Don’t Bite My Finger, Look Where I’m Pointing

Talks given from 1/3/78 to 31/3/78

Darshan Diary

CHAPTER 1

1 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Osho initiates the new baby of a sannyasin.]

Deva means divine, sangam means meeting. Each child is a meeting of the sky and the earth. Each child is a miracle. Something happens that should not ordinarily happen: the meeting of matter and consciousness, the meeting of the visible and the invisible. So think of him as a miracle. Respect, revere him; don’t take him for granted. The moment the child is taken for granted, we start murdering him. And each child is murdered; that’s what is happening all over the world and has happened down the ages: it is a great massacre.

It is not only that Herod killed all the children in Israel, it is happening every day; it was happening before Herod and it has been happening since him.

Each child passes through a psychic murder; the moment the child is not respected and is thought to belong to you like a possession, the child has been killed, effaced. He has to be respected as a god, because the child is the coming of god into the world again. Each child is a statement from god that he is not yet tired, that he is not yet weary of man, that he still hopes, that he will continue to create new human beings, whatsoever we become – sinners and saints. Whatsoever we do, he still hopes that the real man will be created. God has not failed yet! That is the declaration in each child’s coming onto the earth, into existence.

So let this be your meditation now. To be a mother means to meditate with an alive, new, fresh, being.

Devadas – Deva means god, das means a servant – a servant of god, a slave of god, one who is surrendered. The English word ’servant’ is not very good; it carries the connotation of somebody being forced. The English word ’slave’ is also not good; that also has the meaning of somebody being forced against his will. Daso is one who has surrendered on his own accord. In fact there is no word in English for it. It means: a servant who has chosen the life of service as his joy, a slave who has found his freedom in this slavery. When you surrender, on one hand you become a slave, on the other hand you become for the first time free, free from the ego; and that is real freedom.

So this will look like a paradox but it has a great truth in it, that only those who are ready to surrender and become slaves become free and independent. Only those who dare to lose themselves, attain.

Only those who are ready to be defeated by god, prove finally to be victorious.

Prartho means one who prays... and prayer is the greatest miracle in the world, because prayer means trust, love, surrender. It means all that is valuable. Prayer is not just repeating a formula, it is a pouring out of the heart. Prayer gives a different quality to your being. It is not that by praying you change god’s mind; there is nobody like god as a person and there is no such mind as god’s mind. People who pray try to change the mind of god; they are ill and they would like to be healthy, so they want to change the mind of god, but that is not true prayer. The true Prayer is that which changes you, not god. God is irrelevant, god is just an excuse, a device: the real thing is that the prayer changes the one who prays. When you are Faying you are no more the same person.

The ordinary mind continuously doubts; in prayer the doubt is relaxed, the gestalt changes, you start trusting. The ordinary mind always thinks negatively; in prayer you move to the positive; the pendulum moves from one polarity to another. The ordinary mind is always desiring, hankering, groping in the future; in prayer the future disappears, you are utterly herenow. This moment becomes your totality, and in that very totality something, a door that has remained closed forever, opens up.

To pray means to trust in miracles, to pray means that things are possible without your doing anything at all. To pray means that you need not go anywhere and all can come to you, wherever you are.

To pray means that the existence has not abandoned you; you can still call it forth. It has mothered you, it is not indifferent to you. In short, prayer means believing in the impossible before breakfast!

And when you believe in the impossible, it happens. When you believe in the impossible you have created the situation for it to happen; it was only impossible because there was no belief. Because the trust was not there it was impossible; now trust makes all things possible. Trust knows nothing is impossible.

Prayer opens the door, makes you receptive, feminine, a womb which can contain all. Prayer means that you are ready to allow god to do whatsoever he wants to do with you. You simply are in a let-go.

You say, ’I will not hinder, I will not create obstructions; I am no more. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Take possession of me, overwhelm me, flood me.’ Prayer means, ’I am ready to accept you in the deepest core of my being, I am open to you to my very heart. Sink into me, let your arrow penetrate my being, let your energy permeate me.’

Once you allow this to happen all becomes possible, because the whole energy of existence becomes available to you. Man alone is very helpless. Man plus existence is enormous, huge, infinite. Prayer is a meeting of the tiny part with the whole. The tiny part dissolves into the whole and becomes the whole.

Ajaya means that which cannot be conquered. And there is a centre in you which is invincible. It cannot be destroyed, it cannot be defeated; there is no way to even touch it, it is intangible. It is invisible. That is you; it is your awareness and it is your soul.

Sannyas is a journey to this point, a pilgrimage to one’s own being. Unless you have found this immortal, invisible awareness in you, don’t rest. Be diligent and work towards this. Once you start moving consciously towards this point, it happens. It is not very far, because it is you. It only needs a total intensity to find it. Be aflame with the desire to find yourself, because finding yourself is finding all. Then nothing is needed. One who has come to oneself has come to one’s home... to bliss, to silence, to contentment.

Patipado means the way. There are thousands of ways to go outside but there is only one way to come in: that is called patipado. It exactly means what tao means: the way.

You have been wandering for many many lives on those outside ways; now the time has come to turn inwards. It is difficult because of our old habits; the mind knows how to travel the outer ways so it tends to go with the familiar, to the familiar. That is the only difficulty. Once you have overcome that difficulty and you have learned that you can go inside too, things become easier. Only the first step is difficult; so I say that with the first step completed half the journey is over.

Anand means blissful, mayuri means peahen. There is a peacock, this is the peahen. And mayuri represents something immensely silent. The peacock is noisy, is an exhibitionist; he shows off all his colours, he dances, and he is very ornamental – an actor. Mayuri is humble, silent, non-exhibitory.

Bliss can have two ways. One is very expansive, extrovert. The peacock is extrovert, the peahen is introvert. When bliss comes, either you have to sing it, dance it, or you have simply to be silent. Just feeling its awe, one becomes speechless. When satori comes to you, when bliss comes to you, you will become absolutely silent. You will lose your speech, you will not be able to say anything about it. Your eyes will speak, your being will speak, but you will not be able to be articulate about it. And whatsoever you say, you will feel as if you have been unjust to the experience, unfair, because what you have said is simply irrelevant, is almost a lie; it is so inadequate.

Remember it: let your dance be more and more inner, let your song be more and more silent, let your dance be a dance of no-movement. Yes, there is a dance of no-movement. You just feel it in the innermost being but it remains there: unexpressed, unsung. Your whole being will feel the taste of it, the flavour of it. You will be completely permeated by it but still you will not be able to utter a single word.

Many people have been asking me, ’Why have only men been great enlightened masters – why not women?’ One of the reasons is this, that man is an extrovert; he can express himself well. He is a peacock; the woman is a peahen. She can know, she can feel, she can be, but when the point of expression comes she is utterly at a loss. And this is not only so with the ultimate experience but in other experiences too. A woman finds it very difficult to say, ’I love you’; a man finds it very easy. Even when he doesn’t feel much love he can say, ’I love you’. And the woman, even when she is full of love, remains silent about it; it has to be felt by the other. The woman respects the inner experience so much that all expression seems a little vulgar. That’s why there have not been great women masters: not that there have not been great enlightened women; there have been.

You will be surprised to know that in the whole of nature the male is very expressive. If you listen to the cuckoo, the male sings the song, not the female. In the whole of nature you will find the female very silent, unassuming. The male is very expressive and aggressive; he sings the song, he dances the dance of the peacock and he is very very colourful. Only with humanity have things become different. The man simply wears a grey suit, the official dress, and the woman has become very very expressive; she wears many colours, designs, decorations. This is a kind of perversion.

If you go back into history, it was not so. Just see Krishna! He is as decorated as any woman can ever think of being – a colourful dress, long hair, a flute – and the way he is standing is a dancing gesture. In the past men used to wear ornaments; slowly slowly, something went wrong.

Man is the only abnormal animal on the earth. Something went wrong and the roles changed: the woman became very interested in beautifying herself, in cosmetics and dress and hair style, and man became very very ordinary, non-expressive. That has happened in language too. Men are more silent; the women go on gossiping. But if you look into nature it is just otherwise: the male goes on gossiping and the female is silent.

That’s why I am giving you the name Mayuri. Become more and more silent, absorb rather than express, contain rather than overflow. And the more you can contain, the greater it will be; the more you contain, the higher it will rise. It is just as if you dam a river and then its level starts rising because more and more water is collecting; more and more water is collecting and the river becomes a great reservoir.

If you can contain, then you start moving upwards. That upward movement will bring you to god.

[A visitor asks: whether I should develop my individual self or whether I should go out into the world and work. I feel there are so many problems; I have been working with them for a few years, in the outside world as it were. I tend to feel that one’s own spiritual path can be developed, and perhaps as fast, by committing oneself in service.

Osho checks his energy.]

Continue working as you are; you will grow in the world. The temptation will come many times to you in the feeling that it would be far better to leave everything and just work on yourself; but you will not be able to work that way. You are basically an extrovert, your energy is flowing out. And it always happens that the extrovert thinks that it would be far better to be inside because he feels tired of the world and people and the thousand and one things. To introverts also the temptation comes of, ’What am I doing here with closed eyes, sitting with myself? Why am I wasting my time?

Why should I not go into the world and do things as everybody else is?’

The opposite always remains attractive; that has to be remembered, that’s the temptation. But your energy is out-flowing so your growth will be in the world. Renouncing the world will not be helpful to you; it will cripple you, it will not be the right soil for your growth. And these are the basic types – the introvert and the extrovert.

The introvert grows only when he is alone, unrelated, unburdened, without any responsibility. The extrovert grows only when there are great responsibilities and great challenges and great crises every day. Mm? facing the crisis, encountering the crisis, solving those problems, he becomes mature, he becomes steel inside; but that is a by-product. He fights outside, and in fighting outside he grows inside.

There is no need to change. Just put a little more energy into meditation, mm? – if you work in the outside world for twenty-three hours a day, then give one hour to meditation; one hour will be enough for you for introversion. And even the introvert has to give some time to extroversion, because life needs balance. Even a Buddha cannot sit continuously under a tree; he has to walk up and down, he has to do something. Life cannot exist with only one pole; the other pole need not be too much but a little bit of it is needed. Each man has a woman inside and each woman has a man inside.

You must have seen the yin-yang Chinese picture: the yin and the yang are both meeting together and making the circle. There is another thing that is even more important: one is black, another is white, but the white has a black spot in it and the black has a white spot in it, as if two fish are meeting together. But each has something of the other inside it. No extrovert is purely extrovert, no man is purely man; no introvert is pure introvert because no woman is purely woman. They inter-penetrate. The only difference is of proportion, emphasis.

You are emphatically extrovert. Simply enjoy being in the world and go on side-by-side: once in a while go for a retreat, for a few days disappear from the world, that’s perfectly good, but don’t renounce it. You belong to the world and you will grow through it.

CHAPTER 2

3 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Swatantra means freedom, sarjano means creativity. Freedom is true only if it creates. Creativity is the indication of a true freedom, and creation is true only if it comes out of freedom. Creativity without freedom is not true creativity, it is imitation, it is borrowed. It can be very skilful, it can be technically perfect, but something essential will be missing in it: the soul will be missing.

There are creative people who are not free, who have not known the freedom of no-mind. They simply go on repeating; all that they do is more or less a new combination of old things. The wine is old, the bottles new. Maybe there are mixtures of many wines – something from here, something from there. It appears as if it is new; it is not. It is only a combination, it is not a creation; it is a composition, not a creation.

There are people who are free but not creative; their freedom is dead. There are people who sit in the Himalayan caves and have known something of the silence, of the interior, but they are not creative; their freedom is not true. They are also imitating the state of no-mind. They are sitting like a Buddha practising a posture. It is only a gesture, there is nothing behind it. Sitting in their Himalayan caves they are simply vegetating.

So to me these two words are of immense value, and they go together; in fact they cannot exist separately. They are like yin-yang, day-night, summer-winter, the positive and the negative; they are always together. Whenever one is there, the other must be there somewhere, has to be there.

Seeking one, one finds both; losing one, one loses both. So let this be my message for you....

Feel at home – this is your home! Forget, the past, let it simply disappear. From this moment think anew, feel anew. This is your second birth, and without the second the first is incomplete. The second is the true birth, but one has to be very receptive to allow it tc happen. Immense changes are on the way; just be receptive and every day things will be happening.

A great energy is being released here; those who can be receptive are fortunate. If somebody misses, it is only he who is responsible. If he remains closed there is no way to penetrate him. The spiritual energy cannot be aggressive energy; it cannot even knock on your door. It simply waits like sunlight: if you open the door it comes in; if you don’t open the door it does not knock, it does not force. It is not like wind in that it knocks and tries to enter. It is like sunlight: it simply waits there, it has infinite patience. And only those who are capable of opening up to it are benefited. Then there is great celebration, great rejoicing happens inside. For the first time one knows what life is.

So just be open, and allow things to happen.

... Vardan. It means benediction, blessing, divine gift. Sannyas is a benediction: the beginning of a true and authentic life, the beginning of sincerity, the birth of truth in you. People live in lies.

They have lived so long in lies that they themselves have become lies. People have only false faces, masks; they have completely forgotten their original face, hence there is so much misery. With the original face all misery disappears.

Sannyas is nothing but an effort to penetrate all the masks, to dig for the original face. Once the original face is known there is benediction, there is a great joy, there is immense peace, blissfulness.

That is the meaning of vardan.

To know life in its truth is a blessing; to know life as a lie is a misery. To live in lies is to live in hell.

Lies are many, truth is one. To attain to that one is to enter paradise. Paradise, heaven or hell, are not geographical situations, not there somewhere in the space; they are inner psychological states.

It just depends on knowing the knack of it, and you can turn the hell into heaven... just as if it is done by magic. The magic, the secret of the magic, is to be authentically true, vulnerable, open, not hiding, not hiding from anybody. It needs courage and guts, but once you start feeling the joy of it things become easy; every day things become more and more easy. One day one is suddenly relaxed. In that relaxation the ego disappears. That is benediction, that is vardan!

[Osho gives someone sannyas:]

Come here!... come here. Good! Close your eyes, and just feel me. Feel me penetrating you from everywhere, from all directions, like arrows entering from everywhere, trying to reach your heart.

... In your life you have been too serious about everything; about god too. That seriousness has been a barrier; it has to be dropped. It looks very strange when I say that god can be approached only in a playful mood, but it is so. When you are having fun you are closer to god than ever. The English word ’recreation’ is beautiful. It really means literally ’re-creation’. Whenever you are in fun, in a non-serious playful mood, you re-create yourself. You allow yourself to be recreated by god; you go through a rebirth. Whenever man becomes serious, he becomes closed. Seriousness is part of the ego.

Seekers down the ages have thought that they were very very serious people; millions have been searching and missing because of their seriousness. Their search is great, their effort is great, they devote their whole life to seeking and still they miss – not because they have committed any sin but just because of their seriousness.

If you cannot be playful you keep god distant. When you are flowing, relaxed, the distance is not so much. And there come moments of relaxation when the distance simply disappears, when there is no need to seek god: god is found. God is found without seeking. Seeking has nothing to do with god; seekers miss. There are two types of people – the seekers and the finders, and they are different people. Seekers never find and finders don’t need to seek, they simply find.

Picasso was painting something beautiful and the visitor, a friend, asked, ’How do you seek beauty?’

And he said, ’I don’t seek it! find it!’ That statement is pure Zen: I don’t seek it, I find it....

Drop seriousness; there is still time to drop it. And in the very dropping of it you will really start growing.

Prem means love, dip means lamp – a small lamp of love, a small flame of love, a light of love. Love kindles a light inside, and that light is such that it needs no fuel. There is never a power crisis for it because it is uncaused; it is perpetual, eternal. Once you have found that light inside, it goes on burning forever and forever. And with that light inside, the darkness around you starts disappearing.

Then you can go into the darkest night and still your path will be lit. Love is the only light that helps.

Scriptures don’t, but love.... So these two things I say to you: love and laughter, and between these two you will find. Be loving and laughing; don’t take yourself serously.

Once Buddha was asked – somebody had committed suicide and he was asked, ’Why does someone commit suicide? Why?’ And Buddha said, ’Through taking oneself too seriously.’ And that is so. The people who commit suicide are the people who take themselves too seriously. The people who take themselves too seriously may or may not commit suicide, but they live their suicide, a slow suicide. They are never alive to the optimum.

So remember these two things – love and laughter. Between these two is the gap for you. In these two all is going to happen. Between these two the world will stop.

[Osho gives sannyas:]

Feel me... breathe me. Take deep breaths and feel that I am going into you with each breath. If something starts happening in the body, allow it – any shaking, trembling, movement, gesture....

Suparna. Literally it means the eagle. Metaphorically it means the wide-winged. The eagle goes to the farthest point, to the distant; its flight is the flight towards the ultimate.

A sannyasin has to become an eagle, wide-winged. A sannyasin belongs to the sky. He lives on the earth but belongs to the sky. He uses the earth as a temporary abode, not as a goal but only as a means, not as the end but just an overnight stay. His eyes are fixed on the sky, the infinite, the unbounded.

Everybody is born with wings, but because we have never used them we have become completely oblivious to their existence. The work of a master is nothing but this, to show you that you have wings. He has to push you by and by into the unknown so that you can start using your wings. He has to throw you out of your securities. He has to uproot you in many ways. He has to destroy your safeties and he has to throw you into the unknown sky, because only that will help you to regain your wings, to recognise your wings. Only in a tremendous crisis will you be able to recognise who you are.

Suparna is one of the most beautiful metaphors....

Anand means bliss, blissfulness, and savito is the name of the god of the sun, the source of light, the god of light, the sun god – blissful sun god. And you have to work it out in your inner alchemy; let light and bliss become associated.

Whenever you are feeling happy, watch light; any light will do, just a candle, but do it only whenever you are feeling happy, whenever you are feeling relaxed. Whenever something like joy is permeating your being, then look at the moon, at the stars or the morning sun or the evening sun; any light will do.

This association has to be worked out; whenever you are feeling happy, watch, meditate on life, so that light and happiness become joined together, so that there is a kind of conditioned reflex. After three, four weeks you will be able to bring that joy whenever you watch light; then it becomes very simple. But first you have to make it a deep association. Mm? That’s what Pavlov, the Russian psychologist, calls conditioned reflex.

He used to give food to his dog and while giving food to him, he would ring a bell. Each time the food was given the bell was rung. After fifteen days he simply rang the bell and the dog started salivating. There is no food and the saliva had no direct connection to the bell, but now the bell had become associated with food; it reminded the dog of food. The dog must have smelt food when the bell started ringing; he was getting ready, his inner chemistry was ready to digest food. This he calls

’conditioned reflex’.

This has been used in Yoga for centuries; this is nothing new, it has been used in the East for at least five thousand years. It has been used for inner work. For example, when you are feeling happy you can associate your happiness with anything. If you go on continuously associating it, then that thing will become the triggering.

People think that if you repeat a mantra you will feel blissful; that is wrong. First you have to create that association, otherwise you won’t feel blissful. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi goes on giving mantras to people; those are meaningless because he is missing the basic part of it. The basic part is: your chemistry has to become associated with the mantra. Any mantra will do, your own name will do.

Whenever you are feeling happy, just repeat your own name again and again and again; then the sound of the name and the feeling of happiness become intertwined. So whenever later on you repeat your whole name, suddenly you will find that some source has been touched and a great blissfulness has been released.

This can be done with sound, this can be done with light, this can be done with anything; but for you light will be the most suitable phenomenon. So just work it out for three, four weeks. But never do it when you are not feeling happy, never; otherwise you will confuse the chemistry.

Mm? you are listening to good music and suddenly you feel a joy arising. Watch a candle. The joy is there inside and the candle starts getting joined together with it; let them become hooked with each other. Once it has happened you need not wait for joy; just put the candle in front of you and suddenly you will see that you are transported. That’s how all religious rituals were created in the beginning, but then things got lost; otherwise they are all meaningful, originally they had a great significance.

[A sannyasin says that he isn’t feeling any closer to Osho in the three months he’s been here and he feels he’s not opening up. He has broken up with his wife and is not in a relationship.]

That can be one of the main causes, because when your love is not flowing it will be difficult for you to connect with me too. It is very easy when the love is flowing.

You have become afraid of love. Maybe the experience that you went through with your wife made you afraid so the feelings are no more flowing easily. Feelings don’t know; they are unaddressed. If one love experience proves bitter, if something goes wrong, the heart does not know that you are not to love this person only; the heart simply shrinks, it becomes afraid of love.

This happens many times here, in many ways. For example, somebody comes here, and after coming here separates from their wife, their girlfriend, their boyfriend or their husband. It is a shock to the whole feeling mechanism; things suddenly stop, the juices no more flow. Then it is difficult to relate with me too because those same juices have to flow towards me. You don’t have any other juices; those are the same juices. So that experience has made you a little hesitant. The feelings are not as trustworthy as you had thought before; one experience went wrong. You can’t trust your feelings, that’s the problem. This happens to many people.

Sometimes the same thing happens from the other extreme also: somebody comes here searching for me and wanting just to be with me, then he falls in love with a woman. All his juices start flowing towards the woman; then again he starts feeling that he is not connecting with me. It is the same thing, it is the same phenomenon. Now he becomes too involved with the woman, his whole mind is turned towards the woman; he tends to forget about me.

But whenever love is flowing easily and there is not any fear or obsession about it – one is neither very much in it nor very much against it; when things are normal, in the middle – then you relate with me very deeply and very easily. A happy couple – not in their honeymoon, the honeymoon is over and they have settled – if they are here, they relate to me very easily, very simply. The juices are flowing, there is no fear, and there is no honeymoon either so that they have to pay their whole attention to the woman or to the man.

That may have caused it....

I think you should start moving with women a little, start growing into love. And there is no need to fall in love madly, mm? otherwise that will do the same thing again. Love should be taken as a very very natural phenomenon. Just as one eats and drinks and goes to sleep, so one loves. Down the ages people have either worshipped love or have condemned it; both attitudes are wrong and lopsided. Either they think love is the door to hell, mm? so saints go on condemning it, or they think love is the only heaven, so poets go on praising it. Both are wrong.

Love is neither hell nor heaven. It is a natural phenomenon like breathing, like eating, like sleeping.

A normal healthy person, a psychologically healthy person, will take love just as a nourishment.

There is nothing to brag about in it; it is not worship. And there is no need to be afraid of it. It is neither from god nor the devil; it is just human nature.

Keep that in mind and start moving into a love relationship, but take it very naturally. That will help the juices flow.

[Another sannyasin is not happy because she and her partner as splitting up.]

That’s good, it is nothing to be worried about. Mm? these are the games one has to learn to play: separation and meeting and separation. These are the games; don’t be too worried about it. It naturally shakes one because everything gets disturbed. So, find somebody else! All human beings are potential lovers, so there is no need to be focused unnecessarily. If it has finished, it has finished; move into new relationships. If you don’t move into a new relationship you will remain in a complaining mood, grumpy, and you will feel angry at [your partner], as if he has done something.

Nobody is doing anything. Human beings are so unconscious, they are robots, zombies. You neither do anything when you fall in love nor do you do anything when you separate; these are just natural accidents. So when one accident has finished get into another, because without accidents also it is very difficult to live. Then one has nothing to worry about and nobody to fight and nobody to nag, and things are so simple. One needs a little complexity and occupation. One wants misery. Without misery it is such a simple life; for what will you live without misery? How will you live without misery?

And love is the greatest source of misery. It is really beautiful, mm? – it gives all the promise of joy and brings all kinds of misery! It is an hallucination.

So create another!

And soon [you] will become a buddha, then there is no need for... but that comes slowly. And every kind of experience of meeting, separation, falling in love, fighting, falling out of love – all these experiences help you transcend life. It is only through hard experience, bitter experience, that one attains to awareness.

All these things are good, they all help in their own ways. When one arrives at the ultimate peak, one can see that everything has helped: enemies have helped, friends have helped, lovers have helped, haters have helped, everybody has helped. One simply feels a thankfulness towards all that has happened. I know when you are passing through a certain problem it feels very difficult because the problem looks so big, out of all proportion. When you look back, things are in their real shape; nothing is important.

And always remember that each love affair will give you something, will reveal some aspects of your being. For example if you are in love with ’a’ then only that person will reveal something in you. He cannot reveal that which can be revealed by ’b’ because ’b’ will be a different kind of person. He will hit you differently, he will penetrate your energy differently, he will reveal another aspect of your being. The third person, ’c’, will remain still another experience, and so on and so forth. Man is such a big phenomenon that one can go on and on changing lovers and can go on feeling one’s own territory; it is big!

So each love affair has something to give to you. Remain thrilled and always feel good. Even when you have loved, and when a love finishes, feel good because one door has closed; now you can knock at another door. Feel thrilled that some new discovery is going to be made. Life has to remain a continuous invention, discovery, exploration.

So just start searching, mm? Good!

[The leader of the Gestalt and Samarpan groups, says the first group was a little tricky; he was depressed. The second was just beautiful, a rainbow.’]

Very good! Sometimes it happens, mm? It is human sometimes to be depressed, sometimes to be sad. When you are sad it is very difficult to move the energy of the group into a happy space. But by and by one has to learn, and then it becomes possible; you can function there without bringing in your sadness at all. And that is the function of a real therapist. The real therapist should not bring his problems there; he will have that much detachment from himself. When he enters and starts working he puts himself aside; there he is simply the expert. He brings in all his skill, all his understanding; he does not bring in his problems. That becomes possible.

That will be a great help to you, because then you will see that your problems can be put aside, so why not put them aside even when you are not in a group? If you can put them aside, why not put them aside forever? If you can put your problem aside even for a single moment, you know the knack of it; then it can be put aside forever. Then when you want to enjoy it, you can take it back; otherwise it can wait! And that is one of the secrets of being a good therapist, a group leader, that when you go into a group you have no problem, no problems are there to hinder you. You are unclouded, you function as your intelligence, as your alertness. If it is difficult for you just remember me and I will do it. Whenever you feel that Rajen is coming in between too much, just remember me and I will take you away.

Slowly slowly, one learns, and that has to be learned, because much depends on the group leader; it is up to the group leader what is going to happen to the group. If the group leader is in a sad mood, depressed – and he is the nucleus – then all those people around there will simply bring in their sadness, will bring in their depression; you will provoke their depression. People are very ready to become depressed, to become sad; that is their life. They are skilled in it, they have been cultivating those habits for their whole life. So if you trigger it, they all become depressed immediately; then the whole energy goes on. The group leader has to pull them up. He has to fight against their habits, and that can be done only if you put yourself outside.

So just make it a point: whenever you are feeling depressed or anything, before entering the group room stand outside with closed eyes for three minutes, and put everything in a bundle.

Deposit it just by the door and enter, and then forget about it. And you will be surprised; it is such a simple thing! Then when you are out of the group, again stand for three minutes, collect everything, go back and see [your partner]. Right?

CHAPTER 3

4 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Osho gives someone sannyas:]

This will be your new name... and a new beginning, a new birth. Count yourself as being alive from this moment. Up to now you have been a caterpillar, only living in a kind of shell. That’s how everybody is living; their lives are at the minimum, and real life happens only at the maximum.

People are alive for the name’s sake: only at the maximum, at the optimum, when one becomes aflame, does one start living.

The colour orange is the colour of flame. It is just to remind you that from now on you will live life passionately, intensely, that it will not be a lukewarm affair any more, it will be really hot. Only through that passion is god known; only those who live at the optimum attain to that vision. People who live at the minimum live in a kind of dark valley, they can’t see the sun. The sun is available only at the peaks; those peaks are beyond the clouds and once you have reached the peak, you have reached beyond the clouds.

Soura means of the sun, from the sun. We are not of this planet, we are strangers here. We come from a faraway sun. Call it god, call it light, or call it whatsoever you like, but it is the source of all light, life, love. We come from a faraway source, just as light on this planet comes from a faraway source. It fails on this earth but it doesn’t belong to it. We have completely forgotten our home, and that is the misery, that we don’t know from where we come. Unless we know from where we come, we cannot know where we have to go, because the source is the goal. And life becomes a contentment when the circle is complete, when we have reached the source again.

Saddo is Buddha’s word for trust. The Sanskrit word is ’shraddha’ but Buddha never used Sanskrit; he used the people’s language. And the people always tend to make words round, softer; they don’t bother much about language, about grammar. Just as a stone becomes round the more it flows with the river, words also become round the more they are used. So I like Buddha’s word ’saddo’ more; it has become more round, more feminine, and Buddha has given it a new meaning too.

The Sanskrit word ’shraddha’ means trust. Buddha has given it a new turn: he says trust means trust in oneself. The Sanskrit word means trust in somebody else – in scriptures, in the tradition, in God; but the other is important, you have to trust the other. Buddha says: Unless you trust yourself, you cannot trust the other. From where will the trust come? If you can’t love yourself you cannot love anybody else. From where will the love come? First it has to happen in you, in your very being, only then can it be reflected in others.

So Buddha says that saddo is trust, but more than trust it is confidence. And when one starts trusting oneself, one can trust life, God. I like his change. Otherwise trust tends to become faith; rather than becoming confidence it becomes faith, it becomes belief. And belief does not sharpen one’s being; it gathers like rust.

A Christian believes, a Hindu believes; Christ trusts. It is not belief, it is existential; he has encountered reality. And unless you trust yourself you cannot encounter reality, because that encounter is possible only when you are utterly fearless. How can the man who cannot trust himself be fearless? In fact, because he is so full of fear he trusts others. It is just out of fear that he clings somewhere to somebody who may be the expert, who knows. He seeks a father figure out of fear, out of distrust of himself.

Saddo means: start trusting yourself, and out of that trust many other trusts will bloom. That becomes the root, and then many flowers come. You can trust your friend, you can trust your beloved, you can trust your master, you can trust life, you can trust death, you can trust the whole that surrounds you; but only after you have fulfilled the first condition. That is the meaning of saddo.

Let this day become a plunge into your own being. My whole purpose here is to throw you to yourself, to push you to your own being.

Premgeet. It means song of love. Life can be a song, but one can miss it too; it is not inevitable.

The potential exists but it has to be actualised. Many people think that the day they were born all was finished. Nothing is finished.

The day one is born, things only start; it is the beginning. Birth has to happen millions of times in your whole life: you have to go on being born again and again and again.

Man has such potential, so many aspects; he is multi-dimensional. But people never explore their own being, hence life remains sad, poor. That is real. poverty. The outer poverty is not a big problem; it can be solved, it will be solved. Technology has come to the point where poverty is going to disappear from the earth; the time has come for that. But the real problem is the inner poverty. Even the rich people live very poor lives. Their bodies are stuffed with food but their souls are starving. They have not yet known the song of life, they have not heard anything about it. They go on existing somehow, managing, pulling, dragging, but there is no joy.

Great song is possible, great richness is possible, but one has to start exploring. And the best way to explore the song of one’s life is to love; that is the very methodology. Just as logic is the methodology of science, love is the methodology of religion. Just as logic makes you capable of going deeper and deeper into matter, love makes you capable of going deeper and deeper into the spirit, into consciousness. And the deeper you go, the deeper songs are released. When one has reached the very core of one’s being the whole of life becomes a celebration, an utter celebration.

That’s what god is all about.

[A new sannyasin asks for help for her sister who is blind, and a musician.]

That’s very good, mm? So help her meditate! There is nothing to be worried about, because in fact in the world there is nothing worth seeing! She should be happy really; she will not be bothered by so many things which are unnecessary. And a meditator has to close his eyes anyway!

Just help her.

And if meditation and music join together she can have one of the most beautiful experiences possible.

Sometimes curses can become blessings.

Eyes take eighty, ninety percent of your energy. If your eyes are not functioning you are like a reservoir. If you don’t become unnecessarily depressed that you are blind, that reservoir of energy can be used in great jubilation; you can rejoice in life.

So rather than doing anything, help her to enjoy it. Help her to think about it as a blessing. If her attitude changes completely, it will become a blessing, and if sometimes you can bring her here, bring her....

You just be my messenger. I will try. And I have so many blind people, one more won’t.... Bring her!

[A sannyasin who is leaving says: Teach me about playing like a child.’]

It need not be taught; if it is taught it will never be like a child. Simply relax and start playing! It needs only courage, no training; it just needs the courage that if somebody thinks you are a fool, let him think. The courage to be foolish, that’s all that is needed; that makes a man a sage. There is a very simple difference between a fool and a sage. The only difference is that the fool is unconsciously foolish and the sage is consciously foolish.

There is no need to prepare, no need to plan; simply start. Do anything and slowly slowly you will come to know, because you have been a child once, and you can be again; nothing is ever lost.

Whatsoever you have experienced once always remains there in the reservoir.

And if it is taught, it will be totally different; it will be artificial and then you will not be a child. You will only be pretending to be a child, you will only be imitating, but the imitation can’t be true. The authentic childhood is available inside you; you have just to put aside your cultivated ways of being adult. It is just like nudity: you take off your dress and you are nude. There is no need to ask how to be nude, how to plan to be nude: ’Teach me to be nude’; that is not needed at all! Children have to be taught how to dress, not how to be nude; they have always been nude.

[A sannyasin says: I live in a dream, Osho, he says; and I’m very dull and sleepy. Every time I wake up I just get so frightened, I put myself back to sleep again... Can you help me?]

I am helping, but don’t be impatient. The sleep has to be broken in homeopathic doses, because if it is broken too suddenly you may lose all bearings; you may not be able to cope with reality as it is.

Man has lived in lies so much that only so much truth can be absorbed at a time. If the whole truth suddenly becomes available, you may die; you may not be able to survive it, it may be too much.

The shock of it, the realisation of it, will simply drive you mad. So truth has to be absorbed very slowly, very slowly. It is a dangerous process, dangerous because we have been so accustomed to lies.

It is almost as if a man has been sleeping for years, then suddenly you wake him up, take him out of bed and tell him to run. How can he do it? – he will simply fall then and there, he will die. All that he knows about running is in dream. The body remains resting; he only dreams and runs in dream. He has been running, he may be participating in Olympic races and things like that, but in his dream.

Actually he cannot take one single step; he will be paralysed. How do you expect him to suddenly run? He will have to be spoon-fed, slowly slowly.

Just a few years ago it happened near Lucknow that a child was found in a wolf’s cave; he was a wolf child, fourteen years of age. He was not able to stand on two legs but used to run on all fours; and so fast that no man, not even the fastest runner, was able to run with him. That was on all fours, but as far as standing on two legs was concerned it was almost impossible. k took six months of massage, body work, and then he was only able to stand – not walk, just stand. That was a great miracle, because his whole bone system had become fixed in his way of living.

After six months he died, and my own observation is that he died because of this whole effort that was being made to make a man out of a wolf. He was a strong child, very stong, stronger than any man – he was a wolf – but every day he became weakened. All kinds of things were happening: he was being forced to do this and that and he was being taught at least to pronounce his name. They had given him a name Ram, so he had to pronounce it. In fact the day he died, he had pronounced it; that was the first time he had pronounced Ram. Then he died; it was too much. Doctors were puzzled about why he died: everything was perfectly okay, physically there was no problem, but it was the very shock.

So don’t be impatient. You have to come out of your sleep slowly slowly. You will come out of it and then you will fall again, you will come out and you will fall again. This is how it happens; it has to be accepted. You will be able to be awake more and more; there will be less and less temptation to fall.

Slowly slowly, you will have the taste of truth as against the taste of dreams. You are accustomed to dreams; when you are accustomed to a certain thing it feels delicious. You are not accustomed to truth: it will be so unfamiliar, almost bitter. You may not be able to swallow it, you may vomit it.

The German poet, Goethe, used to say again and again that man can tolerate only so much awareness; that’s why every night he has to fall asleep and dream. The dreaming and the sleep help him to cope with reality again. Tomorrow he is awake, and again for a few hours he will be able to cope with reality. But this awakenedness is not much of awakenedness at all; it is again a kind of dream with open eyes.

The awareness I am talking about is totally different. It is coming out of unconsciousness, coming out of the cell called the ego, coming out of your mechanical habits. It has to be slow; but it is happening, it will happen. And when it starts happening one becomes greedy, that I understand, because one wants to finish it soon, one wants to have the whole truth....

It is frightening, but it has to take its own time, it has to grow. Sudden awakening sometimes happens, but for that too one has to prepare for years. Even in a Zen monastery where they talk about sudden enlightenment, you only know the conclusion, you don’t know the process. You say

’The master hit the disciple and he became enlightened’, but you don’t know that for twenty-six years he was meditating! Mm? it is not the whole story. It is tricky! You don’t know his whole story, what was happening to him for those twenty-six years; Zen stories are just the conclusions. If you know the whole process of the training of the monk – his meditations, his fasts, his living in the monastery, his discipline – then you will not say that this is sudden. When it is said it is sudden, what is meant is that the person has been training himself, preparing to absorb this insight suddenly.

There are two ways. For example, a person may prepare for twenty-six years and then one day it becomes available, the truth is there and he is awake; this is one way. the other way is that slowly slowly, truth becomes available, slowly slowly the aperture open, and after twenty-six years the whole truth is available. In both ways those twenty-six years are a must; you cannot avoid that.

In one, only training goes on, goes on, goes on, and then suddenly one day you explode. In another, you start opening your aperture slowly, slowly. And the second process is more human, less drastic.

Just be patient, mm? Don’t be worried. Good!

[A sannyas couple are present and say: we would like to have a child, and I think we are ready to have a child.]

It is good to wait a little longer, because this is just an unconscious desire, a biological desire.

It happens to every man and every woman; more to a woman than to a man, but it is not very conscious.

