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‌CHAPTER 8

19 October 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Anand means bliss and subhan means well-aware – awareness of bliss. That you have to develop. Ordinarily we are more aware of misery. We are more aware of pain, more aware if something goes wrong, more aware of illness, disease, less aware of health, well-being. That creates much trouble, because if you are too much aware of pain you help pain to be there, you feed it. Awareness is food, and if you are too much aware of pain pur whole vision of. We is upside down. You think life is not worthwhile... oceans of misery, and only here and there an island of bliss. So it doesn’t make much sense whether it is there or not It is so rare that it can be counted out; it need not be counted in.

It is as if somebody goes to a rosebush and counts the thorns – and there are many. Then one starts disbelieving the rose. How is the flower possible amidst so many thorns? The flower seems to be an impossibility, an improbability. It cannot happen the way things are. And if you start disbelieving the flower, the flower disappears from your vision, because only that which is believed appears in your vision.

Once you trust something, you are available to it. Once you distrust you become unavailable, closed. Then your mind does not allow it into your being. Even if you see it, you don’t see it And even if it is there, it looks unreal. The thorns become too real and the flower becomes too unreal. Then you start expecting thorns because you know that they are there... and when you expect, you invite. This is a vicious circle.

I am giving you this name for a shift. Wherever you are, always look for the flower. Even in great disease there is health. Only a healthy person can be ill, remember. A dead person cannot be ill – nobody has ever heard of that. Only an alive person can be ill. And remember that life must be more than disease. Once disease is more than life, you die. But still we don’t look at health. A small thing – a headache – and you forget ali the blessings of life. A headache is enough to create a disbelief in you about God.

Simone Weil has said somewhere that for thirty-five years she suffered from a migraine, and those were the years that she became more and more anti-religious, more and more atheistic. But she never came to feel any association between migraine and God; nobody would be able to make any association. Then the migraine disappeared, and, with the migraine, all her atheism also. Then suddenly she became aware. A trust started arising in her being, and she became one of the most significant religious people of this age. She became very very intuitive, and very intimate with reality. And only later on she could feel some association. The headache was so much – how can you believe in God with a headache? A small thing is a headache, but it can destroy much, because we pay too much attention to it.

Because of too much attention, it becomes magnified, multiplied. It looks so big, out of all proportion. So when you are having a headache, remember how many parts you have in the body which are not in any pain. Just count the blessings, and suddenly you will see that the headache is very minute, that it does not matter really. And once you can feel that it doesn’t matter much, it doesn’t – and it starts disappearing from your vision. Because you start paying attention to something else it is no more fed by your energy. This is one of the keys of religious life.

Somebody has been a friend to you for many years, and he insults you one day and all the friendship is gone. You never count all the blessings that came through him. Just one remark. . . maybe he made it never meaning it. Maybe he made it in a certain state of irritation, anger. Maybe he was not aware of what he was saying – and there are dark moments for every being – but you simply forget the whole relationship, the whole love, the friendship, the beautiful moments. Just a small remark! Maybe it is not even a remark – a look, a gesture, and all simply disappears. And that becomes the most important thing. This is the way to be unreligious.

Always count the blessings – and they are infinite. Become more and more aware of the days and less and less concerned with the nights, and one day you will see that days and nights are not antagonistic to each other – they are complementary; pain and pleasure are part of one whole. And when you can see that pain is also an intrinsic part of pleasure, then you have no grudge, no complaint And that’s what I call prayer.

When a consciousness is there without any grudge, without any complaint, then a gratitude arises. Then whether you believe in God or not is not of any importance. That very gratitude – that life is good, that you are happy that you are, that you are happy that an opportunity was given to you, that you are happy that the moon is and the stars are, and flowers are, and rivers and mountains and people, that you are simply happy, that you are blessed and you can bless others – is prayer.

This is the meaning of your name – anand subhan. So from this moment let there be a great shift of awareness. Start counting flowers!

[A visitor said he was experiencing difficulty in getting into the meditations.

Osho said this was a problem of the modern mind – to become involved in anything. We are spectator-oriented, and we have become like voyeurs]

Then everything is just there outside – nothing touches you. This is very dangerous. That means that life will pass by and you will remain untouched by it You will live and yet you will not live you will

simply think you lived. There will be no difference between whether you really lived or you dreamed about it There will be no difference between whether you really lived or you read about it in a novel or saw it in a movie.

One has to get out of this frozen state of being a spectator. Start moving, because that will bring life to you. Life is only for those who are committed, involved. So start doing small things. In the beginning it will be difficult just because of the old habit But nothing is a problem. Create a new discipline. When people are dancing here, dance; don’t watch. When they are singing, sing; don’t watch. Go swimming, go for a long walk or run, but get involved in something. Be active! When you are active, energy flows, your frozenness disappears, your blocks melt – you start vibrating. That is the difference between a corpse and an alive man; a corpse cannot do anything.

