worried about nations, we have to think about the whole world. I am going ahead.” That’s why he attacked India; it was an effort to transform India also into communism.But all this nonsense, nuisance, comes from Jesus’ finger pointing to the moon. He gave this idea to people: convert! He said to his disciples, “Go on the tops of houses and shout my message, my word. Spread it all over the world, because I have come to redeem the whole world.”Now this is something strange. Who is responsible for redeeming me? Except myself nobody is responsible for redeeming me. This is arrogance, violence – the very idea that somebody else is proclaiming that he has come to redeem me. Who is he? If I want to go to hell at least I have that much freedom. I am not asking for heaven, I want to go to hell, but even that much freedom is not allowed.Jesus gave a very primitive idea to people: “Convert them to Christianity because this is the only true religion, the superior religion, the only religion which can save. And I am the only savior.”This is not the right finger. Although I have never said it, I say it now: it is not the right finger, it is not the right moon, and it will be a great day of blessing if we can get rid of Christianity completely. It will help humanity to grow more intelligent, more free, more understanding, more loving, more accepting of others and their differences, more respectful of other people’s uniqueness.There is no harm if there are many religions in the world; every religion may have something beautiful about it. And if people are enjoying it without harming anybody, who are you to interfere? If they are happy with their religion – it may be wrong according to you, that is your idea, but if they are happy with their wrong religion, let them be happy, because the real thing is happiness, not wrong or right. And who is going to decide who is right and who is wrong? There is no criterion.Even Jesus could not prove to his own people, the Jews, that he was right – what to say of others? How is he going to prove it to Hindus, to Buddhists, to Jainas? He could not prove it to the Jews and he was repeating only Jewish scriptures, nothing new. Still Jews were not convinced that he was the messiah. He simply looked like a buffoon, because the way he was proclaiming that he was the messiah, that he was the only son of God….Just try it, tomorrow just try. Tomorrow standing in the mall declare that you are the only messenger of God. And our people are going to enjoy – nobody is going to crucify you, don’t be worried. They may even raise you up on their shoulders and have a procession: “A messiah has come! We have been waiting and after all this time he has come.” They may garland you and give you a good dinner and make you dance in the disco, but they are not going to crucify you at all. That is stupid.Jesus was stupid by claiming that he was a messenger, and the people who crucified him were even more stupid, because to crucify such an insane man does not prove you wise. It simply proves that you can’t even understand that the person is a crackpot, that he should be treated nicely; you can enjoy him. And I don’t see what danger he was creating for anybody.But the reason is that Jews lived with the same kind of idea that he was proclaiming. It is an ancient Jewish disease. He was the pinnacle, the highest peak of the disease, the last stage of the disease. The cancer is old; it started with Moses, because once Moses said that he had encountered God directly, he rolled the ball. Then the football match continued; then prophets after prophets went on coming.Now, nobody can deny them, because if you deny them you have to deny Moses. Once Moses is accepted then other prophets have to be accepted. Jesus is simply the last in the line who really did, in fact overdid…. If he had been a little quieter, more political, diplomatic, he might have managed to become one of the Jewish prophets. But he was too young. Moses was old, Ezekiel was old, Elijah was old; those prophets were old. He was very young, only thirty, and that is the worst time to get a swollen head because that is the time when just any fanatic idea can get hold of you, when revolution catches hold of anybody. Everybody is a revolutionary at the age of thirty.That all these revolutionaries disappear by the age of forty is a miracle. Do you see hippies of forty, fifty, sixty, seventy? – very rarely. Just like Sheela’s father – he is an old hippie, but it is very rare. As they pass thirty somehow they disappear. They melt into the society, get established, get married, get a job and forget all about that nonsense. They never remember all that, they become good citizens.So there is a time – and Jesus was not given enough time. He was thirty when he declared that he was the messiah, and by thirty-three he was crucified. Three years was not enough time for his revolution to subside; he remained caught up in the whirlwind. And people went on forcing him, saying, “You are not the messiah.” The more they insisted that he was not, the more stubborn he became that he was. And Jews became worried because he was trying to prove himself even greater than Moses.Moses was only a person who has seen God; Jesus was saying he was the only begotten son, just next to God. When God dies he is going to become God; he is going to inherit…. And all these Moseses, these etceteras, should be out of the way, thrown out completely. Jews could not tolerate it, it was too much for themBut I think it is a Jewish disease. Prophets have never happened in India, never happened in China never happened anywhere else other than in Judaism It was a by-product of Christianity and Islam, which both were born out of Jews and Jewish ideas: they claim the same kind of nonsense.I am reminded: one of the famous caliphs of Mohammedanism was Omar. A man was brought into his court, chained, and he was told that this man was proclaiming that he was a prophet of God, that God himself had sent him with the message, “I had sent Mohammed, but now too much time has passed, many things have changed, a new dispensation is needed, a new message. So I have sent the latest message which will replace the Koran, the holy Mohammedan book.”Now, this was outrageous. Omar was very angry he said, “Are you mad or something? – because Mohammed is the last prophet of God.” These prophets have this idea always: they proclaim themselves to be the last prophet of God. They close the doorThe same was the idea with Jesus so nobody else can claim that he is a later prophet of God., that he had brought the final word; now there is no need of any improvement. Mohammed says almost the same: “The Koran is the last message; now no improvement is possible.” Man’s whole future is now to be dominated by the holy Koran.Omar said, “You know Mohammed is the last prophet.”The man said, “I know everything; I am coming directly from God. But he said, ‘You have to take the message’!”Omar was not a bad man, not a very cruel person. He said, “Put him in jail and give him a good beating for seven days – and no food. After seven days I will come to the jail.”After seven days Omar came to the jail. The man was tied naked to a pillar, and he had been beaten so hard that all over his body was just blood. Omar said, “I think you must have changed your mind.”The man laughed, he said, “Changed my mind? In fact this confirms the prophecy of God. He told me when I was taking my leave, ‘Remember, prophets are bound to be treated very badly by people. You will be beaten, you will be starved; you may even be killed.’ What you have done has proved absolutely that I am the prophet of God. Now you have to listen to me.”At that moment, another man, naked, bound to another pillar, beaten even more for one month continuously, said, “Stop all this nonsense! Omar, listen to me: after Mohammed I have never sent anybody.” That man, one month before, had proclaimed that he was God himself. He said, “This man is simply lying. I have never seen this man before. After Mohammed I have not sent anybody else.”Now, this disease of prophets is something Jewish. But Judaism is not a big force. Christianity spread all around the earth, and Mohammedanism is the second biggest religion. Both these religions are branches of Judaism.All these three together are the worst finger pointing to the wrongest moon possible.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the most significant thing about enlightenment?The most significant thing about enlightenment is that it is the most insignificant thing in the world.The scriptures are full of great attributes, qualities, about enlightenment. It is the highest peak human consciousness has ever achieved. Naturally, logically, the scholars have been thinking how to describe it. They have found many words. For example, it is arriving home.As far as I am concerned you have never left home in the first place. Nobody can leave; there is no way to go anywhere except wherever you are. And that is the home. It is not like a departure and arrival. Who is going to depart – you? How can you depart from your nature? There is no possibility of division, it is indivisible.Wherever you go your nature will be within you. In fact to say “you” and “nature” is not right, but what to do if all the languages are wrong? You are nature. “You” does not make you a separate entity. You can call yourself a thousand and one names; still you will remain the same forever.So although very great scholars, pundits, theologians, philosophers, even the so-called mystics, have described home-coming as one of the attributes of enlightenment, ninety-nine percent of these people are simply unaware of what they are saying. When there has been no departure, how can you talk of arrival? But these ninety-nine are only knowers of words, scriptures, principles, philosophies; they can be forgiven.The real trouble is with the one percent, the mystics. But they have also to be forgiven for the simple reason that language is so impotent. What can the mystic do? He wants to give you a certain sense of being yourself, but there has been a gap; you were present but you were unaware. You were at home but fast asleep and dreaming of faraway lands, fairylands, utopias, paradises.The word paradise reminds me that it is very ugly. It was used in Persia for the gardens of the kings. In Persian, firdaus means a walled hunting garden. In countries like Persia gardens can only be walled. They have to be protected from the desert, and only kings could afford them. They could live in deserts as if they were living in gardens; for miles they could manage to have walled gardens.And of course for their joy, play, entertainment, all kinds of wild animals were brought into their gardens. And they were living very freely – of course within the border, within the wall, but it was a vast territory. And the kings used to hunt those imprisoned wild animals. It was sheer slaughter. They could not escape, they could not go anywhere. They were caught anyway, and above all they were being slaughtered.From firdaus comes the English word paradise. They have forgotten about the hunting completely, they have only remembered the walled, beautiful gardens of the kings. But the purpose was hunting; the garden was secondary. But that has been forgotten in English completely; otherwise it will be very difficult to describe paradise. A walled garden it can be described as – but who is the hunter there? And who is to be hunted?Perhaps God is hunting the saints? I don’t see any other kind of animals there except the saints; they are the only animals allowed there. If it is a hunting place then saints must be really suffering, in tremendous misery: their whole life they suffered to enter into paradise – and now this is the paradise!You cannot get out of it, it is a walled garden. Out side is desert and death; inside you may try to hide, you may survive – not all animals are going to die. But thinking of yourself as a hunted animal will take all the air out of the balloon of the Christian paradise. It is all hot air.Very foolishly they have chosen the word paradise. But ninety-nine percent of those people were scholars only trained in words, knowing nothing of reality, knowing nothing of themselves, knowing nothing of enlightenment. They were blind people, utterly blind. They had never seen light, and they were talking about light. Naturally they can be forgiven; they are foolish, but forgivable.The one percent knew perfectly well what they were talking about; their trouble was even bigger than that of the scholars. Scholars were at ease describing things that they didn’t know. There was no problem for them because there was no contradiction in their minds; they were clear. Hence the word mystic: it comes from the scholars, theologians, philosophers; they are saying that this man talks in such a way that you can’t make any sense of it. The mystic is one who talks nonsense.But the mystic is really in trouble. He knows the truth, but he does not know any corresponding word for it, so he is compelled to use words which have been used by others. So he also calls it “coming home.”But the true mystic will immediately recognize that what he is saying is not right. In fact, he will not lose a single moment in saying it, that “whatever I say, don’t start believing it word for word. Try to read between the words, between the lines: the silences, the semi-colons, the full stops – read there. Drop words as much as you can and create gaps.”There is a Sufi book, at least seven hundred years old; it is simply called The Book. It is an empty book, nothing is written in it. It has been given from generation to generation of mystics, with great reverence; from the master to the disciple: “This is our message. I have read it my whole life, now you read it. I will go, you will go, but the readings should continue. The book should be preserved.”One can understand preserving the Koran, The Gita, The Bible, The Torah; there is something written in them, something significant, meaningful. But the Sufis have been insisting on preserving a book in which nothing is written. And it is given only by the master to the succeeding disciple, to the chief disciple, who is going to be the next master. Perhaps these people were trying their hardest to say something without words. At least they made the effort.The same has been the situation of all those one percent of mystics around the world: they have to find some vehicle to express that which is inexpressible. The word enlightenment is also invented by the scholars – scholars have been doing great work. And mystics have to use it knowing perfectly well that the experience has nothing to do with the light you are acquainted with.The enlightenment that is being described by the word is beyond light and darkness, because it is beyond duality. You cannot call it darkness, you cannot call it light, and yet it has the qualities of both.In light you can see. The enlightened person has eyes that you don’t have. He can see things the way you can never see. And you can try to understand it: A painter sees a painting; you also see it. As far as colors are concerned, your eyes reflect the same colors as the painter’s eyes reflect; but do you think you are seeing the same painting as the painter? No, that is not possible, because to see a painting like Picasso’s one needs that kind of genius. It is not in the paints, it is the whole organic unity of all those paints. Those paints are only parts.It is as if you take a car apart. Every part is separated; all over the ground you spread it, and you see it. You are seeing the car, but is it the car that you are seeing? no, only parts. When you see a Picasso painting you are seeing it in the same way as the car: you just see fragments, pieces.You don’t have the genius to make a whole out of it, where all those colors lose their individuality and start functioning in a harmony. To see that harmony is to see the painting. It has nothing to do with the colors, nothing to do with the canvas, nothing to do with the frame. The frame may be golden, it doesn’t matter. The question is of the organic harmony. But for that you need a totally different kind of eye – just as a musician needs a different kind of ear.But these are small things compared to enlightenment. I am just taking examples to indicate something which is beyond examples. It has some quality which happens in light, not of light – mind you well. It has some quality which happens in light. If the lights are put off, what disappears? Your capacity to see disappears.When enlightenment happens, a certain capacity to see happens, which has been completely unconscious within you. It is fully ready to function any moment, but you won’t even turn to look at it. Just your very turning will turn the switch on. But it is not enlightenment. Let me repeat: enlightenment is not enlightenment, not just enlightenment. It is a way of saying that you attain to a certain capacity of seeing, knowing.It has also the quality of darkness in it, so there has been a school of mystics who call it the ultimate darkness. And they are as right as those who call it enlightenment; But it is not darkness. In darkness there are a few things which you miss in light.A light gives a certain kind of tenseness to your being; darkness relaxes you. That’s why in the night, if all the lights are on, you cannot sleep. You need to be surrounded by darkness as if you are in the womb of the mother. Darkness has a certain silence, a certain music to it, which we are unable to know because of our fear of darkness. We are so afraid of darkness that we have lost the capacity to make any intimate contact with it. And it is such a profound experience.If you compare light and darkness – light comes and goes; darkness remains, it is eternal. Light is temporal, it has a time limitation. In the morning the sun rises, in the evening it sets. And whatever kind of light you manage, it has a certain limitation: once the fuel is finished the light will be gone. It is dependent, it is not an independent phenomenon. Even the light of the sun will one day be gone because it is being dissipated every moment. It has been a tremendous source of light; for millions of years it has been giving light, but it is becoming poorer every day.There are a few physicists who think that within four billion years the sun is going to be just bankrupt it will run out of its gas. So many suns have died in existence. Almost every day hundreds of stars are dying, and they are as big a sun as yours – in fact, far bigger than yours. Your sun is a very mediocre size. It is very big compared to our earth – sixty thousand times bigger than the earth – but not when compared to stars, which are nothing but suns. They look so small because they are so far away. There are suns which are a million times bigger than our sun. This sun is not worth counting.There is a beautiful story by Bertrand Russell – he has written a few beautiful stories. A bishop is thinking of God, heaven, and his services to God his whole life, and of his life of celibacy, purity, prayer. Just as he is falling asleep he is thinking that if he dies, paradise is certain. He falls asleep and has a beautiful dream. You can call it a beautiful dream, you can call it a nightmare; it depends.He dreams that he has died – the same thread of thought has perhaps continued. He has died. He is so excited – naturally, because now he is going to face God, and his record is so clean. He has never done anything against the scripture, against God’s commandments. He has been really religiously religious, very fanatic about each small detail – it had to be according to the holy scripture. Naturally he was absolutely confident.He is taken somewhere – he thinks of course he is going to paradise – and he is left before a huge door. He tries to see where it ends but it doesn’t seem to end anywhere; it is so huge in all dimensions. Neither can he see the left side nor the right side, nor can he see above; and he feels so tiny that not even a small ant knocking on your door will feel so bad as he felt, because he was even smaller in comparison to the door. And knocking on that door – you can understand his misery.He was fully aware…who is going to hear? If the door is so big, what about the palace? And what about the throne? And what about God the father? The bishop feels he has no hope, but there is nothing else to do so he goes on knocking. He can hear his own knocks, that’s all; and there is silence, no answer. The same thing his whole life he has been praying…. Now he becomes a little angry. His whole life he has been praying, but no answer….“One can understand that everything will happen after death. Now death has happened, and I am faced with this closed door. There is not even anybody here I can inquire from to get any information. At least there must be an inquiry office. People must be coming here and knocking on this door.“I can perfectly conceive that millions must have died – knocking on this door – died again, and died again”…because you cannot really die, you are eternal. So you will have to die again and knock, and die and knock…. He cannot believe how much time has passed and he has been knocking and knocking and knocking. He starts feeling that he is becoming again old and death is coming, and he is still knocking.“Is this not a deception, what Jesus said: ‘You will be welcomed with bands and angels singing Alleluia’? No angels, no bands – but at least somebody should open the door and let me in.” At that time, a small window – I am saying it is small in comparison to the door; it was still so vast that he could not see its proportions – a small window opened. And now he had become accustomed to the size of “small” things there. A small head he could not see the whole face, just parts and pieces, but he could figure out that somebody was looking at him. And he felt really crushed, humiliated; he had never been insulted like that. But what to do?The bishop says, “Are you God?”The head says, “No” – and his voice is so loud that the bishop feels almost as if his ears are going to burst.He says, “Can’t you say it a little softer? Just whisper; that will be enough for me to tolerate. Don’t speak, just whisper. If you are not God, then who are you?”The head says, “I am only the guardsman. God I have never seen, because my duty is on the gate, and God lives far, far away – we have only heard through holy scriptures – in an immense palace. I don’t know the way. I don’t have the courage…and moreover my duty is here, I cannot go anywhere else. But who are you? – because I cannot see you.”The man has such big eyes, how can he see such a small ant? And the bishop says, “I am Bishop So-and-So.”The guard says, “That does not make any sense. Please tell me, from where are you coming?”The bishop says, “I am coming from the planet earth.”The guard says, “That is too small a place – there are millions of earths. Which earth? You please tell me the index number.”“Index number?” the bishop says, “we never heard about an index number. Our earth has an index number.