You will be creating a situation in which you may get too involved; your own growth may suffer. A child is a great occupation and when one enters your life you can’t be the same; you will change through it. Mm? that small child is not so small, that small child is a universe: it will change everything in your life. It will change your relationship too, because then it becomes a triangle. So my feeling is that you should wait a little more – it is always good to wait – and let it become more conscious, more deliberate.

Rather than just becoming a mother, first think of becoming a meditator; go as deeply into meditation as possible. First feel fulfilled, first feel contented, and then it is perfectly good to have a child. Then that child will come out of your contentment, out of your fulfilment, and that child will have a different quality to him. It will be a different kind of soul, it will be a more conscious soul. And when a conscious soul enters your womb that will also transform you but it will transform you for the better; it will also change your relationship but it will deepen it. If a conscious soul can come into your womb and become your child, your life will take on such richness that you have not known before. Just by becoming a mother that is not known.

It is just as anybody can paint a picture, anybody. If a canvas is available, colour is available, anybody can throw the colour on the canvas with the brush or directly from the tubes; but that is not going to give you satisfaction unless you create a masterpiece. If you can create a Van Gogh there will be great joy.

And that’s what happens when a buddha is born: the woman is so fulfilled. Do you know the story?

The story says that Buddha’s mother died seven days after he was born because she was so fulfilled; there was no point in living at all. It is said that whenever a buddha is born, the mother dies after seven days; since then that has become part of the Indian mythology. Why? – because she feels so fulfilled there is no point in living any longer. She has known all that can be known. There is no need even to breathe now; life is complete. The very entry of Buddha into his mother’s womb and she was transformed. She started dreaming things that she has never dreamed. She was puzzled: why these dreams?

Freud is very new in this science; in the East we have been working on it for five thousand years. But we have never looked into the dreams of the pathological; in that Freud is the first. We have always looked into the dreams of those who were really of a different quality, a superhuman quality. It is said in Indian psychology that whenever an awakened soul enters the womb of a woman the woman has certain dreams, she has to have those dreams. Those dreams unfold in a sequence, first, second, third; as the child grows those dreams unfold. Those dreams say that something from the beyond has entered into the womb. Even the mother’s unconscious starts being stirred by the beyond. She starts dreaming of things which are not available on this earth. She starts having visions, she starts hearing sounds which are not of this world.

But that is possible only if you prepare yourself first. My feeling is that you should just wait a little more; and you will be happy that you waited. Let it become a great thirst. There is no hurry.

How old are you?

[She answers: Twenty-five.]

So you can wait, there is no hurry. It is better to give birth to one single child, but let it be a lion!

What is the point of creating a queue of children? The earth is already too crowded, mm? – avoid it! Otherwise you will not be happy either, because how can a mother be happy when the child turns out to be ordinary? But the child is bound to turn out ordinary if the mother was not ready, because only then will that quality of soul enter. You cannot have more than you deserve; that is the law. You can only have a certain kind of soul in your womb. All kinds of souls are available but the womb has to be ready.

So just prepare the womb first. Don’t be; a hurry. Meditate, become more and more silent, become more and more loving. Let the desire be there – desire is beautiful – and one day I will tell you to become a mother. One day you will become one, but just wait, mm? Good!

[Sheela, who works in the ashram office, says: I got stepped on twice by Maneesha, and it just sort of got me aggravated.

Sheela comes to darshan in Laxmi’s absence if Indian people are present. Maneesha had queried her coming when there were no Indians present, and had also queried whether Sheela had been checked at the gate by the ’sniffer’.]

Always remember Sheela: that is her work. So if you are doing anything and it comes under somebody’s charge, you have to listen to the person. Don’t feel stepped on, otherwise how will work happen? It was natural; because there were no Indians she thought that Sheela was not needed. You became angry. You told her to mind her own business, but she was! You must have felt that you have been stepped on, but that is your attitude.

As the work becomes complex we will have to see that whosoever is in charge has to be listened to, otherwise nobody will listen to anybody. If you are doing some work and you are in charge then everybody has to listen to you... even sometimes when they don’t like it. Even sometimes when you are wrong, they have to listen to it, otherwise it will become impossible; this commune cannot function then. More and more work will have to be divided, and everybody should be supreme in his work.

When Maneesha enters your work, you are supreme, so she has to listen to you; but this is her work

– whether everybody has been checked or not.

[Sheela replied: But I have been going through the check.]

Mm, that’s okay, but this is her work; it is not stepping on you. And that has been the structure, that when Indians are there, somebody has to be there, so it was natural for her to ask. You need not get angry about it and you need not feel offended, otherwise rivalries will enter. That’s what has happened to every commune. Then power trips come in: she has stepped on you, so you have to step on her. Then people become bitchy to each other, and that’s bad.

Everybody has to think this, that whosoever is in charge you have to surrender to... even though sometimes, I say, he may be wrong. That is not the point at all, that can be sorted out later on. But nobody should feel offended, otherwise it becomes impossible.

Now, if nothing is said about it, the next time that Maneesha feels that you are unnecessarily there, she will not be able to say anything to you; she will be afraid that Sheela has to be left to herself.

But if Sheela is left then why not Arup, why not Vivek, why not Mukta? Then things go on becoming more complicated. Now you are feeling miserable, she is feeling sad... for no reason! Be a little more alert and aware, and always remember, right or wrong, the person who is in charge has to be listened to.

It happened once when Leon Trotsky was the defence minister in Russia after the revolution.... He was in charge of the whole army and he was the home minister of the whole police and everything.

He went into a party meeting where passes were needed. Of course, he thought, ’There is no need for me to have a pass.’ He was the issuing authority so there was no point in having a pass; that looked meaningless. So he simply went there without a pass. But the man who was at the door said,

’Sorry, where is your pass?’ For a moment Trotsky felt offended; everybody knew he was Trotsky, he was not somebody unknown. He said, ’You know me.’ The guard said, ’I know sir, but where is the pass?’ Trotsky said, ’But I issue the pass!’ So the guard said, ’Go home and issue a pass, but I need a pass here!’

Trotsky went mad, but when he went home, he cooled down a little and he saw the point, that it was right. He came back, apologised to the man, a very ordinary guard, and the guard’s pictures were published all over the country. Great respect was given to him because he had taken a risk.

So always remember: whosoever is in charge has to be looked to, he has to be respected. And if there is something wrong, later on you can talk about it; but never get angry, never get arrogant.

Only then can this commune function, otherwise it will be....

Do you know that all communes die? The longest life of a commune up to now has been three years. I would like this commune to live, and it is going to live, but then the functioning has to be totally different. Those communes die because they have a democratic structure; that’s why they die. You cannot have a democratic structure in a commune, otherwise nothing will work.

The commune has to be in a totally different way; it has to be a discipline. Not everybody has to assert themselves, otherwise fights and then cliques will happen; and then people will join together

– a few people with Maneesha, a few people with Sheela – and then conflict over who is more powerful will happen. These things will go on and they will destroy the whole thing that I am trying to do; your energy will get involved in those things. They have to be avoided, and I am very alert from the beginning.

So apologise to Maneesha. And if she is wrong, that is my business, I will see to it. Mm? but that is not for you. If sometimes you find that somebody is wrong, just report it to me, but don’t react to the person immediately; just report it to me. That’s for me to think about.

I would like this commune to function so smoothly that it can become an example. Communes have become very condemned because they start with great enthusiasm, then everything falls flat. It falls flat because of the politics of people; and this is how politics enter. I am very keen that no politics should enter, and the only way is: always look to the person. You should have written a letter to me that this happened. I am always there; it would not have created any trouble. She cried, she is suffering, and you have been sitting there, miserable for no reason at all!

So apologize to her, mm?

CHAPTER 4

5 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss, satta means a teacher – a teacher of bliss. It is not that you have to teach bliss, but your whole life has to become a teaching. You should live in such a way that even if a stranger passes by he can feel your bliss. That is the real teaching of bliss.

This word ’satta’ comes from Buddha; it is his word. He was telling his disciples to live in such a way that their whole life becomes a message of bliss. If somebody looks into your eyes he can read all the scriptures. If somebody touches your hand he can feel what bliss is. If somebody simply sits by the side of you he will feel overwhelmed by something unknown, untasted before. And if a man works consciously, this becomes possible.

In ordinary situations you can watch people. Somebody comes by and you suddenly feel as if you have become sad; his very vibe is saddening. Somebody else comes close by and you feel depleted, as if your energy has been sucked. Later on you feel weakened, you need rest, you feel exhausted, for no visible reason; the man was a drain. And there are people with whom you suddenly feel joyous for no reason at all; they may not have uttered a word. Sometimes just entering in a house –

you have not seen anybody – you feel joyous; a breeze from the unknown has touched your heart.

In that house live people who are blissful; that house has soaked up enough of their vibe. The same happens in other houses where you will feel sad, frightened; you will feel something horrible, something nauseous, is there.

Become alert about these things and start becoming deliberately blissful. When somebody comes, relax for a moment, remember that you have to pulsate in bliss, and pulsate! Just feel blissful, and soon the knack comes. It is a knack; it is not an art; it cannot be taught. But if you go on looking, one day suddenly you stumble upon it. Suddenly you know: this is the way. Suddenly you know that through breathing in a certain way, sitting in a certain way, looking in a certain way, bliss is released.

Now, it happens to everybody differently, that’s why it cannot be made an art, it cannot be exact.

The way it happens to you may not happen to somebody else, so there is no way to make an exact science of it. Man will always remain beyond science because man is freedom, and science does not allow freedom. With freedom there is no possibility of exactitude. With things science will work, with machines science will work. They are predictable, they don’t change and they don’t have any individuality. You boil water in India and at one hundred degrees it evaporates; so it does in Tibet, the Tibetan water has no separate existence. So it happens in Japan, so it happens everywhere.

The water has a kind of universality, but not individuality. Man is individual, individuality is his very core. That is his beauty, his grandeur; and it is because of freedom.

So I cannot say exactly how you will be able to do it, but I can say this much, that if you consciously watch soon you will stumble upon the key. It is within you, you just have to grope for it. And once you have found the key, try to be blissful as much as you can; the more blissful you become, the more will be coming to you.

Jesus has said, ’If you have, more shall be given to you. If you don’t have, even that which you have will be taken away.’ It is an absurd statement but is of tremendous significance. I consider it one of the most profound statements ever made by any man in the world: If you have, more will be given to you....

So just start creating a little energy of bliss – that will make you a teacher of bliss.

Prem means love, Minakshi is the name of a goddess:... goddess of love. Literally, minakshi means fish-eyed. In India, eyes have always been thought beautiful if they look like a fish’s eyes – wide, open, of the same shape as the fish’s Literally minakshi means fish-eyed, because that goddess has beautiful eyes.

Certainly, love creates those kind of eyes. Whenever a person is in love his eyes are the first things to be transformed; then everything else follows. But the first change happens in the eyes, in the quality of the eyes, because eyes are the doors of the heart. Anything that enters your being, enters through your eyes, and when love enters through your eyes it transforms their quality. They are no more ordinary, they become transparent. They are no more part of earth, they start reflecting the sky. They are no more opaque: they have depth now, infinite depth, and you can see to the very bottom. The whole body becomes beautiful through love but the first impact is on the eyes.

So become such a great lover that your eyes, your vision, is changed through it, that you start looking at life in a totally different way. Only when one learns how to look at life with eyes full of love does one find god, never otherwise. God has to be discovered only through love, otherwise, one can go on thinking, praying, doing rituals, and all is futile, in vain.

[A sannyasin couple are present. The man says: we have been here for fifteen months, and still I feel I am not opening to you, and hence the question to leave arises. But at the same time I feel very attached to this place... ]

You will be benefited if you go once.

You will have more perspective. Going away from me will help: you will resist less because you will not be so afraid. The resistance is out of fear. When you are dose to me you are afraid that if you don’t resist you will be gone forever. So you have to pull yourself back and hold yourself and you have to find ways and means to go on fighting. Your heart wants to relax and surrender and your head says, ’What are you doing? This is a kind of suicide – surrender.’

So it will be good for you to go away for a time. When you are away from me you will not be afraid.

Since you are not afraid you will not resist, and it will be easier for me to enter into your being.

Here you will create trouble, and when you are far away you will feel more and more in tune with me.

You will not be afraid, so you can enjoy being in tune. And next time you come things will be easier because you will have learned something by going away. It is not always a wastage, going away; going away sometimes is very beneficial. I suggest to many sannyasins to go away at least once or twice before they settle with me totally. It is good; going away you will see what you are missing.

Here I am continuously showering myself on you; whether you reject, whether you resist or not, doesn’t matter; I go on raining on you. Even if you reject me, you are nourished. When you go far away you will not feel nourished; you will start feeling hungry for me, you will be starved. And that will be good; that you need, in fact that you deserve.

You can go, and then you will come back more relaxed, and more possibilities will open up.

[The sannyasin says: I would like to have two months, three months more.]

Then don’t resist if you want to stay!

This is a double bind: on one hand you are fighting with me and on the other hand you want to fall in love with me, so both things are destructive to each other. If you want, you can stay.

[The woman says: I’m in a double-bind: I want to stay... On the other hand I would like to stay with him.]

Both things will become possible, because finally he will also stay. This is just some foolishness that he has to go through. It is not very serious. So there is no problem – you can manage to become part of the ashram. Arrange it.

He himself is not going!

He says three months; he will not go even after three months. Just don’t be worried about him – I will take care of him!

[A sannyasin had previously asked a question, ’Why don’t you hit me Osho?’, which Osho had answered in discourse, saying that the sannyasin was not yet ready, had to be worthy of the hit.

Tonight the sannyasin says: Now I just want to come back and be here totally.]

You have to be!

That was the purpose of what I said.

Surrender to the commune totally,

unconditionally; forget everything else. Don’t be calculating and don’t be clever. Just be a fool and surrender everything! Be unconditionally part of the family here and whatsoever you can do, do.

But this constant coming and going is of no use, it is simply wasting your energy and your time.

Go and finish things there, because if you go on doing things there you will be constantly running.

Simply destroy the bridge so there is no going back.

[The sannyasin then asks about going to the West: Should I finish what I started there... doing the work you had asked me to do a while ago.]

But nothing seems to happen! You have been doing that for one year – finish it! I am not interested any more in that work because nothing is happening. You simply go on doing it and wasting time!

How many months have you taken for that work? It must be by now... Eighteen months? So it is enough. It is futile, so simply drop that idea, mm? – because eighteen months is enough time to do a certain thing. You were thinking to do it within two, three months; you have taken six times more.

So it will take eighteen years if it continues this way, and then it has no meaning. If you can finish it within one and a half months, finish it, do it; if you cannot finish in one and a half months then drop the whole project. But this way, prolonging things, is not good; that has become an excuse.

So for six weeks you can make the last effort; otherwise drop it.

[The Enlightenment Intensive group is present. One member says: I don’t feel at ease in the ashram, but I feel that you’re the only one that can help me. You have said that everything here is your responsibility.]

Mm mm, it is my responsibility. And that unease is good. It simply shows that something is going against your ego, something is going against your preconceptions, prejudices; that’s why the unease is there.

Drop the ego and the unease will disappear.

Mm, this ashram is a kind of bulldozer: it simply goes on peoples’ heads; multiple fractures happen.

You can ask Sheela: just the other night the bulldozer went on her! But it will be okay. That’s happening to almost everybody; sooner or later it has to happen. It is better to finish it from the very beginning!

To be with me means that you have to drop all your prejudices and all your ego-trips, and it is difficult.

But next time you are here much more will be possible. And there also I will continue to work on you.

Continue to meditate; choose at least one meditation and continue....

So we have centres there, remain in contact, mm? And next time when you come you will find the ashram even more difficult, because by that time we must have moved and things will have become really huge.

But this feeling will settle. The unease is created deliberately. I can manage the ashram in such a way that nobody will be offended, that is so simple, but then I will not be of any utility to you. You can find those kinds of ashramas everywhere in India. They give you consolation, they never offend; they give you comfort, they never annoy.

I am here to annoy and offend because that is the only way to destroy you and the only way to create you anew. So it is going to be uneasy; but one thing has happened in you – that you know, you have recognised me, so all else is not important. That feeling is there in your heart that you have found me and I am going to help you. That is essential; everything else will drop by itself. If that is not there you will be disconnected with me.

The ashram has two functions: it connects people with me, it disconnects people from me. If the people are worthwhile, it connects them with me; if the people are not worthwhile, it disconnects them from me. It has to serve a double function. It is just as a gate is both an entrance and exit, it has a double function: it allows people to enter in, it throws people out too. But if you meditate, slowly slowly you will see the reason for everything that looks so irrational. The rational is there, deep, hidden; it is not on the surface. And in finding it you will become deeper, you will become more profound.

But come back at least for two, three months again so that you can pass through a few groups and can have a different vision. Each sannyasin has to come and go at least two, three times then accounts settle and he becomes capable of seeing how things are. Mm? you are new, and it is very natural that many things make you uneasy. But they will go – I will see that they go!

[The husband of the previous sannyasin says: I’ve never met a buddha before.... I have nothing more to say.]

That’s right! You have said everything.

You have met one and now this meeting has to transform you totally. This is no ordinary meeting, it is not just a coincidence. You have been groping for it for many lives: you have been desiring, knowingly, unknowingly, for it; you have been longing for it. Now it has happened. Let it penetrate your heart as deeply, as profoundly, as possible. Open up to it totally and you will never be the same man again.

Something is just there on the verge. A very thin layer is preventing you from seeing reality. It is not a very thick layer, just a very thin curtain; you can almost look through it. But even that has to be dropped. So continue to meditate.

[A visitor says: I’ve had some really incredible experiences and I’ve had a good time. I think I would like to be a sannyasin but I’m still very confused. I’m a practising attorney in California and I live in an ego world.]

You can live in it: I allow everything. My sannyas is not a renunciation. It simply teaches you how to live in the world without letting the world in you, that’s all. You can be an attorney; it will not be any problem at all. Just your attitude and approach will change: it will be no more so serious, it will be just a game.

It is a game, and once you start looking at life as a game you are no more burdened by it, no more in its clutches; you are free. Even a free person has to do something, and whatever you do – it is not only a question of being an attorney...

Whatever you do is so complex and its consequences are so inter-related that even when you are doing something good, you never know what is going to happen; even the good may bring evil.

For example, you see that a man is drowning in the river; you jump in and save him. Now, this is a good act – nobody will say that a sannyasin should not do this. But the man comes out and murders somebody.... Now you are part of it. Had you not saved the man he would not have been able to murder. You give money to somebody – he is starving – and he purchases poison and commits suicide. Now you are responsible.

It is a complex world; it is not only a question of an attorney being involved in many things which he should not do. Even if you become a monk you will be as much involved in the world as the attorney is.

So all that can be done is to have an attitude that all is a drama, an act. There is no need to be confused – become a sannyasin! I’m ready to take all your karma on me. What should we do? –

should I make you a sannyasin?...

Come here. Just look at me....

From this moment you are to be absolutely free. Do whatsoever is needed in life, just remain aloof from it. Let it happen on the periphery; the centre remains unattached to it. One has to do it so one goes on doing it, but one is not disturbed by it. It is exactly an act, a performance. Once this is understood you can be anywhere, in any kind of work, and keep your cool; you can keep yourself absolutely uncontaminated.

The problem that you are feeling confused about is this, that down the ages man has been taught to do good, not to do bad, to do this, not to do that. Man has been given commandments, do’s and don’ts. I don’t give you any commandment. I’m not concerned with what you do: my whole concern is with your being.

If you are silent, blissful, centred, do whatsoever is needed to be done and there is no problem. If you are not centred, if you are not collected, integrated inside, if you are not in a meditative state, then even doing good is not going to help. That’s why you see that so many people who go on doing good are nothing but do-gooders. They harm, their ultimate result is harm.

The emphasis has to be not on the doing but on being, and being is a totally different phenomenon.

It doesn’t matter whether you are an attorney or a doctor or an engineer or a prostitute or a politician; it doesn’t matter what you are doing. All that matters is: are you centred in your being? And that will change many things. I am not saying that things will not change; that will change many things.

Your work slowly slowly will go through a revolution. You will not even become aware of when it changed. Its quality will be different, but that is nothing for you to do especially; it will happen on its own accord.

Anand means bliss, deben means god – god of bliss. And remember yourself as a god of bliss, feel yourself as being a god of bliss. That is our true reality, our true identity. Less than that is not going to help. Being a man is just a role, as being a tree is a role and being a dog is a role. God is our reality. We pass through so many roles, so many forms, but deep down existence consists only of god and nothing else.

[Another visitor says: I can’t see – I’m legally blind – so the reason I want to come is to get as close to you as I can, because I want to see your eyes and I want to feel your presence and see if... what happens, you know?

Osho gives him a ’come-close darshan’.]

That’s good. Much is possible!

Because the outer eyes don’t matter; it is the inner eyes. And they are ready to open; just a little work is needed, just a little work.

CHAPTER 5

6 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin brings her five-year-old daughter to take sannyas. Osho tells her: Help her to get into dancing as much as possible; that will become her meditation, Osho then tells her. Children can enter into meditation through dance very easily, because dance is not anything unnatural, artificial; man is born with the faculty of dance. Because we have stopped dancing naturally, the body is suffering very much. There are a few things that can happen only through dance: flow is possible only through dance. So help her to participate in dancing meditations. If she can get into dance, meditation will happen of its own accord.]

And meditate on Christ, think of him. He is one of the doers to god.

Christianity has destroyed his image, so don’t be bothered about what Christians say of him; have more of a direct contact. There is no need to be worried about the theology that has arisen around him: find the man.

The man was immensely beautiful; he transformed humanity. Man has never been the same again since Christ; he is a milestone in human evolution. And it is perfectly good that we divide history from the time of Christ – before Christ, after Christ. That’s perfectly right; nobody else deserves that.

Before Buddha there had been many other buddhas, so Buddha cannot be the demarking line; before Buddha and after Buddha won’t fit. He was one of many buddhas. But Christ is the beginning of a new line, a new work; he is the first Christ. With Buddha, some tradition that had been there for centuries, bloomed; with Jesus a seed fell into the earth but it has not bloomed yet. Christianity has been trampling on the soil, churches have been built on the soil and the seed is dying.

Buddha has compassion, immense compassion, but a passive kind of compassion. Christ has a very active compassion; he is ready to fight for it. Buddha will not fight. He will feel for you, he will be tremendously moved by you, but he will remain sitting under his Bodhi tree. Christ will rush to you, will start doing something; his compassion is active. And that is very much needed in the world.

A passive compassion is good but it won’t change the world. A compassion is needed which acts, which starts doing something, which really gets involved in life, becomes committed. Christ brings commitment, involvement to religion.

Meditate, just silently sitting think of him and slowly slowly, you will be surprised: you start feeling many things about him. You will see him walking again, you will see him talking to his apostles again, you will see him on Lake Galilee, and you will see him on Golgotha.

I am saying this to you because you have seen him once. You have been a contemporary of Christ’s, so all those memories can be revived again. Just a little effort and you can dig up those memories from inside you.

That’s why I liked the name and I will keep it.

Deva means divine, vigyan means science.

Gyan means knowledge, vigyan means science. The difference is this: that knowledge remains speculative, science is experimental. k is not just thinking, it is doing something. Knowledge is only logical; you can do it sitting in your room. It needs no methodology, no lab, no experiment; it is purely logical, it is a mind game. Science is experimental, it is not just a mind game. The mind is used in it but the conclusion has to arrive through experimentation. Only the experiment will prove whether you are right or wrong. You cannot decide it a priori; you have to go hypothetically into the experiment.

And so is the case with religion: it is the science of the divine. k is experimental, it is experiential, it is existential. You cannot only think about god; you have to do something. You have to meditate, you have to pray, you have to search and seek, you have to go withinwards. And all that you start with is only hypothetical; it is always ’perhaps’. The truth is to be proved only when you have arrived through your experimentation. Only the experiment will give you the conclusion.

So the real seeker never starts with a belief. The real seeker only starts with a hypothetical belief.

He says ’suppose’, and goes into it. That’s all that can be allowed, a supposition. He says, ’Suppose there is a god, then what will I do? So let me start doing it! If in doing it I find that god is, then my supposition has been proved right, then it becomes valid.’

So sannyas is just hypothetical, it is a beginning. One remains open but one starts searching and experimenting. Slowly, slowly, one experiment leads you into another and so on, so forth, and a chain comes by and by. One thing is triggered by another thing, and one day suddenly you arrive at the truth. Only then, trust; otherwise everything is hypothetical.

[Throughout this month bhagwan has been insisting people to stay for the enlightenment day celebrations on the 21st. The new sannyasin says he wishes to do a vipassana course in Kanpuri, but this will be over the 21st.]

Then don’t go, because that meditation will not help that much. Go after the twenty-first. And you can do Vipassana here; there is no need to go anywhere. If you are only going for Vipassana, you can do it here....

You can go but... I have told you that you will be missing something. Then go – that is not my business; I am not saying don’t go. I have done my work, I have told you that you will be missing something. If you choose to miss then it is perfectly okay.

[A sannyasin says: I have guilt feelings towards my family. I feel I can’t drop them right now.]

Then don’t drop them! Who is telling you to drop them.... Just tell me, what is the problem with your parents?

[The sannyasin answers: They don’t accept me as a sannyasin. They’re afraid to lose me.]

Then you will have to decide, because one day or other everybody has to go beyond the boundaries of the parents. Otherwise one never grows, one never becomes one’s own self. There is no need to hurt them but there is no need to be dominated by them either. Just make it plain that this is how you would like to be. If they can accept you, perfectly good; if they can’t accept you, then too that is perfectly good.

[The sannyasin says: I’m very afraid to hurt them.]

You need not positively hurt them, but if they feel hurt, that is their business, that is their problem; what can you do about it? Or if you want to drop sannyas you can do that. I am not saying anything to anybody. If you feel that you can’t hurt them and that this will be hurting them, forget all about sannyas! Just be there...

[The sannyasin answers: I don t feel to drop sannyas.... But I don t feel that I can finish things this time.]

So next time you can; there is no hurry. Let it take a little time, there is no need to do it in a haste.

This time go, be loving towards them, be respectful towards them, even if they reject you. They are your parents. You should not make it a condition that unless they accept you, you will not respect them; that again is forcing something on them. Be free and let them have their freedom. If they want to feel miserable about it, that too is their freedom; you cannot interfere in it. You can do everything possible not to make them miserable, but you cannot commit suicide just because they will be miserable.

And their misery is just stupid, because you are not doing anything harmful to anybody. Just by becoming a sannyasin you have not harmed anybody. They must be having some very orthodox ideas. They don’t know what religion is, they don’t know what sannyas is. They must just be thinking that they have lost their hold on you. But that possessiveness is ugly, and they are being hurt by their possessiveness, not by your sannyas. That has to be understood: how can your sannyas hurt them? It is their possessiveness; they want to dominate you, they want to remain your boss. They would like you to do only that which they want you to do. But that is not right; that is destroying you.

That is not love!

[The sannyasin says: My sister is writing that I will give them – yes, it’s good blackmail – a heart attack if I come back.]

Nobody has given anybody a heart attack. If they want to give themselves one, they can, but you cannot. Even if you die, do you think your father or your mother will die of a heart attack? Otherwise the world would be empty if people started dying like that! You have not done anything; you are just wearing orange clothes and they will have heart attacks! Then they must be waiting for it, asking for it.

That is all stupid; these threats are just there to manipulate you.

[The sannyasin says: I don t feel the strength, the energy, to go against them; to say ’no’. I feel guilty.]

Just go there, see whatsoever happens, and whatsoever feels good, do. From my side, never feel guilty. If you drop sannyas I am perfectly happy. You look after the other side; from my side, never feel guilty. If you never come back there is no problem in it. I am not your father and I am not trying in any way to impose anything on you. Whatsoever you become, it’s perfectly good. If you feel that this is less of a problem for you, drop sannyas. Choose whichever is the lesser evil, and I bless you either way. So from my side you are completely free; the other side you have to decide about. Just go and see whatsoever happens.

If you feel the heart attack is coming, drop sannyas but ask the doctors first, don’t trust your sister because a heart attack can be simulated. Ask the doctors; take your parents to the hospital and let them be checked. And if you see it is really coming and the cardiogram says, ’Now, beware!’ simply drop sannyas; that’s perfectly okay. With me there is no problem. All I am saying is that you have to be yourself and you have to learn to be free.

These are all threats and they have violence in them. There are two kinds of violence: the male violence and the female violence. The male violence is aggressive, direct. The male violence says,

’If you don’t listen to me, I will kill you!’ The female violence says, ’If you don’t listen to me, I will die.’

But these are both violences, there is no difference.

One is active, the other is passive – that’s all. So don’t be worried about this. Just go and see. And whatsoever you do is good. I am not here to create any problems for you; I am here to solve them, if I can. I will not burden you with new problems. So from my side you are going completely free, and there, just see – there is no need to decide right now – and respond!

And then come back.

Krishnada. Krishna is a name of god. Literally it means one who attracts; it means the magnetic force. God is the centre of all attraction. It is the ultimate gravitation, everything hangs around it; it is an energy-field. So the word krishna literally means the magnetic energy-field. And we are all moving, knowing, unknowingly, towards that field. Groping in the dark, stumbling, sometimes going astray, sometimes coming back again to the path, but somehow deep in our beings is a search for god. It may take thousands of lives but we go on searching. Unless the search is complete, contentment is not possible; one remains discontented. You can have money and the discontent remains; you can have power and the discontent remains. You can have all that this world gives, can give, and the discontent remains. It disappears only when you have arrived at the innermost core of existence, at krishna.

And da means brother. Krishnada means god, the brother. However far away we may be, man is cousin to god. Trees are also cousins to god, so are rocks. This existence is a family, it is a brotherhood. I don’t think of god as father but as brother, because with the father it becomes authoritative, serious; then disobedience becomes the sin. If Jews and Christians had not conceived of god as father then Adam’s eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge would not have been such a great sin. There was no need to make such a fuss about it.

All that he had done was in innocent disobedience; god tempted him to disobey. But that Christians and Jews have called the greatest sin, the original sin. There is nothing much in it, just a childish temptation to go against the authority; it is perfectly good in itself. It simply shows that Adam had some spirit in him, that he was not bogus, that he had some soul to rebel.

Think of god as father and suddenly religion becomes authoritative and disobedience becomes sin.

Conceive of god as brother and disobedience is not the question at all. You are not obliged to obey the brother; the brother can at the most advise you, he cannot command. And once commandment disappears, disobedience disappears.

This I would like to become one of the fundamentals of future religion, that existence is a brotherhood; there is no god figure, there is no father figure. We are all alike. Maybe Buddha is awake and you are asleep, but you belong to the same reality, you are the same reality. You can take advice from Buddha, you can gather a few clues about how to find your awareness, but there is no authority in it.

Vasu means the good. It is not concerned with any act; it doesn’t mean the good act. It is concerned with the being, good being. And whatsoever is flowing out of good being is good.

In the past it has been said again and again to man to do good then he will be good. I say just the opposite: be good and then whatsoever you do will be good, because action comes out of being. Being is primary, not action. Because the emphasis in the past has been on action people have become hypocritical. The being remains bad and they go on doing good acts. They become respectable, they are even thought of as saints, but if you look inside them nothing has happened; they are the same old rotten beings.

They manage, they discipline themselves, they cultivate themselves with virtues and they do service and they do prayer and they do this and they do that, but this is all doing. Doing remains peripheral, it never penetrates the centre; and the centre is the real matter. Unless the centre changes, all changes are just superficial, decorations at the most. Vasu means good being. It does not arise out of good acts; it arises out of deep meditation. Meditation imparts good being to you, and out of good being, good acts flow. Then there is no disparity between the being and the act; then the act is just a shadow of your being.

[A sannyasin says: I don’t have the feeling that anything much has happened to me and I really don’t know who I am, who you are, and what, if anything, there is between you and me... what I’m doing here.... ]

I understand. The problem arises because you have great expectations. The problem arises because you would like miracles to happen to you. Your expectations are so fantastic, so far out, that whatsoever happens falls short; you cannot feel grateful for it.

People who have great desires can never feel grateful because whatsoever happens is always tiny compared to their desires, it is not much. And because you can’t feel grateful, much more that could have happened cannot happen, because it happens only through gratefulness. So you get trapped in a vicious circle: you desire much, because of that you cannot feel grateful. Whatsoever happens you can’t take any note of; you simply ignore it. And then you become more and more closed.

If there is no desire, if you have no idea what should happen, you are without any idea, then things happen. Those things are already happening, but then you take note of them. You feel tremendously thrilled because this has happened and you had not expected anything. If you are expecting that when you go on the road you will find one lakh rupees Lying there and you only find a ten rupee note, you will say, ’What am I doing here?’ But if you had not expected that one lakh rupees, a ten rupee note is good... nothing wrong in it! And if you had been grateful then from the same source from where the ten rupee note has come ten million can come. But you remain open in gratefulness.

There is no other problem. The problem is simply.... And it is not only with you, it is with many people: people come with great desires. Drop all desiring and just be here.

And don’t bother about what you are doing, because that question will not leave you wherever you are, so what is the point of bringing it here? If you are in England the question will be there; if you are in Australia the question will be there. Whatsoever you do the question will be there: ’What am I doing here?’ The question will remain relevant anywhere you are. Even if you are in paradise the question, ’What am I doing here?’ will be relevant. Even if you are with god, one day or other you will start asking, ’What am I doing here?’

That question is irrelevant because it will be relevant anywhere. That question has to be dropped.

We are simply being here – not doing anything, just being here. And being here is such a joy. What are these trees doing here? What are these birds doing here? They are utterly cheerful just by being. You have to learn cheerfulness in just being here. Not that something has to be done, then you will be happy; that you have to earn, you have to do, you have to perform, then you will be happy.

Even if you perform, the question will be there: I have performed, now what am I doing here? That question has been asked by all kinds of people in all kinds of situations so it seems to be utterly nonsensical.

Then one asks, ’Who am I?’ – that too is of the same type of question. That who cannot be answered because who is the fundamental mystery of existence. You cannot go behind it, because that will be going behind yourself. To know who you are you will have to go behind yourself and look at yourself.

But that is not possible because you will be behind and whatsoever you look at will not be you. So in fact the question ’Who am I?’ is a koan.

Maharshi Raamana used to give that to every disciple: to go on thinking, ’Who am I?’ But man is so foolish that those disciples are still repeating, ’Who am I?’ They think that some day the answer is going to come. There is no answer! That question is such that by asking it continuously again and again, you go on getting deeper and deeper into yourself. One day you suddenly see that the question is absurd. ’I am!’ and there is no way to answer who you are. All answers are false. Then there comes great relaxation, and in that relaxation is knowing.

But I am not saying that you will know who you are; nobody has ever known! No Buddha has ever known who he is. Then what is the difference between a Buddha and An ordinary man? The ordinary man thinks he knows who he is, and the Buddha is one who knows that there is no way to know who he is: that is the difference. The Buddha has come to recognise the futility of the question, has renounced the question, and is simply happy by being. He no more asks, ’Who am I?’

The ordinary person believes that he knows, or if sometimes his belief is disturbed he is very much confused and he starts searching for the answer.

That’s where you are, that’s what every sannyasin has to pass through. Between the ordinary person and the Buddha is the sannyasin. The state of a sannyasin is the state of confusion, chaos. So if you are confused, things are happening, something is going on. There is no fear. When I see some sannyasin not confused at all, I am worried; then I see that this man is going to remain ordinary, he will not go anywhere.

Simply relax into this confusion.

One day this confusion will also disappear.

And when the

confusion has disappeared you will not have the answer, remember; just the confusion would have disappeared, the question would have disappeared. An answer never comes; there is no answer.

Life is a mystery: not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

Just try what I am saying.

[The sannyasin says: Can I ask one more question?]

Next time, mm? For this time it is enough – it can make you a Buddha if you understand!

[A sannyasin had been in individual therapy which was abruptly cancelled because the therapist left. The sannyasin said: I was so afraid of something that was going to happen, and then when suddenly it was over it was as if nothing were there; I was the only torturer.]

That’s how it is! You are the only torturer; you are the torturer and the tortured, the gaoler and the prisoner. That’s what people go on doing, playing both the roles; they enjoy it so they go on playing.

Even when they ask how to drop it, they are simply enjoying the question; they don’t want to drop it.

If they really want to drop it, there is nothing... nobody is preventing them; they can simply drop it.

But they ask how. That means that right now they are not ready to drop it; they will postpone it in the name of ’how?’

[She answers: I couldn’t go through that again!]

Then drop it! This is the secret of all the groups: if you don’t drop your misery, you will have to go into groups. If you think that a group is more miserable, then drop your misery. These groups are simply an opportunity to become more miserable so you can choose, whatsoever you want to. [The primal therapist] will be away for six weeks, so for six weeks you can meditate over it. If you can drop your misery on your own, perfectly good; if you can’t, then [she] will have to help you, mm? So wait for [her]!

CHAPTER 6

7 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Premmurti. It means image of love. Open your heart more, think less. Get down from the head to the heart, feel more. Through feeling more one gets to the being; through thinking more one gets away from the being. Thinking creates distance from yourself; feeling destroys the distance.

The ultimate in thinking is schizophrenia, you become two; the distance is so much that it becomes unbridgeable. And the ultimate in feeling is when only you are left, nothing else is there; you attain to a tremendous oneness, aloneness, all-one-ness.

So get more and more in tune with love. Love more and you will be more.

[The new sannyasin says that in the West: I was working as an electrical supervisor.]