So do! And the only way is to start doing it – there is no other way to learn. That idea that you have to learn how to do, may be again a postponement, may be again a trick of the same mind. The mind says, ‘First I have to learn – then I can do.’ But I’m telling you that you can start right now. Maybe your dance will not be very perfect, but there is no need. Your singing may not be of a great singer, but there is no need. Go swimming – your strokes may not be perfect, but there is no need. And the river doesn’t bother whether your strokes are perfect or not. Start moving into life.

And it is just a question of courage. Certainly when you get into things, you get into troubles also. It is very easy to sit before the TV and see people loving each other; nothing is at stake. You can turn it off any moment But if you fall in love with a woman you cannot turn it off so easily. There will be anxiety and turmoil and conflict and struggle, but that is beautiful – that is what life is! It will create many troubles but it will bring many pleasures also. There will be many ups and many downs. Those downs are worthwhile because they are what life is all about.

Even if you can have a few moments of love with a woman and days of conflict and fighting and nagging, it is worth it; then too, it is worth it. One has to pay for everything. So just start getting into it. Tomorrow morning, start dancing, do the meditation, and just try!

In the beginning you will feel a little hesitant, apprehensive. Again and again the old habit will take possession of you. Force yourself a little into it! And do a few groups.

[The visitor answers: I do many things, I’m always moving in action, but I take nothing seriously and that seems more the problem than finding things to do.]

No, as I see it, that is the problem. You may be acting too much, and that may again be a way to escape from real action. You can be occupied in many things; that may be again a trick to avoid real situations in life. A person can do many things, because one has to do, otherwise what to do for twenty-four hours? I am not talking about that I am talking about involvement I am talking about commitment And remember, seriousness is not needed – sincerity is enough. When you become serious, there is sincerity plus sadness. Sincerity is enough. And when I use the word sincerity, I mean that it you are authentically interested in something, then on4 go into n, otherwise there is no need.

If you are not interested in anything authentically then wait No need to go into anything. But I have never found a person who is not authentically interested in something or other. It is impossible. You

will immediately drop dead if you are not interested in something or other. If you are interested in love move into love. If you are interested in meditation move into meditation. If you are interested in prayer move into prayerWhatsoever it is, but go into it

And by being sincere is meant that you go totally into it; that you don’t hold anything. You simply allow your total being to go into it. You take the risk and you don’t move cunningly, cleverly, calculatingly. You go like a fool – that’s what I mean. Whatsoever the consequence, without any consideration for the consequence, if you love the thing, you go into it. If it brings suffering, one suffers. If it brings death, one dies. But one tries to live through one’s authentic passions, desires.

The first thing in life is to find out what your authentic passion is, what you would really like to be, so that you can feel fulfilled, so that you can feel that you have arrived, so that life can be felt as a blessing and not as a curse. Many people avoid being sincere and take things what you call non- seriously, just so that nothing gets too much. They always keep the door open to escape so that if some problem arises and they are moving into deeper waters they can always escape. They always keep an emergency escape available. A really sincere person has no emergency escapes. In fact there is no way back. You can only go ahead.

You may be doing many things, but as I see it that is more in order to avoid the real situations of life than to do.

Try with sannyas! Take a risk and become a sannyasin – or would you like to think about it first?

... Good! This will be your name: Swami Deva Ashawa. Deva means divine and ashawa means wine. That’s what I would like you to be – a divine drunkard. And the possibility is there (laughter), so don’t get scared! You are ready for many things, you just have to take courage. Your energy is very innocent and pure, but you have been avoiding. Now this becomes your first commitment, involvement.

Now your bogie is hitched with my bogie (laughter). It is a sort of hitch-hiking, mm? And change to orange!

[A sannyasin asks a question on behalf of Geetam Rajneesh Meditation Centre: They say that there’s only one thing that’s separating them from enlightenment. They want to know the difference between spontaneity and irresponsibility.]

Mm, mm.… It is a significant question, and it has to be understood. My whole emphasis is on spontaneity, but there is every possibility that people will misunderstand it It is very difficult to understand a truth. It is very easy to misunderstand it When I say, ‘Be spontaneous,’ only the words reach you, and you supply the meaning to it.

People have been brought up in a very repressed structure. Their freedom has been crippled. They have never been allowed any freedom. In fact everybody has been conditioned to be a slave. It may not be said, but it is so. Morality, politics, society, culture, civilisation – they are all different ways of creating a slave out of a human being. The freedom is denied – and they all say that it is for your own good.

