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‌CHAPTER 4

4 July 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva is a sanskrit root; it means divine. Hasido is a hebrew root; it means pious – divinely pious. There is a piety that can be cultivated by man, but deep down it remains an ego trip. Only on the surface is it pious. Deep down it is just the opposite. It is the ego playing a new game. It is not divine. That you can see anywhere in the priests, rabbis, ministers, monks – the look of holier-than-thou’.

Wherever you find that look of ‘holier-than-thou’, it is piety full of poison. It is a cultivated practice, it is a character; the person has devoted much energy to it. But it is not out of understanding. It is still the old game. The facade is new, the camouflage is new. The mask is religious, but the man is still not in the nude, is still not exposing his real self to god.

There is another kind of piety – I call it divine. It does not come out of practice. No cultivation is needed for it; cultivation will be the undoing of it. It comes through prayer, not through practice. It comes through understanding, not through cultivation. It does not arise in you – it comes from the beyond; you are just the receiving end. It is not your work – it is a gift. And when piety comes as a gift, it drowns your ego, takes it away forever. Then there is a silence, a purity, an innocence, which is absolutely virgin, uncontaminated by any human hands, untouched, untouchable.

This is the meaning of your name. Never think of virtue in terms of doing; think of virtue in terms of god’s grace. Provoke his grace, call him from the deepest core of your heart... cry and weep. Expose yourself in your utter nakedness... don’t hide. And one day it starts happening – suddenly the guest has arrived.

And the very presence of the guest transforms one. But now you cannot claim any authorship – you will not find your signature on it. You cannot have the look of ‘holier-than-thou’. You will be humble; there is no ego to be found any more. You will be egoless in it, and when piety is without ego it is

divine. When it is not of you but of the beyond and you are just a vehicle, a hollow bamboo through which it flows, then there is tremendous beauty in it. That is the meaning of your name.

Anand means bliss, sophia means wisdom. But in the West it took a very wrong turn. In the East it became Sufism; it is from the same root ‘sophia’. In the West it became philosophy; it is from the same root. In the West it became ‘love of knowledge’; in the East it remained ‘love of being’. And wisdom is not knowledge. A man of knowledge is not necessarily a man of wisdom. And vice versa: a wise man is not necessarily a man of knowledge. It is very rarely that both exist together.

A man of wisdom is one who knows himself; the man of knowledge is one who knows others. To know others is knowledge; to know oneself is bliss. And to know others without knowing oneself is just futile, a wastage of energy, because your own house remains in deep darkness. Even if the whole world is full of light but your innermost being is in darkness, what is the point of it all?

Jesus says ‘If you gain the whole world and in gaining it you lose yourself, what are you gaining? And even if the whole world is lost and you have gained yourself, you have gained all.’

Wisdom is self-knowing, and self-knowing has nothing to do with information; it has something to do with meditation... nothing to do with thinking but something to do with the state of no-thought. If you want to know others you will have to go into thinking; you will have to collect information about them, you will have to enquire and collect data. But if you want to know yourself, you need not collect anything, and even if you want to, from where can you collect? Who can say anything about you? If you don’t know then who is going to know you?

To know oneself one has simply to go in and to be silently there. When all is silent, that still small voice is heard. When all is quiet, a new light starts arising – the inner sunrise. When the outer is completely forgotten and you have become oblivious of it, when your whole energy is pouring in, then that which has been asleep for ages is awakened. Just by the pouring of the energy it becomes awake.

That awakening is wisdom. And in that awakening there is bliss, because in that awakening one knows that there is no death, no misery; all those were our self-creating nightmares, that we have always been in paradise, that never for a single moment have we left it. It is just that we had fallen asleep, in a deep slumber, and we dreamed thousands of things and got dragged by one dream into another and it became a chain. But in reality, nothing has happened.

The man of meditation, the man of wisdom, comes to know that in reality nothing has ever happened; all is the same! And all that happens or feels to be happening is part of a dream. Things happen only in a dream; in reality nothing ever happens.

To see that, to be that, is real ‘sophia’. So remember it: not the western interpretation of it but the eastern...

[A sannyasin says she sits all day in the ashram boutique, where she works, her fists clenched tight with tension, as if on guard lest someone attack her. And she’s become more aware of tension in her belly too.

Osho checks her energy. Calling her back, you suggest she begin to exhale deeply, then allow inhalation to happen of its own accord. This exercise will change the musculature of the stomach, which has become hardened, has lost elasticity, you explain, with the lack of deep inbreathing.]

The majority of people suffer from this rocklike stomach. It is the cause of a thousand and one illnesses – physical, mental, both – because the stomach is the centre where your psychology and your physiology meet; they meet at the navel. The navel is the contact point between the psychology and the physiology. So if around the navel the musculature becomes rocklike, you become very divided. Your mind and body become separate; then they are almost two things, with no bridge.

So sometimes you can do a thing which only the mind feels like doing and the body is not ready for. For example, you can eat: the body is not hungry but you can go on eating because the mind is enjoying the taste. It will not know how the body is feeling because the feeling is cut; there is no bridge. Sometimes it can happen that you are so much engaged in playing cards or seeing the movie that the body is hungry and you may not know about it. Then one remains like two parallel lines, never meeting. That’s what schizophrenia is, and it is very rare to find a person who is not, in some way, schizophrenic. But one symptom will always be there: a rocklike stomach.

So the first thing to do is: start exhaling deeply. And when you exhale deeply, naturally, you will have to pull the stomach in. Then relax and let the air rush in. If you have exhaled deeply, the air will rush in with such force. It will go like a hammering – it will destroy the rocklike structure around the stomach... One thing.

The second thing: in the morning, after the motion when your stomach is empty, take a dry towel and rub the stomach, massage the stomach. Start from the right comer and go around, not otherwise – three to four minutes massage. That will also help to relax.

And the third thing: whenever you can, do a little running. Running will be very good – jogging, running. These three things, and within a month this rock will disappear. When it disappears, just inform me.

[A sannyasin has something to say to Osho but doesn’t know what it is.]

Then just close your eyes and say it with your hands. Let your hands start moving, make gestures with your hands. Try to say as if you are incapable of speaking and you have to speak by the hands.…

Good... very good. You have said it – no need to worry about words.

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