Turn On, Tune In and Drop the Lot

Talks given from 1/12/78 to 31/12 78

Darshan Diary

CHAPTER 1

1 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Samvad means communion. Man is living as an island, and that’s from where all misery arises.

Down the centuries man has been trying to live independently from existence. That is not possible in the very nature of things. Man can neither be independent nor dependent. Existence is a state of interdependence: everything depends on everything else. There is no hierarchy, nobody is lower and nobody is higher. Existence is a communion, an eternal love affair.

But the idea that man has to be higher, more superior, special, creates trouble. Man has to be nothing: man has to dissolve into the totality of things. And when we drop all the barriers, communion happens, and that communion is a benediction. To be one with the whole is all. That is the very core of religion.

Deva means divine, anando means bliss. Bliss is something which descends from the beyond.

It cannot be manufactured, man cannot make it. There is no possibility ever. No technology, no methodology, can help man to create bliss; bliss is beyond human creativity. But still, man can receive it; and the whole art of being blissful is the art of being receptive. One has to be in a kind of let-go, then it comes. One has to be almost absent, then it pours in from all directions and fills you to the full – not only that, it starts overflowing in you. Happiness is human, can be created. Bliss is divine, cannot be created. It is always a gift from god, it is a grace; but man has forgotten how to receive.

He has become too much of a doer and he feels that he can do everything: he can go to the moon, he can make atom bombs and he can reach the secrets of nature. For the first time in the history of human consciousness man has fallen deeply into the dream of being a doer. He has lost track of something immensely valuable that can only be received. That’s why a few values are utterly missing.

Love is disappearing, because you cannot produce it. It happens, it is not an activity. And there can never be a science of love; there is no way to cause it to happen, it is not part of the world of cause and effect. It is something mysterious – it happens.

But if we become too much of a doer then we are closed to that happening. Slowly slowly those windows, those doors, become too tightly closed and slowly slowly we forget that they ever existed.

We have become focused on doing. The doing can do many things, but not all; and whatsoever can be done by man is bound to be mundane. All that is great only descends. Great poetry is not man-produced: man becomes a vehicle for it. Great works of art are not man-made: it is god working through man, man becomes possessed. Love, meditation, all that is great, all that is sacred, comes only from the beyond. Man is at the receiving end. And to learn it, to be alert about it, is to be a sannyasin.

The sannyasin is not a doer. To be a sannyasin simply means to be in a relaxed state where the mind no longer functions. One is just open, with no defences; one is simply vulnerable, available.

One has to become like a dry leaf in the wind: wherever the wind blows, the leaf goes with it. One has to leave oneself to the river of life; and the river is already going to the ocean, you need not swim. You only need to trust and let the river take you.

This is the difference between science and religion. Science is action, religion is inaction. Science is doing, religion is non-doing. Science is male, religion is female. Science is aggressive, religion is receptive. Science tries to conquer, religion surrenders. And the miracle is that the more you try to conquer, the more you are at a loss, and the more you surrender, the more you are victorious.

Amiyo means nectar, elixir. Down the ages man has been searching for it, the whole search of the alchemist was for it: to find something that can make man an immortal. But all those searches have failed, they were bound to fail, because man is already immortal, there is no need for any nectar to make him immortal. At the very core of man’s being there is nectar. All search is futile and bound to be frustrated.

Man is deathless, as everything else is. This whole existence is nothing but an ocean of nectar.

Nothing ever dies. Death is only a change of garments. One changes bodies, and that is beautiful because one becomes tired of one body. And the body has limitations; it becomes exhausted, spent, and one needs a new body, a new garment. That’s what death is: a change of garments; but nothing ever dies. The body never dies because it is already dead. It is made of matter; matter cannot die.

And the soul never dies, because it is life. So all that happens in death is a disconnection between the body and the soul – that’s all that happens; they become untied. The soul starts searching for a new body, the body may wait for a new soul, and the game goes on....

Search within yourself for the point which is deathless. That’s what sannyas is all about: an enquiry into one’s own being for that which is deathless. And unless one knows it, one remains in a fear, one remains in trembling. Soren Kierkegaard says ’Man is a trembling’, and he is right! How can it be otherwise when there is death? Trembling is natural. You can hide the fact of death, you can keep it at the back, but it goes on coming again and again; it goes on exploding. Somebody dies and suddenly you are aware of your own death. Even a withering flower can remind you of your own death.

So the trembling remains there. One can hide it, one can be very brave and repress it, but it is there.

And the man who lives in fear of death cannot love, because love and fear cannot exist together. And the man who lives in fear cannot know god, because fear can never become a bridge to truth. Truth needs courage, not fear; truth needs fearlessness. Out of fear people believe in god – they don’t search for him. People become superstitious. One can be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, but these are not religious people at all. They are just afraid people, in a kind of paranoia; they cling to any belief, to any consolation.

But god is not a belief and god is not a consolation. God is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian; god is not even a person. God is this whole existence: this-ness is god, such-ness is god.

How to know this totality that surrounds you, that is within you and without you? With fear it is not possible: in fear one starts shrinking. It is possible only when one starts expanding; then one can have contact with existence. That can happen only if you have found something immortal in yourself; then there is no fear. All meditations lead to it.

Meditation simply means a method to penetrate deeper and deeper into one’s own being. And one has to go on digging till one has arrived at the source of nectar. It is there. All that one needs to do is: one has to learn how to turn off the mind, how to stop the inner talk, the continuous talk, how to stop the inner chattering, how to get off the mind.

And the moment you get off the mind, great energy is released. Such tremendous energy is released that one is simply turned on. No psychedelic can do that, no intoxicant can do that. You are simply aflame with such vital force that it seems impossible that it can belong to you. It seems so huge, enormous, that you cannot believe that this is yours. It is yours. It is just as each atom carries infinite energy. Once it explodes then we will know what energy it has. If an atom of matter has so much energy, how much more has the atom of being, the atom of life, the atom of consciousness?

But the mind is a dissipation, it is continuously leaking your energy. Once the mind is turned off, once you are no more in the trap of the mind, no more a victim of the trips of the mind, when you get off the mind, you are turned on to a new reality, absolutely unknown to you, of immense vitality, of tremendous power. It is a great explosion, and only in that explosion does one come to know who one is, being is revealed.

Sannyas can be reduced to a simple message: turn on, get off and be! That being is deathless. It is always there, it has always been there with you for millions of lives, but you have never looked within. Now the moment has come to look within. And all that you have been seeking outside and have not been finding will be found. One who knows oneself has known all that is worth knowing.

[A new sannyasin says: Well, I am very much of a hesitating person... so, for instance, before I came to Poona I hesitated about it for about two weeks: yes, no, yes, no. I have that often, and I would like to change it because sometimes I feel so hopeless about it.]

One has to learn a few things, only then can the hesitation go. First is: there is nothing to lose.

Hesitation is there because one is always afraid that one may lose something, but one doesn’t have anything to lose! Once this dawns in your consciousness, that you have nothing to lose.... What have you got? We never look into it. We go on thinking that we have much to lose, so we are hesitant about whether to do this or not to do it, to be or not to be; and we have nothing to lose! So in your hesitation you are wasting time, time that could have been lived, time that could have been of immense joy. Just see that you have nothing to lose, then every risk is possible.

Hesitation means that you are afraid of taking a risk. Maybe it is right, maybe it is wrong. There is nothing right and nothing wrong! There are no things fixed as right and wrong. One thing can be right in one situation and maybe wrong in another situation, so don’t be too worried about right and wrong. Rather than deciding whether it is right or wrong, see the appropriateness of it, whether it fits with the situation, whether it is an adequate response to the situation. Don’t be bothered about ultimate values of right and wrong; there are none. Every situation is momentary, and if you think of ultimate values you will be in trouble and you will go on missing life, because by the time you decide maybe the train has already left!

[Osho recounts the story of the german philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, who having taken three years to weigh the pros and cons of marriage, finally accepted the proposal of the woman he loved, only to find her married and the mother of a child.]

... Three years thinking... but that’s how many people are who go on hesitating, postponing, always afraid of making decisions. Life is momentary and each moment needs its own decision. If you wait, the moment is gone. And even if you decide later on it is to no point. But why does this always happen? – because we have been taught about the ultimate values. We have not been taught about the immediate adequateness, the appropriateness, of a certain response. We have been told what is good and what is not good, and what will take you to paradise and what will take you to hell. We have been told so many things, but nobody has been telling us to respond to the present with our total hearts!

And never be afraid of committing errors. If a person really wants to live, he has to be ready to commit many errors; they are natural. Nobody comes with a ready-made mind. The mind grows, and it grows through situations, challenges. The hesitant mind never grows, it remains retarded.

But, again, we have been taught not to commit a mistake. We have become so afraid of committing mistakes that we hesitate.

Never be afraid of committing mistakes, and hesitation will disappear. In fact one should be ready to commit as many mistakes as possible. Remember only one thing: don’t commit the same mistake again, that’s all; but go on committing new mistakes, you will learn through them. Otherwise how is one going to learn? Learning is through trial and error. And there is no ready-made knowledge which can be given to anybody: everybody has to grow in his own way.

So it is not only a question of habit; it has many things around it. And rather than thinking how to drop it, simply drop it. From this moment start taking decisions. Many will be wrong – I am not saying that all those decisions will be right – but that’s how one grows. Sometimes one goes astray – it is perfectly natural to go astray. If Adam had not gone astray there would have been no world. Feel thankful that Adam and Eve went astray, otherwise there would have been no Christ, remember! The whole credit goes to Adam. There would have been no Buddha. There would have been nothing –

the world would have remained empty. The serpent who seduced Adam and Eve into committing the original sin was the greatest benefactor humanity has ever known! He must have really been an adventurer. The original sin is not a sin at all; it is the way of growth.

So be ready to commit as many mistakes as possible. Life is small – commit as many mistakes as fast as you can so you can learn. And the more you learn, the more mature you become. Never waste time in too much thinking. Each moment needs your response. Respond! Whatsoever you have right now – your understanding, your preparedness, your maturity – respond with it totally and then whatsoever happens is good! Otherwise you will live a very lukewarm life, and to live lukewarm is not to live at all.

Live dangerously! Mm? that’s what Friedrich Nietzsche says ’Live dangerously!’ Come back – I will teach you how to live dangerously!

Veet means beyond, chitten means mind. Meditation is going beyond the mind. In fact, that is exactly the meaning of the English word ’contemplation’. The word contemplation comes from the root ’tem’ – tem means cutting off. The word temple also comes from the same root ’tem’, The temple is a place which cuts you off from the world, hence it is called a temple, and contemplation is the process that cuts you off from your mind.

We have become too identified with the mind. That is the only problem that one has to face and dissolve all other problems are secondary. And one should not get involved in solving many problems. It is better to cut the root, rather than to go on pruning branches and leaves.

That’s where Western psychology differs from Eastern psychology. Western psychology is still interested in cutting leaves and branches, pruning the tree, giving it a shape, making man adjusted to the society; and the society to which you are trying to adjust man may itself be insane. Whenever a problem arises, the Western approach is to solve it rather that going to the deepest cause of it. All treatments are symptomatic.

The Eastern psychology is not concerned with individual problems at all. It simply cuts the very root. The root is that we are identified with the mind; and we have to be separate from the mind, we have to know that we are separate, that we are a witness to the process of the mind – whether the mind is angry, greedy, sexual, violent, etcetera... whatsoever it is. It is not a question of how to solve violence. The question is how to become a watcher of the violence of the mind, how to be separate and aloof, how to stand by and just be a spectator of it. And a miracle starts happening: the moment you watch the mind, it loses all energy, because it is you who give it energy, and you can give it energy only when you are identified with it. When you say ’I am the mind’ then you can give it energy. Only when you come so close can the mind take energy from you. When you say ’I am not the mind’, the mind is there, impotent. The idea of anger will be there but it will be impotent; it cannot harm anybody and it will disperse soon, like smoke! Soon it will be gone.

Slowly slowly one has to learn the art of becoming aware, mindful, in each mood, in each state of mind. And once you have learned the knack of it, there is no need to go into psychoanalysis, no need to go into psychosynthesis either. By becoming separate from the mind you have dissolved all psychologies. And then Adler and Jung and Freud and Assagioli all look childish. Compared to a Buddha the whole modern psychology looks very childish, immature.

And the art of being a Buddha is very simple: become watchful of your mind. That is the way to cut yourself off – from the mind; that is contemplation, that is meditation. So this is going to be the method you have to work upon.

CHAPTER 2

2 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Atit means beyond, manaso means mind. The whole pilgrimage consists only of one step: from mind to no-mind. The mind is the world: no-mind is nirvana. The mind is a state of sleep: no-mind is an awakening. Everyone is a born Buddha, but fast asleep, dreaming a thousand and one dreams lost in the world of thoughts and desires and aspirations.

Once you come out of these clouds you are a Buddha. You are a Buddha even when you are in the clouds; the only difference is that you don’t know it. But that knowing is such a difference, the difference that makes the difference, because in the state of sleep you live in hell, and in the state of awareness you become paradise.

Deva means god, vihara means dwelling in – dwelling in god, being in god, living in god.

God is within, god is without, because god is all. In fact god is another name for the all. God is not a separate entity somewhere: god is just this whole totality, all that is. But the total is not only the sum total of its parts, hence the significance of the word ’god’. The total is more than the sum total of its parts; to indicate that more-ness, the word ’god’ is used.

It is like a painting is not just the sum total of the colours and the canvas. It is something more: the harmony in the colours, the organic unity of the colours. A poem is not just the sum total of the words it is made of; it is something more, it has a significance which goes beyond words. Hence to read poetry is not only to read the words it is composed of. To be really in tune with the poetry one has to read much which is not written at all. One has to sense the flavour of it. One has to read between the words and between the lines, because those gaps are not just empty, they are very pregnant.

God simply means the harmony of the total, the music of the total, which is certainly more than the sum total of the parts. And to live in god is to be a sannyasin. In other words to live in harmony with existence, merging, melting into existence and letting the existence merge and melt in you is to be a sannyasin.

It is possible! It looks impossible but it is possible. And it is not even difficult, it is the easiest thing in existence; maybe that’s why it looks so difficult. The easiest is the obvious and we tend to forget the obvious. God is, but we tend to forget. It is like a fish tends to forget the ocean: it is so obvious. The fish is born in it, born out of it, lives in it, will die in it. It is so close by, there is no distance between the fish and the ocean; and to know something a little distance is needed, a little perspective.

God is so close, that’s why we go on missing him. Once we understand this point – that god is not far away but very close by, closer than your own heartbeat then things start changing. Then you are moving into a new gestalt, you have taken a quantum leap.

Svagata. It means welcome. A sannyasin has to open his heart to existence, to life, to god. A sannyasin has to become an utter welcome, a total acceptability, a rejoicing.

People have become very closed, and because they are closed they are missing all the joys of life.

Life is incredibly beautiful, but if you don’t open your eyes how can you see the beauty of it? If your ears are closed you will not be able to hear the music of it. If your heart is not functioning you will not be able to see the love that is continuously pouring on you from all sides.

Open all the doors and all the windows of your being. Let every sense become so open, so available, that there is no rejection at all in any sense, at any level. A one-hundred percent opening is needed, then life starts soaring higher and higher. Then nothing is impossible. But one has to become a welcome!

The old traditions of religion were doing just the opposite: they were teaching people how to become more and more closed. That was the ideal of the monk. My sannyasin is not a monk. The word

’monk’ is ugly. It means a person who has become utterly insensitive to all that is, a person who has become incapable of living. A monk or nun means one who has renounced life and withdrawn into himself.

One has to live at one’s centre and yet live in the world. One should neither be a monk nor a worldly man: one should be a unity. One should not be an extrovert or an introvert: one should be capable of being both, as the situation demands. When the world calls you forth, go out! When a cuckoo starts calling in the trees, listen to it – it is beautiful – but don’t get stuck there, because there are beauties of the inner too, and there are songs that the heart has to sing.

The sannyasin should be capable of coming in and out easily, stuck nowhere. He has no prejudice, he does not divide the inner from the outer; it is all one! It is like a breath going in, coming out, going in, coming out; it is one single breath. And life should be like that – one single breath.

Sattvo. It means the state of utter balance. The Eastern psychology divides human energies into three categories: sattva, rajas, tamas. Tamas means passivity, darkness, utter darkness, inactivity, lethargy, the feminine quality. Rajas is just the opposite of tamas: the male quality, dynamism, activity, aggression, much activity, dazzling light. And sattva means the balance between the two: the male and the female, activity and passivity, darkness and light. Sattva is a state of twilight, neither day nor night – in a way neither, in a way both, a state of utter balance, absolute balance.

And to be in this state is to know, because only a balanced energy can have the right vision of reality.

If you are searching for reality only through the feminine your vision will be lopsided. If your energy is only feminine your search will be for the male energy, the other half. And if the energy is only male you will be searching for the female, because the half always needs the other half so that it can become full. And the half can never become full by searching for the other half in the outer world. For a meeting, for a moment it may be possible, but then again the separation happens. Man and woman can meet for a moment in deep orgasmic bliss, but it can be only momentary; and then despair, then frustration. Then again one is lonely, far more lonely than one was before.

Unless inside your being some chemical transformation happens so that you become whole man and woman together, yin and yang together, tamas, rajas together – you will always remain desiring, hankering, searching, and you will never be at ease. Only in sattva, the state of balance, can one be at ease. It is the state of being at home; one is a perfect circle in one’s inner being.

And both the elements are there. In the night the feminine takes you over, hence you can fall asleep easily. In the day the masculine takes you over, hence you become active. They are always there inside you, both are there: sometimes you are passive, sometimes you are active. If they can meet together.... They happen only separately: when you are active, you are active; when you are passive, you are passive. The whole art of meditation is to make them happen simultaneously so that you are active and passive together, so that your eyes are full of tears and you are smiling too: the paradox.

And in that paradox something becomes welded. In that suddenly you become one. You are no more two cut parts, the circle is perfect, and in that perfection of the circle is sattva: balance, tranquility, quietness, calmness, coolness. That is the goal of all meditations.

Sumito means a good friend. Become a friend to all that is: to the rocks, to the trees, to the skies.

Be a pagan!

Just the other day I was reading about an Italian woman mystic who was burned by the Christians three hundred years ago because she used to worship stars. The only crime was this that she used to worship stars. And this should be really the state of every religious person: to worship trees, rivers, mountains, stars.

Christianity has done something really dangerous to the human mind: it has killed Christ in existence. Judas only betrayed Jesus physically; the church has betrayed him spiritually. And the people who crucified Jesus were not his real enemies because you cannot kill Jesus by crucifying his body. But the church has done the real thing: they have destroyed his whole spirit.

Now burning a woman just because she is a worshipper of the stars and prays to the stars and talks to the stars is unbelievable; but this is what has been done. And this is not an exceptional case: thousands of pagans have been killed by the Christians by the Mohammedans.

And the pagan has something tremendously beautiful in his being. He is a good friend to existence.

He is in communion with existence. He may not be very articulate theologically but theology has nothing to do with religion. He is very poetic; he is not theological but he knows the poetry of life.

He can have a good conversation with a tree.

And we have to bring this quality back to humanity that people start talking to trees and to stars and to mountains and existence can be reclaimed. Man has become isolated because the bridge has been broken; and if you are not in tune with nature you cannot be in tune with god either because god is the hidden quality of nature god is the hidden face of nature god is eminent in nature.

So this is my message to you: become more and more friendly to things to people to birds to animals.

Let friendship become your very style your meditation, and you will be surprised: friendship will bring you closer to god.

Veet means beyond, amo means darkness. Our real being is beyond all darkness, and if we are in darkness, it is only because of identification. We have become identified with that which surrounds us and we have forgotten ourselves, forgotten who we are. We are basically light, our innermost core is a fire, eternal fire, but we are surrounded by darkness. We never look at who we are and we go on looking at the darkness. Slowly slowly we become identified with that which we see. We are not that which we see: we are the seer. But the seer becomes identified with the seen, and that is the whole trouble.

Once it is understood and once the identification is broken and one turns, takes an about-turn and looks into one’s own centre, the sun is already on the horizon; the morning has come. That morning is liberation, that dawn. And then one can live in darkness; there is no problem. You are not darkness; that has been understood. Once it becomes a tacit understanding that one is not darkness, that one is not misery, then all is good. Then one can live in the world and one will not be part of it any more.

And that is the art I want my sannyasins to learn: to be in the world and yet not be of it; without renouncing it, to renounce it; without escaping from it, going beyond it – that’s the real art. It happens! It happens by being centered in one’s own light.

I can see it in you, I can see it in everybody, but you cannot yet see it. You will have to be turned towards your own being, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn is needed. And that’s my work here: to help you to take an about-turn, to have a look into your own depth. And suddenly you are beyond all darkness. That is liberation.

[A sannyasin asks: I wanted to know what kind of mechanism it is that you are infatuated in a split second. How does that work?]

It had nothing to do with the man, not at all. It was something that was happening within you; it was just a coincidence that he entered. If somebody else had entered then too you would have fallen into the same infatuation. It was just an opening inside you. It was a coincidence that your opening, your silence, your centering and his centering, happened together. It was a projection: your inner mood became projected on him, he became a screen.

You will have to learn it; slowly slowly you will see. It will happen many times now. Once it has happened it will happen many times. And you will have to learn: it has nothing to do with the person, it has something to do with your inner processes.

Your being here has been of immense value to you. Something has started growing in you, something that you had always desired but had repressed.

Your relationship with your son

particularly has been a heavy thing on you. You could never love him, you could not embrace him, you could not take him as close as you wanted him to be. That has always been there like a weight on your chest. It has disappeared, and because it has disappeared your love is flowing.

It was just accidental that your love was flowing intensely and he entered. It was simultaneous, so your love became projected. It was a very very open moment of your being. But it will happen again and again so be a little watchful, otherwise you can get into unnecessary trouble. Just watch. It has nothing to do with the person. It can happen with a tree, it can happen with the rising sun; it can happen with anything.

Anand means bliss, punit means purity, innocence – pure innocent bliss, virgin bliss. You cannot create it: you can only receive it. If you create it, you have already made it artificial, impure. You cannot even cause it to happen; you can only be a silent awaiting. Whenever it comes, it comes; it comes like a breeze. But even if it comes for a single moment, that moment is more valuable than the whole eternity. Then it is pure bliss, not created by you, not contaminated by your mind. It comes from the beyond, it belongs to the beyond. It is divine!

If you manufacture it in some way or other....

There are ways to manufacture it – one can

manufacture it through yoga postures – but then it is not pure bliss; it is really a poor substitute.

One can manufacture it through sexual orgies. There have been schools to manufacture it through sexual orgies but then it is not pureness; it is just chemical, hormonal. Down the ages people have used all kinds of drugs to produce it, from soma to LSD, but that is chemical; that is not true bliss.

True bliss has to be unmanufactured, unmade. It should not have any imprint of your mind on it.

Your mind should be in a completely inactive state when it comes, so it cannot disturb it, it cannot distort it; your mind should be annihilated when it comes.

So all my methods of meditation are to annihilate the mind. When the mind ceases to be, then on its own accord the sky starts pouring something into your being, something nectar-like, and there is a great dance inside. In the beginning it is only for moments; then those moments start becoming prolonged, longer and longer and longer, and finally it becomes an established phenomenon in you.

Then it never leaves you.

But you can never claim that you have made it, that you have achieved it; you can only feel grateful that god has given it to you as a gift. It is a grace!

Prem means love, pradip means a lamp – a lamp of love, a light of love. Love is the only light in life; all else is darkness. You can have money and you will live in darkness; you can have power and you will live in darkness. You can be famous, you can have much respectability, but you will live in darkness. Unless you have light, unless you have love, you will not have light at all. It is only love that makes life a light phenomenon. That is the meaning of the word ’enlightenment’. It is love that brings enlightenment. So meditate on love, and not only meditate: act on love. Never be afraid of love, and whenever love knocks on the door don’t hesitate to open it. Go with love, take all the risks.

You will never be a loser.

Love will bring many agonies but it is only through agonies that one day ecstasy arrives. Love will take you astray many times, but that is how one grows and matures. Love will deceive you, love will hurt you, but that is all part of growth and the growth process. Finally, when one has arrived, one comes to know that all that has happened through love was absolutely necessary. Then one feels grateful for the good days and for the bad days, for the pleasures and for the pains, for all those dark nights of agony and for all those beautiful moments of joy. One feels grateful, simply grateful for whatsoever love has brought, because all the negative and all the positive moments together bring integration.

So become love, be loving. Nothing is more valuable than love. Sacrifice everything for love: never sacrifice love for anything else. Let that be your motto. That is the meaning of your name.

Prem means love, sudasi means a good servant, a good slave – a good slave of love. And you look almost perfect!

Serve love, let love be the master in your life. Annihilate yourself for love. Cease to be so that love can come. And through love comes god. It is love that liberates, because it is love that brings you face to face with truth, with life as it is. Love is a mirror: it reflects reality.

The only problem with love is that you have to surrender, you have to become a slave; only then can you attain to love. But the paradox is that those who surrender in love become victorious. And those who are real slaves of love become masters, because love grounds you. It crucifies you: it grounds you too. First it crucifies you, first it kills you, destroys you, and when you are completely gone a new you arrives, there is a resurrection.

So love is a crucifixion and resurrection. That is the whole meaning of Jesus’ story, that he is crucified and after three days he is resurrected again. It is a parable it is not historical – and it is a beautiful parable. To reduce it to history is to make it ugly, to make it false. It is a tremendously powerful metaphor, that those who love will have to die for their love, but those who are ready to die for love attain to eternal life.

[A sannyasin asks: I had some nightmares and I wonder if something is wrong in my body or my energy.]

Nothing is wrong with your body or energy, but something has to be changed in your mind. The nightmares come not from the body, they come from the mind. You must be having a very ambitious mind, and an ambitious mind always creates nightmares! But we will destroy that ambition, don’t be worried. Soon you will forget all about it.

Do a few groups and go on reminding me about your nightmares. They will be gone; nothing to be worried about. In these groups you will encounter such nightmares... that you will think that those nightmares were sweet dreams! It is all comparative! And once you have come out of these groups, you will feel enlightened! After each group one feels enlightened for a few days!

CHAPTER 3

3 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Svadesh means homeland. Man’s search is for his real homeland. In this world man is a stranger, a foreigner; he lives a kind of uprooted life. Something essential is missing: he is missing the soil where he can grow his roots. His life remains an empty gesture. a constant occupation just so he remains occupied, so that he can forget, forget the longing for the homeland.

So from one sensation man goes to another sensation, and if he is left alone even for a few moments he is in a panic. Great anguish arises, because he immediately starts feeling the falsity of all that he calls life, the futility of all that he has been living, the phoniness of all that he is. So nobody wants to be left alone. Nobody wants any quiet, silent moments to ponder on one’s own being, because the moment one is alone, fear arises.

You start seeing that all that you think is valuable is just rubbish, that all your friendships are superficial, that all your so-called loves are not love at all – maybe something else masquerading as love. Sometimes even hate masquerades as love; because love cannot be dominating, love cannot be possessive. These are the qualities of hate! Love gives freedom: hate cripples, destroys. The so-called love that we live and think is love is not really love. Hate is labelled as love, poison is labelled as nectar, and we believe in the label and we forget about the content.

Whenever one is left alone, in solitude, all these things become so clear, so obvious, that naturally one starts feeling that one’s world is falling apart, disappearing; great panic is bound to arise. One is falling into an abyss! You immediately turn the TV on, you start reading the same newspaper that you have read twice since the morning. You start searching for some new occupation or some new entertainment or some new intoxicant. But nothing really helps. Unless one really searches for one’s own being nothing ever helps.

The word ’svadesh’ is far more meaningful than the word homeland. Sva means self and desh means country. It is not only one’s own land, in fact it is one’s very self too. Your very self is your country, and unless you are there you will remain on the surface, you will never know what depth is and what height is; you will never know what real life is.

Sannyas is a penetration into this country of the self, this inner world, the kingdom of god.

Sandip, sandipo, means eternal light, light that has no beginning and no end, light that is never born and never dies, light that needs no fuel. It is another name for your consciousness.

Consciousness is the real eternal light. It lives in the body but it doesn’t depend on the body. The body is just an abode – a beautiful abode, a temple, but still an abode. And one has to search for that which is beyond the body and yet lives in the body. It is very close by: it is you! One can plunge into it any moment. All that is needed is a state of disengagement from the outside world, and that’s what meditation is all about. Meditation is the art of disengagement.

The mind is constantly engaged, occupied, involved.

Whenever there is a moment of no

engagement, no occupation, no-mind arises in you. That no-mind is the eternal light. All that is needed is turning in, tuning in. It is simple, it is easy, it is natural. It is not something very arduous, it is just that we have forgotten about it completely; a remembrance is enough. I am here to remind you that it has happened to me, it can happen to you; that you are in a state of dream but you can be awakened!

To become a sannyasin means that you are saying ’I am asleep. Please, wake me up!’ Once you are ready to wake up it is so simple. All that is needed then is just calling you forth, just as Jesus called Lazarus out of his grave ’Lazarus, come out!’ And man asleep is in a grave; every man is a Lazarus. Until you are spiritually born you are dead.

Veet means beyond, tamaso. means darkness. The time has come to go beyond darkness. The morning is very very close... just a little effort.... The barrier between you and reality is not very thick, it is just a thin screen. It can be easily removed. It is made not of stone; it is made only of thoughts, the same stuff dreams are made of.

It exists only because we don’t know how to be in a state of no-thought. We don’t know how to stop this constant chattering inside. And all the religions of the world simply teach one thing: how to get rid of the mind. And it is simple, the method is not difficult at all, but people don’t even try it. Maybe they are afraid that they may succeed in stopping the mind.

That’s my observation: that people are really afraid of meditative states. They have become so accustomed to living with the mind and its madness, they have become so efficient and clever, they have become so adjusted to all the neurosis of the mind that they are afraid ’If the mind suddenly disappears then what am I going to do? Then how will I live?’... because then there will be no desire and no future, then there will be no ambition and no aspiration. There will be no past, no memories of the past, no nostalgia for the past. You will be simply herenow, just this moment will be all; and it seems very dangerous just to be in the moment. We have never lived in the moment. It is so unknown, and anything unknown creates fear.

And meditation is the most unknown thing in the world. The mind is the most known; meditation is just absence of the mind. All our joys and all our miseries are part of our mind. In meditation all your miseries and all your happinesses will disappear; you will be in a totally new state, in a new dimension. In that dimension you will have to learn everything from ABC, and nobody wants to.

That’s why people are not getting into meditation. They talk about meditation, they make a few half-hearted efforts too, but those are just pretensions. Otherwise it is such a simple thing that if you are really intent, if there is intensity, it will happen, any moment. If you are really afire for it there is no need to wait for tomorrow: it will happen today, it will happen now. And that is the only barrier, a very thin one like a Japanese paper screen; painted beautifully but it is just paper – you can remove it very easily.

The name is to constantly remind you that you have lived long enough in darkness – many lives. It is time to wake up, so don’t miss this opportunity of being a sannyasin. And if you become awakened then you will know what Christ is, what Buddha is. Otherwise you can go on repeating the name of Buddha, of Christ, it is all futile. You can go on creating Christ in your mind, but that is your imagination; it has nothing to do with the real Christ-consciousness. When the mind disappears and you are meditation – I am not saying you are in meditation, I am saying you are meditation – that moment is the moment of Christ-consciousness. One contacts the eternal. Christ and Buddha and Krishna and Lao Tzu are all just expressions of the same, the same truth in different forms.

By becoming a sannyasin you are entering into the essential core of all religions. This is not A religion: this is the religion. I am not a Christian, I am not a Hindu, I am not a Mohammedan, I am not a Buddhist; and yet all that is essential in all the traditions of the world is contained in what I am saying and in what I am doing.

By becoming a sannyasin you are entering into an esoteric school, into an alchemical school. This is not a formal religion, this is not a Sunday religion. This is fire! If you really enter into it you will have to die and you will have to be reborn. You enter into me as one person; when you come out of me you are totally another.

Sannyas is a process of transformation. Hence I am not concerned with dogmas and creeds and ideologies; I am concerned only with the inner science of how to transform your consciousness from the lowest base metal into the highest, into gold.

Lolit. It means the moved. There is a movement in the heart which very rarely happens. That has happened. You will never again be the same person as you came; something new has arrived.

Slowly slowly you will become aware of it: something new has entered. To remind you of this moment I am giving you the name ’the moved’ – one who is moved by god, one who has allowed god to move the heart.

Our hearts are upside-down. Only god can put the heart into the right shape, right-side-up. We are living a very clumsy and chaotic life; only god can bring accord, harmony. Only god can become a dance in the heart. That is the meaning of lolit.

So from this moment think of yourself as a new person, because that will be truer to reality. Think of the past as if it belonged to somebody else. Turn on, tune in, and drop the lot! Think of this as your birth; count your age from this day. If somebody asks you tomorrow how old you are, tell him

’Twenty-four hours’ because up to now whatsoever you have been doing was just a preparation for this; it was only a preparation, an introduction. Now real life will start.

It may take time for you to recognise what I have seen happening in the unconscious of your being, because anything that happens deep in the unconscious takes time to travel to the conscious. It depends how much distance one has created between one’s conscious and the unconscious; it depends on that how much time it will take to recognise it. But the master can see what you may see sometime in the future. Your future can be a present thing for the master.

Something has moved, something has changed beautifully. Slowly slowly you will become aware of a new heartbeat, of a new love, of a new quality surrounding you – as if suddenly spring has burst forth. It is like a tree growing, growing; much foliage, many leaves, many branches are there but the tree is incomplete. Then spring comes and suddenly it blossoms and it flowers.

That should be exactly the case with man too. We can go on gathering many leaves and branches and great foliage, but that is not real life, that is not the thing we are destined to be. Until we bloom...

and then there is a revolution: the green rose bush has suddenly produced red roses. Out of the green, red! It is discontinuous with the past, it has nothing to do with the bush. The bush was a totally different phenomenon, just an introduction.

So the first change happens when a person decides to enter into initiation. And the second thing happens when the flower has opened and the fragrance is released. These are the two revolutions the disciple has to pass through. The first is red roses out of the green bush – a great revolution, but nothing compared to the second revolution when the fragrance is released. The flower was visible; the fragrance invisible. The flower was gross; the fragrance is subtle. The flower was still in the gravitation field; the fragrance is beyond the gravitation field. It is free, it is freedom, it can move upwards. It is no more part of the earth: it is divine!

Orange has been chosen as a symbolic colour. In India it symbolises the spring, it is the colour of the flowers.

Keep alert! Great things are going to happen be watchful. Your name will remind you continuously that the first movement has happened, the first step has been taken; and the first step is almost half the journey because everything else then becomes very natural. It follows as a matter of course.

Prem means love, amrit means nectar. Love is the only nectar there is. Love transcends death: everything else dies. Only love lives and goes on living forever; so those who live in love, those who live as love, become immortal. Those who live without love die again and again.

Death and love are the real opposites, not life and death; they are not opposites. Death is the culmination of life; how can it be the opposite of life? Each life ultimately ends in death, so life is a progression towards death, it serves death; death is the fruit of life. They are not opposites at all.

But love is the opposite. Love never dies, it knows nothing of death.

That’s why when you are in love you are not afraid of death. One can die in love and die joyously, dancing, celebrating, because love is completely unafraid of death. Love knows nothing of death.

For love it has never happened, love has never crossed death anywhere. And the person who is afraid of death is incapable of love. So those who become too afraid of death become incapable of love.

The West has become very afraid of death, hence love has disappeared; and the reason is the idea of one life. That has made people very afraid of death. The East thinks that there are many many lives, one goes on coming. It is a circular process: just as seasons go round and round, again the spring will come and again and again; just as the sun moves around the earth, again there will be a morning and again. Everything moves in a circle – so does life. The East has taken in the circular phenomenon very deeply: one dies and is born again.

The East believes in reincarnation, hence there is not much fear of death. Who bothers? One simply changes one’s body. Who cares? It is really good that the old is dropped and you will get a new body. It is like changing garments: the body becomes rotten so one changes it, but life goes on moving. Because in the East the idea has been prevalent for centuries, people are more loving.

They don’t fear death, there is not much fear.

In the West the Christian idea, basically the Jewish idea, that there is only one life, naturally creates much fear that if you miss once, you miss forever. Hence the speed. Nothing should be missed.

Squeeze every moment: eat, drink, be merry, as much as you can. Manage to live as fast as you can, because death is coming and then there will be no other opportunity; this is the only opportunity.

This creates great anxiety, and because people become too focused on death, love disappears.

Then instead of love there is only ordinary sex, and that is called love; it is not love.

Love can have sex in it but sex has no love in it. When love is there even sex is transformed into something higher, into something spiritual. When there is no love sex is an ordinary, biological mechanism nothing spiritual about it. And because death is too prominent one cannot have enough space and time to love. Love needs time, intimacy, to grow. Sex can be without intimacy. Sex can be a hit-and-run affair. Love needs to grow roots. Love is a Cedar of Lebanon: it takes hundreds of years to grow, it is not a seasonal flower.

So remember, love and death are real opposites. The more you grow in love, the less fear of death there is. When you are really totally in love there is no death; death has disappeared, death has been transcended.

And that is why I call love the only nectar. If one searches for immortality somewhere else, one searches in vain. It can only be found in the temple of love.

Deva means god, viharo means dwelling in – dwelling in god, living in god, being in god. Think of god as the totality, existence. Think of god as the ocean of life and of yourself just as a ripple in it or a fish in it; part of it, an intrinsic part of it.

There is no possibility of separation because there is nowhere to go; all is god. God is everywhere, so there is no way to go away, there is no way to go out. We are in it, we are an intrinsic part of it.

But one can fall asleep and then the ocean disappears. When the fish falls asleep the ocean disappears. When the fish starts dreaming, then she is in the ocean and yet she is not in the ocean; it is in her dreams. And that is the situation of man: man lives in god but is so full of dreams that he goes on missing god... which is everywhere! This is the greatest wonder of the world, that man misses god, that man asks ’Where is god?’, that man has to seek and search for god – and god is everywhere!

Each breath that you take in is god and each beat of your heart is god. Each pulsation of energy in you is god, because god is the totality of the existence. God is not a person sitting somewhere in heaven on a golden throne: god is an impersonal, universal energy.

That is the meaning of your name, and this has to become your meditation. Get more and more into the feel of it and slowly slowly the dreams, the sleep, start withering away. Slowly slowly it is no more an idea but becomes a reality. And the day this becomes your own experience you have arrived home!

Anand means bliss, sidhamo means: one who has arrived. Bliss is the ultimate goal of life. Rocks are seeking it, trees are seeking it, birds and animals are seeking it, man is seeking it. The whole existence is searching for bliss. And until one arrives this agony of the search continues. And the moment one arrives life has a totally different flavour. One lives without seeking, and when one lives without seeking there is grace. When one lives without any future there is a radiance; one pulsates herenow. Then there is great creativity. Otherwise the desire and the search takes the whole energy; there is nothing left to be creative.

The man who has found bliss starts pouring his being over and into existence. He becomes a blessing to existence. That is the state of ’sidhamo’: when you are blessed and you can bless the whole of existence.

This is my work here: to help you to come to that ultimate point, the omega point. And it is your birthright. All that is needed is that you have to ask for it. Jesus says ’Ask and it shall be given unto you. Knock and the door shall be opened.’ You are standing at the door and you have not knocked!

It is your birthright but you have not asked for it. It has to be claimed, that’s all. And when one claims with one’s totality, immediately life is transformed. Then you are no more a caterpillar: you become a butterfly.

But before the caterpillar can become a butterfly there comes a moment, a very strange moment: the caterpillar becomes a chrysalis. The caterpillar can move, the butterfly can fly, but there comes a moment between these two when all movement stops; the caterpillar becomes almost dead. That moment of becoming almost dead is the moment of gathering energy. He does not eat, he does not move. He gathers energy, he gathers momentum, and when the right amount of energy is there, suddenly the caterpillar has disappeared: it is a butterfly. It is a totally different dimension. Now the whole sky is available, all freedom is available.

The same happens to man before he becomes a Buddha or a Siddha: all his movement has to stop in meditation. Meditation is a state of fasting – not of physical fasting but of psychological fasting.

You have to stop eating psychological food. You have to stop thinking, you have to stop desiring, you have to stop dreaming; that is the real fast. You have to stop crawling in the mind. And once this has happened, energy starts gathering; it is no more wasted. You become a great pool of energy, and when the right amount is there, immediately you are no more a man. You have become awareness, you have become bliss.

Then you participate with the universal. You are no more an individual. That is the state of sidhamo.

[A sannyasin says: I ask your forgiveness for not listening to you.]

It is too late, but... you are forgiven – that is not the point – but it is too late!...

If people listen at the right time much can be done. Unnecessarily much is wasted; but that’s how it goes on. It is not only with you; it is with almost everybody. But by the time they understand, it is too late and nothing can be done.

But you have understood; at least that is good. In the future, remember it! When I say something, I mean it! And it is better to do it in the right time.

Forget all about it! You are forgiven. Forget all about it and start some work. Good!

CHAPTER 4

4 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin mother with her exuberant child, says: Sometimes his energy is too much and I don’t know what to do with him.]

It’s perfectly good; this is the time he should have more energy. Don’t repress his energy. Each child brings great energy into the world but we repress it; that is a kind of crippling. Of course, it feels comfortable to the parents, because with less energy the child is more controllable, but he is less alive. So it is better to live in inconvenience than to destroy the child’s growing energy.

The world can be so full of joy if every child is allowed to have his way. Of course it will be a little difficult for the parents. Down the ages this has been the rule, that the child has to adjust to the parents. This should not be any more. The parents have to adjust to the child, because the child is the future. The future should not adjust to the past, because if we force the future to adjust to the past we are trying to repeat the past. That has always been done. That has caused misery in the world and created hell on earth instead of a paradise.

Respect his energy, even if it is inconvenient to you. I understand your problem, but that has to be your sacrifice. If you love the child that much sacrifice can be done. And if you really start sacrificing your convenience for him, he will become more understanding. Children are very perceptive: they can see how much inconvenience they are causing. And if you are not enforcing anything on them, they will learn the art of self-discipline.

He is a beautiful sannyasin! Help him to grow in his own way.

[Her son asks Osho: why don’t you have a mala? He wants to give Osho a mala.]

First become enlightened! (MUCH LAUGHTER) If you fulfil that condition then you can give a mala to me.

And one day you will be able to fulfil it. Just go on creating as many troubles as you can create for your mother!

Nirjano. It means solitude, but not solitariness. It means aloneness, but not loneliness. It means freedom from the other. In loneliness the other is absent but you are not free from the other; on the contrary you are desiring the other. And because you desire the other, loneliness hurts; you feel something is missing. You are not happy in loneliness because you are unoccupied. There is a kind of sadness in it. You cannot relate and you want to relate, because you know only one way of existing and that is relating. You can exist only in a kind of dependence on the other. When the other is not there you feel hungry, empty; and nobody wants to be hungry and empty. The hunger is far deeper than any physical hunger can ever be; it is spiritual hunger. When you miss the other, you start forgetting your face, because we know our face only in the mirror of relationship.

Aloneness is totally different. You are free from the other – there is no hungering, there is no desire, there is no longing. You are enjoying yourself, you are communing with your own self. You are learning how to be just yourself without being occupied, and it brings tremendous freedom. It opens the doors to self-realization.

You can see your face in the mirror of relationship but you can never see your self, because your self has no face, no form; no mirror can ever reflect it. To see your reality you have to be alone.

Aloneness is silence, not sadness. Aloneness is a very very deep well-being. You start rising, soaring high, in your being, because there is no pressure from outside. Nobody is on top of you, nobody is there to pull you down or to pull you out; nobody is there to manipulate you. You are simply there as you are, you need not pretend; because whenever the other is there one tends to pretend. Whenever the other is there one tends to act. Whenever the other is there one wants to show one’s beautiful face.

When you are alone you are relaxed. Beautiful, ugly, good, bad, it doesn’t matter. When it doesn’t matter only then can you relax; you are no more in a kind of performance. Performance is tiring because it is an imposition from the outside. When you are not performing there is a tremendous serenity and a joy that you have never known before.

That is the difference between loneliness and aloneness. Nirjano means aloneness, solitude, but not solitariness. Solitariness is mundane, solitude is sacred. Solitariness simply is as if you are forced into it. A prisoner in his dark cell is solitary, but a meditator – and he may be in the same dark cell of the prison – is not solitary: he is in his solitude. He is utterly happy, he is settled in himself.

No prison can make him a prisoner, no chains can chain him, because in his solitude he knows that he is a soul, not a body; that he is not a mind, that he is something which cannot be killed, cannot be imprisoned, cannot be destroyed. He is rejoicing in that eternal inner source of being, life, existence.

Sitaro means a star. Just as there are stars in the outer sky, there are stars in the inner firmament.

These two worlds exist parallel – the outer and the inner – and whatsoever is in the outer is also in the inner; they are utterly balanced.

That is the meaning of the old mystic saying: As above so below. And again, in all the esoteric traditions of the world it is said that man is a miniature universe, a microcosm. Man contains all in seed form that is manifested in existence.

The centre of existence is light; so is the centre of the inner being, it is light. If you go deeper and deeper into yourself, one day you will find a star shining within your being. That is your self, and to find it is to find joy, to find it is to find real life, to find it is to find something that transcends death.

All meditations are a search for the inner star.

Nirjharo. It means the waterfall. Lao Tzu says that the best way to reach truth is to follow the watercourse way. The water has a great secret in it. First: it is liquid, and only liquid things can have a flow. Only they can move, only they can have a dynamism. Frozen things are dead; they are static, stagnant. One should be like water: liquid.