“Every planet has to; otherwise how are we going to figure out from where you are coming, who you are? If you don’t know the index number at least please tell me the index number of your solar system. In fact that is the lowest category we gather information about in the library. Below that, every solar system has its own library. Only important things from that solar system are fed to the computer in the central library. Perhaps your earth is mentioned somewhere, but you have to tell me about your solar system. From which sun are you coming?”The bishop says, “We used to know only one sun.”The guard says, “There are millions of solar systems – you seem to be completely at a loss! I cannot help you, but I will try my best. I have not seen you yet but I can hear a small still voice, screeching. I will go to the librarian and inquire.”The librarian asked the same questions, and the guard was not able to answer. The librarian said, “Are you mad? How can I find that out in this immense library, where there are only index numbers and index numbers? At least the solar system must be known, then something can be done.”The guard came back. He said, “It is very difficult, but the librarian is trying his hardest. It may take a few years for him to figure out from where you are coming.”The poor bishop said, “A few years! I have been waiting here almost sixty years, or perhaps more, because all time sense is lost.”The man said, “If you can get, in the coming sixty years, the right information about your planet, that will be very quick! You are not aware at all of the immensity of existence.” He shouted so loudly that the bishop woke up. He was perspiring, trembling, and it was a cold night. And he had met only the guard; he had been only up to the gate, outside!This is a vast universe. Our sun is a very young boy, but already declining. There are many ancient people in the sky; this sun has been born after them and will die before them. Even the sun, which has a really inexhaustible, almost inexhaustible source of energy, is bound to be finished one day. Light can never be inexhaustible because it depends on some fuel.Darkness is eternal because it does not depend on any fuel. Darkness does not come and go, it simply remains. It is there – when light is there you cannot see it, that’s all. When light is gone, darkness is there. It has always been there; it is just that the light covers your eyes and you cannot see the darkness. So the people who have chosen to call the ultimate state of consciousness, “the ultimate darkness,” have also some significant points to make.Darkness has a depth which light can never have; light is superficial. You cannot measure darkness, you can measure light. You will be surprised to know, you can even weigh light. If you collect all the sun rays falling on one square mile, they will be almost the weight of one Indian rupee. I am not aware of your American coins, so I cannot say anything about them. One square mile of light – it has been proved. It can be collected through certain glasses, put in a certain way…the whole light can be pulled into a small place, on a weighing scale. It weighs exactly the same as one rupee. But darkness – there is no way to weigh it because there is no way to collect it. It simply is there.You can make light your slave; we have already. You are using light as your slave every day. Putting your switch on and off, what are you doing? You have enslaved light. But is there anyone who can say he has enslaved darkness? That is impossible. You can do many things with light: you can let it in, you can turn it off. Soon there will be, I think there must be, there has to be, because there are clocks….Vivek just brought a catalogue to show me about a clock that follows your orders. When it sounds the alarm, if you say, “Shut up!” it shuts up – very obedient. It remains quiet for two minutes, then again it starts, and louder than before. You can go on for ten minutes saying to it, “Shut up!” and it will stop; and the next time it comes on, it will come louder. The tenth time it will be really mad!If you can do that with an alarm clock, I don’t see there is any problem: you can do it with the light bulb. Just say, “Shut up,” and it shuts up. I think switches are a little old fashioned because there is no need for them. You enter the room and you say, “Be on,” and the light goes on. And when you go out, you say, “Be off, and remain off till I come back.” There is no problem in it.But you cannot do that with darkness. We have not been able even to make any contact, although it is so close, it is always so close. There is a certain freedom in darkness which is not in light; but both have their problems. I cannot choose either to define the whole phenomenon of enlightenment.Attributes have been given to enlightenment: that there is experience of truth, experience of authenticity, experience of love, experience of compassion, experience of eternity, experience of freedom from space-time bondage, experience of freedom from life-death bondage – in short, experience of freedom from all kinds of dualities.These are all big words, and they have puzzled humanity for centuries; and people have been trying to find out, What is truth?Mathematicians say that truth can never be completely defined. One of the mathematicians, Godel, has a principle which seems to be yet uncontradicted. His principle is that mathematics will never be free from paradoxes. In fact, he says, “No man-made system can be free from paradoxes, because man is a paradox; and when man is making something he enters into his making.”There is every possibility that sooner or later your computers may start freaking out because you are putting your mind into those computers. Some computers may go gay! It is up to you; computers will be simply repeating whatever you have put into them. Some computers may become enlightened. Whatsoever you say, they will say, “I am enlightened, I am the only begotten son of God.”And you cannot even crucify a computer – that would be so foolish, to crucify a computer – but there may be times when you may have to shoot a computer. He may become such a nuisance, may start doing such perverted things that you will not be able to do anything else but shoot him. He may start torturing you by very sophisticated means.Godel is right, that whatever man makes, whatever doctrine he propounds, whatever philosophy he brings out, is going to be, in one way or other, paradoxical. Something underneath will remain contradictory. So Godel says there are three categories in mathematics: that which can be described, describable; that which has been already described; and that which will never be described.There are mathematicians who do not agree about the third category. They say, “Two are perfectly okay: the described, and the describable. The indescribable we cannot yet propose till we have exhausted all our means to describe.” And they are not yet exhausted, they will never be exhausted; there will be no point where we can say, “we have exhausted all means and all possibilities.” So the third category cannot be yet settled. About two categories there is no problem.The whole of science is ready to accept two categories: expressible, knowable; and unknowable, but can become known, is potentially knowable. In fact they are making two categories: that which has become actually known, and that which is potentially known. They are dropping the world of the mystic completely. They are saying there is nothing which will always remain unknowable, unknown. And that is really the world of enlightenment.Western mathematicians think that Godel’s three categories exhaust all categories. That is not true. The West is not aware of Eastern mathematicians, philosophers. The most unfortunate part is, even mathematicians from the East, getting Nobel prizes for mathematics…. Two Nobel prizes have gone to two Indians. One was to Doctor Raman; another – just a few years back – to Doctor Khorana. Even these…I have met Doctor Khorana, and I asked him, “Do you have any idea that Godel is not the last word?”He said, “What are you saying? Godel has to be the last word because there cannot be any more categories: the known, the knowable, and the unknowable. Even if he is accepted, then there are only three categories.”I said, “You, being a man from the East, should know, because you have been educated in the West….” And even if you are educated in the East, you are educated in Western methods, discoveries. Nobody bothers about Eastern discoveries.Mahavira has seven categories. That was one of the greatest debates between Mahavira and Buddha when they were alive twenty-five centuries ago. Buddha had exactly the same three categories as Godel. He was saying there are only three categories: either you can say yes to something, or you can say no to something, or you can say it is indescribable. There are no more categories.Mahavira had seven categories, and I agree with Mahavira. He is really exhaustive. But it is a little bit complex; these three categories are simple.The first category is: Yes. That is very clear. You can say yes about something with confidence. You know it and it is describable, known.You can say no; the second category: “I am ignorant. That does not mean that the thing does not exist, I am simply saying it is unknown to me.”Or you may say yes and no, both together. In one sense one can say yes. For example, I can say yes to God in one sense, in the sense of godliness, not as a person but as a quality. But in another sense I have to say no because I don’t think there is anybody who created the world, who is a creator, who is a father, maintainer. All that is nonsense.And yes and no together certainly make it more mystic, hence indescribable. That is the world of the mystic: yes and no, both. So you call it indescribable, inexpressible, unknowable. Yes and no cancel each other but the reality is still there. The reality is not canceledBut Mahavira goes further. He says the fourth category is: Yes, and indescribable. One can say about something, “Yes, I know it, yet I cannot describe it When I say indescribable it does not mean that I don’t know; hence the emphasis is on yes and indescribable.”And the fifth category: No, and indescribable. “I do not know, but this much I know – it is. I do not know exhaustively, I cannot claim that I know; hence, I say no – that indicates me, and indescribable indicates the thing.”And the sixth: simply neither yes nor no – together – and still indescribable. You may be feeling that it is somehow known to you, yet you can put it into neither yes nor into no. “I don’t have the experience to such an extent that I can say yes, nor do I have the experience to such an extent that I can say no. So neither yes nor no – they are indicating toward me; but the thing is there.”And the last: simply indescribable.Perhaps it is because of Mahavira’s very intricate way of expressing things that his religion remained a very confined, small thing. It is not counted in the world religions. But perhaps it has more sophistication than any so-called world religion. That very sophistication is the cause of its not being very appealing to the masses. Now, who is going to bother about these seven categories?People want definite answers to believe in: this way or that. Either be a Catholic or be a communist, but be clear. People want clarity because they are so confused, and this man brings all these seven categories; now their confusion is worse, they are even more confounded. First you were at least aware that you were confused. Now you will not be aware to which category you belong: yes, no, yes – no both, neither yes nor no, or indescribable.Mahavira could not create a world religion for the simple reason that perhaps he had the deepest penetration into reality. If you ask about his enlightenment, he will answer in seven sentences. You will not be able to come to any conclusion – and I feel this is something tremendously valuable.Why this urge to come to a conclusion? If existence is a continuum, an ongoing process – never beginning, never ending – then why is man so eager to come to conclusions? No conclusion can be true, because a conclusion means a process stopped. A conclusion means a full stop has come, the last page has arrived. A conclusion means a death, and life is always on and on and on. There is no beginning and no end.I cannot give you a conclusive answer to your question, What is the most significant thing about enlightenment? But this much I can certainly say, that enlightenment is the most insignificant phenomenon in existence. That’s why people are not interested in it. If it were significant then millions would have been running after enlightenment, just as they are running after gold, after money, after power.Just go and stand at the Pentagon or before the White House and ask everybody, “Where are you going?” Everybody is going, and going fast. I don’t think you will come across a single person who will say, “I am going to enlightenment” – not in Washington, not at the Pentagon. Everybody is going, and is in a hurry; in fact, will be greatly disturbed by you: “What kind of nonsense…stopping me in the middle of the road and asking, ‘Where are you going?’ What business is it of yours!’And you say, “I am simply doing research on enlightenment, on how many people are going for enlightenment. I have not come across a single man yet.”The simple reason is that enlightenment is not going to make you significant. You will not become Ronald Reagan. You will not become even Jesus Christ; nobody will crucify you. You will not even become Al-Hillaj Mansoor; nobody will murder you.If you become enlightened you will become so ordinary, so simple, that nobody will take any note of you. You will become almost absent.Let that become my definition of enlightenment:You will become almost absent.You will pass just like a breeze – not like a storm: Adolf Hitler is coming! You will just pass like a small breeze of no significance.To the world you will be nobody.To yourself you will be the whole world.To the universe, you will be all that you can be, all that you are meant to be.To the universe it will be a tremendous joy that you have dropped all running after significant things. At least there is one man who lives insignificantly, ordinarily, not going anywhere; no heaven, no God, no nirvana. He is not concerned even about the next moment, because all his energies which were involved and invested in all directions are now falling back upon himself.He has become a tremendously fulfilled reservoir of peace, silence, beatitude. He is so full of bliss that without his knowing he will be showering bliss wherever he moves. Whatever he touches will feel the vibe of bliss. But as far as he himself is concerned, if you ask him, “Who are you?” he will say, al do not know. I have no idea at all.”Enlightenment, thought to be a simple, insignificant ordinariness, makes religion non-political, makes religion a true religion.Otherwise there are “His Highnesses,” “His Holinesses”…. And I have heard about this Indian prince in South India who has now been chosen for parliament; his weight is three hundred and fifty pounds. He is known as “His Heaviness”! At least that is true. These “holinesses” are all phonies; these “highnesses” are just their own fantasies. But he, at least in reality, is what he is called.“His Heaviness” is a rare man. He never goes anywhere outside his tremendously rich palace. Perhaps he has the costliest crown in the whole world. His palace is full of diamonds and rubies and emeralds, because his state controlled all the mines, and so the best stones had first to be offered to the king. And this has been going on for centuries; for fifteen hundred years his royal blood has remained a continuous line.He has never spoken in public, and now he has become a member of the parliament. And even when he speaks only a very few people can understand because he speaks through his nose. Only those servants who live nearby have slowly become accustomed to his speech. And in the whole world he has only one friend a small dog; his name is Kinky. He sits on his throne with Kinky the whole day. That’s his whole work. Now he is going to be a real celebrity in the parliament in New Delhi.In this world of “His Holinesses” and “His Highnesses,” a really enlightened person is just nobody. He has no name, no form, no superiority, no inferiority. In fact he has disappeared.And this is the paradox:By disappearing, one finds oneself.By not being anything, one becomes everything. By becoming absent totally, one becomes, for the first time, not a person but a presence – a presence of tremendous beauty, blessing. But all this happens because one becomes a zero. Enlightenment is the experience of being a zero.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the greatest problem in the world?The greatest problem or the smallest problem, it is the same: man. And when I say man, I do not mean something abstract. I mean I, you, he, she. There exists no man as such, separate from human beings.There exists no humanity; it is only a name. The reality is the individual. And the problem arises because the reality has not been accepted. The real has been denied expression; and the unreal, the abstract, has been imposed upon it.You have been told continuously, “Live for humanity.” Where is humanity? Have you ever come across humanity? Do you think you are ever going to have an encounter with humanity? It is just like all those big, bombastic, bogus words: God, motherland, fatherland, Holy Ghost. They don’t exist, they are only projected. “Live for humanity” means don’t live for yourself.Nobody has the guts to say to you directly, “Don’t live for yourself.” So they have found a cunning, clever, indirect way of saying the same thing: Live for God, live for humanity, live for man, live for the universe. Live for anything – XYZ – but please don’t live for yourself. And here is the root of the whole problem.Your life is your life, and it can be lived only one way; there is no other alternative. And the only way that it can be lived has to be found by you. It is not all ready like a super-highway, ready-made, with millions of people moving on it, going toward their goal, and you have just to join the crowd.No, there is no super-highway to existence.There are only small footpaths which are walked in total aloneness.And remember, even those footpaths are not ready-made, available for you so that you can go on number eleven footpath. They don’t exist other than when you walk upon them; it is through walking you create them. It is a very beautiful and mysterious way life has, that it does not make you like a railway train which runs on rails. A railway has no choice, it cannot just go anywhere it likes. Those rails are fixed, somebody else determines them. Those rails are the destiny – the train simply moves according to somebody else’s dictates.Man has no destiny – although you have been told for thousands of years that you have a destiny.This is what I call the way of the cunning, deceiving, exploiting people. Now when it is said to you that man has a destiny, you never think of a railway train. Only railway trains have destinations, stations. But beautiful words can go on hiding ugly realities. “Man has a destiny” – I have been hearing it from my childhood, and I have been saying each time it has been mentioned by somebody in some way, “Please don’t insult me.”When I said this to one of my professors, he was shocked. He said, “I am not insulting you. To have a destiny is not an insult, it is the most honorable thing in life.”I said, “It may be for you because you don’t understand what you are saying. Destiny means predetermined; my tomorrow is already predetermined by somebody. I have not even been consulted – as if it is none of my concern, I am nobody, just some playing cards in somebody’s hands; whatsoever he wants he makes out of me. Whatever game he plays, that is my destiny. And this is thought to be respectful?”And the professor was not saying something crazy. That is what is thought all around the world. I said, “I can understand why you are shocked, because you have never thought about the word destiny. How can I have a destiny? I have not determined it. Then who is the guy who determines it? And what right has he got to determine it? He has not even asked me. I don’t know him, we have not even been introduced. Just for courtesy’s sake he could have asked me, ‘This is going to be your destiny – do you like it or not?’ But nobody has even bothered that much.”Man has no destiny.And I say unto you that it is only man who has not any destiny. Dogs have; buffaloes have; donkeys have. They move on certain rails. Each donkey throughout millions of years has lived the same routine life: the birth, the love affair, and the difficulties of marriage, children, old age, all hopes shattered, all dreams unfulfilled, and the darkness of death. All the donkeys have lived that way, they are still living that way – but not man.In fact, I want to say to you that all men are not behaving like men. A few are behaving like monkeys, a few are behaving like Yankees, but none even tries to assert, “I am a man.” But that assertion contains so much, it is almost immeasurable.So first: man has no destiny. Once you understand it, almost all your problems disappear. I say “almost” – perhaps ninety-nine percent disappear; one percent remains. I want it to remain. Ninety-nine percent of your problems are created by deviating you, by driving you into ways which are not for you. But whenever I said that this is an insult, the reaction was the same – a shock.Slowly I became aware that people don’t use words consciously. What they are saying is almost like a parrot, perhaps worse than a parrot.I am reminded of a story. A Christian priest went into a pet shop. His own parrot had died, and that was his only companion. He was a celibate: no wife to quarrel with, no children to be engaged with. How long can you live with God alone? Once every week, Sunday morning, is good, but for the remaining six days, when the whole world goes to work…and even God worked those six days. The poor priest has to remain in the church doing nothing.Even the good God could not manage to remain for seven days without doing anything. In six days he created this neurotic world, and on the seventh day He said, “Great! I have done a great job, now I can rest.” But this poor priest…so he had his parrot and slowly, slowly he made him almost a scholar, trained him. The whole week there was no other work. The parrot knew almost all the sermons of the priest. He had become lately a nuisance because he wouldn’t let the priest rest even a little while. Whenever the priest was resting the parrot would start his sermon that the priest had – with great labor and patience – been teaching him, not knowing that it was going to backfire.He would shout at the parrot, “Shut up! You keep quiet! On Sunday I have to preach myself, and I have to hear my own words; and then seven days you torture me day and night. Whenever you see me you immediately start my sermons. I am fed up with these sermons!”And the parrot would giggle. He would say, “What about me? And what about those fools who come to the church? Everybody is fed up. When I get bored I start the sermon – what else to do? And here I don’t see anybody, no congregation; only you are my congregation.”The priest was thinking many times that if this parrot died – he was old, and if he died it would be good. By a coincidence the parrot died, and then the priest realized that it was impossible to live alone; the parrot had been a companion. Although he bored him, at least there was something – boredom; at least there was something to complain about, at least there was somebody he could shout at. Now there was nobody.This is how habits work on people. You may be fed up with something – your husband, your wife; I call all these habits. You may be fed up with them, you may have thought many times, “If only this woman dies, or somebody takes her away…if she is hijacked…. In this whole world so many things are happening, but nothing happens to her: no accident, no hijacking, nobody elopes with her…. She seems to be accident-proof!”And the same is what she goes on thinking, “This old foggy-head – how long am I going to suffer with him? Is he going to die or not.” But once the old foggy-head dies then she suddenly feels a tremendous vacuum intolerable.The same happened with the priest. So he went to a pet shop to purchase another parrot. He said, “I want the best one, because the one I have lost is almost irreplaceable. He was such a great scholar, and such a hot preacher. He roused his congregation – although it was not much of a congregation, only I was there; but he was really a hot preacher.“I am a silent and tolerant man – I am a priest and I am supposed to be; but he was able to break the ice. And he was more patient than me because when I used to become angry, he used to giggle; that giggle I can still hear. And I think perhaps he understood better than me. So I need something…really the best. I want to forget my parrot.”The shopkeeper said, “You have come at the right time. Just now I have received a parrot which is a jewel. You cannot imagine anybody to compete with this guy. You come with me.”He took him inside the shop. At the very back he had kept a beautiful parrot in a golden cage. The priest said, “What is the speciality of this parrot?”He said, “You ask what speciality? Can’t you see these two threads hanging down by his legs?”The priest said, “Yes, I can see them.”The shopkeeper said, “If you pull the right thread – and nobody will be able to see it, nobody you have brought to introduce to the parrot…. You just slightly pull the right thread and immediately he gives the Sermon on the Mount.”The preacher said, “That is great, because my parrot used to give sermons but not the Sermon on the Mount. He used to repeat my sermons, and I was repeating others’ sermons. And this parrot gives the Sermon on the Mount just with a slight hint to go? My parrot was not like that.“He didn’t know any signals; the moment he saw me he started, and unless I shouted and made much fuss, he wouldn’t stop. Starting was no problem; the problem was stopping, because unless he stopped the whole sermon, it was very difficult to interrupt him. It was just a mechanical thing, he had to go all the way. But this is good. And what about the left thread?The shopkeeper said, “If you pull the left thread he repeats the Christian prayer.”The priest was really amazed, and he said, ‘What if I pull both the threads?”