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4 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

Swami Anand Avinasho. Anand means bliss. Avinasho means eternal.

Pleasure is momentary: hence it is always followed by misery, it is surrounded by misery. It is just like an island, a small island in the ocean of misery. You cannot stay on it, it comes and goes. When it comes for a moment there is relief, but only for a moment, and then you are again plunged into the darkness, deeper than before, because now you have tasted something against which you can compare.

Pleasure only deepens people's misery because it becomes a contrast, a backdrop. Hence the very strange phenomenon: the richer a society is, the more miserable; the poor a society is, the less miserable. In other words: the more miserable people are, the less miserable they are (laughter), because they don't have anything with which to compare. They have never known pleasure so they think this is what life is all about.

They are accustomed to misery.

This you will see in the East everywhere, particularly in India. And the so-called Indian gurus go on bragging about it as if it is something spiritual. It is nothing

spiritual, it is simply that people are so 1/08/07 Copyright Osho International Foundation 1994

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unacquainted with pleasure that they don't have any idea of what it can be like, even for a moment, to be without misery. They have become attuned with misery, accustomed to it. There has arisen a certain lifestyle which goes hand in hand with misery. It is not spirituality. It is a very negative state, it has nothing positive about it. Spirituality comes in only when you have tasted pleasure and now you want something more than pleasure, something that is going to abide, something that comes and never goes again.

The momentary taste of pleasure is a must for the spiritual seeker because that triggers in him an enquiry. If it is possible to be happy for a moment then why is it not possible to be happy forever? -- there seems to be no intrinsic impossibility about it. But the miserable person is absolutely unaware of it; hence I am not against pleasure, I am all for it, because I know it is only pleasure that gives you a push towards bliss. It is only pleasure that helps you to go on a tremendous journey to find the eternal.

Pleasure is like bliss seen in a dream; but if you have seen it in a dream then the desire is natural to make it a reality. The poor and the miserable have not even seen a dream, have not even tasted in a dream, what pleasure is. They are really to be pitied. They are not blessed, they are really cursed.

In my vision materialism and spiritualism are not against each other, they are not enemies. Materialism is the foundation of a real spirituality, or in other words, science is the foundation of religion -- there is no contradiction. Hence I can see a deep significance between the polar opposites of materialism, spirituality, science, religion, the outside world and the inside world, the body and the soul, the world and god. I don't think they are really contradictory -- or only on the surface: deep down they are complementaries. Hence I may be the first person who can accommodate Epicurus and Buddha together, Marx and Mahavir together (laughter). It has never been tried, the time was not right, but now the moment has come.

First we should make people more and more capable of enjoying pleasure -- that is a device -- so that they can start slowly slowly a journey towards the ultimate bliss. The definition of bliss is that when pleasure becomes eternal it is bliss. When bliss is only temporary, momentary, it is pleasure. The difference is only of quantity -- for a moment or for eternity, but that which is possible for a moment is also possible for the whole of eternity.

The so-called spiritualists cannot understand what I am saying, what I am doing here, because my people don't seem to be fitting with their idea of spirituality. Their idea of spirituality is simply out of date!

It does not belong to this century, it is not contemporary. And the same is true about the so-called materialists, they also cannot understand what I am doing. They both disagree with me -- of course, on different grounds.

The spiritual, the so-called spiritual person, is against me because I am teaching spirituality also. But the moment they understand what I am doing they are in for a great surprise: this is the highest synthesis that has ever been tried. My sannyasins have to be living syntheses of all the polar opposites.

It is possible. If it is possible within me, it is possible within you, because there is no distinction, no intrinsic separation. What is possible for one human being is possible for all human beings.

Swami Prem Dipamo. Prem means love. Dipamo means a lamp, a light, a flame.

Love is the light of the inner world. A man without love is a man without light -- he is just a dark night, and a long, long dark night. There comes no dawn to such a man because only love can bring light in. Love is both light and warmth. It makes you livelier, it makes you more intense, passionate, total; it gives a certain flavour and fragrance to your being.

A man without love is dull, flat. A man with love becomes mysterious. Love gives him new dimensions, and the most important of those dimensions is the dimension of light. There are other dimensions also: freedom, bliss, compassion, truth, godliness, but they are all by-products of light.

But the way man is brought up is against the possibility of love. It hinders the growth of the potential of love, it prevents the spring coming to your being. The whole educational system that exists today in all the countries and which has

existed for ages is nothing but a conspiracy against love. It makes you logical but loveless, it makes you mathematical but it destroys your inner music. It makes you calculative, cunning, but it does not give you intelligence, wisdom. It makes you efficient; its whole effort is to create efficient machines, not loving human beings, because the status quo, the establishment, the state, the church, the nation, the society, they all need efficient machines.