The second quality of water is non-resistance. It is ready to accept any mould. Pour it into a jug, it takes its form; pour it into another pot, it takes its form. It never resists. In that non-resistance is its power; nobody can defeat it. People are defeated by their own resistance. Resistance dissipates energy. Remember Jesus’ famous saying:’Resist not evil.’ Not even evil has to be resisted. Then acceptance is total, and when acceptance is total, god is just in front of you.

The third thing about water is: it always moves downwards. It is non-ambitious. It does not want to be the first in the world, it wants to be the last; and that’s a great secret of the spiritual world.

Jesus says ’Those who are first in this world will be the last in my kingdom of god. And blessed are those who are the last in this world, because they will be the first in my kingdom of god.’ He is talking like Lao Tzu, and Jesus has some quality of Lao Tzu.

Remember these three things. Be liquid, don’t be hard and holding, don’t control; remain in a state of uncontrol. And when one is liquid, in a state of uncontrol, the ego starts disappearing. The ego can exist only in a stagnant life; it is the centre of frozenness.

Second: don’t resist. Live the life of non-resistance, acceptance. Do not be in a constant conflict with existence. Relax and fall in tune with it. Seek and search harmony with life. Don’t stand aloof, don’t be a spectator. And drop that stupid idea of conquering life; that is the most stupid idea that has happened to the human mind. On the contrary, be conquered by life. Allow yourself to be defeated by life, because that is the sure way to be victorious.

And third: be non ambitious, be a nobody. And if all these three secrets can be fulfilled, nothing else is needed: one has arrived!

Prem means love, sato means being – love being. And they are aspects of the same energy, two sides of the same coin. If one is loving, one becomes truthful; it is impossible to be loving and not to be truthful. Truth is necessarily created by the energy called love, and vice versa: when one lives the truth, one becomes loving; it is impossible to be true and unloving. If you find somebody who is loving and untruthful then know well that his love is just a facade, a camouflage, it is phony; because the criterion is truth. And if somebody is truthful and unloving then know well that truthfulness is just an imposed character. It is not growing in his being, it is not his own flower. It is something borrowed, something synthetic, not natural.

Whenever love grows naturally it brings truth in its wake and vice versa. They are always together, they cannot be separated. There is no way to separate them, they are inseparable. In fact they are one, two faces of one reality.

The real seeker has to work from both sides, then growth is fast. Be truthful so that you can be more loving; be more loving so more truth happens to you. And there comes a moment when they are one. That is the moment of illumination – when truth is love and love is truth. That’s what Jesus means when he says ’God is love.’ God is his word for truth.

Satyo means truth, satyo also means being. It means both, because if it only means truth there is a possibility that you may reduce it to a philosophical enquiry.’Truth’ gives the idea of being a concept, but in the East truth is not a concept; it is your innermost core. It is not something to be thought about, pondered over, philosophised; it is something to be investigated, enquired into, gone into. It is something that is already there and has only to be discovered. That’s the difference between the Eastern approach and the Western: in the West truth remained philosophical; in the East it became existential. So in the East truth means more being than truth.

A child is born as a being, then he learns doing; the doing is the second layer around his being.

Then he learns having, that is the third layer; and people get stuck at the third. A few people get stuck at the second: a few people become too involved with doing, they are constant doers.

Their whole life seems to be a constant occupation of doing this, of doing that. They cannot leave themselves in a state of undoing; they are afraid. They have to do something; they cannot rest, they are restless. They keep themselves occupied. Occupation is their obsession; it is pathological. A man who cannot remain restful, relaxed, who has become incapable of leaving himself in the state of non-doing, is mad!

There are doers: they cannot contact their being. And then there are people who are interested in having more and more, their whole life seems to be nothing but accumulation, greed: they are also incapable of knowing their being. The person who wants to know his own being has to be aware of these two threats: the trap of having and the trap of doing.

One needs a few things, but needs are very few; they can be easily fulfilled. But when needs become neurotic, then they cannot be fulfilled. One needs food, one needs clothes, one needs a shelter, but one need not have a bank account of millions of dollars. That is a neurotic need that cannot be fulfilled. You can have as many dollars as you imagine but again you will find that you are hankering for more. A neurotic need means a constant desire for more; whatsoever you have, you have to have more. But now this is impossible to fulfil, because whenever you have more, the desire will force you to have more again. Your whole life will be wasted!

Then there are people who are stuck with doing. Both these are the traps. One has to learn to be satisfied with natural needs and their fulfilment, and one has to learn that doing should not be spread all over one’s life. It has become so spread over people’s lives that even when people are in their beds they cannot stop their doing, so they dream. Dreaming is doing projected in sleep. There are people who cannot sleep at ease: they toss and they turn and they mumble. This is just doing continuously going on, an undercurrent of doing.

One has to be aware of these two traps, and if one can avoid these two traps, being explodes. This explosion brings so many flowers, so much light and so much celebration in life, that one cannot even imagine it! It is the greatest surprise in life. All that one has known, all that one has imagined and dreamt seems utterly foolish, futile, when the inner explosion happens. It is a benediction.

Learn these things. It is not difficult – a person just has to be a little more alert, aware, watchful.

Jayo means victory, but the victory that I talk about is not the ordinary victory. The victory that I talk about comes through surrender, not by fighting. It is not a question of conquering; on the contrary, it is a question of disappearing.

The conqueror is an egoist, and all the victories of the ego are just dreams. Sooner or later you will awake and will find your hands are empty. Even Alexander, when he dies, knows that his hands are empty, that all his victories have turned into dust.

There is only one true victory that comes by surrendering to existence, not by conquering but surrendering, not by imposing one’s power on existence, but by living utterly helpless, powerless.

The search for power is political: the search for peace is religious, and only a person who has dropped his ego can be at peace. But blessed are those who are at peace because they are the victorious ones.

Jesus says ’Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.’ What earth is he talking about? –

because this earth is not inherited by the meek and humble and nobodies. This earth is conquered by Adolf Hitlers, Mussolinis, Alexanders, Genghis Khans; these are not the meek people. Even Jesus could not conquer this earth. Crucifixion is not a victory.

He is talking of some other earth, something of the inner. He is talking of some other kingdom, the kingdom of the within; and that is the true kingdom because it lasts and lasts forever. But that is possible only to those who are ready to dissolve their egos.

Dissolve the ego and be victorious! It looks paradoxical because it is the ego that wants to be victorious. But the real victory happens only as a paradox. All that is real in life happens as a paradox. Disappear as you are and suddenly a new being arises in you. That new being is immortal.

That new being knows no death. That new being is not temporal; it is beyond time and space. That new being is divine. That new being is god himself!

This is the victory I am talking about.

Pujari. It means a blissful worshipper. Worship can be done as a formality; then it is absolutely meaningless. Worship can be done as a duty; then it has no soul in it. When worship arises as bliss then it is alive, then it imparts grace to your being.

My whole effort here is to create a situation where you can drop formalities and can learn the passion of a worshipper, where duties are dropped and one lives through love, through intense passion. Then worship is a revolution. Then very small gestures of worship and prayer bring such benediction that one cannot imagine that it was ever possible. The impossible starts happening.

Learn to be blissful, then all else follows. Out of bliss, prayer becomes true. Worship is no more religious, it becomes spiritual, and then it knows no routine forms: one evolves one’s own style.

Then you don’t do worship as a Christian or as a Hindu; you simply do worship as it happens to you.

It may not have happened to anybody else before, it may not happen to anybody else again. It has the individual flavour, it has your signature on it; then it is authentic...

Let it become your experience too, and that experience will liberate, it is always liberating. Truth always liberates. Phoniness becomes a bondage.

[A sannyasin who had completed an Individual Primal Therapy and the therapist were at Darshan.

The therapist said: He was reached on the second day – it was very beautiful. He threw all the games but then he continued playing them over and over, and he refused to participate... which was sad. The client agreed: she’s quite right.]

But it is difficult for you to drop the games? If you feel she is ’quite right’, you could have dropped them. They don’t pay! Those games are the reasons that millions of lives are wasted. But if you want to play nobody can stop you, unless you understand and drop them. This is absolutely your freedom. A few people choose not to play games: they become Buddhas. The majority choose to play games: they remain mediocre. But nobody can be blamed; they themselves have chosen their life to be that way.

And remember, any moment you can cancel your whole programme, because the past has no power. This is one of the most beautiful things to be understood: a person may have played games for fifty years and one morning he decides not to play any more. Those fifty years are impotent against his decision; his decision is enough! Those fifty years are nothing compared to his decision.

His decision is so potential that immediately all those fifty years can be cancelled.

So never think that you will drop them tomorrow, you will drop them slowly, you will drop them gradually; that is not the way to drop the games. The way to drop them is instantly, immediately; the moment you see the point, drop it! It is your life – why waste it in games? Why not live truly, because only through truth is bliss possible.

But if you understood that you were playing games, then you got it. Then it was not futile. Drop them!

They will not help you to grow at all and they will not give you any joy; they will simply dissipate your energy. They are parasites: they will suck your blood, your soul; they will destroy you!

So meditate over it. Even if you can drop them now, then the process has been beautiful... maybe a little late....

CHAPTER 5

5 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, pravasi means a stranger – a divine stranger.

Man is a stranger on the earth; this is not his true home, hence the search. All search is basically the search for the source, the true home. And whatsoever we make here on the earth disappears: all these palaces that we make are made of playing cards. All that we think is very real finally proves dream-stuff, and by the time one is finished on this earth, one’s hands are as empty as they were when one entered. We don’t bring a thing into the world and we don’t take a thing from the world. The whole turmoil between these two emptinesses seems to be just futile, because it creates nothing. That’s why you see people so frustrated. They may be aware of it, they may not be aware of it, but frustration is writ large on every face, in every eye. People may be different, but they are all living in the same ocean of frustration.

One has to find the home; and you have come very close to it now. This has been your search for your whole life. Don’t miss this opportunity. It is difficult to get the opportunity: it is very easy to miss it. One can find a thousand and one excuses to miss; and it is natural that the excuses look very valid, relevant, because they belong to your mind and to your past. And the thing that is going to happen is unknown, you have never tested it, so there is no proof for it. You have to risk that which you know to find that which is unknown.

That is the beginning of being a sannyasin, and that is the initiation into a totally different kind of world that exists side by side on this earth but which is invisible to the worldly eyes, unavailable to the mundane, mediocre mind.

Every authentic person feels this, that he is a stranger, a foreigner, lost in something alien; nothing seems to fit.

There is a beautiful parable about Jesus: when he was crucified, after the third day he rose again.

He goes in search of his disciples. He meets two disciples on the road but they can’t recognise him

– not only do they not recognise him, they ask him ’Sir, are you a foreigner here in Jerusalem? You don’t look as if you belong to this place. Are you a stranger here?’

His own disciples asking him that! But I love the story: Jesus is a stranger in Jerusalem, that’s why he is crucified. He is not only a stranger to the enemies, he is even a stranger to his own friends; even they cannot see his true reality. They also recognise only his former identity. Now that former identity is crucified. Now he has come in a new radiance, with a new purity, with new innocence: he is resurrected. This is his essential core! Even the disciples cannot recognise the essential core. They could have recognised the old garments, but they are gone. Now this is true Christ-consciousness, but it looks alien, strange.

Jesus is not only a stranger in Jerusalem, he is a stranger everywhere else. And any person who starts feeling himself a stranger is coming close to Christ-consciousness.

That is the meaning of pravasi: one who has become aware that he is living in a strange world which is not his true home. Once this settles in your heart, the search takes on a passionate intensity. This becomes the seed of awakening.

And this is my whole effort here: to make you alert that whatsoever you think you are, you are not, that you are totally something else; that you have fallen into a dream and you have become identified with the dream, that you are not part of the dream, that you are not a character in your dream, that you are the witness of the dream, that you are only pure awareness call it Christ-consciousness, Buddhaconsciousness, or any word, or no word.

And it has been a long search for you. Now relax – now you can relax.

The sannyasins are not a crowd, they are not even a society, they are not even a family: they are an organism. And I welcome you into this organism, into this energy-field. Dissolve yourself into it, utterly, with a total yes, and miracles are possible.

Deva means divine, nirdosh means sinless.

The idea of sin has been the greatest calamity. It has created guilt in people; it has made their life very serious, sombre, heavy. It has destroyed their self respect, and without self-respect one cannot enter into one’s being. The guilt becomes a China Wall and you cannot penetrate into your own self.

You start condemning yourself, and if you condemn yourself, you will never be able to recognise the divine that is within you.

The first contact has to happen within you. Unless and until god is seen within it cannot be seen anywhere else, because that is the closest door to god. If you cannot see it there, how can you see it in a tree? How can you see it in a rock? How can you see it in another human being?

Impossible! The first revolution has to happen within you. Once god has been contacted there then he is everywhere. But first he has to be known within; then he is without, then he is all.

The idea of sin has converted the whole world into an irreligious world. And the paradox is that the people who have been preaching the idea of sin were thinking that they were creating a foundation for religion. They have been the poisoners, the priests have been the poisoners. They have poisoned everything that is beautiful in man; everything that belongs to the beyond has been polluted. And the name of the poison is sin.

My message is that there is no sin at all. At the most there are mistakes, but no mistake is a sin.

There are errors, but errors are not sins. And the mistakes and the errors that one commits in one’s life are not bad either, because it is through them that one grows, matures. By going astray one learns and comes back. And when one comes back to the way again, to the right path again, one comes richer. Every sin, every so-called sin, is nothing but a stepping-stone towards divinity.

Nirdosh means without sin, innocent, pure. And nothing ever reaches to the deepest core of one’s being that can corrupt it; it remains virgin, it remains innocent. There is no possibility of its being poisoned; otherwise priests would have poisoned that too. They can only poison the mind but they cannot poison the being.

Through the mind they have poisoned the body too, because if the mind is so afraid that the fear enters in the body too then the body becomes crippled, then the body has no vitality. Then the body lives only at the minimum, it cannot bloom at the maximum.

Love is a sin: that idea sooner or later enters into the body, because the body and the mind are not separate. The mind is the inner part of the body and the body is the outer part of the mind. You are separate from both! So whatsoever happens in the mind goes into the body, whatsoever happens in the body goes into the mind, but nothing ever touches you; you are incorruptible. And that is the greatest gift of god: that he has provided each being with an incorruptible centre. Cyclones may come and go but you remain the centre of the cyclone, miles and miles away, unapproachable.

But one can awaken to that centre of innocence. That awakening is meditation. Then you look with a different vision, then your eyes are no more the same. Then your senses for the first time function at the optimum. Then the world is psychedelic. There is no need for any Lsd or marijuana or psilocybin. There is no need, because your own inner being goes on pouring something that the Vedas call soma. It is not a drug: it is the juice of your inner being. And when your juice is poured into your mind and into your body, you live a transformed life. Then you have the body of light, you have the body which is divine. Then whatsoever you do is prayer and whatsoever you are, it is meditation.

Deva means divine, purnam means perfection, divine perfection.

Man is perfect as he is. That is one of the most fundamental things that I teach. Perfection has not to be achieved, it is not a goal. It is already the case; it has only to be recognised, remembered.

The moment you make perfection a goal, you will go neurotic. That’s how the whole world has gone neurotic. It is impossible. How can the perfect become perfect? If it is already perfect it is impossible that it becomes perfect; and that very impossibility creates neurosis.

If a rose flower tries to become a rose flower it is bound to go neurotic. It is already a rose flower! If it was not there may have been a possibility, but now there is no possibility. And because it cannot become, frustration settles in; because it cannot achieve the goal, defeatism settles in. And life becomes meaningless when you cannot achieve your goal.

Perfection has not to be achieved. Everything is perfect as it is! The rose is perfect and the mango tree is perfect and the fish is perfect and you are perfect. Everything is perfect as it is, it has to be because everything is divine, and god is perfect. One has only to recognise it and then life is play; then there is nothing to achieve. One can relax and be.

Prem means love, yatro means pilgrimage a love pilgrimage. It is something that has disappeared from the world. There are millions of tourists in the world but it is very rare to come across a pilgrim.

Tourism is not pilgrimage. A tourist is superficial. He is in a hurry, he is rushing from one place to another place. In fact he is not even aware of why he is doing it. Maybe he cannot sit at ease in one place, that’s why he is doing it; he is restless. His being a tourist is nothing but an expression of his inner restlessness.

The pilgrim is a totally different phenomenon. It has something beautiful about it, something sacred.

The pilgrim is not just visiting places; he is searching, he is a seeker. He is not only curious; he has an intense, passionate desire to know. He is not really interested in places; he is interested in energy-fields and he is searching for some energy-field where he can dissolve himself.

That is the meaning of a sacred place: a place where you would like to die, to disappear, a place where death is mote valuable than life, a place where the ego can be dissolved, because something higher is available, because you can exist on a different plane, on a higher plane. There used to exist many places on the earth, many energy-fields. They have disappeared because pilgrims are not there so those energy-fields cannot be nourished; those energy-fields have no more function.

I am creating here an energy-field, a sacred place, a place for pilgrimage. It is a love pilgrimage.

Be ready to dissolve, to put your ego aside. Only then do doors open, only then does communion become possible; and only through communion can truth be conveyed, not through words. Truth can be conveyed only beyond words: it is a transmission without scriptures. That is the meaning of yatro.

Prem means love, gatha means a sacred story – a sacred story of love. Love is the most sacred thing in existence, and those who are not aware of love cannot be aware of god. Those who are aware of love need not worry about god, because love is another name for god. And to live love is religion – not to philosophise about it, not to speculate about it, but simply to love it, to live it, simply to be it. Then one’s whole life becomes a story of love a song of love; and that’s how life should be.

Then there are millions of mysteries, and miracles happen every moment. Mysteries and mysteries go on opening their doors. Then this existence is not ordinary; even ordinary things start moving in an extraordinary way. Then even an ordinary leaf of a tree is so utterly, incredibly beautiful one could not have imagined it ever. Then the whole existence is a celebration. When love is in the heart the existence is a celebration. When love is missing in the heart the existence is a dull and boring affair.

It all depends on only one thing: whether the heart is full of love.

I teach love... Love is my message. And you can grow into immense love, you have the energy. All that you need is to become aware of it.

Samved has two meanings. One is sensitivity and another is right knowledge, and both are interrelated. Only the sensitive person is capable of attaining to right knowledge.

The insensitive can gather information, can become knowledgeable, but will never become wise. He will just be a donkey loaded with great scriptures. He will he simply carrying a burden; it will not be of any use to him. It will fulfil his ego but it will not enlighten him. And when the ego is fulfilled, one goes on falling deeper and deeper into darkness, because the ego is a rocklike thing that hangs around your neck and helps you to be drowned. You cannot fly.

Real knowledge is weightless. It gives you wings, it makes the whole sky available to you. Even the sky is not the limit then: you can go on and on, farther and farther. There is no end to the infinite journey of a seeker.

Become sensitive, and you are; that’s why I am giving you this name. Become more. Don’t be shy, don’t feel embarrassed. Crying is good, tears are beautiful, as beautiful as laughter. And the real man is capable of all these things: he can cry like a child, he can laugh like a child.

These beautiful capacities are crippled by the society. Remain available to all moods, remain available to all the plays of the moods, to all climates, and live each mood in its totality. When you are sad, be really sad, don’t pretend otherwise; then become sadness. When you are laughing, then become laughter. Don’t be half-hearted, don’t be lukewarm; then go into it totally, madly. This is how one grows, slowly slowly, to become more and more sensitive.

And to become more sensitive is to become available to right knowledge. The world starts: revealing its secrets to the sensitive person. The world becomes a teacher to the sensitive person. The sensitive person becomes a disciple – a disciple of trees and rivers and mountains and stars. The whole universe is his teacher. He learns infinitely. He never becomes knowledgeable although he goes on becoming more and more wise.

These are the two meanings, but both are two aspects of the same coin.

Santoshi. It means tremendous contentment: not just so-so – with great depth, with infinite depth.

And not the contentment that people impose upon themselves but the contentment that grows within one’s being.

One can cultivate contentment but then it is false, phony, and deep down there is discontentment boiling, ready to erupt and explode any moment. The cultivated contentment can become only a shield, a shelter, just to save one’s face. One has failed in life: what to do now? It is better to cultivate a certain contentment so that one can say philosophically ’I don’t care.’ That is nothing but the same old Aesop fable that the grapes are sour because the fox cannot reach them. Now, it is very hurtful to accept that ’I could not reach the grapes.’ It is easier to say ’They were sour, they were not worth reaching. I was capable of reaching, I am capable of reaching, but the grapes are not worth trying for.’ This is false contentment. One should not cultivate any phony contentment because that becomes the barrier for the real contentment to arise.

Real contentment is not out of frustration, failure, limitation. Real contentment is out of gratitude.

God has given so much! He has given you eyes to see beauty, he has given you ears to hear beautiful music, he has given you a heart to feel love. What else does one want? He has given you all kinds of sensitivities – to poetry, to att. What else does one want to be fulfilled?

If one looks to that which has already been given one, real contentment arises. It is gratitude. And if one looks to that which one wanted and could not get, then one imposes a false contentment.

Santoshi means real contentment, profound contentment, contentment out of gratitude. Then it has beauty, it has grace, and it transforms one’s life. It makes one’s life elegant, exquisite. It gives you for the first time the feeling of a centre; it creates the soul.

Paribuddha. It means pure awareness, perfect awareness.

The mind is not your awareness: the mind is the object of which you are aware, the mind is the content which is reflected in your awareness. Awareness is your subjectivity.

A thought passes in the mind; you can see it. And when you can see something, you are not it; otherwise how will you be able to see it? It is separate; it is there, it is outside you. Anger passes, love passes, sadness, happiness, and a thousand and one things go on passing; they come in front of you and they pass. You are the awareness, the mirror, but things that pass are reflected in the mirror and for a moment it seems as if the mirror has become it. When the sun is rising and the mirror reflects it, it seems as if there is no mirror any more, just the sun rising in the mirror; the mirror disappears.

And that’s what happens to us: when there is sadness, we forget, we tend to forget, that we are just a witness to it; that we are not sad, that we cannot be sad, that there is no way for the subjectivity to become its own object.

If one starts working on this simple principle, slowly slowly one becomes detached from all the contents of the mind. And then a few moments start happening when there is no content. Those moments are of pure awareness and will bring bliss, benediction. They give you the first glimpses of paradise. When this state becomes your permanent state, when it is not just a momentary happening, when it doesn’t come and go but it is always there, even when you are asleep it is there

– you know the dreams are passing but you are not them – then you have become a paribuddha.

This is the highest state of awareness; nothing is higher than that. That is the topmost in the hierarchy of existence. If the rock is at the lowest, at the bottom, then Buddhahood is at the highest peak.

CHAPTER 6

6 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Madhuma means absolutely sweet – that’s the taste of god. Buddha is reported to have said: Truth is sweet in the beginning, in the middle, in the end; truth is sweet all over. If it feels bitter to us, and sometimes it does, that simply shows that we have become too accustomed to the lies. Otherwise truth is sweet. But we live in lies, and whenever truth is revealed our lies are shattered. It hurts.

Our whole edifice starts falling apart; and that is too much, that becomes unbearable. Hence truth seems to be bitter.

Jesus was crucified because what he revealed was thought to be too bitter; nobody could swallow it. Socrates was poisoned just because the truth that he was forcing people to see was too much against their whole lives, their vested interests, their lies, their phoniness. The Greek court told Socrates ’If you stop talking about truth, you can still live; we can forgive you.’ Socrates declined.

He said ’If I am not allowed to say what is true, then what is the point of my life at all? It is better to die saying the truth than to live in lies or in silence.’ That too is a lie: when you see something and you don’t say it, that is a political, diplomatic way of lying.

Man lives in lies, that’s why truth feels bitter. But that is not the taste of truth itself: it is absolutely sweet. So whenever truth feels bitter, remember, something is wrong in you. That wrong has to be dropped. Whatsoever the cost, truth has to be accepted. Even if one has to pay by one’s life, it is worth paying.

Jayant means the conqueror. Man can either conquer others or can conquer himself. Those who conquer others create much misery in the world. They create violence, conflict and chaos. They are destructive people. The world has suffered too much because of these people.

Those who try to conquer themselves are the religious people. They are creative. They bring love into the world, they beautify it. They are a blessing to existence. It is the same energy that conquers others that conquers oneself. The difference is not of energy but of direction. When the energy is extrovert, it becomes political: when it is introvert, it becomes spiritual. And that is the most decisive phenomenon in life; everything else depends on it. If your energy is extrovert you will live a futile life.

Not only that you will miss all the joys of life, because of you many others will also miss; you will be a calamity to yourself and to others. The political mind is a curse.

If the energy moves inwards then totally different experiences evolve. The closer you come to yourself, the more silent you become and the more loving.

Your very presence becomes a

benediction.

So, remember, one has to go in and one has to be mindful of it continuously, only then one day that turnover. Christ calls it conversion: it is a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn; I call it sannyas.

Jesus says: I am the door. I am the way. I am the truth.

This is not true only about Jesus – this is true about every being. Jesus is simply saying it on behalf of each being. It has nothing to do with Jesus in particular – it is a declaration of the innermost core of everyone.

Remember it: I am the door, I am the way, I am the truth... the way is masculine. It is effort, it is journeying. It is a process: it leads you from one point to another. It is aggression, it is search, it is penetration. Religion is a door, science is a way; and when both are balanced, truth happens.

When the door and the way are utterly balanced, when there is no extreme, when the golden mean has been achieved; when the man in you and the woman in you have negated each other and there is absolutely no division left – there is neither man nor woman – when you have disappeared as a door and as a way, then ultimately that which is, happens. That is truth; and truth liberates.

But the beginning should be the feminine. By becoming feminine one becomes a disciple. And unless and until one has become really feminine, one cannot move on the way, because when one has become feminine all violence has been dropped; then the movement on the way will be non-violent. It will be a process, it will be a movement, but there will be no violence in it. And we cannot be violent with truth. Truth cannot be conquered; that is not the way to relate to truth.

So the first requirement is to be feminine. When the woman is there, then you are allowed to be a man. The woman will take care that the man does not become aggressive, does not become violent.

It will keep you graceful; it will protect your delicacy, your rhythm. Otherwise the male mind tends to be aggressive, violent, ambitious; and those are not the qualities of a spiritual seeker. Maybe they are good in a soldier, but not in a sannyasin.

First become feminine, then allow the masculine. First become passivity, then allow action in it. And when action comes out of inaction, it is a flowering of such beatitude; it is something of the beyond.

Lao Tzu calls it wu-wei: action through inaction. But inaction has to be learned first only then action.

Then that action is not at all, in any way, aggressive, and that makes it beautiful, that gives it grace, that makes it meditative. And when both are balanced, when the door and the way are balanced, in that very balancing truth has already happened, and truth liberates.

The statement of Jesus is tremendously beautiful: I am the door. I am the way. I am the truth.

[A therapist says: When I am leading groups I have some trouble not to do anything. I like to do and not just to float with the energy; I have some difficulties with that.]

Slowly slowly you will become capable of not doing. That is the greatest skill in life. It takes time, it needs seasoning. Doing is very hardening. It is not an art, it is very primitive; everybody who is born is capable of doing something.

Non-doing is a flowering. And non-doing does not mean not doing anything: it simply means a totally different attitude of doing. One remains relaxed and allows things to happen. One does not rush; one goes with existence. One is not in a hurry, one has patience. One trusts that ’Whatsoever is happening on its own is good. And whatsoever I try to do will be a disturbing factor..’

It will be like putting legs on a snake. The snake is doing perfectly well without any legs. If out of compassion you put legs on the snake, you will kill the poor fellow! He will not be able to move at all then, although it appears logical that the snake needs legs, otherwise how will he move?

The idea of doing something is basically egoistic; it is out of ego. The ego is a doer: it can exist only by doing something or other. It can exist only in the tension that doing creates, the dust that is created when you start rushing. The ego exists in that dust. Once the dust settles and you are not rushing anywhere, you are not in a hurry, you have no goal, you have surrendered all goals to existence itself and you simply float with the river, the ego disappears. There is no need to renounce it either: it simply is not found. Then there is great joy, and life then is without any anguish, any anxiety.

It will be difficult, that I know. Non-doing is the most difficult thing in the world because that is the greatest art. Only very few people have been able to do it! But those are the cream, those are the supermen. And I would like all my sannyasins to have some taste of it. Once you have tasted it, then all else is tasteless.

It will be difficult, it is natural that it will be difficult, because we are born doers. We are carrying many lives’ habits of doing; then suddenly you want to drop those habits. They want to persist, they can’t leave you so easily; they have become ingrained. It is just a question of conditioning.

But slowly slowly it is going to happen... I can see it happening. You are going perfectly well; just don’t be impatient. There are a few things which grow only in patience. In the soil of patience the greatest flowers bloom. And the flower of non-doing, wu-wei, is unique. It is the whole secret of tao: speaking without speaking, doing without doing, walking without walking, being without being. Then all is quiet and all is silence and all is joy. You have disappeared: god is. As a doer, you are: god is not.

It is not accidental that in the modern world god has disappeared, because for the first time man has become too obsessed with doing – technology, methodology, science: do this, do that. We have created such a smoke of doing around ourselves that it is impossible for god to exist. God is not dead, but we have created so much smoke that he is almost absent for us; he is behind the cloud that we have created. We cannot see him, we cannot feel him. This cloud has to settle.

There is a beautiful story: Buddha is going from one village to another village. They are passing a mountainous track. It is a hot afternoon; he is tired. He sits under a tree. He is thirsty. He asks his disciple, Ananda, to go back, because two miles back they left a small spring.’Go and fetch water from there.’

Ananda goes back, but by the time he reaches there a few bullock carts have passed, they have passed through the spring; the spring is dirty. All the dirt that was settled inside has surfaced; dead leaves are floating on it. Now it is not worth drinking. So he comes back and he says to Buddha ’It is not worth drinking. I will go ahead. I know that at least two, three miles ahead there is a beautiful river I will fetch water from there.’

But Buddha says ’No, go back. Fetch water from that spring.’ He is so insistent. Ananda cannot follow the logic of it. He says again and again that the water is dirty; Buddha says ’Go back! Even if it is dirty, bring it.’

Ananda goes back, very reluctantly; he has to go because the master has ordered. The whole thing seems to be absurd: in the same time he can fetch water from the river. Why this eccentric idea that the water has to come from that spring? But by the time he reaches, the spring is crystal clear; the dust has settled again, the leaves have gone. He can see the point, that just a little patience was needed, that’s all. He could have waited just a few minutes and everything would have been beautiful. Now he understands why Buddha was so persistent, absurdly persistent: he was giving some message, and it has been understood.

Ananda comes back with water, dancing. He falls at Buddha’s feet and he says ’Your ways of teaching are such that if we are not utterly devoted to you we will never be able to understand what you want us to understand. I went very reluctantly, but I see the point.’

And Buddha says ’Now do the same with your mind. Don’t be in a hurry, be patient. Just as the leaves have gone and the dust has settled, if you can sit silently inside doing nothing, the mind also settles, thoughts disappear, desires are gone, and the spring of your consciousness becomes crystal clear. Ananda, just a little patience! Sit by the side of your mind and wait. No doing is needed. Sitting silently, doing nothing, is all.’

That’s what meditation is all about. So, even though it is difficult, go slowly, go slowly with it.

CHAPTER 7

7 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, subhadro means grace. There are things which man can do and there are things which man can never do. There are things which only god can do; and all that is great comes into that category. Man can do only mundane things which have no ultimate value. Utility they have but value they don’t have. All that is ultimately valuable – love, meditation, prayer, poetry, music, dance – they all happen through grace, they descend from above: you are just on the receiving end.

There are two fundamental principles. One has been discovered by science they call it the principle of gravitation. Another has been discovered by religion – I call it the principle of grace. Gravitation pulls you down; grace pulls you up. Gravitation functions on your body; grace functions on your spirit. And man is a meeting point between gravitation and grace.

Blessed are those who become available to grace. And unfortunate are those who think that their whole life is finished with the world of gravitation. The earth is beautiful, but without heaven it is meaningless. Only when heaven starts penetrating into the heart of the earth is there meaning, is there joy.

Deva means divine, subuddho means awareness.

Life can be lived either consciously or

unconsciously. Unconsciousness is easy, you need not do anything for it; it is natural, it is a given thing. Animals live in it, trees live in it, rocks live in it. Man can also live in it, and ninety-nine-point-nine percent of people have decided to live as they are born. Only very rare people try to transcend the limitations that nature has imposed on them, and the greatest limitation is unconsciousness.

Once it is transcended you enter into a totally different world. That world is divine because it is the world of light, it is the world of eternity and it is the world of bliss.

Everybody is searching for bliss, but without becoming aware it is not possible; awareness becomes the bridge between you and that which you are seeking. Bliss is not a question of desiring; it is a question of becoming aware. It is not a question of searching; it is a question of transforming your being. Bliss is not there somewhere waiting for you to discover it; it is already here: all that you need are the eyes to see it. Those eyes are the eyes of awareness. And all meditations are devices to create awareness in you, to shake you, to shock you, so that your sleep can be broken.

Suniti.

It means the great virtue. There are small virtues which can be cultivated by us; that’s what is taught by the society, that’s what is taught by the family. They are small virtues: they only create a kind of character but they don’t create consciousness. They help you to live in the society more comfortably than you could have lived without them. They function like a lubricating agent between you and other people. You are not constantly in fight with people; that is their purpose. You are not alone, you live with so many people; constant friction will destroy you. So the small virtues are lust a kind of protection, they create an armour around you, they don’t bring you into unnecessary conflict; but they have nothing to do with religion. Morality has nothing to do with religion, morality is a social phenomenon: religion is divine; it is not man-made, it is a revelation.

When you become alert about your own consciousness, of your own centre, out of that alertness the great virtue flows. That virtue does not give you a character; it gives you a conscience. It does not give you a fixed pattern to follow; it simply gives you responsibility, ability to respond. It does not give you fixed rules; it simply gives you eyes to see the situation and to immediately act accordingly.

The smaller virtues give you fixed rules: they tell you what to do, what not to do, they tell you what is right and what is wrong. The great virtue never tells you what you should do and what you should not do; it simply tells you ’Be aware’. And then whatsoever you do is going to be good. Good is a by-product of awareness and evil is a by-product of unawareness.

Smaller virtues there are many.... In the Buddhistic scriptures where very minute details are given, thirty-three thousand have been counted: do this, don’t do that – small details, thirty-three thousand.

Even to remember them is difficult but a Buddhist monk is expected to fulfil those thirty-three thousand virtues. They are all small, mundane, trivial.

I give you only one virtue – it takes care of all: that is awareness. Be alert, act out of awareness, don’t act out of unawareness. A single virtue fulfils all those thirty-three thousand virtues, and more.

It cuts the very root of immorality. It cuts the very root of all that is evil. Rather than cutting the branches and the leaves, it is better to cut the very root in a single blow.

That single blow is suniti: the great virtue, the great virtue of being aware!

Vimarsh means reflection, the quality of a mirror. A mirror has a few very significant things. One: it reflects but it never becomes attached to any reflection. You stand before it, it reflects you; you are gone, the reflection is gone. It has no attachment; it does not become imprinted, hence it remains pure, uncontaminated. Hence it remains available to somebody else who will pass, it will reflect him too. Its capacity is never destroyed.

The mind can function in two ways. One is like a photoplate. Then its capacity is very limited. It becomes imprinted; and that’s how people function. When the mind goes on becoming burdened and burdened and burdened, all the memories accumulate; one starts feeling the weight of the past.

This is not the right way to live, not the right way to use the mind. The mind has to be used not as a photoplate but as a mirror; then the mind is meditation. Then it simply reflects whatsoever is the case. It does not accumulate, it does not become attached. It remains aloof, it remains far away. Its virginity remains untouched.

If one can remember it, one remains fresh, young, alive. And one can remain fresh to the very end; to the very last moment of life one can remain the mirror. Then one reflects death too; one reflects life, one reflects death. And when you have become capable of reflecting life and death both, you come to know you are neither – neither this nor that, neti-neti. Then you know that you are just the quality of reflection, that you are a pure consciousness, a witness, that you are a mirror and nothing else, that you are just a watcher, a watcher on the hill. Thousands of things passed – good and bad, ugly and beautiful, success and failure, sunny days and cloudy days, agonies and ecstasies all passed – but you are separate, eternally separate, from all that passes in front of you. You cannot be reduced to any seen thing: you are the seer.

That is freedom. That’s what is called liberation, nirvana. And that man knows what benediction is!

Gandhraj is one of the most beautiful trees of the East. Gandh means perfume, raj means the king the king of all perfumes. And exactly that is the case with the inner being: if it blooms it is the king of all perfumes, it is gandhraj. Then there is nothing which can be compared to it, it is incomparable.

No fragrance is so beautiful, no colour is so beautiful, no experience is so psychedelic. It is as if a rainbow has appeared in the inner sky or suddenly the sun has risen or a lotus has bloomed.

It is the most incredible experience when one comes to know oneself. And everybody knowingly, unknowingly, is seeking and longing for it. That is the deepest search in every being’s soul. That search has brought you here.

This is a great opportunity: to be initiated, to become a sannyasin, to become committed to this inner search, to risk for this adventure. lust a little effort on your part and much is possible, because you are not alone here: it is an energy-field. So many people growing in meditation creates a certain vibe. If one is intelligent, one can use and ride on that wave. Alone it may be very difficult for you to reach to the innermost core, but when there are many many people searching and seeking – many ahead of you, many behind you – movement is very easy. You can simply become possessed by the collective energy.

I function only as a centre of this collective energy, this commune. It is not visible to the ordinary eyes, it is not tangible, but once you become a sannyasin it starts becoming visible. It becomes almost tangible, you can touch it; then it is a solid phenomenon.

Remember one thing: that man is also a tree, and unless the tree blooms life has not been lived rightly, one has missed.

Mastan means one who is mad for god, a divinely mad person. God can be attained only by those who are mad enough to risk all. God cannot be attained by the calculating mind, by the clever and cunning mind, because the clever and the cunning mind can never risk really. It always goes on holding back, it goes only so far. It is lukewarm, and god happens only when you bum at the optimum, when you become aflame, when the longing possesses you so totally that you forget the whole world, you forget yourself. You forget all and only god becomes a constant hammering in your heart. At that moment, only god becomes possible.

Many search but very few arrive, and the reason is not that god is not. The reason is that the search of many is only so-so; it is not total, it is not whole.

Mastan means one who is so madly in love with god that he can do anything; whatsoever is required, he will be ready to do it. Even if it is death, he will be ready to die. It is a gamble. Religion is not mathematics, it is not business: it is a gamble. It is commitment, and no ordinary commitment either, not a partial phenomenon. Either you are totally in it or you are not in it. It is a question of either/or, this way or that; one cannot be half way.

And millions are only half way: they go to the church, to the temple, to the mosque, but not really. It is formal. They are not seekers. There is no longing in their heart, they are not aflame with the desire.

Their search is not passionate. Mm, that is why churches are there, temples are there, people are praying and going and coming and nothing ever happens; god remains as unknown as ever.

But if one becomes mad, god immediately becomes available; in a single instant one can be transformed. That is the meaning of mastan. Become mad in the search for god, because there is nothing else worth searching for; all else is futile. A man is truly a man when he has achieved god; otherwise he was only man in the form, in the name, but not really.

There is a birth which makes you a man in the form; then there is a rebirth which makes you man substantially, spiritually. Sannyas is that birth. Let it be your rebirth, your reincarnation... Let it be a new beginning.

[A sannyasin says: I still feel half way: I’ve got one foot in, and one foot out of sannyas. What to do?]

It is nothing to be worried about. Even if you are half way, you are very close. Slowly slowly things happen. A few people take a sudden jump, a few people grow gradually; both are right. It depends on the type. You are not a person who can take a sudden leap, but nothing is wrong in it. Go with your pace and don’t be in a hurry. And never compare yourself with others. These are the two types in the world, so there are two types of religion: one is of gradual growth; another is of sudden enlightenment. Your type cannot be changed, and there is no need for it to be either; both are perfectly good.

So don’t be in a hurry, be patient! Things are happening.

CHAPTER 8

8 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, sambhavo means potential. Love is not an actuality, it is only a seed, and the seed can die without ever becoming the actual. That’s the risk of life: every man is born with a possibility but it is only a possibility – it may be actualised, it may be missed. If it is missed then life remains futile, meaningless, a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise signifying nothing – because love is the significance, love is the meaning. If love is missed, all is missed; and without love there is no god, without love there is much logic but no poetry.

Logic cannot impart meaning to life. It is impotent..lt is barren, it is a desert. It is dry, not even an oasis exists in the world of logic. If man does not actually become a lover then he lives on the surface. He never knows what the depths are and what the heights are. He lives horizontally; he knows nothing of the vertical dimension. Logic is horizontal: love is vertical.

I am not against logic, but logic in itself is meaningless. Love without logic is mad: logic without love is dead. The true balance arises when a person is intelligent and loving, when intelligence and love meet and become one, when they are no more separate in your being, when a kind of loving intelligence has arisen in you. Buddha has called it pragyan; we call it intuition, wisdom. Logic is given by the society, by the schools, colleges, universities, but there are no more any institutions which can impart love.

My function here is to impart the quality of love. Sannyas is initiation into love.

Bodhi means awareness, taru means tree the tree of awareness. Remember the biblical parable of the tree of knowledge. The parable is very significant, very fundamentaL. It says that man fell from heaven because he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Knowledge means information, knowledge means something borrowed, knowledge means that which enters from without into you.

Knowledge is a burden. It is ego-gratifying, hence the fall. It creates the ego. The knowledgeable man becomes very egoistic. Subtle is his ego, very hidden, not on the surface. Maybe on the surface he is very humble, but even in his humbleness one can see ego being expressed. That too is a gesture of the ego. The really humble person is neither egoistic nor humble. How can he be humble if there is no ego? It is impossible to be humble without an ego; humbleness is a gesture of ego.

Man fell from paradise because he became knowledgeable. Man can come back into paradise if he eats from the tree of awareness. Awareness is something that happens within you; it does not come from the outside. It is your own potential that blooms. It is not information: it is awakening.

Man has fallen asleep in his knowledge; he can be awakened. The moment he is awake he is back in paradise. All the religions of the world can be reduced to a single principle: the principle of awareness.

Bodhitaru also means the tree under which Buddha became enlightened. The English word ’tree’

comes from the Sanskrit root ’taru’.

Become more and more alert, more and more aware, less and less knowledgeable and more and more intelligent. And remember the distinction between intellectuality and intelligence: intellectuality is the cause of fall; intelligence will be the cause of rising back to the real, original status. Awareness brings intelligence: knowledge brings intellectuality. And to live intelligently is to live religiously. One need not be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; all that is needed is intelligence. Not to live superstitiously is to be religious, not to live through beliefs, to live out of one’s own understanding is to be religious.

It needs guts, it is the very spirit of rebellion, but only those who are rebels know the real taste of life and love and light, and only the rebellious people dare to enter into god.

Shraddhes. It means god of trust. Remember, trust is not belief. Belief is out of fear: trust is out of understanding. Belief is imposed by others. It is political; it is a way to dominate people. It is a way to reduce persons to things. It is a subtle strategy, utterly political. It has nothing to do with religion at all.

Trust is not belief. Nobody can impose it upon you. Only you can help it to grow in your being. It is a growth. It is not like a plastic flower that you can purchase from the marketplace. It is a real rose; it grows in your soil, in your psyche. It comes out of you, it is your flower.

The man of trust does not believe in any dogma: he believes only in what he knows. His respect for truth is immense. The believer has no respect for truth. He is a pretender, he is a hypocrite.

He says god is, without knowing. He says things which he has heard, and he is ready to fight for them, to kill and to be killed; he is stupid! The man of trust goes only as far as is allowed by his own understanding, not even an inch more. He is authentic. He is not a doubter either.

This is something to be understood: all believers are doubters. They have repressed their doubts, that’s all. They have imposed the belief on top of their doubts but the doubt is there boiling within.

And all doubters are believers: their belief is negative, that’s all. Somebody believes in god’s existence, somebody believes in god’s non-existence.

For example, a Catholic is a positive believer and a Communist is a negative believer, but both are believers; and there is not a difference of an iota, they are the same type of people. One believes in the Bible, another believes in ’Das Kapital’. One believes in Moses, another believes in Marx. It doesn’t matter in what you believe, the content of belief is not important; the very phenomenon of belief is ugly.

The man of trust neither believes nor doubts. He begins with an agnostic spirit; open, vulnerable, ready to go into any adventure, ready to try and experiment, ready to explore, but without any prejudice. To begin with he has no prejudice this way or that; he moves with a clean intelligence.

This is respect for truth; and the world is missing, very much missing, these people, the people who respect truth and who are ready to drop all securities, safeties, comforts, for truth.

To be a Christian is comfortable, to be a Hindu is safe: you belong to a crowd. The very feeling that you belong gives you a kind of security. The church protects you; the organised religion creates a comfortable, warm milieu for you. The moment you start searching for truth you are alone.

Plotinus is right when he says ’The search for truth is a flight of the alone to the alone.’ Yes, it is to go alone. You will not be able to be a part of a crowd, you will have to move alone, because you will have to move withinwards and there nobody can accompany you. Buddhas can point the way but they cannot accompany you. Even the master cannot go with you. He can give you a few indications, a few hints about how to search. He will not give you a belief, he will not give you a dogma: he will simply give you an insight. He will open his insight to you, you can partake of something of it; but even that has to be done by your own understanding.

Then slowly slowly trust grows: the more you become aware of the beauties of existence, of the truth of existence, the more trust starts happening, and when trust starts happening, one becomes integrated. Truth gives you more trust; more trust makes you available to higher truths. They help each other: they are two wings of the bird.

Veet means beyond, amo means darkness. Life is dark, life is darkness. But there is a way to go beyond it, there is a possibility to have a breakthrough. Darkness is not all: there is light too: But there is a gap between our being and the phenomenon of light; in that gap darkness surrounds us.

