Beyond Psychology
Talks given from 12/04/86 pm to 04/05/86 am English Discourse series
44 Chapters
Year published: 1988
Ch 6 appears in the book "Socrates Poisoned..." Ch 29 Beyond Psychology
Chapter #1
Chapter title: Truth is the greatest offender 12 April 1986 pm in
Archive code: 8604125
ShortTitle: PSYCHO01
Audio: Yes Video: Yes Length: 86
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
IN THE POONA YEARS, I REMEMBER YOU SO OFTEN USING THE PHRASE,
"BE IN THE MARKETPLACE, BUT NOT OF IT." I THOUGHT THIS MEANT THAT
WHEN I WAS AWAY FROM YOU, I WOULD NEED TO CONSTANTLY REMIND
MYSELF THAT I WAS NO LONGER PART OF THE MARKETPLACE MENTALITY -- I WAS A SANNYASIN.
RECENTLY, DROPPED INTO THE SO-CALLED NORMAL REALITY OF BARGAIN-HUNTING AND FLAT-FINDING, OF SUPERMARKETS AND SKINHEADS, I REALIZED YOUR PEOPLE AREN'T PART OF THE
MARKETPLACE; THAT NOW THERE IS NO NEED TO REMIND OURSELVES --
WE ARE VERY OBVIOUSLY AND IRREVOCABLY A RACE APART.
ONLY WEEKS AGO, MY QUESTION WAS ABOUT HELPING YOUR VISION TO
BE REALIZED. NOW, AFTER MY RECENT EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD, AND
SEEING ITS TREATMENT OF YOU, I DON'T EVEN HAVE THE ENERGY TO
TALK TO PEOPLE ABOUT YOU. DOES THIS MEAN THEY ARE TOO FAR GONE
-- OR AM I?
The way the world has treated me is absolutely natural, you should not feel offended by it. If they had been respectful, understanding, and loving towards me, that would have been a shock. Their treatment is absolutely expected.
You have not gone far away, they have gone far away and they have been going on and on for millions of years. The distance between the real man and the man that exists in the world has become almost unbridgeable. They are so far away from their own reality, they have forgotten the way back home.
They have forgotten what was the purpose of their being here.
There is an ancient parable... A very wise king wanted his son -- the only son, who was going to be his successor -- to be a wise man before he succeeded him and became the king of a vast kingdom. The old man chose a way which was very strange: he sent the son away from the kingdom, told him that he was abandoned, that he should forget completely that he was a prince -- "He is no longer a prince and I am not going to make him my successor."
All his beautiful clothes, ornaments -- everything was taken away. He was given the clothes of a beggar and sent away in the middle of the night in a chariot to be thrown out of the kingdom. And there were strict orders that he should not be allowed back in the kingdom from anywhere.
Years passed; the prince really became a beggar. He really forgot that he was a prince. In fact there had been no effort on his part to forget -- he was a beggar. He was begging for clothes, for food, for shelter, and he had slowly accepted the condition he was in.
After many years, one day he was sitting outside a hotel, begging. It was hot summer and he wanted enough money to purchase a pair of shoes -- secondhand of course -- because the earth was almost like fire, and to walk without shoes was becoming impossible. He had wounds on his feet, and he was crying out for just a few coins. At that very moment a golden chariot stopped before the hotel, and a man descended. The man said, "Your father has called you back. He is very old and dying, and he wants you to be his successor."
In a single split second the beggar disappeared. The man was totally different; you could see it in his face, his eyes... the clothes were of the beggar still, but the
man was totally different. A crowd gathered -- the same crowd before whom he had been spreading his hands for a few coins -- and they all started showing great friendship. But he was not even paying attention to them. He went up to the chariot, sat in the chariot and told the man who had come to get him, "First take me to a beautiful place where I can have a good bath, find clothes worthy of me, shoes, ornaments... because I can go before the king only as a prince."
He came home, and he came as a prince. He said to his father, "Just one thing I want to ask: Why did I have to be a beggar for so many years? I had really forgotten... If you had not called me back, I would have died as a beggar, never remembering that once I was a prince."
The father said, "This is what my father did to me. It was not done to harm you, but to give you the experience of the extremes of life -- the beggar and the king. And between these two, everybody exists.
"That day I told you to forget that you were a prince; now I want you to remember that being a prince or being a beggar are just identities given by others. It is not your reality, it is not you -- neither the king, nor the beggar. And the moment you realize that you are not what the world thinks of you, you are not what you appear to be, but you are something so deeply hidden in yourself that except for you, nobody else can see you, then a man becomes wise. Knowing it, wisdom follows.
"I was angry with my father and I know you must have been angry with me. But forgive me, I had to do it to make it clear to you: don't get identified with being a king, don't get identified with being a beggar, because in a split second these identities can be changed.
And that which can be changed is not you. You are something eternal, something unchangeable."
People have gone far away from their reality, and to remind them of their reality hurts them. Their treatment of me is nothing but an expression of their wounded heart. They don't want to see those wounds; they don't want to be reminded of anything else which they have tried so hard to forget, to forgive. Somehow they have managed a certain identity in the world... and here comes a man who shatters it completely.
It is natural they should be angry with me. It is natural they will stone me. It is
natural they will do everything that they have always done with people like me. That does not mean that you have to lose hope, that you have to become pessimistic, that you have to stop even talking about me. That way you are not helping them, and that way you are not helping yourself either.
Their behavior should not be taken into account at all. They are absolutely asleep. We are trying something which goes against their sleep, and naturally they feel disturbed and react. This is absolutely acceptable. But how long can they react? It is a question of a great challenge.
Losing hope means you have lost the game. I am not going to lose the game.
To my very last breath I will go on doing the same, whatever their reaction. It is only by bringing their reaction to the surface that there is a possibility of change. It will take time, because millions of years have taken them away from themselves. You should have patience with them. They need your compassion, they need your patience.
They will come home; they want to come home, but it goes against their ego to recognize that they are not at home already. It goes against their ego to recognize that they are false, that they are phony.
But their reaction -- their throwing stones at me, or throwing knives at me, or putting me in jails, or crucifying me -- is going to change them. This is the only way that they will start thinking about what they are doing and why they feel offended. You feel offended only when something truthful about you is told, something which you have been hiding.
You are never offended by lies. Truth is the greatest offender.
Their very disturbance, their fear that I will destroy their morality, I will destroy their religion, I will destroy their tradition, shows one thing: they don't have religion, they don't have morality, they don't have any tradition. They are managing to believe that they have, but it is only a belief which can be easily destroyed; otherwise what happened in Greece?
I was just a tourist for four weeks in a country thousands of years old. The Greek Orthodox church is the oldest church in the world -- the Vatican is not that old. Jesus and his sayings were first translated into Greek; that's why he became "Christ," and his followers became "Christians." These are Greek words.
Now, this country -- which for two thousand years has been perpetually propagating Christianity, teaching every child a conditioning -- is afraid of a tourist who is going to be there for only four weeks. The archbishop was disturbed so much that he threatened that my house would be burned, that I would be stoned if I was not removed immediately from the country, because my presence would destroy the morality of the country, it would destroy the religion of the country, the family, the church, the tradition -- just in four weeks!
If I can manage to do that in four weeks, then whatever I am destroying deserves to be destroyed. It simply means that it is phony. People are not really in it -- they are just pretending. Only pretensions can be destroyed in four weeks; realities cannot be destroyed. But the archbishop of the oldest church of Christianity is so much afraid, and he goes on saying things which are absolute lies. But that's what I have been telling you again and again -- that all your religions are based on lies, and hence they are afraid.
The archbishop was sending telegrams to the president of the country, to the prime minister, to other ministers, and he was saying that I had been sent specially from hell to destroy the Christian Orthodox church in Greece. Can you believe a sane man saying something like that? And he holds the highest post, so even the president is afraid, the prime minister is afraid, and they have to do something criminal because that man can provoke the masses against them.
But I enjoyed the whole thing for the simple reason that it shows that truth has really a strength and power of its own. Truth has an authority which lies cannot have. You may have been conditioning people with those lies for centuries, but just a ray of light, just a small truth, can destroy that whole structure.
So there is no need to be hopeless. Talk to people -- and if they are offended, rejoice. It means whatever you have said has disturbed their conditioning, and they are trying to protect it. You cannot disturb an unconditioned man. You can say anything about him, but you cannot disturb him.
Now my sannyasins are in the world, and I have told them to mix with the world
so that they can spread the truth more easily. You are fortunate -- just our people, a small minority in the world of five billion people, is enough to create a wildfire. But don't be in a hurry and don't be impatient. And there is no need ever to be in a state of losing hope.
Truth is intrinsically indefatigable, intrinsically impossible to defeat.
It may take time, but there is no scarcity of time. And there is no need that the revolution should happen before our eyes. It is contentment enough that you were part of a movement that changed the world, that you played your role in favor of truth, that you will be part of the victory that is going to happen ultimately.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
WHY IS MONEY SUCH A LOADED ISSUE? IT SEEMS AS THOUGH WHEN WE
HAVE MONEY, EITHER WE FEEL GUILTY ABOUT IT, AND THUS COMPELLED
TO SPEND IT, OR INSECURE, AND THEREFORE WANT TO HOLD ONTO IT.
OBVIOUSLY IT AFFECTS A MULTITUDE OF AREAS THAT REVOLVE AROUND
THE PIVOT OF POWER AND FREEDOM. THE CURIOUS THING IS THAT EVEN
TO DISCUSS THE SUBJECT OF MONEY IS SOMEHOW AS MUCH A TABOO AS
DISCUSSING SEX OR DEATH AT THE DINNER TABLE. PLEASE COMMENT.
Money is a loaded subject for the simple reason that we have not been able to work out a sane system in which money can be a servant to the whole humanity,
and not the master of a few greedy people.
Money is a loaded subject because man's psychology is full of greed; otherwise money is a simple means of exchanging things, a perfect means. There is nothing wrong in it, but the way we have worked it out, everything seems to be wrong in it.
If you don't have money, you are condemned; your whole life is a curse, and your whole life you are trying to have money by any means.
If you have money it does not change the basic thing: you want more, and there is no end to wanting more. And when finally you have too much money -- although it is not enough, it is never enough, but it is more than anybody else has
-- then you start feeling guilty, because the means that you have used to accumulate the money are ugly, inhuman, violent. You have been exploiting, you have been sucking the blood of people, you have been a parasite. So now you have got the money but it reminds you of all the crimes that you have committed in gaining it.
That creates two kinds of people: one who starts donating to charitable institutions to get rid of guilt. They are doing "good work," they are doing "God's work." They are opening hospitals, and schools. All they are doing is trying somehow not to go mad because of the feeling of guilt. All your hospitals, and all your schools and colleges, and all your charitable institutions are outcomes of guilty people.
For example, the Nobel prize was founded by a man who earned money in the first world war by creating all kinds of destructive bombs, machines. The first world war was fought using the means supplied by Mr. Nobel. And he earned such a huge amount of money...
Both the parties were getting war material from the same source; he was the only person who was creating war materials on a vast scale. So whoever was killed, was killed by him. It doesn't matter whether he belonged to this side or to that side; whoever was killed was killed by his bombs.
So in old age, when he had all the money in the world a man can have, he established the Nobel prize. It is given as a peace award -- by a man who earned the money by war!
Whoever is working for peace receives a Nobel prize. It is given for great scientific inventions, great artistic, creative inventions.
And with the Nobel prize comes big money -- right now it is near about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The best award, and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars with it; and it goes on increasing because money goes on becoming less and less valuable. And such a fortune that man must have created that all these Nobel prizes that are distributed every year are given only out of the interest. The basic money remains intact, will remain intact forever. Every year so much interest accumulates that you can give twenty Nobel prizes.
All charitable work is really an effort to wash your guilt -- literally. When Pontius Pilate ordered the crucifixion of Jesus, the first thing he did was to wash his hands. Strange!
The order for crucifixion does not make your hands dirty, why should you wash your hands? It is something significant: he is feeling guilty. It took two thousand years for man to understand this, because for two thousand years nobody even mentioned or bothered to comment on why Pontius Pilate washed his hands. It was Sigmund Freud who found out that people who are feeling guilty start washing their hands. It is symbolic... as if their hands are full of blood.
So if you have money, it creates guilt. One way is to wash your hands by helping charitable institutions, and this is exploited by the religions. They are exploiting your guilt, but they go on buttressing your ego, saying you are doing great spiritual work. It is nothing to do with spirituality; it is just that they are trying to console the criminals.
The first way is what religions have been doing. The other is that the man feels so guilty that either he goes mad or commits suicide. His own existence becomes just anguish.
Each breath becomes heavy. And the strange thing is that he has worked his whole life to attain all this money, because the society provokes the desire, the ambition, to be rich, to be powerful. And money does bring power; it can purchase everything, except those few things which cannot be purchased by it. But nobody bothers about those things.
Meditation cannot be purchased, love cannot be purchased, friendship cannot be purchased, gratitude cannot be purchased -- but nobody is concerned with these
things.
Everything else, the whole world of things, can be purchased. So every child starts climbing the ladder of ambitions, and he knows if he has money then everything is possible. So the society breeds the idea of ambition, of being powerful, of being rich.
It is an absolutely wrong society. It creates psychologically sick, insane people. And when they have reached the goal that the society and the educational system have given to them, they find themselves at a dead end. The road ends there; there is nothing beyond.
So either they become a phony religious person or they just jump into madness, into suicide, and destroy themselves.
Money can be a beautiful thing if it is not in the hands of the individuals, if it is part of the communes, part of the societies, and the society takes care of everybody. Everybody creates, everybody contributes, but everybody is not paid by money; they are paid by respect, paid by love, paid by gratitude, and are given all that is necessary for life.
Money should not be in the hands of individuals; otherwise it will create this problem of being burdened with guilt. And money can make people's lives very rich. If the commune owns the money, the commune can give you all the facilities that you need, all the education, all creative dimensions of life. The society will be enriched and nobody will feel guilty. And because the society has done so much for you, you would like to pay it back by your services.
If you are a doctor you will do the best you can do; if you are a surgeon you will do the best you can do, because it is the society that has helped you to become the best surgeon, given you all the education, given you every facility, taken care of you from your very childhood. That's what I mean when I say that children should belong to the communes, and the commune should take care of everything.
And all that is created by people will not be hoarded by individuals; it will be a commune resourcefulness. It will be yours. It will be for you, but it will not be in your hands. It will not make you ambitious; it will make you more creative, more generous, more grateful, so the society goes on becoming better and more beautiful. Then money is not a problem.
Communes can use money as an exchange, because every commune cannot have all the things it needs. It can purchase from another commune; then money can be used as a means of exchange -- but from commune to commune, not from individual to individual, so that every commune is capable of bringing in things which are not available there. So money's basic function remains, but its ownership changes from the individual to the collective. To me this is basic communism: the money's function changes from the individual to the collective.
But the religions will not want that. Politicians will not want it, because their whole game will be destroyed. Their whole game depends on ambition, power, greed, lust.
It seems very strange to say that the religions exist almost on irreligious things, or it will be better to say, on anti-religious things. They use those things, but on the surface you don't see that. You see charity, but you don't see from where charity comes, and why. In the first place, why should there be a need for charity? Why should there be orphans, why should there be beggars? Why in the first place should we allow beggars to happen and orphans to happen? And in the second place, why are there people who are very willing to do charity work, to give money, to give their whole lives to charity and serving the poor?
On the surface everything seems to be right because we have lived in this kind of structure for so long; otherwise it is absolutely absurd. No child is an orphan if the commune owns the children, and if the commune owns everything, then nobody is a beggar; we all share whatsoever we have. But then religions will not have their sources of exploitation. They will not have the poor to console, they will not have the rich to help get rid of their guilt. These are the reasons why they are so much against me.
My work is almost like that of a gravedigger who goes on digging up beautiful marble graves and bringing out skeletons. Nobody wants to see them. People are afraid of skeletons.
One of my friends was a student in a medical college, and I used to stay with him once in a while, while traveling. If I had to stay the whole night, rather than staying at the station I would stay in the hostel with this student. One day it happened that somehow, late in the night, the discussion went on about so many things, and came around to ghosts. And I was simply joking; I said, "They are a reality. It is strange that you have not come across them."
Almost fifteen students were there in the room, and they said, "No, we don't believe in them. We have dissected so many bodies; we have never found any soul, and there is no ghost, nothing."
So I prepared my friend... In their surgical ward they had many skeletons, and they also had another ward where autopsies are done, when beggars die or somebody is killed or commits suicide -- it was a big city, it was the capital of a state. The wards were joined together. On this side of the hall were the skeletons, and the other side of the hall many dead bodies used to wait. And who cares about the beggars and this and that? -- whenever there was time the professors would do the autopsies and decide.
I told my friend, "You do one thing: tomorrow night, you lie down on a stretcher where the dead bodies are lying, and I will bring in your friends. You have to do nothing. In the middle of the conversation, when I am there with your friends, you just have to sit up.
From the lying position you simply sit up."
It was a simple thing, there was no problem. He said, "I will do it."
But a problem arose... it became very complicated. We went into the surgical hall, and my friend was lying down. As we entered he got up, and all the fifteen people started trembling. They could not believe their eyes that a dead body...! But the problem became real because a real dead body got up! So my friend who was pretending jumped up and he said, "There are really ghosts! Just look at that body!"
There had been some misunderstanding: that man was in a coma. Some servants had brought him in the night so they put him in with the dead bodies. Then he came back to consciousness, so he stood up. When he saw these people he thought it must be morning and now it is time to get up and ask what is going on. Even I could not manage at first to work out what had happened, because I had sent only one. This second man...! We closed the doors and started to leave. The man was shouting, "Wait, I am alive! Why I am being put here?"
We closed the doors. We said, "It is not our business," and we left. It was difficult to convince my friend who had been lying there that it was not a ghost, that the other man was just a mistake. He said, "But never a next time! It was good that he stood up only when you all had come. If he had stood up when I
was lying there alone I would have died! I could not have survived."
If you go on digging at the roots -- which are ugly, which nobody wants to see.… That's why words likèsex' or `death' or `money' have become taboos. There is nothing in them that you cannot discuss at the dining table, but the reason is that we have repressed them deep down and we don't want anybody to dig them out. We are afraid.
We are afraid of death because we know we are going to die, and we don't want to die.
We want to keep our eyes closed. We want to live in a state as if "everybody else is going to die, but not me." That is the normal psychology of everybody: "I am not going to die."
To bring up death is taboo. People become afraid because it reminds them of their own death. They are so much concerned with trivia, and death is coming. But they want that trivia to keep them engaged. It functions as a curtain: they are not going to die, at least not now. Later on... "whenever it happens, we will see."
Sex they are afraid of because so many jealousies are involved. Their own life experiences have been bitter. They have loved and failed, and they really don't want to bring the subject up -- it hurts.
And so is the case with money, because money immediately brings in the hierarchy of the society. So if there are twelve persons sitting around the table, immediately you can put them in a hierarchy; the similarity, the equality, for the moment is lost. Then somebody is richer than you, somebody is poorer than you, and suddenly you see yourself not as friends but as enemies, because you are all fighting for the same money, you are grabbing at the same money. You are not friends, you are all competitors, enemies.
So at least at the dining table when you are eating you want no hierarchy, not the struggle of the ordinary life. You want for a moment to forget all those things. You want to talk only of good things -- but these are all facades.
Why not create a life which is really good? Why not create a life where money does not create a hierarchy, but simply gives more and more opportunity to everybody? Why not create a life where sex does not make bitter experiences, jealousies, failures; where sex becomes just fun -- nothing more than any other
game, just a biological game.
A simple understanding... I can't conceive why... if I love some woman and she enjoys some man, it is perfectly okay. It does not disturb my love. In fact I love her more because she is being loved by more people; I have chosen really a beautiful woman. It will be really ugly to find a woman whom only I love, and she cannot find anybody else in the whole world to love her. That will be really hell.
And what is wrong if she is happy sometimes with somebody else? An understanding heart will be happy that she is happy. You love a person and you want him to be happy. If she is happy with you, good; if she is happy with somebody else it is as good. There is no problem in it.
Once we stop the old nonsense that has been poured into our minds continuously
-- of monogamy, of one-to-one relationship, of fidelity -- which is all nonsense... When there are so many beautiful people in the world, why shouldn't they be intermixing? You play tennis; that does not mean your whole life you have to play tennis with the same partner, fidelity...! Life should be richer.
So it is only that a little understanding is needed and love will not be a problem, sex will not be taboo. Nor will death be a taboo once your life has no problems, no anxieties; once you have accepted your life in its totality, death is not the end of life, it is part of it.
In accepting life in its totality, you have accepted death too; it is just a rest. The whole day you have been working -- and in the night do you want to rest, or not?
There are a few insane people who don't want to sleep. I have come across one person who was brought to me because he did not want to sleep. The whole night he made every effort to keep himself awake. The problem was that he was afraid that if he sleeps, then what is the guarantee that he will wake up? Now, who can give the guarantee? That is really a great problem -- who can give him a guarantee?
He wants a guarantee that "I will wake up. What is the guarantee that I will not go on sleeping? -- because I have seen many people just go to sleep and... finished! People say that they are dead, and they take them to the burning place and burn those people. I don't want to be burned. So why take the risk? This sleep is risky!" Now sleep can become a problem.
Death is a little longer sleep, a little deeper. The daily sleep rejuvenates you, makes you again capable of functioning better, efficiently. All tiredness is gone, you are again young. Death does the same on a deeper level. It changes the body, because now the body cannot be rejuvenated only by ordinary sleep; it has become too old. It needs a more drastic change, it needs a new body. Your life energy wants a new form. Death is simply a sleep so that you can easily move into a new form.
Once you accept life in its totality, life includes death. Then death is not against it but is just a servant, just as sleep is. Your life is eternal, it is going to be there forever and forever. But the body is not eternal; it has to be changed. It becomes old, and then it is better to have a new body, a new form, rather than dragging the old.
To me, a man of understanding will not have any problems. He will have only a clarity to see -- and the problems evaporate. And tremendous silence is left behind, a silence of great beauty and great benediction.
Beyond Psychology Chapter #2
Chapter title: Your mind is the judas 13 April 1986 am in
Archive code: 8604130
ShortTitle: PSYCHO02
Audio: Yes
Video:
Yes Length:
107
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
I HEAR YOU SAYING THAT WE ARE ALL LEAVES ON THE SAME TREE, AND
THAT ENLIGHTENMENT IS ONLY POSSIBLE WHEN WE REALLY COME
TOGETHER. ON THE OTHER HAND, I HEAR YOU SAYING THAT ONLY THE
SINGLE INDIVIDUAL CAN FULFILL HIS BEING IN DEEP ALONENESS. I FEEL BOTH OF THESE ARE RIGHT, BUT STILL I HAVE NO REAL UNDERSTANDING OF IT. PLEASE COMMENT.
Both are right, but they appear to be contradictory; hence the confusion. On the one hand I am saying that when you are one with existence, you come to realization -- and to be one with existence means you disappear, you are no more. And on the other hand I am telling you to be yourself, to be authentically your original face; only then can you experience realization.
I can see your dilemma. You feel that they are both right -- that is significant to remember -- that you feel that they are both right, but your mind is not convinced, your thinking is not convinced. Your thinking creates questions: How can they both be right?
Mind functions in an either/or way: either this can be right or its opposite can be right.
Both together cannot be right -- as far as mind, its logic, its rationality, is concerned.
If mind is either/or, then the heart is both/and. The heart has no logic, but a sensitivity, a perceptivity. It can see that not only can both be together; in fact, they are not two. It is just one phenomenon, seen from two different aspects. And there is much more than the two -- that's why I say "both/and."
And the heart is always right. If there is a question of choosing between the mind and the heart... because mind is a creation of the society. It has been educated. It has been given to you by the society, not by existence.
The heart is unpolluted. It is pure existence:
Hence it has a sensitivity.
Look from the viewpoint of the heart, and the contradiction starts melting like ice.
I say to you, be one with the universe; you have to disappear and let the existence be.
You just have to be absent so that the existence can be present in its totality. But the person who has to disappear is not your reality, it is only your personality. It is just an idea in you. In reality you are already one with existence; you cannot exist in any other way.
You are existence.
But the personality creates a deception, and makes you feel separate. You can assume yourself to be separate -- existence gives you total freedom, even against itself. You can think of yourself as a separate entity, an ego. And that is the barrier that is holding you back from melting into the vastness that surrounds you every moment.
It has no closed doors, all its doors are open. Sometimes you do feel a certain door open -
- but only for a fragment of a moment; your personality cannot afford more. Those moments you call moments of beauty, moments of ecstasy.
Looking at a sunset, just for a second you forget your separateness. You are the sunset.
That is the moment when you feel the beauty of it. But the moment you say that it is a beautiful sunset, you are no longer feeling it; you have come back to your separate, enclosed entity of the ego. Now the mind is speaking.
And this is one of the mysteries, that the mind can speak -- and knows nothing; and the heart knows everything -- and cannot speak.
Perhaps to know too much makes it difficult to speak.
The mind knows so little, it is possible for it to speak. Language is enough for it, but is not enough for the heart.
But sometimes, under the impact of a certain moment -- a starry night, a sunrise, a beautiful flower -- and just for a moment you forget that you are separate. And even forgetting it releases tremendous beauty and ecstasy.
When I say you have to disappear for the realization of the ultimate, I do not mean you; I mean the you that you are not. I mean the you that you think you are.