“You are expecting a sermon? a Christian prayer?” said the parrot. “You son-of-a-bitch, can’t you see I will fall on my bottom?”Now, even a parrot has some sense, more than the priest asking about pulling on both his legs. Even the parrot could see that this was sheer stupidity. What kind of man is this priest!So I am saying to you that, just parrot-like, man has been repeating words – but perhaps parrots are more alert. Perhaps they are just playing a game, perhaps they are just befooling you. You want to be befooled; you want to be entertained, and they are doing it. But deep down….I have thought about it. I used to have a parrot myself in my childhood – I used to collect all kinds of animals. Looking into the eyes of the parrot, I had the feeling many times that when he was repeating the words that had been taught to him, he knew that these were just meaningless words. That was my feeling looking into his eyes. He was a very clever bird, because whenever I looked into his eyes, I would see a subtle smile. He knew why I was looking. I had an absolute certainty about his eyes: deep down we had not been able to deceive him. But I cannot say the same about so-called man.Looking into the eyes of my professors who were saying, “Man has a destiny,” I have not found that smile of the parrot. They really believed what they were saying, because they knew the meaning of the words; but they don’t know the implications of the words. And the implications are many, and the most profound implications are indirect. They are never direct; you will not find them in the dictionaries.I have imagined many times writing a dictionary not with meanings but with implications. But I am a lazy man; I would not even be able to work on half a page and it would be finished. So I have never started But the idea has always been there that each word has two things. One is the meaning – grammatical, linguistic, superficial, available in every dictionary. But nobody bothers about the second: the implication.Implication is a totally different thing. For example, “Man has a destiny”; the meaning is clear, but what about the implication? What is the implication of the word destiny? There are so many implications. One is, that man is not a man at all, that man is a thing, not a being, because a thing can have a destiny. A chair can have destiny; it is made for a certain function, it Will fulfill its function. Man is not made to order. He is not furniture.Man is consciousness.Consciousness cannot have any destiny.Consciousness has freedom.Destiny is just the opposite of freedom; that is its implication. Destiny means you are a born slave. Even before you were born your stamp of slavery was completely sealed; you were finished before you were born. That’s the meaning of destiny as far as implication is concerned. In fact you were never born, because before birth death had happened; that is your destiny. You are programmed.Because of this idea of destiny, astrologers, palmists, and all kinds of future predictors go on exploiting man. They would not have been able to exploit you if you were not carrying the idea that you have a destiny. If you have a destiny, then there may be some ways to find out what it is: perhaps in the lines of your hands, perhaps in the lines of your head, perhaps in the lines of your feet, or perhaps in your birth chart, in the combination and position of stars, planets. Some way must be there to read the program.And the strangest thing is that you feel happy with astrologers telling you about your future. You are really too curious to know about the future, without ever thinking that to have a future means you are dead. If the future is already settled, then how is freedom possible? If tomorrow something is going to happen, then it is going to happen; I am just a victim in the hands of some unknown force – I am not my own master.To have a destiny means you are not your own master.You cannot do anything about your life.These are the implications of that simple word, destiny. It leaves you dead. It leaves you a slave. It leaves you without any excitement because all is determined. It leaves you without any hope, because what can you hope? Whatever is going to happen is going to happen whether you hope or not. You are no longer significant in any way in your own life. Even to call it your own life is not right: Destiny has taken all juice out of you.This is what has made man into a problem.Once this is accepted, that “I am a determined being,” then you are just driftwood, because you don’t know what that destiny is. There is a subtle, unconscious feeling that there may be wise people who know it. Your parents may be knowing it, your teachers, your professors, your priests, your monks, your messiahs. These people must be knowing it because you don’t know.You don’t know because there is no destiny to know – but all these people have managed a totally different show. They say you don’t know because you are ignorant, but there are wise people who know – incarnations of God, the people who have realized themselves, messengers of God. These are the people who know. Your only wise course will be to listen to them and to follow them and to believe in them because you don’t know and they do.And certainly those people who pretend to know also pretend that they have all the authority of the past; all the scriptures, all the other prophets are behind them – they are not alone. They inherit the whole wisdom of the world, and they are the last word – perhaps the concluding word. They have weight.In Buddha’s time eight people were trying – just like politicians campaigning – for the post of the twenty-fourth tirthankara of the Jainas, because the post was vacant. And twenty-three tirthankaras had already happened, only one was left for the whole of creation to come. It was not an ordinary opportunity.The presidential election is every five years, three years, four years; a prime minister is elected every four years, five years – if some assassin does not interfere – but that too is conditional. Twenty percent of American presidents have been assassinated; it is not a small percentage. And if this is the case in America, just within three hundred years of history, you can think what has happened around the world. And these presidents were killed by enemies, people who belonged to different, antagonistic ideologies.But if you look into history you will be surprised. Kings are being killed by their own sons, kings are being imprisoned by their own sons; brothers are being killed by their own brothers.In South India there is perhaps the best sculpted and the greatest statue in the world. It is in a place called Gomteshwar. It is the statue of a Jaina sannyasin, Bahubali. The word bahubali means man of strong arms; and he was really a giant of a man. He was the son of a king, and the king became a monk. The king’s eldest son’s name was Bharat, and because of this man’s name, India’s oldest name is Bharat, the land of Bharat.Bharat was the eldest son and Bahubali was the youngest son – there were only two sons. Bharat was conventionally the inheritor of the kingdom. When the father became a monk and renounced the world, he did not proclaim who the successor was. When he was asked, he said, “How can I do that? A thing which I am renouncing…how can I proclaim one of my own sons to be the inheritor of something that I have rejected? It is for them: if they want it, it is there; I am not taking it away.“But people will laugh at me: ‘If you found it so useless that you simply kicked it out of your way…you must have some deep greed, some attachment if you still want your eldest son to become the king.” He said, “The kingdom is just worthless – nobody needs to inherit it. If they want to, that is their business.”Bharat, seeing that his father thought that the kingdom was not even worth his declaring somebody a successor, followed his father. Bahubali was very much interested in the kingdom; he was a very worldly man. And he was a great warrior. He knew perfectly well that Bharat was going to be the owner of the kingdom; his chances of being a king were nil. But he could shine in other fields, and the best one was to be the greatest warrior in the country. And of course Bharat was no match for him – Bharat was a simple man.Bahubali prepared himself to be the greatest warrior. But there was trouble, and the trouble was that Bharat had not renounced the world for the simple reason that there was nothing to renounce; the father had not given him any inheritance. It is a beautiful story. The father had not given him any inheritance, thinking it was useless. So what had he got to renounce? – he was already in a state of renunciation.But a formal declaration from Bharat was needed saying that he had renounced the kingdom; only then could Bahubali succeed. If he did not make a formal declaration…and he was not willing to because, he said, “If I have not succeeded to it in the very first place, I don’t own it; how can I renounce somebody else’s property?”One year passed, and Bahubali was getting more and more agitated because this was a very strange situation. The father had left, the elder brother was meditating in the mountains, and the younger brother was in a limbo. He could not declare himself the king; for that Bharat had to renounce it formally. At least he should say, “I am no longer interested,” but he had gone into silence and was simply meditating.Bahubali went there, very angry; and he was a man of tremendous power. He took Bharat up in his hands and was going to throw him down into the valley; even pieces of his body would not have been found. But just as he was holding him up in his hands a thought arose: “What am I doing? And for what? That kingdom, my father has renounced; after his whole life’s experience he found it worthless.“My brother loves me immensely, so much that if I had asked him to make me the successor, he would have crowned me himself. But he is also right because he is no one. And even here, while I am holding him up in my hands ready to throw him, he has not resisted even a single bit; he has just allowed me to take him up as if we are playing.”He remembered their childhood. In childhood also he was strong, and Bharat, although the elder, was a weak, delicate child; many times Bahubali used to lift him up. Tears came to his eyes; what was he about to do? What would the world say about him? Just for power, money – and some power and some money that his father has thrown as useless, and his elder brother has simply said that because it does not belong to him, he cannot even renounce it. Bahubali changed his mind.He said, “I was going wrong.” He put down Bharat and touched his feet; and Bharat went into his meditation just as before, as if nothing had happened. And this changed Bahubali’s whole life.He stands by the side of his brother; that’s where his statue is in Gomteshwar. It is fifty-two feet high, the highest statue in the world, and of tremendous beauty. Fifty-two feet high…the smallest toe of the feet is the length of your side – six feet. A staircase goes around so you can see it from all sides, because the head is so big, if you see it from one side you cannot see it from the other side; you can never see it whole.The statue is in pure white marble. It is a whole mountain of marble that has been carved. It has not been brought from anywhere else; it is the whole mountain of marble that has been carved into the statue, because – fifty-two feet high! This big a piece you could not bring from anywhere else, and particularly two thousand years ago. And it is standing on a high mountain.On the statue is the story that Bahubali was a warrior…. Once he started the inner war, then also there was no competitor to him. He went into such deep meditation that creepers climbed up his legs. They were reaching up to his head – flowers blossoming, leaves all over his body, because the creepers did not know that he was a man; he was standing like a pillar for months. And in his ears, birds had made their nests.Of course on this big statue it is very easy to manage, everything has been managed: marble has been sculpted into creepers, with flowers and leaves going around Bahubali’s legs and arms. Marble has been cut into the shape of birds’ nests in which once in a while birds actually make their nests, because where else can you find a ready-made marble nest?When I went there, there were actually two eggs in one ear and a bird was sitting on top of those two eggs. The ears are so big; you can imagine – a fifty-two-feet-high man, then how big will be the ears? You can sit in the ear, what to say about a bird. You can lay eggs and sit on them. I have seem many, almost all of the beautiful statues in India, but nothing to compare with Bahubali.This man became man because he changed some act which he was just going to commit. He proved his freedom. He was almost on the verge of throwing Bharat; but even from the last step you can come back, there is nobody to prevent you. And a man who was ready to kill his brother for the kingdom – because after his death he would be free to be the king – changed so much that he forgot all about the kingdom. He went into such deep meditation that he became enlightened before Bharat.And when the father came to their side, seeing both his sons meditating and Bahubali enlightened, he was puzzled. He had never thought about Bahubali becoming enlightened. He was a wrestler, a warrior; he would have conquered the whole world – but to become enlightened…. Even his father could not believe that man has so much freedom.And what happened to Bharat who was always almost enlightened? He was just on the verge – and he was still there. What was preventing him? When Bharat opened his eyes and saw his father and his brother – and his brother was just a luminous light, a peace, a silence so dense and thick – he asked his father “What happened? – because I had come before him and I have been meditating here.”The father said, “Nothing, just the idea that you have done something unprecedented in history, something unique. There have been kings who renounced the world, there have been kings who have not renounced the world. You are the only king who has not even accepted a kingdom; the question of renunciation did not arise. You are unique – and that small idea is a thin layer of ego that is preventing you.“Your brother, although rough, raw, uneducated had no such ideas. He had come to kill you, but at the last moment he saw what he was doing. And he is not a great scholar or thinker, to ponder over it; to do it or not to do it. He just saw the point, the simple point that ‘this is stupid’ – and he dropped the idea.“And he had no idea that he had dropped the idea that he had saved his brother, that he had renounced the kingdom, and he had done all that. He had no idea, not even a shadow of the idea, of renunciation, saving – nothing. That’s why you started before him but he arrived before you.”If man has a destiny then there is no possibility of turning off anywhere. And we have been told for millions of years, “You have a built-in program.” Now from where are you going to know what this built-in program is? Somebody has to tell it to you. Those are the manipulators, all around you; like an octopus, they go on sucking your blood from every possible side. And they go on filling you with ideas that you have to become this, you have to become that, you have to become somebody who has nothing to do with your nature. This is what has made man a problem.In fact, man can be the solution, not only of himself, but of the whole existence, because he is the highest peak of consciousness.He is at the topmost peak of existence; but he is in so many knots, puzzles, that he cannot figure out himself what he is, what existence is.Man lives a problematic life, and dies a problematic death. From the very beginning to the end he is just a long, long problem. That creates anxiety, anguish, tension, suffering, and a constant feeling that something is being missed. And that feeling is true. Not only something, everything is being missed.But if you just stand a step back and look at the whole situation, and see how the problem is being created, then to solve it is just a child’s game.I am reminded of a story. Gautam the Buddha one day comes into his morning discourse; ten thousand sannyasins are waiting for him, just like every day. But today there is something surprising. Everybody is puzzled and looking at each other, because Buddha is coming with a handkerchief It is very costly – perhaps some king has presented it to him.But he does not accept that kind of thing, so everybody is looking, thinking, What is the matter? And why should he bring it just in his hand ahead of himself almost saying to everybody, “Look, look well”? And then he comes and sits; and keeping the handkerchief in his hand, says to his sannyasins, “Look very carefully.”They all look. There is nothing to look at, just a beautiful silken handkerchief And then Buddha starts putting knots in the handkerchief; he puts five knots in it. There is immense silence…everybody is simply watching what he is doing. Then Buddha asks them, “Is this the same handkerchief the same that I had brought with me, or is it a different handkerchief?”Sariputta, one of his chief disciples, stands up and says, “Why are you joking with us? You have never done such a thing. This is the same handkerchief”Buddha says, “Sariputta, think once again – because the handkerchief that I brought had no knots, and this has five knots. How can this be the same?”Sariputta could see the point. He said, “I am sorry. I do understand. Although it is the same handkerchief now it is in a very knotted condition – such as a man in anguish. He is the same man; a man in suffering is the same man but in knots.”Buddha said, “Exactly right. That’s what I want to show to you: that the man who is in suffering is not different from Gautam the Buddha. I am just a handkerchief without knots. You are a handkerchief with five knots.” Of course Buddha has his philosophy of five basic problems that trouble man: violence, greed, untruthfulness, unawareness, and the ego. You can find many more knots; these are just the main ones according to him.Secondly he said, “I would like to ask you one thing more. I am trying to open these knots. Look at me – will this help to open the knots?” He pulled both the ends of the handkerchief; the knots became smaller and tighter. Somebody shouted, “What are you doing? This way those knots will never open. Such fine silk and you are pulling so hard! The knots are becoming so small that it will become almost impossible to open them again.”Buddha said, “You can understand about this handkerchief so clearly – can’t you understand yourself? Can’t you see yourself in the same, understanding way? Have you been pulling your knots or not? Otherwise why do they go on becoming smaller and smaller, and tighter and tighter?“A child is loose, relaxed. Look at the old man, just knots and knots. Certainly, whatever you are doing is wrong. You are pulling the handkerchief. You are trying hard; your intention is good, you want to open the knots. You are taking much trouble – but your doing is your very undoing. You are making things more and more complicated, worse and worse. And the more complicated they become, the harder you pull, because you think, What else to do?”Buddha asked, “Then I would like to ask you, what do you suppose I should do?”One monk stood up and he said, “I would like to come close, and first I would like to see how the knots have been put together.”Buddha said, “That’s a scientific way. Before you can undo something, you have to know how it has been done, because if you know how it has been done, you have already known all that is needed to undo it; you have just to reverse the process.”The monk looked at the handkerchief and he said “The knots have been done in such a way that if we relax the handkerchief and allow the knots to become looser rather than tighter, and help them to become loose, it is not going to be very difficult. They are simple knots.”Buddha gave the handkerchief to him and the man opened the knots one by one. Buddha said, “Today’s sermon is finished. I am not going to speak anymore today. Just go and meditate about your knots, and how you have managed to make them so tight. And just do the reverse.”Any small problem, just look at it, at how you have been trying to solve it, and it goes on becoming worse and worse. Certainly in your doing there is something which is becoming a nourishment to it rather than a killer. You are not poisoning it, you are nourishing it, feeding it. And don’t try to work on so many knots together. Just choose one small knot, the smallest you can find in yourself; by smallest, I mean the most insignificant.People have the tendency to choose the most significant; even when they are choosing to solve their problems, they choose the greatest problem first. Now, that is simply foolish. Just become a little aware, alert. Start from the small things, very small things.In one sermon Buddha was speaking, and a man sitting in front of him was moving his toe continuously. Buddha was not like me; otherwise he would have stopped him immediately. He tolerated it, tolerated it, tolerated it – but it was too much, because the man was just in front of him and he went on, went on, went on.At the end Buddha said, “What is wrong with your toe?” The moment he said, “What is wrong with your toe?” the man stopped. Buddha said, “This is what is wrong with your toe: you are not aware of it. You were not doing it, it was happening almost unconsciously. It is just a habit; you must be doing it everywhere you are sitting. Now it goes on doing it by itself knowing that the master needs it. The master is not even aware that it is happening, because the moment I asked you about it, it stopped immediately. That means the moment your awareness went to the toe there was a complete break.”Now, start with such small things which have not much investment in them. People start with their ego – they want to become egoless. Now, you are taking on such a big problem. You are so small, and the problem is so big, that you are going to fail.In fact that’s why you have chosen the big problem, because you want to fail, you don’t want to succeed. Perhaps this too is the way of the ego, to choose the biggest problem. You are no ordinary man trying to change small things here and there; when you want to change, you want to change the real problem. Perhaps this is the ego coming in from the back and deceiving you.Now choose something very insignificant, which makes not much difference. But the beauty is, the smallest problem has the same properties as the biggest problem, the same ingredients as the biggest problem and the same solution as the biggest problem.All problems are one problem.If you can solve a small problem – dissolve it, get rid of it, be finished with it – you know the master key.Now you can go on opening all the locks in your house. And there is not going to be any trouble.The basic key is awareness.And while solving a small problem, you are starting to learn the ABC of awareness.Choose something meaningless with no investment; it will be easier to work with. And once you have worked with it, you will be surprised: you have the secret, the whole secret of your puzzled, knotted life.Solve it, then man is born in you.Before that, you are only a problem.The second question:Osho,What is the difference between being a hollow bamboo, a flute on the lips of God, and being a puppet manipulated by God the puppeteer?It all depends on you.Why not just be a hollow bamboo? Why be on the lips of God? That’s where your ego is coming in You are not a hollow bamboo, you are already full of crap, otherwise, from where have you produced this God. It has come from your crap. It is a creature made out of the crap…must have slipped out of your hollow bamboo.Otherwise, I have been looking for God and I don’t find a trace of him anywhere. And you people go on meeting him everywhere. And you were not doing anything great, just being a hollow bamboo, and there comes God – not only comes, but puts you on his lips.Next time it happens, stop him, because there is always a fear of AIDS, particularly from the lips of God. Avoid this fellow as much as you can, because his whole company is gay, and if for eternity you know a gay company, they are bound to do something stupid, something perverted. Avoid him; even if you meet, just tell him, “Please forgive me, but find some other hollow bamboo. Those days are passed, because in those days there was no fear of AIDS. You go!”A hollow bamboo on the lips of God…. You cannot be hollow; otherwise just a hollow bamboo is more than enough. Nothing else is needed, nobody’s lips are needed.And then a fear arises in you, a question: “What is the difference between the lips of God and a puppeteer? Playing on the flute, or playing with his puppets, it’s the same. So the fear arises that being a flute in God’s hands, you are nothing but a puppet. Because of the ego, first you wanted to be on the lips of God; now, because of the same ego, the question arises that you are only a puppet. So what is the difference, whether the puppeteer is a god or a devil? It make no difference as far as you are concerned; you are just a puppet.Who plays the song through you? What kind of song passes through you? Does it make any difference? You are just a hollow bamboo. In every case you are just a means, not an end; you are being used. There is no difference, there will never be, unless you decide to remain just a hollow bamboo.There is no need for any God or any puppeteer. You can sway in the winds. Winds passing through you can sing and dance their songs. Perhaps by chance wind passing through your hollowness may create sweet melody, but as far as you are concerned, you are utterly contented with your hollowness.The beauty is in that hollowness, emptiness, nothingness.But man is so idiotic that he will spoil everything that is being given to him. I have told you before to be hollow bamboos. But I know that if I simply say to you, “ Be hollow bamboos” – that’s what I am saying now, just be hollow bamboos. But ten years ago I was saying, “Be hollow bamboos on the lips of God,” because otherwise it was so difficult to persuade you to be hollow bamboos.A God was needed, God’s lips were needed. It was very kind of you, you never asked about lipstick, what make of lipstick God uses. Otherwise I would have talked about that too, because anyway I wanted you to be hollow bamboos. So if you wanted not a direct and immediate approach and you were in need of some meaningless support, I was giving that. But I am finished with all that.To me, a hollow bamboo is holy:God is just nonsense.But you wanted nonsense, and without nonsense there was no way to catch hold of you. I said, “Okay have nonsense to your heart’s content. And later on we will have to pump it out again.” And that’s what I am doing now, pumping it out again.Now it is going to be a problem for new people who will be listening to me and reading me. They are in a difficulty. You cannot understand their difficulty You can laugh easily. They cannot laugh because they are in the same situation you were one day, but they missed. And what can I do? My ship is ready and I have to leave. So before I leave, at least I want you to pump out all the nonsense that I have filled you with.So I am finished with it, and existence cannot complain to me, “You filled so many people’s heads with so much rubbish.” Before I leave you I am going to empty your heads completely. Even if I have to behead you, I am ready for it, but the rubbish must come out. I am responsible for putting it in; I must be responsible for taking it out, so you are left just hollow, alone, silent.And to be in that space is all religion is about.Just be as if you are not – and you have found what you have been searching for, for lives together.In your hollowness all problems are left far behind.Now, don’t create any other problem, of God as puppeteer. They are all puppeteers, and you have always been on somebody’s lips: Christian puppeteers, Hindu puppeteers, Mohammedan puppeteers. Now be finished. Be on your own. Just see the beauty and joy of just being on your own, and you are bound for a surprise – that so much beauty and so much grandeur and so much blessing simply arises from nowhere and fills your whole hollowness.It is waiting there; just because you are not hollow it cannot fill you.When everything else has been removed from you, and nothing is left, suddenly out of your own innermost core arises the fragrance.