1 Be Yes

‌CHAPTER 1

Be Yes

1 October 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Osho tells a new sannyasin that the possibility is great and not to miss the opportunity... one can miss it very easily]

The door opens once in a while, so don’t hesitate. Right now the door is open for you. If you can gather courage to go into it, nothing is impossible in this moment.

So drop all ideas that can create any hindrance. Drop all kinds of negative attitudes. Become a yes more around here and things will start happening – things that you have been waiting for for many lives, things that you cannot manage to happen, things which there is no way to manufacture. They come when they come. And they are very close to you – just by the comer – but one can miss them as easilyYou are in a very good space – use it!

Deva means divine, makarand means honey, sweetness: divine sweetness. And one can become very bitter by saying no. No creates bitterness, no is the source of all poisons. If you continuously say no to things, you are poisoning your system. When you start saying yes to things, a total and unconditional yes, holding nothing back, just going into it totally – each moment, whatsoever god wills you go on saying yes to, you go on surrendering and each moment the surrender becomes deeper and deeper – you will find a sweetness arising in you. You will actually taste it. Your whole body will become sweet energy and your whole mind will be in a totally different dimension.

No is poisonous, yes is sweetening. No leads ultimately to hell, yes to heaven. And the whole message of sannyas is to say yes!

[The sannyasin says he will visit Khajuraho, Varanasi and Delhi, before returning to the West.]

Khajuraho is alive here! There you will find only dead statues, a nostalgia, a memory – but here it is alive! Khajuraho is a tantra temple... tremendously beautiful but dead. India has lost track of tantra. The puritans, the moralists, have destroyed that door completely; it exists no more. Hence they are so much against me; I am trying to rebuild it.

Khajuraho is my temple. But here it is alive! Here tantra is breathing again. It is no more a dead science, not a subject to be studied by historians but a psychology alive, a metaphysics breathing. I would like you to see Khajuraho, but first become attuned to the tantra attitude then you will be able to see; otherwise it will not be of much use. You can see the same pictures in a book in far more detail.

Go to Khajuraho when you have learned what tantra is. And that should be the way of going to things: go only when you are ready and prepared and receptive, when you can see things because you have now learned the knack of seeing them . Otherwise what will you see? – naked statues, and within two, three hours you will be finished. They will all look alike – men and women in different kinds of postures, loving, love-making. But you will not understand what it is. At the most you will understand that it is an ancient kind of pornography; you will think it is ‘playboy’ in stone. It is not. It is not pornography, it has nothing to do with naked bodies or sexual postures. It has something to do with inner meditation. Those postures, those love-making statues, have to be decoded. They have a message in them but you can decode it only if you have learned the language, and you don’t know even the alphabet of it.

Khajuraho should not be an ordinary place for tourists; it is not. It is a very dangerous place; it is full of potentialities. But if you want to go, you can. My feeling is that if you can be here for at least one camp more and do a few groups, particularly tantra...

[A sannyasin couple have just returned from the West. The man says: I have been feeling a lot of fear since I came back I don’t know what it’s about.]

I have never seen you bringing any good news about yourself. Do you enjoy these things or what? You should learn to drop these things now; they are so pointless! But I have a feeling that you always bring some negative state of your mind just to get attention, that’s all. They are not real.

You have learned a very wrong technique in your childhood: to get attention by being negative. Maybe you were given attention only when you were ill. Maybe you were given attention only when you were nasty. Maybe you were given attention only when something was wrong with you. And that happens to many children: parents give attention only when they are a nuisance. If everything is going well they tend to forget about you. So children learn a very very wrong notion – that if they want to have attention they have to be problematic. You have to become conscious of it and drop it, because I don’t think that you have so many negativities as you bring. You cannot survive with so many negativities, so they are not all true; you exaggerate.

You have a kind of magnifying glass for the negative. So whenever there is a negative thing you magnify it and make it big, and when it is big you feel very good: something is happening! And you do just the reverse with your positive feelings. They are also there but you never even look at them. You count the thorns and you never look at the flowers. You have beautiful flowers blooming in your being but you have become completely oblivious to them.

Your interest is in the thorn, something that hurts. You have to learn that this attitude will make you more and more miserable. Stop magnifying the negative. Start looking more to the positive. And even if there are ninety-nine thorns, they are not more important than one flower. One flower is so important that ninety-nine thorns can be tolerated for it. But your logic is upside-down. Your logic is such that even for one thorn you are ready to sacrifice ninety-nine flowers. You become interested in the thorn and you say ‘Why this thorn?’ and you are ready to sacrifice all the flowers. But now the time has come that you should take an about-turn, and only you can take it. I can say – you have to take it.

