< Previous | Contents | Next >
Chapter title: None
17 November 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Archive code: 8011175 ShortTitle: ALLWAY17 Audio:
No Video:
No 1/08/07
Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994
Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished
Query:-
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]
THAT WHICH BRINGS US TOGETHER SETS US APART
(It is called love -- and animals can't do it.)
Aristotle and others who define man as a rational animal are not right -- because reason is not his distinction. Other animals also have reason, maybe a little less -
- but the difference is only of degree; there is no qualitative difference. And now we know that even machines can have intelligence, computers can have intelligence.
A computer is more rational than any man can ever be, more rational than Aristotle himself. Aristotle was not very rational. He had two wives -- now, a
rational person cannot even have one -- -- and for his whole life he was tortured by two women. One is enough, in fact more than enough; to be pulled by two is not a very rational decision. And he writes in books a thousand and one irrational things.
One of the most irrational things he writes is that women have less teeth than men. He had two wives, he could have asked them or counted their teeth; it would have been so simple an experiment. No laboratory, no science was needed, just simple arithmetic, but he never bothered. The idea was prevalent in Greece that women have less teeth. Obviously they must have everything less than men. That is the male chauvinist idea: everything should be less. How can they have an equal number of teeth? That is irrational.
My observation is that love is the only quality that making man different from everything else in existence. But very few men are loving. So all men are not distinguished, they are ordinary. Only once in a while a Christ -- a Buddha, a Lao Tzu, has experienced the ultimate peak of love and they are the salt of the earth.
My sannyasins have to move deeper into the phenomenon of love, they have to explore it in every possible way and they have to purify it of all lust. They have to make it more and more close to prayer, and ultimately it becomes just prayer.
When love is just a prayerfulness one has attained true humanity, then one is really born_born as a man.
Before that one was only in the womb, asleep. To attain love is to be a rake. CREATOR OR HATER
Love has immense power but a very different kind of power. We are acquainted with the power of violence and aggression, we are acquainted with the animal power -- destructive power. That's why we go on writing history about Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and Nadir Shah and Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and so on and so forth. These people have a certain power but that power is of violence, aggression, destruction. It is against god, it is against existence. These people are really criminals.
History needs to be rewritten, these people should be completely dropped out of history as if they never existed. Children should not be poisoned with their
names.
History should be concerned with Gautam the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Zarathustra, Krishna, Kabir, Meera, Rabiya -- men and women of love. They also have a power but that is a totally different kind of power, it creates. To destroy is very easy. Any child can do it, any fool can do it, it needs no intelligence. But to create needs great intelligence. It can be done only by people who experience beauty, truth, love.
To be creative means to be part of god because god is the creator, to create means to participate in his creativity -- and that -- q the power of love. The man of love always creates. Poetry -- music, painting, or whatsoever he does is creative. And the man of creativity slowly slowly learns about love.
But my approach is to start from love because that is the centre, and creativity is the circumference. If the centre is there the circumference will happen automatically, but to create first and then to move towards love, is a far long process. It may take lives and even then there is no certainty -- because each time you die 1/08/07
Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994
Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished
Query:-
you lose whatsoever you have attained on the circumference -- because each life will give you a different circumference,,only the centre remains the same. So whatsoever we attain at the centre of our being becomes ours forever, death cannot destroy it -- it will be with you in the new life. It goes on accumulating; circumferences go on changing every life. So many times people create much on the circumference but they lose it again and again.
My whole effort here is to start from the centre itself, only then are you on the right track. Love and let love become creativity in your life. That is my whole religion. Love plus creativity is equal to religion.
TRUE RELIGION: AESTHETICISM, NOT ASCETICISM
Beauty is the most godly experience. One should not think about god in terms of
theology -- that is the wrong route, an absolutely wrong route. One should think aesthetically about god, and to think aesthetically really means to feel. You cannot think aesthetically, you can only feel. Beauty is felt, not thought. You don't think that the sunset is beautiful, you know, you feel; that's why you cannot prove it to others. If somebody denies it there is no way to prove that it really is beautiful. If somebody says the rose flower is not beautiful what can be done? We can feel sorry for him but we cannot help him to experience the beauty of the rose.
He is not available to the rose, his heart is not open to the rose.
There are millions of people who have not experienced beauty and whatsoever they think is beauty is nothing but biological lust. If a man thinks that only a woman can be beautiful and never bothers about the sunrise or the flowers or a bird on the wing or the clouds or the stars, he does not know anything of the woman either. It is only the hormonal, the instinctive, the unconscious in him, which makes him clouded, infatuated, and which makes him think the woman is beautiful -- that is not the experience of beauty.