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Were pagans religious?The Christians have given such a condemnatory definition to the word pagan that it has become almost the meaning of the word. To be a pagan, according to the Christians, is to be irreligious. The reality is just the reverse.Christianity is a pseudo-religion.It is not even irreligious, because to me an irreligious person is at least authentic, but a pseudo-religious person is insincere, dishonest. He is a hypocrite. So first you have to drop the idea about pagans that Christianity has created.Christianity is only two thousand years old; pagans have lived for millions of years. Before any religion was born, the so-called great religions – Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Christianity – before even their names were heard, the pagans were there all over the world.The pagan is not irreligious.He is not anti-religious, he is not pseudo-religious.He is not religious either; but in all these four categories, he comes closest to the religious.The pagan is of a previous state of religious consciousness.Before a man can become religious he will have to go back, through the state of being a pagan. There is no other way.What do I mean by saying that before becoming religious a man has to pass through the state of being a pagan? I mean that he has to become free from all pseudo-religions, pseudo-irreligions, all kinds of ideologies, knowledge which is borrowed. He has to become clean, just like Adam and Eve coming out of the garden of Eden.Who were they – Jews? Christians? Hindus? Mohammedans? The only word that can be used for them is pagans. They were still like small children.All children are pagans. You try your hardest to make them Christians and Jews and Hindus; and unfortunately you succeed because the child is so helpless and so dependent on you, you can force him to pretend to be anybody: Catholic, Protestant, Witnesses of Jehovah, any nonsense. You can force anything on the child, because the human child is the most helpless child in the whole animal kingdom.The human child cannot survive without his parents, without somebody taking care, without somebody giving warmth and love. He needs everything that all other animal kids need – and over and above all he needs something more….It has been scientifically found that you can give the child all his physical nourishment, but if you deprive him of his psychological nourishment, he is going to die within three months. If, for example, nobody cuddles him, nobody tries to hold him close to their body and in the dark night he is left alone, no mother to give him warmth….You can put electric blankets over him, but the warmth of a mother’s body is not just electricity, it is not just heat, it is something more: it is love, it is care. The child feels that he is protected, that he is needed, that he needs to survive because somebody loves him.A child hidden in darkness behind the blankets without anybody holding him close to his or her heart starts feeling ignored, neglected, perhaps abandoned. Why should he go on living? For whom?He is so helpless that you can exploit him. And this is the misery, that even parents have not been able to control the temptation to exploit the helpless, although the helpless is nobody but their own child. Perhaps they never think what they are doing.The Christian parents think they are helping the child to become a Christian; otherwise he will be lost. They never pay a second thought to the question: They are Christians; have they arrived, or are they also not lost?Just a simple question has to be put into every parent’s mind: Whatever you have done, whatever you have thought, whatever you have believed, has it helped you to reach to that space which you would like your child to reach? If you yourself are in a limbo, not knowing who you are, from where you have come, to where you are going, what all this is that you are doing….If you don’t have any answer, please be compassionate to the child. It is your child; at least don’t let him live the life that you have lived. One thing is certain, that the way you have followed has led nowhere.So at least make the child aware, “I have wasted my life, and I would not like you to waste your life in the same way. At least try some other way; even if you also waste your life, at least there will be a satisfaction that you tried something else. Perhaps everything fails, then there is no problem. But, go on your own way.”That’s what I mean by leaving the child a pagan.A pagan to me is one who has a clean slate of mind, who has no idea of God, not even a question about God, who is not worried about heaven and hell, who is not concerned whether Jesus is right or Moses is right or Mohammed is right. These are not his questions.And remember one very fundamental thing:When a question is not yours, no answer can be of any help.It is like forcing somebody who is not thirsty to drink water. When the question is not there, pouring an answer into his head is as absurd as that. Somebody is not hungry and you are forcing him at the point of a sword, “You have to eat!” In almost all civilized societies that is the way, even about eating, food, clothing…You have to do this.”I remember my own childhood…. In a Jaina family nothing can be eaten in the night; between sunrise and sunset you can eat, you can drink. Naturally the times are fixed and you cannot eat many times in such a small span. So in a Jaina family there is nothing like breakfast, because if you take a breakfast then there will be a difficulty; then lunch has to be a little late, nearabout one – as it is all over the world. But if lunch is at one, supper has to be at five, before sunset. Then there will be too small a gap. Then what about a coffee break? There is not even time for a water break.So the only way is, drop breakfast, take your lunch at eleven, your supper at five. There must be at least a six-hour gap between two big meals. This is very unscientific, because then after five till the next morning at eleven – such a big gap.One becomes accustomed, one has to become accustomed – there is no other way – because in a very orthodox Jaina family, after supper everything that is left over is given to the beggars. So there is nothing left in the kitchen that you can find in the night when everybody is asleep. Everything has to be finished because there is no point in keeping it; tomorrow it will be stale. And up to eleven you have to wait.In my childhood, tea was still not very acceptable. It was introduced by Westerners into India. It came after moving around the world. From China it was introduced into the West – Marco Polo carried bags of tea – and from Europe it came to India. In fact in China the first name in the history of tea is an Indian name, Bodhidharma; he was the first tea grower. It really took a round trip.And because it came through the Britishers…. In India, among the masses there was an antagonism about everything that was coming through the Britishers; naturally, they were the enemies. And they were distributing tea and coffee free, even with raffle tickets in the packets. If you happened to get a packet with a ticket, you also won a lottery.The Indian masses were even more reluctant: why so much interest in spreading tea and coffee, investing so much money and so many people in free distribution? I have seen it with my own eyes, in my own town. All the tea companies would come and distribute with big lotteries. But slowly slowly, because of those lotteries, people started opening their packets – and a few rebellious souls started to drink tea and coffee also.It does not taste good in the beginning; tea and coffee – they don’t taste good. You have to learn the taste; but people who tried, found that it gives a certain alertness. Indians were using smoking tobacco for the same purpose. In fact tobacco and tea both contain a similar ingredient which makes you feel a little more alive, less sleepy, more awake.So slowly…but it took years, and particularly in the orthodox houses. I must have been nearabout twenty when I first saw tea entering my house, because my grandmother was absolutely against all this nonsense.“What can be there in just dry leaves? Drink milk drink lassi” – which is made of curd – “which is nourishment. What is this nonsense? What nourishment can there be? And these people,” she used to say, “are befooling you so that you become weak. They want a weak country because slaves should not be strong.”She was an old woman but she had some strong ideas. In a way she was right; she was saying that you should not become weaker, otherwise you will never be free. And rationally, Indians have been drinking milk and eating sweets made of milk or curd with a certain idea that the body needs strength, the mind needs strength. “Now, tea and coffee cannot give it to you, and these people are spreading these things just to divert your mind.”And they succeeded in diverting it. People forgot all about milk and lassi and things that were really nourishing, and they became addicted to tea and coffee. So in my childhood even tea and coffee in the morning were not available. The breakfast was really lunch.If you think of the word breakfast – and it was really a breakfast, because from five o’clock the day before till eleven o’clock…. Your breakfast is not much of a breakfast, because you go to bed eating, munching – if nothing else, then at least chewing gum, so that you can go on chewing even in your sleep. And you get up with tea in bed. First tea, then anything else.In India it was inconceivable. First you have to take a bath, you have to clean your mouth, you have to do your worship. And then too you have to wait until eleven.Now, even children…when I was a child it was difficult for me, and I think it must be difficult for all children to remain hungry so long. Fortunately I lived with my maternal grandmother who was a very softhearted woman, and she could understand. She said, “I know how much I have suffered in my childhood, so you don’t be worried. And if it is sin I am responsible for it because I am giving it to you.”And she would bring sweets and everything and keep them by my bed, even in the night. She spoiled me for my whole life. If even in the night, at two o’clock, I might start feeling hungry, I would just have to find the table, and I would find everything on it that she had kept there.It became such a habit that when I moved to the university all the students were puzzled, “What kind of habits do you have? Every day you bring sweets and keep them by the side of your bed, and in the middle of the night…. Can’t you eat before?”I said, “That does not make any difference. In the middle of the night, when I wake up at two o’clock – I have been doing that for so many years that at two o’clock my stomach simply gives the alarm. Then if I don’t eat I cannot sleep. So it is better to eat and then go to sleep.”But my other brothers and sisters were all learning starvation. I told my father, “It is your religion; if you have chosen not to eat in the night, that is your business. But these children have no idea of any contract with you. You have never even given them a choice that ‘if you are a child born to me then you will have to stay hungry so many hours every day.’ Now, don’t impose these things on them. Leave them alone. Then according to their nature, if they feel hungry they will eat.”And this was a strange situation. For example, whenever I came to my father’s house, which was not far away from my maternal grandmother’s house, if it was a meal time they would try to force me to eat. And I was always full because in the night, before going to sleep I was eating. In the middle of the night I slept, in the morning I was eating, so I was always full; I was not interested in their lunch.And they would force me, they would say, “Eat, otherwise how will you survive?”I would say, “Don’t be worried. I am surviving – can’t you see I am surviving? You can weigh me against any of your children.” And I was heavier than any of their children: my father’s, my uncle’s, my other uncle’s. And I said, “That’s enough proof; you can weigh us any moment. You are starving those poor guys.” But religion imposes itself from generation to generation.All children are born pagan.One basic thing to be noted: you were born pagan.A pagan means just a tabula rasa – nothing was written on you, no scripture, no discipline, no doctrine, no cult, no creed.You were simply a human being, and then people started cutting: this side is longer, this side is smaller…stretching you and trying to make something out of you. They were not interested in you. Nobody is interested in you at all; everybody is interested in his own idea, and he wants to impose that idea on you. He thinks and believes that he is imposing it because he loves you.To me, if this is love, then what is hate? Love must mean only one thing, freedom – and this crippling is not giving you freedom. Who are they to decide what kind of morality, what kind of character, what kind of ideology is right for you? But they decide everything.In this whole world, everything is decided by others for others. This is a very strange place.I am reminded of a small story. It happened in the court of Emperor Akbar – he was the great Mogul emperor of India. He and his wise men were standing in the court discussing something. He had nine wise people chosen from all over India; about every kind of specialization he had the top man in his court. They were called his nine jewels.One of them was a man called Birbal. He was a man with a tremendous sense of humor, that’s why he had been chosen. He was found to be the best man who had the profoundest sense of humor.Just as they were talking, Akbar, for no reason, out of the blue, slapped Birbal who was standing by his side. Birbal never waited a single moment; he slapped the man who was standing by his other side. That was the quality of that man, he was really an intelligent man. The other man could not understand what was going on. The emperor slapped him, why should he slap me?He got stuck, and he asked Birbal, “What do you mean by that?”Birbal said, “Don’t waste time: you hit somebody else!”He said, “What in the world is going on?”Birbal said, “You cannot hit the source back. You just go ahead and hit somebody else and let it pass; otherwise you will be stuck. And the world is round….”You will be surprised that Galileo discovered only three hundred years ago that the world is round. But in India, the very word geography is bhoogol. For thousands of years, the very word for geography was bhoogol; bhoogol means “the earth is round.”Galileo’s discovery is not much, or Copernicus,’ or Columbus’: all these people had no idea that there is a country where the word geography simply means “the world is round.”So Birbal said, “The world is round, don’t be worried; sooner or later the hit will come back to the emperor!” And as it happened it came back that very night.It must have gone round many people; and everybody was dumbstruck, and each said, “What is the point of it? – I have not done anything.”The other said, “Nor have I done anything, but this is how it has started from the palace. And they say simply pass it on, don’t keep it, you are not concerned at all. It came to you, you passed it on; then you are finished with it. You are almost as clean as if nobody had slapped you. You cannot go back to the source.”It is Birbal’s statement, “You cannot go back to the source, you just go on ahead. If the world is round, it will come to him.” And it came to the emperor by his most beloved wife, because her lover – she had a lover, and that lover hit her.She said, “What do you mean by that?”He said, “I don’t mean anything, this is just going on all around the capital. Everybody is being hit, and they say it has started from the emperor himself. And Birbal says, ‘Don’t be worried, the world is round; it will reach sooner or later to the emperor.’ “But she was the person to hit the emperor; who else could have hit him? She hit him really hard! He said, “What do you mean by that? What are you doing? Who told you…? Has Birbal been here?”She said, “No, nobody has been here but the hit has reached me. It has been going round the capital, how can I be out of it? It came to me with the message that you have started it and until it reaches back to you there is no way of ending it. So it is finished.”The next day, immediately, the first thing the emperor did was to ask Birbal, “You are simply something! I was thinking that although the world is round, and what you are saying sounds sensible…. But that just in twenty-four hours it would reach me – that I never thought!”Birbal said, “It is not a question of thinking, reality is such. I have watched this happen continuously. I don’t know why I am a Hindu, my father simply passed it on to me. His father must have passed it to him. Now I have to pass it to my children, otherwise I am stuck with the load.“Pass on, so you remain free. Everybody is passing things. And you cannot go to the source. Now, where am I going to find my father? He is dead. And even if I could find him, he would say ‘Son, what can I do? My father has been dead for years, I cannot find him. It is better you give it to some young person who can carry it, and in his own time he will pass it on. Don’t be worried – this is how it has been happening for centuries.’ “Every question goes on passing all its distortions, confusions, problems, anxieties, to the new generation. And the new generation invents a few of its own, so it goes on becoming accumulative. It is just like a river. New rivulets go on meeting it, and the river goes on becoming bigger, and bigger, and bigger.That’s where it has reached now. For millions of years people have been pouring all their miseries and problems into their children. Now it has come to a point where the burden is too much. It can kill the whole of humanity.Your question is significant. Why can’t you see the problems of life as clearly as I can see them? Let us move slowly. First, I can see clearly because I don’t have any life-problems. It works both ways. If you are clear, if you can see, your life-problems dissolve. Let me remind you about using the word dissolve. I am not saying you find the answers, solutions to your problems, no. And I am only talking about life-problems; that’s what you have asked about.This is the most important thing about life-problems to understand: they are created by your unclarity of vision. So it is not that first you see them clearly, then you find the solution, and then you try to apply the solution. No, the process is not that long; the process is very simple and short.The moment you can see your life-problem clearly, it dissolves. It is not that you have now found an answer that you will apply, and someday you will succeed in destroying the problem. The problem existed in your unclarity of vision. You were its creator.Remember again, I am talking about life-problems. I am not saying that if your car is broken down you just sit silently and see clearly what the problem is: the problem is clear, now do something. It is not a question that you simply sit under a tree and meditate and just once in a while open your eyes and see whether the problem is solved or not.This is not a life-problem, it is a mechanical problem. If your tire is punctured you will have to change the wheel. Sitting won’t do; you just get up and change the wheel. It has nothing to do with your mind and your clarity, it has something to do with the county road.What can your clarity do with the county road? Otherwise, three thousand meditators here cannot mend one county road? Just meditation would have been enough – and in the morning you would find an asphalt road.But the question is only about life-problems. For example, you are feeling jealous, angry, you are feeling a kind of meaninglessness. You are dragging yourself somehow. You don’t feel that life is juicy anymore. These are life-problems and they arise out of your unclarity of mind.Because unclarity is the source of their arising, clarity becomes their dissolution. If you are clear, if you can see clearly, the problem will disappear.You have not to do anything other than that. Just seeing, just watching its whole process: how the problem arises, how it takes possession of you, how you become completely clouded by it, blinded by it; and how you start acting madly, for which you repent later on, about which you realize later on that it was sheer insanity, that “I did it in spite of myself. I never wanted to do it, still I did it. And even when I was doing it I knew that I didn’t want to do it.” But it was as if you were possessed….This very idea of being possessed by ghosts and spirits is nothing but a very ancient symbolical way of saying what I am saying to you. A man possessed by a ghost has nothing to do with any ghost; it is his own unconscious, his own jealousy, his own anger, hatred, his own unconscious mind. And his conscious mind is so small that the unconscious takes it over.It appears almost as if somebody from outside has taken possession of you, because you are identified with your conscious mind – a small island – and an ocean from all around splashes on you, covers you with its foam. Naturally you think, Something from the outside has taken possession of me, and I am doing things which I don’t want to do.Almost ninety-five percent of murderers have confessed in all the courts of the world…. No judge believes them because no judge is yet a psychoanalyst. This is such a mad world – that a murderer is being judged by a man who has studied law. Now what has law to do with murder? Is there any connection between law and murder? Do you think by learning law you become a murderer, or by learning law you become able to understand how murder happens, why a man kills somebody?Law has nothing to do with it. That’s why I say this is a very mad world. A psychoanalyst should be judging because he can understand why a man murders. And when the man says, “I was not in my senses when I did it. I feel sorry for it, I cannot believe even now that I have done it. I have done it, but I cannot believe how it became possible….But no judge is going to understand him. No judge has the capability of understanding. He would have done the same himself – knowing all the laws makes no difference. In fact legal people commit more illegal acts in the world than anybody else because they know exactly how to bypass laws, how to find out loopholes. And no law is perfect, there are loopholes. You need a little intelligence to find the loophole, and then you can do the thing without being caught.I loved, in my high school days, one of my Mohammedan teachers, Maulana Rahimuddin. He was a scholar and certainly a man you could call wise. He used to be the superintendent of all the examinations. He was the oldest, seniormost teacher in the school. At every examination he would come into the examination hall and the first thing he would say was – and he was a very loving old man – “My boys, I have to inform you of a few things.“One thing: copying from anybody is not a crime, it is not a sin – but getting caught is. If you have brought notes with you, hiding in your clothes, or if you have got books hidden in your pants and in your coats, I have no objection. Just be careful, because I am here to do my duty; I will try my best to catch you. You do your best not to be caught.“But if you feel afraid, I give you two minutes: I will sit with closed eyes in my chair, you just bring your notes and your copies and your books and put them on the table. Two minutes to decide…. Either you surrender them and forget about them – when you go home you can take them with you – or, if you decide to keep them, then be careful. With all my blessings do it, but don’t be caught, because if you are caught then I can’t help.”He made the students so afraid when he was sitting there with closed eyes, that students would bring their notes, and their copies, and they would all pile up there.I never used to bring anything, I used to take from his table. Students were bringing things, and I was standing near his table sorting out things which would be useful. And the whole hall was aghast at what I was doing, that I was now…. They knew me – “He is incurable.” And while I was doing this, I would say“Maulana, don’t open your eyes, because I can see that you are trying to peep.” And he had to keep his eyes closed completely.I used to sit just in front, where the examiner’s chair was, just in front of him, because that was the most useful place. He never expected that there, just in front of him, somebody would be doing something.He would go around the whole hall and he would not bother me at all because I looked so innocent sitting just in front of him. Who was going to do any copying from any book or…? Nothing would be possible in front of him. The thieves’ seats were all in the back rows, hiding in the corners, and those were the places where he would go and look.When I passed my matriculation, one day I met him on the road, and I said, “Maulana, I have to say one thing.”He said, “What?”I said, “You should start looking at the first bench in front of you. That’s where you have been…”He said, “What do you mean? Because there you have been sitting?”I said, “Yes, I have been sitting there, and I have been choosing notes from others because I don’t bother making notes and all that; others do it for me. They put them on your table, and while you are keeping your eyes closed I take out whatsoever I need.“And as you know, being caught is the crime. I am just giving you a tip: in future never leave the first row, the front line, unchecked because that is where those who know how to do a certain thing will be sitting. You go on looking for idiots in the corners. Will a man of intelligence hide in a corner?”He said, “You really cheated me! That’s why you used to say, ‘Maulana, keep your eyes closed tight.’ I thought you must be very virtuous. And I even followed you and kept my eyes closed tightly!”I said, “Of course. I had to keep your eyes closed tightly because I had to sort out…they were others’ notes, and two minutes is such a small time.”He said, “In my whole life nobody has been able to deceive me. How did you manage?”I said, “It was so clear, because I could see. The first day I did not do anything; I simply watched, and I saw. It was so clear that you were looking at places where people would be hiding if they wanted to do something. And you were leaving one place absolutely out of your vision and that was right in front of you. That day I decided that this was going to be my seat in every examination.”He said, “But how did you manage to always have that seat? – because certainly I have been seeing you every year in the same seat.”I said, “That too is very easy. One just should not be caught.”He said, “How did you do that?”I said, “Just before the examination day I go in the hall and just change my examination number to that desk; whatever it is, I change it to that desk. And the examination number for that desk I move to the other desk. The next day I am sitting there, and my examination number is there. Nobody can object, there is no problem. And that was the only determining thing. It was so simple!”If you see a thing clearly then either it disappears or, if it does not disappear, that means it is not created by you. It is created by somebody else; you are just being stupid in carrying it. It is not your problem, it is somebody else’s problem.Remember it: only your problems will dissolve before your clarity.But if you are carrying other people’s problems then it is very difficult, because those problems have nothing to do with your vision, your clarity. So those problems which don’t disappear give you a clear indication that you have borrowed them.And you are continuously borrowing other people’s problems.Letters come to me saying, “Somebody passed by me and I had a gut feeling that he was angry with me.” Somebody passed by you, and you have a gut feeling that he was angry about you…. At least you could have asked the person, “Are you angry with me? – because I am having a gut feeling….” You owe him this much courtesy at least before you determine that he is angry with you.He may not be at all interested in you, he may be angry about something else. You may give him a good laugh. But it is possible – he may be angry with something else, somebody else, with himself, and you may get a gut feeling of anger. His anger can touch your feelings. It may not be addressed to you because the emotions are not linear. They don’t move from A to B, they move in circles, concentric circles.Just as when you drop a stone in the lake, concentric circles arise and they go on spreading all around, when somebody is angry there are concentric circles around him of anger. Anybody passing by him, if he is sensitive, can get the feeling that he is angry. And naturally you decode this feeling as if he is angry with you.It is better, then and there, to hold the man and ask, “What is the matter? because I am feeling a gut disturbance. I feel waves of anger arising around you. I don’t know for whom, for what, but at least be clear: if they are addressed to me tell me, so I can do something about them. If they are not addressed to me thank you. You go on your way, I go on my way.”But this is not what people do. That’s why I say you are not straightforward, you are not authentic. Now you are just carrying an idea, and with this idea, whenever you pass that man you may start projecting that he is looking with anger, or he is moving with anger. These may be just projections now because you have got a certain idea that he was angry, so he must be angry.Now whatever he is doing you will try to convince yourself that it is a proof of that. Now you can go on piling up and making a big story out of nothing. And now, later on, even if you tell him, he may not be able to remember what you are talking about. It is better to be very immediate.Don’t start borrowing problems from people. And everybody is doing it – most of your problems are somebody else’s problems. The other may have even solved them, or dissolved them, and you are still carrying them.Try to keep your life as clean and unburdened as possible.Clarity is not something that needs any special talent. It is not something like the talent to be a painter, a poet, a musician. Everybody cannot be a musician, it is clear. There is no need either, because there is enough noise already. There is no need that everybody should be a painter, because almost every wall, every bathroom, every place where somebody can practice his art is full.You will find proof of the insanity of man everywhere. In a railway station you go into the bathroom and you look around: graffiti has become an art form. These are great artists who are doing all this nonsense. What kind of people are these who come into the bathroom to paint and write things – and ugly things. But these must be in their minds, they must be carrying them everywhere.You are passing by the side of people who are throwing all kinds of garbage. They are not throwing at you, they are just so full they have to throw it; otherwise they will die. They are simply unburdening themselves.Of course if they start throwing rubbish and things like that on the road, they will be caught by the municipality or the police and they will be presented in court, charged with making the whole road dirty. But these things that they are throwing are invisible, no court can do anything. No policeman has yet been given an instrument to catch hold of these people’s graffiti that they are throwing all around.If they throw it in the bathroom it is impossible that they are not throwing it in the office, because for the mind it makes no difference. In the bathroom they find it easier because the door is locked and they are alone. But they have come prepared. From where come these colors and pencils? – they have come perfectly ready, with all the instruments. They are throwing their graffiti everywhere, and you may be catching it.Mind is a very sensitive phenomenon.You can experiment with it and you will be surprised. You can sit in one room and let somebody who is very intimate with you, close to your heart, sit in the other room. You tell the person, “You sit silently for five minutes, then start putting on paper whatsoever comes to your mind: a word, an animal, the face of a man, or anything…a flower, whatever, a triangle, whatsoever.“You are not to bring it, you have to allow it to come. You simply wait with the pencil in your hand on the paper; five minutes wait in silence and then wait for whatsoever comes. If a triangle comes, let the triangle be made there; if the face of a horse comes, let it be there.” Tell the person, “Make ten things, and after ten things open the door and come to my room” – or you go out to her room.You are also to make, after five minutes, a first figure, then a second figure, then a third figure – ten figures. And you will be surprised that with a very sensitive person almost nine objects will be caught; the less sensitive, the less objects. But almost by anybody thirty-three percent, one third, are going to be caught.If the person is a little prepared by hypnosis, then things will be very easy, then a hundred percent can be caught. You just have to tell the person to fall in deep sleep for five minutes, to, “close your eyes and relax, and whatever I say you simply accept.”You just put out this idea after five minutes, when he is looking relaxed and his face is looking relaxed and you will be able to see that his face immediately loses its color. It is a different face. His eyes are different, his lips change their position. He is in a kind of deliberate sleep, but able to hear you.You just tell him, “Tomorrow we are going to do an experiment at twelve o’clock. This is the experiment…. And in those ten minutes you will be extra receptive, so whatsoever I will be drawing on my paper in my room, you will immediately draw it on your paper in your room.”These are simple experiments which can show how thought is continuously jumping from one person to another person. Walking behind a person on the road, just look exactly at the back of his neck, which is the most sensitive point – where the backbone, your spine, and your brain meet. It is a juncture.Just stare at that point on the neck for a few seconds, then tell the person, “Look back,” and the person will immediately look back. Or tell the person, “Something is itching on your left leg.” He will scratch his left leg – and he will also look all around, a little surprised because something is not right.There was nothing, no itching but the idea came that “there is itching.” He can feel physically that there is no itching, but the idea was so dear, and the instruction was so clear that before he could stop it, he was scratching.Just small experiments…and you will be surprised to know that thoughts are things. They are continuously moving, and you are continuously receiving them. Other people’s problems jump upon you and sit on your head and eat your head – and you are trying to solve them. You are not even aware that they are not your problems: you are not supposed to solve them.So clarity is simply a little alertness, a watchfulness, trying to watch what goes on inside you, outside you, with no judgment that this is good, this is bad. The moment you judge, you forget the simple process of being alert. A judge can never be alert; his judgment comes in the way.So don’t judge. There is nothing good, there is nothing bad. As far as your effort to create a clear mind is concerned, all are objects of similar value, similar weight. You are just a watcher, with no attachment to this idea or that. Just learn a little detached alertness.And this can be done at any time: working, not working, walking, sitting, eating, Lying down on your bed – anytime is meditation time.And this is the meditation that I want you to do.The only thing that I want you to do is to practice this simple way of becoming aware.Your deepest problems will disappear. The superficial ones you will become aware are not yours. You can start giving them back to people.It happened that from my house to the school there were three ways. Two were big roads but they were a little longer, and between the two there was a very small street. Only people who lived there went on that street, otherwise almost nobody; but because it was a shortcut to the school, that was my routine way.On that street there was a small temple, and an old man lived there who was very much respected in the town. He continuously carried a flute with him, and he always played on it. I have heard many great flautists, and that man was not known at all, but his flute had a quality of his own. It was not professional, skillful, but there was immense love. And what he was singing was not sung for anybody else, just for his own joy.He was a very simple old man. Nobody knew even his name, he was simply known as Bansiwale – the man with the flute. In daytime, in night time, whenever…and he had all the time in the world, he was just a simple old man living in, and taking care of, the temple. He would go out twice to beg, and that was all; then he was free to play his flute.I used to sit in the temple with the old man. He never even asked me, “Why? – because nobody comes here.” Just the day he was dying he asked, because that day too only I was there. He told me, “I have thought many times to ask you – nobody comes here; I am a poor man, just a beggar – why do you come and sit here for hours listening to my flute? And I don’t know how to play it even, I never learned. I don’t have any master who has taught me the flute.“I found it just in the street. Somebody must have forgotten it there, it fell or something. I inquired to whom it belongs. Nobody was ready to take it, so I said, okay, I will try. I started playing, and slowly slowly, I came to love the sounds.“But why you? In your school you have a music class, a music teacher; you can learn everything there. I wanted to ask you but somehow I never was tempted that much. But today I am helpless. I am dying, and I don’t want to die with this question in my mind: Why, you used to come here?”I said, “It is good you asked. I used to come here because I have been moving around the town more than anybody’s boy. I am less in the school and more in the town! I have been watching all kinds of people, sitting with all kinds of people. You are the only one with whom I feel a silence. You are not throwing anything at me – and that’s what I love.”Everybody is throwing something or other, and whatsoever they are throwing gets caught in the head. It will take years to clean it. But you are not looking around; otherwise you would be very easily aware who the people are who are throwing garbage at you, who the people are who are not throwing anything at you, who the people are who simply throw a few flowers at you, a little song, just a loving breeze, and just pass by.And there are people who are simply silent, not throwing anything at all at you. I call those people your friends who don’t throw things at you.Only friends can sit in silence.Only lovers can sit in silence.But the so-called lovers and friends that you know are continuously nagging each other to say something: Why are you silent? And if you say something there is trouble. If you don’t say something there is trouble. Trouble is at any cost.It seems there are no friends, no lovers, in the world. It is better then to go to the trees, sit by the side of the animals; at least they will not throw any garbage at you.If you sit by the side of a buffalo, she is not going to tell you about the weather – even though she is British, it does not matter She is not going to tell you about the newspaper that you have also read – you won’t have to listen to the buffalo tell you again.And if you sit silently, she is not going to nag you, “Man, what are you doing there? – ignoring me? Your own buffalo? And just the other day I saw that you were looking at that other buffalo so lovingly…. If it happens again I will break your neck!” No, she is not going to say anything. You can look at any buffalo, or not look at her.Sit by the side of a tree. You will feel much more strengthened, nourished, clear, silent. Make friends with animals, birds, trees, rocks, because man is in a very third-rate condition. And this situation has arisen because we have not accepted the simple fact that each child is born a pagan. We have condemned that word.A pagan is a pure soul, still unpolluted.Become a pagan.To me that is an absolute precondition for becoming religious.I cannot say the pagan is religious, but I can say certainly that the pagan is the one who is closest to being religious. And anybody else – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist – who wants to become religious will have to pass through the process of being a pagan. That purification is absolutely necessary. That is a fire which will burn all that is rubbish in you.I love and respect the word pagan, and I want it to be redeemed from the condemnation that Christians have poured on it. Yes, a pagan is a primitive, just as a child is.A pagan is unknowledgeable, but to be unknowledgeable is not a sin.A pagan is yet amoral.He does not make much distinction between what is moral and what is immoral, for the simple reason that he is so simple. It needs a cunning mind to make the distinction between moral and immoral. He is very simple. If he likes something of yours, he can take it. He is not stealing it, he simply likes it.One of my professors, Professor S.S. Roy, was very puzzled when one day I saw a book on his table, A New Model Of The Universe, by P.D. Ouspensky. I had been in search of that book. I had all the other books of Ouspensky, only that book was missing. So I took that book and told Professor Roy, “This book I am taking, and I will not be returning it because I need it more than you need it.”He said, “This is some strange criterion. Now we have to decide it this way, who needs it more?”I said, “In fact that should be the criterion whoever needs it more. I know perfectly well you have nothing to do with Ouspensky or Gurdjieff – or do you have something to do with these people?”He said, “That’s true, I have nothing to do with these people.”I said, “I have much to do with these people. This book is useless here. You may have paid for it but you paid for a useless book, and I am stealing something very useful to me. And still you think paying is right and stealing is wrong?”He said, “I don’t want to argue with you, you simply take the book; that is an easier course. But what you are doing to me, don’t start doing with anybody else. This is absolutely amoral; you should at least offer the price of the book.”I said, “No, because I am a poor student and you are a rich professor. To me…this book costs fifty-two rupees; that means for one month I have to go without eating food. Fifty-two rupees is the cost of my food. To you fifty-two means nothing, you earn two thousand rupees per month.“Fifty-two is nothing for you, so you should see a rupee in my hand is much more valuable than in your hand. And I don’t bother about what the reserve bank says about it; you cannot deny the fact that fifty-two rupees means one month’s food for me. Can you say that this book means one month’s food for you?”He said, “I cannot say anything. You simply take that book, but don’t do it to anybody else because nobody will understand it.”I said, “That I know, but I am a pagan and I don’t believe in right and wrong on its face value.”This story went around the whole university, that I was a pagan and I didn’t believe in any morality or immorality; I could do anything.One of my professors, a very simple man, heard this – that I could do anything. He became very afraid because I used to go to his house. His was just on my way from the department to the hostel, his house was on the way. And he was alone, no family; he never got married. He was such a simple man, it was good he never got married. But I used to go in whenever I passed by there. I would enter into his kitchen – and he was a brahmin, and brahmins love food very much, so he used to make food with his own hands.He was really a religious person, celibate, making his food with his own hands. I would eat anything, whatsoever I thought was delicious, and he would simply sit there. He would say, “You see I have been making it since the morning, and you finished it! And today I have heard it said that you don’t believe in morality, in immorality.”I said, “You should have known before because I have been doing this to you for two years. Do you think this is immoral, not even asking you whether you have eaten or not? You have just prepared it and it is just cooling and I have finished it.”He said, “I thought many times to raise the question that…but rather than getting involved in any argument with you, it is better to make the whole thing again; that is simpler, cheaper. But you did it with S.S. Roy and that is too much, because he is a family man. I am alone: if you eat something or you take some of my clothes, that’s not much of a problem. But he is a married man, and you took the book – and he had not even read it! He had just purchased it one day before, in front of me he bought it from the book store.”I said, “That does not matter, he can purchase it again. But why did you get so afraid, hearing the story going around?”He said, “I got afraid that you have been doing these things to me. I thought that you are just playing jokes or just being friendly – I never had thought that you are a pagan.”I said, “But why is pagan such a fear-creating word?”All the religions all over the world have created great fear about the pagan: A pagan is one who does not believe in any values. That’s not true. A pagan is one who is learning on his own what are values and what are not values.A pagan is a seeker, a searcher, an innocent being with a question mark.Yes, he has no answer yet, but he is not a hypocrite. He will not pretend somebody else’s answer is his own. He does not follow anybody, he will simply follow his own natural course.He will fall many times, he will go astray many times, but each time he will be more mature. Each time he comes back to the path that leads to his natural growth, he will be more mature, more centered, and each time have less possibility of falling.That’s how one grows. A pagan grows into a religious man finally. Then he has values, but they are not the values that are being told to you. He has his own sense of what is right, what is wrong. It may not coincide with your morality, because your morality is out of a confused mind. His morality is out of his clarity. Your morality is just like groping in the dark and somehow trying to find the way. His morality is from the sunlit peaks.The pagan is the first step; and the enlightened man is the last step of the journey.Without ever telling you, that’s what I have been doing all along: trying to make you all pagans – but without telling you, because people simply freak out with the word pagan. It is not something to be afraid of. It is something to be proud ofBe a pagan and then see. This whole world looks totally different.Be a pagan and then live, and then life has a different taste.Be a pagan and growth will happen automatically, naturally.And insist that you will remain a pagan. That means you will remain unprejudiced, unbiased, open, vulnerable, ready to accept truth in whatever form it comes. But it has to come to you, it has to be your own. Only then is it of any worth; otherwise it is of no worth at all.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why are people not listening to your message?There are many things to be understood before we can enter into the question.First, the word people…. There are no “people” as such. There are Americans, Russians, Indians; there are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans; there are socialists, communists, fascists – but where are the people? These are all crowds, these are not people.A crowd can be in three different forms. The worst is the mob, and the worst is the most prominent in the world. A mob means an unorganized crowd. The greatest crimes have been committed by mobs, because a mob functions completely unconsciously. And in a mob nobody is responsible: you can do anything and you are not responsible.I have seen mobs burning living people, and I have asked the people who were part of the mob, not just silent partners but active participants, “Are you aware of what you are doing? – burning living people, children, women, just because they happen to belong to another mob? They are Mohammedans, you are Hindus; the only difference is the label of the mob, because most of them have been Hindus before, and tomorrow one of you may be a Mohammedan. To change a label is not a difficult thing.”How many Mohammedans had come to India in the beginning? – only five hundred. Now India is the world’s biggest Mohammedan country. Next to Hinduism, Mohammedanism is the biggest religion in India Half of India the Mohammedans have taken already – it has become Pakistan. Any day they will again demand the remaining part of India, for the same reason.“Five hundred Mohammedans – how have they become millions? They were all Hindus, just their labels have been changed, forcibly – and you are killing them. And even if they are not Hindus, at least they are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands, wives. And a mother is a mother: it doesn’t matter whether she is a Mohammedan, a Hindu, a Christian. The relationship between her and her child is the same, whoever she is.”Do you know what those people said to me? They said, “We were not aware of all this. In fact, we were not doing it. Alone, on our own, we would never have committed such a crime, but when the whole mob was doing it, whether we participated or not made no difference; the people were going to be burned. And we don’t know how we started doing things which we were not intending to do. We had never thought about.This is the way of the unconscious. But the unconscious is a vast continent; and the mob belongs to the unconscious, and any moment that you are possessed by the unconscious you are part of the mob. And the other way round too: the moment you belong to a mob you fall into the darkness of the unconscious. Then you can do anything without feeling at all responsible for it.That’s something very significant to be understood. If we want a better world, the phenomenon of the mob will have to disappear, because it is the mob that goes on pulling you down deeper and deeper into darkness. And there are mobs all around the world – where are the people?The second stage of the crowd is a “crowd”: a little bit organized, a little bit unorganized.And the third form of the crowd is the organization – a perfectly organized crowd.Think in parallels to the human mind. The mob, the lowest, is the unconscious. The crowd is the subconscious, just on the borderline; it is not much. Either you are in the mob or you are in the organization. Perhaps for a transitory period you may be in the crowd, passing from the mob to the organization, or from the organization to the mob. It is just the borderline, subconscious; there is not much space in it.Crowds are not as dangerous as mobs because a little sense, a little consciousness is there, and a little responsibility. The traffic on the road is a crowd: a little organized, a little unorganized – but it is not a mob.The highest in these three categories is the organization: Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism; the communist party, fascist party, socialist party – political, religious, philosophical organizations. It does not matter on what excuse the organization exists, but it is an organized crowd – well organized, regimented.Look at the Catholic church, which is the most organized religion of all religions. It is almost an army camp – the bureaucracy, the hierarchy…. Every small detail is being dictated from above and has to be followed exactly the same as ordered. If you don’t follow it, you are expelled. You are thrown out of your position and power – and it gives so much position and power that nobody is willing to risk it. So people go on pretending, showing false faces.These are the three kinds of crowds in existence but none of them has the dignity to be called “the people.”Whether it is a mob or a crowd or an organization, one thing can be used as a criterion: no individuality is allowed.In that sense the organization is the most dangerous, because it kills your individuality very methodologically.The crowd is not so dangerous; it is a little loose, gives you a little more rope. The mob is less dangerous in this sense, that it does not bother about you at all.It is a cloud, a dark cloud. There is no “who is who” nobody is the leader and nobody is the led. Just the unconscious instinct predominates; and because it is the same instinct in all of us, a mob can function without any order, without any pope, without any church. But its function can only be destructive.To create, you need a certain order – not organization but a certain order, a certain awareness, a certain individuality. But for destruction nothing is needed. You can became an instrument of destruction without any qualification. No university degree is needed, no skill, no craft – nothing. Hence, the great appeal of the mob – to attract people.You can become a great mob leader, for the simple reason that you will not be asked to have any qualification. What is the great quality in V. I. Lenin? It is the quality to create a mob around himself and to manipulate its instinctive destructiveness for his political ends.And the same is true about Mahatma Gandhi, Mao Zedong – any so-called great political leader. His only skill is in finding how to implant in the mob a certain idea. And because it is going to be destructive, there is no problem. Let me explain to you….Mahatma Gandhi was the uncrowned king of India before Independence, because before Independence the question was destructiveness: the British Empire had to be destroyed. Everybody was qualified, and the whole country was under Mahatma Gandhi. But what happened? Even Gandhi had not expected it – could not have expected it, because he was not that conscious a man. He was surprised, taken aback.When Independence came the same mob forgot all about him. The same leaders who were nothing before Independence – who were just changing around him in the hope that if he won the battle they might also get some power – those leaders became prime ministers, ministers, governors, governor-generals. And they all forgot about Gandhi.No Gandhian has analyzed the phenomenon. It is of much importance, because this has happened to every political leader in the same way. From before the revolution to after the revolution there is a tremendous change. Mahatma Gandhi himself said, “I have become a coin which is no longer in currency.”