And the second statement, that only in feeling one with existence, totally dissolved in it, do you realize yourself, you realize truth... there is no contradiction for the heart, because this "you" that you realize when you are one with existence is not the old you. That was your personality, and this is your individuality. That was given by the society, and this is nature, reality, a gift of existence. You can forget it, but you cannot destroy it.
The other you, the false you -- you can create it, but you cannot make it real. It will remain a shadow, a painted face. It will never become your original face.
When I was a professor in the university, in the professors' campus there used to be a small street. Very few bungalows were there and those were the best bungalows -- for the deans and the vice-chancellor and the heads of the departments. So very silent, empty, no traffic... and the street was not long. It
went just half a mile and then there was an end, a dead end, and a deep valley.
Whenever there was rain... I loved to walk in the rain. The last house had made it a point... because they saw it happening again and again, that whenever it rains I am certain to appear on the street. And that was the last house; then the valley was there.
They thought I must be mad -- without umbrella, soaking with water, with a beard, long hair, and walking so slowly and at ease... as if there is no problem of the rain. And then I used to stand by the side of a big bodhi tree, just at the very end of the street.
The bodhi tree has many beauties. One of the beauties is that its leaves are such that when it is raining you can stand underneath it and save yourself from the rains: the leaves prevent the water from reaching to you. And it has very thick foliage, so the water goes on gathering on the leaves. And the leaves are like cups, so they hold much.
So if you are suddenly caught in the rain, and don't want to spoil your clothes, the bodhi tree protects you longer than any other tree. But the other beauty is -- which was more important for me -- that when the rain has stopped, then under the bodhi tree, rain starts! -
- because how long can it contain all that water? Sooner or later it becomes weightier, and leaves start... So when the whole world is silent, under the bodhi tree it is raining.
So I used to go to the end of the street and rest under the bodhi tree. That was another madness to the people of the house. Only in the beginning few minutes of rain can the bodhi tree protect you; after, that is dangerous, the most dangerous. The rain has stopped, but it will not stop under the bodhi tree for at least one hour.
The children of the house, the wife, daughters, sons -- they all will gather in the verandah and look at me. And it became an absolute thing to them, that both things happen together
-- rain, and my coming to their house.
The house was given to one of the most important physicists, the head of the
physics department. And he was very much interested in me, because once in a while I was making statements which were bringing physics and mysticism closer than ever. Perhaps the same statement can be made by the physicist as is being made by the mystics.
He was a very humble man. He had been teaching all over the world in different universities. Whenever I was giving a lecture in the students' union -- because almost every week, once or twice... He was an absolute audience -- he would come, certainly.
Many other professors used to come, but he was the most regular. And we became friends.
He was very old. He had worked with Albert Einstein, and after Albert Einstein's death he came to America in his place -- because he was his closest colleague, and nobody could have taken that place except him.
We became such great friends that he said, "Sometime I would like you to come to my house; I would like to introduce you to my wife and my children." I had no idea that those were the people who knew me already, and I knew them already.
When I reached their house they all started giggling, and he was very angry. He said, "I have brought a friend. Accepted that he is very young and I am very old, and the friendship looks strange, but our conceptions about reality are very close, and you should not behave like this -- you have never behaved like this."
But the wife said, "You don't know this man."
And I said to him, "She is right: we have been well-acquainted for almost two years."
He said, "What! You are acquainted with my wife and children?"
I said, "Not actually, but a sort of acquaintance is there." And then I told him, "I come here on this street when it is raining; I love rains, and these people love to see me -- a madman. And don't think they are unmannerly -- that you are introducing me and they are laughing and giggling... even your wife cannot contain herself."
This physicist met some sannyasin in America, and sent me a message: "The last person I want to see is you, and I am coming back to India as soon as possible just to see you. And the reason is that I feel you are perfectly right that the way of the heart in seeing things is far closer to reality than the way of the mind."
But before he could come to India, he died. I feel that I must have been in his thoughts when he died.
We are one as far as our reality is concerned.
We look separate as far as our fabricated egos are concerned.
So when I say dissolve your "you," I mean your own creation, or the creation of the society in you. And just feel the silence of the moment when you are not; then you will feel so much in tune with clouds and the ocean and the mountains.
The day you drop it completely is the greatest day in your life, because this brings you the whole universe. You lose nothing -- you lose only a false idea -- and you attain everything: the whole universe, the infinite universe with all its beauties, with all its treasures.
But before you can drop the false "I" you have to find your real "I"; otherwise dropping the false "I", you will feel you are becoming empty.
That's why I say become an individual, be yourself.
That simply means that, feeling your reality you will be -- without any trouble -- capable of dropping the false. In fact the false will drop itself. As the real comes in, the false goes out. And the real is from one standpoint, individual -- individual against personality. The personality was just hodgepodge; something was put by your mother, something was put by your father, something by your neighbors, friends, wife, teachers, priests, leaders... It was a patchwork, it was not indivisible.
It was almost falling apart -- any moment, a small accident and it will fall apart -
- it had no soul connecting all its parts. It had no wholeness, it was only parts.
Against `personality' I use the word ìndividuality' in the meaning of indivisibility.
Individual means indivisible: you cannot divide it, there are no parts -- it cannot fall apart. It is solid rock, it is one piece. Seen in comparison with personality... but that is only one aspect.
Seen from the universal, you are no longer individual either. Even that much demarcation disappears. You are the whole. The winds, the trees, the moon are not separated anywhere; neither are you. You are breathing every moment. Existence is not separate from you, even when you think you are separate.
And when you know that you are not separate, it is a tremendous realization. Then all fear of losing your face, all fear of losing your personality -- which is always slipping --
disappears. You have come to the origins. You have come to the eternal, to the universal.
This is what I call enlightenment.
You have become full of light and clarity. Now you live the whole mystery of existence.
Seeing a roseflower, you become it. You don't see it from outside; you feel it from its innermost being. Its petals are yours, its perfume is yours. You are not an observer -- you are it.
Krishnamurti used to say again and again -- his whole life he was saying it; I don't think the people who were listening were really listening to him. This is his most repeated observation: that the observed becomes the observer, or the observer becomes the observed.
You don't see a sunset setting far away; you are in it, you are part of all those beautiful colors. And to live existence in such deep empathy is the richest experience man is capable of.
Trust your feeling.
Never trust your mind -- your mind is the Judas. Question 2
BELOVED OSHO,
THE MORE I MOVE INTO THE MEDITATION, THE MORE I FEEL RESPONSIBLE
FOR MYSELF AND FOR THE SITUATION IN THE WHOLE WORLD. HOW IS
THAT POSSIBLE?
It is the same thing -- just the same question.
The more you become yourself, the more you will feel responsible for the world because the more you are becoming part of the world -- you are not separate from it. Your being authentically yourself means a tremendous responsibility -- but it is not a burden. It is a rejoicing that you can do something for existence.
Existence has done so much for you, there is no way to pay it back. But we can do something. It will be very small compared to what existence has done for us, but it will show our gratitude. It is not a question of whether it is big or small; the question is that it is our prayer, our gratitude, and our totality is involved in it.
Yes, it will happen: the more you become yourself, the more you will start feeling responsibilities which you had never felt before.
I am reminded.… In the life of Mahavira, the most important Jaina philosopher.… He is going from one village to another village with his close disciple, Goshalak. And this is the question they are discussing: Mahavira is insisting, "Your responsibility towards existence shows how much you have attained to your authentic reality. We cannot see your authentic reality but we can see your responsibility."
As they are walking, they come across a small plant. And Goshalak is a logician
-- he pulls the plant and throws it away. It was a small plant with small roots.
Mahavira said, "This is irresponsibility. But you cannot do anything against existence.
You can try, but it is going to backfire."
Goshalak said, "What can existence do to me? I have pulled this plant; now existence cannot bring it to life again."
Mahavira laughed. They went into the town, they were going to beg for their food. After taking food, they were coming back, and they were surprised: the plant was rooted again.
While they were in the town it had started raining, and the roots of the plant, finding the support of the rain, went back into the soil. They were small roots, it was windy, and the wind helped the plant to stand up again.
By the time they had come back, the plant was back to its normal position. Mahavira said, "Look at the plant. I told you you cannot do anything against existence. You can try, but that will turn against you, because that will go on separating you from existence. It will not bring you closer.
"Just see that plant. Nobody could have imagined that this will happen, that the rain and the wind together will manage that small plant back, rooted into the earth. It is going to live its life.
"It seems to us a small plant but it is part of a vast universe, a vast existence, of the greatest power there is." And Mahavira said to Goshalak, "From this point our paths separate. I cannot allow a man to live with me who is against existence and feels no responsibility."
Mahavira's whole philosophy of non-violence can be better expressed as the philosophy of reverence for existence. Non-violence is simply a part of it.
It will go on happening: the more you find yourself, the more you will find yourself responsible for many things you have never cared about. Let that be a criterion: the more you find yourself responsible for people, things, existence, the more you can be at ease that you are on the right track.
One of my professors, Dr. Ras Biharidas -- he was a very old man -- has lived his life alone, because he was so contented, and so joyous in himself that he never needed anybody else. He was the head of the department, so he had a big bungalow -- living alone in it. And as we became acquainted with each other, he became very loving towards me, like a father.
He said, "There is no need for you to live in the hostel -- you can come and live
with me.
I have lived all alone in my life..." He used to play the sitar -- perhaps better than anybody else I have heard, and I have heard all the best sitarists. But he never played it to entertain people; he just played out of his joy.
And his timing was such, that nobody would have ever thought... three o'clock in the morning every day he will play his sitar. For seventy years he had been playing. The difficulty arose the first day, because I used to read up to three, and then I would go to bed -- and that was the time for him to wake up.
And this was a disturbance for both of us, because I loved to read things that I liked, not silently but loudly. When you are just reading with your eyes there is only a partial connection. But when you read poetry loudly you are involved in it; for the moment, you become the poet. You forget it is somebody else's poetry; it starts becoming part of your blood and bones and marrow.
Naturally it was difficult for him to sleep. And when I would go to sleep at three it was difficult for me to sleep. Just by my side, in the next room, he was playing his electric instruments -- the guitar, sitar, and other instruments. In two days we both were tired.
He said to me, "You live in this house -- I am leaving!"
I said, "You need not leave -- and where will you go? I have at least a place in the hostel.
I will leave."
But he said, "I cannot say to you to leave. I love you, I love your presence here. But our habits are dangerous to each other. I have never interfered with anybody; there has never been anybody with me to interfere with. And I know you -- you will not interfere with me. But this will kill both of us! You will not say, `Change your time.' I cannot say that you should leave the house; that's why I said that I am leaving -- you live in the house."
I persuaded him, "I cannot live in the house. Once you leave, the university cannot allow me to live in this house -- this house is meant for you. I have to go to my hostel." With tears in his eyes he came to lead me to the hostel.
I remembered him at this point because I have never seen anybody else in my life who was so responsive, so sensitive. Even if by mistake he had hit the chair, he will apologize
-- to the chair. I told him, "Dr. Biharidas, this is going too far!"
He said, "That's how I feel. I have hit the poor chair. She cannot speak; otherwise she would have been angry. And she is part of this whole cosmos, and she has served me, and I have not been friendly towards her; I have hit her. I have to apologize."
People in the university thought that he was mad -- a man who asks forgiveness from a chair in this world cannot be thought to be sane. I have watched him closely; he was one of the sanest persons. But his responsibility was tremendous.
He could not say to me... it was his house. He could have said to me, "You can read silently" or, "You can read at some other time" or, "You can read while I am playing my instrument." But that he would not do. It would have been easy -- that's what everybody else is doing in the world. But his sensitivity and deep respect for the other person... even his reverence for things was impeccable.
People have looked at his behavior and have thought, "He is not in the right state of mind." But nobody bothered to think that the right state of mind makes people responsible, so responsible that they start looking -- to others -- mad.
For example, Mahavira slept his whole life only on one side. He would not change his side in the night. Asked why, he said -- because he was living naked, having nothing, lying down on the bare floor.… If he changes his side, some ant, some small insects may be crushed by his turning, and he will not do such a thing. His responsibility towards very small things simply shows his integrity with existence.
His way of begging will explain to you what I mean. Nowhere else in the world has anybody done such a thing -- so much trust for existence! In the morning, after his meditations, he would visualize in what condition he was going to accept today's food.
And sometimes it happened that thirty days would pass and he would not be able to receive food because what he has visualized, a particular condition, was not fulfilled.
Strange things.…
For example, he thinks that he will accept food if a woman at the house where he stands begging comes out of the house with her baby still sucking milk from her breast. Then only will he accept food from that woman; otherwise that day is gone. Then next day he will try again.
His people persistently said to him, "This is strange! There have been great ascetics... you can fast as much as you want, that is another thing."
He said, "This is not a question of fasting. I am leaving it to existence, and I am making a condition so that I can know if existence wants me to eat today or not. It is between me and existence. If the condition is not fulfilled that simply means existence wants me to fast. It is not my fast, it is simply that existence does not want me to eat today, and the wisdom of the whole is bigger."
And sometimes such strange conditions were fulfilled that nobody could have imagined that it would be possible. For example, one of the conditions was fulfilled.… After thirteen days remaining hungry, fasting, he continued: unless that condition was fulfilled he would not change the condition. He would change it only when it is fulfilled; then he would add the second condition.
The condition was that a princess -- no ordinary woman, but a great princess -- chains on her legs, handcuffed... if she offers food to him, he will accept. Now, this is asking something absurd. In the first place, if she is a princess, why should she be handcuffed, with chains on her feet? And if she is handcuffed and with chains on her feet, she will be in jail! She may be a princess but she will not be able to offer food.
But it happened that one of the kings got very angry with his daughter -- her name was Chandana -- and out of anger he ordered that she should be handcuffed and chained for twenty-four hours. She was not put in jail, but she was free in the home.
And when Mahavira came... And that was the argument that created the whole problem: she wanted to offer food to Mahavira. She loved the man, she loved his way of thinking, and her father was absolutely against it. That's why she was handcuffed and chained --
she would not be able to go out of the house in that way because this would be
so embarrassing. When Mahavira came, he came with thousands of his followers.
But she went out with the food, and those thousands of followers could not believe their eyes. Because that very day, after thirteen days, they had insisted, "Mahavira, we would like to know: what is the condition? We are not going to tell anybody; we just want to see whether there is any meaning in your conditions. Is existence compassionate enough, is existence caring enough? Does it bother about you? Just for once, we want to know: what is your condition?"
He said, "This is my condition..."
They said, "My God, this may never be fulfilled!"
Mahavira said, "That simply means existence does not need me. I have no complaint; perhaps my work is completed, and I am unnecessarily being a burden." But the condition was fulfilled.
Such trust in existence, such unwavering trust, comes when you start taking responsibilities. As you feel more responsible towards small things around you, existence goes on responding in a thousand-fold way. You are not a loser.
Question 3 BELOVED OSHO,
CAN A CHAIN-SMOKER BECOME MEDITATIVE? I HAVE SMOKED FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, AND I FEEL THAT IN SMOKING I STOP GOING
DEEPLY INTO MEDITATION.. STILL, I CAN'T STOP SMOKING. CAN YOU TELL
ME SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
A meditator cannot smoke, for the simple reason that he never feels nervous, in anxiety, in tension.
Smoking helps -- on a momentary basis -- to forget about your anxieties, your
tensions, your nervousness. Other things can do the same -- chewing gum can do the same, but smoking does it the best.
In your deep unconscious, smoking is related with sucking milk from your mother's breast. And as civilization has grown, no woman wants the child to be brought up by breast-feeding -- naturally; he will destroy the breast. The breast will lose its roundness, its beauty.
The child has different needs. The child does not need a round breast, because with a round breast the child will die. If the breast is really round, while he is sucking the milk he cannot breathe; his nose will be stopped by the breast. He will get suffocated.
The child's needs are different from a painter's need, form a poet's need, from that of a man of aesthetic sensibility. The child needs a long breast so his nose is free and he can do both -- he can breathe and also feed himself. So every child will try to make the breast according to his needs. And no woman wants the breast to be destroyed. It is part of her beauty, her body, her shape.
So as civilization has grown, children are taken away from the breast of the mother sooner and sooner. And the longing to drink from the breast goes on in their minds. And whenever people are in some nervous state, in tension, in anxiety, the cigarette helps. It helps them to become a child again, relaxed in their mother's lap.
The cigarette is very symbolic. It is just like the nipple of the mother, and the smoke that goes through it is warm just like the milk is warm. So it has a certain symmetry, and you become engaged in it, and for the moment you are reduced to a child who has no anxieties, no problems, no responsibilities.
You say that for thirty years you have been smoking, a chain-smoker; you want to stop it but you cannot stop it. You cannot -- because you have to change the causes that have produced it.
I have been successful with many of my sannyasins. First they laughed when I suggested to them... they could not believe that such a simple solution could help them. I said to them, "Don't try to stop smoking, but rather bring a milk bottle that is used for small children. And in the night when nobody can see you, under your blanket enjoy the milk, the warm milk. It is not going to do any harm at least."
They said, "But how is it going to help?"
I said, "You forget about it -- how and why -- you just do it. It will give you good food before you go to sleep, and there is no harm. And my feeling is that the next day you will not feel so much need for cigarettes. So you count."
And they were surprised... slowly, slowly the cigarettes were disappearing, because their basic need which had remained hanging in the middle was fulfilled: they are no more children, they are maturing, and the cigarette disappears.
You cannot stop it. You have to do something which is not harmful, which is healthier, as a substitute for the time being so that you grow up and the cigarettes stop themselves.
Small children know this -- I have learned the secret from them. If a child is crying or weeping and is hungry, and the mother is far away, then he will put his thumb in his mouth and start sucking it. And he will forget all about hunger and crying and weeping, and will fall asleep. He has found a substitute -- although that substitute is not going to give him food, at least it gives a sense that something similar is happening. It relaxes him.
I have tried with a few of my sannyasins, even sucking the thumb. If you are too afraid to bring a bottle and fill it with milk, and if your wife comes to know about it, or your children see you doing it, then the best way is: you go to sleep with the thumb in the mouth. Suck it and enjoy it.
They have always laughed but they have always come back and said, "It helps, and the number of cigarettes next day is less and it goes on becoming less." Perhaps it will take a few weeks, then the cigarettes will disappear. And once they have disappeared without your stopping them.… Your stopping is repression, and anything repressed will try to come up again with greater force, with vengeance.
Never stop anything.
Find the basic cause of it and try to work out some substitute which is not harmful. So the basic cause disappears -- the cigarette is only a symptom. So the first thing is, stop stopping it. The second thing is, get a good bottle, and don't be embarrassed. If you are embarrassed then use your own thumb. Your own thumb
will not be that great, but it will help.
And I have never seen anybody failing who has used what I am saying. One day suddenly he cannot believe that he was unnecessarily destroying his health rather than having pure and clean air, smoking dirty smoke and destroying his lungs.
And this is going to become a problem more and more because as the women's liberation movement grows children will not be breast-fed. I am not saying that they should be breast-fed; but they should be given some substitute breast so that their unconscious does not carry some wound that will create problems for them
-- chewing gum and cigarettes and cigars These are all symptoms. In different
countries they are different.
In India they go on chewing pan leaves, or there are many people who use snuff. These are all the same. The snuff looks far away, but it is not that far away. The people who are nervous, tense, in anxiety, will take a dose of snuff. It gives a good sneeze, clears their mind, shakes their whole being, and it feels good.
But those anxieties will come back. The snuff cannot destroy them. You have to destroy the very base of your being nervous. Why should you be nervous?
Many journalists have told me, "With you one of the greatest difficulties is that we feel nervous." And they have said, "This is strange because we interview politicians -- they feel nervous, we make them nervous. You make us nervous, and immediately the desire to smoke arises. Then you prevent us smoking: `You cannot smoke here.' You are allergic.
"You have a great strategy! -- we cannot smoke, and you are making us nervous and tense, and this allergy you have which prevents us from smoking... so you have no way out for us."
But why should they feel nervous before me? Those politicians are powerful people -- if they feel nervous before them, it can be understood. But the reality is those powerful people are just hollow inside, and that power is borrowed from others, and they are afraid for their respectability. Each word they have to speak, they have to think twice. They are nervous that these journalists may create a situation in which their influence over people is destroyed. Their image that they have created has to become better and better. That is their fear. Because of that fear, the journalist -- any journalist, who has no power -- can make them nervous.
To me there is no problem. I have no desire for respectability. I am notorious enough --
they cannot make me more notorious. I have done everything that could have made me nervous; I have managed already. What can they do to me? -- I don't have any power to lose, and I can say anything that I want because I am not worried about being contradictory, inconsistent. On the contrary, I enjoy being contradictory, inconsistent.
They start feeling nervous, and the nervousness immediately brings the idea to do something, to get engaged, so nobody feels that you are nervous. Just watch: when you start feeling that you need a cigarette, just watch why you need it. There is something that is making you nervous, and you don't want to be caught.
I am reminded... One day in a New York church, as the bishop entered he saw a strange man, a perfect hippy-type. But he made the bishop nervous, because that man looked into his eyes, and said, "Do you know who I am? I am Lord Jesus Christ."
The bishop phoned Rome: "What am I supposed to do?" he asked the pope, "a hippy-looking man, but he also looks like Jesus Christ. And I am alone here, early in the morning and he has come here. I have never been told what we have to do when Jesus Christ comes, so I want instruction. Clearly, so I don't commit any mistake."
The pope was himself nervous. He said, "Do only one thing: look busy! What else can be done? Meanwhile give a phone call to the police station. And look busy so that man cannot see your nervousness."
Cigarettes help you to look busy; your nervousness is covered by it. So don't try to stop it; otherwise you will feel nervous and then you will fall back to the old pattern. The desire is there because something is left incomplete in you.
Complete it -- and there are simple methods to complete it. Just a baby's milk bottle will do. It will give you good food, it will make you healthier and it will take away all your desire for looking busy!
Beyond Psychology Chapter #3
Chapter title: Just counting other people's cows 13 April 1986 pm in
Archive code:
8604135
ShortTitle:
PSYCHO03
Audio:
Yes Video:
Yes Length:
79
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
THE POPE AND HIS BISHOPS -- ARE THEY REALLY FULLY AWARE OF HOW
THEY ARE CHEATING THEIR PEOPLE? I CAN'T IMAGINE THAT THEY ARE
JUST A BIG HEAP OF CRIMINALS, WITHOUT ANY RESPECT FOR TRUTH.
The religious leaders are as asleep as the people they are leading. The only difference between the leaders and the led is theoretical. The leaders have a great store of theological knowledge, all borrowed; nothing in it is of their own experience, but it gives them great authority over the people who don't have even borrowed knowledge. And these leaders are consistently emphasizing the fact: "You are sinners, you are ignorant.
We are the saints, we are the knowers."
The poor masses cannot make a distinction between authentic knowing and borrowed knowledge. Even these leaders -- popes, bishops, shankaracharyas, ayatollahs -- even they are not alert of the distinction. They know only one kind of knowledge, and that is borrowed knowledge. They have no awareness of a different dimension of knowing, so whatever they are doing is done in deep sleep. They are not cheating people consciously.
You cannot cheat anybody consciously.
Consciousness will prevent you from doing anything as ugly as cheating, deceiving, pretending, being a hypocrite, condemning people as sinners and fulfilling your own egos as great saints. No, it is not done consciously.
I never suspect for a single moment their good intentions. Whatever these people are doing, they are doing with good intentions; but the questions is not of good intentions, the question is: what is the result?
You may murder me with good intentions, but your good intentions cannot justify my murder.
I have come into contact with almost all kinds of religious scholars, and on one point they are the same, whether Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jew. That point is that they are perfectly at ease, feeling very good, in whatever they are doing -- they are doing God's work, and they are spreading wisdom. They don't even know the meaning of wisdom.
They have never tasted anything like that; they have heard about it, they have read about it, they have crammed hundreds of scriptures.
I am reminded of an historical event... When Alexander the Great invaded India, his master was no one other than Aristotle, the father of logic in the western
hemisphere.
And he had asked him, "When you come back, bring the four VEDAS of the Hindus. The rumors have been, for hundreds of years, that those four books contain all the knowledge that is in the world; if you know those four VEDAS, you know all. So bring those four VEDAS for me."
Alexander said, "That is very simple." But in those days the VEDAS were not printed.
Hindus resisted printing them for hundreds of years after the printing press was invented.
They never wanted their sources of wisdom to be printed and sold in the market.
Knowledge cannot be sold, and you cannot purchase wisdom. And purchasing the four VEDAS from a bookstall, you will be deceiving yourself -- those words are dead.
Alexander enquired because he was thinking he could get them easily, but it was difficult.
Very few prominent brahmin families had copies of the VEDAS, and that was their whole treasure. But finally he found one old brahmin... people said, "He has one of the most authentic copies of the VEDAS. And he is old; you can get them from him."
Alexander went to the old man. The old man said, "There is no problem, but traditionally we can give the VEDAS only when the sun is rising. You have come at the wrong time --
the sun is setting. Come tomorrow morning, just before sunrise, just as the sun is rising, and I will hand over all the four VEDAS to you."
Alexander said, "I was not thinking that it is going to be so simple. You don't ask anything in return?"
He said, "No, this is enough, that you will be taking the VEDAS into the wide world.