Spontaneity is not allowed; individuality is not allowed. To be natural almost seems to be a sin. One has to be social – and the social is more valued than the natural. Nobody is allowed to live the moment; everybody is forced to live in the future. The present has to be sacrificed always for the future – and that future never comes.

When I say to be spontaneous, I mean be in the present. Never sacrifice the present for the future, because there is no future – only the present is. When I say to be spontaneous, I mean to be natural. Don’ t be bothered too much about what the society says. Listen to your own instincts, to your own intuition. Listen to your own body, your own mind, your own being.

Your master is within you. Take your guidance from there. And wherever it leads is good. Wherever it leads, there God is to be found.

Naturally these are dangerous statements, because you can take them on their surface value. You can start feeling that now there is no need to be responsible. But in fact if you understand me, I am saying that this is what responsibility is. You have been taught a very wrong concept about responsibility – as if responsibility is a duty to be fulfilled, an obligation. When I use the word responsibility, I mean the capacity to respond – and that is possible only if you are spontaneous. If you are available to the moment, only then can you be responsible.

The responsibility is not towards God. The responsibility is not towards the society. The responsibility is not towards the state. The responsibility is towards existence itself. I am teaching a greater responsibility. The lower responsibilities will take care of themselves. If the higher is fulfilled, the lower will be fulfilled automatically, but not vice versa. You can fulfill the lower; the higher will not be fulfilled by the lower.

So when I say to be spontaneous, I mean to be aware of your innermost core. Be aware that you are part of such a great existence, such a beautiful cosmos. Be aware that you are a part, and you have to function in tune with the cosmos, that’s all. If you are functioning in tune with the cosmos, you will never be against society. You will never be against anything. You will be only against those things which create slavery in you, that’s all. And about that too you will not become a political revolutionary; you will not start fighting against them. You will simply avoid them; they are not worthwhile. This is the difference between a revolutionary and a rebel.

I value the rebel more than the revolutionary. The revolutionary is the political person. He is more concerned in changing the structure of the society. The rebel simply says ‘I am here only for a few days, I will not be here forever so who bothers about the structure? I am here to live my life as truly as possible, as freely as possible. So I will live my life and I will not allow anybody to interfere in my life, and I will not interfere in anybody’s life.’ A rebel is an individualist A revolutionary is again trying to control the society, and whenever a revolutionary succeeds, again another orthodoxy succeeds. Whenever a revolutionary comes into power he is no more a revolutionary. The rebel can never come into power because the rebel never seeks power.

To be rebellious is to be against power. To be revolutionary is to be against those who are in power and to make all the efforts so that one can be in power. A rebellious person is one who says that power is not life. Life can go by without being worried about the power and the power structure. Let, stupid people fight for power. The rebel lives his life, but living is very responsible.

So tell them, write to them, that when I say to be spontaneous, I mean be responsible to the cosmos. I make your responsibility greater, not lesser. Man-made laws are just man-made laws. When you start falling in tune with the cosmos you are fulfilling a greater responsibility – and that responsibility is neither against you nor anybody else. It is for everybody’ s welfare, but that is not the goal of it. The welfare is just a natural outcome, a consequence, a by-product

So tell them to meditate. Tell them to listen to their hearts; tell them to feel life more and more in all its forms, and to be responsible. Respond with your totality.

It is, in fact, one life. We are not separate: we are members of each other. We overlap each other. If I hurt you, I hurt myself. If I make you happy, I create happiness for myself. When you are blissful, I am also blissful. When you are in misery, it is impossible for me not to be affected by that misery.

There is a story about Buddha, that when he reached the doors of heaven the doors were opened and the gatekeeper welcomed him and said, ‘Come in!’ Buddha said, ‘I am not coming in, because there are so many people who are still struggling in misery, in ignorance. Unless they have all passed through this gate, how can I pass? I am part of that whole.’ The story is beautiful.

We are all together... we are in one boat. And when I say ‘we’, I not only include man, I include animals, I include trees, I include insects, I include rocks, rivers, stars. I include everything. When I say we, I mean the whole. So be responsible towards everything, every living being – even to things that you don’t think are living: even to chairs, shoes, houses. It is not a question of for whom you have to be responsible – you have simply to be responsible.

But this responsibility has to be out of your awareness, not out of the dictation of some politician or some priest Not from Moses, not from Manu, not from Mahavir, not from Mohammed – it has to be your own response. And this is the criterion: if the person is becoming more and more spontaneous, he will become more and more responsible. If responsibility disappears and the person says, ‘I am spontaneous, that’s why I cannot fulfill any responsibility,’ he is deceiving himself. He is just following himself – and not fooling anybody else but himself Responsibility is the criterion to judge whether the person is really spontaneous.