“A coin which is no longer in currency” He used to say before Independence that he wanted to live at least one hundred and twenty-five years, to see India completely renovated, renewed, rejuvenated. And after Independence he started saying, “I don’t want to live that long. I pray to God: “I have lived enough….”What great change has happened? This is what he was living for up to now, and now he is victorious. It is his disciples who are in power, the country is independent, the empire that he wanted to destroy is destroyed. Now, what more success was he waiting for?But at this crucial moment he realized that he did not know anything about how the human mind functions. He was a leader of a mob, and a mob is interested only in destruction. Now the question was of creation. The whole dimension of work had changed: the country had to be created.It was a tremendous job of almost impossible proportions. Who was going to listen to him? It was perfectly good to carry the flag and go on shouting against the British kingdom; it was fun. And particularly with Mahatma Gandhi it was absolutely fun because he was non-violent, so the British government could not be violent with his people; otherwise it would be condemned throughout the whole world: How can you fire at people who have come bare handed, with their chests open, saying, “If you want to you can kill us, but we don’t want to remain slaves anymore”?It was real fun! The British government was simply confused because never before had such a thing happened. You can hit somebody, shoot somebody if he is doing something criminal, but Gandhi was not doing something criminal. Just shouting slogans against those who have made his country a slave cannot be called criminal; carrying his own country’s flag cannot be called criminal.And Gandhi started inventing small things which nobody can call criminal, but legally they were criminal. For example, he started a movement, the “Salt Movement.” Now, in India, salt is the cheapest thing in existence, and the poorest man can afford it because the poorest man’s food consists of bread, salt, chutney – a little sauce. But salt is everybody’s need.Gandhi started a movement…”It is our country, it is our ocean, and we are going to make salt.” Now, the British government was keeping control on salt production because it was one of the most consumed commodities in the country. So they were manufacturing salt from the sea. The sea was Indian, the people were Indian, but they were manufacturing the salt. And it was the cheapest thing, but still considering the population of India, it counted much.Gandhi was not going to start factories, and on a large scale…. He simply started marching toward the sea and told people to go anywhere and start making salt from the sea – just to break the law.And such a law was absolutely meaningless, because it is our water; if we cannot take our own water, then who are you to take our water? It is our salt, it is our land. Today you prevent us from making salt, tomorrow you will prevent us from sowing our seeds on our own land – because just as the sea…. If the sea is yours, the land is yours too: you should be harvesting, you should be cultivating. So what are we going to do – just be spectators here?”It was such a small legal point that nobody in the world would have thought that it was anything illegal but it was illegal as far as their constitution was concerned. It was in their constitution that nobody was allowed to make salt except the government; it was a government-owned production.But when just a poor man is making salt by the side of the sea, you cannot shoot him; it is not such a crime, and the whole world will condemn you. It was real fun, so everybody in India enjoyed it; but the real problem came when the country became independent.Then Gandhi was shouting, “Do this, do that,” but nobody was interested even in listening to him, because that mob was not capable of creation. And this is what I say was one of Mahatma Gandhi’s blindnesses: he believed in the mass, not knowing that this mass is only a mob; this is not the people.In his own life Gandhi saw all that he never wanted to see – villages burning, people being killed, butchered, slaughtered, women raped…. This was the result of his whole non-violent movement? Yes, I want to say this was the result of his whole non-violent movement because he has no understanding of human psychology.He was talking about non-violence to people who were not people, who were just a mob; and if they were following him as a non-violent leader, the reason was that to follow a violent leader you need guts, because sooner or later you will have to face bullets. To follow a non-violent leader you need nothing; you just need a flag and a good loud voice so you can scream and shout. That was enough. And Gandhi believed that these people would be able to create the country.His own very close disciples stopped listening to him the moment they were in power. They were listening to him because they wanted to remain intimate with him so that when power came they would not be left behind. Once they were in power Gandhi was no one.In independent India’s capital, its own revolution’s leader was killed by one of the Hindus – and Gandhi was a Hindu mahatma. And nobody bothers to think how all this happened, why the same masses became so antagonistic to Gandhi that the people who used to worship him, killed him. The reason was simple: he was asking the impossible. It was his own misunderstanding.He thought that he had created such a great movement, now nobody could prevent him from creating a new India. But he depended on the wrong type of people, because they were not interested in creativity, they were interested in destruction. So when he was not leading them toward destruction…. Anybody who was ready to lead them to destruction they were ready to follow.So if they were Hindus they were following Hindu leaders, killing Mohammedans, burning mosques. If they happened to be Mohammedans, they were following Mohammedan leaders, killing Hindus, destroying temples. And Gandhi was simply left alone.He himself said, “I feel lonelier today than I have ever felt in my life. Nobody listens to me.”But it was not the fault of the masses; it was the fault of Mahatma Gandhi himself that he depended, hoped, and based all his future programs on the sands of a mob. You cannot make a palace on the sands.There are mobs – mobs cannot listen to me. There are crowds – half mob, half organized – they cannot listen to me either. The half that belongs to the mob is incapable of listening; the other half is hindered from listening because of their organization – their religion, their politics, their cult, their prejudice – that hinders them.And the organized one is the most difficult. He is almost deaf; he has no ears to listen. Yes, he can hear but you have to make a clear-cut distinction between hearing and listening.Hearing is everybody’s birthright; listening is not. Listening has to be earned – it is an art. You have to become capable of a certain arrangement. In hearing no arrangement is needed; as you are you are okay. Your ears are working, that’s enough. You can go to the hospital and get your ears checked, and if they say nothing is wrong with your ears, you are capable of hearing – but not of listening.For listening no doctor can give you a clearance certificate because he knows nothing about listening. He knows about the ear, which is a hearing AID. Listening is an inner art…to be so silent, so alert, that when you hear something you are only hearing and nothing else goes on in your mind no thought, no judgment, no decision. Even about the thing that you are hearing there is absolute impartiality. You are just hearing.I have heard that Mulla Nasruddin was made a justice of the peace in his old age. The first case came into his court. He listened to one side and said, “Wait! I am going to give my judgment.”The court clerk could not believe that this old fool had been made a justice of the peace and he did not know a very simple thing anybody would know – that he at least has to listen to both the sides. Whatsoever judgment he wants to give, he can give, but at least he should listen to the other side.The clerk whispered in the ear of Nasruddin, “This is not the right procedure; you have heard only half the story. You have to listen to the other side.”Nasruddin said, ‘Nothing doing! I don’t want to get confused. Hearing both the sides I will be confused – that’s what you want. Then judgment will be difficult. Right now it is absolutely clear, and I am not going to be confused by anybody.”He is saying exactly what goes on happening inside you. You decide before hearing all the possibilities and aspects, the implications of a certain thing.How do you manage to be a Christian? Have you looked at all the implications? Have you searched into other religions? Have you bothered that there are three hundred religions on the earth; that when you are choosing to be a Christian you are declaring that two hundred and ninety-nine religions are wrong?You don’t even know what those religions are, and you have already decided that they are wrong! Certainly you are following Mulla Nasruddin. He was at least better than you; he had heard fifty percent. You have heard only one side, and there are two hundred and ninety-nine more sides to it.And then too it is not certain that any one of these is bound to be true. They all may be wrong. Certainly they cannot all be right, but they all can be wrong. The true one may not have appeared yet – or you may have to find it on your own – so you cannot choose from the ready-made stock available.That’s what is happening. You go into a ready-made clothes store – none of the clothes available can be exactly of your own size because they were not made for you. They are made for the average man. It has been decided by mathematical calculations how many average sizes there are.One of my friends had such big feet and no shoe company made that long a shoe. He was in such trouble. I said, “Don’t be so worried, this can give you a great insight. You are not average – nobody is average.” Everybody is wearing clothes not made for him. Some are loose, some are tight…just close to, but not exactly, their size.That’s why I have to have a whole department under Gayan to make my clothes exactly, because I am a fussy man. You can ask Gayan. She has to make my shirts two times, three times – the same shirt – four times. But she is a German…. If I am fussy, she is a German: she goes on making, I go on finding fault. But I don’t think I will be able to defeat her – finally she manages.One of my friends from Japan started sending sandals for me. Now, in Japan you cannot find my size – Japanese feet are small – particularly because the sandals I use are really not meant for men. But I don’t believe that a sandal can be male or female. It suits me, for the simple reason that I do not have to bend to put it on my foot; I can just slip my foot into it. I am so lazy that bending and putting…all that, I cannot do.So I have chosen this type of sandal – just two strips. I simply slip my feet in and that’s okay. But from Japan – they have been searching all over Japan for me; finally they said that it seems to be difficult. Hundreds of pairs came but they were all short because they are feminine, and they are very small.Then I had to find another German. I trust in Germans! When I want to do something I trust in Germans! So I have found Arpita – she is my shoemaker. She is also in the same difficulty as Gayan. She will make and I will find fault, and she will again make. And this goes on…but they know that finally they are going to succeed, that a moment will come when all faults are gone and then I will have to accept.So they are always the winners, I am always the loser! But the whole journey is difficult, difficult for them. I simply go on sitting in my chair! It doesn’t matter whether I lose or win. They can win. But they have to work hard for months, then they can win.These principles, creeds, cults that you have chosen or you have been forced to choose – do you think they were meant for you? Can you by any trick of the imagination manage to think that Jesus was thinking about Siddha? I cannot. I have tried all kinds of ways to imagine it but I cannot find that Jesus was thinking of Siddha.Manu wrote five thousand years ago, and he has written for the whole coming humanity. Now what kind of arrogant people were these? But that is their problem: they can be arrogant and they can write for the whole humanity or for other future humanities, future creations. That is their business – they can do it – but why should you be foolish enough to follow them?Manu had no idea what kind of a world there is going to be, but he has written in detail for every religious person. If you don’t follow accordingly you fall; you lose the dignity of your humanity.As far as I am concerned, the moment you follow Manu you lose the dignity of being a human being. You lose the dignity of being called part of “the people.”Mobs, crowds, organizations – all consist of persons, personalities. “The people” cannot allow you to have false faces, borrowed ideas, traditional, conventional, dead personalities.No, unless you are an individual in your own right, you cannot be part of the word people.You cannot be a Christian, you cannot be a Jew, you cannot be a Hindu, you can only be yourself if you want to be part of that tremendously significant word people. Only individuals, and only individuals….But to be an individual is the most difficult thing in the world. It should be the most easy, but the way idiots have organized the world, they have made it the most impossible.I have heard about a sardar, Pritam Singh. He was very famous in the village where he lived, and his fame depended on one thing…. It was a small village so nothing was private in that village. The smaller a place, the more difficult privacy becomes: everything is already public. You cannot do anything, you cannot go anywhere, without everybody else knowing.But Sardar Pritam Singh was a mysterious man. Every couple was fighting – and in a village you need not fight with closed doors, because everybody knows. What is the point? People fight on the street; husbands beat wives, wives beat husbands. And every night it is the same scene: you can hear from every house screams and shouts and abuses and all kinds of things.But the whole village was puzzled that from Pritam Singh’s house they only heard laughter. That was unbelievable. Not even a single time did they hear any shout or even a scream, or any beating. Sometimes Sardar Pritam Singh used to laugh, sometimes Sardani used to laugh – and they used to laugh really loudly.Finally the whole village decided, “This mystery is too heavy, and we cannot resist the temptation: we all have to go to him and ask, ‘Sardar, explain why it is that you laugh – and particularly at the time when we are all fighting. You have chosen some time to laugh! Are you laughing at us? Then when do you fight? – because we never see you fighting.”‘Sardar Pritam Singh smiled and said, “There is a secret, but I have been hiding it for twenty-five years, so please don’t insist.”But they said, “It is unbearable. For years we have been also carrying a heavy burden of curiosity; today it has to be settled. It is making our life difficult. The whole day the idea comes again and again, ‘Why does Sardar Pritam Singh laugh in the night, and so loudly too?–and both of them? And they never fight – this is strange because couples are supposed to fight; otherwise what is this whole marriage for? What is the purpose? If you are not even fighting then what are you doing?’”Sardar Pritam Singh said, “If you insist, if the whole village says, I will tell you: I have been married twenty-five years – and we fight every day.”They said, “What!”He said, “Yes. The time you hear our laughter – that is when we fight: she throws things at me. Verbal fights we don’t believe in – we are Punjabis. Verbal fights we don’t believe in. What is the point of just shouting screaming, saying…? Nobody is hurt, nothing. She throws things at me, and I, being a Sardar, can’t throw a thing at a woman – although she happens to be my wife. But it is against manliness; so all I do is, I save myself.“She throws, I save myself. If she misses, I laugh; if she hits me, she laughs! And this way things have been going beautifully. We both enjoy it.”The village people were really at a loss: what to say? But one day there was an even greater surprise: they saw both of them going to the court, so they all followed. In the court the magistrate said, “What do you want?”Sardar Pritam Singh said, “I want a divorce.”“But,” the magistrate said, “I have heard so much about you and your laughter, and you are the only couple in the surroundings who is living joyously, laughingly. You too want to divorce your wife? How long have you been married?”He said, “Twenty-five years.”The magistrate asked, “After twenty-five years what makes you decide?”Sardar said, “I will have to explain to you. She throws things at me. I, being a man and a Sardar, I cannot hit a woman, although she is my wife, so I go on hiding myself. That’s why these people who are here from my village – they all have come to listen to what is going to happen. They have been puzzled all these years as to why we laugh. It is a simple matter: if she hits me, she laughs; if she misses me, I laugh.”The magistrate said, “If it has been going on so well for twenty-five years, what trouble has arisen now?”Sardar said, “You don’t understand. In twenty-five years she has become so practiced that now I have no chance of laughing at all. Every day she is laughing. It is unbearable; now I cannot stay with her.”These are our so-called people. They fight – that is unconscious. They laugh – that is silly. They arrange certain compromises just to pull them through, but nothing works. At a certain point every compromise breaks down. Neither the husband hears what the wife is saying nor the wife…. Both have ears – but the art of listening has not been taught to you. Nobody has told you how to listen.When I became a professor, this was my first thing…. Every year for one month I was not teaching anything. For the first month those who wanted to participate in my classes had to learn how to listen. It was complained against me that, “this is not part of the university course, syllabus; nowhere is it mentioned that for one month we have to learn to listen.”The vice-chancellor asked me, “What is this, that you ask students just to sit and learn to listen for one month?”I said, “Yes. What can I do? I am carrying the whole burden of your society. This should have been done in their earlier stages; it would have been easier.”“But, he said, “they all hear perfectly, their ears are perfect.”I said, “It is not a question of ears. You can hear something while you are thinking inside; then that thinking gets mixed with your hearing – it is contaminated, corrupted. Then what you carry as if you have heard it is not what has been said. It is something else; it can be even just the opposite.“You have prejudices inside which go on screening everything that passes through your ears. They prevent all that is against their prejudices, and they allow only that which supports their prejudices. Now, this way at least you cannot understand philosophy. I am not concerned about other subjects, but in my subject it is impossible, because philosophy basically is an awareness of a problem from all its aspects.“If you already have a mind about it…. For example, if we are discussing God and you already think that you know God is, or you know that God is not, then you cannot understand all possible aspects: what it will mean if God is, what it will mean if God is not, what it will mean if we simply remain indifferent to the question, what it will mean if we conclude that it is impossible to know whether he is or not and we remain agnostic? And there are hundreds of other implications; but these are only possible to think of if you don’t have a predetermined idea.”In the beginning it was very difficult for the students to sit for one hour silently listening: the birds outside, any noise – some professor shouting, some car passing, some airplane zooming – and you just listen. Nothing has to be done – just pure listening.Many of them left before the month was finished. If thirty started, it was almost certain that only ten would be left. But those ten have remained grateful to me; not for what was taught after that one month but what they learned in that one month. What was taught was good to get the certificate but what they learned in that one month of silent listening became a new way of seeing things, of feeling, of being.I call a person an individual if he is capable of listening.That means, if he is capable of being in a state of meditation.Then he is no longer a person, he is an individual.You cannot in any way force him to do anything that his consciousness does not allow. He would rather die than take a false step. Death does not matter; what matters to him is remaining true to himself.It becomes so valuable that everything else can be lost, but there is no way to lose it. Once you have it – in fact it will be better to say you have it already – once you discover it you cannot forget it again.You ask me why people are not listening to my message. In the first place there are no “people,” so who is going to listen? I have been trying to find my people – that has been my whole life’s work, just to find people.I don’t want mobs, crowds, organizations. I want individuals – so pure, unprejudiced, that whatever I have to say they can take it in without judging whether it is right or wrong.This is one of the greatest experiences of life – that anything that is not right starts melting before your alertness.Your alertness, your awareness, your meditativeness functions almost like sun rays for dewdrops: all that is false evaporates. You need not decide what is right and wrong; the wrong disappears of its own accord, and what is left is right.This is a totally new way of existing.But people are already carrying the idea of what is right, of what is wrong; that the right has to done, the wrong has not to be done. Yet they go on doing the wrong, and they don’t do the right.Even a man like Saint Francis says, “God, help me, because I go on doing what should not be done, and I go on avoiding what should be done. Help me!”A man like Saint Francis…. And the same has been said by Saint Augustine, just in slightly different words: “God, please take care of me. I am not strong enough to do what is right. You have to give me strength to do it. And I am so weak that I am easily tempted to do the wrong. You have again to help me and prevent me.”Now, the problem is that these are saints; what to say about ordinary human beings? What will be their situation? – they are almost always doing the wrong. Naturally they feel guilty, miserable – sinners. They fall in their own eyes, they lose self-respect. They cannot feel dignity, and if they cannot feel dignity for themselves, who is going to feel dignity for them?If you are not respectful toward yourself, do you think anybody else is going to respect you? If you yourself feel that you are worthless, then you will be surprised: if somebody thinks that you have some worth you will try to prove that “no, you are wrong, I am worthless.”This is what your religions have given to you – not respect, not dignity, not the pride of being human beings. These things have nothing to do with the ego; in fact the ego is needed because these things are missing.Ego is a false substitute for a real dignity. When a man is really dignified there is no way to insult him, there is no way to disrespect him. You can be disrespectful, but you will see that he is completely unaffected, he is beyond your reach.Dionysius used to say, “You can kill me but you cannot insult me.” Alexander the Great had come to meet Dionysius. He was coming toward India, and Dionysius was on the borders of Greece, just one or two miles away from the main road.Alexander wanted Dionysius to come to see him – which seems to be expected of a man like Alexander. He sent the message to Dionysius: “Alexander the Great wants you; he wants to meet you, and we have come to take you.”Dionysius said, “Tell Alexander that those who are really great don’t call themselves great. If he wants to know what greatness means he should come here. Also, take the message that ‘living, nobody can budge me from here; dead, you can take the corpse but that will not be Dionysius. If you want to meet Dionysius you have to come here.”