The experience of beauty has nothing to do with biology, it has something aesthetic. And when you know the aesthetics of beauty then certainly a woman, a man, the trees, the clouds, the mountains... then the whole universe is involved in it. And to experience beauty in all its forms is to feel god. That's why I say beauty is the most divine experience.
Become available to beauty in all its forms. Open up open as many doors and windows as possible. The more you know of beauty, the more you will know of god. And the beautiful thing about this experience is that you will not become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan because you are not going via theology; you are approaching god directly, not via the priests. The priest poisons. He is the greatest poisoner, the greatest curse that has ever happened to humanity. The priest has to be avoided like the plague.
Humanity will be in a far more superior position when the priests become something of the past, just part of history. You can save a few for the museums and zoos, etcetera but they should not be part of humanity any more. Pope the Polack will look very beautiful in a zoo (laughter). People can watch, just as they watch the hippopotamus, and they can ask what kind of animal this is? -- and that will be perfectly okay. But priests should not be allowed to dominate
humanity any more; they have done enough harm.
The best way to destroy the whole strategy, the whole trade secret of the priest is to make man some direct route that he can follow towards god. And my observation is that the aesthetic experience is the most immediate. It needs no via media, no mediator -- it is immediate, it overwhelms one.
(And bliss is about as aesthetic as you can be. Osho goes on to talk to Anand Monika about the two ways in which you can come to know bliss.)
There are two kinds of blissful experiences: one is of love, the other is of meditation.
Love needs at least two people, it is a dialogue between two energies. But because the other is needed there is a limitation, it cannot be infinite. And because the other is needed there is a certain kind of dependence; hence lovers love each other but deep do, they cannot forgive each other. They ca}mot forgive the other because they have become dependent, hence the constant quarrelling between lovers. It is very significant s why do lovers go on quarrelling? They should be the last to quarrel, but they are the topmost quarrellers. Even enemies don't quarrel that much, in fact they don't meet! And lovers are together twenty- four hours a day, at each other's neck, fighting tooth and nail. Only once and a while are there love-breaks, otherwise they are wrestling; they are intimate enemies.
The reason for their enmity is very subtle and unconscious -- it is the dependence. Nobody likes to be dependent on anybody else because freedom is the highest value of life. But if you want the joy of love you have to compromise and that compromise hurts. The other starts encroaching on your space, you start 1/08/07
Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994
Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished
Query:-
encroaching on the other's space.
Love is one kind of joy, but it is a very limited phenomenon. Unless one has
known the other kind of bliss... and that rarely happens. That comes through meditation. Meditation is the bliss of being alone, the art of being alone. When you are blissful in your aloneness there is no limit, nobody to interfere, nobody to encroach. You have the whole sky to yourself.
Once you have experienced this bliss which comes through being absolutely alone, then you can enjoy even the first kind of bliss which comes through love, because then two lovers can be together and yet not interfere with each other's aloneness. That is true love, not to interfere in the other's aloneness, to give him total freedom,,not to possess, not to dominate, not to reduce the other to a thing to be used -- into a means to be used. But that is possible only for a meditator. When two meditators love then love and meditation are no more different; then they are two aspects of the same bliss. But this has not happened up to now.
Meditators have been afraid of love. They escape to monasteries in the mountains. In fact they are escaping from the other, afraid that they may be caught. They know themselves, they have experienced something of love -- and they are afraid they may be trapped again in some relationship so they are escaping to the deserts, to the mountains. There they may be able to have a certain peace and calmness and a certain joy -- but it will be only half, it will not give them the wholeness.
And there are people in the world who never bother about meditation. In fact they are afraid of meditation because they think meditators become life- renouncers and they don't want to renounce their wife, their children, their husbands their family. They don't want to renounce so they are afraid of meditation.
I have come across both kinds of people but both are half, and to be half is to be miserable, to be whole is to be really blissful. To be whole is to be holy. But one should start with meditation. One should first be able to be happy on one's own. Then there is no dependence, then there is no need to depend on anybody; you can be happy on your own -- but still you would like to share your joy.
I am doing many things here in my commune with my sannyasins, many experiments. One of the experiments is to make them all meditators and lovers so that they can start a new kind of religiousness in the world, so they can make aloneness and love go together, dancing in deep harmony.
-- How long will you be here?
-- I go back tomorrow.
-- Then come back again the day after tomorrow (laughter) or any day after tomorrow, but come back!
ECST-NEST-Y
(Bliss is our home, Osho is to make of Anand Horst's name. First, a brief exchange.)
