< Previous | Contents | Next >
CHAPTER 12
Jollity’s the only morality
12 October 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Deva means divine, and vikrant means power: divine power. And trust not in your won power but in god’s. Man is impotent; only god is potent. If sometimes we feel powerful it is a borrowed power and you should not claim that it is yours; nothing is yours.
To understand this is to become a sannyasin, so from this moment all power is god’s. You are just a hollow bamboo, and all the songs that flow through you come from god. When he sings, the hollow bamboo becomes a flue, but only when he sings. The song is his.…
[A sannyasin says that since doing a couple of groups she is completely in her head and has lost touch with her feeling and energy. Osho checks her energy.
Yes, says Osho at last, you are in the head!]
Sometimes it happens, mm? You are hanging there like a ghost. You have disappeared from the body; you are just there.
So do one thing.… Do you know how to stand on your head? Try it! Somebody can teach you: just ask some sannyasin who can teach you. For three weeks stand on your head so your being will start spreading towards your feet, mm? It happens sometimes; it is good in a way. It must have been so – that you have lived in the head for a long time. The group process simply has made you alert about it, and because you have become alert, now something can be done.
... Be here, mm? And don’t be worried about the head. First you try. If you want to save your head just stand on your head for three weeks. If you don’t succeed, I will cut your head off and be finished with it! Right? Good!
[Osho invites a sannyasin, who is leaving, to come and live in the new commune. She replies that she has a ten-year-old daughter in the West.]
So bring her too! This is the right time for her to come. She will not have the problems that you have!
She will not suffer so much. That will be the greatest gift that you can give to her: you can give me to her! Bring her!
Soon, once we have settled in the new place, I would like many many children to come. And I will start giving permission to my sannyasins to give birth because I will need many children! Much can be done with children, and very easily.
Now the whole process is absurd: first the society corrupts them, distracts their being from their centre, makes them ambitious, egoistic. And that’s what education is all about. It makes them aggressive, makes them rapists so they start raping nature. It makes them so ambitious that they create violence and war and they all become politicians, or makes them too much money-oriented; they become exploiters and oppressors. Then when the society has done all these wrongs, some jesus and some buddha comes and tries to put things right. The whole work of a jesus or a buddha is that of undoing what the society has done.
I would like many children. Once I have a place for them I would like many children to be around. And they can be taught in a totally new way. They can be taught how to enjoy, not how to compete. They can be taught how to cooperate, not how to conflict. They can be taught that life is sheer joy! Many things are not needed to be happy, much money is not needed to be happy. Only much consciousness is needed, much being is needed to be happy, not many possessions. You can come and bring your daughter; there is no problem about it.
And what can she learn there? – she will be simply destroyed as others are destroyed. If parents are a little more alert they will withdraw their children from schools and colleges and universities. It looks very difficult. Then what to give them? – because there is no substitute; that I understand. If they are not sent to university, college, then what to do with them? where to send them ? Then they will become just useless, lazy, lousy. Some alternative is needed. We are going to create an alternative. You start thinking of coming!
[A visitor who is fat says he has a problem with his body and ‘pleasure anxiety’. On hearing one of Osho’s tapes he immediately made arrangements to visit him. Osho checks his energy.]
No, there is nothing much: your energy is perfectly okay. It is nothing to do with the body, the body is not the problem at all. The mind is the problem.
You have certain notions and they are creating the trouble. You have certain ideals, certain ideas of how one should be. You are carrying inside you a perfectionist’s vision. And to be a perfectionist is to be potentially a neurotic. That is your trouble – that you cannot accept limitations, you cannot accept things as they are. You want to improve – on everything – and you are driving yourself crazy.
You have beautiful energy that may simply grow, but remember: growth is not an improvement. That is something very fundamental to be understood. Growth is not an improvement. You cannot do it;
you can only allow it. It is not a question of your doing something to improve your life. Nobody has ever done that, and people who try to do it create trouble for themselves and for others and they all end up in a mad asylum. If you go to the logical extreme of your mind that is the end.
Growth happens when you start living moment to moment with no ideas, ideals. Growth happens when you accept things as they are. It happens through deep acceptance. To accept life as it is is to respect life. These trees will go mad once they start thinking about why they are green, why they are not blue. They will immediately start searching for a psychoanalyst.