‘When this message reached, Alexander felt a little insulted, shocked, but also intrigued, very interested: What kind of man is this? And the people who had come said, “It is good, sir, that you don’t go, because that man is Lying naked in the sun on the bank of a river. He has only one companion, a dog sitting by his side. And, if you don’t feel offended, we would like to say to you that it is safer not to go there because once in a while he also talks to the dog. The man may be mad!”But whatsoever Dionysius had said, they related. Alexander said, “Whatsoever is the case, it is only a question of two miles. And I want to finish it; I don’t want to carry all my life this question of what kind of man this Dionysius was. I have heard about him so much; since my birth I have been hearing about him.“My master” – his master was Aristotle and Dionysius was continuously attacking Aristotle. Aristotle had defined man as “a two-legged animal.” Dionysius caught a bird with two legs, tore off all its feathers and sent it with a note to Aristotle: “This is what you call a two-legged animal – this is man?”This bird arrived while Aristotle was teaching Alexander. Since that time Alexander was interested in that man. Dionysius has simply crushed the whole definition of Aristotle – that man is a two-legged animal. By sending a two-legged animal, he proved to Aristotle that “you are wrong.”Then Alexander heard that Dionysius went around with a burning lamp in the daylight and looked at everybody’s face. He inquired for what he was searching, and he found that when people asked what he was searching for, Dionysius said, “I am searching for man. I find the crowd, but man is lost.”And it is said that when Dionysius was dying – the dog was sitting on one side and his lamp was on the other side – somebody asked him, “Dionysius, you are dying. Will you please tell us what happened to your whole life’s search? Have you found man or not?”Dionysius said, “Yes, I have something to say. I have not found man, but one thing I must appreciate, that nobody has stolen my lamp. At least this much I can say about humanity, that people are at least this good: nobody has stolen my lamp! I was always afraid that somebody was going to steal it; perhaps it is because of the dog that nobody dared.”Alexander went, and he saw the scene as described: Dionysius was lying naked – he was a beautiful man, a very strong man – and the dog was sitting just by the side of his head. He did not receive Alexander as an emperor, a world conqueror, should be received. He did not even get up. Alexander had to introduce himself: “I am Alexander, and I have come to see you.”Dionysius said, “Good, you can see me. I have no desire to see you at all.” And he asked the dog, “Do you? If you want to see Alexander the Great, see him! This fellow is Alexander the Great.”Alexander said, “I am going to conquer India. Would you like me to bring something for you? I can bring it from there.”Dionysius said, “No, because I don’t need anything. But it would be very kind of you if you would stand a little aside, because you are blocking the sun. If you can do this much that is more than one can expect of a man like you.”Alexander remembers that he had not met many people of such integrity, such dignity – and with nothing: no power, no post, not even clothes; no disciples, no church, nothing…only one companion, a dog. And still he asked, “If you can do only this much: stand a little aside, and don’t block the sun. And remember, never prevent anybody’s light, anybody’s warmth.“And I tell you that you will never be the world conqueror, and you will never be able to come back home, because the path that you have chosen never comes back. On and on…you will find something more has to be conquered, something more has to be conquered: there is no end to things.“And I want to ask just one thing before you go:What are you going to do when you have conquered the world?”Alexander said, “What? Really, I have never given a thought to it, but I think I will relax.”Dionysius looked at the dog and said, “Are you listening? This man thinks he is going to relax after he has conquered the world, and I am relaxing already – without conquering the world! This is strange! For relaxation is it a condition to conquer the world? I hen how am I relaxing?”And Alexander never forgot it his whole life. What the man had said was right: there was no condition. If you want to relax you can relax now; you need not postpone it even for a single moment, because relaxation needs no pre-condition. All it needs is for you to want to relax – then relax! Don’t even ask how to relax because that is a trick of the mind to postpone.Then the mind gets involved in “how” – methods, techniques, strategies. Then relaxation is forgotten, then you are again in a trip of finding methods; and there are thousands of methods. And there is not a single method for relaxation. Relaxation is simply a decision: you want to relax, you relax.If you want to close your eyes, close your eyes. Do you ask how to close your eyes? Once you ask somebody how to close your eyes, then one thing is certain: you will never be able to close your eyes. You may learn thousands of methods but you will never be able to close your eyes. If you want to close your eyes, close your eyes; it is just a natural phenomenon. Relaxation is just natural. Tension is unnatural.There are no “people” around the world. That’s what Dionysius was trying to search for, for a human face, but he saw only masks. He was searching for an individual but he saw only personalities. Hypocrites he found everywhere, but not a single authentic individual.And why did he want to find man? The purpose was the same: he wanted to say something. But to whom to say it? Somebody is needed to listen to it; otherwise you are just talking to the walls.I have talked to the walls for so many years. When for the first time, somewhere in 1950, I entered a radio station studio for a lecture to be recorded…. They wanted to display it all over India, broadcast it, for the simple reason that I was so young and the director of the radio station had heard me speaking in a university debate. He could not believe what I was saying, so he invited me to the studio sometime “to record any subject you give me.”Obviously he was worried, because I was in a studio for the first time. I had never spoken in an empty room just in front of the microphone, so he said, “You will feel a little awkward, but just once or twice in the beginning it happens. It happens to everybody, so don’t be worried.”I said, “I will not feel awkward, because I have been talking to the walls.”He said, “What do you mean ‘to the walls’?”I said, “That day also when you were listening and you got impressed and you brought me here – to you there were people, to me there were only empty benches. The people were gone in all directions. Nobody was there. It was absolutely empty; there were only walls around. So don’t be worried.”He thought me a little crazy, but he said, “Okay, you do it. I will be watching you from the outside, giving you the signals when to start, when to stop.”I said, “Don’t be worried. Just tell me the time, and I will start and I will stop, because you will be a constant disturbance standing there in the window” – it was enclosed with glass. “And from outside you will be making signs. Don’t disturb me. You simply give me the time when I have to start. Ten-thirty? – I will start then. At ten-forty I will stop. You don’t bother.”He watched from there, and he was very puzzled because it was as if I was talking to people, the way I am talking to you! He had seen many orators giving their speeches for records but he had never seen people moving their hands and talking and looking at people.When he came in he said, “What were you doing?”I said, “It is not a question of whether people are there or not – they are never there. And I can’t speak without my hands. If you hold my hands I cannot speak a single word, because it is not only that a part of me is speaking, it is my whole being that is involved in it. My eyes, my hands, my whole body’s involved. My whole body is saying something, is supporting what I am saying in words.”He said, “I don’t understand you, because first you said that you always talk to the walls. That, I was puzzling about. And when I saw you talking here I saw that you are talking to people. I actually looked into the room to see if there was somebody.”I have been talking, many have been hearing, a few have been listening; and slowly slowly I have been sorting out those people who are capable of listening. And now I am talking only to those who are listening. Now I am not talking to the walls, I am talking to the people.But the questioner must be asking the question about the outside world, the great world around. There is no way, nothing can be done about it; they don’t know how to listen. I have talked with them – it is not that I am a pessimist – I have struggled thirty years continuously with those people, but nobody seemed to be listening.Slowly slowly I started sorting out my people, and just to sort them out I started initiating them into sannyas so that I could recognize them and know who my people are. I started giving them names so I could remember, because it is difficult for me to remember all kinds of strange names from around the world. The real reason was simply to have names that I could remember; otherwise it would be impossible for me. Now, there are people from almost all the countries, of all languages: it is impossible to remember their names.But when I give you a name it is a totally different matter. When I give you a name, I give you a name for certain reasons, for certain qualities that I see in you, for certain possibilities that I see in you, for certain characteristics that are already there – and all these become associated.The name that I give is known to me, its meaning is known to me. Its meaning and your lifestyle, pattern, potentiality, all become associated. It becomes easier for me to remember you; otherwise it is very difficult, almost impossible.I have given you the red clothes for the simple reason so that I can recognize you; all other excuses are just hogwash. Just to give you good reasons – because people will be asking you and you will have to give good reasons to them – I have been trying to make a philosophy out of nothing. But the truth is simply this, nothing more than this.And the last thing you say is, “Your message…why are people not listening to Your message?”My message is not something just to be listened to.My message is not a doctrine, not a philosophy.My message is a certain alchemy.It is a science of transformation.It is only for those who are willing to die as they are and be born again into something so new that they cannot even imagine it right now. So only those few courageous people will be ready to listen, because listening is going to be risky. Once you listen you cannot escape from it. Then without your commitment you are committed; without even saying a single word from your side, you are finished!In listening you have taken the first step toward being reborn.So it is not a philosophy that you can just make an overcoat of and go bragging about.It is not a doctrine in which you can find consolation about harassing questions; a doctrine which can make those questions subdued, and slowly slowly forgotten.No, my message is not some verbal communication.It is far more risky.It is nothing less than death and rebirth.

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From Misery to Enlightenment 01-30Category: TALKS IN AMERICA

From Misery to Enlightenment 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Exactly how do you not do it?The easiest thing in the world is always the most difficult. For the simple reason that it is easy, it becomes difficult.This is not a puzzle but the simple logic of the ego. You will have to understand that logic. The logic of the ego is that if you try to do the difficult, only then are you proving the ego’s existence. If you succeed in doing the difficult, then you have attained to the ego. If you can reach to the impossible, then of course you are the greatest man in the history of humanity.People have been trying to reach to the highest peak in the Himalayas for hundreds of years. Hundreds of mountaineers died but the effort continued. From almost every country of the world young people went on going there because Everest, the highest peak of the Himalayas and the highest peak in the whole world, remained a challenge to the human ego. It remained unconquered.But there was no gain. If you reach the peak of Everest and look all around you will simply feel silly there is nothing to gain. No shopping place, not even somebody to say hello to…. It is absolutely deserted eternal ice which has never melted. And the peak is so small that even just two people together cannot stand on it.What can you do there? It took years for Edmund Hillary and Tensing to reach – and how long did they stay there? Not more than five minutes. Even five minutes would have seemed like five ages, because everything freezes there, even time. And after five minutes, the descent back to the earth, where people are waving, waiting, shouting – hilarious that man has conquered the unconquerable. But what is the gain?You cannot see any gain outwardly, but there is a certain gain – that’s what I’m calling the logic of the ego: Edmund Hillary becomes history. Now nobody can take his place; nobody can again be the first man to conquer Everest. Anybody who comes will be second, third, fourth – but that glory of being the first is a great nourishment to the ego.The first man walking on the moon, the first man orbiting around the moon…. I have met that Russian Yuri Gagarin, who was the first in the whole history of man to orbit so close to the moon. Without him it would have been impossible to step on the moon. He prepared the ground. He watched and planned from close quarters what had to be done to land on the moon. He became world famous.He had come to India on invitation, and even Indian fools…. One expects from Indian fools a little more sense, because they are the oldest, ancientmost fools; they should have learned a little bit. But fools are simply fools – modern, ancient, Indian, American. They don’t belong to any caste, to any nation. They are almost, in that way, enlightened.I have never seen Indians so mad! Millions gathered to see Yuri Gagarin in New Delhi. They have never gathered to see a sage, a saint, a mahatma, in the same way. So much curiosity!Yuri Gagarin must have felt a thousandfold bigger than he was. When I met him I asked him, “What have you gained as far as you are concerned, personally? I am not talking about the scientific progress – that you have brought all the material that will help the first man to land – that’s okay. What have you gained personally?”He said, “I have never thought about it, but your question is right. I have certainly gained something personally. I have become world famous and I have not done anything. I cannot show you that ‘this is my achievement.’ But I understand your question and I can see where you are pointing.“Yes, it is true: I am no longer the same Yuri Gagarin I used to be. I was an ordinary, simple man. I have never imagined myself being received by millions and with such tremendous joy that I feel that only now am I living; before I was dead.”I said, “This feeling is not from the awareness that you are, because your consciousness has remained the same. This sense of a new birth is coming from your ego; your ego is tremendously gratified, strengthened. That is your ‘gain.’ But according to those who know that is your loss.”What is gain to the ego is loss to the soul.What is a blessing to the ego is a curse to the soul.What seems to be of tremendous importance to the ego is just sheer stupidity to the innermost core of your being.The logic of the ego is that it is never interested in the simple things, because if you say, “I can breathe!” that is not going to bring crowds to welcome you, to say, “Teertha, you are great! Your name will remain immortal because you breathe.”Nobody is going to say this to you and if anybody does, you will think he is taunting you, that he is not appreciating you – because breathing is so easy. You need not even do it; it goes on by itself. It is not your doing, so how can you be strengthened by it? On the contrary, you are its doing: without breathing you would be nowhere.Breathing is far deeper than your ego, far more essential than your ego, and far more existential than your ego. Ego cannot do anything. Ego is a superficial thing – just a soap bubble floating on the surface of the river. It knows nothing about the depths. Breathing belongs to your deepest part. That’s why even when you are fast asleep, it continues. It has no need of your being awake even.I once went to see a woman who for nine months was in a coma, but breathing perfectly, even in a nine-month-long coma; not for a single moment in nine months had she been awake. And the doctors were saying she could remain in that state for at least three years before she died, and she would not wake. But she is alive. She is breathing so peacefully; perhaps she had never breathed that peacefully ever, before this coma happened!So many disturbances are there, but for her now there is no disturbance. She can’t hear, she can’t see, she can’t think – but breathing continues. Breathing is so natural that ego cannot proclaim itself the doer; hence it is none of its interest.Do you see the problem? The most important, the most essential, is not even interesting to the ego; it is not at all concerned about breathing. The people who became concerned about breathing were the people who became aware of a certain truth – that if you go on doing difficult things, ego is never going to leave you, because each difficult step taken becomes a strengthening to the ego, and the stronger the ego is, the farther away you are from yourself.Your ego is the distance between you, the real, and you, the unreal. The bigger the ego, the bigger the distance; the lesser the distance, the lesser the ego. If there is no distance at all, ego disappears, and in that disappearance appears the one that you are.As far as I am concerned this is the most significant discovery in the whole history of discoveries.I don’t consider the discovery of atomic energy, nuclear weapons, or anything else, more important than the discovery that if you can become aware of even a simple, natural process like breathing, ego disappears.You need not drop the ego.If you try to drop it, you cannot drop it:Who is going to drop it?That which is dropped is not your ego. The dropper will say within you, “Look, I have dropped the ego now I am a humble man, egoless, spiritual, holy.” The dropped is nothing; the dropper is the problem.So you cannot do, in fact, anything to come to the point of non-doing.It is so simple. The question is relevant but the answer is very simple. Looking at the question you will think it is going to be difficult; it is not so. If you try to do something to achieve non-doing then you are getting into a mess.It is just like a dog trying to catch its tail; and once in a while every dog tries that yoga exercise. It is beautiful to watch a dog doing yoga – the yoga of catching its own tail. You can see the embarrassment, the failure: gathering his energy again, taking a better jump, finding solutions to approach it – because the moment he jumps, for some unknown reason the tail jumps also! The faster he tries, the faster the tail moves.Now, the poor dog cannot see that the tail is joined to him; there is no way for him to catch hold of it There is no need either; it is already part of him, he is already in possession of it. What is he trying to do? trying to possess something which he possesses already? trying to get something which has never been away from him?Whether he catches hold of it or not, it is always with him; wherever he goes it is always with him. He cannot even run away from it so there is no point in catching hold of it. Even if he wants to escape from it, it is impossible.Perhaps a few dogs who believe in renunciation – and there are all kinds of dogs – seeing this continual failure to catch hold, to get possession of the tail, may have come to the conclusion that this whole business of possessing a tail is illusory, it is maya. “Don’t waste your time; just renounce it and escape as far away as you can – into the caves, into the monasteries – far away in the Himalayas where not even a trace of this tail is found. Then you will be free. Dispossess it!”That’s the whole thinking of a man who is renouncing wealth, renouncing his wife, his children, and escaping. But he is not aware. You can see that the dog’s tail is attached to him; and wherever the dog goes, the tail will go. If you look a little deeper you can see: if the husband is renouncing his wife, children, possessions, is he doing anything different?In the first place, why did he get married? There must be something in him which needed a wife. The wife is not there outside, the wife is some inner need in him. There must be some inner need in him which wanted all these possessions; otherwise why did he collect them in the first place? There must be some intrinsic necessity for wanting children; otherwise, who was forcing him?,In fact the whole world is trying, all the governments are trying: “Use birth control methods.” Nobody is listening. It is not that people don’t understand what you are saying, not that they can’t see the crowds growing in such proportions that soon this earth is going to die – not because of a nuclear war, but out of sheer starvation.But there must be something, so essential a need, that makes a person want children. And these are your inner psychic needs. The tail of a dog can be operated on – it is not such a big problem – but no surgery can help your needs. They are more deeply rooted in you than the tail of the dog. That it is just an outer thing which can be removed, at no special loss to the dog. But your needs from which you are escaping will be with you wherever you go.I have been moving around all kinds of renunciates. Once I was in Rishikesh in the Himalayas and I was sitting under a tree, a very beautiful tree. It was a hot, sunny afternoon, and the tree was so cool, the shadow of it, that although I had to go I lingered a little longer there.One old Hindu monk came and said, “What are you doing here, under my tree?”I said, “Your tree? You have renounced the whole world and this tree is yours? I don’t see your signboard or…. How can you prove this tree is yours?”He said, “There is no need to prove it; everybody around here knows. For thirty years I have been sitting underneath it.”I said, “You may have been sitting for thirty years, the tree has been here even before that; now I am sitting under it and the tree will remain. The tree has no concern with you or me; the tree has no idea who is its owner. You just get lost!”He said, “What are you saying? You have been here for just a few hours and you become the possessor, and I have been here for thirty years.”I said, “I am not going to possess the tree, I will be moving soon; but not in this way. You will have to apologize to the tree. You have not purchased it, you have not planted it, you have not watered it. On what grounds have you become its possessor? – just because you have been here for thirty years bothering the tree day and night?“You owe something to the tree, the tree owes nothing to you. The tree has been kind to you, and you have become the possessor of it! And this ‘possessing’ is what you had left behind. Nothing has been left behind.“You are even ready, right now, here, to fight with me. Thirty years before you would have been fighting for a house, for a small piece of land: ‘This is my wife, this is my house, this is my religion, this is my country….’“Now all that has become concentrated on this poor tree. Your whole possessiveness has become concentrated on this poor tree. It does not matter whether you possess a whole kingdom or just a small tree; possessiveness has nothing to do with quantity, it is an attitude.”I told him, “You are an old renunciate, you must have heard the famous story of an ancient king. A great sage told one of his disciples to go to the court of the king and be there for a few days as his last lesson. Before the sage could declare him graduated he had to go to the kings court and be there for a few days.“‘If this is what the master wants….’ The young man went. He thought, ‘Perhaps the king is a great sage; he must be greater than my own master, if my master sends everybody to him for the last lesson and the last test.“‘Strange, that a sage who has renounced everything should send his disciples to a man who has not renounced anything, who is just an ordinary power-hungry man, continually trying to conquer other countries; an imperialist, so attached to things that he does not bother even about killing thousands of people. And am being sent to him? There must be some secret in it.’