Mm mm, continue working and start meditating. The world has not to be renounced: the world has to be loved and lived. The way to god is through the world. Don’t become an escapist; that escapism is very deep in the Indian consciousness. The Indian consciousness gets very weary and tired and wants to escape; that is suicidal. Live the world in all its dimensionality, in its intensity. Love the world, because it is god’s world: he is hidden behind it. Somewhere, going deeper into life, you will find him. You will not find him in the Himalayas. If you cannot find him in the marketplace, you will not find him anywhere else. The marketplace is the most suitable situation to find him.

So continue to work... start meditating!

[A sannyasin, who is leaving for the West, says: When feelings and emotions come up out of me they don’t seem like just one thing; it is a confusion inside. I don’t know which emotion it is: it’s half of one thing and half of another. I don’t know if it’s something to be concerned about.]

No, no need to be concerned... no need to be concerned. Simply go on living. Live your confusion; don’t try to get out of it. If you try to get out of it you create more confusion. A confused mind cannot get out of confusion. If the mind tries to get out of confusion it will be like pulling yourself up by your shoelaces: it will create more confusion.

The only way is to accept it. Everybody is confused, otherwise all would have been Buddhas! The whole world is confused. Confusion is intrinsic to the human mind. The confusion has a very fundamental reason, there is an ontology to confusion. Man comes from the animals and man has to become god, that is the confusion. Half belongs to the world of the animals, the unconscious part, and the other half is trying to become conscious, absolutely conscious, hence the tension. Both go on trying to manipulate you, and you are never sure who you are – whether to go this way or to go that way. In being pulled between these two the confusion arises.

Don’t try to escape from it; live it. This is life; love it! Get deeper into it, and by getting deeper into it you will be surprised: your eyes are becoming more and more clear. As you look deeper into your confusion, it starts sorting itself out.

If one goes deeply into any problem one arrives at its solution. The solution is hidden in the problem; it is never outside. The problem is simply an indication that the solution is within you and you are not looking for it. So go into your confusion; allow it, watch it, see it. And don’t be in a hurry to get out of it, because whenever one is in a hurry to get out, one stops understanding. What is the point of understanding something which you want to drop? And you cannot drop it unless you have understood it; that’s the dichotomy. Try to understand it; in that very understanding, confusion disappears.

Clarity comes out of understanding your confusions and answers come by going deeper into your problems. Certainly one day it happens: all confusion is gone, all problems disappear, and you are left alone. The beauty of that aloneness is nirvana, is enlightenment. All remains as it is; only now between you and reality there are no more any clouds. Everything is the same – you are the same, the world is the same – it is just the something between the two, the confusion, that cloud, is no more there.

Look deep into your confusion. Don’t be worried about it, don’t be concerned about it, because concern means that you are getting ready to escape from it. Hence people create devices; they repress it, they avoid it, they don’t look at it or they start distracting their mind through some other channels. But all these things are not going to help, they will make you more and more confused. If you want to avoid one confusion you will create another; to avoid that you will create another. Don’t avoid the first one: go into it, watch it, let it be your meditation. If it is there, there must be some significance, because nothing exists without any significance.

By and by you will feel thankful for it, because looking into it you will become clear, more meditative, more alert, more aware. Then finally you will thank your confusion, that it helped you, that it was an opportunity to grow into awareness. It was just an opportunity knocking on your door to help you to grow into awareness.

[A sannyasin, returning to the west, says: I’ve found out who I am... I experience that there’s no place else to be, that I’m the centre of it. I don’t even know what my relationship with you is now... I don’t even see why I need to come here.]

If you don’t feel any relationship with me then there is no point in asking anything, because I am not interested in people who are not related with me; I am not interested even in answering them. Why waste time?...

[The sannyasin answers: There’s something I don’t understand about it yet.]

It is nothing – just an ego trip. You are an egoist and nothing else but you go on justifying your ego in different ways. You can’t accept the idea that you need somebody; that hurts your ego. And you do need someone, so you go on coming and still you go on saying that you don’t need to and you don’t know why you come. You know perfectly well why you come, but the ego can’t accept the idea that you need me. The ego can’t accept the idea that you have to relate.

You are trying to become a master rather than a disciple, and that you enjoy. Nothing is wrong – you can go on enjoying it – but deep down you will remain in ignorance, and the people you think you are helping, you will be harming finally. How can you help? – you still need help. But you feel good, that is true. The ego always feels good whenever it is in a position, a high position. So when somebody comes to you and you advise them and help them and you become a therapist and a guru, you feel very good; in those moments you are perfectly happy. But when you are left alone you don’t know who you are. You always need somebody there to make you feel that you are a therapist, you are a guru, you are this and that. When there is nobody, then you are in a difficulty. That’s why when you come here you feel a little difficulty because here you are not a master and nobody will bother to listen to you.

The whole problem is that rather than working on your own inner self you have started working on others. But that is happening to many people in the West, you are not alone in that trip; thousands of people are moving in that trip. And one day you will be very much frustrated through all that. One day you will find that you have missed something.

It is up to you: if you think that you know and you can help people, then you don’t need any help from me; go on helping. Come only when you feel that now you need my help, otherwise don’t come. I already have so many people who really need help and who are ready to accept the help. Let me work on those people, nobody else should take up any time because that is a wastage.

You really want to hear from me, ’... you have become enlightened, you are a perfect master now.

Go and help people.’ That’s what you really want to hear deep down. And I can say it, if you want I can say it, but that will not be of any help; it will be very harmful.

So get down from your ego trip. In this month try to be a disciple, become more passive. The first thing has to happen to you.

That’s why you are feeling ’I am the centre of my world’, and this and... all nonsense!

You become the centre of yourself only when you are not, not before that. When you disappear, only then are you the centre of your world. When there is no centre, then only are you the centre of your world. While the centre exists it goes on claiming, ’I am the centre of my world.’ That claim you will have to look deep down into; that claiming is your problem, and the sooner you drop it the better.

I am not saying that you will not be able to help; if you drop it you will be able to help many people.

Right now you are only pretending to help, because those same problems are your problems and you have not solved them yet, so whatsoever suggestions you give to others are just knowledgeable suggestions. They don’t come out of your own knowing and experience; they come from your studies, they come from your learning, they come from your memory.

Be a little more humble. And even if somebody comes and wants your help, give it to him with humility. Tell him that you don’t know but you will try; tell him, ’I am in the same boat as you are.

I cannot talk from a peak – I am in the same valley – but maybe I can make available to you my expertise. It has not helped me; maybe it can help you.’ If you help with this humbleness then somebody can be helped, and at least one thing will be certain: nobody will be harmed.

Stop pretending! The first work has to be done on yourself, and much has to be done there. If you start doing it... you are capable of doing it, but your whole energy is moving in an extrovert direction: you are more interested in others, in how to help them. You are like a Christian missionary who knows nothing but goes on helping people. You can become a dangerous do-gooder. It is good to pull yourself out of it. It will not feel very good in the beginning because you will not enjoy the trip, but if you put your total energy into your own work something is possible, you can bloom! And if you bloom, all these problems will disappear. Then you will not feel that you are not related with me. You will not feel that you don’t need to come here.

When the need has disappeared you will come out of sheer gratitude. The coming will not stop, in fact only then will the real coming start. Then you don’t come in any need; you just come to say,

’Thank you.’ And that has a different quality in it: it is not a mere formality, your whole being says thank you.

This looks like a paradox: when you need, the ego goes on saying, ’You don’t need anybody’; when you really don’t need you become so humble that you don’t have any idea that you don’t need. When you need, it is very difficult to bow down because it feels as if you are becoming inferior.

Somebody has just today written a question to me saying that he feels very inferior when he asks a question. He asks: ’Osho, when will I be so capable that I need not ask a question?’ Even in asking a question he feels inferior! He wants to immediately reach a point where he need not even ask a question. You have also written a question: ’There I feel very good helping people, and here just listening to you I don’t feel that good.’ That is because listening is a passive thing. In listening you are not asked to do anything, you have to be just there listening; and that is difficult for you. If something is given to you to do you will feel perfectly good; with the doer the ego is satisfied.

And that’s why I go on talking every day, morning, evening: it is just an indication to you to be passive. At least for the ninety minutes with me just be utterly passive, just be ears, just taking in –

not doing anything, simply letting it in. It is not very important what I say: much more important is that for ninety minutes you are just a receiving end, just a receptivity. What I am saying is just an excuse to create that receptivity. But it is difficult, and I understand – it must be difficult for you. In talking you will feel better than in listening, because in talking you are higher, in listening you feel you are lower.

In this one month just be passive and drop all these nonsensical ideas. Dance, sing, meditate and enjoy! And when you go back start helping people with this humbleness, of saying you don’t know.

All your advice should start with, ’I don’t know. I am also seeking and searching. I have got a few fragments from here and there; they have not helped me but maybe they can help you. I can make available my expertise. You need not follow it and there is no guarantee that if you follow it something will happen. I simply share whatsoever I have accumulated. If you feel like trying, you can try hypothetically.

You will be of a greater help because the other person will not see the authority in it, although I know that then ninety percent of your clients will disappear, because they seek authority. They don’t want really to be helped; they want somebody to lean on. They will disappear. That’s why even people who don’t know anything go on claiming that they know, because only if they claim they know do people cling to them. If the people, if your disciples, come to know that [you yourself are] yet unenlightened, they will disappear. They will find somebody else who can claim that he is enlightened. So out of sheer necessity you have to go on pretending that you know, that you have arrived, that this has helped you and this is going to help them.

They are not going to be helped; they will simply ding to you, they will lean upon you, and sooner or later they will be angry with you. They will never forgive you, remember, because sooner or later they will find out that nothing is happening. And how long can you go on pretending that it has happened to you when it has not happened? Mm? they will poke their noses in and they will find out. They will become curious about you, and they will catch you red-handed many times in the same problem in which they are. They will say, ’What are you doing?’ – and they will be angry with you.

Just be humble. Make available whatsoever you have accumulated but don’t waste your whole time in it; give a few hours to yourself. The thing has yet to happen.

If you feel related to me, only then can I work on you. If you don’t feel related then it becomes very difficult to work on you, because a certain bridge is needed. Unless you are there to receive it I can go on throwing my energy towards you but it will rebound, it will be a wastage.

So relax for this one month, relax utterly. Have a holiday from your ego for one month and let us see what happens.

[A sannyas says: I seem to have more energy or more feelings than I can handle... that’s what makes the knots in my back. I’ve gone to massage for a long time; it was of no help. I think the feelings are one of the things that make me create so well in my business.

Osho checks his energy.]

I can see that it will be difficult for you to manage but there is no need to manage. Leave yourself to this energy, surrender to this energy. This energy is bigger than you; you cannot hold it. If you try to hold it, it will drive you nuts.

Relax with it, go with it. It is like a flood. You cannot swim against the current, swim with it. This one month will do much. Just swim with the current, let the sadness come. Yes, it is there, a sadness of thousands of lives. Tears will come, laughter will come and all kinds of feelings will come. And they will be almost paradoxical: tears and laughter and crying and smiling – they will all come together.

Sadness and joy both, will erupt in you. People go on repressing all – both the positive and the negative. And you have repressed enough so the dam is breaking. It is perfectly good, it has to break so the river starts flowing again.

In this month simply go with the energies. Small things will trigger it off and you will feel you cannot control it, but there is no need to. Just go into it, trust it.

Omesh means god of the primordial sound. Om is the sound out of which the whole existence has arisen. In the East existence is thought to be a sound vibration. The universe is an orchestra, god is a master musician. The world starts with his sound and ends in the same sound, disappears into the same sound. That sound is called om.

This word ’om’ exists in English in many forms: it exists in omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient; they come from the word ’om’. Omnipresent means present as universally as the sound is. Omnipotent means as potential, as powerful, as the primordial sound. Omniscient means one who has seen and heard the universal sound. Omesh means the god of that sound.

Start listening to sounds, let music be your meditation. Listen to the sounds, all kinds of sounds.

They are all divine – even the market noise, even the sounds that are created in the traffic. This aeroplane, that train, all sounds have to be listened to so attentively and silently and lovingly... as if you are listening to music. And you will be surprised: you can transform all sounds into music; they are music. All that is needed is our attitude: if we are resistant, the sound becomes noise; if we are receptive, loving, the sound becomes music. The same thing can be noise to somebody and to somebody else, music.

If you have not heard Indian classical music it will be just noise. If you love it and you have sympathy for it, it is just out of this world, it is of the beyond. People in the East who are not acquainted with the Western music think this is just crazy noise. Whenever you don’t fall in tune with something it becomes noise; when you fall in tune with it, when you start vibrating with it, when there is a harmony between you and it, it becomes music. And great is the joy when you can convert all sounds into music. Then your whole life starts becoming a rhythm.

I am giving you this name because I can see the possibility that sound can become the door for you to God.

CHAPTER 7

8 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

The message is to never think about yourself in any way which condemns. One has to learn to respect oneself; that is the beginning of a great change. We have been taught to condemn, to despise, to hate. We have been told to love others but we have not been told to love ourselves, so we don’t have a good image of ourselves. And without a good image of yourself, you will never be able to know who you are.

One does not want to look at oneself if one is condemned as a sinner. One can enter into oneself only when one feels that one is going into something beautiful. The beginning of love is to love oneself. The beginning of god is to think of oneself as divine. Nobody is a sinner, but if you believe you are a sinner you remain a sinner; it is only a question of belief.

Swayam means self, bhu means existent – self-existent. There are things which are not self-existent; they depend on others’ existence. For example, water is not self-existent, it depends on hydrogen and oxygen; it is a combination. If hydrogen and oxygen disappear from existence, water will disappear. It is a secondary phenomenon, not primary.

Consciousness is a primary phenomenon. It is not a combination of anything else; it is itself. That is the meaning of swayambhu. You cannot disappear from existence. There is no way to destroy you; no death can kill you, no poison can touch you. The innermost core of your being is eternal. It has been always and it will be always. And it cannot be destroyed because it is not a composition, it cannot be destroyed because it is not caused by anything else.

Sam means right, buddho means awareness – right awareness. Awareness can also be wrong. It is wrong when it is cultivated, practised, forced, somehow managed by effort. Then it is wrong. It creates a tension in your being; rather than relaxing you it makes you more tense, it creates stress.

Awareness is right when it is spontaneous, when it is not forced, when it arises not out of effort but out of understanding. Sambuddho means right awareness. Don’t practise it; a practised thing is always false. And when we start practising something we close the doors for the spontaneous; then the spontaneous cannot happen. You become so full of the practised that your very practice hinders it.

If somebody practises love, his love will be false; it will be a practised phenomenon, it will be rehearsed. He will be simply doing an act. He may perform it perfectly but the real will not be in it, the real cannot be in it. The real can never exist in the performed. It can be skilful, the false can be very skilful, very efficient; it can deceive the whole world but it cannot deceive you. You will know all the time that you were just making it, that it was an empty gesture, that you were not behind it, that it was not supported by you, that it had no roots in your being, that it was just a plastic flower.

Allow the spontaneous to happen, and the spontaneous happens just by living life intensely.

Whenever you live anything intensely there arises a kind of awareness which is totally different from the practised one. If you are running, are intensely in it, you will find a floating awareness around you. You need not make it, it is there. You are looking at a sunset: you are thrilled and you come to a peak of experience; suddenly there is awareness. It is always there when the peak comes. Just as at the peak it is always sunlit and the darkness disappears, so at any peak moment you are aware, and that awareness arises on its own accord. That is called sambuddho.

So live life intensely, totally; live life at the optimum. Put yourself utterly into each and everything that you do; don’t hold.

Then love becomes awareness, walking becomes awareness; then even sleep becomes awareness, because at each peak awareness automatically happens and then it has a beauty of its own. The practised is a poor thing, a poor substitute.

[A sannyasin says: I sometimes think I can t open myself enough to your help because I have this feeling of total aloneness inside myself which I’ve had since ever I can remember. I would like you to help me, if you can, to open myself more to you. When I dance, when I do the Dynamic, which I’ve been doing every day, something marvellous happens to me. I feel so happy, happier than any time in my life. Then I close up again.]

No, don’t be worried about closing up, mm? – because you can contain only so much; more than that can be destructive to the system. Slowly slowly, it will open. It is opening, that is the thing to be taken note of. If it is not opening then something has to be done; but it opens in your meditations, so perfectly good, you need not worry about it. Later on it has to close. If it doesn’t close you will not be able to take in so much of existence, mm? – that will be a kind of bombardment and it will shatter your nerves. If you can be open only once in twenty-four hours that’s more than enough; don’t bother.... Later on one has to close up.

It is just as if you look at the sun your eyes will close immediately, mm? because your eyes have to protect themselves. You can take only a little bit of the sun; more than that will be difficult. The existence has so much and it is all pouring on you; the heart can open only in some moments. But the heart is opening so there is no problem; slowly slowly, it will open more and more.

And remember another thing: the length of the opening is not important, the depth is important.

Whether you remain open for one hour or two hours or six hours doesn’t matter much. If you remain open only for a single moment, but you open up totally to the very core, that’s enough. Length is not material, depth is what matters. And you are going perfectly well.

[A sannyasin returning to the west says there is some frustration in meditation. His legs seem disconnected from the flow of the rest of his body, and it is particularly uncomfortable during the first stage of Kundalini... from the knees down to the feet, which are burning a lot.

Osho checks his energy.]

Nothing to be worried about mm? The legs are not in tune with the body, that’s true, but there is no need to be very worried about them. You can do just one thing every day that will help to make the energy flow. Before you take a bath, rub both your feet and legs below the knee with a dry towel; make them hot and then take a cold shower. Within three, four months the disparity will disappear.

It is not much of a problem to be worried about; even if it doesn’t disappear, it is not going to harm your growth. But it will be good if it disappears, so just massage them.

Sometimes when you have time, put both your legs into hot water, just the legs; let them heat up, and then take a cold shower. First, heat them up and then take a cold shower, that will settle the energy. In just two, three months that problem will disappear. But it has nothing to do with your meditation, mm? you need not feel worried.

[A couple are returning to the West. The woman says she has an energy problem and has never experienced orgasm.]

You will need a few groups: Primal and Tantra will be of immense help. So when you come next time, mm? this problem will be solved. Don’t be worried about it; it will be solved. It is simple, it is very simple.

You must have lived in a very very inhibiting family where sex was taboo, so it has gone deep into your system; your body has become afraid of sex. It goes into it, but reluctantly; it does not go welcoming it. Your mind is ready to go into it but the body keeps itself cool; the body keeps itself aloof, it does not co-operate. So sex has to be released from the body. Just do Primal and Tantra and the orgasm will be there.

Orgasm is something very essential. Without orgasm, many things will never happen to you.

Orgasm is almost a door to the divine. If orgasm becomes easy then prayer is easy, meditation is easy, everything becomes easy – one is in a flowing energy. Without orgasm the body becomes dull, insensitive, dead. It loses sensitivity, and because of that, many things become impossible. So orgasm is something very essential – it has to be solved. But just wait....

[Osho tells her to remember a couple of points: to be completely abandoned in love-making and to be the male, the active partner. If that doesn’t remedy things, the situation can be reviewed when she comes next time.]

[Osho gives a name for a centre in the West.]

Mukta. It means ultimate freedom, freedom from the self. There are two possibilities of freedom.

The lower kind of freedom is freedom for the self: the self remains but becomes free. The higher freedom is freedom from the self itself: the self disappears, there is only freedom; there is nobody who is free, but there is freedom itself.

That is so in everything when it reaches to the ultimate peak. The lover disappears, only love remains; or it will be better to say: only loving remains. The dancer disappears, only dance remains; or it will be better to say: only dancing remains. So everything when it reaches to its ultimate peak has that transformation: the self disappears.

That is the meaning of the Buddhist word ’nirvana’; it means cessation of the self. One is and one is not; the presence is but it is a kind of absence. Those old polarities of positive and negative make no sense any more; they have dissolved into each other. Yin and yang are no more separate, man and woman are no more separate. This is unison. In fact this is what ordinarily we call god. God is an orgasmic experience in which the experiencer has disappeared. That’s the meaning of mukta.

Start this centre and help people to be free from themselves... and come back!

[The sannyasin, who is a doctor specialising in chest disease, had previously written to Osho about a research scheme into the use of relaxation and visualisation exercises for inoperable lung cases.]

It’s perfectly beautiful; continue. It is of immense significance. Let it be your meditation, work it out.

And when you are here permanently, through it you will have many people to help, so get ready.

Finally you have to be here, and everything will support your coming. There will be no problem...

not even from your wife. I will take care of things!

[A sannyasin says that he is fed up with his mind. I feel I’m never here and I never see anything at all. I try everything: I try meditation, I try to be aware, But often I don’t feel it.

Osho checks his energy.]

Two things to be remembered.... One: don’t try to stop it. That’s how you are creating the whole problem; don’t try to stop it. It is very natural to you; you will go crazy if you try to stop it. It will be like a tree trying to stop its leaves; the tree will go mad. The leaves are very natural to it.

You are a mind person. If you try to become a heart person you will create so much trouble for yourself, and unnecessarily, because there is a way which goes from the mind itself. There is no need to change yourself into a heart person, mm? That will be against your intrinsic nature. Always listen to your nature, follow your nature. To be natural is to be religious, and to be utterly in tune with your nature is all that is needed. So the first thing: don’t try to stop your thinking; it’s perfectly good.

The second thing: just not stopping will not be enough; the second is to enjoy it. Play with it! It is a beautiful game. Playing with it, enjoying it, welcoming it, you will start becoming more alert of it, more aware of it. But that awareness will come very very indirectly; it will not be an effort to become aware. That’s what you have been doing: you are trying to become aware. Then the mind distracts you and you become angry with it. You feel that this is an ugly mind and it is constantly chattering; you want to be silent and it doesn’t allow you. So you start feeling inimical towards the mind. That’s not good; that is dividing yourself into two. Then you and the mind become two and conflict and friction start. All friction is suicidal because it is your energy being wasted unnecessarily. We don’t have that much energy to waste in fighting with ourselves. The same energy has to be used in joy.

So forget about being aware: rather, start enjoying the thought process. Just see the nuances of thoughts: how they take turns, how one thing leads to another, how they get hooked with each other.

It is really a miracle to watch. Just a small thought can take you to the farthest end, and if you look you don’t see any connection. A dog starts barking and your thought process is triggered. The dog is forgotten; you remember a friend who had a beautiful dog. Now you are off! Then the friend is forgotten; you remember the friend’s wife who was beautiful, and so you go on, and then other women.... Where you will end, nobody knows; and it all started with a dog barking!

Just watch and see the association of thought – how thoughts are linked, chained with each other –

and enjoy it, let it be a game. Play it deliberately, and you will be surprised: sometimes just enjoying it, you will find those beautiful pauses I talk about. Suddenly you will find that the dog is barking and nothing is arising in your mind, no chain starts. The dog goes on barking and you go on listening; no thought arises. Small gaps will arise, but they are not to be produced. They come on their own, and when they come, they are beautiful. In those small gaps you will start watching the watcher; but that will be natural. Again thoughts will start and you will enjoy it. Go on easily, take it easy. Awareness will come to you but it will come indirectly.

Watching, enjoying seeing thoughts taking their turn is as beautiful as seeing the sea with millions of waves. This too is a sea, and thoughts are waves. But people go and enjoy the waves in the ocean and they don’t enjoy the waves in their consciousness. I teach you to enjoy everything, otherwise we go on finding something or other to fight with. Mm? somebody is fighting with sex and somebody is fighting with anger, and somebody starts fighting with thinking, and somebody starts fighting with emotions and somebody with the body. But one thing is the same: they all fight. And to fight is to destroy yourself. There is no need to fight – love! All fighting energy has to be transformed into love energy.

So in the time you are here, forget about it. Even if I go on talking against the mind, remember: I am not talking to you! Otherwise you will collect clues.... And every day I go on talking against the mind. Allow me to talk but don’t get caught in it. Just enjoy it, and soon things will start changing.

[A sannyasin says she wants Osho to tell her where to go, what to do?]

Mm mm! You mean a spiritual journey?...

That’s what you want!...

No need to go anywhere. Just be here and enjoy!...

Mm, that’s all. It is simple: just enjoy. What are you doing right now?

[She answers: I m working in the kitchen.]

That’s great! Work there. Just work there and be in the herenow. There is nowhere to go, mm?

Good!

[A sannyasin says: Things seem to flow. I don’t know if I am lazy and if I should push myself; I don’t know what to do. I’m just confused about whether there’s something to do.]

No, no need. Just remain relaxed; it is not laziness. It is your pace, it is your way of doing things; it is natural. Go slowly, go lazily; no need to be worried.

[She adds: Also I am extremely emotional all the time... strongly.]

No, allow that too, allow that too, mm? And sometimes this miracle happens too, that lazy people sometimes reach faster. So don’t be worried. And emotions are also to be accepted, all has to be accepted. Somehow we go on carrying the idea of dropping this, getting that, changing this, this is not good, this has to be cancelled from your being, that thing is very beautiful, that has to be in your being.... Somehow we go on with this neurotic process.

Whatsoever is, is good and has to be accepted; and not accepted in a kind of defeatism but joyously.

Emotions are good, mm? – without emotions you will just be a rock. And that’s what your so-called saints have been doing down the ages, and they become rocks. Their hearts become frozen and they become stony.

Sometimes it happens that those stupid saints become capable of talking with birds, with trees, but become almost unrelated to human beings. They cannot commune with human beings, because with human beings they suddenly become afraid that their emotions will come up. Those stupid saints will go on searching for lepers to kiss, but they cannot kiss a woman. What is the fear? The fear is that emotion may come again and somehow they are sitting on top of it. It is good to kiss a leper, mm? because how can any emotion come? – it is so repulsive. It is such a thing that one closes one’s eyes and does it like a duty and then escapes. But those saints who will kiss a leper won’t touch a woman. Now what kind of saintliness is this? With a woman the fear arises: the emotions may burst forth again.

Emotions are good. They are the highest things that have evolved through evolution; they are higher flowers than flowers. Welcome them, accept them, enjoy them. Sometimes they bring misery, that’s true, because they bring ecstasy. Whatsoever brings ecstasy will sometimes bring agony too.

Sometimes they bring great misery; it is natural. Once you accept, then the agony and the ecstasy both are good. One simply swings from one to another, without choosing, without any preference.

That is freedom....

CHAPTER 8

9 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Asango means absolute aloneness. It does not mean loneliness. Loneliness is a negative state, it is miserable. You are hankering for the other and the other is not available; you would like to be with the other but you are forced to be lonely. Loneliness is enforced, it is empty. Aloneness is positive; it is not forced. You don’t miss the other; on the contrary, you find yourself. The other is completely forgotten, you rejoice in your being; that is aloneness.

Aloneness makes one an individual, otherwise a person remains just a part of the crowd, dependent, in subtle ways a slave. Freedom is the fragrance of aloneness. And the paradox is that only one who knows what aloneness is, is capable of love too; that is one of the mysteries of life. Only an individual can love: you can love only when you are, otherwise who is going to love? People go on playing the game of love but they ARE not, so those gestures are empty. There is no substance in it; it is just fantasy... sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, but it is fantasy all the time. Only a real person can love, only an individual can love. Love can only come out of your being, never otherwise.

And in aloneness the being is found.

So this is the paradox: the person who hankers for the other never finds it possible to commune with the other because he is not; there is nobody to commune. So he goes on rushing from one relationship to another, from one thing to another, from one sensation to another sensation; he goes on hoping and goes on being frustrated at every step. His whole life is just a hope and a frustration, and no hope is ever fulfilled. He chases the other but he never finds the other, because he has not done the homework: he has not yet found himself.

Asango means one who is alone, and out of that aloneness, all that is beautiful is born: love, freedom, silence, communion. So aloneness is not anti-love or anti-relationship: aloneness is the very foundation of love and relationship. And it is a very very ecstatic state of being; it is not empty. So those two words, aloneness and loneliness, appear to be synonymous; they are not. Linguisticaly they may be, but existentially not; they are poles apart. Loneliness is darkness, impotence; aloneness is light, potence. Aloneness has a power to it.

Sugata means well-gone – it is a Buddhist term of great significance. Buddha calls one ’sugata’, well-gone, who will not be coming back into the world again; hence he is called well-gone: one who has finished his work here, who has lived in the wheel of life and death and has matured from here, has graduated from the world. Only when one is absolutely ripe does one become sugata, well-gone. Just as a ripe fruit falls of its own accord, the ripe individual disappears from the world of misery. He enters into another dimension, the separate reality, the other shore or god or heaven: those are just names. They all indicate one thing, not to be lost in the superficial. There is a depth to everything: this shore is not the only shore, there is the other shore too. Search for it!

And don’t go on repeating the same things that you have been doing for your whole life, otherwise you remain moving in the wheel: the same spokes go on moving, up and down, up and down.

Millions of people have decided to just remain part of the wheel, they cling to it.

One has to see the whole point, that it is repetitive, that it is utterly ridiculous. And with this awareness – that the mechanical is ridiculous, that the repetitive is simply boring and creates dullness and stupidity and nothing else – one becomes more and more alert, more and more aware.

One starts living in new ways, one starts searching for new styles of being. That search is sannyas.

One is fed up with the ordinary world, one has seen all the games: the game of money and power and ego. One has lived through it and one has seen that nothing is there; it is much ado about nothing. Seeing this, one starts searching for a different quality to life; that is meditation. One starts moving inwards, and when one reaches to one’s innermost core, one becomes a sugata. Remain on the periphery and you will remain in the world; you come back again and again. It is the same kind of world, the same kind of desires and the same kind of miseries.

Friedrich Nietzsche is right about his idea of eternal recurrence... not absolutely right, but ninety-nine-point-nine percent right. Rarely does somebody escape from the wheel; about that person he is not right. He does not know about a Buddha. In fact he closed his doors against Buddhas. He got into the trip of being anti Christ, and he closed his doors. But it is a great insight, that things go on repeating themselves eternally. You are born again, and you live the same thing and the same thing.

That’s why people look so dead and dull: they have lived it many times. In this life also they have lived it many times, but they can’t find something else to do so they go on repeating; what else is there to do? You rush after one woman, you are finished, tired, then you start rushing after another woman. You know that this has happened many times and that nothing really happens; you simply keep yourself engaged. It is a pseudo kind of busy-ness... busy-ness without business.

When this penetrates one’s consciousness the search starts: one starts moving inwards. That is the only place we have not looked yet. We have searched everywhere but we have not searched in our own being, in our own selves. If you can reach the innermost you will become a sugata. That is everybody’s possibility, everybody’s birthright too. And that is the whole purpose of existence: to make you a well-gone, to make you so ripe that out of your ripeness you fall and disappear.

Be happy and rejoice!

[A sannyasin returning to the West says that something is happening, or rather not happening, with his energy; the left side is blocked. Osho studies his energy.]

It is not blocked in the left side of the body; it is blocked in the right hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere is connected with the left side of the body, so you are feeling it in the left side of the body, but it is not there. Nothing has to be done in the body, no body work is needed: on the contrary you have to do something so that the right hemisphere of the mind starts functioning.

The left hemisphere is logical, rational; it controls the right side of your body, that’s why the right hand has become very important.

The right side hemisphere can function only in a feeling way. It is irrational, intuitive; in fact, this is the heart. The heart is not there (indicating his physical heart), the right hemisphere is the heart.

So anything that is helpful in creating feeling in you will change the situation: a good laugh, crying, tears, singing, music, just watching the stars, love... all that is irrational.

Give a little more attention to the irrational, that’s all, and once the right hemisphere has started functioning, the body will change automatically; you need not do anything about it. The body is in perfect shape.

This is the situation with many people because we have been taught, brought up to use only one part of the mind. Society is afraid to allow both the parts to function because they are polar opposites.

Society wants a man to be very consistent, efficient, so it is better to keep only one hemisphere functioning because it is consistent, logical, mathematical. The other part is not reliable, the other part is a danger to many things. For example, if the other part functions well it will be difficult to create armies, it will be difficult to reduce people to clerks. People will start becoming poets and musicians and painters; people will start becoming rebellious. So there has been a conspiracy down the ages to destroy the right hemisphere.

If you look into the whole phenomenon correctly, the right hemisphere is the East and the left hemisphere is the West. The East and the West are not going to meet outside; they are going to meet in these hemispheres inside. When we have become courageous enough to allow both the hemispheres to function totally, in unison, then immediately East and West will disappear and left and right also. Then there will be no rightist and no leftist; man will be one.

So just start moving towards feelings and emotions a little more and it will change. Keep this (a box) with you. And whenever you need me, just put it on your heart and remember me....

[A visitor asks: I’ve changed my question. I’d like to know why I fear having my navel touched?

Osho checks his energy.]

It has something to do with sex. Maybe in your childhood something happened to your sexual energy. The navel is very closely connected to the sex centre. The navel is the death centre; that’s why Japanese call it hara and they call suicide hara kiri. To commit suicide you have just to force a dagger in below the navel, two inches below the navel; and it is really a medically unbelievable thing that man dies immediately, with no pain, with no anguish.

Sex is life, and just close by is the centre of death, hara. It is not exactly at your navel but below the navel that you have become very much afraid. Death and life are naturally connected, connected deep down. If something goes wrong with the sex centre then something goes wrong with the death centre.

It happens to many people in childhood that sex is repressed; no child is allowed sex, no society allows it. He is not allowed to touch his own genital organs, he is not allowed to play with them. That happens so early that you cannot even remember it. Mm – the child in the crib is playing with his genital organs and the mother comes and takes his hand away. Now, it is a shock to the child, he starts becoming afraid of touching his own genital organs. And it is such a joy to touch them, it is so relaxing. The child really gets non-sexual orgasm through it; it is orgasmic.

In the East, particularly in primitive tribes, when a child will not go to sleep the mother will start playing with the genital organs. Immediately the child relaxes, and relaxes into a very very happy sleep. You can see from the face... so glad!

But just the opposite is the practice in all civilized countries: the child has not to be allowed. And the natural urge is to touch the genitals, to play with them; it is so beautiful. The child has no idea that it is wrong, he has no idea of guilt yet; he simply does whatsoever is natural. Again and again, again and again, he has to be stopped, again and again he has to be condemned. He can see the rejection on the mother’s face, on the father’s face, and by and by the energy shrinks and he becomes afraid.

People are afraid to go below the navel; they are hung up above the navel. The part between the navel and the genital organs is almost a forgotten part. That’s why people are ticklish too. If the child is allowed to play with the sexual organs he will not be ticklish. The tickle simply makes the sexual energy move, nothing else.

But this has to be dropped, and this has to be changed otherwise you will miss something very significant in your being. Just do one thing: whenever you have a friend, lie down and tell them to play with your navel. It will be difficult in the beginning but soon you will start enjoying the sensation of it. The only way to go out of anything is to do it; there is no other way.

Tell them to tickle you; go into laughter and enjoy it. One day, suddenly, that energy that has become frozen there, and of whose release you are afraid, will be released. Once it is released you will become orgasmic; otherwise you will never become orgasmic. Your orgasm will remain a local thing; it will not touch your whole body. It will not be a delight of energy, it will be just local, genital. It will not even go into your navel, it will not even touch your death point, and when the life and death points vibrate together, that’s what orgasm is.

People have orgasm very rarely. Women have it less because they are more afraid of death than man, so they don’t allow their death centre to vibrate with the life centre; they pull it, they hold it, they turn frigid. A man at least can have a local orgasm, but a local orgasm is nothing. It is just like a sneeze – absolutely meaningless. It has no ecstasy in it.

Tantra has worked very deeply on the death and the life centres and on how to vibrate them together, in harmony. When they vibrate in harmony great joy arises. In fact the first experience of samadhi comes from there. One has the first glimpse of god from there. God is not a theological phenomenon; god is a sexual phenomenon, it is the uttermost in sexuality. But man is so stupid that the thing has gone just topsyturvy: god has become anti-sexual. God is the peak of sexual orgasm.

There are many layers of orgasm. First, it can be just local, genital. Second, it can be total in your body. Your death and life centre both vibrate together; it has great depth. But if the woman you are making love with is also vibrating in the same way as you, her life and death centres also vibrating in the same way as yours are, then you will have a new depth which you cannot attain alone.

Then there is a third phenomenon which is attained only if you go very very deeply into each other, when you drop all fear. Two persons start functioning almost as one person; then the third depth is attained. The fourth and the final depth is attained when this unity of two persons, this couple, vibrates with the whole of existence. That is turiya, the fourth state of samadhi.

So start working on it. Just tell your friends to massage the navel. Sometimes in the beginning it will be painful and very fear-creating, but soon that will disappear. There is no other way to let it go. Only experiencing it again and again will prove to you that there is no need to fear, it is so beautiful. But it has to be dropped, and with its dropping, in many things your depth will go very very... profound layers will be touched....

Keep this box with you... It is an empty box, mm? – just a symbol that I share my emptiness with you. And that is the goal: if one can become empty, fullness happens out of it. To be empty is to become available to the fullness of existence.

Sometimes just put it on your navel so I can work on your navel too. And come back! Good.

[A sannyasin says she feels pulled off centre in relationships, so she doesn’t know what she wants.

Osho checks her energy.]

Just raise your hands, close your eyes, and feel like a tree in a solitary field. It is raining and the tree is delighted. It is windy and the tree is swaying. Forget the human body; become the body of the tree, and do whatsoever the tree will do when it is raining and it is windy.

Good, mm? You need not worry about it; it is a natural process. When you fall in love you have to go off centre, otherwise you cannot fall in love. Falling in love means you are going out of yourself to meet the other, to reach the other. You cannot remain in yourself, you will have to go out. Love is an outward journey so you cannot remain as centred as you are when you are not in any relationship.