-- What is the meaning of your name?
-- I don't know -- maybe 'nest' in German.
-- Yes, that's my feeling! I asked Nandan (a medium, she is sitting to Osho's right) -- she is a German -- and she said it means a small forest. In fact her name means a small forest; Nandan means a small forest. I was suspicious... Horst certainly means nest, it means home. That's good! (There is a ripple of laughter and Nandan grins to herself. Osho pops the mala over Horst's head and touched his third eye.) Just look at me.
(Then Osho shows Horst his new name. He talks to him about how we only feel at home when we're happy.)
Sannyas is a deliberate search for bliss, for the real home. And unless you deliberately seek and search for bliss you will not find it. You may come across it many times but you will not be able to recognise it unless you are consciously looking for it.
We only see that which we are looking for -- remember this. Now the scientists say that only two per cent of information goes through the eyes; ninety -- eight percent is debarred, rejected, censored. for the simple reason that your eyes don't want your head to be overloaded. It is already overloaded. If all the information goes in within twenty-four hours you will go cuckoo. It has to be prevented. So only that which you are seeking and searching for is allowed. It is an inbuilt process.
1/08/07
Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994
Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished
Query:-
For example, many people pass along the street, the same street, every day, but they all look at different things. The street is the same -- the houses, the trees, the people, everything is the same, but they all see different things. A thief passing on the street will be focussed on the policeman, he will not look at anybody else but the policeman will immediately enter his mind, because he is afraid and alert. The hungry person will only look at the hotels and the restaurants -- but the person who is not hungry may not look at the hotels and the restaurants at all. The person who has lived without any sexual repression may not look at women or men, but the celibate, the monk, the nun -- the people who have taken the vow of repressing their sexuality
-- will look only at women and men. Their whole interest will be there -- nothing else will enter their minds.
So remember it, we find only that for which we are looking. And bliss is possible. It comes each moment but you never recognise it because you are running after money, power, prestige -- who cares about bliss? You say 'We will see about bliss when we retire, this is not the time.' But by the time you retire you have become so accustomed to running after power, prestige, money, that now you cannot look at bliss; it has become a life-long habit to overlook it, not to recognise it. Habits die very hard.
So it has to become a deliberate search. From this moment look for bliss in every possible opportunity.
For example, right now if you become silent then the sound of the insects and the silence of the night...
and suddenly a breeze of bliss, suddenly it is there. You start falling into a restful moment. Something settles -- a pause, an interval -- and you can recognise that this is a beautiful moment.
Just go on watching, go on deliberately looking for it. And it is not very far away, it is just around the corner.
MIND YOUR BUSY-NESS
(Because there are certain things you can only know when you've got plenty of time.) For them there is no short-cut. And all that is great belongs to that category. Only small things can be attained quickly. Coffee can be instant -- -- love cannot be. Instant love cannot be love. Instant simply means you are not even ready to pay the little patience for it.
One should learn to be patient -- to be ready to wait with open doors, with a welcoming heart, but not in a hurry, not demanding, not forcing things. And the miracle, the paradox, is that the less you force things, the more quickly they happen. The more you force them, the longer it takes.
Because meditation has to be learned -- and meditation only means stilling of the mind, the silencing of the mind -- you cannot be in a hurry. If you are in a hurry your mind will remain in a turmoil. You will be jumping ahead of yourself, you will be so interested in the result that you will not be able to give total attention to the present -- you will be looking at the future. And the meditator has to be in the present; he has to forget all about the future, all about ends and results. He has to be so attuned, so in an at onement with existence right now that he is not concerned With anything else. Of course this is possible only if one is patient.
The word 'patience' became associated with the ill people; we call them 'patients'. It became associated with ill people, with sick people, for a certain reasons healing cannot be forced, you have to wait -- you have to allow nature to work. All that medicine does is to help you to wait, it gives you hope to wait.
They say that the common cold is cured within seven days if you don't take any medicine, and it is cured in one week if you take medicine. Medicine does not make much difference, the cold takes its own time, but if you don't take medicine then those seven days look very long. Medicine helps you to hope that you are doing whatsoever needs to be done. And the more famous your doctor is... The more you have to pay for the doctor and the hospital, the better, because it gives you more hope and in hope you can wait, you can be patient. That's why the word 'patient' became synonymous with the ill person. And in a sense we are all ill, ill without god, sick without god. We are carrying wounds and they all need to be healed.
Religion is a healing process, spiritual healing. One has to be patient, so much so
that one need not bother about the result. One should be in the present, in the now, in the here, and in deep trust that whenever the time is ripe it is going to happen, it has nothing to do with you.
