11

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‌CHAPTER 11

14 June 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Veet Lynne. Veet means going beyond; Lynne means idols – going beyond all idols: idols of religion, idols of race, idols of nation. They all make us idolators, and a religious person really cannot be a worshipper of an idol. He wants the real.

The idol is only a symbol. To be trapped by the symbol is the misery of man, and all men are trapped by symbols. Somebody is a Hindu, somebody is a Mohammedan, somebody is a Jew. These are all trapped human beings, trapped by certain language, metaphor, symbol.

But the more you are trapped in the symbol, the farther away you are from reality. Reality reveals only when all ideals are broken. One has to destroy all idols. In that utter emptiness, reality reveals itself of its own accord.

Reality is that which is; an idol is that which we have made out of it. The idol is a human creation; reality is always there. It is not a creation, it is simply there.

Hence the really religious man cannot be a Hindu cannot be a Mohammedan, cannot be a Christian. It is impossible for him to be confined into any category, he cannot have a label. He will laugh at all labels! And that’s what my sannyasin has to do.

Anand Hiroshi. Anand means bliss; Hiroshi means calm... but not the calm of Hiroshima, not the calm of a cemetery. Not the calm that descends when death comes, but the calm that exists in the very core of life – vibrant, pulsating, with a heartbeat; a calm that breathes. Then it has bliss in it.

Calmness can be of two types: negative or positive. The negative is easy to achieve; one has only to go on committing suicide. That’s what for thousands of years the monks have been doing in all

the countries. Go on destroying, go on destroying and slowly slowly you become nonexistential, just a nonentity.

But that has been the great ideal down the ages. Hence religions have been in the service of death more than in the service of life. They have not enriched this life, they have not enriched your sensuous life. They have not given you more ways and means to celebrate. On the contrary they have taken all juice away from you. They have left man dry, juiceless, desertlike.

My effort here is just to reverse the whole process. I am trying to turn the wheel of dharma in a totally different way; I am trying to change its direction. It has been anti-life: I am trying to make it life-affirmative.

Calmness is beautiful, but it must surround a dancing bliss. It must be capable of singing. If it cannot sing it is not true; it is not worth either.

So my sannyasin has to learn love, life, laughter. I want to create a temple which knows how to celebrate, whose only worship will be festivity, whose only prayer will be dance, love, and who will know how to participate in this life – not to live for another life but to be totally herenow. Because God knows no other time than now and no other space than here. The real temple of God can be made only out of two bricks: those two bricks are now and here.

Deva Liberty. Deva means divine; Liberty means freedom. There is a freedom which is human, but human freedom has limitations. And a freedom which has limitation is not much of a freedom, cannot be. Freedom can be really freedom only when it is unlimited, when it knows no boundaries. But then it cannot be human; it can only be divine. Anything that has no boundaries to it is bound to be divine.

What is the limitation of human freedom? Human freedom is limited by two things: it is against something, that is one limitation; and it is for something, that is another limitation. Between these two it is sandwiched.

Divine freedom is neither against nor for: it is simply freedom. It is not a reaction against anything and it is not a longing for anything either. It is just freedom, for no reason at all. It is not a fight against the past, it is not a fight for the future. It is living in the present, moment to moment, utterly free, utterly unhampered by any past, by any future. And that’s the religious dimension of freedom. Otherwise, if you are for or against, those are political dimensions.

The communist is against the capitalist system, and he is fighting. And the anarchist is for a stateless world; he is fighting for that. But both are political. Buddha is not against anything or for anything. He is simply here in this moment, so totally here that you cannot divide him into past, present and future. He is indivisibly here. So is Jesus, so am I, and so I would like you to be.

Prem Viola. Prem means love; Viola is the Latin name for the flower violet. It represents modesty and grace. Love is both: it is modest and it is graceful. Love is the real flower of our being; it brings all that is beautiful into existence, and ultimately it brings God too as a guest.

Love is the beginning of real life, of how life should be. Without love we know something else in the name of life, which is not life, which is only a slow kind of death. Between birth and death people

are simply dying and doing nothing. Because the death is very slow they don’t become aware of it. It takes seventy, eighty, ninety years to die, so they are not aware of it. But people are doing only one thing in their whole life – dying.

This is a great challenge: that life, as it is, is nothing but a dying process. Can we transform it? Can we take a jump from it into eternal life? Can we use it as a jumping board? And I say yes, it can be used as a jumping board; it is a jumping board.There is no need to make a house on it; it is only a bridge to be crossed over. And only those few, rare souls who cross it over know what true life is. Then their being becomes a flower, a flower of tremendous grace, humbleness, modesty.

But that flower is not given to us; we are given only the seed, and we are given all the opportunities to grow the seed. But we are also given the freedom to grow or not to grow. We can choose to be that flower; we can choose not to be that flower. And this freedom is being misused by the ninety-nine point nine percent people. That’s why only once in a while you see a person who is like a flower; otherwise people are very stony.