Come early in the morning." But that old man was really clever.…
The whole night he and his four sons remained awake sitting around a fire. He told the sons, "Read one page of the book that I have given to you." He distributed the four VEDAS to the four sons, according to their age. The eldest got the RIGVEDA, the oldest scripture. "You read aloud one page so that I can hear that you are reading it rightly, and then remember it and drop it into the fire. By the morning all four VEDAS have to be burned, and by the morning all you four have to become my four VEDAS. I am going to present you to Alexander the Great."
In ancient India, memory was particularly trained. Still, all universities, and colleges'
educational systems depend on cultivating memory. They deceive you and themselves, thinking that this is intelligence. Memory is not intelligence, because memory can be part of a computer -- which has no consciousness, which has no intelligence. Your mind is also a natural bio-computer. Memory is simply remembering but not understanding; understanding is totally different. Memory needs a very mechanical mind, and understanding needs a very non-mechanical mind. In fact the ways are diametrically opposite.
In the morning when Alexander appeared he was stunned. All the four VEDAS were burned, and the old man said, "Now you can take my four sons. They have perfect memory. They will repeat the VEDAS exactly. I could not give you the VEDAS -- that is never done -- but I can give my sons to you. My whole life I have trained them in memorizing. You just have to repeat something one time and it remains in their memory, as if written on a stone."
Alexander was defeated by the old man. He could not take those four sons because they didn't know the meaning of what they were saying; they could not explain anything. The language was different, and they could not translate it -- they didn't know Greek. What purpose would be served by taking these people?
But all your religious scholars and leaders are nothing but memories, trained memories.
They don't know what they are saying, but they say it correctly. Their language is right, their grammar is right, their pronunciation is right, their accent is right, but all these are futile because they don't know the meaning, they have never
lived it. That meaning comes through living, through experiencing. But they will remain in a deception, and they will spread the same deception to other people.
So I say again: the popes, the bishops, the shankaracharyas -- they are not doing intentionally any crime. They are fast asleep; they cannot do anything intentionally! They are living an unconscious life. Their words are beautiful -- they have collected them from beautiful sources -- but the words have not grown within their being. The words are not part of their life. They are as ignorant as the people they are teaching.
Socrates used to say that there is a knowledge which is ignorant, and there is an ignorance which is knowledge.
Borrowed knowledge is ignorance.
Experienced truth makes you not knowledgeable, but humble. The more you know it, the less you claim to know it. The day you know it perfectly, you can only say, "I am utter ignorance. I am just a child, collecting seashells on the beach. I know nothing."
"I do not know," can only be said by a man who knows perfectly.
The people who say, "We know," are utterly ignorant people -- but their memories are full. And those memories are dead, because they have not given birth to any experience of their own.
Gautam Buddha used to say, "I used to know a man -- he was my servant. Sitting by the door, he would count the cows that were going early in the morning to the pasture, to the river." He would count them -- it had become almost an automatic thing with him. His duty was to sit in front of the door of Gautam Buddha, in case he needs anything; otherwise he was sitting there the whole day. And by the time the cows returned... It is one of the most beautiful times. In Indian villages, which are still not modernized, the time when the sun is setting has got a special name, goadhooli. Goa means cow, and dhooli means dust: the cows are coming, raising dust. The sun is setting, the birds are returning to their trees -- it is a very peaceful moment.
So at the time of goadhooli he would count again the cows that were returning home.
And he would become very much worried if some cow was missing, if the count was not exactly as it should have been. Later, when Gautam Buddha became a great master, he used the story of that man and his habit to explain something immensely meaningful.
He said, "I used to ask that poor fellow, `Do you have a cow?' And he would say, Ì am so poor, I don't have a cow.' And I would say to him, `Then why do you unnecessarily go on counting thousands of cows in the morning, then in the evening again -- thousands of cows? And if one cow is missing -- or perhaps you have miscounted -- then you are worried, you cannot sleep. And it is not your cow, it is not your concern!'"
Buddha used to say to his disciples, "All knowledge that is not yours is not your concern.
You are counting other people's cows, unnecessarily wasting your time. It is better to have one cow of your own -- that will be nourishment."
But all your scholars are just counting other people's cows. And they are doing immense harm without knowing it, because they are helping people to become knowers without knowing. This is the greatest harm that can be done to man, to give him a sense that he knows -- and he knows nothing. You have destroyed his whole life. You have destroyed the opportunity in which he may have known, experienced, lived. You have taken all his opportunities, all his possibilities of growth.
I am against all these scholars, not because their intentions are bad but because the outcome of their very good intentions is disastrous. They have destroyed millions of people on the earth; they never allowed them to grow, they gave them a false notion that they know already. This is pure poison.
George Gurdjieff used to tell a story... there was a magician who had many sheep. And it was a trouble to get them home from the forest every night -- wild animals were there, and he was losing many of his sheep. Finally the idea came to him, "Why do I not use my expertise, my magic?"
He hypnotized all his sheep and told them different things. To one sheep he said, "You are a lion. You need not be afraid; you are the king amongst the animals." To another he said, "You are a tiger," to another, "You are a man." And he told to everybody, to all the sheep: "You are not going to be butchered because you are
not sheep, so you need not be afraid to come back home. You should come early, before nightfall."
And from that day no sheep went missing. In fact, from that day no sheep was behaving like a sheep: somebody was roaring like a lion, somebody was behaving like a man, and nobody was afraid of being butchered, killed -- the very question was irrelevant. And the magician was butchering them every day for his food. They may have been roaring like lions -- that did not matter; they were sheep after all.
But he managed very beautifully. Giving one sheep the notion of being a lion, there was no need now to be bothered that he would try to escape, seeing that other sheep are being killed. Still sheep were being killed, but this sheep will know, "I am a lion, I am not a sheep. Sheep are bound to be killed!" When he is killed, others will be thinking, "He was just a sheep, we are men. And he was not only a sheep, but a foolish sheep who used to think that he is a lion, and never listened to us. We argued many times, `You are a sheep.
We are men, we know better. You stop roaring, that is not going to help.'" But the magician was in absolute control.
The story Gurdjieff was telling was about your religious leaders. They have managed to tell you things which you are not. They have managed to convince you that you know things which you know not. And this is the greatest crime that can be committed. But you cannot call them criminals, because they are not doing it to harm you. They are trying to serve you, they are trying to help you.
Just because all the religions have been doing the same thing, the whole world is under a certain hypnosis. And why have I created so many enemies? -- for the simple reason that I am telling you that your knowledge is not knowledge, that it is a cover-up. You are utterly ignorant. You know nothing, and you believe that you know. It hurts!
I am taking away your knowledge, I am taking away your virtue, I am taking away your morality. I am taking away everything that you used to think is a great treasure, everything that was cherished by you, nourished by you, protected by you, because you thought that you have got the real secrets of life, that you know the real mysteries of life.
And to take away these things from people is naturally going to create enemies.
It is a strange world. The enemies are popes, are archbishops, are shankaracharyas, are ayatollahs -- they are the respected people of the world, and the friend looks like the greatest enemy. The enemies appear to be friends, and the friends appear to be enemies.
Humanity has misbehaved with its friends and given all its respect to its enemies. And that is the reason why the whole world is in misery: you have listened to the enemies and you have destroyed your friends.
And the same story continues.
I have talked to so many wise people, and found that all their wisdom is just memory.
Not even a small bit is their own; all has come from others. And this is something fundamental to realize, that truth can only be your own experience. There is no other way to get it. Lies you can get in abundance. There are supermarkets all over the world, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist -- all kinds of lies, all colors, all shapes and sizes, whichever you prefer. They are available and suitable to you. You are not to fit with them, they fit with you. It is very easy. They are made for you, they are tailored for you.
Truth is a totally different matter. You will have to fit with it.
Truth knows no compromise.
You will have to change according to it.
You will have to go through a transformation.
So I am creating enemies, not without any reason. The reason is clear. I am creating a few friends also, but those few friends have to go through a deep fire test. They have to drop their false personalities, their egos, their knowledge -- everything they have. They have to be ready to be utterly naked and empty. Only then are they at the right point of the journey, the journey towards truth.
Naked, empty, and alone.…
But it is such a joy, and each moment is such a glory, such a paradise that once you have tasted a single moment on the way towards truth, you will never look back on all that you had to leave. It is a great unburdening, a freedom.
Now you can open your wings unto the sky. The whole sky now is yours.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
YOU WERE SAYING THAT THE NEW WILL BE VICTORIOUS. WILL IT REALLY
BE THE NEW, OR WILL IT BE THE OLD POLISHED UP HERE AND THERE.
THERE ARE PUBLICATIONS NOW IN GERMANY THAT USE YOU. SOME
MENTION YOU IN THE LIST OF LITERATURE AS THE SOURCE, BUT OTHERS
USE YOU AND DON'T MENTION YOU -- OR THEY EVEN CONDEMN YOU. I AM REALLY AFRAID OF THOSE PEOPLE. WHAT IS THEIR INTENTION? CAN
YOU PLEASE TAKE AWAY THAT FEAR?
There is no need to be afraid of those people. That is happening in every language all over the world. People are taking my statements and not mentioning my name. There is no harm in it, because my name is not important; what is important is the statement. Even if these people are stealing, there is no harm. That statement may start something in somebody which these people cannot fulfill. That statement may trigger a process in somebody who will have to come to the original source.
They are not mentioning my name for two reasons. One reason is, they would like to appear original. Secondly, they are afraid that if they mention my name
they will be condemned -- then their book is not going to be praised, respected.
But don't be afraid of these people, whatever their reason. Anything taken from me is fire, and it does not matter in what way the fire reaches to somebody's heart. These people who are doing such things cannot be great writers, poets, creative thinkers; otherwise they would not do such an act of stealing. These people are third rate.
So if they have stolen something from me it is going to stand out in their whole book as separate, unrelated, out of context. Anybody who has a little intelligence, will see that this part has not come from the same man who has written the book, because the book has a third class flavor; there is no originality, there is no understanding of the deeper problems of life, and there is no courage to say the truth as it is. So anything that they have stolen to decorate their books, to make their books valuable, unknowingly that very part is going to destroy their whole book. They have stolen fire and put it into their book.
In India, one radio station was reading my statements every day, for ten minutes in the morning, without mentioning my name -- but passages from books, stories. Hundreds of letters came to me saying, "These people are stealing from your books."
I said, "Don't be worried. My name is not significant, my message is. They are cowards, or perhaps they love me but they are government servants."
In India radio is owned by the government, television is owned by the government. If they use my name, they may lose their jobs. And certainly during that series, which was continuing for six months, even ministers, cabinet ministers and the prime minister, were quoting from those statements, thinking that they have nothing to do with me. But the people who were listening knew that those statements were not coming from Indira Gandhi -- they could not be, they had no relevance with the person -- they were stolen.
And they started searching for the place from where the statements had been stolen.
Finally I met the person, the director of that radio station. He was a lover of me, and he said, "I have been condemned. Hundreds of letters are coming to me, saying, `You are stealing. You are not mentioning Osho's name. But if I mention your name then the series will be stopped that very day. I will continue as long as
they don't discover...
`"And the moment it was discovered, immediately the series was stopped and the man was removed. He told me, "It happened because of that series. People started writing letters to the prime minister saying, `This man is stealing passages from Osho.'"
The prime minister herself had been stealing. Her lectures have been sent to me, and word for word, long passages have been stolen from me. But I have always taken the standpoint: let the truth reach to people by any means, by anyone.
I have been thinking that if the great powerful governments of the world are so afraid that they will not allow me entry into their country -- just as a tourist for three or four weeks -
- if they are so impotent with all their power that they will not even allow me an overnight stay at the airport, which is legally my right...
In England my jet plane was standing at the airport, and the pilots had to rest. According to the law, after a certain period they cannot fly, so only in the morning would they be able to fly. I had every right to stay in the lounge at the airport, but they refused -- as if with me there are different laws!
One of my friends who was traveling with me just happened to see the file of the man who was preventing me, because he went to the bathroom, leaving the file on the table.
And my friend just looked and was surprised, because there were government instructions I had just arrived, but the file was ready, saying that if I try to stay
even overnight I should not be allowed to stay in the first class lounge, but I should be put in jail; I am a dangerous person.
In the airport lounge, from where I cannot get into the country... there is no way to get into the country from the lounge. Every instruction was there about how they had to treat me. In England we had to stay for one night in jail, without any crime -- just because the pilots could not fly overtime. And the government was ready beforehand. It was not a spontaneous decision, it was well-planned.
Now there are countries who have decided in their parliaments that I should not be allowed into their country. And they have a certain European parliament...
Just the other day I was informed that now they are considering in the European parliament -- which is just a combined body of all the parliaments of Europe -- a decision that I should not be allowed even to land my plane at any airport in Europe.
Today they will be doing this in Europe -- America has done it already. Tomorrow they will be doing it in Asia, in Australia, in Africa. It is possible, very possible, that if they are so much afraid of me, they will start banning my books. And it may become necessary that my books go without my name, or with any name -- like Holy Ghost!
The name does not matter. But the message has to reach.
It is unprecedented. The whole world against a single man -- a man who has no power, no nuclear weapons, who cannot do any harm to anybody. The whole world is at war with a single person. It simply shows that I am hitting at their very roots.
You need not be worried. If somebody has taken some passage, that passage will prove more important than his whole book. And I would like more and more writers, poets, film makers to steal as much as they can, because truth is not my property, I am not its owner.
Let it reach in any way, in anybody's name, in any form, but let it reach. Question 3
BELOVED OSHO,
THESE WORDS "TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOURSELF," CONFUSE ME. I AM AN INDIVIDUALIST AND ENJOY BEING ON MY OWN. IF I DO WHAT
FEELS GOOD TO SUPPORT MYSELF, IS IT NOT A WAY OF FEEDING MY EGO?
WHERE IS THE LIMIT BETWEEN TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR ONESELF
AND FEEDING THE EGO BY FULFILLING ITS TENDENCIES?
There is no limit for taking responsibility for yourself. And the question has arisen... and not only this question, many questions arise because you only think about them; they are not your existential experiences. If you take responsibility for yourself you cannot be an egoist, because to be an egoist simply means you are fast asleep and you cannot take any responsibility.
Responsibility comes with awareness, alertness.
You are asking an intellectual question like, "When we bring light into the room, what are we are going to do with the darkness? Where have we to throw it?" Intellectually it is perfectly right. There is darkness in the room and you say, "Bringing light into the room, the question arises, `Where then has the darkness to be pushed? Where has it to be thrown? In what way?' But it is not existential. Just try to bring light in and there will be no question about darkness. There will be no darkness!
Responsibility is awareness, alertness, consciousness. Ego is just unconsciousness.
They cannot coexist.
As you grow more conscious you grow more towards light, and anything belonging to the world of darkness starts disappearing. Ego is nothing but darkness.
So remember one thing, try to ask questions which are existential. Intellectual questions may look logical, but are really absurd. You try responsibility, and by being responsible you will have to be conscious and alert.
Remaining responsible, you will create the light that automatically dispels the darkness of the ego.
Beyond Psychology Chapter #4
Chapter title: Dancingly, disappear
14 April 1986 am in Archive
code:
8604140
ShortTitle:
PSYCHO04
Audio:
Yes Video:
Yes Length:
102
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
OFTEN, WHEN I AM DEEPLY RELAXED, A STRONG FEELING TO DIE COMES
UP IN ME. IN THESE MOMENTS I FEEL MYSELF AS PART OF THE WHOLE
COSMOS, AND I WANT TO DISAPPEAR INTO IT. ON ONE HAND, IT IS SUCH A BEAUTIFUL FEELING, AND I AM SO GRATEFUL FOR IT. ON THE OTHER
HAND I MISTRUST IT: MAYBE I HAVE NOT SAID "YES" TO MYSELF,
TO MY
BEING, IF THE DESIRE TO DIE IS SO STRONG. IS IT A SUICIDAL DESIRE?
It is not a suicidal desire.
One basic thing about suicide is that it arises only in people who are clinging very much to life. And when they fail in their clinging, the mind moves to the opposite pole. The function of the mind is of either/or: either it wants the whole, or none of it. The lust for life cannot be fulfilled totally, because life as such is a temporal thing; it is bound to end at a point, just as it began one day at a point. You cannot have a line with only the beginning; somewhere or other there is bound to be an end.
So the people who commit suicide are not against life; it only appears so. They want life in its totality, they want to grab it whole, and when they fail -- and they are bound to fail -
- then out of frustration, out of failure, they start thinking of death. Then suicide is the only alternative. They will not be satisfied with whatsoever life gives them; they want more and more and more.
Life is short, and the series of the desire for more and more is infinite, so the failure is certain. Somewhere or other there is bound to come a moment when they will feel they have been cheated by life. Nobody is cheating them -- they have cheated themselves.
They have been asking too much, and they have only been asking, they have not been giving anything, not even gratefulness. In anger, in rage, in revenge the pendulum of the mind moves to the other end -- still they do not know with whom they are taking the revenge. They are killing themselves: it does not destroy life, it does not destroy existence.
So this experience is not of a suicidal nature. It is something similar to suicide, but on a very different level and from a very different dimension. When you are relaxed, when there is no tension in you, when there is no desire, when the mind is as silent as a lake without any ripples, a deep feeling arises in you to disappear in this moment, because life has not given you anything better than this. There have been moments of happiness, of pleasure, but this is something far beyond
happiness and pleasure; it is pure blissfulness.
To turn back from it is really hard. One wants to go deeper, and one can see going deeper means disappearing. Most of him has already disappeared in relaxation, in silence, in desirelessness. Most of his personality has already gone, just a small thread of the ego is still hanging around. And he would like to take a jump out of this circle of the ego, because if relaxing even within the ego brings so much benediction, one cannot imagine what will be the result if everything is dissolved, so that one can say, "I am not and existence is."
This is not a suicidal instinct. This is what basically is meant by spiritual liberation: it is liberation from the ego, from desire, even from the lust for life. It is total liberation, it is absolute freedom.
But in this situation the question is bound to arise in everyone. The question is arising not out of your intelligence; the question is arising out of your cowardice. You really want some excuse not to dissolve, not to evaporate into the infinite. Immediately the mind gives you the idea that this is what suicide is: -- "Don't commit suicide. Suicide is a sin, suicide is a crime. Come back!" And you start coming back. And coming back means you become again tense, again full of anxieties, again full of desires. Again the whole tragic drama of your life...
It is your fear of total dissolution. But you don't want to accept it as a fear, so you give it a condemnatory name -- suicide. It has nothing to do with suicide; it is really going deeper into life.
Life has two dimensions. One is horizontal -- in which you are all living, in which you are always asking for more and more and more. The quantity is not the question; no quantity is going to satisfy you. The horizontal line is the quantitative line. You can go on and on. It is like the horizon -- as you go on, the horizon goes on receding back. The distance between you and the goal of your more and more, the goal of your desire, remains always exactly the same. It was the same when you were a child, it was the same when you were young, it is the same when you are old. It will remain the same to your last breath.
The horizontal line is exactly an illusion. The horizon does not exist, it only appears --
there, perhaps just a few miles away, the sky is meeting the earth... it meets nowhere.
And out of the horizon comes the horizontal line -- unending, because the goal is illusory; you cannot come to make it a reality. And your patience is limited, your span of life is limited. One day you realize that it seems all futile, meaningless: "I am unnecessarily dragging myself, torturing myself, reaching nowhere." Then the opposite of it arises in you -- destroy yourself. It is not worthwhile to live, because life promises, but never delivers the goods.
But life has another line -- a vertical line. The vertical line moves in a totally different dimension. In such an experience, for a moment you have turned your face towards the vertical.
You are not asking -- that's why you are being given.
You are not desiring -- that's why so much is made available to you. You don't have any goal -- that's why you are so close to it.
Because there is no desire, no goal, no asking, no begging, you don't have any tension; you are utterly relaxed.
In this relaxed state is the meeting with existence.
The fear comes at the moment when you come to dissolve your last part, because then it will be irrevocable; you will not be able to come back.
I have told many times a beautiful poem of Rabindranath Tagore. The poet has been searching for God for millions of lives. He has seen him sometimes, far away, near a star, and he started moving that way, but by the time he reached that star, God has moved to some other place. But he went on searching and searching -- he was determined to find God's home -- and the surprise of surprises was, one day he actually reached a house where on the door was written: "God's Home."
You can understand his ecstasy, you can understand his joy. He runs up the steps, and just as he is going to knock on the door, suddenly his hand freezes. An idea arises in him:
"If by chance this is really the home of God, then I am finished, my seeking is finished. I have become identified with my seeking, with my search. I don't know anything else. If the door opens and I face God, I am finished -- the search
is over. Then what? Then there is an eternity of boredom -- no excitement, no discovery, no new challenge, because there cannot be any challenge greater than God."
He starts trembling with fear, takes his shoes off his feet, and descends back down the beautiful marble steps. He took the shoes off so that no noise was made, for his fear was that even a noise on the steps... God may open the door, although he has not knocked.
And then he runs as fast as he has never run before. He used to think that he had been running after God as fast as he can, but today, suddenly, he finds energy which was never available to him before. He runs as he has never run, not looking back.
The poem ends, "I am still searching for God. I know his home, so I avoid it and search everywhere else. The excitement is great, the challenge is great, and in my search I continue, I continue to exist. God is a danger -- I will be annihilated. But now I am not afraid even of God, because I know His home. So, leaving His home aside, I go on searching for him all around the universe. And deep down I know my search is not for God; my search is to nourish my ego."
I place Rabindranath Tagore as one of the greatest religious men of our century, although he is not ordinarily related with religion. But only a religious man of tremendous experience can write this poem. It is not just ordinary poetry; it contains such a great truth. And that's what your question is raising. Relaxed, you come to a moment where you feel you are going to disappear, and then you think, "Perhaps this is a suicidal instinct," and you come back to your old miserable world. But that miserable world has one thing: it protects your ego, it allows you to be.
This is the strange situation: blissfulness does not allow you; you have to disappear.
That's why you don't see many blissful people in the world. Misery nourishes your ego --
that's why you see so many miserable people in the world. The basic central point is the ego.
So you have not come to a point of suicide. You have come to a point of nirvana,
of cessation, of disappearance, of blowing out the candle. This is the ultimate experience. If you can gather courage, just one step more... Existence is only one step away from you.
Don't listen to this garbage of your mind saying that this is suicide. You are neither drinking poison, nor are you hanging yourself from a tree, and you are not shooting yourself with a gun -- what suicide? You are simply becoming thinner and thinner and thinner. And the moment comes when you are so thin and so spread all over existence that you cannot say you are, but you can say that existence is.
This we have called enlightenment, not suicide.
This we have called realization of the ultimate truth. But you have to pay the price. And the price is nothing but dropping the ego. So when such a moment comes, don't hesitate.
Dancingly, disappear... with a great laughter, disappear; with songs on your lips, disappear.
I am not a theoretician, this is not my philosophy. I have come to the same borderline many times and turned back. I have also found the home of God many times and could not knock. Jesus has a few sayings. One of the sayings is, "Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you." If this sentence has any meaning, it is this meaning that I am giving you now.
So when this moment comes, rejoice and melt. It is human nature -- and understandable -
- that many times you will come back. But those many times don't count. One time, gather all courage and take a jump.
You will be, but in such a new way that you cannot connect it with the old. It will be a discontinuity. The old was so tiny, so small, so mean, and the new is so vast. From a small dewdrop you have become the ocean. But even the dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf trembles for a moment, tries to hang on a little more, because he can see the ocean...
once he has fallen from the lotus leaf he is gone. Yes, in a way he will not be; as a dewdrop he will be gone. But it is not a loss. He will be oceanic.
And all other oceans are limited. The ocean of existence is unlimited. Question 2
BELOVED OSHO,
WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES I OFTEN HEAR THE SOUND OF A TINY BELL RINGING WITHIN.
CAN YOU PLEASE TELL US ABOUT HEARING, MEDITATION, SOUND AND
SILENCE?
It is possible that hearing inside you a tiny bell when you enter into meditation may be related to your past life, particularly as a Tibetan, because for centuries in Tibet this has been the conditioning of the mind -- that when you enter meditation, you hear tiny bells.
And if a conditioning has been continued too long, it is carried into new lives.
But hearing the tiny bell is not meditation; it is just a conditioning. When you start entering into total silence where no bells are ringing, then meditation begins. The tiny bell rings in the mind, and meditation is a state of no-mind. Tiny or not tiny, no bell can ring there; it is utter silence.
But many religions, particularly in the East... and the most prominent is the Tibetan religion which has used tiny bells. It is a significant technique but dangerous, as all techniques are: you can get attached to the technique. If you listen to a tiny bell for hours it will have a hypnotizing effect on your mind. Thinking will stop, only the bell will go on ringing. Even when in reality the bell has stopped, it will go on ringing in the mind.
The idea behind the technique was that slowly, slowly the sound of the bell will fade away into silence. If it happens, good. But the greater possibility is that you will become attached to the bell. And it gives great peace, it will give you a feeling of great well-being, because the mind will not be thinking; it cannot do
two things.
It is not only the bell -- anything can be used. Lord Tennyson, the great poet, was embarrassed to recognize in his autobiography that from his very childhood... he does not know how -- perhaps sleeping in a separate room as a small child, he was afraid of the darkness. Just to make him feel that he is not alone, he started repeating his own name,
"Tennyson, Tennyson..." Repeating his own name he forgot all about the darkness and the ghosts, and all kinds of creatures that humanity has invented for poor children to be tortured with. He would repeat a few times, "Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson..." and he would become silent and would fall into a deep sleep.