For six months, never bring any negative thing to me, and always bring something positive. Find something! Let us see whether you can find anything positive or not. So whenever you come, find something... and I am not saying to invent, no – discover! If you cannot find you can simply say ‘I could not find anything positive.’ This is going to be the work for six months. The negative has not to be talked about. You have talked about it already and I have known all the negative points in you. I am perfectly aware of them.

For six months go on looking for the positive. Make a diary and note down anything positive that happens to you – any flower that blooms, any fragrance that comes, any ray of light that enters, any call from the beyond that you hear. Maybe it is only a whisper and you cannot even understand what it is but make a note of it. Now start gathering positive pebbles on the seashore of time. And for six months, whenever you come you will have to tell me something that you have found positive in yourself. And these six months will become a transformation for you. I am not going to talk about your fears and your sadness, your anguish. Enough is enough!

(To the girlfriend) help him. Otherwise one day or other he will make you a witch, mm? He has that magnifying glass, so if you want to survive do what I am saying, right ?

[A sannyasin says: I want to stay here, and how I do it is by thinking of other possibilities. I don’t feel at ease with that.]

It is natural, mm? It is natural. It is such a different place. It will take at least two, three weeks for you to settle. And I can see that you cannot escape for two, three weeks, mm? If somebody wants to escape, the first week is the time to escape. If you can survive two, three weeks here, you will be drowned; then there will be no problem. It is only a question of two, three weeks. And for everybody, it is such a change, such a different world, a different milieu, that you have to reorient yourself to it. You have to learn a different language of being, and nobody wants to learn. Learning seems so arduous and hard; that’s why people start becoming stuck in their old pattern. No need to learn – just go on moving around and around.

Just do a few groups and things will disappear. Nothing to be worried about. It happens to everybody; it is normal and natural, mm? Don’t think that is wrong. [Osho suggests some groups for him.]

These three groups and you will start settling into a new life style. You are going to be here and much is going to happen, so don’t be worried about this mind. Whenever the mind feels any danger for it, it starts creating fantasies of escaping, going here and there, and alternatives. This place is a death to the mind; that has to be understood deeply. Because the mind is the problem; there is

no other problem and I don’t solve any other problems. I solve the problem of problems: the mind. To be in the mind is to be in problems. To be without the mind is to be beyond problems. So the question is not of solving this problem or that. You can solve a thousand problems and again a thousand will simply bubble up. Problems arise out of the mind just as leaves come out of a tree – so we cut the roots! The mind naturally becomes very much frightened. To the mild it looks crazy, mad; what is going on? And from the mind’s standpoint it is mad and it is crazy. No-mind looks like craziness to the mind. The mind is a hoarder. It does not want to lose anything.

And only losers can win in this game – nobody else!

The mind is a miser. It wants to protect your past, your clinging, your possessiveness, your anger, your jealousy. It wants to cling to everything that has been there although it has been just miserable, really. But the mind even clings to the misery. Anything familiar is good; it may be hell. Anything unfamiliar and the mind is frightened; it may be heaven itself! That’s why very few people enter heaven: they cannot, because they cling to hell.

And I don’t see any reason why people should be so miserable; there is no reason in fact. But they cling to their misery and whenever an opportunity comes to be happy they won’t listen to that opportunity; they will become completely deaf to that opportunity. They cannot afford to be happy because to be happy they will have to leave the old-mind, and that seems too much of a price. My whole work here is to hammer on the mind.

Yes, it is mind-washing... with only one difference. Mind-washing has been used by Adolf Hitler, by Joseph Stalin, by Mao Tse Tung. They use mind-washing to create another mind. They take away your ideologies so that they can put another ideology in its place. The capitalist’s mind has to be replaced by a communist mind or by a fascist mind. The hindu mind has to be replaced by a mohammedan mind or the mohammedan mind has to be replaced by a christian mind. Down the ages priests and politicians have used mind-washing, but they simply change the mind from one to another mind. Here, we simply destroy the mind and leave you alone. We don’t replace it because replacing is meaningless: it is changing one disease for another.

Mindlessness is freedom. And that’s what has been done by Sufis and Zen masters and Hassids – the real masters have always done this. They take away the mind and then don’t replace it by anything; they don’t give you any substitute. It is very difficult to accept the idea that one can live in total emptiness without a mind, but that is where bliss happens. That is the place to go, the space to be... that is another name for god.

Just book for these groups, and I will look after you. Right? Good!

[A sannyasin says: My child had an accident.she hurt her foot very badly and she was in such

pain. I felt so caught up in the pain, I felt so identified. Osho checks her energy.]