One of the greatest statements of Krishna in Gita is s Do the work and leave the result to god; that is none of your business. Action is your business and the result is god's.
1/08/07
Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994
Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished
Query:-
ESSENCE D'ENLIGHTENMENT
Man can stink, man can also be fragrant. It all depends on how you live, on how you approach life. If one never learns the art of living life stinks stinks badly, because unless you learn the art of living you can't have grace, you can't have beauty, you can't have bliss, you can't have truth, you can't have love, and without all these experience, how can there be fragrance?
One comes with a great potential but very few people use that potential, it remains unused. And when water is dormant it starts stinking; any energy that remains dormant goes sour -- it needs dynamic flow. One should be more like a river than like a pond.
My sannyasins have to become dynamic, always moving, moving into the unknown, moving into the unfamiliar, always reaching for the stars. And then there is great fragrance. In the old days that fragrance was called god, nirvana, enlightenment. It is nothing but life blossoming.
YOU'RE A ONE-FF
Everyone is unique. God never duplicates, he never makes two people alike; he respects the individual.
He is not like an assembly line is the factory of a car manufacturer; he never
repeats. There has never been a person like you, there isn't now and there never will be again. This is god's way of paying respect to the individual.
But our society does not give any respect to the individual; it teaches you not to be yourself but somebody else. It teaches you to be a Jesus or a Buddha or a Krishna. That's why Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, exist. Society teaches you to be imitators, and when people become imitators they become ugly, pseudo, phony. Then they have a double personality: on the surface one thing, in the depth something else, just the opposite of it.
My sannyasins have to be simply one. You are not to be an imitation of anybody, you just have to be yourself. To accept oneself as one is the first step in growing, in becoming adult. To love oneself is the first step in loving god -- because this is the way he has made you -- To love his creation is to love the creator --
and we are his creation. It is against god to be somebody else. Just be yourself.
Love and respect yourself and never compromise for anything. And then you will be surprised how much growth starts happening of its own accord... as if rocks have been removed and the river has started flowing.
(You've got to be one and to have won you your own truth. Osho is talking to another sannyasin.) Sannyas is courage, the courage to drop out of all traditions, the courage to discard all ideologies, the courage to renounce the whole past, the courage to start anew from ABC, as if you are born today.
Once these things are fulfilled you have started moving towards god, towards truth, because truth is not a tradition, not a convention, not a church, not a race. Truth cannot be delivered to you by the past. Nobody can give it to you, it has to be discovered by you and only by you. Unless the truth is yours it is not true.
Truth certainly liberates, as Jesus says, but I would like to make a condition to that statement; truth liberates only when it is your own. If it is somebody else's it binds you, it never liberates.
EXISTENTIAL EQUATION
Man appears very small from the outside, but if you look at yourself from your own centre, from inside, you are as infinite as the sky itself. You are eternal -- - no beginning, no end, no birth, no death. But a very funny and strange thing is
that we know ourselves only through a mirror. If others know us only from the outside that is understandable because they cannot enter into your centre, that is not possible, nobody can become part )of your interiority. So they look at you from the outside -- that's perfectly right. They only know your boundary, and that boundary is not really yours but your body's. But the strange thing is that we look at ourselves through a mirror.
Looking through a mirror means looking at yourself from outside. While you can stand within you are 1/08/07
Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994
Osho's books on CD-ROM, published and unpublished
Query:-
trying to look at yourself as others look at you. That is why we create a very wrong notion of ourselves.
When Socrates and people like him say, 'Know thyself' they are saying drop the mirror, close your eyes, go within and see from there. And that's what mean by meditation: go within and see from there, only then will you know your skylike consciousness. And once you have tasted of it, that oceanic experience, all misery disappears, all darkness disappears; suddenly you are part of god himself.
One of the great disciples of George Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, has written a very beautiful statement.
On the surface it is illogical. He says that the part can never be equal to the whole. It is obvious, simple arithmetic, that the part can never be equal to the whole. How can my finger be equal to the whole of me? --
the part is bound to be smaller than the whole. But Ouspensky says there is an inner experience where the part is equal to the whole, exactly equal to the whole. Now that is illogical, beyond mathematics, but certainly true.
When you know yourself from inside suddenly you are not only part of god, you are god. The part is equal to the whole. hence the declaration of the Upanishads 'Aham Brahmasmi' -- I am god. It has nothing to do with ego, it is a simple statement of an inner reality.
Going All the Way
Chapter #18
< Previous | Contents | Next >