Later on, as he grew up, it became his usual practice. Without it he could not fall asleep --
it became a necessary ritual. But it started giving him new insights: it not only brought sleep, but repeating, "Tennyson, Tennyson," his own name, he became silent, peaceful; he became somehow more than the body, somehow immaterial. And then, as he came to know about meditation... he had already developed a technique through his whole life. He tried it for meditation, and it worked. Just as it was leading him into deep sleep, it started leading him into deep relaxation, a great peacefulness.
So it is not a question of what mantra, what chanting, what name of which God, or just the sound of a bell... it doesn't matter. All that matters basically is that you become concentrated on one thing, that the mind is so full of one thing that all other thoughts stop. And any one thing for a long time is going to give you a certain kind of hypnotic state.
Just a few days ago, Anando brought me a press clipping. The man was authentic in writing it... he was puzzled, he could not understand what is happening. He had been listening to me -- he had come as a journalist to report -- he had never heard such long discourses, and on subjects which were not his area! So he reports on me: "What is striking," he reports, "is Osho speaks very slowly, with gaps -- sometimes with closed eyes, and sometimes he looks very intensely at you. He speaks so long that one feels bored, but the strange thing is that after this boredom one feels a deep serenity, a silence -
- which is strange, because usually out of boredom one feels frustration, one feels angry."
But he has observed well his own mind... one feels a certain serenity, silence, peacefulness, and finally it seems that a kind of hypnosis has happened: "Perhaps this is Osho's method -- to speak slowly, to speak with gaps, so that you start feeling bored. But out of that boredom comes a serenity."
It is strange for him -- it is strange for Western psychology too -- that if boredom is used rightly it is going to create serenity, peacefulness and a state of hypnosis. And hypnosis is healthy: It is not meditation, but it still somehow reflects meditation. It is like the moon reflected in the water; it is not the moon, but this is still a reflection of the moon.
So all the religions -- in the East particularly, but in the West also -- have used very similar techniques. Now a Buddhist monk in Tibet, in the silence of the Himalayas, goes on ringing a small bell for hours... no other sound -- the whole universe around him is silent -- the only sound is the bell. Naturally his mind starts getting bored, starts feeling disinterested. There is no excitement, it is just repetition, but that is the point: if the bell can be stopped -- and the bell has to be stopped -- the mind will go on listening to it for a little time longer.
The monk has become so accustomed to listening to it that he will go on listening to it.
And as the sound of the bell recedes, becomes thinner, becomes distant, more distant, the mind is left in a certain silence. This silence either can give you hypnosis... Hypnosis is another name for deliberately created sleep: it is deeper than your ordinary sleep, healthier than your ordinary sleep; it rejuvenates you within minutes, which your ordinary sleep can do only in eight hours. That is one line that it can move on, but that is not meditation.
The other line is... listening to the bell inside you getting more and more distant, you become more and more alert so that you can listen to it, even though the sound is going away from you.
Now you have to be more conscious to listen to it. First you were unconscious and you were listening to it; now it is getting distant so you have to be very alert, very conscious.
And a moment comes when the sound disappears... you have to be perfectly conscious.
You have taken a different route.
This state of consciousness is meditation.
I am not against hypnosis; what I am against is... hypnosis should not be understood as meditation. Hypnosis is of the mind, and good for the mind, good for the body.
Meditation is neither of the body nor of the mind, but belongs to the third within you --
your being. It is good for the being, it is nourishment for the being.
So it is possible that if sitting in meditation, you suddenly start hearing bells, you may have practiced this in your past lives. I don't talk about past lives for the simple reason that for you it will be just a belief. But the question was such that I had to bring the past life in, because it had nothing to do with this life. You had not practiced meditation on the sound of bells, so from where can it come into your mind? It can come only from the past conditioning, and a very deep conditioning.
Nothing is wrong in it. Enjoy it, but remember not to go towards sleep. Go towards more consciousness. Sleep is unconsciousness, so they are diametrically opposite directions.
And there comes a point from where you can move either way. When the sound of bells is receding, disappearing, that is the moment. Either you can fall asleep... which is good but this is not meditation, and it is not going to give you any spiritual experience. If you remain alert, aware, the sound disappears; only silence remains.
Consciousness and silence together is what meditation is all about. Question 3
BELOVED OSHO,
I ONCE DREW A PICTURE OF A FLOWER BLOSSOMING. THE FLOWER WAS
SIMPLE AND LOVELY; IT HAD A FAINT LIGHT COMING OUT OF THE JUST-OPENING BUD, AND THE LEAVES WERE STRONG AND HEALTHY. BUT THE
ROOTS WERE UNDERDEVELOPED AND WEAK, AS IF THEY DIDN'T BELONG
TO THIS FLOWER AT ALL. THIS PICTURE WAS TO SYMBOLIZE ME, AND I HAVE A DEEP ATTACHMENT TO IT. BUT I AM CONSTANTLY WORRIED BY
THE ROOTS, AS THEY CONTRADICT THE PROMISE OF THE BLOSSOM.
THERE ARE MANY QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THIS PICTURE, BUT I WOULD BE VERY HAPPY IF YOU WOULD ANSWER ME SOMEHOW.
This is not only your situation. This is the situation of almost all human beings: their roots are weak, and without strong roots the promise of a healthy blossoming of thousands of flowers is impossible. Why are the roots weak? They are kept weak.
In Japan they have trees four hundred, five hundred years old, and six inches high. It is considered to be an art. To me it is simple murder. Generations of gardeners have been keeping those trees in this situation.
Now, a tree which is five hundred years old... you can see its branches are old, although small; it is a very tiny old man, but it shows on the leaves, on the trunk, on the branches.
And the strategy that has been used is this: they plant a tree in a mud pot which has no bottom, then they go on cutting the roots -- because the pot has no bottom. When the roots come out and try to reach the earth, they will cut them. They will not do anything to the tree; they will simply go on cutting the roots. Now for five hundred years a family has been continuously cutting the roots. The tree may live for thousands of years, but the tree never blossoms, it never
comes to fruition.
The same has been done to man all over the world. His roots have been cut from the very beginning, about everything.
Every child has to be obedient. You are cutting his roots. You are not giving him a chance to think whether to say yes to you, or to say no. You are not allowing him to think, you are not allowing him to make a decision on his own. You are not giving him responsibility -- you are taking responsibility away, behind the beautiful word òbedience'. You are taking his freedom away, you are taking his individuality away, by a simple strategy -- insisting that he is a child, he does not know anything. The parents have to decide, and the child has to be absolutely obedient. The obedient child is the respected child.
But so much is implied in it that you are destroying him completely. He will grow old, but he will not grow up. He will grow old, but there will be no blossoming and there will be no fruition. He will live, but his life will not be a dance, will not be a song, will not be a rejoicing. You have destroyed the basic possibility for all that makes a man individual, authentic, sincere, gives him a certain integrity.
In my childhood... there were many children in my family. I had ten brothers and sisters myself, then there were one uncle's children, and another uncle's children... and I saw this happening: whoever was obedient was respected. I had to decide one thing for my whole life -- not only for being in my family or for my childhood -- that if I in any way desire respect, respectability, then I cannot blossom as an individual. From my very childhood I dropped the idea of respectability.
I told my father, "I have to make a certain statement to you."
He was always worried whenever I would go to him, because he knew that there would be some trouble. He said, "This is not the way a child speaks to his father
-- Ì am going to make a statement to you.'"
I said, "It is a statement through you to the whole world. Right now the whole world is not available to me; to me you represent the whole world. It is not just an issue between son and father; it is an issue between an individual and the collectivity, the mass. The statement is that I have renounced the idea of respectability, so in the name of respectability never ask anything from me;
otherwise I will do just the opposite.
"I cannot be obedient. That does not mean I will always be disobedient, it simply means it will be my choice to obey or not to obey. You can request, but the decision is going to be mine. If I feel my intelligence supports it, I will do it; but it is not obedience to you, it is obedience to my own intelligence. If I feel it is not right, I am going to refuse it. I am sorry, but you have to understand one thing clearly: unless I am able to say no, my yes is meaningless."
And that's what obedience does: it cripples you -- you cannot say no, you have to say yes.
But when a man has become incapable of saying no, his yes is just meaningless; he is functioning like a machine. You have turned a man into a robot. So I said to him, "This is my statement. Whether you agree or not, that is up to you; but I have decided, and whatever the consequences, I am going to follow it."
It is such a world... In this world to remain free, to think on your own, to decide with your own consciousness, to act out of your own conscience has been made almost impossible.
Everywhere -- in the church, in the temple, in the mosque, in the school, in the university, in the family -- everywhere you are expected to be obedient.
Just recently I was arrested in Crete. They did not show me my arrest warrant. I told them, "This is absolutely criminal."
They said, "We have got it, but it is in Greek."
And I said, "Do you have another warrant to search the house?" They had none -
- they had never thought about it. I said, "You were allowed by your warrant to arrest me outside the house; you were not allowed to enter the house. You not only entered the house, but Anando, my secretary, was trying to tell you, `Just wait! Osho is asleep and I will go and awaken Him. It will take only five minutes.' You could not even wait five minutes.
"You threw Anando from the porch, four feet high, onto the ground -- which was gravel and stone -- and dragged her away and arrested her with no warrant. And the only crime she had done was to tell you, `Just wait. We are bringing Osho down, then you can show your papers to Him.'"
When I was awakened by John, they had already started throwing rocks at the windows, at the doors, trying to break into the house from all sides. I heard noises as if bombs were being thrown. They had dynamite bombs, and were threatening to dynamite the house.
On the way to the police station they stopped in an empty, silent space and gave me a paper, describing all that had happened, that I should sign it. I said, "I would be happy to sign it, but it is not a true description. You have not mentioned anything about breaking the windows, the doors of the house, threatening that you will destroy the house with dynamite. You have not mentioned anything about Anando, that you threw her on the ground, dragged her along the stones without any arrest warrant for her... I will not sign it! You want to cover it up. If I sign it, that means I cannot go to the court because you can present this paper that I have signed already. You make it exactly factual, saying all that has happened; then I will be willing to sign it."
They understood that I am not a person who can be threatened, and they took the paper away. And they never again asked me to sign it, because they were not in a position to write all those things that they had done; that would have been their condemnation. They wanted immediately to send me to India by boat, and I refused. I said, "Sailing by boat on the sea does not suit me. I will be seasick, and who will be responsible for it? So you have to give me a written document saying that you will be responsible for my seasickness and the damages." They forgot all about that boat!
I said, "My jet plane is waiting in Athens. You have to take me on a plane from here to Athens, or you have to allow my plane to come here. I am not interested in living in such a country even for two weeks" -- because my visa was valid only for two weeks more --
"where government authorities behave in such a primitive, ugly, inhuman way."
I told the police officer, "Wherever the pope goes, he kisses the ground after landing. I should start spitting on the ground, because that's what you deserve."
The comment that he made to me reminded me of all this. He said, "It seems that from your very childhood, nobody has disciplined you in obedience."
I said, "That's right, that's an absolutely right observation. I am not against obedience, I am not disobedient, but I want to decide my life in my own way. I
don't want to be interfered with by with anybody else, and I don't want to interfere in anybody else's life either."
Man can only be truly human when this becomes an accepted rule. But up to now the accepted rule has been to destroy the person in such a way that his whole life he remains servile, submissive to every kind of authority, to cut his roots so that he doesn't have enough juice to fight for freedom, to fight for individuality, to fight for anything. Then he will have only a small amount of life, which will enable him to survive till death relieves him from this slavery that we have accepted as life. Children are slaves of their parents; wives are slaves, husbands are slaves, old people become slaves of the younger people who have all the power. If you look around, everybody is living in slavery, hiding the wounds behind beautiful words.
So that drawing of yours, of a flower with beautiful petals and a light aura, but with very weak roots... you felt that it describes you: it describes all human beings.
The roots can be strong only if we stop what we have been doing up to now, and do just the opposite of it. Every child should be given a chance to think. We should help him to sharpen his intelligence. We should help him by giving him situations him and opportunities where he has to decide on his own. We should make it a point that nobody is forced to be obedient, and everybody is taught the beauty and the grandeur of freedom.
Then the roots will be strong.
But even your God has been cutting the roots of his own children because they were not obedient. Their disobedience became the greatest sin, such a great sin that hundreds of generations have passed, but the sin continues; you have not committed it, but you come in the line of hundreds of generations. Somebody in the beginning disobeyed God, and God is so furious that not only Adam and Eve should be punished, but all their future generations, forever.
These are the religions which have made human beings live without any blossomings and without any fragrance; otherwise each individual has the capacity to be a Socrates, to be a Pythagoras, to be a Heraclitus, to be a Gautam Buddha, to be a Chuang Tzu. Each individual has potential, but the potential is not getting enough nourishment. It remains potential... and the man dies, but the
potential never becomes actuality.
My whole effort and approach is to give each individual opportunities to develop his potential, whatsoever it is. Nobody should try to divert his life -- nobody has the right to do it. And then we can have a world which is truly a garden of human beings. Right now we are living in hell.
Beyond Psychology Chapter #5
Chapter title: You have to go nowhere 14 April 1986 pm in
Archive code: 8604145
ShortTitle: PSYCHO05
Audio: Yes Video: Yes Length: 80
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
I FEEL DIVIDED IN TWO PARTS -- HALF GOING TOWARDS THE UNKNOWN, AND HALF TOWARDS ALL THAT IS FAMILIAR FROM MY PAST. WHEN I GET
CLOSE TO LETTING GO OF WHAT I BELIEVE IS MINE, I PANIC -- EVEN THOUGH I YEARN TO GO TO THE PLACE YOU TALK ABOUT.
PLEASE GIVE ME COURAGE TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP.
The real question is not of courage; the real question is that you don't understand that the known is the dead, and the unknown is the living.
Clinging to the known is clinging to a corpse. It does not need courage to drop the clinging; in fact it needs courage to go on clinging to a corpse. You just have to see...
That which is familiar to you, which you have lived -- what has it given? Where have you reached? Are you not still empty? Is there not immense discontent, a deep frustration and meaninglessness? Somehow you go on managing, hiding the truth and creating lies to remain engaged, involved.
This is the question: to see with clarity that everything that you know is of the past, it is already gone. It is part of a graveyard. Do you want to be in a grave, or do you want to be alive? And this is not only the question today; it will be the same question tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. It will be the same question at your last breath.
Whatever you know, accumulate -- information, knowledge, experience -- the moment you have explored them you are finished with them. Now carrying those empty words, that dead load, is crushing your life, burdening your life, preventing you from entering into a living, rejoicing being -- which is awaiting you each moment.
The man of understanding dies every moment to the past and is reborn again to the future. His present is always a transformation, a rebirth, a resurrection. It is not a question of courage at all, that is the first thing to be understood. It is a question of clarity, of being clear about what is what.
And secondly, whenever there is really a question of courage, nobody can give it to you.
It is not something that can be presented as a gift. It is something that you are born with, you just have not allowed it to grow, you have not allowed it to assert itself, because the whole society is against it.
The society does not want lions, it wants a crowd of sheep. Then it is easy to enslave people, exploit people, do whatever you want to do with them. They don't have a soul; they are almost robots. You order, and they will obey. They are not free individuals.
No society wants you to be courageous. Every society wants you to be a coward, but nobody says it so sincerely; they have found beautiful words instead. They will not say,
"Be cowardly," because that will look offensive to the person and he will start thinking,
"Why should I be cowardly?" -- and a coward is not something respectable.
No, they say, "Be cautious. Think twice before you leap. Remember your tradition, your religion is thousands of years old; it has wisdom. You are a newcomer, you cannot afford to disbelieve in it. There is no comparison. You have just come in, and your religion has been there for ten thousand years, accumulating more and more experience, knowledge.
It is a Himalayan phenomenon.
"You are a small pebble. You cannot fight with tradition -- that is fighting against yourself, it is self-destructive. You can only submit to tradition; that is wise, intelligent.
To be with the crowd you are protected, you are secure, you are assured that you will not go astray."
In so many ways you will be told a simple thing: Just be a coward; it pays to be cowardly.
It is dangerous to be courageous, because it is going to bring you in conflict with
all the vested interests -- and you are a small human being. You cannot fight with the whole world.
My grandfather used to say to me, "Whatever you say is right. I am old, but I can understand that you are saying something true. But I will suggest -- don't say it to anybody. You will be in trouble. You cannot be against the whole world. You may have the truth, but truth does not count; what counts is the crowd.
"Somebody may be simply lying" -- and all religions have been doing that, lying about God, lying about heaven, lying about hell, lying about a thousand and one things -- "but the crowd is with them. Their lies are supported by the immense humanity and its long tradition. You are nobody."
I was very friendly with my grandfather. He used to take me to the saints who were visiting the town. He enjoyed very much my arguments with the so-called saints, creating a situation absolutely embarrassing for the saint because he was unable to answer me. But coming back he would tell me, "Remember, it is good as a game but don't make it your life; otherwise you will be alone against the whole world. And you cannot win against the whole world."
The last thing he said was the same. Before he died, he called me close and told me,
"Remember, don't fight against the world. You cannot win."
I said, "Now you are dying. You have been with the world -- what have you gained?
What is your victory? I cannot promise you what you are asking. I want it to be absolutely clear to you that whatever the cost... I may lose in the fight, but it will be my fight, and I will be immensely satisfied because I was in favor of truth. It does not matter whether I win or lose -- that is irrelevant, the defeat or the victory. What is important is that whatever you feel is right, you stand for it."
This courage is in everybody. It is not a quality to be practiced; it is something that is part of your life, your very breathing. It is just that the society has created so many barriers against your natural growth that you have started thinking from where to get courage?
from where to get intelligence? from where to get truth?
You have to go nowhere. You contain in the seed form everything that you want to be.
Realizing this and seeing the other side... The people who live with the crowd -- what is their gain? They lose everything. In fact they don't live at all; they only die. From their birth they start dying, and go on dying till the last breath. Their whole life is a long series of deaths. Just look at the whole crowd of people. You can be with them, but the same is going to be your fate.
It is so simple if you see it: the only way to live life is to live on your own. It is an individual phenomenon, it is an independence, it is freedom. It is a constant unburdening of all that is dead, so that life can go on growing and is not crushed under the weight of the dead.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
YOU ARE MY INSPIRATION.
I HAVE HEARD YOU SAY YOU NEVER HAD A MASTER; BUT WAS THERE
ANY SOURCE OF INSPIRATION FOR YOU WHEN YOU BEGAN YOUR JOURNEY?
Life itself is enough.
Seeing people all around -- walking corpses -- is inspiration enough not to move with them, not to go their way, but to find a small footpath of your own if you want to be alive.
I have never had a master, and I am fortunate that I never had a master. I have been, in my past lives, with a few living masters. They were beautiful people, lovable, but one thing has been clear all along to me -- that nobody can be a source of inspiration for me, because that word ìnspiration' is dangerous.
First it is inspiration, then it becomes following, then it becomes imitation -- and you end up being a carbon copy. There is no need to be inspired by anybody. Not
only is there no need, it is dangerous too. Just watching, I have seen... each individual is unique. He cannot follow anybody else.
He can try -- millions have been trying for thousands of years. Millions are Christians, millions are Hindus, millions are Buddhists. What are they doing? Inspiration from Gautam Buddha has made millions of people Buddhists, and now they are trying to follow in his footsteps. And they are not reaching anywhere; they cannot.
You are not a Gautam Buddha, and his footprints won't fit you, neither will his shoes fit you; you will have to find the exact size of shoes that fit you. He is beautiful, but that does not mean that you have to become like him. And that's the meaning of the word ìnspiration'. It means you are so much influenced that the man becomes your ideal, that you would like to be like him. That has misled the whole humanity.
Inspiration has been a curse, not a blessing.
I would like you to learn from every source, to enjoy every unique being that you come across. But never follow anybody and never try to become exactly like somebody else; that is not allowed by existence. You can be only yourself.
And it is a strange phenomenon: the people who have become an inspiration for millions of other people were themselves never inspired by anybody -- but nobody takes note of this fact. Gautam Buddha was never inspired by anybody, and that's what made him a great source of inspiration. Socrates was not inspired by anybody, but that's what makes him so unique.
All these people whom you think of as sources of inspiration have never been inspired by anybody else. That is something very fundamental to be understood. Yes, they learned; they tried to understand all kinds of people. They loved unique individuals, but nobody was to be followed. They still tried to be themselves.
So please don't be inspired by me; otherwise you will never become a source of inspiration. You will be just a carbon copy, you won't have your authentic, original face.
You will be a hypocrite: you will say one thing -- you will do another. You will show your face in different situations with different masks, and slowly, slowly
you will forget which one is your real face; so many masks...
I have heard about a man... One hundred years had passed since Abraham Lincoln was shot dead, so for one year a great celebration was arranged in his honor all over America.
One man looked like Abraham Lincoln; just a few touches here and there and he was almost a photographic copy of Abraham Lincoln.
He was trained to speak the way Abraham Lincoln used to speak, with his gestures, his emphasis, his accent, everything, small details -- even the way he walked -- for twenty-four hours a day... and he was to perform this drama of the life of Abraham Lincoln all over the country, moving from one place to another place the whole year.
He was shot dead so many times, every night in every show, sometimes even twice a day.
That year was a long year -- he died so many times -- and his part in the drama became almost his second nature. So when the celebrations were finished, people were surprised: he walked out of the hall the same way Abraham Lincoln used to walk -- he used to limp a little. He was limping.
His wife said, "Come to your senses!" -- because he spoke in the same way, in an accent one hundred years old. His wife said, "Don't stretch the joke too much. Just become your real self and come home."
He said, "I am my real self, I am Abraham Lincoln." For one year continuously he had lived as Abraham Lincoln, he died thousands of deaths as Abraham Lincoln; he had completely forgotten that he was ever anybody else.
He was brought to a doctor. The doctor talked to him, but he was still in his dramatic role. The doctor said, "Just forget that drama."
The man said, "What drama?"
The doctor turned to his wife and said to her, "This man won't listen unless he is shot dead!"
The family was getting mad. He lost his job; nobody was ready to treat him
because he was not sick. He was simply glued with a mask. One year is a long time, and every day, twenty-four hours a day, he was Abraham Lincoln. And to be Abraham Lincoln for one year and then suddenly become an ordinary human being -- who would like it? He had seen the glorious days, the golden days, and he was clinging tightly to them.
That man lived for a few years as Abraham Lincoln; he used to sign "Abraham Lincoln"
exactly the same as Abraham Lincoln used to sign. Would you say this man has attained something or lost something? He has lost himself, and what he has gained is just a dramatic act. He has become absolutely phony.
And this is the situation of almost everybody in the world -- not so dramatic, not so outstanding -- but everybody is playing a certain role that has been taught to him, for which he has been brought up.
A child is born -- he is not Christian, he is not a Jew, he is not Mohammedan -- and then we start putting a mask on him. His innocent face disappears. And he will die believing that he is a Christian. So don't laugh at that poor man who died believing that he was Abraham Lincoln, because everybody else is doing the same. People are dying as Hindus
-- they were not born as Hindus.
It was a continual trouble for me whenever there was census. The officers would come to me to fill out the form, and when it came to religion, I would say, "I don't have any religion."
They would be shocked, but they would say, "You must have been born into some religion. Your parents must have been Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas."
I said, "That does not make any difference. My father can be a doctor or an engineer --
that will not make me a doctor or an engineer. He may be a Hindu or a Mohammedan --
that is his business. He cannot biologically transfer his religion to me. If he cannot transfer his medical knowledge to me, how can he transfer his spiritual
knowledge to me?
It is a deception, and I don't want to be part of any deception."
People are being trained as actors; in this whole big world you will find everybody acting. Everybody is brought up to act... beautiful names -- "etiquette," "manners" -- but hidden behind is a subtle psychology to make you forget your originality and imbibe some actor which the vested interests want you to be.
Never be inspired by anybody. Remain open.
When you see a beautiful sunset, you enjoy the beauty of it... when you see a Buddha, enjoy the beauty of the man, enjoy the authenticity of the man, enjoy the silence, enjoy the truth the man has realized -- but don't become a follower. All followers are lost.
Remain yourself -- because this man Gautam Buddha has found because he has remained himself. And all these beautiful names -- Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Bodhidharma, Nagarjuna, Pythagoras, Socrates, Heraclitus, Epicurus -- all these beautiful names which have been a great inspiration to many people were themselves never inspired by anybody.
That's how they protected their originality; that's how they remained themselves.
I have been with masters, and I have loved them. But to me the very desire to be like them is ugly. One man is enough; a second like him will not enrich existence, it will only burden it.
To me, uniqueness of individuals is the greatest truth.
Love people when you find them in some dimension true and authentic, blossoming. But remember, they are blossoming because of their authenticity and originality; so be mindful not to fall in the trap of following them. Be yourself.
The famous maxim from Socrates is: "Know thyself." But it should be completed -- it is incomplete. Before "Know thyself" another maxim is needed:
"Be thyself"; otherwise you may know only some actor that you are pretending to be. Knowing thyself comes second; first is being thyself.
The real great masters have been only friends, a helping hand, fingers pointing to the moon; they have never created a slavery. But the moment they died they left such a great impact around them that cunning people -- theologians, priests, scholars -- started preaching to people, "Follow Gautam Buddha."
Now the man is dead and he cannot deny anything... and these people started exploiting the great impact that Buddha had left. Now the whole of Asia, millions of people, for twenty-five centuries have followed in the steps of Gautam Buddha, but not a single Gautam Buddha has been created. It is enough proof: two thousand years and not a single Jesus again; three thousand years, not a single Moses again.