Meditation is nothing but a bridge between you and light. Then darkness is just a river, it goes flowing underneath the bridge; you can move to the world of light. And the essential core of meditation is very simple: it is to be a witness of your mind process, not to be identified with the mind processes

– thoughts, desires, imaginations, projections, dreams, memories and so on and so forth – not to be identified with anything that passes in the mind but to remain aloof, watching, seeing it, knowing, tacitly knowing ’I am separate, I am not it. I am just a mirror reflecting it all but I don’t become the reflection. The thought of anger passes in the mind but I don’t become anger; I simply reflect it, I simply take note of it, that it is there. I may act accordingly, I may not act – that decision is mine –

but I am not obliged to act. There is no compulsion. I am separate. The mind is giving a certain clue but I am the watcher.’

And the more you become a watcher, the more and more the mind simply disappears. At the peaks of watchfulness the mind becomes empty, and that emptiness is the bridge, the bridge that takes you beyond all darkness, beyond all death.

Prem means love, amir means rich. Love is the real richness, the only wealth. Everything else that people think is wealth is more illth than wealth. Only the man who has discovered the dynamism of love in his being is rich. Jesus calls it ’the kingdom of god.’ Jesus also says ’God is love.’

And it is there, it is a given reality, but is lying there undiscovered. And we are rushing all over the world, searching, seeking something that will make us rich: power, money, prestige. Nothing will ever make you rich, neither power nor money nor prestige. Only one thing can make you rich, and that is the hidden sources of love within your being. If they are tapped, if the energy called love starts flowing in you, you will be rich. Even in poverty you will be rich. Even if you are a beggar you will be an emperor; and vice versa: you can be an emperor, you can be Alexander the Great, and still you will remain a beggar, a poor man.

Once this is understood a great turning point happens in life. Sannyas is that turning point. This is conversion; this is a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. One simply turns towards oneself; for the first time one starts encountering oneself, and from that very moment great riches start happening.

Deva means divine, satyam means truth – divine truth. Truth cannot be manufactured by man: truth is. It has not to be invented, it has to be discovered or rather, rediscovered... because each child is aware of it in his innocence, but cannot be aware of his awareness. That is the only difference between a sage and a child: the child is aware of the truth but is not aware of his awareness; the sage is aware of the truth and is aware of his awareness. Hence Jesus says: Those who are like small children, only they will be able to enter into my kingdom of god.

Truth is already here: we have just to open our eyes. Truth is not a conclusion arrived at by any logical process. Truth is not a hypothesis, because a hypothesis remains tentative, and any conclusion arrived at by logic can never be absolute; it is always relative. That’s why science goes on changing its theories every day. It has to: they are all man-made. A few more facts are discovered, then one has to change the theory to adjust to those facts.

But there is a truth: that truth is god, the ultimate, the absolute. It has to be discovered only once and then there is no change, there is no possibility of change. Then one can abide in it. Then it is yours forever and forever.

Thinking is a way of inventing truth: meditation is a way of discovering truth. Thinking is human: meditation is divine.

Sugito means a great song. Life can be a song or it can be just a long long process of misery. It can be heaven or it can be hell; it all depends on you. And small things make the whole difference.

For example, a person who is too interested in the outside world will not be able to sing the song that is hidden in his heart. One needs to turn towards oneself. A person who is ambitious will never be able to know who he is; and only by knowing oneself can the song burst forth. Without knowing oneself life can never become a celebration. It remains dull, drab, a dragging affair. It remains a boredom.

My sannyasins have to learn how to laugh, how to love, how to sing, how to dance. I don’t teach a serious religion – sincere, of course, but not serious. Seriousness is a kind of disease, a psychological cancer.

Life should be playful, because god is playful, and we come closest to him when we are playful.

Deva means divine, bandhu means brother. The whole existence is nothing but a great brotherhood.

We are all interdependent. Nobody is independent, nobody is dependent; it is an organic unity. Even if a pebble is missing in the world, the world will not be the same. There is no hierarchy, it is not that something is higher and something is lower; there is immense equality. In fact existence is very communistic: it exists in equality, it exists in brotherhood. And man has destroyed that harmony; he has destroyed the whole ecosystem of existence. Man has poisoned ecology because of a mad desire to be at the top, the stupid longing to conquer nature. It has been the greatest calamity. We are now on the verge of committing a universal suicide.

To me, to be religious means to fall in harmony with all that is. You are neither lower nor higher.

Trees are brothers, rocks are brothers, birds and animals are brothers. I love Saint Francis because he used to call his donkey ’brother’. He would always address the donkey as ’brother’ and trees were ’sisters’.

That should be the approach of a religious person. Start feeling a kind of brotherhood towards all that is; let that be your meditation and your prayer.

It means absolute contentment, unconditional contentment; and that is the door to the divine. Having no complaint in the heart is prayer. Having utter contentment and gratitude in the heart is enough; no other prayer is needed. That is a silent prayer, and only a silent prayer can be there for twenty-four hours. You need not say it: your very life shows it. You need not go to any temple or church: wherever you are, you are surrounded by your own contentment, and that is the temple.

The word ’temple’ comes from a root ’tem’; ’tem’ means to cut off. The temple is the place that cuts you off from the world. Now the outer temple cannot do that. It is part of the world; how can it cut you off from the world? It is part of the establishment, it is part of the status quo; how can it cut you off from the world?

Something totally different is needed. One needs to create a temple around oneself. It is made of contentment, that is the stuff that the real temple is made of; and when you are surrounded by a vibe, an aura, of contentment, you are cut off from the world, you are no more part of it. You are here and yet not here: you walk on earth but your feet no more touch the earth. That is really to be in a temple. One becomes a temple oneself. Contentment is a miracle, it is a magic key.

Be contented with whatsoever life has given to you, feel utterly grateful. Even sometimes when you think that something is wrong, know perfectly well that the whole knows better than you. Don’t disturb your contentment for small things, because nothing is more valuable than contentment. Once it is crystallised in you, you have arrived; you have arrived home! You have penetrated the source of your being.

It means courage; and courage is the most essential quality for the religious. Cowards cannot be religious, although you will find cowards in churches and temples and mosques every day, worshipping, praying, going through all kinds of empty gestures, fulfilling all kinds of so-called religious formalities. But they are not religious and they cannot be religious. Their god is nothing but their fear projected.

One can come to god never through fear but only through love. But love needs courage: it is risky.

And to fall in love with the unknown is certainly very risky. It is falling in love with something invisible.

It may be, it may not be. Unless one is a gambler one cannot be a religious person, because unless one is able to gamble, one cannot adventure, and god is the greatest adventure there is.

[A sannyasin says: Osho, my mind’s put up so much resistance to you since I’ve been in Poona.]

It happens, but it is natural. The mind is afraid to die, and if you come close to me, the mind has to die, hence the resistance. But now nothing can help it. It can resist and delay the process a little more, that’s all; but your heart wants to come close, so the mind cannot obstruct it for long. When the heart wants to come close, the mind can at the most create a few resistances, but they are not to be worried about. The mind has no power before the heart.

The mind is powerful if the heart remains asleep. If the heart has not become full of love then the mind is very powerful; then the servant is the master because the master is fast asleep. Once the heart has started becoming alert, has started becoming loving – a longing has arisen in the heart

– then the mind can create resistances but those are all futile. They will all disappear. But it is a natural process: the mind has remained so long in power; who wants to be dethroned?

It is going to happen; don’t be worried! My eye is on your heart. Don’t be worried! Your mind can make a little fuss – that’s nothing!

Anand means bliss, neerava means silence. Bliss is a state of absolute silence, tranquillity. Bliss is not a state of excitement. Pleasure is a state of excitement, happiness too. But bliss is utter serenity: no waves arising in your being, not even a ripple. When you are as if you are not, when your presence has almost become an absence, then there is bliss.

So become more and more silent. You create silence and then bliss descends in you like a gift from god.

CHAPTER 9

9 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veeto means transcendence; and that’s the secret of all meditation. It is the very foundation of all religion. That which we know as the world is only the periphery; the centre is hidden. The centre is transcendental. It cannot be seen by the eyes, it cannot be heard by the ears, it cannot be touched by the hands, yet it is, yet it can be experienced.

The way you experience it is not through the senses; hence it is called the transcendental. We seek the world through the eyes, through the ears, but god comes to us not through the eyes, not through the ears. In fact he does not come from anywhere: he arises in our being. He is felt there at the very core.

God is like the silence in the heart of a rose flower: it is already there. Even when the flower is closed, is a bud, it is there. It does not come from anywhere; it is your nature. Hence senses cannot help. That’s why the mind is impotent to know god, because the mind is nothing but the super-sense.

The mind is nothing but the accumulated experiences of all the senses. Each of your senses goes on pouring its information into the mind. The mind is a coordinator. it cannot know anything that is beyond senses, hence the mind has to become silent, utterly silent. It has to cease to be, then the transcendental is felt, experienced, realised. It is not an object: it is your very being.

Sampurno means absolute perfection. It is not a goal. If it is a goal it creates neurosis. I am not saying to you to become a perfectionist. All perfectionists are bound to go neurotic because they are trying to do something which cannot be done.

Giving you the name ’absolute perfection’ means you are already perfect. It is not a goal to be achieved, it is a reality to be recognised; it is already the case, because all is god, all is perfect. All is perfect as it is, no improvement is needed at all; all programmes of improving man are dangerous.

They have been a kind of paralysing, crippling, poisoning. They have created great ideals to improve man, and all those ideals have done only one thing: they have created hypocrites.

I don’t give you any ideal; all ideals are nonsense. I want you to become aware of reality as it is: all is good, beautiful, perfect. To live in this feeling is to be religious. To live with this feeling is to be prayerful. When all is perfect, gratitude is natural. And when you know you are perfect you know that everything else is perfect too. Then there is no question of feeling superior, inferior. The person who feels inferior suffers; the person who feels superior suffers. Only the person who does not feel any inferiority, any superiority, does not suffer. He enjoys the bliss of existence.

Navino means the absolutely new. Existence is new every moment. Only man’s mind becomes old because it accumulates memories and those accumulated memories in the mind create a burden, heaviness. One should live like a mirror: one should never accumulate any dust.

So think of each day as new and forget the past, never remember the days that have gone. And if you can do it from right now, you will have a totally different life. You will have a life of benediction and beauty. People are missing because they have been taught to accumulate the past. Forget the day that is gone; it is no more. Live in the moment and don’t think of the future either. If one can live here and now, god becomes available. And children can live in the here and now more easily than grown-up people. The so-called grown-up people are already poisoned.

So this is my message to you: don’t lose your innocence, your childhood, ever. Always remain like a child: fresh, young, fresh like dewdrops, fresh like the morning sun, fresh like the stars. This is what I call religion. Religion has nothing to do with the church and the Bible. It is a way of living life so lovingly, so consciously, that each moment becomes joyful.

So sing, dance, celebrate!

Prem means love, dhyano means meditation love meditation. Love without meditation is blind, love without meditation is a dark night. One gropes, one stumbles; one hurts oneself, one hurts others.

It is natural in darkness, it is natural in blindness. And because love is blind without meditation it is frustrating too. Because it is blind it cannot soar very high: it remains crawling and creeping on the earth. It is afraid to soar high. A blind man cannot go climbing the mountains; he is even afraid to walk on plain ground. To go to the mountains, to climb the peaks, is going to be suicidal.

Meditation without love is lame, dull, cold. Meditation without love creates the ugly phenomenon of the monk and the nun. They are ugly because they don’t live at all. They are ugly because their lives are loveless. They are ugly because love is the only phenomenon that gives you beauty and grace.

Love without meditation is full of juice but blind. Meditation without love has eyes but has no juice; it is dry, it is a wasteland. Love without meditation is hot, passionate, but it knows nothing of silence.

Hence it is a kind of turmoil, a feverish state of consciousness. It is a restless state. Meditation without love is silent, but the silence is that of the cemetery, the silence of death, not the silence of life, because the silence of life is a song. Meditation without love is empty silence. It is not full, it is not overflowing.

And both these things have been done down the ages: either people have chosen love – they are called the worldly people, they suffer – or they have chosen meditation – they go to the monasteries, become monks and nuns, and they suffer. Both remain incomplete.

To be a total man one needs both together. One has to become love/meditation; that is the highest synthesis. One becomes a perfect circle. Then there is joy of love and there is silence of meditation.

Then there is a life of love and the peace of meditation. Then one can dance, yet the dance never becomes feverish. One can sing, but the song is never tiring. Then one is at ease with both. One can live in the marketplace and yet be far away in the mountains. And one can be in the mountains yet be full of love and compassion for the world.

This is going to be the future religion of man, the synthesis between love and meditation. And this is my work here: the effort is to create a new kind of total man, a whole man, and I call a whole man, holy. This is the whole alchemy: create both together – be loving and be meditative.

Prem means love, gyano means wisdom. Knowledge is part of the mind; wisdom is part of the heart. Wisdom comes through love; knowledge comes through logic. Knowledge is good as far as the outside world is concerned, because about the objects of the world, knowledge is enough; more than that is not needed. But knowledge is absolutely inadequate as far as one’s own being is concerned.

Knowledge is good about the known: knowledge is absolutely useless about the knower. Knowledge cannot know the knower; that is impossible. It is just as your eyes cannot see themselves. At the most you can see your eyes reflected in a mirror, but that is a reflection, not your real eyes.

You can read in scriptures about wisdom, but that is about wisdom: a reflection, not real wisdom.

Jesus can be a mirror, Buddha can be a mirror, I can be a mirror, but we will be only mirrors, and whatsoever you come to know will be a reflection; it will not be the truth. The moon in the sky is one thing and the moon reflected in the lake is not the same thing. In fact there is no moon in the lake; it is an illusion.

So people who search for wisdom in the scriptures, in the books, remain entangled with reflections.

About and about they go, round and round they go, never touching the centre.

The centre can be touched by only one way, and that way is of love. One has to become more of the heart. One has to slip down from the head. One has to hear the heart more and one has to ignore the head. And that is my message to you: you have heard enough of the head – enough is enough. Now listen to the heart. God speaks through the heart, he whispers through the heart. His messages come through the heart-beats. His messages are not logical: they are certainly full of love. That is divine logic, love is divine logic.

Satsango. It is a very special word. It has no equivalent in any Western language, because nothing like it has ever happened or existed in the West. But it can approximately be translated as: in loving communion with a master; but that is just approximate.

Truth can happen only in loving communion with someone to whom it has already happened; there is no other way. Truth is contagious, it is a kind of infection. It is like a flame jumping from one lamp into another unlit lamp. It is a continuum. It is given in deep intimacy.

Satsang simply means sitting with the master silently, not doing a thing, not even thinking, because thinking will be a barrier; just being with the master, open, vulnerable, available, just being in a kind of let-go. And the miracle of miracles happens: one day, suddenly, doing nothing, just being there with the master, the fire has entered you. You are no more the same: the old man is gone and the new has arrived.

In the East that has been the surest way for the seeker. The seeker will search for a master.... And the only way to know is to listen to your heart. Wherever you fall in love, wherever your heart starts beating a little faster, wherever you feel ’This is the place!’, wherever you feel suddenly possessed by something unknown – something mysterious, something miraculous, you know you have found your master; this is the criterion. Then the seeker will sit with the master. Days will pass, months and years will pass, and slowly slowly, sitting there continuously, the disciple will start disappearing.

That is the whole art of disciplehood: to be able to disappear, to become absent, not to be. And when the ego is completely gone – any moment the ego is gone – instantly, something from the heart of the master jumps into the heart of the disciple. It is not that the master gives it; it is not a thing to be given. It is not that the disciple takes it; it is not the thing to be taken. It simply happens!

The master is aflame with god and the disciple has dropped the ego. In that very vulnerable state, in that opening, the fire enters the disciple. That moment is called ’satsang’. The communion has happened. The disciple is pregnant now. Now the seed will grow. Now, even if the disciple is thousands of miles away from the master, he is not away, he cannot be away. He may be on another planet but there is no distance.

And this is the way it is going to happen to you. To remind you I am giving you the name. You need not think about truth, you need not practise anything in reality. You have a very Eastern heart; you may have lived many lives in the East. It can happen very easily to you. You are just on the verge: a little push, maybe only one step, and you can disappear!

Sannyas is nothing but a gesture from your side of ’I am ready. I will not hinder. I will not resist.’

Jayesh means victorious – not victorious over others but victorious over oneself. That is true victory.

The very idea of being victorious over others is ugly, it is violent, it is destructive. But to conquer oneself is beautiful, it is creative; and by conquering oneself I mean becoming more integrated.

Ordinarily man is fragmentary. In one man you will find so many people; each man is a crowd. There is not a single integrated individual: many voices, many desires, many minds, many selves, and they are all clamouring, fighting, competing.

This state, which is thought to be the normal state, is not normal. If it is normal then what can be abnormal? The so called normal state of man is very abnormal. It is a kind of madness, under control, but still madness is madness, and it can go beyond control any moment. Anything can trigger the process and it can go beyond control. One can go berserk any moment; any straw may do. This is not a normal state. Something is essentially wrong with humanity as it exists. People are not helped to become integrated. They are not helped to become rooted, centered; they don’t have centres.

To have a centre is to be victorious. Then small selves with small, lower case ’s’, disappear and the Self with a capital ’S’ appears. All the small selves disappear into a capital ’S’ Self, the supreme Self.

That is the master. That is the meaning of Swami: Swami means one whose master has appeared.

Mouliko means the original, the authentic, the true, the non-imitative. Man is brought up to be an imitator. Every child is taught to be somebody other than he is. And every child has to learn this hypocrisy because he is so helpless, he is so dependent; he cannot rebel. There is no way to protect himself against the parents; they are so powerful.

Slowly slowly his mind is manipulated. Slowly slowly he is given a false character that doesn’t belong to him. He starts wearing masks, he becomes a good imitator, but he loses his self. And once you lose track of your self you are lost. Then you may accumulate much wealth, you may become famous, you may be respected by the society, but you will never be able to be blissful, you will never know the joy of life.

Bliss happens only to authentic individuals, to those who stick to their original being, to their original face, only to those who are ready to risk all, to risk all for being themselves, whatsoever the cost.

And that’s my message to my sannyasins: be original, be yourself. Never compromise, because all compromises are suicidal. And never become an imitator, because you are unique: there has never been any individual like you and there will never be. Assert your individuality, but remember: this should not become an ego trip, otherwise you are again into another trap.

By asserting your individuality I don’t mean that you have to assert your ego. The ego is part of your personality. The personality is that which is given by others to you: individuality is that which you have brought with yourself. Individuality has no idea of the ego; it is very innocent.

So one has to be aware of two things, otherwise on both sides there are traps. Life is like walking on a tightrope: lean a little too much to the left and you fall, lean a little too much to the right and you fall. One has to continuously balance oneself. One has to be original and without any egoistic nuance to it.

And that is the state of a religious person, that is sannyas.

Nirjanando. It exactly means what Jesus means when he says: The kingdom of god is within you.

We go on searching in the outside and we go on missing, because it is not there. And we never search within, where it is. This is the dichotomy man lives in: the treasure is within and the search is without. If one continues this way one can continue for lives and lives and there will never be any possibility of arriving, of reaching, of attaining.

The treasure cannot be brought without; that is impossible. But the search can go within. The treasure is your consciousness – that’s why it cannot be brought out – but the search is only your attention. One can close one’s eyes and give a turn to the attention, so that which was looking out can start looking in. It is just a re-focusing of it. It is a one-hundred-and eighty-degree turn. It is as if I was looking at you with a torch and then I turn the torch towards me and the light falls on my own face. exactly like that.

And that’s what meditation is: turning your attention inwards. Once the attention is turned inwards there is a great surprise waiting for you: all that you always needed and were never finding is available there. It has been always there: it is just that you were not looking at it.

That is the meaning of nirjanando: bliss is within.

CHAPTER 10

10 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Premendra. It means god of love. Love has to become the very centre of your whole life. Whatsoever you do, it has to be kept in mind that you are doing it out of love, that you are doing it for love. It has to be part of your growing heart, then only does one enter into the world of god. Each single act has to become so loving, so devoted, that it takes on the flavour of prayer. Then nothing has to be divided into sacred and mundane; there is no division. Love knows no division: nothing is small and nothing is great. For love all is the same, even cleaning the floor or taking a shower or cooking food or walking in the early morning sun....

Each act has to become full of your heart. It has not to be just done superficially, mechanically. A kind of heartfulness has to penetrate, and then the whole of life becomes prayerful. And unless and until the whole of life is prayerful, god is invisible and remains invisible. It is only the eyes of love that make one capable of seeing that which cannot be seen and hearing that which cannot be heard and feeling that which cannot be felt.

God remains a mystery because our love is lacking. Logic is there enough, more than needed, but the heart is empty; the head is too full and the heart is utterly empty. The whole process has to be reversed: the head has to be empty and the heart has to be full. That is what conversion is, the transfer of energy from the head to the heart.

Premdo. It means one who is capable of giving love. Everybody wants to be loved, everybody is greedy for love, but love comes only to those who give it; giving has to be the beginning. One should not demand. It comes, it comes of its own accord. Existence is very very fair: if you give, you get.

People are not getting because they go on asking but they never give. And even if they give, they give very grudgingly, very reluctantly, as if their treasure is disappearing.

They don’t know the treasure of love. It doesn’t follow the ordinary economic laws. The more you give, the more you have of it. So if one understands the law of love it is against the economic law. If you go on distributing your money, soon you will not have any, but if you go on sharing your love you will have more and more and more. Once this is learned, one is capable of giving infinitely; then it showers back infinitely.

Premdo means one who is capable of giving love unconditionally, because even if there is a slight desire to get back, that makes it impure, that makes it a bargaining, a business; and love cannot be a business. It has to be just the sheer joy of giving it.

Pyaso. It means the thirsty one. Truth is possible only if one has a total thirst for it. It is not a question of intellectual enquiry: it is a question of life and death. It is just like a man lost in the desert is thirsty. It is not an intellectual question for him: it is his life and death question. And his whole being is thirsty; it is not only the mind, each cell of his body is thirsty.

When truth is enquired after with such tremendous energy, with such intense passion, with such heat, it is not far away. That very heat burns the barrier between you and reality; that very passion proves to be a fire. In that fire the ego is reduced to ashes; and the moment the ego disappears, god is, truth is.

Parjato. It is the name of a flower, a beautiful flower. Man also has to bloom. Man is born as a seed, and unless one becomes a flower one remains discontented. Fulfilment is only when there is flowering of your being. But millions are born as seeds and they die as seeds. Only rarely, once in a while, does a person become a Buddha or a Christ; these are the flowers.

Become a flower: that’s the challenge of life!

Punito. It means utter purity, absolute purity. Purity is not something to be cultivated. If it is cultivated it is just on the surface; it is a camouflage, it is a mask, it is false. It can give you respectability but it will not give you a soul.

The real purity is something utterly uncultivated, the real purity is not something practised. Then what is it? It is to live without mind, it is to live without planning. It is to live not out of the memory but out of the present moment.

Whenever somebody lives out of the past, his act is a reaction; it is not an act. Acts are pure: reactions are impure. The act is a response to the present moment. You don’t bring your mind in.

You don’t ask your past how to respond; you simply respond spontaneously. Then there is purity, and that purity liberates. And in living moment to moment – alert, conscious, responsible – life becomes pure. And that purity is uncultivated, unpractised. That purity is divine; that is real holiness.

The so-called saints are just pseudo. Their holiness is nothing but a cunning, clever, calculated phenomenon. They are trying to get something out of it. It may be heaven, it may be god or it may be something else, but there is business in their mind. The real purity has no motive.

A child has fallen and you simply help him to stand up again, with no motive; it is a sheer response to the moment. Somebody is drowning in the river and you jump – not that the act is good, not that it is moral, not that you are going to benefit out of it in your future life, not that god will reward you; nothing is there in the mind, no motive. You simply jump; the very moment you see somebody drowning, you jump! Not even a shadow of thought passes your mind. That is pure act. It is holy.

And the reward is not in the future; it is contained in the very act itself. Whenever you do something out of the moment, spontaneously, there is great joy; not later on – immediately.

Shraddho means loving trust. There are three words which are synonymous in the dictionary but not in actual experience. One is belief, the second is faith, the third is trust. In actual experience they have nothing to do with each other – not only that: they are totally different dimensions.

Belief is intellectual; it is a kind of information that has been fed to you. One is a Christian, another is a Hindu; this is a belief. A system of thought has been imposed on the child and he accepted it because he was not aware when it was imposed on him. He had to accept it because he was helpless; he had to accept whatsoever the parents were feeding him. This is a social strategy so that the children always remain in the boundaries of the parental fold. It is a kind of slavery, mental slavery. It is a spiritual poisoning; it is harmful.

In a better world there will be no Hindu, no Mohammedan, no Christian. In a more intelligent world we will not feed children any system of thought. We will simply help them to become more and more alert and intelligent so that they can choose their own system of thought, whatsoever it is; we will leave it to them. We will give intelligence to them, we will help their intelligence to become sharpened so that they are not deceived. But right now the parents themselves are deceiving their children. They are doing just what their parents had done to them.

Belief is an ugly phenomenon; it should disappear from the world.

Faith is a little better; faith is of feeling. Just as belief is of intellect, thought, faith is of feeling. It is a little better because it goes a little deeper, but it too is without any awareness. It is emotional, sentimental, but blind. It goes deeper and transforms your life a little more than belief. Belief simply remains a facade, because it never touches your heart; faith makes you more devoted. But that devotion is also based on a kind of blindness, and blindness in itself has to be dropped to know truth.

Trust is neither of the head nor of the heart: it is a transcendental phenomenon. It comes by becoming more aware of the mechanism of the mind and the heart. You watch how the mind functions, how thinking proceeds – the whole process of thought – and you watch the whole process of emotions. You remain aloof, you remain just a watcher. Then slowly slowly a third dimension opens in you: that is trust. It is existential, it comes only when you have known something on your own.

Belief is given by others and faith is also given by others. Trust arises out of one’s own experience.

Then one falls in love with existence; that love is true religion. It is not a dogma, it is not a doctrine, it is not a church. That is the meaning of shraddho.

Layena means one who is absolutely dissolved – dissolved into god. Man can achieve only if there is that readiness to dissolve into the oceanic, just like a dewdrop dissolves into the ocean, slips into the ocean and is lost. On one hand it disappears; on the other hand it becomes the ocean itself.

Man is only a drop, a dewdrop. There is a possibility to become the ocean, and unless one becomes it one remains frustrated; because every limitation in life is a frustration. One can be contented only with the infinite, with the unbounded. Everybody is longing for something oceanic, something great, something so vast that you cannot see where it begins and where it ends. That something has been called god. God is just a name – a name for the oceanic, for the vast, for the tremendously infinite.

But one has to take the risk! The risk is: one has to die as one is, one has to disappear as the drop.

In that very disappearance the doors open.

Either man can live as an ego... But then he lives in a prison cell; it is suffocating. If one wants to live as an ego then frustration is the only taste of life. If one is ready to drop the ego, which is difficult, hard, because we think we are it... We are not but we are identified with it. The moment it is dropped, misery disappears, suffocation disappears, and something of the beyond enters, takes possession of you. You are no more, in one sense; and you are for the first time in another sense.

Anand means bliss, raj means the secret – the secret of bliss; and the secret is very simple. Misery is a very complicated phenomenon: bliss is not. Misery is complex: bliss is simple. Misery needs much effort on your part to create it; much art, much skill is needed to become miserable. Bliss needs no skill, no effort, no art; bliss is natural. One is born with the nature of bliss.

Misery is going against your nature: bliss is just relaxing into your nature. That is the secret: let-go is the secret of bliss. If one relaxes into oneself, one is blissful; and whenever you relax, suddenly bliss is there. It has always been there all along; it is just that you were so tense and you were so much after creating new patterns of misery that you never looked at it.

Misery has to be earned: bliss is a gift from god. All that one needs is not to have any ideals, because they create tension; not to have any future, because the future always destroys the present; not to live according to somebody else, because then one will always be in conflict.

Live like a tree, like an animal, like a bird, with awareness, that is the only difference. If one can live like a bird with awareness, one is a Buddha. And the miracle starts happening: each moment is so blissful, so incredibly blissful, that it looks almost unbelievable. And it goes on growing; it goes on becoming more and more intense and there is no limit to that intensity.

Anand means bliss, rajan means a king – a king of bliss. Everybody is born as a king but lives as a beggar and dies as a beggar. We never claim our potential, we never actualise it. It can be actualised, it can be easily actualised, but it needs one thing which is missing in human beings: it needs awareness. It is only in the season of awareness, only in the climate of awareness that your potential can become actual. Just as trees start blooming when it is spring, when the spring of awareness comes into your being things start sprouting; all that has remained dormant becomes dynamic. And man is a great energy, man contains infinite sources of energy.

To be a sannyasin means to be reminded of who you are, to be reminded of all the glories that are possible to you, all the possible worlds that are yours, and yours just for the asking!

Terradas. It is a beautiful name. It means your servant, god’s servant. But make it your life too, just the name won’t do: become a servant. And the miracle is that if one is ready to become a servant, one becomes a master. By surrendering one becomes victorious. That’s the only way to become victorious in life: to be surrendered to life so totally that nothing remains inside you, that you pour out all that you have.

Such empty people become full of life, only they can become full. Those who are ready to bow down are crowned!

[A sannyasin says: My mouth opens when I’m meditating; I feel energy there. I don’t know what I should do about it.]

No problem at all. When the mouth opens, just allow it. Don’t close the mouth when it wants to open.

It is nothing of a problem. It is perfectly good. The mouth opens because the energy reaches the mouth; the opening of the mouth is perfectly beautiful.

It’s perfectly beautiful. If it is closed then it will be troublesome. Then the energy will be there like a tension. Your jaws will start feeling the tension. A few people have that problem: energy comes there but the mouth does not open; then their jaws become too tense. And if your jaws become tense you will feel angry, you will feel irritated, you will feel continuously irritated for no reason at all and you will find excuses to be angry.

This is perfectly beautiful; it is a relaxation.

CHAPTER 11

12 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[December 11th was Osho’s birthday celebration darshan in Buddha Hall.]

Sourabh means fragrance. The seed and the flower and the fragrance – these are also the states of human consciousness. Man is born as a seed. There is no necessity that the seed will become the flower; the seed can die as a seed. The seed can become a flower but it will have to search for the right soil and will have to be courageous enough to die, because only when the seed dies is the tree born and the possibility of flowering is there.

From seed to flower great courage, great effort, is needed on the part of the seeker. From the flower to the fragrance no effort is needed, no action is needed; it is part of divine grace. Fragrance happens of its own accord: when the flower is ripe the fragrance will be released, of necessity.

No flower can die without releasing the fragrance, but millions of seeds die without ever becoming flowers.

So these are the two things to be understood: effort from the seed to the flower and no effort from the flower to the fragrance. But when we have become invisible fragrances, only then is life fulfilled.

That is the meaning of sourabh.

Deva means divine, svado means taste – divine taste. God is literally a taste. God is not a thought: it is a taste, it is an experience, and as inexpressible as the experience of taste. You can eat something but only you know how it tastes; you cannot express it. Unless the other has also tasted it there is no possibility of any communication. But when the other himself has tasted it there is no need for communication.

This is one of the dilemmas, one of the greatest, that those who know can communicate, but then there is no need to communicate. Communication is needed from the one who knows to the one who does not know, but then it is impossible. It is like explaining the taste of sweetness to somebody who has never tasted it: it is utterly impossible.

The function of a master is not to express the inexpressible but to help you to taste it, to create the situation where you can also taste of it, you can also drink out of it. Hence I say that god is literally a taste. One has to eat and digest god, only then does one know.

The knowledge has to be absolutely existential; it is not a question of the intellect at all. Every fibre of your being, every cell of your body, has to become a witness to it.

Prem means love, geha means home. Love is the only home. A house becomes a home if it is full of love; otherwise it remains a house. Love transforms everything it touches. Without love man is a homeless wanderer on the earth. With love, immediately one starts growing roots into the earth.

One feels grounded, one feels centered; one is at home.

The loving heart is at home everywhere, and the unloving heart is at home nowhere. Unless one creates love in the heart, one remains a stranger, an outsider. We can make great palaces outside but they will not be homes. Even a small cottage, a hut, can be a home if you have created love in your heart, if you radiate love.

Remember it, that love is the only home in existence; all other homes are just poor substitutes.

And love is not only a home for you: if you have created it, it becomes a home for others tool and ultimately it becomes the home of god. The man of love finally becomes a temple, an abode for god to reside in.

Prem means love, adeha means bodiless. Love is basically a bodiless experience. Even though it is felt through the body, even though it is expressed through the body, it is not part of the body. It is something that hovers around the body, it is an aura around the body. The body is only a field that attracts it, but it is not produced by the material of the body, it is not the same stuff. It comes from the beyond: it lives on the earth but it is a penetration of the sky into the earth.

That’s why the moment you start feeling love you start soaring high; you become more and more astral, less and less physical. When one is in love, one immediately becomes weightless, as if gravitation has no effect on one, because something in one starts growing which is beyond the field of gravitation; and it is so close to one’s heart that the earth and the earthly heaviness disappear.

But I am not saying that one has to love only bodilessly. The body is just the language. The poetry has to be expressed through it but the poetry does not consist only of language; it is more than language, more than grammar. It is like music. The guitar is physical but the music that comes out of it is non-physical. The body is a guitar and the music that can come out of it is love; but love itself is bodiless.

Deva means divine, karuno means compassion – divine compassion. Man has all the potential to become compassion, but we never use that potential; we remain at the minimum. At the minimum life is a passion: at the maximum life becomes compassion, only at the maximum when one lives life in its totality. Then passion starts having a totally new quality to it. It is transformed into compassion, it starts growing wings. It is no more tethered to the earth, it becomes free of the earth.

But things happen only at the maximum, that has to be remembered. People miss life because they don’t have intensity. They live only so-so, lukewarm; that is the definition of their life. They never come to the boiling point, and only at the boiling point does the evaporation happen. The moment the water evaporates it takes a totally new form – not only quantitatively different but qualitatively different. Water flows downwards, vapour rises upwards; water is visible, vapour becomes invisible.

Passion flows downwards, compassion rises upwards; passion is visible, compassion is invisible.

Compassion is evaporation of all your passions; but that is possible only at one-hundred-degree heat.

And that is my whole teaching: to live life in utter intensity, to live life madly and totally.

Bodhi means enlightenment, sattvo means potential. Bodhisattvo means one who is potentially a Buddha. Everyone is. We may not claim it; that is our responsibility and our fault. If we claim it, it is ours. One can remain potentially a Buddha for thousands of lives never claiming it, but all those lives will remain nightmarish, miserable; that’s what hell is. Not to be that which you are meant to be, that is what hell is. To miss that which is your destiny, which is your fulfilment, that’s what hell is.

The moment you have recognised, realised, who you are, when the total potential has been transformed into the actual it is metaphorically called heaven – one has arrived home. And then life has beauty and grace and joy.

[A sannyasin says: A week ago I mentioned to someone ’I think my father might die’ and today during the lecture my watch stopped; then I got the telegram that he’s very sick.... I just have the feeling that this is the first time I can understand him and show him that I love him. I feel that he might have been hurt.]

Just go and see whatsoever happens. Mm? don’t be worried about the future – just go. And give him as much love and respect as you can. This will be far more important than anything else. Don’t be worried about the groups or anything; that is secondary.

If you can settle your accounts with your father, that is the greatest thing. People remain entangled with their parents. Accounts are never settled, and unless accounts are settled, one remains childish. Growth happens by settling accounts. If one is perfectly clear about one’s parents, that is growth: one is mature. But very few people are clear about their relationship. Their relationship is formal, clumsy, unloving, inhibited, and a thousand and one complexities are there.

If your father is dying, then this is the time not to miss but to settle everything, because once he is gone, then for years and years you can be in Primal Therapy and nothing will be settled. This can be settled very easily now, so forget everything, just go.

And I am not saying that he is going to die. I am saying the idea that he is going to die is very helpful, mm? – you will be able to settle things. If you know that he is not going to die, you will postpone.

And don’t be worried about the watch. Watches are not very intelligent: they can stop any time! It is very difficult now to find those wise watches which used to stop exactly!

Don’t be worried – just go!

Pragito means a great song; and life should be a great song. It should be lived aesthetically. No religion has yet existed on the earth which has been aesthetic: nobody has worshipped beauty and nobody has thought of music as prayer and dance as worship. Now the world needs a religion utterly life-affirmative, with no denial, with no inhibition. Total acceptance should be the only law; and then life starts becoming a great song, each act is a new addition to the celebration.

Up to now religions have been death-oriented, hence they have crippled and paralysed life. Rather than helping to make this earth closer to paradise, they have made this earth ugly, condemned.

They have condemned the body, they have condemned everything; condemnation has been their only contribution to life. They have made everybody guilty; and out of guilt there is no possibility of any celebration. I am against guilt, against the idea of sin.

And I am not saying that you have first to become pure, then you can sing the song: I am saying to sing the song and the song will purify you.

And Punito means utter purity, innocence. Not the purity that comes by virtue: that is a cultivated thing, that is not true purity. It is practised it is a manoeuvre. The so-called saints are pure. But the real purity is found in the children, not in the saints: uncultivated, unpractised, natural, spontaneous.

And when there is a real saint like a Jesus or Buddha, he is innocent like a child. His innocence is not a calculated gesture, his innocence is not through some motivation. If there is motivation how then can there be innocence? If there is calculation how can there be purity?

The so-called saint is pure because he thinks that by being pure he will be able to attain to heaven, to the great joys of heaven, to great rewards, and if he is not pure he will suffer in hell. His purity is out of fear and greed; and that which is out of fear and greed may be anything else but it cannot be purity. Purity is absence of fear and greed.

Real purity is not the purity of the so-called saints. Learn it from small children, learn it from flowers.

Learn it from trees, birds, animals: they are really innocent. And when a man is innocent like that, like a tree, like a mountain, then something superb, something really virgin, starts happening. That brings god to you. God comes following this innocence. You need not search for god then: your innocence is bound to bring him to you, you need not go anywhere.

Drop complexities, calculations, cleverness, and become simple. Even if you become a simpleton it is good! Jesus was known as an idiot in his days, a simpleton; Buddha was also known as an idiot.

You will be surprised to know: the Hindi word for ’idiot’ is buddhu; it comes from Buddha. And that is the sense in which the great Russian novelist, Dostoevsky, has written his book ’The Idiot’. Read it! That is a real saint. That is the meaning of punito.

[A sannyasin, who had completed Primal therapy said it was a bit hard because she was a bit hard.]

It is hard, the very process is hard – it has nothing to do with your hardness; but that is the beauty of it. It is like a hammering, it is very destructive, but out of that destruction something is created. A sculptor has to be hard on the stone. It is hard for the stone – chunks of it have to be cut – but only then does a beautiful figure arise out of it.

Primal Therapy is hard work, but it pays!

CHAPTER 12

13 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Niro means the element water. And water is very symbolic, symbolic of flow, symbolic of non-resistance, symbolic of let-go. And these have to become the qualities of a sannyasin.

One should never become stagnant, because life is a process, a constant process; the moment you stop the process you are dead. Life is a river, on-going, from infinity to infinity. The moment you start clinging to something, you become attached to something, obsessed with something, you are stuck.

Then a rock has come in the way and the process is no more beautiful. Slowly slowly the movement stops. Then one is a stagnant pool, no more a river; and to be a stagnant pool is to be in misery, is to be in hell.

So the first thing for a sannyasin to remember is: always remain flowing. Nothing is more valuable than the flow itself. Nothing should prevent you, nothing should be allowed to obstruct the flow of life. Go on dropping yesterdays so that today remains flowing. Don’t plan for tomorrow, otherwise you have already obstructed it.

And the second thing: don’t resist life, don’t fight with it. Be friendly: don’t create any antagonism with life. We are part of it; to fight with it is simply stupid. But that’s what has been taught: for thousands of years man has been taught to fight, to become a fighter. Life has to be conquered, it has been said to people. Who is going to conquer life – we are part of it. A ray of the sun is going to conquer the sun? A wave of the ocean is going to conquer the ocean? It is utter nonsense, but that nonsense has become such a long tradition that nobody thinks about it. And when you resist and you fight, you lose; life loses nothing. You simply become separated from it, isolated from it; hence you start feeling lonely. Otherwise there is no loneliness.

Nobody can ever be lonely: life is always around you. Even if you are sitting in a Himalayan cave you are not lonely because the rocks are there, the birds are there, the trees are there and the rivers are there. Maybe there is no human being, but just the presence of human beings does not make company. One can be alone in a crowd; people are alone in crowds. And not to be in human company does not mean aloneness if one knows how to remain non-resistant, not to fight.

The third thing is always to remain in a let-go, relaxed, as if you are not going anywhere. We are here, we have been here always and we will be here always and always; there is no hurry, there is no haste.

Then one can taste each moment in its radiance, in its utter benediction.

Veet means beyond, vivado means argument – beyond the argument. There is something which cannot be dragged into argument. That something is truth or god or whatever one chooses to call it. It cannot be proved, it cannot be disproved; there is no way to argue about it. Either it can be experienced or not experienced. It is a question of experiencing, not discussing. Philosophy discusses: religion experiences. Philosophy goes on and on, round and round, never arriving at any conclusion. Its very premise is wrong: it is arguing about something which cannot be argued about.

Its first step has gone wrong, and when the first step goes wrong the whole journey goes wrong; then you can go on ad infinitum.

Five thousand years of philosophising has not given a single truth to man, a single conclusion. All problems remain the same; in fact, they have become more complicated. The more we have argued about them, the more complexities we have created. Philosophy is a dead-weight: religion is an unburdening. Exactly what science is for the outside world, religion is for the inside world; it is a science. Just as science believes in experimentation, observation, not in argument, religion also believes in experimenting, in experiencing, not in argument.

Nija means one who is one’s own self. That is the most difficult thing in the world, to be one’s own self, because others don’t allow it. They have a vested interest in not allowing you to be yourself: you can be reduced to a commodity only when your desire to be yourself is crushed. You can be coerced into anything once you forget who you are. Then everything is simple. Then anybody and everybody can manipulate you, control you; and all those who are around you are interested in manipulating you, even those who say that they love you. Their love is a very sweet way of manipulation.

It is very rare to find a person who loves you and does not allow his love to become politics – politics to control, politics to dominate, politics to destroy the other. Whenever one wants to be powerful over the other there is politics; and all our relationships are fully political.

So nobody wants you to be yourself; everybody wants you to be according to him or her. So only you can work it out; nobody is going to help, everybody will hinder it. But it is a question of life and death to you. You will have to find ways. You have to be intelligent, you have to be rebellious, you have to be courageous. You have to create strategies so that nobody can manipulate you, so that slowly slowly you can grow into that which you are meant to be.

And only when we have grown into that which we are, is there fulfilment. Remember it! This is the beginning of sannyas.

Ajija means the friend. Create a kind of friendliness in you which is not addressed to anyone in particular. Friendship should not be a relationship: it should be your flavour. It should be more a state of your being than a relationship with somebody. Then many relationships can happen, but your friendliness remains a quality of you. If you pass by a side of a tree you are friendly to the tree.

And to be friendly to existence is to be prayerful. I don’t know any other prayer which can reach to god, except friendliness.

This is the highest quality of love: unaddressed love. Then there is no motivation. When it is unaddressed it creates no attachment. When it is unaddressed it has no expectations, hence it never feels frustrated.

Friendliness is the purest form of love. That is the meaning of ajija.

Madhupran. It means sweet soul. Madhu means sweet, pran means soul. The moment love arises in one’s being, one becomes sweet from end to end. And that sweetness arises out of your core, your centre, and spreads towards your circumference. It becomes your whole life.

Love is the most important phenomenon in life.

Without love a man remains bitter.

Without love the poison of your being cannot be transformed into nectar.

Love is the

alchemy to change poison into nectar, to change the base metal into gold.

And it is re-

ally a taste of sweetness.

Each breath is sweet when you are full of love, and each

experience has its own beauty and sweetness and its own bliss.

And life then has

thousandsofsurpriseseveryday.Oneachstepyouareencounteredbyanewmystery; wonderandawesimplyg But the man who does not know love, knows nothing of the mysteries of life. He is locked in a dark cell; he knows nothing of light. He knows nothing of all that is happening around. It is tremendous!

It is unbelievable, but it is happening, it is true... once you open your eyes. And only love can open your eyes, because love gives you maturity, integrity, sincerity, authenticity. Remember it!

To forget love in life is to make the whole of life futile; to remember love is to make it meaningful.

Love is the poetry of life, the sweetness of life.

Deva means divine, anunado means echo – echo of the divine. And that’s what we are: echoes of god, far away echoes of god; reflections of the moon in the lake. Hence the search for the real.

We have seen the real only as an echo, but the echo has created a desire to know the original. It is as if we have seen somebody in a dream and fallen in love and now the search starts. We have heard somebody singing but we have not seen them; now the search starts! We have a feeling that somebody is present, we are utterly certain of the presence, but the presence is not tangible, it is not material. We cannot grasp it, we cannot hold it in our hands, but still we can feel it. It touches and moves our heart and the longing arises to know the truth.

Our whole life is an echo, and the fortunate people are those who know it is an echo, because then they can start searching for the real. The unfortunate are those who think this is the real. Those who take this life for the real miss the whole point.

Remember it: this life is only an echo of that. This is only a finger pointing to that. Use the finger –

it is beautiful – but don’t cling to it. That has to be realised.

Virat means the great; it is a name of god. We carry the great in our beings. We may be seeds but we carry great trees in our being. And we may be just a drop but we are hidden oceans. The drop is an unmanifest ocean and the ocean is a manifest drop.