In fact they are afraid of authentic human beings because a real human being is always rebellious. He has to be rebellious; he has to continuously rebel against all kinds of superstitions, stupidities. He has to fight against the tradition, the past, the burden of the past; he has to shake himself free of the burden. He has 1/08/07

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to cleanse his mirror constantly so no dust gathers. But such a person cannot be exploited, cannot be manipulated, cannot be regimented. Such a man is dangerous to the establishment.

The establishment does not want intelligent people: and love is the greatest source of intelligence. The moment you are loving, your intelligence starts reaching to its ultimate heights. Love is a new way of seeing, a new way of being, a new way of relating, a new way of sharing. It is a transformation.

Logic is perfectly good for the society because if you are logical you are a good computer, if you are mathematical you are usable, you are a commodity. And machines never rebel, they never say no, they are always obedient -- and that's what the society has always wanted. And the educational system is an agency of the past to manipulate the present.

I am against this educational system. A totally new kind of education is needed -

- an education which helps a man to be an individual; which helps a man not only to be more informed but more transformed.

And this whole miracle can happen through love. Love is the most logical and the most magical thing, simultaneously. It is a paradox. Because it is logical and

magical both, it contains contradictions within itself, but those contradictions give it beauty, they give it grandeur, they make it something of a splendour.

They give it some poetic sensitivity, some aesthetic understanding.

My effort here is to help you to be more loving. I am not much concerned about god and not much concerned about what happens after death. My whole concern is what happens before death. And if love can happen then god is bound to happen to you.

Jesus says god of love. I have changed it a little bit; I say love is god. In a say it is a very small change, just the words have been arranged differently, but in another say it is a great change. When you say god is love that simply means love is an attribute of god and there may be other attributes too -- love is only one of the attribute. But when you say love is god, then god himself is nothing but an attribute of love, then god is not a person, then god is only the fragrance of love, a quality. You cannot worship fragrance, you cannot worship a quality.

The old idea of god being love has only created worshippers, not true religious people. When you think of love as god then it is not a question of worshipping or going into a church or into a temple, praying, falling down before a statue, talking to the sky -- which is all simply idiotic, there is nobody to hear you. All your prayers are monologues, they are not dialogues at all; you are talking to the walls. It is childish, but in the name of religion that's what people have been doing for thousands of years.

To me love has to be lived, there is no other prayer. You have to live in a loving way -- and that's what prayer is. You need not go to the church, there is no point. Wherever you are and whatsoever you are doing, do it with great love, with great care, and you will be surprised: when you do it with love and care you do it intelligently, you do it in a totally new way, as you have never done anything before.

A sannyasin is one who changes his whole life into a loving phenomenon twenty-four hours a day. Then godliness comes as a shadow. You need not seek it, it comes of its own accord.

Swami Gyan Atito. Gyan means knowledge. Atito means one who has gone beyond.

Sannyas is a transcendence of knowledge, it is going beyond knowledgeability. It is again becoming like a child-innocent, full of wonder and awe. The moment you have the idea that you know, you lose your innocence, Knowledge is very destructive of innocence is the greatest treasure.

Knowledge is nothing, it is rubbish. Just knowing where Timbuctoo is or where Constantinople is or who Henry the Eighth was... and losing your innocence for all these stupid facts, is really unbelievable!

What has man been doing? Innocence has the quality of flowers, the freshness -- don't destroy it by unnecessary rubbish. And people go on accumulating so much unnecessary knowledge.

There must be some reason why people go on accumulating knowledge. The only reason is that it gives you a sense of ego: "I know!" Knowledge is secondary but it feeds the idea of the I; hence one goes on accumulating more and more. just as people try to accumulate money, power, prestige, respectability, they accumulate knowledge. It is the same game, the same ego trip.

Socrates says at the very end of his life "I know only one thing, that I know nothing." That is the moment he becomes a wise man, that is the moment he regains his childhood. He has rediscovered his innermost wonder, again his eyes are full of wonder. And the moment your eyes are full of wonder, existence becomes mysterious. It happens simultaneously: if your eyes are full of knowledge, existence is demystified -- and a demystified existence has nothing in it, just bare facts: geography, history, chemistry, physics, ;etcetera, etcetera -- all only facts, and you gave lost in those facts something which was really 1/08/07

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precious, you have lost the wonder, the awe.

Just watch a small child looking at a rose flower: he stands there in such awe. That is true religiousness.