“He went there. It was evening time, and he was brought immediately before the king. It was time for the king to drink, and the women, beautiful women had come to dance. His court was now going to celebrate the evening.“Seeing all this, the young renunciate was terribly shocked, and he said to the king, ‘I had come to stay for a few days but I cannot stay here for a few minutes even. I cannot think why my master has sent me to this hell!’“The king said, ‘If your master has sent you, there must be some reason. And don’t be so judgmental so quickly. What are you going to lose in two or three days’ time? And remember, this is your last test. Without my approval you can remain there in your master’s house your whole life, but you will never be declared graduated. So it is better you come to your senses; remain here for three days. You have not been sent here to judge me; you have been sent here to be judged by me.’“Now, this was too much: this man was going to judge him, who had renounced everything! But what to do? He was in a fix. If he goes back, the master will be unhappy. And if this is going to be the case, that he will have to finally come here, then it is better to pass these three days somehow and get the clearance from this arrogant man.“The king said, ‘You are cooling down and coming to your senses. First take a good bath that I have had prepared for you, because the message of your arrival had come to me. But don’t be worried: in youth everybody is too quick to judge. It takes a little experience not to judge, not to judge superficially at least. And you have not seen anything.“‘Be here for three days, watch, see. And your whole life is there in which you can judge – no problem – but first get my clearance. So first think of my judgment and move accordingly, so that you can get a favorable judgment from me; otherwise you will have to come here again and again and again, your whole life. So you go and take a bath – I have arranged everything.’“The young man had never been in the bath of a king; he had never seen such a beautiful place. Naked women were there to massage him…. He said, ‘My God, the test is finished; in three days this man is going to kill me!’ And before he could say anything – in fact he was on the point of a nervous breakdown: he had escaped from women and here he finds naked women. He had never seen such beautiful women before, and they were going to massage him!“But before he could say anything – in fact he found he had lost his voice, he could not speak. He could only say, ‘Aaaahh!’ – nothing much. And those women started undressing him. Before he could do anything, he was standing naked; those four women took possession of him completely and put him into the bathtub, which was full of rose water.”In India, kings and very rich people take baths in rose water. In the night, hundreds of roses will be put in the bathtub so their fragrance is caught by the water. Then in the morning the petals are removed, so you don’t see any roses but you are surrounded by a cloud of rose fragrance.“He had never in his whole life seen anything so luxurious. The bathtub was made of gold; precious oils were poured on his body and he was massaged. And he was dying to escape somehow from there, but he was feeling completely paralyzed too.“And then the king invited him to a feast of things that he had never tasted before. He had always been reading, ‘Discipline yourself to tastelessness’ – and here was such tasteful, delicious food! Just the aroma, the flavor, was enough to make you feel hungry.“The king said, ‘Sit down and eat – and remember your discipline of tastelessness. What was the point in your master’s house where the food was tasteless anyway? If you could remember tastelessness there, do you think that was because of some discipline? It was tasteless; any idiot would have felt tastelessness. Now feel tastelessness.’“The young man saw the difficulty but saw the point also. ‘And by the way,’ the king said, ‘how was the bath? Were the women nice to you? – because they are the best out of all the massagers. I think you must be feeling satisfied.’“He said, ‘Satisfied! I am just somehow trying to get through the three days – if I can survive, but I don’t have much hope. This is the first evening; three days seem like three lives to me. And now this food! I will not forget it my whole life – and I have to be a renunciate! And those beautiful women – I will not forget them. What kind of test is this? You are giving me all the experiences against which I have been prepared for all these years.’“Then came the wine, and the king offered him some himself. The young man said, ‘This is too much – because wine is prohibited in my master’s house.’“The king said, ‘This is not your master’s house, this is your examiner’s palace. If you want clearance, be alert and do what I say. Your master has told you not to be unconscious. Don’t be unconscious; drink and remain conscious. What is the point of remaining conscious without drinking? Anybody can do that; everybody is doing that.“‘You drink, and drink to your heart’s content, because never again will you get the chance. And I tell you, consciousness has nothing to do with it: I will be drinking with you; in fact I have been drinking the whole evening – can you say I am unconscious? So drink!’“He had to drink. And then the king took him…. He was falling all apart, not knowing what was happening – the intoxication, the women, the food, the beautiful clothes that were given to him after the bath…. And then the king took him to the guest-house where he was to stay. He could not believe it: he thought he must have come to heaven – alcohol gives many people the idea of heaven.”Perhaps that’s why all the religions are against alcohol, because if alcohol can satisfy your desire for heaven…. Who would bother to go to the churches and to the temples and to the ashrams, and do all kinds of strange things when heaven is possible through the simple process of drinking alcohol?“The young man thought he must be in heaven; he forgot completely that he had come to be examined. The king showed him his bed, and the moment the young man lay down he saw a naked sword hanging by a thin thread just above him. All intoxication disappeared; suddenly he found that he was not in heaven. That sword…. Death can bring anybody back to earth from anywhere!“He asked the king, ‘Why is this sword hanging here?’“The king said, ‘This is hanging here to keep you conscious. This is your room – now, go to sleep. And if, by God’s grace, both of us survive till tomorrow morning, we will meet again.’“The young man said, ‘Nothing is going to happen to you, you will survive; the question is about me. Even with God’s help I don’t think this thin thread can hold this heavy, naked sword hanging over me; it is going to fall any moment. Just a little breeze is enough, and I am finished!’“The king said, ‘Don’t be worried. If you are finished off – your master must have been telling you about reincarnation – you will be reincarnated – a rebirth. And whatever you have learned will go with you. So don’t miss these last moments. Perhaps it may fall – I cannot guarantee anything. It is up to you, what you make of these moments. Remain conscious, and if you die in consciousness, nothing can be better than that.’“But the young man said, ‘I don’t want to die. I have come here just to get the clearance, and you are just clearing me away from life itself!’“The king said, ‘This is the way one gets the clearance. You go to sleep: whatever is going to happen is going to happen – that’s your master’s teaching. That’s what Hindus say: even a leaf does not move without God’s will, so how can a sword kill you without God’s will? And with His will, sword or no sword, you will be killed.“‘So just go to sleep, the way I go to sleep. Over you there is only one naked sword hanging; over me there are thousands of naked swords hanging. And soon you will hear my snores from the other room.’“The young man could not sleep the whole night; the whole night he heard the king snoring. In the morning the king came into his room. The young man was fully awake, lying, just looking at the sword; there was nothing else in the whole world except the sword.“The king said, ‘I am going to take a bath’ – just behind his palace was the sacred Hindu river, the Ganges. Come along with me for the morning walk, and a little swim in the river.’ They went there. The man had nothing except a small langoti.A langoti is just a small piece of cloth, a very mini mini underwear without any stitches or any sewing done on it. You have just to put a thread around your waist and stick one end of it in the front and the other end at the back, and the mini mini underwear is ready.No tailoring is needed; you can make it any time anywhere. And that’s what the Hindu monk is supposed to wear, because stitching is a complicated affair; you will have to accept somebody’s help, you may need money – and all these things have to be avoided.The Hindu monk tries to avoid as much as possible. He has the barest necessities: a begging bowl – which is not made of metal; it is made of a coconut cut in two pieces, and the hard shell of the coconut becomes the begging bowl. You can attach a small string to it to hold in your hand. The same way you make your mini mini underwear, you make your begging bowl.And a staff – one wonders why a staff. It is because of the Indian dogs. There are so many, and they are particularly against all kinds of uniformed people. Although the monk’s is not much of a uniform, still it is a uniform because all the Hindu monks are the same, with their begging bowls, that mini mini underwear, the staff – and all naked.Dogs feel suspicious of uniforms; they think that something somewhere is wrong. And perhaps they are right, because the army uses uniforms, the police use uniforms, postmen use uniforms – and the monks use uniforms. It seems all the wrong kinds of people are in uniforms. So the staff is absolutely necessary to keep the dogs away.So I said to the old Hindu monk, “So these were the three things that the young man had brought with him, the langoti, begging bowl and staff. In the morning he went off with these three things again because he felt embarrassed in all those valuable clothes, robes that the king had offered.“He said, ‘In the palace I can use them but not outside. If somebody sees me in these robes it will be very embarrassing for me and for you, so let me have my uniform.“The king said, ‘That is up to you.’ So the king went in his royal clothes and the monk in his uniform. They both put their clothes on the bank of the Ganges and entered the water. While they were taking their bath the monk shouted to the king, ‘Your palace is on fire!’“The king said, ‘I saw it before you did, but there is nothing to be worried about. Now what can be done? It is on fire, but nothing happens without God’s will so don t be worried; you just take your bath.’ “The young man said, ‘What are you saying! At least I have to save my uniform that is lying just by the side of the palace’ and he ran out of the water to save his uniform. The palace was burning, the king’s clothes were there, but he was worried about his uniform!“The king took his bath. The palace was completely finished – it had been burned on his orders. The monk was continuously shaking and trembling, and he was saying, ‘It is such a great loss. How many millions of rupees…!’“But the king said, ‘Don’t be worried; that has nothing to do with you. Your things are safe.’“The young man said, ‘All my things are perfectly safe.’“The king said, ‘That’s enough for you – you should be worried about your things: these are your possessions, this is your kingdom. But I don’t care if my whole kingdom burns down; it doesn’t matter – because before when I was not here, the world was here and the kingdom was here. One day I will not be here again and the world will continue. I am here just as a visitor, a watcher. Why should I get too involved?“‘But you have to remember that you have not been able to renounce anything; you have not yet become a watcher. You could not even watch my house on fire. If your uniform – which is not much of a uniform – had been on fire I think you would have gone mad! You are already in a state of madness because of so much loss…. But what has it to do with you?“‘And you were shocked seeing me drinking, but you don’t know that even while drinking I am a watcher. You were shocked seeing me surrounded by beautiful women; even looking at their dance I am only a watcher. But you are not a watcher at all. Now make up for it within two days. The time is short, very short. Be a watcher, because before I give you the clearance that, yes, you can graduate, you will have to prove that you have become a watcher.’“He said, ‘How have I to prove it?’“The king said, ‘Today just go on trying it on everything. Everything is managed in such a way that it will help you to watch. Just watch. Don’t try to escape, don’t try to repress, don’t try to fight, don’t try to avoid: just watch, let things happen.’“And on the last day, the last test was that there was going to be a beautiful dance. This young man was given a cup full of oil – so full that if he just moved a little, the oil would spill. The dancers were in a circle – all naked women dancing – and the king was sitting in the middle. And the man, the poor young man holding that precious bowl full of oil, was told ‘Even if a single drop of the oil falls, you have failed.’“Now there was so much temptation to look to the side at what was happening – so many beautiful women dancing! But from that bowl, just a single drop…just a single moment of unwatchfulness…. He passed by the women, went around them – and as he was going around, slowly slowly watchfulness settled in him. He forgot all about the dance; there was only the ‘now,’ the oil, and watchfulness….”Watchfulness is a simple thing.But it has no ego fulfillment.Meditation is the same.These are different names – watchfulness, witnessing, meditation, awareness, alertness – different names for a single phenomenon; and all these happen when you are in a state of not – doing. And that is the question: how to do that non-doing?If you ask how, you have missed the point, because “how” means doing – and you are asking me, “Tell us to do something so that we can attain non-doing.”If you go to any religious priest he will tell you what to do, and just by telling you what to do he proves that he knows nothing.I can only explain to you that doing is not going to help. You will have to understand that no doing is going to help. In that very understanding, non-doing happens.Non-doing is a happening.It is nothing on your part, that you can claim, “I have done it, I have achieved it.” You can only say, “When I was not there it happened. Because I have always been there it was not happening.”Don’t ask what has to be done.Leo Tolstoy, one of Russia’s wisest men of this century, has written a book, What Then Must We Do? – and this was one of the books that changed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi into Mahatma Gandhi.Mahatma Gandhi declared three persons his master. The first was Leo Tolstoy, the second was Henry Thoreau, and the third was Emerson. All three were fanatic Christians.It is a very strange thing that Gandhi was influenced by these three fanatic Christians. Gandhi did something immeasurably harmful to India: he sabotaged the Eastern religious understanding by mixing it, unconsciously with fanatic Christian ideas. He was influenced by these people, and he started interpreting Eastern religions according to these ideas.There were many times in his life when he thought to become a Christian. It would have been far better if he had become a Christian. At least he would not have been able to contaminate Eastern thought with things which are far lower.But his politics prevented him, because if he had become a Christian he would have lost his Hindu following. To keep the Hindu following he remained a Hindu, but his mind was already Christian; he had no understanding of Eastern thought.He was educated in England and then he was working in South Africa, again under a British government. And his contact was only with Christian missionaries. One of the very famous Christian missionaries of those days, C.F. Andrews, was Gandhi’s greatest friend. But he could not become Christian because once he was a Christian all Hindus would have dropped him completely, immediately.His son, Haridas Gandhi, just in rebellion against his father – because that father was really too much of a father, really a dangerous father…. He wanted to mold you completely according to his ideas. I have a soft corner for Haridas Gandhi, his son, because Haridas wanted to go to school; but Mahatma Gandhi would not allow him because he thought the whole educational system was corrupted.It is true that it is corrupted, but what is the alternative? To remain uneducated? Before you create a better education system there is no other to go to; it is a necessary evil. So be cautious, be careful – but to prevent children from going to school….You will be surprised: all Gandhi’s children remained uneducated except for Haridas, because he escaped from the home. You will have thousands of cases where children have escaped from home because their fathers wanted them to be educated, but this is a single case where a son escaped from home because he wanted to be educated and his father was absolutely against any kind of education.Gandhi was so angry. He was talking so much of non-violence and love and compassion but he had nothing of it; he was so angry. And what crime had the son committed? – he became a matriculate. And Haridas was thinking that once he is a matriculate, his father will be angry and shout and may even beat him; but how long can this go on? – things will change. But Gandhi was not an easy father.He declared that Haridas could not enter his house; he disowned Haridas as a son. Haridas had guts. He said, “Okay, I am going to become a Mohammedan, because my father goes on saying that Hindus and Mohammedans are all brothers; that the Koran and the Gita and The Bible all give the same message; that there is the one God called by so many names – so let us see.”He became Mohammedan, and Gandhi was so angry that he told his wife, “I don’t want to see the face of this boy again.” When Haridas heard it he said, “But Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, are all brothers, and all these books have the same message. What has happened?”From Haridas he changed his name to Abdullah. His new name was Haji Abdullah Gandhi. Haji is equivalent to Mahatma. He went to Mecca to do haj. Haj is a pilgrimage; you go to Mecca, the place where Mohammedanism was founded and where Mohammed created the first mosque.It is absolutely necessary for every Mohammedan to go on a haj; haj means holy pilgrimage. If you don’t, you are not a real, authentic Mohammedan. And one who goes is called haji; he has become a saint. Just by going to Mecca and moving seven times around the stone, you become a sage.Abdullah is simply a translation of Haridas in Arabic. Haridas means servant of God; that is exactly the meaning of Abd-allah. Allah means God, abd means servant: Abdullah. And Haridas asked to keep it exactly the same. Haji means mahatma, Abdullah means Haridas – and “Gandhi” he kept because “Gandhi” has nothing to do with Hinduism.In India there is a strange convention: your profession by and by becomes your surname. Gandhi simply means one who sells perfume. Somebody among his forefathers may have been a perfume-seller. Gandh means perfume, so gandhi means one who sells perfume. It has nothing to do with Hinduism; there are Parsi Gandhis – that’s why Indira was also Gandhi.She had no relationship to Mahatma Gandhi. She was married to a Parsi, Feroze Gandhi; she was not even married to a Hindu. Feroze’s parents must have been selling perfume. Perfume has nothing to do with any religion – anybody can sell perfume – but when you sell perfume in India, slowly slowly you will become a Gandhi. That’s how Indian surnames are. Your business, your profession, slowly slowly gets you fixed. So Abdullah kept “Gandhi” because that has nothing to do with Hinduism.Only once, in a railway station in Katni, did Mahatma Gandhi and Abdullah Gandhi cross paths. Gandhi was traveling in the train, and Abdullah was going to catch the train from Katni. Hundreds of people had come to see Gandhi and hundreds of people, Mohammedans, had come to give a send-off to Haji Abdullah Gandhi, because they had made him a saint – just in opposition to Gandhi.That Gandhi’s own son did not believe in Hinduism and thought of Mohammedanism as higher, as a true religion, was a great boost to their ego. So they were shouting slogans in praise of Haji Abdullah Gandhi: “Long live Haji Abdullah Gandhi!”When their procession passed by the side of Gandhi’s compartment – he was standing facing the crowd – he turned his back. He would not look at his son’s face – and this man is talking about compassion, kindness, love, non-violence! And not only that, his wife was, after all, a mother. She wanted at least to have two words with Haridas, but Gandhi stopped her. He said, “Choose. If you say a single word to Haridas, you also go with him.”This is the way of the ego. Kasturba, his wife, remained silent, crying tears, but she could not say a single word. Abdullah stopped there, seeing his father’s back. Everything was said: looking at his mother’s face covered with tears he thought it better not to say anything, not to create any trouble for the old woman; he passed on by.The day Gandhi was assassinated…. Haridas was the right person to put fire to Gandhi’s body but he was ignored – and he was no longer a Hindu. He followed the whole procession, he was present there when Gandhi’s body was burned, but nobody even recognized him, not even his brothers.One of Gandhi’s sons, Ramdas, was very friendly to me. I asked Ramdas, “Now your father is dead, what is creating a wall between you and Haridas? If it is only a question of ego, of who should approach whom, then I can manage something, because I know Haridas. And as far as I understand Haridas is a man of tremendous courage – fighting with a steel-hearted father, a hypocrite, who was not a mahatma, who could not be a mahatma.“Haridas had simply given a challenge to your father: ‘If you say that every religion is the same, then why so much fuss about my becoming a Mohammedan? And you have been continually thinking of becoming a Christian; if your son has become a Mohammedan what is wrong in it?’Ramdas said, “I can understand, but for his whole life my father was telling us, ‘Never treat Haridas as your brother,’ and now that my father is dead I would feel guilty if I went against his will. But you are right.”I said, “I can bring Haridas, because he has never been against anybody – neither Mahatma Gandhi, nor you nor his mother nor other brothers. He was just showing a simple fact to Gandhi, but ‘what you teach is not your reality; what you say is not what you live.’”But this is the way of the ego. It says one thing, and lives just the opposite. It can even pretend to be its own opposite: it can pretend to be humble. And that’s where the question leads.If you ask me what to do to attain non-doing…. Nothing has to be done to attain non-doing. Non-doing is not an attainment, it is simply your nature. When you are not doing anything, it is there.If somebody is running in this room and he asks, “What can I do so that I can stop running, so that I can also sit just like you?” what are you going to say to this man? Running is an act; sitting is not an act. You are not to do something to sit, you have simply to stop running; don’t run! Or if you find it impossible to stop, then the other way, the only other way is to run as long as you can, and sooner or later you will fall down. How long can you run?So there are only two types of non-doers in the world: one who by sheer understanding relaxes and finds the state of non-doing, of peace, of silence; and the other type, who will go thousands of miles, torture themselves in every possible way, do yoga exercises, stand on their head and fast, starve, renounce, repress, pray, go into the monasteries and do all kinds of stupid things. And finally, simply by being tired, exhausted, they sit down – and suddenly it is there.Perhaps they may think it has come because of all their doing. That is not the case – it has come in spite of all their doing. Otherwise, they are such practiced doers that it was possible they might have continued still, because the more you run, the better your running becomes.There is no end to it: you go on becoming more and more skillful, more and more articulate, more and more crafty. You go on finding new ways. You get fed up with one thing, then you move to another; you get fed up, you move to another. And there are millions of things available in the world for you to do.But for non-doing, nothing is available, no method.You have simply to understand the nature of non-doing.Don’t ask an absurd question. Just try to understand that by doing, your ego will be fulfilled. Whatever you do – you do prayer, you do fasting, you go to the church, you become a monk – whatever you do, doing is food for the ego, and ego is the barrier between you and existence, between you and your reality.Don’t do anything.Why can’t you just live without doing all this nonsense?Eat when you feel hungry.Drink when you feel thirsty.Go to sleep when you feel sleepy.Get up when you feel awake.And just forget everything else!Just do the small things that are needed.Live a simple, ordinary life.And you will find it.Jesus says: “Seek and ye shall find.”I say to you: “Seek and ye shall never find.”Jesus says: “Ask and it shall be given to you.”I say to you: “Ask and it shall never be given to you.”Jesus says: “Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.”I say: “Knock and the door shall never be opened unto you.”In fact there is no need to knock:The doors are open.Just get in!