Man is small and yet not small; both things have to be remembered simultaneously. It looks like a paradox: it is not. Man is small; it has to be remembered, otherwise the ego arises and the whole of life becomes poisoned by it. And man is great too; that has also to be remembered, otherwise man forgets that which is hidden in him, and to forget it is to go astray. We are small, like atoms, and yet we are carrying the great energy of the divine, the infinite energy of the divine. As man we are small, but there is something in us which surpasses us, which transcends us. We are not only man: we are also divine.

That’s why Jesus goes on saying again and again ’I am the son of man’ and ’I am the son of god.’

He uses both expressions. He has puzzled theologians for centuries. If he had used only one expression things would have been very clear-cut. One day he says ’I am the son of god’; another day he says ’I am the son of man.’ What does he mean? He means both together.

Apparently we are man; in a hidden way, in a subtle way, we are gods. Obviously he is the son of man, but that will be only half true; it will be true only about the periphery, it will not be true about the centre. To remind us of it he says ’I am the son of god’ too. But that is the story of everybody else too. Remember it!

[A sannyasin says: I am in beautiful love with a sannyasin here but sometimes I feel very much that I need my own space, I need to be alone. And I don’t understand if it is good or if it is because I am afraid to be more deeply in love.]

Nothing to be worried about.

You need that much space to be alone. It is not a question of escaping: it is your need. So whenever you feel like being alone, be alone. Don’t force yourself to do something which is not happening naturally. One needs a few moments to be alone. To be together for twenty-four hours is dangerous. It starts being an encroachment on the other’s space, and the other starts encroaching on your space. Then one feels suffocated; this is a sure way to destroy love.

Love can exist only when two persons are capable of coming closer when it is happening naturally, and then withdrawing. This is the rhythm: coming closer, going away, coming closer, going away; this is the day and night of a love affair. If you remain far away too much, again love will be destroyed.

There is a need of a great balance – to go away and to come and to go away again – so each time you come close it is again fresh. Again there is passion, joy, much longing to be together.

This is a natural rhythm; there is no question of escape. Simply follow your natural feeling.

[A sannyasin says: Since I’ve come out of groups, many changes have been happening. I find that I’m aware of my mind but the old mind comes back many times.]

This is how the old mind goes, slowly slowly. It comes back many times. Just remember not to be a victim of it. This is natural: it cannot go easily; it will come back many times. It will try in every way to catch hold of you. You have remained a slave to it so long; how can it simply leave you alone? It will go one day, but it will go only when it has tried in every possible way to dominate you and has failed.

So just leave it – nothing else can be done. Just don’t support it any more. When it comes, remain indifferent. Just tell it ’I know your tricks and your trips and I am not going to be carried by you. You can come and go but I am indifferent.’ Keep aloof, keep cool, and slowly slowly, it will come less and less. It will become more and more meaningless for it to come back; it will be an uninvited guest.

One day it simply disappears and never comes back; but it takes time.

The process has started, so feel happy that a new thing has started happening. Now it is a question of time and your awareness.

[A sannyasin says that sometimes she feels a lot of shaking in her belly. Osho gives her an ’energy darshan’]

It is not a block: it is just that the energy is arising for the first time. It is a good sign. It will spread all over the body, and once it has spread all over the body you will not feel it. You will feel it only for a few days till it spreads all over the body. It is there too much and it is trying to spread. It is going in ripples; soon it will over-flood the whole body and then you will feel a totally new life. All the dead parts in your body, in your mind, will disappear through it; so love it, respect it, and when it shakes you, co-operate with it.

And something good is going to happen!

CHAPTER 13

14 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Sitaro. It is the root of the word ’star’, the Sanskrit root. It means the star...

Remember that the real star is within. And the real star is not even a whispering star: it is utterly silent, not even a whisper. And we reach it only when we are totally silent.

Even if a little whispering remains, that is enough of a barrier, that is enough of a wall. Only silence is the door. Words, whether said loudly or whispered, are words, and words are the only barrier between you and your real you. Words create continuous smoke around your being; a fog is created by words. Words have to disappear, and they can disappear easily if we don’t cooperate with them.

If we don’t go on pouring our energy into them they start dying of their own accord. They cannot live by themselves, they are parasites: they live on our blood. And everybody looks to be so sucked, so dry of juice, because those words are constantly sucking on their soul. The more words that are in the mind, the less juice your life will have. And if the mind goes on in inner talk continuously – that’s how it is – then it drives you crazy.

Silence is sane; in fact the only way to be sane is to be silent. And the whole art of sannyas consists of being utterly silent. Everything else is just a device to help you towards silence. It may be music, it may be dance, it may be anything, but the basic thing is that all these methods lead you slowly slowly towards an inner stillness. And when all is silent – the inner talk has disappeared and there is no fog, no smoke of the mind – the star rises.

The story in the Bible that three wise men saw a star when Jesus was born and followed it, and by following the star reached Jesus, has nothing to do with any star in the sky. The stars in the sky don’t move that way; they have their fixed roots. Then what is the story talking about? It is saying something of the inner; but the inner can be seen only by the wise.

Whenever a man like Jesus or Buddha is there on the earth, those who have any wisdom left in them start moving towards the person – sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly. Sometimes they think it is just accidental, coincidental, that they have arrived; but it is not so. Their deepest being has seen something. Their mind may not have heard about it, because the mind knows nothing much about the deeper depths of your being. There are things in you which your mind is not aware of, and because they are very deep sometimes the mind remains unaware for years. But they are very potential, powerful: they can move your life into certain directions.

Those three wise men from the East saw the star rising not in the outer sky but in the inner sky.

They felt a presence; they felt that something of the unknown had penetrated the earth again, that something of the divine had again materialised. It was a rare miracle. They travelled long distances.

It was not a question of seeing a star in the sky and following it. They were continuously meditating and feeling and groping to find where the miracle had happened; and they did find it.

That’s how you have come here to me. That’s how millions are going to come. It has nothing to do with anything that you may have heard from the outside: it has something to do with your inner feeling.

And you have come in the right time. Something tremendously important is going to happen. Just become more and more silent so that you can feel your inner light, your inner star, more clearly.

Deva means divine, sansargo means contact divine contact. Sannyas is the beginning of a new contact, of a new relationship. It is falling in love with god. All other loves fail: only love for god succeeds. All other loves only promise but they never fulfil. And the strange thing is that love for god promises nothing but it fulfils; it is the only fulfillment in life. So those who are searching for anything else except god are moving in a wasteland. Futile is their search, fruitless is their life, and frustration is their who!e biography. From one frustration to another frustration; they go on moving that way, in a vicious circle. After each frustration they hope; that hope brings them to another frustration. They hope again; again there is frustration.

Love for god is not a hope. It has nothing to do with the future: it has something to do with the present, because god is the present. God is never the past, never the future; god is always present, always now. He is the eternal now. So one cannot hope for god. Those who hope have missed the point. People can only live god: they cannot desire or hope for god. God is now and god is here.

God is all that is.

So one has to jump, plunge, into this mysterious existence. This is what I mean by falling in love with god. Falling in love with trees and birds and animals and people and rivers and oceans and stars...

all this is falling in love with god. This whole universe is his temple. He may not be visible to those who are not in love with him but he is visible to those who are in love with him – although not visible as a person but as a presence.

You will feel his presence in the tree, in the flower: you will feel his presence everywhere. God is a presence, and only love can feel the presence, because only love has the eyes to see the invisible.

Anand means bliss, rupen means beauty – beauty that comes out of bliss. Bliss brings beauty which is not of the body, which is not of the mind either. Bliss opens the doors for the divine. The moment one is blissful the divine starts radiating from one’s being, and that creates a beautiful phenomenon around oneself.

It is said that Jesus was physically ugly. It may have been so, but he attracted so many people; his impact was tremendous. Something was radiating from him which was not of the body, not of the earth: the sky was expressing itself through him. Socrates also was not beautiful physically but his impact on people was tremendous: very penetrating, very deep-going. Sometimes it happens that a person has both: Buddha was physically beautiful too. But the physical beauty is just a wave in the ocean: it comes and goes – a soap bubble. One moment it is here, another moment it is gone.

But the inner beauty remains, it is non-temporal. And once the person has become spiritually beautiful, his body may die but his beauty goes on circulating in existence like a fragrance. The flower disappears but the fragrance remains. In that sense Jesus is still here, Buddha is still here, as a fragrance: they permeate the whole of existence.

Search for the beauty that comes from bliss, because that is the only eternal beauty.

Sangit means music. And music is the ancientmost meditation. It was discovered as meditation; it was practised for centuries as meditation. Now it has fallen from its pedestal; it has become mundane, it has become very ordinary, a commodity in the marketplace. Otherwise it was on the same plane as prayer.

But it can be used as a meditation if one understands how to use it. It is a tremendously powerful method. The whole art consists in this: if you can play music yourself then get lost in playing. Don’t remain separate from the music: dissolve into it, be possessed by it, and it becomes meditation.

Or, if you are just a listener, then get lost in listening, become music again. Don’t be there as a spectator, don’t be critical, don’t question whether it is good or bad. Don’t bring in your likes and dislikes: be choicelessly lost. Let it overpower you, let it surround you... first without and then within, slowly slowly. Then you will be just a part, a throbbing part of the melody, and immediately music will open a door to meditation.

Whenever the ego is lost, meditation arises. The ego is the state of non-meditation; egolessness is the state of meditation. And music will really help you. Use music as a door: it is one of the most beautiful doors to enter god.

[To a sannyasin newly returned from the West Osho says:]

Just come a little closer, raise your hands. Close your eyes. If anything starts happening, allow it; just be in Latihan.

You start your Latihan again. Now it will go far deeper. In these six months much has been cleansed in your being; many impurities have fallen. You have passed through many many cathartic moments; now you are a purer vehicle. Latihan will take on a more graceful expression now.

Start Latihan again that’s absolutely the right meditation for you.

[Anand Saman – song of bliss] Life has the potential to become a song of bliss, but there is every possibility of missing it too. It is not a certainty, there is no inevitability about it. It depends: you can make it, you can destroy it. Out of one hundred, ninety-nine point nine percent of people destroy their song of bliss. Then their life is nothing but a cry, a scream of pain and agony. But they have chosen it that way; nobody else is ever responsible.

This is the first truth to be learned in life: that you are always responsible, nobody else. With that comes great freedom, because with that all alternatives are open. If you think that somebody else is responsible then you are a slave; then nothing is open. Then you have to be what you are. If your life is a tragedy then it has to be a tragedy, because others are responsible; unless they change, nothing can be done about it. You don’t have any freedom.

And that is the reason why millions of people live in misery: they think others are creating their misery. Nobody is creating your misery, nobody can create it; and nobody can create your bliss either. It is a totally individual phenomenon. It is just your work upon yourself.

And the most strange thing is: to create misery is difficult and to create bliss is easy, but people always choose the difficult thing, because the difficult thing always gives them an ego-trip. The ego is not interested in easy things; the ego is interested only in difficult things. The more impossible a thing looks, the more attractive it feels for the ego, because the ego feels a challenge, and only through challenge can it conquer, can it prove to the world ’I am somebody special.’

Misery gives you challenge: bliss is very simple. Trees are blissful, birds are blissful. It needs no special talent to be blissful. To be miserable needs talents, one has to be really very very clever to be miserable.

Bliss is innocent; you can be blissful without any education, but you cannot be miserable without any education, remember! It is very difficult. You need degrees, universities, mm? then only do you become skilful.

So the first truth has to sink deep in the heart: ’I am always responsible for whatsoever I am. Bliss or misery, this is my choice. If I have chosen to be miserable, then there is no need to be sad about it; this is my choice and I am doing my thing.’ Feel happy that you have succeeded in being miserable!

If this is not your choice, drop it immediately, drop all those patterns that create it and start creating new patterns, new doors from where bliss starts flowing.

For example, the person who wants to be miserable has to think in terms of fighting with life; that is his gestalt. He is always fighting. The person who wants to be blissful has to be a non-fighter, surrendered to life, in a kind of let-go. The person who wants to be miserable has to create great ideals, has to make impossible demands upon himself. Then only can you be miserable; otherwise you will not be miserable. You have to be this, you have to be that, and when you cannot be, frustration settles in.

The man who wants to be blissful has no ideals at all, he is a non-idealist; he is a realist. The miserable person is always an idealist. The happy person, the blissful person, is a realist: he lives moment to moment with no ideals. You cannot frustrate him because he has no expectations.

The miserable person always condemns himself because he is not rising high enough to fulfil the demands. He is a constant condemnor; he lives in self-condemnation. The blissful person is very accepting of himself. He makes no demands. He is relaxed, at ease with himself; he loves himself as he is.

So you have to watch: that which creates misery, drop; and that which brings bliss like a flood, create that space in you. And my whole effort here is to make each of my sannyasins a song of bliss: not miserable saints, not long faces, but celebrants! I am interested in celebrants, not in saints at all.

So let your life become a celebration; and it is up to you! That is the meaning of your name – make it a reality. It is possible and it is easy!

[Prem Sampurno] It means love perfection, perfect love. And by perfect love I don’t mean any ideal: by perfect love I mean an unconditional state of love. Give, and don’t ask anything in return. It comes, it comes a thousandfold – and when it comes, receive it with gratefulness – but don’t ask for it! The moment you ask, you stop its coming. And the moment you ask, you become miserable, because it is not coming and you feel at a loss. When you ask something in return you are already thinking in terms of profit, and profit means: give less and get more. So from the very beginning you are miserly in giving.

Love is responded to only when it is not miserly, when it is given totally, with abandon, when it is not a business, a bargain, but just a sheer joy of giving. That love I call perfect; and perfect love brings perfect bliss.

So feel more and more love. Let it become just the climate around you – not that once in a while you are loving: let it be a twenty-four-hour climate around you, let it become your breathing. Even asleep a real man of love is loving... even in sleep. If you go into the room of a man who loves, he may be asleep but you will feel the room full of love vibrations, because now love is not a question of doing or not doing; love is just his very life. Then I call it perfect.

And this is possible for every human being because this is a built-in potential in us. It has not to be brought from somewhere: it has to be just allowed to grow, allowed to be expressed. So express as much love as you can, and more will be coming, more and more will be flowing. It is something inexhaustible, you cannot exhaust it. The more you give, the more you have of it.

[Somadeva – Moon god] The moon represents a few things.... One: it is light but cool. The sun is also light, but hot. The sun represents passion; the moon represents compassion. The sun energy is male energy, aggressive; the moon energy is feminine energy, receptive.

If somebody wants to become a scientist he will need to have more and more sun energy. But if somebody wants to become religious he will need more and more of the moon energy. Science is a male project; religion is a female project, soft.

God cannot be conquered: god can only be invited. The very idea of conquering is of violence.

All meditators have to learn how to become more and more part of the moon energy: receptive, womb-like, feminine, available, vulnerable, open, so existence can pour its mysteries into you. That has to be remembered.

Meditate on this metaphor – not only meditate on this metaphor: let this metaphor slowly become your life. Become moon-oriented, and much will be possible through it.

[Shrira] It means body of bliss. The physical body is the outer body; there is an inner body also: that body is the bliss body. It is made of the stuff called bliss, it consists only of bliss and nothing else. It is pure energy, and energy is delight.

The physical body is gross: the bliss body is the most subtle. And the finer the energy, the more joyful it is. The bliss body has the finest particles in it; there is no more possibility to make it more refined.

We have to search for it. You cannot find it outside in the world: you will have to go in. It can be found only with closed eyes; it is an inner journey.

Slowly slowly you will start feeling it. The more you remain silent and quiet and just watching inside, tuning in, turning in, one day the contact happens and suddenly you see such light as you have never seen before, and you hear such music as you have never heard before. You have entered paradise. And it was always there: we had just not opened the gates for it. All that is needed is an in-sight.

[A sannyasin says: I had a friend... he introduced me to marijuana and brownies and the first type of touching experiences with a man. It was beautiful when I could let go... I picked up a lot of guilt feelings sometimes and other times feelings to open and.... I’m not sure.]

It can be a beautiful experience – you can continue. No need to be afraid and no need to feel guilty.

It will be helpful. And when you feel that now it is no more helping, then stop it; but use everything possible that seems to give some experience. Use it! Even if sometimes it doesn’t happen, no need to worry.

Always remember: no method has to become an addiction, that’s all. When it is finished, its work is finished, when it no more gives you anything, simply drop it; but while it gives you something, continue. No need to be worried.

CHAPTER 14

15 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, iman means faith. Man can either live in belief or in faith. Belief is man-made: faith is a grace that comes from beyond. Belief is a thing of the mind: faith, a stirring in the heart.

Belief is superficial, it never transforms anybody. Rather than transforming it only consoles. It is convenient to be a Hindu, to be a Christian, to be a Mohammedan, because the crowd is there, surrounding you in every way. But to be with the crowd a certain compromise is needed; that compromise is belief. One submits to the crowd and its demands; that is belief. Belief is a subtle slavery: faith is a freedom. Belief is collective: faith is individual. And faith has no name: beliefs have many names.

Faith is something that happens in you, and when it happens, the very happening becomes a total change. But you have to understand one thing, that you cannot create it; you can only be receptive towards it. You can pray for it, you can invite it, but you cannot create it. You have to just remain waiting, in a prayerful mood, for the right moment. When you are worthy enough it will come as a gift from god. It always comes, but it comes only when you are ripe, and your ripening means silence, prayer, infinite patience.

One day the light enters you and then your life is totally different, discontinuous with the past; that is iman.

Deva means god, islam means surrendered – surrendered to god. One can live a life of struggle or one can live a life of surrender; both the alternatives are there. The ego chooses the path of struggle because it can exist only through struggle: the more struggle, the better, for the ego. But the ego is a false entity. You create it with great effort and finally it is going to disappear, so the whole effort is futile; death will take it away. Those people who go on working for their egos are just making castles in the air. It needs tremendous effort, a total devotion, and yet the end result is nil. You live empty, you die empty, and meaninglessness is writ large all over your life.

The other alternative – living a life of surrender – makes you religious. Then the ego immediately dies; it cannot exist with surrender, there is no co-existence possible between surrender and ego.

By surrendering you come to know a totally different kind of self, a self which is not an ego, a self which is not a self at all, a self which is equivalent to no-self. You are, but there is no idea of I. You are a pure am-ness, a pure existence. That purity is bliss and that purity is truth.

Let surrender become your life, your very style of living. And you are not going to lose anything by surrender; you will lose only that which you don’t have, you will lose only the false. You will lose only the notion of the ego – because the ego is not a reality and can never be a reality – but you will attain to your authentic self. And to know one’s own reality is sheer joy.

Deva means divine, atosh means discontent. A great discontent is needed to attain to god. Be contented with the world but don’t be contented with your inner being. People are doing just the opposite: they are contented with their inner being, they are discontented with the outer world.

Hence we have been progressing as far as the outside world is concerned – we have better cars, we have better houses, we have better gadgets, better planes, better bombs and everything: we just don’t have a better man.

If Jesus comes to the world he will be surprised at seeing our materialistic growth, progress, but he will be very frustrated at seeing our human beings. Humanity has not grown at all. Everything else has become better, only man has remained stuck. And the reason is that we are discontented with the outside world so we go on improving upon it; science goes on searching for new ways to improve the world.

A great discontent for the inner is needed, then religion grows; and only then is religion possible.

Religion has disappeared from the world for the simple reason that nobody is interested in god, nobody is interested in themselves, nobody is interested at all in that which is invisible, hidden.

Truth has become a disvalue. A divine discontent is needed. One has to become a total thirst for god. It should not be only an intellectual question, it should not just be a curiosity or a philosophical enquiry: it should be passionate, it should be a question of life and death. Only then does something happen because only then are we aflame, afire.

To be a sannyasin means getting initiated into a totally different kind of discontent. To be worldly means the ordinary discontentment with your money, with your house, with your wife, with your husband, with your children; it is a search to improve the circumstances outside.

To be a sannyasin means a discontent with one’s inner state. The inner world is so dark, it needs light. The inner world is so poor, it needs to become more rich. The inner world is so empty, it needs to be fulfilled.

And the potential is there, just the fire is missing. The potential is there, just the impetus, that momentum, that can change the potential into the actual, is missing.

That is atosh, that is

discontentment as one is. Then immediately things start happening.

[Veet Diti – Beyond limitations] All limitations are false, arbitrary, not real – utilitarian of course, but not real. Existence is one. Things that appear to be separate are not separate. The tree is not separate from the earth, so you cannot think of the tree in a limited way; the earth has to be included in it. And the tree is not separate from the sun; you have to include the sun in it too. The tree is not separate from the stars and the moon and the air and the water. If you go on searching, you will be surprised: a small tree contains the whole universe; there is no limit to it. The whole existence is one single phenomenon. To understand this is to understand god.

The mind loves limits. It wants to categorise, define, but because of its definitions and its categories it creates a very arbitrary world around itself.

Once you stop seeing limits, the mind starts

disappearing; and the disappearance of the mind is the appearance of god.

The day it happens that you cannot see any limit anywhere and all seems to be involved with everything else and each thing is just the whole existence, you are transported into a totally different dimension: the dimension of the infinite – unlimited, unbounded.

And remember: that is the case with you too. The tree was just an example; you also include the whole. Each single drop of water contains all the oceans of the world. When you start seeing it without, you have seen god manifest in the world; when you start seeing the same within, you have seen god as unmanifest. And these are the two aspects of the same reality: the manifest and the unmanifest. Both are unlimited; no beginning, no end, no boundary is possible.

Just to contemplate it, to see it, is liberating. Then life is never the same again. Then you cannot die, because the whole never dies! Fear disappears, and the same energy that was becoming fear in you becomes love.

So think of yourself as being beyond all limits and think of everyone else too in the same way.

See limits disappearing, evaporating, and see the unlimited in every form – behind every form the formless and behind every name the nameless – and closer and closer you will be approaching the truth, the ultimate truth.

Gyan means wisdom, raj means secret – secret of wisdom. And there is only one secret of wisdom.

Knowledge comes from many sources. There are millions of sources of knowledge – so many scriptures, so many people, so many experiences, the whole accumulated past of humanity. Science gives you knowledge and theology gives you knowledge and literature gives you knowledge and....

You can go on searching for knowledge; there are many many sources.

But for wisdom there is only one secret: it wells up within your being, it arises in you; it doesn’t come from the outside. It cannot be transmitted or transferred: it has to happen in your deepest core, in the recesses of your own being. The seed is there but we have never cared about it. We have never prepared the field, we have never watered it; we have not been good gardeners to it. Hence wisdom is missing.

Lao Tzu says that to know the truth you need not go outside your room, you need not ask anybody, because truth is given to you from the very beginning. You are it. The only secret to be learned is how to go in, how to be there where truth is already. And that’s what meditation is all about.

Meditation is the secret of wisdom.

Meditation simply means a state of no-thought, awareness without the process of thought, just pure, mirror-like awareness, with no thoughts passing in the mind. And when there is no thought, you immediately become unhinged from the world. You are no more focused outside, because there is nothing to see, and the focus starts turning inwards. When there is no content to know, consciousness starts knowing itself, and that is wisdom.

CHAPTER 15

16 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Darpano means the mirror. The moment one starts functioning as a pure mirror, god is revealed immediately. God is already here: we are just not a mirror to him. One need not search for god, because he is not far away: he is very close, he is closer to you than you are to yourself. All that is needed is to become a pure receptivity, with no interference. That is the beauty of the mirror: it doesn’t interfere, it simply reflects that which is. It does not project, it does not impose anything. It is simply there, with no idea of good, bad; with no judgement. A beautiful woman comes before it, it reflects; an ugly woman comes before it, it reflects. It has no likes, no dislikes, no prejudices at all: it is simply empty.

This is what meditation creates in you: meditation creates a mirror of consciousness.

The ordinary mind is full of thoughts, desires, ambitions, prejudices, beliefs, superstitions, ideologies. They are all there clamouring, creating great noise. They are like dust on the mirror, and the dust is so much that the mirror has completely disappeared; you cannot look into it.

Meditation means cleansing the mirror, dropping thoughts, letting thoughts disappear, attaining to moments when thinking ceases. And those are the most blissful moments in life. Once you have tasted a single moment of no-thought, you have taken a great leap into truth; then things will become more and more easy every day.

Deva means god, shahid means beloved. God is the only beloved. We have been seeking the beloved in different ways, in different lives, but we have not yet arrived because we have not been seeking god consciously; the search has been an unconscious search. It has been more like a groping, less like a search. Search means intensity, awareness, watchfulness.

There is an unconscious longing in every being to know the truth, to be the truth; but it is an unconscious longing. The first step towards truth is to make it conscious. That’s what sannyas is. The first thing that I have to help you to do is to make the search conscious. It should not be a groping, it should not be deep in the darkness of your being; it should come to the lighted part of your being. If it remains unconscious we go on moving into wrong directions.

People search for money. In fact they want to be rich, and one can be rich only when one has achieved to god, never before. But the unconscious search for inner richness becomes distorted and we start searching for money.

People search for power but the real power is with god. Without god we have no power. But if the search is unconscious then one becomes a politician, one wants to become a prime minister of a country or a president. Ultimately one will find tremendous frustration because that was not the real search. Something got distorted; the unconscious was not interpreted rightly.

Just as you need a psychoanalyst to interpret your dreams to yourself – they are your dreams, but you cannot interpret them because a certain skill and understanding is needed to interpret them, and they are very metaphoric, they are not literal, because the unconscious speaks in metaphors –

in the same way a master is needed to transform your unconscious desire for god into a conscious flame. And once it has happened, life takes on such a quality of which you had not even dreamt before. When one’s whole life becomes just a rush towards god – just as a river is rushing towards the ocean – then life is so rich, so beautiful, has such grandeur, is a splendour.

That is the meaning of your name. From this moment think of god as the beloved. Whomsoever you love, search for god in him, in her – in your children, in your wife, in your friends, in your parents; whomsoever you love, search for god in them! Let each lover be now the beloved, and you will see a great change happening of its own accord.

Bodhi means awareness, sagar means ocean – an ocean of awareness. The mind is tiny, narrow, very small, petty: consciousness is oceanic. Hence we all feel suffocated in the mind. We are vast, huge, immense, and the mind is so small; it is a prison cell. There is no way to grow in it, and it becomes smaller and smaller every day. The child has a bigger mind than the young man.

The young man still has a little more space than the old man, because as one experiences more and more things, all those experiences go on accumulating in the mind. More and more space is occupied by unnecessary furniture – by memories, the past, experiences, knowledge. Slowly slowly a moment comes when you don’t have any space to live in, no possibility of any movement. You are simply stuck, drowned in your own mind.

That’s why in children you see a certain intelligence. It is very rare to find that intelligence in old people, and whenever you can find that intelligence in an old person, that shows he has lived well.

That shows he has not been accumulating baggage, unnecessary luggage. That shows he has been able to die moment to moment to the past. He has kept his space intact. He has remained uncorrupted by experiences, uncontaminated by experiences, unpolluted by experiences. He is still a child: open, vulnerable, full of wonder and awe. He has not de-mystified experience, existence, life; the mystery is still there.

But even then, the mind of a child is small – spacious, more spacious than the old man, but still small.

Consciousness needs the whole sky. It is an ocean. In some moments you slip out of the mind and you experience the ocean too. Watching the night full of stars you slip out of the mind. You forget all about your mind – your worries, your name, your address, your thoughts. For a moment you are transported. You are no more part of your so-called identity; you lose your identity. For a moment the whole sky is yours, for a moment all those stars are moving within you; hence the liberating experiences of nature, of beauty, of love, of music.

Any experience that liberates you on the mind becomes an experience of god; but those are rare moments, and you don’t know how they happen. They happen almost of their own accord: suddenly one day things fit. You slept well, the night was undisturbed, there was not a single nightmare: your mind is clean and fresh, you are feeling very vital, rested, relaxed. You see the sunrise and the birds singing... and it happens! But you are not able to create the space yourself, it was just coincidental, hence it cannot last long; it comes and it goes.

Sannyas means becoming capable of creating that space of your own accord. That is the whole art of meditation, of yoga, of tantra, of tao. The whole art is simple: how to create a space where the beyond can penetrate you. That space can be created, and because that space can be created religion has relevance; otherwise there would be no relevance, no relevance of religion. Then there would be science, which knows nothing of the beyond, and there will be poetry, which knows only coincidental moments of the beyond.

Religion is a conscious effort to create that space, to give the invitation to god, to provoke god, to open oneself in such a way that god has to come.

Prem means love, arifo means wise – wisdom through love. Knowledge needs no love: wisdom is based in love, and that is the beauty of wisdom. Knowledge is dry: it only collects dead facts about life. It cannot come in contact with real life, because real life is love.

The scientist is trained to remain aloof, dispassionate, not to get involved; he has to be there just like a computer. That is not the way to know life. That’s why science goes on knowing only something that is dead. It knows about matter; it misses all that is alive. It has no vision for life, no opening for it.

The poet also knows, but in a different way; he knows very lovingly.

His knowledge is not

dispassionate, he is involved in it. He participates in what he knows, but his participation is not total, it is momentary: sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t happen. He is not a master of his own life, so one day he feels great poetry arising in him and the next day all has disappeared; he is just a dry wasteland, a desert. One day a flower blooms and then for months there is no flowering.

The mystic knows life in the same way as the poet, with one difference: he remains totally in contact with life. Each moment he goes on renewing his contact. He is a master: he is not just accidentally in participation with existence, he has created the space to be in that participation. He knows how to create it and he goes on creating that space and he goes on and on participating; even when he is asleep, he is a participant. And then great mysteries are revealed to him.

That is the meaning of arifo: a mystic, a wise man, a saint, who has come through love, whose knowing is another name for loving, whose knowing is rooted in loving, whose knowing is part of his prayer.

The scientist is the most gross: the mystic, the most subtle. The scientist moves into the visible: the mystic, into the invisible; and the poet is just a mid-way house between the scientist and the mystic.

Ordinarily he remains part of the world of the scientist, but there are extraordinary moments when he soars high and touches the world of the mystic. But very rarely, once in a while, it happens only sometimes. The mystic abides there. That is the meaning of arifo.

[A sannyasin says: I feel like this time I’ve come to commit myself either way and I get really scared of committing myself.... All the time I’ve been here I just think ’I’ve got to decide.’]

Decide not to decide; be finished!

Commitment will come on its own. It will not be your decision; don’t be worried about it. Commitment will happen; it will not be your decision. Suddenly you will see it has happened, so no need to worry about it.

One day I am going to do it – you just wait! (LAUGHTER) You need not make any efforts this way or that, for or against. Don’t unnecessarily waste your time; do something else. That is my work, that I will do!

[A sannyasin says: I find I lose touch a lot – with you, with god, with myself, with the world, with other people.]

I understand. Simply accept: when you are in touch, accept that; when you are not in touch, accept that. Only through acceptance can worrying be stopped; and worrying is the factor that comes between you and me, between you and you, between you and the world: it is worrying, the wall of worrying. So we have to cut the roots of worrying, and the best way is to accept whatsoever happens in that moment; that is the reality.

And don’t think about whether you are really in touch or not really in touch. Whatsoever it is, it has to be accepted; real and unreal does not matter. Acceptance is a sword: it cuts all worrying in a single blow.

[A sannyasin says: For the past months my blood pressure has been mostly going too high. I’ve been to the doctor but he couldn’t find anything physical, so I don’t know what to do about it. Osho studies her energy.]

It is not physical – the doctors are right – and it is not psychological either: it has something to do with your astral body. But it is nothing bad at all, in fact it is a good indication. So whenever it happens, start enjoying it. Rather than thinking of it as a disease, think of it as a blessing. Some work has started happening inside you and that work is of immense benefit to you, so you have to help it rather than hinder it. And once you have started enjoying it, it will disappear: the restlessness will disappear – the work will continue.

The restlessness is not caused by the work; the restlessness is caused by your interpretation that something is wrong. That very idea of the blood pressure going high makes you restless. Drop the interpretation, and the restlessness will disappear and soon you will find that the blood pressure will also disappear. But even if it remains for a few days there is no need to be worried. Soon you will see what is happening; when it has happened only then will you be able to recognise it.

Great energy wants to be released. Mm? it is like a bird who wants to get out of the prison and becomes restless. It starts flying in the cage, gets stuck, tries to fight.... That’s what is happening; but it is a good indication: something wants to flower.

Anand means bliss, raje means secret – the secret of bliss. It is a secret in one sense: that people are unaware of it. Otherwise it is not a secret at all. It is an open secret. Somewhere deep down everybody knows it and yet goes on denying it because misery seems to be more paying in the world, misery seems to be more profitable.

A blissful person is a very rebellious person, he is pure rebellion. A blissful person is so independent that he needs nobody, that he can be alone, that he does not depend on anybody; and that seems to be arrogance to the society. The society does not like blissful people, it likes miserable people.

The society patronises misery in every way, and if one wants to be patronised by the society, one has to remain miserable; that is the pay-off of misery. Otherwise it is a simple phenomenon to be blissful, very simple.

Just don’t impose any ideals on yourself, no ideals; don’t try to pretend that which you are not. Then bliss starts showering. Just as it is showering on the trees and on the mountains, it starts showering on you; because trees have no ideals, no pretensions, no hypocrisy. And when you don’t have any ideals, when you don’t want to be anybody else other than who you are, how can you be miserable?

You are never frustrated because you never expected anything in the first place. You never feel inferior because you have never wanted to be superior. You never feel defeated because from the very beginning there was no desire to succeed, no desire to be victorious. In such a space, bliss happens naturally; it wells up in you. To be relaxed, to be natural, to be spontaneous, is the secret of bliss.

And Anand Raje can have another meaning too.... Anand means bliss, raje can mean queen. But those who know the secret become kings and queens of bliss, so that is an extension of the first meaning. Once the secret is practised one becomes a king or a queen. We are beggars because we have chosen to be beggars; otherwise we are born as kings and queens. Everybody is born that way.

So become natural and you will see bliss arising. It arises with such tremendous energy, it becomes uncontainable. When it arises in you it is not only that it gives you bliss, it starts overflowing, it starts reaching other people. The blissful person creates a held, an energy-field around himself, and whosoever enters into that energy-field is immensely benefited by the grace.

Deva means divine, sarvo means total, whole. Man is totally divine. There is nothing in man which has to be discarded, there is nothing that has to be denied: man is divine.

All the so-called religions go on telling man ’Discard this, deny that...’ They teach you to choose something but they don’t help you to accept the wholeness of your being. And because of the teachings of choice they have crippled every man, every woman. The denied parts go on hanging like dead-weights; and the denied parts will take revenge some day or other, because nothing can be cut. You are an organic unity, everything is absolutely necessary: whatsoever has been given is absolutely necessary, needed.

So rather than cutting anything from your life, you have to use all that is given in such a way that your life becomes an orchestra. If your life is noisy and miserable, that simply shows you have not been able to create an orchestra, that’s all. So one instrument is doing something, another instrument is doing something opposite, and then it is creating a madness. But both instruments are needed: one just has to learn the art of creating a synthesis.

Anger is needed as much as love; greed is needed as much as compassion. All is needed; you just have to create a synthesis. Black is needed as much as white; in fact without black, white will lose all meaning, it will not have contrast. Use the black as a background, then paint with white and the white will come out loud, clear. Use anger as the background and then paint it with compassion and then compassion will come very loud, very clear, crystal clear.

Life is not a question of denying, destroying, choosing. Life is a great art, it is an alchemy, so that you can put all the ingredients in such a way that the baser metal becomes more.

You have a beautiful name!

CHAPTER 16

17 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Sangit, means music; and music is something that is the most spiritual, religious, and the most expressive of the existence of god. Where words fail, music succeeds. Words can only describe god: they go round and round. Music can represent; it is very symbolic.

So become more and more musical in your being. Life has to be treated as a musical instrument.

Only do things which don’t create disharmony in you, and you will be surprised that if you can keep alert, you will become virtuous without ever trying to become virtuous. The person who lives in disharmony cannot be wise... Cannot be wise, because the moment you do something wrong, the others may be affected later on but first you are affected, your harmony is disturbed.

For example, if you become angry it will take time to reach the other, and if the other is alert, aware, he may not even receive your disturbance, he may ignore it, he may not take it in. He may not be disturbed by it, but you are already disturbed. The moment you become angry you lose your musical quality.

Let music be your criterion to judge what is right and what is wrong. Whichever helps you to be more and more in harmony, in accord, is good, is right; whatsoever goes against it is wrong. And you will be moving towards god slowly slowly without ever becoming self-conscious about it. Otherwise the virtuous people become very righteous, they become very self-conscious, and then a subtle ego arises in them – the ego that gives them the idea of holier-than-thou.

To me virtue is a shadow of being musical.

Geet, means a song... with the same approach, with the same attitude.

The song is more manifest than music. The song is more earthly than music. Music is a very illusive quality – it is like fragrance. The song is like the flower – you can touch it, it is tangible. The song is the meeting of the earth and the sky: music is pure sky. In a sense music is tremendously significant because it is pure sky. In another sense, a song has its own splendour because it has all the beauties of both the earth and the sky. A song is a manifestation of music; music is a hidden, unmanifest song.

So be musical and help him from the very beginning to be more and more of a song, more and more celebrating, happy, joyous. Teach him to be joyous, don’t make him serious.

That’s what parents go on doing with the children: they try to enforce things on them and the children become serious; and the moment a child becomes serious you have killed him, you have disconnected him from his own source. All that a real parent will do is to help the child to be more and more playful, to be more and more joyous, celebrating. And the parent should help the children to keep that quality intact for their whole life; the child should never disappear. It should not be imposed on by other things: the child should remain an undercurrent always flowing there.

And remember: to remain a child your whole life does not mean to remain childish. To be childish and to be childlike are contraries: they don’t mean the same thing. They are polar opposites.

The childish person is stuck, unflowing, retarded; the childlike person is growing in innocence every day. And if a man can die as a child, then he dies as a saint.

Parami means perfection – but perfection not as an ideal, not as an ideal or goal: perfection as a declaration of your isness.

It is not that you have to become perfect but that you are. We have to live it: we are already it. And the whole tradition of teaching people to be perfect has simply driven them neurotic.

The perfectionist is bound to become a neurotic, he is on the way. Never be a perfectionist, and the only way not to be a perfectionist is to declare ’I am perfect as I am....’ With all the flaws and all the limitations you are perfect. In fact all those flaws and all those imperfections and all those limitations add to your richness. Otherwise perfection will be very dull. It will be very very grey, it will not have colours.

To accept oneself as one is, is the first declaration of being a sannyasin. I teach acceptance, total acceptance. In that very acceptance the future disappears and this moment becomes all-important.

In that very declaration you stop torturing yourself – to be this, to be that – and the moment you stop torturing yourself, bliss arises. Bliss is a shadow of acceptance. And when a person accepts himself, herself, then he or she accepts everybody else as he is, she is, and compassion arises, love arises.

The people who have great ideals are always condemnors, are bound to be. If they have a great ideal in their life, they cannot forgive anybody who falls short of that ideal; they cannot forgive themselves, they cannot forgive anybody else. These are the people who have created the idea of hell. In fact there is not much difference between the people who create hell on earth and the people who create hell somewhere after death; their mentalities are the same.

Adolf Hitler creates hell on the earth – he is more of a realist – and your saints go on creating hell after death; but the desire is the same: to torture people. They are all sadists. And the best way to torture people is to give them ideals. They will never be able to fulfil them, because an ideal is an ideal only when it is impossible. They will not be able to fulfil it, or if they try too hard to fulfil it they will become inhuman.

So there are two possibilities: once you give ideals to a man either you will drive the man neurotic or you will drive the man into hypocrisy. If he is a sincere man he will become neurotic because he will sincerely try to achieve it and he will fail. He will fall into a great depression and frustration and he will think that something is wrong with himself; nothing is wrong with him. Or, if he is cunning, he will become a hypocrite; he will have double standards: one to talk about and one to live.

My sannyasin cannot be a hypocrite, because I don’t give any ideals. And my sannyasin can never be neurotic, because I don’t give any ideals.

You are perfect as you are – rejoice in it!

Anand Moses. That is the quality that is missing in Moses – anand, blissfulness. He is too strict, a law-giver. Love is missing; and that’s what Christ has to be. Moses is law; Christ is love.

That’s why Christ was not liked by the Jews, because love seems to be dangerous. People who have learned to live according to law are always afraid of love. Law is repressive: it creates control, inhibition. Love gives you total freedom. And the people who live through law think of freedom as if it will create indulgence. It never creates indulgence; a loving person is never indulgent. Only a repressive person becomes indulgent, because repression, only repression, can create the polar opposite.

If any time the pendulum moves – and it is bound to move one day or other – then the repressed person will become indulgent; he will go to the other extreme. Extremes are always together. A loving person is neither repressive nor indulgent; he is exactly in the middle, the pendulum has stopped in the middle. And that moment, when the pendulum stops in the middle, is a moment of bliss because time disappears, the clock stops. Whenever time disappears you are in bliss, or whenever you are bliss, time disappears: time and bliss never meet.

Law is a temporal phenomenon; it is needed. Moses did his work; it was needed in those days.

People needed a kind of discipline, people needed commandments, people needed a certain way of life to live – rules, regulations. It was needed, he fulfilled a certain need, but that is a very primitive need. Society has grown out of it. Now society needs something more than law: it needs love.

Moses gives character; now society needs consciousness, not only character. Unfortunately Jews rejected Jesus, otherwise Judaism would have become one of the most perfect circles. Without Jesus, Moses is only a half-circle. And without Moses, Christianity is also a half-circle. That schism, that division, drives both the communities schizophrenic; the word ’schizophrenic’ comes from schism.

Whenever you are half, you hanker for the other; and you cannot go to the other: the other is the enemy. You prohibit, you inhibit, you repress it. It is a strange phenomenon, a paradox, but life is full of paradoxes, truth is paradoxical. A man who knows what law is and also knows what love is, is a perfect man.

[A sannyasin says: I love you, Osho!

You love – that’s why you are a sannyasin. Becoming a sannyasin is possible only if you love me, because I don’t give you any ideology; I can only give you my love. And you can get it only when you are in love with me; there is no other way.

Sannyas is a love affair... and it is going to grow every day. Something immensely beautiful is going to be born out of it. Each love affair is creative, in fact only love is creative.

Anand means bliss, and kaba is the sacred place of the Mohammedans. Your full name will mean: the sacred temple of bliss.

Man is a temple. There is no need to go anywhere, no other temple is needed: the kaba is within you. One has to go inwards, and to go inwards is to go upwards. Similarly, to go outwards is to go downwards. Outwards and downwards are synonymous; inwards and upwards are synonymous.

This has to be your work on yourself: you have to go so deep in yourself that the body is left far behind. Then the mind is also left far behind, then the heart too is left behind. And finally, only pure consciousness remains. That pure consciousness is god.

[The new sannyasin says: I have wasted thirty years.]

Now you have come! Now the fire has entered you! It will burn your past and it will give birth to a new being in you. It will burn all your masks, your personas, and it will give birth to your original face.

Yes, you have waited long and you have been searching, but now you have come. So forget all the troubles of the journey and don’t think of all that. Simply forget all about it.

Shahido means beloved. The beloved is within you; don’t seek him anywhere else.

Those who seek him somewhere else, seek in vain. The farther they go in the search, the farther they are away from the beloved; because the beloved is not the sought but the seeker himself. To remember this is to become enlightened. All that is needed is just a change of your attention. We are focused outwards, we have to become focused inwards. The moment your attention starts falling On yourself, god is revealed.

Anand means bliss, paramo means ultimate. Bliss is the ultimate state of consciousness. There is no going beyond it, there is nothing beyond it; everything is before it and everything is a step towards it. The people who have stopped somewhere before attaining it are lost. They have made their houses on the bridge, and the bridge is just to take you to the other shore; it is not a place to make a house. The other shore is the ultimate bliss.

Pleasures are just momentary things, happinesses are too; they are a little deeper than pleasure but still momentary, they come and go. Pleasures are physical; happinesses are psychological; bliss is spiritual.

The body is constantly changing, hence pleasures cannot be more than momentary. And so is the case with the mind. The mind is a chaos, it is a cloud, it goes on changing its form every moment; so no happiness can be forever. And one wants something that should be forever, hence the misery.

Hence after each pleasure one falls into a deep depression. After each happiness great darkness surrounds one because one is frustrated. One had hoped so much and when it came, one believed that it was going to remain; but it comes from this side and it goes from the other side. Happiness is like a bird that enters from one window in your room, flutters a little while, and then goes out from another window. Just a little flutter, that’s all, a little excitement, that’s all, a little forgetfulness, a little intoxicant, that’s all.

Neither the body can satisfy nor the mind. Contentment is possible only when the spiritual bliss has happened. That is called anand paramo – the ultimate bliss.

It is a Sufi word – it means the beloved. Sufis think of god as the beloved. It is their word for god:

’mashuk’. We are all lovers; god is the beloved.

Sufis think of god as a feminine energy. The seeker is masculine energy; the sought is feminine energy. It is one of the most beautiful approaches towards god to think of god as mashuk, as the beloved. Then religion becomes poetry, then religion takes beautiful forms.

If you think of god as the father then religion becomes law, dry. Then religion is reduced to just obedience and nothing else. And the figure of father is not a very beautiful figure either. In the first place, the father is an unnatural phenomenon; it is a social by-product. It doesn’t exist in nature: it is a man-made institution, it is institutional.

It is not just a coincidence that Christianity became the most organised religion in the world, the greatest institutional religion in the world. The reason is the idea of god as the father. Then obedience is virtue and disobedience is sin.

Because Adam disobeyed that became the original sin. Religion became legal, it looked more like a law code.

Sufis have turned religion into poetry. It is not a law code at all. Lovers don’t need any law: love is enough of a law unto itself. If love is there all is allowed. In fact in love you cannot do anything wrong, it is impossible to do anything wrong. Love takes care of it, and without any deliberate effort.