Then you are centred. You can’t be as centred in love as you are in meditation. But nothing is wrong: sometimes to go off centre is perfectly beautiful.

To become too centred is also dangerous. To become too centred means to become too self-centred, and much ego can arise out of it. That’s why monks are the most egoistic people in the world, because they always remain in their centre; they never go out, they don’t need anybody. So great ego arises. Love is good to kill the ego.

Between love and meditation the real thing happens; moving between these two, the real thing happens. It is neither in centering nor in relating. It exists just between the two, in that balance –

when the pendulum is not going to the right and not going to the left, just in the middle. But that is not centering either; it is beyond both.

So don’t be worried about it; it is a natural phenomenon. Whenever you are alone, meditate, become centred again, and whenever you feel the urge to move, go off centre. Remember only one thing: when you are centred, become absolutely centred and when you go off centre, go absolutely off centre. Mm? try to reach to the extremes, because only if you move in the extremes do you flow, and flow is life, is aliveness. Don’t make a problem out of it, it is not a problem.

[A sannyasin says: It has been a very strange experience to be here. I have been alone a lot and simply enjoyed that – walking around, sitting and everything, just doing nothing.]

Good! In fact there is no need to do anything. If we can just enjoy being, all happens. Continue the way you are there, back home too.

Remember, man cannot do much, and whatsoever man can do will never satisfy him. Something from the beyond has to happen as a grace, as a gift. All that we can do is to become receptive to that gift. So enjoy being, walking, swimming, sitting. Slow down!

In the beginning it seems almost as if you are becoming lazy, mm? because so much has been put in the head:’Be active, do this, do that. Time is money – don’t miss it. Life is short, so rush. It is a great competition and struggle, and if you are just standing there like that you will miss all.’ So everybody has been forced to run and rush and compete and to always be in speed. Go fast: Even if you don’t know where you are going and for what, go fast!

That has taken all joy out of our life. It has created very very strained and tense beings on the earth.

The whole humanity is living under a great mountain of stress, and for no reason! So that has to be understood.

Relax, cool down, slow down. There is nothing to be achieved and there is nowhere to go. Delight in this moment, and slowly slowly you will feel everything is falling in tune with you and you are falling in tune with everything else. A great melody arises; one starts listening to the celestial music. You cannot show any results, any tangible results to anybody, because those are not tangible things.

And the result-oriented people, anyway, won’t understand them even if you show them. They are not commodities: they are such subjective experiences, so private and so intimate, that only one who loves you tremendously will be able to have a little glimpse of it, otherwise not. But you will know that things are changing and god is entering you.

So keep this slow pace. Never become a race horse; remember to remain a turtle. Race horses never reach and turtles have already reached, that’s why they are not in any hurry!

CHAPTER 9

10 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet means beyond, ama means darkness – beyond darkness. And everybody is living in darkness.

Until god has happened to you, you are in darkness, because god is the only light there is. One can be rich in darkness, one can be poor, one can be educated, one can be uneducated; one can be famous and one can be absolutely unknown, anonymous; one can be successful, one can be a failure – that doesn’t make much difference – but we all live in darkness till god happens. Remember that: success or failure are all alike; life and death are also alike. Unless god happens, nothing has happened. Unless that door has opened, no door has opened; we have been befooling ourselves; and man has created many things to befool himself with.

All the ways that we have invented to feel successful are the ways to somehow cover up our emptiness. Somebody becomes a president of a country and he feels very good, he feels he has arrived, and nothing has happened! A Jimmy Carter is a Jimmy Carter whether he is a president or not. The heart is in the same space; nothing has changed.

You may be poor and you can accumulate much money, but you remain the same; your money cannot make you rich. Your richness, your success, your victory, depends only on one thing – that god should happen to you. And god is ready to happen any moment but we are not looking for him. We are looking for ten thousand things except god. The day one is ready to look for him, he immediately happens. He has been waiting a long time for you... for everybody. He has been knocking on your door, but you are so full of noise that the still small voice is never heard. He comes in many ways but you go on missing him. Unless you are looking for him, you will not find him. We find only that for which we look, for which we look intensely; then our gestalt changes.

If you are not looking for flowers, you can go out of this garden without seeing single flower. When you look, only then are they there. They suddenly bloom in existence when you look for them; otherwise they are there but not for you. They don’t enter into your world; they remain part of the world outside but you remain unconnected with them.

God is everywhere but we are not looking for him. Start looking for him, start a a very deliberate search for him. Devote as much time as possible, as much energy as possible, to it. And one day suddenly it happens: whenever your thirst is really afire and you are aflame with desire for him, he happens. All that is needed is a thirst so deep that it touches your very being, hurts; the pain is felt in the heart. That pain is prayer, and that pain will take you beyond darkness.

Kavita means poetry. My approach towards reality is that of poetry, it is not of philosophy. Search for beauty and forget about truth. If you can find beauty you will find truth; if you cannot find beauty you will never find truth. When one starts searching for truth one becomes more and more hung up in the head, and the head is a barrier. The very word ’truth’ is a dry word, desertlike. It has no juice in it; it is a logical concept. So a seeker after truth becomes more and more heady and more and more loses the qualities of the heart.

My emphasis is on the heart. It is through the feeling, not through the thinking, that we arrive. It is through emotions that we feel god for the first time, not through argumentation. One has never been able to arrive through philosophy. k gives a thousand and one conclusions but they don’t satisfy; they are empty conclusions. The heart gives only one conclusion, but it is the conclusion; it quenches the thirst, it gives contentment.

Search for beauty, search for sensitivity. Think less, feel more. Put logic aside and follow love. Let tears flow from your eyes; they will cleanse you more than any austerity can do. No fast will cleanse you; only tears will. So that emphasis has to be remembered: be more and more poetic, feel the wonder of existence and the infinite mysteries that abound.

Everything is a mystery because everything remains unexplained.

Five thousand years of

philosophy and three hundred years of science have not given a single explanation; everything remains as unexplained as ever, as unknown as ever. Open those eyes of wonder, become a child again. That’s what I mean by poetry. Each child is born a poet; we destroy him. Each child knows how to dance and how to sing and how to feel wonder, but we don’t allow him.

Rather than feeling wonder, we initiate him into doubt, logic, reason, arithmetic. Sooner or later his heart closes, then he starts functioning only in the head; now he will miss his whole life. He will never know what joy is, he will never know what peace is. He will never come across anything which he can call a proof of god, because all those things happen only on the path of feeling, never on the path of reason.

[A new sannyasin, who is a business man, says that he gets a bad pain in his shoulder when he is in the marketplace. Doctors say it is psychosomatic and treat it with painkillers.]

I think that a few things can be of very great help. One is Rolfing and the second is acupuncture.

First try Rolfing; take all the ten session. It is available there so you can do it. If it doesn’t work...

ninety percent chances are that it will work. If it is psychosomatic it is going to work, and it must be psychosomatic.

You try that. And if it doesn’t work then try acupuncture next. You could have tried it here but...

It will go – nothing to be worried about. Just remember a few things. One is: a Canadian psychoanalyst, Doctor Hans Sehye, has been working his whole life on only one problem – that is stress. And he has come to certain very profound conclusions. One is that stress is not always wrong; it can be used in beautiful ways. k is not necessarily negative, but if we think that it is negative, that it is not good, then we create problems. Stress in itself can be used as a stepping stone, it can become a creative force. But ordinarily we have been taught down the ages that stress is bad, that when you are in any kind of stress you become afraid. And your fear makes it even more stressful; the situation is not helped by it.

For example, there is some situation in the market and that is creating a stress. The moment you feel that there is some tension, some stress, you become afraid that this should not be so: ’I have to relax.’ Now, trying to relax will not help, because you cannot relax; in fact, trying to relax will create a new kind of stress. The stress is there and you are trying to relax and you cannot, so you are complicating the problem.

When stress is there use it as creative energy. First, accept it; there is no need to fight with it. Accept it, it is perfectly okay. It simply says, ’The market is not going well, something is going wrong,’ mm?

– ’You may be a loser’... or something. Stress is simply an indication that the body is getting ready to fight with it. Now you try to relax or you take pain-killers or you take tranquillisers; you are going against the body. The body is getting ready to fight a certain situation, a certain challenge that is there: enjoy the challenge!

Even if sometimes you can’t sleep in the night there is no need to be worried. Work it out, use that energy that is coming up: walk up and down, go for a run, go for a long walk, plan what you want to do, what the mind wants to do. Rather than trying to go to sleep, which is not possible, use the situation in a creative way. It simply says that the body is ready to fight with the problem; this is no time to relax. Relaxation can be done later on.

In fact if you have lived your stress totally you will come to a relaxation automatically; you can go on only so far, then the body automatically relaxes. If you want to relax in the middle you create trouble; the body cannot relax in the middle. k is almost as if an Olympic runner is getting ready, just waiting for the whistle, the signal, and he will be off, he will go like the wind. He is full of stress; now that is no time to relax. If he takes a tranquilliser he will never be of any use in the race. Or if he relaxes there and tries to do TM he will lose all. He has to use his stress: the stress is boiling, it is gathering energy. He is becoming more and more vital and potential. Now he has to sit on this stress and use it as energy, as fuel.

Sehye has given a new name for this kind of stress: he calls it ’eustress’, like euphoria; it is a positive stress. When the runner has run he will fall into deep sleep; the problem is solved. Now there is no problem, the stress disappears of its own accord.

So try this too: when there is a stressful situation don’t freak out, don’t become afraid of it. Go into it, use it to fight with. A man has tremendous energy and the more you use it, the more you have of it.

Rolfing will be helpful. It is not going to help you relax; it will simply change your musculature, it will make you more vital. So this will go with Rolfing.

When it comes and there is a situation, fight, do all that you can do, really go madly into it. Allow it, accept it and welcome it. It is good, it prepares you to fight. And when you have worked it out, you will be surprised: great relaxation comes, and that relaxation is not created by you. Maybe for two, three days you cannot sleep and then for forty-eight hours you can’t wake up, and that is okay!

We go on carrying many wrong notions – for example, that every person has to sleep eight hours every day. It depends what the situation is. There are situations when no sleep is needed: your house is on fire, and you are trying to sleep. Now that is not possible and that should not be possible, otherwise who is going to put that fire out? And when the house is on fire, all other things are put aside; suddenly your body is ready to fight the fire. You will not feel sleepy. When the fire is gone and everything settled you may fall asleep for a long period, and that will do.

Everybody does not need the same length of sleep either. A few people can do with three hours, two hours, four hours, five hours, six, eight, ten, twelve. People differ, there is no norm. And about stress also people differ.

There are two kinds of people in the world: One can be called the race-horse type and the other is the turtle type. If the race-horse type is not allowed to go fast, to go into things with speed, there will be stress; he has to be given his pace. And you are a race-horse! So forget about relaxation and things like that; they are not for you. Those are for turtles like me! Mm? So just be a race-horse, that is natural to you, and don’t think of the joys that turtles are enjoying; that is not for you. You have a different kind of joy. If a turtle starts becoming a race-horse he will be in the same trouble!

You can get out of the market. It is so easy; the mind will say, ’Get out of the market, forget about it.

Just come and be here in the ashram.’ But you will not feel good. You will feel more stress arising because you will not feel your energy is engaged, and I will have to make you a race-horse again in something else. You can ask [the sannyasins who work in the ashram office]: I go on putting them into things!

So accept your nature. You are a fighter, a warrior; you have to be that way, and that’s your joy.

Now, no need to be afraid; go into it whole-heartedly. Fight with the market, compete in the market, do all that you really want to do. Don’t be afraid of the consequences, accept the stress. Next time you come you will be in a totally different kind of space. Once you accept the stress it will disappear.

And not only that, you will feel very happy because you have started using it; it is a kind of energy.

Don’t listen to people who say to relax; that is not for you. Your relaxation will come only after you have earned it by hard labour. One has to understand one’s type. Once the type is understood there is no problem; then one can follow a clean-cut line. Stress is going to be your way of life.

So do this and take Rolfing.

[A sannyasin couple ask about their relationship. They both say they enjoy fighting, but the woman feels stuck between jumping right in or jumping out of the relationship.]

Jump in, not out! If you both enjoy fighting then you are made for each other! That is the best relationship possible, mm?

Just do a few things. One is: whatsoever he says you should be like, that is his problem; that is none of your business to be worried about. He is simply stating his mind; don’t take it personally. When he says, ’You should be like this, what he is actually saying is that this is how he would like you; but that is his problem! If he likes you that way and you are not that way he is free to leave. Persist in being yourself: you need not change just because he says to change, because that will be phony.

If you feel like changing – not because he says but because of your feeling, then change. Then it will be authentic. Otherwise don’t pay much attention to what he says; that is his problem. He is worried so he shouts at you. Remain yourself and fight for your own being.

Love is just an intimate fight and nothing else. It is a very cultured fight, sophisticated, but it is a fight. Lovers are fighters. In fact be with anybody and immediately the fight starts, because you are different, the other is different, mm? You are a woman and he is a man, first. Then he has been brought up in one way, you have been brought up in a different way. You have different ideas, he has different ideas.

Nobody is wrong, just differences are there.

To attain to that maturity when you start respecting the other’s differences takes time. It will come but it takes time. It comes only when one has lived through many many fights and has burned oneself, wounded oneself and the other. Then slowly slowly, the wisdom arises. Wisdom is through experience; it is not knowledge. So anybody can give you the knowledge but it won’t work; you will have to attain to your own wisdom.

It will come slowly. It is costly; one has to pay for it through one’s life. Then one day one arrives at the point of seeing that it is just futile to ask the other to be somebody else other than who he or she is, and one has to accept that. In that acceptance love takes on a new colour, a new face, a new intimacy; love is no more a struggle.

The first phase is struggle, the second phase is totally different. But to reach to the second, the first has to be passed. And that’s what is happening in the modern world: people never pass the first.

If a fight arises, you drop him, he drops you, you change partners; again fight arises, you change partners; again fight arises, you go on changing. You never arrive at the second point, and the second is possible only when you remain intimate long enough. This fight is a fire. It will make you more ripe; go into it. Don’t jump out, jump in.

And let him say what he wants to. Maybe that is his way of creating a fight. Insist on being yourself.

But that needn’t make any difference: you go on loving, he goes on loving, fighting continues by the side; they can go parallel.

So I don’t think that you should separate; you should go deeper into it. It is going to give you something valuable – enjoy it!

CHAPTER 10

11 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Maya means illusion, veet means beyond – beyond illusion. Maya in itself is not good. Maya means that which only appears but is not; it is an hallucination. The English word ’magic’ comes from this root ’maya’... Veet Maya – it means one who has gone beyond illusion, mm? Good, Maya!

Nirguno means the formless, the attributeless, the quality-less. It is a definition of god.

God has no form, no attributes, no limitations. And that unlimitedness is hidden behind everybody; that is our within. God is not without. The formless is hiding in the form, the bodyless is residing in the body and the no-mind is the very core of the mind. To find god one has to go within; search without and all search is in vain.

Just have a look inside and all is found, even without searching all is found, because it is already there. But the mind tends to look outside, it is thrilled by the outside. There are millions of things there to attract its attention and it goes on running from one sensation to another. That is an endless process, one never comes to any end. One can go on and on; that’s how we have gone on life after life: sometimes searching for money, sometimes for power, sometimes for respect, sometimes for fame.

It is time now to look inwards, to close your eyes and see within. In the beginning it is difficult because the habit is to look out. One finds oneself very restless if one stops looking outside and starts looking in. Mm? just to sit for thirty minutes, forty minutes with closed eyes, unmoving, seems such an impossible task. But slowly slowly the habit changes and one starts feeling the joy, the silence, the tranquillity, that arises from within and one becomes more and more attracted towards it.

Once the taste has started happening then there is no problem. Then the without is just useless, futile; one knows it through one’s own experience. So one goes without only reluctantly, when it is almost a necessity; one goes when it is inevitable, otherwise one remains within oneself. Whenever one finds time one closes oneself inwards. There is the joy of all joys, there the ultimate resides.

That ultimate’s definition is nirguno.

Sanmarga means the right path. And the right path basically is a no-path. All paths are wrong because all paths take you away from yourself. A path is really needed to go away. When one wants to come to oneself no path is needed because one is already there. Just a recognition and the revolution happens. Just a remembrance, ’I am already there’ and all has happened instantly in that very moment. The path joins you with something that is far away. You are not far away from yourself; you are that self.

So sanmarga means right path, but right path means no-path. In following no path one comes to one’s own self; in dropping all paths one arrives. Search and you will be going astray from yourself.

All search is desire; desire creates distance. No search is desirelessness, and when there is no desire, where can you go? How can you go? In that non-going something explodes. In Japan that explosion is called satori; in India we call it samadhi. That is enlightenment. If one can just stop all going for a single moment the energy converges upon oneself and explodes. And the sun is not as bright as that explosion is; it is as if thousands of suns have suddenly arisen on the horizon. It is the very source of light and life and love.

That’s how one centres: leaning this way and that way, left and right, slowly slowly one centres in the middle. That’s perfectly true! Anything to say to me?

[Osho gives a name for a centre in the west.]

Mouna. It means silence, absolute silence – not only of the tongue, not only of the lips, but of the inner being too. It is not only that you don’t speak, but at the deepest layer there are no ripples of thought; then it is mouna. There is no outer expression, there is no inner thought emerging, nothing emerges. Within, without, there is complete silence. That is the goal of all meditations. To come to that point is to come home.

[A sannyasin says: My heart is beating!]

Yes, that is how it should be: when you come to me your heart has to beat fast! You have to go through a heart attack when you come to me, and one day the final thing happens – heart failure!

[She then says that her mind is wavering whether to stay here or leave.]

I know – just trust me! You can be here and start working. It happens to everybody in the beginning: the mind wavers. But once you get into this family, soon that disappears; then even when I want to send people for a few days they don’t want to go....

Even if only for a few days some work is there they don’t want to go, nobody wants to. One just has to get in tune with the family here. Once the tune has happened then this is your home and nowhere else.

CHAPTER 11

12 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss or blissfulness; iti means this or thisness – this is it. Bliss is not far away, it is close by; not even close by but within you, not even within you: you are it. The mind always thinks of that; the existence is this. The mind always desires the far away, the distant, and hence it goes on missing; it becomes too obsessed with the far away. In that very obsession it loses consciousness herenow. And all that is, is here: this shore is the other shore. This is the meaning of iti.

So search here, not there; search in this not in that. Forget the distant, it is illusory. The real is not distant, you are surrounded by it. To live in this is to be blissful. To live in that is to be miserable.

People live in that, that’s why they remain miserable. That is hell, this is paradise....

Sat means being, geet means song – the song of being. There are three possible ways to sing one’s life. One is intellectual, it is in the head. Ninety percent of people decide to be there because it is very efficient, it brings results. People who are result-oriented remain there in the head. But it is the most superficial. It is very clear-cut, well-defined, never confusing, you know where you are. One is never lost in it; one can control it, one can manipulate it, because the mind is a machine. But it is the most superficial part of your existence so it is clear but shallow. That clarity is not much use. At the cost of depth you attain to that clarity.

The second kind of song that is possible is of the heart, of the feeling. That is more confusing –

things are vague, boundaries not clearly defined. It is cloudy, a kind of mist surrounds the heart, but it has more depth than the head can ever have. The head has length, it is horizontal. Feeling has depth, it is vertical. With the head you will succeed. With the heart there is every possibility of failing because the heart is not a machine, it is not efficient, it does not work that way, it is not result-oriented. It is more of the moment; it doesn’t think of the future, it lives in the moment. It is risky. But remember, even if you succeed through the head, that is not worth much; failure through the heart is far more significant and enriching. It gives you intensity in life.

There is another song also – the ultimate song, the song of songs. That is of the being; that is even deeper than feeling. Thought is shallow, feeling is deep; being is beyond both, both shallowness and depth. The head is horizontal, the heart is vertical; the being is beyond both, it is transcendental.

All the meditations are meant, devised, to bring you first from the head to the heart, then from the heart to the being. And when you have come to the being you have come to god; being is god. Then a song explodes; your life has a grace, a benediction. That is called satgeet.

[A sannyasin who is leaving says: I am too much of a fighter. I fight for everything – for people, for love, for sex, for life. And also I am very tired of life and sometimes I love life. But it is very difficult to love.

Osho checks her energy.]

Come close to me. Just put your hands up dose your eyes, and if something starts happening in your body, allow it – any trembling, shaking. Be possessed by my energy and don’t hold it back; at least for this moment don’t be afraid.

I will take care of it. It is gone; don’t be worried. Simply forget about it. It will not haunt you.

Whenever you feel that it is coming, just put this box in your hands and remember me.

It is not really fear. To call it fear is wrong; it is something else. To reduce it exactly to what it is will be helpful. It is that you feel very lonely. Out of your loneliness arises the shadow of fear. You are simply lonely, that’s all, and you have become afraid of anything that makes you more aware of loneliness.

Sometimes it happens that if you are in love you will feel more lonely in contrast. When love disappears or love is lost then one falls into a ditch, in a valley. So one does not want to see the peaks of it, because finally they land one in the valley; hence one becomes afraid of the peaks.

One does not want to be in deep relationship because all relationships end and one is left lonely again. After a relationship loneliness hurts more, so one keeps aloof – no relationship, no love, nothing. Then one never will feel loneliness, that’s the strategy.

But you can allow me to be with you, to be inside you, and the loneliness will disappear. This is a love affair that needs no ending, and with this relationship all other relationships will become possible. If you can allow me to be in your heart, you can allow anybody, then there is no problem. If you have known the highest peak of love, then who is worried about small hills? And it is going to happen –

just help me. I beg you to help me!

Come back, and if you want to come back forever, then come back forever! I will need you here....

Next time you come things will be different.

[The sannyasin says that she feels the need to be alone – she’s afraid to be in a community.]

Mm, that fear I have to destroy; that’s how you have been remaining lonely. I will help you to indulge in many relationships....

I know how to destroy everything! Just start thinking of coming here, and in the new commune, when we move, a place will be there for you.

I will need many painters around me. The many things I cannot say can be painted. I need poets, painters, dancers – all kinds of crazy people!

[The sannyasin then says she finds it difficult to start something new – she would like to paint for children but feels she’s not able to.]

Do one thing: if you want to paint something for children, don’t think about it; rather, become a child and do it. That’s the way to do a painting for children. If you think too much about it, children won’t be able to understand it. You have to be a child. Just dose your eyes and think of yourself as a three-year-old child. If you are going to make a painting for three-year-old children then become a three-year-old child. Forget all about painting and all about art and techniques. Just take colours and start playing with them like a three-year-old.

And the painting will arise; those three-year-olds will understand it. In Zen they say: If you want to paint a bird, become a bird; if you want to paint a bamboo, become a bamboo; there is no other way.

Know it from within. It is difficult to become a bamboo; it is not difficult to become a child because you have once been a child. Maybe you have been a bamboo too but that has been so long ago.

Maybe millions of years ago you were a bamboo; to bring that memory back will be hard. But you were a child just a few years ago; you can revive that memory. Become a child and paint.

Never be worried about the beginning and never be worried about the end; both these things are difficult. Whenever a person is afraid to begin or feels it is very difficult to begin, the same person will find it very difficult to end; it is a logical phenomenon. Beginning is difficult because in fact no beginning is possible. Whatsoever we begin is in the middle. How can we begin anything? The world has existed, people have existed for so long, paintings have been done, painters have been painting; how can you just begin? There is no beginning; really you start in the middle. Many things have already been done, and we are in the middle. So first the problem is how to start, and then the second problem arises of how to stop? – because everything seems to be non-ending. It is! Again you have to stop in the middle.

No painting has a beginning and no painting has an end. The beginning and the end are arbitrary: because we have to begin, we begin, and because we have to end, we end. Otherwise there is no beginning and no end to any painting. How can there be? You don’t have any beginning, you don’t have any end; everything is in the middle, always in the middle, and everything is incomplete.

But remember, the incomplete paintings are far more beautiful than those which are thought to be completed. The incomplete songs are more beautiful than the ones which seem to be complete, because the incomplete thing has the quality of life. It still breathes because it is not complete.

There is an ancient tradition in India that if you are going to make a great temple, never complete it.

So all the great temples are incomplete. If you go into the details, then something is missing. That missing thing keeps them alive. It is beautiful, because if something is really complete then what is the point of its being here? – it is dead. Perfection is death, imperfection is life.

So start playing with the paints, and when you feel that the game is over and you have enjoyed it, end it. And think of coming!...

[A sannyasin reports on a meditation Osho gave her three months ago to watch the breath. She says: It is quite rewarding and opening... I’ve also been on the path of love – surrendering to existence, to you. Somewhere I read in one of your lectures that the two don’t co exist and one shouldn’t take the two paths.]

They are not for you. those words are not for you. They can co-exist in you, you can easily maintain both.

Mm, it is natural, it is natural. I must have said those words to somebody for whom it was not possible.

It is going very well; just go into it. Both are good for you, and in fact you will grow through both together. If you stop one, you will be cutting yourself into two parts.

So don’t be worried, mm? And whenever you come across something in my words which is going against your experience in any way, immediately come and check it, because I am saying so many things to so many people and each person is so different.

For example, I am saying this to you. Soon somebody will read it and he may try to bring both together. It may not be for him then he will get into trouble. He will not be able to manage either; in trying to manage both, he will mismanage both.

So whenever something goes against your grain, then immediately check. If something is going with your grain and everything is flowing, there is no need to check; then it is for you. But the ultimate criterion is your experience. It is good – continue. Good.

[A sannyasin says: The last time I came up and sat in front of you, you said that I was tricky, and ever since that darshan I’ve been seeing the extent of my trickiness.

Osho gives her a ’come close darshan’.]

I take away your trickiness now! Nothing to worry about. Things are going well – you will not be tricky any more. I just told you so that it would surface; it surfaced, mm? – now it can be dropped easily. You are not basically a tricky person, it is not your characteristic, but it was there; just a tiny part, everybody has it, but now it has surfaced. And saying it helped to bring it up. Saying it made it conscious; you became alert about it.

Sometimes I have to say things, sometimes I have to say them in such an exaggerated way that is not true to the fact, because only if I exaggerate it will it come to the surface, otherwise not. So I am not much concerned about facts; I am much concerned about transforming you. Even if I feel sometimes that a lie is going to help, I can be a liar. I don’t worry about it. But it did its work. You are in a totally different kind of space now: enter into it and live in it.

This is the whole purpose of being with me, that everybody should drop trickiness. cunningness.

There is no need. Here, you can be absolutely authentic and new. That’s why we are trying to create this small alternative world. Outside it is impossible to be authentic because the people live on insincerity. And everybody is insincere; if you are sincere, you will be at a loss, you will be cheated, you will be deceived and you will remain miserable.

Here, we are trying slowly slowly to create a true, authentic world where people can be true and nobody will take offence, where people can be true and nobody will exploit them. Good!

[A sannyasin, returning to the west, says she has been in a relationship for nine years; is it time to have a child? He feels she is young yet and should wait. There is no need to be in a hurry, he says; in a hurry you will do a lousy job! One needs to mature, to make the right preparations in oneself before one thinks of bringing a child into the world.

So love more, meditate more and become more and more joyful. I would like my sannyasins to have children, otherwise how am I going to get new sannyasins? – it will be difficult! But I would like you to wait. With that also I am going to do a great experiment. I will start allowing my sannyasins to have children only when I feel that they are ready; then we can create a really beautiful world. It can be a model world.]

CHAPTER 12

13 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, lali means redness – redness of love. Red represents life, it represents blood, it represents passion. It is not only the colour of the flowers, it is not only the colour of the rising sun; it is also the colour of rising consciousness, of blooming consciousness. It is not only the colour of blood and the blood circulation; it is the colour of life flowing, circulating, moving.

That’s why red has been chosen by two kinds of people in the world; they are very different, opposite and yet they have chosen red as their symbol and the saints of the East have chosen red as their symbol. Communists have chosen it because it represents revolution, it represents blood and violence. And the mystics in the East have chosen it because it represents vitality of the soul.

Red is not only the colour of life in body; it is also the colour of life in spirit....

[A sannyasin, returning to the west, says he is nervous about seeing his children for the first time in three years. His wife has married again and they have never written to him although they used to be close.]

The best thing is not to disturb them.

[That] is a long time and they must have forgotten by now, they must have readjusted themselves to the new family. Now it will be just a disturbance to enter into their lives; it will not be any help to them.

[The sannyasin says: It sort of cancels out a lot of dreams and fantasies that I’ve had.]

Your dreams are not the thing: if you love them it is better to leave them alone.

But they are perfectly okay – that much you know?...

So just let them be. If you want to visit them, you can just visit casually but don’t disturb them.

Just be casual; just visit to say hello, and disappear again. That’s what is required if you love them; otherwise you will be creating a disturbance and they will start thinking of you and will revive their memories about you. They will feel close to you again, and naturally then they will feel far away from their new father. Between their mother and themselves there will be a barrier; you will stand there.

Now things have settled. And it takes time; they must have suffered for years. Mm? slowly slowly the wound has healed, now they have accepted it; you will be opening their wound again. So just be there casually. If you want to see them, just see them, say hello and disappear again. And next time you feel like that, be casual again, say hello and disappear, so they will know that this is the type of man you are: you sometimes come, say hello and then you disappear. They will not be disturbed....

Your ego would like to disturb them; that has to be remembered....

Yes, that has to be avoided; your ego would like to go and see that they are still close to you and....

[The sannyasin says: I would like to take them along with me if I could.]

That is not right... that’s not right, mm?

Love knows how to renounce when renunciation is needed; love knows how to sacrifice when sacrifice is needed. So this will be a sacrifice of the ego and the dreams, but those are just dreams and nothing to be worried about. Just go and see if they are happy, then you should be happy.

And make them feel more happy wherever they are; act in such a way that they feel more in tune with their new family. Don’t create any alternative for them.

[The sannyasin says: My appearance is automatically creating an alternative. Just because I’m a sannyasin, it’s another way of life and it’s new to them.]

Yes, that too is good – you can just say that you have renounced everything, you are a sannyasin!

You have just come to say hello to them, that’s all, mm?

And come back....

[A sannyasin says: Last week after making love, some madness came up in me, death and blackness too, very strongly.

Osho checks his energy.]

It was really good, mm? – you had a glimpse of sanity for the first time in your life, that’s why it looks insane. People live in a kind of madness they call sanity. What people call or think of as normal is not normal, it is pathological, but pathology is the usual so it is thought to be normal. When for the first time your so-called sanity is abandoned and existence explodes in you, it looks insane, because existence is so vast and so huge you cannot contain it. Your capacity to contain is very small and the whole ocean just drops into you. You have a small cup and you cannot contain that flood, hence it looks mad; otherwise the experience has been beautiful.

It is almost always so, that it happens after love-making, because love is the only natural process through which you are still connected with the universe and its sanity. Everything else has been contaminated by the society, corrupted, twisted and turned into something unnatural. That’s why sex remains so appealing, because that is the only natural way to become sane for a few moments; otherwise you remain insane. But it has been good; don’t be worried. It will happen again and again: enjoy it!

And be perfectly alert when it happens; if alertness remains there is no danger. That explosion can be dangerous only if you lose consciousness. Then you can do something which later on you will be unable to sort out, to figure out what it was. So the only thing to be remembered is that next time it happens, just sit silently and watch it all, become a witness. Let it happen and become a witness.

It is an incredible experience that has happened; allow it to happen again. If you become frightened it won’t happen again; you will shrink.

This is what the tantra experience is; it is a wild experience of cosmic consciousness. So go into it; there is no need to be worried.

[A sannyasin, at a previous darshan, said she had much fear. Osho suggested some groups.

Tonight, after the tantra group, she says it was good, but it wasn’t perfect.

Osho checks her energy.]

Your fear does not allow you to go deeply into anything....

Two things: one is, every night for forty minutes live your fear. Just sit in the room, turn the light off and start becoming afraid. Think of all kinds of horrible things – ghosts and demons and whatsoever you can imagine. Create them, imagine that they are dancing around you and trying to grab you...

all evil forces. Become really shaken up by your own imagination and go to the very extreme of imagination. They are killing you, they are trying to rape you, they are suffocating you, mm? And not one or two, many; from every side they are doing things to you. Get into the fear as deeply as possible, and whatsoever happens go through it.

You have repressed fear in your childhood; you have been trying to be brave. You have always been against fear so you have created a facade of bravado. But that is only a mask; deep down you are a small child still afraid. So throw the mask and become the child. Do this meditation every day for at least one week.

And the second thing: in the day time or at any other time, whenever fear arises, accept it; don’t reject it. Don’t think that it is something wrong that you have to overcome; it is natural. By accepting it and by expressing it at night, things will start changing.

After two weeks report to me: write a letter about how you are feeling.

[Another tantra group participant says it was helpful but now, post-group, be feels be took in all the group’s energy. Osho studies his energy.]

There is no problem: the energy is there. You are just feeling this because in a Tantra group so many people’s energy is available; now you are alone. A Tantra group is like an orchestra: so many people playing on so many instruments, mm? The whole energy of the group takes you high. Now you are solo, you have to work out your own energy. But that’s how it has to be done. One cannot remain in a group forever.

And there is no need to be afraid; it will come back. Just start moving into it. Are you in some relationship with somebody?

[He answers: No.]

That may be the cause – you need some relationship. So find somebody!

[The sannyasin says he’s fighting himself about love and relationships.]

There is no need to fight. It is better to fight a woman rather than fighting with yourself. Mm? find a woman and fight with her – that is what love is. There is no need to fight with yourself.

And an Italian without a woman doesn’t look right! Just find a woman.

Dhiren. It means two things: first, it means patience, and second, it means wisdom, and they both are two aspects of one phenomenon. Wisdom is attained through patience and wisdom leads to more patience. Knowledge is easy to get, it is cheap. Wisdom takes time. Knowledge is like seasonal flowers, but wisdom is like a Cedar of Lebanon: it takes hundreds of years to grow.

So only those who are patient can afford to be wise; the impatient are debarred. This is one of the reasons why this century is not so wise – because people want everything instantaneously. They like satori, samadhi, as instantly as they like coffee.

Remember that: be patient and wisdom will follow it. If one can be infinitely patient then the miracle can happen – wisdom can happen immediately too. But the paradox is that you should not ask that it happen immediately. You should be ready to wait forever and ever. If it takes eternity it is okay; then it can happen immediately.

[Osho asks the Japanese translator present if he knows any Japanese sannyasin who knows anything of Zen gardening.... I would like to make the new place almost Zen, so just find out!]

CHAPTER 13

14 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Osho gives sannyas to someone.]

Come here! Close your eyes. Just listen to the sounds, all the sounds – the flute, the dog barking –

and if something starts happening in your body, any shaking, trembling, swaying, go with it. If your breathing changes, you allow it. Listen....

Chandra means the moon. The moon represents a few things. It represents the feminine, the soft, the poetic, and one has to move towards the feminine, towards the soft, towards the poetic.

To live outside oneself, logic is enough, arithmetic is enough. To live outside oneself one needs to be hard, violent, aggressive, one needs to be competitive, cruel, cunning; but to go inside just the opposite is needed. Logic is a barrier there, and hardness of being won’t allow you to go in. One has to become soft, one has to melt; one has to disappear as a rock and become a flower. Only the flowers become enlightened, only the flowers come to know what life is all about. The rocks on,!y struggle but they never arrive, and the flower has already arrived.

[She has booked for the Encounter group.]

It will be helpful. And then just meditate and do the Sufi dancing. Sing and dance, and be here, mm? – things will happen just by being here. And whenever you can manage, do a few more groups, otherwise there is not such a necessity.

Rikta means zero, emptiness, nothingness. One has to disappear utterly then the space is created for god to be. We are the barrier, we have to die. If we live, god is dead; if we die, god becomes alive.

You must have heard Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous statement ’God is dead.’ And it was perfectly true for Nietzsche. He was an egoistic philosopher; god was certainly dead for him. As far as he was concerned he was stating a truth, it was his truth: ’god is dead’. If you are too much then god is dead, because there is no space left for god to be. If you die god starts becoming alive, god starts breathing again. Both cannot exist together, and that’s what the human mind wants to happen.

That is not possible, it is not in the very nature of things.

It is as if you want the darkness and the light to exist together in your room. You would like the beauties of darkness and the light both together, simultaneously... the silence of darkness, the infinity, the velvety touch, and the light, the fearlessness that happens in light, the sharpness and clarity. You would like both to exist together but that is not possible, because darkness is only the absence of light, so light cannot be both present and absent together. Either light is present then darkness is not, or light is absent then darkness is.

So is the case with man and god; god and man never meet, they can’t meet. You cannot see god.

You are the only barrier in seeing; when you are not there god is seen. When there is no seer then god is seen; when there is nobody left to be enlightened in you, enlightenment is. That state of space is called rikta.

Gather courage to disappear, to evaporate. And all that I can do for you is just help towards disappearing.

[The new sannyasin asks what kind of work she should do – she has tried many things but found none satisfactory.]

Then do one thing: just finish things there and come here! Then I will teach you what to do, mm?

We have to bring the whole of Germany here; just come! My feeling is that nothing will satisfy you.

All things that you have been doing or all that you will do, will be the same. You don’t need different work but a different being. You don’t need a different object to work upon, you need a different perspective to see things.

You can go on changing work but every kind of work has its limitations and its bondages. You can’t find anything that has no bondages... even art. If you do non-commercial art then the problem arises of how to sell it. If you can’t sell it, you starve; if you starve you can’t paint. If you want to sell it you have to think of the consumer; then you have to paint something that he needs, not that which you would like to paint – so again the same thing.