You are using a wrong word and hence you are creating misery for yourself. It was not identification at all – it was empathy, and these are two different things. Be very careful when you use a word. Some words are very very loaded: ‘identification’ is a very loaded word.

It was empathy. The child is part of you, it is your extension. It is just as if your hand is hurt: you will feel pain. The mother always feels pain that way when the child is hurt. That is really the meaning of being a mother. Although the child has gone from your womb he has not gone out of you yet. It takes years and sometimes it never happens.…

First I would like to change the word from identification to empathy. Sympathy means somebody is in pain and you are in sympathy. You understand the pain is severe but you are not in pain yourself. Then you can do things: you can rush to the doctor, you can bring medicines or something, because you are perfectly normal. You understand the pain of the other intellectually but emotionally you are out of it.

In empathy a different thing happens: you are emotionally in it – you are not separate, you are not an observer. It is not that something has happened to the child. It has happened to you and you are completely at a loss. But this is how a mother should be; nothing wrong in it.

[The sannyasin says: But there was someone near her who did everything, and I thought if she wasn’t there then what would have happened?]

Because she was not in empathy. She was not the mother, so she could be a nurse. A mother cannot be a nurse, a mother cannot be a good nurse. To be a good nurse you need a kind of distance. But that is a beautiful space; nothing to be worried about! Next time it happens really go into it and you will have a great insight.

It used to happen to ramkrishna very much. He was in such empathy that if somebody was beating somebody else he would start crying. Once it happened that a man was beaten, and ramkrishna started crying and shouting, ‘Don’t beat me!’ His disciples said, ‘What are you talking about, parmahansadeva? Nobody is beating you!’ He showed them his back and there were marks on it. When they went to see the man who had been beaten, there were exactly the same marks on his back. This is empathy.

One can get in such a great attunement with the other that there is no distance left. But that is the whole space of being a mother. Feel good that you have love for your child! If there had been nobody there then after a few minutes you would have come out of it. But next time it happens, go into it. See it almost as if it is happening to you and then tell me. It has been good!

[A sannyasin describes a problem with her sister who is mad and paranoid. The sister is married with children.]

A few things.… First... you need not be worried about it, mm? Because sometimes we can have very inhuman ideals – for example that you are responsible somehow. You start feeling guilty. You start feeling you are so happy and she is so unhappy so it seems she is paying for your happiness by her unhappiness. These are dangerous ideas; they can create misery for you. And your misery is not going to help her. Only your happiness can help, not your misery; misery helps nobody. But it happens always: if somebody is in misery and you want to help, you become miserable. But that will not help. So first, you need not be troubled by it. It is not something that you can be held responsible for. But I’m not saying that you have no responsibility. You can be of much help.

First thing: tell them to commit her to the hospital. Because it is always the family that drives people mad. Who else can drive a person mad? Strangers cannot drive you mad; only the people with whom you are related too deeply can drive you mad – the husband, the children, the mother, and relatives, friends, mm? Everybody lives in a small world of those people one is related to. And if somebody starts falling mentally ill that means that atmosphere has to be changed immediately. Otherwise the more they take care, the more they will drive her mad. She has to be taken out of that climate immediately... and that will help tremendously.

It may not be in a hospital – she can move to somewhere else. She can go to one of our ashrams there, some commune. Something totally different is needed so she can regain a hold on herself. It helps immediately. Because basically individuals are not ill: basically families arc ill. Whenever an individual starts showing symptoms of illness, that simply shows that that member is the weakest link in the family... more vulnerable, that’s all. She has to be taken out of the family.

No need to hospitalise her because sometimes the word ‘hospital’ creates much trouble. But she has to be taken out of the family atmosphere, and the husband has not to follow her, to take care of her, no. She can be moved to anywhere – she can go to suryodaya just near london, it is a beautiful place. She can move there and sannyasins can take care of her; there will not be a problem at all. Or if she can come here, that will be the best. Just call her here and she will be okay immediately; there will be no trouble at all.

[The sannyasin says that between bouts of craziness her sister insists she is copying with the children and her husband.]

That coping may be the whole problem.…

Then it becomes a strain. You can cope only to a certain limit and then you fall flat; then you move to the other extreme.

Write to her husband, to your mother, that is my suggestion: move her somewhere. And nobody from the family should follow. She has to be left alone with strangers and she will be completely okay, immediately. That is the best that can be done to anybody who is going crazy. In fact nothing has to be done – one just has to be taken out of the family surroundings. Something must be there that is driving her crazy.