Existence never repeats.
History repeats itself because history belongs to the unconscious mob.
Existence never repeats itself. It is very creative and very inventive. And it is good; otherwise, although Gautam Buddha is a beautiful man, if there are thousands of Gautam Buddhas around -- if wherever you go you meet Gautam Buddha, in every restaurant! --
you will be really bored and tired. It will destroy the whole beauty of the man. It is good that existence never repeats. It only creates one of a kind, so it remains always rare.
You are also one of a kind. You just have to blossom, to open your petals and release your fragrance.
Question 3 BELOVED OSHO,
I HAVE HEARD IT SAID THAT SOME SANNYASIN THERAPISTS NOW
IMAGINE THAT THEY ARE ON THE SAME PLANE AS YOU ARE, DOING THE
SAME KIND OF WORK -- IF PERHAPS ON A SOMEWHAT SMALLER SCALE.
THEY NO LONGER EVEN MENTION YOUR NAME, AND APPEAR TO HAVE
DISCARDED THE MALA AND RED CLOTHES ENTIRELY.
HAVE THEY ACHIEVED -- OR WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON WITH YOUR
THERAPISTS?
What is going on is hilarious.
These people think they have become individuals, they have attained freedom. But they don't even see a simple thing... I said to them, "You can drop your malas, and you can drop your clothes, and you can be free" -- and they
immediately followed! They proved that they are followers -- chronic followers! If I had not said that, they would have been wearing the mala and red clothes still. Their freedom is not their attainment, but just my joke!
Naturally when I said, "I am your friend," they started thinking that they are my friends.
These are two totally different things! When I say I am your friend, that does not mean that you are my friend. For the second to be real, you will have to travel long.
I say out of my compassion that I am your friend, and you say out of your ego that you are my friend. Naturally, when you are my friend, then you are doing the same work as I am doing. It is just out of humbleness that they are saying, "Perhaps you are doing it on a bigger scale and we are doing it on a smaller scale." But deep down they may be thinking that they are doing it on a bigger scale -- or a more personal and intimate scale.
They have been with me for years, but they have been less with me than with their patients. The people who have missed me most are the therapists.
Once I declared some people enlightened -- and they became enlightened! And when I said it was just a joke, they became unenlightened again. I had told them, "You are now free." So they are free! Tomorrow I can call them back and put them in red clothes and in the mala: "This much freedom is enough; more than that is dangerous. Just come back and be your old self!"
If you are really understanding me, you will see the point: I give you chances to show your ego to yourself, to show your reality to yourself. And that's what is happening, and it is really hilarious. I saw one therapist who has even shaved his beard and mustache.
Perhaps he thinks by shaving the beard and mustache, he has shaved himself spiritually too. And all that he looks like is like a well-shaved ape -- just stupid.
It is unfortunate but it is true that the therapists have missed me most, for the simple reason that in the commune they were working on people's psychology and they started getting a subtle ego that they are helping my work. They forgot completely that they have not even started working on themselves.
They had a certain knowledge of therapy; they were useful for people and they helped to bring people close to me. Their patients became more intimate to me, more open to me, became more understanding of my work than the therapists. Because they were therapists and they were answering questions from people, running groups, they would not ask questions to me about themselves.
They had come for themselves, but they got lost because they had brought a load of knowledge. It was useful for others, and I told them that they should help people. But all their knowledge was not able to indicate a simple small thing to them, that "we have come here to realize ourselves. We can do the therapy, but that is not what we have come here for."
They went on doing therapy, and when the commune dispersed, they went back to their countries thinking that now they are doing exactly the work I am doing -- and they don't know even the ABC of my work. They were the most blind and the most deaf, because they were the most knowledgeable people.
They have missed the first opportunity. Now in the second opportunity, all those therapists who are just behaving like buffoons will be called back and put to some other work -- not therapy. They have to be completely removed from their knowledge; otherwise it is very simple for them to think like this.
They are afraid to mention my name because that may create the feeling in people that they are still not free of me. Their fear shows that they are not free of me. If they were really free of me, there would have been gratitude. They would have taken my name to different parts of the world with great respect and love if they were really free.
But they know they are not free; hence the fear. If somebody discovers that they have been my sannyasins, then what will happen to the sudden mastery that they have attained? A few of them have become "enlightened," a few of them have become
"liberated" -- and they are simply proving one thing, that they are utter fools. And the sooner they realize it, the better!
Question 4 BELOVED OSHO,
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT PERHAPS ALL THE MASTER NEEDS TO DO IS TO
HAND OUT TO EACH OF HIS DISCIPLES A LENGTH OF ROPE. OVER THE
COURSE OF TIME, WE EITHER USE THAT ROPE TO SKIP WITH OR TO HANG
OURSELVES WITH. PLEASE COMMENT.
That's true -- it needs no comment! Beyond Psychology
Chapter #6
Chapter title: A lot -- and nothing 15 April 1986 am in
Archive code: 8604150
ShortTitle: PSYCHO06
Audio: Yes Video: Yes
Length:
130
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
CAN YOU TELL US WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU SINCE WE LAST MET ON
THAT BEAUTIFUL MORNING IN CRETE, SOME WEEKS AGO?
A lot -- and nothing.
A lot on the periphery, and nothing to my being -- nothing to me.
The first thing that I became aware of was that man has not been evolving, that perhaps the concept of evolution is wrong, because for thousands of years he has been behaving in the same pattern.
That beautiful morning on the island of Crete, the people and their mistreatment of me and my friends who were with me, reminded me of Socrates. These were the same people, and strangely the crime alleged against Socrates was the same: corrupting the young minds, destroying their morality. Their allegation against me was exactly the same.
It seems twenty-five centuries have simply passed by and man is stuck, not evolving.
Their behavior was brutal, inhuman. They could have told me to leave the country -- it is their country -- there was no need for brutality, smashing the windows and the doors of the house with rocks. To me, coming from the top floor, it sounded as if bombs were being exploded. They had dynamite with them, and they were threatening that they would dynamite the whole house. It seems as if to send me out of the country was just an excuse to give expression to this brutality; otherwise it was a simple matter to tell me that I am not welcome.
The man who had given me the tourist visa for four weeks was the chief of police; and the man who canceled it after fifteen days was the deputy chief of police. That seems to be absolutely improper -- that the chief should give the permission and the deputy should cancel it.
At the airport in Athens there were at least forty police officers, just for a single unarmed man, and that deputy chief was also present. There was a huge crowd of press people from newspapers, radio, television, and dozens of cameras -- they all wanted an interview with me. And I said, "There is not much to say, other than it seems man is not going to be civilized, ever."
The press people were in front of me and those forty police dogs -- all big officers -- were surrounding me, and the deputy chief was standing by my side. When I said, "With this kind of police, this kind of government, you are destroying the very future of humanity, particularly of your own country. These people were responsible for killing Socrates "
When I said this, pointing towards the deputy chief, he wanted to interfere.
For the first time in thirty-five years, I pretended to be angry. I could not succeed because inside I was giggling! But I told that man, "Shut up, and stand by the side where you belong. And don't come close to me."
And I shouted so loudly, "Shut up!" that he really became silent and went back and stood in the crowd. Later on I saw the reports: they thought I was ferocious, very angry -- I was nothing! But that is the only language those people will understand. And when you are talking to somebody, you have to use the language he understands.
But I enjoyed that. Anger can be acted -- you can remain absolutely silent within and you can be ferocious outside. And there is no contradiction, because that ferociousness is only acting.
On the plane I remembered George Gurdjieff, who was trained in many Sufi schools in different kinds of methods. In a certain school one method was used, and that was acting
-- when you are not feeling angry, act angry; when you are feeling very happy, act miserable. The method has a tremendous implication.
It means that when you are miserable you will be capable of acting happy; when you are angry you will be able to act peaceful. Not only that, it implies that you are neither misery nor happiness. These are faces you can make: you are different, your being is not involved in it. Strange methods have been used for meditation, to discover your being, to detach it from your emotions, sentiments, actions. And Gurdjieff became so proficient in it, and the school was training him for this particular method.…
Gurdjieff became so capable that if he was sitting between two persons, to one person he would appear immensely peaceful and silent -- half of his face, one side profile. And to the other he will appear to be murderous, dangerous, criminal -- the other profile, the other side. And when both persons would talk about Gurdjieff, how could they agree?
They were bound to disagree: according to one they have met -- a very silent, peaceful person, and according to the other -- a very murderous, dangerous, criminal type.
When asked, Gurdjieff would say, "They are both right. I can manage not only to divide my being and my action, I can manage to divide even my face into two parts."
I was presented a statue of Buddha from Japan -- a very beautiful statue, but very strange.
In one hand he is holding a naked sword, and in the other hand he is holding a small lamp. In the East they use mud lamps, which are just small cups of mud filled with oil.
They are almost like candles with a flame, so the flame was there. The flame was shining on one part of his face; it was lighted, silent, peaceful. And the sword was reflected on the other side of his face -- a warrior, a fighter, a born rebel, a revolutionary.
At the airport in Athens, I saw those forty police officers... they must have been the topmost people -- except the chief, because he could not gather courage to come. I would have asked him, "On what grounds has the visa issued by you been cancelled by your assistant?" -- only he was not there.
But the others... I saw a strange thing: they were behaving in very inhuman
ways, but they were all cowards. When I shouted, "Shut up!" that deputy chief simply slipped back like a small child, afraid that the television would catch my words and me, and him with all the honors of the police on his coat, with a pistol hanging by his side. But inside there was a child, a cowardly child.
It was an experience -- because democracy was born in Athens.
Democracy is a Greek idea, and yet the man who created the idea of democratic values was poisoned by Athenians -- that's what history goes on saying. But that day I became suspicious of history.
Socrates was not poisoned by the people of Athens, but by the bureaucracy of Athens.
And one should make a distinction, because I was mistreated on the island of Crete by the police. But the people of the village where I was staying, Saint Nicholas, were not with the bureaucracy. And when one journalist asked me, "What is your message to the people of Saint Nicholas?" I said, "Just tell them to come to the airport, to show the police that they are with me and not with them."
Three thousand people were at the airport in the middle of the night, filling the whole terrace of the airport. They had been standing there for hours. The whole village was empty; those who were left behind had to walk because they could not get any taxi, any bus -- everything had moved to the airport. But people walked miles to reach the airport to demonstrate a simple fact: they are not with the brutality and the fascist behavior of the government; they are with me.
People have always been blamed for the bureaucracy and its brutality. I don't think Socrates would have been killed by the people of Athens. He was such a loving person, and with no egoistic idea of being holier than you.
In the morning he would go to fetch some vegetable, and he would not return even by the night -- because everywhere on the streets, in the vegetable shop, in the market, he was discussing with everybody things which are beyond the ordinary man. He was the teacher of the whole of Athens. A single man made Athens one of the most intelligent cities that has ever existed in the world -- single-handedly, just moving, meeting anybody. To say hello to him meant you were entering into a dialogue -- in spite of yourself. You may have been in a hurry -- Socrates was not in a hurry.
These people could not have killed him. The bureaucracy became afraid. The Crete experience made me look again at history. The books are lying -- the people have not killed the man. They could not have even imagined it. But the government... and why should the government kill the man? -- because the man was making the masses so intelligent, so independent, so freedom-loving, so individualistic, that the government would soon find itself in troubled waters. It would not be able to control these people, it would not be able to enslave these people.
It is better to kill Socrates than let him go on sharpening people's minds to such an extent that the bureaucrats look like fools! Before it happens, it is better to kill him. But the history books go on saying that the people of Athens killed Socrates. Now, I saw the people of Saint Nicholas come running to the airport to demonstrate that they are not with the police. And even when I had left their country, a deputation from Saint Nicholas, on their own decision, went to see the president of the country to protest about what had happened in their village.
I had been there only two weeks, and I had never gone out of the house; but they could see my people -- at least five hundred sannyasins from all over Europe had gathered.
They were well accustomed to tourists, because it is a tourist place, but they had never seen such loving people. And just because of my sannyasins, although they could not understand me -- the language was a great barrier -- still, a few of the village people started coming just to sit with me in the morning, in the evening. And that's what was hurting the religious hierarchy.
The archbishop was getting mad because nobody comes to his congregation; and I had been there for fifteen days and I had created a big congregation. In his congregation, between six to twelve old women -- who were almost dead -- they used to come to listen to him.
He was getting afraid, sending telegrams to the president, to the prime minister, to other ministers, to the police chief, giving interviews which were full of lies -- because he knew nothing about me. And his fear became infectious: the government also became afraid.
One of my sannyasins, Amrito -- who had invited me to Greece -- was a close friend of the president, of the prime minister. She was well connected with all
the high-position people, because twenty years before she had been chosen as the beauty queen, "Miss Greece," and she had become famous. And since then she had been modeling, so all the film directors, businessmen... all kinds of people were related to her. She was never asked to make an appointment; she simply went to their houses -- the president or the prime minister.
But that day she went to the president and for six hours she remained there, and she was not allowed into the house. Why was the president afraid of a woman whom he knows, who has been coming to him and they have been friends...? The fear was because... what will he say? What had been done to me and my people by his government, he had no answer for.
And you will be surprised: the answer came in a very strange way. I left Athens because they wouldn't allow me even to stay for the night in a hotel under their supervision, or at the airport.
As I left, they immediately started searching for Amrito. She must have found out from some source: "Now you will be the target -- why did you invite Osho here, knowing him?" And she had to escape out of the country. And still the police went.…
Amrito is a very simple and loving person. She is not rich; she has only a small juice bar.
And still the police went to the juice bar and tried to find out strange things with which the police had no concern -- that it was not clean.
Of course it was not clean, because for three days she had been out of the country. And it was not clean because for fifteen days she was on the island of Crete with me, so only the servant was running it. But that is not a crime -- at least not for the police. Perhaps the municipal authorities who look for cleanliness in restaurants, hotels may have come -- but they were not there; the police were finding faults.
But I have told her to go back and give a fight, because she has not done anything wrong.
Everything wrong is on the part of the government. Because they could not do any harm to me, afraid of its international consequences, they found a scapegoat: they can harass her, they can torture a woman who is divorced, has a little child,
an old mother, and she is the only earning person. And what earning can come out of a juice bar?
These people always throw their crimes on the masses -- and the masses are dumb. And history is really bunk: there are more lies in history books than anywhere else. The incident was small, but the implications were great.
I had not stepped out of the house, I was not talking in Greek. The people of the country could not understand me. The people who were listening to me were all from outside of Greece. To say that I am corrupting the minds of youth, destroying the morality of the country, its tradition, its church, the family... but the people who were listening to me were not Greek! In what way could I have had any effect on their morality, on their religion?
But it seems bureaucracy does not think; it simply lives out of fear. And the fear is that somebody could raise questions about the very roots of their society. But it is foolish because wherever I am, I am going to do the same, and my word is going to reach everywhere in the world.
What can I do if their roots are rotten? What can I do if their morality is not morality but only a pretension? What can I do if their marriage is hypocrisy and not love? What can I do if the family has been outlived, and needs to be replaced by something better? It has done its work. It has done a few good things which can be done by a different way. It has done a few very dangerous, poisonous things which can be avoided.
The family as it has existed down the ages cannot be allowed to exist. If it exists, then man has to die. To save man we have to change the social structure around him, to bring a new man -- because the old has been an utter failure.
For ten thousand years at least, we have moved on the same lines -- reaching nowhere.
It is time to understand that we have taken a wrong route. It is stale; it leads to death. It does not allow people joy, rejoicing; it does not allow people to sing and to dance.
It makes people serious, heavy -- for themselves and for others.
In the family are the seeds of all wars, of all religions, of all nations. That's why
they call the family, the "unit of our civilization."
There is no civilization -- and the unit is rotten. It creates only a pathological man, who needs all kinds of psychotherapies and still remains pathological.
We have not been able to create a sane humanity.
So on the periphery I thought what happened in Greece perhaps may happen in other countries, because it is the same structure -- and it happened.
From Greece we moved to Geneva, just for an overnight rest, and the moment they came to know my name they said, "No way! We cannot allow him into our country."
I was not even allowed to get out of the plane.
We moved to Sweden, thinking that people go on saying that Sweden is far more progressive than any country in Europe or in the world, that Sweden has been giving refuge to many terrorists, revolutionaries, expelled politicians, that it is very generous.
We reached Sweden. We wanted to stay overnight because the pilots were running out of time. They could not go on anymore; otherwise it would become illegal. And we were happy because the man at the airport... we had asked only for an overnight stay, but he gave seven-day visas to everybody. Either he was drunk or just sleepy -- it was midnight, past midnight.
The person who had gone for the visas, came back very happy that we had been given seven-day visas. But immediately the police came and cancelled the visas, and told us to move immediately: "This man we cannot allow in our country."
They can allow terrorists, they can allow murderers, they can allow Mafia people, and they can give them refuge -- but they cannot allow me. And I was not asking for refuge or permanent residence, just an overnight stay.
We turned to London, because it was simply a question of our basic right. And we made it twice legally -- we purchased first-class tickets for the next day. Our own jet was there but still we purchased them in case they started saying, "You don't have tickets for tomorrow, so we won't allow you to stay in the first-class lounge."
We purchased tickets for everybody, just so that we could stay in the lounge, and we told them, "We have our own jet -- and we also have tickets." But they came upon a bylaw of the airport that the government or anybody cannot interfere with: "It is at our discretion --
and this man we won't allow in the lounge."
In the lounge, I thought: How can I destroy their morality, their religion? In the first place I will be sleeping, and by the morning we will be gone.
But no, these so-called civilized countries are as primitive and barbarous as you can conceive. They said, "All that we can do is, we can put you in jail for the night."
And just by chance one of our friends looked into their file. They had all the instructions from the government already about how they were to treat me: I should not be allowed in any way to enter into the country, even for an overnight stay in a hotel or in the lounge; the only way was that I should be kept in jail.
In the morning we moved to Ireland. Perhaps the man did not take note of my name amongst the passengers. We had asked just to stay for two, three days -- "At the most seven, if you can give us." We wanted time because some other decision was being made, and they were delaying it, and our movement was dependent on that decision.
The man was really generous... must have taken too much beer: he gave everybody twenty-one days. We moved to the hotel and immediately the police arrived at the hotel to cancel it, saying, "That man is mad -- he does not know anything."
They cancelled the visas, but they were in a difficult situation -- what to do with us?
We were already in the land, we were in the hotel; we had passed a few hours in the hotel. They had given us twenty-one days on the passports. Now he had cancelled them, and we were not ready to go. We had to wait still a few days.
You can see how bureaucracy covers its own errors.
They said, "You can stay here, but nobody should come to know about it -- no
press, nobody should come to know that Osho is here, because then we will be in trouble. And of course we cannot do anything because that will stir up problems immediately.
"If you don't want to go -- and we have given you twenty-one days' permission On what grounds are we cancelling? You have not done anything -
- you have only slept the night here. Unless sleeping is a crime... So we are in a difficulty. The only way is, you remain silent and absolutely hidden."
Now, it was absolutely illegal to stay without a visa; and the police were suggesting to us to remain silent so that nobody knows it -- and leave silently. And they were keeping the press away; they were giving them false clues so they were looking in some different places.
But the strange thing is that these people are in direct communication with the government.
The question was raised in the parliament, "What happened? Their jet is standing at the airport. They have entered the country -- where have they disappeared to?" And the minister simply lied, saying, "They had come, and they have left." We were in the country, and the parliament was told that we have left the country.…
This whole journey has been an exposure of the bureaucracies.
And just now I have received the information that all the countries of Europe, jointly, are deciding that I cannot land my plane at any airport.
How will that effect their morality -- refueling the plane? But they simply want to cut me away from humanity. That's why I had to leave India. Their conditions were clear: they wanted me to remain in India -- naturally they cannot deny me; it is my birthland. "You can remain," they said. "But no foreign disciple can be allowed to reach you, and no news media can be allowed to reach you."
That was a way to cut me off from the world, from my people, and even from news media, so nobody knows whether I am alive or dead. It was a strategy to make me almost dead -- although I am alive -- to cut me away from everybody.
I refused their conditions. I have never lived under any conditions, and particularly such ugly conditions. I left the country and went to Nepal -- because that is the only country where I can go without a visa; otherwise the Indian
government had informed all the embassies that no visa should be issued to me so that I cannot leave India. They have a treaty with Nepal; no visa is needed.
But Nepal is a small and very poor country -- the poorest -- and under tremendous pressure from India.… India can take it over any moment. It has no army worth the name.
When it became from reliable sources; absolutely certain that they would compel the Nepalese government either to arrest me or to send me back to India, I had to leave Nepal.
It makes no difference to my being.
But it makes a lot of difference to my attitude about the society in which we are living. It is absolutely ugly, barbarous, uncultured, uncivilized.
That's why I said, "A lot -- and nothing." Question 2
BELOVED OSHO,
I FOUND THE STORY YOU TOLD US ABOUT MAHAVIRA WHEN HE WENT
BEGGING VERY ODD. THAT HE SHOULD STIPULATE HOW EXISTENCE
SHOULD PRESENT HIS DAILY FOOD SEEMED TO ME LIKE A TRIP, AND NOT
THE ATTITUDE OF SOMEONE TOTALLY AVAILABLE TO, AND ACCEPTING
OF, LIFE'S WAYS. PROBABLY I HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD THE WHOLE POINT.
YOU HAVE SAID WE NEED NOT BE IN A HURRY IN OUR SEARCH; BUT
AROUND YOU I ALWAYS FEEL SUCH A GREAT SENSE OF HOW PRECIOUS
TIME IS, SO I WANT TO USE IT TO THE MAXIMUM. AND TO ME AT THE
MOMENT THAT MEANS ASKING ALL AND ANY QUESTIONS I ONCE MIGHT
HAVE HELD BACK, FROM FEAR OF APPEARING STUPID. I REALLY DO WANT
TO STAND BEFORE YOU, "NAKED, EMPTY, AND ALONE."
The story of Mahavira has always been misunderstood -- it is not only you who have misunderstood it -- because we understand things according to our minds. If you were in place of Mahavira then perhaps it would be stipulating existence, but for Mahavira it is not so; it is not stipulating existence.
As far as Mahavira is concerned, he simply wants a signal from existence -- whether he should continue, or he is no longer needed. He never complains. At times he has remained fasting for three months continuously, but not a single word of complaint.
If he was stipulating then there would be frustration, there would be complaint. If he was trying to manipulate existence then there would be a certain sense of failure. For three months he had not been able even to get food -- but there was no complaint. He was one of the most peaceful, loving, silent beings.
Why did he make this decision after his morning meditation? -- simply not to be a burden on existence. Let existence decide. He is not stipulating existence; he is allowing existence to take total charge of his life, even of his breathing, of his food. Everything he is leaving in the hands of existence.
But how will he know? There is no linguistic communication between you and existence; there can be only a symbolic communication -- and that was nothing but a symbolic communication. He wanted a symbol.
One thing has to be remembered, that these people like Mahavira, Parsunatha, Buddha, are very unique beings. They have their own ways, and their ways fit perfectly with their personality.
Now I will never do that kind of thing. I am a totally different person -- but I will
not misunderstand Mahavira either. I accept his uniqueness, and I respect the way he lived his life -- always undemanding. This was not a demand -- that existence should fulfill this condition -- it was simply an agreement: "Because language is not possible, I will choose a certain symbol, and then it is up to existence." He is leaving himself in the hands of existence so totally that he does not want to breathe even a single breath on his own.
But I am a totally different person, almost the very opposite of Mahavira. I will never ask such a thing from existence. My whole way is of let-go -- and why bother? Once and for all, leave it to existence, and when existence does not need you, you will be absorbed into the universe. There is no need every day to ask again and again -- that is a kind of nagging. I have done it once, and that's all. I will not do it twice, because to do it twice means that the first time you were not total; otherwise who is doing it again? Let-go can be done only once.
When I was a child we used to have many puzzles, and particularly we used to ask a teacher -- who was a little dumb -- simple things, and he would get into such a nervous state.
For example we used to ask him, "One man tried to commit suicide four times. Can you tell us when he succeeded? -- the first time, the second time Which
time did he succeed?"
And he would start thinking about it. He would say, "How should I know?" If a man succeeds then the last time is really the first time!
In my understanding, let-go is only once. If you need it again, that means the first time...
whom were you deceiving? And what is the guarantee that the second time is not going to be just like the first?
Let-go is an understanding.
It is not something that you have to do.
It is not something that you have to say to existence; it is simply an understanding: "I will not swim against the current, because that is simply stupid." You are going to be tired soon, you can never be victorious against the current. Understanding that, you accept the current's way as your way.
That is let-go.
Now, wherever the river leads you... you don't have to check every day; you simply go with the river. Some day -- any day -- you may reach the ocean, you may disappear.
So I will not suggest to anybody to do what Mahavira used to do. But Mahavira has his own unique being.
His real name was not Mahavira; mahavira means "a great warrior." His real name was Vardhmana, but nobody remembers his real name for the simple reason that his whole approach is that of a warrior, a fighter. Even with existence he is in a constant fight. He is saying, "I can live only if I am welcome. I don't want to live even a single moment more if I am not welcome."
Deep down he was fighting, but his fighting had a beauty of its own. He was total in it --
that was its beauty. It was not a partial war, it was total. And the secret is, whatever is total transforms you; your let-go, if it is total, will transform you; your fight, if total, will transform you.