This whole world is involved in one game only. You can go on changing your roles but the game remains the same, the pattern remains the same. You would like to teach children, you would like to enjoy teaching them, but their parents are there, the education system is there and they can’t allow you freedom because they are interested in their children’s future. They are not worried about you, you are just a servant; you have to do the job that their parents want to be done. You may not like it, you may think it even harmful to the children. You may think that this is going to destroy these children and you will certainly feel, ’I am being imprisoned – I cannot do that which I want.’ But if you want to do that, nobody wants you to be a teacher there.

That’s why I am planning to create a small alternative world of our own where limitations can be dropped and you can be allowed to do your thing, and still your thing can be respected, valued, used. So finish things and come here – I will give you a different perspective, mm? Good.

Sat means right, marga means path – right path. There are paths and paths; there are right paths and there are wrong paths. The right path goes through the heart and the wrong path only goes round and round in the head.

The wrong path continues and continues. It is a vicious circle: one thing leads to another and another and another; it is ad infinitum, there is no end to it. You never arrive. You are always frustrated, always hoping and always frustrated. Mm? the goal is always there just on the horizon.

It looks very close by: you feel just a few steps more or a few miles and you will have arrived. But as you proceed towards the goal, the goal goes on receding and the distance between you and the goal remains constantly the same. That’s how people are living: somebody is searching for money and somebody is searching for power and respect and all those things, but one never arrives. One goes on and on and one dies before one arrives.

The right path is to jump out of this vicious circle, to jump out of the thinking process, to become a non-thinking energy, to fall into the heart, to escape from the imprisonment of logic into the freedom of love. Then suddenly things start working, things start happening. Life starts falling together and a unity and an integration arises and you start feeling centred. For the first time you are not hoping but living. And when the hope disappears, frustration disappears, because frustration is only a shadow, a lengthened shadow of hope. When there is no hope, the frustration has gone, then you live in the moment, you enjoy the small things of life. And the moment you enjoy them, they are no more small things; then the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Lived, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Lived totally, the world becomes god and this moment turns into eternity.

[The new sannyasin asks: How can I so concentrate that whatever is necessary I decide to do?]

Just wait. Pass through a few groups, mm? and then you will have a better understanding of exactly what your need is.

Concentration is never the need, but people have been taught that it is. What actually is needed is awareness, not concentration, and they are different phenomena. Concentration is a tense effort; you have to force yourself. It is will against nature, and it is tiring, it is an unnecessary exertion and one never blooms out of it; it creates worry.

Awareness is a totally different phenomenon. It is spontaneous; it is not through will but through understanding. By seeing life in a more clear-cut way one starts becoming more alert, more aware.

When one is more aware, one can do all that is needed and without any tension. If sometimes it is needed to pour your whole energy into one thing you can, but there is no forced effort in it. Because there is no forced effort you never feel tired. It doesn’t create any worry, it doesn’t create any mental pathologies.

It is concentration that has created all kinds of neurosis in the world. We don’t need concentration, we need meditation, and they are different worlds. Concentration focuses on something outside and meditation is simply a relaxed consciousness inside; it is not objective, it is subjective.

Just wait: participate in meditations, do a few groups. I will give you certain groups which will make you more alert and then when you have finished a few groups remind me again. Then your question will have changed. It is a wrong question. I cannot answer it because any answer will be wrong. You are asking something which if answered will create trouble for you, it won’t help.

Just wait a little more. Good.

Prem means love, ahimsa means non-injuring. It is one of the greatest findings of the Eastern mystics, the importance of not injuring anybody.

The man who emphasised it the most was

Mahavira; it became his basic fundamental message. But his followers went to the extreme and destroyed the whole teaching.

The teaching was not to injure; it was not only meant that you were not to injure others, you were included in it: you were not to injure yourself either. But what the disciples did was to think that they were not to injure anybody, so they stopped injuring everybody and started injuring themselves; that was easier. The violence turns upon oneself, the sadist becomes the masochist, but nothing basically changes. You were angry with others, now you are angry with yourself; you were trying to dominate others, now you are trying to dominate yourself. You wanted to kill others, now you are committing suicide, a slow kind of suicide.

For twenty-five centuries in India the followers of Mahavira have been doing that: injuring themselves. So the whole teaching went down the drain. And that’s a natural possibility. If one is violent and tries not to be violent, then where will the violence go? It has to have some outlet; it turns upon oneself.

Ahimsa simply means reverence for life; you are included in it. I always emphasise that you are included in it because that fallacy has been committed once; it should not become committed again.

You have not only to love others, you have to love yourself; in fact you have to love yourself first, only then can you love others. That reverence for life has to become reverence for yourself, then it will become reverence for others.

[A sannyas has just returned from the west, where she was able to be with her mother when she died: I think I helped her and it was an experience for me.]

Good. Death is always a great experience if we allow it. If we don’t close ourselves to it, it is one of the greatest experiences in life. But people are so afraid of death that they simply close themselves, they don’t live it. And when a person like a mother dies it is a really incredible experience; because your life started with your mother, now she is dying.

The death of your mother can go to the very foundation of your being. It can help you to be disillusioned. It can open up new doors of being. It can make you aware that time is death, that only eternity is life and one has to search and seek for the eternal. Time is just an opportunity to seek the eternal. If we become too engaged in temporal things we are missing the opportunity, and sooner or later death will come. And the opportunity lost cannot be recovered.

If you can be available to some beloved’s death you will start falling into deep silence, into deep meditation. And you will not be disturbed by trivia. If one is not disturbed by death then one is not disturbed by anything else; that is the criterion. If you can pass through the experience of death, unscathed, unscarred, then something of a valuable insight has arisen in you. It was good that you went.

[At a previous darshan a sannyasin, who was crippled by polio four years ago, said he disliked the constant attention his disability received. Osho suggested he wear a sign ’I am crippled. Please don’t ask me about my leg. Thank you!’

Tonight he said it helped him to accept his situation, but he still feels frustrated; he wants to dance totally.]

Be a total cripple! – that’s what totality should mean to you. Just accept it and enjoy it.

[The sannyasin asks: Will it become better?]

Yes, it will. If you can accept it and enjoy it, it will start changing. The rejection of anything is always a barrier to change; you create a division between you and your leg. Somehow you are ashamed of it, somehow you don’t like it the way it is, you don’t respect it, and it is only respect that will change the situation.

Feel grateful: at least you have the leg; there are people who don’t have legs! Nothing is wrong in it, there is nothing to be worried about; it is just comparison. Just think of a world where all are crippled and one man is born who is not crippled. He will be in the same position as you are, because then dancing with all the crippled people, he will think, ’I am not dancing as totally as they are. I am not totally in my crippledness because I am not crippled.’ It is just comparison.

One can transform any situation by looking at it positively. So simply accept it; this is the way god wants you to be. Now why not be a perfect cripple? Do you think that if you were not crippled problems wouldn’t be there? Then why are there so many people here not crippled but still having problems?

It is good that you only have a crippled leg; people have crippled minds, crippled hearts. You have a very small problem. Don’t fuss about it too much, mm? – just forget about it; accept and forget.

Do whatsoever you can do, and within your limits be total. You can’t have somebody else as your criterion. Somebody is a fast runner and you cannot run; even if you are not crippled, you are not an Olympic runner. But nobody bothers about it; why should one bother? Whatsoever the given situation, make the most out of it, and you will be surprised that if you can make the most out of it, everything that can happen to a man, will happen.

Simply forget about it. But respectfully forget about it, mm? – not that you keep it at the back just to avoid it, you keep yourself occupied with something else. That is not respect. Respectfully, mm?

– be loving to the leg: massage it, play with it. Just give some enthusiasm to the leg and say to it,

’Don’t be worried. I am not worried – why are you worried? Everything is perfectly okay!’ Things will start changing, energy will start moving more.

[A sannyasin asks about the meaning of his name.]

I have also forgotten the meaning. Really, I’m not joking! Just remind me of what I told you. Try!

Just see my problem: you have only one name and I have fifty thousand names to remember. And when I give a name I create the meaning. Just remind me a little bit. Mm? You don’t remember at all? You remember little bits. Just remind me a little bit then I will come to it. Close your eyes and remember....

In Sanskrit one word can mean many things, that’s the problem. A single word can have twelve meanings and many nuances to it, and sometimes all very different from each other. That is the beauty of Sanskrit; it is a very poetic language. I don’t think that there is any other language which can be compared to Sanskrit as far as poetry is concerned. And the poetry is possible because it is a very loose language. You can change the meaning very easily, you can create new flavours in the meaning, very easily.

So when I give you a name you have to remember it! Otherwise next time you ask me, I may give you another meaning of it and that will be more confusing.

CHAPTER 14

15 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin and her young son are present. She says: It’s very difficult for me – I feel he is very strong and I don’t feel strong at all. I don’t know what to do in certain situations.]

Let him be strong! Why should you be worried about his strength? It is good. He has to be strong and the mother has to be soft. He has to be strong; only then can he grow into an individual. If he is soft and the mother is strong, he will be killed. That’s what happens to many people: the mother is too strong and they are soft, or the mother would not allow them to be strong. Then they go on hanging around the mother for their whole life. Even if they are old and the mother is dead and gone they are still holding on to her apron strings; deep down they still psychologically depend on her.

That becomes pathology. Then the man may start looking at his wife as if she is his mother. He cannot live without a mother; he needs somebody to mother him.

Because of this tendency, breasts have become so important. Artists go on painting breasts, sculptors go on sculpting breasts, poets go on writing about breasts; it seems to be really a great obsession. Basically it is just an indication that these people are still hankering for the mother; the breast represents the mother. If children are free of the mother, the breast will disappear from poetry and films and painting. They will take the right proportion, they will be natural parts of the body. Right now it seems that it is not the woman who has breasts but the breasts who have the woman; the woman seems to be secondary. This is a very pathological state.

Children have to be very strong, so help him to be strong. It will be difficult for you to manage because the stronger he is, the more trouble he will create for you; if he is weak, there is no trouble.

But one has to be strong in life: life creates trouble, life is risky, it is challenging. If he is dull and stale and just dead, he will sit in a corner and will not give you any inconvenience but then he is not alive! If he is alive he will create many many problems for you. You have to face them. That’s what it means to be a mother: to face those problems. And by facing them you will also grow, by giving him freedom and strength you will also grow. Mother and child grow together.

Remember always, the day the child is born the mother is also born. Before that you were just a woman, not a mother. Once the child is born you are a separate phenomenon, a mother; something has bloomed in you. And now the growth of the child will be the growth of the mother too. If one day you can help the child to be completely free of you, you will also attain to your inner freedom. So help him to be strong.

[To the son:] It is good.... Create trouble!

Daya means compassion, and compassion is the highest flowering of love. In love a little bit of lust remains; love remains contaminated with the earth. Love has something of the sky in it and something of the earth in it. It is dual: its body belongs to the matter, its soul belongs to consciousness.

Compassion is pure soul, it is pure sky: it has no matter around it. It is the ultimate blooming of the flower. Even the flower disappears in it, only fragrance remains.

Shanti means silence, deva means god – god of silence. Help him to become as silent as possible.

By being silent yourself, he will learn.

Children are imitators. If you sometimes find something in your child which you don’t like, look within yourself, you will find it there; it is reflected in the child. The child is only a sensitive response. The child is simply there imbibing you, repeating you, imitating you. So if something wrong appears in the child, rather than putting it right there, put it right in yourself, and you will be surprised: the chi!d drops it automatically. The child does not only depend on the mother for physical food, he depends on her in every way – for spiritual food also. So if you become silent, the child will follow it, he will learn it unknowingly; if you become meditative, he will become meditative.

Whenever parents come to me and they complain about their children, they are not aware of what they are doing, because my own observation is that if something is wrong with the child, it must have come from the parents. It is almost always so: ninety-nine percent of it comes from the parents; the smaller the child, the more is the percentage. When the child becomes a little bigger and starts moving in society, then of course he learns from others too, but in the ultimate account, almost ninety percent always comes from the parents. So whatsoever you want the child to become, be.

Be silent, be compassionate, be loving, be joyous, and you will be surprised that just by your being that, the child starts imbibing those qualities. And this will be the greatest thing for him, if he can imbibe silence.

[The vipassana group is present. One participant says: There’s some conflicts in the technique for me. Before I came I was watching the breath here, (indicating his nose) and it was working fine. I went into Vipassana here and I’m watching the breath here (indicating his navel).]

All three are possible alternatives. Either you can watch the breath where it touches the nose or you can watch it at the very end where it raises up your belly, you can watch the whole process going in, coming out, or you can watch the gaps. But the real thing is the same – watching. Where you focus the watching irrelevant; these are just excuses for watching. So you can do any, whichever suits you, but stick to one because if you get confused that will be a disturbance.

All are good. It is not that this way is better and that way is not so good. All are the same, but everybody has to choose one, any that feels good for you. There are a few people who cannot feel it in the belly – they are not so aware there; it is better for them to choose to watch at the nose.

[The participant then says: During Vipassana I got ill. I use a kind of pranayama usually but the leaders said don’t use any breathing techniques.... Can I use the pranayama just for health things?]

Yes, you can use it – but don’t mix it up with the Vipassana.

Mm, you can use it, you can use it separately; that is no problem.

CHAPTER 15

16 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Aseem means the unbounded, the infinite. Start living in the infinite, because that is our true reality.

The idea that we are finite is just an idea, it does not correspond to reality; hence it creates much misery. Once you start thinking of yourself as finite you are constantly in struggle with the infinite.

By being finite we become many, by becoming infinite only one remains. Then there is no possibility of any conflict, and when all possibilities of conflict cease there is peace. Peace cannot be attained.

only by mental efforts; it needs a new spiritual vision.

Don’t think of yourself as the body – not that you are not the body: you are the body plus. Never end anywhere. Go on thinking of yourself in bigger and wider terms. You are the sun too because without the sun you would not be alive. You are the earth too; that’s what you go on eating every day. You are the air too; without it you are gone. You are this whole universe, this whole universe crisscrosses in you. You are just the crossroad of millions of things passing through you.

It is just as if you go on drawing lines through one point: the point will become thicker and thicker and thicker; more lines pass and the point becomes very thick – that is the ego. Start taking lines away and slowly slowly the ego disappears. One day you come to know that the ego was only a construct of crossing lines. It was not a reality, just an illusion.

When you think of yourself as finite you become the ego; when you drop the finite the ego disappears, and the disappearance of the ego is the arrival of god. Think of yourself as the universe.

In the beginning it looks crazy but soon the heart starts flowing that way.

Because it corresponds with reality, it comes easily, spontaneously; one day you suddenly see that you are connected with everything that exists. You cannot exist without them, they cannot exist without you; it is a great interdependence. And the sheer complexity of it is a mystery....

Deva means god, ragi means in love within love with god. We may know it, we may not, but our object of love is always god. Whenever we fall in love we fall in love with god. It may be just a glimpse and the glimpse may disappear, but we have fallen in love with god; it is always so.

When you fall in love with a woman you have seen a glimpse of the divine. It is not really the woman that you have fallen in love with; she has been just a window, a beautiful window but still a window.

You have seen something beyond, it may have been just a flash; that’s why it is so difficult to explain your love affair to anybody.

If somebody asks, ’Why have you fallen in love with this woman?’ it is almost inexplicable. And if you try to explain it looks absurd, even to you. Whatsoever answer you give seems to be wrong, and not to give any answer also doesn’t seem right. But the problem is that you have not fallen in love with this woman at all: you have fallen in love with something beyond.

It is as if you have seen a sunset through a window. Now the sun is gone, it is dark outside and you cannot believe how you fell in love with this window. There seems to be no reason at all, but you cannot deny that something happened, something mysterious happened.

Wherever love happens it is always between you and god. Sometimes you have glimpsed him in a flower, sometimes in a star, sometimes in a song, sometimes in the giggle of a child. God comes in so many ways but all these are fragments of god.

Once you start understanding that all love is towards god, just as all rivers are flowing towards the ocean, notwithstanding their directions... One river is going to the north, another is going to the south, some other river is going to the east, some other to the west: notwithstanding their direction they are all moving, groping unconsciously, they are probing and groping for the ocean. They may not be able to answer why; and man also is not able to answer the question why, but we live for that, we move towards that.

Once it becomes conscious, that is sannyas. You still fall in love with a woman but no more only with the woman; in fact you are grateful to the woman that she allowed you a glimpse of god. You still fall in love with a bird on the wing but you know that in that moment something of god has penetrated you. The descent of the bird and something has moved within you, you have touched some depth inside your own being. Or just a small flower dancing touches you, moves you.

Be consciously in love with god.

It means a poet. Think in terms of poetry and live in terms of poetry; let poetry be your religion.

There is no higher religion than poetry. God is not philosophy, not theology either; it is sheer poetry.

It is available only to those who are ready to become mad. The logical, the calculative, the clever, miss; the illogical, the irrational, reach.

The poet is there in your heart, it just needs to be expressed. You are utterly a heart person but in this world the heart is not accepted and the heart people are crushed and repressed?

So don’t listen to anybody; you have to live your life. It is better to live one’s own life and suffer rather than to be comfortable and live somebody else’s life. Millions of people die thinking, ’Whose life have I been living all these years?’ because they were not meant to be that which they became.

Somebody was meant to be a carpenter but he became a priest; somebody else was meant to become a priest and became a carpenter. This is very disrespectful towards the inner life.

Love yourself, respect yourself. Be whatsoever it feels right to be and pay for being that, never compromise.

[A couple are present. The woman is not a sannyasin, and the man is. He says: It seems it’s hard for one person in a relationship to take sannyas and the other to not be a sannyasin.]

But one can be a sannyasin and the other need not be a sannyasin; what is the problem? One is a man, another is a woman and there is no problem. Why can’t one be a sannyasin, another not?

There is no problem! (to the woman) What is the problem? His sannyas is creating trouble? How can his sannyas create trouble?

[She replies: He s been a great blessing of love, but I haven’t been able to accept his name.... I feel that he will not accept me if I am not a sannyasin.]

No, no there is no problem at all, mm? – there is no problem. You are imagining things unnecessarily.

How can his change of name create any problem? Were you in love with the name or with the man?

So the man is still there – he has not changed. And he will not expect you to become a sannyasin, no. If you want to, you can, but that is not his expectation. If you don’t want to become, you can remain a non-sannyasin. There is no problem in it, mm? so don’t be afraid about that.

None of my sannyasins are going to enforce anything on anybody in any way, because that is my whole teaching – not to try to change the other in any way; accept and respect the other as he or she is. So that is an unnecessary fear. And you have to learn... you love the man, so learn his new name!

There is no need to be worried that he will want you to become a sannyasin, no. Even if he wants you to, I will not give you sannyas; unless I feel that you are worthy to receive it, I will not give it. It is not easy. When you feel like it and I feel, ’Yes, the feeling has arisen in you’, only then will I give it to you. So drop this idea; and there is no problem – just be in love, mm?

(To the man) And let her feel that your sannyas has made you more loving, more accepting, more relaxed, so that one day she will start feeling like becoming a sannyasin. But that feeling has to arise in her, it is not that you have to put it in her mind. Simply forget about it. Just love her as she is: that very love may change her mind. But make no effort to convert her. All efforts to convert are efforts to dominate, and the freedom of the other has to be respected. Just respect her as she is and love her.

(to the woman) Do a few meditations, do a few groups, start feeling what is happening here. So many people are getting into it; there must be something in it. Don’t think that only you are right.

There are so many people; they must be getting something from it.

[A sannyasin who has just completed the individual primal therapy says: I found out what I was doing to myself and I got into some spaces of fear that I couldn’t go through. I feel that all I can do now is be with you and be here.]

That’s what has to be done: just be with me and be here – that is enough. If you can really be here and be with me, all else will follow on its own accord; there is no need to do anything else. If your heart can beat with me and you can breathe in tune with me, things will happen. And when you are transformed you will not even come to know.

CHAPTER 16

17 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Swanirodha. Swa means self, ego, nirodha means cessation – cessation of the self. And the only problem is the self; all other problems are by-products of it. People go on becoming too concerned about other problems. They try to solve them, but they cannot be solved because they are not the real problems... just by-products, shadows. There is anger and there is greed and there is ambition: they are only symptoms, the disease is the ego. Anger arises because of the ego, so does greed, so does ambition. Unless the base is destroyed those problems will continue in one form or another.

You can close one door, another will open immediately. You can throw the problem outside from one door, and as you turn you will find it has entered again from the back door. There are not problems, there is only one problem: that is the false idea of ’I am.’ You are not, god is. Dissolve the I and all problems simply disappear as if they have never existed. That is the meaning of... Swanirodha.

And that is the whole work here: to help you to dissolve, to persuade you to melt. It really needs great persuasion, because that is the most dangerous thing a man can ever think of. To cease means to commit suicide. Sannyas is suicide... literally, not metaphorically. The ordinary suicide is nothing compared to it. In the ordinary suicide you only change the body like the clothes or the house, but you remain the same. In sannyas you disappear, and when you disappear, there is great benediction.

[A sannyasin says: I can’t say anything.]

And there is no need to say anything – I understand what the problem is; it is not really a problem.

Sometimes we make problems out of things which are not problems. Just a different approach is needed and the problem is no more thought of as a problem. Sometimes we look at a mystery as a problem; then we are on the wrong track. We start trying to solve it, finding ways and means... and it cannot be solved, it is a mystery! You can live it, you cannot solve it. The problems of the head can be solved, they are problems, but the problem of the heart cannot be solved. It is not a problem in the first place, it is a mystery to be lived.

Your hands went right to the place where you are feeling. It is a question of feeling and being, mm?

– that is why it is very difficult to express it. Feelings are nude, dumb, non-assertive. They are there, one can feel them, but they cannot be expressed. That is their beauty really, that they can’t be expressed. Anything that can be expressed is bound to be superficial. Anything that can be expressed is worthless; just because it has been expressed it becomes worthless.

Lao Tzu says, ’That which can be said is no more true. The tao that can be talked about is not the real tao.’ The real tao cannot be talked about. You cannot make a problem of it, you cannot find a solution for it. You can only go into it and disappear into it. The question is never solved but the questioner disappears. And that’s my work on you here: I am here not to dissolve your questions but to dissolve you. And that is going to happen... that is already on the way.

[A visitor reminds Osho of the letter she wrote him in which she asked: What of the elder son? (in the story of the Prodigal Son).]

Mm mm. I remember your question and I waited for today to answer it.

The story has immense significance, and your question is very very relevant. It very rarely arises in people’s mind to ask about the elder son. The whole story moves around the younger son – the one who went astray, the one who lost everything and came back home. The story says nothing about the elder son who remained at home. But the question is very significant and Christians have been avoiding that question. I have never come across a commentary about the elder son; they are afraid to talk about it. The reality is that the elder son is not yet born, because you cannot be born if you have not gone astray. The elder son exists not, he is fictitious. To be, one has to rebel; that is the way of being.

Each child has to leave the mother’s womb. If somebody asks, ’What about that child who never left the mother’s womb?’... The child will be dead: nothing can be said about him. Not only will he be dead, he will kill the mother too. Those elder sons are killing god himself. They are there: they always remain in the womb, they never leave it. They are very orthodox and conventional; they never rebel.

God wants you to rebel, to go against him; god wants you to go astray – to explore, search, be lost.

Only when you have gone so far away that the thirst to be close to god arises again in you, when you feel a great hunger to return, then only will you find god, otherwise you won’t.

That is the meaning of the original sin. It had to happen, Adam had to leave. And my own interpretation is that god arranged it perfectly well that he should leave, but he managed it in such an indirect way that Adam never came to know that it had been arranged. If he had known it was arranged it would not have happened, that is certain. Adam is not allowed to know about it; the planning has to remain hidden. If he knows that god is sending him away he will not go at all.

That’s why the prohibition not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. That is a provocation, not a prohibition; rightly understood it is a provocation, it is a challenge, it is a seduction. It creates great attraction towards the tree.

Since that time Adam must have dreamt about the tree continuously, must have thought about it continuously, must have gone many times to the tree, must have looked and thought, ’Why? Why am I not allowed to eat from this tree?’ And the temptation must have become bigger and bigger and bigger. It was not the snake or the devil; it was god!

In fact in the East the snake has always represented god, never the devil. In the East we think too that inside each of us there is a coiled serpent, just at the base of our spine; we call it kundalini.

That serpent power arises, and when it reaches the highest peak in your consciousness you become enlightened. You become enlightened through the serpent.

God pushed Adam to go away in such an indirect way because he loved him and he knew that Adam could only understand things when he had lost all. Adam could become Christ only if he went astray.

The original meaning of the word ’sin’ is separation, nothing else. Sin and the English word ’asunder’

come from the same root: to make separate, to divide, to cut. Sin simply means that man went away from god, he cut himself off from god; he started searching on his own, living on his own. That is the meaning of the parable, that the younger son leaves.

And why does the younger leave? – that too is significant – because only youth, only a mind which is young, can rebel.

The elder is a conformist, but the elder is not born yet. He can never be welcomed home because he never went away. He is not a grown-up person; he may be the elder but he is not a grown-up person. The younger is the grown-up person, the younger is mature. He paid; he suffered and he attained to a kind of wisdom that comes only through suffering. One has to pay for it through many sufferings. The younger is not the same person who left home; in those ten or fifteen years that he was away he learned a lot, he saw a lot. The elder didn’t learn anything, he had not seen anything.

He had not been in the world; he had lived protected. He simply vegetated.

So to me, the elder son is fictitious; he is not yet born. Jesus has not explained it because he was more concerned with the younger son; the parable moves around the younger. But I liked your question, because the elder also should be thought about; then the parable becomes more complete.

When you see that sin is a must – by sin, again I mean the separation – then coming home has a totally different quality. It is not the same home because you are not the same person any more: now you have eyes to see what the home is.

It is said that unless you have seen many countries you will not understand your own motherland.

How can you? – you don’t have any comparison. The son went away, went against the father; now he has experienced what it means. He became a beggar, he suffered, he was in pain. Now he knows the beauties of the home, the comfort, the security, the love, the warmth, now he will understand. Now he can compare and contrast.

Christ is possible only if you become an Adam.

... You have to go into many things which you have been avoiding. You are afraid of life and you will miss if you are afraid. Life has to be lived. It is painful, certainly painful, it brings many anguishes, but those anguishes create you; you can’t be created in any other way. They are like birth pains.

I am saying only this, to try to experience as many things in life as possible. Don’t be afraid; an afraid person can never know god, he will become the elder son. One has be courageous and one has to try! Naturally there are many errors possible: when you do things you commit mistakes. Don’t commit the same mistakes again and again; create new mistakes. But don’t be afraid of mistakes, because it is through them that you will learn and will become more mature. Then coming home is really beautiful... it is just fantastic. Otherwise you can remain in the home; you are in the womb.

You are afraid here also because it is a totally different experience that is available here. You are avoiding it, you are just standing outside; you are afraid of taking any jump into it. And you know that you can take the jump. You know also that the jump will give you great experiences, but you are afraid: ’Who knows? Why leave the known and the familiar territory? Why jump into the ocean?

Cling to the shore.’ But that attitude is suicidal. You will miss many things in life. The world exists only for the courageous.

There is no point in being afraid because this body will go, this mind will go. One day we will die; everything is going down the drain already, so why not live it? Tomorrow we die so why not live today and why not risk? It is simply foolish not to risk, because the elder son will die, just as the younger will, but the younger will die with a great understanding and the elder will simply die like a fool.

Ordinarily the elder looks wise and the younger looks foolish, but deep down the elder remains foolish, naive, childish, and the younger has become a grown-up person. He will die with a contented heart: he has known all that was available, he lived all dimensions. Be rich!... and richness comes only through living new experiences.

This is a totally new experience available here. Don’t protect yourself; you have nothing to lose and all to gain. But your whole life pattern has been of fear. You are holding yourself; it is time to drop that. Once you drop it, life will start flowing. And you will be surprised later on at how you have been holding back for so long and why and for what. Don’t miss the opportunity that is available here.

[One of the ashram therapists] was also worried about you, that’s why he has sent you here. But you are keeping aloof; you have even been afraid to come to me! He has sent you for a specific reason: he wanted you to be more close to me, to be closer to this work that is going on here. This is what Christ was doing in his own time! It is the same work, because the principle, the basic principle, always remains the same. You call it Christian, you call it Hindu – you call it anything, it doesn’t make much difference. What you call it is just your preference, but the basic principle remains the same: man has to be helped to go beyond conventions. That was the rebellion that Christ brought to the world: man has to be helped to be rebellious. That’s what he died for. He was one of the most rebellious men.

So think of sannyas, become a sannyasin and take the plunge! There is no need to avoid. Will you have to think about it or would you like to take the jump today, mm? Today?...

I can help you jump... I can push you! That I know: left alone to yourself you will not jump. Somebody has to love you so much that he can push you. Once you have jumped you will always feel thankful, but somebody has to do the thankless job first! I am ready to push you. Just come close and close your eyes and I will help you jump.

You have been holding back long enough. mm? Relax! You may not find this opportunity again in your life. What should I do? Should I push you or leave you to yourself, mm?

Prem means love, suparno literally means the eagle; metaphorically it means wide-winged – wide-winged love, an eagle of love. And two things have to be remembered.... Instead of fear, live love; they are the polar opposites. People ordinarily think that love and hate are opposites; that’s wrong, they are not. Love and hate are the same energy, love-hate is one energy. Love can become hate, hate can become love; they are convertible. So they are not opposite, they are complementary. In fact we love and we hate the same person; they are always together. They are not enemies, they are friends. The real opposition is between love and fear. They are never together; if you become attached too much to fear, love disappears. Fear cannot be converted into love, love cannot be converted into fear; they are not convertible.

You have lived basically through fear, so this is my message: start living through love, not through fear. Only love makes one rich. Fear cripples, paralyzes, and the more paralyzed you become, the more afraid, so it is a vicious circle. Love gives you wings, it helps you relax into life, it gives you courage to experience life in different ways. It allows you the whole span of life, it is multi-dimensional. It is the whole rainbow, all the colours of life. So the first thing: drop fear and imbibe love more and more; replace fear by love.

And the second thing: think of the sky, the vast, think of freedom, infinity. Don’t think of small things, trivia. Fear always thinks of small things, love never thinks of small things. Love is ready to sacrifice all; love only thinks of the vast. It is an eagle on the winds, it goes in search of the unknown.

So these two things: instead of fear, love, and instead of small things – security, comfort, convenience, safety, familiarity – think of exploration, new experiences of the unknown, adventures.

These two things will bring you closer and closer to god.

[A sannyasin says: I’m separating from a man I’ve been with. I feel a lot of different things: I keep expecting to feel sad... and I don’t!... But I feel I ought to feel sad.]

No, no, you need not feel sad; that is just a wrong habit and wrong expectation. One should always feel good when one separates, because one is moving into new freedom; one bondage is broken.

When one relationship is gone, one prison is gone. One should feel really happy, and in reality happiness comes. But because you have been taught to feel sad and cry about it, if you don’t feel sad you start feeling guilty that you are doing something wrong. You aren’t; you are just becoming natural. This is how it should be.

Why should one not feel happy when one misery has disappeared? It is perfectly good. Be happy at least for a few days till you create another misery.

Don’t miss this chance because sooner or later some other karma will come up and you will have to go through some other experience, mm?...

So meanwhile enjoy as much as you can; don’t feel guilty. The human mind has been conditioned to feel guilty about many things for which naturally it doesn’t feel guilty. Listen to nature.

If the relationship were good it would have continued. It came to a point where it was too heavy, not worth keeping; that’s why it has broken. You are free, the other is free: celebrate freedom! Feel grateful to the other person because he has helped you to learn many things. He helped you to go through many experiences – good and bad, ugly and beautiful, sweet dreams and nightmares; feel thankful for all that. There is no need to feel sad. And if you don’t feel sad, don’t feel guilty; that is far worse. Sadness is bitter but guilt is going even one step deeper into hell. But no need for guilt, no need for sadness; just enjoy the open sky again.

When one is unrelated, when one is alone... and it happens only when one relationship is finished, for a few days you can be alone and you can really enjoy the aloneness. You have been longing and longing for this aloneness but the other was there constantly crippling you, interfering and constantly encroaching upon you. Now you can enjoy! This will only last for a few days because wisdom does not last long! Again you will start hankering for relationship and the joys of being together. Soon you will start feeling that this is loneliness and what are you doing sitting here? Such a beautiful girl; what are you doing unrelated? Everybody is moving in couples and everybody is suffering so much; what are you doing? The problem will arise and soon you will get into some trip again. Before that happens, enjoy this aloneness; this is precious.

There is a rhythm: sometimes enjoy relationship, sometimes enjoy aloneness. Enjoying both again and again, one day you will come to the understanding that there is no need to be in relationship and there is no need to be alone. You can be in relationship and alone and you can be alone and in relationship. Then you have become wise. Then they are not two opposites. You are not to choose, both are there; one remains in relationship and yet remains alone. One knows one’s aloneness is eternal, it cannot be broken; still one shares one’s joys with the other but one doesn’t feel related in any way.

When two alonenesses exist together in deep love without creating any imprisonment for the other, then something immensely valuable has happened. But before that happens you will have to go through these two stages again and again; one learns only by experience. But see how the human mind is foolish: when you were in relationship, you must have been hankering to be alone and free.

Now you are alone and free you are thinking that you should be sad, you should feel miserable.

Again you will be in relationship and again you will think you should be alone and happy; how beautiful it was!

We go on missing the point and we go on thinking of something else which was not the case; this is how the foolish mind functions. Enjoy the moment, and whatsoever the moment makes available to you, be enriched by. This time, be alone; this is the season for you to be alone. Bloom in your aloneness: dance and sing before it is lost. Then dance and sing together before that is lost! And it will come and go many times. It is just like seasons: summer comes and the rains and the winter and it goes on moving. But one day that ultimate also happens; it always happens only through experience. Don’t feel sad and never feel guilty. Never allow guilt to enter into your being for any reason at all.

If sadness is coming naturally, that’s okay; I allow it. Enjoy it. But if it is not coming don’t feel guilty.

Enjoy the natural and avoid the artificial. Good!

[Another sannyasin says that he lacks authenticity because he is unable to express his emotions: This is the result of having ended a relationship. It frightens me that I can’t express my needs or I’ve never been able to. I cover them over with manners and rationalisations and generalisations. I feel good about it, as if something new is about to happen, but it’s.... ]

Mm mm. Feelings cannot be expressed, so if you live in the head you will feel you are authentic, because the head can express itself easily. All the ways of expression are invented by the head; they are head ways. When you start feeling something, this problem will arise automatically; you will feel inauthentic because whatsoever you will express will not be the thing that you are feeling, and what you are feeling will not be expressed. So you will feel that there is some inauthenticity. It is nothing, not inauthenticity. You have to recognise the fact that feelings cannot be expressed; all expression is very very inadequate for feelings.

So no need to be sad about it, no need to be worried about it. Just remember that the feelings cannot be expressed the way thinking, thoughts, can. Language is made by the thoughts, for the thoughts, so it is perfectly okay with thoughts. Feelings are a different world altogether. So remember that feelings cannot be expressed adequately, but there is no need to be worried about it; it is not that you are inauthentic.

For the first time in many years you have felt feelings, hence the problem. It is not that you are inauthentic, it is just that you have remained in the head. For the first time the heart is opening, a new world is opening for which you have no language so you feel almost uneducated, illiterate. That happens to everybody because all literacy is in the head; when the heart opens, you suddenly feel illiterate. But by and by the heart will find its own way.

It will never be as adequate as the head, never be as clear, as skilful, as the head, it will never be as efficient either but it will find its own ways. That’s how you love a person: you just hold her hand because whatsoever you can say looks so stupid. Now you are trying to say something through body language. Or you hug the person. You are saying, ’I cannot say it – I can only be it’; a hug is a way of being. Or you cry and the tears come down from your eyes; you are so full of joy that words are inadequate. Or you dance, you sing a song.... But these are all indirect ways.

They will come by and by; don’t be worried. You will just have to learn a new language, a new grammar, a new semantics. You cannot do anything about it: you just have to go deeper into it, you have to become more foolish, that’s all. The mind will say that you are getting more and more foolish; but you have to become a little madder! And the heart finds its own ways; they are utterly different from the head.

Right now your heart is opening for the first time so you will feel this difference: your head is developed, intelligent, skilful; your heart is absolutely new. The disparity will create the feeling that you are inauthentic; you are not!

Just enjoy the heart and its feelings. Be more in the body and say things through the body, through acts. And small things are so expressive, mm? You may not be able to say something to your woman but you can give her a flower, or just the way you look at her, the way you are charmed by her, the way your eyes have a glint, is enough. Women are very very understanding about that.

In fact, if you talk too much, that is all junk. A woman doesn’t see what you are saying: she sees what you are feeling. That is one of the problems: the man thinks, ’I am talking about such beautiful things, I am being so loving, I am saying such great things’, and the woman is simply uninterested!

She knows that you are talking but your heart is not in it. Sometimes you are silent and the woman understands. In the way you look at her or you hold her hand or just sit in simple silence where not a single word is uttered, something is communicated.

The woman is still intuitive. She is still more animal than man, wilder than man; that’s her beauty.

And that is the hope for humanity, that at least half of humanity is still wild, uncivilized. There is hope that the other half will also fall back into uncivilization, will become uncultured again.

But I don’t think there is any problem.