And when god is the beloved, the woman you love, naturally great poetry arises in the heart of the seekers. Sufis sing, dance, play music. It is a totally different vision. It is a very soft, feminine vision... delicate, aesthetic.

Deva means divine, masti means intoxicated, drunk – drunk with the divine, intoxicated with god.

Less than that won’t do; no half hearted effort is going to succeed. If one is mad for god, only then does god happen; it is only for madmen!

People live in a lukewarm way, their whole life is lukewarm, so when they pray their prayer is also lukewarm; it reflects their whole style of life. When they love their love is lukewarm; and to live a lukewarm life is to drag a burden. One never comes to know the real mystery of it. The real mystery is encountered only when you have risked all, when you reach to the very end of your capacities, when you use your whole potential, when you come to the boundary of your being, to the optimum.

On that boundary the meeting happens. The known starts dissolving into the unknown, the river meets the ocean. But that is possible only for those who are madly in love with god, madly in love with life!

Prem means love, sunito means great virtue. Love to me is the greatest virtue, because all other virtues are love’s by-products. If you love you cannot be untrue; truth comes naturally. If you love you cannot be dishonest; honesty comes naturally. If you love you cannot deceive. If you love, all the virtues that have been propounded down the ages simply follow it like shadows.

If you love you cannot be miserly; it is impossible to manage both together. A loving person cannot be a miser and a miser cannot be a loving person. Love means sharing, and the miser cannot share.

If you love you cannot be destructive because love is creativity. Whatsoever is touched by love is transformed immediately. Then small things become creative.

Your name means: love, and all the virtues will follow you. One can try to cultivate all the virtues, but love will not follow. That’s why your saints have all the virtues but love is missing; and if love is missing, all is missing. The saint is dead: you are worshipping a corpse. Although those virtues are there like flowers on a corpse, those flowers and their fragrance go on hiding the stinking corpse, that’s all.

So let that become your life: forget all about other virtues, commandments, great teachings. Just remember a single word ’love’. It contains all!

Love is the only real scripture. It contains all the Bibles, all the Korans, all the Vedas, because it contains god himself.

Prem means love, shardo has two meanings: one is goddess, another is the most beautiful month in India, sharad.

In the month of sharad, India has the most beautiful moon. The sky is very clear, cool, and the moon comes the best. The full moon night of the month sharad is worshipped. That night is also the night of the goddess Sharda. It is thought – it is just a myth, but beautiful – that on that particular night, in a certain moment, nectar falls from the moon. In fact the moon is so beautiful on that night that it should fall. That night has been the night of meditation for centuries.

Just sit silently looking at the moon the whole night, just watching it, doing nothing, thinking nothing; many have been able to drink the nectar that falls from it. Buddha became enlightened on the same night. Buddha’s life is beautiful: he was born on the same night, he became enlightened on the same night, he died on the same night. He must have really loved the night.

And the night is so beautiful that love simply arises. You cannot resist; it is maddening. The moon has always been thought to have something psychedelic in it. It drives people crazy, hence the word

’lunatic’; it comes from lunar, the moon. It drives the ocean crazy, and now scientists say that even the earth rises six inches above its normal level. Not only does the ocean rise in great tidal waves, even the earth rises six inches. We don’t feel it because the whole earth rises.

It functions as if it is made of rubber. The moon’s attraction is great. Poets have loved it, lovers have loved it, mystics have loved it. There is something that simply stirs the human heart and fills it with great joy and great love.

So one meaning is goddess of love: become one, be one. Everyone should be a god or a goddess of love. That is our birthright, and unless we are, there is no fulfilment. And the second meaning is: meditate on the moon around the year but never miss that particular moon. That may bring a sudden enlightenment to you: it has brought it to many people!

So while you are here, just enquire when that month comes, and that night, dance, sing and meditate and forget everything!

[A sannyasin says:: I became so silent inside, and my mind keeps fighting it, as if it’s not allowed to be silent, and it makes me sad.]

You have to accept it. It will disappear only through acceptance. If you fight it, it will remain with you forever; it will become chronic.

Sadness is perfectly natural. Sometimes it is cloudy, and sometimes it is sunny. Exactly like that, sometimes it is sadness, sometimes it is joy. We have to love all the moods of life and all the shades of being. If you are continuously joyous for twenty-four hours you will become tired of joy. You will commit suicide. (laughter) You will be bored to death! Sadness is good for a change.

Start accepting it and then see what happens!

CHAPTER 17

18 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love. And only love brings victory; everything else brings defeat. Money brings defeat, power brings defeat, success brings defeat. Only love brings victory; that is one of the most fundamental laws of life.

We try everything but we never try love. That’s why there is so much depression, despair in the world. Everybody wants to be victorious, but nobody succeeds or very few people succeed. Those people, those few people, are the people of love.

Prem means love, islamo means surrender, total surrender. Love is possible only through total surrender, and unless love happens, life does not happen. People are not really alive: they are existing only as potential possibilities. Those possibilities have not yet been realised, actualised.

Only love makes life a reality. Love gives it spirit, a centre, a rootedness. But love seems difficult because it requires surrender, so people only pretend to love. And by pretension I mean that they try to love without surrender; that is their pretension. It is not possible to love without surrender, and whenever you pretend love without surrender it is a plastic phenomenon, manufactured by the mind.

It never goes to the heart, it never stirs the heart, it never transforms it, it never brings a new birth, a new life. It is stale.

Surrender is the key to love and ultimately to god, because god is love. And surrender means not to behave in an egoistic way, to function without the ego. That’s what surrender is all about: to function without the feeling of I, to function spontaneously, without bringing your past in; because your I consists only of the past. If the whole past disappears your I will disappear immediately. The I means past, the ego means past. You are present and the ego is past, so by dropping the ego you don’t disappear, in fact by dropping the ego, for the first time you appear in total radiance.

That is life! Love gives life, and when love starts happening and goes on bringing more and more life to you, you are moving towards god, because god is the ultimate life and ultimate love.

Anand means bliss, wali is a Sufi word; it means a sage – a blissful sage. It is very easy to find saints; it is very difficult to find a sage. A saint is one who has cultivated holiness around himself, with great effort, with practice; he has created a character. But if you go deep inside him, he is not transformed; he is only wearing a beautiful mask. The sage is one who has not cultivated character, who has not practised virtue, but who has become enlightened within, who has come to know the innermost core of his being. There awareness has happened, and out of that awareness, out of that light, his character has changed on its own accord, with no effort, with no practice. The insight is first and then the character has followed it; it is bound to follow.

When you can see, you cannot behave against your vision. When you cannot see, only then can you stumble into things, bump into the wall. A blind man has to search for the door; he has to enquire about it. The man with eyes, when he wants to go out, simply goes out. He does not ask ’Where is the door?’ He does not even raise the question in his mind ’Where is the door?’ He sees it; there is no question: he simply gets out of it. Even while getting out of the door he never thinks of the door; there is no point in it.

When inner awareness is born, your outer character changes simply, with no effort. And when there is no effort, there is beauty.

A sage has tremendous beauty, grace. His whole existence is very ordinary in a sense, because there is nothing cultivated; and yet he is extraordinary. He moves, walks on the earth, but his feet do not touch the earth. He lives in the world, yet he is like a lotus flower: the water cannot touch the lotus leaf, cannot touch the lotus petal; yet the lotus is in the water.

The saint is always afraid: he may forget and he may misbehave, he may do something which is not right to do. He is always on guard, frightened, cautious, watching each step. How can he be blissful?

With such guardedness bliss is impossible. Bliss happens only to a spontaneous person. That’s why saints look so sad. They carry long faces, they are serious. Sages are playful, non-serious: the saint cannot laugh. The sage is pure laughter, his whole being is a laughter. That is the meaning of wali: a sage.

Prem means love, madiro means drunk – drunk with love, intoxicated with love. Love intoxicates, and its intoxication is no ordinary intoxication: it intoxicates you with god. God has no other proof except love. Those who love, they start feeling the existence of god. No other argument is capable of proving god, only the experience of love. The moment you have known love you cannot believe that life and existence are meaningless. It is impossible, because you have seen the meaning. The first ray of meaning has entered in your being, and when the ray is there it proves that there must be a sun.

You may not be able to see the sun yet, but the ray is enough proof that there must be a source.

God is the source of love, love is just a ray, but once love penetrates your life you start feeling, becoming slowly slowly aware, that life is full of something unknown, invisible. You start hearing a melody which cannot be heard without love and you start seeing colours which cannot be seen without love. Love is the true psychedelic. All other psychedelics are just imitations, chemical imitations of love.

In the modern world psychedelics are becoming more and more important because love is disappearing more and more; it is bound to happen. Either love has to be brought back to the world or the whole world is going to be on the drug-trip. Governments cannot prevent it, nobody can prevent it. It is not a question of a few individuals; it is now a collective, universal question. If love is not there, then what is the purpose of living?

With love, life is a poem, a song, a subtle humming, and everything seems to be significant. Love brings all things together, gives them a context, creates a space in which they become meaningful.

When love is not there, one starts falling apart; then something is needed as a substitute. That’s what drugs are doing, but they are dangerous substitutes. For a moment they may give you a glimpse but at a very high cost: they destroy you.

Love creates you: drugs destroy you. But these are the two alternatives: either the world will have to learn the ways of love again – that’s what I am doing here, my whole message is that of love – or, if love does not happen, if we cannot revive love, if the heart has really gone asleep and there is no way to shock it into awakening, then drugs are going to spread more and more.

Love is the only real intoxicant, and blessed are those people who can be intoxicated with it. It has a very paradoxical quality: it makes you intoxicated, yet it makes you more and more aware. On one hand you start becoming more and more unconscious of the ego and on the other hand you start becoming more and more conscious of the self. On one hand it destroys the false; on the other hand it provokes the real, triggers the whole process, so that all that is asleep in you becomes awakened.

Love is a miracle....

[Osho asks a sannyasin: Something to say to me? The sannyasin replies: So many things.]

You can tell me only one! Because there is always only one thing but it may have many faces. I have not seen a single person who has many problems: only a single problem, with many faces, facets...

[The sannyasin begins to cry.]

Tell me one thing. If it is difficult to say it then just raise your hands and close your eyes. Say it with your energy. Close your eyes and if something starts happening, allow it.

Good. Start doing one thing every night before you go to sleep: become a small child, as if you are just a few months old. You are crying and weeping and you cannot find where your mother is. That’s your problem!

Every night, before you go to sleep, for five to ten minutes become a small child, crying, weeping, sucking your thumb, and fall asleep in that space. All your problems will disappear slowly slowly.

Next time, when you come, you will not have anything to say!

[Osho gives him an ’energy darshan’]

The fear is there, but it is part of the mind, of everybody’s mind. It is just that you have become aware of it, and it is good to be aware of it.

It has no particular reason: that’s why it is more frightening. If one can find a certain reason for why one is afraid, at least there is a consolation, an explanation. And if there is a cause one can hope some day to change the situation. If the cause can be changed, then the fear will disappear; the fear is an effect. But this is not an effect, hence you are trembling very much deep down. This is a totally different kind of fear. It has nothing to do with any particular reason; it is just part of the human situation. Death is there: that is part of the human situation. We don’t know from where we come, we don’t know to where we are going, we don’t know who we are. This is the fear, and this fear has to be lived; it has not to be repressed.

You have to go deep into it. You have to feel it, you have to become totally it. So every day make it a meditation: at least for twenty minutes just sit silently and let the feat possess you.

And whatsoever happens in that moment – you cry, you weep, you sway – whatsoever happens, you have to allow it, you have to be in a state of uncontrol. And soon you will see a great change happening: you will start becoming a witness of this fear.

But I am not saying to become a witness; that will be a consequence: I am saying to you become the fear. Don’t try to become an observer of it; if you observe you will repress it. All observation is a subtle repression. Become it so that it comes to a full flowering, and in that very flowering, one day suddenly you will see: you are in it and yet not in it. One day you will suddenly see this paradox: you are inside it and you are outside it. You are it and you are also the watcher of it. And that day you have found the key: after that day you become the witness.

Mm? it will take at least a few months to disappear, but no effort has to be made to make it disappear.

You are not to help it disappear. You are not to help it disappear, you are to live it in totality. As a consequence the witness will be born and as a consequence fear will disappear. The moment it disappears you will feel much calmness, much coolness, as you have never felt before. The whole energy that is involved in the fear will be released. You will feel full of light and love.

There is nothing to be worried about: this fear is not pathological either; this is just part of the human situation. Everybody has to pass through it and fortunate are those who become aware. Meditating here, doing groups, you have become aware of it. It is beautiful to be aware of it: now start a twenty-minute meditation on it.

[A sannyasin says: It started two or three years ago after a very strong experience I had, that I had the feeling all my thoughts could be heard by everyone around me. And it’s not just my feeling: many times I think something and people talk about the same thing or react immediately.

Sometimes I suppress my thoughts, sometimes I say ’Okay, let’s tolerate it’ but sometimes it makes me angry.]

I understand... I understand. In fact it is always happening, and not only to you: to everybody in the whole world...

Whenever you are thinking something, you are broadcasting it in a subtle way. The moment a thought becomes formulated in you, it starts being broadcasted. Immediately ripples arise around you, vibrations start spreading. It is like throwing a pebble into a silent lake: immediately ripples arise and ripples go on and on. The pebble may have settled at the bottom long ago but the ripples will go on continuing.

This is actually the case; it is not something abnormal.

You have just become aware of it and that is creating difficulty. Everybody is doing that. That’s why all the great masters of the world have been saying to you ’Don’t think bad thoughts’ mm? because they go on affecting people. Not only do your actions reach people: your thoughts, your feelings, everything reaches people. And it is not only that people are hearing: trees are hearing, birds and animals are hearing and rocks are hearing.

Now there are scientific experiments which prove that if you come to the side of the tree in anger, the tree immediately feels your anger. Now there are methods to detect whether the tree has felt it or not. When you come with love the tree immediately feels it and goes into a joyous expression.

And when somebody comes to cut the tree, he has not said anything – he has just come with the idea – the tree starts trembling, great fear arises in the tree. It has been simply broadcasted without being said, without doing anything to the tree.

A scientist working on trees was very puzzled one day.... He was going to kill an insect to see whether the tree was affected or not. The tree was affected! He was not doing anything to the tree, not even thinking to. He killed the insect, but the tree responded with great fear and anxiety, with sadness.

Life is interconnected. We are not separate: we are part of one spider’s web, we are part of one harmony.

This is good; don’t be worried. Of course if you become aware of such things it creates a disturbance, but if you understand, there is no problem: this is how it is. So just be more and more alert. Have beautiful thoughts of compassion, of love, of prayer. And drop those thoughts that can create some trouble in somebody’s life. This is a good situation, a good challenge; it can transform your whole being. It is not a problem, it is an opportunity, a god-given opportunity: use it!

And just go on watching. Immediately you see something meaningless, cut it then and there.

Disidentify yourself with it. And soon you will be able to do it. Instead of ugly thoughts, think of beautiful things. Somebody passes by you, a stranger: why not silently give a hug to him, just in your thoughts? Why not say deep down ’I love you’? And you will see that the person will look at you

’What has happened?’ You can do it. I can see: you have the talent, and in a very very developed form. Use it to create beautiful vibes around you.

That’s how a person can change the whole world just sitting in his own room, not even going outside the room. Just sitting in his own room he can create such vital waves, such tidal waves of joy, bliss, love, that people may never know about him but they will be affected by them.

CHAPTER 18

19 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet means beyond, charitro means character. I don’t teach character: I teach consciousness.

Character is a false phenomenon, imposed from the outside. It is fulfilling others’ expectations about you. It is not growth, because it has not arisen out of your own spontaneity. It is a conditioning, and all conditionings are slaveries, subtle strategies of the society to manipulate the individual, to destroy the individual.

Consciousness is something that happens at your core. It is not your circumference; it is your centre. And once consciousness has started arising, your character changes on its own accord

– not according to others’ expectations but in response to your growing consciousness. A great responsibility arises but that responsibility has nothing to do with the social morality. It may go together with it, it may not go together with it; it may even go against it.

The society is very much against conscious people because they are capable of disobedience, they are capable of rebellion. They will go only so far with the society – if their consciousness allows, only then. Otherwise they would like to die rather than to live; they will not compromise. They will live according to their inner law and that law is god-given.

The society lives with arbitrary laws: consciousness lives with absolute laws. Sometimes they coincide, but only very rarely. Other times they run parallel, never meeting anywhere, and some other times they go just in diametrically opposite directions.

To be a sannyasin means to start living not according to others but according to your own conscience, your own consciousness, your own being. And then whatsoever the cost, it is worth it.

Prem means love, imano means religion. Love is the highest religion; everything else is a little lower, even truth. Everything else is just a ladder to it; all values, from the lowest to the highest, are just rungs of the ladder. But when you have arrived, when you have reached, only love remains; all else dissolves into it. Love is the ocean, all other values are like rivers: they all reach and get lost in the ocean.

Remember, anything that goes against love is irreligious, and anything that goes with love is religious. Let that be the criterion, because that is the only criterion there is. Always use love as a touchstone: if love approves, it is gold; if love disapproves, it is just useless rubbish.

Go on dropping that which is not part of love, and slowly slowly the space is created in which only love blooms. Become a lake in which the lotus of love blooms.

[Osho gives sannyas to a woman called Teresa.]

Just close your eyes and feel something from the unknown descending on you, feel that a great energy is pouring in you. The energy is full of light, luminous, a torrent of luminous energy. If anything starts happening in the body, allow it...

This is your initiation into being a real Christian.... Up to now you have been just a Christian formally: you have worshipped Christ, you have loved Christ, but it was because you were told to. It was not something that happened in your heart; it was something in the head, because anything that is told remains in the head.

Only the heart can know god. The head can go on thinking about it endlessly, infinitely, but all that thinking is utterly meaningless. The glimpse happens in the heart; it is a by-product of love.

The truly religious person in one sense is Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist – altogether. In another sense he is none: neither Christian nor Hindu nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan. The really religious person is concerned with the essential core of religion, not with the formal garb, not with the garments, rituals, but with the essential spirit, and that is one!

Buddha embodies the same spirit as Jesus embodies. The bodies are different, but to pay too much attention to the bodies is to be a materialist. And that’s what I see in people: somebody has become too attached to the body of Christ. Then he will not understand Christ, because Christ is not the body; the body is just an abode. His body consists of as much of earth and water and air and sun and sky as your body does. Bodies are material. The real question is: who is residing within? And it is the same spirit! It is always the same god that manifests in many many forms.

One who understands this never becomes attached to any particular manifestation. He never thinks of the lamp; he thinks only of the light within. The lamp may be manufactured in India or in Germany or in Japan. It may have this shape or that, this paint or that paint. It may be made of gold or may just be of steel; it doesn’t matter at all. All that matters is whether it is lit, whether it is radiating light.

And this is stupid – to become too concerned with the lamp, so much so that one tends to forget the light.

The essential core of all the religions is the same. You will find it in the church, you will find it in the temple, in the mosque, and if you understand it you can find it in your own home. Just sitting silently you will find it in your own self.

It is not difficult to attain to Christ-consciousness. The difficulty arises because one becomes a Christian, formally, and the more important the form becomes, less and less do you pay attention to the core. The centre is almost forgotten and the circumference becomes all.

My work here consists of changing your focus, your attention, from the periphery to the centre. So I say to you, in a sense you will never be the same Christian as you have been up to now. In another sense, for the first time you are being baptised...

Teresa is a beautiful name. Prem means love, and love is the secret of Teresa too. She lived a life of tremendous love: love for Christ, love for god. There have been very few women who can be compared with Teresa.

Loving Teresa, that is the meaning of your name.

Deepan. It means a lamp, a small lamp. We are all lamps. If we remain unconscious we remain unlit; if we become conscioUs we become lit. The only difference between an ordinary man and a Buddha is that much: one is an unlit candle, Buddha is a lit candle. And everybody has all that is required to create light... just a little arrangement, just a looking in to find things which are scattered and putting them together, is needed.

It is as if you have flour, you have butter, you have salt; you have all that is needed to make bread.

The fire is burning and all the things are ready but you don’t mix them. You are hungry, but you need not be!

Meditation is just an art of mixing all the ingredients that are already given. Meditation does not bring anything new into you, it simply puts things together; and once they are together, the light arises.

The bread is ready; it can fulfil your hunger.

And everybody is hungry for lighter everybody is hungry for truth, everybody is hungry for god. That hunger is in-built, and it will persist till you fulfil it.

Religion is not something accidental. It is a very essential need. It cannot be destroyed on the earth; people will find it again and again. Even in Russia, where religion is no more accepted officially, religion goes on existing, underground. People pray, people meet together, in seclusion. It is an anti-government activity, it is dangerous, but still it continues: the hunger is such. No government can destroy it; at any risk people are going to find god.

Remember that all is already given. So the only question is to arrange it in a certain way so that light can be produced. And that’s what sannyas is all about: giving you a new arrangement of all that you already have. It does not add anything to you; it simply teaches you the art of putting things together. And once you put things together their quality immediately changes.

You can eat flour, you can eat the butter, you can eat the salt, but you will not be satisfied; you may even become ill. Rather than nourishing you, they will become poisonous to your system. First they have to be put into a certain arrangement, then only you can digest them, absorb them. They will become your blood, your bones, your very marrow.

We are creating that space here. It is one of the greatest experiments that is going on the earth. It can be known only by the participants, and by becoming a sannyasin you are becoming a participant in something which is hidden, something which cannot be made public, because people do not understand; rather they misunderstand. There are things which can happen only in privacy and secrecy. There are secrets which can only be imparted in deep communion.

Sannyas is getting in communion with a master.

Deva means divine, arifa means wisdom – divine wisdom. Knowledge is human: wisdom is divine.

Knowledge is worthless. It is manufactured by us. It is guesswork, it is out of our ignorance. It has no light in it, it cannot have any light in it; its sole purpose is to hide our ignorance. It helps us to pretend that we know. Without knowing anything, it gives us a false confidence that we know; it is a false security. But man cannot live with nothing, so anything is better than nothing.

We go on clinging to knowledge. It is always borrowed, and because it is borrowed, it has no truth in it. Truth is untransferable. Only words are transferable; the meaning is not transferable. We can collect many words, clever words, very very articulate arguments, but deep down there is nothing but darkness; it is just a facade, a face to show to others, but behind the face there is all ugliness, the ugliness of ignorance. This is not wisdom.

Wisdom is something untouched by human hands. It is not manufactured by us; it is only received.

It descends, it comes from the beyond. It only comes to those people who are ready to be open to the sky. It is sky penetrating into the earth. It is the invisible coming to the visible. One has to become utterly empty of knowledge, then wisdom happens.

So it is not only that knowledge is not wisdom: knowledge is the barrier that does not allow wisdom to happen. The knowledgeable person is the farthest from god. Hence the rabbis could not understand Jesus. They were knowledgeable people, they were great priests, they knew all the scriptures.

Jesus was not knowledgeable at all. He was utterly uneducated, the son of a carpenter. Nowhere is it mentioned that he ever went to any school. He must have helped his father in his workshop; he may have carried wood from the forest. But wisdom happened to him! He opened himself to the unknown.

That courage is needed to open oneself in utter nudity, in utter helplessness, in utter insecurity. The moment you are not hiding and you are not creating any pseudo personality around yourself – the moment you are naked, empty, a nothing – instantly wisdom happens. That wisdom is called arifa.

Prem means love, sharabo means wine – wine of love. Love is a wine, it intoxicates; and nothing intoxicates like love. All other intoxicants are poor substitutes for it, and harmful too. Love not only intoxicates you, it also transforms you. It not only intoxicates You? it makes you more alert. That is the miracle of love. It is paradoxical: on one hand one becomes drunk; on the other hand, one becomes utterly conscious. It brings this paradox together.

One becomes unconscious of one’s self: one becomes conscious of the supreme Self. One becomes unconscious as an ego: one becomes conscious as a universal consciousness. One loses boundaries, one starts melting; definitions disappear. One is simply there, unlimited, unbounded, infinite: neither limited by time nor limited by space.

Love gives you the first glimpses of eternity, of deathlessness, of timelessness. And once love has stirred the heart, one lives a totally different quality of life. One lives without anguish, one lives without fear. One lives dangerously and one lives creatively.

Love releases a thousand and one qualities. It makes you authentic, it makes you sincere, it makes you creative. It makes you a celebrant. It brings unknown songs to you. It introduces you to new planes of being, to new plenitudes. Love opens the doors of all the mysteries of existence; and there are mysteries beyond mysteries, peaks beyond peaks. It is an eternal pilgrimage. But one needs guts to drink the wine of love. It frightens you because you will be dissolved in it; you will not find even a trace of yourself.

Kahlil Gibran says when a river comes close to the ocean it hesitates, it trembles, it feels scared. It looks back with great nostalgia for the mountains and the peaks and the forest and the plains and the people and all those that it has passed, all those beautiful cherished memories. It has existed up to now as an individual, it has a certain identity; now all is going to be lost. The ocean is vast: the river will be gone forever.

The same happens to a disciple. When a disciple comes to a master, a river has come to the ocean. The fear grips one. One would like to remain oneself, one would like to cling to oneself. But howsoever the river may hesitate for a moment, it takes the plunge: it disappears into the ocean.

In one sense it is no more; in another sense it has become the ocean. The same is the state of a disciple, the same is the state of you, of every disciple.

Initiation means that you are ready to merge. Fear will come and there will be many moments of hesitation, uncertainties, doubts, but if one has courage enough. one overcomes all those.

[A sannyas couple ask about their relationship: we get confused and stuck around anger and sex.]

These are not really problems. These are part of the game of love, otherwise the game will be very monotonous...

These things keep it a little alive; otherwise what will you do? If no anger arises, no problem arises, you will get very stuck with each other.

These are just natural consequences of two persons being together, because each person is unique and different from the other, so clashes are bound to happen.

By and by, corners are rubbed and they disappear. And it is better to let them disappear in their own time. They can be dropped through understanding, they can be dropped through analysing them, but then the corners will remain and there will be no way to get rid of those corners. This clash, conflict, this constant running, slowly slowly removes the corners and the intimacy goes deeper.

Sex naturally creates fear because sex is the polar opposite of death; it reminds you of death. Sex is life, the source of life, and the other side of it is death. That’s why, down the ages, people who have been interested in eternal life all came to be against sex. There is a logic in it. The logic is: they came to understand that sex brings death, it is one part of death, so if you want to avoid death, avoid sex. But even if you avoid sex, death cannot be avoided, because basically it is not a question of your avoiding sex. Sex has already happened in your birth, your birth was a sexual phenomenon.

So your death is going to be there; whether you avoid sex or not does not matter at all. Death is going to happen because sex has already happened in your birth. One part has come; the other part will be coming.

Going deep into sex always creates fear, so there are a few alternatives. One is that of the monk.

Out of fear he simply escapes from sex. But he lives a very ugly life: he lives a life of fear, of escape.

And without sex he loses all contact with all that is beautiful, with all that is creative, because sex is also the energy that creates. The great poet is bound to be very sexual, so is the great mystic, so is the great scientist. The greater a person is, the more sexual energy he has, because it is the sexual energy that creates; there is no other energy. The monk becomes uncreative, desertlike. He has committed a suicide.

The other alternative is never to go deep in sex; so you make sex a superficial thing. The polar opposite of the monk is the prostitute. She never makes it an intimacy; it is business. You can make love to the prostitute; she will not recognise you tomorrow when you come across her on the street, she may not even know your name. This is another possibility. The possibility of the monk has been dropped more and more in this age; the other possibility has come very much into use. Now people are making sex a very superficial phenomenon – without intimacy, without love. Then there is no fear. Then it is just a physical contact, a physical release, a relief, and you are finished. There is no commitment, no involvement, so there is no fear.

But both are ugly. The monk is ugly and the prostitute is ugly. And both are together, they are not separate. Monks create prostitutes; prostitutes create monks. The mind is the same. They say that the prostitute’s profession is the oldest. I cannot agree, because the priest must have preceeded the prostitute; otherwise who would create the prostitute? The prostitute’s profession can only be number two; the primary thing is the priest.

Between the two, exactly in the middle, is the real life. Neither become a monk nor become a prostitute. Get involved, go to the deepest layer of it, without any fear, because death is going to happen, so why be afraid of it? Accept it. The fear of death keeps sex non-orgasmic. Mm? you go on holding, and if you hold it never takes you to the peak where it can take you and can take you easily; it never becomes meditative.

Death is going to happen: monks die, prostitutes die, everybody dies. Death is such a natural phenomenon that one should not be afraid of death at all; it is unnecessary. It has to be accepted, and once accepted it is finished.

So be more conscious and go consciously deeper into lovemaking, and become more orgasmic.

Let your whole body shake and tremble and dance and vibrate and pulsate. Go crazy in it! In fact in a better world, whenever two persons make love the whole neighbourhood will know because there will be dancing and shouting and screaming and everything will happen. It will be wild!

Then only can you touch its deepest core, and if you have touched its deepest core it is the same as meditation, because at the deepest moment of climax, time disappears, space disappears, ego disappears.

So don’t be worried – things will settle!

Anand means bliss, peter means rock. Jesus called one of his disciples Peter because he was the only one who could have become the rock on which the temple of Jesus was to be made. Deep down in one’s being one needs something crystallised so that it can become the fountain. People are like sand: nothing is stable in them, and when nothing is stable, life becomes a driftwood, it becomes accidental. Something, at least one thing, is needed to be the rock.

Let bliss become your rock, let it become your undercurrent: everything changes, but remain blissful.

Even when there is misery on the surface, deep down remain blissful; accept the misery too, and there will be bliss. You have failed in something: accept the failure and you will find a deep undercurrent of bliss. In good times, in bad times, in love, in hate, in richness, in poverty, remember that one thing has not to be lost track of, and that is a blissfulness, a bubbling joy inside.

Slowly slowly that will become the rock, and on that rock the temple can be built. Either it has to be love or bliss or silence, but something is needed to become the rock, mm? Otherwise there is no foundation in life, and a life without foundation is a life which is going to remain futile, fruitless, a wasteland.

[Harisharan] It means at the feet of god, surrendered to god, lost in god. This is the ultimate goal.

The name is given to you to remind you continuously again and again not to forget the ultimate goal.

Everything else is a distraction. Don’t get lost in by-paths; there are millions. Keep your eyes focused on the star; that one has to reach to the very centre of existence. Don’t become too interested in toys.

If one can remember it, slowly slowly all that is non-essential drops from life and only the essential remains. And to live with the essential is to live in great joy. It is the non-essential that creates misery, it is the unnecessary that becomes the burden. The necessary, the essential, is never a burden; it is a nourishment.

God is the only nourishment, the only food, that one needs. If one can keep one’s eyes focused, one arrives sooner or later. In fact even to keep your eyes focused on the far-away star gives such bliss. Although you are far away still that light starts penetrating you, permeating you.

Harisharan means at the feet of god – remember it!

CHAPTER 19

20 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, wilayat means a sage. The birth of a sage is through love, not through knowing.

It is not a head phenomenon, it is a heart phenomenon. The saint remains in the head; he cultivates it thoughtfully. The sage disappears into the heart. The saint is very clever, calculating, logical, methodological. The sage is almost mad, but his madness has beauty, his madness has a transcendence; it is something not of this world. He may look insane in the eyes of the world because his values are totally different, but in fact, in reality, he is the only sane person. But a sage can be understood only by another sage, otherwise to be misunderstood by people is his fate.

Lao Tzu has said that if something of the truth is said and people understand it, then it is not true; if people mis understand it, then it is true. Because people exist in the world of lies they cannot understand truth. To understand truth they will have to climb high to the mountains, they will have to get out of their dark valleys, and it is so much effort that they don’t want to do it.

Rather than going to the peaks of the mountains and trying to understand, they drag the truth into their world of lies; they falsify it. They understand only when they have falsified it.

They don’t understand Christ; they understand Christianity. They don’t understand Buddha; they understand Buddhism. Buddhism is their own creation. Bud&a is far away: it is impossible for them to see him. And whatsoever they can see, he is not, and whatsoever he is, is invisible to them.

The sage is the climax of human potential. The saint is ordinary: the sage is extraordinary. But the revolution that brings sagehood comes through love. The more you love, the more you become mad in love, the more you fall in love with existence as it is – the more you feel its beauty, its joy, its celebration – the closer you come to sagehood.

Wilayat is a Sufi word.

Deva means divine, lalla literally means a very very small child who has not yet learned anything of the world, utterly innocent. And that is the requirement to enter into the kingdom of god: one has to become a child again.

The child comes into the world as a pure consciousness. The sky is absolutely clear, with no clouds.

The child is just a mirror because he knows nothing; that’s why he is innocent. He has great enquiry but no knowledge. He is full of energy but with no attachment.

The same has to happen again: one has to become pure energy without any attachment, because every attachment is a dissipation of energy. One has to become innocent again without knowledge, because all knowledge is like dust on the mirror. One has to unlearn all that one has learned. One has to erase all that the society-has written. This is the whole process of sannyas, of meditation, of becoming religious.

Religion is not part of the society; and if it is, it is no more religion; it is politics. Religion is constant rebellion against all structures. It is the search for the sky without clouds. That is the literal meaning of the word ’lalla’.

And another meaning.... In Kashmir there has been a great woman sage; her name was Lalla. There have been very few women sages in the world because man has not allowed that much freedom to women; they have been repressed down the ages. But those few women were as great as Buddha, as Christ, as Krishna. They can be counted on one’s fingers: there are not more than one dozen names. Lalla is at the top; she was really a rare woman. To be born in India and to live naked for the whole of one’s life is something; she lived naked. She was an utterly beautiful woman – her courage, her guts....

So that will also remind you of this strange woman. And if you can find something about Lalla, read it!

Srajan means creative, atosho means discontentment – a creative discontentment.

All

discontentment is not bad; all contentment is not good either. The creative discontentment is a great value. One has to turn one’s discontentment into a creative energy.

The idea of contentment has been very dangerous: it has made people uncreative. Contentment is good but it should come out of creativity. It should not become inactivity, it should not become lethargy. And a person who is not creative becomes lethargic. A person who is not creative loses all significance and meaning, becomes distracted, loses all direction, starts feeling accidental, because there is no continuity in him. And because he does not contribute anything to life, he feels futile, unworthy. Worth arises only when you contribute to life, whatsoever it is: a poem, a song, a painting, whatsoever it is. Unless you contribute something to lifer unless you beautify life a little bit more, you will never feel that your life has any meaning. Meaning is a by-product of creative contribution.

Remain discontented as far as creativity is concerned. Remain in a chaos, in a deep thirst. in a hunger. Something has to be created: one should not leave life as one has found it. Not that one has to become famous, not that the whole world has to know about you, not that you have to leave your name in the history books; that is not the point. Nobody may ever know about you, but if you create, you will feel tremendously blissful.

And what you create does not matter – whatsoever arises naturally in you. It may be just a small garden. Nobody may ever know about it, there is no need; it is a fulfilment unto itself. The very presence of the flower and the bushes and the tree is enough reward; nothing else is needed. When your rose bush has blossomed, that is enough that is paradise! You have created a little beauty in the world. You have created a little perfume in life. In that very creation, joy arises, wells up.

Religion has suffered very much because it condemned all discontentment and it praised all contentment. That’s an utterly nonsensical standpoint. There is creative contentment – then it is good; there is creative discontentment – then it is good. In fact the goodness that comes is not from contentment or discontentment: it comes from creativity.

Buddha sitting silently under his tree is not uncreative. He is creating a tremendous vibe that is still alive. He is creating a certain space that has not disappeared yet, and those who are perceptive can enter into that space even now. Sitting under the tree, he was not visibly doing anything, but he was in such a creative silence. That silence was not of a cemetery, that silence was very pregnant: out of that silence much has blossomed.

So contentment can be creative, then it is good. If it is uncreative it is not good; it is evil. And thousands of monks and priests have simply been uncreative. In the name of contentment they were hiding their uncreativity, they were hiding their empty souls.

And if discontentment is creative, then it is beautiful. Remember, beauty arises out of creativity, so whatsoever form it takes.... Buddha is sitting silently: that is creativity out of contentment.

Michaelangelo is not sitting silently, Mozart is not sitting silently; they are doing a thousand and one things. They are trying to create something: they are trying to bring the unknown into the world of the known, they are inviting the sky to the earth. Somebody may be inviting the sky through sculpture, somebody through painting, somebody through music; those are all mediums. Whenever music catches something of the unknown then it is real music.

So this is my message to you on your sannyas birthday: let your meditations, your work on yourself, be creative, and remember always that one has to create more and more and more; and there is no end to it. Then your creative discontentment becomes a prayer towards god, your offering to god.

Mutriba means a musician. Music is great meditation; in fact it was invented in the beginning as a prayer.

If you can create music, create it; if you cannot, then listen to it. The only thing to be remembered is: if you are making music, get lost in it; don’t remain a technician. The technician is not a true musician. He only knows the peripheral thing of it. He can deceive those who are unaware of real music. He is an expert, he knows the know-how, but the spirit is missing; and the spirit is the real thing, that is a totally different phenomenon. The know-how is needed, but the spirit of a musician is not just the sum total of the know-how; it is something more, that something plus.

If you make music then forget the technician, then forget yourself. Let music happen as if on its own accord, as if you are just an instrument of some unknown force that is flowing through you.

If you are not making music, listen, but in listening forget the listener. Just become listening, just ears and ears and ears, as if your whole body has turned into ears: you have become two big ears and nothing else. Your eyes are listening, your hands are listening, your feet are listening; every fibre of your being is just a listening. Then the same thing will happen.

The point is to disappear in music; then something starts descending. Then something is heard at the innermost recesses of one’s being. The outer music becomes just a space, a context, in which something inside arises. The outer triggers a process in the inner; it becomes a catalytic agent. It cannot cause the inner music, the inner music cannot be caused by anything but it can be provoked.

The relationship between the outer and the inner is that of synchronicity, not of cause and effect.

Now they say that if classical music is played around plants they grow faster. They bring bigger flowers, bigger fruits, and the growth rate is so much more that it cannot be just a coincidence. The same plants without music go only to half the height as those around whom music has been played.

But the music has to be Bach or Ravi Shankar – something subtle, something spiritual. If jazz or pop music is played around them their growth is stunted, they don’t grow to their normal size even.

Their flowers are smaller and crippled, as if the plant has collapsed inside himself, as if the plant has become suicidal. Now, the music cannot cause anything, but something is provoked in the plant.

The plant listens: those vibes thrill something in the plant.

One scientist has been working on a few plants which have never grown any flowers. Just by persuading them – playing music around them, beautiful music, and talking to them – he has succeeded in bringing flowers to plants which have never flowered in the whole of history, who don’t know how to flower; flowers don’t come to those plants....

Another scientist has succeeded in persuading a cactus not to grow thorns just by playing music and talking to the plant, persuading it ’Don’t be afraid: we are friends, so you need not grow thorns. Nobody is going to hurt you, you need not be so defensive. Those thorns are just a defence mechanism.’ And he succeeded in persuading a plant not to grow thorns!

These are real miracles, but these miracles have happened through music, and if it can happen to a plant, much more, tremendously more, can happen to human consciousness.

Ashiko means a lover. Sufis have two beautiful words: one is ’mashuk’, another is ’ashik’. Mashuk means the beloved: they think of god as a woman. And ashik means lover: god is the beloved and all the seekers of god are lovers. Man or woman, it does not matter; all are lovers of god.

Consciously or unconsciously, it doesn’t matter, everybody is searching, groping, longing, for god.

One may not give it the name of god: one may call it truth, one may call it freedom, one may call it love, but they all mean the same thing.

Something ultimate is needed. Everything seems to be so momentary that it doesn’t satisfy.

Everything comes and goes; nothing abides. So the whole effort seems to be making castles in the sand. A little breeze comes and the castle is gone. Something ultimate is needed, something which will come and will never go.

In Sanskrit the world is called jaggat. The word ’jaggat’ means: that which continuously comes and goes. Gat, ga, means goes; from the same root comes the English word ’go’: that which is continuously going. The world is just a coming and going, nothing abides. And unless we find a home where we can relax and forget everything, the search continues. The home is god.

Becoming a sannyasin means becoming an ashik, a lover. And when I say ’becoming a lover of god’

I don’t mean to hate people, to hate the world and to become a lover of god; that is utter stupidity.

If you really want to love god you will have to love people, you will have to love the world, you will have to love the trees and the rocks and the river. You will have to love all that is, because it is all god manifest. They are momentary glimpses, but still they are of god. So love, simply love! Let it become your inner climate, a state, not a relationship.

That is the meaning of ashiko: when love is a state – not that you love somebody but that you simply love. It is unaddressed, it is for all that is. And this brings you to true religion. Then whatsoever you do is prayer, is meditation, and wherever you do it is the church, the temple, the mosque. Then wherever you walk, you are walking on holy ground. Then every act has a quality of sacredness about it.

Anand means bliss, sharabi means a drunkard – one who is utterly drunk with bliss. And it is possible to be drunk with bliss. In fact it is not only possible, it is everybody’s birthright. But it has to be claimed, and we have forgotten all about it; it has to be rediscovered.

Each child comes knowing it, being it, but sooner or later we force him to forget all about it. We think we are educating him, we think we are giving him initiation into civilisation. We think we are a blessing to him, that without us he will be lost. In a sense it is true that without us the child will not be able to survive; in another sense it is wrong. It is because of our conditioning that he will remain miserable his whole life. He will remain a lost soul, disconnected from himself, uprooted. He will be a tree which is uprooted from the soil. His life will just be of long long misery, of anxiety, fear, anguish, and the taste in his mouth will be that of meaninglessness, utter futility. If he thinks, he will think like Jean-Paul Sartre, that man is a useless passion, that life is meaningless, that existence is absurd.

Existence is not absurd, neither is life meaningless nor man a useless passion. But we have lost contact with reality, hence these problems have arisen.

One has to get back one’s roots, and the way to get back is to drop all that is unnecessary, all that is cluttering the mind. Ninety-nine percent of it is absolutely unnecessary. Maybe one percent is needed as a utility, but only as a utility. Use it when it is needed, otherwise forget all about it. It should not invade your silence, it should not enter into your being; it should not become a constant inner talk in you. When words are needed they should be used; when they are not needed one should be able to remain in a wordless state.

Then a tremendously beautiful experience starts happening: one starts feeling as if drunk, drunk with something one cannot pinpoint, drunk with existence itself. And unless one has tasted that wine, one should not leave any stone unturned; all efforts should be made to find that source of wine. And it is within you. We are born with it: we just have to dig a little deeper. Much rubbish has gathered around that source so we have to dig deep to find it.

Meditation is nothing but a method of digging. The more man becomes civilised, the more and more will meditations be needed, because that is the only way to get rid of the unnecessary and to get to the essential. Meditation is a return to the source.

Anusati means reflecting – not thinking, but reflecting. The mind can function in two ways: one is thinking, another is reflecting. Thinking is aggressive, the male quality of the mind. Reflection is receptive, the female quality of the mind.

Science needs the male quality of the mind, and religion needs the female quality of the mind.

Science is a training in thinking, in rigorous, logical thinking. Religion is a training in becoming a mirror, just reflecting that which is.

If you think, you miss the point, because whatsoever you think will not be the truth. For truth, thinking is not needed at all. It is there, you are here: reflect it, just be a silent mirror with no ripples of thought.

If ripples arise then whatsoever you see will be distorted. It will be like a full moon reflected in a lake which is full of waves and ripples; it will be distorted. If you want to get the undistorted moon in the lake, then the lake has to be completely silent with no ripples at all. Then you will get the moon as it is.

Truth is, but we are thinking about it, hence we go on missing it. God is, but we go on thinking about it. Then we become Hindus and Mohammedans and Christians and we go on missing. One needs only to be silent, available, open; that is the quality of anusati. Truth is not very far away, it is very close; it is just that we are disturbed, we are in an inner tantrum. We have so many thought waves.

Slow down, relax, and let these thoughts disappear. Slowly slowly they disappear. If you remain alert that they have to be dropped, you stop co-operating with them, you stop identifying with them, one day it happens: you are there, god is there, and there is no barrier of thought between you and god, no screen. And that is what is called enlightenment. Suddenly all is light and all is joy and all is eternal life.

[Yoga Shakti]: Yoga means a state of inner union. Ordinarily man is just in fragments. He is not together, he is not one; he is many. When all your parts function together in a harmony and are no more in conflict, yoga has happened. Yoga means union, integration. And integration brings power; shakti means power.

The more integrated a person is, the more powerful he is. The more disintegrated a person is, the less powerful, because his energies go on fighting amongst themselves, and fighting amongst themselves is very destructive. But that’s how people are, in a constant civil war – one part destroying another part.

The whole foundation of religion is how to bring all these parts together. That is actually the meaning of the word ’religion’: to bring fragments together, to bind fragments together. Religion means to bind, and that is really the meaning of yoga too. Yoga and religion are synonymous: the science of creating a togetherness, making you one piece. And then great power is released. Shakti means power, power that comes out of inner integrity, individuation.

CHAPTER 20

21 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Arhata means one who has arrived. Man is in a constant wandering. He is always departing from one point for another, but he is never arriving anywhere. It is much ado about nothing. The mind goes in circles, and when you move in a circle you cannot arrive. You can go on moving forever, for eternity. And unless one arrives at a point of contentment, unless one arrives at a state where all desires disappear, life remains unfulfilled and life remains one of agony.

Once you feel that you are at home, that now there is nowhere to go, now there is no need to go, now there is no desire – that feeling of at-homeness, relaxation with the moment, utterly in tune with it, that is arhata, a state of desirelessness.

No desire can ever be fulfilled because each desire brings many more desires in its wake. By the time you are coming to fulfil one desire, it has produced many others to be fulfilled; it is a long chain.

Unless one understands, unless one becomes so alert and aware of the whole futility of the desiring mind... The desire goads you, pushes you, pulls you, tortures you, and goes on and on taking you farther and farther away from yourself. And it is not one desire: there are many desires and they are pulling in different directions.