What transforms is neither let-go nor war, but your totality.
Even today there are monks doing the same, who follow Mahavira. There are not many because as soon as Mahavira died there was a division. There were people who were not ready for such a fight. And that division has many monks. They have compromised on many points on which Mahavira would not compromise.
For example, they wear clothes; Mahavira remained naked. These people stay in homes; Mahavira never stayed under a roof. It may have been raining, it may have been cold, it may have been hot -- he was always under a tree. So the people who wanted to compromise could not compromise when he was alive. He was a tremendously powerful man. But the day he died, his followers divided.
So the orthodox ones, who still follow Mahavira... There are only twenty-two of them --
there were when I was in India; a few may have died, because they were all old people.
And once one monk dies, it is very difficult to replace him.
The other party, the compromisers, have almost five thousand monks -- and they go on growing. And they go on compromising.
First they started using clothes; then they started using people's houses to stay in. Now they have started using even airplanes. Mahavira walked all his life, never using any vehicle. I have seen these compromisers hiding toothpaste; Mahavira never washed his teeth.
I know about these monks, that whenever they have a chance they take a shower; Mahavira never took a shower himself unless the sky was raining and he was standing under a tree. I have seen in one monk's place, where he was staying... he was very friendly to me, and he was not worried that I would expose him.
He said, "What you will take? -- Fanta or Coca Cola?" I said, "What are you saying?"
He said, "Just don't tell anybody!" -- and he opened a closet and he was hiding Coca Cola, Fanta. Compromise has no limit. But what is harmful in it? -- it is absolutely nonviolent junk; you can drink it.
But those who have followed Mahavira, their number has been getting less and less; one dies and is not replaced. Even they, in an underground way, have compromised. It is difficult to be exactly like Mahavira -- that's what I say, following is impossible.
These people also make, after their meditation in the morning, a certain condition that should be fulfilled. But those conditions are limited -- six or eight
-- and everybody knows, so if they are staying in a city, then they will go to all the Jaina houses and all the Jaina houses will be fulfilling different conditions. And they have made very simple conditions.
For example, if on the door of a house two bananas are hanging, then the food will be accepted. And this is known, so every Jaina is hanging two bananas, and they come and they accept the food -- the condition is fulfilled. Just such small conditions which are known, and which must be made known by the monks.
They cannot eat food from anybody other than a Jaina family, so you will be
surprised to see that they have renounced their family, one family, but when they are moving... And they are constantly moving. They cannot stay more than three days in one place, because this is Mahavira's understanding -- and I feel that he is right -- that after three days some kind of attachment starts growing.
For example, for the first day you will not find the place suitable to you. You may not sleep well, you may have a certain tension in you. But after the third day, things start settling; and after the twenty-first day you become well- accustomed to the place, as if you had been born in it.
A certain amount of time is needed for adjustment, so Mahavira does not allow more than three days. And in India, Jainas are very few, so there are many, many places where there are no Jainas -- so what will the Jaina monk do? So twenty families follow him with their buses and their cars and tents, and wherever there is no Jaina family they make a small campus of tents and bananas are hanging... and all eight conditions that are known are fulfilled. And every family has prepared food -- and the man must have made one condition out of eight -- so he will get food.
Now, formally he is following, but this was not what Mahavira was doing. That was a totally different thing. It was not let-go; he was not a man for let-go, he was a warrior.
Truth has to be conquered, according to him, and to conquer it you have to fight totally.
And the story I told you is part of his fight. His whole life is the path of fight. I will tell you one story more.
He remained for twelve years silent, till he became enlightened. Those twelve years are filled with great incidents. One day he is meditating... and his meditation is also not that of a relaxed way. The meditation ordinarily done in the East is in the lotus posture, and the lotus posture physiologically is the most relaxed once you have learnt it, because your spine is straight and the gravitation is the least, and that makes your body hang on the straight spine like a loose cloth.
Mahavira meditates standing. In his every attitude he is a warrior. There are people who meditate with closed eyes -- this is more relaxed. There are people
who meditate with open eyes, just the natural way -- blinking. That too is not a fight. Mahavira meditates with eyes half closed and half open, and no blinking.
In those twelve years one day he is standing and meditating by the side of the river, and a man comes and says to Mahavira, "You are standing here, just watch my cows. I am leaving -- I have to go urgently to my home; my mother is sick and somebody has come to inform me that she is dying. So I will be back soon, but just... you are standing here for the whole day: just have a look so my cows don't get lost in the jungle."
And Mahavira, because he cannot speak, is silent. And the man is in such a hurry
-- his mother is dying -- he does not bother that this man is not speaking. He simply takes his silence as a yes.
When he comes back after one or two hours, Mahavira is still standing there but all the cows are gone. Now, he gets furious. He says, "You seem to be a cunning man. So you were standing here the whole day just for my cows. Where are my cows?"
And because he does not speak, the man becomes more and more furious: "So you are trying to be dumb! I will make you speak!" And he takes two pieces of wood and forces those two pieces into Mahavira's two ears and hits them hard with a rock, so that he becomes deaf for his whole life. But still he will not speak, he will not blink.
The man thought, "He seems to be mad. Anybody would have spoken..." And he goes and looks in the forest. In the evening the cows come back, and when the man comes back, he finds they are all sitting around Mahavira where he had left them before.
He said, "You are really a man! I destroyed your ears and you did not speak! I have been going all over the forest, and the cows are sitting here! Where have you been hiding them?" And he beats him -- he is naked. And Mahavira remains standing. The man is thinking that he is really mad -- neither beating has any effect... you cannot do anything to him, he will not react. That is total silence -- that whatever happens, he will remain centered without any reaction. It is not only a question of speaking.
The story is beautiful. Up to this point it is factual, but it takes a mythological ending. In India there are many gods. India does not believe in one god -- one
god seems to be like believing in a dictator; it is undemocratic -- India believes in many gods, actually thirty-three million. That was the population of India when they invented gods: one god for everyone. That seems to be right and fair.
Indra, one of the gods, feels terribly hurt and disturbed by what has happened to Mahavira -- a silent man who has done nothing. The cows moved themselves, came back again, and he is utterly innocent.
Indra came -- and gods can speak without words -- so he spoke to Mahavira, "I can give you two gods as bodyguards, because it is unthinkable, unbelievable! This should not happen." And to gods you may not speak but they can read your thought.
Indra reads Mahavira's thought: "Just leave me alone. I don't want anybody's help; I want to fight it alone. I don't want to be indebted to anybody -- forgive me. Whatever happens, I am going to fight this whole war alone until I am victorious."
Now, his victory will sound strange to anybody who has been listening to the idea of let-go, surrender to existence. But this is a good place to remind you: Be compassionate about others, their uniqueness. It does not mean that you have to follow their path; it simply means a deep understanding that people are unique; and if people are unique then their ways are going to be unique. And sometimes very opposite ways lead to the same goal.
It is very easy to misunderstand, but I would like you to understand different ways, different people, different uniquenesses. All that will help to broaden your heart, your compassion, your comprehension. And whatever path you are following, it will be helpful to it.
This is broadness -- that it can contain contradictions. Beyond Psychology
Chapter #7
Chapter title: Empty from birth to death 15 April 1986 pm in
Archive code:
8604155
ShortTitle:
PSYCHO07
Audio:
Yes Video:
Yes Length:
108
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
I REMEMBER WHILE YOU WERE IN THE POLICE STATION IN CRETE, THOSE
TWO YOUNG SMILING GREEK WOMEN, DRESSED IN BLACK LIKE TYPICAL
CRETAN WOMEN, COMING TO THE WINDOW, HOLDING YOUR HAND AND
SAYING IN VERY BROKEN ENGLISH, "OSHO, WE LOVE YOU. WE ARE CRETAN, WE WANT YOU TO STAY HERE."
IT SEEMS THAT AS THE GOVERNMENTS BECOME INCREASINGLY STRIDENT
IN THEIR ATTACKS ON YOU -- IN SPITE OF THE INCREASINGLY OBVIOUS
LOVE THE COMMON MAN HAS FOR YOU -- ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT
PARTS OF YOUR WORK WILL BE TO SHOW HOW THE BUREAUCRACY, FAR
FROM REPRESENTING THE COMMON MAN, IS IN FACT IN COMPLETE OPPOSITION TO HIM.
I certainly remember those two young women holding my hand and trying to convey to me that "We, the people of this island, want you to stay here. We love you."
The question you have raised has occurred to me many times in my life, again and again.
The bureaucracy is not for the people, it is against them. It uses them, it exploits them, it manipulates them; it makes them believe that it is serving their purposes. But the reality is just the opposite.
They define democracy as the government of the people, for the people, by the people. It is none of these things. It is neither by the people, nor of the people, nor for the people.
The people who have been holding power down the centuries have always been able to persuade people that whatever is being done, is done for their sake. And the people have believed it because they have been trained to believe; it is a conspiracy between religion and state to exploit humanity.
The religion goes on preaching belief and destroys the intelligence of people to question, makes them retarded. And the state goes on exploiting them in every possible way -- still managing to keep the people's support, because the people have been trained to believe, not to question. Any kind of government -- it may
be monarchy, it may be aristocracy, it may be democracy, it may be any kind of government... Just the names change but deep down the reality remains the same.
In Japan before the second world war, Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, was believed to be the direct descendant of the God Sun, and whatever he was saying was not human, it was divine; his order had just to be followed. For centuries Japanese people have believed in him as a Sun God, And they have died in hundreds of wars, willingly, joyously, because they are dying for God himself. What more blissful and beautiful a death could one aspire to?
Japan is a small country but no other country has been able to conquer it -- even countries like China, vast countries. China is the greatest country as far as numbers are concerned, as far as land is concerned, but a small tiny Japan was able to defeat the Chinese because the people had this fanatic belief that God is behind them, so victory is theirs. And more or less the same has been the situation all over the world.
That day when those two Cretan women, holding my hand with great love, said to me,
"We are not against you. We love you and we want you to stay here," they represented the real consciousness of the people. And then I saw at the airport, three thousand people
-- it must have been the whole population of Saint Nicholas -- came to show their support, and to show that they are not with the brutality and nazi actions of the police against me, that they are for me.
Yes, it has to be one of my works to awaken people to the real situation: you are being exploited in different names. The exploiters even call themselves public servants, to tell you that they serve you. For thousands of years they have been "serving," -- and the people are in immense misery, ignorance. They don't have anything to their life; they are born, they somehow live, and they die. Nothing happens to them which could be called ecstatic, which could be called an experience.
Empty from birth to death, nothing flowers, nothing blossoms... and they have all the potential of being a song of joy. But these bureaucracies, religious and political, would not allow it. They are so afraid of joyous people.
It was a strange feeling for me in the beginning. I had never thought that people should be so afraid of joyous people. Slowly slowly, I became aware that joy has many implications:
A joyous person is not retarded. A joyous person is intelligent.
A joyous person knows the art of life; otherwise he cannot be joyous. And a joyous person is dangerous to all those vested interests which go against humanity.
Those interests want humanity to live in hell forever. They have managed in every possible way to keep you in misery. They destroy everything that you can rejoice in, and they give you ample opportunity to be miserable. A miserable person is not a danger to this rotten society.
Yes, it has to be one of my basic works to make people aware that the powerful ones --
either religious or political -- are not your friends. They are your enemies. And unless the common humanity goes through a rebellion against all types of bureaucracies, man will remain stuck, not evolving, not reaching to the heights which are his birthright.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
HAS ANYONE REALLY UNDERSTOOD YOUR MESSAGE OF LOVE?
RECENTLY IT HAS BEEN PAINFULLY CLEAR TO ME THAT I HAVEN'T, AND I WONDER IF WE AREN'T ALL, WITH SOME SLIGHT VARIATIONS ON THE
THEME, STILL SINGING THE SAME OLD SONG.
WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO LIVE SOMETHING THAT IS SO SIMPLE AND
NATURAL?
Just because it is so simple and so natural, that's why it is so difficult. You are not simple and you are not natural.
And it is simple and natural.
My message of love is absolutely simple; nothing can be more simple than that. But your mind is very complex, very tricky. It makes simple things complicated.
-- that's its work.
And for centuries it has been trained for only one thing: to make things so complicated that your life becomes impossible.
Your mind has become expert in destroying you, because your life consists of simple things. The whole existence is simple, but man's mind has been cultivated, conditioned, educated, programmed in such a way that the simplest thing becomes crooked. The moment it reaches to your mind it is no longer simple. The mind starts interpreting it, finding things in it which are not there, ignoring things which are there.
And you think that you have heard whatever I have been telling you? It is not so. I have been telling you one thing, and you have been hearing something else because your hearing is not direct. There is a mediator -- your mind. It functions in many ways as a censor, it does not allow many things to enter inside you.
You will be surprised to know how much it prevents -- ninety-eight percent. It allows in only two percent of what is being said to you, and that too not in its purity. First it pollutes it by its own interpretations, by its own past experiences, conditionings, and by the time the mind comes to have the sense that it has understood, what was said and what was heard are poles apart.
Gautam Buddha used to tell a story... it is strange that all great masters have depended on stories. There is some reason for it: the mind relaxes when it is a question of a story; when it is just a joke the mind relaxes. There is no need to be tense and serious, just a story is being told, you can relax.
But when something like love or freedom or silence is being explained, you are tense.
That's why the masters have to use simple stories. Perhaps by the end of the story they can manage it so a small message enters in from the back door while you are still relaxed.
Gautam Buddha used to say -- it was his custom after his evening talk -- he used to say to his disciples, "Now go and do the last thing before you go to sleep." That last thing was the meditation.
One day it happened that a prostitute was listening and a thief was also in the audience.
When Buddha said, "Now it is time for you to go and do the last thing before you go to sleep," all the sannyasins went to meditate. The thief simply became awakened -- "What am I doing here?" This was the time to do his business. The prostitute looked around and felt that Buddha was really very perceptive, because when Buddha had said that, he was looking at her. She bowed down in gratitude because she was reminded, "Go to do your business before you go to sleep."
A simple statement, but three types of people heard three meanings. In fact there must have been more meanings, because to somebody meditation must have been a joy, to somebody else meditation must have been something one has to do; and then the meaning differs. To all those meditators the message was the same, but what was heard by them could not have been the same.
All my life I have never taught anything complex to anybody. Life is already too complex, and I don't want to burden you more. But I have been more misunderstood than perhaps anybody else in this whole century, for the simple reason that I am saying simple things which nobody says. I am talking about the obvious which everybody has forgotten, which has been taken for granted. Nobody talks about it.
You can look at the great theological treatises of the Christians, at great works of religion by Hindus, Mohammedans, Jews -- very scholarly, very difficult to understand. The more difficult they are, the more they are respected. When people cannot understand something they think it is something great, mysterious, something far above their comprehension.
And naturally it becomes respectable.
The Hindus use a language for their religious treatises, Sanskrit, which has never been a living language. It has never been spoken by the people in the marketplace; it has been a language of the experts. But they have resisted continuously that Hindu scriptures should be translated.
I was always wondering, why this resistance? In fact they should be happy that their scriptures are being translated and their message is being spread to all corners of the earth. But when I studied their scriptures, I understood the reason.
The reason was that those scriptures have nothing. Just the language is so difficult, and people don't understand it, so they go on paying respect to it. Once it is translated into the language of the people, it loses all glory, all spirituality. It becomes so ordinary because it is no longer difficult.
And the same is true about others -- for example the Jews. The rabbis will still prefer Hebrew. Now it is not a living language, why go on insisting on it? But it gives the mind the impression of something mysterious, impenetrable, holy, far beyond, so that all that you can do is to bow down. Once it is translated, it has nothing. And specially, it has nothing that you need.
None of these scriptures teach about love, its implications, its different dimensions. None of these scriptures teach about freedom. None of these scriptures teach about you, your life, and how it can be transformed into a celebration. They talk about God! I have never come across a single man who has any problem with God -- it is so irrelevant. Is God anybody's problem? Is the Holy Ghost anybody's problem? -- things which are absolutely irrelevant to human existence.
The mind has been filled with all kinds of unnecessary luggage. No space is left in the mind for the realities that you have to live. So even your greatest theologian is as foolish about love as you are, has no understanding of freedom, has never enquired into the distinction between personality and individuality.
I had one professor who was teaching religion. After listening for a few days I stood up and told him, "I think you are talking about irrelevant things. I don't see a single student here for whom God is a problem, and I don't see either that God is a problem to you" --
because I used to live just in front of his house, and his wife was the problem.
I told him, "Your wife is the real problem; that you can discuss. God is absolutely abstract. I have never seen you thinking about God in your house. And all that you are teaching about God has nothing of your experience in it, it has not been your quest. You are filling the minds of these innocent people with ideas which are of no use. Talk about love!"
He was very angry. He said, "You have to come with me to the principal." I said, "I can come even to God. You cannot threaten me."
On the way towards the principal's office he said, "You don't feel afraid?"
I said, "Why should I feel afraid? You should feel afraid! I know all the students; their problem is love, and your problem is love. And I am going to tell the principal, Ìf you don't believe me, just call this professor's wife, and you will know what I mean by problem.'"
He said, "You are making it too complex."
I said, "I am making it absolutely simple, factual. I can bring all the students to the office; they all have problems of love. Somebody is chasing a woman, and is not getting her --
that's his problem. Somebody has got her -- and that is his problem." He said, "It is better you should come back; there is no need."
I said, "I never go back from anywhere. If you are not coming, I am going alone."
He said, "When I am saying there is no need..."
I said, "It may not be a need for you; it is a need for me. I have to decide it finally, because to me love is a religious phenomenon, while God is not. God is only a hypothesis. It means nothing because there is nothing corresponding to it.
"And love is a religious phenomenon. Unless it is understood in its totality, a man is bound to become miserable by something which could have made his life divine. The same thing which could have been his heaven is going to become hell because he has no understanding. And it is certainly an art. Who cares about
God? So you start talking sense. We have come here to understand religion, not nonsense."
"But," he said, "in the whole syllabus there is no mention of love, freedom, individuality, silence... we have to complete the syllabus."
Universities are completing their syllabuses without bothering about the real life of man, his real problems.
Because I am talking about simple things, many people simply feel that this is not what religion has to be. They have got an idea of religion, of complicated abstract hypotheses, you can go on thinking about them but it makes no difference to your life -- you remain the same. You may be a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian it does not matter; your real problems are the same. Your unreal problems are different, but those unreal problems are nothing but a burden to the mind.
It is possible to understand me if you can just put aside your mind and its complicated mechanism. It is not needed because my work is heart to heart.
I am speaking from my heart.
I am not a theoretician, I am not speaking from my mind. I am pouring my heart to you, but if you are going to listen from the mind you are going to miss it.
If you are also ready to open a new door into your being, if you are ready to hear from the heart, then whatever I am saying is so simple that there is no need to believe in it because there is no way to disbelieve it. It is so simple that there is no way to doubt it.
I am against belief for the simple reason that for all my teaching, no belief is needed. I am all for doubt because for my simple teaching, you cannot doubt. All the religions of the world insist on belief, because what they are teaching can be doubted. And they are all against doubt because doubt can destroy their whole edifice.
I am simple and real. I am not metaphysical; hence there is no need to believe in me. If you have heard me, a trust is bound to arise which is not belief, which is closer to love; even if you try to doubt, you cannot. And when you cannot doubt something, then there is real trust, indubitable trust. It transforms simply by
being within you.
In the whole history of man, only Mahavira has made a distinction to be remembered --
which is significant in this reference. He says that there are two ways to reach to the truth. One is the way of the shravaka. Shravaka means one who can hear, one who is able to hear from the heart. Then he need not do anything. Just hearing is enough, and he will be transformed. The other is the way of the monk, who will have to try hard to reach to the truth.
My effort has been not to create monks. That's why I have chosen to speak because just hearing you can be reborn. Nothing else is needed on your part, except a willingness to open the doors of your heart. Just let me in and you will not be the same again.
I have seen thousands of my people changing without their knowing; they have changed so drastically, but the change has happened almost underground. Their mind has not been even allowed to take part in it -- just from heart to heart.
These people had not needed any therapy. These people here have not needed any meditation. If they have heard, the way I am telling you, then this is their meditation, and this is their therapy, and this is their revolution.
Question 3 BELOVED OSHO,
I HAVE HEARD YOU EXTOL "COMMUNE-ISM" AS THE HIGHEST FORM OF
ECONOMIC SYSTEM, THE EQUAL SHARING OF ABUNDANCE AND RICHNESS
IN A LOVING FAMILY OF MAN. HOWEVER, I HAVE HEARD YOU SAY THAT
THE POOR SHOULD BE BROUGHT UP TO THE LEVEL OF THE RICH RATHER
THAN THE RICH BEING DRAGGED DOWN INTO POVERTY, AS HAS
HAPPENED IN ALL EXISTING COMMUNISTIC SOCIETIES. BUT HOW CAN THE
RICH SHARE WEALTH NOW, AND LIVE IN "COMMUNE-ISM" WITHOUT
BEING DRAGGED DOWN INTO ECONOMIC MEDIOCRITY?
The first thing is that the rich people of the world should start living in communes. Let those communes be of the rich! -- so they will not be dragged down from their standard of life, their comforts, their luxuries. Let there be around the world hundreds of communes of rich people -- rich communes.
And to me, wealth is a certain kind of creativity. If five thousand rich people who have all created wealth individually are together, they can create wealth a millionfold. Their standard will not go lower; their standard can even go higher. Or they can start sharing.
They can start inviting people who are not rich but who are creative in some other way, who will enhance the life of their commune although they may be poor.
Five thousand rich people together with their genius for creating wealth are capable of creating so much wealth that they can invite thousands of other people who may not be rich in the sense of being wealthy, but who may be rich as painters, as poets, as dancers, as singers.
What are you going to do only with wealth? You cannot play music on money; you cannot dance just because you have so much cash in the bank. And these rich communes can start becoming bigger, absorbing more and more creative people. These rich communes will need every kind of thing.
Talking about the rich commune, I am reminded of the Jaina community. There was a time, in India, in the history of Jainism... because Jainism is a small community and it is a community of rich people. In India you cannot find a single Jaina beggar, a single Jaina orphan. In the ancient days it was a fundamental rule that if a Jaina was poor, then all other Jainas would simply contribute just little bits.
For example, if he needs a house, the whole commune simply provides it. Somebody provides the wood, somebody provides the bricks, somebody provides the tiles and the whole community provides some money for the man to start off with. You have changed a poor man into a rich man. Nobody has been forced to do it, it is just out of generosity.
And that man will do the same when a new arrival happens to come to the commune.
You are asking me right now what the rich people should do. They should drop their private ownership and make a rich commune wherever they can manage -- and they can manage everywhere, anywhere. They can make beautiful places all around the world, and slowly, slowly more people can be absorbed.
For example, you will need plumbers, however rich you may be; you will need mechanical people; you will need technicians; you will need shoemakers. Invite these people -- and they come to you not as servants, but as members of the commune. They will be enriching the commune doing whatever they can do the best. And it is the commune's duty to raise those people to the same standard of life.
Slowly slowly we can transform the whole world -- without any bloodshed and without any dictatorship.
A communism that comes out of love, out of intelligence, out of generosity, will be real.
A communism that comes through force is going to be unreal. And there is not a single man in the world, howsoever poor, who has nothing to contribute.
I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln... I love this anecdote so much! It was his first address in the Senate as president. He was a poor man's son, his father was a shoemaker -
- in India he would have been an untouchable. Even in America people were very annoyed, irritated, angry that a shoemaker's son had become the president; the aristocrats, the rich, the super-rich naturally were angry. There was great tension on the first day when he addressed them.
As he stood up, one aristocrat also stood up and said, "Mr President, before you
start speaking, I would like you to remember that your father used to make shoes for my family. Right now I am using the shoes made by your father, so don't forget that. Just becoming president does not mean anything. Don't forget that you are a shoemaker's son."
There was absolute silence, pin-drop silence. Everybody felt that Abraham Lincoln would feel embarrassed, but instead of feeling embarrassed, he made the whole Senate feel embarrassed.
He said, "It is good, I am immensely thankful to you that you reminded me about my father" -- and tears came to his eyes. And he said, "How can I forget him? I know that he was a perfect shoemaker and I can never be that perfect a president. I cannot defeat the old man.
"You are still wearing shoes he has made -- many of you must be wearing them. If they do not fit you, if they are pinching, if you are feeling uncomfortable, don't be worried.
Although my father is dead, he made me learn the art enough to mend your shoes. I cannot replace him; he was a perfect master. I am just an amateur, but I can mend your shoes and I will always remember to try at least to become as good a president as he was a shoemaker. I cannot hope to be better than him -- that is impossible, because I know him."
The poorest man in the world has also got something to contribute.
Create rich communes and suddenly you will find that you need many people, not just the rich. They may be able to create wealth, but wealth is not all. Life is much more than wealth. It needs so many things that naturally you will have to invite many people.
Around the world all the rich communes will need people; and slowly, slowly your commune will become bigger and bigger.
The richer will not become poorer, but the poorer will become richer, and respectable, and equal -- in no way inferior to anybody else -- because they are also functioning in the same way as anybody else. And whatever they are doing is needed as much as anybody else's expertise is needed.
I conceive of this just like a flower opening up, becoming bigger -- all the petals
opening up. A commune, full-blown, complete, lacking nothing, will not be only of rich people.