[Another sannyasin said he doesn’t know any more what’s the point of being here... suddenly he felt like being very far away from Osho and he just felt very hopeless and helpless.]

In fact there is no point in being here. You are coming closer to the right thing, to the truth. And if I can take all your hopes from you, I have helped you. If you can become hopeless that means you will never be frustrated again, because it is through hope that frustration comes in. If you are here with some business in mind, you are not here. Unless you are purposelessly here, you are not here at all.

So something beautiful is happening. You cannot understand it right now, that’s true. You look bewildered; but I am happy....

[Osho checks his energy.]

Good! You are just on the brink of explosion. Something really great is possible at this moment. Just accept it and enjoy!

CHAPTER 17

18 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Osho gives someone sannyas.]

Come here! Close your eyes, and just feel me. Feel surrounded by my energy, and open all the doors, all the windows. If your breathing wants to change, allow it to, because with the change of feeling, the breathing changes, and unless the breathing changes, the feeling can’t change. So simply allow the change if any comes. And if your body starts swaying, trembling, allow it, simply leave all control.

Satdeepa. Sat means being, and deepa means light – the light of being. There are three lights possible in man. One light comes through concentrated thinking. Concentration functions as fuel, so a man who can think concentratedly has a certain light, but it is only on the periphery, because the mind consists of the outermost periphery. You can still see the intelligence, the sharpness, the light, but it is only on the boundary and only skin-deep. It is good as far as the outer life is concerned, but for the inner life it is not enough. It is just a very small candle. It can help you in the world but it cannot help you withinwards. There darkness is far more deep; this small light can’t function there.

Then there is another light that comes out of feeling, that happens in the heart through prayer, through love. That is deeper than the first. It goes a long way but not yet to the ultimate; it falters somewhere in the middle. It creates the poets, the artists; and they do have a certain kind of luminosity.

The third light consists of being – neither of thought nor of feeling, just of pure existence. That comes out of meditation: just by being utterly silent with no thought to interfere, with no feeling to create any ripples, no concentration, no prayer. That simple isness, just sitting and doing nothing – that is the meaning of the word ’zazen’: just sitting and doing nothing.

These are the two doings, thinking and feeling. When all doing has disappeared, the doer also disappears because the doer can exist only through the doing, just as the dancer is a dancer only when he is dancing. When he is not dancing he may be a father, a brother, a husband, but he is not a dancer; he is a dancer only when he is in dance. Dance creates the dancer; doing creates the doer; thinking creates ego. Feeling creates humbleness, but that is the ego just standing upside-down.

With thinking and feeling gone, the ego simply is not found. One is and yet one cannot utter the word ’I’.

Then a light arises in one’s being. That light is the ultimate light; it is called satdeepa. So meditation has to be your path.

[A sannyasin, returning to the west, says: I’ve been here four months and it seems that I have gone through a lot of pain and despair. I’m just wondering if it is going to keep on this way.]

No. This is how things are dropped: one has to go through the pain. If one goes to the very end of it, it disappears; if it is not repressed, it disappears. And you have been going into it perfectly well.

You have not been repressing it, you have not been afraid of it; you have dared to go into it. That is the way one finishes it. No, it will not continue; soon you will come out of it. You will come out of it totally fresh and new as you have never been, because all that pain was always there inside you, that despair was inside; you were hiding it from the world. This time you gathered courage and you exposed yourself. Through exposure things disappear.

Never hide and never hold things; otherwise they cling, they poison your being. Always bring them to light, remain open, vulnerable and you will always be happy, tremendously happy. You have earned it; the happiness will be coming any day. It may start on the twenty-first (Enlightenment Day) and then it will grow. You have earned it!

[At a previous darshan, Osho had suggested to a woman who is gay that she try moving into heterosexuality. Tonight she says it has been a nightmare... just too complicated to explain.]

You can write a long letter, mm? and make it as complicated as possible! It is really simple, it is not complicated.

When something is complicated it is very easy to express it. When something is utterly simple, then there is a real problem in trying to express it. The utterly simple is unexpressible. The complex is never unexpressible, the complex can always be expressed.

The very complexity shows that it belongs to the heart. The heart is beyond words and beyond language, and that is the trouble. If it is a complicated thing write a complicated... letter; make it as complicated and as big as possible. Just pour your whole nightmarish mind into it; it may be good....

You can say if you want to right now – I am available.

[She says: It s this whole nightmare for me about men and women. I feel that where I’m vulnerable and where the polarity is and where all my feelings are, is with women.]

[Today we have to finally decide about it, Osho says, and gives her a ’come close darshan’]

You forget about men. You are naturally a lesbian and it will be impossible for you to become heterosexual. Simply accept it and go into it. Drop the whole idea of men; your energy will not fit with them. You have been trying hard, that’s why it is creating a nightmare. Simply relax with yourself and never again raise the question, never again think about it.

There are very few people who are naturally homosexual, but you are. I knew that you were a natural lesbian, but I was trying to see if you could come out of it; it will not be possible. And there is no need – if it is natural then there is no need. Only those who have fallen somehow and adopted it as a habit can come out of it. It is not a habit to you. It is not second nature, it is your nature. So simply accept it and forget all about men. Just drop the whole idea and the whole nightmare will disappear.

And be absolutely happy as things are, as you are. Even if sometimes I say something – because I am speaking to so many people, mm? – you need not worry. If sometimes I am saying something against homosexuality, remember: you are excluded! Or do I have to remind you again and again that [you are] excluded?

Just take it as understood – that Chandan is excluded. And when more natural homosexuals come, I will make a club of you. Just wait! A few natural ones will be coming. There are at least ten percent of people who can be natural homosexuals. It is not a big majority, but still a large number. Ten percent means that out of ten people one is a natural homosexual.

So soon you will have your own world here too. But from this moment I take away your nightmare –

it is finished. Good?

[A sannyasin who is leaving is weeping.]

Think of coming back and then you will not cry. Always think of coming back; then there is no problem!... It will happen soon; nothing to worry about, don’t be sad about it, mm?

[She says: I feel as if I’m only just starting to be receptive to you and so I don’t know how I’ll feel in England when I’m so far away.]

I will be there, mm? If sometimes I simply come in the night, in the middle of the night, don’t be afraid and don’t start shrieking and screaming... don’t freak out! Can I come?...

Don’t be afraid. I will follow you....

You will be coming back, certainly. And meanwhile I will keep track of you. The whole night that is my work: to keep track of my sannyasins wherever they are... just eavesdropping, mm?

Keep this (a box) with you. And whenever you need me just put it on your heart and continue to meditate.

CHAPTER 18

19 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Sindhu means the ocean. The small is beautiful, but the small is not really small; the small is big.

Every atom contains the whole universe and every drop, the ocean, because only one exists – in the drop, in the ocean. Only the form is different, the content is not. Even in the smallest grass leaf, the earth and the clouds and the sun and the far-away stars, are contained. It appears small but it is not. Nothing small exists, things only appear small: everything is huge, enormous, infinite.

So let this be your meditation: think of the infinite. Look into the drop and search for the ocean, and you will find it, because it is there.

Just the other day I was reading....

A man had listened to J. Krishnamurti for at least twenty years.

He was an intellectual, a

philosophical man, and by and by he got fed up with the constant repetition of the same awareness, awareness, awareness, and the way Krishnamurti goes round and round, and hints at the same thing; because there is nothing else to hint at.

So one day he stood up and said, ’Stop all this! It is just as they used to say about philosophy – that philosophy is like searching on a dark night without any lamp or light, in a dark room for a black cat which is not there.’ Krishnamurti hit him on the head with his fist and said, ’But sir, it is there!’ I liked it: He said, ’But sir, it is there.’

That black cat exists; if you search long enough you will find it. And the very search ultimately becomes the light. Searching creates light – there is no other light; seeking creates light – there is no other light. Just the intensity of the search, the passion of the search, makes you aflame.

And the cat is there. Look into the drop and you will find the ocean. But people are living in such unawareness that they look at the ocean and they don’t even find the drop there.

Mandip. Man means mind, dip means light, lamp. Consciousness, Mind with a capital ’M’, is the light. Mind with a small ’m’, a lower case ’m’, is the darkness. Mind with ego is darkness; it is a lower case ’m’. Mind without the ego is with a capital ’M’; it is universal mind, it is light. So both exist within you; it is only a shift of emphasis. These two words are very significant: I am. If you emphasise I, there will be darkness; if you emphasise am, there will be light.

Think of am-ness, existence, pure existence. Don’t think in terms of I, ego, self, country, religion, church, man, woman. Don’t think in terms of identifications, and suddenly you will find that the light was not to be searched for outside: it was already there but you never looked at it. The darkness is within, so is the light; the kingdom of god is within, so is hell. God is within, so is the devil.

When the I becomes too important you are in the grip of the devil. That is just a way of putting it; there is no devil. When the I dissolves you are part of god. That’s again a way of putting it; there is no god. All that is meant is that when you are not, the whole is; and the whole is light and life, eternal life, abundant life.

The whole effort here is to drop the lower case ’m’ and to create the capital ’M’. That is the meaning of... Mandip.

Varuna is the name of the sky god. In the East we have been thinking in terms of gods – everything is divine, so the sun is a god, the moon is a goddess, the sky also has its own god. That god is called Varuna. It is one of the most beautiful things to meditate upon because it has no form. The sun has a form, the moon has a form, but the sky has no form, it is formless. It has no face, it has no personality, it is impersonal, hence it is infinite, unbounded, it knows no limits.

A man should be like the sky, then he has arrived home. And the sky outside is not the only sky: you have a sky inside too, and the inner is far more vast than the outer. If one goes in search of the inner sky one goes on and on; depths upon depths open. One never comes to a point where one can say, ’Now I have arrived.’ Doors upon doors open and the mystery thickens, becomes more mysterious. It is an unending process. Outside it is infinite, inside it is infinite too. In fact these are not two infinities; this is one infinity, and the difference is just like breathing in, breathing out. It is the same breath, it is the same sky.

So get more and more in tune with the sky. Lie down on the ground and just look at the sky. Then close your eyes and look at the inner sky. Let the sky become your object of meditation. It is of immense significance. Looking deeply into the sky, thoughts start disappearing on their own accord.

They cannot live in such vastness; they need a very narrow hole, they are beings of a very dark, narrow hole. They cannot bear expanse; they simply die. Just looking at the sky and thinking starts disappearing, it becomes more and more distant and disappears. Then suddenly there is nothing but sky. You also are not there, because you are nothing but your thought process.

When all thoughts are gone, you are gone. Then it is a mirror reflecting another mirror, an open sky facing another inner sky. That meeting is the experience of god. God is not a person but the meeting of the inner and the outer sky.

Veet means beyond, samya means tradition – beyond tradition. Truth is always beyond tradition.

To search for truth in tradition is to search in vain. You will find words, great words, complicated doctrines, but you will not find truth. Truth leaves no mark. It is like a bird in the sky. It leaves no footprints, it creates no tradition. It is always new, it is never old. You cannot come to it by following somebody else’s footprints. All footprints are false, but people are worshipping footprints.

Jesus and Buddha walked on the sands of time and people are just worshipping their footprints.

The footprint of a Jesus is not Jesus; you can go on worshipping it for eternity and it will all be futile.

Jesus leaves no marks. The footprint is of the body, it is of the physical, not of the spiritual; and truth has to be found in the world of the spirit. One need not go into tradition, in fact, one has to avoid going into it; one has to go withinwards. One has to go into one’s own being, and that is absolutely non-traditional. Tradition teaches you to follow somebody else.

So I say, religion is not tradition. Religion teaches you to follow your own inner feeling and to stake everything for it, to risk all and to live your life and do your thing. Be an authentic being. Be a being in your own right; never be a carbon copy.

I am here to help you to be yourself, not to distract you from your being. I am not here to give you a discipline. I am here only to give you this insight, that you have to go withinwards. You are not to follow me, you have to understand me and go into yourself. And the difference between understanding and following is immense. People become followers. My sannyasins have to be not followers but people who understand, people who try to experiment in their own being.

Listen to me, understand me, but experiment in your own self. Don’t believe in me. Trust in me so that you can experiment but don’t believe. Believe only when you have arrived, believe only when you have experienced.

[A sannyasin has just returned to Poona, ’forever’.]

That’s very good... welcome home! That’s very good. I needed you here.

And I liked your idea of making a workshop for rugs. That is one of the old Sufi things we should do; it’s very good. Start talking to sannyasins so that you can create a group and then start.

[The sannyasin says that experiences he used to find heavy in the Gurdjieff movement, to which he used to belong, have now become okay.]

It is far more difficult than Gurdjieff’s work. People can manage work very easily because they are all workoholics; their whole life is full of work so there is not really much change. Maybe the direction changes but the same attitude, the same approach and the same work attitude remains. But to be playful is really difficult; that is a real change, a transformation, because it has to change your total life and its habits.

So it looks easy when I say to be playful, that work is not needed, just play is enough. It appears easy, it is not. That is the really difficult thing: simple things are the most difficult things. We have lost the capacity to be simple, we have lost the capacity to be innocent.

Gurdjieff appealed to the Western intellectuals very deeply. The reason was that he was talking their language: work, work hard that is the language of the ego. The ego is always ready to work hard.

The harder the work, the better the ego feels, because the more it is sustained by the work, the higher the peak to be attained, the greater the challenge, the more happy the ego feels, the more intoxicated.

What I am saying is that there is nothing to be done; relax! And that is difficult for the ego. I am saying to be a child again: start playing on the seashore with coloured stones and seashells, start running again after butterflies. That goes against the ego. People will laugh at you. That’s why you started feeling naive there. But that’s perfectly good: feel naive; that is how we come back to reality.

We have to attain our childhood again. That’s what Jesus means when he says, ’Unless you are born again....’

In India we have called the enlightened person twice born; he is a child again, the sage is a child again. But it will happen easily here.

The work also has to be play. It has to be done joyously, not for any result but for its sheer joy. That’s why I called it the Sufi work.

Sufis have been weaving, spinning, carving; rug-making particularly has been one of the most cherished Sufi works, but it was a play, it was a game. They were in fact not making rugs; it was just a meditation. The rug was just a by-product; the idea was just to be meditative, to be playful, to be silent, to be utterly there. It was a kind of absorption, a creative absorption. And I respect Sufis very much for that, because in India the monks have been very uncreative; I am altogether against that. They have been sitting in their caves, very very inactive; they became almost oppressive in this country. They exploited it, they never contributed anything to the country. Their whole contribution was this, that they were meditating so the country had to look after them.

Sufis are right, on the right track: meditate but contribute something to the society too. And if it can be done playfully, then it is not business; then it is meditation. And that’s what I would like my commune to become slowly, slowly. We have to do many things. This commune has to be utterly creative, but the creation has not to become work – that is the whole point. It has to be playful, sincere but not serious, devoted; one has to be committed to it, involved, but not for the result’s sake. It is art for art’s sake: the joy is intrinsic.

Start talking so that you have a few people in your mind and when we are ready you can immediately start working.

And be naive! To be a fool is really the way to be wise.

[The sannyasin adds: One thing, Osho: I don’t really believe that Gurdjieff himself ever called his teaching the work.]

Others called it work; he himself never called it work. He was really playful. But that’s the problem that always arises after the master is gone. He was very playful, he was very non-serious, but the disciples can’t be non-serious, that is the trouble. They will take even the non-seriousness very seriously.

Gurdjieff was almost a totally different kind of person than what he was depicted by his disciples.

He was a Zen man, another Bodhidharma. He needs a different kind of interpretation. But Ouspensky was a very serious man – a professor, a mathematician, a logician, a philosopher; that created trouble. And he became the most authentic interpreter. Gurdjieff has been known through Ouspensky. Without Ouspensky you would not understand Gurdjieff; Ouspensky has almost become a must. And it was absolutely certain that the two men would separate because they were worlds apart. Ouspensky was absolutely a professor. Gurdjieff was not a professor at all. But that is not new, it has always been happening.

Christianity was founded by Paul, not by Christ, and Paul was a totally different kind of person.

Buddhism was founded not by Buddha but by the brahmins who became his disciples. So was the case with Jainism: it was not founded by Mahavira but the brahmins, the scholars, who became his disciples. They are always the people who compile and make the discipline and laws and everything.

They are proficient at it, and once the master is gone nobody can prevent them. And they are very very articulate so you cannot argue with them.

Sometime Gurdjieff needs a totally different kind of interpretation; maybe we can create that interpretation.

[A sannyasin is leaving for the West to sell up then be here as part of the community. You have to come back, Osho says; I will need you here. Thousands of people are going to come – the organisation has to be as perfect as possible. You have to be a host to thousands of people who are on the way. You don’t know: it is going to explode Once you arrange things, they will be coming, so the organisation has to be ready for it. It has to be something very big. It rarely happens, only once in a while.]

CHAPTER 19

20 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin with terminal cancer and a few weeks to live is returning to the west. Osho blesses him.]

Don’t be worried... don t be worried. I am coming with you; don’t be worried at all.

You have taken it really as it should be taken. I have been very happy. Just accept everything, and something is possible through that acceptance. Even if death comes one has to accept it joyously, as a gift from god. That is the way we can transform even the nature of death; that’s the way to transcend death.

Death is going to come to everybody. It makes not much difference when; when is irrelevant. Today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow – time is not of any significance. Death comes, death has already come with one’s birth, so we are all going to die. All that can be done is in how we die.

Death cannot be avoided, nobody can avoid it; that is the only thing in life which is inevitable. So it is useless to think to avoid it. The only thing which can be done and which is of great significance is how to go through it, how to live it, how to live one’s death. Live meditatively, live lovingly, take it as a gift, and you will be surprised: death will reveal to you more than life has given. Your death can become your satori.

And I have been very happy that you have been accepting things so easily, so relaxedly....

I am with you, and I am going to make this death far more valuable than life itself.

There are people who live and live in vain; and there are people who die but who die in such an artistic way, with such skill. with such awareness, that even death becomes a blessing. So if it comes, it comes; that is nothing to be worried about. Never pay a single thought to it....

Just enjoy and be happy. And because days are few one has to live very intensely and joyously.

Others can afford... they will be living for a few more years so they can afford to waste life; You can’t afford to. You have to live each moment. Each moment is so precious.

So be meditative, be relaxed, be accepting. If it comes, we are going to transform it. If it doesn’t come, we will wait! When it comes we will transform it then....

You will be able to attain to a great freedom through it, so simply go.

And your friends, your family, they may be disturbed. Tell them not to be disturbed, because they can affect you. Just tell them joyously that it is nothing to be worried about.

[Later in the darshan, Osho gives a record of Bach’s ’St. John’s Passion’ to him, saying: Whenever you need me, just listen to this music; keep it with you!]

Apa means self, dipo means light. The light has not to be searched for somewhere else, it is already there within you. It has not even to be kindled, we just have to look within. It has been there forever and ever, from the very beginning. It is because of that inner light that we live. It is our life.

And that source is infinite, inexhaustible. It burns without any fuel. It needs nothing to happen, it is self-sufficient. But our eyes are turned towards the without. All our senses open towards the without, and we exist within. That is the dichotomy: our energy goes out searching and the one we are searching for goes on living inside.

One has to take an about-turn; that’s all religion is about: an about-turn, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and suddenly that which you were seeking is found.

Upasika means a worshipper – not a worshipper of any image but just a worshipper of life, of all that exists, a reverence for all that exists, a respect for all that lives. That is true religion. The idols that we worship in the temples are just bogus religion, pseudo. To avoid life we have created them, and the worship is cheap: you can go and worship in a temple or in a church and your life remains untransformed by your worship. Unless life is transformed by your worship, the worship is meaningless, a sheer wastage of time and a deception – to others and to oneself.

Be a worshipper of life... of the trees and the mountains and the people and the animals and the birds, and all that exists and lives and breathes. This is true god.

God is not a person but a presence, it is a subtle presence everywhere. You can feel it in the trees; it is there. You can feel it in the silence of the night, in the hustle and bustle of the day. One just needs a little sensitivity and suddenly it is there. That sensitivity is worship. And once you feel the presence, you cannot avoid being respectful towards it.

Anubhava. It means feeling. Thinking has to be slowly slowly dropped and replaced more and more by feeling. Lean towards feeling. Thinking is mechanical, a computer can do it. Feeling is human, no machine can ever do it. Only through feeling do we come to know our very ground, who we are; the question is not answered by thinking. And that’s where we are lost. We are hung up in the head asking the question ’Who am I?’ and no answer comes. The head cannot supply it; that is not the right place to ask it. The question has to resound in the heart. It has to vibrate in the body, it has to circulate in the blood, it has to move in the breath – and then the answer arises. k never comes from the outside; it comes from your very innermost core, your own innermost heart speaks to you.

Not to know oneself is to live a futile life. That is the primary value, everything else only starts afterwards. The first foundation of a real life is the answer of the question ’Who am I?’

Chetsa means living according to consciousness. There are two types of people in the world: the people who live according to conscience – the orthodox, the conventional, the square.... Conscience is created by the society in which they are born. The conscience is a conditioning from the outside. If they are born in Russia they are Communists; if they are born in a Catholic country they are Catholic; if they are born in India they are Hindus or Mohammedans. These are names of conditionings, and they live according to this conditioning. This is not true life, this is not life in god.

Life in god means a life of rebellion. One does not live by conscience; one starts living through one’s own consciousness. Conscience is borrowed; consciousness is individual, it is yours. Conscience comes from the church, society, the priest, the politician, the parent; it is always from the outside. It is a kind of manipulation of the individual by the society. It is destructive of freedom. Consciousness arises in you.

That s why my whole emphasis is on meditation, because meditation is nothing but digging into your consciousness so that all the layers of conscience are broken, dropped. One becomes nude in one’s consciousness and one lives accordingly; and that is beauty, that is benediction.

I am giving you one of the beautiful names. Contemplate over it and live accordingly. It will be a dangerous life but only through danger does one arrive.

The orthodox live only for the name’s sake; they are dull and dead. Only dust gathers on their being, they don’t have any sharpness of being. For that sharpness adventures are needed. And this is the greatest adventure there is: to live according to one’s own consciousness.

Rupsa. It means beauty – beauty not of the form but of the formless, beauty not of the body but of that which is hidden in the body, beauty not of the house but of the master of the house.

The body can be beautiful; that does not make one beautiful. And sometimes it happens that beautiful people are very ugly within. The reason is that they think they are beautiful so they don’t feel any need to create any inner beauty. And vice versa also happens: ugly people sometimes are utterly beautiful within; because they are ugly outside they have to find some substitute. But a man can be beautiful both on the surface and in the depth. A man can have both beauty of the body and the soul, then beauty has many dimensions to it.

Rupsa basically means the beauty that arises out of the meeting of the soul and the body, out of the meeting of the form and the formless. It is a kind of inner balance, an inner music, an inner melody.

That melody is heard in meditation or sometimes in love....

CHAPTER 20

22 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[March 21st was Enlightenment Day when everyone could come to celebrate darshan in Osho’s silent presence.]

Madhuban means the garden. The garden is a metaphor of joy... celebration, flowering, of life, of vitality, of flow, of change. These two metaphors are very symbolic, the garden and the desert; they are polar opposites.

In the past religions have existed more like a desert. I want to transform the whole desert into a garden. To me sadness is almost a sin, laughter is prayer. Austerities are pathological, celebration is spiritual.

Religion has not to be against life but for it. We have to make life a garden, a beauty and a benediction. Religions have been thinking about paradise as being somewhere far away in the heaven. That is all dream. Paradise has to be created here, this earth has to become a paradise.

And remember, there is no other reality than this one. One has to go deeper and deeper into this reality. Going deep into this, that arrives.

[A sannyasin asks what he should keep in mind.... ]

Wait. For two months go through a few groups, a few processes, then I will tell you what to keep in mind. First the pot has to be cleansed completely; only then can something be invited into it!

[Osho gives one of his handkerchiefs to a sannyasin who is leaving.]

Mm, good! This is the beginning of freedom. Once the heart becomes a captive in love then one has started moving into the world of freedom. Love looks like a bondage in the beginning but it will give you wings.

So don’t be afraid of that. And certainly it gives much pain but that pain is therapeutic. It is really a healing pain; it heals the wounds of the heart. So you are in a beautiful process... don’t be worried.

[Another sannyasin who is leaving says: I’m frightened to go back to my old life.]

That fear is natural but unnecessary. Just go and you will find that there is nothing to be afraid of. It is natural, mm? because here you live in a different climate, in a different world, in a separate reality.

Things were growing, you were flowering and flowing, new spaces were happening. Now with going back to the ordinary world the fear arises: one may lose what one has gained. But it is not so. Fear is natural but unnecessary, because whatsoever you have gained cannot be lost, can never be lost.

You may forget sometimes but you will remember it again and it will be there. It has really happened, that’s why it cannot be lost. It is not imagination. If something is only in the imagination then it will be lost; it cannot be forever, you are bound to lose it. But my work here is not in imagination.

I am not writing myself in water. I am engraining myself in rocks. You cannot lose it. It will go on growing; in spite of the whole world there it will go on growing. And once you have that feel, that it goes on growing even when the circumstances are all against it, then a great joy arises. You know that nobody can take it away from you, no situation can destroy it, that it is something indestructible.

[Another sannyasin, returning to the west, says: The first time I saw you you just told me to relax, and since then I went completely satoric... then I came down and... I don’t know how I can go up again.... I’m moving in a complete sort of cloud of unknowing.

Osho checks her energy.]

This is the way life grows: move into the unknown like a cloud. Never think where you are going, never think what you are doing. That is what I mean by ’relax’.

Things have been happening beautifully and they will go on happening. One just has to relax and god is available everywhere. Satori is nothing but a deep relaxation.

... Just relax. Doing will disturb, doing will make you tense, and with tension this state will go away.

It looks crazy because one thinks, ’How can anything happen without doing?’ but god happens only when you don’t do; when you are absolutely a non-doer god happens. When you do, you miss, because when you do you become stronger, the ego becomes strengthened.

[She says: It’s left no ego, and when I go back, I don’t know... ]

Don’t be worried, don’t be worried, because that is the ego worrying again. That is the ego trying to come back saying, ’Now you are going away I will be needed.’ That is the ego pushing itself to the front of the mind. It has not gone absolutely, it has simply receded. It has gone into the background, now it is trying to come to the foreground.

Don’t listen to it; just say, ’I don’t need you any more!’ Say goodbye, and go on relaxing wherever you are, and I will help you relax.

Keep this (a box) with you, and whenever you feel some tension just put it on your heart and relax, mm? Good!

[A sannyasin, recently returned, says: I don’t feel as if I’m totally here with you. I don’t feel at all surrendered to you... and I wonder if I should give this (his mala) back to you?]

That is true, and that understanding is good; that will help....

Give it back, mm?

This will make you free and will make for more of a possibility to surrender. When you are not feeling surrendered the mala becomes a constant provocation and you start fighting with me. Rather than helping, it becomes a hindrance. Just be a nonsannyasin. And there is no problem in it. The surrender is to come one day, but only when it comes is there some meaning in sannyas; otherwise it is a meaningless thing. You cannot force it to come, but now it will be more possible because there will be no question of fighting. Now I make you completely free so you need not fight with me.

And if you stop fighting, surrender is bound to come, it is on the way.

You really want to surrender, that’s why the problem arises that your surrender is not total, that you are not surrendered. Those who don’t want to surrender can easily deceive themselves, they can think that they are surrendered. It is not a sincere thing in them, it is not authentic. An authentic person will always think whether he is surrendered or not. If he is not surrendered, then what is he doing? This is the way right surrender happens one day.

Don’t be worried, don’t feel any guilt, don’t feel any burden and don’t feel that you have done anything wrong by giving sannyas back. Feel free! Out of freedom sannyas will happen again. This time you missed it but many times people miss... and it is not cheap. One misses and one tries again and one misses and one tries again, but if one goes on trying it happens one day.

It is the greatest thing that can happen to any human being, because only in surrender do blessings shower, only in surrender does grace arrive. Only in surrender do you know what life is. Otherwise there is only struggle and strain and stress and tension and anxiety; and the whole of life is just a continuous vicious circle of all these things. It moves like a wheel: the same spokes come up again and down again, up again and down again. Surrender is jumping out of this wheel of anxiety. But, one has to wait for it.

Perfectly good. Continue to meditate, do a few groups, feel completely at ease, and when you start feeling that the sprout is arising, come back again, mm? – it’s perfectly good.

[A sannyasin, recently returned after three years, says he went completely crazy and was put in hospital.]

Yes, I know. That too is nothing to be worried about, mm? If it happens next time, think of the hospital as a resting place, as a place for meditation, and enjoy it!

The word has become very wrongly associated. Once you are put in a hospital you are given the feeling that something has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong; society is just hospitalising you.

[The sannyasin says: I’ve come to reason with that, I’ve come to be at one with it, but it’s still not very pleasant when it happens.]

Yes, it is difficult – I understand.

But if it happens, it happens; one has to enjoy it. And by enjoying it you will learn more and you will go deeper into your being.

Any breakdown is a possibility for a breakthrough. If you use it rightly it can be transformed into a breakthrough. And any breakthrough can become a breakdown if you don’t use it rightly. That is a very delicate problem and Western psychology has yet not been able to cope with it. No, everything, a breakdown or a breakthrough, is just; a breakdown for them. They aren’t yet aware of the difference between a breakthrough and a breakdown, and because they are not aware, they cannot utilise it, they cannot utilise it in a creative way. Otherwise every madness can be used as a great meditation.

Sooner or later it is going to happen in the West too. It has happened in the East, we have used it: if somebody goes mad, we have used it as a meditation. Madness simply means that all the armour of the ordinary reality is broken, the man is no more normal. The man is no more confined by the so-called normal structure of mind. The more that structure is, the less free you are; the less that structure is, the more free you are. In fact it is an expansion of consciousness. Society makes every consciousness very narrow, and whenever it happens that your consciousness is no more contained by that narrowness, the society condemns you as mad. But that moment can be used for a great spiritual experience, for satori.

So I understand – it is difficult and they will not understand – but still if it happens, you can use it.

Just don’t bother about them, about what they are thinking. Just smile at them deep inside, and rest in bed! It is a great time to rest. In fact in the West there is no other way to rest, mm? Unless you are mad, nobody allows you to rest; because what are you doing? You have to be constantly on the go.

And come back for a few weeks sometimes so that you can go through a few groups, a few meditations; it will be good.

[The sannyasin had lost his mala and was wearing a new one. He says: But I also feel like dropping sannyas. He only got the new mala to stop people asking questions in the ashram.]

No, that’s not right – that is cunning.... That is cunning....

Mm, that is not right, that I don’t support. Dropping sannyas is perfectly good, but this is cunning.

There is no need, you should not ask for the mala. If it is stolen, that’s one thing; if you have dropped sannyas then there is no need to ask for a mala. Don’t make it a convenience, because that is cheating. So, if you come next time there is no need for a mala – you can be here as a non-sannyasin! Let people ask, that is not a problem. You can just answer that you have dropped it.

I would also like many people to drop sannyas, because I have to concentrate on my people, I have to work on my people more. I don’t want people who just hang around. So that’s perfectly good, and you make me happy, mm? because one burden, one responsibility is gone.

But this is cheating, this you should not do; nobody should do this. You want to enjoy all the facilities that are available for a sannyasin and you don’t want to be a sannyasin; that’s what is wrong. If you are not a sannyasin you should not ask for all the facilities that will be available for sannyasins. They will have all the priorities, they need them; non-sannyasins have to be secondary, they cannot be primary here.

So that’s what people want to do: they want to be primary, they want to be prominent, they want to have all the facilities and all the opportunities but they don’t want to risk anything.

So you give the mala back... and don’t do such a thing again, mm? Good!

[A sannyasin says: I came five-and-a-half months ago and my energy was shattered. You said... in three months I’d be fine.

After about three months I was... my energy was good. I mean, that’s the first time for five years.

In the last three months my body’s been shaking from my neck down to my belly; mainly it happens when I relax.

[Osho checks his energy.]

Good. Nothing to be worried about. Allow it, it will settle on its own. It is something beautiful. The energy is coming up higher and higher. It is no more concentrated at the sex centre; it has moved to the throat centre. Soon it will move higher, it will come to the third eye, and then this shaking will stop. It is trying to penetrate the third eye.

[The sannyasin asks: Is it better to be aware when it happens or just to let the shaking happen?]

Sometimes let it shake, sometimes be aware; both have to be done, both will be helpful. Sometimes let it shake because that creates movement, and when it has moved you can be silent and watch it.

Both are beautiful. But it is moving from the fifth to the sixth centre, and that is one of the greatest movements. Once it has completely reached the sixth centre the shaking will stop and you will become so aware you cannot imagine: everything will become crystal clear. All the dust of the ages will disappear and the mirror will be a perfect mirror. That is the function of the sixth centre. That’s why it is called the third eye, because from there you can really see reality as it is, hence it is called an eye.

It is trying to penetrate, and when it tries to penetrate great shaking arises. Enjoy it – and sometimes watch too. Enjoying will help it to move from the fifth centre and watching will help it to centralise, crystallise at the sixth centre, so both have to be done. But first shaking, then watching; never otherwise: don’t watch first. But something beautiful is on the way – I am happy.

[A sannyasin has a catharsis in front of Osho who tells her to go into it. Afterwards she says: I am very happy!]

Allow it. Things are happening – just go into them, mm? Don’t be afraid. Even sometimes when you come across a scary space, even sometimes when you feel that the whole world is falling apart, I am with you. Go with it, dig as deep as possible.

Now you are on the right track. The energy has come up and the work has started. Now more and more courage will be needed, but with each step of courage you will find more and more happiness happening....

[She has done several groups but has no money to do more.]

There is no need, mm? – just continue Sufi dancing and join the Music group in the night. Dance; that will help the energy. Music is needed now. Music is food for higher forms of energy, it is nourishment. More than food you will need music now.

[The massage group is present. The leader said she became ill, and felt very weak; it is something to do with her liver, and she feels shaking all over her body. Osho checks her energy.]

It has nothing to do with the body, it is just somewhere in your emotions. The body is affected by the emotions but the body itself has no problem; the energy is perfectly beautiful. So you have to do something about your emotions. k is there that you are feeling very shaky, uprooted.

That has to be deeply understood, mm? because this can happen again and again. Whenever you invest too much in a relationship this will happen. If the relationship goes down the drain, one feels like that – shaken, utterly shaken; not only in the mind but in the body too the effects are felt. And if it happens again and again then by and by the body is weakened.

One has to be very very careful about a few things. One is: never invest in individuals. Invest in love but never invest in individuals. If one individual is gone then one should be capable of moving easily with somebody else, it should be an easy process. We make it too painful, unnecessarily, and the reason is that we have been taught it has to be painful. If it is not painful we feel guilty, if it is not painful then the mind says, ’What kind of love was this? – you are not suffering! Feel guilty, suffer!

That’s what you read in the novels and see in the movies and hear all around, so do it. Now the time has come, do it!’

Really, if you look deep down, the mind always feels free when one relationship is finished; one feels happy really but one cannot say it because it is not allowed. One wants to dance and laugh. One feels unburdened: so one nightmare is over! But we have been taught that this is something bad, it is not mannerly to be happy. Feel miserable, at least look miserable if you don’t feel it. But if you look miserable and you try to feel miserable, you become miserable. The mind needs only a few hints and it starts working.

Feel free – there is no need to feel miserable. Relationships come and go, and the more they come and go, the better, because the more experienced you will become. Being obsessed with one person is not really love but an obsession, and it tortures both persons. Never make any relationship an obsession; let it be a free-floating phenomenon. Things are going beautifully so you are together; if things don’t go beautifully, say good-bye. There is not any need even to hesitate, to linger on. So many beautiful people are available in the world, why get hooked with one person?

And I am not saying not to love the person – love him, but when things start going wrong... which they are bound to, because you are fast asleep, the other person is fast asleep, both of you are snoring and both of you are trying to be loving! Both of you are simply disturbing each other’s sleep and nothing else. Sooner or later one gets tired of this snoring; one starts throwing pillows and things that is natural. There is a point beyond which one cannot tolerate it: so then finish; start something else.

One day one becomes capable of seeing the point, that these things come and go. One should live many relationships, many loves, and one should experience life in as much multiplicity as possible.

I am not saying that one has to, one is not to force oneself. If it comes, then it is good: if things are going well with one person, perfectly good. There is no need to escape from the person while things are going well.

So I am not giving you a programme, that it has to be done. I am simply saying that if it happens this way it is perfectly good; if it happens that way it is perfectly good. Whatsoever happens is good, relax into that happening. And when one person has left, if you can be alone, good; if you can’t be alone, find somebody else. But don’t remain in that gap too much. That gap is ugly, that’s what is disturbing you.

You are still in a need of a relationship, you will not be able to live without a relationship yet. One day you will be able to and all these experiences will help you to become able to live without relationship.

[She asks: Is that a bad thing, not to be able to live without a relationship?]

No, nothing is bad... nothing is bad, but that comes automatically out of relationships; that comes automatically out of many relationships. If it doesn’t come, perfectly good, but it does come; I cannot help that! The only way to stop it coming is to cling to one person. That’s why marriage was invented.

Marriage is a way of always keeping you in relationship, because you never become ripe. Because one has not known many relationships, one goes on thinking that someone else would have been better – that woman, that man, mm? ’I got hooked with the wrong person, that’s why the whole thing is wrong. There are so many beautiful people; things would have been different with somebody else.’ That hope remains. Marriage keeps people hoping, it keeps people fantasising.