That’s why every person feels in such a tense, strained state: there is such stress, such pressure that everybody is falling apart. Somehow one manages and keeps oneself together. This togetherness is not much; it is a hodgepodge, it is managing somehow. It is a mess, covered over by a blanket.

The blanket looks very beautiful: inside is madness.

And desires cannot be dropped, because the very idea to drop desires is again a desire. That is the point to be understood: you cannot drop desiring. You may think that by dropping desire you will feel blissful so you will drop desires, but this is a new desire and the mind has tricked you again. Now the desire for desirelessness has arisen. It does not matter what you desire; it is the same mind desiring. Now it desires a state of desirelessness. Again the agony, again the same nightmare, and maybe this nightmare will go deeper than any other nightmare because other desires are not so absurd.

Somebody desires a house; it is possible. Somebody desires a woman; it is possible. Somebody desires a man; it is possible, it is not impossible to fulfil it. It may lead into other desires but this desire can be fulfilled at least. But to desire desirelessness is impossible; you are creating a contradiction.

Then what has to be done? How does this miracle happen, that desires disappear and one becomes an arhata? It happens not by dropping but by understanding the mechanism of desire, by seeing the futility of it. Not creating a new substitute, not making any effort to drop it: just seeing through and through it, just watching it, becoming more of a witness of it. Slowly slowly, seeing again and again that desire leads into frustration, one day that ripeness happens. Suddenly, in a single moment, you have gone beyond desiring. It is a quantum leap. Not that you have dropped them; you have simply understood the futility and they have dropped on their own accord.

That state is called arhata. That is the goal of all religion, and that should be the goal of all psychology too.

Prem means love, paramo means ultimate. Love is a ladder; it implies the lowest and the highest both. It is a ladder from sex to superconsciousness. One part of it is very earthly: the other part, very heavenly. It is a paradox because it contains the opposites; those opposites are not really opposites but complementaries. The earth cannot exist without heaven and heaven cannot exist without the earth; they exist in a kind of interdependence, they support each other. If one disappears the other will disappear automatically; they are two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Love is the whole rainbow, all the seven colours of existence, all the seven notes of music, all the seven days of time, all the seven chakras of the inner body of man. Those seven chakras are seven rungs of the ladder. One has to go higher and higher – in love; and one can go higher and higher if the lower is not denied, because the lower has to be used as a stepping stone. If you avoid the lower rungs of the ladder you will never reach to the higher: the higher happens by going through the lower.

This is my approach: the lowest is sex, the highest is prayer; both are forms of love. In sex the body is ninety-nine percent; in prayer, the soul is ninety-nine percent. In sex there is only one percent of god; in prayer, only one percent of earth. And the ultimate means going beyond both, transcending the duality – not only going beyond the lower but going beyond the higher too. You reach the higher from the lower and then from the higher you reach the ultimate. The ultimate means you have used the ladder; you drop it. You have used the boat; you get out of it and forget all about the boat. You have reached the other shore.

The ultimate means transcendence of all duality – the duality of body and soul, the duality of matter and mind, the duality of negative and positive, the duality of sex and superconsciousness, and finally, the duality of life and death. And this is possible through love.

Let love be your only law. It will take you slowly slowly to the ultimate.

Deva means divine, shama means a candle – a small divine light. And it is there; it is our very life!

We may not have looked at it because we are looking outwards and it is our innermost core. A small candle is burning there. We are alive because of it, we are conscious because of it. We are because of it. And that light connects us with god; we are small rays of god’s sun. But if we go on looking outwards we will go on missing it.

Now the time has come to look inward. The time has come to look with closed eyes, to listen with closed ears, to smell with closed nose, so that the inner can be felt. And once the inner is felt, all the treasures of the world are yours because then god is yours! And one cannot find god in any other temple, in any other church. You are the temple, you are the church: god has to be found inside you. And in fact you are not separate from god; howsoever small, we are part of him.

This is the higher mathematics of life, that the part is equal to the whole. In the lower mathematics the part is smaller than the whole; in the higher mathematics of life the part is equal to the whole. A single drop is equal to the whole ocean because it contains all that the ocean contains. If we could understand a single dewdrop we would understand all water – not only of this earth but of other earths also; we would have found the secret of H2O in a single dewdrop. And that is the whole secret of water. The difference between a dewdrop and the ocean is only of quantity, not of quality, and the difference of quantity is no difference at all. It is a difference that makes no difference; qualitatively they are the same. Man is only quantitatively small – qualitatively as divine as god himself.

This is the ancient declaration of all the sages of the world: Aham Brahmasmi, I am god; Ana’l haqq, I am truth. Jesus says: I am the way, I am the door, I am the truth. All that is needed is just turning inwards, and sannyas is a step towards turning in. Turn in, tune in, and all that we are missing is immediately achieved. In fact we had never missed it; it is just that we had forgotten about it.

God is not lost so there is no need to seek and search; he is only forgotten. All that is needed is only a remembrance, a reawakening of the lost memory.

Deva means divine, akasho means sky – divine sky. Our boundaries are false; we are unbounded.

In fact all boundaries are false because nothing is separate, nothing can be separate; all is together.

The whole existence is one unity, it is a cosmos. That’s why it is called the universe; uni means one.

It is not a multi-verse, it is a universe. So things appear separate but they are not.

The sky contains all. Each single being is part of this infinite sky, and the part of any infinite is always infinite. The part of any infinite cannot be finite, because if the part is finite then the total will become finite. So the part of the infinite is always infinite. You can go on putting it into small pieces but the infinity remains; you cannot destroy the infinity. So we are parts of this immense sky, unbounded, infinite, and we are as infinite as the sky itself. We may be small skies but the infinity remains intact.

And how can the infinity be small? So smallness is just an illusion. In truth everything is absolute, the whole.

Meditate on the sky and feel one with it. Let that become your meditation. Get lost in the sky, disappear, melt, merge. And it is only a question of learning the knack of it. One can merge. The only thing that can become a barrier is fear, because when you start merging into something bigger than you a great fear grips the heart as if you are dying. Only that fear has to be overcome. Once that fear is overcome you are the sky! And it is a great joy to feel the infinite throbbing in your heart, to listen to the heart-beat of the eternal within you, at your core.

Then life has a different flavour. then misery is impossible. agony is impossible, death is impossible, disease is impossible. Not that disease will not happen to you, not that death will not happen to you: diseases will come and death will come but nothing will happen to you. They will come and go just as clouds come in the sky and pass and nothing happens to the sky. Let this become your meditation. Something to say to me?

Deva means divine, mutribo means musician – a divine musician. Life is a musical instrument, an opportunity to create great music. People create only noise, and ugly noise at that; and they were meant to create great music.

It is possible. It is very easily possible to bring a harmony, to become a melody: just a little effort is needed, and that little effort consists of three things....

One: the head should not be allowed to dominate; the heart should be given the reins of life. Second: the mind should not be predominant in the body. The body should be given all freedom, because the body has all the doors of sensitivity, the body has great mysteries. The body is a gift of god and the mind is just a human creation. That’s why there are different religions and different philosophies, different kinds of beliefs and dogmas, but as far as the body is concerned it is the same; the Hindu body, the Mohammedan body, the Christian body, is the same. You cannot judge from the body whether it is Hindu or Christian or Jewish. lust by testing the blood nobody can know whether the blood belongs to a Jew or to a Catholic or to a Protestant. The body is still uncontaminated.

Thoughts are Christian, Hindu, Buddhist; theist, atheist, and different kinds of ideologies are there.

The second important thing is to come down from the mind to the senses. The first is from the mind to the heart; the second, from the mind to the senses; and the third and the ultimate thing, from the mind to no-mind. The mind means the thought process, that continuous inner talk. That is the noise that is disturbing the inner music; you cannot hear the music because of the noise that the mind goes on making. Cessation of the thought process immediately makes you aware of great music that is just there inside you, part of your being.

This is the meaning of mutribo. These three things have to be done in life; and we are doing just the opposite. Nobody listens to the heart, everybody listens to the head; nobody bothers about the body. All the religions have been teaching people to be against the body, anti-body, as if the body is the enemy. And the body is the door to god, the body is divine! They are imposing ugly mind-ideologies on the beautiful body. Everybody is trying to gather more and more knowledge, and all that knowledge becomes noise inside. So we are doing just the opposite of these three things; that’s why the music is lost.

And the inner music is the way to god. It is on that wavelength... once you have started listening to the inner music, it is on that wavelength that you start reaching to god. That music takes you, you ride on it. It is the greatest experience in life to hear the inner music. In the East we call that music anahat nad: the unstruck sound.

Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping. It is really the meaning of the word ’logos’. All the translations of the Bible translate logos as the word. It should not be the word; it should be the sound.’In the beginning was the word’ they say. No: in the beginning was sound, unstruck sound. In the beginning was music, not the word. Word is not the right translation of logos.

In the beginning was music, and music was with god and music was god – that’s my translation.

Manu is a significant word. It really means the most essential quality of man. The English word ’man’

comes from manu. Manu means the capacity to contemplate; manan, the capacity to meditate. Man is the only animal who can meditate, and a man is not really a man unless he becomes a meditator.

Otherwise he is only a man in name but not in reality. It is meditation that gives you the real space to grow as a man.

So I will keep the name, but try to make it an actuality. When the mind is without thought, it is meditation. The mind is without thought in two states: either in deep sleep or in meditation. If you are aware and thoughts disappear, it is meditation; if thoughts disappear and you become unaware, it is deep sleep. Deep sleep and meditation have something similar and something different. One thing is similar: in both, thinking disappears. One thing is dissimilar: in deep sleep awareness also disappears but in meditation it remains. So meditation is equal to deep sleep plus awareness. You are relaxed, as in deep sleep, and yet aware, fully awake; and that brings you to the door of the mysteries.

In deep sleep you move in god, but unawares. You don’t know where you are being taken, although in the morning you will feel the impact and the effect. If it has been a really beautiful, deep sleep, with no dreams disturbing you, in the morning you will feel fresh, rejuvenated, alive, again young, again full of zest and juice. But you don’t know how it happened, where you had gone. You were taken in a kind of deep coma, as if some anaesthetic was given to you and then you were taken to some other plane from where you have come fresh, young, rejuvenated. In meditation it happens without anaesthesia.

So, meditation means: remain as relaxed as you are in deep sleep and yet alert. Keep awareness there; let thoughts disappear but awareness has to be retained. And this is not difficult: it is just that we have not tried it, that’s all. It is like swimming: if you have not tried it, it looks very difficult; it looks very dangerous too. And you cannot believe how people can swim because you simply drown! But once you have tried a little bit it comes easily; it is very natural.

Now one scientist in Japan has proved it experimentally that a child of six months of age is capable of swimming; just the opportunity has to be given. He has taught many children of six months of age to swim; he has done a miracle! He says ’I will be trying with smaller children too.’ It is as if the art of swimming is in-built; we just have to give it an opportunity and it starts functioning. That’s why, once you have learned swimming, you never forget it: you may not swim for forty years, fifty years, but you cannot forget it. It is not something accidental, it is something natural; that’s why you cannot forget it.

Meditation is similar: it is something in-built. You just have to create a space for it to function; just give it a chance. And that’s what sannyas is all about: giving meditation a chance to grow.

Laghima means the power to fly. And that’s what I teach!

Meditation is a flight into the inner sky. Meditation makes you capable of transcending all gravitation.

It helps you to transcend all that is gross, material, earthly. It takes you into a totally different dimension where all is light, weightless, where all is subtle, sublime. It is a change of dimension.

A person who lives without meditation lives in the gross world. He knows nothing of the subtle, he knows nothing of the higher realms of being. He is utterly unaware that there exists something more too; he thinks this is all. Have a little money, a good house, a car, a family, a little name and respectability; this is all. His life consists of trivia. He is utterly unaware that he carries a great potential the potential to become a demigod, the potential to become divine!

Meditation will give you the first taste of a totally different world the world of the invisible, the unknown, the mysterious.

Laghima means the art of becoming light, weightless, the art of transcending gravitation. Science has proved one law, the law of gravitation. Religion has proved another law, the law of grace.

Gravitation pulls you down; grace, the law of grace, pulls you up. But you have to learn to be so weightless that the law of grace can pull you upwards. It cannot pull rocks, and people are like rocks: they don’t feel, they don’t have hearts, they don’t sing, they don’t dance. They are dull, dead, hence god remains unknown to them.

You just have to become light, available, open, and immediately a totally different law starts functioning on you. You are pulled upwards and upwards and there is no end to it. Even the sky is not the limit.

Vishuddha means pure, utterly pure, innocent, and bharti means one who belongs to India. India is just a symbolic name. I don’t mean the geographical India and I don’t mean the political India, but India has become a symbol of the inner search. For five thousand years that has been India’s innermost desire. It has become the centre of all those who are in search of themselves; it has become a shelter. It is a metaphor.

By purity, by innocence, I mean the state of a child uncontaminated by the society, uninfluenced, unconditioned. That state exists still in you. It is covered by many layers, but those layers can be thrown any day that you decide, because that which you have brought with you from your real home, from god or from the very source of life, is still there, hidden behind layers and layers of rubbish. But even if a diamond falls into the mud and is covered by layers and layers of mud, nothing is lost: the diamond remains the diamond, and you can clean it any day. It can be found any day because it is there.

I am talking of that diamond of inner innocence which cannot be contaminated. That virginity is absolute; there is no way to pollute it. You can cover it with mud but the diamond is there; it only needs a little bath. And meditation functions like an inner bath, an inner shower: it cleanses the dirt, it takes your knowledge from you, it burns your scriptures. One day suddenly you are again a small child, and that very day the revolution has happened.

[A sannyasin going to the West says: I think I’m crazy going so soon.]

No, there is nothing to be worried about. I exist for crazy people, don’t be worried. And I love crazy people, because they are the cream! They are the very salt of the earth. If the world becomes sane, as sanity is understood, it will become a very ugly world. It is because of a few crazy people that the world remains beautiful. It is because of a few crazy people that there are a few poets, a few mystics, a few musicians, a few dancers. If all become sane, then the marketplace will be the only reality and business will be the only life. It is because of a few crazy people that god has not died yet, that poetry lives, that somebody can still dance and sing and rejoice and shout ’Hallelujah!’ Otherwise sane people, they simply earn money. They don’t have any time for prayer, for meditation, for joy, for love, for celebration. The world is tired of sane people!

So don’t be worried. Go and come back!

[A sannyasin says: At the moment I’m working in Vrindavan (the ashram canteen).

In Vrindavan? Work in Vrindavan. Just surrender totally, otherwise it becomes hard. If you surrender then it is a joy. Take it as part of your sadhana. Surrender totally: forget that no exists. Just become yes, and then there is no resistance.

Resistance destroys much energy. You do something and you are resisting: you don’t want to do something and you do it, you don’t like doing something and you do it.... Then it becomes an unnecessary conflict within yourself; it is very destructive.

The art of being in Vrindavan is just to say yes, totally, and go into it. Then you will really gain much out of it.

[A doctor from Nepal says: My health is not perfectly right... mainly lack of energy... I have tried the Western medical science, and I have done all possible investigations... I’m doing Gourishankar, Nadabrahma... Vipassana meditations.]

Don’t do any strenuous thing.

And when can you come back for a longer period? because this can be changed. It has nothing to do with the body; it is just psychological. But whether psychological or physiological, it is there, so a problem is there. And when it is psychological it is more difficult because then nobody knows what to do about it.

You have lost interest in life; you will need interest to be re-injected into your system. You have lost meaningfulness, life has become a boring thing. Somehow you have been carrying on because it has to be carried on.

At this age it almost always happens to all intelligent people, more or less; it always happens. There comes a point in every intelligent person’s life somewhere between forty-two to fifty when he starts seeing the futility of life. He may not be very conscious of it, but in the background it starts lurking, the feeling that life is futile.

Children are very interested in the future. Naturally, they have a great hope: something great is going to happen tomorrow. By the time you reach the age of forty-two you have seen so many tomorrows and nothing happens, so the hope is lost; now tomorrow is no more meaningful. You know it is going to be just the same as today. Then what is the point in living? Then why wait? When hope disappears, to live becomes pointless. One starts vegetating.

But if life is very strenuous – for example, one is struggling to live, struggling for food and shelter –

then one has no time for it. It happens only to people who are well-settled, who have a good job, who are not worried about their bread and butter. It does not happen to poor people, it cannot happen.

They don’t have any time to brood, to think, to think backwards or forwards; they have no time. The everyday struggle is so much that they are constantly occupied, so in a poor country people remain more hopeful than in a rich country. In a rich country hopelessness starts settling; that’s what is happening in America. The more affluent a society becomes, the more meaningless life becomes.

Because all that is needed to survive is available, now survival is not the question. Then what to do?

For centuries we have been totally absorbed in the struggle for survival, so the mind knows only one way to remain occupied and that is survival. Now, if your survival is secure – you are earning well, everything is going well – then suddenly everything flops.

That’s what has happened. It is a natural consequence of intelligence and a well-secured life; it has nothing to do personally with you.

You will need a new vision of life so hope arises again. You will need a new project to work out. It is not low energy: you have lost direction so your energy has gone low. Energy needs challenge to remain vital. It almost always happens to everybody in some moments: you come home tired, utterly tired, no energy at all and suddenly the house is on fire; then you forget your tiredness. You forget everything! For the whole night you will be awake putting the fire out, and so full of energy that you will not be able to believe next day that you could do so much and you were so dead tired!

The house on fire gave you a such an immediate project, it was such a challenge, that the energy simply rose, rose to meet it!

At the age of forty-two everybody feels a crisis. By everybody I mean everybody who is successful in life. Otherwise there is no question. Nothing fails like success, and success fails at the time near about forty-two. Then all kinds of symptoms arise: people have heart attacks and blood pressure and this and that, and it is nothing but that life has lost meaning. So all problems start becoming bigger and bigger and you don’t have energy to face them. You don’t even feel that there is any point in facing them: Tolerate them, accept them, let it be so; one day everybody has to die.

Come for a few days to do a few groups, a few meditations. I don’t see that there is a problem. Your energy will be back, it just needs new challenges. And we have so many challenges here that even if you bring a dead person there is every possibility he may be revived! (laughter) CHAPTER 21

22 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Srajan means creativity. The highest value in existence is creativity, and it is creativity that brings you close to the creator, nothing else; there is no other bridge. Only a creative person comes to know something of god. And it is always only something, because god is infinite: the more we know the more there is to know.

Religion, to be real, should consist more and more of creative acts. In the past it has been just the opposite: religious people have remained very uncreative. That’s why they have remained dull, dead, and they have not contributed anything to existence. In fact they have been an unnecessary burden. Only once in a while a Buddha, a Krishna, a Lao Tzu, a Christ, has contributed something.

Otherwise so many saints, the long chain of saints, have just been unfertile.

Art of any kind has to become prayer and creativity has to become worship. It is only in the moments of deep creativity that the ego disappears, time disappears, space disappears. And it is only in the moments of total absorption in a creative act that one merges into the whole. It is ecstatic to be creative.

What you create does not matter, the product is not important but the act of creation is. It is not a question of whether you become a Picasso or you remain an unknown painter. It does not matter whether you create great sculpture or you are just a poor potter; it doesn’t matter at all. The product is valuable in the market; but when I am saying to be creative my whole emphasis is on the very act of creativity, not on what it produces. Whatsoever is produced becomes a commodity, it can be sold in the marketplace. If people like it they will pay more, if they don’t like it they will not purchase it; that is a totally different phenomenon, a by-product. But the act, the very act of being in creativity, is prayer.

Almasta is a state of consciousness where no worry, no anxiety, exists and one is utterly drunk with the divine. These are two aspects: if worries, anxieties, anguish, disappear, then the intoxication with god appears. If worries, anxieties, are there they go on dissipating our energy; and overflowing energy is needed to be drunk with god. Worries are leaks, holes, from where we go on dissipating.

Drop worrying. There is nothing to worry about; all is taken care of. Live with that trust. Existence loves you. No harm is going to happen, no harm can ever happen, because how can the whole do any harm to its own part? It is impossible. And if sometimes you feel that some harm is happening that must be some misinterpretation on your part; there must be some blessing in disguise.

Once this trust arises in a person he becomes religious. Then there is no need to worry, then there is no need to remain in a state of anxiety. Anxiety means ’There is nobody to look after me. I have to carry the whole burden on my own shoulders. If I don’t carry it then I am finished, and the whole existence is inimical.’ That’s what creates anxiety: ’Everybody is against me. Somehow, everybody is conspiring against me, everybody is at my throat. I have to protect myself. I have to be watchful, I have to plan, I have to move in such a way that I and not others prove the winner. Otherwise everybody is a competitor and they are bent upon defeating me.’

This attitude creates anxiety, and this attitude is the attitude of a non-religious person. When I say a non-religious person I don’t mean that he does not go to church, he does not read the Bible; that is not the point. He may read the Bible, he may go to church, but if he remains in anxiety he is not religious. And it is possible that he goes to the church only because of his anxiety, out of his anxiety; he prays to god out of anxiety, he reads the Bible as a protection, as a security. But if anxiety is there a person is not religious. He is pathological and his religion will be pathological.

The religious person knows nothing of anxiety; he changes the whole gestalt. He knows ’I am part of this whole existence, and if trees are not worried and the birds are not going crazy and mad and the animals are utterly happy, why can’t I be? I belong to this existence, I am an essential part of it.’ This trust, this understanding, this faith, and anxieties simply disappear, they are not found any more; you have stopped creating them, you have stopped secreting them. Then so much energy is preserved that it starts overflowing in a kind of festivity; it becomes a dance. It is so abundant, it is so exuberant, that life becomes a festival. Then a person is religious, then one is drunk with the divine.

That is the meaning of almasta: drunk with the divine, utterly lost in the divine, feeling one with the divine, with no worry, not a worry in the world.

Ari means the enemy, hanto means the killer – one who has killed the enemy. The enemy is the ego, and unless the ego disappears life remains a hell. The ego creates darkness, the ego creates blindness. The ego becomes a rock and it does not allow your life to flow. The ego creates a separation from existence and the separation breeds all kinds of miseries. It is like uprooting a tree from the earth: the moment the tree is separate from the earth it starts dying. It feels thirsty, it feels hungry; the juices flow no more, the sap arises no more. Great sadness surrounds the tree. It is on its deathbed.

This is what happens with the ego: it separates you from your own nourishing sources, it separates you from the soil of god. It creates a thin layer, very thin and transparent, so unless one is very alert one will not be able to feel it. It is like a pure glass: you can see through it, it does not obstruct your vision in a sense, but if you want to get out then you will know that you are against a wall, a transparent wall. And we are moving with this glass-like shell continuously.

It does not allow you to love, because whenever you want to meet somebody it comes inbetween.

It does not allow you to communicate, it does not allow you any possibility of relating; it obstructs.

That’s why it is called the enemy. And one who is capable of dropping this enemy arrives at the doors of the friend. God is the friend: the ego is the enemy.

Arihanto has two aspects: one, killing the enemy, and the other, realising the friend. It is the highest state of consciousness. Just as the word ’Christ’ is important in Christianity, arihant is important in Jainism; it is equivalent to Christ, to Christ-consciousness. Buddha is the Buddhist equivalent of arihant. Its meaning is of significance and has to be meditated upon. You will have to work it out it has to become your reality.

Sundaro means the beautiful. The East has praised three values very much: satyam, the truth; shivam, the good; and sundaram, the beautiful. But sundaram is the last and the highest, even higher than good, higher than truth. Beauty is the very essence of existence. The whole existence is its expression in manifold forms. Somewhere it is a green tree and somewhere it is a sunset, somewhere it is a human face, somewhere it is a tear and somewhere it is a smile, but the whole existence is an expression of beauty.

Religion should consist of aesthetics, the search for the beauty. Religion should be really the highest form of poetry. If it is not, then religion falls very low and becomes part of politics. The lowest is politics and the highest is poetry. Religion can either be politics or poetry. When there is a Jesus, it is poetry; the moment Jesus is gone and the popes arrive, it is politics.

These so-called religions have been fighting. They have been destroying each other in far crueller ways than animals can ever do. If man falls, he falls below beasts; if he rises, he rises above gods.

Religion in the highest form is creativity, poetry, aesthetics, a search for beauty, a rejoicing. At the lowest it is violence, power politics, an effort to dominate others, hypocrisy.

My sannyasins have to be very very alert that we are trying to create poetry, we are trying to create the beautiful. Religion should be at the highest peak; only then it brings deliverance, it becomes salvation.

Veet means beyond, laksho means goal. God is not a goal and can never be a goal: god is the source. God is not the effect but the cause. God is not there outside somewhere in the future waiting for you; he is inside you right this very moment. He is in the seeker. He is in the seeker, not in the sought. Your very existence, your consciousness, your life, is god. Because we have made a goal of god we go on missing him. We are searching for him where he is not; we can go on searching for him for millennia and we will not come across him.

It is as if you have your specs on and you are searching for them: through your specs searching for your specs. Now, there is no possibility of finding them unless somebody hits you hard on your head and makes you alert that the specs are there on your nose, you need not look for them.

People ask ’Where is god? What is god?’ This is utter nonsense. You are him. He is hidden in the very questioner; in fact the question arises from himself. And if we go deep into our question we will find the answer hidden in our own being.

Mandir means a temple. The body is a temple. The world too is a temple, because god is residing in everything. Everything is a host and god is the guest; the body is the host and god is the guest.

They are not enemies as it has been told again and again down the centuries; they are friends. And the body has to be respected and loved. God has chosen it to be one of his temples, it is sacred. Not only is the soul sacred, the body is as sacred as the soul because this whole existence is permeated by god. Matter is also one expression of it, as the mind is, as the soul is. Matter is god visible; the soul is god invisible.

I teach respect, love, reverence, for the body, because it is only through going deeper into the body, into its sensitivities, that one becomes aware of who is residing within. Knowing your body in its totality is the introductory part of knowing your spirit. Remember it!

And drop all anti-body attitudes. Everybody is carrying them. The priests have poisoned humanity so much and for so long that we may not be aware sometimes, but it is there in the unconscious, an undercurrent, that we are all anti-body, anti-life, anti-world. It is because of these antagonisms that man is not becoming religious. A religious person is not anti anything. He is a yes to all and everything, and his yes is total.

Svargo means paradise. There is no paradise in the future. Paradise is a state of being aware now, here. Paradise is not something geographical: it is another name for being spiritually alert. Paradise is not after death; this very life is paradise! But people have reduced this life to hell; a life that could have been heaven has been reduced to hell.

We have not been responsible and we have not functioned as awareness. Man is functioning like a robot. He just goes on moving through empty, dead gestures, not really living, not intensely living, and always thinking of the future and the past. Between the future and the past the present is crushed, sandwiched, and the present is the only reality. The past is no more, the future, not yet: only the present is and always is.

To live in the present, to live in this is-ness, is to be in paradise. Paradise is neither in space nor in time. Time consists of past and future, so it cannot be in time. Present is not part of time at all; present transcends. time, it is non-temporal.

To be in the present is to go beyond time, and to go beyond time is to know what is. And that very knowing is a benediction. Then there is no death; if there is no time there cannot be any death.

Then there is no ego; if there is no past, no future, there cannot be any ego.

The present knows no misery at all. You cannot be miserable in the present; you have to bring the past or the future in if you want to be miserable. Try it sometimes, to be miserable in the present, and you will be surprised: you cannot be. It is not possible in the very nature of things. Bring in the past – somebody insulted you yesterday – and then you can be miserable, or bring in the future....

Tomorrow you are going to have an examination so be miserable about it, about whether you are going to make it or not, whether you will succeed or not. But right this very moment you cannot be miserable. It simply is, and there is no misery in it. That state is paradise.

Meditation is a way to enter into paradise, because meditation is a way to go beyond the mind and beyond time. Meditation is a way to enter into the eternity through the present.

[A sannyasin asks: When people come here you give them a new name. Why have you not changed my name?]

The name is just a game... it is not a question of the new or the old; it doesn’t matter. You have to change, you have to become new.

And you don’t have any name; all names are just utilitarian. A child is born without a name. We give him a name because that is necessary, otherwise he will be in difficulty in life: how to call him, how to communicate with him? If he has no name he will find a thousand and one difficulties every day.

If somebody asks ’Who are you?’ he will be at a loss.

So we give a name. That is just a label, useful, but utterly arbitrary, of no existential value.

And this has to be remembered, that no name is yours, that you are a nameless reality, a formless existence: neither name nor form are yours. The form is of the body and the name is a social utility.

Behind the name and the form is your being, utterly indefinable; no word can contain it.

Even to call it Rajendra, king of kings, is not adequate, because it is indefinable. No word can contain it, no word can describe it; it can only be experienced.

So whether I give a new name or whether I keep the old, it doesn’t matter.

[A sannyasin says: Lately I have been meditating with candlelight. After some time I suddenly felt that I didn’t know where my legs or my arms were. A great fear came and suddenly I felt a great agony. Osho gives him an ’energy darshan’.]

Perfectly good! There is no need to worry about it. Just as your legs and hands are disappearing, your whole body will disappear – don’t be worried! It is perfectly good, continue; there is nothing to fear. It is a good symptom.

CHAPTER 22

23 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, darpano means mirror – mirror for the divine. And this is the whole art of meditation. God is; we just have to mirror him. Our mirror is covered with layers of dust. We are not to go anywhere to search and seek because god is everywhere, as much here as there. So the journey is not from here to there; the journey is from here to here. And all that is preventing us are the layers of dust on the mirror. The mirror is incapable of reflecting because of the dust; and by dust I mean the thought process.

Whenever you are thinking, your mirror disappears behind the smoke of thoughts like a sun behind the clouds. Whenever there is no thought going on, the clouds have dispersed and you can see the sun; the dust is no more there and the mirror immediately reflects that which is.

God is only another name for that which is.

Deva means divine, arpan means surrendered to surrendered to god, surrendered to the divine.

The search for truth is not really a search but only an invitation, a prayer. It is not a search in the sense that science uses the word. It is a totally different kind of search – the way a woman waits, prays, for her lover. It is not aggressive; it is receptive.

Arpan means so surrendered that one is just a receptivity and nothing else: open, available, not expecting anything but tremendously expectant. When you expect something it is in the head – a thought, a projection. When you are simply expectant it is not a question of the head; you are totally involved in it. It is not a thought, it is not intellectual; it is existential. And only a surrendered man can be expectant.

This is the secret of the secrets. Search can be an ego-trip, and if it is an ego-trip, one is doomed from the very beginning. But receptivity can never be an ego-trip; that is the beauty of it. Surrender can never be an ego-trip. To have an ego and to be surrendered is not possible. Surrender means egolessness, ego means non-surrender; they can’t co-exist.

That’s why the person who is surrendered immediately becomes transformed. The moment you open your doors, the sun and the wind and the rain, all enter; god rushes from all directions towards you!

Prartho means prayer. The word ’prayer’ comes from the same root as darkness. Prayer is a state of being; it has nothing to do with praying. One can pray and may not be in prayer.

You can go and watch thousands of people around the earth praying in the churches, mosques and temples, and nobody is in prayer. They are simply acting, repeating parrot-like; their heart is not in it, their words are empty. They are moving through the gestures but they are not in them; they may be somewhere else. The person may be kneeling before Christ and he may not be there at all: he may be in his office, with his wife, in the market-place. It is not a question of being in church and repeating the right kind of words.

Prayer is a state of being, a state of feeling, a state when words disappear and one is simply possessed by the divine. You cannot do prayer; you can only make yourself available to god, and then many things happen.

And I can see the potential in you. If you simply allow god to take possession of you, you may start saying something which you had not planned saying. You will be surprised from where it is coming.

You may start moving, dancing, swaying, kneeling, but you will see that it is not that you are doing these things; it is as if they are being done through you. You are possessed by something higher and bigger than you. That state is prayer: to be possessed by something higher and bigger, to be pulled upwards.

All that is needed is that we should not hinder, we should not obstruct, we should not close our doors.

So make it a point, every night before you go to bed, to just sit in the room and allow things to happen. Feel possessed by god. Then your hands start moving, certain gestures come, your body sways or you stand up or you start dancing or you start singing, or sometimes just sounds come which have no meaning, or you start speaking in tongues. Nobody will be able to understand what language it is. You will not be able to understand what you are saying and why you are saying it, but still, when it has been said, you will feel a great silence permeating you, the silence that comes after the storm.

Just fifteen to twenty minutes availability to god is enough to nourish your very roots. And slowly slowly you will feel the quality of your acts changing, the quality of your relationship changing, the quality of your twenty-four hours changing. They become luminous, they become graceful, and one is simply bubbling with some unknown source of joy. That is prayer.

Deva means divine, anito means amorality. There are moralists, there are immoralists. I am neither a moralist nor an immoralist; I am an amoralist. And that is the highest point to live from. Amoralism means dropping all duality of good and bad, dropping duality as such, not thinking in terms of opposites but living in a kind of transcendence.

God is amoral. He cannot be moral, obviously he cannot be immoral. And because many religions made it a point that god is moral, god is good, they had to create the devil; it was a necessity of thought. Once you make god equivalent to good. then you will have to create the devil, otherwise where will the bad go? Then the conflict is eternal, it can never end. Between those two poles man is crushed. Both are false: the idea of god being synonymous with good is false. It is just a theological idea; it corresponds not at all with reality.

This is the way of thought, that it always creates the opposite. Without the opposite the mind cannot think, there is no possibility of thinking. The moment you say darkness, immediately you have to create the idea of light. Without light, darkness loses all meaning. Thinking as such is dual; non-thinking is non-dual.

And when all thinking disappears, who are you? – good or bad? When there is no thought in the mind, who are you? – good or bad? You are nobody. That state is amoral – it is beyond morality, beyond immortality and that state is divine!

The real god is just transcendental. We cannot say of him that he is beautiful and we cannot say he is ugly; we cannot say he is light and we cannot say he is darkness. He contains both, and because he contains both, he is beyond both. When you contain both, they cancel each other. If you have fifty percent light and fifty percent darkness, they cancel each other. The dualities balance each other and disappear, and in that disappearance for the first time truth as it is, is known.

The real meditator has to go beyond all kinds of distinctions, and the basic distinction is that of good and bad; all other distinctions are based on it. The basic duality is that of the sinner and the saint, and all other dualities follow it; they are by-products.

My message to sannyasins is: you are not to become good against bad, otherwise you will never be good. The bad will always be hanging around you, somewhere lurking in your unconscious; it will remain repressed. One has to go beyond good and bad, then real goodness happens. So I use three words: the sinner, the bad; the saint, the good; and the sage; the sage is beyond both. Jesus is a sage, not a saint. Lao Tzu is a sage, not a saint. Mahatma Gandhi is a saint; Adolf Hitler is a sinner.

And the sinners and the saints are two aspects of the same coin. They are not different; they only appear different. Somewhere deep down in Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi is hidden, in the unconscious – the other side. And it is not an accident that he was a vegetarian, just as Mahatma Gandhi was an absolute vegetarian. This is strange, that the man who was the greatest murderer in human history was a vegetarian. He never smoked, he never drank any alcohol, and he was very very disciplined. He was exactly like Mahatma Gandhi in his discipline. Early in the morning he would get up.... He was almost a saint! You cannot find anything bad in his character. This was his unconscious asserting itself. Consciously he was a sinner, unconsciously he was a saint.

Just the reverse is the case with Mahatma Gandhi: consciously he was a saint, unconsciously he was a sinner. He was constantly bothered by sin; it was a constant obsession. Even if he saw a woman in his dreams he would go on a fast – because he had seen a woman in his dreams! And of course he was seeing women in his dreams; it was bound to be so. If you avoid, if you repress, those repressed thoughts are bound to come in the night. To the very last he was having sexual dreams; he was utterly disturbed and was feeling very guilty.

He talked about non-violence but he was very violent in his approach, very violent – violent with himself, violent with his disciples, for small things. A disciple was caught drinking tea. He had not committed any sin; all the Buddhist monks down the ages have been drinking tea and yet becoming enlightened, in fact more of them have become enlightened than anybody else in the world. But in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram tea was a sin, and if somebody was caught, much fuss would be made out of it. He would be condemned, and condemned in such subtle ways, in such holy ways, that nobody could say that he was being condemned. Gandhi would go on a fast! He would not torture the person; he would torture himself.

Now, this is a more vicarious way of torturing the person. If you slap the disciple, this is simple; finished! But you go for a twenty-four hour fast... Now for twenty-four hours the disciple is being tortured and is in hell: it is because of him, and just because of a cup of tea, that the master is hungry for twenty-four hours. Now he is condemning and condemning himself. You have condemned him forever, you have made him feel very guilty. This is violence!

I have been studying Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi side by side; they are each other’s reflection.

You will find one’s conscious is the other’s unconscious, and the other’s conscious is the first one’s unconscious; but there is no qualitative difference.

A sage has no conscious, no unconscious; he is undivided. He simply lives moment to moment. He has no idea of good and no idea of bad. He simply lives, and he lives so consciously that whatsoever happens is good, but that good has nothing to do with our ordinary so-called good. It is not virtue because it is not against bad. It is a transcendence. It has its beauty, tremendous beauty, but it is amoral.

That is the meaning of anito: divine amorality.

Deva means divine, ashika means lover – a lover of god. And god is not a question of logic; god is a question of love. Those who think about god will never find him. Thinking is a barrier, not a bridge.

God can only be felt, not thought about.

It needs the heart of a lover, and you have it. You have not allowed it to function because in the society it does not pay; in fact it creates troubles. The society feels perfectly okay about the logical mind; it fits. The logical mind is created by the society. The society in its turn is created by the logical mind. They fit together, they are made for each other.

The heart is something asocial. It is not created by the society; it comes from god. It has no responsibility towards the man made world; its responsibility is towards the whole. Hence the society is against the heart. It cripples it in every way, paralyses it, does not allow it. And even if it allows it a little bit, it is such a partial phenomenon that rather than fulfilling it, it creates more frustration. It is like giving a little food to a hungry man or just giving a dewdrop to a thirsty man. It would have been better if he remained thirsty. Now this one dewdrop is going to make him more miserable.

The society is against the heart and that’s why the society has to create false gods – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan to substitute. The society is very clever in creating substitutes, plastic substitutes; all the churches and all the temples are full of plastic substitutes.

The real god can be found only through individual love. It has nothing to do with society; it is something absolutely private, intimate. It is far more private than the love that happens between a man and a woman, because in that love at least two persons are present.

When you love god, only you are; god is an invisible presence. When you begin the journey, only you are; the other is not visible. When you end the journey, the other is; you have disappeared. But it is always one: in the beginning you are, god is not; in the end, god is, you are not. The meeting never happens in a sense; two are never there, only one; first you, then he. This unity is possible only through great love.

Love is going to be your meditation. Let it become your life. Love as totally as possible, love unconditionally. Share your love with each and everybody with friends and with strangers, with man and with animals; just go on pouring your love. Don’t miss a single opportunity where you can pour your love, don’t ask anything in return, and you will be surprised: if you can pour your love and don’t ask anything in return, god comes in return. If you ask anything in return you have missed an opportunity; you did not allow god to enter in. You asked for something small.

That is the meaning of ashika: one who loves and expects nothing in return, one who simply loves, one whose joy is in loving itself, one who loves for love’s sake. Then one day the incredible happens, the impossible happens: when you have poured all that you have and you become utterly empty, in that emptiness the unknown penetrates, the sky descends to the earth! That is rebirth, resurrection; but first one has to die in love.

So love is both the cross and the resurrection.

Veet Lakshen. Veet means beyond, lakshen means goal. There is no goal to be achieved. The very idea of the goal creates tension and anxiety in life. If you have a goal to achieve you will go on missing the present moment. With the goal in your head you cannot be herenow. The goal has to be in the future, and life is in the present, so all goals are anti-life. And if one really wants to live, one has to be anti-goal.

Try to understand this basic arithmetic; everything else depends on it. If one is goal-oriented, one will live in misery and die in misery. It is not just accidental that you see so many miserable people walking on the streets all around the earth. They are caught up with goals, obsessed with goals.

They are all ambitious, they want to achieve something in the future. And the future is that which never comes: it is always coming, always coming but it never comes.

Nobody has yet seen tomorrow, and it is so close by! By the morning it will be here. It is always arriving but never arrives. We go on thinking about it and planning it, and meanwhile life is slipping out of our hands. The goal-oriented person only dies, he never lives.

I teach a non-goal-oriented life. I teach you this moment, I teach you herenow. That’s what sannyas is all about: a life lived each moment with utter joy and celebration, a life which knows no postponement. And when you don’t postpone, your life takes on such intensity because you have only this moment to pour your whole energy into. You cannot spread it out thin. The person who has a big future can spread it out. The person who has no future cannot spread it out; it becomes so intense, so passionate, so one-pointed, and in that very one-pointedness of life-energy there is joy. In that concentration of energy there is bliss.

Then one knows the real taste of life. The name of that taste is god.

[A sannyasin says that he has a problem with his navel.

He can’t allow anybody to touch it. He also cannot touch it himself.]

We will change it don’t be worried! (LAUGHTER) I will tell everybody, whoever sees you (MUCH

LAUGHTER).... It will be gone; it is nothing to be worried about. But there is a reason why it has happened: in your very early childhood, somewhere, you became very much afraid of death.

The navel is the centre of death. Just behind the navel is a point which is the most vulnerable point in life. If somebody becomes very afraid of death then this problem arises. Very rarely is there this much fear, but if you become very afraid of death then you will not allow anybody to touch your navel.

Once the fear of death disappears, this problem will be solved. And we will make it disappear!

Do a few individual sessions of shiatzu and hypnosis. Then do these groups: the first is Intensive Enlightenment, the second is Centering, the third is Massage and the fourth is Tantra.

You have a beautiful problem!

Deva means divine, deep means lamp – a divine lamp, a divine light. It has not to be created; it is already there: it has to be discovered, or rather re-discovered.

Each child born knows about it, feels it, sees it. Each child in its mother’s womb remains full of light; that is an inner light, an inner glow. But as the child is born and he opens his eyes and sees the world and the colours and the light and the people, slowly slowly the gestalt changes: he forgets to look within, he becomes too interested in the outside world. And there is a reason, because the outside world has so much variety.

The inside world has no variety; it is simple, silent, light. In a sense it is monotonous: no change ever happens there, no movement ever occurs, it is always the same. And naturally the child becomes more interested in things that are changing. Everybody is interested in change because change brings something new. The child is enquiring, curious, and the world is really tremendous – so many colours and trees and birds and animals and people and so much noise. He becomes so engrossed with it that slowly slowly he forgets to look within; he becomes oblivious of it.

In meditation one has to re-connect oneself with that inner source of light. One has to forget the whole world and go in, turn in and tune in, as if the world has disappeared, as if it doesn’t exist.

At least for one hour every day one has to forget the world absolutely and just be oneself. Then slowly slowly, again that old experience is revived. And this time, when you come to know it, it is tremendous because now you have seen the world and all its variety, you have seen all the noises.

Now to see the inner silence and the purity of light is a totally different experience. And it is so nourishing, so vitalising; it is the source of nectar.

Once you have known it, consciously.... The child knows it unconsciously; the meditator comes upon it consciously.... Once you have known it consciously the fear of death disappears because you know, you know absolutely, without any doubt, that this light is eternal, that the body may drop but this light will continue. It is so indubitable that even if one wants to doubt it, one cannot; doubt simply disappears. The certainty is absolute, and with that certainty comes a transformation in life.

Then all values change: things that were important up to now become unimportant and things that you have not even thought about become important. One goes through a revolution.

So this has to be your meditation, every night or in the early morning or whenever you can find time, when it is easier to forget the world, either late in the night when the traffic has stopped and people have gone to sleep and the whole world has disappeared on its own accord – then it is easier to slip out – or early in the morning when the people are still fast asleep. But once you have started seeing it then it can be seen any time. In the market-place, in the middLe of the day, you can close your eyes and you can see it. And even to see it for a single moment is tremendously relaxing.

But start in the night: for one hour just sit silently looking in, watching, waiting, for the light to explode.

One day it explodes. You are not to create it you are only to re-discover it.

Prem means love, parvati means daughter of the mountains; it is just a metaphor for a river – a river of love.

Love is not a static thing. It is a process, it is a movement, it is a dance. It is not like a rock, it is like a river, it is always flowing. And whenever it stops anywhere it dies; to remain alive it has to go on flowing. Life and flowing are synonymous as far as love is concerned. So one has to go on loving, one has never to become satisfied; in satisfaction is death.

And one has not to make love a routine. If it becomes routine, it has become a stagnant pool. It has to go on moving into new territory; one has to be very creative about love.

So, many people start perfectly well in the world of love but soon everything goes wrong, and the reason is: people are very uncreative, unimaginative. They don’t know how to go on creating new surprises, how to go on exploring new territories. So sooner or later all is finished and then they are stuck. And in that very experience of being stuck, things start becoming stale and things start stinking.

Love has to be a river till it reaches to the ocean. Love has to remain flowing till it reaches to god.

Until it has reached god never allow it anywhere to become a stagnant pool. That is the message in your name. Love has to reach to the ocean. Unless love becomes oceanic, don’t settle, don’t say ’I have arrived.’ Go on moving and keep the movement alive. And with that movement prayer is born automatically.

In fact when love moves tremendously it is prayer. The very phenomenon of the movement of love creates the fragrance called prayer.

CHAPTER 23

24 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, anando means bliss. Love and bliss are two aspects of the same energy. They always happen together: if one happens, the other follows, has to follow. They cannot be divided, they are indivisible. And just like that, hate and misery are two aspects of the same phenomenon: the person who is full of hate can never be blissful; and the person who is full of love can never be anything else other than blissful. One has to work from both sides.

If you love you become blissful, if you become more blissful you become capable of more love, and so on and so forth; it is a dialectical process. And the ultimate crescendo is when love and bliss are no more separate. When love means bliss and bliss means love, one has arrived.