Many poor people will have been transformed into richness. And they will be contributing -- they will not be a burden, and they will not be beggars. They will have their pride. You cannot exist without them.
We can transform the whole earth into a rich society, but it should start the way I am telling you: not by the dictatorship of the proletariat, but by communes of the rich.
Question 4 BELOVED OSHO,
I REALLY FELT AFFECTED WHEN YOU TALKED ABOUT RAJEN THE OTHER
NIGHT, BECAUSE I FEEL FRIENDSHIP FOR HIM, AND I FEEL HE LOVES YOU
AS HE DID BEFORE. I FEEL THAT IN DROPPING THE MALA AND THE RED
CLOTHES, HE IS SIMPLY TRYING TO EXPERIENCE SOMETHING NEW.
I MUST ADMIT, THOUGH, THAT HAVING WORKED WITH HIM FOR YEARS, IN
THE MOST RECENT GROUP EXPERIENCE WITH HIM JUST A FEW DAYS AGO
THE QUALITY OF HIS WORK FELT DIFFERENT: I MISSED THE FEELING OF
YOUR PRESENCE THROUGH HIM. PLEASE COMMENT.
Your question itself is the answer. If he loves me, then in his groups my presence would have become even more tangible. If my presence in his groups has disappeared, then what he calls love is just an empty word. This is a simple
thing.
Neither dropping the mala nor the red clothes is important, because I have allowed it myself. But in his groups he is saying, "I used to serve Osho through surrender. I am still serving him, through making you free of Osho."
The whole world is free of me. Nobody needs to work to make people free of me. The whole world is already free of me.
But why is my presence being missed? He has lost contact with my heart; his heart is no longer beating with my heart. And it is not only with Rajen. It is so with many other therapists. Only a few have proved the fire test, like Prasad. He has not just remained the same, but has become more deeply involved with me on a new basis, a new flowering of love. In his groups my presence has become deeper. And his work has changed; his therapy has become different, more effective.
But all these people are unconscious. Their love is not what I mean by love. Perhaps at the most, their love means that they don't hate me. Even that much will be great, because most of them may even be angry with me for the simple reason that they had become accustomed to being just a follower. The whole responsibility was on me. Now I have given back the responsibility to them; they can be angry -- they are bound to be angry.
They may go on saying like old parrots, "I love you," but their actions don't prove it.
Ananda Teertha and a few others with him have opened a meditation academy in Italy.
Devageet was there. In finding the place, in arranging the place he worked hard, but finally he was very disappointed because they did not want my name to be associated with the academy.
Devageet said, "I have been working day and night just so that we can create an academy for Osho, and you are not ready even to mention His name in the brochure!" They all had their pictures in the brochure, and they were not willing to have my picture in the brochure.
Devageet had to leave in disgust. They all were saying, "We love Osho," but no
mention of me in the brochure, no mention of me in their groups. And all their groups are filled by sannyasins, and those sannyasins are coming because of me. Devageet made it clear that this is pure exploitation. "These people are coming to your groups because of Osho, not because of you. And you are no longer working for Osho."
Devageet came to see me in Crete, and I told him, "Don't be disturbed. This is how unconscious humanity is. Let them do what they are doing. If it is good for people, people will go on coming to them; if it is not good, they will disappear."
"But," he said, "it hurts that you made these people great therapists. You made their name famous around the world."
I said, "You don't understand the unconscious mind's logic: now they are taking revenge.
They cannot forgive me because I have made them; they feel a certain inferiority, and they would like to proclaim their superiority. So let them do it -- don't be worried. This is how this world goes on."
It makes no difference to me whether my name is associated with their academy, because there are thousands of other therapists in the world who have nothing to do with me, so these few also can be part of that. Or, they may realize sooner or later that what they are doing is ugly, unloving, and to a man who has made you world-famous; otherwise nobody knew about you, nobody would have ever heard about you.
But this is the problem: it is very difficult to forgive a person who has helped you in any way. You cannot pay it back to me; there is no way of repaying, and you feel indebted. A certain inferiority that you are not self-made creates anger, revenge. But all this will subside.
Just look at your question. You say that you have been with Rajen, and you feel, "He loves You just as he loved You before." And still you observe that in his work I am no longer there; I am absent.
Can't you see the contradiction? If he loves me, I should be more present and he should be more absent. If he loves me totally, then only I will be present and he will not be present at all; otherwise the word `love' is just a word as everybody else is using it.
But these people will come to understand soon. It will take a little time because while they were with me, and they were working with the people in therapy groups, it was as if they were constantly nourished by my love.
Soon they will find out that that nourishment is no longer there because their hearts are closed, and they will start feeling tired, exhausted, because all those people who come for therapy are going to take their energies. Soon they will find that they have lost their roots, that now they cannot blossom. But it will take a little time. You can cut the roots -- still the flowers will remain for a few days, but not for long.
So let them come to the understanding by themselves, that here they used to work so much with so many people -- thousands of people they worked with -- but they never felt as if their energies were sucked. But they were not aware why they were not feeling like that -- because their roots were within me.
But in the name of freedom, they have withdrawn their roots. They will start dying. It will be sad if they don't understand it.
Beyond Psychology Chapter #8
Chapter title: The head is compulsory, but not the cap 16 April 1986 am in
Archive code: 8604160
ShortTitle: PSYCHO08
Audio: Yes
Video:
Yes Length:
101
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
YOU TALKED THE OTHER MORNING OF THE CHILD BEING FORCED TO BE
OBEDIENT. THAT CHILD IS STILL SITTING HERE: I HATE BEING TOLD WHAT
TO DO. BUT IN A WAY THAT SHOULD BE THE OTHER PERSON'S PROBLEM; HOWEVER, I INSIST ON MAKING IT MY PROBLEM BY REACTING WITH
ANGER, RESENTMENT, AND THE NEED TO JUSTIFY MYSELF. IT IS CLEAR
THAT THOSE WHO DO THE TELLING ALSO HATE BEING TOLD WHAT TO DO.
IT SEEMS AS IF WE ARE ALL CAUGHT IN THE SAME INTRICATE WEB, PLAYING DIFFERENT ROLES AT DIFFERENT TIMES. AS AN ADULT HOW
CAN I CONVERT REACTION INTO RESPONSE AND RESPONSIBILITY?
The first thing to be understood very clearly is what I mean by "disobedience." It is not the disobedience you will find in the dictionaries. My idea of disobedience is not to hate being told what to do or, in reaction, to do just the opposite.
Obedience needs no intelligence. All machines are obedient; nobody has ever
heard of a disobedient machine. Obedience is simple, too. It takes from you the burden of any responsibility. There is no need to react, you have simply to do what is being said. The responsibility rests with the source from where the order comes. In a certain way you are very free: you cannot be condemned for your act.
After the second world war, in the Nuremberg trials, so many of Adolf Hitler's top men simply said that they were not responsible, and they don't feel guilty. They were simply being obedient -- whatever was told they did it, and they did it with as much efficiency as they were capable of.
In fact to make them responsible and condemn them, punish them, send them to the gallows, according to me was not fair. It was not justice, it was revenge. If Adolf Hitler had won the war, then Churchill's people, Roosevelt's people, Stalin's people or they themselves would have been in the same situation, and they would have said exactly the same -- that they are not responsible.
If Stalin had been on the stand in the court, he would have said that it was the order of the high command of the communist party. It was not his responsibility because it was not his decision; he had not done anything on his own. So if you want to punish, punish the source of the order. But you are punishing a person who simply fulfilled what all the religions teach, and all the leaders of the world teach -- obedience.
Obedience has a simplicity; disobedience needs a little higher order of intelligence. Any idiot can be obedient, in fact only idiots can be obedient. The person of intelligence is bound to ask why? -- "Why am I supposed to do it?" And, "Unless I know the reasons and the consequences of it, I am not going to be involved in it." Then he is becoming responsible.
Responsibility is not a game. It is one of the most authentic ways of living -- dangerous too -- but it does not mean disobedience for disobedience's sake. That will be again idiotic.
There is a story about a Sufi mystic, Mulla Nasruddin. From the very beginning it was thought that he was upside down. His parents were in trouble. If they would say, "Go to the right," he would go to the left. Finally his old father thought that rather than bothering with him, it is better, if they want him to go to the left, to order him to go to the right --
and he is bound to go to the left.
One day they were crossing the river. On their donkey they had a big bag of sugar, and the bag was leaning more towards right so there was a danger that it may slip into the river; it had to remain balanced on the donkey. But to tell to Nasruddin, "Move the bag towards the left," will mean losing the sugar -- he will move it towards the right.
So he said to Nasruddin, "My son, your bag is slipping; move it towards the right." And Nasruddin moved it towards the right.
The father said, "This is strange, for the first time you have been obedient!"
Nasruddin said, "For the first time you have been cunning. I knew you wanted this to be moved towards the left; I could see with my eyes where it needs to be moved. Even in such a subtle way you cannot make me obedient."
But just to go against obedience is not moving your intelligence higher. You remain on the same plane. Obedient or disobedient, but there is no change of intelligence.
To me disobedience is a great revolution.
It does not mean saying an absolute no in every situation. It simply means deciding whether to do it or not, whether it is beneficial to do it or not. It is taking the responsibility on yourself. It is not a question of hating the person or hating to be told, because in that hating you cannot act obediently, disobediently; you act very unconsciously. You cannot act intelligently.
When you are told to do something, you are given an opportunity to respond. Perhaps what is being told is right; then do it, and be grateful to the person who told you at the right moment to do it. Perhaps it is not right -- then make it clear. Bring your reasons, why it is not right; then help the person -- what he is thinking is going in a wrong way.
But hate has no place.
If it is right, do it lovingly.
If it is not right, then even more love is needed, because you will have to tell to
the person, explain to the person that it is not right.
The way of disobedience is not stagnant, just going against every order and feeling anger and hate and revenge towards the person. The way of disobedience is a way of great intelligence.
So it is not ultimately obedience or disobedience. Reduced to the basic fact, it is simply a question of intelligence -- behave intelligently. Sometimes you will have to obey, and sometimes you will have to say, "I am sorry, I cannot do it." But there is no question of hate, there is no question of revenge, anger. If hate, anger or revenge arises, that simply means you know that what is being told is right, but it goes against your ego to obey it; it hurts your ego. That hurt feeling comes up as hate, as anger.
But the question is not your ego; the question is the act that you have to do -- and you have to bring your total intelligence to figure it out. If it is right, then be obedient; if it is wrong, be disobedient. But there is no conflict, there is no hurt feeling.
If you are obeying it, it is easier; you need not explain to anybody. But if you are not obeying it, then you owe an explanation. And perhaps your explanation is not right. Then you have to move back, you have to do it.
A man should live intelligently -- that's all. Then whatever he does is his responsibility.
It happens that even great intellectuals are not living intelligently. Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest intellectuals of this age, was a follower of Adolf Hitler. And after Adolf Hitler's defeat and the exposure of his basic animality, brutality, murderousness, violence, even Martin Heidegger shrank back and said, "I was simply following the leader of the nation."
But a philosopher has no business to follow the leader of the nation. In fact a philosopher's basic duty is to guide the leaders of the nation, not to be guided by them, because he is out of active politics, his vision is more clear. He is standing aloof, he can see things which people who are involved in action cannot see.
But it is easy to throw responsibility...
If Adolf Hitler had been victorious, I am certain Martin Heidegger would have said, "He is victorious because he followed my philosophy." And certainly he was a great intellectual compared to Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was just a retarded person. But power...
We have been brought up to follow the powerful -- the father, the mother, the teacher, the priest, the God. Essentially we have been told that whoever has the power is right: "Might is right." And you have to follow it. It is simple because it needs no intelligence. It is simple because you can never be told that it was your responsibility, that whatever happened was your responsibility.
In all the armies around the world only one thing is taught through years of training, and that is obedience. In Germany, in the second world war, there were good people, but they were heads of concentration camps. They were good fathers, good husbands, good friends. Nobody could have conceived -- watching them in their families, with their friends, in the club -- that these people are burning thousands of Jews every day.
And they were not feeling guilty at all, because it is only an order from above. And that is their whole training, that you have to follow the order. It has become part of their blood and their bones and their marrow. When the order comes, obedience is the only way.
This is how man has lived up to now, and that's why I say obedience is one of the greatest crimes, because all other crimes are born out of it. It deprives you of intelligence, it deprives you of decisiveness, it deprives you of responsibility. It destroys you as an individual. It converts you into a robot.
Hence I am all for disobedience. But disobedience is not just against obedience.
Disobedience is above obedience and the so-called disobedience described in the dictionaries. Disobedience is simply the assertion of your intelligence: "I take the responsibility, and I will do everything that feels right to my heart, to my being. And I will not do anything that goes against my intelligence."
My whole life, from my childhood to the university, I was condemned continuously for being disobedient. And I insisted, "I am not disobedient. I am simply trying to figure out, with my own intelligence, what is right, what should be done, and I take the whole responsibility for it. If something goes wrong, it was my fault. I don't want to condemn somebody else because he has told me to
do it."
But it was difficult for my parents, for my teachers, professors. In my school it was compulsory to wear caps, and I entered the high school without a cap. Immediately the teacher said, "Are you aware or not that the cap is compulsory?"
I said, "A thing like a cap cannot be compulsory. How can it be compulsory to put something on your head or not? The head is compulsory, but not the cap. And I have come with the head; perhaps you have come only with the cap."
He said, "You look a strange type. It is just written in the school code that without a cap, no student can enter the school."
I said, "Then that code has to be changed. It is written by human beings, not by God; and human beings commit mistakes."
The teacher could not believe it. He said, "What is the matter with you? Why can't you just wear a cap?"
I said, "The trouble is not with the cap; I want to find out why it is compulsory, its reason, its results. If you are unable... you can take me to the principal and we can discuss it." And he had to take me to the principal.
In India, Bengalis are the most intelligent people; they don't use caps. And Punjabis are the most unintelligent, simple people, and they use turbans. So I said to the principal,
"Looking at the situation -- Bengalis don't use any caps and they are the most intelligent people in the country, and Punjabis use not only a cap but a very tight turban, and they are the most unintelligent people. "It has something to do with your intelligence. I would rather not take the risk."
The principal listened to me and he said, "The boy is stubborn, but what he is saying makes sense. I had never thought about it -- this is true. And we can make this code non-compulsory. Anybody who wants to wear a cap can wear one; anybody who does not want to use, there is no need -- because it has nothing to do with learning, teaching."
The teacher could not believe it. On the way back he told me, "What did you
do?"
I said, "I have done nothing, I simply explained the situation. I am not angry, I am perfectly willing to use a cap. If you feel it helps intelligence, why only one? I can use two caps, three caps, caps upon caps, if it helps intelligence...! I am not angry. But you have to prove it."
The teacher said to me -- I still remember his words -- "You will be in trouble your whole life. You will not fit in anywhere."
I said, "That's perfectly okay, but I don't want to be an idiot and fit in everywhere. It is good to be an "unfit" but intelligent. And I have come to the school to learn intelligence, so I can be an unfit intelligently! Please never try again to change me from an individual into a cog in the wheel."
And from the next day the caps disappeared; only he had come with a cap. And looking at the class and the school... because the new rule has come into force that caps are not compulsory, all other teachers, even the principal, had come without caps. He looked so idiotic. I said to him, "There is still time. You can take it off and put it in your pocket."
And he did it!
He said, "That's right. If everybody is against the cap... I was simply being obedient to the law."
I said, "The law is made by us. We can change it, without any anger. Can we not discuss each and everything intelligently?"
So remember, when I say "disobedience" I don't mean replace obedience by disobedience. That will not make you better. I use the word `disobedience' only to make it clear to you that it is up to you, that you have to be the decisive factor of all your actions in life. And that gives tremendous strength, because whatever you do, you do with a certain rational support to it.
I entered the university, and the first question the vice-chancellor asked me was, "Why have you been growing your beard and mustache?" And it was in a way natural because no other student was doing that.
I said to him, "I have come here to see you for a scholarship, but I can risk the
scholarship. I cannot risk a chance for an argument." He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "I mean I should ask you why you have shaved your beard, your mustache. I have done nothing; they are growing by themselves. You have done something; you have not allowed them to grow -- you are shaving twice a day. You owe me an explanation. What is the reason why you are doing it?"
He said, "I have never thought about it... because everybody else was doing it I started doing it."
I said, "That is not a very intelligent answer. You can think over it. I will come every day and knock on the door, so whenever you have found the answer you can give me the answer, and from that day I will start shaving."
Three days only I had to go to his office to knock. On the fourth day he said to me,
"Excuse me, you have taken away my sleep. The whole day I am thinking about my beard and mustache, and the whole day I am looking at the door, thinking that you must be coming to knock. And sometimes I hear that there has been a knock, and I open the door and there is nobody, so I am hallucinating! You have made me so afraid! You simply take your scholarship and do whatever you want; it is your beard and your mustache. And just please forgive me that I asked you."
I said, "It is not so easy. You have to stop shaving; otherwise I will continue coming every day, knocking on the door, waiting for the answer."
He said, "My God! I am giving you the scholarship, which really should not be given to you because you don't belong to this university -- you are coming from another university, and according to our rules, the first preference will be for a graduate of this university. I am not bothering about the rule; I am giving you the scholarship because I simply want you to stop knocking on my door."
I said, "You can keep your scholarship and you can give it to anybody you want, but you will have to stop shaving."
He said, "Don't be so hard on an old man -- because what will people say? Don't make me a laughingstock!"
I said, "You will become a laughingstock if you don't listen to me, because then I am going to tell everybody the whole story of what has been happening in these four days."
And you will not believe it: he gave me the scholarship, and he started growing the beard! The whole university was surprised, because he was very fussy about his clothes, and about shaving -- he had been in Oxford, a professor of history, head of the department of history there. Everybody started asking him, "What has happened?"
He said, "Nothing has happened. I just came to realize that I was doing something wrong, because I cannot give any reason. This young man has made me aware that you should live your life rationally. I have been an imitator, I have been very obedient to the surroundings. Nobody has told me -- I have been obedient on my own. But because I don't have any reason, I will let my beard grow. And this young man seems to be right, that if women start growing beards, mustaches..."
And it is not very difficult. There are hormones which can be injected and they will start growing beards. Do you think it will be a beautiful world, where men are shaving beards, and women are growing beards? A woman with a beard will freak out anybody! And the same happens with the man; just the women are very patient, very tolerant. They even tolerate people without beards. No man can tolerate his wife with a beard, I tell you; it is absolutely certain. Either he will throw her out, or he will hang himself! But millions of women are tolerating beardless men.
Nature never does anything without any reason. I have tried to look at men without beards. It seems something is missing in the man. Just look at Milarepa! When I first saw him here I was so shocked. He was looking so beautiful with a beard and now he is looking simply idiotic! He has lost all his grandeur.
Just live intelligently.
If something is told to you, decide whether it is right or wrong, then you can avoid all guilt feelings. Otherwise, if you don't do it, then you feel guilty; if you do it, again you feel guilty. If you do it you feel that you are being obedient, subservient, that you are not being assertive, that you are not being yourself. And if you don't do it, then you start feeling guilty again -- because perhaps it was the
right thing to do, and you are not doing it.
There is no need for all this clumsiness. Just be simple. If something is told to you, respond intelligently. And whatsoever your intelligence decides, do it this way or that --
but you are responsible. Then there is no question of guilt.
If you are not going to do it, explain to the person why you are not going to do it. And explain without any anger, because anger simply shows that you are weak, that you don't really have an intelligent answer. Anger is always a sign of weakness. Just plainly and simply explain the whole thing; perhaps the other person may find that you are right and may be thankful to you. Or perhaps the other person may have better reasons than you; then you will be thankful to the other person because he has raised your consciousness.
Use every opportunity in life for raising your intelligence, your consciousness.
Ordinarily what we are doing is using every opportunity to create a hell for ourselves.
Only you suffer, and because of your suffering, you make others suffer. And when so many people are living together, and if they all create suffering for each other, it goes on multiplying. That's how the whole world has become a hell.
It can be instantly changed.
Just the basic thing has to be understood, that without intelligence there is no heaven.
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO
YOU HAVE BEEN CALLED "THE GENIUS OF THE ABSURD." YOUR WAY IN
THIS WORLD SEEMS SO RELENTLESSLY WILD AND CRAZY THAT MANY
PEOPLE -- PERHAPS ALL PEOPLE -- ARE FILLED WITH WONDER, OR CONFUSION; AND SOMETIMES, EVEN ANGER. BUT THE EUROPEAN
PARLIAMENT, GATHERING VOTES TO BAN YOU FROM EUROPE FOREVER
SEEMS ALSO ABSURD AND CRAZY. I WONDER WHO IS MORE ABSURD: YOU
OR THEM? WHAT CAN WE DISCOVER ABOUT TRUTH IN YOUR ABSURDITY?
They are not absurd; they are functioning very logically. They can see the potential danger that I can bring to the younger generation, and which can destroy their centuries of vested interests.
They are not absurd. It may look absurd -- the whole world against one single man -- but it is very logical. They can see that what I am saying is true, and they have no way to defend their morality, their marriage, their family, their social structure. Naturally, they would not like me to come in contact with their youth, because their youth is going to be powerful tomorrow; and if their youth becomes aflame with my ideas, tomorrow the old world will have completely collapsed.
To save the old and to prevent the new, they are taking every measure -- and it is logical.
I am certainly absurd.
You have to understand the meaning of absurd. In life everything that is significant is absurd. When you fall in love with someone it is absurd, it is not logical. You cannot give us a logical answer why you have fallen in love with a particular person -- man or woman. It is something beyond you that has gripped you. It is not your doing. Even if you wanted to prevent it, you could not have succeeded; in fact you were absolutely helpless.
Your joy in a world full of misery is absurd. It has no relatedness to the miserable humanity. You are completely alone. Everything that is valuable -- you love music, you are enchanted with beauty, you are seeking truth, you want to
know yourself -- all these are absurd activities.
Meditating is absurd; it would be better and more logical to earn money.
Just before I left Nepal, a group of sannyasins from Delhi had come to prevent me from going out of Nepal or out of India -- a kind of deputation. They were ready to purchase a big palace and make every arrangement for a commune. But I told them, "Right now you are being emotional. You will be in difficulty. The palace costs one million dollars.
Perhaps you can collect that much donation, saying that if the palace is not purchased, I am going to leave. But the palace is not the only thing; then there will be at least fifty people living there, and you will not be able to support them.
"It is not a question of one day, so be logical. Your asking me to remain in India is out of love, but it is absurd. You will create trouble for me and trouble for yourselves. So you go back, think over it. I will wait here ten days more. You can come after seven days with the decision."
They never came. They must have understood the implications -- they will not be able to manage it. But their insistence was out of love, not out of reason.
I am absurd because whatever I am teaching to you goes against everything that you have been taught. And you have been taught things for so long that you have forgotten completely that they are questionable.
For example, every culture in the world has believed, has conditioned its younger generations, with an idea that love is permanent, that if you love a person you love that person forever. This idea has prevailed for centuries all over the world. It looks logical that if you love a person, the very phenomenon of love will make it permanent. And why has everybody accepted it? -- because you also desire that it should be permanent.
Everybody wants his love to be permanent.
So the traditional idea and your desire synchronize, and it becomes a truth... so much so that if your love changes, then not only others but you yourself start thinking that it was not love -- that's why it changed. You don't change the basic idea of permanent love; you start thinking, "Perhaps what I thought was love was not love, because it has changed --
and love does not change."
I am bound to be absurd, because I want to say to you that in life everything changes -- in spite of your desire for no change. It does not matter that sitting by the side of the river you desire that the river should not go on flowing, that the seasons should not change, that the flowers should not die, that youth should never turn into old age, that life should never end up in a graveyard.
Your desires apart... existence does not listen to your desires, and does not follow your desires, however beautiful and however pious. Existence goes on in its own way.
Everything changes -- and love is not an exception.
Now, perhaps I am the first person who wants to make it understood by everyone that love changes: it begins, it comes of age, it becomes old, it dies. And I think it is good the way it is. It gives you many more chances of loving other people, to make life richer --
because each person has something special to contribute to you. The more you love, the more rich you are, the more loving you become.
And if the false idea of permanence is dropped, jealousy will drop automatically; then jealousy is meaningless. Just as you fall in love and you cannot do anything about it, one day you fall out of love and you cannot do anything about it. A breeze came into your life and passed. It was good and beautiful and fragrant and cool, and you would have liked it to remain always there. You tried hard to close all the windows and all the doors, to keep the breeze fragrant, fresh. But by closing the windows and the doors, you killed the breeze, its freshness, its fragrance; it became stale.
Every marriage is stale.
I am absurd, because I don't want to enforce logic -- which is man-made -- on existence.
In trying to impose logic on existence you simply create misery for yourself, because you are going to fail; your failure is absolute. Millions of people are simply pretending that they go on loving each other. Once they had loved, but now it is only a memory, and becoming fainter and fainter every day. But
because of the idea of permanency they are afraid to say the truth.
And it is not anger, it is not hate; it is nothing against the other. It is simply the way of life -- love changes. It is seasonal, and it is good to have summer and to have winter, and to have rain... to have the fall and the spring.
Your whole life can be lived either as logic or as existence. Existence will be absurd. One moment it is one thing; another moment, it is something else. And you are left with the choice either to go on pretending that it is still the same, or to be honest and sincere and to say that it was a beautiful moment but it has passed. The oasis is passed and now we are in a desert, and we know that we are in a desert; we cannot enjoy, we cannot rejoice.