If you really live out your fantasies, sooner or later you are finished with them. You love this man and everything turns sour; you love that man and everything turns sour. You have seen all kinds of people and every time it happens that everything turns sour. How long can you remain unaware of the phenomenon that all love affairs fail? That is in-built. Not that I am saying they have to fail, but they do; I am simply stating a fact. Then one day one finds that one is able to be alone, and in that aloneness, relationship disappears; love becomes very much enhanced.

That too has to be understood: a love relationship is one thing and a loving nature is another thing.

When a relationship disappears a person remains just loving. He can relate but he will not have any relationship. You follow me? He can relate, there is no problem in it; in fact only he can relate, because now there is no problem of relationship. He can relate easily, without any burden, without any thinking, without any fear, but there is no relationship. He lives moment to moment. He is loving but his love is out of his aloneness. His love is not a kind of dependence. He is not a beggar any more, he is a king.

My own understanding about marriage is this, that cunning people invented it, very cunning people invented it. And the whole point is to keep people in an illusion; marriage helps to keep them in an illusion, to remain within the illusion.

One day suddenly all hope disappears; one is hopelessly there. In that hopelessness one starts thinking, ’Why not be alone? What is the point of all this trouble?’

And I am not saying that that point has come. [You have] to go through a few more nightmares!

So don’t force it. While you can enjoy these nightmares, do. But I can’t help it; one day they are finished. And with my people these fantasies are going to be finished because here is no support for them. I am making everything possible, all kinds of relationships are possible here – casual or not so casual, intimate or not so intimate. The whole point is so that you can see the futility of it. I teach you about love so that you can go beyond it.

But right now you will need a few more, so just find someone. Nothing is wrong with your body, mm?

– once a relationship starts flowing and the honeymoon is there it will be okay!

Good.

CHAPTER 21

23 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[An Israeli, who is studying at a college in Poona for one year, takes sannyas.]

Use this time for meditation also. That will be far more significant than any study. Meditation is self-study. And that is the central core of one’s whole life: if one can become rooted in meditation then all else becomes a blessing, everything starts becoming as it should be. There is never any frustration in life: fulfilment comes of its own accord. But if meditation is missing then we can go on doing all that we can do but nothing really happens – all is futile.

And you have a very prayerful heart... use it! So meditate, pray, think more of the inner and less of the outer. The outer has to be given attention but it should not become predominant. Not that one has to renounce it; nothing has to be renounced. Life has to be lived in all its dimensions, in all its richness, variety; only then does a symphony arise. Otherwise people become monotonous. The worldly people are monotonous because the inner is lacking, and the other-worldly are monotonous because the outer is lacking, and the music needs both: it needs sound and silence both. Sound is supplied by the outer and silence is supplied by the inner. When the inner silence and the outer sound meet, a great symphony arises in one’s being. That is religiousness.

But the inner is more important, that has to be remembered; never sacrifice the inner for the outer.

If there is ever any choice, sacrifice the outer for the inner but never otherwise, and you will never be a loser.

[The new sannyasin says: My father is the biggest Sufi in Israel.... I took some of your books and I told him about you. He said I am free to go anywhere I like to go.... But the people here are against me; I don’t know why.... here, in Poona – the Iranis and also the Indians.]

Mm mm.... Only a Sufi can understand what is happening here, others can’t. The others can only misunderstand. It is beyond their comprehension – not that they are knowingly mischievous, no; they are unaware. And sometimes when you cannot understand something, the natural tendency is to criticize it. It is very difficult for a man to say, ’I don’t understand so I will not assert anything for or against.’ That is very difficult, that needs great integrity to be able to say, ’I don’t understand certain things so I will keep mum. I will say something only when I understand.’ But that integrity is not easily available.

So just to hide the fact that they can’t understand, that they are ignorant about something, people criticize; that has always been so. But your father will understand. I can see something of his qualities in you too.

Sudhindra means god of remembrance, god of awareness, god of mindfulness. The most important thing in your life will be awareness. Pour your whole energy into that dimension: become more alert, more attentive, more mindful. Whatsoever you are doing, make it a point that you should do it with awareness... small things: washing your clothes, do it with full awareness. You can do it mechanically, you can think of a thousand other things and you can go on washing the clothes. That does not need awareness: you know how to do it, your body has learned the trick of it, it goes on doing it. You are not needed; you can think, you can fantasise, you can dream and the body will do the work. The body is functioning like a robot: it is programmed, so it will do its acts.

Bringing awareness in means dissolving the body robot, its mechanicalness, creating awareness deep in the body. And when awareness penetrates the body it becomes luminous. When awareness penetrates the body there is no separation between the soul and the body; they are one unity, functioning in unison. And that’s a great blessing. It is what blissfulness is all about: when the body and the soul are functioning as one, when they are coupled together in deep loving embrace, when all boundaries dissolve.

But from our very childhood we have been taught one thing, that we are separate from the body.

Control the body; we are the master and the body is the slave – manipulate the body. Because of these teachings, every human being on the earth is a victim; no human being finds a harmony between his body and soul. With that harmony missing you can’t feel god; god can be felt only in a harmonious being.

Each child has been forced to become a kind of schizophrenic, a duality, a division: the mind and the body. And between the two a gap has been created; that gap is ugly, that gap is a calamity.

Man has lost all joy because of that gap and man has lost contact with nature because of that gap.

We are connected to nature through the body but we are disconnected from the body so we have become ghosts in a machine. the body is being used as a machine, as a robot.

Awareness means dissolving the robot, awareness means unlearning the nonsense that has been taught by the society, bringing the mind closer and closer to the body, penetrating the body with awareness. and when it happens, a great thrill passes through the whole body mechanism, and then it is no more a mechanism at all: it becomes an organic unity with the soul. Then the body vibrates in unison. You don’t have the division, you don’t possess the body; you are the body – there is no possessor, no possessed. That’s where sanity and health and wholeness arise; otherwise everybody remains schizophrenic.

So that is going to be your work here: become more and more alert in small things. In drinking water, drink it with absolute alertness, as if everything depends on it. In that moment don’t do anything else. Taste the water, feel its coolness going down your throat. Feel the quenching of the thirst, feel the entry of the water in the body. In that moment only be that. Eating, do the same. In walking, sleeping, loving, remember one thing: the body has not to be used as a robot. It is not a machine, you are not the manipulator. It is you; it is your visible being, you are its invisible source.

But you are not two, you are two aspects of one energy. Matter and mind are not two but two states of the same energy; matter is more condensed, the mind is more abstract.

[A sannyasin says: I’m going to Europe to earn some money.]

Then you are coming forever?...

It will be so! Come back... and make it as fast as possible. No time should be lost unnecessarily.

Just be alert, because our minds are very accidental. The mind is like driftwood: it has no sense of direction. Unless you remember it you can be hooked into something, you can get involved in something and then the time will be prolonged unnecessarily. It is urgent to come back and to be with me. Keep alert about that urgency. That will help and will not allow the mind to drift anywhere.

Once you are with me, stop drifting. That goes for you and for everybody else too, because something immensely important is going to happen and you have to be present when it happens: You have to be part of it.

So just remember the urgency... and come back!

[Another sannyasin is returning to his farm in the west.]

Come back whenever you can find time. To be on a farm is beautiful. Make your work your meditation. Farming is the only work that is worth doing. Whenever you are with things which grow, you grow. That is the difficulty with machines: they don’t grow, so if you work with machines you are stuck. They don’t keep the growing energy flowing around you. So people who work with machines, by and by, slowly slowly become mechanical. Machines reduce man to a machine.

To be with trees and plants is beautiful because they go on growing, they become an impetus, an inspiration, and the whole energy is flowing upwards with the growth. You cannot remain low, you have to go high. If you are alert, then farming can turn you on as no drug can ever do. Mm? just the smell of the wet earth, the smell of the growing plants, the joy of the birds and the sun – all that becomes a milieu for spiritual growth. To be close to nature is to be close to god.

So perfectly good – continue. Even if it is not very economical, even if it is not very paying, don’t be worried; that is irrelevant. And whenever it is possible, come, mm? Good!

[A sannyas couple are going to the west for a short visit.]

Go consciously with the sense of a mission and don’t be shy any more! All of my sannyasins have to become my apostles. Don’t be aggressive but take the initiative. And there is no need to be shy.

Now the news has to be spread, and as fast as possible so as many people as possible can come.

So these three, four weeks will be a great meditation for you both. Talk to as many people, meet as many people as possible.... Good!

CHAPTER 22

24 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Nirjara. It is one of the most important words in the Eastern search for truth. It comes from the Jaina tradition. That tradition is very much unknown in the West but is one of the most important in the East, as important as the Buddhist tradition. But it never gathered too many followers so it remained almost unknown.

Nirjara means a state of consciousness where all conditionings have dropped. In the fall leaves drop and leave the tree naked, bare, with no foliage, and the naked tree and the naked branches stand against the sky; that nakedness is nirjara. When all the thoughts have dropped – they are leaves –

when all desires have disappeared – they are leaves – and when your being is just naked, utterly naked, with no foliage, with nothing growing in it, when all has stopped, the world has stopped, in that moment one comes to know oneself, one comes to know who one is.

When desires and thoughts continue it is impossible to know oneself because those desires are distractions and those thoughts go on imposing themselves upon your being. Your mirror is never left alone; some cloud or other is always surrounding you.

When all the clouds have disappeared, that cloudless sky is nirjara, that contentless consciousness is nirjara. It is the ultimate state... and that is possible.

Coming to me is simply a gesture of your being that now something is going to happen, it is very close-by. It will only depend on how much courage you can gather to plunge into it. Nothing else is needed, only courage, and you have taken the first step by becoming a sannyasin.

Sannyas means trusting me, because the journey is unknown and no maps are available. Guides are available but no guidebooks. And the journey is such and so complicated that no books can be fair to it; they can only misguide, they cannot guide. Only an alive master can take you slowly slowly

– one who has travelled the path again and again, one who has gone to the beyond and come back to the earth, has gone beyond and come back to the earth, who has been shuttling between this and that continuously.

Sannyas means trusting somebody so utterly that your life becomes a secondary value to the trust.

Even if one’s life is needed, one is ready to give it. In that readiness the impossible becomes possible.

Sananda. It means blissful, joyful, cheerful. And they are all on different layers. Blissfulness is something absolutely inner, nobody can see it from the outside. It is not available on the surface; it is only in the depth, of the depth You cannot see it in the waves; you will have to dig deep into the profundity of your own being, only then will you find it. Joy is its outer expression; it is not bliss but just a reflection of bliss on the surface. Bliss is happening at the core, it vibrates your whole being, and joy arises on the surface.

So joy is a by-product of bliss; without bliss there is no joy. What people ordinarily call joy is not joy, it is something else; it is pleasure. When they say, ’I am enjoying’, they are simply saying that this sensation is pleasurable, not that there is joy in it. Joy is not possible without bliss, it is a by-product of bliss. And in just the same way, cheerfulness is a by-product of joy.

Joy will arise sometimes and will disappear; cheerfulness becomes a characteristic of your personality. If joy comes again and again, again and again, then slowly slowly your personality is changed through it and it starts having a characteristic of cheerfulness; one is simply cheerful for no reason at all. Joy is happening so much again and again that it leaves traces on your face, in your eyes, in your lips, in your touch, in your vibe.

The real thing is bliss, the first by-product is joy and the second by-product is cheerfulness, but they are all joined in sananda. It is joy in all its expressions, in all its branches. And all have to be imbibed: if any one thing is missing out of these three, then you are missing one dimension of blissfulness. A really blissful person will be joyful and cheerful too. If cheerfulness is not arising that simply means that something is wrong. Maybe your surface is not in contact with your depth, your conscious mind is not in communication with your unconscious mind. Some bridge somewhere is missing, some link somewhere is broken. But whenever all bridges are functioning perfectly well, all these three things appear together. That is the perfection of joy.

Saki. It is a difficult word to translate into English but it can be understood. It is a Persian word and comes from the Sufi tradition. Literally it means ’the bartender’ but that is just literally. Metaphorically it is of immense significance. It means god, it means the beloved, the one who goes on pouring wine into our being. He is the real bartender who pours juice into flowers and life into beings, who is green and red and gold in the trees, who is in the sun and is in the rivers – that ultimate juice of being.

Life is intoxicating. People who are not intoxicated with life are simply fools, and with those fools are all the moralists, all the priests and all the scholars; they are very learned fools.

The only wisdom that I know of is the wisdom of being intoxicated. Be drunk with life and love! It is through being drunk with life and love that god arises. That is the metaphorical meaning of saki.

Become a bartender!

... Next time when you come, be here for a longer period... then I will give you a few groups which will help centering. Centering is not difficult; we just have to work a little, because for the whole of our lives we are distracted from our centre. Every situation in life distracts you from yourself, so slowly slowly, you forget the way back home, you keep hanging around. The whole of life and its training is such that it helps you to go away from yourself and not close to yourself. It teaches you, it conditions you how to go away from yourself. So we have just to learn to balance it, that’s all.

Once you know how to go in and how to be centred, you can be centred any moment, anywhere; in the marketplace suddenly you can become centred. Wherever you feel that you are becoming tense, just a small effort to centre and all tension disappears. You are again refreshed, again rejuvenated, again full of energy, again able to cope with life, its situations and its challenges.

Centering is a must. If you lose contact with yourself you will become more and more worried, tense and frustrated, because it is a kind of starvation. It is as if a tree has been uprooted and it has lost its roots in the ground. How long can it live? How can it live? How can it remain green? How can it bloom and be fruitful? Impossible! And that is the situation of man: he is no more rooted in his own being. That’s why people look so sad, so dull, so dissipated.

CHAPTER 23

25 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin, who is returning to his job as a therapist in the west says: I fear really giving a lot of energy and never getting any of that love back. It’s something I realise that I really need since I’ve been here.... What do I do?]

Go with this new understanding and try to live in the new way. Don’t fall back into the old pattern.

And don’t be worried about whether anybody is responding to your love or not; go on loving. It will not be long before people start responding; love cannot go in vain. But don’t think of returns at all. If you think of returns from the very beginning, then you become hesitant, you become miserly.

You start thinking, ’What is the point? I will give love and nothing will be returned, there will be no response and it will be lost.’ Nothing is lost... never!

All that you give is bound to come to you, is bound to rebound, sooner or later. Remember that, it is one of the most fundamental laws of life, it can’t be otherwise. Maybe it takes a little time: if people are very insensitive it takes a little time for them to understand your love, to respond to it, to be loving. Or maybe people are very afraid of love, so when you give love rather than opening up towards you, they close, they become afraid. They are afraid because in love they will be vulnerable; they don’t want to come that close to anybody. They have learned in life that whenever you come close to somebody you are being cheated, deceived.

But don’t be worried – go on giving love, and soon you will see that things have started happening: one response, then another, and then more and more responses start coming; then all explodes on you.

I know that one needs the feedback, mm? otherwise one feels as if one is alone, just shouting in a wilderness. But wherever people are, they can’t be so insensitive that they can go on being non-responsive to love forever; no, that is not possible. Nobody has a heart of a stone. Even stones don’t have that kind of a heart. If you go on pouring love on a rock, sooner or later the rock also responds, starts singing a song to you, becomes soft towards you. It shows its heart to you, it has a different vibe and a different texture for you. Try it!

Never be hopeless about love, because love is the only hope. And make it a point to go on giving whether the feedback comes or not, and you will be surprised that it does come... delayed, maybe, but it comes. Sometimes when it is delayed it is a surprise because you had completely forgotten about it; you had thought that it is lost. But one day suddenly it knocks on the door: it is there. It is a surprise; you cannot find from where it is coming because you have completely forgotten what you have done.

So let this situation be a challenge to your love, and whenever you feel too depleted, come back; just be here for a few weeks and go. And finally you have to be here permanently, mm? – this is just for the time being, coming and going.

Keep this (a box) with you. And when nobody responds, just put it on your heart: it will respond!

[A sannyasin, returning to the West, says that during the couples group she experienced Osho’s presence and love very strongly, while she was reliving her birth trauma. She realised she had a great resistance to life, and now she feels transformed.

Osho confirms now that he was indeed with her then.]

It will happen again and again and again, even in America it will go on happening, because once you are in love with me space makes no difference. Wherever you are, on this planet or on some other planet, it doesn’t matter. So don’t be afraid if it happens there; it will be happening.

Love makes impossible things possible; love is magic. And because we have forgotten the language of love, we have fallen out of the magic of life. Otherwise everything is so magical, so miraculous.

Each and everything is a miracle here but we have become so dull and insensitive that we go on living as if this is nothing. People go on dragging themselves in such a beautiful life. It is such an immense gift but they go on wasting it. They are always full of complaints and grudges and they are always talking as if everything is wrong. Nothing is wrong, nothing has ever been wrong, nothing can ever be wrong. That is the meaning when we say that god exists: it means that nothing is wrong and nothing can be wrong.

Once we start loving and saying ’yes’, new doors open; doors whose existence we had never even suspected. They have always been there. When you open you know that it has been there. You had always thought it was a wall but suddenly a door opens and new realities become available.

I am there in your heart so it will happen again and again.

[A sannyasin returning to the west says that she feels enmeshed in parental expectations: They really want to take part in the things I do and I don’t want them to. I feel really as if they’re holding me so much.

Osho asks if she will be living with her parents, and she replies, ’No’.]

No, because that won’t be good for you. Just go and see them.

And this is nothing to be worried about; almost everybody feels more or less like that with their parents. Their expectations are natural because they never think of you as a separate individual; they think of you as their projection, their extension, their child. Naturally they want that you should be this and that – famous, respected, rich. Nothing is wrong in it, because that’s how they have been brought up: their parents have been conditioning them in this way, they would like to condition you in the same way. You are fortunate that you are alert and so they will not be able to condition you.

For the first time in human history... this is the first time in the whole of history that a few children have been able to get out of the grip of the parents. This is a great revolution, a silent revolution of immense importance. This is a breakthrough; it has never happened before. Once in a while it used to happen: a Buddha would escape, a Jesus would escape, but they were just single individuals, their impact could not have been much. But for the first time in history millions of young people, men and women, are no more in the grip of their parents. Not to be in the grip of the parents means not to be in the grip of history. Not to be in the grip of the parents means not to be in the grip of the past.

This is a breakthrough, a sunrise. New horizons open now: man will never be the same now. All depends on this new generation because it will create new foundations for the new being to evolve.

Otherwise up to now it has been a constant repetition, the same wheel has been going on moving. It is a very subtle wheel: one generation conditions the other generation according to its conditioning; then that generation in its own turn conditions the next generation, and this goes on and on and on. Things seem to be moving but nothing moves because each father repeats his father’s training, practices his father’s training on his son, so history goes on moving in a vicious circle. People go on changing but the pattern remains the same.

This is something great, this time which you are passing through. It is bound to be of great crisis, turmoil, chaos.

This generation has to suffer much pain too – pain because you are no more part of your parents’

world. You don’t belong to it, you are alienated from it, you are homeless. That is the pain, that there is no home now; home means the parents. You cannot look back, you cannot fall back, you cannot return to the security that parents have always been giving. You have to go ahead into the unknown, into the insecure, into you know not what. The past is closed, only the future is open. It is risky, it is adventurous, it is painful, but it is ecstatic too. All around the earth there is great excitement among the new generation: something is going to happen, something which has never happened before.

My whole work here is with the new generation, and if old people have come to me, they are also in a subtle way young; that’s why they have come to me, otherwise they cannot be here. Maybe physically they are old but psychologically they are young and fresh.

My whole work is with youth. I am working to create something about which you are not aware. The end of this century, these coming two decades, are going to be of such value that rarely happens even in centuries. It is going to be a clean cut, a gap between the past and the future; man will never be the old again.

So you have to pass through that pain. Don’t think it is something personal, it is not. Fortunate are those young people who are passing through it because only they are young. Those who are not passing through it don’t belong to this generation, they belong to the past; they have no future. They will be happy; they will be settling into marriage, into good jobs. They will earn money and they will have bank balances and all those things and then they will die. But they will not create the future and they will not live the excitement of creation. Live this excitement and don’t think that something is wrong in it.

Don’t be hard on your parents, because what can they do? Mm, whatsoever they can do they are trying to do. Feel compassion for them, be loving towards them, but there is no need to compromise.

Compassion does not mean compromise. Be compassionate, be loving, but don’t allow them to destroy you!

CHAPTER 24

26 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Krishna is one of the names of god. And one has to remember constantly that at the innermost core of our being god abides, lives, that we are shrines of god, that we live only because we live in god. We may not be aware of it – we are not – but life is not possible without god. It is said that he breathed into Adam; that is simply symbolic. He is constantly breathing into you too, because without him breath will not come; he is your breath. He circulates in your blood, without him there would be no circulation. He beats in your heart, he is your beat and he is conscious in you. He is the searcher and he is the sought.

Always remember that ultimately we are gods, howsoever deep we may have fallen in sleep. But that is only sleep. By the morning when we wake, we will know that we have always been gods, even when we were dreaming of a thousand other things.

[A couple of sannyasins who have been running a centre in Goa are going West.]

Spread my word wherever you go. Now this is the work: every sannyasin has to shout from the housetops, mm? Don’t be shy about it; that time is over: now take initiative. And don’t miss any opportunity.

Whenever you find a receptive heart, put a small seed into it. One never knows: sooner or later the man will be coming. Just a small seed triggers a long process and sometimes small things change the whole of life.

So this is good – travel and help a few people. And there are millions of people who are in need, in great need. They are thirsty but they don’t know what to do and they don’t know where to go.

Because of this thirst and there being no possibility of quenching it, great pathology is arising in the world; people are becoming insane. This insanity that is happening now is not an ordinary insanity.

This is a very spiritual phenomenon. People want to be more sane than ordinary sanity allows but they don’t know how to be more sane, how to be more healthy and whole.

Not knowing how to be more sane, they get into difficulties. And they cannot adjust to the ordinary sanity. Millions of people around the world are ready to become more sane than humanity allows, and they are groping in darkness. So wherever you are, make it a point to help people....

[The Tao group is present. One participant describes experiencing being back in the womb and feeling misshapen and being afraid.]

Very good. It has been beautiful. Yes, it is frightening but it is beautiful.

Nothing to worry about. No, it has been a beautiful experience. And you were not deformed or anything, but a foetus of six weeks looks deformed.

It has been a beautiful experience... a very rare experience. It will come a few times and you will go even deeper into it. One day you will see the first moment of conception, and only when you have seen that will this experience disappear. That moment is of great joy; it brings so much understanding and light into one’s life. You are almost in a process of being reborn. You will be completely new, so just allow it, whenever it happens.

[Osho suggests more groups and continues:]

Then remind me again about how things are, mm? I would like you to go deeper into it. You can even go beyond this life to your past life. You are just on the boundary line. Feel happy!

CHAPTER 25

27 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

And remember that the change of a name is not just a change of the name: it means much. It orients you towards the future instead of the past. The old name belongs to the past, it contains your whole past; it holds your whole past like a thread, running through all the events and all the memories. That name is almost like a container which contains all, a hold-all. Dropping it is immensely valuable. In the very dropping you disconnect yourself from the past, and through that disconnection you become available to the future.

Energy can only move either towards the past or towards the future. The misery is that man lives in the past and the past is death, the future is life. Life is continuously renewing itself, moving into the unknown, searching, seeking; life is adventurous. And one cannot really live in the past, one can only pretend, because the past is no more. But we go on looking back, we go on hiding in memories behind memories. They give us a kind of protection but that protection is poisonous: it destroys your capacity to be available to the future, to the new. So the new name is just an indication that you disconnect yourself from the past, that from this moment you are born again, this is a rebirth.

Jesus says: Unless a man is born again, he will not see my kingdom of god; this is exactly what he means. Sannyas is a way of dying to the past, a way of being reborn. And the rebirth that is starting this moment has not to stop anywhere. It is not an event, it is a process. It will continue: you will be born again and again and again. A really alive person is continuously changing, moving, is continuously dropping the past, dying to the past. Real life is a constant rebirth.

Vitrago is the highest form of love. The lowest form of love is called raga; raga means attachment, possessiveness, lust. Vitrago means going beyond possessiveness, going beyond domination. The lowest form of love reduces the other person to a thing it kills, it is murderous – and naturally when you reduce the other person to a thing, he takes revenge: he reduces you to a thing. That is the conflict that goes on amongst all kinds of couples: husband and wife, friends, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, all kinds of couples. The whole struggle is to see who is to be the dominant one. But remember that even the dominant one is reduced into a thing through that relationship. You can only reduce the other by reducing yourself to the same status. So people have become things, they are no more people.

The highest form of love transforms even things into persons. It gives freedom, it is respectful, it has the quality of reverence Parents love their children but they don’t have any reverence for them.

That’s how they destroy their children. Husbands love their wives but they don’t have any reverence for them, and so on, so forth. Unless love is full of reverence it is going to be murderous. It is poison, pure poison; it destroys behind beautiful names. Only the labels are beautiful, the reality is something else; it is jealousy, possessiveness, conflict, nagging, struggle; it is an ego trip.

Vitrago means going beyond the ego, going beyond domination, going beyond possessiveness, going into freedom and reverence for life. Love, but never reduce the other to a thing. Love so deeply that slowly slowly, the other is transformed into a god or a goddess.

[A sannyasin mother and daughter are leaving for the west. The mother says that up to now she’s been working as a pharmacist... she has to give medicine which may harm people rather than help them. Some of it is healing but she is not entirely happy about the whole of it.]

I understand... but nobody is constantly happy in any kind of work. It is not concerned with the work as such; it is more concerned with our mind, with our attitudes, with our moods, with our lows and highs. So nobody is always happy, and by changing the work, nothing will be changed: you have to change yourself. That is a very easy thing to do, to change the work. People start doing that, then they start moving from one kind of work to another. But every kind of work will be frustrating unless your mind changes.

So a few things: whenever you feel that you are not in a good mood and you don’t feel good in the work, before starting work just exhale deeply for five minutes. Feel with the exhalation that you are throwing your dark mood out. And you will be surprised: within five minutes you will suddenly be back to normal, the low will have disappeared, the darkness will be there no more.

I can understand your problem, but life is complicated; one never knows what is going to help and what is going to harm. It is not only with allopathic medicine; it is so with everything. One never knows what is going to help and what is going to harm. All that we can hope is that we don’t do any intentional harm, that’s all; and that you are not doing.

If we start thinking in that way – that we should do only that which is absolutely certain to be beneficial – then nothing can be done at all, nothing can be done at all, and that will be more harmful. For example, if you give medicine to a hundred patients and to ten, it is harmful and because of them you stop giving the medicine to a hundred, then it will be harmful to one hundred percent of people. So we have to choose the lesser evil; the lesser evil is this.

And sometimes it happens... for example, in homeopathy, the medicine doesn’t harm but it doesn’t help either. It is just your gullibility that helps, not the medicine at all. A medicine which is not harmful at all cannot be helpful. Only a medicine that can help, can harm, because it has power. So one can go on distributing homeopathic medicine and can feel very good, but then too one is harming in a very indirect way.

For example a patient with cancer comes to you and you give him homeopathic medicine. It is not going to harm him but he could have taken some other medicine which could have helped him, and now he will depend on homeopathy; if he dies, you will be responsible. You have harmed him – not by homeopathic medicine but by delaying. So it is complicated. If you start getting into this, you will go mad. Simply relax. Just don’t do intentional harm, that’s all.

In the East we have thought very much about these things because we got into it too much and became almost crazy. Now there is a sect of Jainas in India which don’t eat in the night because some insects may fall in the food and may die and they may be responsible. They don’t drink water in the night. But they are torturing their body, and in that very torture many cells will die inside. So they are killing those cells.

Now Jaina monks go on fasting for long periods of time, thirty days, and they think it is very auspicious and very virtuous because in not taking any food for thirty days you have not harmed anybody. Mm? by taking food you harm something or other, even if it is vegetarian: so many plants have been cut for you, those plants have died; you are responsible for their life. They would have lived; now you have eaten them.

They fast. But then you are eating your own flesh; that’s why about two pounds is lost in weight each day. Where has it gone? Then rather than being a vegetarian you have become a non-vegetarian,: you have eaten your own meat!

These are complicated problems and one can try to go on avoiding them but one cannot avoid them absolutely. All that we can do is not to do intentional harm... the least, that’s all, but don’t try to be perfect. So just be in your work, help. And you know about it, you have had twenty years’ experience; do whatsoever you can do.

Drop these problems and these worries, otherwise you will become more and more tense. Leave everything to god, mm? That’s the beauty of being a sannyasin: you can leave everything to god.

Now it is his problem: whether to save this man or to kill him. Finally he is responsible, nobody else.

[A sannyasin, returning to the west, says: I always feel as if I’m in a dream, as if I’m not really here.

Osho checks her energy.]

Nothing to be worried or disturbed about. It is not actually a dream: you have a very very deep quality of being a visionary, and visionaries always feel like that. It is something beautiful which can be used in your spiritual growth; you can see many things which others can’t see. So rather than getting disturbed about it, feel happy about it and use it. You can develop great qualities of seeing into the future, seeing into possibilities. It can become an extra-sensory perception; you can develop e.s.p. very easily, you can become telepathic too.

These are qualities which humanity has forgotten, and they need to be revived again. You can-read somebody else’s thoughts very easily, just a little knack has to be learned. If you don’t learn how to become a true visionary these visions will look like dreams and you will feel you are living in some hazy kind of existence where nothing seems to be clear-cut. Everything seems to be vague, ambiguous, and everything fades into everything else.

So rather than trying to get out of it, try to get into it, and start being creative about it. You will be surprised that you will discover a treasure within yourself. And I will help you. So the first thing is: accept it deeply with gratitude; it is a gift. Just as poetry is a gift and there are born poets, so to be a visionary is a great gift. There are born visionaries, you are a born visionary.

But you will be in difficulty; if you don’t understand it you will always feel strange. You live with people who have forgotten this language, who know calculation, logic, mathematics, who deal with concepts and words, and you deal with pictures; that is the difference.

There are two types of people: the word-oriented and the picture-oriented. The picture-oriented is a different type. If somebody says ’mango’, the word-oriented person will never visualise the mango.

He will simply listen to the word ’mango’; he will hear the word ’mango’ but no picture will arise in him. But in you immediately an image of the mango will arise – not only that: you will start feeling the taste of it, the texture of it. One feels that this should not be so but really this should be so.

People are missing much, they are missing great depths of being.

So when you come next, remind me, mm? – I will give you a few methods to work out. But accept it from this moment, and that very acceptance will help many things. Just start playing around with the faculty. Sitting silently, try to penetrate the wall and see what is in the next room, then go and see. Soon you will be surprised.... Somebody is going to say something – just try to find out what he is going to say and you will be surprised. You are sitting in your room; go on trying to guess who is at the door. You will be able to see that a man has knocked.

Slowly slowly, confidence will arise, and then things will start working. All you need is a little confidence in it, a little trust in it. And when you are here next, remind me, then I will give you a few methods to work it out. It will be easier to work it out here.

[Osho had previously told a sannyasin that he’d been at Jesus crucifixion, that one day this memory would surface, the recall would transform him. To help, Osho suggested he make a meditation of feeling crucified, of getting into rapport with Jesus.

Tonight the sannyasin says: I haven’t found the key to the method you gave me in meditation.]

Don’t be worried about it, just forget about it right now, drop it. You have worked. What happens many times is that it is as if you see a man: you remember that you know him, you know that you know his name, you feel it is almost on the tip of your tongue, but the more you try, the more difficult it becomes. Tired, exhausted, you forget about it, and then suddenly the name pops up.

So you have worked; just drop it now. Suddenly it will pop up, any day. Leave it, mm? – just become unconcerned about it, your very concern may be preventing it.

[A sannyasin says: I’m terrified lately. There’s something I haven’t reached in the groups. It’s a deep sadness that I’m experiencing. I’m desperate now.

Osho checks her energy.]

Come a little closer. Just look at my hand. Raise your hands and go on looking without blinking. If something starts happening in the body, allow it. I would like to see the energy moving.

Good! Mm mm, so this is the method that you have to do; start gibberish again. It will bring up all that is lying at the bottom of the heart. That is the right method for you. It is your natural method and the one which will change you completely. Groups can help, I can give you a few more groups, you can go into them, but this you have to continue. This is so natural to you that it can transform you totally. This glossolalia is your method.

So at least once a day go into it for a sixty-minute period; go wildly into it. It will throw out all that is there. It will relax you, relieve you of all the burdens. It is there, you are right: the sadness is there.

That is because of your past, mm? You have lived as a Christian nun for so long that the sadness has settled in you. It has to be broken; it has almost become frozen ice but it is melting. Almost ninety percent is gone but the ten percent is there and it has to be removed completely, otherwise the ten percent can again gather and you can again fall into the trap.

So it has to be uprooted totally, it has to be destroyed totally; not even a fragment has to be left there. Even a small fragment will become a crystallizing force and it will bring everything else up again. These things are like cancer: you have to remove the whole canceric growth. Even if a cell remains inside, that cell will multiply and soon the thing will be back again.

So start glossolalia, gibberish, for one hour every day. And you have been going so beautifully. I am tremendously happy with you.

[Another sannyasin tells Osho he is feeling weird, something’s happening. He begins to fall to one side.

Go into it, allow it, Osho says.]

It is not weird; it is beautiful, mm? it is just far out! You are going into a new space, one in which you have never been, so it feels weird. But you have come in contact with something very deep in your being; you have moved inwards. The energy is perfectly good. But that’s how it feels when energy really starts moving. Then you are no more normal. It looks as if you are becoming abnormal, crazy or something. It is perfectly good. Soon you will become a paramahansa... just wait!

Just continue as things are, mm? And you have to absorb this energy; don’t express it. People won’t understand and there is no need to express. Just absorb it. Soon it will settle in a great centering in yourself.

It will become great meditation.

[The sannyasin then says that when he is making love, for the first time he is unable to climax. He has been doing the Kundalini meditation regularly but feels sick after it.]

Stop Kundalini... just stop it for a few days. I will see later but just stop it for a few days. And while making love do Kundalini!

The Kundalini must be doing something to your energy now. Its work is finished it seems, Kundalini won’t suit you any more. I will give you some other method but for three, four weeks simply stop it, mm? – and just live a normal life. Forget about meditation. Let your love come to a natural state then tell me, then I will give you a new method.

[A sannyasin, with Osho’s encouragement, goes into catharsis. There is a block in her belly.]

Mm, it is there – I can see it – but it will go. Do you have a box with you? Good. So tonight just put the box where you feel the energy is concentrated, mm? It will help, it will relax things. But it is good: energy has come up from the sex centre, it has started moving upwards. It is too concentrated there so you are becoming a little worried. You are pregnant with energy!

It happens to women more than to men. They have more space there because of the womb so energy can accumulate more. With men it ordinarily never happens, it never accumulates there.

It accumulates in different places, it can accumulate in the throat with man, but with women it can accumulate there in the belly. And it becomes heavy, it can really give you a big belly. It can almost make you feel that you are pregnant. You can start walking like a pregnant woman... but don’t be worried: you are not pregnant or anything!

It will go, mm? – every night for five minutes put the box there... just enjoy this energy!

CHAPTER 26

28 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

We are alone, all togetherness is just a dream, because in fact there are not two to be together: only one exists. So all relationship is illusory. There is nobody to relate to – only consciousness exists –

that is the meaning of kaivalya; and to understand it is to understand all. That is the ultimate peak of understanding. With that understanding, all misery disappears. The misery is created by the illusion of the other.

Jean-Paul Sartre has said ’The other is hell’, but in fact the other is not hell because the other exists not. It is the illusoriness of the other that is hell. It is just like a dream: in the night you are alone and dreaming of a thousand and one things. When in the morning you wake up, you start laughing: all those dreams look absurd, ridiculous.

So it happens when a man becomes a Buddha. That is the real morning.

Veet means beyond, sanskara means conditionings. Beyond all conditionings is truth – beyond Christianity, beyond Hinduism, beyond this philosophy and that. There is no way to conceive the truth through the mind, because the mind is nothing but conditioning. The mind is not yours; it is projected in you by the society, by the parents, by the teachers, by the priests. It is society in you.

And the more the mind is there, the less you are.

Let the mind go! – then for the first time you start evolving. When the mind is utterly gone you have arrived. And both cannot exist together. They are like light and darkness: only one can exist. It is very hard to drop the mind because we think we are it. That’s the whole trick. of the society: it has taught us this identification with the mind. It is very strange: you are not it, but everybody goes on living as if he is the mind. Hence we go on missing the truth.

It is possible to drop it but one has to be very courageous.

[The new sannyasin’s Taoist teacher in Japan has sent him and another disciple to take sannyas.

He asks about entering the path through methods like Aikido and Do-en.]

Tao has no methods, it is anti-method, because Tao means that which is natural. The method always creates the artificial, the method is always against nature. Nature needs no method, nature means that which already is. You need not discover it, you need not create it. You need not practise it; in fact, if you practise it you will miss it, because all practising will be of the mind and will create more conditionings.

A Taoist life can be lived but cannot be practised. It is a sheer understanding. These trees are Taoists, the animals are Taoists, and they have never heard about Tao, they have not been reading Lao Tzu. They are not following any path, they are not trying to enter into any way: they are simply in it! We are also in it. Relax, rather than practising. A,low nature to take possession of you; don’t try to grab nature, don’t be active, be passive.

And that’s where everything has gone wrong: those methods. If you practise them too long you will go very very far away from Tao. Live it but don’t practise it. Enjoy the small things of life – food, sleep, walking, working, loving – and just forget all about goals.