A spontaneous person will always be responsible. He will act out of freedom but he will never act out of irresponsibility. He will be tremendously careful because he will see the value of life. He will have a reverence for life in whatsoever form it exists. And because this is not an outward discipline one has to continuously balance oneself. If you start falling to one extreme immediately balance yourself.

These are the two extremes: either a person becomes a slave, loses his freedom, and then fulfills all his responsibilities, or – if you free him – he becomes irresponsible, starts indulging in all sorts of crimes against life, against himself, against the cosmos. Just in the middle, where freedom is absolute and responsibility is also absolute, where freedom and responsibility don’t mean two different things, but are one – that is the point at which to remain balanced. And it is not that once balanced you are balanced forever. You will have to balance every single moment of your life.

I am not giving you any dead codes. I am simply giving you a few indications about how to live a dynamic life. Many times you will err – to err is human. Many times you will fall into pitfalls – it’s

natural. They will all help you to become more and more attuned, more and more balanced, more and more integrated.

[A sannyasin says: In the meditations... I’ve felt really bad about myself, worthless. I feel sick in my stomach all the time. It’s not physical but I just feel sick of everything or something.

Listening to you in the lecture sometimes I feel so sick of your words. I’m so sick of hearing those things!]

Then don’t hear! There is no need. If you feel sick of my words, forget about them. I’ m not here to make you sick. Anything that makes you sick, drop it!

... It has nothing to do with anything in particular – that I understand. But a moment comes in meditation when the whole life that you have lived up to now simply appears meaningless. All that you have been simply seems to be nauseating. All that you have been doing seems to be irrelevant, and as Soren Kierkegaard has said, ‘a sickness unto death arises’. One simply feels fed up with life, fed up with everything. There is nothing wrong in it; it is a good indication.

If you can live with it for a few days, if you can be with it, it will disappear. And when it disappears you will have a totally new feeling of your being. A fresh being will arise out of it. But if you try to escape from it and you try to get occupied somewhere and forget about it, you will hit back into the old pattern again. It will disappear but it will come again. So the only way is to be with it.

And my words are not creating sickness. My words are making you more and more aware that the life that you have lived and are living is just futile. It is doomed to fall. So the more you listen to me, the more angry you will feel, because I am creating more and more that sickness unto death.

Now there are two ways. One is that you can fall back into the old pattern: stop listening to me, stop meditating and get involved in other things. You will forget about it and you will be back to your old self – if you think that it is worthwhile, that old self. If it is not, my suggestion is that you live with this sickness. Simply live with it with no condemnation, with no attitude about it. It has simply happened so you have to live with it. What to do? It is there.

So befriend it. Just be friendly with it It is your companion for a few days. Hold its hand and move together. Be sick. Feel sick. Let it be there. It has nothing to do with the body, it is absolutely psychological – but it comes. It comes only in rare moments when you are very close to home. It comes when something can really happen. You can stop in it if you start fighting with it

Jean-Paul Sartre has written a book, ‘Nausea’ . He himself got stuck there; he got stuck in this situation. He made a whole philosophy about it. Now nausea is his philosophy – that life is meaningless. It seems to be the ultimate truth to him – that man is doomed. That is the only truth about man. Not that man is sick but that man is sickness. Man himself is sickness – that is his conclusion. He got stuck there. He was courageous enough not to escape to his death from there but he could not find a way to go beyond it so he got stuck in it

So either you can fall back to the old self – which is meaningless and will never be satisfying; once you have known that life is meaningless it can never have any meaning again, not the old meaning

certainly – or you can get stuck in it If you fight with it you will get stuck in it If you condemn it, if you are in conflict with it, you will get stuck in it – that’s how Sartre got stuck in his nausea.

Don’t fight with it; don’t fall back on your old self. Befriend it That is one of the oldest experiences in the East. For the West it is very new; for the East it is as old as man. Seekers have always come to a point where this life becomes meaningless and they have to befriend this sickness; they have to absorb this sickness. And once it is absorbed they come out of it very healthy. The very sickness becomes a healing force. One is surrounded by a benediction. But this has to be befriended, so befriend it Don’t have any anti-attitude. If this is so, let it be so. Accept it. Welcome it in fact. Go with it and live with it. You follow?

When you are sitting alone and you feel sick, accept it This is part of it. The old house is crumbling, collapsing, and the new house is not yet on the horizon. You cannot see anything of it because you are the old house, so you will crumble and disappear, and in your disappearance arises something which is completely discontinuous with your past. That is the new being, the spiritual being. Then one can live again.

Befriend it, and after one month tell me. Mm? Good.

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