You are you; you are nobody else. Nobody else can function as an ideal for you. You have never been in the world – you are here for the first time – and you will never be again. Nobody else is like you and will ever be like you. Each individual is so unique, so utterly unique. And ideals are general – they are not concerned with the individual: they are just generalisations. Nobody is ever perfect. God does not allow perfect people; even he himself is not perfect. If god were perfect he would have been dead long ago because after perfection there is nothing to do, growth stops. Then he would be stuck; perfection means being stuck. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do, no future, no hope. Everything is finished and has come to a full stop, a dead full stop and you are stuck there.
God would have committed suicide. He is not perfect – hence life is flowing, moving, growing, and it goes on growing. It is always moving towards perfection but it never becomes perfect. It is always arriving but it never arrives... and that is the whole beauty of it, the whole excitement and the ecstasy of it.
You have a very perfectionistic idea about how the body should be, how you should be, mm? You have a very clear-cut goal, and because of that clear-cut goal you fall short and you cannot accept yourself; you go on rejecting. And out of rejection, you feel miserable.
Just destroy those goals and ideals: those ideals and goals that you are keeping in your mind of how things should be, how you should be. Drop them! And there is nothing missing, nothing is lacking: your energy can start flowing.
Once you are in the moment, your body will start losing weight. It is continuous antagonism with the body that is making it fat, because when you are continuously against the body the body feels insecure, and out of insecurity it goes on eating.
It is like a child who cannot trust his mother. If the child cannot trust the mother, once he has the mother’s breast he will not leave it because he cannot trust; he does not know when he will get the breast again. It is not certain – he cannot remain secure in it – so he will grab. He will go on drinking as much as he can. He will stuff himself because the future is uncertain. When the child knows the mother loves him and knows the mother will be available – whenever she is needed she will be available – he does not bother to stuff himself. He can rest, he can eat as much as he needs in that moment; there is no need to hoard.
In fact fat is a hoarding; for some uncertain future one goes on hoarding. A man can live three months without food; one can gather that much fat. It is an old, ancient habit, biological. There were times, thousands of years back, when man was a hunter and the food was not certain. One day it was there, and in abundance, and for days together it was not there at all. Man carries that
biological habit. That is associated with insecurity. Now there is no problem – at least not in america: you have enough food. For the first time a society has enough food. Americans should not be fat at all. Indians can be allowed to be fat because the food is not certain.
What I am saying is that now food is available, good food, good nourishment, there is no physical need to eat more, but now psychological insecurity triggers the mechanism of the body, and the body starts feeling insecure. It knows only one way of how to avoid insecurity, and that is to eat more, to go on eating and stuff itself It becomes an occupation.
Drop the ideals! There is nothing that you have to improve; you are perfectly beautiful as you are. And start living! Rather than thinking that you will live in the future when you are perfect, when you are like this, like that, you will live when you have attained a certain standard according to your mind.But life is herenow and slipping out of the hands. Tomorrow there is death – only today is
there lifeit is always today.
Start living and start enjoying. The more you enjoy, the less you will eat. A really happy person does not eat much. It is out of misery, out of pain, out of emptiness, out of a meaninglessness that one wants to grab on to something – at least food, something.
For these few days that you are here, meditate, forget the mind that you have always been carrying. Even for the three, four weeks you are here just have another kind of life. Just give it a try! Dance, sing, meditate... and keep repeating one word continuously: ‘Yes, yes.’ Drop the no. You are a no-sayer.
You are saying no to yourself – how can you say yes to anything else? You will have to learn how to say yes. Let this be your mantra: sitting silently simply repeat, ‘Yes, yes...’ Go into the feel of yes, and let it resound in your whole body; let your whole body say yes. And if you feel thrilled by it, stand up, dance, and say yes! For one month forget the word no.
And if you can do a few groups that will be of immense helpHere it will be totally different. I don’t
think anything has happened through your groups.… No, so they missed or you missed them. Do some groups here.… And next time come for a longer period.because you simply need another
vision of life – that this too can be possible. And the people around me here have no ideals, no moralities, no religions. You cannot find a more hedonistic atmosphere anywhere else. This is pure hedonism, but that to me is what the meaning of god is. God is a pure hedonist! He is enjoying! This creation – these stars, these trees, these people – is out of his joy!