And all families are insane. The earth is not yet fortunate enough to have sane families. The insanity is so deep-rooted and so much accepted, so much a part of the structure, that nobody thinks that it is insane. Just write this much. And you need not get into it. There is nothing in it, nothing in it, mm

? Otherwise you can create unnecessary anguish for yourself. And never feel guilty because you are happy. You feel guilty, it seemsDon’t feel that. Never feel guilty if you are happy. If you want to

feel guilty, feel it when you are miserable. Join, associate misery with guilt but never associate guilt and happiness. A happy person is absolutely guiltless. But this is how we have been brought up in the world – to feel guilty whenever one is happy. A few people don’t allow themselves to be happy at all, just out of the fear that if they are happy something is wrong. In such a miserable world you are feeling happy? There are people starving, and you are happy? There are thousands and thousands of people in the hospitals and millions of people going mad, and you are feeling happy? There is Vietnam and there is Israel and there is this and that, and you are feeling happy? The moment they

feel happy they bring all kinds of problems around them. They surround themselves in gloom and darkness and then they are miserable. Then everything is okay: they are not guilty. And in fact the miserable person is the cause of all others’ misery. He helps the world to remain miserable.

So never for a single moment feel guilt for being happy. You don’t take your happiness from anybody else but you can give your misery. You can’t give your happiness to anybody and you can’t take anybody’s happiness. Happiness is untransferable; misery is very easily infectious. And people are hankering for misery, they are begging for it – to be given just a little more misery. It is misery that is keeping them together; at least that’s what they think.

When something slips out of their hold, a window opens and suddenly there is sunshine, they cannot believe it. They immediately close the window. If they cannot close it, they start feeling guilty about what others will say. Everybody is suffering and they are standing and looking at the sun and sand and sea.That’s why saints down the ages have been very very sad-looking.

So drop that idea completely; it has nothing to do with you. And you can be helpful, you are in a space from where some help is possible. This will be the sanest thing to advise – to take your sister out of the family atmosphere. And just give her the idea that if sometime she feels like coming, she can come here; then it will be very easy. Nothing to worry about. Good!

[A sannyasin teenager says she sees herself setting up a stage and just performing for others. She’s often lonely and wonders why. Men are attracted to her but afraid of her. She is too much of an iceberg to approach men, even when invited.]

Right! You don’t give permission to yourself to be happy! You are too proud in your miseryand

happiness makes one humble. So anybody who wants to be very very proud has to remain miserable because he cannot bow down to happiness, he cannot open to happiness. He has always to be on the top: inaccessible, unapproachable, Impossible. But then you will suffer very much, and unnecessarily. That s why people around you will feel that you are too sure of yourself. And men particularly don’t like that. They are very egoistic themselves. They don’t like a proud woman; they like a baby. They don’t want a grown-up woman who is very sure of herself. Then where will they be? Then they become unsure. They like a woman who will be like a creeper around them, depending on them, depending on their support, who will follow them like a shadow. And women have learned that trick.

The more clever a woman is, the more she pretends to the man that she is just a creeper; without you she is nobody. You are her surety, you are her security, you are her all. Even if she knows that this is not true she goes on playing the game, and the man feels very good. Men are great fools! They feel very good. Every man likes that idea. Every man likes, needs at least one woman to say that he is the greatest man in the world. They would like all women to say it to them but that will be too difficult; nobody can afford that so easily. But if at least one woman as a representative of the whole woman-kind, says ‘You are the greatest’, looks up to them, it makes them feel great.

But if you are too sure of yourself they will not like you because then their egos will not be fulfilled. And I am not saying to fulfill their egos, no. But you will be unnecessarily miserable for your whole life. Come down from your performing self: become more a participant rather than a performer.

Be humble. And it is very good sometimes to commit mistakes. It makes others feel very good: so you are also human. You are trying to be inhuman or superhuman; that’s why that ‘no’ comes again and again. You can’t allow yourself to go to somebody, because that means you need him. Not that he will reject you. He has said he is open and he means it and you know whenever you come he will be happy. But still coming to him, going to him on your own means you need him. and you can’t give that much importance to him. If he wants you to come, he should come and persuade you. That’s why women don’t take the initiative. They miss much, because half the joy of life consists in taking the initiative. Whosoever takes the initiative will have more joy.

Don’t be worried! When you feel like going, go! There is no need even to ask! Why make yourself split in two? – the one who asks and the one who answers. You can ask me and I always say yes to happiness. I can give you ‘yes’ in writing, so whenever you are in some difficulty and your no is coming, just read it.…

Right? Good! I will give you ‘yes’! [Osho writes ‘YES’ on a paper for her.]

Keep this with you, mm ? This is a permit, a licence. Right? And you can show it to anybody! Good!

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