My sannyasins have to become flowers, violets. It is possible, it is within our reach, and if we miss only we will be responsible, nobody else. Once this responsibility is understood, once this challenge is accepted, things start changing. One starts moving and growing, one starts blooming.

Sannyas is only a space in which you can bloom, you can come to your own. I don’t impose any pattern on you, because you may be a violet, somebody else may be a rose, and somebody else may be a marigold, and one knows not. There are millions of people, millions of flowers, and everybody has to bloom in his own way, in his own color. Everybody has to release their own fragrance, so no imposed pattern can be of any help.

In the past that has been done: patterns have been imposed – a Christian pattern, a Hindu pattern, a Buddhist pattern. Those patterns have crippled people, paralyzed people, destroyed people.

I stand for total freedom. I will not give you any commandment. I will not teach you how you should be or what you should be. I will teach you only how to grow into that which is your destiny. And that destiny is unpredictable. Only when the flower has come we will know what kind of seed it was; only the flower can prove what kind of seed it was. And each individual is such a unique seed that there is no possibility of any prediction. And that is the beauty of human beings: they are unpredictable. That is their freedom and that is their dignity.

Prem Melissa. Prem means love; Melissa means honey.

Love is sweet; everything else in life is bitter without love. Even the sweetest thing in life is bitter without love, and vice versa – even the bitterest thing is sweet with love. Love is elixir: it transforms the very form of a thing; not only the form but the very substance of a thing, the very soul of a thing. The moment love touches anything, it transforms it from the lower into the higher, from the worldly into the other-worldly, from the prosaic into the poetic.

Religion to me is the highest form of poetry, the highest form of music and the highest form of alchemy. And the secret thread that joins all these aspects of religion – its poetry, its music, its alchemy – is love. It is a secret thread running through the whole garland. You can see the flowers; you cannot see the thread, but it is the thread that keeps the garland together.

Hence once a person is in love he is together, one piece, integrated. If love disappears one starts falling into pieces; one is no more together. One becomes hotch-potch: one part goes to the north, another part goes to the south. One has no more a soul. One is at the most a mechanism, but not an organic unity.

Love makes you one individual. And the flavor of that oneness is the sweetest thing in existence. Anand Dwariko. Anand means bliss; Dwariko means a door – a door to bliss.

Jesus says: “I am the truth, I am the door.” He is not talking about himself. He is talking about the “I” that resides in everyone. He is talking about the ultimate “I”. He is not referring to Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary; he is referring to Christ-consciousness, which is everybody’s substantial self. When he says: I am the door, he means whosoever can say “I am” is the door.

Certainly the so-called I is not the door; it is the barrier, so there must be another I behind it. We have to search for it, we have to inquire into it. The ego is a false I. Behind the ego is hidden a real I.

The false I separates you from others; the real I joins you with others. That is the criterion. The false I makes you a person; the real I makes you universal. The false I makes you a drop; and the real I makes you the ocean. And the moment you are the ocean, you are the door to God. You are the door to truth, you are the door to all that seems impossible now, unimaginable, unbelievable. All miracles are possible once the real I is found.

This has to be your mantra: Who am I? Go on asking, and don’t be satisfied by any answer that the mind supplies to you. Don’t be satisfied by any answer that comes from the outside. Go on rejecting all those answers – unless your own answer comes up, surfaces, wells up. And that answer will be your liberation.

[A sannyasin who stutters has previously been advised by Osho to do it intentionally as much as possible and enjoy it. Tonight he says he is afraid of doing this with his parents and friends... and when he starts work as a teacher.]

You just go and do the same there. This is their problem, not your problem! Make it as difficult as possible and enjoy when you see them puzzled until they start stuttering too!...

Don’t be worried!

Just enjoy – and let the children enjoy. If you try to hide it, it becomes a problem. Just tell the children that “This is my way! If you want to learn, you can learn!” And children are very very understanding. If you try to hide and they catch hold of you, then they will create trouble. But from the very beginning go and write on the blackboard “I am a stutterer. Now start!” And don’t make it a problem – enjoy it! It will be gone. It is nothing to be worried about... it is nothing to be worried.

And come back again.

Keep it (a box) with you, and when you start forgetting that you have to stutter, put it on the heart! [A sannyasin says: Since the Satori group I feel in a hurry and I feel confused and afraid.]

That happens. When you go into a group it helps everything to come up, all that is repressed; it brings all the pus out. So it is natural. Just go on going through a few more groups and it will be gone. Nothing to be worried.

The wound heals only when the pus is out. If you hide the pus, the wound will never heal. Hiding the pus is one of the most dangerous things in the world to do. open it to the sun and the wind, and it will heal. nature is a healer; nature is the greatest physician.

And that’s the work of these groups: to destroy all the barriers between you and nature and make you natural, help you to be as you are, naked, utterly naked. It hurts! In the beginning it confuses, puzzles, because all your images start toppling. But they are false – let them topple!

If you want to find your real face, you will have to lose all your masks. And only the real face can bring contentment.

So don’t be afraid! This happens to everybody. Just go through few more groups.

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