In India we have the right concept about god. We don’t call him the creator because that gives a sense of him being very serious. No, we call this his leela, his play; it is a game that he is enjoying. If you can enjoy the game too, you participate with him.
To me serious people are non-religious people. People who take life as fun are religious. For me celebration is worship, and anything that makes you joyful and helps other people to be joyful is moral and virtuous. Anything that makes you and other people miserable is immoral. And the so- called morality makes people very miserable; then it is immoral. And the so-called church makes people very serious, gives them long faces... makes them very afraid of hell, makes them very greedy for heaven. This is not religion and this is not god’s purpose here.
People have to be freed from fear. People have to be given absolute freedom to be the way they want to be.
[The visitor says: Hassidism and Kabala say everything that you say except about the purpose of the creation. And that’s what’s ripping me apart!]
That is absolutely nonsense! Who says it doesn’t matter. There is no purpose. God is not purposeful at all; he is playful. There cannot be any purpose in the ultimate sense, because if in the ultimate sense there is a purpose, that means god is lacking something. If there is a purpose that means he is trying to achieve something. If there is a purpose then the question will arise, ‘What is the purpose of that purpose? For what?’
For example, you eat. There is a purpose because you want to live. You want to live, and if somebody asks, ‘What is the purpose of that?’ maybe you can say you want to love, but then what is the purpose of love ? Ultimately you have to come to a point where you say ‘Now there is no purpose.’ What is the purpose of love? Then it becomes purposeless; it is playful. Love is a play. And that’s what jesus means when he says ‘god is love’. Love is purposeless. It is an end unto itself.
So whosoever says it – Hassidism or Kabala or anybody – it doesn’t matter. Man projects purpose in life because man cannot live without purpose. He goes on projecting ideas into god’s mind also. They are all anthropomorphic. It shows the mind of the Kabalist, of the Hassid, but it doesn’t show the mind of god. The bible says that god created man in his own image. The truth is just the reverse: man creates god in his own image.
For one month be here and live purposelessly. You have lived with purpose up to now and what is the achievement ? So why not give this crazy man a chance ?
Give it a try! And something is going to happen... but you have to give it a try. If you are determined that you won’t allow yourself any happiness, that you cannot permit yourself any happiness, then only will it not happen. If you are ready to allow it, it is there just by the comer. It will overflood you!
So for these twenty days forget all your questions. Say yes to things that are here. Become a child again! Dance and sing, be loving, and try these two groups that I will suggest to you. Have you done anything like enlightenment intensives?... Do intensive enlightenment and centering. And forget that you are a leader, that you run groups; forget all about it. Just be a participant and enjoy, otherwise that mind will hold you. Good!
[Osho referred to this visitor the following morning in the discourse, saying:]
Just the other day I was talking to a seeker. He has the quality of a seeker but is burdened by knowledge.
While I was talking to him his eyes became full of tears. His heart was just going to open and in that very moment the mind jumped in and destroyed the whole beauty of it. He was just moving towards the heart and opening but immediately his mind came in. Those tears that were just on the verge of dropping, disappeared; his eyes became dry. What happened? I said something with which he could not agree. He was agreeing with me up to a certain point, and then I said something which
went against his jewish background, which went against the kabala, and immediately the whole energy changed.
He said, ‘Everything is right. Whatsoever you are saying is right but with this one thing – that god has no purpose, that existence exists purposelessly. I cannot agree, because the Kabala says just the opposite – that life has purpose, that god is purposive, that he is leading us towards a certain destiny, that there is a destination.’
He may not have even looked at it in this way – that he missed in that moment because comparison came in. What has the Kabala to do with me ? When you are with me put away all your knowledge of the Kabala, of yoga, of tantra, of this and that. When you are with me, be with me. If you are totally with me – and I am not saying that you are agreeing with me, remember, I’m not saying that you are agreeing with me. There is no question of agreeing or disagreeing.When you see a rose
flower, do you agree with it or disagree with it? When you see the moon in the night, you simply see it! Either you see it or you don’t see it but there is no question of agreement or disagreement.
That way be with me. That is the way of being with a master.…
< Previous | Contents | Next >