Watch him seeing a bird on the wing: he looks at the bird, he cannot believe it -- he is so wide-eyed! His whole being has stopped for the moment, he is not breathing. Those moments when you come to a full stop because the beauty of what you are experiencing is so overwhelming that you forget to breathe, you may miss a heartbeat -- those are the rare moments of life when man becomes aware that this existence is not just facts, there is a truth hidden behind the facts. And that truth is its miraculousness, its mysteriousness! Those are the moments when you can say "Ahhhh!" with your whole being. Each fibre of your being, each cell of your being is dancing with "Ahhhh!" That moment makes one enlightened.

Go beyond knowledge because it is all rubbish, go beyond mind because mind is nothing bur knowledge, go beyond all that you have accumulated to feed the ego.

Once the ego is not fed it dies. And to be egoless, innocent, is what Buddha Jesus, Zarathustra, Socrates, have been trying to convey to the world.

Swami Dhyan Siddho. Dhyan means meditation. Siddho means one who has arrived.

Meditation is the goal. We are all moving towards it, knowingly or unknowingly. If you move unknowingly it is almost impossible for you to reach, because there are thousands of ways to go astray and only one way to reach it.

There is a beautiful story about Diogenes -- there are many beautiful stories about this man. The Greeks have never produced another man of the same quality. He was really a man who could have introduced the whole Zen approached to the West, but nobody listened to him. People listened to his antagonist, Aristotle --

they were the enemies.

Aristotle represented logic, and of course logic can always be easily understood, and it is useful too.

Diogenes represented the illogical, but in his very illogicality he shows tremendous insights. This story is very illogical and yet tremendously logical, but you have to dug deep to find its logic.

An amateur archer was showing his archery in the marketplace. A crowd had gathered and people were laughing and enjoying the whole foolishness of the man, because not a single arrow was reaching the target.

Diogenes went there, looked around at what was happening, and then he went and sat just underneath the target. People said "Diogenes, are you mad? That man can kill you!" Diogenes said "This is the last place he will ever be able to reach! His arrows are going in all directions, every place is dangerous -- this is the only place which is secure!" And he was right because not a single arrow reached Diogenes or the target! It is said that not only did he sit there, he went to sleep (laughter): he was so safe there, so secure.

Man searching unconsciously has no possibility of ever reaching, because only one door reaches the right place and there are millions of wrong doors. Unless one starts seeking and searching consciously there is no hope.

Sannyas is a deliberate enquiry. It is a conscious search, so conscious that we can reject, eliminate, all the paths that lead us astray, and we can pinpoint the goal and move towards the goal with deep intensity and totality. The goal is meditation.

Meditation means a state of absolute silence where not even a single thought is creating any noise, any flutter; where no desire is creating any ripple; where there is no memory, no desire, no past, no future, no thought process at all; where you are simply relaxed, totally at rest, utterly silent -- that state is meditation.

And this is the goal, because once you are absolutely silent you become aware of the immense beauty of existence, you become aware that you are part of the whole. You also become aware that you have never been separate, that the separation was only an idea, a dream -- you have always been one with the whole.

Existence is an organic unity, it is a cosmos.

And because you thought yourself separate you created so many unnecessary anxieties, problems, worries. They were all by-products of the basic error that "I am separate". Then the fear of death arises: if you are separate you are going to die. If you are not separate then how can you die? If you are not separate in the first place, you were never born, so how can you die? You were before your birth

-- of course, not in this form -- and you will be here after your death -- of course, not in this form. So only forms come and go, the reality remains. Only the non- essential changes, the essential abides, is eternal -- so there is nothing to worry about.

When Maharishi Ramana was dying, a disciple asked him "Bhagwan, after your death where will you go?" Ramana was in great physical pain because he had cancer of the throat. In his last days it had become 1/08/07

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almost impossible for him even to speak a single word. He could not swallow anything, he could not even drink water; his whole throat was blocked with the cancerous growth. But when this disciple asked him

"Where will you be after your death?", he laughed. It was a miracle; the doctors were present and they could not believe how he could laugh. The laughter was so total that his whole body was laughing, and he even said a sentence. For days he had not spoken, but it was as if life came rushing back in. He laughed and said

"Where can I go? I have always been here and I will always be here! There is nowhere to go! Before my birth I was here, after my death I will be here." And this was his last statement before he died.

Now such a man cannot have any anxiety. Such a man cannot be worried, cannot have any nightmares.

Even death cannot frighten him. He has dropped the idea of the ego, the idea of reparation.

Meditation means the disappearance of the mind and the ego and all the problems that are created by the ego and the mind. It is the ultimate goal. Those who have arrived are called siddhas; siddhas mean those who have found the home.

Sannyas is a journey towards the home -- and the home is not far away. If we go deliberately, consciously, we are bound to reach it, it is just around the corner.

Nirvana now or never

Chapter #5

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