17

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‌CHAPTER 17

1 January 1976 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin brought his guitar to darshan and sang and played to Osho. He sang a song full of hare krishnas and LSD, kama sutras and cosmic consciousness. Osho commented that it was good, but could have been better]

You bring too much of the mind in; it should be more of the heart. Even nonsense songs are beautiful. There is no need to bring in chemistry, physics and philosophy, no need. You bring in too much of the mind and then the whole music is missed.

Music is not of the mind. Mind is a jarring note in music, a distraction. You cannot become lost in it; it becomes more like thinking and less like singing. Sing anything wild, anything of love, even gibberish, but nothing of the mind.

You can go on repeating ‘hare krishna, hare ram’ just two words – in different ways, different arrangements, so it is like waves and becomes a wild ocean splashing on the rocks and you are lost in it. There is no need to manage, manipulate. Let the music be in control of you. Simply be lost in it and you will attain to a deep orgasm, you will explode. You will become the universe. Cosmic consciousness you become of course, but you don’t talk about it. Do you follow me? Become so in tune with the music that it carries you to the furthest shore of being.

Otherwise you are misusing the music; it is an abuse. You are bringing something of the mind and pouring it in. That is corrupting it. Music is an innocent thing. It knows nothing of philosophy, nothing of chemistry, nothing of marijuana. It knows nothing of LSD, of cosmic consciousness. These are mere words, just bullshit.

Move into it. Become one with it! Start dancing! Be lost in it, and whatsoever you are saying will start happening. You will explode into a totally different dimension of being where stars are moving, and where there is pure existence.

Music is a meditation and it is sacred. If you bring mind into it, it is a sacrilege. So don’t do it; drop the intellect.

But it was good. Next time when you come go wild with the music. Just drop your head, that will do!

[A sannyasin, an economist for the United Nations in Geneva, said she did not know whether she should be in Poona with Osho, or with her work in Geneva. She wondered whether she had her priorities wrong in feeling responsible about her work.]

No, feel responsible. There is no need though to make it a burden or a tension. One should always feel responsible, whatsoever one is doing. Whether the work is going to be used or not is not the point, because just in feeling responsible for something you mature...

You must have taken responsibility in a very wrong way. It is not a burden.

When you feel responsible, it has nothing to do with others – it is not a duty. It is not that you are trying to prove something, or that your whole life depends on it; nothing like that. Responsibility is just a sincerity of the heart – so that whatsoever you are doing you do with your whole heart. When one does something, one should do it totally – then it becomes a meditation.

If you do something irresponsibly then you are wasting an opportunity to be meditative. You work six hours in the office and you may work indifferently. I am not worried about whether the work suffers or not. It may be useless work because almost ninety percent of government work is useless, and as far as the U.N. is concerned, it is one hundred percent useless – that is not the point.

When you live six hours of the day in a dull state of mind, it is not easy to get out of this dullness. By and by it becomes part of you, your very style of life. If this film of dullness spreads all over your life, you are poisoning yourself. Being responsible means doing the work consciously, lovingly. Do it totally so that those six hours become a sharp, intense awareness in you, and then you carry that awareness into the other parts of your life. By and by your life becomes a life of response, of aliveness.

That word ‘responsibility’ is very beautiful – it means alive. A dead man is not responsible. If he is lying in the middle of your path and you ask him why, he will not answer. He is not responsible; he is not answerable to anybody now. If you are responsible, you become alive.

So you see, my emphasis is not on the work; it is on you.

Gurdjieff used to tell his disciples to do foolish, absurd work – and to be responsible. For example, he would tell a disciple to dig a hole. The whole day the disciple dug; it was hard work and he was perspiring. By the evening, Gurdjieff would come and tell him to fill it up again. So the earth had to be put back into the ground.

The following day, again Gurdjieff would say to dig another hole. The disciple wondered what was going to happen, but again, by the evening Gurdjieff would be there telling him to refill the hole.

And he used to say to be responsible! What Gurdjieff is trying to say is that if you look for the use, then the whole of life is useless. It is just digging holes and filling them up again. Eat every day, and

then throw it out of the body; fill the hole in the stomach, then throw it out. Every night go to sleep, get up again every morning. And this goes on and on until one day, one dies.

The whole thing is just like that. But Gurdjieff says that that is not the point. He says do the work as responsibly as possible, as if much depends on it – do it with full alertness. He would allow a person to stop such absurd work only when he saw that he had become responsible. It would take months sometimes; for three months the person would be just digging and refilling a hole. People would escape from Gurdjieff sometimes because it was maddening – you knew from the very beginning that it was useless.

But if you stuck to it, by and by a tremendous beauty arose. The hole became irrelevant; the emphasis now was on consciousness. Doing it lovingly, by and by you forgot about the end. You simply enjoyed this moment.

Responsibility means to be alive in this moment whatsoever you do, mm?

So after two weeks, you go and be responsible – in my sense of the word – and enjoy it. When nobody else is going to enjoy it, at least you can!

[A sannyasin says she doesn’t know what is real and what is unreal.]

Nobody knows in fact. One has to understand this: that one has to live without knowing it. By living, by and by you will come to know it. There is no other way. One never knows what is real and what is unreal. Live life – and by and by, that which gives you happiness is real, and that which gives you pain and suffering and nothing else is unreal.

I know nothing is clear, I can understand your difficulty – and it is everybody’s difficulty. Everybody is in the same boat. I don’t think you are stupid. It is good that you understand that you don’t know. This is good. One has to grope in the dark. Truth is not something that can be given to you; you have to seek and search.

[She says: But I don’t know where to search and how]

Love, cry, laugh, weep, dance – these things you can do. By and by you will come to feel it. [She answers: I don’t feel really happy, and I don’t feel really unhappy in anything I do.]

Then this is the thing to be tried! Feel really unhappy. Don’t you ever feel really unhappy? I can give you a few people who can make you really unhappy, mm? (laugh)

[She answers: I often felt very unhappy with my boyfriend in Germany.]

Were you unhappy with him? So love will give you something.at least it can give unhappiness. If

you can be really unhappy, then you become capable of being really happy.

So whatsoever you are, be real. If you can cry, really cry. If you laugh, really laugh – and be authentic. Move to the very depth of it.

[She answers: I’m so afraid to... ]

Then be afraid totally. Nothing is wrong in that either! Whatsoever you do, whatsoever you feel like being, be in it. Don’t start thinking about it; live it. By and by you will have a feeling of who you are.

Even if at the end of your life you come to know who you are, it is early. So never expect that in the beginning someone can tell you that this is you. If it were so easy then everybody would have known. One has to struggle for it

One has to grope, one has to go astray many times. There are many hazards, many pitfalls on the way; a thousand and one wrong doors and one right one. It is a puzzle.

Life is a labyrinth, mm? But if one goes on, persists, one day the right door opens. That is the reward for your whole struggle. There is life in its tremendous glory and splendour!

But that cannot be given to you. You will have to seek and search for it. But don’t be depressed in any way – this is how it has to he. Mm? Mm... good!

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