Still we are bound to each other with the idea of permanent love. That permanent love is a logical idea.
Real love is a real roseflower: it is going to change. From morning to evening it is going to take different shapes, different shades, and by the evening it will be gone. And I don't think that there is anything wrong.
Love is just one example. Your whole life is full of such things. For example, every child is taught respect for the parents, respect for the teachers, respect for the elders. Respect is a beautiful experience, but when you have to be respectful just as a mannerism, it is ugly.
I was told again and again in my childhood, "You have to be respectful."
I used to tell my father, "Before you tell me to be respectful towards somebody, you should at least be certain whether he is worthy of respect; otherwise you are making me phony. I know that a man is not worthy of respect; but he is elder, and I am supposed to be respectful. I am ready to be respectful, but there must be something corresponding to it. For what am I going to be respectful?"
But for centuries upon centuries, the same idea in different dimensions... be respectful towards your parents. But why? Just because they have given birth to you? Was it not a joy to them? If it was a joy to them, they have already got their reward. Now if they want respect from you, then they should be worthy of respect.
And my father would say, "You are always talking absurdities. We have to live in
a society, and the society runs through a certain discipline. Certain manners have to be followed; otherwise you will be crushed by the society. So don't be absurd," he was continuously saying to me.
And I said, "I would not like to be crushed by the society, but I cannot behave logically, seeing that existence is moving in a different direction. What you are saying is logical.
You are saying, `This is the way things have always been done; and this is the way things should be done.'"
And there is a logic in it -- that if you are respectful towards others, others will be respectful towards you; if you help the society, the society will help you. But if you go on criticizing the society, if you go on finding faults everywhere, you will fall alone, and you cannot win against the vast majority.
Logic is the way of winning in the society.
Be logical, and it will be easier for you to climb the ladders.
I said, "I would like to remain true to existence -- and existence is absurd. It has no logic, it has no meaning. It has immense beauty, it has tremendous possibilities for ecstasy, but you cannot make a logical system out of it."
So remember it: the European parliament, the American government -- and others will soon be following -- are all behaving very logically.
But I am not a logician. I am an existentialist.
I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads.
I don't have a goal, because existence has no goal. It simply is, flowering, blossoming, dancing -- but don't ask why. Just an overflow of energy, for no reason at all.
I am with existence.
And that's what I call being a sannyasin:
To be with existence.
The only thing you will have to renounce will be your logical mind. So start living in an existential but illogical way.
The world may call you absurd, mad... So what?
Beyond Psychology Chapter #9
Chapter title: I want to provoke your jealousy 16 April 1986 pm in
Archive code: 8604165
ShortTitle: PSYCHO09
Audio: Yes Video: Yes Length: 102
mins Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
BECAUSE OF YOUR GENIUS IN COMBINING AND THEN GOING BEYOND THE
MATERIAL AND THE SPIRITUAL, AND BECAUSE YOU SEEM TO HAVE AN
ABUNDANCE OF BOTH WORLDS, I THINK THAT MANY NON- SANNYASINS
AND SANNYASINS FEEL JEALOUS OF YOU. PEOPLE RESENT AND DON'T
WANT TO FEED ABUNDANCE. IF THEY FEED ANYTHING, THEY FEED POVERTY. IF YOU WERE SITTING IN A CAVE, NAKED, COLD, AND
MEDITATING, IT WOULD BE ONE THING, BUT YOU ARE NOT. SANNYASINS
WHO NEVER DREAMED OF HAVING A ROLLS ROYCE SEEM TO YEARN FOR
ONE MORE THAN FOR THE STATE OF MEDITATION EVEN AFTER SPENDING
YEARS WITH YOU. YOU SEEM TO BE SPARKING GREED FOR THE
MATERIAL, RATHER THAN A YEARNING FOR THE BEYOND -- OR AT LEAST
THAT'S THE MESSAGE THAT'S BEING RECEIVED BY SOME. COULD YOU
COMMENT.
It is part of my whole device to change the very structure of human consciousness.
The past has revered poverty, asceticism, masochistic attitudes. A man was respected if he was renouncing all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable. He was respected for torturing himself; the greater the torture, the greater the respect. The whole human past is masochistic, and all the religions have contributed to this insanity.
My effort is to change such a vast past and its influence. So it has been only a device. I have not been creating desires for materialistic things in people; they are there without anybody's creating them. Yes, they have been repressed so deeply that people have even forgotten that they had them. I am not creating them; I simply want to remove the cover-up, the repression, and to make the person realize that he wants a Rolls Royce more than enlightenment.
This realization will be a basic step towards enlightenment, because it will make him aware of his own reality, his greed.
There was no need for ninety-three Rolls Royces. I could not use ninety-three Rolls Royces simultaneously -- the same model, the same car. But I wanted to make it clear to you that you would be ready to drop all your desires for truth, for love, for spiritual growth to have a Rolls Royce. I was knowingly creating a situation in which you would feel jealous.
The function of a master is very strange. He has to help you come to an understanding of your inner structure of consciousness: it is full of jealousy.
All the traditions and the whole past have done just the opposite. The so-called saint, in all the traditions, lives in such a way that you will never feel jealous of him. Note that point.
You will feel sympathetic towards him, respectful towards him; but respectfulness is not your reality, sympathy is not your nature. The saint is torturing himself, that is not his nature either. He is being unnatural to gain respect, to fulfill his ego. He is not interested in spiritual growth; he is interested in respectability, in being worshipped like a god. And he is ready to do anything for it.
He is living in an illusion, and he is creating a great illusion in people who come
to him.
He helps them to feel that they are religious, that they are spiritual, because they respect a saint, they worship a saint. They are not yet ready to do such ascetic disciplines for themselves, but they hope some day... this is their ideal. They are completely forgetting that they are jealous human beings. And the saint is helping them to forget their jealousy; he is helping them to repress it.
My work is bound to be totally different. I want to provoke your jealousy, because that is the only way to get rid of it. First you have to know that you have it; then you can drop it, because it is misery and hell. But you can repress it so deeply that the question of dropping it does not arise.
I have lived in abundance because to me there is no division between the material and the spiritual.
The teaching to live in poverty is dangerous: you will be materially poor, and you will be spiritually poor too, because there is no division. I teach you to live richly, in abundance, materially and spiritually -- both. It is not a question of whether you should live materially in abundance, or spiritually. The basic question is whether you should live in abundance, in richness -- which is natural and existential. It is your very basic urge to blossom in abundance, to know all the colors, to know all the songs, to know all the beauties of life.
But certainly I am bound to come in conflict with the old, because the whole human past has been praising poverty and making it equal to spirituality, which is absolute nonsense.
Spirituality is the greatest richness that can happen to a man, and it contains all other richnesses. It is not against any other richness; it is simply against all kinds of poverty. So what I have been trying is something so radical that it is bound to create antagonism all around the world from every corner. People have lived with certain values for so long that although those values have given them only misery, they don't see the connection.
Those values have not made them fulfilled, contented -- but they don't see the connection.
I want my people to become symbolic... to make the whole world aware that their misery is caused by their wrong values, that they are poor because they
have respected poverty --
and their behavior is so insane. On the one hand they will respect poverty, and on the other hand they will say, "Serve the poor." Strange! If poverty is so spiritual then the most spiritual thing will be to make every rich man poor, to help the rich man to be poor, so he can become spiritual. Why help the poor? Do you want to destroy their spirituality?
But a deep unconsciousness, a great blindness exists, and I am fighting against a mountainous unconsciousness, darkness. Naturally they will be very much annoyed.
They would have loved me, they would have worshipped me. And it was so easy for me to do what they wanted, but then I would have been continuing the old misery, the old disease, the old stupidity. I decided to be unrespectable, but not to help any nonsensical value system.
It is a very simple thing to see why ascetics -- self-destructive people engaged in a kind of slow suicide -- have been respected; it is because it is unnatural, because you cannot do it. They are doing something which you cannot do. If somebody is standing on their head on the road, there will be a crowd immediately, but you are walking on your legs --
no crowd will be there!
What is that man doing that attracts the crowd? He is doing something that the crowd cannot do. He is proving mind over body, he is proving spirit over nature. Torturing his body he is proving that he is not the body, it does not affect him. By fasting, not sleeping, or standing for days he is proving that what you cannot do he can do; he is superior to you. You also can do what he is doing, you just have to be a little stupid, you just have to be a little suicidal, destructive. All that you need is a certain pleasure in pain and you can become a great spiritual saint.
I have looked at the whole history and found not one single man revolting against this suicidal attitude towards life, this anti-life attitude. Perhaps they were afraid that nobody was going to listen to them, afraid that they would lose their respectability.
I decided in the very beginning days of my life that there is one thing I have to be aware of, and that is not to be bothered about respectability. Then things are
very simple. Then I can do what is natural and what is healthy. And then I can manage a bridge between matter and spirit, between this world and that world.
And to me, to live in abundance is the only spiritual thing in the world.
Just look at existence and its abundance. What is the need of so many flowers in the world? Just roses would have been enough, but existence is abundant: millions and millions of flowers, millions of birds, millions of animals -- everything in abundance.
Nature is not ascetic; it is everywhere dancing -- in the ocean, in the trees. It is everywhere singing -- in the wind passing through the pine trees, in the birds...
What is the need of millions of solar systems, each solar system having millions of stars?
There seems to be no need, except that abundance is the very nature of existence, that richness is the very core, that existence does not believe in poverty. Look at nature, look at existence, and you will see that what man has done is against it.
My effort is to bring man back to his natural self.
I will be condemned, I will be criticized. Every religion, every tradition, every morality, every ethical code is going to condemn me. That does not surprise me! I expect it, because what I am saying and doing is changing the very course of human consciousness.
I don't think that by torturing yourself you can meditate more easily; on the contrary, if your body is pleasantly at ease you can meditate more easily. I don't think that when you are fasting you can meditate. You can only think of food and nothing else; you will dream of food and nothing else. But if you are well fed, well nourished, you don't think of food -- there is no need. The body is completely satisfied, it does not create any disturbance.
To live pleasurably, to live joyously is not against meditation. It is really the basic need of meditation. I know many kinds of ascetics but I have never seen any intelligence in them, I have never seen any creativity in them. I have never seen in their eyes a light of the beyond, or in their gestures some message that cannot be said through words. They don't have anything. They are simply starving -- and starving because it fulfills the ego, because the more they starve,
the more they torture themselves, more and more people come to worship them.
Now this is to me just an insane chapter in the history of man; it has to be closed. It is time that we start a new chapter -- natural, existential, life-affirmative -- and create a bridge between the body and the soul... not a wall but a bridge.
There is no need for any conflict and war. Fighting with yourself, you are not going to get anything; you will be simply destroying yourself slowly. All your so-called saints are mostly mentally sick, and they have made the whole of humanity sick.
Your question is significant. I have been asked again and again, "Spiritual people are respected everywhere, why are you opposed everywhere?"
I said, "Only one thing is certain: either they are not spiritual, or I am not spiritual. We both cannot be spiritual, that is certain. And as far as I am concerned, I say that they are sick, not spiritual, and they are worshipped by a sick society."
It is a vicious circle: the society creates the sick saint, the sick saint creates the sick society -- and it goes on and on. I have no part in this sickness, the so-called spirituality. I am just a contented, fulfilled human being. What more do you want? And what more can spirituality be?
We want people to be fulfilled and contented, and this journey towards contentment, fulfillment, enlightenment should start with the body. You cannot begin from anywhere else. You can begin only from the beginning. You cannot ignore the roots and just go on praising the flowers. Your flowers will die, and you will have to replace them with plastic flowers if the roots are not taken care of. Is there any conflict between the roots and the blossoms? It is the same juice
-- and you have to begin with the roots, because flowers will come only in the end.
But with humanity we have been almost mad. We have never bothered about the roots, and we have talked only about flowers. We talk about people being nonviolent, being compassionate, being loving -- so much that you can love your enemy, so much that you can even love your neighbor. We talk about flowers, but nobody is interested in the roots.
The question is: "Why are we not loving beings?"
It is not a question of being loving to this person, to that person, to the friend, to the enemy. The question is whether you are loving or not. Do you love your own body? Have you ever cared to touch your own body with a loving caress? Do you love yourself? No, all your religions teach you to hate yourself: you are the wrong person and you have to put yourself right; you are a sinner and you have to become a saint. How can you love yourself? -- you cannot even accept yourself. And these are the roots!
I will teach you to love yourself. And if you can love yourself, if you can rejoice in being yourself, naturally your love will go on spreading. It will become an aura around you; you will love your friends, and in a certain way you will love your enemies too -- because just the way the friend defines you, your enemy also defines you.
I am reminded of a recent incident. In India, before freedom came to that country, there was great struggle between Hindus and Mohammedans because Hindus wanted the country to remain one, undivided. It was favorable to them because they were the majority religion. If India was undivided, then Mohammedans had no possibility of ever being in power; they were the second majority religion.
The Mohammedans wanted a separate country and they had their reasons: "We have a different language, we have a different religion, we are a different race, we cannot live together." But the basic reason was not language, not culture, not race, because they had lived together for two thousand years, so there was no problem about that. The real thing was, if they had a separate country of their own they would have power.
The leader for an undivided India was Mahatma Gandhi, and the leader for the division of India and for a new land, Pakistan, for Mohammedans was Mohammed Ali Jinnah. They were archenemies their whole life.
In 1948 Gandhi was shot dead. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was now governor general of Pakistan. He was sitting on the lawn as the news reached him that Gandhi had been shot.
The person who had brought this news thought that he would be happy to hear it
-- that his long, long enemy is dead. But he was surprised: Jinnah became sad, and he went into the house and told his secretary that he should not be disturbed.
"If Gandhi is dead, much of me is dead too, because we defined each other."
A great insight -- the enemy also defines you, in the same way as the friend defines you.
Jinnah lived only one year longer, and he was never again seen so happy as he used to be; this last year was just sadness. Without Gandhi a gap, a great gap... A life-long enmity is a relationship, a deep relationship. So the man of understanding will love the enemy too -
- not for any spiritual reason, but for the simple reason that he is defining him, he is part of his existence. Without him there will be a gap which nobody else can fill.
The question is not "love your enemies" the way Jesus says it. That is simply egoistic: love your enemies because you are a superior spiritual being, and he is just an ordinary human being; so love him, show him the true path of spirituality. But it is just fulfilling your own ego.
I will also say, "Love him," but not for the same reasons. I will say, "Love him," because he defines you; he is part of you, just as you are part of him -- not only the friend, but the enemy too. It does not make you "holier than thou." It is a simple understanding of how psychology functions.
Love yourself. But you can love yourself only if you drop the idea of being a sinner. You can drop the idea of being a sinner if you drop the idea that there is a god.
If there is a god, you are a sinner; you cannot be anything else. If there is a god, then you are a sinner. You have been expelled from the kingdom of god, and you will be accepted back only if you become obedient -- so obedient that you lose your individuality to a hypothetical god whom you have never ever seen and whom you will never see.
Your religions don't allow you to love yourself, but then they talk all this bullshit of loving your enemies and loving your neighbors. But you can see the point. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anybody else in the world. That loving energy has to come from your heart, and there, there is sitting a sinner, condemned, waiting to be thrown into hellfire.
I have heard... In the middle ages when people, particularly women, were more naive, more simple, there were Christian preachers who would go on threatening them with hellfire, describing in minute details how they will be tortured. And it used to happen that many women would faint in the churches listening to the sermons, because the hellfire and the minute details would drive them nuts. Now these women, can they accept themselves as they are? -- No!
All the religions stand upon one single word, and that is how you should be. That word is
`should' -- that word is not ìs'. The ìs' is condemned, and thèshould' is praised; and thèshould' is opposed to your ìs'.
You cannot love yourself, your wife cannot love herself -- and you both are supposed to love each other. I don't understand how it is possible. You can pretend, but basically you will hate, because the wife knows you are dragging her farther into hell, you know that she is dragging you farther into hell -- how can you love? Jesus is clever. He talks about loving your enemies but he does not say anything about loving your wives. Strange, that should have been the first thing to be reminded of -- "Love your husbands." But no, these things are not mentioned.
The religions have been talking about flowers; I am working with the roots. And I am against plastic flowers. Real flowers have many differences; plastic flowers are permanent -- plastic love will be permanent. The real flower is not permanent, it is changing moment to moment. Today it is there dancing in the wind and in the sun and in the rain. Tomorrow you will not be able to find it -- it has disappeared just as mysteriously as it had appeared.
Real love is like a real flower.
But all religions teach you plastic love. And then they destroy the very possibility of ever coming to know a real flower. The real flower will have fragrance; the plastic flower has nothing to contribute to your life. It only looks like a flower, it is not a flower. The plastic flower is easy. You do not need to water it, you do not need to take care of the roots. Real flowers need some creativity on your part. Every real value needs creativity.
And just look at your saints: none of them are creative. All their qualities are just hilarious -- somebody can lie down in a grave for seven days, and then you dig
him up and he is still alive; and he becomes a great saint. But I don't see that there is any contribution, any creativity in it. He may lie for seven hundred years in a grave; that does not matter. How can he become a saint by lying in a grave for seven days, by learning a certain technique of holding the breath in?
Paul Brunton, a great seeker going from one country to another country all over the East, came across many people who were worshipped as saints in the beginning of this century.
In Ajmer in India he came across a Mohammedan saint who used to put both his eyes down, hanging out of their sockets -- that was his only quality. And he was worshipped far and wide, because he was doing really the impossible!
He came across a Hindu yogi who was able to drink any kind of poison. He had exhibited his great achievement at many universities -- in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Varanasi, in Calcutta. But in Calcutta an accident happened. He was capable of keeping the poison in his body, without getting it into his bloodstream, only for half an hour: more than that he was incapable of. He had learned his whole life how to do it, but in Calcutta the traffic defeated him.
In India, you know the traffic is great; all the centuries are moving on the road -- a bullock cart, a horse-driven vehicle, a donkey, a camel-driven cart, cars, buses, trams.
Particularly in Calcutta you will find all the centuries together on the street. From the very beginning when man first invented a vehicle to the latest car -- everything is available. You just stand by the side of the road and watch.
So he was stuck somewhere in a traffic jam and could not reach the place where he was going to vomit; that was the whole art. For half an hour he could keep it; and then he would vomit -- not to let it go into his bloodstream. But he was late; it reached to his bloodstream and he died. But he was a world famous saint. What is his contribution?
I cannot conceive why these people should be called saints. Perhaps they should be called certain kinds of experts; they have a certain expertise, but it has nothing to do with spirituality. In the name of spirituality you have been worshipping utter nonsense. And behind this nonsense is the real man -- suffering, uncared for, unlooked at. Nobody bothers about him and his problems; nobody answers his real need.
My whole effort is to make a fresh beginning. It is bound to create condemnation of me from all over the world. But it doesn't matter -- who cares!
I care only for those who are ready to change the very course of human consciousness. I will offend others, I will annoy others, I will irritate others, I will create jealousy in others. These are part of my devices. I am really exposing them. If they have any intelligence they will understand it.
Ninety-three Rolls Royces... but I have not looked back at them, at what happened. They were not mine, and I am as happy without them as I was with them. I never went to see those Rolls Royces in the garage. The director of my garage, Avesh, is here. I went on saying to him, "One day I am coming," but that day never came. I have never seen those cars together. It was he who would bring a car for a one-hour drive, it was his choice.
And I have not looked back.
Those cars fulfilled their purpose. They created jealousy in the whole of America, in all the super-rich people. If they were intelligent enough, then rather than being my enemies they would have come to me to find a way to get rid of their jealousy, because it is their problem. Jealousy is a fire that burns you, and burns you badly. You are in the hands of somebody else.
I was just a tourist there, and I made the whole of America disturbed. They had enough money; they could have purchased more Rolls Royces if they wanted. But they had no guts for that either. They were condemning me, saying that I am a materialist. And you will be surprised; one bishop who was continuously condemning me as a materialist, wrote me a letter, privately, saying, "It would be very compassionate of you if you could donate a Rolls Royce to my church. It won't make any difference to you -- ninety-three or ninety-two -- but it will make much difference to us." And every Sunday he was condemning me. His condemnation was not about my materialism; his condemnation was to hide his jealousy.
The politicians, the rich, could have managed it for themselves -- why were they worried?
But the worry was that a tourist, who has not even a valid visa, has defeated all the superrich; it hurts! If they were intelligent enough, they could have understood that there must be a purpose behind these Rolls Royces. It cannot be
just the one-hour ride. For that, one Rolls Royce would have been enough.
Everything that I have done in my life has a purpose. It is a device to bring out something in you of which you are not aware.
If you are intelligent you would like to get rid of it because it is a poison which is killing you. A jealous mind is incapable of love; a jealous mind is incapable of rejoicing... and not only incapable of rejoicing, he is incapable of seeing anybody else rejoice. This kind of people fill the whole earth. And your so- called saints have not been a help to them.
Your so-called saints have exploited them.
It is hilarious! Your saints are exploiting you by being poor, torturing themselves; they are helping you not to feel jealous, not to feel hurt. They are protecting your ego. And it is not one-sided. That's why I say it is hilarious. The game is strange: they are helping you to remain in your misery, in your insanity, and you are helping them to remain in their suicidal, torturous life -- a mutual conspiracy of the whole of humanity to remain in hell.
The commune in America was also a device. It did its work. It made people aware that to be joyous, to be loving is possible on this earth; you do not have to wait for heaven. And I can't see, I can't understand... a person who has never been dancing and singing here, when he enters heaven and a harp is provided for him -- what is he going to do with the harp? He will be at a loss! He will ask, what is it, and what am I supposed to do with it?
Only my people will be immediately able to do something, whichever instrument is provided. It is not only a question of rejoicing... all other things too. If here for your whole life you learn only torture, what are you going to do in heaven? That self-torture has become a second nature to you.
I am reminded of a story... There was a very beautiful man, Eknath, who was going on a pilgrimage with his disciples. One well-known thief approached him, and asked the master, "Although I am a sinner -- you know me, everybody knows, I am a thief -- a great desire has arisen in me to go on a pilgrimage with you, if you allow me in your company.
Thirty people are going; it won't make much difference, one person more..."
Eknath said, "There is no harm, but one condition: while you are with me, and it is going to take nine months" -- because they were going to be traveling by foot all around the country, covering all the holy places, singing and dancing -- "you will not steal anything from the group or from somebody else where we are staying in a village. You will have to stop your art for nine months. If you promise me you are allowed."
The man said, "I promise absolutely that I will not steal anything for the coming nine months." But just within two, three days there was trouble. A strange kind of thing started happening, and that was that your money bag was found in somebody else's luggage, somebody else's coat was found in somebody else's bag! Strange... things were missing from here, but they were found there.
Finally Eknath one night had to remain awake to see what was going on, because it was very disturbing. Every morning you would have to find out where your things were; they were always found, but it was an unnecessary nuisance. Eknath had a suspicion that that man may be the cause of it -- and he was. In the middle of the night he started changing things around, and Eknath caught him redhanded. He said, "You had promised me that you would not steal."
He said, "I am completely following my promise; I am not stealing. But I never promised you that I would not change things from one bag to another -- that is not stealing. I am not putting anybody's things into my bag. But just to practice... otherwise in nine months I may forget my whole art. And moreover, I cannot sleep unless I do something. It is a lifelong habit."
Eknath said, "I understand your problem, but you must understand my problem too: every morning everybody is disturbed and upset -- money has gone, somebody's shirt is missing, somebody's blanket is missing. And unnecessarily every morning, for one hour, we have to sort it out."
But he said, "This much you will have to tolerate. This I have never promised. And I am not doing too much -- just one hour in the night then I can sleep at ease."
A man who has tortured himself for his whole life -- do you think he will be able to rejoice in heaven? He will have forgotten how to smile, he will have forgotten what joy means. No, I say to you the whole human past has been ugly, insane; it has created a kind of spirituality which is another name for schizophrenia. I have
to fight against it, whatsoever the cost.
Somebody has to raise his hand and say to the people, "You have been misled. Your misery is a proof; no other proof is needed."
Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,
RECENTLY I READ AN OLD SAYING: A MAN WHO LOVES ONE WOMAN
WILL SURELY LOSE HIS MIND; BUT A MAN WHO LOVES TWO WOMEN
LOSES HIS SOUL. IS THERE ANY TRUTH TO UNDERSTAND IN THIS?
I am sure this question must be from Milarepa!
It is true: if you love one woman you will lose your mind; if you love two you will lose your soul. But if you go on loving more and more, you have nothing else to lose -- with the second you are finished!
When Milarepa came I asked Vivek, "Has he brought his guitar? And what else does he do?"
She said, "He does nothing else -- just plays on his guitar and chases women."
I said, "Enquire if he has got his guitar. Then he should start playing guitar; otherwise chasing women the whole time will not be good for his health. So once in a while, just to get some rest, he can play guitar."
But he has not brought his guitar. I think you should provide him with a guitar, because he has lost everything. Now he has nothing to be worried about losing; he can go on chasing...
That's why the saying stops at two women, because for the third you have nothing to lose.
And it is good to go beyond the second, because then you really become humble
-- you have nothing.
To me that is spirituality. Beyond Psychology Chapter #10
Chapter title: The ostrich argumentChapter title: Obedience needs no artChapter title: We cannot be otherwiseChapter title: Come a little closerChapter title: Falling above the mindChapter title: Each moment is insecureChapter title: A world beyond timeChapter title: Everybody is enoughChapter title: Logic should serve love