There is nowhere to go and no one to go. From the very beginning we are there. And there is no way to enter into Tao because we are in it. Trying to enter Tao is like a dog trying to catch its own tail: he will go crazy! And Taoists go crazy because Tao is one thing and to be a Taoist is another.

Tao is not Taoism. It has no ism, no philosophy, that’s the beauty of it. It is not a religion either: it is just pure life!

But it is very difficult for the mind to be natural. That’s why I have given you the name: if you practise, you will be conditioning yourself. Go beyond all conditioning – good and bad, moral, immoral. Just relax and be a child and suddenly you will find: Tao is here, Tao is now.

But when you come next time, stay a little longer. I will destroy your Taoism and really make you somebody who knows nothing of Tao but who lives in Tao.

Prem means love, akshara means immortal, indestructible, eternal – deathless love.

In life

everything dies except love. Love is the eternal element in existence. It is the bridge from the lowest to the highest. The lowest mind is also in love, maybe with wrong things, the love is contaminated, but it is there. And the highest consciousness – a Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Christ, are also in love.

Their love is absolutely pure, uncontaminated, but it is still love.

The lowest and the highest are joined together in love; this is the thread that runs through the whole of existence. Be loving – that is the only prayer for you.

[The new sannyasin says that he is an I-Ching reader. He is living together with the same Taoist teacher. He says: I feel the I-Ching tells me how to live according to nature.]

Nature is not enough – you have to ask the I-Ching? Why not look directly into nature? Why go through the I-Ching? And who is going to interpret it?you will be the interpreter. It becomes a game.

One can enjoy it, the game is beautiful: one of the most beautiful games is the I-Ching. But always remember that the way to nature goes through no book at all, because the book represents the mind. When you read the book, you must have to interpret it; it will be all projected from your mind.

So first there is the mind of the author who wrote I-Ching and then your mind. Between these two nature will be completely killed and murdered!

Enjoy it as a game, it is a beautiful game, but don’t think that you can get into nature through it. Nature is available without going through anything. Go directly, be immediate. No mediator is needed, and the moment the mediator comes in, the mind has entered. The mind is the basic mediator, it is the sole agent of all that is unnatural.

Come back again! and if you feel any difficulty, read the I-Ching and it will tell you to come?

[A sannyasin who is leaving says: When I came I thought big things would happen but they’re just....

He indicates things very small.]

They are real things. Big things are all imaginary, real things are always small. Big things are only in dreams. Reality consists of very small things: eating, drinking, loving, sleeping, washing your clothes, cleaning the floor, life consists of very very small things. It is only the ego that creates big things – god and enlightenment etcetera. It is always the ego that creates the big; it is never satisfied with the small, its trip is the big.

One expects big things and goes on missing the small, which are the real things... just very small things: a child laughing, somebody crying out of joy and those beautiful tears, or the sunset or just a bird on the wing. Just small things but they have immense beauty, immense truth.

One has to learn to live with small things. The small is beautiful, and if you go deeply into it, the small is not as small as it appears; if you enter into it, it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. Each drop contains the ocean and each leaf of grass contains the whole universe.

The art consists of going into the small. Go into the small and you will find the big, and go on searching for the big and you will never find it; on the contrary, you will miss the small too.

Next time come without expectations. The first time it almost always happens that you come with expectations. But I am here to give you real things, not imaginary trips. Those trips can be given very easily, I can manage them very easily, and your ego can be satisfied, but then I will be your enemy, not your friend. Back home you will fall flat on the earth because all that will be just imagination, fantasies. And in the name of spirituality and religion much fantasy goes on.

I want religion to be very earthly. I want it to be concerned with real life. Tillich has defined religion as the ultimate concern and I define religion as the immediate concern. Mm? the ultimate is a big thing; the immediate.... And that is the whole approach of Zen, of Tao, of Tantra. All these three great traditions coincide on one thing, that the immediate is the concern: just drinking a cup of tea –

the taste of it, the flavour of the tea....

That’s why in Zen, tea became ceremonious. The teahouse is a temple. It is prayerful, people enter it with reverence. It looks so foolish, mm? if you think of god and cathedrals and all great things that are talked about there, and then these Zen people are just sitting in a small cottage, with such reverence, silence, meditativeness – drinking tea! They are indicating something, that the concern is immediate: pouring tea... the flavour, the smoke and the sound of the samovar, listening to it meditatively, prayerfully. And that is far deeper than any church music and any nonsensical talk about god and paradise and angels, and how many angels can dance on one pinpoint – all nonsense!

I teach the immediate. And if you can drop your trips, you will be immensely enriched. The Zen master says, ’Chopping wood, carrying water from the well – how marvellous! how wonderful!’ Just think of chopping wood: the smell of the freshly cut wood, the joy and the flow of energy... or carrying water from the well. Such trivia is transformed if you can be totally there in it. The art of transforming the immediate into the ultimate is being totally in it. That’s magic! That’s what I teach.

Next time you come, come without any expectation and much more will be the outcome.

[A visitor says she has done one group but is afraid to do more. She feels she is self-destructive and keeps on hurting herself.]

But that you have to decide before you participate in any other group: if you don’t want to go into it, then there is no point. Why torture yourself? Don’t go into the group. If you want to participate, only then go into it.

[She says she wants to participate but cannot bring herself out.]

Then just go on doing a few groups; it will come.

And then come again, because this will need a little longer time. You will have to go through a few groups; slowly slowly, you will open up. You can do a few groups in Germany too.

[She replies: I did therapies in Germany and they gave up on me, that’s why I came here.]

That’s great! I always like to defeat the therapist. It seems that somehow you are enjoying it – that you are a toughie, that you have some control over yourself, that nobody can open you up. You are enjoying it.

You have to understand: if you want to enjoy, this is your life, it is nobody else’s problem. But if you really want to change it, you can. It is not the therapist’s problem, it is yours. He is just there to help you; you can take it or you can reject it. It is like going to a doctor for medicine and then throwing away the medicine. You can do it but you are doing it at your own risk.

Come again for two, three months, whenever it is possible and next time I will give you really hard groups and I will put a few people after you! We will make special arrangements – you come! Mm?

Whenever you can come, come. Good!

[A sannyasin asks: What do I have to do to really accept myself and stop looking all the time, stop searching and trying to... ]

When you come for the leaving darshan, remind me, mm? It is going slowly slowly; it will go, it takes time. Just time is needed, nothing else. The more you understand that it is futile, the more you see that it is creating misery, the more it becomes possible to drop it. Unless you really suffer through it how can you drop it? If you have not suffered enough through any problem then it is only intellectual to think to drop it; but your existence still needs it. It is only your mind which says drop it, but your whole being needs it, it is needed. When something is not needed, it drops. So you have to suffer a little bit more.

All these groups are really to intensify your suffering, nothing else. In an Encounter, in those seven days, or in a Primal, your suffering is intensified, mm? Left to yourself you will take years to suffer that much. The therapist brings his expertise to torture you, so in less time much suffering happens.

Through that suffering you start seeing: you see the pain of it, you see the futility of it, you see the absurdity of it, and in that very seeing you drop it. There is no other way to drop it. You must still be enjoying it a little bit, that’s why it continues. That’s why whenever somebody raises a question I have to send him to groups; it means he needs a little more suffering! Good!

CHAPTER 27

29 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Chandrakirti is one of the greatest Buddhist philosophers. He is not only a philosopher but also a Buddha himself, part of that great chain that Buddha created, and one of the most important links in that chain. There are no traditions which have produced as many enlightened people as Buddhism.

And Buddha’s disciples have bloomed in such great numbers that it has never happened before or since.

Jesus is lonely in that way; only once in a while an Eckhart or a Boehme or a Francis have attained.

Jesus’ disciples who have become enlightened can be counted on one’s fingers; not so with Buddha

– thousands! He really created such a momentum for enlightenment in human consciousness, a tidal wave.

Chandrakirti is one of those great disciples. Literally the name means chandra means moon and kirti means glory – moon glory. That too is very significant. In life man can have two kinds of splendour. One is that which is found around an Alexander; that is sun glory – aggressive, hot, violent. Another kind of glory is found around a Buddha or a Jesus or Lao Tzu; that is moon glory

– nonaggressive, non-violent. You can conquer somebody through violence but his heart remains unconquered. You can crush, you can destroy, but you cannot create, through violence. You can destroy somebody’s body but you cannot bend his soul; there no weapon can penetrate, no fire can reach. Man’s interiority is ultimately free. But when you come across a moon person, you surrender; not that he conquers but you surrender.

Chandrakirti means a loving energy, silent, cool. It will not even knock at your door: it will simply wait for you to understand, to see, to feel. k will not shout at you, it will not be loud. It will not be like slogans; it will be a very very silent whispering. It will speak in gestures; it will sing a song or a lullaby.

That is the meaning of chandrakirti. The real masters are always moon glories – become a moon glory!

Veet means beyond, vivarta mean illusion – beyond all illusions. Man lives in illusions because man lives in his mind. The mind is the source of all illusions; it only creates dreams, it generates dreams and desires. When those dreams and desires are not fulfilled... and they cannot be fulfilled, by their very nature they cannot be fulfilled because they are not in tune with existence; existence has no obligation to fulfil them.

The mind has taken itself as being the centre of existence; it is not, it is a pretender. But it is very very skilful in creating dreams, desires, of how things should be. It goes on and on fabricating, decorating, and it gets impressed by its own dreams; it is a kind of auto-hypnosis. When it becomes too obsessed with its dreams and they start looking as if they are realities then the danger arises; life becomes a wastage. One goes on working for those dreams to be fulfilled and they never are.

Ultimately only frustration happens. Through the mind there has never been any fulfilment, ultimately only frustration and only frustration.

One has to learn not to dream, one has to learn not to desire, one has to learn not to be a mind.

Then one goes beyond illusions and then everything immediately starts happening, because then one is in tune with reality. When you are not, you are in tune with reality. Then the whole exists and the individual simply disappears in the whole. That is let-go and that is sannyas.

I am initiating you not into any new dream; I am initiating you against all dreams. Sannyas is nothing but renouncing all mind-trips, relaxing into that which is. That liberates, that let-go is liberation.

Each language in fact is not one language but two. There are two dimensions to each language, diametrically opposite to each other; they never meet. They run parallel but they never meet. One is the ordinary language, the factual language, the language of the world. It can be refined, then it becomes the language of science. It is the common world language; refined, made more articulate, made more objective, more exact, but it is the same language – the language of facts. It says, it informs, it is needed, it has utility but it is not enough. There are so many things which it cannot do anything about – love, beauty, prayer, god. The language of facts is simply impotent about those experiences. It cannot express them, and because it cannot express them it denies them, it says they don’t exist.

There is another kind of language, just parallel to the factual – the language of poetry, of love, of prayer. The first language is logical, purposive, sticks to the fact. Hence it is useful but limited, because there are many things in life which are not factual and yet they are existential. Somebody whom you love is ill. He is dying and you care for him. He says, ’You have made a great change in my illness, you have transformed my being. I am a totally different person and I am taking my illness in a different way.’ There is no medical instrument which can detect this difference but this is true.

If somebody loves a dying man, his death has a difference, his illness has a difference. He can go to meet death dancing; he can go to meet death singing. He has been loved, he has been cared for.

He knows that he has been accepted; he is fulfilled. But no medical instrument can detect it –

whether the ill person was loved or not loved. The illness remains the same as far as the factual language is concerned but something of immense importance has happened.

There are things which are not facts. For them a totally different kind of language is needed. It exists; the language of aesthetics. It is illogical, it is emotional, it speaks heart to heart. It does not say much but still it says much. Sometimes it is even silent but in that silence there is a great message, communication, communion.

The first kind of language is from mind to mind. The second kind of language is from heart to heart.

It speaks in gestures, it speaks in metaphors, it speaks in myths and parables. It spins beautiful poetry. If you try to squeeze meaning out of that poetry, nothing will come into your hands; only the poetry will be destroyed. It cannot be squeezed. One has to be very sympathetic, available, one has to fall en rapport with it, one has to be possessed by it. One has to allow it to enter one’s interiormost core and then suddenly a flower blooms within. And one understands, but that understanding is not knowledge; that understanding is wisdom.

Become a language of love. Facts are okay, but just okay; they don’t make life a rejoicing, they don’t create celebration. They can give you a better standard of life but they cannot give you a new passion for life, they cannot give you intensity of life. They cannot give you quality; they can only give you quantity. Only the language of love starts penetrating you through a different dimension, through the vertical dimension.

The first language is horizontal, the second language is vertical; it goes into depth and it goes into height. The first language just moves on the plain road, on a superhighway. It never goes deep, it never goes high; it knows nothing of depth or of height.

My effort here is to teach you the second language. And remember, I am not against the first. It is needed, it is perfectly good as far as it goes, but there is much more beyond it, and that much that is beyond it is really valuable. It is nonpurposive, but valuable. It brings glory to life and benediction.

[A sannyasin who is leaving says: You have given me so much!]

More is on the way... much more is going to happen. The more you have, the more I give. I give to rich people! Not rich in the sense of money but rich in the sense of being. Money people are poor people; they have only money and nothing else. The rich people are those who have a heart, and you have a heart.

[A sannyasin who has just arrived says: I feel better.]

Mm Mm, you are better and you will become better every day. One just has to accept the idea that one can be better and one starts becoming better.

People are very miserly in accepting happiness; nothing else is a barrier. It is just that people cannot believe that they can be happy, this is the barrier. And if you can’t believe that you can be happy, how can you be? People believe in unhappiness, they are great believers in unhappiness; they believe in hell. They talk about heaven but they believe in hell, they talk about god but they believe in the devil. In fact they talk about heaven only so that they can believe in hell because without heaven there will be no hell. They talk about happiness so that they can feel really miserable; in comparison to happiness they can see how unhappy they are. But they don’t accept this simple truth which can transform their life immediately, instantly – that life is meant to be blissful, that it is just normal to be blissful. Not to be blissful should be a rare thing, a freak-out.

If people could accept happiness, joy, peace, silence, then buddhahood would be the normal course of life; everybody would be a Buddha. Only once in a while a person may not be a Buddha; that can be accepted. Health is normal, disease should not be normal. Sanity is normal, madness should not be normal. And buddhahood is nothing but sanity, utter sanity, sheer health. But this is the most difficult thing for people to understand, it takes them so long a time to accept a simple thing –

that they can be happy, that they are worthy of being happy, that god has created them to be happy, otherwise he would not have created them, that they are already accepted, that this existence needs them, that they are not useless, that they must be fulfilling some function in this vast complexity of life.

Once one starts accepting and respecting oneself, life starts changing, joy arises. There is no need to better yourself, you start becoming better; it simply starts happening more and more every day.

And the more it comes, the more trusting you are that it is possible; then it becomes easier. It simply depends on you, on how much you can receive; that much will be given to you.

So open your heart. Become a receptacle, an infinite receptacle. Then god becomes a guest in your being. This time something is going to happen!

[A sannyasin recently returned has written a letter to Osho saying that whilst in the West, everything was fine except that he kept waking in the early morning feeling restless and disturbed. First he began to feel that he was falling into depression; then the sadness became anger, aggression.]

I received your letter. It is something important and it is good that you have not taken any medicine, the medicine would have been a disturbance. It would have been comfortable, convenient, but it would have disturbed a very deep process that has started.

Yes, it was good that you didn’t take any and felt that. It is something from the deepest basement of your being that is being released. And it can be released only in dreams, because if it is released when you are awake you will go crazy, you will go mad. So it is a natural safety device that all that is very horrible is thrown out of you when you are fast asleep. It is just like when you are being operated on: anaesthetic has to be given to you. The operation can be done when you are awake but it will be too horrible, it will drive you crazy, and it will be too painful.

Surgeons have learned it from nature; nature has a built-in process: whenever something is too horrible or too painful the person immediately falls into a swoon, becomes unconscious. You can bear pain only up to a certain limit. If the pain becomes more than that, you simply become unconscious. So in fact, to call any pain unbearable is not right because the moment it is unbearable, you are not conscious; if you are conscious it is bearable. It is a built-in phenomenon, you have nothing to do with it. No pain is unbearable; when it is unbearable you simply pass out.

And that’s the phenomenon with dreams also: much rubbish is being thrown out in dreams and when the unconscious really starts pouring the rubbish which has been accumulating for so many lives, down through the centuries, if you can see it, you will never be sane again. So it has to be released in dreams. But even when it is released in dreams, in the morning you will feel bad, mm?

because the dream also happens in you.

You are not fully conscious but a part of your being goes on watching it, a part of your being never falls asleep. It is a very tiny part but that much remains as a link between your consciousness and your unconsciousness. That part goes on watching, that part remembers; otherwise you would not be able to remember your dream. That small, tiny part remembers in the morning that this was the dream. It remembers fragments: a few things it forgets, a few it remembers, because it is very tiny.

It is as if you are watching the whole film through a keyhole; you only know the fragments.

So in the morning it will be difficult and you will feel bad, but it has to be accepted; soon it will change.

And the fundamental change has happened: first it was sadness, then it became anger; that is a natural process. Now the anger will also dissolve. And once the anger has gone, the dream has done its work; you have vomited out your garbage from the unconscious. Then you will feel really unburdened.

So something beautiful has started. And it is good that you have come because here it will be easier for things to settle.

[A sannyasin says: I don’t know what’s happening. I feel such fear and I feel as if I can’t love.

Osho checks her energy.

She then tells him she has problems with relationships and having an orgasm.]

You need satsang with [one of my sannyasins, who] falls in love every day and then forgets all about it; next day she falls in love again. And when she falls she really falls. She is the greatest lover around here!...

Mm mm. Do one thing.... You are paying too much attention to orgasm; that is not needed at all.

Simply drop the idea of orgasm for three months. Let love be more playful, rather than purposive.

When you think of orgasm it becomes a purpose, it is more businesslike and then orgasm becomes difficult. This is the dilemma: if you are after orgasm it becomes difficult because you are looking out for it, hankering for it and you are not total in the act. Your mind is looking towards orgasm: you are thinking about whether you are going to make it this time or not and that fear paralyses the sex centre.

The sex centre can only open really when there is no fear, when there is no question of any result, when one is not thinking of any future, when the activity is not goal-oriented, when one is simply playing. It is beautiful to play with somebody’s body and have somebody play with your body. Just two bodies dancing, singing, hugging, caressing is a beautiful symphony, there is no need to think about orgasm. And then it will happen! This is the beauty of it – then it will happen. But whether it happens or not is irrelevant. Simply forget about it.

For three months forget about orgasm. It will happen many times but even if it does, don’t feel that you have it, so you have made it this time. Don’t think before, don’t think after; it is irrelevant. And after three months report to me.

Things will settle. It is this idea of orgasm that is creating the whole problem: when it doesn’t happen, you feel frustrated, you feel as if you are unloving, you feel you are unloved, you feel you cannot find a right partner. Then you become angry and your whole energy starts becoming violent and aggressive. It is the same energy: if it becomes orgasm, it relaxes; if it doesn’t become orgasm, it becomes tense.

In tension, anger functions almost like orgasm. It is anti-orgasm. It is the opposite polarity: it is hate orgasm. As the ordinary orgasm is a love orgasm, anger is a hate orgasm. One can get into such a rage that one can feel really great release; it comes out of violence. So violence and sex are very deeply related. If people are really sexual they are less violent; if they are not sexual they are violent.

That’s why sex has never been allowed in armies: to keep people violent. If they have their girlfriends they will not be so violent. They have to be kept very angry, in a rage, their energy boiling and with no way for it to be expressed in a human way; they become inhuman. And all the weapons – the sword, the knife, the bullet – are nothing but sexual organs, projected, trying to enter the other’s body. One can really feel an orgasm when one kills; that is the appeal of murder. There have been cases on record where a man has killed the woman while making love. He was trying to make double orgasms together, mm? a greater peak. While making love with one orgasm happening, he killed or strangled the woman. He was trying to manage both ends together: a love orgasm and a hate orgasm.

For three months just enjoy love. The orgasm will take care of itself and things will change. After three months you report to me, but for three months, really forget. I don’t see any problem... Good!

[A sannyasin reminds Osho about a letter: I wrote about my work in the kitchen, about moving into the ashram and about moving in a new relationship. I was feeling a lot of fear and distance... getting a lot of headaches the last few days which I felt was due to the fear.

Osho checks his energy.]

It is nothing to be worried about, there is no problem really. Just relax, relax a little more. You are simply feeling a little tired, that’s all. You look a little exhausted; maybe the work is exhausting and with this heat coming, mm?... but it is nothing to do with your mind. And there is no resistance or anything; you are just looking a little tired so you have a little more rest. And do the work less seriously then you will be able to do more with less wastage of energy. Love the work, make it a meditation – don’t do it just as work.

The whole commune has to learn that – that the work has to be done out of love, out of joy, a kind of celebration. It has not to be work, it has to be play. Play does not mean that it has to be insincere. It has to be sincere but non-serious. In play also there is a kind of sincerity but it is nonserious; one is not carrying the whole mountain of work on one’s head. And when you are not working then relax...

just rest a little more.

I don’t see that there is any resistance or anything. Those are excuses you are finding to try to find out why this is happening. Maybe there is resistance, this and that. This much resistance is natural; it exists in everyone. Slowly slowly it will go. But that is not the problem, the problem is that you are exhausted.

So just continue for one month and then report to me, mm? Everything will be okay. Good!

[A sannyasin says: I feel very closed but I feel very emotional; there is so much crying and so much.... It just all comes out of my belly. It’s beautiful and... ]

Allow it, mm? – this is prayer happening to you You may be surprised to know that in old Hebrew there is no word for prayer because the prayer was never a separate thing from crying, rejoicing, talking to god, dancing, singing. Prayer was never a separate phenomenon, it was all these things, so there was no word for prayer in ancient Hebrew; Jesus did not know the word ’prayer’.

Prayer is happening to you as crying. It happens differently to different people: to somebody it happens like laughing, to somebody else, something else. But whenever something is coming from your very centre, it is prayer, whatsoever form it takes. So allow it.

It will disappear, one day when its work is complete it will disappear. But with crying there is an association. The word has become contaminated because we see people crying only when they are in pain, misery, sad. But this is not that kind of crying, this is prayer. Be moved by it! When it comes, go totally into it. Become your tears, become your crying. Let every fibre of your being cry, let every cell of your body cry. Let it spread all over – body, mind, soul; let them all be together and crying. And this will be the natural meditation for you. I am happy, it is good; allow it. Good!

[A sannyasin says: I’m afraid of going crazy... Then I get uptight inside... I can’t relax and I can’t find any peace.

Osho checks her energy.]

No, nothing is the problem. You can relax easily but you do not, mm? Just drop the idea that you are holding; you are not holding or anything, just the idea is there. You have great expectations about yourself, that you should relax so much and you should do this and that, and that let-go should be total. don’t ask inhuman things. You are perfectly good; it is just that you have a great idea that that has to happen and then you start feeling, ’I must be holding back, because it is not happening!’

Forget about all these things, these are all ideas. Let-go is also an idea, totality is also an idea.

Forget all about these. Just be natural, whatsoever you are. Enjoy small things. Laugh and cry and weep and dance, and sometimes go crazy too because that too is part of life. In fact, if craziness is accepted as part of life then there will be no more crazy people. The crazy people only exist because people are not allowed to be crazy at all. So it is a simple division of labour. A certain amount of craziness is a must in the world, otherwise the world will not run; it will stop, it will be stuck. So a few people have chosen to remain sane, whatsoever happens and a few people have to go crazy because of these people.

You will be surprised: if a family is very sane then one person will have to become crazy. Now psychologists have stumbled upon the fact that the person who goes crazy is simply carrying the burden of the whole family. The whole family has dumped its craziness on this poor fellow, he is a victim. The mother cannot be crazy, the father cannot be crazy, the brother cannot be crazy; nobody can be crazy. Then somebody has to take that craziness. Everybody is trying to be sane and this poor fellow is vulnerable: all the crazinesses that others have left have been dumped upon him, he is suffering from all their craziness. If everybody were a little bit crazy once in a while this person would not be crazy at all. People in the madhouses are victims, victims of those people who think they are sane. We have forced them to be crazy. They are carrying our crosses and we are enjoying at their cost.

Always keep it in mind that once in a while a little bit of craziness is just beautiful. It gives salt to your life, a little taste, a flavour. And in twenty-four hours one should go crazy at least once. Then nobody will be crazy in the world, craziness will be spread; there will be no concentration of it.

So you need not be worried. If craziness happens, just go crazy. For one hour every day, it is perfectly healthy to be crazy. That’s what I mean when I say, ’Do Dynamic meditation!’ I have just given it a good name, that’s all, because people will not like ’Go crazy for one hour’; I say ’Dynamic meditation’,’Kundalini’, but it is all craziness!

But it helps sanity; it brings health, it brings wholeness.

CHAPTER 28

30 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin who is leaving says: It’s like a step into the unknown, to go back. I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t know how I’m going to live anymore.]

Yes, it is... it is. You will be back soon. Once you have lived with me you cannot live anywhere else.

Sooner or later every sannyasin has to come to me and be here forever. The world won’t taste so beautiful again. You will feel like a stranger and you will not feel that you are being understood.

We are creating here a totally different milieu of understanding, of accepting, of reverence, of respect for the individual. We are creating a different kind of world based on love, in love and for love. The ordinary world is against love. It does not give freedom to the individual, it does not have any respect for the individual, it does not accept the individual and his way of life. It enforces its own ways, its own structures, on the individual. It accepts the individual only if he is ready to yield to its pressure.

It accepts the individual only if he is a slave; that means if the individual is not an individual.

So it will be difficult, it will be hard, but it will be a great experience too. You will be able to see what has happened to you here; in contrast it will be very very clear and loud. So it is very good to go back once and then one feels one is finished with the outside world. Then you can come and become part of my heart....

[Another sannyasin, leaving says: I seem to have lost all certainty. I know nothing....

That’s good, says Osho. All certainty is stupid, it is part of the stupid mind. When you open up to existence, certainly certainty is lost. It is so vast, you can’t figure it out. This is beautiful – it simply shows that you are losing your knowledge. Now I am taking away the ground on which you have been standing. Soon you will be falling into an abyss. But uncertainty is beautiful... it is intrinsic to life, to its flow. It means there are still things to know, things are still growing, you haven’t made conclusions.

Let all your certainty be lost; become a child again – innocent, ignorant.]

[Another sannyasin, leaving, says: I wrote you a letter last week... I was feeling rather desperate at the time. It was just telling you about how I’d come here and how confused I’ve become... It’s better now.]

That I know – that has to happen to every seeker who is going to come to me. You come in search of certainty and I take your certainties away. You come in search of knowledge, not truth. People think that they are searching for truth when really they are only searching for knowledge. And I would like to give you truth, but for truth to happen to you, you will have to become absolutely unknowledgeable; that is confusing. What is confusion? – confusion simply means that now you no more know what is what. Confusion is a freedom.

It is as if a person has lived in prison for thirty years, chained, in a dark cell; then suddenly one day he is released from the gaol. He stands on the road, confused; now he does not know where to go. He has forgotten the taste of freedom. He does not know where he will get his food and where he is going to find a shelter for the night. For thirty years everything was taken care of: food was given at the right time, it was always the same food, the same time to get up in the morning, the same work, the same time to go to sleep, the same wardens and the same gaolers and the same prisoners. Everything was certain; one was comfortable! Those chains were there but they were no more hurting, they had become part of one’s being. One had forgotten the sun and the open sky and the fresh air.

Now he is standing in the open. The sun seems dazzling, hurts his eyes. The air smells strange; it is no more the same stale air of the prison cell, it is very unfamiliar. The traffic noise... nowhere to go...

and all the discipline of the gaol – when to eat, where to eat, what to eat – is gone. He had become almost dependent. He would like to go back to the prison cell; then he would be comfortable again and he could rest. He will be missing the weight of the chains on his hands and feet. It is very confusing. In the night he will not be able to sleep because he will miss the sounds of the chains.

Each time he used to turn and toss there was that sound, and it had become so familiar; it was a kind of lullaby. Now he is utterly confused, standing there in an alien world, in a crowd. Nobody seems to be interested in him, nobody knows him.

This is the situation that is going to happen to every sannyasin who comes to me. 1 destroy your prison, and I confuse you. That is the function of a master: to confuse the disciple, to confuse the disciple so deeply that he can never find the old certainties again.

You will try, everybody does, but you will not be able to find them because now you know.... And this is the beauty of knowing: once you know something, you cannot go against it. Now you cannot go back; you will have to go forward into more uncertainty, into more confusion. But with more confusion and more uncertainty you will be moving closer to god.

Knowledge will disappear, then truth happens. Truth is not knowledge. Truth happens in innocence, and this confusion is just preparing the ground for innocence. It’s perfectly good. Just be a little courageous and soon you will see that confusion has also gone. First I create confusion, then by the time I see that you have started settling with the confusion, that you are even turning confusion into a certainty, then I take that away too. The whole work is in eliminating everything that you can cling to. When there is nothing left to cling to there is freedom. That freedom is god, that freedom is love.

[Another sannyasin, leaving, says he worries about small things, like where I’m going later in the day or my parents and going home. He feels it cuts him off from taking part in Osho and in the ashram.]

Continue to worry a little, there is no hurry. Mm? you have not yet worried enough. Go deep into your worries, just really go madly into your worries. That is the only way to get out of it: one has to suffer it. Suffering liberates. You want to get out of it without getting into it; that won’t be possible, you have to pay the price. The way is through, remember. Never escape from anything. If this worrying is happening then it must be something essential for your being to go through. This is what I call acceptance, trust.

And don’t call those things small. They are important to you, otherwise the worry wouldn’t happen.

The worry always happens around something important. Those things may not be important for somebody else but for you they are. They may not be important for me but for you they are. The Buddha may say that they are not important but that is about his consciousness that he is talking, not about yours.

A child worries about his teddy-bear and a grown-up laughs at it; but the child has to become grown-up first before he too can laugh at it, and that is the only way he can become a grown-up. If the child listens to the grown-ups and thinks that this is not good; he is worrying about the teddy-bear which is just a toy, such a small thing... he should worry about great things: god and enlightenment and he is worrying about a teddy-bear. What kind of a fool is he?... Then the child will get into more of a mess, because god is meaningless and enlightenment does not mean anything to him. If you put enlightenment on one side and the teddy-bear on another, he will choose the teddy-bear. And I think I am perfectly with him – he is right!

So whatsoever you are worrying about is natural at this stage. So worry! Nothing to be worried about

– worrying.... Worry! Accept it. Play with this teddy-bear a little more and soon you will come to a point where it disappears of its own accord; you need not drop it. If you have to drop it, it will come back, because dropping it will mean violently. forcibly, dropping it. The work was not yet complete, you were not ripe yet. For one or two days you may remain enlightened and then you will fall again.

You will be holding your teddy-bear and you will say, ’To hell with god and to hell with enlightenment; I don’t want them, I don’t care about them!’

Nothing can happen unless the time for it has come, nothing ever happens unless the time is right.

The problem arises because we go on listening to many kinds of people. Somebody says, ’Think of humanity; humanity in such a trouble and you are playing cards? Think of humanity, think of Israel; you are playing cards?’ He can create trouble in your mind. You can start thinking, ’What am I doing? – playing cards and people are dying in Israel. Millions are dying from starvation and I am playing cards?’

You can drop those cards but sooner or later you will come back. In fact the more worried you become about Israel, the more you will feel that it is better to play cards. Just to forget all about Israel you will have to play cards!

Just do whatsoever comes natural to you. I respect nature and my respect is absolute. Relax and worry... and things will change.

When will you be coming back?... start worrying about it! Come back soon!

[An ’esoteric’ visitor says: I was hoping you’d have something to say to me.]

Become a sannyasin. Risk!

That’s why it is better to ask rather than to ask me to tell you, because you may not be able to listen, so what is the point? You may not be able to listen or understand or follow, so don’t ask me to tell you something; it is better if you have something to ask, to ask it.

[She asks: what is the next step?]

Mm mm! The first step has to be taken first, the next can only follow. It is very difficult to take the next step unless you have taken the first. It is impossible.

[Osho suggests she do a few groups and meditations.]

They will help immensely. Things will become clear, and you will come closer to me.

CHAPTER 29

31 March 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyas couple who are part of a music centre in the west tell Osho they want to start a meditation centre. He gives them a name: Malar – It means melody, music, rhythm.]

And to be in music is to be in meditation, to become music is to be in meditation. There is a kind of music that you hear from the outside; there is also another kind of music that is heard within. When one is utterly silent and all inner turmoil and noise has disappeared, a small, still voice is heard within. It is not verbal, it is musical. It is just a rhythm, the feel of a rhythm, the feel of something dancing inside... something infinitely beautiful, absolutely exquisite, something not of the earth but of the beyond.

So make the centre as musical as possible – singing, dancing, praying, chanting; introduce all kinds of musical possibilities. Music is food for the soul....

[A sannyasin asks: Is it possible for love to exist between a man and a woman?

Osho checks her energy.]

With this energy it is possible. It is not a question of man and woman; it is a question of energy.

There are levels of energy, seven levels of energy. At the first level there is simply sex, no love; love is just sugar-coating on an ugly fact. At the second level a little bit of love enters into it, but only a little bit. It can be destroyed very easily: possessiveness will destroy it, anger will destroy it, ego will destroy it; it is very delicate. At the third it becomes a little stronger, it will not be so easily destroyed.

But at the fourth things start changing: then one can have a divine relationship with a human being.

Beyond the fourth the divine becomes deeper and deeper, and slowly slowly, the sex part disappears. At the seventh level there is only pure love, all sex has disappeared. Just as at the first there is only sex, love is only a pretension, at the seventh there is only love, sex can only be a play. And the fourth is just exactly in the middle of these two: three are below it, three are above it.

You are at the fourth. From this point a divine love is possible. But one can fall, so one has to be very alert. Never be possessive, never be jealous. It is not love that is the problem; the problem is jealousy, that brings it down. That is the load, the heavy load, that makes it gravitate towards the earth. Drop jealousy and love has wings. It can go to the highest, to the ultimate, then the whole sky is yours.

[A Japanese sannyasin says: I’m having a hard time adjusting to the weather and climate. I feel tired, I feel really weak.]

It is just a question of two, three months, and then once we have moved from this place all problems will disappear. It is a problem for everybody: heat is a problem. It is very tiring and one feels weak.

I am trying to move as fast as possible (to the new commune) but there are a thousand and one obstacles.

Mm, soon it is going to happen; don’t be worried. Just pull on somehow. If you feel too much heat, you can do two things... A wet towel on the head in the day when you are sitting reading, working, translating, will be good, or a wet towel on the stomach will be of immense help. Try that, mm?

[The sannyasin then asks: I have very deep fear; I can’t figure out what it is, but with that fear underneath every sensation, anything – joy, excitement – everything becomes like a knife to the stomach.

Osho checks his energy.]

Mm! you must have committed hara-kiri in your past life! So the wound is still there.

Still the wound is there. This can only be done by a Japanese, nobody else! But once you become conscious of it, it will disappear; it is a wound from your past life.

Just knowing it, you will see it is disappearing. Anything that is in the unconscious, once it becomes conscious, starts being released. When one commits hara-kiri that wound remains for lives.

That’s why all the religions have been against suicide, because everything else drops with this life but the suicide, the impact of the suicide, penetrates another life. When you are committing suicide, that turmoil, that state when you are leaving your body is the last state of your mind. It naturally moves with the mind into the new body. It can create the same wound in the new body although this body has not suffered any hara-kiri. But the mind can create it; it can carry the blueprint and can create the same wound again. So it is just a wound. But it will go; just become conscious of it.

Whenever something starts happening there just relax the stomach, don’t pull it in. If you pull it in you are helping the wound, because when somebody commits hara-kiri he has to pull his stomach in.

In deep fear we all pull the stomach in and the breathing becomes shallow. When you are relaxed, unafraid, you relax the stomach; then the breathing goes deep and you don’t pull the stomach in.

So just remember that much: whenever you start feeling some sensation there, relax the stomach and don’t pull it in.

It will disappear soon; nothing to be worried about....

I will see to it: it will go. Just don’t worry....

Prakriti means nature, and in that single word is my whole message. Man has gone astray by going against nature, by trying to conquer nature. The effort has been a disaster: it has destroyed the whole ecology outside and it has destroyed the inner ecology too. Science has been trying to conquer nature and the so-called religions of the past have been trying to conquer the inner nature. They have been part of the same conspiracy. Science does not like nature and the so-called religions are also against it. The outer nature has been destroyed, but even far deeper has been the damage to the inner nature.

There is no need to fight with nature; we are nature. There is nobody to conquer it, the whole idea is simply idiotic. How can the part conquer the whole? In trying to conquer the whole the part will simply become alienated, will lose its contact, its roots in the whole. It can exist only through the whole. The part is not separate, the part is not apart.

To understand this and to live it is religion to me. To me religion is not any effort to conquer anything.

Religion is celebration – not victory but celebration; not conflict, but rejoicing.

Accept nature outside and inside. In that acceptance, the transformation. That very acceptance is the transformation. One relaxes immediately, there is no need to be tense. One starts flowing with nature. Life can become a splendour if you flow with nature. If you fight, then life is hell. To me this is the meaning of hell and heaven: to be with nature is heaven, to be in conflict with nature is hell.

[The new sannyasin says she would like to stay but she has accepted a job in the West.]

Nothing to be worried about. Just drop the idea!...

Tell them you are not coming! and I take the responsibility for breaking the promise. You need not feel guilty about it....

Mm! When your master orders you, you have to follow!...

Just tell them, ’I have fallen in the trap of a master and he says ”Don’t go!”’

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29