Prem means love, anurodh means an invitation. God cannot be searched for. You cannot seek him because he has no name and no form and no address. Either he is everywhere or nowhere. The seeker goes astray; wherever you seek, you will miss. God can only be invited, not sought. God is not an object somewhere that you can go to. God is a presence that enters you when you are in a state of welcome. When you are an invitation god enters you. And he does not enter from one direction; he enters from all the directions simultaneously. The moment you have given the invitation, god seeks you.

The seeker is still an egoist. The search is an ego project. The person who invites, bows down: he is in a state of surrender, he opens up, he is simply vulnerable. That vulnerability is prayer, that invitation is prayer. He says ’I am available. Please come to me!’ Slowly slowly that becomes his very breathing: ’I am ready – come to me!’ And one day, when you are really open, immediately it happens: god is!

Prem means love, sangita means music – love music. Man is a musical instrument, but we don’t know how to play upon it. Great music is hidden in everyone, but it has to be struck. The instrument has to be set right, tuned, and one has to learn the art of playing it. That art is love.

Love teaches you how to become more and more musical, harmonious, a melody. It is love that brings all that is hidden in you to the surface. It is love that gives you exquisiteness, grace, beauty. It is love that fills you with some unknown, invisible grandeur. And when love has arrived, music arises on its own accord.

That music is our only offering to god; we don’t have anything else to offer. All else is meaningless.

Unless you can offer a loving, singing heart, a dancing, melodious soul, you are not offering anything to god.

The flowers that people offer are not your flowers; they were already offered on the trees. You have to offer your own flowering. That flowering I call the inner music, and the way to it is love.

Prem means love guha means the cave of the heart. The heart is a hollow phenomenon, it is utterly empty: it is a cave. And because it is empty, it can become full. To become full the first thing is, the first requirement is, to be empty. The head is very full, hence it remains empty. All kinds of rubbish is gathered together there. The heart remains utterly empty unless god arrives. And god cannot be a guest in the head; he will not find any space there. The only space available is in the cave of the heart.

Because we are too much in the head, we have completely forgotten our own inner cave. If we go into that cave it is meditation. Meditation is nothing else but a search for the inner cave where we can be absolutely alone, where the world disappears. It is not a question of going to the Himalayas and finding a cave there: everybody has the cave in the heart. It is a question of going into the inner Himalaya; and the outer Himalaya is nothing compared to the inner: it is just a poor reflection.

The path to that cave is love. If you love, you start moving towards the heart. If you don’t love you start moving towards the head. The head knows nothing of love; it knows only logic, calculation, business. The heart knows nothing of calculation, mathematics, logic. It simply knows how to share, how to give.

Giving in itself is a joy if you are in the heart. If you are in the head you don’t want to give. The head is very miserly, it clings to everything. If it gives, it gives only to get more; it is always bargaining. It does not know how to give. It is a beggar. The heart is an emperor.

Open the door to the inner cave by the key of love.

Prem means love, avinasha means eternal, indestructible, immortal. Love is the only experience in life which is not of time, the only experience which happens in time and yet does not belong to time, the only experience which knows no death, the only experience which is part of eternity and yet penetrates time – the only miracle, the only paradox. That’s why whenever you are in love you are unafraid of death. Lovers are utterly unafraid of death, but the people who don’t know what love is are continuously afraid of death.

Lovers are ready to die because they know that something will go on living, that there is no death; they may disappear but their love will live. And the certainty is so absolute that not even a single doubt ever arises. When two persons are in love, time simply disappears, the clock stops. You start soaring above time. You reach some plenitudes which are beyond time.

Love is the natural experience of meditation.

[A sannyasin says: I wanted to work here and I applied for a proofreading job. The lady said it would depend on you.]

First do a few groups, first feel at home here. Mm? because the work that is being done here is not work; it is worship. Unless you become very very tuned into the whole energy that is happening here, it will remain work. And if it remains work it is not going to help. It has to become your prayer, your love: you have to utterly dissolve into it. From the surface it is the same work as everywhere else, but from the inner it is a totally different experience.

You will be able to – just wait. Do a few more groups, meditate, feel me more. Soon you will be working, there is no problem in it!

Prem means love, divyo means divine. Love can be earthly, love can also be divine; it depends on you. Love is earthly when it is a projection of your ego. Love becomes divine when love is there but you are not. When the ego has disappeared, evaporated, and only the energy of love is left behind, then it is divine.

Down the ages people have not rightly understood this simple phenomenon. In fact because it was simple they missed it. They thought love is dangerous because in ordinary cases love is always an ego projection; it is always earthly. earthbound, mundane, physical, something gross. It is almost always so. So the logical mind started thinking that there is something which pulls you downwards.

If you want to go upwards you have to renounce love.

Thousands of people renounced love, became monks, moved to the monasteries outside the world so that there was no opportunity to fall in love. But they missed the whole point: it is not love that pulls you downwards; it is the ego behind the love that pulls you downwards. They dropped love, they forgot all about the ego, and the ego remained with them. Now the ego was in the garments of a monk; it was still earthly.

The ego is heavy. It cannot soar, it cannot fly into the sky. It has no wings; it is a rock. The ego always follows the path of gravitation; it cannot follow the path of grace. It is not love that brings you downwards; it is the ego.

So my whole process is different: love has not to be renounced; love has to be rejoiced in. The ego has to be renounced. Once the ego is dropped love has wings, love is free, love is freedom. And then you can go higher and higher. Love is a weightless experience.

So remember these two things: love can be earthly if it is associated with the ego, hence the ego has to be renounced, not love; second, if there is no ego and only love remains, it is prayer, it is meditation, it is how god arrives in your life!

Prem means love, dwaro means a door. Love is a door to god. Whoever has entered into god has entered through love; there is no other door. People have created many false doors. They are only painted doors, you cannot enter through them; they are just walls painted as doors.

All the rituals of all the religions are painted doors. Real religion is non-ritualistic. It consists of the spontaneity of love. And love means not only loving the idea of god in your head; love means to love all that exists around you: the people, the animals, the birds, the trees, the rocks. Love all that is, and soon you will see a door opening. That door opens within your own being, and from that door you enter into god and god enters into you.

Prem means love, dasen means a servant, a slave – a servant of love, a slave of love. The paradox is that in love, to be defeated is to be victorious, to be a servant is to be a master, to be conquered is to conquer.

This is what Jesus means when he says ’Blessed are the meek, for theirs is the kingdom of god’...

because only the meek know how to love. Love can happen only in a humble heart; it cannot happen when the ego is too strong. The state of surrender is needed for love to happen. And the whole existence belongs to one who is ready to surrender in love.

Prem means love, madir means wine – the wine of love. Love intoxicates, it is the ultimate in intoxicants. One who has drunk out of love, for him all other drinks are just meaningless. In fact people have been searching for other intoxicants because they are really searching for love. They may be searching in wrong directions but the desire is not wrong. And unless they find love and the wine of love, they cannot stop their search. All intoxicants will disappear from the earth if the earth becomes a paradise of love. Alcohol, LSD, marijuana – all are poor substitutes for love.

The ego is heavy, burdensome; one wants to forget it, one wants to get out of its yoke sometimes.

In love you forget all about the ego, its worries, its tensions, anxieties. That’s what happens when you drink something alcoholic: for a few moments you forget all the worries, for a few moments you drop all your agony, for a few moments you are ecstatic. But it solves nothing; again you will be back in the same old rut. It gives you a relief but it does not transform you.

Love gives relief and also transforms. It is a non-chemical psychedelic. It gives a new vision, a new poetry to your life, new eyes to see the world and a new heart to feel existence.

And once love has taken possession of you the ego cannot come back. They cannot exist together; they are just like light and darkness. Bring light in and the darkness disappears; bring love in and the ego disappears. And with the ego disappear all the worries and the anxieties and the anguish.

To live in love is to really live. Others only pretend to live: lovers really live.

Anand means bliss, abhishek means initiation into. Sannyas is an initiation into bliss. My religion is that of celebration. My worship is to be in a festive mood, to be constantly cheerful, to always be in that mood of rejoicing in the existence.

The old sannyas used to be an initiation into something serious, heavy, because it was renouncing the world. My sannyas is totally opposite, diametrically opposite. This is neo-sannyas, a totally new vision of sannyas not of renunciation but of rejoicing, and not of the spirit of seriousness but of the spirit of festivity, of light-heartedness, of taking life as fun, play.

CHAPTER 24

25 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet means beyond, apeksha means expectation. The root cause of misery is to expect, and the mind is full of expectations. The more you expect, the more you will feel frustrated; frustration is a shadow of expectation. Nobody wants to be frustrated but everybody goes on expecting ’Things should be like this’ and they never are. The universe has no obligation to fulfil your expectation.

And it is not only about things: people go on expecting how persons should be. The husband expects the wife to be a particular person, a certain kind of person. That is impossible! She has her own dignity; this is humiliating her. To expect a certain behaviour is taking her freedom away, is destroying her; it is not love. The wife expects the husband to behave in a certain way, and so on, so forth. Parents are expecting their children to be this or that, and even children are expecting how their parents should be.

In this mass of expectation everybody falls into a kind of a hell. And no expectation can ever be fulfilled because the world, the existence, is not run for your private, idiotic ideas. All private ideas are idiotic. The word ’idiot’ is very beautiful. It means having private ideas – nothing else.

The world has a destiny, but that destiny cannot be decided by individuals, otherwise the whole world would fall apart. Individuals have to lose themselves in the world stream. The person who loses himself in the world stream is the only person who is not an idiot. The person who has no expectations is the person who is not an idiot. Then intelligence flowers. You become part of the river, you go with the river; wherever the river is going is good. You don’t have a private goal: the river’s goal is your goal too. The part has to become adjusted to, harmonious with, the goal of the whole. The part should not function apart; that is idiocy. And whenever we expect, we become idiotic.

The really intelligent person lives without expectations, then all that happens is a fulfilment. Then whatsoever happens brings great contentment, it is a gift from god. Because you had not expected anything there is no question of being frustrated. Because you had not expected anything there is every reason to be grateful.

And when gratitude arises, prayer is born.

Almasto means one who lives utterly in the present, having no desires for the future, no worries from the past, one who lives moment to moment, care-free, worry-less, in a kind of deep at-one-ment with existence. And that at-one-ment brings great intoxication, great joy, a maddening joy. Unless it is achieved a man has not really lived. Unless it is achieved a man has missed the opportunity.

That’s what Jesus means when he says to his disciples: Look at the lilies in the field. They think not, they desire not, they are utterly herenow. Look at their beauty, look at their immense joy. They don’t have any riches, they don’t have any power, yet the poor flowers of lilies are far richer than the richest man. Jesus says: Even Solomon, attired in all his grandeur, was not so beautiful as these poor flowers of lilies.

And the secret is simple. The secret is: except for man, everything lives in the present; except for man, everything is still part of paradise. Only man has lost track of it and has become deeply miserable. The past brings misery, the future brings misery.

To be in the present is to be in bliss. Almasto means to be in maddening bliss with existence, in a deep intoxication with all that is.

Madhu yamini means honeymoon. The honeymoon in ordinary life begins and ends; it cannot last forever. It brings a great meeting with the beloved, but soon it starts dissipating. Within one week or two weeks or three weeks at the most, that peak has disappeared; one settles on plain ground. It is natural: one cannot live on those heights forever. That excitement is too much; one cannot contain it forever.

But there is also another honeymoon – the honeymoon with god, with the real beloved – which begins but never ends. And it is not only that one remains on the peak forever; one goes on from one peak to another peak, higher and higher, and there is no end to it.

To relate with god is to be in an orgasmic joy without any end. It is infinite: it begins in time but it takes you beyond time. It is triggered first in time, but immediately you are part of eternity.

The honeymoon that happens between two human beings is beautiful because it gives you a glimpse of the ultimate honeymoon; but it is momentary. It is beautiful like a soap bubble. It reflects the sunrays, and the small soap bubble can become a small rainbow, but it is only for the moment; soon it is gone. It gives great joy but in the wake comes great misery too. The greater joy it brings, the greater misery it will bring.

It is because of this fact that in the past cunning and clever societies decided in favour of marriage instead of love; it was a very calculated move. Only when two persons fall in love do they have a honeymoon; it takes them to a great, romantic height, but then they have to descend and then it is very frustrating. The frustration can be avoided only if the peak is avoided.

So the cunning societies decided in favour of marriage: parents would decide and the marriage would be an arrangement. There would be no honeymoon peak, hence there would never be a fall from the peak. Societies which have opted for marriage, arranged marriage, are more stable: families are more established, divorce is a rare phenomenon.

In the modern world the pendulum has moved. Nobody who is really contemporary is in favour of an arranged marriage; it looks ugly. How can a marriage be arranged? Unless it happens, unless two persons start throbbing for each other, the marriage is just a social, economical arrangement –

ugly, mundane, immoral. The contemporary mind thinks marriage is immoral unless there is love, but then love brings its difficulties.

Whenever a society starts giving more importance to love, then the family is disturbed, the society becomes unstable, because once you have seen the peak you start expecting it, and it will never come again. Now the whole life will be just downhill. So sooner or later one starts thinking ’Why not fall in love again and have that peak?’ Then people start learning the trick of how to have many peaks in life, and the only way seems to be to have many more love relationships. They attain to a peak but intimacy disappears. These are the dilemmas: if intimacy has to be preserved, then peaks disappear; if peaks are allowed, intimacy disappears and marriage becomes a very shaky thing.

You cannot trust it, and unless you trust it you cannot get totally involved in it.

This will remain so, because deep down in the human heart the real search is for a honeymoon that goes on rising higher and higher. It is not possible in a human relationship, unless a human relationship turns into a divine relationship. That miracle also happens sometimes. It depends on there being two very very artistic persons, very aesthetic, sensitive, alert and aware. If two persons are really aware and alert, then the relationship is no more human; it is divine. And then the honeymoon can remain a constant flow; it can become a continuum.

Madhu yamini means the ultimate honeymoon, which certainly begins but never ends. Let sannyas be that honeymoon. Let sannyas be the beginning of a great passionate love for god.

Veet means beyond, dehen means the body. Man is in the body but is not the body. The body is beautiful, the body has to be loved and respected, but one has not to forget that one is not it, that one is a resident in the body. The body is a temple: it is a host to you but you are not part of it. The body is a contribution from the earth; you come from the sky. In you, as in every embodied being, the earth and the sky are meeting: it is a love affair of earth and sky.

The moment you die, nothing dies; it only appears that it does to others from the outside. The body falls back into the earth to have a little rest and the soul falls back into the sky to have a little rest.

Again and again the meeting will happen; in millions of forms the play will continue. It is an eternal occurrence.

But one can get very identified with the body; that creates misery. If one starts feeling ’I am the body’ then life becomes very heavy. Then small things disturb, small pains are too much: just a little hurt and one is disturbed and disoriented.

A little distance is needed between you and your body. That distance is created by being aware of the fact ’I am not the body, I cannot be the body. I am conscious of it, so it is an object of my consciousness, and whatsoever is an object of my consciousness cannot be my consciousness.

The consciousness is watching, witnessing, and whatsoever is witnessed is separate.’

As this experience deepens in you, miseries start disappearing and evaporating. Then pain and pleasure are almost alike, then success and failure are the same, then life and death are not different. Then one has no choice, one lives in a cool choicelessness. In that cool choicelessness god descends. That has been the search of all the religions, that cool choicelessness. In India we call it samadhi, in Japan they call it satori; Christian mystics have called it ecstasy.

The word ’ecstasy’ is very significant; it means standing out. Standing out of your own body, knowing that you are separate, is the meaning of ecstasy. And the moment it happens you are part of the lost paradise again, paradise is regained.

Nirala means unique, incomparable. Each individual is incomparable. God never repeats, he never makes two individuals alike. It is not only that two individuals are not alike; even two pebbles on the whole of the earth are not alike, two leaves are not alike. Individuality is written on everything. That is great respect from god towards whatsoever he creates.

Even great painters start copying; if they don’t copy others, they copy themselves.

It happened once: a man purchased a very famous painting of Picasso’s. The cost was millions of dollars. He wanted to be certain whether it was authentic or not, so he went to see Picasso and he said ’I am putting so much money into it, I want to know whether the painting is really yours or is it a fake?’ Picasso looked at the painting and said ’It is a fake.’ The woman who was living with Picasso in those days, his girlfriend, said ’It is not! You painted it and I was present.’

Picasso said ’That’s true, that I painted it, but it is fake because I was simply copying one of my own paintings. Although I have painted it, it is not authentic. It is a Picasso painting, but whether I copy somebody else or I copy myself, it makes no difference: it is not original, it is an imitation.’

God never copies, not even himself; that quality is nirala. Everything in existence is unique, incomparable. This is god’s love, his respect to his creation, and if we understand this then great respect and great love arise towards oneself and all self-condemnation disappears. And that is one of the most fundamental things for a sannyasin to understand: no self-condemnation, no guilt.

That does not mean that one has to become egoistic. There is nothing to become egoistic about either, because you are not superior to anybody, nor are you inferior to anybody; you are simply yourself. There is no possibility of comparison. When comparison is impossible there is no question of inferiority or superiority. And if superiority and inferiority can disappear from the world, we will have a very healthy world. It is a very sick and sickening world. Everybody is comparing, and all comparison is ugly, violent. If it gives you the idea of superiority, it is egoistic. If it gives you the idea of inferiority, it makes you ill at ease. In both the ways it is dangerous. Comparison is a double-edged sword: it cuts both ways. It has to be dropped! You are just yourself and everybody else is also the same.

Suddenly a totally different world opens up where each thing is so unique that nothing can ever be boring. When things are similar, they are boring. The world is such an enchanting phenomenon because nothing is ever repeated – each moment is unique, each event is unique – and because it will never be repeated, live it totally! Once gone, it is gone forever.

Pari means transcendental, gyan means knowing transcendental knowing. The ordinary knowledge consists of information about objects. The ordinary knowledge is objective: it knows something outside yourself. You go on knowing many things except yourself; you yourself remain in darkness.

Your light illuminates everything around you except yourself – the darkness underneath the lamp.

And one can know everything about the world yet if one has not known oneself all that knowledge is futile, meaningless.

Parigyan means to know oneself, to know the knower. To know the known is ordinary knowledge; to know the knower is transcendental knowledge. Self-knowledge is liberating because it brings to your vision your own reality, which is eternal, immortal, timeless, deathless. And once you have known your own truth of being, all fear disappears and all suffering disappears, because now you know that you are beyond all suffering, all fear, all pain: you are a transcendence. You are always a witness.

If there is suffering, you are the witness of it. If death is happening, you are the witness of it. And the witness always remains a witness: whatsoever happens makes no difference to the witness; the witness remains untouched. The virginity of the witness can never be lost, its innocence is absolute.

To know that witness is the real knowledge.

Socrates says ’Know thyself’ – he is talking about parigyan.

[A sannyasin says: When I become a little bit more silent inside. At that moment I feel tears coming up and I feel a lot of sadness there... When I do a meditation or reading your books or listening to your lecture it happens.]

You have to allow it and go deeply into it. Don’t label it as sadness. That labelling will prevent you from going deeper into it, because in calling it sadness you have already condemned it, and when we condemn something we cannot go deep into it. We have already shrunk back, we have already decided that this is not something good. So don’t label it, don’t give it a name at all, and you will be surprised: it is a beautiful space, just your interpretation is wrong. It is a beautiful space. It is an overflowing emotion, and it is good. It will relax you and it will take many many things off your heart which are burdening it. Those tears are part of an unburdening, and if you don’t call it sadness, soon you will learn what it is: it is a new kind of silence that you have not known before.

It looks sad because there is no excitement in it, and that’s what we call sadness. When there is some excitement we are happy and we think things are happening. When nothing is happening and the excitement is not there and we are not occupied, we think we are sad. That’s how we have experienced sadness.

Now this is a totally new phenomenon. Something is happening but it is not an excitement, it is not feverish. It is not a kind of occupation. Something is happening, and it is so new that you cannot categorise it. So don’t categorise at all; just watch what it is and go into it.

If in reading my books it comes, close the book. Let tears flow, enjoy, help them, and whatsoever is happening, receive it as a gift from god. And you will be surprised: it will give you such depth and such perception as you have not ever known before. It will keep your eyes so clean, so clear – and not only the physical eyes but the spiritual eyes too – that you will start seeing deeply into things.

Things will become transparent to you, people will become transparent. And soon you will see that this is not sadness but silence.

Silence and sadness have one thing in common, that’s why the misunderstanding arises; that common thing is depth. The depth that happens in sadness, happens in silence, but sadness is a negative state and silence is a positive state; that is the difference, and that is a great difference.

It is like sleep and samadhi. Patanjali says that samadhi is exactly like deep sleep, with only one difference: sleep is negative, samadhi is positive. One thing is similar in both: that the ego disappears. And one thing is dissimilar: that in sleep with the ego disappearing, consciousness also disappears. In samadhi the ego disappears but the consciousness remains.

Exactly like that, silence and sadness have one thing in common: both have depth, but the depth of sadness is negative and the depth of silence is positive. That difference you will know only if you go into it. If, from the very beginning, you say ’This is sadness’ you have cut yourself off from the energy that was arising.

And remember this, not only about sadness and silence but about everything that is going to happen; many more things are going to happen: never label. Whenever something new happens the mind tends to categorise it according to some old category. It wants to pigeon-hole it somewhere. The mind is very worried; unless something is pigeon-holed the mind feels uneasy. Once the mind can label it everything is okay. Then the mind thinks ’I have known’ and in fact, because of this tendency, we go on missing knowing many things.

Before anything is known, the mind immediately jumps in and labels it. You see a rose flower and the mind says ’Beautiful’: finished! The word ’beautiful’ is not the experience of beauty. And you are only using a cliche. You have heard it so many times – that the rose flower is beautiful – so you are repeating it. It is just a tape in your head, nothing else. Your heart is not moved by the rose; you are not a participant in the beauty, in the presence of the rose. In fact you have avoided the rose by labelling it. By labelling you think you are finished; now what more is there? The rose is beautiful, and your word ’beautiful’ is empty.

Forget the word and look into the presence of the flower. Don’t say what it is: go into what it is.

Go into that which is and then let the flower say something to your heart, impart something to your heart, and then you will experience beauty. And when you experience beauty, you will stop using the word, because the experience is so big and the word is so inadequate that is falsifies.

Go into it, make it a meditation.... And come back!

[A sannyasin says: We really enjoyed working for you in Holland but now I’m back here, when I just have to be, I keep falling into all kinds of black holes and feel a lot of fear in me.]

First do a few individual sessions – Shiatsu, Hypnosis, Alexander then do Zazen, Awareness, and Leela.

These holes that you are feeling, black holes, you have been avoiding for a long time. They are there, and when you remain occupied, intensely occupied, you need not encounter them, but when you are unoccupied you are bound to encounter them.

This time don’t repress them. When they come, make it a point to go into that deep darkness, into that black hole. And if you allow yourself to go into a black hole it becomes a white hole. It all depends on your going or not going. Whatsoever you avoid becomes your enemy and whatsoever you accept totally becomes your friend. Black holes can easily be transformed into white holes.

Now even physicists have discovered this phenomenon, that what is thought to be a black hole is only one side of the phenomenon; the other side is a white hole. This is a very new hypothesis that is becoming more and more significant every day.

When for the first time black holes were contemplated on, discovered, it was very frightening. In a black hole everything collapses. That’s what the astronomers say, that if the earth goes into a black hole it will simply collapse and disappear. A black hole is the greatest destructive force possible in existence, and once anything enters it, it cannot come out. It reduces everything to nothing. But soon astronomers became aware of another phenomenon, that from the other side it is the white hole – because every destructive energy is bound to have a creative aspect to it; the other side of the coin. So if the earth enters a black hole and collapses, disappears, this is a death; but from the other side the earth will appear again, fresh, young, revitalised – a resurrection. So each black hole is also a white hole, even in the world of physics.

As far as my experience goes about human consciousness this is absolutely true. I don’t know whether in physics it is true or still only a hypothesis, but the experience of human consciousness is absolutely clear about it. If you avoid something it becomes a black hole, it becomes destructive.

Because you don’t want to face it, and you have to face it sometimes, it is a very shattering experience when you have to face it. It impinges upon you with vengeance and you start avoiding it again; in that very avoiding you are creating it.

This time don’t avoid it. Go into it, disappear into it, let it overpower you, and from the other side you will come out resurrected. And then you will wait for the black holes to come, because now you know that each black hole has a silver lining to it and if you can go into it, it is tremendously creative.

It is chaos from one side and cosmos from another side.

Once you have learned it, then it is a joy to be crucified. If resurrection is certain, it is a joy to be crucified. You get rid of all that is rotten and you come out fresh, young, and innocent. Try it! This time don’t avoid it.

CHAPTER 25

26 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, bhadrena means grace. There are things which man can achieve by his own efforts and there are things which he can never achieve by his own efforts. The things that man cannot achieve by his own efforts are the really valuable things. The things that man can achieve will be lost sooner or later, death will take them away; they are momentary. Man’s efforts cannot give birth to the eternal: man can manufacture only momentary soap bubbles. They may look very significant for the time being, but they are only for the time being. And out of them richness is not born. One simply deceives oneself that one is rich; one remains poor. They create a facade, but if you look behind it there is just a helpless human being – empty, hollow.

The things that cannot be created by man are really valuable: love, prayer, truth. They all come through god’s grace. One needs to be ready to receive them, that’s all. One has to be on the receiving end, prepared, ready, open. Man can do only one thing about great things, etemal things, and that is to remain in a state of welcome. Then something starts descending which no death can take away. And that is real richness: you will carry it beyond the body, it will be with you forever.

That is the meaning of your name: think of things which man cannot create, think of things which only god can give as gifts, and think of how to receive them.

Deva means divine, pujano means prayer. There is a prayer that cannot be leamed, and that is the true prayer. The prayer that can be learned will be Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, but it will not be true prayer. The prayer that can be learned will not arrive out of your own being; it will be imposed from the outside. Your parents, your teachers, the church, will impose it on you, and anything imposed is always false and remains false.

The real has to arise, not be imposed; the real has to be expressed. It has to be your own. Millions of people are praying every day, yet their prayer has no meaning; it is a formal gesture. They have been taught, they have become afraid, they have become greedy; they pray. They pray out of fear, they pray out of greed; but real prayer arises out of love, it has no concern with fear or greed.

So drop all prayers that you have learned. That is the first step, the negative step; negate all that you have leamed about prayer and then start watching life. Sometimes the sky is full of stars. Lie down on the ground and look at the stars and wait. Sometimes lie down on the earth, your hands spread as if the earth is your mother – it is – and feel the earth. Sitting by the side of the tree, just feel the presence of the tree, and one day you will be surprised: prayer is arising. You will feel like kneeling down on the earth, you will feel like saying something to existence. And when you say something on your own, whatsoever it is, it has tremendous value. The dialogue has started; now you are in communion with god.

That prayer will never be a flxed thing that you can do at a particular time; it will come any time. It may not come for a few days and then suddenly one day it is there. But don’t falsify it, don’t try to bring it; just wait. Whenever it comes, go into it. If it doesn’t come, wait, wait for the right moment; it will come.

Slowly slowly you will go deeper and deeper into real prayer, and that real prayer transforms, enlightens. And then god is not just a theory; then it starts becoming your experience. Then your prayer is no more a monologue as it is ordinarily; it becomes a dialogue. You know for certain that there is a response from the other side. It is not only that you are saying something: you will start hearing something also. And when prayer becomes not only saying but hearing too, you have arrived.

That is the meaning of deva pujano.

Pari means absolute, pumo means perfect absolutely perfect. Existence is absolutely perfect as it is, it needs no improvement, and each being is as perfect as he can ever be. All that is needed is the recognition of the fact, a kind of awareness and respect for the fact. Man is perfect, just as trees and stars are perfect, but he is asleep, not aware, not aware of the truth. And in that sleep we go on planning how to improve, how to be this and how to be that, and we get into unnecessary troubles.

All our efforts are like putting legs on a snake. Then life becomes very miserable, unnecessarily miserable.

Sannyas means simply one thing: a declaration of ’I am perfectly good as I am,’ and a great acceptance, a great self-respect, dropping all ideals and desires to be somebody or somebody else, and just living moment to moment the simple, ordinary life. And slowly slowly, a clarity arises that nothing has ever been missing. From the very beginning things are perfect.

Everybody is a Buddha, just asleep, dreaming that he is not. One need not become a Buddha; all that is needed is a little shaking so that one wakes up. And that’s what I am doing here: a little shaking. You are it already – you just have to be shocked a little bit, shaken a little bit, so you become aware of who you are. And that awareness is liberation.

The moment it dawns in your consciousness ’I am already at home; there is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve,’ each moment becomes a celebration. It is bound to become, because all the energy that was involved in desiring, ideals, reaching – that ambitious mind – all that energy is released.

Now that energy cannot do anything except sing, dance, laugh, cry, love, pray. What else is left?

There is no future left, and when there is only present left, life becomes utterly intense because the whole energy moves into the present moment. Life becomes aflame and one lives at the optimum.

Ordinarily we are living at the minimum, and the reason is that we are hoping for a better future, in this life or maybe in the next life, here or maybe in paradise, but all our utopias are in the future. And my whole message is: we are in paradise. This very earth, the paradise, and this very body, the Buddha. That is the meaning of your name.

CHAPTER 26

27 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Manava means a real human being. There are millions of human beings on the earth but it is very difficult to find a real human being. The humanity of the millions is just an appearance; in truth it doesn’t exist, it is only a facade, a mask. Deep down they have not yet grown to be human.

Physiologically they are human beings, but not yet psychologically. And to be spiritually a human being is a far-away thing. The way the society exists, it does not allow anybody to become a real, authentic human being. It creates false, phony people, it needs false and phony people; it is afraid of the real man.

The real man will be constantly in rebellion against all that is wrong, against all that is inhuman, against all that is rotten, against all that is authoritarian. He will be basically a revolutionary. He will not yield to any submission forced upon him. Of course he will be able to surrender in love but he will not surrender without love. He will not be available for anybody to make him a slave; he will be a master of his own being. If he decides to surrender, that’s a totally different affair, but nobody can force him into submission, nobody can force him into any sacrifice. Not that he is afraid of sacrifice, he can sacrifice all, but that sacrifice has to be his own choice.

He will not be part of the crowd; he will have some authentic individuality. He cannot follow the herd, the mob. He will be so conscious, so alert, that he will be alone; he will have to travel the path alone.

His will be the flight from the alone to the alone. Not that he will be against people – he will love people, he will help people in every way – but he will not depend on people.

The ordinary so-called human being is always dependent on the crowd. He cannot exist on his own, he is afraid to be on his own. He has no will of his own, no intelligence of his own. He needs somebody else to command him: he is ready to obey. He is always in search of father figures, people who are authoritative; then he feels at ease. Then somebody else takes the responsibility of deciding, of ordering; now he is no more responsible. The real human being is a responsible being.

He wills, he chooses, and he takes the whole responsibility on his own shoulders.

The society does not allow that type. It allows humanoids, not human beings. It allows machines, not men. And this whole society is in a self-perpetuating mechanism: the parents were reduced into phony beings by their parents; they will reduce their children into phony beings. Then the school, from the kindergarten to the college, is part of the established society: they will go on reducing one.

By the time a person comes out of the university he is efficient, a functionary, but not a human being at all. He has been reduced to a biocomputer. And those who rebel, they fall apart; they are not accepted by the mainstream. The university and the whole education system exist as a screening system. It goes on dropping people who cannot be totally reduced to machines. They go on falling off, they become dropouts, they are forced to be dropouts.

The highest educational degrees are attained by those who are ready to sell their souls totally, and those are the people who become the dominant figures in society. They will be the administrators and the politicians and the governors and the commanders. They will be in all the key positions in the society and again they will start doing the same trip to other people. It is a self-perpetuance, a self perpetuating, vicious circle. Only very few people have been able to escape.

Sannyas is an escape from this self-perpetuating hell. It is a declaration of ’I am no more a slave. I take all responsibility. From this moment I live my whole life, whatsoever the consequences. If I have to suffer, I will suffer, but I will suffer only for my own individuality, not for anything else.’ Then even suffering is beautiful, because then suffering is out of freedom, and when suffering is out of freedom it brings more and more freedom.

This is the meaning of manava: a real human being, an authentic human being.

Atten means one who has a true self. People have only egos. The ego is a substitute self. Because we are not aware of the true self, we create the ego; it is a make-believe. Because we cannot live without the centre we have to invent a false centre.

There are two possibilities: either know the true centre or create a false centre. The society helps the false centre because the false person can easily be dominated – not only can he be easily dominated: he seeks domination. He is constantly in search of somebody to dominate him. Without being dominated he does not feel good, because only when he is dominated does he have a certain feeling of ’I am.’ When he is fulfilling somebody’s order, he feels ’I have some worth.’ His worth, his life, all are borrowed. He has no meaning in his life on his own; somebody else has to give meaning to him.

He becomes part of a church, then he feels good: he is a Christian, and Christianity gives him at least a false feeling of meaning. Or he becomes a Communist and the great crowd of Communists helps him to feel that he is doing something important. He cannot stand alone; and that is the whole strategy of the society: it does not allow you to stand on your own. It cripples you, from the very beginning it makes you dependent on crutches. And the best way to do it is not to allow you to become aware of your true self.

Instead of the true self it simply gives you a toy called the ego. It supports the ego tremendously; the society praises the ego, nourishes it. If you follow the dictates of the society in every possible way you will be respected, and respectability is nothing but a food for the ego. If you don’t follow the dictates of the society you will be disrespected. That is punishing your ego, keeping it starved; and it is very difficult to live without a centre, so one is ready to fulfil all kinds of demands rational, irrational.

My effort here is to help you to drop this false entity called the ego. Dropping it is half of the work, and the other half is easier: to make you aware of your true self. Once the false is seen as false, it is not very difficult to see the true as true. That true self is atten.

The ego is a created thing, hence it has to die. The true self was before you were born and will be there after you are gone, dead. The true self does not exist only between birth and death. On the contrary, birth and death are just episodes in the long, eternal journey of the true self. And this is not the only birth; many have happened before and many may happen afterwards.

The moment one becomes aware of one’s true centre, one becomes aware of eternity, and to know eternity is to know god. Hence, the true self is the door to god.

Kavisho means poetry. Poetry is the bridge between this world and that. Poetry to me is not only literature: it is a deep meditation.

These three words have to be remembered: the first is science – it concerns itself only with this world; the second word is religion it concerns itself with the other, the transcendental world; and between the two is the world of poetry, art, aesthetics.

Poetry has its roots in the earth and its branches in the sky; it bridges science and religion. Those who miss the world of poetry remain unbridged, remain in a kind of split. And when I use the word

’poetry’ it not only includes poetry, it includes all that is poetic: music, dance, sculpture, painting.

Painting is poetry with colour. Dance is poetry with body gestures. Music is poetry with sound, just as poetry is poetry with words. Poetry is all-inclusive. It is equivalent to the world of aesthetics, beauty.

This has been one of the most dangerous things that happened in the past, that religion became unpoetic, and the same fallacy is being repeated by modern science: modern science is also very unpoetic. And if religion is unpoetic and science is unpoetic then there can be no bridge between these two. Then the rift will become bigger and bigger, and the rift is dangerous.

To know only this world is to live without meaning. Then you know only the body; you never become aware of the spirit. Then the invisible becomes non-existential. and the visible cannot have meaning without the invisible. The visible gets the meaning through the invisible. When you become aware of the invisible through the visible, when the visible is transparent and gives you glimpses of the invisible, there is meaning and there is joy, and life becomes significant only through that joy.

Religion has insisted on being non-poetic. It became ghost-like, a spirit without a body, a tree without roots. A tree without roots cannot live long; and the tree only with roots is meaningless. And that’s what has happened: science is a tree with only roots. It denies all flowers, it does not believe in flowers and fragrances. It is only roots; that’s why science has something ugly in it. Roots are ugly.

They live in the darkness of the earth. They hide themselves like thieves; they cannot come into the open.

And religion became a tree without roots. Of course a tree without roots is dead: no flowers will come to it, no birds will make their nests on it; it will have no foliage, no juice will flow through it. So all the churches are like cemeteries, dead; and science is creating technology, just ugly roots with no significance. It is giving great speed to man but no destiny, no destination. It is providing great facilities but man is dying. Who is going to use those facilities? It has released great power, but man is not mature enough to use it. And the only problem that I see is that poetry has disappeared: it is neither accepted by science nor acceptable to religion; the bridge is broken.

My sannyasins have to become poets so that they can bridge science and religion, East and West, body and soul, man and woman; so that they can bridge all polarities. And whenever a polarity is bridged, great orgasmic ecstasies are released. That is the meaning of kavisho.

Rahasyo means in the mysterious. Life is totally mysterious. All that we know about it is just superficial, and the more we know about it the more it becomes clear that it is superficial. The depth of life remains not only unknown but unknowable.

The modern mind is too full of knowledge and has fallen into a state of non-wondering. It knows so much that it feels that now no mystery is left in life. This knowledgeability is destroying all possibilities of growth, because a man grows only when he starts communing with the mysteries of existence. If there is no mystery, then suddenly you are separate from existence; there is no possibility of relating.

And if one thinks that he knows everything. automatically he becomes bored, dull, unintelligent. That is what is happening all over the world: people are becoming more and more bored, but they don’t see why they are becoming so bored. It is their so-called knowledge that is making them bored: the wonder has been destroyed by knowledge.

Children are never bored because they are innocent, ignorant. Then each and every thing is mysterious for them; that’s why they ask a thousand and one questions. The more people are educated, knowledgeable, the more you see when you look into their eyes that they are dull, they have no spark; they are dragging themselves somehow. In their life no spring ever comes, no flowers bloom, no birds sing. This is what hell is all about; and we have created it through so much knowledge. Through great endeavour, perseverance, persistence, man has created knowledge and knowledge has created hell.

My sannyasins have to learn one thing: to unlearn all that they have learned and to become children again. Then the ordinary tree is suddenly a surprise. A seed dying into the soil and two leaves popping up is a miracle. A dewdrop slipping on the grass leaf is great poetry. Then the whole of life becomes so permeated with mystery – how can one remain bored?

To encounter mystery is to allow your intelligence to function. The more mystery there is, the more intelligence functions, the more you become sharp, alert, aware, because there is so much happening all around and one would not like to miss anything. Then life takes on intensity, life becomes a passionate love affair, and in that passionate love affair god is found.

God is not found in the temples and the mosques and the churches. God is found when your heart is full of wonder, utterly nude of all knowledge and absolutely alert to the mysterious, the miraculous.

God is another name for the mysterious, for the miraculous. And wonder is worship: to be in a state of constant wonder is the religious quality.

Imbibe that quality and start living from this moment in wonder: allow surprises to happen again, ask questions again, start exploring things. Don’t be satisfied with the so-called knowledge that the society has given to you it is all humbug!

Raso means dancing with the beloved, a dance with the divine. It is one of the most beautiful experiences. It can be created. First start dancing with friends, with lovers, but always remember that the other is divine, is god. Don’t forget that; that remembrance has to be kept.

The physical body of the other is there, but that is insignificant. Remember you are dancing with the spirit of the other. Let it become more and more of a non-physical communion. Once this has settled there is no need for the other; you can dance alone with the invisible god. That is raso.

In fact the whole of human life is nothing but a stepping stone to the divine. Love a man or a woman, but remember it is just a stepping stone to love god. Talk to friends but remember it is just a step towards a communion, a communication, with god.

Each act of your life has to be made sacred in this way. This is what sannyas is all about.

Kaaba is the sacred place of the Mohammedans. The outward thing is just a ritual, but there is an inward, inner mystery in it.

All the religions in the past created a few sacred places for people to gather; there are two parts to those sacred places. One is for the ordinary, those who come just to fulfil a ritual that their religion demands. The other is for the real seekers so that they can find masters there. Masters gather together. It would be difficult for seekers to search for the masters all over the earth; this is easier for them. The masters can be available in one place, and all kinds of masters, so that each seeker can find his type with whom he can fall in deep harmony. That has continued in Kaaba.

The ordinary Mohammedan simply goes there to worship the stone but the real seeker goes there to find a real Sufi master. And from all over the world, each year Sufi masters gather there. So all the masters available at a certain time are present in one place, and the seeker can go from one to the other and can feel where he fits. Wherever he can feel love arising in his heart, he has found the man who will take him to the other shore.

[Kutira] It means a home of love, a house of love, a temple of love. Without love the temple is empty, the deity is missing. Unless love arrives there is no fulfilment. It is only through love that for the first time you feel full, not only full but overflowing. Love is the name of god, and you have to become the host. All preparation is nothing but preparation for becoming a host so that god can be a guest in you.

So watch everything that you do to see whether it is going to help you to invite god or it is going to hinder you; let that be the constant criterion. And you will see great changes happening in you: a few things will start dropping because you will be able to see that if these things continue, god cannot happen. God cannot happen in an angry state of mind, god cannot happen when your mind is full of the poison of hate. God cannot happen when you live in greed, god cannot happen when you live in ambition. God can happen only when the mind is so pure that there is no ambition. no desire, no greed, no anger – in that innocence.

So all that helps you to invite god, do it! Do it very deliberately, consciously; do it totally and fully.

And whatsoever will become a hindrance, stop co-operating with it. Even when it happens – anger comes – don’t co-operate. Let it be there like a smoke around you, but without your co-operation soon it will disappear on its own. If greed arises, watch. If the ego arises, remember ’This is not my real self.’

This way, slowly slowly, all that hinders is eliminated and all that helps is created. One day the miracle happens: one becomes a temple of god, a temple of love.

[A sannyasin says: I wanted to ask you if you would be with me even though I fail a lot and I get scared and my awareness slips.]

I will be with you; that is not the question. I am unconditionally with my sannyasins – in their fear and their doubt and their dark moments, it doesn’t matter.

[Prem Neeto] It means love virtue. Virtue that arises out of love is true virtue. Virtue that is imposed by others and has not arisen out of your heart is a pseudo thing. Only love is the law, the fundamental law, to be lived. All other laws drive people astray from their natural being: love brings you home. There is no higher law than love, so love is the true foundation of morality – not codes, not commandments.

People go on following what is written in the Bible and in the Geeta; they only become pretenders.

Listen to your own heart and follow it. Wherever it leads it is good; it cannot lead you astray. It is infallibly moving towards god.

[A sannyasin says: I was feeling very high and excited in the first group that I did, and in the last groups that I’ve done, I felt very low and I’ve come out of them feeling very low. I feel more defensive and more closed than when I arrived.]

That excitement was just imaginary; that’s why it wore out. This is the truth, this is the truth about yourself, but you were pretending for a long time and you imposed a certain pattern upon yourself and had started believing it.

My groups are not meant to make you more enthusiastic, more energetic, more euphoric. They are simply meant to make you aware of whatsoever is true in you. Now this is a true sadness, and out of a true sadness something is possible, because only through truth does growth happen. It does not matter what the truth is, but only through the truth is growth possible.

It may not be so exciting, and you may be feeling dull and low and lost, but it is truer. You were living in a dream. Now your dream is shattered by the groups because they have been pulling you down to the earth, and they have succeeded.

It is difficult to drop a beautiful dream. If you are seeing a beautiful dream and you are moving with beautiful people in golden palaces and all that, and suddenly you are awakened, you will feel very very sad. But that which is known when you are awake is truth, and only truth can become a right foundation for a life.

So please don’t create your old enthusiasm and excitement again; that was false. And I am not against excitement or against enthusiasm, but I am for a true ecstasy. Excitement is a poor substitute for ecstasy. Ecstasy arises only when you have started living your authentic being. If it is sad at this moment, then it is perfectly good; accept it and be sad. And you will be surprised that through accepting the sadness, sadness disappears.

Now, there are two ways to let the sadness disappear. One is to accept it, then ecstasy will arise.

The other is to forget about it, to repress it, to avoid it, to escape from it, and to create some kind of excitement. That excitement will be untrue; the sadness will remain there and you will have to come to terms with it sooner or later. It is better to do it sooner...

... but do only one thing: accept this. Within two, three weeks, out of deep acceptance it will disappear, and then for the first time you will see something totally new, which is blissful but which you cannot call feverish excitement. It is very silent and very cool.

Ecstasy is very silent and very cool: excitement is feverish, it is a kind of delirium. And in a delirium you can enjoy many things which are not there! You have been in a delirium. And these people really worked hard on you and they have pulled you down to the earth. Now that’s why you are feeling lost: you were flying with the clouds and suddenly those clouds have gone and you don’t know how to create those clouds again. Don’t create them; you will be able to: if you were able to before, you will be able to again. Avoid that temptation.

Out of this sadness something really beautiful will grow. Let this sadness become manure for an ecstasy to come. But a little patience will be needed. Just accept it. Cry, weep, feel sad, go deeply into it, as deeply as you can. Touch the bottom rock of this sadness, and from that bottom rock, you will start rising upwards. That will be a totally new experience, and not only an experience but a transformation too.

[Prashant] It means bliss and peace, profound bliss and profound peace. They are two aspects of one energy: on one side it is bliss, on another side it is peace. If bliss is without peace it is false; beware of it. If peace is without bliss, it is false; beware of it too! They are true only when they are together; that is the criterion of their truth. And if something is false they can never be together, remember.

So just watch. Whenever you are feeling blissful, watch and see whether a peace is also arising by the side of it. And whenever you are feeling peaceful, watch and see whether bliss is arising by the side of it. If they are both together, feel blessed and go deeper into it.

Start from either, the other will follow. So sometimes start with peace – that is the path of meditation; and sometimes start with bliss – that is the path of love. When in love, create bliss and let peace follow. When alone, meditating, let peace arise and bliss follow.

CHAPTER 27

28 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means god, prarthi means in prayer. Prayer is not something that you do or that you can do: it is something in which you can be. It is a state of being, not a state of doing. Prayer simply means in deep communion with existence. It is not a dialogue, it is not a verbal communiCation; it is non-verbal. It is just energy meeting with energy. It is just a dewdrop slipping into the ocean. It is a moment when one drops separation from existence. The moment you drop separation, you are in the state of prayer. And the state of prayer transforms you into the state of a god; you are no more a human being.

To be human, separation is needed; to be divine, non-separation is a must. And unless we become divine we can never be at ease, at home, because the separation is so arbitrary that one has to continuously maintain it; still it goes on slipping out of your hands. It is so false that one has to pour much energy and work into it; only then can it be maintained, otherwise it disappears.

The real is that which needs no effort. The unreal is that which needs all kinds of efforts and props to support it. Separation is something unreal; it is not, in fact, there. It is a make-believe. We believe that we are separate so we feel that we are separate, but even if we go on believing that we are separate, we are not separate; we remain one with existence. Whenever you drop your make-believe suddenly you are one with the whole, and that sudden meeting is prayer.

It has nothing to do with the prayer that is taught in the churches and the temples; that is a verbal communication. And god knows no language so you are unnecessarily wasting your time. He cannot understand what you say: he can only understand what you are. That is the only language that he understands, the language of being. So prayer is not something to be done but something to be. It is a state of immense love for existence.

Veet means beyond, mayo means illusion. The mind lives in illusions. The mind is nothing but all the illusions accumulated in you illusions as memories, illusions as imagination, illusions as dreams, hopes, desires. And in the very centre of all these illusions is the illusion of ’I am’, the ego. That is the very root, the central illusion, and all other illusions move around it. They support it, they feed it, they are supported by it and they are fed by it; it is a mutual arrangement. And between these two, you and your reality are utterly lost.

Meditation simply means getting out of this illusory state – of dreams, desires, past, future – and just being in the moment that surrounds you. Just to be utterly in the moment, with no thought, is to be in reality. It takes a little effort to drop out of the illusions because we have lived in those illusions for so long; it has become almost habitual, a second nature. It also takes a little effort to get out of those illusions because we have invested in them very much. They are our hopes: it is through them that we go on living, prolonging. To drop them means to drop the future, to drop all hopes; and we don’t know how to live in the present without hope.

That is the whole art of sannyas: to live in the present and without hope. And remember, living without hope does not mean living hopelessly. Living without hope simply means that the present is so tremendously beautiful, who cares about the future? Who bothers about it? Not that one is living in despair and hopelessness, but that one is so fulfilled in the present that there is no space left to think about the future.

The person who lives in hopelessness lives an empty life. He does not know what the present is, and the future has disappeared. He was only living for the future: the carrot that goes on hanging there tomorrow and which never arrives. One goes on working hard to catch the carrot; because it is never caught, one goes on running after it. Ultimately death takes you over, and you have not arrived. This is the story of millions of people: they live in hope without any fulfillment ever, and they die unfulfilled.

To live without hope simply means to live herenow knowing that there is no tomorrow; it is always today. And then a totally different kind of life starts getting crystallised in you. It is so utterly joyous that one does not think of the past and one does not think of the future.

We think of the past and the future only because the present is very empty, because we don’t know how to live this moment. So either we run towards the past or we run towards the future, which is in a way the same. The past is no more, the future is not yet; both are nothings. Between these two nothings is this moment, and this moment is all.

Chetan means consciousness. Consciousness is the key, and if one understands how to become more and more conscious, nothing else is needed.

To become conscious one need not go

anywhere. To become conscious one has to live the ordinary life, as it is, with something added to it. From the outside it remains the same life; from the inside it becomes totally different, utterly different. You do the same things but with a new awareness. You bring the quality of awareness into your acts.

Eating, one can eat in an unconscious way; one can eat mechanically, as people do. They simply go on throwing things in and they are thinking a thousand and one thoughts. They may not be there at the table at all. Only physiologically are they there;. psychologically they may be roaming somewhere else on some other planet.

Unconsciousness means: whatsoever you are doing is not connected with your being. You are split: the body is doing one thing, you are doing something else. That is what unconsciousness is, a split. The body is eating and you are either in the past or in the future or somewhere else, thinking, planning, remembering. This is a split. This split has to be bridged, and the only way to bridge it is: become alert of what you are doing.

If you are eating then be there and let only eating happen; everything else has to be dropped for the moment. Be totally there as if the whole world has disappeared; you are focused. Eating is all when you are eating, and ’walking is all when you are walking. Listening is all when you are listening, and talking is all when you are talking. Then slowly slowly your body and your being are bridged, and whenever the body and being are bridged, a great grace arises. You can see in the person who has attained to this welding that he has the quality of presence, something solid, something crystallised.

Other people will look hollow compared with him, empty, shallow. He will have depth and he will be very transparent: you can see through and through. He will have a transparent self. There will be no clouds in him, no smoke; his flame will be without smoke. This is the man who comes to know god, life, love, and this is the man who attains to significance, splendour.

So let this be the key: whatsoever you are doing, go on bringing your consciousness to it again and again. It will slip again and again, that’s natural. Don’t be worried about it, don’t be troubled by it and don’t start feeling frustrated by it. It takes months, sometimes years, but it is worth it. And slowly slowly, for a few moments, it will start happening. Even those few moments will bring so much joy to you, more than you have ever known, even dreamt about. Even if for a single moment your body and being are welded, are in tune, you will see what-bliss means. You may not be able to tell anybody what it is, but you have tasted it. In that moment you fell into the ocean of god. In that moment you were showered on by divine energy.

Slowly slowly more and more moments will be coming and one day it happens that this becomes your very life. It becomes a crystallised thing.

That state is called enlightenment.

Anubodh means awareness. Man lives almost as if he is asleep. A great metaphysical sleep surrounds the earth. In the night we are asleep, in the day too; what we call waking is fake. Only once in a while has a person become awakened – a Buddha, a Christ, a Lao Tzu, otherwise people are somnambulists. Of course they can manage to do the daily routines of their life but that doing is just as a machine goes on doing things; the machine needs no awareness. That’s how man goes on doing things: without any awareness of what he is doing, why he is doing it, from where he is coming, to where he is going, why he is at all. Not even the most fundamental question has arisen in millions of people – ’Who am I?’ They ask a thousand and one questions, they collect much knowledge, but without ever asking the real question.

Awareness means becoming aware of all this situation. And the first question that a person has to ask is ’Who am I?’ and ask it so deeply that it penetrates like an arrow into the very heart, so that it goes to the very core. And once the arrow of questioning has reached to the very core of your being, a great fountain of life is released, a great fountain of light is released. Suddenly you see a fountain arising in you that you have never been aware of before: that is awareness.

Just as, if we go on digging in the earth a moment comes when water starts coming up, water wells up, in exactly the same way, if we go on digging deep inside our being, there are many layers of sleep, but if we go on digging.... And the best way to dig is to make your vital question, your quest:

’Who am I?’ This has to become your meditation. Whenever you are sitting silently ask ’Who am I?’

and don’t be satisfied by any answer given by the mind. The mind will say ’You know who you are your name, your address, your education, your family name.’ The mind may even become clever. It may start quoting scriptures, that you are the soul, that you are god-incarnate, and all that nonsense.

Go on shoving it aside. Unless you come to know who you are, no question, no answer, is of any help, no answer has to be accepted.

Because you have avoided all answers, there comes a moment when the question becomes so pure, that it is just a fire reaching to your very being. And once you have decided not to accept any parrot-like answers from the mind, this is going to happen. Out of that fire, that quest, great light is born, and it comes from your very centre. It does not come from the Bible, it doesn’t come from the Koran, it doesn’t come from the Geeta; it comes from your very own core. You can see it arising out of your own being; and truth liberates only when it is your own.

Gayano means a song, a beautiful song. Life ordinarily is not a song. It is deep down a cry, a scream, because it is pain, suffering, anguish. How can a song survive out of pain, suffering, misery?

The song can arise only when there is some experience of bliss in you. When you have touched something ecstatic, only then is the song born. The song is waiting there, but it will need to be triggered by some ecstasy. But instead of ecstasy there is only agony. People are living in hell.

They pretend they are not; they have to pretend, just to save face. They go on smiling on the outside but all those smiles are painted. They go on pretending, laughing, enjoying, and showing that they are living a real life, but they are trying to deceive others just as others are trying to deceive them. We are living in a very deceptive world where everybody is trying to deceive everybody and everybody is, deep down, suffering.

This deception has to be dropped, because this deception will not allow the song to be born in you.

One has to drop all masks; only then can the real face be discovered. And the real face is that of ecstasy. Man is born to be blissful – that is man’s intrinsic nature – but somehow we are never allowed to enter into our own being; the society goes on pulling us outwards.

The whole mechanism of the society is to keep you an extrovert. It creates great lust for things; that is a device to make an extrovert. It creates great ambition, for money, power, prestige; these are all just devices, strategies, to make your mind go outwards. And once you have learned the ways of going out, naturally you tend to forget the ways of going in. If you don’t ever go in those ways are lost. And ecstasy happens at the innermost core of your being.

Sannyas means creating paths again in your inner territory so that you can reach and know who you are. Once that fragrance is there, that experience is there, one’s life becomes an ecstatic song; then the whole of life is a song. Then whatsoever you do is singing, whatsoever you do is a dance.

My effort here is to create people who can dance, who can sing, who can love, who can celebrate, because I don’t see that there is any possibility of knowing god without becoming utterly ecstatic.

Ecstasy is the door to god, and people who have reached are the people who have danced the whole way, sung the whole way. The people who have reached have reached with great laughter and joy.

That is the meaning of gayano: a song is waiting there in your heart – you have to give birth to it.

And in giving birth to it, you will be born and your real life will start.

Deva means divine, islama means peace.

silence, stillness – divine peace.

Man has been

conditioned to always be in conflict: the body is fighting with the mind, the mind is fighting with the body. The whole past of humanity has been a constant conditioning to make man a split personality; and it has succeeded.

There was a reason for it: if a man is in constant conflict he becomes weak; that is the sure way to make man weak. Because he dissipates energy in fighting with himself, he cannot fight with anybody else. And that’s what the priests and the politicians needed: they wanted weak people who could be dominated easily, they wanted weaklings. They found a very psychological strategy. The strategy is to create a conflict in you so that you are always fighting with yourself and dissipating your energy, becoming weaker and weaker. And because you are divided, you can be ruled. ’Divide and rule’ –

that has been the fundamental policy of all the politicians and all the priests down the ages.

Now the time has come that man should come out of this whole stupid nonsense. The priests and the politicians are not going to help, because if man becomes one then there is no possibility for any priesthood to exist in the world. If man becomes one he will not need any leaders to lean upon.

He will be enough unto himself, he will be a light unto himself; he will not need guidance. That will destroy their whole business, and it has been really a great business; no other business can compete with it.

To attain to inner peace means drop all fighting with yourself, don’t condemn any part of your being.

Respect, love, and love all that you are, nothing excluded. Then only will there be peace, then there is bound to be peace, and in that peace you will become powerful. That peace will bring power; as conflict has brought weakness, that peace will give you strength. That peace will soon make you so powerful that you can rise above the law of necessity, cause and effect, and you can enter into the world of power and grace. That peace will make you a pool of power, overflowing, and that overflow of power is love!

Only a silent person can be a loving person, because only he has something to share and give. The man who is in conflict, how can he love? He is so tired, so exhausted, so spent; he has no more energy to share. Love is a luxury: you can share only when you have more than you need. You can share only when if you don’t share your own energy will become a burden on you. You have to share it, it has to be released. A peaceful person naturally becomes a loving person.

And the secret of becoming at home, at ease, is simple: stop fighting with yourself.

Try to

understand yourself rather than fighting with yourself. Fighting will bring you more and more defeat: understanding becomes a victory.

[A sannyasin says: In trusting myself I’ve found that I’m questioning a lot of things... and one is whether you’re my master.]

Whenever you want to drop me, you can! But that simply means that the trust you think is arising is not trust but only ego....

If it is trust, then it will make you more trusting of me. Trust cannot create doubt: trust only creates more trust. If the disciple attains to trust he becomes more grateful to the master, he trusts the master more. Trusting oneself never goes against the trust in the master. If it does then you are simply giving it a good name. It is just the ego asserting itself and pretending to be self-trust. Then all doubts will arise and everything will arise.

But if you enjoy it, that’s perfectly okay!...

If you are enjoying this trip that you call trust, it’s perfectly okay: enjoy it! There is no problem in it.

People have very absurd ideas. They think that somebody is destined to be their master, as if it is something fixed, preordained. If you are a disciple to me, I am your master; if you are not a disciple to me, I am not your master. Your disciplehood makes it happen. But people have very foolish ideas.

They go on asking me ’Are you my master?’ as if my being their master has nothing to do with their disciplehood!...

It all depends on the disciple. I am not here at all – to be your master or not to be your master.

And this way or that, both are perfectly okay with me. It is a question for you to decide whether you are a disciple or not. The question of whether I am your master or not should never be raised; that is a secondary thing. If you are a disciple, I am a master; if you are not a disciple, I am not. But the beginning has to happen in you. And disciplehood means trust, it means a tremendous love, the courage to surrender.

Because the ego obstructs all these things it can start playing the game of ’What is the need? Self-trust has arisen.’ But you can try your self-trust. Drop sannyas and try your self-trust, and see what happens with it. If something happens, very good; if you grow, very good. If you don’t grow, you can come back. There is no other way.

But you can try it! If you feel that something is arising in you and you can just be on your own, try it.

Don’t make any problem out of it. And if doubts arise. then whatsoever I am saying now will again be the same: you can doubt it also.

So I give you total freedom. A disciple has to be totally free. It is his decision to be with me and his decision not to be with me; I don’t enforce anything.

Just one thing I should make clear: the first time you take sannyas, it is one thing; the second time it will be difficult. I may not give it or you may have to earn it. The first time I give it with no conditions: the second time you have to earn it.

So think about it and you decide for yourself. Asking me is of no use. Asking me is of use only if you trust me, and then there is no point in asking. But remember one thing: if it is really trust arising in you, it will deepen your trust towards me; it cannot be against it. Otherwise it is just an ego-trip.

For example, if you are in love with somebody and great love arises in you for yourself, is it going to enhance your love with the other person or is it going to destroy it? It is going to enhance it, it will make it deeper, more intimate. In fact only the person who loves himself can love the other. If your love for yourself becomes a hindrance in the love for the other, that simply shows that it is nothing like love. It is just the ego asserting itself behind the name of love. This is the criterion. That criterion can be used in many ways and has to always be remembered, because the ego can go on playing many many games.

Self-love always helps you to love the other more. Self-trust always helps you to trust the other more. If the disciple trusts himself then great trust arises in the master. If it is not so, then something somewhere is fishy, something somewhere is wrong.

So think it over, and whichever way you decide is good. If you decide to remain a sannyasin, my blessings. If you decide not to be a sannyasin, my blessings. Good!

Anand means bliss, disha means direction, dimension – the direction of bliss or the dimension of bliss. Sannyas is a new dimension.

People live a two-dimensional life. Sannyas is a third dimension. When you live a two-dimensional life it is flat, it has no depth. Only the third dimension brings depth, and with the third dimension you become a trinity, something becomes whole inside.

A two-dimensional life is a false and phony life, it is superficial. For example, if you see a person you only see his face, his behaviour; you cannot see his being. His face is almost as if it is a mask. If you turn the mask around, behind it you will not find anything. People’s faces are almost like masks.

And this is the case because you have not even looked behind your own face, so how can you see behind somebody else’s face You have lived outwardly – sometimes going to the left and sometimes going to the right; the leftist and the rightist: those are two dimensions. For or against, those are two dimensions; love or hate, those are two dimensions.

There is a third dimension which is neither love nor hate, which is non-dual, which is only a choiceless awareness, which is neither rightist nor leftist, where you become just an observer of all that is happening, of all that you are doing. That observation is the direction of bliss, that awareness is the direction of bliss; and when you have started feeling your own depth, then you will see people in a different way, then you will see them also as three-dimensional beings. Now you know that behind the face there is a being, and your behaviour will change.

The person who has never known his own depth can be very cruel. For example, a person like Adolf Hitler – he can be very cruel, very violent. He can destroy millions of people very easily, with no conscience, with no repentance, because he sees only two-dimensional people – as if they are made of paper and there is no depth, there is no soul, as if they are only machines and there is nothing else. You need not be very compassionate to a machine, and if you destroy a machine you need not have a deep pain and anguish in your being. A machine is a machine; who cares about a machine? Adolf Hitler could burn millions of Jews because he himself never knew his own inner depth. So he could only see people as flat, two-dimensional beings who could be easily destroyed; nothing was at risk.

The world needs more and more three-dimensional people, then there will be less cruelty, less violence, less war.

And that’s what a sannyasin is all about: a three-dimensional being. That is the meaning of your name search for the third dimension, the depth. Look inwards more and more and find who you are there; and the day you have found your centre, you will be surprised: when you open your eyes, every person in the world has a centre. Not only people but trees and rocks and birds and animals, all have their own centres. Then this whole existence is three-dimensional.

To know existence as three-dimensional is to know the trinity of god. That is the meaning of the concept of trinity.

CHAPTER 28

29 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, dipa means an earthen lamp – a small lamp of love. Love’s small lamp is far more significant. far more powerful, than the whole darkness of hate, anger, greed. The darkness of the centuries is not so powerful, so potent, as just a small flame of love. Darkness has no power, it is impotent; in fact it does not exist, it only appears to exist. It is an absence. It is not the presence of something, it is the absence of light. The moment you bring light in, it simply disappears, it is not found at all. It cannot resist, it cannot say ’I have lived here for millions of years. How dare you, just a small lamp? I am not going to go.’ That is not possible.

A small lamp has to burn, has to be kindled, in the heart. The heart has all the potential to become light. We have not tried, we have not worked on the heart; otherwise it start radiating, glowing, it becomes aflame. All that has been so much of a problem simply disappears. One need not fight with greed, anger, possessiveness, jealousy, one need not fight. And those who fight with them will never conquer: they are fighting with darkness. You cannot fight with darkness you will be defeated.

All that is needed is to bring a light in. And this is something very strange, that the light is already there, just a little cleansing is needed. The light is there; it is only that the glass of the lamp is dark, it has not been cleaned for centuries. Clean the glass and the light is burning. That is your life –

it has to be there. You are alive, so light is there. You are alive, so consciousness is there, hidden behind a dark glass.

All meditation is nothing but cleansing the glass. Slowly slowly the light start coming out, slowly slowly the darkness is gone, and with darkness, all those problems.

Modern psychology tries to solve each single problem. That is meaningless. A single stroke and all the problems disappear, and that stroke is meditation. So never be concerned with individual problems; just a single experience is enough to destroy them all. Otherwise, if you struggle with anger you may succeed in conquering it, but then anger will start flowing in some other direction, from somewhere else.

Unless meditation happens, nothing happens. So that has to be kept in mind.

Divyam means divine. We are divine; we may know it, we may not. Even when we don’t know, we are divine. Even when we are fast asleep, lost in dreams, we are divine. It is not possible to take our divinity from us. The sinner is as divine as the saint. Divinity is our inalienable right, it is our very nature. To be at all is to be divine, to exist is to be divine.

But there is a great difference when you know or when you don’t know. The person who is not aware that he is divine goes on living the life of a beggar. Misery surrounds him, and all kinds of anguish and anxiety and tension.

The man who knows that he is divine simply rises above all misery, simply knows that nothing can ever touch him. he still lives in the world but lives in a totally new way: he lives like an emperor. He is no more an outsider; he belongs, he knows this is his home. and all that is needed to know it is to remember, is to become more and more alert, aware, mindful, watchful, because the more aware you are, the less you dream. When you are perfectly aware, even for a single moment, all dreaming disappears, and in that state of no-dreaming the divine is revealed. So the whole thing is to be more and more aware, and less and less involved in dreams and sleep.

By becoming a sannyasin you are taking a decision that ’I will not co-operate with the dreaming mind any more,’ that ’My whole energy will be poured into awakening, into becoming aware.’ Then one day it happens, and the day it happens you are really born. Before that, you were only thinking that you were alive. That was not much of an aliveness; it was just a lukewarm life. There was no passion in it, no intensity in it; you were living at the minimum.

The awakened man lives at the maximum, at the highest peak of life. He knows what joy is, what bliss is, what freedom is and what love is...

Arihanto is one of the most beautiful words in the East. It means the ultimate state of consciousness.

Literally it means one who has conquered all his enemies: the ego and the whole battalion of anger, greed, lust, etcetera, etcetera. Ari means the enemy, hanto means one who has killed all the enemies. It has nothing to do with outer enemies: the real enemies are within you, and the real friend too. So the whole thing has to happen inside. and the whole thing can be reduced to two simple words: unconsciousness and consciousness.

Unconsciousness creates a thousand and one enemies. to be conscious is to be a master of oneself; to be unconscious is to be a slave of a thousand and one things. and to be a master, to create mastery, is the whole effort of sannyas.

It is possible, and it is possible only through one single phenomenon: by bringing more and more consciousness into your being.

All that is needed is transforming your acts, slowly slowly, into conscious acts. Whatsoever you do, do it very consciously. In the beginning it will be a strain. If you have gone for a morning walk and you walk consciously, it will be a strain because you have to be alert about each step that you are taking.

Buddha used to say to his disciples ’When you move your right leg, deep down be watchful: ”Right, left, right, left.” Whatsoever you are doing, be watchful. Not that you have to use the words ”right, left”, but be alert about what is happening.’ We have lived so long with unconsciousness that it has become habitual. So when for the first time one starts becoming aware, it is a strain, but that strain is worthwhile. It is a little painful; and one feels a little strange too, because one has never done it.

It is just like learning a new art. You feel awkward in the beginning if you learn painting, everything seems to go wrong. If you learn swimming, in the beginning it seems as if it is impossible, but slowly slowly the art is imbibed. And I call it an art because it is not like science; it is very vague, it is very mysterious. One really does not learn it, one imbibes it. Hence down the ages, art has been learned by living with great masters. and that is the way of religion too, because it is the ultimate art.

Being with someone who is alert bring you again and again to alertness. Being with someone who is conscious, hits you again and again into becoming conscious. When ever you go unconscious, immediately you become aware because somebody is there with whom you can continuously compare. It is a very slow-going art, but one it is learned life is transformed.

Mandiro means a temple, a sacred place of worship; and this is how one should respect oneself –

as a temple, as a sacred place of worship. Drop all self-condemnatory ideals. Drop all ideas that people have given to you, that this is wrong, that this should not be done, that you should not be like this. People have taught everybody to disrespect themselves; and great respect is needed to grow.

One has not only to accept oneself but one has to rejoice in being oneself. One has to be grateful to god that he has made one this way; one has to be thankful for the great gift. And when that happens

– that gratefulness, that thankfulness, that respect and love for oneself – one is ready to move into a totally new dimension. And when you respect yourself as a temple you will not remain empty long; soon the deity will arrive. A person who respects and loves himself is closest to god.

But remember, when I am saying to respect yourself, love yourself, that does not mean that you have to disrespect others or you have to hate the others; it has not to be comparative. Respecting yourself is not a comparison with anybody else. It has no ’more’ or ’less’ about it. I use the word without any comparative sense. It is not that you are more respect-worthy than your neighbour. When you really respect yourself, it has no comparison in it.

And through great respect for yourself one day you will be surprised: you have started respecting the neighbour too, because he is also a temple, of a different form, in a different size, of a different colour, but the same god resides in him.

CHAPTER 29

30 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Prem means love, sahaja means spontaneous. Love is true only when it is spontaneous, unplanned, unpracticed, uncultivated, unthought. Whenever you plan for love, whenever deliberateness enters into it it becomes phony and false. And that’s why people go on loving yet it never satisfies, because no phony food can be nourishing.

True love has to be spontaneous, it has to happen without any preparation preceding it. It has to come out from nowhere, out of the blue. Suddenly it is there; you were not rehearsing for it. Anything rehearsed is bound to become false. Then later on you are acting it, in the mind you rehearse and then you act. If you are waiting for your lover and you are rehearsing in the mind what you are going to say and what you are going to do, that won’t allow you real love. When he comes you will simply be repeating the ready-made idea, it will be acting.

But people are unaware that that’s how they go on missing the opportunity that love gives. And then rather than a contentment, a fulfilment, love becomes a frustration. But the root cause is in its being false. And why is it false? – because it is ready-made, it is not spontaneous, it is not out of the moment.

Learn to love spontaneously, out of the moment, and you will be surprised: it liberates!

[Deva Takashi – divine love for one’s own parents] To love one’s own parents is one of the most difficult things in the world. But if one can manage it, it is of great importance. If you are at ease with your parents, you are at ease with the whole existence, because existence is the ultimate parent. And because the parents have to give guidance, the child resents them. As the child grows and becomes powerful, a natural rebellion happens. Then one only goes on paying respect to the parents, that’s all, but love disappears.

It is also not in the nature of things to love one’s parents, that’s why it is very difficult; it is going upstream. It is very natural for the parents to love their children; the flow is downstream. It is a natural thing, there is nothing special about it. Every mother loves the child and every father loves the child. It is plain, ordinary, and the people who brag about it are simply being stupid.

But to love one’s parents is going beyond nature, it is transcending your biology. It is an uphill task, but if you can do it, it becomes a door to god.

Satyanando. It means truth and bliss. Truth is naturally followed by bliss. Bliss is a shadow of truth

– misery, of untruth. One cannot drop misery unless one stops being untrue. Everybody wants to drop misery but nobody wants to drop the untruth, hence it becomes impossible to get out of it. You cannot drop the shadow. If you want to do anything with the shadow you will have to do something with the original.

If I want to cut the head of your shadow, I will have to cut your head, then immediately the shadow loses its head. Otherwise one can go on fighting with the shadow and nothing is ever going to happen. And that’s what goes on and on: people go on fighting with their misery but they cannot succeed; in the very nature of things they are doomed, their efforts are doomed. And people also go on trying to find bliss; that too is not possible. I cannot invite your shadow: I have to invite you.

When you come the shadow comes automatically.

Bliss is the shadow of truth, so the whole thing hinges upon one thing: drop all that is untruthful in you, false, pseudo. Drop all masks. Don’t pretend, there is no point in it. Just be the naked self you are, even if in the beginning it creates inconvenience. It is going to create inconvenience, because to live with people who are untrue and to start becoming true creates discomfort. It is like in the city of the blind one person starts seeing or as if in a madhouse one person suddenly becomes sane; he will be in great trouble.

One of my friends was in a madhouse. That was not a problem at all: he was mad. Three months went perfectly well, in fact he enjoyed those three months. He had great company – there were at least eight hundred madmen – and it is always beautiful to have people who are just like you. Then one day, through some accident, he drank a bottle of phenol; it had come for the bathroom – he drank it.

For fifteen days he had great diarrhoea, vomiting. Somehow that cleansed his system. He became sane, as if the whole of the poison went out of his body. For those fifteen days he couldn’t eat, he could not hold anything: anything he ate he had to vomit immediately and he had motion after motion; the whole system was cleansed. On the fifteenth day he suddenly awoke as if out of a nightmare. then the trouble began, because there were eight hundred mad people and you alone sane. The real nightmare begins! Somebody is pulling your hair and somebody is pulling your leg and somebody is beating you. All kinds of things were going on but now he was sane!

He went to the chief. He told him ’Now I am sane.’ The chief said ’But this is what everybody says. You just go away. Every madman says ”I am sane”.’ Nobody would listen to him. The more he insisted, the more they denied. He had to live out the whole term; for six months he had been sentenced to live in a madhouse.

So when you start becoming truthful in a world which is basically untrue, phony, inconvenience is bound to be there; that is part of growth. One has to take it easily, accept it easily. But it is worth it, because great joy starts arising in your being. As you go on dropping your masks, misery disappears, layer upon layer, and the sun rises above the horizon – the sun of bliss. But it always comes after the truth.

To be utterly nude in the world, to be as you are, to be as god has made you, is to be blissful. and that’s what sannyas is all about.

Govindo is a name of god. All names are names of god, all forms are forms of god, because nothing else exists; only god is.

Let this feeling sink deep into your heart: only god is! And it will bring a great transformation. Go on remembering it. The sound of the insect65s: only god is. The darkness of the night: only6

god is. Somebody laughing: only god is. Somebody weeping: only god is. Sadness surrounds you: only god is. Great excitement and happiness: only god is. In all moods, in all climates, in all seasons, go on remembering the is-ness of god, and slowly slowly it becomes an undercurrent of your consciousness. You need not remember then, it is always there: it is like a fragrance that surrounds you.

And when this starts happening, that without remembering the remembrance persists, it is prayer!

Prayer means that the door has opened. Prayer means that the revelation has started happening: god has started arriving in you; you have been accepted. Prayer is an indication that god is very close by. That’s why you are feeling so cool, so collect5ed, so silent, so joyous, for no reason at all!

So this is going to be your meditation: god is, only god is – not that you have to repeat the words, but allow the feeling.

[A sannyasin asks about an esoteric group he visited in the West.]

Just be here for a few months... and all these things are games: they will disappear. You can play beautiful games, and you can play games which look very spiritual and you can give those games the colour of esotericism, occultism. But in any experiment, unless at the centre there is somebody who is enlightened, everything remains a game. Howsoever sophisticatedly played and howsoever cleverly arranged, it remains intellectual gymnastics.

Unless there is a Buddha at the centre, at the core of the group, nothing is possible. People can meet together, they can discuss and they can talk and they can create great systems of thought

– appealing, logical – and they can create an aura, as if something mysterious is happening; but never.... Down the ages millions of experiments have been done but only those experiments succeed where there is a man who has arrived.

It is as if you are in a gaol. You can make a club of the prisoners inside the gaol. They can discuss things, they can meditate, they can pray together, they can do a thousand and one things, but still they are in the prison. They can decorate the prison, they can make the place beautiful, they can make themselves believe that now it is no more a prison but a home. they can create that quality of cosiness, but still they are in the prison.

Unless they become connected with somebody who is outside the prison, who is no more p0art of the prison, their efforts will remain futile. They are beautiful, and good in a way, because what are you going to do in the prison? Something is better than nothing. Their whole purpose is one, that if you go through such experiments, sooner or later you will become frustrated. If you go through so many things like these, the frustration will become so much that you may start looking for somebody who is outside the gaol, with whom you can have some connection. That is the only purpose of all these experiments, otherwise there is nothing.

If you can come across a master, if you can fall in love with a master, then nothing else is of any importance. I will send you back to them to trap them, just wait! We cannot leave those nine people so easily. and they must be good people: the idea is good, but it is just an idea.

So be ready. After four months go and bring them all here! (much laughter) Deva means divine, arhata means one who comes to know truth utterly alone. there are people who can grow only as part of a school; they cannot grow alone. There are people who can only grow alone; they cannot grow as part of a school. You belong to the second category: you will have to learn how to be more and more alone.

And to be alone is not loneliness. In fact when one is alone one is with oneself and when one is with somebody else one is not with oneself. It is paradoxical, but in crowds people are very lonely, and when they are alone they are not lonely at all.

Aloneness means solitude, not solitariness. When you feel solitary you are hankering for others.

When you are in solitude you have forgotten all others; there is no desire to go out of yourself, you are utterly contented.

That is going to be your path. I am not saying not to relate. Relate, love, but remember that you are not to lose your inner space, that you are not to become utterly lost in others. If you can keep your inner space intact then all relationship is good; in fact it will enhance your growth. But don’t allow people to encroach on your inner space. That is sacred, that is only for yourself. and whenever you can find time, move into it, be in it, be it!

[A sannyasin says: During the last few days there were so many questions but now... ]

That’s very good! Questions should disappear when you come in front of me and then you can learn a secret: whenever some question is disturbing you, just think of me and slowly slowly you will become capable of dissolving any question. Just think of me and feel that I am present there and the question will go. So you are very close to a secret.

Try it when you are back home. If some question arises just sit silently, think of me, as I am sitting here right now, and immediately you will see that the question is disappearing.

I don’t answer questions: I simply kill them!

Prem means love, prabhat means morning, dawn – the dawn of love. Sannyas is a small beginning, the first step, the first ray of the morning sun. But with a single step the journey of thousands of miles starts. From a small seed the great tree arises.

Sannyas is not the ned but the beginning, the beginning of a pilgrimage that knows no end; it is eternal. But the first step has to be of love, only then are you in the right direction. Be love more and more. and while you are here remember only one thing, that if you have learned how to be love – and I am not saying ’loving’, I am deliberately saying ’how to be love’.... It is not a question of relating. Even if you are sitting alone and there is nobody, you have to be love. It has nothing to do with the object: it has something to do with your subjectivity, your interiority. In your interiormost core love has to become a flood, overflowing... and that will become the end of the night and the beginning of the day.

CHAPTER 30

31 December 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Darpana means a mirror. Thinking is a barrier: mirroring is the way. To think is to miss: to reflect is to get. Truth has not to be invented but only discovered. And the veil is not on truth; it is on our mirror. Truth is utterly naked, it is not covered. So when I say ’It has to be discovered’ I mean that we have to open up to it. Once the veil of thinking is removed from the mind, the mind becomes a mirror, it reflects that which is. And that which is, is god.

Lalito means beautiful, graceful. Beauty is divine; in all its forms beauty expresses god. Wherever beauty is, god is. And the deeper one starts feeling the beautiful, the more prayerful one becomes because the very experience of beauty awakes something in the deepest core of your being, stirs it. The heart starts dancing, and the dance of the heart is prayer. That stirring at the deepest core of your being is prayer. Beauty provokes prayer. Beauty provokes love beauty provokes respect.

Beauty provokes the transcendental. It creates gratitude. It is the most sublime quality in existence.

Think of god more as beauty than as truth, because truth is a logical concept, beauty is more of the heart. Truth smells of syllogism, has a heady ring about it: beauty is utterly of the feelings, of sensitivity. Truth seems to be a dry word with no juice in it: beauty is something alive. Whenever you think of beauty you think of a dewdrop slipping off the grass leaf or a rose flower or a child giggling or the stars or the ocean or the sky. Whenever you think of beauty you are bound to to think of something existential and whenever you think of truth it seems to be only a concept in the head. It represents nothing, it looks empty.

Beauty is the very soul of god and that beauty is the meaning of lalito. It is not ordinary beauty but the divine that permeates existence. Feel it! Dance with it and sing with it and it will take you to the ultimate. It can become the boat to the other shore.

Veet means beyond, gyanam means the known – beyond the known. God is always the unknown.

The known is a barrier to him. The known has to cease for the unknown to be. Knowledge has to be sacrificed, only then does wisdom descend. Wisdom is not a continuation of knowledge but the end of it. the death of knowledge is the birth of wisdom. Knowledge is borrowed: wisdom is your own.

Knowledge consists of the known: wisdom is the door to the unknown, to the mysterious. and the mystery is such that it can never be reduced to the known. Even those who have known god cannot reduce him to knowledge. Even after you have known him, he remains unknown; in fact he becomes more unknown than ever. The mystery deepens, it does not disappear...

To go beyond the known is meditation, to allow the unknown to enter you is meditation, dropping knowledge is meditation, becoming utterly empty of knowledge is meditation. And whenever you can create the space which is empty of thoughts, immediately, like lightning, one is transformed, transported to another world, and then one is on the earth but not of it.

Dipam means a light, a lamp. Be a lamp unto yourself. those are the last words of Gautama the Buddha but they contain the whole message of all the masters. Listen, learn, watch, but always remember that each decision is your responsibility. Never shirk any responsibility. It is easier and more comfortable to throw the responsibility on others, but it is very costly, because in throwing the responsibility on others you are throwing opportunities for integration, for individuation.

’Be a light unto yourself’ does not mean egoism, because when the light is there, there is no ego ever found. ’Be a light unto yourself’ does not mean that you have to close yourself to existence and that you are not to learn from anywhere else. Learn from each and everything: from trees, from birds, animals, rivers, mountains. Learn from everywhere, keep yourself open to all the dimensions of life. Let existence pour its wisdom into you, from every nook and corner. But the final decision has to be yours; never allow anybody else to decide for you.

The people who want to decide for you are not your real friends. The real friends are those who will give their whole heart to you, who will make everything available to you, whatsoever they have known and learned, but who will also insist that you decide on your own. They will not help you to lean upon them.

In fact sometimes real friends look very hard because when you wanted to lean too much they simply denied you. When you wanted to just follow them, they didn’t help; they wanted you to be on your own. But finally one comes to know that those were the people who really loved you. They gave all that they could but they never took away your basic right to decide, to choose, to be.

That is the message in this simple word ’dipam’: be a light unto yourself.

Veet means beyond, darshana means that which can be seen. God cannot be seen because god is the seer in you. He can never become an object. He is your subjectivity; he is the one who sees. So those who want to see god are bound to fail. God cannot be seen because he is not there outside you, he is your interiority. In your looking at me, he is looking at me. In my looking at you, he is looking at you. He is always the seer, and the seer cannot be reduced to the seen.

Once this is understood then the whole effort of search undergoes a great change, it starts moving in a different direction. Then you don’t go on searching for god somewhere outside yourself: you start closing your eyes and entering in.

Once this is understood, that god is your subjectivity, then all that is needed is that all objects have to be dropped from the mind. when there is no object, no content, no thought, then the pure subjectivity reveals itself. It is self-luminous and self-evident. It needs no other light to reveal it, it needs no other proof to prove it: it is your very being. Seeking and searching for god somewhere else is utterly stupid because you will never find him anywhere. He is in the seeker himself; he is never the sought but the seeker.

The Western religions have never risen above the idea of god as an object. they have always remained clinging to the idea of god as somewhere there. But in the East religions have taken the ultimate leap: god is not there, but here; not out, but in. God is your consciousness, so to know consciousness is to know god. and the only thing that hinders you is too many thoughts running inside you. They don’t allow you to see consciousness. They keep you occupied with them.

It is like the sky is full of clouds and you cannot see the sky. when the clouds have disappeared the sky is there in all its beauty, in all its grandeur, silence, that inner sky is god.

Keemiyo means alchemy, the science of changing the earthly into the divine, changing the baser metal into gold. It is the greatest science because it transforms dust into the divine. And that’s what sannyas is: a new reincarnation of alchemy.

Man is not what he appears. He is that and far more, and that far more remains invisible unless you start groping for it. It is within your reach, but you have to consciously search and seek. It is not far away; it is your birthright, but it is given only when you make all the possible efforts to get it. It is a paradox: it is natural and yet it has to be earned.

Prem means love, sangit means music. Love is the music of the soul; that’s why love is so nourishing, so moving, and that’s why music also is so moving and so nourishing. They have something in common: music is the harmony of sound and silence; love is the harmony of male energy and the female energy. The male energy is sound, the female energy is silence; and whenever the male and female meet inside you great music arises.

Each man and each woman is carrying two polarities. Each man is also a woman and each woman is also a man; no man is just a man and no woman is just a woman. Half of you comes from your father and half from your mother; both the energies are there. But ordinarily they are in conflict, in friction, hence the misery of life.

We go on repressing one. We have been taught that the man has not to allow anything that is feminine so he goes on repressing all that is feminine in him. and the woman has been taught not to have anything manly; that is ugly, gross. She has to be utterly feminine. so both have become repressive of one part of their being. That part is an essential part, and whenever any essential part is neglected, denied expression, harmony is disturbed. to disturb the inner harmony is to lose contact with god, because only a harmonious being can be in contact with god.

This is the secret of the inner alchemy, that all that you are has to be used, nothing has to be rejected, nothing at all ever has to be rejected. Even if sometimes something looks dangerous, destructive, even then it has not to be rejected, because when you come to know the whole, you will be surprised that the destructive and dangerous thing has its own place in it. and when the whole is known, you know that without it, the whole world would have missed something very significant, would never have been whole. In the context of the whole, nothing is destructive, all is creative. In the context of the whole, nothing is dangerous, all is simply nourishing; but only in the context of the whole.

Nobody has been allowed to live a holy life, everybody is forced to live a partial life; that’s from where the whole destructiveness arises. And the part that is denied slowly slowly becomes a thief, it becomes sly, cunning; it has to, just to survive. It becomes tricky, treacherous, and it starts playing games with you. It starts coming in new forms, in vicarious ways. It overwhelms your unconscious and manipulates you from there.

Our lives become ugly because basically we have accepted a split. Man has to become a full, perfect circle; and that is the meaning of inner music. this is great art. One is not born with that art, one has to learn it. That’s the function and purpose of sannyas: to teach you the inner science of becoming whole.

Accept everything that you find in yourself and don’t hide anything from yourself. At least in front of yourself be utterly naked and nude; know who you are in your totality, with no judgement, no condemnation, no evaluation. And you will be surprised: once your hidden parts start surfacing you will see so much energy released and so much joy released. You could not have ever imagined it, ever dreamt of it. Once a person has allowed his totality, his inner well, his spring, starts flowing.

and then we are connected with the infinite ocean; inexhaustible is our energy and tremendous is our power.

Madhu means sweetness and devi means goddess – goddess of sweetness. Great respect is needed towards oneself, and that is the message in the name, think of yourself as a god or a goddess, because whatsoever you think, you become. The potential is infinite, so whatsoever you think becomes the actual.

And sweetness represents love: love is sweetness. So be as respectful towards yourself as one is respectful towards a god, and be as sweet to existence, to people, as possible, to the optimum; because the more you are loving and sweet, the more you are sharing of your being, the more you will get from the existence. that is the law: give and you will get a thousandfold; be miserly and even that which you have will disappear. That’s what Jesus means when he says ’Those who have, more will be given to them, and those who don’t have, even that which they have will be taken away.’

Life is a process. The moment you make it a stagnant pool, you start dying; then you don’t have anything. Then you simply become emptier and emptier, and it is a very negative kind of emptiness.

Go on flowing, sharing, giving, for no other reason than the sheer joy of giving, and more and more will be coming to you from unknown sources. The more you give, the more you get, and the more you have, the more you become capable of getting.

Respect, great respect, is needed towards oneself. In all the ancient cultures all the names were names of god, for a simple reason: that everybody had to be reminded that they were a god or a goddess. Never think less than that. and it is not an ego-trip either, because not only are you a god or goddess; everybody is the same.

[A sannyas couple asked about an experience where they had fought and expressed their anger, and then afterwards felt much calmer and more centred.]

Never be afraid of the new. If one has to be afraid, be afraid of the old and the repetition of the old...

but never be afraid of the new. God is always with the new. The old is already dead.

I can understand: it is scary, because we are accustomed to living in the warmth of the known, the safety of the familiar and whenever you move into something new, you don’t know what is going to happen, what will happen to your shelter and your security and safety; but that’s how life is. Once you have tasted the beauty of the new, slowly slowly, fear will disappear. You will always be thrilled whenever something new knocks on your doors.

It has been good, because unless anger is expressed, love also remains repressed.

If you

cannot express the negative, in the same proportion the positive will also be repressed. This is a fundamental law of inner processes, that they always balance each other. If you go so far in the positive then you will go so far in the negative; if you can go deep into the negative, you will be able to go deep into the positive. They always balance; they are like two wings, continuously balancing.

Once you have understood that anger is not anti-love but in fact is part of the rhythm it is not disruptive of love; on the contrary it enhances love, strengthens love, makes your love seasoned, stronger than ever. The more challenges your love faces, the more centered it becomes, the more certain and confident, the less fear exists between the lovers.

The second thing that you felt is also significant. That happens: if you can go totally into your anger, immediately the other will become silent. It is only the non-total that is creating confusion in people’s lives.

Whenever one is totally angry, the other has to balance it; that is a natural phenomenon. The other will go very deep in calmness, quietness, coolness. and when the other is angry you will simply move into calmness and coolness. and when one is calm and cool, the other cannot remain long in anger; the other starts understanding what is happening. After the anger, great love will arise. It follows in the wake like silence after a storm.

Once you have understood the rhythm then there is no fear. You are not afraid of the other being angry, you are not afraid of your being angry. You know your love is strong enough to bear all these situations. Only poor love is afraid. when love is rich, has great roots, it is unafraid; it can simply enjoy the great wind and the rain and the lightning. It is all thrilling and adventurous.

Once you have seen that one automatically becomes silent – and that is the beauty of going totally into any emotion – then you have learned something great. The other will be able to understand your anger, and his understanding will make you more understanding of your anger. and anger understood is anger transformed: the same anger becomes love, compassion.

Go into it and don’t be afraid. there are peaks and peaks, peaks beyond peaks, and it is always new. If love remains a growing phenomenon it always brings you to new territory, new lands, never known before. the moment you stop, wherever you draw a boundary and you say ’This is enough, beyond this we will not go’, love starts dying. Love can only live if it is riverlike.

Allow it. This is really beautiful. Go into it as deeply as possible, and whatsoever it brings will be good and beneficial; and I say whatsoever, unconditionally.

[Prembodhi – love, enlightenment] Enlightenment can happen either through love or through meditation; there are two doors to enlightenment. Meditation means being alone, utterly alone, and love means being totally with someone, so totally that the two-ness disappears and one-ness arises. And these are the two ways. Fifty percent attain through meditation and fifty percent through love; that is a balance.

Prembodhi means enlightenment through love, through relating.

So teach the child as much love as possible. Be loving without being possessive. Be loving without trying to mould the character of the child. Be loving but don’t give your knowledge to the child. Be loving but help the child to be independent, free.

These are the obligations of the real parents: they will help – the child needs help – but they will also help the child to be independent as soon as possible. They will not help the child more than is needed. They will be always ready to withdraw so that the child starts depending on the inner energies – only when you depend on your inner energies do they start flowing; so the child starts thinking, willing, seeking, searching, groping. Watch and help but don’t force the child to go in a direction. Give freedom to the child to be whatsoever god means the child to be. the child should not become your ambition and your ego-trip.

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 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30